Is required?

The publication of this article in Sunday’s Denver Post lit up the biggest Colorado Pagan e-mail list.

Of course, we recognized a pentagram ring–and the reference to reading Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land rings a big Pagan-history bell, about the founding of the Church of All Worlds in the 1960s.

But now people are asking, “Is monogamy subtly put down in the Pagan community? Is there pressure to be polyamorous?”

One poster, a divorced mother with a steady boyfriend, notes, “When I was married, I found it hard to find support for monogamous relationships in the community. The implication seemed to be that if you were monogamous, you were really just repressed and needed to get with the program.”

The high priestess of a Boulder coven, married 25 years, talks of people assuming that she must be polyamorous. “When potential initiate/students come to me on a first information-gathering chat, they often ask if it is required to sleep with the [high priestess] or [high priest].” The answer for her is no, absolutely not.

It’s an aspect of Pagan life that isn’t discussed too often outside the arena of plain old gossiping. When your religion–many forms of Wicca, at least–is heavily erotic in its symbolism, does that symbolism cross over into personal behavior? Like Carrie Bradshaw, I will leave the question hanging.

Killing for the gods

The idea promoted by writers such as Jonathan Kirsch that polytheists are less likely to wage religious warfare than monotheists (including, for instance, Communism as “secular monotheism”) does not mean that polytheistic societies had no religious violence.

Consider the new evidence from forensic anthropologists that not only the Aztecs but also the “peaceful” Mayans indeed engaged in large-scale human sacrifice, including children.

Using high-tech forensic tools, archaeologists are proving that pre-Hispanic sacrifices often involved children and a broad array of intentionally brutal killing methods.

For decades, apologists for these cultures have blamed the Spanish for their so-called propaganda about the “peaceful” Indians whom the Spanish just wanted to conquer and enslave. Certainly the Spanish conquistadores committed plenty of atrocities, recorded and protested at the time by those priests and laymen who objected to them. But the Spanish also recorded what they saw in Aztec society.

I once wrote a paper for a graduate seminar with Davíd Carrasco arguing that, again contrary to the apologists’ view, the Spanish reports of self-mutilation, bloodletting, and self-flagellation by the Aztec priests were probably correct. I quoted Ignatius Loyola and other Catholic religious who advocated self-flagellation, for example, to argue that the Spanish knew these practices when they saw them.

Prof. Carrasco is quoted in the article. I take no credit for shaping his thinking. The man has an ego the size of El Templo Mayor all by himself.

Filler

Bad dogs and other fine T-shirt ideas.

Once I crawl out of the hole that is the first week of the semester, I will post more. That’s a promise.

More on the “poison path”

This looks interesting, but will it hold a candle to Dale Pendell’s work (the third volume is supposed to be out in August)?

You’ve got heresy

Originally filmed in French as Le moine et la sorcière (“The monk and the sorceress”), this 1987 take on the Inquisition is available dubbed in English as The Sorceress, and it packs some surprises. To quote the Internet Movie Database plot summary:

A Dominican friar visits a 13th-century French village in search of heretics. Despite the opposition of the local priest and the indifference of the villagers, he finds a seemingly perfect suspect: a young woman who lives in a forest outside the village and cures people with herbs and folk remedies.

When the monk arrives, all full of bright ideas, I could not help thinking of Prof. Hill in The Music Man. You know how it goes: “You got trouble, folks, right here in River City . . . . and that rhymes with ‘H’ and that stands for ‘heresy.'” But what rhymes with ‘H’? Shakespeare used “ache,” but that does not work anymore in spoken English.

Forget the silly rhymes and watch The Sorceress. I liked the cult of St. Guinefort the greyhound, once you get past the beginning.

Northumberland rock art

An elegant Web site of Bronze Age rock art from Northumberland, in northeastern England. Pagan by definition. I would love to see the same thing done for southeastern Colorado, with our mysterious “Ogham” and not-so-mysterious cowboy/sheepherder rock carvings.

You can ask Dr. Shulgin

“Ask Dr. Shulgin” is now a blog by Dr. Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, renowned chemist and expert on entheogens. Its subtitle is “Imagining a world with real drug education.” Yeah.

It’s sponsored by the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics.

The Witchcraft Bibliography Project

It’s an online bibliography devoted to historic portrayals of witchcraft with a European focus.

‘Dream Nazis’ and others

Brad Hicks has been blogging on “subculture engineering,” the three personality types within affinity groups, volunteer-based organizations, religious groups, etc. His most recent entry replies to some of his commenters.

Beat misery through blogging

After a very unsatisfactory day involving the county clerk, an underperforming car dealer employee (no one named “Candy” has ever won a Nobel prize), and a Chesapeake Bay retriever, I wish that Mondays came with “rewind” buttons. But they don’t.

So onward–to movies.

We ended our trip to Utah and watched another Mormon-themed movie, Latter Days. You won’t find Richard Dutcher anyone near this one: the plot involves the seduction of a Mormon missionary in Los Angeles by a gay neighbor, the impossibly gorgeous Wes Ramsey.

Meanwhile, anyone moving to Utah should pick up a copy of Green Jell-o and Red Punch: The Heinous Truth about Utah. It’s a guide to Utah culture in the spirit of Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors.

Then, in the spirit of the bumper sticker, “Doing my part to piss off the Religious Right,” we watched Kinsey at a theatre in downtown Fort God

According to some, pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (together with Hugh Hefner and, I don’t know, maybe Helen Gurley Brown) nearly destroyed Western civilization.

For Kinsey’s fans, finding out that masturbation or homosexuality did not make you insane was liberating.

It’s a conflict between inductive and deductive reasoning, in a way. Kinsey, a natural scientist, was inductive: he gathered data–lots of data–and then drew conclusions. His detractors are deductive: they want to start with stated truths (“Thou shalt not . . .”) and make experience fit those truths.

For example, if “X” percent of married American women have sex outside of marriage, it becomes more statistically “normal.” Does that make it acceptable, or is it still wrong? There is the battleground.

Kinsey could not answer that question: emotional and spiritual realities were outside his method. His data collection too, especially on the first book on male sexual behavior, had some problems. But at least he provided data of types that no one before him had provided, and so he forever changed these moral debates.