The trailer to a new documentary, The WinniPagans, focusing on the (largely Wiccan, I think) Pagan scene in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It will be available as video-on-demand — details at the website
Complete with a cute Pagan puppy and a nice shot of Boletus edulis.
Week-old pizza from the back of the refrigerator …
• Here’s an idea for a novel: “two down-on-their-luck entrepreneurs who stumble upon the idea of reviving for-profit idolatry. Selling statues of household gods to the masses, and building a neo-pagan religion around it.” Um, I think that people have been doing this for some time.
• Circus Breivik. Norwegian scholar of esotericism Egil Asprem analyzes the trial of Anders Behring Breivik. (He wrote about the shootings for the current Pomegranate.)
This trial will be about two things: psychiatry and ideology. Two drastically conflicting reports on Breivik’s mental health have already ensured this. Added to this, of course, is Breivik’s own clearly stated wish to be judged as sane, and have his actions confirmed as ideologically motivated.
• Teaching classical philosophy to Brazilian schoolchildren:
I assured the students that until the nineteenth century hardly any philosopher was an atheist. Plato’s Euthyphro—with its argument about the relationship between ethics and the will of the gods—gets us into a lively discussion.
* This is called “edgy, irreverent outreach” by some of today’s Christians Jesus Followers. I think the pastor needs to look up “pathos” in the rhetorical dictionary, because he is doing it wrong. But to be fair, some long-ago saints would have agreed with him.
• Alcohol “sharpens the mind.” But “beer goggles” are real too.
Police in southwestern Ontario crunch some arrest numbers and note that they arrest more suspects with Sun in Aries than any other sign.
Const. Pearce, who produced the data, concedes, “Next year the list could be completely different unless we arrest the same people.”
An interesting post from Walking the Hedge on daily practice, medicine bags, and the demands of tutelary spirits:
That’s a whole other bother … fellow witches and pagans who don’t get it. Who think that it all must be done elegantly, flowing and … and not weird. Do something odd or awkward like blowing on your divination set or baby talking to a crow skull and all your validity goes right out the window in their mind. Nevermind that fact that the elegant shit is just for show and the spitting, swearing, shaking, whispering, sweating, bloodletting, pissing and such is the real deal! It’s supposed to look like the white witch on TV with her perfectly rhyming poetry and not the crazy voodoo chick with her eyes rolling back into her head on that documentary we watched once … right? Bullshit.
Delhi 2 Dublin, playing and explaining panj-ab / Keltoi fusion music.
Gaia Gathering: Canadian National Pagan Conference
Theme: Language to Liturgy
Gaia Gathering was founded in 2004 and had its first conference in 2005. Each year the conference is hosted over the Victoria Day long weekend in a different Canadian city through a bidding process similar to the Olympics. Past host cities include Edmonton, Halifax, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Vancouver.
Legally, we are incorporated federally as a non-profit organization and operate with a national Board of Directors as well as a local host committee.
The conference is organized collaboratively by Canadian Pagans and includes three days of discussion and workshops about Canadian Paganisms. After six years of traveling across the country, the conference is finally coming to Montreal’s Concordia University! The proposed theme for 2011 will be “Language to Liturgy,” which reflects the cultural diversity of Montreal and how language itself can affect our practices and beliefs.
Our keynote speakers are Lucie Dufresne, Professor at the University of Ottawa, speaking on Language, and Arin Murphy-Hiscock, published author and priestess, speaking on Liturgy. We are also planning an opening multifaith panel on the Friday night and live entertainment on Saturday and Sunday evenings.
Conference will be held Spring 2011 (May 20-23)
SUBMISSION CRITERIA
We invite papers and proposals from all faculties within the humanities who touch into the realm of alternate spirituality, Paganism, New Religious Movements and related subjects. We hope to see students rise to the challenge and welcome them to this opportunity to present here in Montreal with like-minded individuals.
Submissions may be sent via mail or e-mail and are to be no more than one page. They must include a publication-ready, titled abstract of 150-200 words. The name, address, telephone numbers, e-mail address, college or university affiliation and level of study of the presenter(s) must also be included. Any special requests or needs for audio-visual equipment must also be indicated. We will be accepting submissions for peer and academic reviewbetween December 21st (Yule 2010) and March 20th (Ostara 2011).
Abstracts and proposals (and thus presentations) may be in English or in French. All received submissions will be acknowledged, with notification of acceptance, by mid-April 2011.
Email to: scarletcougar@gmail.com
Postal mail to: ATTN Scarlet (Gaia Gathering)
Department of Religion, Concordia University
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West
Montréal (Québec)
H3G 1M8
Somehow I missed this, but last September an organization of self-proclaimed Canadian skeptics challenged the world to prove that witches exist—along with Bigfoot, voodoo, and the Easter Bunny.
OK, all this fun hinges on the difference between “anthropological witchcraft” and capital-P Pagan religious capital-W Witchcraft.
But still.
Of course, if anyone shows up and says, “I’m a witch,” the professional skeptics will set the bar so high: “Can you fly? Can you turn me into a frog?” You know the drill. And no, metaphor will not be good enough.
Preparing for last night’s solstice-eclipse, the Montreal Gazette went looking for the Pagan perspective.
There are two of them actually: The UPG, it’s-personal version …
“It’s a ritual of transformation from darkness into light,” says Nicole Cooper, a high priestess at Toronto’s Wiccan Church of Canada. “It’s the idea that when things seem really bleak, (it) is often our biggest opportunity for personal transformation.
“The idea that the sun and the moon are almost at their darkest at this point in time really only further goes to hammer that home.”
Cooper said Wiccans also see great significance in the unique coupling of the masculine energy of the sun and the feminine energy of the moon — transformative energies that she plans to incorporate into the church’s winter-solstice rituals.
Since the last time an eclipse and the winter solstice happened simultaneously was just under five centuries years ago, Cooper said she wasn’t familiar with any superstitions or mythologies associated with it.
… and the old-time communal Pagan version.
The winter solstice also played an important role in Greco-Roman rituals.
“It’s seen as a time of rebirth or renewal because, astrologically, it’s a time where the light comes back,” said Shane Hawkins, a professor of Greek and Roman studies at Carleton University in Ottawa.
For the ancient Romans, it was also a time of great feasting and debauchery.
“If (the eclipse) happened on the 21st, they might well have been drunk,” he said.
(Hat tip: Roberta X, who is most unimpressed.)
A reporter in Ohio left me an email about wanting to do a telephone interview, but she never called. Sigh. She must have found a more accessible expert.
A movie made by a company called Heathen Films is likely to have a certain ideological component. Severed Ways, a 2007 indie production, however, has not become a cult favorite like The Wicker Man.
The plot comes right from the Vinland Sagas, but adds a bit about two scouts abandoned and believed dead when Norse settlers abandon one settlement after conflicts with the natives.
The dialog is in Swedish with colloquial English subtitles, like “We’re toast if the Skraelings find us.”
But in accordance with a Scandinavian tradition of filmmaking, there are long silent periods where the camera merely follow the men on their journey seeking their comrades.
One Internet Movie Database comment calls it “Aguirre, the Wrath of God for Black Metal fans.” That is not necessarily a compliment, but director Tony Stone would disagree:
Heavy metal and vikings have always had this sort of connection—the warrior spirit, the harshness, the visuals of battle, the pagan side. The music is hard and rough and trying at times, but that’s what the physical world is; that’s how we used to live. Metal describes something of another time. It’s a very emotional music that’s more like classical music in the way it recalls history. It’s also just music we were listening to while making the movie.
As an expression of “Dionysian pessimism” (Nietzsche’s term), it works.
It was filmed in Maine, Vermont, Labrador, and at the reconstructed Norse camp of L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland.
M.’s short review: “Beautiful landscapes interrupted by bashing.”
Bryan White at Cinema Suicide says much the same thing at greater length.
Yet another study attacks the theory of “repressed memory,” which has sent real people to real jails for crimes that they supposedly committed against children.
Professor Grant Devilly, from Griffith University’s [Queensland, Australia] Psychological Health research unit, says the memory usually works in the opposite way, with traumatised people reliving experiences they would rather forget.
“It’s the opposite. They wish they couldn’t think about it,” he said.
In a briefing to the US Supreme Court, Professor Richard McNally from Harvard University described the theory of repressed memory as “the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry”.
Where do “repressed memories” come from? Therapists help patients to invent them, as described in this 1993 article from American Psychologist.
Here is another article by Prof. Devilly on the “memory wars.”
During the “Satanic abuse” scare of the 1980s, some prominent Pagans were fooled by supposed abuse survivors who came to Pagan gatherings and would spout some nonsense about how “I was abused by ‘witches,’ but now I see that your kind of Witchcraft is not like that.”
The template for many such fantasies was Lawrence Pazder’s Michelle Remembers, about a little girl in Victoria, B.C., who supposedly spent her childhood as the plaything of a ring of organized and powerful Satanists.
And I will admit that I was blown away by the story when I first read it, such that I did not notice the obvious plot holes.
I say “plot” because it is a work of fiction, dreamed up cooperatively by patient and doctor (who later married) under hypnosis.
These “moral panics” seem to come through on a regular basis, and all you can do is seek the facts and hope that justice does, in fact, move slowly and deliberately and not at lynch-mob speed.