Model T Religion

A hat tip to Wren at The Witches’ Voice, who posted on Facebook a news item about a parliamentarian in Kuwait, Abdulrahman Al-Jeeran, who is upset about the sale of non-Islamic statuary in Kuwaiti gift shops.

He revealed that statues representing gods believed by non-Muslim pagan worshippers during the primitive era are commonly seen at various shopping malls across the country.

He is not against freedom of religion, however, as he explained in this brain-twisting statement:

He explained that he was not trying to restrict the society to believing only one religion; however, he stressed that God Almighty commands human beings to accept faith without any alternative. He further stressed that issuing such a ban will protect future generations from deviating from the path of faith

Or as Henry Ford said c. 1922 about the Ford Model T car, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”

Iron Mountain Ritual Site To Be Restored

Iron Mtn., Manitou Springs

Iron Mountain, Manitou Springs, Colorado. (photo by Colorado Springs Gazette).

When M. and I read this item in the Colorado Springs Gazette, our hearts soared. When we were newlyweds and bought our first house (a barely winterized 1920s cottage, 740 sq. ft.), it was just outside the lower left boundary of this photo of Iron Mountain in Manitou Springs, Colorado.

Iron Mountain is just a foothill, really, but when you look up from below, it blots out the higher ridges behind it.

Before we bought the house, we rented it, and our landlord was Tom McGee, who would later build “The House on Iron Mountain.” (I think the article’s date is wrong; we recall it being built around 1984.)

Before then, we would climb to the summit, where there was a natural stone throne, sometimes using it as a ritual site.

The coven we headed in the early 1980s was the Iron Mountain Coven, and Iron Mountain gave its name to a certain zine of the mid-1980s — Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion.

I put out only four issues, but they helped to inspire Fritz Muntean to start his own zine called The Pomegranate, and look at it now.

As for the McGees’ house, not only did it ruin “our” ritual site, but it was not even architecturally interesting. So they are razing it today? Hurray! And if that land upon which technically we trespassed becomes public open space, someone else can sit in the “throne,” if it is still there. I suspect that the rock outcropping survived the construction project.

Animist Blog Carnival: Death and the Blogger

This month’s Animist Blog Carnival is up. The theme is “death.”

I am represented by something from Southern Rockies Nature Blog.

Good Advice: “Run Your Own Race”

I hit bottom the summer I turned 36. Part-way through grad school, I took a break to work as managing editor of an outdoor magazine, Colorado Outdoor Journal. (You’ve never heard of it. I needed a job.) In May, the publisher pulled the plug on the magazine, but I had already registered for the June annual conference of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, so M. and I packed up our VW camper and — unemployed — drove to that year’s site, Kalispell, Montana.

At a reception, this guy — call him T. — came up and introduced himself. I did not know his face, but I knew his name: he had written several books I admired and was on the masthead of one of the leading magazines.

As freshmen at Reed College, he said, we had been in the same creative writing class. He remembered me. I had totally forgotten his being there. (He dropped out, started writing. I stayed.)

It wasn’t T’s fault, but in the wee hours one morning on that trip I woke up in the camper and had the nearest thing to a nervous breakdown that I ever had experienced. Everything that I thought I was or would be turned to dust and ashes. I was not suicidal, but I was crushed by an overwhelming sense of failure. No job. Maybe no career. Bills to pay. Taking the wrong path . . .

Someone should have given me this to read: “Run Your Own Race.”

The best advice I’ve received about surviving in the competitive world of grad school was passed down from a colleague: “Kaitlin, make sure to run your own race.” . . . .  Looking around at your colleagues, there will be people publishing more, teaching more, and people who have more extracurricular activities, or more funding. It can be easy to think you don’t measure up. This self-deprecating thinking ignores strategies that can help make you successful and instead fixates on what others are doing.

I learned that lesson as writer, too: Be happy about your friends’ successes, and don’t measure yourself against them. Run your own race.

A Pastafarian Prophet

A surrealist and a proto-Pastafarian, SE Portland, Oregon.

A surrealist and a proto-Pastafarian, SE Portland, Oregon.

This recent post on Religion Clause describes the victorious struggle of a Texas Pastafarian for the right to wear the sacred pasta strainer in his driver’s license photograph.

It caught my attention because I had just finished editing an article by Joe “Vampires” Leycock, “wandering anthropologist of the occult,”  for the Bulletin for the Study of Religion: “Laughing Matters: “Parody Religions” and the Command to Compare.”

In it he mentions the similar struggle of an Austrian man, Nico Alm, for the same end. Laycock argues that Alm, like Pastafarianism’s founders, “wanted to demonstrate that religion is a category fundamentally preoccupied with the absurd and to question why Western democracies afford special privileges to religion.”

But then a memory of years ago trickled up.

Since this photo predates the founding of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I think that that afternoon my friend and I were merely “preoccupied with the absurd.” Little did I know that I was an unheralded prophet of Pastafarianism.

The bare-chested fellow in the Greek fisherman’s cap is, in fact, Greek — my housemate Yioryos Chouliaras. He seemed to live on Turkish coffee (that’s what he called it) and strong cigarettes and wrote surrealist poetry by the yard. The last I heard, he was the cultural attache at the Greek embassy in Ottawa. Sounds like tough duty, but I am sure that Yioryos could handle it.

Resources in Pagan Theology

Christine Hoff Kraemer has assembled a list of books and websites on contemporary Pagan theology.

I was happy that I only once reacted with “What is X doing here?” And maybe I ought to give X a second look (or maybe not).

You really ought to read most of those books.

So You Want to Worship the Old Gods . . .

Hipster-Jon-Snow-game-of-thrones-23594329-362-500There are people who think that in order to do so, you have to learn “their” language, as spoken centuries ago, because the gods don’t keep up or something, let alone communicate in non-verbal ways.

All right, then.

You want to deal with Werunos (Sanskrit, Varuna), keeper of cosmic order? Talk this way.

It’s all explained at this link from Archaeology magazine on the reconstructed pronunciation of Proto-Indo-European: “Telling Tales in Proto-Indo-European.”

I played that clip for M., and she said that it reminded her of the 1970s–80s vogue for playing songs backwards to hear the “Satanic messages.” Maybe that’s the crucial fault in reconstructionism.

Oceania Has Always Been at War with Lemuria

51119-243x366The Los Angeles Review of Books offers a review of two books on Ray Palmer, the Shaver Mystery, and pulp-esoteric publishing of the 1940s–50s: The War Over Lemuria and The Man from Mars : Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey.

From the review:

Of course, the underground worlds of Richard Shaver did not spring full grown from his brain, no matter how fevered it might have been. Subterranean adventure has long been a staple of science-fiction. Even more to the point, the belief in the existence of subterranean civilizations itself has a long history, and not just among the ancients who believed in one form or another of an underworld abode of the dead.  Indeed, there are other instances in which fictional stories about the underworld have been regarded by some readers as revealing a hidden, sometimes religious truth. The Shaver Mystery, it turns out, is not without precedent. John Cleve Symmes’s hollow-earth novel Symzonia (1820), Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril: The Power of the Coming Race (1871), and Willis George Emerson’s The Smokey God (1908) are all examples of fictional tales of underground civilizations that have been treated as true accounts and the source for religious belief by some members of the Theosophical and occult communities. Shaver’s stories are darker than the similar works that preceded them, but Palmer’s claim that Shaver’s tales contained truths about the hidden world under our feet is part of a long tradition.

Ray Palmer went on to found Fate magazine, which has done several retrospective articles on the Shaver Mystery over the years. Until 1988, Fate was published in Chicago, which just adds to that whole “occult Chicago” meme. (See also the work of occult journalist Brad Steiger.)

Around the Pagan Blogosphere, 25 August 2013

Some bookmarked links are piling up, so let’s clear them away.

¶ Lee Morgan: What happens when a writing project turns mysteriously magical:

It wasn’t long before the story, its characters and underlying mythic themes came to life in very tangible ways for me. Not only did I start to dream about the characters who would inform me of what their ‘future’ should hold, but other friends dreamed about them and sometimes it wasn’t easy to tell if they were the character from the book or being ‘gloved’ by a spirit or god they were aligned to mythically in the book. The characters have become what is known in the western Occult tradition as “egregores’” or thought-forms.

¶ Via Forging the Sampo, a link to a post on “The Survival of Animism in Russia — and its Destruction in the West,” which, given the source, you know will focus on Finnic peoples,

¶ But never underestimate Russian xenophobia, now aligned with resurgent Orthodoxy, which has led, among other things, to the closing of the only Mari-language primary school that served this partly-Pagan nation.

¶ The list of polytheistic devotional books (and some Pagan SF) published by the Biblioteca Alexandrina  continues to grow. I have one and should get a couple of others.

Parking Lot Polytheism

Photo from PeopleofWalmart.com

Meeting the priestess might be . . . interesting. (Original source.)