Read ‘The Policeman’

The creation of the blogosphere has given us new, unofficial ways of getting information. We can watch the television news about the fighting in Fallujah, Iraq, for instance, and then read one Iraqi’s personal response to it in a blog like Riverbend’s.

For another “behind the walls” perspective, this time on our loyal ally Saudi Arabia, visit The Religious Policeman. (No, that’s not his picture at upper right.) His take on life in the non-magic kingdom is a useful antidote to all the official coziness between the House of Bush and the House of Saud.

Greek Pagans battle for their rites

Followers of traditional Hellenic religion are becoming more visible, notes The Independent in this story.

Georgios, a distinguished lawyer with a turquoise ribbon in his hair to signify the circle of life, cannot see where the credibility problem lies. “The ancient Greeks invented logic, science, medicine and philosophy and built the Parthenon,” he says. “Are you telling me they didn’t know what they were doing when it came to religion?

No doubt the upcoming Olympic Games and, possibly, the meeting of the World Council of Ethnic Religons upcoming in June have something to do with this move for religious freedom.

Folk religion means ignoring the art critics

Robert Ellwood, one of my favorite and most-readable historians of religion, has a new book out, Cycles of Faith, a sort of lifespan-development theory of how the major religions of the world grow, develop, and change.

Christianity he places in the Folk Religion phase, when although still vibrant, the religion is no longer organically connected to the sources of political power and to “high culture” generally.

Today, although plenty of third-rate and derivative art is produced and although such artists as the early twentieth-century symbolists have drawn from alternative esoteric strands of spirituality, art based on the dominant religious traditions that could be called original and distinguished is miniscule.”

The 19th century, Ellwood notes, had its “revivals” — Gothic Revival, Byzantine Revival. But in the 20th century, “high culture” no longer depended much on religion for inspiration. Even church architecture, after a Modernist phase, seems to have drifted into lassitude.

Into this atmosphere comes Image: A Journal of the Arts & Religion

Image’s manifesto: One of the legacies of the modern era has been the secularization of culture. For much of the twentieth century, the belief that God is dead, or at least inaccessible, has stripped a great deal of religious vision and wisdom from the modern imagination. Most of our leading critics and thinkers have been skeptical of, or indifferent to, artistic expressions of religious faith.

A culture is governed by its reigning myths. However, in the latter days of the twentieth century, there is an uneasy sense that materialism cannot sustain or nourish our common life. Thankfully, religion and art have always shared the capacity to help us to renew our awareness of the ultimate questions: who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going.

They are trying, but I think that Ellwood may be right.

Do visit The Juggler, a new collaborative Pagan blog with a strong group of contributors. I have put a permanent link on the right.

Trojans, anyone?

I have always wondered why sports teams and condoms were named after the Trojans too, but these guys do it so much more lucidly.

And the word is that the movie totally ignores the gods. What’s the point without that essential flavor of human futility that the Olympian backstory adds? But the Notorious M.C. has been commenting on how buff Brad Pitt is looking these days, so maybe we will see it anyway.

Inexpectatus

I had started a letter to a friend in England that mentioned, among other things, the annual return of the broadtailed hummingbirds on April 16. (They then had to endure two snowstorms, but that is the way of the hummingbird). There are no hummingbirds in Europe, but apparently there once were, millions of years ago: a fossil has been found.

Wicca and the Navajos

Continuing my uploading of essays and papers to my web site, I have now added one of my favorite pieces of Pagan autobiographical writing, Malcolm Brenner’s “A Witch among the Navajos,” which originally appeared in 1998 in Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions.

Far too much Pagan writing is either advice-giving, instructional, fiction, or something else: There is a definite shortage of well-written “creative nonfiction” such as Brenner supplies here.

Bull-leapers, then and now

Archaeologists — but not some goddess-worshippers — generally accept that Arthur Evans basically invented the popular conception of Bronze Age Crete, the “Palace of Minos,” the Cretan Labyrinth, and so on. (More Bronze Age archaeology resources here.

But the famous fresco of the “bull leapers” is in all the art-history books, and the combination of (mechanical) bull + barely clad girl is still potent, as this site (not safe for work) attests.

There is a paper waiting to be written here. . .

“Bless that pet”

Ship of Fools, the (mostly Anglican) Christian humor e-zine, collects humorous captions of liturgical pet-blessing under this introduction: “Animals used to get sacrificed by priests, but in these liberal times, they get blessed up instead.”

And speaking of Anglicans, this blog, by a female Episcopal seminarian, gives me a chuckle, insofar as I was raised a Broad-to-High Church Episcopalian myself, until I bailed out at age 15. She writes that she is “one year closer to being ordained a priest.”

It’s funny how Episcopalians speak of ordained women as “priests,” i.e., as honorary men. Perhaps the word “priestess” carries too many connotations of flickering flames, tinkling cymbals, diaphanous costumes . . . and erotic Paganism.