Russian Seasonal Dream Rituals

I missed Orthodox Christmas by  a day, but here is an article on Russian Pagan dream practice.

 Here I’ll try to give the “taste” of the authentic Russian tradition of dream work that has very deep roots in pre-Christian culture.  Mainly the Russian tradition tells about highly practical dream incubation and tuning.  The tuning rituals are connected to certain calendar dates and periods all over the year, days of the week, and time of the day.  There is also very rich practice of using ‘magic’ objects and creating special situations for powerful dream incubation. My experience in teaching dream work shows that three days intensive in the nature is not enough to try at least either summer, or winter rituals.

Copy Editors Killed in Chicago Manual-AP Violence

“At this time we have reason to believe the killings were gang-related and carried out by adherents of both the AP and Chicago styles, part of a vicious, bloody feud to establish control over the grammar and usage guidelines governing American English,” said FBI spokesman Paul Holstein, showing reporters graffiti tags in which the word “anti-social” had been corrected to read “antisocial.”

Chicago rulez. We got two documentation styles, an’ we know de difference tween a hyphen and an en-dash. Dey ain’t got shit.

Pentagram Pizza with the Inner Bark of Pine Trees

pentagrampizza• At Wytch of the North, a lengthy blog post on being a godspouse.

• A small publisher seeks submissions for a volume on “transgressive rites and rituals.”
We are looking primarily for practical articles describing new and original rites and rituals that cross barriers and challenge social norms. Although the bulk of the book will be made up of practical working material, we will consider articles relating to historically significant rites, philosophical discussions on the nature or significance of transgression, and first person accounts of actual rites and rituals. Original artwork will also be accepted for consideration.

• Certain ponderosa pine trees in my region are identified as being “sacred trees” to the Ute Indians. I would like to know more about this, since is a distinction between these “cultural” trees and those that were de-barked for eating purposes — this link addresses both eating the inner bark and the “cultural” use, complete with power dreams.

 

PLTV — New Pagan Video Podcasting

Todd Berntson’s Pagan Living TV video podcast has launched with a news-magazine format.

Production values are a lot higher than in some Pagan video podcasts I have seen, although it’s still just talking heads in the studio at this point. At least there is a studio, not a sheet tacked to the wall. Visit the website.

Celebrate Winter (2)

You thought that you had a drum circle. Read more about it.

The Year the Calendars Ended

Was 1 January 2013 was some kind of unrecognized cultural watershed, like “The Year Frenchmen Stopped Wearing Berets” or something?

Image from the “Year and a Day” calendar.

I took my 2012 Reed College alumni association calendar off the wall and realized that I had nothing to replace it with — not one free calendar.

Not another from Reed, nor Trout Unlimited, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, nor any other organization. Maybe I have not been sending them enough money, preferring to donate to local and state-level causes this year. Or maybe this is some spin-off from the over-hyped 12-21-2012 apocalypse.

Despite all the electronic stuff, iCal and whatnot, I still like to be able to look up and see the month at a glance (What day is the 22nd?) without opening an app.

M. had picked up a free calendar at Natural Grocers down in Pueblo, but it hangs in the kitchen, where she can clip the monthly discount coupon.

So I am “buying Pagan,” ordering this year’s Gerald B. Gardner “Year and A Day” calendar, featuring historic photos of Craft figures and a list of Pagan festivals from different cultures in case you need an excuse to lift a glass in honor of Janus, Hathor, or the Vietnamese Parade of the Unicorns. (Parade of the unicorns?)

Sex with Ghosts, Vengeful Mummies, etc.

At The Hairpin, A Q&A with author, photographer, and ossuary expert Paul Koudounaris.

Two quotes:

Back in grad school I was known as the Fox Mulder of the art history department. Everyone else was working on Rembrandt and I was looking at woodblock prints of witches. . . .

If you consider Psycho, the one thing that makes Norman Bates absolutely unfit to be a member of human society is that he has his mother mummified and dresses her in clothes. That what marked him as a lunatic. But back in 1700 in Sicily that would have marked him as the paradigm of a loving son. At that point death was not a boundary, it was just a transition and the dead still had a roll to play.

I have my own ossuary on the mantel, but it is for birds and small mammals. It started with the discovery of a sharp-shinned hawk “in kit form” by the driveway when M. and I moved into this house.

↬ The Daily Grail.

The Basic Split in Pagan Witchcraft

Issue 2 of the British newsletter Pentagram, November 1964, price 2s, "for private circulation only."

Issue 2 of the British newsletter Pentagram, November 1964, price 2s, “for private circulation only.”

As I posted earlier, the issue of The Pomegranate now in press has an article about Robert Cochrane, one of the first English witches to use the term “traditional” in opposition to Gerald Gardner’s Wicca, back in the 1960s. In fact, my own current researches are going to force me to grapple with that term and its permutations quite a bit.

The term “traditional” is tossed around a lot more now than in past decades, but the clashes between various forms of revived Witchcraft started quite some time ago — in the 1960s, at least. Some of the infighting appeared in a short-lived publication called Pentagram, arguably the first English-language Pagan zine.  Note the headline, “Before Gardner—What?”

Gerald Gardner himself had died earlier that year, so he could not say anything. There might be a connection with the timing of the article!

The unsigned short article complains, in essence, that Gardner’s version of Witchcraft is getting all the press attention. It continues, “Now as you must know, there are a number of other groups, quite apart from the little group in which I am interested, who practice various forms of Magic and Witchcraft. Now why does the Press make no mention of them . . . ?” and goes on to speak of “hereditary covens” and about Witchcraft is a “complicated and all-embracing way of life.”

There you have one split that has persisted to this day. Against Gardner’s claims of unbroken ancient tradition (which I do not think that any Wiccan leader would advocate today), you have another set of claims: that there are non-Wiccan groups that do not seek publicity (yet are apparently insulted that they do not receive it), that are “hereditary” in some sense, and that are more demanding of their members than some mere Stone Age fertility cult allegedly rediscovered in southern England.

Was that Cochrane writing ? Possibly. He did write for Pentagram under his own name as well. And the use of “sock puppets” predates the Internet. The idea of being more “complicated” sounds like something he might have said.

The appeal to (undocumented) tradition and other logical fallacies are still found  in “Traditional Witchcraft,” but there can be something else as well, something healthy and refreshing. I will return to this topic in the near future.

 

Comet ISON Is Coming

Here is something to look forward to — a very bright comet due later this year. (Corrected–thanks, Medeine.)

End of Year Lists: Books, Movies

Religion Dispatches lists five important new books on alternative and metaphysical spirituality in America — I prefer that to saying they are about the “nones,” which is a vague term — yes, well, so is “alternative.”

Catherine Albanese of UC-Santa Barbara has done important work in identifying first the non-theistic “nature religion” current  in American thought and secondly the importance of the metaphysical current in the book mentioned here: A Republic of Mind and Spirit.

And one of the Pagan studies crowd, Lee Gilmore, gets a mention for her book on Burning Man. You can also read a longer interview with her at the site.

A burst of blogging at The Juggler produces lists of the worst Pagan movies of 2012, plus the best Pagan movies, environmental Pagan movies, and more — look around.

Not a year’s end “Best Of” list, but still a round-up of scientific thinking about alien life and and fictional treatments of alien invasions at Instapundit.

And may your 2013 be a “Best Of” as well.