Is Starhawk (still) Jewish?

Terry Mattingly of the religion-and-journalism blog GetReligion has posted recently on the difficulties of determining Jewish identity, both for Jews and for journalists.

His post is based on the National Jewish Population Survey of 2000-2001; the link is to a longer article that he wrote. What caught my eye was his line about “non-monotheistic religion,” but then he mentions Islam (?!). And here I was expecting some exploration of the prominence of certain Jewish Pagans.

The survey defined a Jew as someone whose “religion is Jewish, OR, whose religion is Jewish and something else, OR, who has no religion and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing, OR, who has a non-monotheistic religion, and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing.”

I guess people like Mimi “Starhawk” Simos belong in a “hard-to-define, niche spirituality” to newspaper religion writers, to quote Mattingly’s blogging colleague, Douglas LeBlanc.

Here is Jewish commentary from Starhawk’s home town, but it focuses on the dating and marriage issues.

Creating Pagan Identity

Back at my campus office, I discovered a review copy of Witching Culture by folklorist and anthropologist Sabina Magliocco. The publisher’s cover blurb calls it “the first ethnography of this religious movement to focus specifically on the role of anthropology and folklore in its formation.”

I think the meatiest section will be the last, Part III, “Beyond Experience: Religion and Identity” with its two chapters, “The Romance of Subdominance: Creating Oppositional Culture” and “‘The Heart is the Only Nation:’ Neo-Paganism, Ethnic Identity, and the Construction of Authenticity.”

I am just starting to read it, but I can already see that Magliocco takes on the problem of why, in the face of all historical evidence, so many Pagans cling to the myth of the Burning Times and of the antiquity of Wicca, as though it really was a direct survival of the Stone Age and not a twentieth-century creation. She seems to view these issues through the lens of “identity politics,” which probably is as valid an approach as any. I look forward to spending more time with the book.

Why we go to British Columbia

We go to British Columbia to see the big trees, like this Western red cedar in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park. Although these mountains are well inland–they are the Western ranges of the Canadian Rockies–they catch the storms and produce landscapes that feel in places like the Pacific coast. Here is M. “in church,” with a choir of hermit thrushes.

The Mystery of Wicca Lake

No, that’s not the title of another of Llewellyn Publications’ ventures into “occult” fiction. It’s a question that has been bothering me since my return from British Columbia.

That area of SE British Columbia was settled in the 1890s, first by miners. Ninety years later–1983–the provincial government set 49,893 hectares aside as Valhalla Provincial Park, which includes the Devil’s Range, Lucifer Peak, the Devil’s Couch (another mountain), and other unfortunate names. (Why the Christian Devil gets so many interesting geological features named after him is a paper that I have always wanted to write.)

Other features have names more in keeping with the “Valhalla” theme, which also undoubtedly explains the naming of Thor’s Pizza in nearby Nelson.

Hiking into the Devil’s Range, M. and I came across Wicca Lake, which our otherwise authoritative hiking guide referred to merely as “a tiny lake on Drinnon Pass.” Wicca Lake? Devil’s Range? OK, that’s unfortunate, but the scenery is great: here is one professional photographer’s version.

It’s funny how the memory of how places got their names often vanishes rapidly, within a generation or two, unless they were named after famous people or obvious physical characteristics. I have asked one Canadian Wiccan with a wide geographical knowledge of B.C.’s mining districts if she knows, but so far, no response. I will post one if I get one; otherwise, if you have a solid answer, post a comment.

The Inner West is published

The Inner West: An Introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West is just out under Penguin’s Jeremy Tarcher imprint, with the publisher’s web page here.

The collection of 20 articles is drawn mostly from the back issues of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, whose founding editor, Jay Kinney, has edited this new collection. I look at it as a sort of “best of Gnosis,” with a focus on Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and Gnosticism. Richard Smoley, the second editor of Gnosis and a fine writer on Western esoteric traditions, has several pieces in the collection.

A piece that I wrote about 1991 called “The Unexamined Tarot” is part of the collection; I think that it holds up pretty well after all these years. The collection also includes Judy Harrow’s “Explaining Wicca.”

Another short break from blogging

M. and I are leaving for our favorite small town in the We(s)t Kootenays of British Columbia, which offers bigger lakes, bigger trees, and different mountains than those we see every day. I hope to continue the editing of Her Hidden Children with a goal of finishing the re-write by mid-August.

Blogging should resume after 18 July.

The new issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies is being mailed. Janet Joyce, managing director of Equinox Publishing, dropped off some copies when I was in Bath; otherwise, I would still be waiting to see it, thanks to some start-up glitches in the mailing process. It looks good! Now if we can just get the start-up bugs out of the distribution system. . .

Greek Pagans rile church

Followers of revived Greek Pagan (or Ethnic) religion are indeed able to gain more publicity, thanks to this summer’s Olympic Games in Greece.

On a green meadow at the foot of Mt Olympus, famous in mythical literature as the home of the Zeus and the Hellenic gods, a group of men and women stand dressed in togas in a circle, heads covered with wreaths of leaves, right hands held up as they repeat lines in Classical Greek.

A ritual of baptism has begun, at the end of which about a dozen members of the group will formally cast aside their old Christian beliefs and accept new Hellenic, pagan names.

Read entire article here.

Update: A couple of people have questioned the word “toga” in the article, rightly pointing out that togas were worn by upper-class Roman men, not by ancient Greeks. (A toga was the Roman equivalent of a man’s three-piece suit, you might say.) Not having seen photos, I cannot be sure, but I suspect that the reporter used “toga” ignorantly to mean “ancient garment.”

Under the spell of Sulis (5)

Part 1 Part 2

I have added one video clip to Part 3 and two video clips to Part 4

The Poison Path and Fatal Fronds


While I was in England, M. was Web-searching and turned up the Duchess of Northumberland’s “poison garden,” which I would like to see today. Part of a much larger garden complex that is under construction but still attracting busloads of garden-loving Brits, it has gotten a lot of press.

In a recent article, The Guardian, <sarcasm > official organ of the nanny state </sarcasm>, gets hyperbolic about the terribly dangerous plants. Protect the children! Fence off the catnip!

“Evil-looking flowers,” Caroline? Imagine a potato flower. Imagine it pale yellow with dark brown veins. OK? A plant can be a traditional entheogen without being “evil-looking.” Ah well, she has to promote the product.

Of course, people visit exhibition gardens to get ideas. If, for instance, the duchess gets official approval to grow coca (and being a young, media-savvy duchess she might well get it), others might well think, “I could plant some of that between the rhododendrons.”

LEFT: “Evil-looking” henbane blossom.

Who knows what else adventurous British gardeners might be tempted to try growing.

I have long assumed that some very discreet growers in mild North American climates have brought Mama Coca north of the Mexican border. How useful for that long hike in the Sierra Nevada! Unlike refined cocaine, the natural plant has been used for centuries, it has nutritional value, etc.–all this is in the writing of ethnobotanists like the late Richard Schultes or Wade Davis.

(I owe the phrase “poison path” to Dale Pendell.)

Under the Spell of Sulis-4

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

At today’s exchange rate, it costs US $16.38 to tour the excavated ruins of the Roman baths that give Bath its name. I paid the entry fee twice, last Sunday and last Monday. It was worth it.

Full of tourists as it is, the place still has a presence. Celtic British holy site, Roman temple-baths complex, Dark Ages ruin, medieval hospital for “leprosy” (whatever they meant by that term back then–any skin disease, apparently), 18th-century fashionable watering hole . . . layers on layers. And underneath it all the sacred spring still flows, 13 liters per second, or 250,000 gallons per day, however you wish to measure it.

LEFT: Diorama of a Roman priest with two visitors to the temple-baths complex. The temple of Minerva Sulis is in the background.

I had stayed at the White Hart Inn with seven friends; six returned to their homes in the UK after the conference, leaving just Doug Ezzy and me (the “rude colonials”), so we found new lodgings nearby at No. 3 Caroline Buildings and stayed on. After a “full English breakfast” on Sunday the 27th of June (a meal that seems always to include baked beans–I had forgotten that), we walked to the site of the baths.

They give you one of those audio guide receivers to listen to, as many museums do. Its soundtrack is a little too fond of Roman trumpet blasts, but they also include, for instance, the screamed Latin curse of a woman throwing a scrap of lead with a curse written on it into the sacred spring. Folks used to do that a lot, along with their votive offerings.

By the time I arrived at the dedicatory altars (placed in the sanctuary in fulfillment of someone’s vow) and the tombstones, I was there. I don’t mean some big reincarnational flashback; I’ve had those (maybe), and this was not the same. But I half-lost track of Doug, and the clusters of tourists were in the background. Here, underground as the site now is, I was ready to do it all: to cast my offerings into the water (still done), pay honor to Minerva Sulis (yes), and then submerge myself (sorry, not permitted). Only a clandestine dip of fingers, in defiance of the posted notice (not sanitary!).

Instead, the nearest thing is to go upstairs into the 18th-century Pump Room and to pay 50 pence (90 cents) to a man in wig and knee britches who decorously passes you a glass tumbler full of the water, tasting of rust and sulfur, and drink it down, down, down.

Not enough. Doug and I left to have a quick pint of the local Blackthorn cider with Alan Richardson and his lady friend, Margaret–Alan’s new biography of the magician William Gray, The Old Sod, was recently published by Ignotus Press. And Doug went on to continue his interview of British teen witches for a study that he is conducting together with Helen Berger. And I was up the next morning and back to the Roman baths.

I let the audio receiver hang from its cord, instead just walking the ancient pavements, listening, looking, feeling. And taking pictures. Maybe taking pictures is a votive act itself, sometimes–perhaps there is a paper there or at least a couple of paragraphs. No doubt, had the Empire lasted, the priests of Sulis would be selling disposable cameras at a stall in the temple courtyard–or they would have leased the concession to someone else to do it. Pagan religions, after all, delight in the tangible. The relic, the souvenir–that is one of the Pagan substrata that underly the so-called world religions. We want to experience the gods with all our senses, so a soak would have been nice too. Instead, you get the T-shirts and the Aquae Sulis bath products in the museum shop. Oh well, it’s a handsome T-shirt.

This 3.1 MB video clip pans across the Roman pool (facing east), showing the 19th-century terrace above the pool with Victorian statuary, various tourists, and a glimpse of the abbey in the background.

This 1.4 MB video clip pans from the opposite side, looking down into the entrance to the West Baths.

And then on to Bristol, for a too-short, 24-hour visit with Ronald Hutton, and then bus-bus-airplane-airplane-Jeep and home.