Newest Pomegranate Online with Some Free Content

Issue 13.2 of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies has been posted online, while the print version is in production and should be on its way to subscribers oon.

Two essays are available for free download: Ronald Hutton on “Revisionism and Counter-Revisionism in Pagan History” and Tamara Ingels on Contemporary City Shaman Jóska Soós Included in the New Antwerp MAS Museum.

Book reviews may also be downloaded, but not all hyperlinks are working yet.

UPDATE: You should be able download PDF files of the book reviews if you click on the word “PDF.”

Gerald Gardner and the Question of Polytheism.

I recently reviewed Philip Heselton’s latest biography of Gerald Gardner, but I did not have time to discuss one of his final observations, written in a too-brief closing chapter, “An Assessment of Gerald Gardner.”

Heselton writes, “Indeed, he really didn’t, I think, have any of what we might call ‘spiritual’ feelings: at any rate, he never wrote about any.” Nor, in his assessment, did Gardner believe in spirits or have any success at working magick on his own (640).

Think about that, the chief founder of a new Pagan religion who never had one of those knock-you-down experiences with the gods that convinces you that She, He, or They are really there. Compare, for example, the experience of Feraferia, Fred Adams, also back in the mid-1950s.

If he, Edith, and friends were talking about witchcraft during lazy days at the nudist camp in the late 1940s, they had a lot of concepts swirling around, concepts such as these:

  • Witchcraft was merely a collection of psychic abilities available to everyone.
  • It was spells and herbal curing and folklore and whatever, with no clear organization — just a soup of this and that.
  • It was power given to someone after a pact with the Devil.
  • It was power that you were born with, either for good or ill.
  • It is a super-secret Pagan cult that survived 1,000 years of Christianity in western Europe (Margaret Murray’s view).

All of these ideas are swirling around and bumping into each other in Witchcraft Today (1954). But there is not much about deities — for that, Doreen Valiente should get the credit, I suspect.

Somehow this vagueness and messiness of definition ties in — in my mind at least — with P. Sufenas Virius Lupus’s recent blog essay, “Bringing Back the Gods.”

What I am noticing more and more recently, however, is that modern Paganism is being purposefully defined so as to not include the gods. In recent weeks alone: Jonathan Korman has defined “the pagan sensibility” as not necessarily needing to include the gods; John Halstead has discussed the four centers of modern Paganism, but has portrayed the deity-centric forms of Paganism as inherently creedal; and here at Patheos’ Pagan Portal, Yvonne Aburrow has defined “theology” as “reasoning about the Divine” rather than “reasoning about the gods,” which is not remotely the same thing (on which more will be said in a moment).

For a long time now, I’ve been hearing modern Paganism characterized as a “nature religion” or an “earth-based religion.” That is true to an extent (and in some cases, far less true than others—and not necessarily in a negative sense). However, I suspect a huge reason that it is characterized that way—especially to non-Pagans—is because of fear of being thought foolish or “primitive” for recognizing the gods. We have then internalized that dialogue and have spent lots of virtual and actual ink on determining whether or not one group or another is truly “earth-based,” when in fact that understanding in itself might be more of a problem than an accurate portrayal.

On the “nature religion” part, I would suggest that non-theistic nature religion is rooted in 19th-century American thought, and Catherine Albanese tackled it well in Nature Religion in America and other writing. So it is not a reaction against contemporary polytheism originally, but a genuine spiritual current on its own. I have argued that the existence of that spiritual current made it easier for Pagans in the 1970s and 1980s to grab the “earth religion” label — partly as camouflage.

And some people just have not had that knock upside the head that leaves you saying, “All right, You are real and now we have some sort of relationship.”

I would agree that there is a cultural prejudice against polytheism. Some practitioners of what look like polytheism to us have maybe learned to emphasize a “Great Spirit” or “High God” behind them in order to avoid that label. It’s what you say when the missionaries have you backed into a corner.

Should Pagans Show “Solidarity”?

At The Wild Hunt, you can read a second group of excerpts from various Pagan writers and bloggers on topics of community and solidarity, but this post is different.

If you scroll to the bottom, there are links to everyone’s full remarks in PDF form.

Yes, one of them is mine. I tried for a “hypothetical,” but TWH did not select that particular bit, so here it is.

“Solidarity” is tricky too. Does it simply refer to religious freedom under the broadest umbrella, like you are a Druid, and I am a rootworker, but I respect you as a Pagan practitioner, and you respect me?

Or does it mean that I have to support everything that you do and all your struggles, like union workers not crossing each other’s picket lines? If the Phoenix Goddess Temple  gets in legal trouble over prostitution and the Maetreum of Cybele gets in trouble over zoning, must I — or we — support them both under the principle of “solidarity”?

(Let me say that I am pretty much of a small-l libertarian about these things, but “religious freedom” is a flimsy shield when you go up against government — look at Hobby Lobby’s fight over Obamacare and the contraception mandate. You had better get real good legal advice before you play the “religious freedom” card.)

Does the principle of solidarity just mean that the stronger voices will drown out the weaker, who will be told to sit down and shut up because they are not showing solidarity?

Survey on Pagan Health

If you like taking surveys and want to help a Pagan anthropologist in her study of Pagan attitudes toward health care, start here.

The Greenland Norse: Maybe the Young Folks Just Moved Away

The disappearance of the Norse colonies in Greenland after more than 400 years of occupation is a compelling historical mystery.

Some people have suggested that their numbers slowly diminished until there were too few left to reproduce. Others (such as Jane Smiley in her well-researched novel The Greenlanders) lay some of the blame on slave traders from the port of Bristol, carrying people away. Others wonder if conflict with the Thule Eskimos contributed to the settlements’ collapse. The bubonic plague has also been suggested as a culprit.

This article from  Der Spiegel suggests something less dramatic: with the settlements’ economy faltering and fewer ships coming from Norway and Iceland, young adults saw little potential in staying around, based on a study of Norse graves.

It also appears that epidemics were not responsible for the decline of farm life on the island. The scientists did not discover more signs of disease in the Viking bones uncovered on the island than elsewhere. “We found normal skeletons, which looked just like comparable finds from Scandinavian countries,” says [Danish anthropologist Niels] Lynnerup.

The archaeologists rule out malnutrition, saying the Greenlanders were doing well enough as seal-hunters to feed themselves, contrary to earlier views that they refused to learn seal-hunting.

In the final phase, it was young people of child-bearing age in particular who saw no future for themselves on the island. The excavators found hardly any skeletons of young women on a cemetery from the late period.

“The situation was presumably similar to the way it is today, when young Greeks and Spaniards are leaving their countries to seek greener pastures in areas that are more promising economically,” Lynnerup says. “It’s always the young and the strong who go, leaving the old behind.”

In addition, there was a rural exodus in their Scandinavian countries at the time, and the population in the more remote regions of Iceland, Norway and Denmark was thinning out. This, in turn, freed up farms and estates for returnees from Greenland.

However, the Greenlanders didn’t leave their houses in a precipitous fashion. Aside from a gold signet ring in the grave of a bishop, valuable items, such as silver and gold crucifixes, have not been discovered anywhere on the island. The archeologists interpret this as a sign that the departure from the colony proceeded in an orderly manner, and that the residents took any valuable objects along. “If they had died out as a result of diseases or natural disasters, we would certainly have found such precious items long ago,” says Lynnerup.

The settlements’ abandonment may have been planned. It is known that the Western Settlement was abandoned first, but even it appears to have been evacuated rather than wiped out by catastrophe.

Read the rest. I suppose that it is far too late to remind editors that “Viking” is an occupation, not an ethnicity.

Mouse’s Way: Philip Heselton’s Biographies of Gerald Gardner

A serious scholarly biography of Gerald Gardner, the effective founder of the Wiccan religion, remains to be written. Philip Heselton has now written four books on Gardner’s life, but his vision is near-sighted and close to the ground, like a mouse seeking food in the grass, unaware that there are tall trees around him.

Heselton is a master of the trivial detail: He tells us that contrary to the Jack Bracelin biography, Gerald Gardner: Witch (1960), Gardner sailed from Sri Lanka to England in 1907 rather than in 1905, and a naive reader might be impressed by such a correction. He spends pages on minute details regarding the real-estate dealings behind English nudist resorts.

But as he did in Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration (2003), he continues to miss the implications of the chronology that he himself lays out.

• 1939. Gardner says that he was initiated into one of (or the only) surviving English witch covens at a house owned by Dorothy Clutterbuck in Hampshire on “the most wonderful night of his life.”

•  1946.  Gardner is ordained in a Old Catholic church, this one called the Ancient British Church. Would a man who had found his heart’s desire seven years earlier in a Wiccan coven now become a heterodox Christian priest?

• Circa 1946. He is also involved with the Ancient Druid Order, also known as the Universal Bond, and joins its rituals at least until the key year of 1951 (Witchfather,  328–31).

• 1947. He pays Aleister Crowley to give him an upgraded initiation into the Ordo Templi Orientis, with authority to take over its activities in Britain.

• 1947–48. Inspired by his contacts with Crowley, he starts copying old magical texts into a big book, “Ye [The] Bok of Ye Arte Magical.”

Is he thinking about witchcraft at all? He writes a novel,  High Magic’s Aid, published in 1949, but the supposedly medieval witchcraft in it is actually Renaissance ceremonial magic with the addition of a naked woman — and she is more of a passive psychic medium than an active high priestess and leader. It does not resemble what we know as Wicca much at all.

Later he will claim that “the witches” gave him permission to write the book if he concealed their “secrets.” Even that statement would have made good advertising, but it does not appear in the original 1949 edition — only later, when Wicca is up and running. I suggest instead that it was a story made up in order to mesh with the story of the 1939 initiation.

• 1951.  He and Cecil Williamson open their museum of witchcraft and magic. Gardner will later buy Wiliamson’s share. Gardner now goes public with Wicca and writes two more books, although he pretends to be an anthropologist and not a participant.

Despite the 1939 initiation story, during the 1940s Gardner bounced from one esoteric and magical group to another. He was still a “seeker.” By contrast, the 1950s–1960s Gardner totally committed himself to Wicca. That comparison alone tells me that Wicca began in 1950–51.

It is a chicken-and-egg question: which came first, Wicca or the museum. I suspect that it was the museum that forced Gardner’s hand. Now he had to have a coven of witches, in order for said coven of witches to be able to loan ritual objects to the museum — objects which, as his correspondence shows — he was having manufactured to order in some case, whether by theatrical prop-makers or the local blacksmith.  Whichever way it was, 1951 was the crucial year for Wicca, not 1939. But having once told a whopper about 1939, Gardner had to keep inventing new stories — some of which Heselton innocently repeats.

A scholarly biographer would realize that others had attempted similar tasks, acknowledge that, and show where his conclusions were different and more certain. In Gardner’s case, that other writer is Aidan Kelly, who in Crafting the Art of Magic (1991) , republished as Inventing Witchcraft: A Case Study in the Creation of a New Religion (2007, points out one important fact: Our only source for the alleged 1939 initiation and the 1940 anti-German invasion ritual is Gardner himself. There are no independent corroborating sources.

Heselton, in contrast, quotes such other historians of Wicca as Kelly and Ronald Hutton only briefly, and only when they seem to support his basic belief in the truth of the Official Myth of 1939. When they do not support him, as Kelly in particular does not (and Hutton too, if you read between the lines),  he ignores them.

Heselton can build edifices of speculation. He can try to make lists of who might have been in a 1939 coven, but there is no other evidence that the 1939 coven itself ever existed other than Gardner’s say-so. (Yes, Dorothy Clutterbuck wrote nature poetry. That of itself does not make her a Pagan witch.)

Throughout Witchfather, Heselton writes that Gardner engaged in “deliberate mis-representation of what he wanted to do” (512),  “definitely enjoyed intrigue and deception”  (529),  and “was a trickster and had perfected this to a fine art” (641), to give just a few examples.

Yet his adherence to the Official Myth of 1939 makes him unable to ask if it, too, was a bit of “intrigue and deception,” designed to make Wicca look older than it was. When another writer on Wiccan history,  Allen Greenfield, writes of the “the new witch cult” in the 1950s, Heselton feels obligated to add [sic] after the word “new” in the quotation, because it violates the Official Myth.

Heselton has the evidence in his hands, but he does not see it. He admits that Gardner bought a fake PhD from a diploma mill in Nevada so he could call himself “Dr. Gardner.” (Witchfather  167–68). He mentions Gardner’s using out-of-date stationery when writing to Aleister Crowley because he “might have just wanted to impress Crowley with the grandness of his address [which suggested a large country house]” (Witchfather, 301). But he misses the larger pattern.

Call it vanity, call it obfuscation — Gardner wanted to seem to be more than he was, and he wanted the new religion of Wicca to seem older and larger than it was in the early 1950s when he and it went public.

So he backdated it, creating a false origin myth, the “Stone Age survival” that fooled Margaret Murray. (See the first sentence of her introduction to Witchcraft Today.)

Again, had Heselton studied new religious movements, he might have seen a pattern here.

Let it be said that once Wicca was launched, Gardner devoted himself to it. No more OTO, no more Old Catholic Church. He taught, wrote,  and publicized Wicca, giving himself 101 percent to the Craft up until his sudden death by stroke in 1964. Now he had found what his heart desired, but he could not admit to having largely invented it — or, if you will, served as a channel for the old gods to bring it back.

Heselton himself writes at the close of Witchfather, “he never lost his enthusiasm for witchcraft from the moment he was initiated [1939] until the end of his life'”(637). Here again, he does not see the implication of what he has just written. If the “enthusiasm for witchcraft” had existed in the 1940s, would there have been all the excursions into other spiritual and esoteric groups? After 1951, there were no such excursions.

When Heselton turns away from the Official Myth, as in his chapter on the relations between Gardner, his covener Jack Bracelin, the Afghan nobleman and Sufi mystic Idries Shaw, and the writer Robert Graves, he suddenly becomes more analytical and even something of a literary critic. Why? Because nothing here threatens the Official Myth. He can look up from his narrow pathway and see the trees.

If I sound a bit frustrated, it is because I have saying for years that Gardner deserved a good biography— and that if I can, I would be happy to see it through to publication. And I have been told, “Heselton is writing it.” But this is not it. There is no analysis and no awareness of Wicca and its chief founder in relation to other new religious movements and their founders.

Now if only someone could combine Heselton’s research with scholarship on new religious movements and less blind obedience to the Official Myth, then we might have the scholarly biography that Gerald Gardner deserves.

How Real Science Is Done

Isn’t this the truth about most published psychology research?

See more similar posts about scientific research.

 

The P-word

Since the early 1990s, I have been working in my small way to get the word Pagan capitalized in books and articles — of course, I was not the only one doing that. Ironically, the most resistance seems to come from certain British academics. Neither of the two conflicting editing gangs has published an official statement yet, so it’s up to us. I was looking today at the copyedited ms. of Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, and it looks as though the Brit copyeditor is leaving our capital P’s alone.

When people vocally announce that they are not going to call themselves “Pagan” anymore, they are acting right within the mainstream of contemporary Paganism, where individual choice, transaction-based relationships,  and the voluntary joining and leaving of groups trump any notion of organic community. (That was the point I tried to make when Heather from The Wild Hunt asked me to comment on “solidarity.”)

If I read him right, Peter Dybing suggests that this kind of behavior guarantees that contemporary Paganism is a long way from having oppressive institutions.

Pagan studies scholar Lee Gilmore writes on her Facebook page, “All this hand wringing over terminology is, I think, indicative of both Pagans’ struggle to construct authenticity, and also of larger social anxieties about religious boundaries, which also seem to increasingly locate authenticity outside of ‘religion’ (i.e., the whole ‘spiritual but not etc.’ thing).”

To further complicate things, some people persist in using the word “pagan” — and here I would lowercase it — in ways like this:

Paganism is a sustainable way of life that has existed for thousands of years. Sometimes mistaken as a religious path (true pagans do not worship deities), paganism will appeal to anyone who cares about the environment or is interested in maintaining an organic lifestyle.

You silly people who thought you had a religion! Go cultivate your gardens!

Recreating Hair Styles of the Vestal Virgins

Credit Janet Stephens via Livescience.com

View of the work of a “forensic hairdresser” who creates ancient women’s hair styles, such as those of the Vestal Virgins of Rome.

The stylist, Janet Stephens, has a YouTube channel with other examples of her work.

ᔥ Via Cara Schulz.

Critiquing “Double Belief” in Russian Paganism

Consider this a follow-up to yesterday’s post on Russian dream rituals, which linked to an article whose author totally accepted the idea of spiritual practices with  “very deep roots in pre-Christian culture.”

I had not realized this, but Routledge published a book critiquing the idea of “double belief”  (dvoeverie) three years ago: Stella Rock’s Popular Religion in Russia: ‘Double Belief’ and the Making of an Academic Myth.

From the catalog:

This book dispels the widely-held view that paganism [sic] survived in Russia alongside Orthodox Christianity, demonstrating that ‘double belief’, dvoeverie, is in fact an academic myth.

Scholars, citing the medieval origins of the term, have often portrayed Russian Christianity as uniquely muddied by paganism, with ‘double-believing’ Christians consciously or unconsciously preserving pagan traditions even into the twentieth century. This volume shows how the concept of dvoeverie arose with nineteenth-century scholars obsessed with the Russian ‘folk’ and was perpetuated as a propaganda tool in the Soviet period, colouring our perception of both popular faith in Russian and medieval Russian culture for over a century. It surveys the wide variety of uses of the term from the eleventh to the seventeenth century, and contrasts them to its use in modern historiography, concluding that our modern interpretation of dvoeverie would not have been recognized by medieval clerics, and that ‘double-belief’ is a modern academic construct. Furthermore, it offers a brief foray into medieval Orthodoxy via the mind of the believer, through the language and literature of the period.

From what I have seen in current Pagan studies, the concept is indeed widely accepted by today’s Russian Pagans and by some scholars as well. I may need to read this book.

UPDATE: From a review in Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review by Kaarina Aitamurto:

The validity of the myth has been increasingly called into question in recent decades. Rock’s contribution, however, is ground-breaking in its extensive and methodologically solid approach.