Interior with shelves for cremations (BBC).
Some “experiential archaeology” — yes, it will hold the cremated remains of modern people.
“It’s strange really. We haven’t built a long barrow for 5,000 years, but then about six weeks ago we had another enquiry for one.
“They want a burial chamber built in central London to hold some art.
“They’re like London buses. You don’t get one for 5,000 years and then all of a sudden two come at once.”
Neil Degrasse Tyson’s remake of Cosmos tries to remake Giordano Bruno as a martyr of modern science, but he was nothing of the kind.
He was a lot more of an occultist. Even The Daily Beast gets it.
As Discover magazine’s Corey Powell pointed out, the philosophers of the 16th century weren’t anything like scientists in the modern sense. Bruno, for instance, was a “pandeist,” which is the belief that God had transformed himself into all matter and ceased to exist as a distinct entity in himself. He believed in all sort of magic and spirits, and extrapolated those views far beyond his ideas about the infinity of the universe. In contrast to contemporaries who drew more modest conclusions from their similar ideas, Bruno agitated for an elaborate counter-theology, and was (unlike the poor, humble outcast portrayed in Cosmos) supported by powerful royal benefactors. The church didn’t even have a position on whether the Earth orbited the sun, and didn’t bring it up at Bruno’s trial. While the early-modern religious persecution certainly can’t be denied, Bruno was killed because he flamboyantly denied basic tenets of the Catholic faith, not because religious authorities were out to suppress all “freedom of thought.”
Religion blogger Peter Berger, melding articles from The Tablet (Roman Catholic) and The Christian Century (mainline Protestant) notes “the major demographic shift in world Christianity—the fact that more Christians now live in the Global South: Asia, Africa, Latin America—than in the old Christian homelands of Europe and North America.”
With this shift goes huge growth in Pentecostal Christianity—Protestant churches emphasizing ecstatic worship and the “gifts of the Holy Spirit,” such as speaking in tongues and faith-healing. (The modern Pentecostal movement began in Los Angeles in 1906—the same month as the great San Francisco earthquake and fire. Some of them see a connection.)
In 1970 Pentecostals were 5% of world Christians; today the figure is 25%! 80% of Christian converts in Asia are Pentecostal! I’m not quite clear how this arithmetic is worked out, but the Christian Century story asserts that one of twelve people alive today is Pentecostal! Not surprisingly, the [recent Pentecostal World Conference] in Kuala Lumpur was “young, vibrant and confident”. No stepping around quietly so as not to offend Muslim sensitivities!
There is, for example, major competition between (often Pentecostal) Christians and Muslims for conversions in sub-Saharan Africa. Sometimes it is bloody—see the recent news from Nigeria and the Central African Republic, for example. Some conflicts that are not religious on the surface become divided on religious lines.
So what is the Pagan angle? For one, Pentecostal Christians (and many Muslims) see the world as a scene of spiritual warfare. (See, for instance, “Saudi Arabia’s War on Witchcraft.”) Both groups battle demons and “demonic” practitioners. Consequently, followers of traditional animist/polythestic religions as well as new Pagans are going to continue to be targeted.
If you are reading this, chances are that you live in a culture where the notions of religious freedom and individual religious choice have at least some weight. But from a global perspective, isn’t that a minority view — no matter how many interfaith congresses and parliaments there are?
I am all for religious freedom, but much of the world has a very limited idea as to what that means.
Slate contributor Joseph Stromberg chronicles his trip through “the shadowy, surreal world of an academic book mill.”
The bloggers and academics who’d written these posts had gotten emails virtually identical to mine and wrote about how the company obtained the rights to tens of thousands of theses, dissertations, and other unpublished works for essentially nothing; sold copies of them as books to unsuspecting online buyers (who assumed they were purchasing proofed, edited work); and kept essentially 100 percent of the proceeds. LAP Lambert, I learned, is the print equivalent of a content farm: a clearinghouse for texts that generate tiny amounts of revenue simply by turning up in search and appearing to be legitimate, published works.
So, naturally, I replied to Holmes, telling her I was interested in hearing more.
It’s a marriage of content-scraping and tax-evasion, by the sound of it. Certainly there is evasion of paying royalties. And this:
Some naive academics think publishing will add cachet to their C.V., but they find that having the Lambert name on it is an embarrassment.
Authors in the developing world may be the most easily exploited, thinking that they are being published by a prestigious German house. And like all vanity presses, this one makes some of its money by selling copies to the books’ authors.
Judy Harrow, one of the most influential East Coast American Wiccan priestesses and a damn fine writer too, is no longer with us.
You can read tributes at The Witching Hour blog, on a Facebook page, and elsewhere, I am sure.
From The Witching Hour:
As an author she contributed to a number of notable anthologies, including Rites of Passage and the excellent Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft. Her first book, Wicca Covens was published in 1999, and her second, Spiritual Mentoring, in 2002. Judy’s leadership skills were apparent in all of her writings, as they were in any conversation about modern pagan witchcraft.
¶ Joe Laycock examined the mythologies behind True Detective. (I have not seen it, being much the same situation as Jason Pitzl-Waters.)
Religion scholar Philip Jenkins has suggested these two sources—contemporary Satanic Panic and the “weird tales” of pulp horror—are connected. He suggests that it was the weird tales authors of the 1920s, notably Lovecraft and Herbert Gorman, who first introduced the idea of secret, murderous cults into the American consciousness.
¶ Those so-called “hex signs” on Pennsylvania Dutch barns? They have little to do with witches and magic, notes librarian of esotericsm Dan Harms in a book review.
From time to time, I’m asked if The Long-Lost Friend has anything to do with hex signs, those beautiful star and flower figures that decorate the barns across much of eastern Pennsylvania and adjacent areas where German settlers made their homes. The answer is, “Not really,” with a follow-up about the possibility of a mystical link that might or might not be present. Hex Signs provides us with answers to these questions, and much more.
¶ Speaking of folklore, Ethan Doyle White notes a free online special issue of the journal Folklore, focusing on folklore and Paganism. Lots of good material there.
The March Animist Blog Carnival, on the theme of dreams, is hosted at Pray to the Moon.
We have a more modest collection of writings for this month. But, being an avid dreamer, I am not at all surprised. I find more often than not, when I begin to prattle about dreams, the response is invariably, “I don’t dream,” or “I never/rarely remember my dreams.” However, I also find that those people who are in tune with the dreamworld never disappoint in their storytelling.
Kira Salak, a writer for National Geographic, has a good article published on her ayahuasca pilgrimage to Peru.
But she can’t call it a that. It was “a lark,” at least the first time:
And then there is me, who a year ago came to Peru on a lark to take the “sacred spirit medicine,” ayahuasca, and get worked over by shamans. Little suspecting that I’d emerge from it feeling as if a waterlogged wool coat had been removed from my shoulders—literally feeling the burden of depression lifted—and thinking that there must be something to this crazy shamanism after all.
And so I am back again.
I have read a lot of put-downs of this sort of journey. The term “ayahuasca tourism” is tossed around, along with the presumption that any such experience cannot possibly be “authentic,” whatever that means.
Such an attitude may suit neo-puritans, but it is profoundly un-Pagan.
In the collection Anthropological Research on Contemporary Tourism (thanks to Amy W. for the citation), Nelson Graburn offers a “Working/Traveling Matrix,”
Stay Travel
Voluntary “Doing Nothing” at home Tourism and/or recreation
Compulsory/Serious Work, incl. school & housework Occupations requiring travel
What I see in this is the attitude that if you are not getting paid to travel, it’s not real, and that if it is not work, it is not serious travel.
Think of those times when you have met someone — or maybe said about yourself — who claimed to be a “traveler” but not a “tourist.”
Imagine someone leaning against a wall two thousand years ago outside the sacred precinct of Delphi, sneering, “Look at that — another bunch of rich oracle tourists.” (Well, there were the Cynics.) But a scholar of religious tourism in ancient Greece writes,
Many tourism scholars however have begun to recognize that the differences between what is a tourist and what is a pilgrim is not as large as was once thought. These scholars have coined a new term, the religious tourist, to describe those travelers who seem to bridge the gap between the traditional definition of a pilgrim and the traditional definition of a tourist.
Maybe a contemporary writer has to describe her trip as “a lark” in order to distance herself from the fact that it might be a pilgrimage, leading some of her readers to dismiss her as a “religious wacko.”
Two things.
1. “Phallephoria, the carrying of a phallus in procession in honor of Dionysus. For the first time after almost two thousand years, Phallephoria was celebrated in Athens.”
And that is tremendous. There is also a longer, 30-minute YouTube video
Although the weather looks rainy in the video, was it always so, archaeologists wonder.
2. After thirty-some years of attending festivals, I know that the Wiccan ritual model of casting a circle is not the solution for big groups—too much standing around and waiting. Instead, the quintessential Pagan large-group creation of ritual space should be by processing, whether in the streets or the open country.
And the Greeks do a good job with masking too.
Some months I am so relieved to see the New Moon, and this is one of them.