It’s Called “Occult” Because It’s Hidden

In my professional life, I am currently in the middle of Major Drama that I cannot talk about right now. I think that it will be all for the best, but the details will have to remain occult for a bit longer.

Plus I seem to be getting some kind of equinoctial crud (this happens) that leaves me feeling tired and achy. Thus I observe the Turning of the Wheel.

So let me direct you to a post at The Teeming Brain on “Haunted by Our Amnesia: The Forgotten Mainstream Impact of the Occult/Esoteric ‘Fringe.’ ”

When one starts to look, it’s as if history mirrors physics, where some hypothesize that nearly 84% of the mass in the universe is composed of dark matter. It seems as if the main historical influences that affect us exist in a shadow realm that few give credence to, yet this realm forms the main source of the ebb and flow that pushes us forward. What the media, mainstream science, and academia consider “fringe” is often at the very heart of the issues we face.

Think of it: both the much-lauded leader Mohandas Gandhi and the common funerary practice of cremation (in the context of American culture) have their roots firmly planted in the Theosophical Society, an organization that most people today know of as a New Age joke, if they know of it at all. (See, for example, Gary Lachman’s forthcoming biography Madame Blavatsky: Mother of Modern Spirituality for a look at the ironic “open hiddenness” of both Theosophy and its formidable founder in today’s spiritual marketplace.)

And there is more, so read the whole thing.

The Multivalent Mothman

Last month I wandered off into Mothman territory, but here is more, from the editorial blog of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion.

There is an annual Mothman festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and two entries deal with it: “West Virginia is one big portal!” Reflections on the Eleventh Annual Mothman Festival – Part 1 and also  Part 2

Both are by Joseph Laycock, who is known in my little corner of academia for his work on vampire culture in Atlanta. He muses,

Driving away from Point Pleasant, I continued to think about Mothman and meaning.  Mothman is more than just a mascot for Point Pleasant. It is a reflection of the people and their history.  Scott Poole has suggested that monsters often point to darker aspects of our history. The Mothman mythos connects many elements of the community’s past that are generally not discussed with tourists: The murder of chief Cornstalk, the collapse of the Silver Bridge, and the pollution lurking just underneath the surface of the local wildlife preserve.  Mothman lore also functions as a kind of art form that, as Clifford Geertz notes, can serve to capture the themes of everyday life and more powerfully articulate their meaning.  Mothman even serves as a metaphor for the coal and power industries that dominate West Virginia. Like the smoke stacks and devastated mountaintops, Mothman is a portent of death and future disaster. But it is also a source of livelihood and closely connected to the identity of the people.

Hallowe’en Costume Failures

It’s not too early to be thinking about late October fashion disasters.

I kind of like “Edward Butter Knife-hands” though.

The Most Amazing Psychic Reading Ever

It’s a public service announcement from Belgium, actually, hence the careful alternating between French and Flemish.

Distrust of Mainstream Media Grows, and That Is a Good Thing

It is now 22 years since I worked as a journalist, and about four years since I last taught a class that was cross-listed with the university’s Department of Mass Communications.

I had six years in daily newspapers — not a career, but enough to learn the ropes — plus some magazine work.

The Gallup Organization is out with polling data, appropriate for an election year, about growing distrust of the news media.

The lede:

For the fourth straight year, the majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 57% who now say this is a record high by one percentage point.

A key graf with implications for the business side:

Lower-income Americans and those with less education are generally more likely to trust the media than are those with higher incomes and more education. A subgroup analysis of these data suggests that three demographic groups key to advertisers — adults aged 18 to 29, Americans making at least $75,000 per year, and college graduates — lost more trust in the media in the past year than other groups, but the sample sizes in this survey are too small to say so definitively.

Quite simply, editors no longer totally decide what is “news.” In the old days, they did. The managing editor of one paper where  I worked had written a master’s thesis on that very topic: agenda-setting. He also once pronounced to the staff, in response to some citizen’s complaint that we had not covered Event X, that “a newspaper is not a public utility.”

In other words, we had no obligation to cover an event, a political candidate, or anyone’s activities if we were short on staff or just did not think it newsworthy.

Now, however, you see even the big papers and networks reacting — slowly and creakily — to news stories that germinate in blogs or other types of “citizen media.”

In addition, the exposure of things like the Journolist scandal or other examples of blatant bias get rapidly circulated online.

What New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane said about  the newsroom’s “culture of like minds” is true at many papers. I saw it when I was in my twenties, in both print and broadcast media,  but outside of journalism graduate programs — and maybe not even there — where would I have discussed it?  Who would have cared? Now some people specialize in pointing out media bias.

Where I am going with this? I liked newspaper work on many levels, but I can think of some smug editors and reporters who deserved to have their cages rattled. I like that there are multiple channels of information now, even if some of them are unreliable. (Not to mention criminal.) It’s still better than the alternative.

 

I Rarely Eat Doughnuts . . .

(well, I did have one yesterday at a meeting), but I would go here for doughnuts.

Evidence of Jesus’ Wife?

You don’t think a good Jewish boy from a peasant culture got to be thirty years old without being married, do you?

Now there is textual evidence that suggests that he was.

“This fragment suggests that some early Christians had a tradition that Jesus was married,” Dr. [Karen] King said. “There was, we already know, a controversy in the second century over whether Jesus was married, caught up with a debate about whether Christians should marry and have sex.”

Was or was it not Mary Magdalene, that is the question. Or was she just a well-off woman who helped to finance the ministry, as so often happens? Or as the Gnostic gospels suggest, one of the disciples — maybe one with special privileges — which brings us back to the question of her possible spousal status. Or were there two Marys — Magdalene the patroness and Mary the wife?

Three Related Blog Posts

From Deborah Castellano, who also blogs at Charmed, I’m Sure: “The Art of Career Occultism.”‘

Let me ask you, how do you see a career occultist?  Do you see her as someone who gets up and does sun salutations, writing in her dream diary over herbal tea and an organic scone, sauntering through a field with an animal companion as she chooses herbs to harvest while wearing something fabulous and floaty, coming home to her gorgeous dedicated workshop for afternoon sketching for new designs?  Because . . .if so, you’re going to be greatly disappointed as to what’s actually the job.

From Heather Awen at Adventures in Animism: “Dancing in the Ashes of the New Age.”

A friend recently said to me that she’s going to go for it and do some really hard things to make her dreams of working to improve children’s lives a reality. She said that she had to believe the Goddess would provide for her. I used to believe that. I want to believe that, but I don’t anymore. I asked her to explain this, not to be a bitch, but because I was hoping she’d be able to convince me that the Goddess works this way. . . . .  How did the Goddess decide who to provide for? So why should I trust that “we always get what we need” when clearly the facts say that we don’t?

Both are about facing some facts of mundane life and a balance between willing, affirming, etc., and actually doing.

At Pantheon, Star Foster is talking about an ancient philosopher who could help sort these questions out: Epictetus.

So as I sit here worrying How am I to live? and How do I cope with this huge change in my life? I am finding my answers in Epictetus.

He lived from 55-135 CE. He was at first a slave — an educated slave, as some were, but still a slave. That ought to give him a certain amount of street cred, don’t you think, when it comes to knowing what you can change and what you cannot?

Brief Interruption in Blogging

M. and I are traveling in Bobos in Paradise country. Yesterday I was walking up the street and a man pulled over and in a foreign accent that I could not quite place asked me how to get to Pebble Beach.

As it happened, I knew. And I don’t play golf.

Back to reality next week.

The Cure for Internet Addiction

1940s technology might save the day.

Seriously, Jonathan Frantzen wrote The Corrections blindfolded?

So this article on writers coping with Internet distraction claims. Since most of my work requires copious reference to notes and text — and since I am a lousy touch-typist — the blindfold would not work. I understand what this guy did, however:

Born in 1985, [Ned] Beauman is a digital native – he has spent the entirety of his adult life surrounded by digital technology. Yet despite being immersed in the internet from an early age, Beauman is not immune to its power to distract, and he employs a level of computing trickery that makes Zadie Smith look like a Luddite.

“There are five layers of technological solutions I use,” he explains. “I edit my host file to block some websites, but that’s too coarse grain. I use K9, which is a parental control application, to block certain pages within websites, and I use an ad-blocker, not to block adverts, but to block the comment sections of many sites. And when I’m working I use Nanny for Google Chrome and SelfControl to block certain websites.”

The sites he blocks that cause so much distraction? “Virtually all newspaper and magazine websites as well as blogs and Twitter. And,” he says with amusing candour, “I also block things relating to my career that it’s probably best not to look at.”

Or maybe you just walk away from the computer and try something else. M. found this late 1940s portable typewriter for next to nothing and gave it to me for  my birthday. It dates from when Smith-Corona was able to stop making M1903 rifles and other war matériel and go back to its core business — typewriters.

Of course, I had to ship it off to an old-school typewriter-repair shop in eastern Pennsylvania (Where did all the typewriter repairmen go? Rhetorical question.) and have it reconditioned at no small expense.

Then I sat down to write a letter to a friend in England and, guess what, I could not stop to read a blog or check the weather radar for a thunderstorm. It was liberating.

I keep thinking that I should go into the city, find a Starbucks, order a double cappuccino, pull out my  Smith-Corona “Silent,” and get to work.

But — like its rival the Remington “Noiseless” — it is not.