La Virgen as a Goddess

Today’s Denver Post dips a toe into the water with this story suggesting the the Virgin of Guadalupe might be a goddess–or at least a pop icon.

“Many of us are working to claim her larger cosmological meaning as earth mother,” says scholar China Galland, author of Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna.

Robert Anton Wilson made much the same point nearly 30 years ago in an essay in the long-gone Llewellyn magazine Gnostica, but who was he? Just some pulp-fiction writer in a “fringe” publication, not “mainstream media.”

Journalists and new religions

Being a former newspaper reporter and someone whose religion by academic standards is “new,” The Revealer’s review of Sean McCloud’s Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955-1993(University of North Carolina Press, 2004)went right through me.

McCloud contends that since the 1950s, mainstream magazines like Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report have tarred and feathered any group that displayed high levels of zeal, dogma or emotion. Whatever cultural stereotypes would make these groups look most peripheral and abnormal were thrown at them. Sometimes this meant lightly mocking them, at other times representing them as simply offering brain candy for poor people, and very often giving the impression that all “cults” were lead by charismatic serial killers and rapists who had turned their followers into zombies.

I’ve been on both sides of this one: I have agonized over poor reportage on contemporary Paganism, yet in my early-1980s pieces on such groups as The Way International and the Church Universal and Triumphant (a/k/a Summit Lighthouse), was I guilty of what McCloud calls “push[ing] these groups to the periphery as a way of reinforcing their own position in the center”? But which “center” was that? Certainly not a mainstream Protestant center. A secularist center disguising my Pagan identity?

Reviewer Gal Berckerman does not totally buy into McCloud’s use of certain social theorists; I will have to read this book to see if I do.

Canada’s First Pagan Conference

Gaia Gathering, billed as Canada’s first national Pagan conference, is planned for May 20-23, 2005, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

Panel discussions include topics such as Pagan paths, Paganism in the various regions of Canada, interacting with the mainstream community, forming ‘churches’, marrying rights, Pagan parenting, living our beliefs in an environmentally sensitive world, Pagan Chaplaincy, and much more…

A discussion group is here, or visit the official Web site.

CES Founder Honored Online

A eulogy page to Church of the Eternal Source co-founder Don Harrison is now online. It loads slowly if you have a dialup connection. I mentioned him earlier here.

A Fistfight at the Poets’ Café

When I was about 15, I saw Jean Cocteau’s Orfée, a film based on the Greek legend of Orpheus the poet, his wife, Eurydice, and their journeys into Hades.

Most of it went right by me. I was not prepared for its intensity nor its shamanic overtones. All I really remembered were Death’s outriders on their motorcycles.

I watched it again last night and was amazed. Made in 1949, it is still a compelling film. This film has the imperious logic of a dream: you don’t know exactly why things are happening as they do, but they are “right” all the same. Surrealist poetry coming from the radio of a Rolls-Royce? Of course.

All of this is done in black-and-white with a minimum of special effects.

Alexander and the Critics

I still have not seen Alexander, but Rogue Classicism is tracking critical reaction, particularly from the Greeks.

Pagan Studies in the Academy (AAR musings, part 2)

Right now more than 50 scholars who work at least some of the time in Pagan Studies are anxiously awaiting an announcement from the American Academy of Religion’s program committee.

Steered by Cat McEarchern, organizer of the last two Conferences on Contemporary Pagan Studies, we have put together a proposal for a “consultation” on Pagan Studies as part of the AAR’s regular annual meeting, as opposed to an “additional meeting,” our current status.

The AAR has four levels of program units: consultations, seminars, groups, and sections, each one longer-lived and with more time slots during the meeting. Consultations are for “nascent discourses seeking to establish a constituency and create a framework for thinking about a specific set of problems,” in AAR-speak.

This whole process began during the 1995 annual meeting, when Selena Fox and Dennis Carpenter of Circle Sanctuary organized an informal meeting of scholars in Paganism and nature religion. In 1996 the baton was passed to me. We had another brief meeting and agreed to start a listserv for researchers in the field.

In 1997 a group of us met and wrote up a consultation proposal, which was rejected on the grounds that we had not adequately proven that our intellectual concerns could not fit into an existing unit, such as New Religious Movements.

From 1999-2002 we met for one 2.5-hour session before each AAR-SBL annual meeting, which I organized, and presented papers just like a real program unit. Then Cat stepped forward and, beginning in 2003, organized a day-long session.

In the meantime, I found an academic publisher to take over The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, and other publishers began showing interest in publishing Pagan Studies books, most notably AltaMira Press.

Plus the AAR is now actively soliciting new program units, which it was not in 1997. So we’re hopeful. Watch this space for more news. (AAR Musings Part 1 here.)

Blog Stew

1. A University of Texas study suggests that the nutritional value of American vegetables has declined over the past 50 years (from Science Blog via MacRaven).

Yesterday two of my students, both living at about the poverty line while attending university, were complaining about how hard it is to eat high-quality food because “they make the price so high.” Setting aside the tendency to blame things on “they,” these two women had a point: high-quality food often does cost more than junk.

One of them, I know, drives to Pueblo from a prairie town and goes almost right past our favorite organic farmer’s place–but what should she do after his harvest is completed for the season? I am not sure that I know. Take a generic multivitamin?

2. My brother-in-law has two public sculptures on display in Charlottesville, Virginia: “Business as Usual” and “One-Room Cow.”

3. Thursday night is often B-movie tonight. Last night’s offering, Red Blood, which was something like “Tony (Soprano) meets Tony (Hillerman).”

It had minor Mafiosi versus sort-of-like Apaches in the Mogollon Rim country of Arizona. A bunch of guys with real or assumed north Jersey accents (who auditioned for The Sopranos but were never called back) were paired off against every lesser-known American Indian actor in the book. Fat guys with guns and gold chains and bad-guy cowboys faced an Indian warrior (who was also, we are to believe, a New York City stand-up comedian) with a compound bow on a mountain bike.

A Yoda-like wise grandfather said things like “Every being is responsible for his own actions.” (But Yoda would have said, “His own actions every being is responsible for,” right?) It was multi-culturalism at its finest: a cliché to offend everyone.

An ex-Pagan’s blog



Blogger John Gibson apparently defines himself by what he no longer is, Wiccan:

I met with Alan, became interested, and started meeting with his group during their new moon rituals. Most of these rituals were what we called “prosperity” rituals, because they were aimed at getting money to the participants. I participated fully in these rituals. At this point, I’d like to mention a sinister reality: At times, the devil can use the tactic of giving “gifts” as a lure. During one of these rituals, I was in need of a couple of thousand dollars to pay bills. The next day, I was contacted by a gentleman who wanted to purchase two computers that I had for sale.

Now he is Catholic:

During Lent, I made my first confession. I wonder how many priests get to hear the sin of idolatry?

But he is young, and perhaps more changes lie ahead.

Van Briggle

The local PBS station is running a documentary tonight about Artus Van Briggle, a leading Art Nouveau potter of a century ago whose short, brilliant career ended when he died in Colorado Springs of tuberculosis. (The studio and factory built around the time of his death is now the Physical Plant headquarters building for the Colorado College.)

His wife, Anne, was a designer too and kept the business going for a few years after his death. The new owners moved to a highway location and made it all quite touristy, but the current owners have toned down the “gee whiz” stuff and returned, at least partly, to the roots. New designs continue to come out “in the spirit” of Artus Van Briggle.

About 25 years ago, I opined that if you were a true Colorado Springs Witch, you had your grandmother’s Van Briggle candlesticks on the altar. Well, I did. Gods, the things people can find to be snobbish about.

Today’s Van Briggle staff seems to be an interesting mix of longhaired or dreadlocked artistans, old ladies who have been there for thirty-plus years, and bluecollar guys who have found an offbeat factory job that they like.