Idol-worshiping Episcopalians
Christianity Today reacts to Pagan aspects of an Episcopal Church experiment with women’s liturgy. Other conservative Christian bloggers chime in: check out the “comments” section of this blog. The ordination of women led to “sexual narcissism,” you see.
It’s been a long time–like 40 or 50 years–since the Episcopal Church was humorously referred to as “the Republican Party at prayer.”
Wolf packs for truth
The Bush campaign’s latest television ad is debunked by the wolves themselves.
You would not expect Karl Rove to have read Of Wolves and Men, would you?
O Web gallego
When I was in graduate school, I studied Portuguese in order to be able to read books on Umbanda for my research. Since I already knew some Spanish, the two languages would blend in my mind and produce a feeble hybrid. I joked to my teacher that I was actually speaking Galician (from northeastern Spain).
That would be no joke to some people, since now there are Web sites in Galician. Abre ben os ollos e toma nota, as they say.
Musicians on drugs
These, however, probably are not the musicians whom you expected to be reading about.
It’s that time of year again
The Religion Newswriters Association primes journalists everywhere with story ideas on Wicca.
Meanwhile, a school district in Washington state bans Halloween as “offensive to witches.” (Thanks to Joanne Jacobs.)
Let’s see, if “Everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day,” as the common saying has it, then what happens on the last day of October, hmm?
Offended? No. Amused at the annual flurry of attention is more like it.
A Forest God
This has turned into a weekend of car repair and grading student writing. But last Friday M. and I did manage to fit in a short cross-country ramble in the Wets. In some shadowed ravine I bumped into that forest god again.
Or, to use technical language, it is a sort of “irruption of the numenous.”
You’re walking through the woods, and there, in a tiny clearing, you see a man-high young fir tree, all perky and perfect, every needle sharp, blue-green in the sun.
On its needles has fallen a shower of golden coins–the golden, rounded leaves of aspen trees. The little fir seems to have its “hands” out snatching leaves from the shower of gold.
It is full of shining power–and it’s just a fir tree.
Pomegranate updates
I spent a few minutes yesterday on updating the old Pomegranate Web site. SInce all the activity is at Equinox Publishing’s new site, the old one exists mainly to sell back issues.
The first five volumes of quarterly issues, less one–19 issues all together–are available on CD-ROM in PDF format for US $20.
Just for fun, I put up a page listing the contents of Volume 6 (2004).
Finally, I am updating the contributors’ style guide on both sites. (Changes at Equinox’s site, however, will not be immediate, because I have to wait on their webmaster.)
As far as The Pomegranate style is concerned, I have issued an editorial “fatwa” about the capitalization of such words as P/pagan, W/witch, H/heathen, and so on.
It’s “Pagan” both when referring to self-consciously revived contemporary
Paganisms and to other polytheistic, world-affirming religions, especially when viewed in contrast to monotheisms, for example, Roman Paganism.
My analogy is with “Hinduism,” a category that did not exist until Westerners arrived in the Indian subcontinent and applied a label to a very diverse collection of religious practices.
It’s “pagan” when the meaning is “irreligious,” “sensual,” or merely “nature-loving,” for example, we could take the last sense and speak of the literary paganism of Algernon Blackwood.
This rule tends to follow American over British practice, but I’m an American. They get to keep their single quotation marks and to put the full stop outside the final quotation mark in a sentence. (Canadian usage is a muddle, but that’s another issue all together.)
Living by the Code
I have blogged before about certain Christians’ horrified response to the success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. At least a dozen books are devoted to “exposing” it.
But Curtis White’s review essay in the Voice Literary Supplement makes the best point:
“The Da Vinci Code is important as an expression of a desire for a spirituality that cannot be had within the confines of the institutionalized church. More simply yet, it is the popular expression of a desire for a kind of meaningfulness to life that is missing for most of us. And certainly, it is the scandalous expression of a willingness to be disobedient to achieve the heretical end of a salvation outside the confines of the church.”
“Excursus religion,” in other words, a term of Robert Ellwood’s that I always find useful and apply wherever I can.
More than a passing fad?
Brooks Alexander of the Spiritual Counterfeits Project (an “anti-cult” group) has a new book, Witchcraft Goes Mainstream
It gets favorable notice from Jeffrey Burton Russell, perhaps one of the last of the hardline historians of the medieval and early modern witch trials, who treated at least some of the victims as genuine Satanists.
The publisher’s language manages to be both conventional and scare-mongering: “What do I say to my teenage daughter who wants to experiment with witchcraft?” Why not “son”? “Experimenting” — sounds so much less committed than “adopting a different world view” or even “changing religions, much to her parents’ horror.”
Alexander’s assertion that “historical” witchcraft is in the past would be challenged by plenty of journalists and anthropologists, for people are executed (usually by their neighbors) for the crime of so-called witchcraft all the time, particularly in Africa but also elsewhere.
Much of the Craft’s appeal, Alexander asserts, arises because “The contagious excitement of cultural insurrection is modern Witchcraft’s functional substitute for missionary zeal.” And then there is feminism, oh yes. Read the excerpt at the Web site. Much of the history is accurate enough, if polemical.
The Goddess is Back, and She’s Horny
Waking the Moon, another unintentional Pagan classic, covers some of the same ground as Tartt’s The Secret History. There is the university setting, the eccentric professor, the elite group of students, but then things take a different turn, down the road of conspiracy theory reaching back to the Bronze Age at the very least, whereas The Secret History is more about hubris and intellectual vanity.
Author Elizabeth Hand attended the Catholic University of America, where she “used to wonder what the priests were really into,” recalls one of her college acquaintances.
I wonder why so many people assume that Goddess worship must necessarily involve human sacrifice. Waking the Moon is still a good read, although some readers have been thankful that it was never made into a cheap horror flick.
For all the cosmic battles, Hand is not a mastery of astronomy. At the beginning of Chapter 8, a character awakes at dawn, looks out her dormitory window and sees the new moon in the sky. (An uncritical plot summary-review here.)