Really?
Witchcraft at Second City Chicago? Magical warding for the building?
Or were those “demons” just metaphorical?
How come this was not part of last November’s “Occult Chicago” tour?
Where Are the Hidden Folk?
The “cave” is big enough to walk into if if you bend over.
My little patch of the southern Colorado foothills may not be great agricultural land, but it does (or because it does) have boulders. Big ones.
Ever since I posted about the Icelandic huldufólk (hidden folk) documentary, I have been scrutinizing them. Is this one . . . um . . . inhabited?
It is something that I accept in theory. And I have had some interesting dreams about the hidden folk/fairies/”UFO people” (all the same thing, probably) who live inside the house walls or in invisible houses.
So maybe I need a hidden-folk consultant, like the woman at the start of the documentary, who can walk around each boulder and give a nei or já as appropriate.
Around the Blogosphere, 24 March 2013
• Unitarians squirming over polyamory:
But as the issue of same-sex marriage heads to the Supreme Court, many committed Unitarians think the denomination should have a position, which is that polyamory activists should just sit down and be quiet. For one thing, poly activists are seen as undermining the fight for same-sex marriage. The UUA has officially supported same-sex marriage, the spokeswoman says, “since 1979, with tons of resolutions from the general assembly.”
• How do you honor your Christian ancestors?
When They first began contacting me, it was a cacophony of voices, questions like “Why did you stop going to church? Do you not like Fr. ___ anymore?” and “You can still pray with us, yes? (or ja?, dependent on the Ancestor)?” and many others. Their Catholic identity was so strong and intrinsic to Their Being that They carried it over with some part of Them into Death. If Their Catholicism is as deep, powerful, and purposeful a presence in Their life as Paganism is in mine, that it lasts well after They have crossed over, who am I to argue with Their spirits?
• While we are reclaiming formerly pejorative terms, why not reclaim “apostate?”
The word apostate is one such boundary. It is a word that requires confidence and defiance. People demand things when they hear it. It opens conversations and breaks down walls. It can also cause a great deal of pain and suffering in places that do not allow freedom of belief or thought
Akhenaten, Proto-Monotheist, Worked His People to Death
Things were hard for the people who built an instant capital city for the Dear Leader.
Researchers examining skeletons in the commoners’ cemetery in Amarna have discovered that many of the city’s children were malnourished and stunted. Adults show signs of backbreaking work, including high levels of injuries associated with accidents.
“We have evidence of the most stressed and disease-ridden of the ancient skeletons of Egypt that have been reported to date,” said University of Arkansas bioarchaeologist Jerome Rose (a National Geographic Committe for Research and Exploration grantee), one of the team of experts examining the dead. “Amarna is the capital city of the Egyptian empire. There should be plenty of food . . . Something seems to be amiss.”
Wikipedia describes Akhenaten’s new religion, which imposed on Egypt and which died with him, as “monolatristic, henotheistic, or monotheistic.”
Other ancient Egyptian workers’ skeletons show signs of hard lives, but apparently Amarna’s workers had it the worst.
‘She wanted to come to America and eat bacon’
Cara Schulz has written a tribute to Yana, a young Syrian Pagan woman (yes, there are a few) tortured and killed by Islamic militants.
Trying to make something positive of this sickening story, she has created a donation page for the group Doctors Without Borders in Yana’s name. You can read the whole story there. I donated, you should too. The campaign has almost reached its goal.
Oh, and Yana’s brother, you will pay in another currency. So much for Syrian family values.
It Makes Women into ‘Witches’
What is it? Long hair:
Whatever the fashion, no woman over 55 should even think of wearing her hair long and loose, unless she wants to look like a mad witch. Hillary Clinton unwisely let her hair down recently and her authority drained away. She would do better to rein it back again neatly. Long hair may say “I’m seductive”, but it seldom says “I have authority”.
You can be sexual or you can have authority, says the Telegraph, one of Britain’s national newspapers.
This is the same fashion argument that the New York Times made two months ago: As commenters noted there too, it’s an argument about sexuaity, and whether older women should express any.
Is there some kind of p.r. campaign going on here?
Around the Pagan Blogosphere
• At The Used Key Is Always Bright, a young boy’s dream of “small gods” intriguingly includes “the god of keys.”
• Ivo Dominguez deals with someone who thinks that His People own the idea of four directions, the elements, etc. Via Miniver Cheevy, where there is a postscript.
• Christopher Penzcak talks about the Mighty Dead and the idea that “There is a part of the Inner Planes, the Other World, which is called Witchdom. There you may learn much, if you can contact it. There are spells and chants, dances and music and such woods and streams as delight the hearts of witches.” That came from a “channeling” done by Doreen Valiente in the 1960s; make of it what you will.
Articles on Otherkin, Therianthropes
• Joseph P. Laycock, ” ‘We Are Spirits of Another Sort’: Ontological Rebellion and Religious Dimensions of the Otherkin Community,” Nova Religio 15, no. 3 (2012): 65–90. DOI: 10.1525/nr.2012.15.3.65
• Venetia Laura Delano Robertson, “The Beast Within: Anthrozoomorphic Identity and Alternative Spirituality in the Online Therianthropy Movement,” Nova Religio 16, no. 3 (2013): 7–30. DOI: 10.1525/nr.2013.16.3.7
“Therianthropic,” coined from the Greek words for “wild beast” and “man,” first showed up in 1886, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, when a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica wrote of “Religions, in which animistic ideas still play a prominent part, but which have grown up to a therianthropic polytheism”—such as ancient Egyptian religion with the jackal-headed Set, etc., I suppose. Other therio- combinations go back to the seventeenth century, such as theriomancy.
Both Robertson and Laycock rely heavily on blogger Lupa’s book A Field Guide to Otherkin.
Laycock’s Otherkin scholarship seems to be a spin off from his work with the Atlanta Vampire Alliance, which produced Vampires Today: The Truth about Modern Vampirism.
Although he has to take time to explain the Otherkin “community” to his readers (I use the scare quotes because I have some reservations about the world community in such cases), Laycock is really engaged in religion scholars’ ongoing debate over what “religion” is or whether the word “religion” is useful at all in a scholarly setting. (There are those who claim it is not, that it merely masks political and social competitions.)
He places the Otherkin in the historical spectrum of Western esotericism and spiritualism: the idea of “walk-ins” goes back to the 19th century, for example, while the influential English esotericist Dion Fortune wrote of “possesion by ‘elementals’ or thought-forms . . . . Despite Fortune’s rather pejorative view of such people, Psychic Self-Defense has since been cited as an early reference to the Otherkin phenomenon” (71).
To Laycock, Otherkin are perhaps best described as an ” ‘audience cult,’ a movement that supports novel beliefs and practices but without a discernible organization. Individuals frequently participate in audience cults simply through reading books and watching television programs. . . . As an audience cult facilitated primarily by the Internet, Otherkin are free to practice whatever religion they like, but their identity tends to color that practice” (73).
There is more, but I am just summarizing a few points.
Robertson spends more time explaining the concept of Therianthropes’ self-descriptions of “awakening” to their dual natures, goes into “Internet religion — Therianthropy popped up on alt.horror.werewolves in 1992 — and concurs with Laycock that Therianthropes “reify their anthrozoomorphic identity through the appropriation of spiritual concepts into personal mythologies” (10).
She spends time on the idea of shape-shifting through history and the return of totemism through neo-shamanic teaching as well as contemporary Paganism. But she also notes that there are Christian Therianthropes who see themrmselves as “having a gift bestowed upon them by God to redress the balance between nature and civilization” (23).
Her conclusion is that the Therianthropy movement “exemplifies the innovation of spiritual individuals in the postmodern age . . . popular occulture and re-enchantment in motion” (24). In other words, the key sociology-of-religion concept of re-enchantment is more malleable and multi-faceted than previously discussed.
Sarah Pike on Witchcraft and American Religion
Religious studies professor Sarah Pike, author of Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community and New Age and Neopagan Religions in America discusses her work at the Religion and American History blog.
In a chapter I wrote recently on “Wicca in the News” about changing representations of Witches in American news media since the 1960s (Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media, 2012), I argue that reporters today rarely depict Witches as evil or satanic, even though stereotypes from the 1960s and 1970s of sexy young female Witches or cuddly cookie-baking elderly Witches-next-door still remain. In the past 25 years since I entered my first occult shop and started asking questions, the boundaries between categories like religion and magic and the differences between “folk,” “popular,” and “institutional” religion are treated with more nuance. And scholars of American religions are more likely to take traditions like Wicca seriously than they did when I was a graduate student, because Neopaganism has become firmly established across North America and formally recognized in government branches and institutions such as the military and prisons.
Now We Are Ten
Ten years ago, I started a blog using Blogger’s FTP service to my own domain, which you cannot do any more. Blogs were the cool new thing.
If you go back and look at the archives (sidebar, scroll down past the blogroll), you will find that my concerns then looked a lot like my concerns now.
Progress is an illusion.