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.

Death and the Viking Mind

Stora Hammars stone : Wiki Commons

A short piece from Heritage Daily summarizes research by Neil Price of Aberdeen University into Viking-period burials.

Aside from these literary work [sagas], Professor Price suggests that the grave assemblages of the Viking Age may be used to tell stories and provide an insight into the Viking conscious. There is an “infinite diversity of Viking Age burial,” he says, and whilst certainly there are similarities, these common aspects are ‘themes’ for the burial stories to be played out. So how do these stories take place?

If you scroll to the bottom, there are links to YouTube videos of three of Price’s lectures.

This is Going to Upset Some Writers on Dreaming

The often-retold story  story about the ring of snakes and the benzene ring in chemistry may be not so true.

By claiming to have made two major discoveries with the help of dreams . . . Kekule shrewdly avoided sharing credit with deserving foreign colleagues. . . . . In a recent article in the British scientific journal Ambix, Dr. Wotiz and Dr. Susanna F. Rudofsky concluded: ”Psychologists have cited the Kekule dream account in support of their preconceived theories, rather than deducing any important novel theories from it.”

ᔥMiniver Cheevy.