Tag Archives: scholarship

Magic Spells for Professors

I want these!

Just a sample:

1st-LEVEL PROFESSORIAL SPELLS

* CANCEL MEETINGS. Professors at Level One may cancel department meetings only. (See Appendix 253 for a full list of levels and corresponding meetings.) This spell may be countered by another Professor’s Spell of Urgency, and will always be blocked by a Department Chair’s Reminder of Contractual Obligations.
* ACCEPT GRADES. -2 to Students’ Argument rolls. However, Students with 3 hit dice or more may retaliate with a Spell of Grievance (-3 to Professors’ Endurance rolls).
* MAGIC PEN. Increases grading speeds by a factor of at least two.
* SUMMON SENIOR COLLEAGUE. Professors attacked by Red Tape (q.v.) or under a Spell of Bewilderment may conjure up a tenured colleague for assistance. For correct information, perform a DC 12 Bureaucracy check.

(Hat tip: The Little Professor)

Problem copies of Her Hidden Children

I learned a couple of weeks ago that some copies of my book Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America from the second print run were defective.

They are missing thirty-some pages, including the last chapter and the index. If your copy ends around page 160, you have a bad copy.

Other copies may appear to be missing chapter 6.

Call Rowman & Littlefield Customer Service, 800-462-6420, to get a replacement from the newest print run.

New Pomegranate Contents

In the rush of travel and then preparing for the spring semester, I forgot to post the contents of the latest issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies (Volume 8, no. 2, Nov. 2006).

So here is what’s happening in Pagan Studies:

“Santeria Sacrificial Rituals: A Reconsideration of Religious Violence (book excerpt),” by Mary Ann Clark.

“‘Be Pagan Once Again’: Folk Music, Heritage, and Socio-sacred Networks in Contemporary American Paganism” by Christopher Chase

“Wandering Dreams and Social Marches: Varieties of Paganism in Late Victorian and Edwardian England” by Jennifer Hallett.

“Russian Paganism and the Issue of Nationalism: A Case Study of the Circle of Pagan Tradition” by Kaarina Aitamurto.

“Challenging the Morals of Western Society: The Use of Ritualized Sex in Contemporary Occultism” by Henrik Bogdan.

(“Sex” plus “occultism.” The search engines should have fun with that.)

We have a Pagan Studies series!

Introduction to Pagan Studies by Barbara Jane Davy
With Barb Davy’s Introduction to Pagan Studies, we now have three books in Rowman & Littlefield’s Pagan Studies series.

And three of something truly is a “series,” right?

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A fall from a height

I am in Colorado Springs today, where famous evangelical pastor Ted Haggard’s fall dominates the news.

Frankly, to borrow the name of a better-known blog, I just don’t “get” his kind of religion. A 14,000-member megachurch? Why? So you can sit on your butt and be preached at and sung at among a huge crowd of strangers?

My dislike for Haggard’s approach is more than theological. It is partly aesthetic–the whole megamall megachurch entertainment thing. And it’s partly because of the way that New Lifers regarded the most interesting parts of Colorado Springs (such as the Old North End and Tejon Street) as controlled by Satan or something. I wrote elsewhere that they do not understand the gods of the city, only the gods of the suburban shopping mall.

One excerpt: “[Jeff] Sharlet makes a good case for New Lifers as exurban parasites, taking the services that the city provides but being unwilling to pay for them, either financially or psychically.”

Anyway, he is toast now, although there will probably be some sort of public-repentence-as-career move. From a Christian perspective, LaShawn Barber’s coverage is about the best.

And that’s the news from “Fort God.”

Leaving the meat uncovered

Sheik Taj Din al-Hilaly, Australia’s senior Islamic cleric, explains rape and how women serve Satan:

“If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park, or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, then whose fault will it be, the cats, or the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the disaster.

I just felt that I needed to share that. Pagan cat-owners, please don’t be offended.

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Some Pagan Publishing Gossip

Sarah Pike’s new book, New Age and Neopagan Religions in America, just landed on my desk with instructions to review it for Nova Religio. Given that many contemporary Pagans are ambivalent at best about the “New Age” movement, it will be interesting to see how she sorts out and categorizes attitudes and practices. (Her first was Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves, which concentrates on the festival scene.)

Also anticipated: Nikki Bado-Fralick’s Coming to the Edge of the Circle. (Oxford U. Press’s US web site does not seem to be working today.)

Meanwhile, the AltaMira Press Pagan Studies series has signed Douglas Cowan to write on Pagan material culture, even the spoofy stuff, like “Secret Spells Barbie” (right). Doug was last seen studying ten years’ worth of Llewellyn datebooks.

Speaking of Llewellyn, they are moving into postmodern magical studies. Soon you will be able deconstruct symbol systems, foreground phallocentric magical artifacts, and examine hegemonic discourse in sigils and defixios. Penetrate the panoptic metanarrative of divination and and create a praxis of postcolonial decentered womanist occult networking!

No, the best thing up in Minnesota is company president Carl Weschcke’s new blog. He is writing sporadic entries on such topics as his own family history of occultism–interesting stuff.

Not too many years ago, some in the company despaired that Carl would even take to e-mail. He is, after all, well past 60, and Llewellyn’s work force tends to be youthful, since turnover is high. And now he’s blogging. Keep it up, Carl.

More Wiccan History

“The Founding Fathers of Wicca,” a graduate-school paper by Susan Young, currently at the University of Alberta, explores Aleister Crowley’s liturgical and other influence on Gardnerian Wicca. It was published in Axis Mundi: A Student Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, whose article index is here. The paper is in downloadable PDF format, about 180 KB.

Paganism on National Public Radio

This week, National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” program has been running a series on new religious movements, including Paganism. The initial segment, which includes an interview with J. Gordon Melton of the Institute for the Study of American Religion, can be heard online here.

If I am able to hear Thursday’s segment on Wicca live, it will be picked up from KRCC’s repeater somewhere on the highway around Wagon Mound, New Mexico.

That’s right, the notorious M.C. and I are going on the road for a few days. Blogging will resume around the 19th.

Lose Yourself Here

The Internet Sacred Text Archive is an amazing place. Recent additions include the complete corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry, in Old English, of course. (Time to dig out my undergraduate copy of Bright’s Old English from Prof. Harper’s class.) Thanks to Language Hat for the link.

You were wondering if they had Pagan texts. Yes, they do. But why that cheesy cheap graphic that looks like a computer-game backdrop? No stock photos of Stonehenge? No John Waterhouse paintings?

Comprehending the Great Vowel Shift

I love reading about the history of the English language. If I have 20 minutes to fill in my rhetoric class, I can give an impromptu lecture on that history, which I title (to myself) as “Why the English Language Is Like a Club Sandwich.” But never having formally worked with the International Phonetic Alphabet in a linguistics class, I never felt that I truly comprehended the “Great Vowel Shift” that marks part of the transition from Middle to Early Modern English.

Thanks to the Web, this site, by Melinda Mezner of Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, makes it all comprehensible. Read the IPA text, listen to the sounds. After that, the diagrams might make more sense. Warning: lots of small sound files to download.