Slovak religion scholar Michal Puchovský’s new YouTube channel, 15 Grams of Religion, offers a new video on “What Makes Pagan Music Pagan?” Not long ago, Puchovsky published a paper in The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, on the Pagan musician and teacher Žiarislav, titled “Actually, I’m Pagan Thanks to Music: The Role of […]
Download links (Spotify, YouTube, Apple) here. Learn more about the Pagan History Project here.
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 […]
• 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 […]
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, […]
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 […]