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 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.
Another candidate for Atlantis
A German archaeologist thinks that he has found the site of lost Atlantis, the BBC reports.
Satellite photos of a salt marsh region known as Marisma de Hinojos near the city of Cadiz show two rectangular structures in the mud and parts of concentric rings that may once have surrounded them.
“Plato wrote of an island of five stades (925m) diameter that was surrounded by several circular structures–concentric rings–some consisting of Earth and the others of water. We have in the photos concentric rings just as Plato described,” Dr Kuehne told BBC News Online.
Psychological polytheism
The Juggler links to a piece by a writer discovering the psychological polytheism of James Hillman.
“Hurray,” I say. But I have to say too that Hillman’s psychological writing takes some getting used to. The best introduction might be the collection A Blue Fire, introduced and edited by Thomas Moore.
And let me put in a plug for Ginette Paris’ books Pagan Grace and Pagan Meditation too.
Psychological polytheism rejects the idea of a single, true “self,” instead admitting that we all function as a collection of selves, Hillman seems to suggest too that “soul” (one of his favorite words, and used in his own way) is made over time rather than bestowed by a creator deity.
Hillman’s thinking is often capital-A Archaic; in other words, more in line with the previous 30,000 years of human culture than with 20th-century psychology. But he also does what philosophers should do: tell you how to live. Here’s a sample from the Scott London interview linked above:
Hillman: It’s important to ask yourself, “How am I useful to others? What do people want from me?” That may very well reveal what you are here for.
London: You’ve written that “the great task of any culture is to keep the invisibles attached.” What do you mean by that?
Hillman: It is a difficult idea to present without leaving psychology and getting into religion. I don’t talk about who the invisibles are or where they live or what they want. There is no theology in it. But it’s the only way we human beings can get out of being so human-centered: to remain attached to something other than humans.
Somehow I always suspected . . .
The Salt Lake City Weekly has a feature story on how Jay’s Journal, that staple of the nice-kid-caught-up-in-the-occult genre, is basically a fake. (Go Ask Alice is another.)
Titled Jay’s Journal: The shocking diary of a 16-year-old helplessly drawn into a world of witchcraft and evil … the book changed Alden from a sensitive, questioning young man with a high school girlfriend and sympathies toward Eastern religion to a curious teenager who unwittingly finds himself participating in vile satanic rituals, crazed sex with a girlfriend named Tina and outrageous acts of supernatural black magic. The book remains true to Alden’s fate, however. By book’s end, Jay kills himself.
Me, I was never caught up “the occult.” It’s because I knew that “occult” is an adjective–as in “the occult what?” (Sheesh, talk about a “disease of language.”)
Thanks to The Pagan Prattle.
War is not just between soldiers
Sometimes I play computer games. Tropico, also known as “SimCuba,” was a favorite, as were Atomic Games’ Operation Crusader and Stalingrad. I played every variation on the latter, until I was convinced that I could have won the Battle of the Don and saved most of the Romanian forces too. (Just take Gen. Von Manstein’s advice: stage a “communications breakdown” with Berlin and then evacuate Stalingrad, no matter what Der Fueher says.)
But I digress. The point here is that this article, using the language and humor of computer war- gaming, makes some valid points about not only the current Iraq and Afghanistan fighting, but on whatever will follow them as well.
Thanks to Belmont Club for the link.
The Goth menace and bureaucrats at play
What happens when a town gets a six-figure federal grant to study the pseudo-problem of Goth kids? Not much, except that people in charge get to travel to lots of conferences.
Instead, the draft report shows that $54,000 was spent on salaries for Ford and her secretary, whose duties included buying furniture and equipment to set up their office; doing research “utilizing the Internet, library, Barnes & Noble bookstore, A-to-Z Comics, Spencer Gifts and Hot Topics”; interviewing police and school personnel; poring over police and school reports for any instances of goth-related criminal activities (they found none); and creating checklists and a brochure about goths.
The whole story is here.
After Troy, Alexander
The official site for a new movie about Alexander the Great, starring Colin Farrell and directed by Oliver Stone, accompanied by a fan/critic’s site.