CFP: Culture and Cosmos

Call for papers . . .

CULTURE AND COSMOS

Vol. 17,  no. 1: Literature and the Stars

We are inviting submissions for Vol. 17 no 1 (Spring/Summer 2013) on Literature and the Stars. Papers may focus on any time period or culture, and should deal either with representations of astronomy or astrology in fiction, or studies of astronomical or astrological texts as literature. Contributions may focus on western or non-western culture, and on the ancient, medieval or modern worlds.

Papers should be submitted by NOVEMBER 15, 2012. They should typically not exceed 8000 words length and should be submitted to editors@cultureandcosmos.org. Shorter submissions and research notes are welcome.

Contributors should follow the style guide. 

Please include an abstract of c. 100-200 words.

All submissions will peer-reviewed for originality, timeliness, relevance, and readability. Authors will be notified as soon as possible of the acceptability of their submissions.

Culture and Cosmos is published in association with the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture, School of Archaeology, History and Anthropology, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales, SA48 7ED, UK.

As from Vol. 17 no 1 Culture and Cosmos will be published open-access, on-line, in the interests of open scholarship. Hard copy will be available via print-on-demand.

Giant Green Goddess

Northumberlandia is the name of a new sculpture made at the site of a former open-pit coal mine in northern England.

The work is described as “goddess-like,” but please, not Pagan:

There was no intention to make a Pagan figure or mimic any ancient fertility symbols, despite her breasts which rise almost 100ft above the ground.

”Charles Jencks, the American artist who designed her, saw the far-off Cheviot Hills which look like a reclining woman,” Ms Perkin said.

”He has borrowed from the landscape and drawn those curves and lines into the form.

”Northumberlandia is just a lady, she doesn’t represent anything, but I think it’s understandable that people have their own interpretations.”

Check back at one of the quarter or cross-quarter days, Ms. Perkins.

The Bushranger and the Witches

A quirky story has been filtering out of Australia in bits and pieces.

First came the discovery of the headless skeleton of Ned Kelly (1854–1880), the country’s most infamous bushranger (outlaw) of the 19th century, which involved DNA matching and other modern techniques.

Then his descendents appealed for whoever had the skull to bring it back.

Then comes a “self-proclaimed” (a term used to avoid libel suits) witch from New Zealand who says that she has it — “given” to her by a security guard (under what circumstances?).

This woman, Anna Hoffman, was supposedly a friend of Australia’s most famous pre-Wiccan witch and trance-artist, Rosaleen Norton of Melbourne. An Australian writer on occultism, Nevill Drury, has devoted quite a lot of time to writing about Norton. including a recent article in The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, titled “The Magical Cosmology of Rosaleen Norton.”

Which is why I am blogging about Ned Kelly.

Stone Circles: Not Just for Neolithic People

“Andy Burnham, who runs the Megalithic Portal Web site and society in Surrey, England, has recorded 253 monolithic circles built in recent decades. And ‘there must be many more in private gardens that we don’t know about,’ he wrote in an e-mail.”

The New York Times profiles a Vermont man who has built more than twenty. And the writer manages to work in the controversial Pagan worship site at the Air Force Academy as well as, you guessed it, Druids — who did not build the ancient stone monuments but who remain associated with them, thanks to antiquarian writers of past centuries.

Mothman: High Strangeness in 1967

The Mothman Prophecies, the late John Keel’s first-person account of a paranormal investigation in West Virginia, may not answer the question of exactly what the Mothman phenomenon was, but it remains one of the best accounts of the shadowy world of paranormal investigation itself. (Skip the movie, except for laughs.)

Here, from the Fate magazine website, is a short article that Keel wrote some years later, discussing the the vortex of strangeness and paranoia that sucked him in back in 1967.

First Impressions from EASR, Contemporary Esotericism Conferences

I did not attend these conference sessions  on the study of esotericism in Stockholm, alas, but several blogging friends did attend. One of them, Sasha Chaitow of the Phoenix Rising Academy, has already posted an initial report, so go read it.

Water Temples of California

Sunol, California, water temple, built in 1910. (From the BF Photo blog.)

At the BF Photo blog, via Roberta X, a photo essay on California water temples. Bay Area readers, does anyone use these temples for bioregional ritual purposes?

From a Hereditary Tradition

I come from a hereditary tradition — of mushroom hunters.

A few dried mushrooms and my favorite book.

I remember my father the forest ranger taking me out when I was ten or eleven to look for them. It was usually raining, and I did not understand what he was seeing, but the activity was somehow important. And we ate them.

Then nothing until I was in my mid-twenties, when M. and I went hiking on the west side of Pike’s Peak (Horsethief Park, if you know the area) one late-summer day.

There we met a number of middle-aged and older German ladies wandering the forest with shopping bags.

They re-initiated me — and initiated her.

It’s like another German “grandmother story.”

(Demographic note: Colorado Springs is a major military garrison town, and troops at Fort Carson frequently go back and forth to Germany, which they have been doing since 1945. Sometimes they get married.)

For a time we got by with what the German ladies taught us. Then we wanted to learn more. But we had moved to a much smaller town, and there were no mycological groups there.

Then we moved again, into an area known for bears and mushrooms. In fact, the Pikes’s Peak Mycological Society frequently organized “forays” (an in-group term, kind of like “sabbat”) into this area.

Dad, a member, bought us a membership too. But that was a drought year, and all forays were canceled. Then he died, and my stepmother died, which pretty much ended our regular trips to Colorado Springs.

We started buying books. Yep, we’re book-taught mushroomers. Every time we go out (we don’t say “foray”), we try to learn a new one—and meanwhile we stick to the half-dozen that we know are good.

Like the Sarcodon imbricatus (hawk’s wing) in the jar. I figured those out from a book.

Two days ago we hit one of our favorite spots, and right off spotted where someone had sliced some Boletus edulis at the base. Everyone goes for king boletes! But they had left pounds and pounds of hawk’s wing mushrooms while they focused on boletes. (We still found some boletes ourselves anyway.)

It’s OK being solitary mushroom-hunters with a few good books and an inquiring (but careful) attitude.

I just wish that Dad was here to share them.

The “2012” Prophecy and Ancient Maya Politics

If you know someone who starts getting nervous as the end of the year approaches because of the “Mayan prophecy,” send them here.

They should be able to understand how it all goes back to the king of one of the ancient Mayan city-states proclaiming how great he was.

The key to understanding the reference to 2012 is a unique title that this Calakmul king gives himself. In the text, he calls himself the “13 K’atun lord”—that is, the king who presided over and celebrated an important calendar ending, the 13th K’atun cycle (9.13.0.0.0). This event had occurred just a few years before in AD 692. In order to vaunt himself even further and place his reign and accomplishments into an eternal setting, he connects himself forward in time to when the next higher period of the Maya calendar would reach the same 13 number—that is, December 21, 2012 (13.0.0.0.0).

“The 10 Most Difficult Books”

If you like reading lists, here is one from Publishers Weekly.

I confess to having read none of them, although I did manage Gravity’s Rainbow, one of the runners-up — twice!