Starhawk at Occupy Santa Cruz. Photo by Matt Fitt, Santa Cruz IMC.
“I so strongly believe that the world needs a positive vision of the future right now. I can’t think of any movie that projects a positive vision of a future here on earth. How can we create it if we can’t envision it? A friend confessed to me the other day that she and everyone she knows thinks it’s already too late, that we’re past the point of no return. I don’t believe that. I believe that the earth is resilient and creative—and we are agents of that creative force called to reinvent our way of life right now. If we can give people some hope, some direction and some inspiration, it seems worth all the risks and the work!”
“What it’s not: It’s not a trailer for the movie, in the sense that a trailer is a selection of scenes to build interest for a movie that’s already been made. We haven’t made it yet—and when we do we still intend to make a live-action, feature film with real actors, not an animation. But until we get the financing to shoot the film, we can’t put together scenes that don’t yet exist. So we’ve exercised our creativity to show you a bit of our underlying concept, together with the art and music we have been able to create thanks to the amazing support we’ve already received. So think of it more as a video calling card, something we can use to introduce the project to investors and potential collaborators.”
The video narration is by actress Olympia Dukakis, who has also agreed to star in the film. A closed captioned version of the video can be found, here.
Considering the pace of pitching and making a movie in Hollywood, they don’t call it “development hell” for nothing, it may be several more years before a film is actually made. Then again, if the production team is able to find backers, and a studio (small or large) expresses interest, things could ramp up rather quickly. The Fifth Sacred Thing website will most likely have ongoing updates.
I think a “Fifth Sacred Thing” film could be a welcome antidote to the bulk of post-apocalyptic films that either depict wastelands, unending horrors, or fascist media-controlled enclaves where teenagers are forced to fight for our amusement. A film that posits a humanity able to change, grow, and build something new together in the face of collapse instead of endlessly tear each other apart seems like an antidote that our culture might be ready for. Here’s hoping!
I just got back from seeing the latest “witch” film, Beautiful Creatures. It is a supernatural love-story adapted from a popular young-adult novel of the same name by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. The story tells of Ethan, a mortal boy, falling in love with Lena, a young witch, or “caster” to use the film’s politically correct term. Tension builds as Lena’s 16th birthday approaches, at which she will be chosen for either the dark or the light.
On my drive home from the theater, the wheels began spinning in my head – age 16, light vs. dark, young love. The narrative fits so perfectly into the allegorical language of Hollywood teenage witch caster films. My mind is still spinning.
For those of you who haven’t read my bio, I am a film scholar. I spent many years writing about the mediation and impact of visual imagery. The release of Beautiful Creatures has provided me with the incentive to dust-off an old dissertation proposal, Visual Representations of the Witch in Hollywood Cinema: An historical analysis. However, I can’t do this in one post. Over some indeterminate period of time I will explore the topic, in-between news outbreaks and other stories. I’m thrilled to see just what this work will conjure.
(One important note, for my purposes: A witch is a witch. A caster is a little wheel on a piece of furniture. )
A few weeks ago, Jason asked, “What does the witch do?” The answer to this question is complex because film art is complex. It’s a narrative form with a definitive language and particular mythology, which speaks to us through a variety of technical elements including; visuals, sound, and story. Each film production unit has a slightly different language. For example, India’s film language is different from France’s. American Independent films are different from Hollywood films.
So, let’s talk Hollywood. Since its inception, Hollywood has been an integral part of the American pop-culture paradigm, one that both reflects and informs our culture. Hollywood gives us what we want as well as attempting to shape our opinions. In the 1930s, musicals, such as Busby Berkley’s 42nd Street (1933), were an attractive distraction from the Depression. In the 1940s, Hollywood released war films, such as Flying Tigers (1941) or Casablanca (1943) , to encourage support for American involvement in WWII. Hollywood films are an excellent gauge of the “pulse” of the nation at any given point in time.
Casablanca (1942) Photo Courtesy of doctormacro.com
Using an historically-based model, we can locate the witch’s place within Hollywood’s symbolic structure. However, before diving in, there is one very important piece of film history that is essential for understanding Hollywood iconography. Most viewers recognize the extreme conservatism in early Hollywood films, but most don’t realize that it wasn’t just happenstance. In the 1930s Hollywood made a deal with the Catholic Church in order to ensure its financial future.
By the late 1920s, the Catholic Church had organized boycotts and petitions to protest the perceived indecency in Hollywood films. As a result, in 1930, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) established a censorship standard called the Production Code and a watch-dog agency called the Production Code Administration (PCA).
The Code was meant to appease the Church and stop the outcry. After the Crash of 1929, Hollywood could not afford to lose patrons. Regardless, from 1930-1934, the Code had very little effect on Hollywood’s output. So, the Catholic Church increased its pressure by establishing its own motion Picture watch-dog agency, The Legion of Decency.
Together with other religious organizations, the Legion pushed the PCA into hiring an enforcer, Joseph Breen. As noted by Film historian Thomas Doherty, Breen had been a “diplomat and publicity director for Chicago’s 1926 International Eucharistic Congress, a World’s Fair for Catholics.” Breen and the PCA became involved in all aspects of production from writing to editing. Doherty explains:
Breen demanded that American cinema obey a strict catechism of thou-shalt-nots. More than any single individual, he shaped the moral stature of the American motion picture.
From 1934-1968, the PCA was charged with “keep[ing] patrons from movies which offend decency and Christian morality.’” On the one hand, the Code probably saved Hollywood from the Depression turning it into one of the only industries to thrive in the 1930s. On the other hand, Hollywood’s film language was shaped by this conservative Catholic moral sensibility. Doherty goes on to explain,
The code itself was meant to be almost Biblical, metaphors of print-based religiosity would waft around it like incense: the commandments, the tablets, and the gospel.
As a result, a highly-codified film language was born. Here are just a few examples of the religious-bias written into the Code either directly or indirectly through language: (Read more of the Code here)
Pure love, the love of a man for a woman permitted by the law of God and man, is the rightful subject of plots. The passion arising from this love is not the subject for plots.
The name of Jesus Christ should never be used except in reverence.
The effect of nudity or semi-nudity upon the normal man or woman, and much more upon a young person, has been honestly recognized by all lawmakers and moralists… Hence the fact that the nude or semi-nude body may be beautiful does not make its use in films moral.
In the end the audience [must] feel that evil is wrong and good is right.
Over time, the Code broke down due to competition with television and the onset of the Cultural Revolution. By 1968, it was replaced by our current age-based rating system. But the underlying Catholic sensibility had lasting effects. For example, we still have movies with very strong good-versus-evil themes, as represented byBeautiful Creatures.
Wizard of Oz (1939) Photo courtesy of doctormacro.com
Where does that leave the witch? Early on, she* was saddled with a stigma common to any Catholic-based mythological system. As such, she is absent of any meaningful theology, other than the residuals from Christianity. In Hollywood, she is a fictional or mythological creation. She is not us – or those of us who identify as such. While our paths may intertwine and even have common historical roots, we aren’t the same. Why? In Hollywood mythology, the witch is not real.
Has that changed or evolved? Now there’s my cliff hanger, to coin a Hollywood expression. We’ll see where this study leads. In the end, it may prove that not only does the witch inform and reflect mainstream culture, but she may inform our culture and how we, as witches, define ourselves.
To Be Continued…
*Using “she” for ease of explanation at this point.
I fear that some of us living in the developed “first” world have developed a tendency to romanticize the European witch persecutions of the early modern period, a time where between 35 to 65 thousand men and women were killed for crimes of sorcery and witchcraft. It was so long ago that we have taken to fictionalizing the witch-hunts in films like “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters,”“Black Death,” and “Season of the Witch.” Blurring the line beyond mere romanticization into utter fantasy, a fantasy fed by the very lies used to initially convict those men and women. This fantasy is problematic not only for the way it warps history in the minds of the uncurious, but because witch-hunting has never stopped. The witch-hunts in Europe may have ended generations ago, but in other parts of the world they are still burning innocents.
Kepari Leniata being burnt to death in Papua New Guinea for the crime of “sorcery.”
“A young mother accused of sorcery was stripped naked, doused with petrol and burned alive in front of a crowd including schoolchildren in Papua New Guinea, reports said on Thursday. The woman, named by The National newspaper as Kepari Leniata, 20, was reportedly tortured with a branding iron and tied up, splashed with fuel and set alight on a pile of rubbish topped with car tires. According to the rival Post-Courier newspaper she was torched by villagers who claimed she killed a six-year-old boy through sorcery, with police outnumbered by onlookers and unable to intervene.”
The source of that blaze is a woman. A crowd gathered to watch her die, swept up in the hysteria and panic of the accusation. That is what “killing witches” looks like. In Nigeria, another woman, 70-year-old Rebecca Adewumi, was recently killed for being witch.
“Mrs Adewumi was accused of being responsible for the sickness of a local evangelist. She was dragged to the palace of the monarch, where she was forced to drink local concoctions. The concoctions were given to her to make her confess or die within seven days. But after seven days she did not confess or die. Subsequently local thugs stormed her house. They dragged her under the rain and flogged her. According to a family member, her attackers scrapped her hair with broken bottles and used a big scissors to cut her fingers, then placed her on a tyre and set her ablaze.”
“A teenage boy underwent “unimaginable physical torture” before being drowned by his sister and her partner because they believed he was a sorcerer who was practising witchcraft, a court heard on Thursday. [...] Over four days Kristy, who was visiting his sister from France, was tortured with metal bars, wooden sticks, a hammer and a pair of pliers in a “prolonged attack of unspeakable savagery and brutality”, the court was told.”
I’m not saying we can’t have fantasy witches riding broomsticks and cackling, I’m simply saying that we can’t enjoy them in a vacuum. When we blur the lines between the fantasy witch and the innocent women and men that were killed in early modern Europe, when we make them the villains while witch-hunts rage and people die in places like Papua New Guinea, we have to start examining what we are saying to ourselves through our art. The reality of burning witches is not fun, entertaining, or exciting, it is horrifying and tragic, it should gain the world’s attention and mobilize us into action. The figure of the witch, in fantasy and reality, has always been a dangerous and complex idea and we cannot ignore what we invoke in its name.
“Samantha was representative of suburban domestic ideals. However, at a time when women were beginning to have their horizons broadened, Samantha’s supernatural abilities conjured up the promise of women’s liberation and the unleashing of female power that was to come.”
However, this particular theme of housewife witches turned to darker territory in the late 1960s and the 1970s. You had the Satanic coven in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) trying for an Antichrist, and the evil witch coven in Suspiria (1977), perhaps reflecting the darker turn culture took during that era. When you start examining witches in movies, you’ll see the pendulum swinging back and forth, empowerment, and fear of that very empowerment. By the 1990s, the rising religious Witchcraft movement started influencing these films, blurring the lines between the fantasy witch and real Witches, most evident in films like The Craft (1996) and television shows like Charmed (1998) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997). Still, the evil fantasy witch persisted during this time, most famously in The Blair Witch Project (1999).
Today, the figure of the fantasy witch, influenced both by religious Witchcraft, and the pop-cultural ups and downs of previous generations, seems more popular than ever. In an atmosphere where vampires, werewolves, and zombies are big box office, there seems to be an ongoing expectation that witches will join that pantheon of tortured pathos and veiled commentary about modern life. This time television led the way with witches (and sometimes Wiccans) regularly appearing in True Blood, (the now-canceled) Secret Circle, and The Vampire Diaries. This year, 2013, seems to be the biggest yet, with a variety of big-budget films featuring an assortment of good and bad witches heading to the screens, starting with the (by all accounts very bad) movie Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.
That clunker of a film will soon give way to something even darker, Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem which seems very much an homage to the Rosemary’s Baby/Suspiria Satanic witch-meme.
Before that hits this Fall, we’ll have Oz The Great And Powerful in March, which updates the “good” and “bad” witches of that fantasy world, a prequel to the film version of The Wizard of Oz, perhaps the most famous film featuring witches (a film which has been reevaluated in recent years thanks to the musical Wicked).
Those are only the beginning. We also have The Seventh Son and Beautiful Creatures on the way this year, and another witch-hunting movie, The Last Witch Hunter, slated for next year. Television will also see a new witch-themed series in Witches of East End out this year, joining an already-impressive lineup of fictional witches and spell-casters on cable and network TV.
I’m commenting on this now because I think it’s important that we start discerning what all these witches are telling the viewers. What does the witch do? Is witchcraft evil? Good? A neutral technology? What theology, if any, is included in these works? How will it reflect on those of us who call ourselves Witches in the real world? As much as some of us would like to simply ignore pop-culture, we know first-hand that it does inspire people to seek out the “real” thing. Those of us who lived through the “Teen Witch” boom of the 1990s know how powerful films like The Craft were in making kids curious about Wicca and other forms of religious Witchcraft.
A still from “The Craft.”
Organizations and groups that advocate for modern Witchcraft will have to be ready to field questions, to handle journalists that will inevitably want to talk to “real” Witches when these various films come out, and to deal with blatant self-promoters who want to grab this moment by the tail. As “witches” join the paranormal urban fantasy soup in greater and greater numbers, we will have to be savvier than ever, because these works do shift perceptions, and we can’t ignore their magic.
There are lots of articles and essays of interest to modern Pagans out there, sometimes more than I can write about in-depth in any given week. So The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up.
I’m not saying this from any kind of religious perspective, but dang “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” looks terrible. OK, to get into it a little bit, let me say that I have no problem separating the idea of a folkloric/fantasy witch from other kinds of real-world witchcraft (I’m a savvy consumer of pop-culture). But you know what? Real, innocent, people were tried, convicted, and killed for being “witches” in our collective history, and it still goes on today. So you gotta walk a real fine line if you’re going to make your protagonists witch-hunters and you’re going to mix-and-match fantasy witches with the witch-trials in Early Modern Europe. I don’t see that here. Also: it looks really terrible.
Last week was Benin’s annual Vodun festival,the Associated Press has a report. Quote: “Though Benin appears to be where slaves brought to America and the Caribbean learned about Voodoo, the nation itself has a mixed history with the religion. Mathieu Kerekou, a one-time Marxist dictator turned elected president, banned Voodoo practices during the Cold War [...] Now, the religion has its own national day Jan. 10. It coexists peacefully with Islam and Catholicism, the other major religions in the country.”
Sam Webster, author of “Tantric Thelema” and founder of the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn, is now writing for a column for Patheos entitled “Pagan Restoration.” Quote: “The world will be a better place if the ancient religious cultures of Europe, the Mediterranean, and Mesopotamia are restored to their glory, suitably updated by what we have learned in the last two thousand years. This column is dedicated to achieving this end. We shall call this project Pagan Restoration. To do so, the Pagan community must mature into a healthy, sustainable religious movement.” It should be a thought-provoking journey!
Indian Country Today columnist Duane Champagne asks: How should Native Americans best attempt to protect sacred land? Quote: “A new and promising movement, however, may be afoot. Lately, various nonprofit land-conservancy organizations have used federal and state law to buy land and put it into conservancy trust. And Indian tribes have organized and joined such conservancies, e.g. the Native American Land Conservancy. These groups have also used existing law to remove sacred places from the market and taxation, while preserving plants and animals thereon. Under this approach, the land can be protected from intruders. In many cases, tribes don’t have to explain why they want to preserve the land—as long as they can make strong environmental arguments.”
The PNC Bay Area bureau is conducting a series of interviews in the lead-up to PantheaCon in San Jose. So far they’ve interviewed David Salisbury, Lisa Spiral Besnett, and Joseph Merlin Nitcher: “Pantheacon is a truly amazing thing, it offers such a large variety of activities, events and opportunities, I therefore have numerous motivations to attend and am drawn by the full spectrum of interests. I find the diverse assortment of presentations both spiritually and intellectually stimulating, no matter what your interest or flavor, there’s something there for everyone. I particularly love the interaction, attending various rituals allows me to exploring different traditions, meet new people and make new friends. The social aspect is also a big motivation; there are some friends I only get to see at Pantheacon, which makes the whole experience that much more meaningful.”
Yesterday, and in less than a week, The Wild Hunt’s Fall Fund Drive met, and then surpassed, its $6000 dollar goal. While I was always confident that this campaign would eventually meet its goal, I had no idea it would do so with such alacrity. I have been overwhelmed by the generosity of my readers, my community, in helping The Wild Hunt go independent once again. To fund a new vision for the site, and Pagan news. So thank you, whether you donated $5, $50, or $500 dollars, you all made this happen. The campaign will stay up through November, and any donation above the $600 goal number will go towards a travel and a materials stipend for our reporters, and perhaps even towards paying additional contributors. So once again, thank you, thank you, thank you. The links lists, Fall Funders list, new underwriting affiliates, and supporter graphics will be going up soon (honestly, I had no idea I would make my goal this fast).
Now that I’ve shared that happy news, let’s have a few news links, shall we?
You may have seen a wire story about a pagan rock carving in Morocco being destroyed by ultra-orthodox Salafi Muslims. Turns out that the report of the sun-divinity’s image being destroyed may have been greatly exaggerated. Quote: “The Moroccan government has denied that an 8,000-year-old rock engraving depicting the Sun as a divinity has been destroyed in the south of the country in an attack residents had blamed on ultra-orthodox Salafi Muslims. Communications Minister Mustafa el-Khalfi took journalists to the site of the pagan engraving in the Toukbal National Park to demonstrate that reports of its destruction were untrue.” So, I guess the lesson here is “pics or it didn’t happen.”
A not-destroyed petroglyph inToukbal National Park.
The Guardian’s film blog points to an interesting essay on the rise of a “new magical realism” in American film, spearheaded by Generation X filmmakers. Quote: “I think there have been signs in recent years that, surrounded by difficulties at home and abroad, America has turned from doing to thinking, and that its imagination is growing heavy to the point of overflowing; the emergence of a film like Southern Wild was only a matter of time.”
A Christian Air Force chaplain recounts his experience with being asked to officiate a Wiccan handfasting. The story centers on his refusal, and how the Wiccan wife-to-be understood the exchange: “Dear, don’t you understand? We would be hypocrites for saying the Christian vows, and the chaplain would be a hypocrite for officiating a wedding for people he knows don’t believe the Christian vows.” That chaplain, Norris Burkes, says that “her words were so profound that I have repeated them to nearly every engaged couple who has come to my office.” Just proof that real interfaith exchanges and understanding can happen at any time, if you’re open to the experience.
That’s all for now, have a great day, and thank you for supporting The Wild Hunt!
There are lots of articles and essays of interest to modern Pagans out there, sometimes more than I can write about in-depth in any given week. So The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up.
Noted early-music performer Owain Phyfe, a long-time fixture on the Renaissance Faire circuit, science fiction conventions, and Pagan festivals like Pagan Spirit Gathering, passed away this week from pancreatic cancer. Selena Fox of Circle Sanctuary, who knew Owain, had this to say about the musician:“Thank you, Owain, for good times, friendship, & carrying on the bardic tradition with old & new songs & stories! Thank you for being part of the Pagan Spirit Gathering & Green Spirit Festival! Blessings of our Welsh ancestor Owain Glyndwr, upon you as you make your way in Annwn, the Otherworld!” You can find out more about Owain at his Wikipedia page, or this article from Renaissance Magazine. What is remembered lives.
How do you stop a witch-hunt from happening? In rural India, groups of women who met through micro-loan programs are banding together in solidarity to resist the hysteria that can come with an accusation of witchcraft, and have met with some success. Quote: “In one case, a woman was accused of causing disease in livestock and an attack was planned. Members of the self-help groups gathered in a vigil around the woman’s home and surrounded the accuser’s home as well, stating their case to the accuser’s wife. Eventually the wife intervened and her husband recanted and ‘begged for forgiveness.’” So how do stop witch-hunts? Empowering women seems an important first step.
The Vancouver Sun has more on the unfolding controversy over Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ move to stop the issuing of new contracts for minority-faith chaplains, including a Wiccan chaplain, because he’s “not convinced” that it is needed. Quote: “For the past six years, Wiccan priestess Kate Hansen has been visiting federal inmates across British Columbia who follow the pagan religion, guiding them in meditation and leading them in prayerful chants [...] ”If they choose to scrap this, they’re denying the rights of all of these people – their access to spiritual advisement of the religion of their choice,” Hansen told Postmedia News.” For more on this situation, read my post from yesterday, and be sure to check out the comments section, which features input from a Canadian Pagan prison chaplain.
There’s been a lot of chatter online about Naomi Wolf’s (author of “The Beauty Myth”) upcoming book “Vagina: A New Biography, “ specifically concerning language that explicitly (and implicitly) points towards a Goddess consciousness for women connected to their vaginas. One example:“Despite the repeated invocations of cutting-edge scientific research, the smell of patchouli pervades throughout: there are sentences such as “the vagina may be a ‘hole’, but it is, properly understood, a Goddess-shaped one”. Brace yourself.”A Guardian reviewer called it “dumbed-down feminism” that acts “lesbianism never happened, nor class, nor vast swaths of feminist theory.” You get the idea, the scorn is rising on this one, has Naomi Wolf jumped the shark?
Over at his Witches & Pagans blog, Sam Webster asks: “do we really want to be using this kind of Belief-language?” Quote: “It’s the Christian mode for thinking about religion. (We’ll talk more about them in a future post.) Do we want to model our religious thought on theirs? I don’t. I think it poisons our view of Paganism if we uncritically adopt the belief-oriented Christian view of religiosity and supports their distorted understanding of the rest of us.”
There are lots of articles and essays of interest to modern Pagans out there, sometimes more than I can write about in-depth in any given week. So The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up.
With Olympic fever at full pitch National Geographic weighs in on the ancient pagan Olympics, reprinting an interview with Tony Perrotet, author of “The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games,” about the “Woodstock of antiquity.” Quote: “Today’s Olympics is a vast, secular event, but it doesn’t have the religious element of the ancient Olympics, where sacrifices and rituals would take up as much time as the sports. And there were all these peripheral things that came with the festival: the artistic happenings, new writers, new painters, new sculptors. There were fire-eaters, palm readers, and prostitutes. This was the total pagan entertainment package.”
A Good Morning America report conflates Satanism with Palo in reporting on a grave robbery in New Jersey, and Palo is only mentioned because a relative of the deceased did “a lot of research” into who might want bones. Reporter Alyssa Newcomb manages to find an actual expert of sorts, Rick Ross, who says that “the likelihood they would go into a mausoleum and drag out a body seems remote.” Too bad they didn’t talk to an actual expert on Palo, or Satanism for that matter, but I guess it’s better than nothing.
Dead animals show up in a Utah park, and for once, they don’t blame it on Santeria! It’s progress of a sort, though undermined by the fact that they ruled on Santeria because these chickens didn’t match other dead animal that they thought WERE left by adherents to that faith. The misinformation on Santeria (and related faiths), often disseminated by “cult experts” (usually conservative Christians masquerading as experts), is something I’ve written about here again and again.
Neoshaman Kelley Harrell, author of “Gift of the Dreamtime,” writes at HuffPo about the “shamanic narrative of Tigger’s bounce.” Quote: “Pooh then deduces that Tigger’s bounce had been startled out of him. Having an aspect of the soul leave in times of duress is a classic feature of soul loss. Often in trauma one can articulate the feeling of a part of self leaving, afterward feeling fragmented or that something is missing. In this case, Tigger’s bounce was missing. In being faced with a deep fear, his power had left him.”Is there anything that can’t be explained with Pooh?
I recently reported on the plight of Chico Goddess Temple, which has been struggling to regain the necessary permits to stay open after complaints over noise, building without permits, and an illegal festival held on the grounds. Now, the Butte County Board of Supervisors has rejected owner Robert Seals’ appeal on the matter, and he is now planning to move the temple, sell the land, and relocate to Santa Cruz County.
PNC-Minnesota has an interview up with Andras Corban Arthenof Earthspirit, a guest at next week’s Sacred Harvest Festival. Quote: “In the modern world, when people talk about Paganism, they typically frame it as part of a dichotomy between polytheism and monotheism. That’s certainly one way of looking at it, but it isn’t the only way. And it is actually a Christian construct, it’s how Christianity, as it came into power, defined Paganism, particularly in reference to the Romans and the Greeks. But the older, original definition of Paganism placed it in the context of a very different dichotomy, one between rural and urban cultures.”
Finally, do check out Devin Hunter’s Modern Witch podcast, where he interviews Michael Lloyd, author of “Bull of Heaven,”and yours truly. If you wanted an hour+ of me talking about Pagan media and The Wild Hunt’s role in the Pagan community, there you go. If not? Well, check out Michael Lloyd’s segment, he wrote a really great book.
That’s it for now, have a great day! Feel free to discuss any of these links in the comments, some of these I may expand into longer posts as needed.
“Mythology and folklore have become this thing that is sort of archaic, like the “old” stories. But good movies are constantly updating these classic stories and these classic scenarios. Our idea of what a hero is and what a hero does is an important barometer for where the world is and where our culture is. When you watch how Western heroes evolve over the period when Westerns were really important, you can track culture through the way that that hero changes from 1950 to 1970, when they sort of stopped being made. ET is an incredible folk hero to me, and that was a really interesting moment when we realized this type of being can be a hero. It says something about how people should behave and what it is to be good. That’s the thing about a folk tale: It is always addressing incredibly key issues about how you should live and what the right thing to do is, which is really what I’m the most interested in—like the questions that religion takes on. And I think that, for those of us that aren’t religious, we need, or I need, art that stimulates the same kind of thinking about what it is to be a mensch, or a good man, things like that.” – Benh Zeitlin, director and co-writer of the film “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” out now in select theaters. Zeitlin is the son of folklorists Amanda Dargan and Steve Zeitlin.
“[The video for 'Seekir'] definitely wasn’t a parody. I am infinitely curious about the pop world. It’s something that has always felt so foreign and far away from me. But that sort of feeling of inaccessibility tantalizes me. I wanted to try my hand at it. I would love to be a popstar if I felt like it didn’t have to involve extreme psychological manipulation of consumers. But I think the whole point of being a pop star is to be an icon, to be this unreachable ideal for people to either lust over or look up to and try to become themselves. And they will buy whatever they can to get closer to that. Buy, buy, buy. It’s easy for that seat of power to be abused and mishandled. Anyway, I will do the best I can to be my own sort of pop icon. Pop can be a beautiful, seductive band aid for society, but it doesn’t have to be. The whole video for ‘Seekir’ is based on Gurdijeff movements which promote discrete cosmic truths and knowledge of self-awareness.” – Zola Jesus (Nika Danilova) , discussing the video for her song Seekir, from her 2011 album “Conatus.”
“Visitors to Rome overwhelmed by all it has to offer—”the abundance of its pasts” in the words of the poet Rilke—can find relief with a stop at the Pantheon. Embodying the city’s pagan and Christian identities, the Pantheon is Rome in microcosm. Built in the second century by the Emperor Hadrian as a temple to all the Roman gods, it is the only major work of Roman Imperial architecture still intact. It owes its survival to having been consecrated a Christian church (Santa Maria ad Martyres) in the seventh century, which placed it under papal protection. [...] The oculus is many things. It is the Pantheon’s basic design module. It is an act of consummate architectural audacity. Most of all, however, it is a portal to the heavens. The round disc of sunlight it admits draws our thoughts out and away from our immediate surroundings to the motion of the planets, and invites us to think of ourselves not as members of a particular faith, city or country, but as part of the whole cosmos.” – Eric Gibson, Wall Street Journal Editor, on the Pantheon in Rome.
There are lots of articles and essays of interest to modern Pagans out there, sometimes more than I can write about in-depth in any given week. So The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up.
Preliminary Australian Census numbers. (PaganDash)
Pagan author and activist Starhawk has contributed some thoughts on the Summer Solstice at The Washington Post’s On Faith section. Quote: “Today, we’re at a crossroads. We can continue to feed unbridled greed, destroying the fabric of community and the life-support systems of the planet, or we can learn the lessons of the cycle: that we are all interconnected, that for anyone to thrive, we must respect the balance, share the abundance, and protect the web of life that supports us.”
Yesterday I mentioned the Rio +20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, and the role played by Grove Harris, a Pagan, in highlighting religious voices for a sustainable future. In a similar theme, Survival International highlights indigenous voices at Rio+20, who note that “we understand sustainability better than anyone.” Quote: “Sonia Guajajara, of the Guajajara tribe, said, ‘We have come here to raise awareness about our fight and to show that this model of development is not realistic… We want to show the world what it really means to live sustainably. Nobody understands sustainability better than indigenous people’.”
Chas Clifton notes that Archdruid John Michael Greer and the Four Quarters Sanctuary are highlighted in an article on “doom time religion.” Quote: “…there’s nothing touchy-feely about the way Whiddon and his board of elders runs Four Quarters. Full-time residents are required to live under strict rules, including the merging of their finances, in a lifestyle that Whiddon calls monastic and which requires a commitment to an ascetic counter-cultural lifestyle that hearkens back to Whiddon’s other inspirations, the Benedictine brothers and the Buddhist sangha.”
Photographer Lisa Levart, who produced the book “Goddess on Earth: Portraits of the Divine Feminine,” writes about men and the Divine Feminine for the Huffington Post. Quote: “As we women learn to embrace our power to lead, create a better world and manifest change, the men in our lives are also an integral part of this equation. Fathers, brothers, lovers, husbands and sons; these men are with us on our journeys yet often don’t have the opportunity, emotional freedom or interest to allow themselves the benefit of being informed by a spirituality that practices a balance between the feminine and masculine divine.”
This Monday is the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court ruling Engel v. Vitale, which prohibited public schools from composing and encouraging the recitation of a “school prayer.” Americans United has an appreciation:“Engle, in fact, established the framework for secular public schools that welcome students of all faiths as well as those who have no religion. These schools can teach about religion in an objective manner, but they’re out of the business of religious indoctrination. Thanks to Engel, our schools must stay focused on teaching, not preaching.”
