Tag Archives: American religion

Contemporary Pagan Studies Group’s Call for Papers

The process to submit papers for the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group’s sessions at next November’s American Academy of Religion meeting is now open. The submission deadline is March 3, 2014.

More information and links can be found here.

Call for Papers

We invite individual papers, papers, sessions, and roundtable proposals related to all aspects of Pagan studies (including historic) from different parts of the globe. We welcome papers using diverse methodologies: theoretical and practical, qualitative and quantitative, normative and descriptive. In addition to proposals on topics generally in the purview of this group, this year we especially welcome proposals that address the following for possible cosponsored sessions with other groups:

• Sexuality and gender politics in contemporary Paganism (for a possible cosponsored session with the Women and Religion Section): We seek papers on the critical analysis of women, gender roles, and ideals about women in the contemporary Pagan movement. Possible topics include but are not limited to: ideals about motherhood as envisioned in stories of the divine versus lived parenting, explicit critiques of Western gender and power dynamics in Contemporary Paganism, analysis of gender politics in small groups (e.g., How does the idealized, authoritative high priestess (role manifest in social relations in groups?), analysis of gender ideals versus lived realities and what this means for group cohesion and stability, analysis of British Traditional Witchcraft ideals and the reality of homosexuality in Paganism, analysis of gender fluidity in practice (e.g., Can an effeminate male be high priestesses or take “women’s roles,” and how does this affect group dynamics?). Other topic proposals are welcome.

• Exploring sexual identity and conversion in today’s shifting paradigms (for a cosponsored session with Gay Men and Religion Group; Lesbian-Feminist Issues and Religion Group; Men and Masculinities Group; Religions Conversions Group)

• New animism and ritual assemblies with the other-than-human (possible cosponsorship with Ritual Studies Group and Religion and Ecology Group).  Graham Harvey’s recently edited volume, The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (Acumen, 2013) opens possibilities for dialog among many religious traditions about humans’ relationships with the other-than-human or nonhuman world. This panel seeks papers that engage with the concept of the New Animism from multiple perspectives.

• Contemporary Paganism as “lived religion”: We seek papers for a methodologically oriented panel exploring how religiosity shapes the values and practices of people in their everyday lives. How do our religious views help us to create meanings and take action in the world, how do individuals shape and create practice, and what are the wider social and cultural contexts in which religiosity functions?

Pentagram Pizza: An ‘Apocalypse’ for Witches

pentagrampizza¶ From Scarlet Imprint, Peter Grey’s Apocalyptic Witchcraft. In its review The Daily Grail said,

Grey sets out to explicate a perspective on the familiar symbols and stories of witchcraft in the West which has little truck with the formalities of scholarship, the sensibilities of the Wiccan paths or the white-light Newage perspective. His is a witchcraft both messy and impudent, one that stinks of mud, blood and spunk — in a good way. One where the oft-ignored or sidelined aspects — the legends of human sacrifice, poisons, curses and The Devil Himself — are both represented and, on some level, embraced.

¶ Once again, local authorities are deeply unimpressed by a legal defense based on “sacred prostitution,” especially when the woman involved is trying to get a license for a Colorado marijuana dispensary. 

¶ The list of polytheistic devotional books (and some Pagan SF) published by the Biblioteca Alexandrina  continues to grow. I have one and should get a couple of others.

1971: Witches in Bellbottoms, Talking Heads

Here is a 1971 documentary from the BBC that is supposed to be about witches. But at the time it was made, no one was making much effort to sort out the new Pagan Witches, anthropological and folkloric witches, and Satanic witches of the Church of Satan variety. So what you get is all of them! Plus talking heads — academics, clergy, exorcists . . .

Like so many of the paperback “I go among the witches” books of the time, the filmmakers interview a few of the most public Pagans, such as Doreen Valiente (who should get equal billing with Gerald Gardner in creating Wicca), Alex and Maxine Sanders, and others. But they quickly run out of interview subjects — there were not too many in Britain back then — so they start skipping around: a famous murder case with a possible (folk) witchcraft connection, desecration of graveyards, the evil grip of Satanism, and so forth, to fill up their 49 minutes.

I write about this period in Chapter 4 of Her Hidden Children: “The Playboy and the Witch: Wicca and Popular Culture.” Looking at a number of paperback books on the American scene, I created a rough spreadsheet of places visited and people interviewed. It was interesting how much overlap there was. There seemed to be a “witchcraft trail” that the writers followed — you could imagine it starting at the Warlock Shop/Magical Child store in New York City and ending at Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey’s house in San Francisco.

What is missing at this moment from the outsiders’ view is an overall sense of the new Paganism, at least until Hans Holzer’s 1972 book, The New Pagans. Even the participants themselves were just coming to the view that Wiccans, for instance, might share a Pagan outlook with Druids — the new Druids, that is. We often forget how deliberately isolated those covens were (“We can’t circle with Coven XYZ because it would mean sharing our secrets!” Really, I heard stuff like that in the 1970s.)

Serious academic study of the new Paganism(s) would not really get rolling until the 1980s. For instance, during the 1970s Robert Ellwood, Jr. at the University of Southern California was writing Alternative Altars: Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America (1979), which would offer some theoretical models applicable to the new Paganism, but he did not incorporate it into his discussion in that book.

Welcome, visitors from The Wild Hunt. Look around a bit.

(Thanks to Renna in Denver for the link.)

Someone Should Burn for This

IMGP2077Seen at the booth of a large, evangelically oriented Christian publisher at the American Academy of Religion–Society of Biblical Literature joint annual meeting.

If anyone had made a bobblehead of John Calvin in 16th-century Geneva, JC would have had the maker burned, most likely. Martin Luther might have laughed, depending how much beer he had drunk.

And bobbleheads do not exist in Middle Earth.

“There is nothing phoney about him.”

If you can watch this documentary without laughing, I wonder why you are reading this blog.

And yet . . . and yet  . . . it raises wonderful questions about the categories of “spiritual teacher” and “spirituality.”

More.

A Pastafarian Prophet

A surrealist and a proto-Pastafarian, SE Portland, Oregon.

A surrealist and a proto-Pastafarian, SE Portland, Oregon.

This recent post on Religion Clause describes the victorious struggle of a Texas Pastafarian for the right to wear the sacred pasta strainer in his driver’s license photograph.

It caught my attention because I had just finished editing an article by Joe “Vampires” Leycock, “wandering anthropologist of the occult,”  for the Bulletin for the Study of Religion: “Laughing Matters: “Parody Religions” and the Command to Compare.”

In it he mentions the similar struggle of an Austrian man, Nico Alm, for the same end. Laycock argues that Alm, like Pastafarianism’s founders, “wanted to demonstrate that religion is a category fundamentally preoccupied with the absurd and to question why Western democracies afford special privileges to religion.”

But then a memory of years ago trickled up.

Since this photo predates the founding of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I think that that afternoon my friend and I were merely “preoccupied with the absurd.” Little did I know that I was an unheralded prophet of Pastafarianism.

The bare-chested fellow in the Greek fisherman’s cap is, in fact, Greek — my housemate Yioryos Chouliaras. He seemed to live on Turkish coffee (that’s what he called it) and strong cigarettes and wrote surrealist poetry by the yard. The last I heard, he was the cultural attache at the Greek embassy in Ottawa. Sounds like tough duty, but I am sure that Yioryos could handle it.

Parking Lot Polytheism

Photo from PeopleofWalmart.com

Meeting the priestess might be . . . interesting. (Original source.)

UPG: An ‘Ugly and Misguided’ Term

In a Wikipedia article on Heathenry in Canada, you will read, “The acceptance of such UPG can be a source of controversy among practitioners.”

UPG here means Unverified Personal Gnosis or Unusual Personal Gnosis or Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis, defined (also in Wikipedia) as “the phenomenological concept that an individual’s spiritual insights (or gnosis) may be valid for them without being generalizable to the experience of others. It is primarily a neologism used in polytheistic reconstructionism, to differentiate it from ancient sources of spiritual practices.”

And as the entry notes, it is a derogatory term.

Heathen/Germanic Tradition writers seem to spend the most time evaluating the idea of UPG, as possibly “worth considering” if certain preconditions are met or as highly suspect unless rigorously examined in the light of “the lore”: “The key is that [UPG] has little to no basis in the lore as we have it. Most assumptions about the Gods, myths, and rites are based on careful research of the lore often involving years of study.”

Based on limited discussion with practitioner-scholars, I see less concern about UPG among Germanic Tradition Pagans in Europe and little concern among Baltic or Slavic reconstructionists, for example. Perhaps this concern is largely a North American issue? More study is needed.

Pagan scholar Sam Webster, in fact, goes farther, calling UPG an “ugly and misguided” label.

Experience is the center of all spiritual and religious life. Text is at best derivative. By creating and using such a term as UPG, “Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis,” we privilege text over experience. (This is a rather Christian move, and those who have been following my writing know how I feel about that. . .) Even more damagingly, by framing someone’s experience as a UPG we dissociate ourselves from the primary data of spirituality.

Good point. But not everyone respects phenomenology, even in religious studies.

Sacred Geography in the Cumberland Plateau

Interpreting prehistoric rock art is a challenge, and I suspect that some of Professor Simek’s colleagues may well challenge his interpretation, but he has been looking at petroglyphs from the Mississippian culture and thinks that they describe a three-tier cosmology (Upper, Middle, and Lower Worlds), already attested elsewhere.

A Mississippian priest, with a ceremonial flint mace and severed head. Artist Herb Roe, based on a repoussé copper plate. (Wikipedia).

The Mississippian Culture is a term applied to people living in the area from about 800–1500 CE, contemporary with the European Middle Ages. These people  lived in fortified villages, and some built large ceremonial mounds.

Simek and his team analyzed 44 open- air art sites where the art is exposed to light and 50 cave art sites in the Cumberland Plateau using nondestructive, high-tech tools, such as a high-resolution laser scanner. Through analysis of the depictions, colors, and spatial organization, they found that the sites mimic the Southeastern native people’s cosmological principles.

“The cosmological divisions of the universe were mapped onto the physical landscape using the relief of the Cumberland Plateau as a topographic canvas,” said Simek.

The “upper world” included celestial bodies and weather forces personified in mythic characters that exerted influences on the human situation. Mostly open-air art sites located in high elevations touched by the sun and stars feature these images. Many of the images are drawn in the color red, which was associated with life.

The “middle world” represented the natural world. A mixture of open air and cave art sites hug the middle of the plateau and feature images of people, plants and animals of mostly secular character.

The “lower world” was characterized by darkness and danger, and was associated with death, transformation and renewal. The art sites, predominantly found in caves, feature otherworldly characters, supernatural serpents and dogs that accompanied dead humans on the path of souls. The inclusion of creatures such as birds and fish that could cross the three layers represents the belief that the boundaries were permeable. Many of these images are depicted in the color black, which was associated with death.

Read the rest at Heritage Daily, an online archaeology magazine. Wikipedia’s article on the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex connects with all this, particularly the section on cosmology.

‘Non-Christian’ License Plate Prompts Oklahoma Lawsuit

An Oklahoma court has cleared the way for Methodist clergyman Keith Cressman to sue the state over his objection to  imagery on that state’s license plate.

The new license plates carry a photo of a statue called “Prayer for Rain,” of an Apache man shooting an arrow into the sky.

His 2011 lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City seeks a court order allowing him either to cover up the image on his plates or to get a personalized plate for the same cost as a standard license plate.

“Mr. Cressman’s (lawsuit) states a plausible compelled speech claim,” the appellate judges wrote Tuesday in a 39-page decision, reversing Judge Joe Heaton’s dismissal of the lawsuit. “He has alleged sufficient facts to suggest that the ‘Sacred Rain Arrow’ image on the standard Oklahoma license plate conveys a particularized message that others are likely to understand and to which he objects.”

Oklahoma has used American Indian imagery on license plates before, but something about this one evidently pushed the Rev. Cressman’s buttons.

Sigh. Maybe they should make a plain black and white plate for militant monotheists.