A Quick Encounter between Fire and Thunder

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Jekabs Bine (1895–1955) “Perkons (Thunder),” 1941. Oil on canvas, 53 x 65 cm.
The Janis Rozentals Saldus History and Art Museum, Latvia.

The next issue of The Pomegranate will include a special section on the revival of Paganism in Latvia, a revival that blossomed in that Baltic nation’s first period of independence, 1917–1940, or between the Russian Revolution, which released Latvia from the old empire, and the beginnings of World War II, when the small nation was scooped up first Soviet Union, then by the Third Reich and then by the Soviet Union again, a crushing embrace that lasted until 1991.

I was partway through layout on an article by the Latvian art historian Kristine Ogle on Pagan themes in Latvian art before World War II, when M. came in from the veranda, saying that she could hear the emergency siren from down the valley.

Drop editor persona, assume volunteer firefighter persona.  Over my clothes I put on my “wildland interface” jacket and pants, since the sheriff’s dispatcher was saying this was a report of smoke, not a structure fire. I grabbed pack, radio, helmet, and was off, soon to be driving one of our brush trucks (wildland engines) up a county road that might lead to the site. But nothing.

Eventually we ended up with another firefighter and me in the brush truck, two more following in personal vehicles, a sheriff’s deputy, and an engine from the Bureau of Land Management. We split up to investigate different muddy ranch roads — still nothing. So after an hour, we called it off.

It had already hailed briefly in the morning, and soon after I came home, another little thunderstorm went through. So it seemed reasonable not to worry too much, not this week. People are still jumpy after the fire last October that took out 15 houses near mine—a wisp of low-hanging cloud might have looked like smoke.

Back at my computer, I continued where I had left off on the article. I had been just about to place a graphic in the file, and you can see it up above — the god of thunder.

Thunder has been much in evidence today here in the Wet Mountains, but given the painting’s date, you have to wonder if the dark clouds over the peaceful Latvian farmstead were more than thunderheads.

“Categories of Mishegas” and Other Medical Craziness

A new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is coming out, the fifth such.

The DSM gives your “mental health provider” a code for your “adjustment disorder” or whatever, so that he or she may bill your insurance carrier, and if he or she is an MD, prescribe suitable psychotropic drugs.

The new version continues the trend of medicalizing everything. If you don’t feel happy happy happy all the time, then you need drugs and therapy. Some people disagree, but they are standing in front of a pharmaceutical bulldozer. (Sell more drugs! Sell more drugs!)

At least there is a Yiddishkeit parody of the whole mess:

Mishegas Minor: This category refers to most of us most of the time. We’re all a little mishugah, right? For example, a young woman who worries because the young man she is engaged to is more excited by a New York Knicks victory than oral sex.

Yes, we’re all a little mishugah, but once you have been diagnosed and coded, your civil, parental, and other rights start slowly to disappear because some social worker thinks you are “disordered.”

Call for Papers: Current Pagan Studies Conference

Below is the CFP for the 10th Conference on Current Pagan Studies, February 8–9, 2014, at Claremont, California.

Relationships With The World

What is our relationship as contemporary Pagans with the rest of the world at this point in history? What is the nature of our relationship with ourselves? With others? With the Divine? Who do we reach out to? Who do we support? What kind of communities are we building? As we ask for acceptance, who are we accepting? Who do we reject? Who do we love? Who do we make the enemy?

These questions have been running through our minds as we prepare for the 10th Conference on Current Pagan Studies. As usual, taking a very broad stance, we thought we might take a look at how we are living, loving, creating, singing, building, dancing, running, growing in this world.

This year we are encouraging proposals for academic panels. Please contact us early if you would like to organize a panel. We are looking for papers from all disciplines. A community needs artists, teachers, scientists, healers, historians, philosophers, educators, thinkers, activists, etc.

As usual, we are using Pagan in its most inclusive form, covering Pagans, Wiccans, Witches and the numerous hybrids that have sprung up as well as any indigenous groups that feel akin to or want to be in conversation with Pagans.

Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words and are due by August 3, 2013. Go to our website  for advice on presenting papers. Please email abstracts to pagan_conference -at- yahoo.com

The PC PC as Sacrificial Victim

Guidelines for the politically correct police constable who finds him- or herself in the Wicker Man.

A Police Federation spokesman said: “During stressful situations there is a tendency to use hurtful or insensitive language, especially if you’re trapped in a massive, highly flammable corn dolly while an entire village gambols around it with lit branches singing folk songs about ‘ye [sic] offerings’.

“Naturally this situation is a long way from best practise in terms of health and safety, but the officer should refrain from using ideologically inappropriate language while begging for egress.”

Read the rest.

Consciousness after Death: “Neurologically Inexplicable”?

Doctors performing “resuscitation medicine” keep finding people living longer after they are clinically dead — and talking about it:

New techniques promise to even further extend the boundary between life and death. At the same time, experiences reported by resuscitated people sometimes defy what’s thought to be possible. They claim to have seen and heard things, though activity in their brains appears to have stopped.

It sounds supernatural, and if their memories are accurate and their brains really have stopped, it’s neurologically inexplicable, at least with what’s now known. Parnia, leader of the Human Consciousness Project’s AWARE study, which documents after-death experiences in 25 hospitals across North America and Europe, is studying the phenomenon scientifically.

Read the whole thing.

Ancient Roman Music (Conjectured, Imagined)


The trouble with most of the “early music” groups that I have heard is that they take stuff originally played by drunken peasants (setting aside Christian church music) and make it sound like it is played by anorexic graduate students.

In this case, however, no one knows what ancient Roman music sounded like. They have the instruments and knowledge of ancient modes — and the rest is just conjectural.

But I still think they all need to slam back some of the good Falernian wine and then play.

Science Cannot Explain Me . . .

Sam Wo Restaurant, formerly in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Inside Scoop SF)

. . . or any other left-handed person. Are we “damaged”? Genetically different? Who knows?

When I was a student at Reed College, we often fled south to San Francisco at spring break or other times, “itching to get away from Portland, Oregon.”

And one day five Reedies squeezed into a booth at the late, legendary Sam Wo Restaurant in Chinatown, only to find that we were all left-handed. Make of that what you will.

(However, in the interest of manners, I use a knife and fork left-handed and chopsticks right-handed.)

Wild Men of Europe

Bulgarian masked figures (Charles Fréger, courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York)

Photos by Charles Fréger of masked figures from various European festivals. from a gallery in Slate.

Positively inspirational.

See more Krampus videos here.

Nature Religion as She Is Conceptualized in 2013

I am off Thursday to Cherry Hill Seminary’s “Sacred Lands and Spiritual Landscapes” symposium. Although not one of the marquee speakers, I have a small part to play as a respondent for one panel.

What does a respondent do? First, you read all papers in advance. Of course, there is often somebody who has a string of excuses for not sending his or her paper, so (assuming that person does not bail out totally), you hope that you can take some notes during its delivery and extemporize some remarks.

Having heard the presentations, it is your turn to take a few minutes and discuss common themes, opportunities for further research, and the like. It is considered bad form—at least in the conferences that I have attended—to say, “Jane Doe’s paper was jumbled and had nothing useful to say about Problem X.” You might say, however, “Jane Doe rightly draws our attention to Problem X.”

On the other hand, I have heard respondents critique the overall theme of a session as being poorly thought out, so it’s not always all sweetness and light. But the respondent responds constructively, rather than conducting an oral examination.

Cherry Hill is a seminary too, after all, which means some of the presenters engage in more theologizing than I am used to in my corner of religious studies.

To get in the right frame of mind, I have been re-reading parts of Bron Taylor’s Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, which lays out different aspects of what he calls “naturalistic animism” in particular, that is to say, animism that is does not require any supernatural component but is more of a shared web-of-life experience. Is this the same as the “New Animism”? Perhaps we have a theme for an AAR session here.

This new book, Walking in the Land of Many Gods: Remembering Sacred Reason in Contemporary Environmental Literature by A. James Wohlpart, looks like it might belong on the same shelf. I need to order a copy.

Also related: I have added Adrian Harris’ BodyMind Place blog to the blogroll. A psychotherapist in England, he gives ecopsychology-based workshops in the UK under the name Nature Connection. Here he writes about what happens when he took one of his psychotherapy techniques . . . outdoors!

On the Science of How Plants Talk to Each Other

Imagine this, a kernal (heh) of truth:

Sound is so fundamental to life that some scientists now think there’s a kernel of truth to folklore that holds humans can commune with plants. And plants may use sound to communicate with one another.

Do beetles eavesdrop on drought-stressed pine trees? Maybe so.