“Amazons” in Roman Britain
Via Cronaca: the Times mentions a new archaeological find suggesting that Roman auxiliary forces in Britain included at least some female fighters.
It’s all about birds
Things found while Web-surfing. Snopes.com debunks the story that the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” contains hidden references to Christian doctrine, adding that the “five golden rings” are ring-necked pheasants. If true, that would establish an earliest date for the song: when were those birds first imported from Asia? (They were brought to the Willamette Valley of Oregon about 1881, I think–their first North American importation.)
And while we are debunking, Snopes says “Ring around the rosie” does not contain any reference to the English bubonic plague outbreaks of either the 14th or 17th centuries.
Midnight (imagistic) Mass
A few nights ago, M. and I were sharing reminiscences of Christmases long past, including the experience of Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. It wasn’t the content of the service that mattered, but the experience: the waiting all evening, driving to the church through quiet streets, the explosion of lights in darkness, then walking out from the church into the cold, crisp night air.
It was one of few times when modern Christianity–at least in our churches (hers Roman Catholic, mine Episcopal with High Church touches at the holidays)–felt like a mystery religion. Watching the stripping of the altar on Good Friday was another such time: it could actually seem deathly scary.
Neither of us could understand the Protestants–people just sitting passively and being talked at. No altar (at most a vestigial table), but a dominating pulpit that turned the church into a lecture hall.
A year ago I was introduced to the work of Harvey Whitehouse, an anthropologist of religion who divides religions depending on which tendency they embody most: the “doctrinal” or the “imagistic.” Once you have had an imagistic experience, such as an initiation into a mystery, it stays with you, whereas doctrinal teaching must be reinforced with constant repetition.
Whitehouse has developed this idea in several articles and monographs; his new book, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission is on my current reading shelf. I may have more to say about it later.
“The gods return to Olympus”
Thus the title of an article in the January/February 2005 issue of Archaeology magazine on Greeks re-creating their ancient religion. An abstract is available here, but to my mind it leaves out a key quote, from reconstructionist leader Tryphon Olympios, who left the country for political reasons during the junta years of the 1970s and taught philosophy at Stockholm University:
We argue that Christian ethics, based on apocalyptic truth, are incompatible with Greek ethics, based on philosophical, scientific knowledge, a product of rationalism.
No mystoi here then? A documentary film about the reconstructionists, I Still Worship Zeus, is supposed to be available, and I am looking for it.
Seasonal confusion, hard feelings, and so on.
Evidently the struggle over who gets to define the solsticial holiday continues. The Bureaucratic Mind, confronted with competing claims, tends to retreat to blanket negativity . . . and is then accused of promoting “secularism.”
Punditry ranges from ramblings about “druids” to curmudgeonly rants like this one from Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post, muttering that everyone should “just leave Christmas alone.” (Registration required.)
To insist that the overwhelming majority of this country stifle its religious impulses in public so that minorities can feel “comfortable” not only understandably enrages the majority but commits two sins. The first is profound ungenerosity toward a majority of fellow citizens who have shown such generosity of spirit toward minority religions.
He is right about one thing: no one has a constitutional right not to be made to “feel uncomfortable.” But in my experience, while some Pagans might feel that Christmas is “shoved down their throats,” others are more likely to take the approach of Asatru blogger Robin Runesinger and “take back Yule,” enjoying the Pagan roots of the whole celebration, from the fir tree to Santa’s possible relationship to Odin the shaman god.
Even a novelist whose main qualification is that she wrote a thriller about Catholics versus “The Goddess” (and guess whose side she was on?) gets to pontificate on the reason for the season. (Registration required.)
Regardless of how we feel, I am afraid that the impulse to bureaucratic blandness is winning. Rather than think deeply about American tradition, as Krauthammer suggests, mayors, school principals, and the like are more likely to forbid anything that looks “religious.”
And some Christians are able to talk out of both sides of their mouths: America, they say, is a “Christian nation,” yet somehow these Christians are the victims, no less, of secularism (whatever that is), the so-called liberal media, the Hollywood film industry, and so on.
Yet the admittedly Christian bloggers at GetReligion remind us that Christmas used to be a low-key holiday, when it was celebrated at all. (Seventeenth-century Puritans banned its observance when they could.)
Lucky for us Pagans, trees are religious symbols, as are five-pointed stars.
PS: Why newspapers make online readers is pointless to me. Protect your privacy and get an instant login and password from BugMeNot. Thanks to Wildhunt for a couple of the links above.
The Passion but not the Code
The Religious Newswriters Association’s top 10 religion news stories list of 2004 leads off with Mel Gibson’s Passion.
Some Year-End Roundups
1. Top cryptozoology stories of 2004 by Loren Coleman. Those Southeast Asian “hobbits” lead the list.
2. Top stories involving Paganism, from the Wildhunt blog. Start with “Drug dealers, religious intolerance, court battles and a possible trip to the Supreme Court!”
Llewellyn George, Patent Medicine, and Pagan Publishing
In 1993, when I was editing the Witchcraft Today series for Llewellyn Publications, I few up to Minnesota to spend a couple of days conferring with Carl and Sandra Weschcke, who own the company.
Driving me around St. Paul in his black Cadillac, Carl told me the story of how he came from a German family heavy with doctors and pharmacists, inheriting a company that made cough lozenges and other over-the-counter medicines. In the 1960s, however, he took a different turn, buying a tiny astrological publishing firm founded by astrologer Llewellyn George (1876-1954). He even legally changed his own middle name to Llewellyn in homage.
Llewellyn Publications is still in St. Paul. It publishes (in short runs) more books on contemporary Paganism, astrology, ceremonial magic, and other such topic than any other firm, although the quality is sometimes uneven.
So much for the astrology connection. But there is also a patent (OTC) medicine connection: Llewellyn George was in that business also, as the journalist and critic H.L. Mencken noted in one of his “Free Lance” columns almost ninety years ago. I have put Mencken’s full text here.
UPDATE: Llewellyn now plans to move to suburban Woodbury, Minn., and the old Coca-Cola bottling plant that has served as office/warehouse will become part of some waterfront re-development.
“Satan in the Groin”
It’s the name of a site devoted to “exhibitionist figures in medieaval churches,” but with excursions to phallic standing stones in Ireland as well.
Communicators struggle with communication
It looks as though the Religion Newswriters Association is re-doing its website, and although it now boasts this page of religion blogs, the links to John Dart’s and Don Lattin’s blogs don’t work anymore. And they are stalwart RNA members. Consequently, their links on my blogroll under “Religion and Journalism” don’t work either.
While we are waiting for RNA to figure this problem out, read Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion instead.