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Two Items Involving Ronald Hutton

First, an interview by Ethan Doyle White with British scholar of esotericism Dave Evans, who did his doctorate with Hutton at Bristol and speaks well of him:

Having a conversation with Ronald is a delight, and I had him to myself every 3 weeks or so, for a precious half an hour, for almost 3 years. I am a very lucky person. He is indeed a very friendly man, but no pushover when you work for him- he is a superb adviser on academic work; firm but fair, and he will not allow crap work to get through the filters- he steered, cajoled, encouraged and generally supported some very difficult stuff I was doing, at the same time as managing his perpetually massive workload in other areas.

Second, news that Professor Hutton will be hosting a program for the Yesterday Channel (half-owned by the BBC, I am told) called Professor Hutton’s Curiosities, about little-known museums in the London area. I think that one of these is the Horniman Museum. Let me know if it is any good, since I do not have satellite or cable TV.

 

Journalism and the AAR-SBL

Journalists are few at the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature’s joint annual meetings.  But the New York Times‘ Mark Oppenheimer, searching around for “the narrative,” noted that some fraction of the participants wore flowing robes and weirdly remarked about people carrying hefty reference books, as  Steven Ramey notes in his fisking of Oppenheimer’s reportage at the Bulletin for the Study of Religion blog. (My take: Oppenheimer saw books and just guessed at what they might be.)

My frustration at Oppenheimer’s representation of the AAR/SBL conference illustrates the limits to the descriptive aspect of both ethnographies and the news.

As for the Pagan studies sessions, no one from the Pagan Newswire Collective showed up, which might be a better thing than the sort of odd reporting that PNC produced last year in San Francisco. PNC is providing community news announcements in the regions that it covers, and  it has one pretty good blog, The Juggler. But I sense a loss of momentum.

Todd Berntson of Pagan Living TV, which is I think still in the start-up phase, attended the “Mapping the Occult City” pre-conference event and did some on-camera interviews with some of the presenters. I expect that that video will be available before long.

I know from my own reporter days that it is hard to attend a big meeting and get “the story.” You hope for a newsworthy keynote presenter, or maybe you find someone colorful to profile in a news feature.  “Mapping the Occult City” could have been presented as a documentary, since it included an architectural tour and a performance, as well as talking heads. Maybe at least those interviews will be archived some place.

The Norse on Baffin Island

Swedish archaeologist Martin Rundkvist discusses evidence of a Norse presence on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic and whether the people who were there were seasonal trappers or trying to establish a year-round settlement. 

Remains of Old World rats are indicative.

So what we have here is High Medieval Christian Norse-speakers gone native in Arctic north-east Canada. Interesting stuff! But as so often – don’t believe the headlines.

And he reminds us,

Note that while NatGeo’s writer calls the Tanfield settlers “Vikings”, Dr. Sutherland wisely calls them “Norse”. The sites are post-Viking Period, and even during the Viking Period, most people were never Vikings. That was a part-time men-only occupation, not an ethnicity.

The past is always more complex than we imagine.

Hail, Caffeina, Goddess of Health!


A little idol like this one, purchased at the Nashville Parthenon* gift shop, sits on my bookshelf. Truly, Caffeina rewards her followers, as this article in The Atlantic notes:

But that caffeine is only mechanism behind coffee’s health effects is supported by a small study of 554 Japanese adults from October that looked at coffee and green tea drinking habits in relation to the bundle of risk factors for coronary artery disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes known together as metabolic syndrome. Only coffee — not tea — was associated with reduced risk, mostly because of dramatic reductions observed in serum triglyceride levels.

So aside from caffeine, just what are you getting in a cup, or two, or six? Thousands of mostly understudied chemicals that contribute to flavor and aroma, including plant phenols, chlorogenic acids, and quinides, all of which function as antioxidents. Diterpenoids in unfiltered coffee may raise good cholesterol and lower bad cholesterol. And, okay, there’s also ash which, to be fair, is no more healthful than you would think — though it certainly isn’t bad for you.

* Is it a functioning Pagan shrine? You bet it is.

Pentagram Pizza: Buy It by the Slice in the Occult City

pentagram pizza• David Metcalfe writes in depth about the “Mapping the Occult City” event that I mentioned earlier.

• The one true religion —  the Church of Aircraft. It has some bizarre rituals too.

• Dver on polytheism: “Gods are not characters.”

• A rare book on witchcraft — a manual for prosecutors, similar to the Malleus Maleficarum  — has been re-discovered in the library of the University of Alberta (the article is a little unclear.)

Its pages describe cackling wenches sailing across the night sky on broom sticks, frolicking in nocturnal orgies of twisted delight and casting Satanic spells to doom crops with lightning and hail.

The usual. But note that the organized persecution of witchcraft was coincidental with the rise of modernity, not the Middle Ages.

How Ren Faires Changed the Counterculture

Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American CounterculturePersons interested in understanding festivals and other “temporary autonomous zones” might find insights in a new book from New York University Press, Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture by Rachel Lee Rubin.

From the publisher’s description:

In order to understand the meaning of the faire to its devoted participants,both workers and visitors, Rubin has compiled a dazzling array of testimony, from extensive conversations with Faire founder Phyllis Patterson to interviews regarding the contemporary scene with performers, crafters, booth workers and “playtrons.” Well Met pays equal attention what came out of the faire—the transforming gifts bestowed by the faire’s innovations and experiments upon the broader American culture: the underground press of the 1960s and 1970s, experimentation with “ethnic” musical instruments and styles in popular music, the craft revival, and various forms of immersive theater are all connected back to their roots in the faire. Original, intrepid, and richly illustrated, Well Met puts the Renaissance Faire back at the historical center of the American counterculture.

Entheogens for Good and Evil

Probably most people who have taken MDMA (Ecstasy, Adam) have felt that it can be a very “psychological” entheogen, enabling you to look at your thoughts in a dispassionate and sort of therapeutic way. Now a new study shows that it can be useful in treating war veterans with post-traumatic stress syndrome for that very reason.

“The feeling I got was nothing at all for 45 minutes, then really bad anxiety, and I was fighting it at first,” said Anthony, the Iraq veteran, who patrolled southwest of Baghdad in 2006 and 2007 amid relentless insurgent harassment and attacks with improvised explosive devices. “And then — I don’t know how to put it, exactly — I felt O.K. and messed up at the same time. Clear. It was almost like I could go into any thought I wanted and fix it.”For instance, he could think and talk about an attack that occurred in a town near Baghdad, in which Iraqis posing as allies — and who had been armed by the American military — turned their guns on American troops, killing several. The unit could not quickly evacuate its wounded because of weather conditions. Anthony’s rage and grief were so overwhelming that he had to suppress them and did so for years.

On the other hand, entheogens administered to unsuspecting people can be destructive, something the Central Intelligence Agency learned in 1953. That death, of a government researcher, is news again because his family is suing the CIA for causing it, claiming that it was murder, not drug-induced suicide.

For more on the Cold War use of LSD as a “secret weapon,” read Jay Stevens’ Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream.

When Esotericists Were Really Underground

A 250-year-old ciphered manuscript is deciphered and turns out to have been created by a Masonic-type fraternity.

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans belonged to secret societies in the 18th century, Önnerfors explained to Megyesi; in Sweden alone, there were more than a hundred orders. Though they were clandestine, they were often remarkably inclusive. Many welcomed noblemen and merchants alike—a rare egalitarian practice in an era of strict social hierarchies. That made the orders dangerous to the state. They also frequently didn’t care about their adherents’ Christian denomination, making these orders—especially the biggest of them, Freemasonry—an implicit threat to the authority of the Catholic Church. In 1738 Pope Clement XII forbade all Catholics from joining a Masonic lodge. Others implied that the male-only groups might be hotbeds of sodomy. Not long after, rumors started that members of these orders actually worshipped the devil.

These societies were the incubators of democracy, modern science, and ecumenical religion. They elected their own leaders and drew up constitutions to govern their operations. It wasn’t an accident that Voltaire, George Washington, and Ben Franklin were all active members. And just like today’s networked radicals, much of their power was wrapped up in their ability to stay anonymous and keep their communications secret.

It’s a strange, complex story — were the “outsiders” actually the “insiders” pretending otherwise?

(Hat tip to Grant Cunningham.)

Some Snapshots of the Shifts in Higher Ed

A cluster of related articles on higher education.

1. From Washington Monthly: why states are funding higher ed less.

State support comes out of taxes. When the economy goes bad, states collect less money in taxes. States, however, are legally required to fund certain things. Pension plans, for instance, are usually not things the governor can simply reduce or cut one year. He has to pay for them. To a certain extent this makes sense, but it can be devastating for other items in the state budget.

2. A longer Washington Monthly piece on how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are seeking to make money off higher education, if they can just find the right key.

So the VC guys and the start-ups look at K-12 and higher education, which between them cost over $1 trillion per year in America, and much more around the world. They see businesses that are organized around communication between people and the exchange of information [like Facebook], two things that are increasingly happening over the Internet. Right now, nearly all of that communication and exchange happens on physical platforms—schools and colleges—that were built a long time ago. A huge amount of money is tied up in labor and business arrangements that depend on things staying that way. How likely are they to stay that way, in the long term? Sure, there are a ton of regulatory protections and political complications tied up in the fact that most education is funded by the taxpayer. As always, the timing would be difficult, and there is as much risk in being too early as too late.

Still, $1 trillion, just sitting there. And how much does it cost for a firm like Learn Capital to invest in a few people sitting around a table with their MacBook Airs? That’s a cheap lottery ticket with a huge potential jackpot waiting for whomever backs the winning education platform.

3. Meanwhile, the Community College Dean, of the blog with the same name, thinks about the “Big Sort,” where educated people from top-tier schools marry each other and cluster in certain places, and the “two-body problem” in academia. But mostly he wonders what the future role of community colleges will be.

 Community colleges, by dint of the “community” part, are tied to particular places.  As those places become more polarized, and as instruction becomes more removed from those places, some of the baseline assumptions of the colleges come into question.