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.
You thought that you had a drum circle. Read more about it.
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?)
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.
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.
Here is something to look forward to — a very bright comet due later this year. (Corrected–thanks, Medeine.)
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.
Back when I was subscribing to Stewart Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly in the 1980s, Jaron Lanier made frequent appearances in its pages as techno-prophet extraordinaire.
He was the guy who was helping to invent virtual reality. He was presented as being miles ahead of the rest of us. He was, as this Smithsonian article, “What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web” says, a Silicon Valley rock star.
Now he is a Silicon Valley heretic. And having seen the consequences, he has changed his mind about a number of things, including the whole “information wants to be free” mantra, which he helped to promote.
The mistake of our age? That’s a bold statement (as someone put it in Pulp Fiction). “I think it’s the reason why the rise of networking has coincided with the loss of the middle class, instead of an expansion in general wealth, which is what should happen. But if you say we’re creating the information economy, except that we’re making information free, then what we’re saying is we’re destroying the economy.”
The connection Lanier makes between techno-utopianism, the rise of the machines and the Great Recession is an audacious one. Lanier is suggesting we are outsourcing ourselves into insignificant advertising-fodder. Nanobytes of Big Data that diminish our personhood, our dignity. He may be the first Silicon populist.
“To my mind an overleveraged unsecured mortgage is exactly the same thing as a pirated music file. It’s somebody’s value that’s been copied many times to give benefit to some distant party. In the case of the music files, it’s to the benefit of an advertising spy like Google [which monetizes your search history], and in the case of the mortgage, it’s to the benefit of a fund manager somewhere. But in both cases all the risk and the cost is radiated out toward ordinary people and the middle classes—and even worse, the overall economy has shrunk in order to make a few people more.”
This is a challenging article, one that I plan to return to and absorb. Read it yourself.
Added: Rod Dreher talks about the Lanier article and how it dovetails with a lesson he learned in life: Never trust the Crowd.
It is an article of faith (an appropriate word here) for contemporary Pagans that Christianity stole holidays left and right from our spiritual ancestors, particularly Christmas.
Here Mollie Ziegler at Get Religion, a blog about the critical examination of religion-writing in the (mostly) American media, gets into some of the nuances in the process of critiquing a typically breezy seasonal piece from the Washington Post.
Yeah, well, it’s certainly true that when the calendar was standardized, there was a push for Dec. 25 as the date to mark Jesus’ birth. But was this because it was a co-opting of Saturnalia? It’s certainly a theory. But Dec. 25 was one of the many dates being used by Christians to mark Christ’s birth and maybe not for the reasons you hear.
Some historians argue — read her piece for details — that Jesus’ birth was placed on December 25th centuries before “Christmas” was celebrated. In the early church, Easter was much more important.
Now before somebody says “Yeah, and ‘Eostre’ was a Germanic goddess,” we are not talking about Germans but about the eastern Mediterranean region (and Rome) when we say “the early church.” The Germanic tribes were mostly unaware of Christianity until some converted in the fourth century, right? And complete conversion took another six hundred years.
It is the news media, not the Pagans, that keeps the “Christmas started out as a ‘pagan’ holiday” meme alive. Maybe that is more of a secularist position — taking organized religion down a notch — that provides a convenient bit of cover for the modern Pagans?
And let’s not forget another group that contributed to the Christmas-is-pagan meme — the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Just today at the laundromat I saw a one of their Awake booklets, which made that very same argument, one that they have been making for many decades.
I found this graph at the College Insurrection blog, a project of law professor William Jacobson.
When I first started university teaching, I never bothered to wander through the bookstore and see what the books that I assigned actually cost. Once I did, I was suitably shocked.
After I had taught a little more, I began to realize that, for instance, the differences between the “fourth edition” and the “fifth edition” were not exactly substantive. They mainly existed to damage the used-textbook business, I think.