Fisher at Carhenge

On the way home from North Dakota, Fisher and I stopped at Carhenge. The Wikipedia article compares it to its inspiration in England.

Late Harvest

Pastor Flaten displays a firm grip of the obvious, this week when the sound of grain driers dominates the town and grain cars clank on the railroad tracks. That sermon will just write itself, you betcha.

The actual harvest—the one that feeds us—is running late, however.

All of this is prelude to saying that I am on the road, but more serious blogging will resume in a few days.

Off to CESNUR

After the better part of two days on the road, M. and I arrived this afternoon at a Homestead Suites hotel in Salt Lake City, where I will be attending the CESNUR conference.

The trip started off on a sour note, because my previously trusty-if-aging G4 PowerBook laptop developed a series disk-access problem on Monday night, taking the last version of my paper with it.

So, fellow professors, if your students say that the computer crashed the night before their papers were due, sometimes they might be telling the truth. (On the other hand, "grandmother's funeral" is probably made up.)

I will be reading partly from handwritten notes on Friday, I suspect.

We began with a long detour to Colorado Springs to drop the PowerBook off at Voelker Research, where the service techs considered it gravely and offered a 50/50 chance of data recovery in five or six days.

Ah, Colorado Springs, where there is no east-west through highway and never has been. Eventually by a series of zigs and zags known to locals we cleared town about 2 p.m. Then Ute Pass, Wilkerson Pass, Hoosier Pass, Vail Pass and westward into the desert until we finally called it a day in the motel oasis of Green River, Utah.

Every time I go through Green River I more and more get the feeling that it is picking up the people who cannot afford to live in trendier Moab.

Weirdly, it was raining in Green River today. That must be an event. It turned the land a darker shade of tan.

In fact, it's raining all over Utah, as witness the photo of the hotel's back garden, which looks semi-tropical. I was happy to drop the bags, pop the top off a bottle of Polygamy Porter (which ought to be the official beer of CESNUR), and relax.

M. has discovered that Whole Foods, Nordstrom's, Barnes & Noble, a public library, and a large park are all within about two blocks, so she has everything she needs, she says.

On the Road

I leave today for the annual CESNUR conference on new religious movements, to be held this year in Salt Lake City, so you know which not-so-new-anymore religious movement will be heavily discussed in the presentations.

My paper is a thrown-together mess, but at least it has me thinking about how it could become the introduction to a book that I could write—or co-write, perhaps. More on that as it develops.

On the Road

I will be on the road or in the land of longleaf pine for the next four days, so posting will probably be non-existent until around May 5th.

Yes, vitamin C and oshá are on the menu. I have a magical faith in oshá, especially from the Taos Herb Co. I just squirted some tincture into my wine, which makes it taste sort of like retsina.

Meanwhile, links:

•Fifty things every 18-year-old should know. Some of them would have helped me, for sure.

•Here is a Web page of re-creations of ancient statuary -- which was not all white marble! (One of the small details that I appreciated in the Oliver Stone's Alexander, for all its other goofs.)

Midway through AAR

If I come away from this year's AAR annual meeting with any one Big Idea, it is that I am glad to see Pagan Studies moving away from "Wiccans and Odinists," as Jone Salomonsen put it, and towards a broader sense of a "a way to think about religion" (or religious behavior). Our joint session with the Religion and Popular Culture Group started the weekend off well, and presenting a co-written work-in-progress paper and slide show there got me thinking about how I want to return to the whole nexus of nature religion, civil religion, and small-p paganism as well as thinking about capital-P Paganism.

Meanwhile, the election that has lasted forever is almost over!

Last night, from the 23rd floor of the Chicago Hilton Towers, I looked down a floodlit, fenced-off portion of Grant Park, where Sen. Obama's victory rally will be held. The mayor has "suggested" that businesses in this part of town close at 3 p.m. on Election Day. No doubt they expect a riot if Obama loses -- and probably if he wins as well, by the same mob-logic that caused violence and destruction in Philadelphia when the Phillies won the World Series.

Food of the Gods

One of the benefits of eating in Chicago's Greektown is that it almost feels like a religious act when the restaurants are named Zeus and Venus. ("Venus" is Aphrodite -- in Greek -- on the screen-savers at the waiters' computer terminals.)

Going out to eat becomes embodied religion. "Corpospirituality," as Michael York would have it.

My friends are in awe of the Cyprian's Mousakas Tsoukas.

Packing for Cold and Beasts

As a post-equinoctal thunderstorm comes over the ridge, M. and I are packing for a little road trip to see some charismatic megafauna.

I have checked my camera gear, but I really should test the bear spray. (You can guess where we are headed.)

Blogging will be slow or sporadic for the next week.

Crossing a Different Divide

A typical prairie slough in the Sheyenne River drainage. Cookie, a German wirehaired pointer, is looking for sharp-tailed grouse.

I left my hosts' home in North Dakota on Wednesday for the two-day drive home. On I-94 east of Jamestown, N.D., I saw a sign proclaiming the Continental Divide, elevation 1,400-something feet.

"What the hell?" I thought, being a good Coloradan. "What is the Continental Divide doing here? And so low!"

Then it hit me: I had spent the previous few days along and near the Sheyenne River, which flows into the Red River of the North, which flows into Lake Winnipeg, which in turn discharges into Hudson Bay.

In other words, I had just crossed from the Arctic Ocean drainage back into the Atlantic Ocean's. Almost immediately the land became drier, with fewer sloughs, and I started spotting a few center-pivot sprinklers. Yikes, the Arctic! And without even entering Canada.

Autumn, however, has progressed farther here in southern Colorado: willows and Gambel oaks are turning color.

The Pulley that Broke the Plains

A close-up of pulleys and chains on that operated an old McCormick combine, one designed to be tractor-pulled rather than self-propelled.

I am no expert on agricultural implements, but I suspect that it dates from the 1950s, no later.

It seems to be part of the prairie aesthetic to park obsolete threshing machines, etc., on tops of knolls, either as local landmarks or memorials to farming as it was. (Or because the nearest scrap-metal dealer is 70 miles away.) This one is near Finley, North Dakota.

This post's title is a weak allusion to the movie The Plow that Broke the Plains, made during the Dust Bowl and something anyone interested in North American ecology should watch.

Prairie Fog

Two days ago: morning fog creeping west from the Missouri River, south of Fort Pierre, South Dakota.

On the Road

Blogging will be sketchy for the next week, as I am on the road, my destination being first, a small town and an old friend in eastern North Dakota -- and then possibly the Turtle Mountain area of that state.

Tonight I fetched up in Valentine, Nebraska (more than halfway there!), which in some respects is a typical Plains town that smells like cows and diesel fuel, but which is surrounded by some fascinating country, including the Sand Hills.

On the Road in Virginia: Monticello

Today to Monticello to visit the First Citizen, Thos. Jefferson, but he was unable to Receive us. Hundreds of his Fellow Citizens waited upon him also, diverting themselves with Tours of the House and Gardens, which are both Marvelous.

M. and I walked up to the house from the parking area. We came to the family cemetery. I saw his tombstone and started weeping and had to move away.

"Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia."

Then we walked in the vegetable garden and orchard. I picked a few cherries—they seem to be going to waste. I hope he won't mind.

The house truly is a marvel. If he lived today, Jefferson no doubt would have a high-tech house with photo-voltaic solar panels, hydroponic gardens, and a garage full of classic and hybrid cars. And he would finally be able to serve fine Virginia wines.

And thence to Charlottesville, where we shall remain the next three Days.

The base of Jefferson's obelisk tombstone is covered with coins. Some kind of unconscious folk-paganism going on there: offerings to the genius of Thomas Jefferson. I would have burned a pinch of incense had any been available.

Travel, Tourism, Pilgrimage

Blogging will be sporadic, or maybe nonexistent, for the next week as I head for the Mysterious East (Virginia) for M.'s family reunion.

I do want to make a little bit of a pilgrimage along the way, and if it happens, I'll blog it.

Right now, I am obsessed with the thought of flying into a strange airport, renting a strange car, and driving three hours at night through a mostly unfamiliar area to find a place that I have never seen before.

Unlike your typical road warrior, I have to do that only about once a year.

Really, it's nothing compared to what some people have faced:

I had decided quite definitely that if I could find the right kind of Kurdish brigand — and the hills around Kuchan were infested with them — then by means of a goodly sum of money which I felt confident of getting, and the promise of some plunder into the bargain, I would be able to get through the mountains with explosives.

Now that is what is meant by "travel, not tourism." It's from The Spy Who Disappeared by Reginald Teague-Jones, a memoir of his months in the Caspian Sea region during the Russian Civil War.

My pilgrimage connects with that era too.

But I all I need is someone helpful at the Avis counter, not Kurdish brigands. (Imagining an Avis counter manned by Kurdish brigands ... Like this?)

At least we can come back by train.

All Charged Up

M. and I are preparing to hit the road to where we can eat some good red chile sauce and look at some 17th-century churches. So what am I doing? Charging ...

• the iPod
• the digital camera
• the cell phone
• the laptop computer (correction, twoPowerBooks. M. needs her in case of student crises.
  

It didn 't use to be so complicated. We packed clothes.

But this way you might get to see a photo from where we are going.

Vikings Are Coming

Another reconstructed longship is on the whale path headed west, and it has made it to the Orkneys.

The plan is to sail through the Orkney Islands in order, among other things, to avoid the Pentland Firth. That this is not a sailing strategy of recent date is evident from the old Nordic texts. They also describe the dangers of Péttlandsfirdi and speak of the shipwrecks in Svelgr “the most gigantic of all whirlpools”.

A running historical commentary is here.

"Travel by Train"

If I had leaned far enough out of my window at the Oxford Hotel to get the full text of the sign at Denver's Union Station, I would have fallen three stories, which would have ruined M.'s and my trip to the Mendocino coast.

And if I had remembered to pack the USB cable to connect camera to PowerBook, I might have published a day-by-day photo journal. And that journal might have bored some readers to death.

So here is a synopsis, with links instead.

We took Amtrak to Sacramento, then drove to Clear Lake, because I have a fondness for down-at-heel resort towns, like Truth or Consequences, N.M., or Manitou Springs, Colo., the way it was when we lived there. We spent one day just zig-zagging around Lake, Sonoma, and Mendocino counties, being auto tourists.

We stayed at a 19th-century B&B, ate beyond our budget, and of course bought wine. And more wine. (I have a sentimental fondness for Pedroncelli, even though it is not one of the fawncy post-wine boom vineyards, based on a strange dream-like experience during my college years.) And beer, just to be fair.

And then retraced our steps.

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.

Post-travel update

I came home Saturday night the 16th with a flourishing head cold that I probably picked up on the previous Monday's flights between Colorado Springs and South Carolina. It manifested on Thursday morning--that interval seems like about the right incubation time--and made the last three days of the conference I was attending much less fun.

M., meanwhile, had left on June 6 to see relatives in St. Louis. Her return trip on the 11th was disrupted, but this time, Amtrak did right by her--nothing like the trip last winter where we ended up taking a cab from Philadelphia to Washington.

She was supposed to meet the westbound Southwest Chief in Kansas City, but it had derailed on its way from Chicago. This time, Amtrak put her and other delayed connecting passengers in the nearby Westin Hotel. And the next morning she was able to continue on to Colorado.

People on the derailed train were bused to KC. Several told her that the engineer had handled the derailment--possibly caused by vandalism--like a pro. There were no serious injuries, which is one thing that I like about trains: the wrecks are more survivable.

Meanwhile I "enjoyed" a series of virus-laden metal tubes. No big problems, although we sat for twenty minutes on the tarmac in Chicago, passengers fanning themselves with the safety cards from the seatback pockets, while a problem with one engine's bleeder valve (??) was corrected. It was not as bad as Rod Dreher's experience with Delta:

This is going to be a miserable summer for air travel, with sprawling terminals serving as Dante-esque cities of woe. Abandon hope all ye who enter here – and don't forget the Advil.

So I did almost none of the writing that I hoped to do outside the conference sessions, there on a beautiful campus with wireless access everywhere. Yesterday I finished, I hope, an anthology contribution that has been hanging over my head. Now on to some book reviews and an article revision.

Amtrak Heaven, Amtrak Hell--and all for Pagan Studies

Regular readers know that M. and I like train travel. We saw both sides of it on our just-completed trip to Washington, DC.

The Southwest Chief was on time to La Junta, Colorado, where we meet it, but the ticket agent was muttering about possible stoppage due to high winds.

Somewhere in western Kansas, we ended up parked for five hours. Apparently there is an Amtrak regulation against prairie travel when winds exceed 50 mph, and according to a crew member, winds at the Dodge City airport were 63 mph. Can those double-decker Superliner cars blow over?

Late to Chicago, we missed our connection on Capitol Limited to Washington, but did make it onto the Lakeshore Limited, which had been held in the station. Thus began the great Rust Belt tour: northern Indiana and Ohio, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and down the Hudson River to New York City. This time, our sleeper was one of the one-level Viewliner cars, designed to fit into Penn Station.

I could never keep count of all the old brick warehouses, piles of scrap metal, and empty factories. What is the quarter-mile long three-story white brick building in Utica, New York, that looks empty? There is just so much stuff in this country.

We arrived in New York about 8 p.m. and an Amtrak representative promised us seats on a regional train down to Washington, DC, which would have gotten us there by midnight--eight hours late, but we could live with it.

But what she did not tell us was that a freight train had derailed south of Baltimore, interrupting the "catenary" electrical system and stopping commuter trains in that sector. We got this sad news from the conductor somewhere around Trenton: our train would stop at Philadelphia.

It was too late for a Greyhound bus--the last one had left at 10:15 p.m. The rental car counters were all closed. Amtrak's Philadelphia agents were flailing around, first promising buses and then saying that there were none, and that Baltimore was worse, anyway.

Eventually, like some other passengers, we partnered with a third traveler and rented a cab. Yes, from Phillie to Washington by taxi, driven by an immigrant Indian driver who knew how to get onto Interstate 95 south, but after that had no idea where he was going.

Neither M. nor I knew our way around either. Fortunately the other guy knew the main roads--and somewhere in the south part of downtown, the brotherhood of cabdrivers was invoked: our driver pulled alongside a DC cab, rolled down his window, and shouted [assume melodious Indian accent]: “Where is Hotel Washington?” And soon we were there, heads hitting the pillow about 3 a.m.

And so I slept until about 10:30 a.m. and then trudged off to the Convention Center, arriving late for the all-day Pagan studies conference, but delighted to be there and able to say that I had paid all that money out of my devotion to Pagan studies.

It was totally worth it.

On the return trip, we were only slightly late into Chicago and right on time in La Junta. Boarding the Southwest Chief in Chicago, we looked around and realized that we were in the same "roomette" in the same sleeping car that we had just vacated six hours earlier. That never happened before. Perhaps it was . . . a sign.

Thursday, Nov. 16, apparently was no picnic for air travelers either. I spoke to one attendee who had been dropped in Pittsburgh and sent by bus to Baltimore. Others had similar stories. The travel system is complex and fragile. One thunderstorm at an airport can back up air travel all around the country, so I cannot be too hard on Amtrak for its high-wind policy.

On the other hand, I have been talking with Customer Relations and will be seeking some sort of refund, having bought Chicago-Washington sleeper tickets but having been dumped in Philadelphia.

Tag: Amtrak

We have a Pagan Studies series!

With Barb Davy's Introduction to Pagan Studies, we now have three books in Rowman & Littlefield's Pagan Studies series.

And three of something truly is a "series," right?

Tag: Pagan Studies

A fall from a height

I am in Colorado Springs today, where famous evangelical pastor Ted Haggard's fall dominates the news.

Frankly, to borrow the name of a better-known blog, I just don't "get" his kind of religion. A 14,000-member megachurch? Why? So you can sit on your butt and be preached at and sung at among a huge crowd of strangers?

My dislike for Haggard's approach is more than theological. It is partly aesthetic--the whole megamall megachurch entertainment thing. And it's partly because of the way that New Lifers regarded the most interesting parts of Colorado Springs (such as the Old North End and Tejon Street) as controlled by Satan or something. I wrote elsewhere that they do not understand the gods of the city, only the gods of the suburban shopping mall.

One excerpt: "[Jeff] Sharlet makes a good case for New Lifers as exurban parasites, taking the services that the city provides but being unwilling to pay for them, either financially or psychically."

Anyway, he is toast now, although there will probably be some sort of public-repentence-as-career move. From a Christian perspective, LaShawn Barber's coverage is about the best.

And that's the news from "Fort God."

Leaving the meat uncovered

Sheik Taj Din al-Hilaly, Australia's senior Islamic cleric, explains rape and how women serve Satan:

“If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park, or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, then whose fault will it be, the cats, or the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the disaster.

I just felt that I needed to share that. Pagan cat-owners, please don't be offended.

Tags: Islam, Women, Satan

Under the Spell of Sulis-4

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

At today's exchange rate, it costs US $16.38 to tour the excavated ruins of the Roman baths that give Bath its name. I paid the entry fee twice, last Sunday and last Monday. It was worth it.

Full of tourists as it is, the place still has a presence. Celtic British holy site, Roman temple-baths complex, Dark Ages ruin, medieval hospital for "leprosy" (whatever they meant by that term back then--any skin disease, apparently), 18th-century fashionable watering hole . . . layers on layers. And underneath it all the sacred spring still flows, 13 liters per second, or 250,000 gallons per day, however you wish to measure it.

LEFT: Diorama of a Roman priest with two visitors to the temple-baths complex. The temple of Minerva Sulis is in the background.

I had stayed at the White Hart Inn with seven friends; six returned to their homes in the UK after the conference, leaving just Doug Ezzy and me (the "rude colonials"), so we found new lodgings nearby at No. 3 Caroline Buildings and stayed on. After a "full English breakfast" on Sunday the 27th of June (a meal that seems always to include baked beans--I had forgotten that), we walked to the site of the baths.

They give you one of those audio guide receivers to listen to, as many museums do. Its soundtrack is a little too fond of Roman trumpet blasts, but they also include, for instance, the screamed Latin curse of a woman throwing a scrap of lead with a curse written on it into the sacred spring. Folks used to do that a lot, along with their votive offerings.

By the time I arrived at the dedicatory altars (placed in the sanctuary in fulfillment of someone's vow) and the tombstones, I was there. I don't mean some big reincarnational flashback; I've had those (maybe), and this was not the same. But I half-lost track of Doug, and the clusters of tourists were in the background. Here, underground as the site now is, I was ready to do it all: to cast my offerings into the water (still done), pay honor to Minerva Sulis (yes), and then submerge myself (sorry, not permitted). Only a clandestine dip of fingers, in defiance of the posted notice (not sanitary!).

Instead, the nearest thing is to go upstairs into the 18th-century Pump Room and to pay 50 pence (90 cents) to a man in wig and knee britches who decorously passes you a glass tumbler full of the water, tasting of rust and sulfur, and drink it down, down, down.

Not enough. Doug and I left to have a quick pint of the local Blackthorn cider with Alan Richardson and his lady friend, Margaret--Alan's new biography of the magician William Gray, The Old Sod, was recently published by Ignotus Press. And Doug went on to continue his interview of British teen witches for a study that he is conducting together with Helen Berger. And I was up the next morning and back to the Roman baths.

I let the audio receiver hang from its cord, instead just walking the ancient pavements, listening, looking, feeling. And taking pictures. Maybe taking pictures is a votive act itself, sometimes--perhaps there is a paper there or at least a couple of paragraphs. No doubt, had the Empire lasted, the priests of Sulis would be selling disposable cameras at a stall in the temple courtyard--or they would have leased the concession to someone else to do it. Pagan religions, after all, delight in the tangible. The relic, the souvenir--that is one of the Pagan substrata that underly the so-called world religions. We want to experience the gods with all our senses, so a soak would have been nice too. Instead, you get the T-shirts and the Aquae Sulis bath products in the museum shop. Oh well, it's a handsome T-shirt.

This 3.1 MB video clip pans across the Roman pool (facing east), showing the 19th-century terrace above the pool with Victorian statuary, various tourists, and a glimpse of the abbey in the background.

This 1.4 MB video clip pans from the opposite side, looking down into the entrance to the West Baths.

And then on to Bristol, for a too-short, 24-hour visit with Ronald Hutton, and then bus-bus-airplane-airplane-Jeep and home.

Under the Spell of Sulis-3

Part 1 Part 2

RIGHT: Indigenous Avon skipper

The first evening of the consciousness conference ended with a cruise into the English rain forest, in the company of indigenous shamans. Our boat moved at a stately 5 knots or so down the dark and shimmering Avon, away from the town and into a green tunnel: the sinister Salix, the ghostly Umbellifereae. Techno/world music thumped in the main saloon in the indigenous dusk until, by a deserted mission station at the water's edge, our indigenous pilot swung the bow around, we returned through the ancient Weston lock, and glided back from the green tunnel into the stone walls of dreaming Bath.



In this video clip, the rain-forest cruise is leaving Bath, heading down the River Avon. Watch your head.

Under the Spell of Sulis-2

But before I could visit the temple of Minerva Sulis, there was the conference to attend. I arrived midway through the first day, 24 June, considerably jet-lagged, after a journey on two airplanes, two trains, and my feet.

Arriving at The Forum, a 1930s movie palace now home of the Bath City Church, I was a little perplexed by the church's name on the marquee. But the building looked right, and once inside, I knew.

For that weekend, the stage was decorated with potted Salvia divinorum, San Pedro cactus, morning glory, and other interesting plants--not quite the BCC style, I'm sure. But they fit with an auditorium full of psychonauts, astrologers, Pagans, and (mostly Pagan) academics.

We presenters really had only 20 minutes out of the allotted 30, once you subtract the introduction and the question-and-answer period. Some people (like me) still wrote out papers with citations, such for our own security, while knowing that we would have to condense them drastically.

My list of people whom I knew of but had never met included the grand couple of psychoactive chemistry, Alexander and Ann Shulgin, as well as two outstanding astrologers, Robert Hand from the US and Liz Greene from England, not to mention the two German ethnobotanists, Christian Raetsch and Claudia Mueller-Ebeling.

More to come. Meanwhile, some views of Bath.

Under the Spell of Sulis-1

Back from England, I am planning several blog posts as I edit the photos and video clips to go with them.

Left: the base of a column that once helped to support a high, vaulted roof over the main swimming pool in the Roman baths, rebuilt in the 2nd century CE., when the town was known as Aquae Sulis, the waters of the goddess Minerva Sulis.

I spent four days in Bath, the town that grew up around the only significant hot springs in England, which have been a site of worship, therapy, and pleasure-seeking for centuries--and under Roman rule, visitors could have combined all three in a way never since equaled.

To get a feel for Bath, you might imagine what Santa Fe, New Mexico, might have been like if the center of town included the hot springs from Ojo Caliente or Jemez. Like Santa Fe, Bath is clogged with tourists, every third business is a restaurant, and you probably want a fat bank account to live there, and yet, underneath, its energy is flowing.

For me, a bonus to visiting Bath and the nearby port city of Bristol is that when making hotel reservations, etc., I never had to spell out my surname. Everyone was familiar with it.

More soon. . .

Southwest Chief

Here's a snapshot of the platform after Mary & I left the train in La Junta, Colorado.




















More blogging soon as I get back into writing. I did manage about 300 words on the issue of "family tradition" (fam-trad) witchcraft before my PowerBook battery got dangerously low as we rolled across southern Illinois