Adolescent Rebellion as “Mental Illness”

At Vice, Molly Crabapple gives an ex-goth girl’s take on “Shooter Boys and At-Risk Girls.”

Only she does not really explain the school-shooter phenomenon, though she tries to transition into it at the end. Still, the rest of the essay is excellent.

In the post-Sandy Hook rage to blame anything (guns, video games, internet-addicted youth) the easiest thing to blame is always the kid who fails at the blankly inoffensive ideals of childhood. This 16-year-old drew a glove shooting flames. The police searched his house. They found the sort of gutted machines that hint at a proclivity for engineering. He was arrested on December 18, and was still in juvenile hall when papers ran the story on the 28th.

A few weeks later, 17-year-old Courtni Webb was thrown out of school in California. A teacher searched her bag, and found a poem she had written for herself, that showed too much empathy for Adam Lanza. When you’re underage, your property isn’t private. Neither are your thoughts.

I think of these kids because I was one of them . . . .

Like many smart kids, I had age dysmorphia. In my head, I was ready for adventures. In the world, I couldn’t hang out alone at Starbucks. What the guidance councilor didn’t want to remember is that childhood is helplessness. Schools, sometimes benevolently, sometimes not, have power over their students that most American adults will never experience unless they are in a hospital, old age home, institution or prison.

And there is a Wicca reference too, in a 1990s pop-cultural context. Read the rest.

Of Beards and Priests and Pastors

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

pentagrampizza• 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

OKYoungFreemasons
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.