“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.

Supremes back UDV

The Uniao do Vegetal, a Brazilian-based church that uses entheogens in a way similar to the Native American Church, has won an important battle in the Supreme Court.

“Those poor pagans”

A meandering Denver Post opinion column has a lot of Colorado Pagans upset, mainly because Paganism is invoked rather pointlessly just to color yet another rant about secular government and religious observances.

Some sample comments from the e-mail lists:

–He responded to me also, just to say, “Please, tell me again HOW you think I offended you and other Wiccans.”

–Frankly, that’s the only way it makes sense. There are such amazing leaps in logic there that Superman would be dizzy.

I think we are seeing one fruit of Wicca and other Pagan religions’ increasing visibility. We have moved from “invisible religion” to “fake and/or ludicrous religion,” which is, I hope, a step on the way to “just another religion.” See my previous post here and Jason Pitzl-Waters’ comments here and elsewhere.

UPDATE: Some letters to the editor about the column.

Secret Thrills of Teaching Rhetoric

I teach a class each semester on advanced composition and rhetoric, using this book as one of the texts. The students are mostly education majors who must take the course as their last exposure to a writing class before they are turned loose on the job market.

This semester’s final exam included a creampuff essay question that brought this response in the first paper that I graded. “Students should know who Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, and Quintilian were.” Quintilian! Take that, constructivists!

Of course, who knows what she will actually do once she has a classroom of her own. I just like the fact that I’m able to pass on a little bit of the Classical Pagan tradition here at a minor state university.

Over the break, I plan to snuggle up with Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric to design some new in-class writing exercises.

UPDATE: In all fairness, I should point out that there is a “Classical” wing in the Christian homeschooling movement. But they run up against opposition from their own co-religionists, as in this excerpt from the “Classical Christian Homeschooling: Frequently Asked Questions” page:

Classical education seems like the best model to produce truly educated children. But as Christians, how can we use the model established by the pagan Greeks and Romans? Does Christian classical education have a Biblical foundation?

Answer coming soon

I’ll be watching for that answer. See also my earlier post about the possible dangers of “addiction to Greek mythology.”

As I try to point out gently to my own students, rhetoric cannot really stretch its wings when there is a Holy Book With All The Answers limiting what can and cannot be discussed or even asked.