Pastors on the playa

Over the past several years, the annual Burning Man event in Nevada has gained a higher and higher profile. In some quarters, this event is viewed with alarm. Is it a convocation of “earth-worshipping pagans” and a preview of Hell?

Does the Lord tell you to “lead a team to Burning Man”? Does it speak to one of the favorite notions of Abrahamic religion, that, “historically, God has chosen the desert as a backdrop when He wanted to strip the peripherals away”?

The third writer, Randy Bohlender, adds, ” I go to Burning Man because I want the church of the future to learn lessons that can only be learned when one goes to where the future is headed. ” (I have given the links in order of increasing theological liberalism, as I see it.)

Undoubtedly, some Burners would flinch at seeing a Christian spin put on this determindly non-sectarian even–or a capital-P Pagan spin either. A Pagan theologian like Michael York, with his position that “Paganism is root religion,” could argue that Burning Man undoubtedly contains Pagan cultic elements at an almost unconscious level, an observation that would probably delight Thomas Horn, the first author linked to.

I suppose it’s a dubious sign of success when people start trying to “spin” your event to fit their theologies and ideologies.

Dewitched

Jason Pitzl-Waters offers his observations on one of the latest occult-scare books, Dewitched. True or not, the publisher starts out with the “fastest-growing religion” meme.

The Lost Books Club

I’m with Maud Newton when it comes to Vance Bourjaily!

AAR-SBL Musings, take 1

I actually left San Antonio, Texas, site of this year’s American Academy of Religion–Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting, on Tuesday the 23rd, but that was the beginning of a two-day drive home through the live oaks, cotton fields, mesquite, and prickly pear of West Texas, the Llano Estacado, buttes, and lava fields of NE New Mexico, and eventually home.

Other attendees were already home and blogging by then, Robert Puckett, for example. I will link to other religious-studies bloggers when I find updated entries.

The AAR-SBL annual meeting is Mardi Gras for intellectuals. Think and drink, think and drink–or at least that was my experience, somewhere in the fog of the final hours of the last night in Equinox Publishing’s hospitality suite.

UPDATE: The SBL bloggers, being if anything even more textually oriented than us AAR members, have started in already.

Pagans in Natural History

Natural History reviews two books by scholars of Paganism Sarah Pike and Sabina Magliocco.

Paint your statue

Art historians and archaeologists know that the creamy white marble statues of ancient Greece and Roman actually were painted.

Now this article in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica shows photos based on research on microscopic paint particles. The Guardian has the story in English. (Thanks to Cronaca.) Totem poles in the Pacific Northwest were originally painted too.

Shinto’s struggle

Although I have never visited Japan, I have often wondered if Shinto in some ways best resembles classical Paganism, in so far as the shrine and the gods come first–there is not the idea of minister + congregation.

In Pagan Theology, Michael York asks something similar about Hindu temples.

Shinto, says this Japanese writer, is looking more and more like tourism.

Road trip

When I came out of the university’s Music building late this afternoon, the crescent Moon hung in the sky, veiled by a high, thin layer of cloud. I blew her a kiss, which they say is an old Craft custom, and which I always do the first time I see the New Moon each month.

A legend says that when the philosopher Proclus (412-485 C.E.) arrived in Athens at age 19 to study philosphy (Athens being still a seat of Pagan learning in an officially Christian Roman Empire), he called on his teacher, Syrianus, who allowed him only a brief visit, because it was the New Moon, and the professor had private ritual worship to perform.

But looking out the window after his new student departed, the older man saw Proclus “take off his shoes and do obeisance to the crescent moon in the open street.” Proclus’ willingness to thus proclaim his Pagan allegience openly won the teacher’s respect. (C. Bigg, Neoplatonism, 1895)

What did Proclus do? Kneel and lower his head like a Muslim at prayer? (Considering the connection between Allah and the earlier Arabic Moon God, maybe so.) Perhaps some rogue Classicist can tell me.

Speaking of that, I am adding Rogue Classicism to the blog list.

I will be on the road and/or at a conference for the next week. Time and Internet access permitting, I will post something here.

Finally, a word from M., spoken after picking her way through the canines snoozing around the wood stove: “Who spilled dogs in the living room?”

Frantic last-minute writing

Professors, accustomed to stories of their students working all night to complete a paper that is due the next day, themselves like to joke about finishing a conference paper on their laptop computers in the airplane en route to the conference.

In my case, it will probably be a motel somewhere in west Texas, between here and the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in San Antonio. (To get in the mood, I watched The Alamo, in which Billy Bob Thornton makes a fine, non-stereotypical David Crockett.)

I may be making final notes on Michael York’s Pagan Theology for a panel devoted to the book at the Conference on Contemporary Pagan Studies on the 19th. In essence, this involves expanding my cover blurb (“audacious redrawing of traditional religious boundaries…” etc.) into a ten-minute presentation.

As far as Paganism is concerned, I have always been leery of people who wanted to rush into “doing theology.” It seemed that what we needed were poets, ritualists, makers, and doers rather than theologians (or “thealogians,” for whose who prefer the grammatical feminine). But York does present “Pagan theology” as an entity in itself, rather than merely as the mishmash from which “true religion” arose.

As Wendy Griffin said in her own cover blurb, he treats Pagan theology as its own entity rather what looking at what it is not when compared to Judeo-Christian tradition.

Hiding out in the valley

Blogging has been a minimum lately. On Friday the 5th, I set off for three days in the San Luis Valley, winding up here, where the sandhill cranes far outnumbered people, and where Jack the Chessie got to make a couple of “hero dog” retrieves.

Duck-blind reading during the slow mid-day hours included the second annual issue of Tyr the journal of Northern Paganism, Nordic myth, and capital-T Tradition edited by Michael Moynihan and Joshua Buckley. This latest issues, which includes a CD sampler of revived Nordic folk and Pagan music, is available for US $22 from Ultra, P.O. Box 11736, Atlanta, Georgia 30355. (Make checks payable to Ultra.) I blogged the first issue here.

Together with quite a wide range of book and music reviews, this issue includes an article by Stephen McNallen, “Three Decades of the Ásatrú Revival in America,” and a long, interesting piece by Collin Cleary, “Summoning the Gods: The Phenomenology of Divine Presence,” plus numerous others.

Stephen Edred Flowers, another important writer on Germanic religion, offers “The First Northern Renaissance: The Reawakening of the Germanic Spirit in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in Germany, Sweden, and England.”

Other writers include Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist, Charles Champetier, Michael Moynihan, Steve Pollington, Nigel Pennick, John Mathews, Christian Rätsch, Markuss Wolff, Peter Bahn, and Joscelyn Godwin.