American Indian

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.

Tutankhamun (aka King Tut)

There’s an excellent long-form journalism piece at Medium on the controversial issue of King Tut’s DNA. Quote: “The possibility that Mormon researchers were trying to convert the ancients was a particular, peculiar threat to Egypt’s sense of self, but it soon became apparent that it wasn’t just the Mormons that the Egyptians were worried about: it was all foreigners.”
Everyone knows that World Net Daily (aka World Nut Daily) is your prototypical “Obama is the Antichrist” conspiracy site, I don’t think anyone disputes that. So keep that in mind when you read about how Canada is going to force Catholics to teach their students about how awesome Wicca is. Quote: “A dispute over whether government can require Catholic schools to teach Wiccan and pagan rites as equal to the Ten Commandments and the resurrection of Jesus is heading to Canada’s highest court. […] The battle is over a government program adopted in Quebec in 2008 called “Ethics and Religious Culture” that is mandatory for all public and private schools. It presents all religions, from Christianity to Wiccan, “as equally valid” and requires schools to teach the beliefs in that fashion.” Here’s some non-dramatic information on the program. Here’s a non-hysterical new story from 2012 on the challenges to the curriculum. Christians sure love the idea of religious education in public schools until you subtract the triumphalism.
A goat’s head was recently found in a park in New York and Joseph Laycock at Religion Dispatches is unimpressed. Quote: “Much of our horror and fascination concerning severed goat heads may be due to the fact that we’re almost entirely alienated from our food supply. Many Americans are unaware that goat heads can be acquired from a butcher without any illegal or violent activity involved (and there are numerous recipes available should anyone be interested). Maybe if we stopped getting so excited every time someone left a goat head where it doesn’t belong, the problem would go away by itself.”
Can you do group-based spiritual work (like meditation) on a smart phone application? Sue Thomas at The Conversation investigates. Quote: “So how does it feel to meditate alongside invisible people? Well if, like me, you’ve spent a lot of time in virtual worlds, gaming online, or even just chatting in Facebook, you’ll know that there can often be a strong sense of co-presence. During research for my book on technobiophilia, our love of nature in cyberspace, I found that as early as 1995 the Californian magazine Shambhala Sun described the internet as an esoteric place for meditation which provided ‘a feeling of complete and total immersion, in which the individual’s observer-self has thoroughly and effortlessly integrated’.”
The Tasmania Examiner has a “meet the Pagans” article up. Quote: “University of Tasmania sociology associate professor Douglas Ezzy said ritual was central to all pagans. He said paganism, like Christianity, was separated into various denominations according to their traditions and beliefs, for example witches, wiccans, druids, heathens, and Greek or Roman reconstructionists who follow the corresponding gods and goddesses.”

So how’s the Gaia Hypothesis holding up? According to a new critical book on the subject, not as well as some would hope. Quote: “Tyrrell concludes that the balance of the available evidence does not tip in favor of the Gaia Hypothesis. He adds, however, ‘While rejecting Gaia, we can at the same time appreciate Lovelock’s originality and breadth of vision, and recognize that his audacious concept has helped to stimulate many new ideas about the Earth, and to champion a holistic approach to studying it.'” There’s a website for the book, if you want to explore this more.
Can Jews reincarnate? Apparently they can! Quote: “For the person, however, who has graduated from Chumash to Mishnah to Talmud, and then to the Zohar, he will find, among countless other topics, a very detailed discussion about reincarnation, particularly in the Zohar’s commentary on Parashas Mishpatim, what reincarnation is, how it works, and why it is necessary in the first place.”
The concept of Christians trying to raise other Christians from the dead confuses me. Aren’t they, in essence, grabbing a soul that’s in heaven and bringing them back to earth? Wouldn’t that, you know, kind of suck? Quote: “Tyler Johnson runs a ministry called the Dead Raising Team in the US. He claims to have brought several people back to life. He says he even persuaded the authorities in his state to issue him with an official photocard which lets him through police lines at car accident sites. Johnson appears in a new documentary film called Deadraisers, which follows enthusiasts as they trail round hospitals and mortuaries trying to bring people back to life. Sadly, those they pray for in the film remain resolutely dead.” I think there was a whole Buffy the Vampire Slayer subplot about this very issue.
Indian Country Today features an editorial advocating for Native youth to reclaim tradition. Quote: “Give tradition a second chance and see the miracle for yourself. When we follow tradition, the spirits of our ancestors smile down on us. Tradition helps. Tradition soothes. Tradition heals. Tradition cures. Tradition certainly does not mean rejecting modernization and scientific progress. But it does mean recognizing that traditional Indian values are vastly different from the values of the shallow and materialistic society presented to us by the colonizers. Indians have admirable traditions. Family-orientedness, courage, loyalty, sacrifice, generosity, honoring elders, being respectful to women, never interrupting, being tolerant of all people whether they are gay or of some other race, not focusing on material values, forgiving others, helping our fellow humans, being gentle with children, giving thanks to the Creator every day, being kind to animals, treating the Earth and the environment with utmost respect – these and more are all part of our sacred traditions.”
Be careful with how you market those mythological flood narratives, people get picky about them. Quote: “Aronofsky said recently that he had won a battle with executives to screen his own version of Noah in cinemas after around half a dozen alternate cuts failed to find traction with evangelical filmgoers. Now a new profile of the film-maker in The New Yorker details the desperate lengths to which Paramount went to court religious audiences in the US, who had earlier turned their noses up at a test screening of Aronofksy’s edit. ‘In December, Paramount tested its fifth, and ‘least Aronofskian’, version of Noah: an 86-minute beatitude that began with a montage of religious imagery and ended with a Christian rock song,’ reveals the profile.”