I often like to post re-creations of ancient music. Supposedly, the “Song of Seikilos” is the oldest that has music and lyrics. It is Greek, dating from around 100 CE. The words can be translated as, While you live, shine have no grief at all life exists only for a short while and time demands …
The trouble with most of the “early music” groups that I have heard is that they take stuff originally played by drunken peasants (setting aside Christian church music) and make it sound like it is played by anorexic graduate students. In this case, however, no one knows what ancient Roman music sounded like. They have …
Continue reading Ancient Roman Music (Conjectured, Imagined)
• Finding a complementary relationship between Paganism and Tantra at The Pagan Perspective. Not this: My sabbatical led me down the rabbit hole of tantra, or rather neo-tantra, which turned out to be nothing more than a mobsterized store front for polyamory and polysexuality. Now I am the last person to dismiss sexuality or the …
Continue reading Pentagram Pizza: Some Good Reads and Free Music
At The Mead Muse, reviews of a different Pagan musician or group each day for 28 days during February. First came Sharon Knight and Pandemonaeon, a solid choice.
A short documentary on contemporary Siberian shamanism from the Russian television channel RT. The interesting part is a young shaman and his friend composing a sort of “house” music (or so the narrator describes it) to try to bridge contemporary sounds with the shamanic tradition, which was almost destroyed by seventy years of atheistic Communism. …
Delhi 2 Dublin, playing and explaining panj-ab / Keltoi fusion music.
The wide world of academia includes Buffy Studies and edited collections published by serious presses on the legal aspects of Harry Potter’s world. So why not a quasi-academic symposium on black-metal music? He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early-1990s Norwegian black-metal bands Gorgoroth and Immortal; he framed black metal as respecting some of rock’s orthodoxies, …
Continue reading Black Metal Music: ‘Abiding and Transcendent’
My title is lifted from Charles Blow’s column in the New York Times, noting that the recent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life report on American religiosity shows that things are pretty darn heterodox in the pews (no pun intended). When 28 percent of Roman Catholics say that they believe in reincarnation (really?!), or …
So Jason decides that he would rather blog about abortion than Iceland Paganism, which leads me to follow the Icelandic Paganism link, as I have read all the usual blather that followed the murder of Dr. Tiller. Thus I am lead to the documentary Screaming Masterpiece, about Icelandic music, which is now in my Netflix …
The article “Musicking and Soundscapes amongst Magical-Religious Witches Community and Ritual Practices” by Helen Cornish is available as a free download from Religions journal. Abstract Drumming and chanting are core practices in modern magical-religious Witchcraft in the absence of unifying texts or standardized rituals. Song and musicality contribute towards self-creation and community making. However, Nature …
Continue reading Helen Cornish on Witchcraft Drumming and Chanting