Mythical and Arcadian motifs in opera, classical music, and ballet are nothing new, but it’s always nice to remember that choreographers and composers have been mining these rich themes for generations. For instance, The New York Times reviews the American Ballet Theater’s revival production of “Sylvia” (aka “Sylvia ou La Nymphe de Diane”) and revels in the pure pagan pageantry of it all.

“The crescent, the moon, the horn and the hunt all tie brilliantly into Act I of “Sylvia,” which Ashton choreographed in 1952 and which American Ballet Theater has revived this week at the Metropolitan Opera House. The score is by Léo Delibes. Blow that horn! Or rather, those horns! None of the many hunts in music-drama prepare us for the full blaze that comes with the entrance of this ballet’s huntresses and, finally, Sylvia herself … No character in all ballet — and few in music drama — enters to more splendid music than Sylvia. She and her friends leap and do whipped (fouetté) turns, and the ballet moves into a new kind of scale and energy. Nobody has time to think what this says about gender stereotypes. The huntresses and pastoral hero of “Sylvia” were conceived not by Ashton in 1952 but by Delibes and his Paris colleagues in 1876, when Degas was painting ballet dancers and when, most of us tend to think, ballet stereotypes were thick on the ground.”

This ballet of pagan huntresses in love went on to inspire other works, including the more well-known “Swan Lake”. It’s lovely to see this unique gem get some attention (especially with themes that would delight the Pagan soul), if you’re in New York and want to see experience “Sylvia”, it’s running through Saturday at The Met.

I’m not a fan of Dan Brown’s writing. I think he’s something of a hack, who lucked out by stumbling onto a deep yearning to embrace the divine feminine. The films, thanks partly to director Ron Howard, are far more entertaining, excising much of the tiresome lecturing masquerading as prose in Brown’s novels. One of my only real pleasures in considering the influence of Brown’s career is how he seems to make conservative Catholics (and quite a few conservative Protestants) spend countless hours debunking a popular fiction writer. Enter conservative (Catholic) columnist Ross Douthat, who in his zeal to slam the co-existence of Jesus with Brown’s various New Age/heretical theories does his own sloppy research.

“Brown’s … depiction of the Roman Church’s past constitutes a greatest hits of anti-Catholicism, with slurs invented by 19th-century Protestants jostling for space alongside libels fabricated by 20th-century Wiccans. (If he targeted Judaism or Islam this way, one suspects that no publisher would touch him.) … In the Brownian worldview, all religions — even Roman Catholicism — have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.”

Wiccan-fabricated libels? Oh! You mean the “Burning Times”, right? The old “nine million witches” killed thing. Funny thing about that, it wasn’t a libel fabricated by Wiccans, it was an estimate by an 18th century German scholar which was then propogated (in part) by a 20th century British anthropologist. While some debunking of that estimate already existed in academic circles, it was hardly common reading at the time it was picked up by feminists and early Wiccans (the 1960s and 1970s). In the last twenty years, as the number was successfully reevaluated, modern Paganism has mostly dropped that meme, and those who don’t are often criticiszed within the modern Pagan community. Even Charlotte Allen, who wrote the critical piece from 2001 that Douthat links to, admits that Wiccans and Pagans have mostly moved on from “The Burning Times”.

“Generally speaking, though, Wiccans appear to be accommodating themselves to much of the emerging evidence concerning their antecedents: for example, they are coming to view their ancient provenance as inspiring legend rather than hard-and-fast history. By the end of the 1990s, with the appearance of Davis’s book and then of Hutton’s, many Wiccans had begun referring to their story as a myth of origin, not a history of survival.”

Funny that Douthat, in his zeal to discredit Brown, engages in the very act of libel he seems to disdain. It’s also interesting that he remarks on the fact that Brown wouldn’t write about Judaism in the same manner he writes about Catholicism, since the Catholic Church recently dealt with a scandal regarding their lifting an excommunication from a traditionalist Catholic Bishop who endorsed the the ultimate anti-Judaism tact “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. Glass houses and all that, right? In any case, all this talk about libel and blasphemy is really just a front. What Douthat is really upset about is the fact that we’re entering a post-Christian society where Catholic teachings aren’t given the same deference they once were, and “spiritual but not religious” types are increasingly on the rise.

“The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don’t suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well … These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah — sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity. But the success of this message — which also shows up in the work of Brown’s many thriller-writing imitators — can’t be separated from its dishonesty.”

This is a man who is truly and deeply upset by the fact that he’s living in “Dan Brown’s America”. But I would postulate that he placed himself there. Heresy and eclecticism are the price of freedom, they have always existed and they always will. The vast majority of Americans are still Christian, and Catholics make up a whopping 24% of American adherents. What has changed is that the Catholic church, or any church for that matter, no longer has the power to silence heretics, ruin careers, or ban books. As for Brown’s warmed-over conspiracy theories, I agree with Matthew Yglesias who points out that the Catholic church is custom-made for a good conspiracy-themed fictional yarn.

“You could target Judaism or Islam for criticism in a book, but you simply couldn’t target Judaism or Islam “this way.” The Catholic Church has a centralized bureaucracy and an institutional continuity lasting over a thousand years. That’s good fodder for conspiracy theories. Other religions aren’t organized this way. Protocols of the Elders of Zion had to postulate not only a conspiracy, but the elders themselves, since you can’t have a conspiracy without conspirators.”

There is a very good chance that the Catholic Church was nothing more than a good vehicle for a conspiracy-laden tale that would transmit Brown’s feel-good divine feminine message. By writing one more angry editorial, Douthat not only proves that he’s living in Dan Brown’s America (and hating it), but that he’s willing to be a part of his promotional machinery (cast as the villain, of course).

Head over to the religion journalism blog Get Religion to check out Terry Mattingly’s examination of a recent New York Times write-up on the few enduring lesbian separatist communities. Mattingly rightly asks, where’s the examination of their religion?

But here is the mystery, to me. While the story is saturated with religious images — the sisters in this secret, hidden, gated community live on streets named after goddesses, like Diana Drive — there is no specific content about organized religion. Are the sisters agnostics, pagans, a mixture of various liberal mainline faiths? Are they feminist Catholics? Are any of the sisters ordained? We are not told. They are driven by very religious motivations and they are practicing strict, strict, strict doctrinal separatism. But we do not know if these beliefs link to organized religion — other than faith in radical feminism and to the vows that define their corner of the sexual revolution.

These women have “community full moon circles”, but do they have a Goddess? The article never makes it explicit. I encourage my readers to read both the NYT article, and Mattingly’s post, and leave your two cents.

The New York Times has posted a review of the newly opened exhibition “Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens” at the Onassis Cultural Center. According the the article, a main goal of the show is to correct the misconception that women led a passive existence in Athenian society.

“It is true that they lived with restrictions modern Westerners would find intolerable. Technically they were not citizens. In terms of civil rights, their status differed little from that of slaves. Marriages were arranged; girls were expected to have children in their midteens. Yet, the show argues, the assumption that women lived in a state of purdah, completely removed from public life, is contradicted by the depictions of them in art … it is using art to survey where, within a system of institutionalized restriction, areas of freedom for women lay.”

Where were these areas of freedom? According to the show’s literature, from within a religion that honored goddesses.

“…the exhibition brings together 155 rare and extraordinary archaeological objects in order to re-examine preconceptions about the exclusion of women from public life in ancient Athens. The story told by these objects, and experienced in the galleries, presents a more nuanced picture than is often seen, showing how women’s participation in cults and festivals contributed not only to personal fulfillment in Classical Greece but also to civic identity.”

The show is divided into three sections: “Goddesses and Heroines”, “Women and Ritual”, and “Women and the Cycle of Life”, each presenting a different vantage point to consider women’s roles, both divine and mortal, in the Athenian context. The show runs through May 9th, 2009. If you’re in the New York, New York area, it certainly seems worth a look. One can only imagine how differently Western culture would have developed if, in the gradual arc towards women’s liberation and equality, we had kept the goddesses around.

ADDENDUM: As if by synchronicity, shortly after writing this, I came across a listing for another goddess-themed art exhibition in nearby Brooklyn.

“Nine extraordinary ancient female figures are the focus of the third Herstory Gallery exhibition in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The Fertile Goddess explores these objects that served as a source of inspiration for the depiction of the Fertile Goddess at The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago, on view in the adjacent gallery. The exhibition, which will be on view December 19, 2008, through May 31, 2009, includes both the oldest sculpture in the Brooklyn Museum’s vast collection, made by people living in Mesopotamia in the late fifth millennium b.c.e., and a ceramic figure made by Judy Chicago in 1977.”

For more information on this exhibit, click here. You may also want to check out my blog entry on Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party”. Looks like the beginning of 2009 is shaping up to be pretty friendly to the feminine divine (at least in the art world).

While Pagan-owned shops often act as meeting places and central hubs for the local Pagan community, many of them depend heavily on the curious non-Pagan shopper to pay the rent and keep their lights on. Author and blogger Cintra Wilson does a nice write-up of how New York’s Enchantments (the oldest Witchcraft store in the city) caters to those just looking for a little magic now and then.

“Nancy and I were shopping for luck for our literary projects. “If you’re a writer, Mercury is your patron god,” Ricky said. “He’s all about speed, speech and commerce. New York is his city. There’s a big statue of Mercury at Grand Central station.” Our candles were selected by color, then spoonfuls of powdered incense were burned in the glass candleholders while Kathy and Ricky took out their daggers and carved “magickal seals” into our candles from a guidebook of drawings kept in plastic sleeves in a three-ring binder. Once the candles were carved, they put on latex gloves and rubbed custom oils and glitter into our candles.”

An employee at Enchantments also explains that despite the recent economic downturn, they haven’t seen any sharp decreases in business.

“A financial crash, Kathy agreed, is a good time to be in the occult business: ‘We’re always asked to do love stuff, but lately, it has been way more about jobs — people looking for work and protection of their monies.’”

These Witch/occult shops essentially fulfill the same function that botanicas do for Latino communities. They provide a way to exercise some control over forces in your life that can sometimes seem uncontrollable, and provide consolation and empowerment when you feel you have nowhere else to turn.

“I went. First I got a tarot reading from this absolutely stunning witch, with big blue eyes, tons of black hair, a thick Bronx accent and a huge pentagram necklace. I was weeping, and she was so comforting! So maternal! … This witch gave me an object to project power on, but what the experience really gave me was the ability to see how much power I had on my own. I didn’t need the guy. I got an idea of how to confront my own pain and darkness, and transform it into something positive.”

Let’s hope that all our little Pagan shops find themselves as resistant to our ongoing economic turmoil, and continue to service the needs of their communities, Pagan and non-Pagan alike.

I’m still wondering if I should feel slightly offended by a recent New York Times article profiling the abhorrent crimes and mental breakdown of Army Specialist Robert H. Marko. Marko, who believed he was an “alien dinosaur-like creature, and that he would transform from his human form into his Black Raptor form on his 21st birthday”, had a history of neurological problems but was still classified as “deployable” by the Army. NYT reporters Dan Frosch and Lizette Alvarez then chose a somewhat insulting descriptor for Marko’s worldview.

“After joining the Army, his “unusual beliefs” in his Black Raptor alter-ego resulted in his being referred for psychiatric evaluations three times. Ultimately, the beliefs came to be viewed by his mental health evaluators as a religion, of sorts, like Wicca.”

Like what? I’m not sure how I should read this, that a demented philosophy that drove a troubled young man to rape and murder people is somehow “like Wicca”? That “Wicca” is now a easy way to convey a non-typical belief system? Was “Wicca” as a descriptor used by military mental health evaluators, or was it placed there by the NYT reporters?

Whether it was the military who classified a delusional man with a “history of behavioral health issues” as having a Wicca-like religion, or it was the reporters searching for a way to describe someone who thought they were a dinosaur, we have a problem. Either there are Army psychiatrists who feel Wicca is little better than mental illness (which could harm Pagan soldiers needing help), or we have journalists who think describing a mentally ill killer’s worldview as “like Wicca” is acceptable.

The New York Times reports on the recent increase of custody cases that are centering around religion. While at one time custody arrangements were often fairly simple, with the mother of the child usually gaining custodial duties, nowadays more and more parents are battling it out in court and issues over religion are being used as a wedge to prove unfitness. A trend that is making many judges uneasy.

“Judges do not want to take on custody disputes rooted in religion, said lawyers like Gaetano Ferro, who until recently served as president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. Mr. Ferro said, “How will a judge say in any rational fashion that Islam is better than Buddhism, Catholicism better than Judaism, or Methodism better than Pentecostalism?” As a result, more and more states have tried to keep custody disputes out of court by mandating mediation. But the effect has been piecemeal, and religious disputes have proven to be among the most difficult to resolve, lawyers said.”

A consequence of this trend is that custodial parents who belong to a religion that may seem strange or “cultish” to an outsider are getting their rights challenged more often, and in some cases losing custody to the parent who belongs to a more “normal” faith.

“We were easy targets because we were made to look like cultists,” Mrs. Snider, 36, said. “I think whether anyone admits it or not, almost all of the ruling had to do with religion. Nothing I had done was called into question except that.”

This trend has had reverberations within the larger modern Pagan movement. Several recent custody hearings have had the parents adherence to a Pagan faith factor into the case. One of the most notable being the infamous SubGenius custody battle, in which a mother lost custody of her son, and didn’t get it back until the biological father was imprisoned for drunken driving, she had racked up over 100,000 dollars in court costs, and was forced by a judge to remove all materials relating to the Church of the SubGenius from her home. Even after all that, she still only has “temporary” custody.

“Magdalen still does not have permanent custody of her son. Judge Punch took the case back and, for whatever reason, he has only given her a temporary custody order. This means that when Jeff gets out of jail, he could (in theory) take up the legal reins and continue harassing her once again.”

So how do we solve these problems over faith, divorce, and custody? Some states are hoping that increased mediation will help solve some of these problems.

“Some states like California and Connecticut have taken innovative steps to get parents to resolve custody issues outside court. In Connecticut, for example, those seeking a court order have to meet with a family-relations specialist in an effort to negotiate. If that fails, they attend a daylong session to settle their differences before a panel that includes a lawyer and a mental health professional.”

Meanwhile, some lawyers are pressing to give the children in such cases greater autonomy at ever younger ages.

“If Julie Ann Bergmann (the mother) and her supporters win this case it could create a legal precedent in which a minor as young as 13 could choose their own religious life despite the wishes of the parents. The ramifications for modern Paganism are immediately clear. A child who converts to a modern Pagan faith could refuse to attend Christian Church or be forced into a school that inhibited his or her religious choices. It would also help protect Pagan parents from custody challenges brought by Christian relatives (so long as the child expressed a preference for modern Paganism).”

Neither solution has made much headway in the legal system, and it seems likely that these sorts of cases will happen more often as religious minorities, and non-mainstream variations of the dominant monotheisms, continue to grow. Eventually, one of two roads will have to be taken. Completely leave out matters of faith from custody battles, or directly involve faith communities and experts on religion in the custody process. Neither path will please everyone, but our current system seems far too whimsical and uninformed to make wise decisions involving children and religions outside the mainstream.

The New York Times reports that due to growing pressure and criticism, the federal Bureau of Prisons is restoring the chapel libraries that had been purged of all books not on their new “safe” lists.

“The bureau will begin immediately to return to chapel libraries materials that were removed in June 2007, with the exception of any publications that have been found to be inappropriate, such as material that could be radicalizing or incite violence. The review of all materials in chapel libraries will be completed by the end of January 2008.”

However, the secretly created lists won’t be going away, they have simply decided to leave the libraries intact until their lists are “complete”. While this is a step in the right direction, the essential problem with the lists is still there.

“This is a positive step: it means they are not throwing the baby out with the bath water,” Mr. Moore [director of prison policy oversight at Aleph] said of keeping books on the shelves for now. “But our position is there should not be a list of what should be on the shelves, but what shouldn’t be.”

There is also still no word on who was consulted to make these lists, a fact that should disturb anyone worried about bias and conflicts of interest in the list-making. Elysia Gallo, an acquisitions editor for Llewellyn Worldwide, claims that their company wasn’t consulted in the making of the list, and that they have no idea who was consulted.

“I think I can safely say that publishers were not consulted. Everyone here at Llewellyn was surprised and troubled when we first heard the news of this secret list. I think we can *all* agree that we would much rather have Pagans and seekers in prison be able to read anything and everything that is donated to chaplain libraries than simply what is on a list like this. It is a real shame for all religions involved. Chaplains were already selectively screening out books that include nudity, incite violence, etc. etc. from what I’ve heard anyway. Why try to be all pre-emptive by making a pre-approved list, rather than letting the chaplains handle these issues on a case-by-case basis as they always have? I have talked with others about this and so far no one knows who these mystery list-makers could be.”

So while it is good that the chapel libraries are being restored, the core issues haven’t changed, and we may see a similar purge take place again at the end of January. The federal Bureau of Prisons needs to be transparent as to who their religious “experts” are, and how these lists are being made. Better yet, they need to abandon this unconstitutional policy that serves only their convenience, not the safety of Americans or prisoners.

Today’s New York Times has published the leaked lists of approved books for prison chapel libraries. The lists, a part of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ controversial “Standardized Chapel Library Project”, limits approved books in hopes of eliminating works that “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

“The federal Bureau of Prisons is under pressure from members of Congress and religious groups to reverse its decision to purge the shelves of prison chapel libraries of all religious books and materials that are not on the bureau’s lists of approved resources. Outrage over the bureau’s decision has come from both conservatives and liberals, who say it is inappropriate to limit inmates to a religious reading list determined by the government.”

You can get a PDF of the list for Pagan books, here. Also of interest might be the Yoruba and Native American lists. From a quick read-through it seems like a list that will make Llewellyn happy, a large chunk of the selections are published by them (including several selections by Silver RavenWolf, D.J. Conway, and Ted Andrews among others). Asatru and Heathenry seems to be well-represented with six books by Steve McNallen of the Asatru Folk Assembly, along with works by Galina Krasskova, Mark Puryear, and Swain Wodening.

Some of the selections weren’t surprising, like Margot Adler’s “Drawing Down the Moon” and Starhawk’s “The Spiral Dance”, but others, like Edgar Cayce’s “Gems and Stones”, seemed a bit out of place. There is only one book by Aleister Crowley allowed, “The Book of Thoth”, and a few titles that seem aimed at Celtic Reconstructionists (“The Apple Branch”, “The Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology”). But even with 131 book choices, there are several glaring omissions, including an almost complete lack of academic-oriented Pagan books, not a single book on Thelema, and no books by important founding figures like Gerald Gardner or Doreen Valiente.

But no matter how good (or bad) the list as a whole may be (and we still have no idea who composed the list), it still represents a dangerous encroachment on religious liberties, and has been gaining criticism from both sides of the political spectrum.

“The Republican Study Committee, a caucus of some of the most conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives, sent a letter on Wednesday to the bureau’s director, Harley G. Lappin, saying, ‘We must ensure that in America the federal government is not the undue arbiter of what may or may not be read by our citizens’ … Sojourners, a liberal evangelical group based in Washington, sent an alert to its members, who within 48 hours sent the bureau more than 15,000 e-mail messages urging it to scrap the policy. The issue is also a hot topic on conservative Christian talk radio shows.”

But despite the flood of criticisms, the BOP is standing firm and refusing to reconsider its policies. So it looks like changes to this newly restrictive measure will either have to come in the form of legislation from congress, or the class-action lawsuit currently in motion. In the meantime, it looks like the prison system’s “secret chiefs” get to decide which books Pagan prisoners can read.

The New York Times weighs in on the growing controversy concerning a new policy set by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which tightly restricts approved religious titles to prison libraries.

“Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries. The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.”

This secret list (the BOP won’t release it to the public) claims that 20 religious categories (”from Bahaism to Yoruba”) have a list of “up to” (but in some cases, most likely less than) 150 approved titles. These titles have been selected by “chaplains and scholars” (but no list of these individuals has been released, either), in order to avoid works that “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.” Considering the huge gray areas in terms like “radicalize” or “disparage” it is unsurprising that the move has already sparked a class-action lawsuit and serious criticism.

“Government does have a legitimate interest to screen out things that tend to incite violence in prisons,” Mr. [Douglas] Laycock [professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School] said. “But once they say, ‘We’re going to pick 150 good books for your religion, and that’s all you get,’ the criteria has become more than just inciting violence. They’re picking out what is accessible religious teaching for prisoners, and the government can’t do that without a compelling justification. Here the justification is, the government is too busy to look at all the books, so they’re going to make their own preferred list to save a little time, a little money.”

In addition, according to religious scholars who have seen the list, the title selection is “inhibiting”, and favors “a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism”. So naturally, one has to wonder what the book selections are for modern Pagan and Heathen religions. Which books were approved for Wicca? For Asatru? Which “experts” picked the books for these categories, and how many titles total are allowed in prison libraries? Have innocent non-extremist books been removed because they didn’t make the list?

“The bureau has not provided additional money to prisons to buy the books on the lists, so in some prisons, after the shelves were cleared of books not on the lists, few remained.”

No matter what your opinion concerning the rights of prisoners, this move seems completely misguided and almost designed to cause controversy and confusion amongst the religious organizations that provide chaplaincy services to inmates. I’ll be watching this story as it develops, and if I can I’ll try to find out the “approved” Pagan books. If you are a Pagan/Heathen working in the prison system, and have any information on removed books, please drop me a note by leaving a comment on this post, or sending me an e-mail.