From the opinionated and entertaining blog Beauty Tips for Ministers, a link to a site examining the beard styles of Christian clergymen.
The thing is, I think I see some Pagan bloggers here as well.
Popularity Contests and Declining Universities
Janice Fiamengo takes on Rate My Professors as a sign of what is wrong with American universities.
Such accusations reveal little about the professor in question; no one ever satisfactorily distinguishes a boring professor from a boredom-inclined student — which is not to suggest that boring professors do not exist, simply that Rate My Professors cannot recognize them. What the comments reveal are students’ assumptions about what they are owed by their teachers and what constitutes a good classroom experience. Most pointedly, they show the extent to which higher education in North America has become a consumer product like any other, catering to client satisfaction and majority appeal. Reading through the comments, one is disheartened not only because so many are crude and illiterate but also because they indicate how deeply most students have imbibed the canard that university is about being entertained and helped to feel good about oneself.
Read the rest: There is even a witchcraft reference.
Rate My Professors probably never would have been created if schools in the 1970s had not started collecting student evaluations, instead of relying on peer evaluations and other methods. That got us to thinking that student opinions mattered right then and there instead in retrospect after a few years of growth.
The funny thing is that in my years of university teaching only once did I see my department chair use someone’s evaluation against them, and that only because he needed some “objective” evidence to support his decision not to rehire a particular adjunct professor.
Otherwise, as long as your numbers came in sort of average, you were OK, and if they were below average, well, that was because you were teaching difficult material and actually making the little darlings work.
I dodged the RMP bullet, but when M. was teaching psychology, one student rated her as “a great teacher, just a little off the wall. but its [sic] all good.” Isn’t “off the wall” appropriate for a psych class? 😉
The Hidden Folk of Iceland
“Two nations live in this country — the Icelandic nation and this invisible nation.”
Huldufólk 102 is a wonderful 2006 documentary about Icelanders’ relationship with the Hidden Folk (elves, fairies) in their landscape. You can watch it online here (74 min.) Here is the trailer.
One of my favorite parts starts eight minutes in, when a primary school teacher is explaining to the kids how the elves live in a boulder.
Only one of the numerous people interviewed is obviously New Age-y, with her talk about earth chakras, etc. And there is one guy in sort-of medieval Norse garb, his cap decorated with runes, who is described in the subtitle as a “sorcerer.” (Some people are speaking English, some Icelandic with subtitles.) The rest are pretty much down-to-earth Icelanders, a couple of whom describe their own outlooks as Pagan and/or Heathen.
You have heard stories about roads being routed around “inhabited” spots? Here is a civil engineer who did it.
Also the land itself: mountains, geysers, rocky coasts, cliffs — wonderful as well.
UPDATE: Bad link to complete film now fixed.
(Hat tip to Galina Krasskova.)
“Sheikhs against shakes”
Nine years ago I wrote a post about Islamist reaction against popular Middle Eastern singers such as Haifa Wehbe. For some reason, I kept working in references to Sappho.
The process continues. Now a court in the new, improved Islamist Egypt has ordered al-Tet, a television channel devoted to belly dancing, shut down.
The channel was also accused of airing advertisements that “arouse viewers,” sell sexual-enhancement products and promote matchmaking, according to the court’s statement.
According to [Baleegh] Hamdy, the court ruling was not based on accurate evidence. “The judge was supposed to check the facts present in the lawyer’s allegations.”
There is not much the court can do about the the owners’ YouTube channel, however.
Parsing Paganism, Rejecting the F-Word
This whole issue of “Pagan fundamentalism,” Pagan identity politics, and related disputes have been giving me a lot of agita.
In fact, I do wish that “the f-word” had never been introduced, because rather than helping the conversation, it shuts it down.
As soon as you refer to someone as a “fundamentalist” or to a movement as “fundamentalism,” you have, within the sub-dialect of the chattering classes, declared that nothing those people say is worthwhile, that they have nothing to teach you, and that they should just sit down and shut up. Or stop calling themselves Pagans, whichever.
Historically, the term “Fundamentalism” was coined by conservative Christian theologians of the early twentieth-century and named after a book series called “The Fundamentals.” In other words, it presented itself as a back-to-the-roots movement.
The Latin word for root is radix, which gives us “radical,” a term (or person) about stripping away everything seen as extraneous and getting “back to the roots,” renewing your tradition. About the same thing, no? Yet it is more acceptable in academia, for example, to refer to one’s self as a “radical,” at least in some quarters, than as a “fundamentalist,” which would suicidal, professionally speaking.
According to Sabina Magliocco — whom I wish had chosen a different word, but she consciously chose it to be provocative — “Pagan fundamentalists” seem to be those who think that they have the truth and who are overly dogmatic.
Prof. Magliocco suggests that in the good old days, practice mattered more than belief, but now some people are getting all “fundamentalist” about belief. Yes, but. In the 1970s, for example, I encountered some very “fundamentalist” American Gardnerian Witches. Some Goddess feminists could be pretty dogmatic too.
But the people taking offense today are not Gardnerians. They tend to come more from reconstructionist Pagan traditions. And they are the ones being targeted by this current discourse, as best I can tell.
Whatever your position on “hard polytheism” is, I tend to have some sympathy with their position because, as stated above, being called a “fundamentalist” is sort of like being called a “racist.” It puts you in a box that it is almost impossible to climb out of — and that is a deliberate rhetorical tactic designed to marginalize a political opponent.
A friend wrote to me of the “childish” polytheists who ought, in his words, to “detach themselves from contemporary Paganism.” (That is, sit down and shut up while the grown-ups are talking.)
No, I would argue, they are as much a part of contemporary Paganism as you or I are. Are we going to slide into heretic-hunting? Is contemporary Paganism going to develop a handy acronym, like those Republicans who accuse fellow party members deemed insufficiently pure of being RINOS (Republican In Name Only)? (Democrats do it too, but they lack a handy acronym.)
As an editor in the field of Pagan studies, I look at Paganism as a way of being religious, not as specific beliefs or specific practices. I want to keep the tent big and broad.
Paganism old and new is creedless and flexible, as Michael York wrote in Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion, yet some have written creeds (Gleb Botkin with the Church of Aphrodite in the 1930s, for example), and we haven’t thrown them off the boat.
Continuing with York, I still like his definition, even though it reads like a legal document:
Paganism is an affirmation of interactive and polymorphic sacred relationship by individual or community with the tangent, sentient, and nonempirical.” (162)
Parse those words carefully, and you will that Prof. York has stretched the tent as far as possible to include the hardest of hard polytheists and the nature-as-source-of-sacred value people, and everything in between. There is room under it for the committed “godspouse” as well as the person whose Paganism is heavily influenced by Jungian psychology. They are both doing religion in a way that we define as “Pagan.”
Here we do come back to the notion of “doing,” but I would allow that one’s “doing” might include relating to gods, spirits, and wights as discreet entities — and talking about it — which seems to be the crux, or a crux, of the current kerfuffle.
The Secret Police as Ethnographers
The next issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies will be devoted largely to new forms of Paganism in the Baltic countries, if all goes as planned.
One article that I have been reading is entitled “The Dievturi Movement in the Reports of the Latvian Political Police, 1939–1940.”
This movement itself started in the 1920s—and promptly fissioned. (Insert “Peoples’ Front of Judea” joke here.) But that origin does make it an old-timer in contemporary Paganism.
Latvia gained its independence in 1919, following the collapse of czarist Russia and Latvia’s own factional war. It became a republic, but a politician named Karlis Ulmanis dissolved Parliament and seized power in a bloodless coup in 1934. His authoritarian nationalist government lasted until the Soviet Union occupied Latvia in 1940.
During that time, however, the political police were spying on all political, dissident, and unusual groups, including the Pagans. I don’t want to steal Prof. Anita Stasulane’s thunder, but she made an interesting discovery in the national archives: notes on Pagan meetings and rituals made by a police “mole” in the group.
There is so much there: who attended the meeting, what was talked about, what songs were sung, how the altar was decorated . . .
Imagine, for example, if someone had infiltrated that Yeshua ben Yusef’s group two thousand years ago — and that the scrolls had survived and been re-discovered. New Testament studies would sure look a lot different.
Pentagram Pizza without External Validation
• Pharoah Tutankhamun was a lot more important dead than he ever was during his short life. So for him, can we say that the embalmers and craftsmen did give him immortality?
• Magic is a way of living: or why Dion Fortune got it wrong, from Anne Hill.
• Sannion on why you do not need external validation in your practice . . .
• . . . followed by Galina Krasskova on the same topic: “How can you ever find your way, or center yourself fully in the road of devotion if you’re endlessly willing to change your path on the whim of a random person’s say so? How an there ever be integrity in what you do if you’re constantly worried about how others are going to respond?”
The Future is Yours, Students
This speaks for itself, but I can’t remember where it came from. But if you Google “young Freemasons world domination,” you will find all sorts of interesting links.
The Secret to Spelling in English
It is understanding how the Great Vowel Shift moved pronunciation away from spelling — and how that older spelling was fixed and fossilized by the 15th-century introduction of printing.
Three quick items:
1. A 10-minute radio discussion of the Great Vowel Shift, from the CBC’s Sunday Edition.
2. A website devoted to the Great Vowel Shift, with discussion of Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc. Check out the dialogs (top of page), particularly the one for Middle English — pre-Vowel Shift.
3. The technology of printing came to England from countries that did not use particular English letters such as thorn (Þ) and edth (ð) — and several others as well. Compromises were made, and some are still confusing people.
The lingering offender is thorn. If you read this, you can now sneer at anyone who pronounces “ye olde” with a Y sound as being inadequately educated. (You can also sneer at anyone who names a business, etc. Ye Olde Whatever in the first place, on general principles.)
3.5. You will also understand the Scottish pronunciation of the name Menzies.
An Eggcorn that Annoys Me a Lot
Reins
See the leather straps crossing the horse’s neck horizontally?. Those are reins, held by the rider and used to direct the horse left or right.
Raise your hand if you have held a set of horse reins in the last year. Yeah, about what I thought — not many of you have.
As the Wikipedia entry on “reins” notes at the bottom, there is certain eggcorn connected with the word reins.
If you hold them loosely, letting the horse (or team of horses pulling a carriage, etc.) go as fast or slow as they want and where they want, you have given it “free rein.”
Not “free reign.”
Queen Elizabeth II. She reigns.
Note the woman at right. She is Queen Elizabeth II, of whom it is sometimes said (as of other recent British monarchs) that “she reigns but does not rule.” In other words, she is the head of state, but she cannot make law nor order “Off with his head!”
No show of hands about the queen, sorry. But the difference is clear enough.
So when you want to restrict the spread or movement of something, you “rein (it) in.” Or someone gives you a power to do what you like — gives you “free rein.” But it has nothing to do with being a monarch.
Yet I have found that egregious “eggcorn” in two scholarly books within the last two weeks, one from Johns Hopkins University Press and the other from Thames & Hudson, which “has always prided itself on the very high standards of the books it produces.”
The real lesson here is that writers should avoid those metaphors that are dead to them — or they make silly errors. And careless editors let them go through.
For instance, I have shot antique-style flintlock guns, so I know what a “flash in the pan” looks, sounds, and smells like. It is a partial ignition of the priming powder that fails to set off the main powder charge and fire the gun. In other words, a promising start that goes nowhere. It has absolutely nothing to do with gold-panning, despite what some people think.
If you have visited a steam-powered railway, like the Cumbres & Toltec, you have seen a coal-burning locomotive “get up a head of steam”—build sufficient steam pressure—before it begins to move. But should you use such an expression if it leaves some readers puzzled?
If your audience isn’t horsey, don’t give them free rein.