Current Reading

I will be leaving tomorrow for a long festival weekend; paradoxically, I hope to get some reading done, toward the paper that I'm writing for the Bath Spa UC "Exploring Consciousness" conference. So it will be a weekend in the woods with some of the old-timers: Jeffrey Burton Russell, Carlo Ginzburg, Norman Cohn, and others.

I just received a copy also of Ken Dowden's European Paganism, illustrated with ornate 19th-century engravings of muscular, curly-bearded barbarians. Not cheap, even through Powell's.

Dowden writes, "I wanted to show paganism in action, see what it looked and felt like, let the reader see the evidence and listen to the authors, even boring old Caesarius of Arles and grumpy Maximus of Turin."

And all the while contemporary Paganism will be in action in the temporary autonomous zone of festival-time.