Tag Archives: scholarship

Smokey and the Sacred

My paper “Smokey and the Sacred: Nature Religion, Civil Religion, and American Paganism” has been accepted for a special issue of the journal Ecotheology, edited by Graham Harvey.

The publishing agreement, however, forbids me from publishing more than the abstract online. (But maybe if you ask nicely.) I will supply a complete bibliographic citation to the printed copy as soon as it is available.

Maybe it’s the first Pagan Studies paper to invoke Smokey Bear as a godform, following the footsteps of Gary Snyder’s “Smokey the Bear Sutra.”

OK, so he is somewhat discredited as a forester in these “prescribed burn” days. Sometimes demigods have a come-down.

We’re Covered

This looks to be the almost-final cover design for The Pomegranate, courtesy of Mark Lee of Hardcore Design.

Somewhere along the way the word ‘international’ was added to the subtitle. Perhaps that’s Janet Joyce’s doing. We’re international, multicultural, transtemporal, and biodiversified.

And now a word from the competition: the Association for Esoteric Studies and the Society for the Academic Study of Magic.

The Pomegranate is reborn!

After a hiatus of nearly two years while we sought a new publisher (a process that began at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Denver in 2001), The Pomegranate: The Journal of Pagan Studies has a new publisher and will resume print publication in May 2004.

As the new editor, replacing Fritz Muntean, I have signed a contract with Equinox Publishing, a new firm started by Janet Joyce, formerly academic editorial director at Continuum’s London office. The Equinox Web site is not fully put together yet; check it at the end of August.

–The Pagan Studies book series

–The daylong Pagan Studies conference at AAR-SBL in Atlanta

–And now the return of The Pomegranate, heir, in a roundabout way to Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion and to Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Esoteric Tradition.

This will be the year that Pagan Studies happens at AAR-SBL, a slow process that has been building since 1995, when Dennis Carpenter and Selena Fox organized (and then dropped out of) the first Pagan scholars’ meeting there.

The Paganism Reader

A telephone call from Graham Harvey on the 9th confirms that our anthology of important Pagan texts is going into production at Routledge. Here is the latest version of the cover–really, Graham’s name should come first, as it was his idea to collect important texts from the Pagan revival, reaching back to the Homeric Hymns, the Eddas, the Mabinogion and others, and also collecting such things as Rudyard Kipling’s song that begins “Do not tell the priest of our art,” from Puck of Pook’s Hill, which when I first encountered it was presented to me as a genuine relic of underground Pagan religion! (I had not read that particular book of Kipling’s, and I did not know better.)

Druids

I’ve been working on a section about American Pagan Druids today. First, let me say that I am so glad that I do not have to do anything on British Druids, since in the UK there are two hundred years’ worth of self-proclaimed various Druidic groups of all sorts, from the merely fraternal to the seriously Pagan to the almost self-parodying sort. Fortunately, Ronald Hutton has a new book out, Witches, Druids, and King Arthur, which I now have on order.

The best resource that I know of remains Isaac Bonewits’ web site. Although he did not become involved until six years after the “We’re not really a religion” Reformed Druids began at Carleton College, he remains the central figure of the revival in this country, having devoted more nearly forty years to it–editing journals, writing songs, creating organizations, creating ritual, networking and more networking, creating Web sites. . .

Paganism: A Reader

What I hope was the last paper work for Graham Harvey’s and my new anthology, Paganism: A Reader went into the campus mailbag today on its way to Routledge, the publisher. The book is a collection of mostly primary sources, so in that way it’s somewhat different from Graham’s earlier anthology, Shamanism: A Reader. The selections in it begin with Classical materials, including “The Hymn to the Moon” (attributed to Homer) and the famous address to Isis from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, in Robert Graves’ translation. What I regret not being able to include (for reasons of space) was Sappho’s poem to Aphrodite, which I always find to be heart-wrenchingly good. But the Emperor Julian’s “Letter to a Pagan Priest” was included, as well as some translations from Celtic and Norse sources that have been important to the Pagan revival.

We have tried to show just a few of the literary influences on the Pagan revival as well, such as Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, as well as many well-known contemporary Pagan authors (Gardner, Valiente, Adler) and some new writers: Judy Harrow, Michael McNierney, and myself.

Daniel C. Noel

I was shocked two days ago to learn of the death in late 2002 of Dan Noel, a friend and sometime mentor. I had the privilege of reviewing his book The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities (Continuum, 1997) for Gnosis. He taught me the difference between “imaginary” and “imaginal.”

Here is an interview with Dan about the ideas in that book, including the “lure of the archaic” and the “democritization of the sacred.”

Who and Where are the Pagans?

Sociologist Helen A. Berger, author of A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States, has a new book coming out in July, written together with Evan Leach and Leigh Shaffer.

The title is Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neo-Pagans in the United States. Like her first, it was published by the University of South Carolina Press.

I plan to post a fuller review after I have read it. The “census” referred to was distributed by Berger and by Andras Corbon of Earthspirit Community. The authors claim that (this time) they reached more than just the festival-going Pagan crowd.

According to the catalog, “The scholars . . . identify variations within the Neo-Pagan population, including those related to geography and to the movement’s multiple spiritual
paths.”