Fooling the Cyber-Censors

Yesterday I wrote a review of The New Generation Witches: Teenage Witchcraft in Contemporary Culture, a collection of papers edited by Hannah Johnston and Peg Aloi, for the upcoming issue of The Pomegranate.

Teen Witches, a fluid and constantly changing group, have been heavily dependent on the Internet, because they are often alone and either ignorant of Pagan groups or not welcome there as full-fledged members--the latter partly a result of the various satanism scares and their blowback onto contemporary Pagans.

In Aloi's own chapter, "A Charming Spell: The Intentional and Unintentional Influence of Popular Media upon Teenage Witchcraft in America," she writes how some of the Net-filtering programs such as Cybersitter blocked words such as "witchcraft" or "neopagan."

Internet censorship and the use of filtering software threatened to shut down teenage pagan internet activity. So one result has been that teens got very creative with the names they gave their sites. Instead of calling it 'Teen Witchcraft Study Group' it would become 'Seekers of the Emerald Moon' or 'Oak Grove Musings.'

Honestly, since I never have had to cope with filtering software, this problem and responses to it were not on my radar. But don't tell me that it is the only reason for some of the extravagant group names one encounters in the Pagan world.

Casual Labor at the New Age Trade Show

So as I was saying, I briefly visited the INATS West show yesterday, in the capacity of day labor to help the Zells take down their booth on its last afternoon.

(You sit on the curb in front of the liquor store until a guy wearing a wizard's hat and driving a van with California plates comes along and says, "Hey, want to eat at an Ethiopian restaurant?")

The "Street of the Idol-Makers" was shorter than last year's version, due partly to Sacred Source now being owned by the same people as Maxine Miller Studios, or so I'm told.

The emphatically Pagan switch plate on the right was at Dryad Design's booth. Paul Borda has also designed a Green Man version, where the switch forms his tongue.

And suddenly it's all over. Dropped steel pipes from someone's exhibit frame ring like tolling bells. Castles, temples, and crystal caves lined up in rows collapse into bags and shrink-wrapped pallets. The 4-Wheel Parts Truck Fest needs to set up next.

Denver Post Discovers Local Pagans

Denver's Pagan community is featured in The Denver Post According to chatter on the local listservs, the "leaving a bottle of whiskey" bit was the reporter's misunderstanding.

Not surprisingly, Colorado's hard-working Wiccan chaplains were completely ignored in this Post article, which seems to suggest that only the Middle Eastern Monotheisms™ can rehabilitate state prison inmates.

But at least the newer piece mentions them:

Brennan and Anthony also serve as state prison chaplains. Their services are in demand by 500 self-identified pagans who account for 2 percent of the state prison population. Inmate neopagans include Wiccans, druids and the Asatru, who worship Odin and other Norse gods. In prisons especially, the Asatru can be identified with Nazis, skinheads, patriarchy and racism, yet there are pure forms, Brennan said, which focus on positives — self-empowerment and tribal loyalty — rather than white supremacy.

On the Road in Virginia: Looking for Gleb Botkin

The house in Charlottesville, Va., where the Botkin familiy lived in the 1960s, also the final location of the Church of Aphrodite.

Gleb Botkin's Church of Aphrodite lasted from the 1930s to 1969. (He formally incorporated it in 1939, but I don't know just when it started.)

The church was more Goddess-monotheistic than polytheistic:

Aphrodite, the flower-faced, the sweetly smiling, the laughter-loving Goddess of Love and Beauty, is the self-existent, eternal and Only Supreme Deity, Creator and Mother of the cosmos, the Universal Cause, the Universal Mind, the Source of all life and all positive and creative forces of nature, the Fountainhead of all happiness and joy.

But Botkin rejected such formulas as "love thy neighbor as thyself" and the "so-called Golden Rule," arguing instead that love requires "two mutually responsive poles."

Some of the argument he makes in his thealogical book In Search of Reality could justify polyamory as well, although I don't know if he applied it in that way.

Some of the Charlottesville Pagans still want an historical marker on the house. I don't know who lives there now; when we stopped by, no one was at home but the cat.


Botkin, his wife Nadine and his daughter Marina Botkin Schweitzer are buried just outside Charlottesville, where his marker describes him as the Reverand [sic] Gleb Botkin and includes the astrological symbol of Venus.

The Church of Aphrodite, meanwhile, had both a personal and a literary connection with the California Pagan group Feraferia and hence to the broader Pagan revival of the late 20th century.

The Theoi Project

The Theoi Project is a site for "exploring Greek mythology and the gods in classical literature and art. The aim of the project is to provide a comprehensive, free reference guide to the gods (theoi), spirits (daimones), fabulous creatures (theres) and heroes of ancient Greek mythology and religion."

Want a family tree of the gods? It's here. And here is the cultus page for Hekate.

Gaulimaufry to Fill Space 2

Still too busy to write the really startling post that's in my head. So here some more links.

¶ "White folks Was Wild Once Too" -- The video, in case you missed it.

¶ You thought that Lord of the Rings was about a Quest? Actually, it illuminates questions of property law as well.

¶ The Druidbook blog discusses homegrown American polytheism. I like this approach.

¶ You could call these people a sort of priesthood of the dead.

¶ An online petition for a European Pagan Memory Day. Interesting idea, but do online petitions ever accomplish anything? And do signatures of people not living in Europe help or hurt?

¶ Watch this, and you will never think of Bollywood music videos in the same way again.

¶ Contrary to what you probably have read, the Thuggees of early 19th-century India may not have been Kali worshippers at all.

¶ A definitive list of fluffy and non-fluffy Paganisms? It's a wiki, so you can jump into the discussion. UPDATE: Comment on the list here.

The Scholar and the Festival

The registration brochure for the big Pagan Spirit Gathering in June came in the mail. I won't be going, but I read it for general information and found this:

Pagan Scholars who want to conduct Pagan Studies research at the Gathering as part of their participation must submit a research proposal by March 30, 2008 in order to be considered.

An old joke from the Navajo Reservation came to mind. You have to know that traditionally the Navajos were matrifocal--a man lived with his wife's people.

Q: What is a typical Navajo family?

A: A grandmother, her daughter(s), their husbands, the kids, and an anthropologist.

Are Pagan festivals these days that overrun with people handing out questionnaires? And what about the non-Pagan scholar studying Paganism?

Pomegranate 9.2

I've been remiss in not noting the contents of the latest issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies. Videlicet:

• "The Quandary of Contemporary Pagan Archives,"
Garth Reese,

• "The Status of Witchcraft in the Modern World," Ronald Hutton,

• "Kabbalah Recreata: Reception and Adaptation of Kabbalah in Modern Occultism," Egil Asprem

• "Putting the Blood Back into Blót: The Revival of Animal Sacrifice in Modern Nordic Paganism," Michael Strmiska.

And the book reviews.

Abstracts are online, and the book reviews may be downloaded in their entirety.

The Pagan Anthology of Short Fiction

Winners of a a Pagan fiction contest will be included in a new collection forthcoming from Llewellyn Publications. The contest was co-sponsored by BBI Media, and the judges named three winners:

• Grand prize, $500, and publication in PanGaia magazine, to "A Valkyrie Among Jews" by April

• Second prize, $250, to"Black Doe" by Vylar Kaftan

• Third prize, $100, to "Dead and (Mostly) Gone" by Deborah Blake

Review: Living Gnosticism

Gnosticism, says Canadian Gnostic priest Jordan Statford (and blogger), is not a Jewish or Christian heresy, but stands alone, "too heretical for other faiths. . . . the Secret Church of the Holy Grail."

His new book, Living Gnosticism: An Ancient Way of Knowing, defines it as "a pre-Christian religious tradition that fuse Judaism, Greek philosophy, and the Mystery Schools of the ancient world.

"Originating in the intellectual 'café societies' of Alexandria around 200 BCE, the original Gnostics were Greek-educated Jews, living in Egypt, on the doorstep of the Roman Empire. Theirs was the realm of diverse and interplaying cultures, of ideas and imagination. Gnostics unflinchingly explored the borders of myth and archetype, of metaphors and dreams, of creativity and poetic expression."

(Sometimes he makes them sound like beatniks of the ancient Mediterraean.)

Also included are

• A dictionary of Gnostic terms such as archon and demiurge.

• A ritual calendar that starts with Candlemas, equating Bridget with Sophia, both as "goddesses" of wisdom and creativity, and runs through the feast of the apostle John, December 27. (Not real goddesses but "symbol[s] for an aspect of something greater.")

• A question-and-answer section, viz., "Do Gnostics deny the historical Jesus?"

Answer: He is an archetype; "these stories don't need to be historically true to be valuable."

• An introduction to the various Gnostic churches of North America: the Apostolic Johannite Church, the Ecclesia Gnostica, the Ecclesia Gnostica Mysteriorum, the Gnostic Church of Mary Magdalene, the Order of St. Esclarmonde (a Cathar mystic executed by the Inquisition).

It's an excellent introduction to the topic.

There is no original sin in Stratford's Gnosticism; instead there is a story of loss. (I have suggested before that this story underlies the appeal of such fantasies as Anna Anderson's claim to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia.)

All Gnostics are in exile from heaven; they need to be reminded of their divine spark within; they need to be told that "the system" is not the world. And salvation comes not from faith-there is the rupture with orthodox Christianity-nor from works, but through enlightenment, gnosis.

Stratford wants to contrast Gnosticism with the "credal" or doctrinal religions. I think the opposite term to "credal" (following Harvey Whitehouse) is “imagistic” – not dependent on doctrine but on small-scale experience involving all the senses.

Stratford, in fact, wishes to link one of Gnosticism's arms to contemporary Paganism, but I am not so sure of that.

Ultimately there is a chasm between them. Gnosticism cannot be separated from a belief that the world was simply made wrong: "There's that certainty that something is wrong with the universe, and creeping paranoia that (a) this is somehow not the real world and (b) the forces in charge of this world are hiding something secret, something powerful." It is a religion of psychic exile.

By contrast, Paganism allows sacred relationships "with the tangible, sentient, and/or nonempirical," to use Michael York's definition from Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion.

We may say that there is more to the world than This Side (the "nonempirical" part, but we don't reject any of it. The gods pop up everywhere: Aphrodite in a shoe-store window display, as Ginette Paris once said.

Some Pagans may feel alienated (for good cause), but we have no reason to be in exile. This is our world, the parts that you can see and the parts that you cannot.

Gallimaufry: It's Traditional

¶ When an ill-informed blogger writes that "Wicca Attempts to Control Life" on a right-wing site, commenters weigh in. The gist: (a) religion has nothing to do with politics or (b) all religions are bogus. It's nice to see street-level libertarianism thriving.

¶ Maxine Sanders' new autobiography Fire Child: The life & Magic of Maxine Sanders, 'Witch Queen' is on my to-read list. She says the first mid-1990s draft was it badly written, self-indulgent and absolute rubbish. And then she adds something that is true of all memoir-writing:

When I did start work on Fire Child there were details that were not recorded in my magical diary and should have been. However, magical life is often repetitive and would have proved boring to the reader. On reflection, the differences between memory and diary entries made fascinating personal analysis.

Update: Another reviewer discusses some inconsistencies in the book but still recommends it.

¶ Volume 3 of TYR Myth-Culture-Tradition has been published, and I am just starting to read it.

This third issue is a big one, 530 pages, with articles such as Nigel Pennick on "Weaving the Web of Wyrd," Joscelyn Godwin on "Esotericism without religion: Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials," and Christopher McIntosh on "Iceland's Pagan Renaissance," plus many pages of book and music reviews. Impressive.

Not Getting the Whole Blogging Concept

Some people just do not get the concept -- in this case, the concept of blogging.

When you write a blog, you either link to a web site you have visited (blog = web log, remember) and you comment on it. Even a Glenn Reynolds-ish "Heh" counts as a comment.

Or you write what amounts to an online diary entry. Those are the two main types of blogging.

But lately, thanks to Google Alerts, I noticed that some Pagan bloggers think that cutting and pasting Wikipedia entries counts as blogging. Examples: 1, 2, 3, 4. There are probably more.

If you cannot link-and-comment, or write about your day (or night), then there is always the Japanese option: Tell what you ate for lunch.

⟨/RANT⟩

Meanwhile, read Doug Cowan's Cyberhenge: Modern Pagans on the Internet for a broader perspective than I can offer in a blog.

"Why I became a Pagan"

The advent of the Web has made survey-taking much easier, and so when some graduate students want to interview Pagans, they just post a survey on SurveyMonkey.

This link came to me from a trusted source, so I plan to take it myself once I have the free time.

It is interesting how methodology has changed. No one has to go to festivals and try to cajole people into answering a questionnaire anymore.

Where's the Wall? I Need to Hit It

Forgive the melodramatic headline, but I have been grading tests and research papers for about six hours. At least "the big class" is done, and what lies ahead will be more pleasant reading--essays by better student writers.

So to make up for the lack of blogging, some odds and ends:

• A web site devoted to iconography of deities and demons of the ancient Near East. (Thanks to Caroline Tully.)

• I am please to announce that the Consultation on Contemporary Pagan Studies in the American Academy of Religion has been upgraded to "group" status, i.e., it is now the Contemporary Pagan Studies group, although their site does not reflect the change. The change gives us more program slots and a longer period before the next oversight review.

• Via Circle Sanctuary, a program for sending "Care Packages" to Pagan military personnel overseas.

• Mainly because it has a lot about Gleb Botkin, founder of the Church of Aphrodite and hence one of America's Pagan pioneers, I just read Frances Welch's A Romanov Fantasy: Life at the Court of Anna Anderson. (Reviewed in the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian.)

I really didn't learn anything new about the C of A., but there is this tidbit, as close as Welch comes to suggesting how Franziska Schandzkowska [Anna Anderson] (1896-1984) fooled so many people into thinking that she was Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the Russian royal family--including Botkin, who knew the real Anastasia when they were both teenagers. Anastasia's uncle by marriage, Grand Duke Alexander, suggested that Anna was what New Agers call a "walk-in."

A confirmed spiritualist and table-rapper, Alexander claimed that Grand Duchess Anastasia's spirit had returned and incorporated itself into another body. His proclamation revealed the extent to which he was impressed by Anna's memories. 'She knows so much about the intimate life of the Tsar and his family that there is simply no other explanation for it; and of course it wouldn't be the first time that a spirit has returned to earth in a new physical form.'

Y'think?

Gallimaufry with Dreams

¶ Anne Johnson on Dream Weaving.

¶ Anne Hill writes about dreaming too. (Is this a blog meme? Ann + dreams?)

¶ Northern Path likes the new Beowulf movie.

¶ Peg is upset about people stealing Pagan music.

¶ Caroline posts collage Tarot decks.

Colors of Paganism

Remember the 1980s fad for having your "colors done"?

The Color + Design blog is applying it to religions too, and here are the colors of Paganism, as selected by Pagan blogger Yvonne Aburrow.

If you are planning to redecorate your house, you can pick "Green Man" or "Red Earth."

Altars at the Student Center

As promised, three of today's altars at the state university erected for the Day of the Dead (Día de los muertos).


An altar to Vlad the Impaler, also known as Dracula, from the history and art clubs. Club members admitted that it was a bit short on Roumanian content. One girl speculated about an impaled head that she had seen somewhere; all agreed that a big spike would have helped.

After all, he was just a hard-working prince holding off the Islamic menace. For more Vlad-ophilia, read The Historian.


An altar to firefighters.


The Catholic student association altar. Off the the left, out of the frame, was a bottled pre-mixed mojito cocktail, which the builders agreed could not be left there overnight. (Apparently La Virgen likes mojitos.) The place is swarming with students after all.

Rites of Passage

Help a Wiccan college student with a research project on rites of passage by taking this test.

No, I don't know if she has read Coming to the Edge of the Circle or not, or if she still thinks that Van Gennep is the latest thing.

(I do not know the student personally, but I sort of know her through email lists.)

Or you could just find out how fluffy you are. I hope that your score is a negative number.

Gallimaufry (with horns)

¶ Oberon Zell seems to drive some Pagans around the bend for his fondness for costuming, but who else reinvented unicorns? The original work was done by a Maine wildlife biogist whom Zell acknowledges, W. Franklin Dove, in various articles and a book, Artificial Production of the Fabulous Unicorn:a Modern Interpretation of an Ancient Myth (1936).

¶ I always say that making movies about writers is difficult because the work of writing is not very visual. Margaret Soltan links to an article about movies that are more about writers' egos and screw-ups. I think that I will rent a couple of them.

I would add Almost Famous to the list, mainly for Philip Seymour Hoffman's rants as a real-life character, rock journalist Lester Bangs, which are dead on.

¶ Recently a shut-down Toys 'R Us store in Pueblo that I pass on my way to the university blossomed with new, temporary signage as a Spirit World Halloween Store. I had no idea that there was a Halloween chain store! Or that there was a category for warrior and god costumes. Or that it included "outlaw zombie"--shades of Texarcana.

The Occult Experience

In my office with the fast Ethernet connection, I downloaded the 1987 documentary The Occult Experience. It is available on various bittorent servers, such as here. (There was tie-in with Nevil Drury's 1987 book of the same name, I believe.)

Lots of the film is actually older. Some footage goes back to the 1960s, such as a brief appearance of Isaac Bonewits during his Church of Satan experience. There's Selena Fox and Dennis Carpenter and her coven trooping through the Wisconsin snow and some New York Witch mispronouncing "Samhain," Alex "king of the witches" Sanders, The Temple of Set, and Janet Farrar teaching some students while Stewart smokes cigarettes in an armchair before robing.

One of the Farrars' initation rituals is shown at length, and there is also a segment on the Australian Witch and artist Rosaleen Norton.

Also included: Z Budapest and her Dianic coven of the time, explaining how women used to curse warmongers, Luisah Tesh talking hoodoo, the Fellowship of Isis at Clonegal Castle, and Michael Harner of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. But what the filmmakers really love is the work of H.R. Giger.

What those Australian Pentecostals are doing in there, I'm not sure, except for the speaking in tongues and the exorcism. The latter just goes on and on ("Push it, Petra. In the name of Jeee-zuss, come out!"). Talk about savage rites!

The Further Adventures of Lucius Vorenus & Titus Pullo

Netflix has at last delivered the first disk of Rome's second season. I will admit it: I go into happy fanboy mode at the receipt of new episodes.

It's like The Sopranos for Pagans. There are no really sympathetic characters, but you can't take your eyes off them.

Especially Lindsay Duncan's Servilia--perhaps because she resembles the former provost of my university, whom we used to refer to as the Dark Queen.

I asked my rhetoric class yesterday if any had seen it, and only one hand went up. (Just as well, perhaps. Our textbook talks about Cicero, but he doesn't come off all that well in the series.)

Likewise, when I used a clip from The Sopranos to illustrate Machiavelli's maxim for rulers that it is better to be feared than loved for a class of freshmen, many had never seen the show. Kids these days! I thought everyone but us got HBO. But getting it does not mean watching it, I realize.

The Most Advanced--But Vanished--Pagans.

Everyone has their favorite vanished Pagan civilization, I suppose. The Minoan civilization is one of mine.

Tropaion links to a Discovery Channel video about the destruction of Atlantis. The basic idea -- that "Atlantis" was Santorini (Thera) and Crete -- is not new, but the computer recreations of their cities is excellent. (Bonus: Greek subtitles.)

The Egyptian material at the end is most interesting as well.

A volcanic eruption bigger than Krakatoa, tsunamis, and earthquakes. How well could we handle that combination?

Bonus: This Flash animation shows all the empires and nations of the Middle East. The Minoans don't appear, but they would be contemporary with the Egyptian empire. (Via Hecate.)

Bog Bodies

I was shelving library books for my college work-study job when I saw it: "The Bog People Glob," the spine announced. After rolling that around in my mouth, "bog people glob bog people glob," I had to check it out.

And so the Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob introduced me to some dead people who were sort of time capsules from the late Neolithic to the Middle Ages.

Northern Path links to a National Geographic article that updates some of those stories. It turns out, for instance, that "Windeby Girl," supposed to have been executed for adultery or some crime, was actually a boy. Oops.

Wikipedia explains the preservation process.

I am waiting for someone who proudly follows a reconstructionist Pagan path to commit their body to a few centuries of tannic acid bath.

Witchcraft on the Screen and on the Page

Pagan performance-studies scholar Jason Winslade is interviewed at the TheoFantastique blog on Witchcraft and the entertainment industry:

Let me first say that I have a hard time coming up with any examples of “real witchcraft” or “real magic” in television or films. As you rightly state in your blog, any portrayals of these phenomena are inevitably fantasy with fancy special effects and things flying around. Any practitioner will tell you that this does not happen. At least they do not in the waking world. (Of course, this begs the question what “real magic” actually is – ask 3 practitioners and you’ll get 5 answers. Certainly "real" magic, with the exception of ritual, is much more of an internal process, and thus doesn’t lend itself to special effects extravaganzas). Some programs may incorporate sound magickal philosophy and metaphysics but their application is ultimately fantastical.

TheoFantastique is written by John Morehead, who also writes Morehead's Musings, where he has a special interest in Christian evangelism to new religious movements.

Oss Tales: Creating the Archaic

To watch Oss Tales is to see the difference between a community and a network and the contrast between self-conscious ritual and tradition.

If you are interested in the construction of ritual and of community--and in the history of the Pagan movement--you should buy the DVD, which contains three short films:

1. "Oss Oss, Wee Oss (1953), an 18-minute documentary of the May Day hobby horse procession in Padstow, Cornwall.

This film was made at the same time when Gerald Gardner & Friends were creating Wicca as the "Old Religion," and you can feel that mental atmosphere when the narrator intones that the procession represents "one of our religions when we lived in caves." There are constant references to the unknowable antiquity of the event. "Some say it's 4,000 year old," says Charlie Bate, a member of the family that traditionally "brings out" the [Red] Oss.

2. "Oss Tales" (2007), filmed at the 2004 Padstow May Day event, and including some of the people from the original documentary and their descendants, by American anthropologist Sabina Magliocco and filmmaker John Bishop, who compiled this new DVD.

Unlike the 1953 film, which focuses on an unsubstantiated claim that the Oss goes "back to Pagan times," the newer film touches on some of the social and class issues involved. For one, since 1918 there have been two Osses, the Red and the Blue, and everyone knows who belongs to which faction: "You are born into your color."

The Blue Oss raises money for charity while the Red Oss raises money for beer for its crew. The Blue Oss dances at the manor house while the Red Oss, although invited by the squire, stays in the town. At least the two groups no longer get into fist fights when they meet in the street. Maybe they don't want to scare away the 30,000 tourists.

These and other issues were omitted from the 1953 documentary.

Yet. as the historian Ronald Hutton notes in a brief appearance, the event has a "really archaic spirit" and has become a "genuinely primitive rite." Without any overt, capital-P Paganism, the Padstow event grabs you by the throat, even through the medium of video.

We also learn that professional folklorists have influenced the event and its interpretations since the 1930s, telling Padstownians that their Oss procession was "the relic of a pagan sacred marriage between earth and sky," as Hutton writes in The Stations of the Sun: The Ritual Year in Britain (1996). The earliest record of the Padstow procession is from 1803. In fact, the oldest record of a hobby horse in England dates from the Tudor era, the 1500s, and most hobby horse processions in England and Wales are--or were--associated with Christmas and New Year's rather than with May Day.

There is the fertility connection: a woman "covered" by the horse is supposed to become pregnant soon. And there is a death connection: a decoration of graves in the cemetery before the procession.

3. "Oss Oss Wee Oss Redux: Beltane in Berkeley" (2004) runs 14 minutes and was also made by Magliocco and Bishop.

About a dozen years ago, Pagans in Berkeley, California, started their own Maypole-and-Oss tradition in a park. They started by researching Padstow, and as Oss-dancer Don Frew ruefully admits, they found no clues about ritual. So they took their NROOGD Wiccan rituals from the 1960s and added on to them.

After all, while the Padstow procession is ritualized, its rituals are communal, such as which family brings out the Oss. There is no magic circle. But the Berkeley Oss appears in a self-consciously created ritual rather than a pub and the streets. It is a conscious attempt to create tradition and magic. According to some women interviewed, the pregnancy part works, at least.

But this is America, and there is a separation of Oss and state. Participants discourse about rootlessness and ethnic identity and wanting to belong to something.

In Padstow, your family must have lived in town for at least two generations before you can even dance with the Oss. Think how many Californians that provision would disqualify.

One participant flippantly says that after three years, it was an ancient tradition. Maybe, maybe not. If they can keep it going until their grandchildren are doing it, then as Hutton says of Padstow, it will communicate "something genuinely archaic, whatever [its] actual age."

The disk also inclues a "making of" segment and a study guide. It comes in a two-sided NTSC and PAL format for worldwide use.

Some Shinto Priests

A Dutchman has become the only (?) non-Japanese Shinto master in Europe.

His house, which includes the Dutch Yamakage Shinto Shrine, incorporates a "kami-dana" household Shinto shrine and a "shime-nawa" (sacred rope). It is also home to the Dutch Shinto Association.

"When I was approved as a Shinto priest by the Rev. Yamakage, I was told to apply Shinto to Dutch society," de Leeuw said. "So in that sense I decided to change the interior of the shrine a little bit from the interior I knew from Japan.

Coincidentally, I was just reading a book by his teacher, Motohisa Yamakage, The Essence of Shinto. Yamakage seems interested both in explaining Shinto to the West and revitalizing it within Japan. He is old enough (81) to remember what happened when this decentralized practice was co-opted by the imperial government in the late 19th century.

Yamakage quotes one priest with approval:

Shrines should gather parishioners together and not teach them, I believe. We should not give any lectures to those who come to pay respect at the shrine or to visit the office of the shrine. We have to respect their positions or ideas. We should neither criticize them nor force them to follow our ideas. For the shrine is the public facility, and we don't ask which religion or sect they belong to. The shrine is not the place we give more education. It is the place where they freely feel and learn something in their own way.

With so much pressure on contemporary Paganism to follow the "Protestant mode," with designated leaders, "congregations," and so forth, we might want to consider Shinto as a model in some things instead, particularly the idea of a priest serving a shrine instead of a congregation--which was true in ancient Paganism as well.

Pomegranate 9.1 (June 2007)

Contents of the newest issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies:

• Marisol Charbonneau, "The Melting Cauldron: Ethnicity, Diversity, and Identity in a Contemporary Pagan Subculture."

• Carole Cusack, "The Goddess Eostre: Bede's Text and Contemporary Pagan Tradition(s)."

• Victor Schnirelman, "Ancestral Wisdom and Ethnic Nationalism: A View from Eastern Europe."

• Boria Sax, "Medievalism, Paganism, and the Tower Ravens."

• Mikirou Zitukawa and Michael York, "Expanding Religious Studies: The Obsolescence of the Sacred/Secular Framework for Pagan, Earthen, and Indigenous Religion."

• Book reviews.

It's Robert Heinlein Week

Maybe you had forgotten that July 7, 1907 was the birthday of SF great Robert Heinlein? I certainly had, but thanks to the InterWebs, now I know.

The always-iconoclastic Steve Sailer gives snapshots of Heinlein's novels, including Stranger in a Strange Land, which had such an effect on the American Pagan movement via the Church of All Worlds:

- Heinlein's 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land evolved much like Nabokov's Lolita. Both writers began working on their respective scandalous magnum opuses about 1949, figuring that while they weren't publishable at present, American norms were changing fast enough that they would be publishable eventually. Both ended up long and self-indulgent.

- After a fast-paced opening, Stranger in a Strange Land bogs down badly. It reads like a few cokeheads lecturing some credulous potheads on everything under the sun. Still, what a great title it has, maybe the best by any novel ever. The Prophet Abraham's description of himself is borrowed to describe a new prophet, a human raised by Martians, who comes to a satirical America. And one plot detail -- how the First Lady's astrologer was influencing the President -- turned out to exactly foreshadow the situation under Ron and Nancy Reagan!

Gallimaufry

¶ Is a Celtic bowl the Nazi holy grail? Probably not, but it might inspire a Dan Brown-wannabe.

¶ On Sunday we leave on a trip to the Mendocino coast. We are taking Amtrak most of the way. Some of our friends seem to think that we are eccentric for preferring cross-country trains. After all, air travel is so much smoother.

¶ You knew that chimps and elephants painted. But did you know that trees can draw? (Via Mirabilis.)

¶ Australian writer Glenys Livingstone has put her book on ecospirituality, PaGaian Cosmology, online at the PaGaian website.

¶ Jason Pitzl-Waters is blogging as he works on a book about Pagan music.

The Street of the Idol-Makers

Last Monday I drove to Denver for the last day of the International New Age Trade Show (West) at the Merchandise Mart, partly to see friends and also to check out the

Books, New Age and World Music, CD's and DVD's, Aromatherapy Bath and Body Preparations, Apparel, Candles, Crystals, Tarots and Divination Tools, Heath and Wellness Herbal Remedies, Incense, Jewelry, Native Traditions, Metaphysical Supplies and Greeting Cards.

I had not visited that show (it's wholesale only) since 1997, when I was signing copies of Sacred Mask, Sacred Dance at the Llewellyn booth. (They were not about to fly John Jones over from England, even though he wrote 75 percent of the book.)

The Llewellyn booth this year was big, but the energy seemed low. Nobody made eye contact. Maybe the staff had partied too hard the night before. I snagged a free 2007 Tarot reader for M. and left.

When M. worked for Celebration Books in Colorado Springs, she also had to work some of their metaphysical fairs--the same stuff, but at the retail level. (The two businesses are now owned separately, I understand.)

Walking the show, I could not help but notice how little has changed in the 20-some years since we first went to a metaphysical fair, other than the shift from videotapes to DVDs.

But there is one big change. In 1981 there was no Pagan merchandise sector. Now here was the Mythic Images booth next to Maxine Miller Studios and Celtic Jackalope (love that name), followed by Sacred Source and Dryad Design.

With all the divine images, it was like the Street of the Idol Makers.

Off to the side was King-Max Products with its bland Chinese manager representing a whole line of Gothy knick-knacks and kannabis kitsch and some very NSFW statuary. (You can't even see it on the website without an account.)

I just wonder if the Chinese worker painting the statuette of a voluptuous woman receiving cunnilingus from a wolf thinks that that is a common occurrence in America.

The Sun High in The Sky

Here is the news from Stonehenge. No human sacrifice though, if that is what is was. But The Guardian gloats:

Today is the summer solstice, and the druids have taken over Stonehenge to commemorate their ancient rites. Today's festival at Britain's most charismatic monument is based on a cultural fantasy, behind which are dark facts.

At the moment of maximum Sun-iness, I shall probably be drinking cappuccino in Colorado Springs somewhere. M. and I need a city day.

For some substance meantime, drop by Quaker Pagan and read Cat's two-parter on her spiritual journey: Part 1 and Part 2.

Pan's Labyrinth --More Gnostic than Pagan?

Pagan blogger Jason Pitzl-Waters has written a great deal about the film Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno), praising it in words such as these:

I believe "Pan's Labyrinth" presents a unique opportunity to discuss Pagan/polytheist theology in contrast to the dominant monotheisms. Unlike "The Da Vinci Code", this film isn't bogged down with questions about Christian heresy and Gnosticism and can be referenced without having to talk about our views on Mary Magdalen's marital status. If this film continues to seep into public conversations about faith and religion, Pagan commentators should be ready to move beyond disclaimers regarding Ofelia's actions and instead talk about what elements in the film accurately portray Pagan ideas and beliefs.

Living 25 miles from the nearest movie house, M. and I are big Netflix customers, and last night we finally saw the film now that it is out on DVD.

Neither of us would have called it a "Pagan" movie, faun or no faun. (I will skip the "faun movie" puns.)

To me it was far more Gnostic, although perhaps not so thoroughly Gnostic as The Matrix.

That Ofelia is a "lost princess" seems like yet another telling of the wanderings of Sophia (Wisdom) in the fallen world. Many people respond to that story of separation: "I am not from here. My parents are not my real parents. I belong in a better, purer place." So Gnostic.

The "lost princess" is an archetypal story. It is why so many wanted to believe that young Grand Duchess Anastasia survived the murder of the Russian royal family in 1918 to wander lost and unrecognized for years. The story pulls us. As the Wikipedia article points out, Sophia is the original "damsel in distress."

Gnosticism and Paganism have their points of contact, but they differ in their views of divinity and the material world. In Pan's Labyrinth, the material world is clearly one to be escaped from (and with good reason) and the "real world" is somewhere else.

What Makes a Photo Pagan?

It turns out that a lot of people are working on that question, and they are posting their work on sites like Flickr. Metapagan has a roundup.

Reading Augustine on Polytheism

As a Reed College student in my freshman humanities class, I read St. Augustine's Confessions, often considered to be the first autobiography in the Western world.

Augustine did more to shape institutional Christianity in the West (Roman Catholics, Protestants) than anyone except the apostle Paul. The eastern Orthodox churches were not so impressed by him.

I re-read The Confessions when I was working on The Encyclopedia of Heresy and Heretics, because of Augustine's former involvement with the followers of Mani.

Being older and a little wiser--and also Pagan--I was somewhat less impressed by how piously he ditches his Pagan girlfriend, the mother of his son, because his Christian mother (St. Monica) does not like her and wants him to marry a Christian virgin. Monica herself advised Christian women to be sweet to husbands who beat them. You can find her spiritual heirs on the shelves of Christian bookstores today.

Augustine's big book, however, is The City of God, which established him as a theologian. I never had read it, but I have decided to attempt at least the first half, which is his attack on Roman polytheism.

He wrote it around 410, roughly 50 years after Julian, the last Pagan emperor, and a century after the imperial house (except Julian) became officially Christian. Paganism lingered, more in the Western empire than in the East, I think, but no longer enjoyed such government subsidies as formerly.

Its historical context was the Visigoths' attack on Rome. The Visigoths, who had lived in present-day Bulgaria, were tribes allied to Rome, and the attack was part of an attempt by their leader, Alaric, to become supreme Army commander--or maybe more--it was a complicated time of military-political contests for rulership. But the idea of barbarians breaking into Rome was a big shock for the empire, and some people claimed it happened because Rome had abandoned the old gods.

Here is were Augustine seems to "spin" his story, however, in a manner worthy of a Sunday-morning political TV talk show. He did teach rhetoric, after all.

Right off, in Book I, he makes much how the "the barbarians" spared residents of Rome who fled to Christian churches, even Pagans. He writes, "For of those who you see insolently and shamelessly insulting the servants of Christ, there are numbers who would not have escaped that destruction and slaughter had they not pretended that they themselves were Christ's servants."

He was not an eyewitness, but let's assume he was right. But what he does not mention is that "the barbarians" themselves--at least some of them, including Alaric--were Christians.

The only problem is that from Augustine's point of view, they were the wrong flavor of Christians. They were Arian Christians, who believed Jesus was created by God the Father instead of having existed eternally as part of the Trinity. Arianism was big among the Germanic tribes, possibly because it made Jesus more of a "culture hero."

The controversy was long and bitter, so Augustine prefers to write about "barbarians" instead of admitting that they were largely Christian barbarians looting a Christian/Pagan city.

That's Book (in other words, "chapter") One. I might have more to say about his take on polytheism later.

Gallimaufry

¶ Most of my blogging energy lately has gone into Nature Blog, but here are some links of interest.

¶ Pagan Web sites and podcasts continue to become more sophisticated. Chris Larsen's Odin Lives site includes archived radio shows and a news portal<