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.)
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?
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.
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.
Apocalypse
Worth reading: “The Last Man on Earth,” an essay by Kathryn Joyce at The Revealer, on the enduring power of such books as 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Brave New World. Here is the first paragraph:
“In my father’s favorite dark fantasy he is Mr. Mead of Ray Bradbury’s short story, ‘The Pedestrian’: persecuted for walking alone at night without purpose instead of watching television, as everyone else does in a disturbingly-familiar authoritarian state of the future. That Bradbury’s dystopia sounds a lot like Westchester, where my father grew up, or any other suburb, is of course the real chill — an intended one, one of recognition.”
Nanny-state tendencies, and what about that May Pole?
Recently, British police officers have been forbidden to join the British National Party, a political party which might charitably be described as far-right. More here from Wikipedia.
You don’t like far-right parties? Fine. But the BNP is, as its web site points out, a legal political party in the UK. Imagine an American cop being told, “You will lose your job if you register as Libertarian (or Green).”
In another weird drug-war development, it is seriously suggested that British children could be vaccinated against euphoria.
I don’t mean to pick on the Brits. These same things could happen tomorrow in Canada under the banner of “order and good government.” They could happen the day after tomorrow in the United States under the banner of “The War on (whatever).”
Two incomplete thoughts:
1. As a Pagan, I have strong small-l libertarian feelings. As Judy Harrow once pointed out to me, ours is a “high-choice ethic.” We make up our own minds. Evidently Police Constable Smith is no longer to be trusted to make up his own mind. Nor would the kids be trusted. The less a government trusts the people, the more totalitarian it becomes–even if for the “best” of reasons.
2. Back to the BNP: Take another look at its web page. Click on the link at upper right that says, “”New ‘Land and People’ site launched.” Watch the photos–particularly in the upper right. See that May Pole? Hmm. Does the American political right own “family values”? Does the British political right own (revived) Pagan symbolism?
“There are 60,000 recipes in Italy”
USA Today brings an Italian cooking expert to rate the food at the Olive Garden restaurant chain. (Ah, the typical strip-mall setting shown on the web site.)
“This is bad. This is really bad,” Marcella says. She stares into the bowl. “This is Bolognese sauce?” She reaches for a menu in disbelief.
“I must console myself,” Marcella says. She orders a Jack Daniel’s.
Hat tip to Consumer Whore.