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.

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.

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.