Candles and the Eco-Witch

LED-light pseudo-pillar candles, with remote control.

Homes with candles burning brightly
are filled with sexy wood nymphs nightly.

As best I recall, that was a couplet from one of Al Manning’s books. I never met him, but from his how-to books and particularly his early-1980s autobiography, Eye of Newt in My Martini, I get the impression of a guy who could have been the house with of the Sterling Cooper Draper Price advertising agency—or perhaps of its hypothetical Los Angeles branch office.

My first Craft teacher always had candles burning, and before then there had been the highly aesthetic literature professor at Reed College who held class in his home, where the walls were covered in black felt and racks of votive lights burned in every room.

And I had my altar boy days behind me—I liked candles.

When we got together, M. and I burned lots of candles: ritual candles, nightly dinner table candles, meditation candles, et cetera. But then she got religion about candles. Most of the candles you buy are petrochemical-based (parafin), and when you burn them, you are putting some unfriendly stuff into your household air.

It is kind of like running a diesel engine indoors. So for some years, we cut way back on candle-burning except during (a) electrical blackouts and (b) outdoor use.

Meanwhile, a friend gave us a big beeswax pillar candle, which is now on the dining table — kind of like this. Nice, but not cheap. Maybe that is why St. Luke’s Episcopal Church always had donors for each week’s beeswax altar candles. (The big paschal candles were probably partly parafin.)

Another friend recently tossed in some soy-based tea candles as lagniappe on an order of — wait for it —  battery-powered LED candles. (Suitable for homes with toddlers or in areas of high fire danger.) We use them indoors  in one of our many votive-candle holders.

At Natural Grocers I recently picked up a box of palm oil-based tapers. But there are environmental issues connected with palm oil plantations too. It’s another case where “green” is not as earth-friendly as you might hope.

What is an environmentally conscious Witch to do?

RELATED: A video on getting wax out of fabric.

Resource Website for Scholars of Esotericism in Antiquity

News release:

The Network for the Study of Esotericism in Antiquity (NSEA) is happy to announce our new website. With continually-updated online resources news, and conference announcements, AncientEsotericism.org is intended to be a one-stop location for scholars and students of the field.

What is esotericism in antiquity? This is a broad term that governs the use of secrecy, concealment, and revelation to talk about the really important stuff—from the true identity of the creator of the cosmos (Gnosticism) to the keys to the heavenly palaces (Hekhalot literature) to how to talk about the indescribable One (Neoplatonic mysticism), etc. So if the subject involves arcana celestial and subterrestrial, it’s ancient esotericism. Scholars in various disciplines have struggled to describe a spike in “secret revelations” in Hellenistic and Late Antique religion (Hengel) or the trend towards mythology in the “Underworld of Platonism” (Dillon)—what all this diverse material has in common is an interest in secrecy and revelation for dealing with the divine, and a common reception-history in “esotericism” in the modern era, ranging from Renaissance Platonism to the New Age.

The website is intended provide a guide to the wonderful, but dizzying, online resources available for the study of this vast and difficult body of literature. My goal (in collaboration with Sarah Veale) was to create the website I would have died to see when I was an undergraduate and just starting to get excited about this material, but totally confused about how to go about studying it, what scholarship was already out there, and, most importantly, where to find the most useful primary sources and reference materials on the web. A lot of the resources gathered here will be familiar to you—but perhaps not to your students, or colleagues in an adjoining field, or a friend. So, if someone has come your way who is starting to get into Nag Hammadi, or Iamblichus, or the apocalypses, etc. and asks you for some guidance to what’s out there, please consider making this one of the links you pass on to them. We will do our best to make it worth your while.

We encourage those interested in these fields to submit calls for papers, workshop notices, conference announcements, and other pertinent news and resources for inclusion on the website. You can submit by email or through our online submissions form. Those wishing to get involved with NSEA are invited to contact us for more information.

With best wishes to you and yours,
Dylan M. Burns, University of Copenhagen
Coordinator, Network for the Study of Esotericism in Antiquity

I have looked at the site, and it is large and comprehensive. Congratulations!

On Bringing back the Olympian Gods

This went around a couple of weeks ago, but  I never blogged it. Now I have.

Here’s a short list of things we could do if we brought back the Greek gods:

• Go to oracles.
• Go on quests.
• Fight monsters.
• Challenge gods to contests.
• Go to Hades and try to rescue dead loved ones.
• Dip babies in magic rivers, making them invulnerable.

Now, not all of those are good ideas — most of them are insanely dangerous — but man, they’re still a hell of a lot more exciting than sitting in church for an hour every Sunday.

Read the rest.

NYT: On not Looking like a ‘Witch’

Wear your gray hair long, ladies, says the New York Times, but be careful not to look like “a witch.”

The article is tied to a “march” that was clearly a staged publicity event. Still, it resonated with NYT readers, and one commenter even started a blog.

That choice [to wear one’s gray hair long]  however, flies in the face of a long-held assumption that a lavish head of snowy hair is somehow unseemly, a rude reminder that a woman, whatever her age, remains a sexual being.

Much of the 16th-17th century art of witches touches the “wrongness” of sexuality in post-menopausal women. Here is an article on witch hunts and gender, and i would also recommend art historian Linda Hults’ The Witch as Muse if you want to think more about artistic representation of witches, which were not made in any sort of journalistic way.

A Survey of Finnish Pagans

For residents of that country — take it here.

AAR 2013 Call for Papers Now Online

The online call for papers for next November’s American Academy of Religion annual meeting is now online.

You can go directly to the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group’s call as well. Or maybe you are working in the area of  religion and food.

Wicca, Recategorized by Librarians, Now by Booksellers as Well

In 2007, the  news was that books on Wicca were re-categorized by the Library of Congress from BF (psychology, abnormal) to  BP 600, a sort of catch-all for “other beliefs and movements.” A new Dewey Decimal number was assigned as well, for libraries using that system.

Now the change is on the retail side. As Elysia Gallo blogs at Llewellyn, some Pagan books are being re-categorized for retailers as well.

So here’s the news – Wicca, in the eyes of the book selling industry, is now a religion. It crossed over from OCC026000 Body, Mind & Spirit / Wicca and Witchcraft, to two separate BISAC codes. One remains in the occult section – OCC026000 is now simply Body, Mind & Spirit / Witchcraft. But Wicca itself is now REL118000, or Religion / Wicca.

Let’s not even stop to think about what a headache it will be for me to decide whether any given book should go into the occult “Witchcraft” end of things or the religious “Wicca” end of things. Sometimes this distinction is made crystal clear by its author or its content, but much more often it’s a very blurry line. No, instead let’s allow that to just sink in for a moment. Imagine going in to your local bookstore chain (because this will probably not change how metaphysical stores or libraries operate) and, instead of heading to the New Age section (or whatever your local store calls it), you head to the Religion section. There, next to shelves of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim books, you will find your Wicca books. Strange feeling, isn’t it?

But the change may confuse some book-buyers, she continues.

 

“Yana Dropped Off First”: Vanishing Pagans of Egypt and Syria

To begin with, there were just a handful of them. And some are going silent, as Cara Schulz writes for the Pagan Newswire Collective:

The situation in Syria appears to be more grave, according to the last messages I received from the five Pagans I chat with regularly.  They spoke of the fighting and how places looked like Beirut,  buildings just shells of themselves, rubble blocking the streets.  They detailed neighbors going missing.  Islamic fundamentalist patrols that monitor behavior and took violent action against people who violated rules and customs. They debated fleeing, worried about being outed as a Pagan, and started destroying or burying altars.  Three began attending local mosques to show their devotion to Islam.

I would bet that in a generation, even the Egyptian Christians will be gone, off to North America or somewhere else. I have even met a few in my area — and we see very few Middle Easterners. In this case, it was the family coming to visit their daughter who had married an American and then moved with him to this area — and then I heard that they were still in the United States. Trying for political asylum?

A FedEx Delivery from R’lyeh

It lies under the sea, sleeping, waiting, until it is summoned forth.

Life imitates art, again.

Peaceful Minoan Crete . . . Was Not

Boy boxers smack each other in a Minoan fresco. (Wiki Commons).

Bronze Age (Minoan) Crete is often portrayed as this peaceful place where people gathered flowers, danced, sang, and worshiped the Great Mother Goddess.

Um, no, says an archaeologist from the University of Sheffield:

“Their world was uncovered just over a century ago, and was deemed to be a largely peaceful society,” explained [Barry] Molloy. “In time, many took this to be a paradigm of a society that was devoid of war, where warriors and violence were shunned and played no significant role.

“That utopian view has not survived into modern scholarship, but it remains in the background unchallenged and still crops up in modern texts and popular culture with surprising frequency.

“Having worked on excavation and other projects in Crete for many years, it triggered my curiosity about how such a complex society, controlling resources and trading with mighty powers like Egypt, could evolve in an egalitarian or cooperative context. Can we really be that positive about human nature? As I looked for evidence for violence, warriors or war, it quickly became obvious that it could be found in a surprisingly wide range of places.”

Much like other people, in other words. Read the rest here.