The Anglo-Saxons had a word for it

And the word was utfus, meaning outbound or eager to be on the way. Most students of Old English (e.g., me in Prof. Harper’s class years ago) encounter it in Beowulf, at the ship-burial of Scyld, forebear of Hrothgar, whose mead hall, Heorot, will be invaded by the savage monster, Grendel. (I suspect that the Old English letters thorn and edth will not display for everyone.)

Þr æt hyðe stod hringedstefna,
In the roadstead rocked a ring-dight vessel,
isig ond utfus, aæþelinges fær.
ice-flecked, outbound, atheling’s barge:
Aledon þa leofne þeoden,
there laid they down their darling lord
beaga bryttan, on bearm scipes,
on the breast of the boat, the breaker-of-rings,
mærne be mæste. þr wæs madma fela
by the mast the mighty one. Many a treasure
of feorwegum, frætwa, gelæded;
fetched from far was freighted with him.

I feel utfus now, ready for a quick trip across the Atlantic. Blogging will resume in early July on my return.

Pagan Studies audio files

The organizers of this year’s ASANAS conference on new religious movements have put several presentations online as MP3 files, including talks by Graham Harvey, and Leuan Jones. Visit the download page if you have a high-speed Web connection: these files range from 18-30 megabytes in size.

Stonehenge still rockin’

The BBC marks the solstice with a recap of the tumultous history of public festivals at Stonehenge since the 1970s.

In the 1980s, Prime Minister Thatcher took a hard line (doesn’t it sound like John Ashcroft today?):

“Mrs Thatcher would later tell the Commons she was ‘only too delighted to do anything we can to make life difficult for hippy convoys’, adding that “if the present law is inadequate we will have to introduce fresh law’.”

Cheer up with camels

It’s a little off-topic for this blog, the “The Religious Policeman” has an interesting post on camels in Saudi Arabia.

Chief returns as orca, tribal members say

Luna the whale is a reincarnated chief, say First Nations people in British Columbia. Luna arrived in Nootka Sound about the same time as the elder chief died in 2001.

“That means a lot in that my late father expressed to a couple of members that he was going to come back as a killer whale,” said Mike Maquinna, chief of the Mowachaht First Nation. More here.

‘Aspecting’ Deity

An interview with Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone at Witches’ Voice offers some first-hand description of “aspecting” a deity as well as a different twist on Wicca-as-nature religion. (Thanks to Wild Hunt.)

If you’re goin’ to San Antonio

Cat McEarchern has posted the program for the 2nd annual Conference on Contemporary Pagan Studies, to be held in conjunction with the American Academy of Religion–Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in November in San Antonio, Texas. I’ll be on a publishing panel.

If you’re goin’ to San Antonio,

be sure to wear some footnotes in your hair.

(A poor parody of the original hit song.)

A Caravaggio moment

We spent the weekend at the Front Range Pagan Festival (one of three annual festivals in Colorado that I know of), held at a private campground southwest of Denver.

It’s a low-key (sometimes too low-key) event, with lots of kids and dogs–no stages for performers, no communal kitchens, etc.

The image that I will take away, in fact, involves some of those kids. On Saturday night, as the drummers were drumming and people were singing, two of them, seated on camp chairs, were lost in a game of chess over to the edge of the bonfire circle. An older boy, maybe 12 or 13, shone a flashlight down on the board, while the orange light of the fire caught lit the sides of the players’ faces, while also striking part of the older boy’s features under his floppy Army-style boonie hat.

To add to the composition, a girl of about 3 years was peering in the shadow over the edge of the chessboard, uncomprehending but captivated by the movements of the chessmen.

Their stillness and the composition of the group were classical, and the lighting was worthy of Caravaggio or some other Old Master. I wished for my camera, but I don’t think any film emulsion (or the digital camera) would have captured that little girl in the shadow.

Current Reading

I will be leaving tomorrow for a long festival weekend; paradoxically, I hope to get some reading done, toward the paper that I’m writing for the Bath Spa UC “Exploring Consciousness” conference. So it will be a weekend in the woods with some of the old-timers: Jeffrey Burton Russell, Carlo Ginzburg, Norman Cohn, and others.

I just received a copy also of Ken Dowden’s European Paganism, illustrated with ornate 19th-century engravings of muscular, curly-bearded barbarians. Not cheap, even through Powell’s.

Dowden writes, “I wanted to show paganism in action, see what it looked and felt like, let the reader see the evidence and listen to the authors, even boring old Caesarius of Arles and grumpy Maximus of Turin.”

And all the while contemporary Paganism will be in action in the temporary autonomous zone of festival-time.

“Are you ready to get your Jesus on?”

is a line from Saved, a new high-school comedy set in a private Christian school, and it’s already being denounced predictably as “extremely offensive” from that quarter. National Public Radio’s Bob Mondello’s audio review is here.

Yes, if you have recovered from the culture-war battle over Mel Gibson’s Passion, get ready for another one.