The Three Fairly Sagacious Persons
The Church of England abandons the term “Three Wise Men” for “Magi”–unfortunately, it’s just kneejerk political correctness rather than a reappraisal of Zoroastrian influence on the birth of Christianity. Read more here, and don’t overlook the joke at the end.
“Hello, Pagan”
Despite the best efforts of those of us at The Pomegranate and such writers as Michael York, author of Pagan Theology (and a member of The Pom’s editorial board), some people continue to use “Pagan” as a synonym for “irreligious.”
Consider the “Pagans Only” page at the fundamentalist Christian TTW Ministries. (Thanks to The Paris Project for the link.)
Like too many of my students, preacher Todd Friel is confused about apostrophes and the use of the comma in direct address. “Pagan’s” is not the plural form of the word “Pagan, and that “Hello Pagan” makes me think of “Hello Kitty,” which sends my mind off in entirely unsuitable directions. (Love the blue hair, though.)
Sometimes to feel as though I am truest to my Pagan heritage when I am teaching rhetoric and grammar. Maybe we need some WWQD bracelets: “What Would Quintilian Do?”
Some people are saying that the “teen witch” craze, symbolized by the 1996 movie The Craft, has peaked. I don’t think so. My latest Llewellyn Publications reviewer’s catalog recently arrived, and I saw that Silver Ravenwolf’s Teen Witch had been redesigned. Whereas the former cover art had something in common with the poster/box art for The Craft, the new cover seems more in common with last year’s movie Thirteen.
It’s all about Pouty. Adolescent. Sexuality.
In his review essay “Sifting the Ashes,” an expose of the tobacco industry (collected in the book How To Be Alone, Jonathan Frantzen desconstructs the industry-funded anti-smoking ads aimed at teens and comments how “several antitobacco newspaper ads offer . . . the image of a preadolescent girl holding a cigarette. The models are not real smokers, yet despite their phoniness, they’re utterly sexualized by their cigarettes. The horror of underage smoking veils a horror of teen and preteen sexuality.”
Witchcraft, the new cigarette?
On a more positive note, a Colorado Witch describes sitting in on an interview of several teen Wiccans by a National Public Radio reporter.
“I spent the afternoon in the upstairs of the Oh My Goddess coffee house in Denver, listening to Barbara Bradford Hagerty of NPR interview 6 teenage Wiccans and one Christian teen learning about Wicca. She was amazed at how articulate, intelligent, and self-aware they were. She’s planning on doing a segment or show about teens and Wicca. They wouldn’t stop talking! She used more than one minidisc to record, which she says never happens in an interview. The 6 Wiccan teens were all raised Wiccan, more or less.
“She spoke briefly to most of the parents and to me; she may talk to me again in a couple of days if she can on her way to the airport. She is a colleague of Margot Adler’s, and therefore actually knew something about the topic. She asked each of the Wiccan teens if they thought it was a phase that they would grow out of, and the general consensus was ‘No. This is who I am.’ It was an amazing experience.
“Based on the kids that were there today, I have to say I think that the future of Paganism is in pretty capable hands.”
UPDATE 4/29/07: I had not looked at this post for a while, but it appears to me that the cover displayed, which is on Llewellyn’s web site, is not the one that I described as “pouty” a couple of years ago. Does anyone know for sure?
Pagans in Canada
Canada’s census asks questions about religion, and in 2001, slightly more than 21,000 Canadians (median age, 30.4) reported themselves as Pagan and/or Wicca. Of course, defining “Pagan” broadly, I would include the followers of “Aboriginal spirituality” as well, which would more than double that number. Statistics are here.
The obvious question is, how many felt constrained not to answer the question honestly?
Since Google sends some readers seeking news and photos about such new Arab singing stars as Haifa Wehbe and Nancy Ajram to this blog, here are two articles by Charles Paul Freund that might interest you.
“Look Who’s Rocking the Casbah: The Revolutionary Implications of Arab Music Videos,” Reason magazine, June 2003.
“Weapons of Singing Destruction” The Escalating Storm over Arab Pop Videos,” Reason magazine, October 29, 2003.
Freund writes:
If you add the voluminous press and publicity machine that has grown around this scene, it begins to take on the proportions of a cultural frenzy. Such phenomena have a long and fascinating history; they occur when a cultural form becomes available to an audience that uses it to assert and validate its quickly shifting sense of itself. The Netherlands famously experienced such a phenomenon in the 17th century, when members of its suddenly enriched middle class latched onto paintings of themselves and their world as a way to express and validate their new social power. At the time, such subject matter was a departure for painters; indeed, it was the first time that anyone outside the aristocracy had owned paintings. The emerging British middle class of the 18th and 19th centuries went through a fiction-reading frenzy (of Grub Street “trash,” mostly) as it sought models for its emerging social opportunities and identified with characters grappling with an industrializing, urbanizing world. Similarly, movies and rock music were powerful forms for different generations of 20th-century Americans. They used such forms to play with the new possibilities of identity that were coming within their grasp.
Skiing is Wrong, says Jack
It’s been a snowy winter here on Hardscrabble Creek: a good thing too, since we are still in a drought overall. By the end of January, according to a nearby ranch wife who had been keeping count, we had had 32 inches (81 cm) of snow, although it comes a little bit at a time, and most melts away between storms.
Thus far in February, some 22 inches (56 cm) more has fallen, and twice this month it has been possible to go skiing out the front door, instead of having to drive into the higher mountains. I go for the “Camp Hale” look close to home: baggy olive-green pants, ex-Army white skis, and perhaps the last bamboo ski poles in use in the state of Colorado.
LEFT: A World War II ski trooper from the 10th Mountain Division, during training at Camp Hale, near Leadville, Colorado. (Photo courtesy Denver Public Library)
But there is one problem: Jack, our Chesapeake Bay retriever. Like all good Chessies, he loves water in all forms: rain, rivers, swamps, ponds, fog, and snow. But, evidently, for his people to travel by skis is wrong, completely wrong. Every winter we go through this: Mary and I ski, and Jack runs alongside barking at us. The hills and ridges echo with his bark. The other dogs run too–they think that it’s all good fun–but somehow Jack takes skiing personally. Double-poling is worse than a diagonal stride in his view.
The only solution is to keep skiing until he gets tired of barking. Mary and I need to get away and up into the higher mountains.
The saga of Kennewick Man, the 9,200-year-old Caucasoid (which is not the same as “Caucasian”!) skeleton found in Washington state in 1996, continues. An federal appeals court panel has ruled in favor of reseachers who want to continue to study his remains, now stored at the University of Washington, and against the tribes that wanted to rebury him. Go here and here for more background on the controversy.
He was a tall, strongly built, middle-aged warrior who probably died a violent death. The question “at whose hands?” produces all sorts of fascinating speculation. Those speculations tie into theories of “diffusionism,” once discredited as ridiculed as “racist,” but now enjoying a bit of a quiet comeback.
Norse-tradition Pagans, led by Stephen McNallen claimed him as a European forebear, part of their argument that Heathenism was the natural spiritual path of today’s Euro-Americans. Some anthropologists suggested that he (and other, anomalous, non-Mongoloid skeletons found over the years) suggested that long-ago Polynesians also came to this continent, but were, perhaps, exterminated by the ancestors of those people now designated as Natives.
The Covill, Umatilla, Yakam, and Nez Perce tribes claimed the rights to rebury the skeleton as one of theirs, generally speaking, because he was found where they lived in historical times, from the 18th century onwards, at least. Their attorneys are not happy with the judges’ strict reading of the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, as described here in Native Times.
The tribes’ argument does not convince me either. We cannot assume that the population 9,000 years ago was the same as now/. It’s possible, but we know that tribes did change homelands–the Kiowa moving from Wyoming into the Southern Plains, to give just one example. NAGPRA was passed to repatriate the remains–thousands of them–of more recent skeletal remains, whose removal from their graves by scientific researchers had embittered many American Indians over the past century. But to claim a 9,200-year-old skeleton as “ours” is just too much of a stretch.
Kirk Mitchell’s mystery novel, Ancient Ones, was inspired by the battle over Kennewick Man’s remains. For more on the whole genre of “American Indian mystery novels,” go here.
Nature blog
The students in my “Nature Writing in the West” class have started blogging. Read their thoughts at Nature Blog.
Now to crack the whip over them: more posts! more links!
I am adding Natureblog to my links list.
What is Wrong with a Moon God, Anyway?
The fun-loving gang at Chick Publications have a new one, Allah had no Son, which offers evangelical Christians Chick’s comic-book take on the notion that Allah was originally an Arabic Moon god, which, I suppose, makes Islam a sort of failed polytheism. Thanks to Allah himself for the link.
You will find a bibliographic essay on the “Was Allah a Moon God?” issue here, which cites most of the dubious texts out there. (It’s a Christian apologetics site.)
The ubiquity of Chick’s little booklets once led Tim/Otter/Oberon Zell of the Church of All Worlds and Pete Davis of the Aquarian Tabernacle to create their own small series of Pagan anti-tracts, done in the same style and format. The first, The Other People, took the approach that since most Western Pagans consider themselves to be neither literal nor metaphorical “children of Abraham,” all those Middle Eastern holy books simply do not apply to us.
Chick also champions the anti-Wiccan, anti-Masonic writer Bill Schnoebelen, dealt with effectively here.
On Saturday the 24th of January, a colleague invited me and the notorious M.C. to the “Burns Nicht Supper,” an annual event in many locations around the world, celebrating the birthday of the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Go here for a typical evening’s program, Alberta version.
“You’ll see,” she said. “The Presbyterians provide the organization, and the Pagans provide the music and energy” . . . or words to that effect.
I tied on my dress Gordon necktie (Victorian invention, all that specific clan tartan stuff); the notorious M.C. combed her red hair and dressed in black, and off we went, to the dining hall of The Retired Enlisted Association in Colorado Springs, a suitably banner-hung and martial venue. Aside from one singer/guitarist and his companion, who set off my . . . what’s the Pagan equivalent of “gaydar”? . . . I would say that the Presbyterian influence dominated the evening.
All the elements were there: the haggis was piped, the toasts were drunk, and the wee laddies and lassies danced around basket-hilted broadswords as large as they were. I give the Scottish Society of the Pike’s Peak Region credit for this: they are not afraid to let children handle large edged weapons. Imagine such a thing in a public school in this safety-crazed age.
But eventually it all wore on us, and we slipped away before “Auld Lang Syne” was sung, pleading the long drive home.
The same Scottish Society of the Pike’s Peak Region will be “kirkin’ the tartan” in our former home of Manitou Springs come April 3. A little research reveals that this seemingly ancient “tradition” was invented early on in World War II to build American support for the British cause, in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack brought us into the war. Now it has become a major American and Canadian tourist event: here is one example from Nova Scotia.
As for the Pagans, I think that they are at the Highland Games that are spreading everywhere.