The divine with a wet nose
You might not think of southern India as being particularly dog-friendly, but this Tamil family certainly is now. Read the last paragraph in particular.
When Bark magazine puts “Dog is my copilot” on the masthead, there is a whiff of irony. Not here.
Pueblo and Colorado Springs
Compare the “You might be from Pueblo if” quiz with the Colorado Springs Independent’s recent feature, “You are sooooo Colorado Springs.” (Link may change.)
I always put it this way: if you go to a party in Pueblo, you might be asked, “Where did you go to high school?” In Colorado Springs, you would be asked, “Where did you move here from?”
That’s not always true: Pueblo’s dark side manifests itself when it seems like everyone is somebody’s cousin, and some us can claim roots in the Springs. Given a choice, these days, I’m partial to Pueblo–but then I work there.
Thanks to Don McCullen for the Pueblo quiz and to my students who had fun discussing the questions.
Medieval sorcery
From The Guardian: “A mural which has come to light in Tuscany has been identified by a British university lecturer as the earliest surviving representation of witchcraft in Christian Europe.
“A book published in Italy by George Ferzoco, director of the centre for Tuscan studies at the University of Leicester, argues that at least two of the women in the porno-erotic wall painting are sorceresses.
“”I have no doubt that this is by far the earliest depiction in art of women acting as witches,” he said.”
Moab is not yet destroyed
One of the guys whose rants are collected under the name of the prophet Isaiah once ranted,” “On the night when Ar is sacked, Moab meets her doom/ on the night when Kir is sacked, Moab meets her doom” (Isaiah 15:1).
I can say that Moab is still here. I am, however, in Moab, Utah, whereas the prophet was ranting about biblical Moab, the area east of the Dead Sea–now part of Jordan. “Ar” and “Kir” were its so-called capitals.
The funny thing is, when you read those guys ranting (“Damascus shall be a city no longer!”–When was it destroyed?), the more they all sound like Osama Bin Ladin.
Meanwhile, here in the other Moab, it’s a good time for visiting places like Arches National Park without the March-through-October crowds.
What annoys me about places like Arches–and many other places–is that the most amazing geological formations are named for the Christian devil. Here it’s “Devil’s Garden,” which has the largest collection of natural arches in the park. Or think of Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, to name one prominent example. Or Devil’s Hole, a steep side valley off the Arkansas River canyon above Cotopaxi, Colorado.
On the other hand, if Pagans had settled this area in historic times, there would be hundreds of rock formations with names like “Penis of [fill in name of fertility deity].” It would be almost boring.
Internet access here courtesy of the Mondo Cafe and the Red Rock Bakery.
What makes a creepy movie creepy
The Devil Rides Out, one of the classic Hammer Studios horror films, is supposed to be scary. It’s based on a novel by occult-horror writer Dennis Wheatley and stars Christopher Lee (Saruman in Lord of the Rings). I watched it recently, and I learned that the main attribute of British ceremonial magicians, “black” and “white,” is that they spend much time driving from one country house to another in vintage Rolls Royces and Morgans. It’s a yawner.
Then there is Brigham City, a low-budget but taut thriller from Zion Films, a company serving a largely Mormon audience.
On one level, it’s a modern “Western,” with a rural sheriff confronting a baffling string of murders. Richard Dutcher plays the sheriff with one sustained weary expression. No doubt he is weary, because he is also the producer, director, and screenwriter.
Because of his LDS religious convictions, Dutcher created a PG-13 movie without gratuitous sex and violence and not one curse word–even in the bar scenes. Some other directors might profit by watching it: violence that is barely off-screen or understated can still be chilling. But something else was more chilling than the killings.
The sheriff, you see, is also a Mormon bishop. At one point, he summons all the men in this mostly Mormon town for a house-to-house search for one of the victims. To paraphrase The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, “We don’t need no search warrants. I don’t have to show you any steenkin’ search warrant!”
Merely to lock out the civilian searchers brings down the sheriff’s wrath. When one man does so, he is thrown against the wall of his house. The searchers do find something embarrassing in his home–but it has nothing to do with the murders. In fact, none of the house searches turns up any useful evidence at all.
I don’t think that Dutcher intended this lesson of what happens when spiritual and temporal power are identical to be the scary part of the movie, but it is.
At the end, the man whose secret was disclosed is shown sitting in a pew at the Sunday sacrament meeting. He has nowhere else to go. And of course his secret will be known to everyone via the gossip grapevine. Oh well, what’s a little Inquisition on the ward? It’s not like he questioned the archaeology of the Book of Mormon.
Joe’s World
More seasonal thoughts:
Consider the Holy Family as the prototype of the typical television sitcom where everybody is smarter than dumb ol’ Dad. Let’s call the show Joe’s World
Joe is this hardworking contractor. He drives a pickup truck with tool boxes and a ladder rack. He stops off after work at The Palms bar for a beer with his friends.
Then he comes home to his bright, perky, upwardly mobile wife, Mary, who could be played by someone like Helen Hunt in Mad About You or DeLane Matthews (my choice) in Dave’s World. Her ally in getting Joe to do whatever she wants is her charmingly bratty, verbally precocious kid, Jesus.
You can read a typical episode in Luke 2: 39-53.
“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.