“Constant sobriety is not a natural or pleasant condition, and intoxicants are an essential part of life and literature” — another story on artists, writers, and drugs. (Thanks to Butterflies and Wheels.)
Lose Yourself Here
The Internet Sacred Text Archive is an amazing place. Recent additions include the complete corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry, in Old English, of course. (Time to dig out my undergraduate copy of Bright’s Old English from Prof. Harper’s class.) Thanks to Language Hat for the link.
You were wondering if they had Pagan texts. Yes, they do. But why that cheesy cheap graphic that looks like a computer-game backdrop? No stock photos of Stonehenge? No John Waterhouse paintings?
Dem Bones
American archaeologists have had more a decade’s experience with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). It has also been misapplied, I believe, as in the case of Kennewick Man. Although that skeleton may have been proto-Polynesian rather than European, Steve McNallen of the Asatru Folk Assembly filed a brief in the court case over who got the skeleton under NAGPRA’s rules. Mattias Gardell (see 29 November post ) makes an interesting point: We know that Norse people visited North America, but if a Norse cemetery were discovered in, say, Maine, a literal reading of NAGPRA would require those bones to be handed over the nearest federally recognized American Indian tribe as “ancestral remains.”
Now similar legal issues could be on the horizon in Europe, as discussed in two stories on Spiked Online, “Battle of the Bones” and “Burying the Evidence.”
“So far as governments are concerned, repatriation strategies have become part of the way in which they attempt to connect with what they perceive as fragmented, divided societies. In the USA and Australia, the apparent failure to integrate indigenous populations had became a particular cause for concern by the 1980s, and with no new solutions to integration on the horizon, the issue became how best to build a relationship – any relationship – with these separate, impoverished groups of people came to the fore.
“Repatriation, in this context, represented a symbolic reversal of conquest – a giving back of what had been taken, a recognition of the value of indigenous culture at the highest levels of government, and an attempt to create, not one national identity, but a new ‘pluricultural’ ideal” (“Battle of the Bones”).
(Thanks to Arts and Letters Daily for sending me down this track.)
British Pagan are increasingly positioning themselves as “indigenous religion” and taking an active interest in the management of prehistoric Pagan archaeological sites, so these controversies will only increase.
Gods of the Blood
How to meet the Asatruar at an academic gathering–walk around carrying a copy of Mattias Gardell’s Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism. 
Gardell, a Swedish historian of religion, also wrote an earlier book on the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims), In the Name of Elijah Muhammed. Both are published by Duke University Press.
From the cover blurb: “Gardell outlines the historical development of the different strands of racist paganism–including Wotanism, Odinism, and Darkside ?satr?–and situates them on the spectrum of pagan beliefs ranging from Wicca and goddess worship to Satanism.”
To Gardell, both the racist Pagans and earlier groups such as Christian Identity arise from a version of the “cultic milieu,” a shared basis of attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions, which is why he calls them more a counterculture than a movement. The actual groups keep breaking up, changing, and coalescing, but the counterculture as counterculture persists, because it embodies its own form of attitudes which are actually common enough in society at large: about nature, about government’s misuses, about a reaction against modernity and for capital-T Tradition.
I think these people need some help with naming. You have to understand as a reader that Wotan’s Kindred is not the same as Wodan’s Kindred is not the same as Wotansvolk (USA) is not the same as Wotansvolk (Sweden).
It’s a worthwhile book, but I did find one geographic howler, which shook my confidence a little. He describes the federal prison where David Lane is incarcerated as “deep underground in mountainous Florence, Colorado.” Um, no. I watched it being built, and, granted, the maximum security complex surrounds inmates with so much concrete that they might as well be deep underground. But Gardell must be one of those who thinks that all Colorado is mountainous. About 40 percent of Colorado is the High Plains, and Florence is on the edge of that region, in a gentle river valley with the prison only slightly higher. (Hardscrabble Creek passes not far away after it emerges from the mountains). Considering that Gardell includes a photo of Lane taken in prison, I don’t know how he came to write that sentence.
Gods of the Blood
How to meet the Asatruar at an academic gathering–walk around carrying a copy of Mattias Gardell’s Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism. Gardell, a Swedish historian of religion, also wrote an earlier book on the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims), In the Name of Elijah Muhammed. Both are published by Duke University Press.
From the cover blurb: “Gardell outlines the historical development of the different strands of racist paganism–including Wotanism, Odinism, and Darkside ?satr?–and situates them on the spectrum of pagan beliefs ranging from Wicca and goddess worship to Satanism.”
To Gardell, both the racist Pagans and earlier groups such as Christian Identity arise from a version of the “cultic milieu,” a shared basis of attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions, which is why he calls them more a counterculture than a movement. The actual groups keep breaking up, changing, and coalescing, but the counterculture as counterculture persists, because it embodies its own form of attitudes which are actually common enough in society at large: about nature, about government’s misuses, about a reaction against modernity and for capital-T Tradition.
I think these people need some help with naming. You have to understand as a reader that Wotan’s Kindred is not the same as Wodan’s Kindred is not the same as Wotansvolk (USA) is not the same as Wotansvolk (Sweden).
It’s a worthwhile book, but I did find one geographic howler, which shook my confidence a little. He describes the federal prison where David Lane is incarcerated as “deep underground in mountainous Florence, Colorado.” Um, no. I watched it being built, and, granted, the maximum security complex surrounds inmates with so much concrete that they might as well be deep underground. But Gardell must be one of those who thinks that all Colorado is mountainous. About 40 percent of Colorado is the High Plains, and Florence is on the edge of that region, in a gentle river valley with the prison only slightly higher. (Hardscrabble Creek passes not far away after it emerges from the mountains). Considering that Gardell includes a photo of Lane taken in prison, I don’t know how he came to write that sentence.
Gods of the Blood
How to meet the Asatruar at an academic gathering–walk around carrying a copy of Mattias Gardell’s Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism. Gardell, a Swedish historian of religion, also wrote an earlier book on the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims), In the Name of Elijah Muhammed. Both are published by Duke University Press.
From the cover blurb: “Gardell outlines the historical development of the different strands of racist paganism–including Wotanism, Odinism, and Darkside ?satr?–and situates them on the spectrum of pagan beliefs ranging from Wicca and goddess worship to Satanism.”
To Gardell, both the racist Pagans and earlier groups such as Christian Identity arise from a version of the “cultic milieu,” a shared basis of attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions, which is why he calls them more a counterculture than a movement. The actual groups keep breaking up, changing, and coalescing, but the counterculture as counterculture persists, because it embodies its own form of attitudes which are actually common enough in society at large: about nature, about government’s misuses, about a reaction against modernity and for capital-T Tradition.
I think these people need some help with naming. You have to understand as a reader that Wotan’s Kindred is not the same as Wodan’s Kindred is not the same as Wotansvolk (USA) is not the same as Wotansvolk (Sweden).
It’s a worthwhile book, but I did find one geographic howler, which shook my confidence a little. He describes the federal prison where David Lane is incarcerated as “deep underground in mountainous Florence, Colorado.” Um, no. I watched it being built, and, granted, the maximum security complex surrounds inmates with so much concrete that they might as well be deep underground. But Gardell must be one of those who thinks that all Colorado is mountainous. About 40 percent of Colorado is the High Plains, and Florence is on the edge of that region, in a gentle river valley with the prison only slightly higher. (Hardscrabble Creek passes not far away after it emerges from the mountains). Considering that Gardell includes a photo of Lane taken in prison, I don’t know how he came to write that sentence.
Gods of the Blood
How to meet the Asatruar at an academic gathering–walk around carrying a copy of Mattias Gardell’s Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism. Gardell, a Swedish historian of religion, also wrote an earlier book on the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims), In the Name of Elijah Muhammed. Both are published by Duke University Press.
From the cover blurb: “Gardell outlines the historical development of the different strands of racist paganism–including Wotanism, Odinism, and Darkside ?satr?–and situates them on the spectrum of pagan beliefs ranging from Wicca and goddess worship to Satanism.”
To Gardell, both the racist Pagans and earlier groups such as Christian Identity arise from a version of the “cultic milieu,” a shared basis of attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions, which is why he calls them more a counterculture than a movement. The actual groups keep breaking up, changing, and coalescing, but the counterculture as counterculture persists, because it embodies its own form of attitudes which are actually common enough in society at large: about nature, about government’s misuses, about a reaction against modernity and for capital-T Tradition.
I think these people need some help with naming. You have to understand as a reader that Wotan’s Kindred is not the same as Wodan’s Kindred is not the same as Wotansvolk (USA) is not the same as Wotansvolk (Sweden).
It’s a worthwhile book, but I did find one geographic howler, which shook my confidence a little. He describes the federal prison where David Lane is incarcerated as “deep underground in mountainous Florence, Colorado.” Um, no. I watched it being built, and, granted, the maximum security complex surrounds inmates with so much concrete that they might as well be deep underground. But Gardell must be one of those who thinks that all Colorado is mountainous. About 40 percent of Colorado is the High Plains, and Florence is on the edge of that region, in a gentle river valley with the prison only slightly higher. (Hardscrabble Creek passes not far away after it emerges from the mountains). Considering that Gardell includes a photo of Lane taken in prison, I don’t know how he came to write that sentence.
Idol Thoughts
After three days of hearing papers and networking at AAR-SBL, our brains were full, so half a dozen friends and I headed for the traveling Etruscan exhibit at Atlanta’s Fernbank Museum. It was wonderful to get away from the convention-hotel district.
The exhibit on ancient Etruscan life was organized by subjects: feasting, domestic life, war, the gods, etc. In a case of religious items I saw several small hand bells. One looked almost identical to a “Sanctus bell” that I remembered from my altar-boy days, the kind rung at key moments during Mass. There is probably a line of unbroken ritual ringing of small bells from ancient northern Italy to your nearest parish church.
The jewelry case held a ring with a carnelian set in gold. One of the Pagan women raised her hand: her ring was almost identical.
You exit the exhibit into a special gift shop, of course. There among the reproduction Etruscan ware was a statuette of Diana that looked familiar. I turned it over: the label said “JBL Images,” which is the old name of Sacred Source. Yes, their India-made idols were scattered throughout the shop. They must be the Wal-Mart of idolatry. (Does that make Mythic Images the Target of idolatry?)
Wear your carnelian, ring the bell, honor the gods of the city–does anything ever really change?
Off to See the Pagan Studies Crowd
I’ve been turning off the overhead fluorescent lights in my office, leaving just the desk and reading lights on, so that I can watch the eastern sky turn mauve over the prairie. Today is effectively the first day of Thanksgiving break, and that means leaving for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, this year in Atlanta, a city in which I would otherwise have no interest what so ever. (The AAR is slowly divorcing itself from its parent, the Society for Biblical Literature; annual meetings will go their separate ways in a few years.)
Eleven years ago I attended my first AAR-SBL meeting in San Francisco. I knew no one other than my professors from graduate school. (I had attended a couple of religional AAR meetings only.) It was huge, overwhelming (probably 7,000-8,000 attendees), humbling. I felt outclassed and out of place, a nobody, in his first year of teaching at an unknown state university.
In 1995 (Philadelphia), the first group of scholars working with Paganism and/or “nature religion” got together just for a meet-and-greet. “Nature religion,” of course, can be either a euphemism for Paganism or, as in the case of Bron Taylor’s or Catherine Albanese’s work, something much broader. We still have not bridged that gap.
By 1997 (San Francisco, again) we were applying for “consultation” status in the AAR–a regular meeting slot, in other words. We were turned down and kept on presenting papers and having panel discussions in the marginal “additional meetings” category. And that year Fritz Muntean and Diana Taylor started The Pomegranate (see links on the right), which is now a bona-fide peer-reviewed journal. And in 1998 (Orlando) I met Erik Hanson of AltaMira Press, who was bidding for but did not get Bron’s and Jeff Kaplan’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature project, which went to Continuum instead. But thanks to that contact, I got to know Erik and eventually signed to write Her Hidden Children: I will be taking a rough draft ms. to Atlanta with me.
And this year our little additional meeting has grown to an all-day Pagan Studies session.
I’m still humbled, but now it’s by the way in which interest has grown, the volume of scholarly writing has exploded, and by the fact that I’m editing The Pomegranate. Now I’ll be approaching people to publish papers, soliciting book mss. for the AltaMira Pagan Studies series . . . suddenly four days don’t seem like enough.
Expect more news here in about a week.
“Cosmic Truths of the Ages, Revealed” (Fated, part 2)
A newspaper article on Fate magazine and its editor, Phyllis Galde.
My “Part 1” here.