New Article on Polish Paganism

Via Scott Simpson, who is quoted in it, “Pre-Christian Slavic Beliefs are on the Rise in Poland” (PDF file), from the Krakow Post.

“The native faith movement as a whole is loosely organised and doesn’t
have a strong dogmatic component, it is actually less about faith – as in
‘correct belief’ – and more about being faithful, living the lifestyle,” said
Scott Simpson, a scholar of religious studies at the Jagiellonian University,
and a co-author [sic] of a recent study of Eastern European neo-paganism.

Scroll to page 22 and watch out for extraneous commas.

A Medical Origin for Norse Monsters?

This is what happens when a parasitologist/archaeologist muses on the origin of mythology. It gets interesting at about the 6:30-minute point.

And this is a very famous turd in English archaeology.

Druid Sex Magic

Many things come to mind when I think of Druids, but sex magic is not one of them.

Silly me. I did not know about “fundamentals of Celtic sex magic,” etc.

Actually, Ronald Hutton was planning to put this in his next book, but now someone has beaten him to it.

On the Keeping of Pet Hermits and Druids

Some of the eighteenth-century hermits employed by rich landowners were in fact characterized as “Druids.”

Campbell clearly had fun with his quest for real hermits. At Hawkstone in Shropshire, a bare-footed and venerable Fr Francis regularly posed with his stock-in-trade: a skull, an hourglass and book. Although replaced at times by an automaton, Hawkstone’s hermit – a hereditary post – may have survived into the twentieth century. The impecunious Charles Hamilton reputedly advertised for a hermit for his Gothic hermitage at Painshill in Surrey, offering a fee of 700 guineas (some reports say 500) to anyone able and willing to meet his stringent conditions over seven years: to go barefoot in a woollen robe, never to cut beard or nails, or to speak with the servant who brought his food. Although the advertisement cannot now be traced, the hermit undoubtedly existed, and Campbell’s exhaustive enquiries confirm how ubiquitous hermits were in Georgian Britain.

Maybe there is still a niche waiting to be exploited here, for either philosophy majors or designers of animatronic hermits.

British Witches of 1964

Some photos of the coven headed by Eleanor “Ray” Bone. Possibly from the weekly magazine Tit-Bits. Here is a Wikipedia entry about her.

In 1964, you could wear a white shirt and tie in circle, if you came straight from the office, I suppose.

(Remember, witches in England were hung, not burned during the Early Modern period, the height of the witch trials.)

Why Academics Should Blog

(with examples from religious studies)

Mark Goodacre at NT Blog makes the argument for blogging’s benefits, part of a series of blogger responses (links in his post):

I sometimes wonder whether one should think of publication as being on a continuum, from tweets to blogs to critical notes to articles to introductory books to monographs.  The summit of all publication is the monograph, and the well-written monograph actually takes some real skill and effort.  Tweets, on the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, are forgotten almost as soon as they are uttered.  Blogs are somewhere in between.  They take a bit more effort than a tweet but like them they are pretty ephemeral.  It’s remarkable just how quickly we forget them, and that’s if we ever read them in the first place.

Now, back to the monograph.

Quality of British Crop Circles Sagging

Says the Daily Mail, which prints some examples.

Insiders say a number of top crop circle makers have quit following a clampdown by farmers and moved onto making sand circles, which are legal.

In previous years, impressive crop circles have drawn in thousands of tourists to southern England and some believers who saw the circles as the work of aliens.

But this year visitors have been disappointed by just a handful of crude patterns such as a square, a heart and a small uneven circle.

Former crop circlemaker Matthew Williams [not an  “energy vortex”] — who has given up his hobby because he suffers from hay fever — said the lack of competition is driving down standards.

He said: ‘The problem is that the best croppies have retired or gone onto something new, so there isn’t any competition any more.”

Looking at Birds, Listening to Birds

July 1st started out well and then rapidly went downhill as I got the news about the Granite Mountain Hotshots on the Yarnell Fire in Arizona.

By the 2nd, I was so drained from constantly accessing news videos, etc., that I had to get away, and so I went fishing. I wanted to try to different approach to a mountain stream that I fish now and then — it involved some gravel county roads, then two miles in four-wheel-drive down a steep descent into its canyon, followed by a short walk.

As I came out of the dry juniper and oak brush into the lusher creekside vegetation hawk flew low over me — an accipter, probably a sharp-shinned hawk. Its head turned, and it looked at me.

It felt like a welcome, I thought.

“Bullshit,” I told myself, “it’s just cruising the riparian zone looking for lunch. I happened to be here, so it checked me out.”

Maybe the flip side of the New Animism — the focus on relationships between yourself and the other-than-human world — is that you cannot think that these encounters are All About You.

The wild birds are always watching, and they do talk to you. And they talk about you. Several times I have had crows and Steller’s jays tell me something when I was hunting deer or elk — but it is up to me to act correctly on their information. Apparently our relationship is not yet perfectly harmonious. But if they would help me more, they would have something to eat. Isn’t that fair?

What gets under my skin is when someone says something like, “My totem is Hawk,” because I want to know which hawk? There is a boatload of difference between a Cooper’s hawk and a Mississippi kite, for instance. (Oh well, they probably meant red-tailed hawk anyway, the pickup truck of buteos — large, useful, and ubiquitous.)

A Pagan-Flavored Study of Religion

Graham Harvey, one of founders of contemporary Pagan studies, has a new book out, Food, Sex and Strangers, which “offers alternative ways of thinking about what religion involves and how we might better understand it. Drawing on studies of contemporary religions, especially among indigenous peoples, the book argues that religion serves to maintain and enhance human relationships in and with the larger-than-human world. Fundamentally, religion can be better understood through the ways we negotiate our lives than in affirmations of belief – and it is best seen when people engage in intimate acts with themselves and others.”

Like Michael York’s definition of Paganism that I offered earlier, Harvey’s perspective on religion is heavy on relationship. Not surprising for someone who has also helped to define “the New Animism.”

Doug Ezzy, an Australian scholar of Paganism, writes in his cover blurb, “Harvey’s ideas about religion are some of the most important and ground-breaking of our time. He demonstrates that religion is not about belief but about practices.”

Survey: Adult Children of Pagans

If you were “raised within a family and/or communities which practiced a form of neo-Paganism during their developmental years,” a scholar friend of mine, Laura Wildman-Hanlon, wants your opinions on a survey, “Spiritual Beliefs and Social Identity.”