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?
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.
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).
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!
I always chuckle at how when archaeologists cannot immediately ascertain the purpose of an ancient object, they describe it as “cultic,” in this case as a phallic symbol.
This tendency was parodied in the steampunk-ish graphic novel Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay, who also created City, Cathedral, Ship, and others.
In this instance, the “phallic symbols” appear to be parts of fire drills. If you have ever watched someone start a fire with a drill (I have), it does seem sort of miraculous.
. . . to borrow a phrase from another blogger.
This summer has been a tough one, trying to keep the garden alive, always watching for forest fires — fighting a couple of small ones with the local volunteer fire department.
The hummingbirds have been working the feeder hard for weeks — broad-tails and black-chinned, and for the last three weeks, the rufous hummers on their slow way south. I had to rinse and fill it twice a day.
Suddenly, on August 1st, there were noticeably fewer buzzing skirmishers around it. Oh, we still have hummingbirds, but some have left.
After a sort of poor mushroom hunt last week, M. and I went up on our favorite mountain today and had a real wild harvest.
After an early supper, we worked on the veranda until the light was gone, filling the dehydrator and covering two large screens with sliced mushrooms. Dried until they are crispy, they will go into jars for storage. The process actually concentrates the flavor.
The dark closed in faster, and the cool of the evening came more quickly too. The air outside smells of mushrooms from the dehydrator sitting on the outdoor dining table.
It is now late summer.
Via Invocatio: Check the Summer 2012 issue of the online magazine Lapham’s Quarterly for an issue devoted to magic, small-w witchcraft, wonder-working, spiritualism, and carnivores versus vegetarians.
Then go back to Invocatio for more news on the study of Western esotericism.
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.
Make a desert and call it search engine-optimized blog content. (Tip of the bronze helmet to Retronaut.)
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.