Pentagon turns to Wiccan chaplain

Patrick McCollum, Wiccan chaplain in the California state prison system and advisor to Wiccan prison chaplains in several other states, is now advising the Pentagon on Wiccan soldiers’ needs, according to the Contra Costa Times in this article.

The article requires registration. Why do newspapers make it more difficult for people to read their online content? But there is a way around the registration issue: if you don’t feel like giving them your name, visit BugMeNot and pick up a generic password for that paper’s web site.

Now on to the lead paragraph:

After U.S. military personnel pelted American Wiccan servicemen and servicewomen in Iraq with bottles and rocks as they worshipped in a sacred circle, the Pentagon turned to Patrick McCollum of Moraga.

Rebuilding a temple

A UC-Berkeley news release describes the partial rebuilding of the temple of Zeus, knocked down by earthquakes and/or Christians.

Speaking of earthquakes: The use of interlocking stones dissipates a lot of energy,” said [engineering professor Nikos] Makris. “A single stone or stones connected with mortar or cement would be rigid and less able to effectively absorb the energy induced by earthquakes.

A further linguistic clue supports the seismic stability theory: The word the ancient Greeks used for the column drum, spondylos, also means vertebra. The temple columns were abiding by the same shock-absorbing principles as the human spinal column.

Leaving Lammas

What was the “moment” of Lammas this year? Not a formal ritual, but walking down an overgrown logging road in the Wet Mountains, looking for mushrooms in the grey-green firs. A soft, misty rain started to fall, enough that I had to dig my GI poncho out of my pack and put it on. The poncho always makes me feel a little sacerdotal–after all, the Christian priest’s chasuble originated as a traveler’s poncho or mantle, whatever you want to call it. I could break the mushroom and hold out a fragment: “Take and and eat this in remembrance . . .”

(The old liturgy. I’m dating myself. A past life, so to speak.)

School of the Seasons is a web site with information on “on spiritual practices and creative pursuits that match the energy of each season” and an email newsletter. (Thanks to Gaian Tarot Artist for the link.)

If you want to know the peak of the energy of each cross-quarter day, check this archaeoastronomy site. Many people, including Waverly Fitzgerald at the site linked above, seem to prefer the calendrical day–the 1st of August, whereas the actual midpoint is usually about six days later. The solution is to simply make it a “season” rather than a day!

By the time that the day itself came, M. and I had loaded the Jeep and driven down to Taos for a long weekend with friends. If you’re in Taos and need a wireless connection that comes with a view of a blooming xeriscape flower garden, try the Wired cafe, tucked in behind Raley’s supermarket on Paseo del Pueblo Sur.

And at home the wild Liatris is blooming, the signal of summer’s end.

Passing of Joe Wilson

Joseph Wilson, one of the founders of the Pagan movement in America in the 1960s, died yesterday. He had suffered from chronic illness for many years and was on morphine for pain relief.

His new book, So You Wannabe a Shaman, Huh?, was just about to be published. That title expresses something of his personality: cantankerous but with a lot to say.

His autobiography is online, and I urge you to read it. (Thanks to Wren’s Nest.)

The Rehabilitation of Rosaleen Norton

Back in the 1950s, the artist and occultist Rosaleen Norton was the witchcraft scene in Australia, at least according to some of the older books I have read. Her relationship with Sir Eugene Goosens, conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, was a scandal, as were her paintings, some of which were confiscated as indecent.

Now that scandal has achieved folkloric status, and Norton’s memory is a local tourist attraction, as you may read here (scroll to the bottom).

Things have changed a little.

Goosens, incidentally, worked hard for a new classical-music venue in Sydney; now the Sydney Opera House with its white “sails” is the tourism-poster icon of Australia. I think that it will be a while before there is a Rosaleen Norton retrospective exhibit in the lobby, but think of the connection.

Australian nanny state-ism?

Let’s see, we have …

1. A security guard licensed to carry a pistol, who is …

2. Supposed to protect US $21,000 at a hotel from …

3. An armed robber who who inflicts on her “ a fractured skull, a broken nose and left hand, and possible brain damage ,” so . . .

4. She shoots him (and there is no such thing as “shoot to wound” when your life is on the line), he dies, and . . . .

5. She is charged with murder.

Pretty soon I’m going to start sounding like Kim du Toit, if this keeps up. I’m glad that I live in a state where what should be the common-law right to self defense is written into the statutes.

Any Australian readers care to elucidate?

“The Village”

Those merry pranksters at Landover Baptist Church are

Let the games begin

Jason Pitzl-Waters at Wild Hunt blogs about the revived Nemean Games, where you do not have to be a world-class athlete to run the same race as did the ancient Greeks.

Meanwhile, PBS will be running two episodes next week of The Real Olympics, complete with the gore of chariot racing, the blood and flies from the sacrifices . . . or at least as much as can be put on television.

‘Give it up to the Goddess’

I confess that I had not looked at Eurotrash’s blog for a while, so I missed this account of her summer solstice trip to Avebury.

It is safe to say that it provides a certain balance to the stories told by some friends who spent the night there this past solstice.

Her link to Children of the Stones did not work for me, so here is another guide to its episodes.

Missing Texts

The Wiccan/Pagan times has reviewed Graham Harvey’s and my anthology, The Paganism Reader. So far, no review (of two that I have seen) has noted our big, accidental omission, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

It is easy to see what happened. Neither Graham nor I make any use of this monument of 19th-century anthropology. We tend to think of it as an exhibit in the Museum of Ideas. But it was influential in the Pagan revival and it still pops up on Pagan reading lists because of all that “sacrificial king” stuff: examples here and here.

By the time I thought to include it, Routledge did not want to hear of any more changes, and we were already 300 UK pounds over budget on permissions. (Someone is still making money off Rudyard Kipling, for example.)

It hurt me more to leave out Sappho’s invocation of Aphrodite, because all her surviving poems still speak with a fresh voice, even though she lived more than 2,500 years ago.

Letter from Hardscrabble Creek

A Pagan Studies Blog by Chas S. Clifton

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Leaving Lammas

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The Rehabilitation of Rosaleen Norton

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Missing Texts

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