BBC: Our Ancestors Were Stupid

Here is the Beeb with a story about an ancient monument in Scotland:

“Excavations of a field at Crathes Castle found a series of 12 pits which appear to mimic the phases of the moon and track lunar months.”

Then they trot out that stale old idea that ancient people needed to build giant monuments to tell themselves what time of year it was:

The pit alignment also aligns on the Midwinter sunrise to provided the hunter-gatherers with an annual “astronomic correction” in order to better follow the passage of time and changing seasons.

And these, mind you, were hunter-gathers, not agriculturalists — not that any farmers need a calendar to tell them when to plant. Every traditional farming culture has its signs: “When the leaves of such-and-such tree are big as a mouse’s ear, plant such-and-such a crop.”

And hunters? They watch the animals and factors affecting animals. “It’s snowing hard. The elk will be moving down off the mountain.”

And gatherers? They watch the plants. “It’s rained for the last week. Let’s go check our mushroom-gathering area — they might be coming up.” I plan to do that tomorrow, in fact.

You don’t need twelve posts in a circle to tell you when it is time.  Even today, would you need a calendar to tell you when it was spring? Changes in vegetation, bird migrations, and other natural signs are quite enough.

Astronomically aligned structures are meaningful, but sometimes we do not know why. But many instances, ancient Tenochtilan, for example, aligned grand buildings  showed that the rulers enjoyed the favor of heaven/the gods. Likewise in imperial China and in the Middle East.

Possibly these twelve posts in a meadow were erected on the orders of some Paleolithic “Big Man” whose ideas about the “formal construction of time” were connected to his sense of self-importance. That makes as much sense as allegedly telling people when it was time to hunt and gather.

Defining Paganism (2)

Previous: “Defining Paganism (1)” and “Defining Paganism (1.5)”

The first definition that I offered was created by a scholar of religion, Michael York. It facilitates the ability to talk about Paganism not as a set of doctrines, but as a way of being religious.

In an essay that he published in The Pomegranate in 2004 (behind paywall) called “Paganism as Root Religion,” he wrote,

Deep paganism or natural paganism is that recognisable communal and individual religiosity that would appear to be humanity’s spontaneous response to nature, the world about us and our unaffected sense of the animistic or numinous. It is how we respond before we become increasingly conditioned by any theological construct. It survives in our subliminal and automatic behaviours, such as tossing a coin into a water source or fountain, in being awe-inspired by watching a sunrise or sunset, or when we are drawn to a bonfire on a beach at night. This primordial paganism is atavistic and, as such, I am calling it root-religion, the root of religion, the root of all religions.

Whereas York is arguing here for the ability to find Pagan elements in various religious traditions, cutting across doctrinal boundaries, a historian must work within boundaries. No one can write The Compleat History of Everything. Thus historians tend to focus, for example,  on social history, political history, military history, economic history, or even religious history. Within those sub-disciplines there is focus on a particular problem, era, culture, whatever.

This definition, an historian’s definition, comes from doctoral student Sam Webster’s blog:

(January 2013) But, as an apprentice historian (I’m working on my Ph.D.), I am aware that Christianity destroyed the ancient religiosity of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin, while Islam destroyed the Mesopotamian, the Persian, and many of the African branches. There is no historical continuity, but we do have books that inspired our rebirth in the Renaissance, and we have been growing and developing ever since. In fact, it is not respectful to call the ancient peoples ‘Pagan,’ lumping together the religious activities of vastly disparate peoples who never called themselves Pagan, nor saw themselves as a single religious tradition, however much they had in common. Religion wasn’t even a separate cultural category until Christianity impacted the Romans. But the main point is that the old ways need to be rebuilt, but in a manner in accord with contemporary needs and knowledge. Paganism will be something new and different, rooted in the ancient and fulfilling the needs of today.

And as refined in March 2013:

In short, the term “Pagan” only applies to that complex of religions that develop starting with the Renaissance and eventually call themselves Pagan. It does not apply to the ancients, or to cultures outside the European, Mediterranean, and Mesopotamian region. Neither the ancient pre-Christian religions nor those foreign to the aforesaid region call themselves “pagan,” and while they have much in common, they are each distinct and should be referred to by their proper names. Contemporary Paganism is derived from the occult revival that began with the Florentine Renaissance and is a uniquely modern phenomenon. We are a very different people from the ancients and do not share their worldview even as we reconstruct their religions.

I see his mentor’s fingerprints on that second paragraph, I think.

That definition is useful to the historian, but I think “respectful” is a red herring and a dead end. If you define Paganism in York’s way, then it is not a “single religious tradition,” and arguing that it is such is misleading.

In fact, historians, anthropologists, etc. “lump together” ancient peoples all the time. Are we not to call earlier cultures by such descriptors as agrarian, matrilineal, expansionist, peaceful, warlike, patriarchal, pastoral, or whatever?

Terms such as “Neolithic” describe cultural stages that occur in different times and places across the globe. I argue that those are merely descriptive and not disrespectful. Archaeologists may speak of Neolithic cultures in what is now Iraq or in what is now Japan without someone jumping up and saying, “That’s not respectful! You must refer to them by their proper names!”

“Neolithic” refers to a set of cultural accomplishments and markers (e.g., pottery, agriculture, domestication of animals, some social hierarchies), not always developed in the same order. By analogy, why not consider “Pagan” to describe a cluster of attitudes, practices, and concerns?

The value in each of these definitions — and they are not the only definitions — depends on the intellectual field in which is deployed.

Yes, There Is a Hardscrabble Creek

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July thunderstorms muddy the creek. Beaver dam at lower left.

In case you ever wonder about the name of the blog, yes, it’s a real place.

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Swimming beaver.

Here is a fading-light photo from my pocket camera of one of the beavers. We are happy to see them, both because beavers are cool and because their dams might be keeping more water in the shallow aquifer, thus benefiting our well.

On the down side, the beavers seem to eat up all of the tender willows, narrow-leaf cottonwoods, etc., after a year or two. Then they have to move elsewhere, but this year a pair is back in the old location.

UPG: An ‘Ugly and Misguided’ Term

In a Wikipedia article on Heathenry in Canada, you will read, “The acceptance of such UPG can be a source of controversy among practitioners.”

UPG here means Unverified Personal Gnosis or Unusual Personal Gnosis or Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis, defined (also in Wikipedia) as “the phenomenological concept that an individual’s spiritual insights (or gnosis) may be valid for them without being generalizable to the experience of others. It is primarily a neologism used in polytheistic reconstructionism, to differentiate it from ancient sources of spiritual practices.”

And as the entry notes, it is a derogatory term.

Heathen/Germanic Tradition writers seem to spend the most time evaluating the idea of UPG, as possibly “worth considering” if certain preconditions are met or as highly suspect unless rigorously examined in the light of “the lore”: “The key is that [UPG] has little to no basis in the lore as we have it. Most assumptions about the Gods, myths, and rites are based on careful research of the lore often involving years of study.”

Based on limited discussion with practitioner-scholars, I see less concern about UPG among Germanic Tradition Pagans in Europe and little concern among Baltic or Slavic reconstructionists, for example. Perhaps this concern is largely a North American issue? More study is needed.

Pagan scholar Sam Webster, in fact, goes farther, calling UPG an “ugly and misguided” label.

Experience is the center of all spiritual and religious life. Text is at best derivative. By creating and using such a term as UPG, “Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis,” we privilege text over experience. (This is a rather Christian move, and those who have been following my writing know how I feel about that. . .) Even more damagingly, by framing someone’s experience as a UPG we dissociate ourselves from the primary data of spirituality.

Good point. But not everyone respects phenomenology, even in religious studies.

Circles and Rectangles: Does Your House Shape You?

My first year as an undergraduate, I lived a in four-person dormitory suit. One day I entered the (rectangular) room of my suite-mate Bill and found that he had placed his bed, desk, etc. at diagonal angles to the walls.

“I got tired of everything being so rectilinear,” he said. It was funny how Bill’s new arrangement felt oddly disquieting.

A circular room, however was not an option.

People in some times and places have favored circular shapes and in other times rectangular shapes. Do these preferences say something about the societies?

These kinds of idea have a long history. In the early 1930s, the Soviet city planner Mikhail Okhitovich claimed that the right angle in architecture originated in private land ownership: curvilinear structures, whether they be round buildings or chairs with curved backs, were therefore communist in principle.

This quotation comes from a review essay in the Times Literary Supplement: “Seeing Straight,” discussing three books that examine questions of shape, perception, and society:

Vision is a form of cognition: the kinds of things we see shape the ways we think. That is why it is so hard to imagine the visual experience of our prehistoric ancestors, or, for that matter, the girls of nineteenth-century Malawi, who lived in a world without right angles. Inhabitants of, say, late Neolithic Orkney would only have seen a handful of perpendicular lines a day: tools, shaped stones, perhaps some simple geometric decoration on a pot. For the most part, their world was curved: circular buildings, round tombs, stone circles, rounded clay vessels . . . . What does a round building mean? Does it mean anything, or is the choice of one shape of house over another simply a matter of practicalities?

I think that I want to read at least one of the books reviewed, How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Vision, Patterns, and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times.

As for my roommate Bill, he eventually put his furniture back in line with the walls, as the non-rectilinear arrangement made it too hard to move around his dorm room.

Defining Paganism (1.5)

The first definition of Paganism that I offered, that of Prof. Michael York, should be placed in its context, which was primarily the academic study of religion. (Amazon link to York’s published books.)

When it was published in 2003, academic interest in the study of contemporary (or neo-) Paganism had been growing, but primarily from the point of  view of Paganism as a new religious movement.

Within the academy — and here I speak mainly of the American Academy of Religion, the largest body for such study on this continent (it includes many Canadians too) — even the study of new religious movements was way off to the side. Those scholars themselves were relative newcomers to the AAR, which had its origins in the study of Christianity and which devoted most of its program sessions to textual matters.

York not only situated Paganism  as “a religion, a behavior, and a theology,” he argued that Pagan elements were found in other “world religions” too — not just “Pagan survivals” but behaviors, primarily.

I don’t mean to suggest cause and effect — one book did not do that  — but it was at about the same time that the AAR’s leadership, which had rejected a proposed Pagan Studies program unit — a permanent slot, in other words — in 1997,  relented in 2004 and granted it.

So York helped to forge a sort of non-sectarian (not Wiccan, not Asatru, not Roman reconstructionist, etc.) definition that would change people’s minds to where they no longer thought that the P-word meant “having no religion” or “follower of an obsolete religion from long ago.”

Instead, it would be a type of religion or a way of being religious. Paganism (academic definition) was everywhere.

Defining Paganism (1)

A couple of a weeks ago, on another blog, a commenter, wishing to insist that his sort of Paganism was different from some other people’s Paganism, concluded his comment by asserting that there was no overall definition of Paganism anyway.

I decided to step in and disagree, since I could think of at least two non-sectarian definitions. I offered the broad, relationship-focused definition that Michel York offered a few years ago in Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion.

An affirmation of interactive and polymorphic sacred relationship by the individual or community with the tangible, sentient and/or nonempirical.”

But what about atheist Pagans!? the commenter responded, thinking that he had me cornered.

Not a problem, I said, they fit under the umbrella too. York offered it as a definition that allows not only polytheism but non-theistic humanism and naturism/naturalism.

The commenter responded with something about “gobbledegook,” which I translate as “You are asking me to think too much and to question my position.”

But even though I know that reading comprehension is low online, I am going to break down York’s definition and talk briefly abut what I like it from a religious-studies perspective. Then in a future post, I will look at another definition, one perhaps more suited to a historian.

“An affirmation” — Not a “belief” or a “creed,” but just an understanding by practitioners that this sacred relationship exists.

“interactive and polymorphic” — whatever Pagans do, they treat as flowing both ways: “We need the gods, and the gods need us.” “We respond to the world, and the world responds to us.”  These relationships are polymorphic because they can take many shapes—not just formal worship, but all kinds of interactions.

“sacred relationship” — now here we hit rough water. The existence of “the sacred” or any “agent beyond the purview of science” is debatable in religious studies. One contingent sees the term “sacred” as meaningless (or of “mixed empirical utility”) and asserts that every action or attitude described as “sacred” can be explained within the the realms of human power games, economic games, gender games, etc. Or else it is just an accidental product of brain wiring of dubious evolutionary value.

But for now, let assume a sacred realm, as most religious people do, with which one can  have a relationship. That does not necessarily mean a theistic relationship. For more than anything, this definition treats “Pagan” as a way of being religious, not as a set of rituals or beliefs or creeds.

“by the individual or community” — Solitary Pagans, you’re covered.

“with the tangible, sentient and/or nonempirical” — this phrase covers “green religion” in Bron Taylor’s sense. Your relationship might be with Mother Ocean, as his is. Or a mountain? Or a work of art — all tangible. It may be with persons, human or other-than-human, but still characterized as sacred.

It might be with the “nonempirical,” those “agents beyond the purview of science”: spirits, gods, wights, whatever you want to call them. But the “or” still leaves room for non-theistic Pagans.

In the book, York differentiates Paganism from other ideal types of religion: Abrahamic, dharmic, and secular. But he also sees “paganism” (he does not capitalize) as appearing in other religions, for example, if Christian pilgrims visit a sacred mountain (the tangible), that is a Pagan element in their practice.

Certainly some Sunni Muslims would agree: hence the Saudi government’s destruction of sites from the time of the prophet Muhammed, including what many think was a house he lived in — these tangible elements might distract believers from The Book.

This definition, unlike the next one that I will discuss, is set out independent of culture, history, ethnicity, and so forth. It does put what seem like disparate groups into one basket — and it largely ignores groups’ claims about their own origins, lineages, and so forth.

But to return to the idea of “a way of being religious,” it does seem useful in discussing earth- and body-centered  practices (such as pilgrimage) that were previously shoved to the side in favor of textual criticism and the study of hierarchies and religious transmission from one leader to the next.

Multi-media Sutton Hoo

A multi-media site about the excavation of the Anglo-Saxon era ship burial at Sutton Hoo in1939, with archival footage from the British Musem and more.

It is often believed to be a king’s burial site, since it contained armor and weapons, a lyre, gold coins, and many rich grave goods from different places.

Books, Monopolies, and the Internet

Two articles that seem to relate to each other.

1. Having gotten the majority of the book market through aggressive discounting, Amazon is (surprise) raising prices, although their prices on academic books are still often under the publisher’s list price.

Bruce Joshua Miller, president of Miller Trade Book Marketing, a Chicago firm representing university and independent presses, said he recently surveyed 18 publishers. “Fourteen responded and said that Amazon had over the last few years either lowered discounts on scholarly books or, in the case of older or slow-selling titles, completely eliminated them,” he said.

2. Google, Facebook, and Twitter want to create “closed gardens” for their users, as America Online, Compuserve, etc. tried to do twenty years ago.  You go to the site, and you stay there. Hence Google’s elimination of Google Reader: RSS and Atom feeds are free, low-maintenance, and don’t make money.

Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started, seemingly accidentally: the battle to own everything.While Google did technically “own” Reader and could make some use of the huge amount of news and attention data flowing through it, it conflicted with their far more important Google+ strategy: they need everyone reading and sharing everything through Google+ so they can compete with Facebook for ad-targeting data, ad dollars, growth, and relevance.

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople.

New Book on Ukrainian Paganism

The Return of Ancestral Gods: Modern Ukrainian Paganism as an Alternative Vision for a Nation by Mariya Lesiv, who teaches in the Department of Folklore at  the Memorial University of Newfoundland, has now been released by McGill-Queen’s University Press in Canada.

From the publisher’s site:

In The Return of Ancestral Gods, Mariya Lesiv explores Pagan beliefs and practices in Ukraine and amongst the North American Ukrainian diaspora. Drawing on intensive fieldwork, archival documents, and published sources not available in English, she allows the voices of Pagans to be heard. Paganism in Slavic countries is heavily charged with ethno-nationalist politics, and previous scholarship has mainly focused on this aspect. Lesiv finds it important to consider not only how Paganism is preached but also the way that it is understood on a private level. She shows that many Ukrainians embrace Paganism because of its aesthetic aspects rather than its associated politics and discusses the role that aesthetics may play in the further development of Ukrainian Paganism.

An earlier article of hers, “Glory to Dazhboh (Sun-god) or to All Native Gods?: Monotheism and Polytheism in Contemporary Ukrainian Paganism,” appeared in The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, in 2009.