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.)

The slippery slope at AAR

The annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion is more than a month ago, but the shock waves are already forming on the cultural right, as this article from World Net Daily shows. (Credit: The Revealer.)

I plan to be there, maybe even blogging–although not on S&M, most likely.

What do Pagan scholars do?

Cat McEarchern answers that question at the Pagan Studies site, where he has compiled a list of papers in Pagan Studies presented at various conferences. Some of mine are there, and you can find links to them on my own home page.

Snippets

• Why am I blogging about Pagan and magical themes in old movies (as I did here and here ) when Tanya Kryzwinska has the lot in her book A Skin for Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in Film? She characterizes Häxan, for instance, “the first ‘nunploitation’ movie” for its flagellant sisters.

• Four more cartons of Pagan magazines and ephemera shipped off to UCSB today, which with last week’s shipment makes seven. The storage shelves in the garage look about the same, however.

• My revised version of Her Hidden Children: The Beginnings of American Paganism (that subtitle is still under discussion) received a favorable review from the series’ co-editor. Hurray!

Urban Primitive

When I read the sentence, “Children’s dolls, broken or whole, are symbolic of urban ‘elves’–the urban version of the tomte or tontu,” I was drawn further into reading–and then buying–Urban Primitive, by Raven Kaldera and Tannin Schwartztein.

The title and cover treatment owe something to RE/Search’s Modern Primitives, whose title in turn came from the idea that “Primitive” actions . . . rupture conventional confines of behavior and aesthetics . . . [they explore] the territory of the last remaining underdeveloped source of first-hand experience: the human body.”

It’s a Llewellyn book, which means it is “Wicca 101,” but with enough twists and originality to make it interesting–using subway trains in banishing rituals, assigning astrological symbolism to different body piercings. It’s not the usual “the ancient Celts did this and that” approach, at least. The way that the authors teach city dwellers to seek the “heart of the city” is important, because too often American culture tells us to hate our cities–and so we make them ugly, and they sprawl as we keep trying to “escape” them.

The book gave me the idea of a magical action that I wish to carry out–and it also gave me the germ of a nature-writing class assignment.

Researching Paganisms

Congratulations to Graham Harvey, Jenny Blain, and Doug Ezzy on publication of their new anthology, Researching Paganisms, with contributions by the editors plus Andy Letcher, Jone Salomonsen, Wendy Griffin, Melissa Harrington, Sarah Pike, Ronald Hutton, Ruth Mantin, Robert Wallis, and some incoherant rambling essay by me.

The publisher says, “Should researchers of spirituality and religion be distantly ‘objective,’ or engaged and active participants? The traditional paradigm of ‘methodological agnosticism’ is increasingly challenged as researchers emphasize the benefits of direct participation for understanding beliefs and practices. Should academic researchers ‘go native,’ participating as ‘insiders’ in engagements with the ‘supernatural,’ experiencing altered states of of consciousness? How do academics negotiate the fluid boundaries between worlds and meanings which may change their own beliefs? Should their own experiences be part of academic reports? Researching Paganisms presents reflective and engaging accounts of issues in the academic study of religion confronted by anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, historians and religious studies scholars—as researchers and as humans—as they study contemporary Pagan religions. The insights that contributors gain, with resultant changes to their own lives, will fascinate not only other scholars of Pagan religions, but scholars of any religion and indeed anyone who grapples with issues of reflexive research.”

My lingering question (in the tone of Carrie’s column-writing voice-over from Sex and the City), “Are we being too reflexive too soon?” But it’s fun.

New blogs on writing

Bitch Novelist: “I suppose I should begin by telling you what this blog is for. I have no intention of being one of those bloggers with attitude, as in fuck you, you figure it out. I welcome readers of this blog as enthusiastically as I welcome readers of my novels. It’s the industry, the prize committees, the reviewers, and many over-hyped novels that I am here to bitch about”

Galley Cat, a spin-off from Cup of Chicha: “While reading is still considered a relatively private and intellectual endeavor, national book clubs seem to drive up sales by ensuring books’ social currency. Reading no longer needs to be the artsy equivalent of solitary confinement; instead, it can be a ticket to a group event, as well as an affordable emulation of a beloved celebrity’s habits. Consequently, if you think literary culture is suffering for lack of readers, you probably see some good in TV shows’ book clubs; and if you think literary culture is suffering because people no longer like to think — at least, for themselves, that is — book clubs may seem like its death knell (and here comes the grim Ripa). ”

Not as new, but I never linked to it: Maud Newton’s blog, now featuring The Secret [Literary] Agent

Donation

I spent a large chunk of the afternoon sorting and packing three large cartons of Pagan magazines dating back to the 1970s. They will be donated to the American Religions Collection at Davidson Library, University of California-Santa Barbara.

My book on the first decades of American Paganism is with the publisher. I sent in one draft last spring, it went to two outside reviewers, and I spent the summer revising it in light of the reviewers’ comments. Now another editor is reading the revised ms., but I feel fairly confident that she will pass it. Finally.

And at any rate, these cartons of materials were not critical to my research. Some materials I am holding back for possible further use.

But in the long run, I am not in the archive business. If the special-collections librarian with whom I am dealing wants more, I could send him another four, five, or maybe six cartons, easily.

On one level this is a happy milestone, but on another, it feels spooky. I suppose I feel that way because in the last 18 months I have spent too much time disposing of my late parents’ belongings, and now I want to shout, “I’m not dead yet,” like the character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.