Another Serving

¶ A body-art slideshow, beginning with the signs of the Zodiac. (Probably NSFW.)

¶ Read the comments and see where you fit in.

¶ For your polytheistic bookshelf: Dancing In Moonlight: Understanding Artemis Through Celebration, via Executive Pagan, who is reading it and other books.

¶ Info on an article on Jack Parsons, ceremonial magician and rocket scientist.

Gallimaufry for Many Moons

¶ Malleus Maleficarum collector figures.

¶ Women of Esoterica blog: "On women involved in the paranormal, esoteric, Fortean, strange, magickal, supernatural, anomalous, symbolic, UFO, ghostly, chupacabra-y, Nessie/Sasquatch, world of really weird things."

¶ I would like to have walked out under these skies.

"Hearing Voices"

My series co-editor Wendy Griffin and my editing collaborator Graham Harvey (The Paganism Reader) appear on the BBC Radio 4 to discuss hearing voices and Paganism. (Real Player download -- you will hear some BBC news first.)

Good Timing?

Maybe I am getting out of higher education at a good time. Community colleges might still be hiring, though.

Gallimaufry and the iMac

¶ Metaphysical writer Louise Hay is profiled in the New York Times: "Queen of the New Age." (Hat tip: Jordan Stratford.)

¶ I can tell that you are reading only 20 percent of my blog.

¶ Ten years ago, the look of personal computing changed forever. "As far from the cable-twined tangle of beige boxes as you could imagine, its smooth-as-an-egg blue-and-white all-in-one shape was compelling and futuristic."

¶ When I saw Jason's post about people choosing to have Pagan weddings for what amount to aesthetic reasons, I was reminded of a news article I linked to in 2006 about Westerners performing fake Christian ceremonies in Japan.

Back in our days as active coven leaders (20+ years ago), M. and I did marry a sort-of Pagan American guy and the daughter of a Thai UN official. Her family treated it as an unusual ethnographic spectacle, but we got a great Thai dinner out of the experience.

No, the marriage did not last. I think we are 1 for 3 on handfastings. You had better choose someone else.

"Still Life with Screwdriver"

All done. New adventures await.

Cora Anderson

Cora Anderson, co-founder of the Feri (Faerie) tradition of Witchcraft with her late husband, Victor, has left this life at the age of 93.

Jason Pitzl-Waters links to some tributes to her. There is more at the Andersons' LiveJournal community and at Thorn Coyle's blog.

Her book Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition is still available. I think I will take another look at my copy.

I did not know the Andersons, except for hearing stories from Gwydion Pendderwen of his apprenticeship with Victor. One major source of the Feri Craft was Max Freedom Long's take on Hawaiian huna magic. (Wikipedia entry here.) From what Gwydion said, the Andersons were wildly eclectic, typical of Craft teachers of the mid-twentieth century. Bear that in mind when you read her book.

Albert Hoffman, 1906-2008

He will always be remembered for a certain bicycle ride: Albert Hoffman has died. He was the first chemist to synthesize LSD, in 1938.

MAPS has a tribute page up. Here are his obituaries from the Telegraph and from Gaia Media.

The Hopi Orpheus

Writing my post about the Inquisition and the church at Quarai, I reviewed the history of the Pueblo Revolt, which led me to the work of Ekkehart Malotki, a specialist in Hopi language and oral literature. I ended up reading his Hopi Stories of Witchcraft, Shamanism, and Magic, which are full of shapeshifting, potions, evil sorcerers--all the usual stuff. Malotki collected these stories in the 1980s.

One story, "The Man Who Traveled to Maski, Home of the Dead, to Bring Back His Wife," maps almost perfectly onto the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.

I could make several stories out of that coincidence:

1. Aha, it's another example of trade links between Mediterranean world and the American Southwest 2,000 years ago, but the tenured professors won't accept the evidence that is in front of their eyes!

2. Or maybe a century ago some Hopi kid got sent off to boarding school, found solace in a book of Greek myths in the school library, and came back and told the story, giving it a Hopi gloss, and soon it became "traditional."

3. Or maybe going to the Land of the Dead to bring home your dear one is not a good idea and usually ends up tragically, regardless of the culture.

What Lies Ahead

Here are a couple of links. Meanwhile, expect a series of new book-related posts, now that spring semester is finally coming to a close.

¶ What was it like to live in a Norse longhouse in Vinland or Iceland? Re-enactors have ideas.

¶ At least Pope Benedict understands that religion thrives better without governmental support.

The Inquisition in New Mexico

This ruined church, Nuestra Señora de La Purisima Concepcion de Cuarac, stands at the edge of the Southern Plains, southeast of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is one of three large mission churches built in the early 1600s by forced labor from the Indians who lived at the adjacent villages. The interior is about 100 feet long.

It is now part of Salinas Pueblos National Monument.

Constructed by the Franciscan order, it was also the location of the Inquisition in New Mexico, which could bring charges of heresy, witchcraft, etc., against the few thousand Spanish colonists in the province.

The remote Spanish colony of New Mexico suffered from two command structures: one religious and one secular-military, with frequent "turf wars" between them -- all very medieval.

You can imagine the conflicts:

Don Somebody y Somebody de Someplace, encomendero: "I need los indios to to work for me, to herd my livestock and build my new house."

Fray Somebody, Franciscan priest: "Oh, no, señor, they must work building the new rooms on the church. Such labor helps in the conversion of their heathen souls."

(Los indios, in Tiwa: "Do we ever get to hoe our own corn fields?")

Fray Somebody, playing his trump card: "And we have reports that you have permitted los indios to perform their devilish kachina dances. Could it be that you are sliding into heresy? We have prepared these documents for the holy Inquisition. . . ."

Meanwhile, the Apaches and Comanches of the Plains, having mastered the horse-riding lifestyle, started playing the game of "Let's attack the settled agriculturalists, kill them, and take their stuff."

The Spanish were spread too thin to fight them off, and arming the Pueblo Indians went against their plan of keeping the Indians subservient and helpless.

Between raids and drought, things got so bad at the three Salinas pueblos that the Franciscans pulled the plug. In 1677, the priest at the church in the picture, Fray Diego de Parraga, locked the doors and rode off in a cart with all the altar goods and the church bell, accompanied by the remaining residents of the pueblo of Quarai (Cuarac). They went to Isleta, where the people spoke the same language.

And then three years later came a significant event in American Pagan history: the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when all the missionized Indians of New Mexico and northern Arizona revolted simultaneously.

The revolt's cultural effects linger to this day, as David Roberts explains in The Pueblo Revolt : The Secret Rebellion That Drove the Spaniards Out of the Southwest.

Plaques and Gold Medals

Once when he was awarded a gold medal for his poetry, Robert Graves later took it to a jeweler and discovered that it was not gold at all.

He got an essay out of the experience, at least, turning the experience into a metaphor for true poetic gold as opposed to gilded base metal or pinchbeck. Graves had very definite ideas about what constituted "true poetry."

Wednesday I was on the list of honorees for a campus-wide awards luncheon, but as I was coming down with the godawful head cold that led me to cancel my classes for the rest of the week, I skipped it.

I went instead to my office, took care of various matters--at the end of the academic year, we are always hit with requests for recommendation letters for various jobs, internships, and graduate schools--and eventually went home. I did not want to sit sniffling and sneezing at a big table, almost unable to talk.

As I left my office to go home and to bed, I encountered a student who was looking for me. She had brought my plaques--one of them 5x7 inches, the other one 8x10 inches. Each bore a pseudo-metallic plastic face plate with pseudo-gilt highlights bearing such sentiments as "In honor of your retirement." The smaller was for my 15 years of service, apparently. (Technically, I did not retire--I quit.)

So somebody wasted the taxpayers' money down at the trophy shop in the strip mall. Am I supposed to hang them on the wall of my study at home and contemplate them?

By contrast, when we had the departmental joint retirement (that word again) party for two senior colleagues and myself last Saturday night, my colleagues gave me gift cards for Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Bam! No more Amazon.com wish list. Thanks, everyone!

But, geez ... plaques.

So I thought I could pry off the face plates and use them as display bases for some other project.

On closer examination, however, I saw that they were merely made from some kind of pressboard with a plastic wood-grain veneer. So they cannot be sanded or refinished.

Maybe there is a metaphor there too, but I am going to leave it alone for now.

The Religion of Beer

As "religion," beer predates Christianity and Islam. And it is back on sale in Iraq.

(In some areas, as I understand, the sellers of alcoholic beverages come from Iraq's dwindling Christian community. I do not know if that is the case here.)

Via Instapundit.

Relief for Tired, Bloggy Eyes

My eyes cringe at Web pages with light-on-dark type. Dark-on-light was good enough for Gutenberg, and it's good enough for me.

Now there is a solution: a Java script in the form of a toolbar bookmark that lets you flip headache-inducing light-on-dark pages to the way that Johannes intended. (Thanks, Kelley.)

For the bookmarklet, just scroll down to the box marked "Update," and drag and drop.