Under the Spell of Sulis-3

Part 1 Part 2

RIGHT: Indigenous Avon skipper

The first evening of the consciousness conference ended with a cruise into the English rain forest, in the company of indigenous shamans. Our boat moved at a stately 5 knots or so down the dark and shimmering Avon, away from the town and into a green tunnel: the sinister Salix, the ghostly Umbellifereae. Techno/world music thumped in the main saloon in the indigenous dusk until, by a deserted mission station at the water’s edge, our indigenous pilot swung the bow around, we returned through the ancient Weston lock, and glided back from the green tunnel into the stone walls of dreaming Bath.

In this video clip, the rain-forest cruise is leaving Bath, heading down the River Avon. Watch your head.

Now here is a ‘Pagan survival’

Is Alexander the Great’s body actually in Venice? In the current issue of History Today, historian Andrew Chugg makes the case that the mummified body of “St. Mark” treasured in Venice might actually be that of the world-conqueror Alexander (356-323 BCE). (Article available online, registration required.) It’s all timed for the movie, of course.

Under the Spell of Sulis-2

But before I could visit the temple of Minerva Sulis, there was the conference to attend. I arrived midway through the first day, 24 June, considerably jet-lagged, after a journey on two airplanes, two trains, and my feet.

Arriving at The Forum, a 1930s movie palace now home of the Bath City Church, I was a little perplexed by the church’s name on the marquee. But the building looked right, and once inside, I knew.

For that weekend, the stage was decorated with potted Salvia divinorum, San Pedro cactus, morning glory, and other interesting plants–not quite the BCC style, I’m sure. But they fit with an auditorium full of psychonauts, astrologers, Pagans, and (mostly Pagan) academics.

We presenters really had only 20 minutes out of the allotted 30, once you subtract the introduction and the question-and-answer period. Some people (like me) still wrote out papers with citations, such for our own security, while knowing that we would have to condense them drastically.

My list of people whom I knew of but had never met included the grand couple of psychoactive chemistry, Alexander and Ann Shulgin, as well as two outstanding astrologers, Robert Hand from the US and Liz Greene from England, not to mention the two German ethnobotanists, Christian Raetsch and Claudia Mueller-Ebeling.

More to come. Meanwhile, some views of Bath.

Under the Spell of Sulis-1

Back from England, I am planning several blog posts as I edit the photos and video clips to go with them.

Left: the base of a column that once helped to support a high, vaulted roof over the main swimming pool in the Roman baths, rebuilt in the 2nd century CE., when the town was known as Aquae Sulis, the waters of the goddess Minerva Sulis.

I spent four days in Bath, the town that grew up around the only significant hot springs in England, which have been a site of worship, therapy, and pleasure-seeking for centuries–and under Roman rule, visitors could have combined all three in a way never since equaled.

To get a feel for Bath, you might imagine what Santa Fe, New Mexico, might have been like if the center of town included the hot springs from Ojo Caliente or Jemez. Like Santa Fe, Bath is clogged with tourists, every third business is a restaurant, and you probably want a fat bank account to live there, and yet, underneath, its energy is flowing.

For me, a bonus to visiting Bath and the nearby port city of Bristol is that when making hotel reservations, etc., I never had to spell out my surname. Everyone was familiar with it.

More soon. . .

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.)