• You knew this was coming: the zombie Tarot deck.
• On cave paintings, art, and cognition.
• More old stuff: were those ancient figurines of voluptuous women goddesses . . . or toys? Don’t suggest the latter to the idol-makers of today.
• Have beautiful handwriting by Christmas. You have a whole year now to improve!
Following up on last July’s post about Mari Paganism, here via Forging the Sampo is another contemporary journalistic article with links.
Two of the grandmothers are less concerned, lying down in the grass in their shawls as their grandsons collect wood for the fire. “In [Orthodox] Church, you have to stand for hours. I can’t deal with that. The glade is better. Much more comfortable.”
You will find the same article linked as well as other material at the MariUver blog.
Dave Wilton links to a fine rant in The Atlantic about hyphens. (Yes, we care.) And that link will get you to this one in Mental Floss about the difference between the em-dash and the en-dash.
Now I am careful to use the en-dash when separating ranges of numbers, such as an article being on pages 317–24 of a journal (although you can’t see the difference in this font), but how did I get through various writing and editing jobs without knowing about “the storied ‘compound adjective hyphen,’ an event so rare in the English language that proofreaders shiver with excitement whenever they come across it”?
Me with a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style always within reach. I am but an egg.
A headline from 75 years ago in the International Herald-Tribune: ” ‘Neo-Pagans’ Target Carols” with further discussion about the relations between National Socialism and Christianity here.
Not just a cult-favorite TV show but an issue of free speech on campus at the University of Wisconsin. With Neil Gaiman and a thick-headed campus police chief. Don’t underestimate the fans of Firefly.
UPDATE: Sorry, the YouTube link disappeared for a while.
Direct from Edinburgh, “Christmas Special — Only 60 Seconds!”
May I challenge the speaker if Rudolf Otto never actually used the term “the sacred”? Is speaking German a “deviation”?
“Far too many -isms going on here.”
The local weekly newspaper arrived in my post office box today.
I see that a liquor store in my little mountain county is announcing a new 12/21/12 pricing plan:
Bud or Bud Light six packs will cost you two chickens or a goat . . . Canadian Mist 175’s will cost you 1,000 rounds of 12 gauge . . . All wine 750’s will be traded for five gallons of gas.
People up in the county seat must be well-armed and thirsty. I wouldn’t give more than a box (25 total) of shotgun shells for 175 ml. of blended Canadian whisky myself .
As I mentioned in November, the Equinox Series in Historic and Contemporary Paganism will continue, even though two books in the series will be published by Acumen, the result of the two firms’ merger and then de-merger. These are the titles:
1. Kaarina Aitamurto and Scott Simpson, eds. Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe.
2. Donna Weston and Andy Bennett, eds., Pop Pagans: Pagans and Popular Music.
Both are well worth reading. Unfortunately, the Central and Eastern European volume will be available only in high-priced hardback at first—one of the problems that my co-editor, Nikki Bado, and I had with Acumen’s approach.
So during 2013 we will be interested in seeing new proposals for the series.
Never underestimate the ability of senior academics to dismiss a book with what sound like words of praise.
Today’s example, Wendy Doniger’s (leading scholar of history of religion, particularly in India) blurb on a new book called The Origins of the World’s Mythologies.
“Not since Frazer’s Golden Bough, has anyone achieved such a grand synthesis of world mythology. Boldly swimming upstream against the present scholarly emphasis on difference and context, Witzel assembles massive evidence for a single, prehistoric, Ur-mythology. An astonishing book”
–Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago and author of The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was
In other words, I think she is saying that it follows a solipsistic (“swimming upstream”) and out-of-date methodology (the Golden Bough reference), and what astonishes her is that Oxford actually published it.
This brought a visitor to the blog: “grizzly bears knowing Jesus Christ is coming.”
The truth is that I did have Jesus Christ and a grizzly bear in one blog post.