Smile When You Say ‘Tradition,’ Partner

Last week I found in my campus mailbox the first (only?) issue of Tyr: Myth-Culture-Tradition, a new journal focusing on ?satr?-Odinist-Heathen thought. It’s quite a bit like The Pomegranate started out to be for the more broadly defined Pagan community (including A-O-H), before The Pom morphed into a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. The first issue of Tyr was dated June 2002. I cannot find a web site to link to, but here is one online review.

I’m always interested in what Joscelyn Godwin has today on esoteric subjects–here, he writes about the man who put the T in Tradition, Julius Evola–and on the evolution of the followers of the Indo-Europeanist Georges Dum?zil. But the trouble is, you never know when you are going to step over the edge when reading Tyr. Turn the page and someone is claiming that the his Heathen rock band’s music “resonates” with people of European origin because “DNA will out, you know.”

Uh, yeah. I once thought that that was why I was so thunderstruck the first time that I heard bagpipes playing when I was a child–my sliver of Scottish ancestry. On the other hand, I always liked blues music too–even did a blues show on my college FM station. Maybe my banks-of-the-Mississippi River ancestry is more important than DNA? Who knows? This “blood and soil” stuff so easily can be warped.

More information: Utrdisc@aol.com

Subscriptions US $16 domestic; $25 foreign (airmail)
Ultra, P.O. Box 11736, Atlanta, Georgia 30355

Inspiration in Paganism

“I had been a Christian pastor for 15 years when I found true inspiration in Paganism.” And he has written a book. His use language on the Web page, at least, shows some background in evangelical Christianity.

Trudging Along with Baskets of Corn

This Denver Post article on carrying corn to Chaco Canyon helps to illuminate the world of Bone Walker and the Gears’ other Anasazi novels. (See entry for 28 September 2003.)

NOTE: I do not know how long this link will be good, since the Denver Post does not make its archives available forever. If the link does not work, visit the Post and search the archive for “Chaco.”

The more I think about Chaco, the more I wonder if the great kiva of Casa Rinconada was not perhaps the Southwestern equivalent of the Nuremberg stadium, site of the Nazi Party rallies filmed so memorably by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will.

Smokey and the Sacred

My paper “Smokey and the Sacred: Nature Religion, Civil Religion, and American Paganism” has been accepted for a special issue of the journal Ecotheology, edited by Graham Harvey.

The publishing agreement, however, forbids me from publishing more than the abstract online. (But maybe if you ask nicely.) I will supply a complete bibliographic citation to the printed copy as soon as it is available.

Maybe it’s the first Pagan Studies paper to invoke Smokey Bear as a godform, following the footsteps of Gary Snyder’s “Smokey the Bear Sutra.”

OK, so he is somewhat discredited as a forester in these “prescribed burn” days. Sometimes demigods have a come-down.

Bone Walker

I have just finished Bone Walker, by the prolific Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear, last in a series of novels set among the Anasazi people of the Southwest in about the 13th century. It is the third of a series, actually, and in the words of the authors’ Web site, “Bone Walker ties all the threads woven in The Visitant and The Summoning God together.”

The Gears used to be archaeologists. No doubt they got out of the profession due to its apparent high homicide rate, if we are to believe them, Tony Hillerman, Jake Page, and other writers. I always knew that archaeology was a high contentious and even vicious field; now we see that it is probably the most murderous corner of Academia.

If you read Bone Walker, personal knowledge or a map of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, is essential.

The interesting thing about the Gears’ novels is that they incorporate current archaeological thinking, e.g., how might the cannibalism documented by Arizona State University’s Christy Turner have occurred? Was there really religious warfare between followers of the “kachina cult” and other people?

Frankly, I wonder if the religious-warfare angle is not overdrawn. It sounds too much like 16th-century Europe: “Die, Protestant dogs!” I like to think that people who did not have “holy scripture” telling them what to do would be more likely to go to war for the usual reasons–resource control, prestige–and less over dogma or the nature of the gods.

For people who must spend a lot of time outdoors, the Gears do include some oddities. For instance, these Anasazi warriors skulking in Chaco Canyon are always trying to sneak from one town to the next in the “period of darkness between sunset and the rising of the New Moon.” Now think about that. One thing about us Pagans–we at least know when the Moon comes up.

And one woman, the beautiful but deceitful Obsidian, she of the perfect full breasts, goes jogging down the Great North Road with the warriors. Did the Anasazi invent the sports bra?

That Auction

Just a follow-up to yesterday’s post: We went to the auction, so I can see that I’ve seen that particular elephant.

I think I was last at the Pines Ranch the summer of 1975, when I drove there in Dad’s Chevy Vega from Colorado Springs, got permission to park it near the lodge, and walked up through the nearby summer cabins, onto the Rainbow Trail, and thus to Lake of the Clouds.

Obviously, it has changed a little. I spotted the two-story Victorian lodge with the porch that I remembered, but that whole fake Western town/office/dining hall/swimming pool complex was not there then.

As for the art, I have nothing against representational art (one of my favorite painters of all time is still John Singer Sargent), but I want it to move me somehow, to go beyond mere postcard prettiness. (I love Sargent’s nervous intensity.) One more office-credenza-size bronze bull elk or mounted-cowboy-with-packhorse does not do much for me.

It was 95 percent standard middle-range-Taos-art-gallery stuff, well-executed but predictable. Back in the 1970s we started calling some of that genre “oil company boardroom art”– romantic views of the country that they are now cutting up with roads and drill pads. My checkbook stayed in my pocket. OK, I had tentatively set a spending limit in the hundreds, and pretty much everything was in the $1,200-$2,500 range; and I would have to be deeply in love to spend that kind of dough.

A Greenhouse

Big news that is not about writing: the new greenhouse kit is here–four big cardboard cartons lying beside the driveway. I hope this weekend to spread gravel where it is going to sit, and then I can assemble it next Friday or Saturday. The weather forecast is dry, luckily–and the aspens are turning now, streaking the ridges with gold.

We have always had vegetable and flower gardens. We grow food to eat and some plants just because they are dramatic and drought-resistant (wormwood, various sturdy asters), and we grow some medicinal herbs. Since the greenhouse will not be heated, it will not provide year-around production, I reckon; but it should stretch the season for salad greens, at least.

This afternoon Mary and I are going to an art auction to benefit the local conservation land trust, which I do support with donations, even though I feel like they tend to ignore this end of the county. Mary is not thrilled about hob-nobbing with the “trophy house” crowd (if that truly is who attends), but I think that we will see at least a few familiar faces from our service on the board of another nonprofit organization a couple of years ago.

There will be painting demonstrations, which seems weird to me. Can you imagine a writing demonstration? It’s the finished product that matters. (My father, who was a representational painter, would disagree with me on that–but I am not interested in studying another painter’s technique.)

The art will be primarily representational and/or “Western,” I suppose, but maybe we’ll find a local version of Robert Bateman–someone whose paintings of the natural world are not only superbly executed but also have a sense of Mystery to them. I’ll take the checkbook, set a modest spending limit, and see what happens.

To use my favorite 19th-century expression, I just need to “see the elephant.”

Online Pagan News

Two more sites, in addition to the almost-too-huge Witches’ Voice:

1. Pagan Institute Report’s online features.

2. Jason Pitzl-Waters’ Mythworks, which unfortunately is not updated often enough.

The Pagan cover-design dilemma (again)

Graham Harvey, my co-editor on the Paganism Reader, tells me that Routledge editors are still agonizing over a cover design. Admittedly, the one shown in the online catalog is pretty pedestrian.

It seems that there are only three choices for Pagan books.

1. A tree
2. A standing stone, as on Michael York’s Pagan Theology.
3. A Pre-Raphaelite female figure in earth tones, as favored by Kensington/Citadel and other publishers of how-to books.

We will see which one we get.

More on ‘Bast’

A reliable source tells me that as of two years ago, Edghill was heading an ‘ultra-conservative’ Gardnerian coven. Maybe that outcome fits better than my hypothesis of disillusionment with the contemporary Wiccan scene. Or maybe it’s the same thing.