Call for Submissions: Preternature

Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural

Volume 3:2. Old Gods and Ancient Ones

Call them pagan or ancient, earth-based or demonic, or by names like Hekate, Isis, Poseidon, Ereshkigal, Loki, and Anath, the Old Gods have  been topics of energetic scholarly discussion, literary recreation, and artistic depiction for decades. As supplanted as they might seem to historians, the Old Gods live on and capture our imagination.

Contextualized in archaeological study, sensationalized by filmmakers,   and rendered in new costumes and flesh by artists, Old Gods continue,   components of the flexible mythologies that make up shared cultural references. They are used across literature, graphic novels, television series, cinema, and MMORPGs to tell and enact narratives.  As they had in ancient landscapes, the Old Gods now make up part of a dynamic belief systems and figure in new forms of ritual invocations.

This issue of Preternature especially welcomes scholars whose work focuses on the new uses of ancient Asian, Babylonian, Canaanite, Egyptian, Greek, Mesoamerican, Norse, and Slavic Gods. It also welcomes contributions, from any discipline, that highlight the cultural, literary, dramatic, religious, magical, or historical  significance of any of the ancient gods in their own contexts, as a  part of “paganisms,” and as a part of contemporary popular cultures.

We welcome synthetic overviews of Sarapis veneration in Ephesus or the cult of Mithras as much as feminist critiques of  representations of goddesses in graphic novels. Analyses of new  ritualizations of Old Gods in specific neopaganism groups are welcome as well. Ultimately, we are interested in how the ancient gods are  maintained, in various media and inscholarly discussion, in this modern era.

Contributions should be roughly 8,000 – 12,000 words, including all documentation and critical apparatus, and adhere to the Chicago Manual  of Style, 15th edition (style 1, employing endnotes). Contributions mustbe submitted through the Preternature CMS. Final submissions are due March 31, 2013.

Queries about journal scope and submissions can be made to the editor, Dr. Kirsten C. Uszkalo. Queries concerning books to be reviewed can be  made to the book reviews editor, Dr. Richard Raiswell.

Preternature is a bi-annual publication, published through Penn State Press, and available in print or electronically through JSTOR, Project Muse, and as a Kindle e- book.

As always, I recommend reading an issue or two of the journal before submitting anything to it.

Blogging the Roman Way

 Make a desert and call it search engine-optimized blog content. (Tip of the bronze helmet to Retronaut.)

“The Wicker Tree” and “The Wicker Man”

Don’t count on me for breaking pop-culture news. That Pagan classic film The Wicker Man was released in 1973, but I did not see it until the mid-1980s.

I always say that I missed the 1980s in pop-culture terms. Part of that was due to graduate school and a general turn away from or just not caring so much about music, movies, etc. And catching up on the 1970s, evidently.

I did finally see The Wicker Tree, which sort of re-uses the first movie’s plot. (Here is an article connecting them published before the newer film’s release: “The Wicker Tree: The Return of the Pagan World.”)

Thanks to Netflix, I am only two years behind instead of ten years or more.

As Star Foster noted in one of her blog posts about the newer wicker flick, in comparison with The Wicker Man, “Robin Hardy played a brilliantly cruel joke on us by giving us more sympathetic victims and utterly vicious Pagans.”

I see a huge difference between the two, but I don’t know if it is not due merely to my being more prepared for the second film. When I saw The Wicker Man, I honestly did not know where it was going. Sgt. Howie’s search for the missing girl was sincere, and there was no cinematic villain in sight.

In The Wicker Tree, Sir Lachlann and his lady were more obviously sinister and villainous, while the young Texas evangelical Christians were of course portrayed as innocent and clueless. It’s probably in the secret Filmmakers Code somewhere: “All missionaries are either evil or deluded.” (Before the 1960s, missionaries or wannabe missionaries might be heroic, but not since then.)

You have to be clueless yourself if you cannot see where it is going from the young couple’s arrival in Scotland. The plot hits you in the face with the subtlety of a fresh-caught herring.

Pagans liked The Wicker Man because many could imagine themselves in a place like Summerisle. Not so this time around.

 

Data-Mining and Student Success

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses using data-mining techniques for better student advising.

One way to ensure that students will reach the finish line is to quickly figure out if they’ve selected a suitable track. So the Arizona State system front-loads key courses. For example, to succeed in psychology, a student must perform well in statistics.

“Kids who major in psych put that off, because they don’t want to take statistics,” Ms. Capaldi says. “They want to know, Does their boyfriend love them? Are they nuts? They take all those courses, then they hit statistics and they say, ‘Oh, God, I can’t do this. I can’t do experimental design.’ And so they’re in the wrong major. By putting those courses first, you can see if a student is going to succeed in that major early.”

Arizona State’s retention rate rose to 84 percent from 77 percent in recent years, a change that the provost credits largely to eAdvisor.

It might work.

My university has tried all the usual approaches:

  • Every faculty member must advise some undergraduates (particularly in their first year).
  • Certain trained faculty advisers will do it and be rewarded with release time.
  • Specialist staff advisers will do it, freeing up professors to teach.

I think I saw the whole cycle go around and start over again.

As a freshman at Reed College years ago, I was the victim of ineffectual advising. I was assigned to a professor of foreign languages. She was not informed about things outside her department. She just said OK to whatever courses I chose and signed the forms. It was not until my second year that I began to realize that I had made some bad choices in terms of meeting requirements and taking things in sequence. It took me another year to get straightened out and on track.

A more aware human adviser could have helped me sooner. For a university with complicated “distribution requirements,” a human adviser plus the data-mining might actually help a lot.

 

Pentagram Pizza: Academic Edition

• “Three Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know about Google Scholar” at GradHacker. I did not know about a couple of these features, like being able to track how often something you wrote has been cited, which can be either an ego boost or give you the feeling that you have been spitting into the Grand Canyon.

• The early issues of The Pomegranate, those edited and published by Fritz Muntean in Vancouver, BC., are now online. Go here and scroll down to the numbered issues 1–18 at the bottom. Yes, Equinox is (Brit. are) charging for articles, but book reviews and the readers’ forum downloads are free, and remember what I said about interlibrary loan.

• Egil Asprem reviews Stepchildren of Science, a book on the history of parapsychology in Germany. “In the fascinating last chapter Wolffram shows how the struggle between parapsychologists and academic psychologists also led to attempts, by both sides, to pathologise the other.” That sounds so familiar.

Critical Theory, Mere Description, and Pagan Studies

Some thoughts after reading Markus Davidsen’s review of the Handbook of Contemporary Paganism—and, by extension, of the entire field of Pagan studies.

Part of his critique does resonate with me. It raises an issue that I have thought about too.

When I saw that the first authority cited was Russ McCutcheon, I had a pretty good idea of where it was going.  McCutcheon is a former editor of the journal in which the essay appeared, among other things.

Davidsen himself identifies with the critical theorists such as McCutcheon who “no longer study religion or religious activity as such, but aim to analyze how people talk about religion, which social constructions people label religion, and how the resulting discourses serve to legitimate power structures.”

He stumbles in a couple of spots. For example, he seems to think that Unitarians, despite their name, are Christians, and therefore the Wiccans in Unitarian congregations must not be purely Pagan but somehow Christian as well. Yes, all of you in CUUPS are Christians—or so Markus Davidsen thinks.

Here we simply have a Danish scholar who does not know the history of an American religious denomination.

To move on to the substance, however—Davidsen regrets that so much study of religion takes place in by “religionists” who are “field-directed.” Of course, some of that is rooted in history and some is the job market: institutions often want someone to “teach Asian religions” or whatever.

Davidsen notes the absence of Ronald Hutton from the handbook, but given Hutton’s emphasis on the history of ideas and such chapters titles as “Finding a Goddess,” he would probably have dismissed him as a descriptive religionist as well.

But now the resonance. He faults much of the writing in that Brill Handbook (including mine) as being too “descriptive.” Nolo contendere.  I have often wondered if in Pagan studies (and in the study of new religious movements in general) we regard descriptive work as (a) necessary and (b) easier—or at least more obvious, easier to think about.

Necessary because, after all, don’t we have to adequately describe something before we can theorize about it? Of course, the horizon of the perfect description is always receding before us. 🙂

But how would the sort of critical theory that Davidsen calls for be applied to Pagan studies, and who is doing it? Certainly I would never say that Pagan studies should be immune to critical theory. Yes, talk and write about “which social constructions people label [Pagan] religion, and how the resulting discourses serve to legitimate power structures,” or whatever you like. But it won’t be the only way that people do Pagan studies.

“Season of the Witch”

On Peg Aloi’s recommendation, I recently watched Season of the Witch, also known as Hungry Wives.  As Peg mentioned, part of it is witchcraft-meets-Second Wave feminism, and part of it acknowledges the whole “occult explosion” of the late 1960s-early 1970s.

Maybe it it is what the old Bewitched series would have been if that show had any sort of edge to it.

Or Mad Men with a coven, bumped up to the early 1970s. (Hey, Mom had that couch!)

Enjoyable, and with enough twists that it rates three pentacles.

 

Own The Pomegranate’s Printer

No, I don’t mean CPI Antony Rowe, I mean the actual HP inkjet printer that for the last two years has churned out the mss. for editing and the page proofs.

It is for sale on eBay. Since there are many days when it never prints a page, however, I think that is fair to describe it as having had light home use.

I’m tossing in some extra black ink cartridges, which are the real expense of inkjet printers, and if you bid, win it, and tell me that you read this blog, I will add a copy of the latest Pomegranate.

The Historical Jesus and the Grizzly Bears

When it comes to who Jesus of Nazareth was, I tend to think that there is somebody behind the stories, a real person, not, for example, a mushroom. (Although that would make for great video.)

As Craig Keener argues in this column, it remains the simplest explanation at its counter-intuitive core:

Scholars’ confidence [in the historical Jesus] has nothing to do with theology but much to do with historiographic common sense. What movement would make up a recent leader, executed by a Roman governor for treason, and then declare, “We’re his followers”? If they wanted to commit suicide, there were simpler ways to do it.

On the other hand, there are people in some esoteric circles who think that the Jesus of the New Testament was a composite character, made of perhaps three individuals’ stories.

It works with grizzly bears.

Last month, on my birthday, M. and I made a sort of pilgrimage to the haunts of Old Mose, the last grizzly bear killed in central Colorado, on 30 April 1904. (The last known grizzly killed in Colorado died in 1979.)

When I lived in that county, I heard and read all the stories about how Old Mose was this terrible bear, killer of several humans and countless livestock, et cetera et cetera, who lived to be at least forty years old.

But a Colorado historian who dug into the story and conducted some elementary scientific research made a good case that Old Mose’s legend conflated the lives of at least three bears between the early 1880s and 1904. The big male grizzly killed in 1904 was simply too young to have done all that.

And this in an era of (by 1904) telephones, telegraphs, electric lights, railroads, and newspapers, not an antiquity of oral wonder stories and hand-copied manuscripts.

If it happens with bears, I wondered at the time, could it happen with prophets?

Still, I lean towards the single-Jesus theory. And if I could choose between bringing a messianic Jewish wonder-worker or a big grizzly bear back to walk this earth, I know which one I would pick.

How I Spent My Afternoon

I don’t know where the morning went — this and that, some fire department communications — but then I started assembling the next issue of The Pomegranate, and immediately encountered the Lithuanian typography issue.

As in, some of the special characters, such as e-with-a-dot-over-it, are not in our normal font, Book Antiqua.

But ah, Book Antiqua is derived from Palatino (my favorite default font), and my installation of Palatino has all those characters.

So it’s point-and-select-and-change fonts for about half an hour until every special Lithuanian character in the article is changed to Palatino, which is slightly narrower but has about the same x-height as Book Antiqua.

And, oh yes, the bibliography has to be checked and uploaded to the Equinox website for some indexing purposes and also sent to the guy in England who does the Digital Object Identifiers.

At which time it is beer-thirty.

This is after all the original editing, the selecting and working with peer reviewers, the interaction with the two authors, and the re-editing.

And there are people who complain about the cost of academic journals and who think that everything should be free.

Well, you naïve whiners and whingers, who is going to do what I have been doing for no pay whatsoever? I’m nowhere near finished. There will be more hours of work in Adobe InDesign and on the web before the issue is ready for the printer — who also expects to be paid, and not in rainbows and unicorns.

You, impoverished graduate student, haven’t you learned how to do interlibrary loan yet? Get a librarian to show you how, or go the university’s library website.

And if you do not have a university affiliation are you not aware that many public libraries have inter-library loan librarians? Or that you can walk into most state university libraries, make nice, and get a “patron” card that includes various borrowing services?

You only have to pay retail for downloaded articles from academic publishers if you need them right now.