Pagan Community Notes

Pagan Community Notes: Ohio State University, Standing Rock, Wildwood Tradition and more!

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COLUMBUS, Ohio — News broke this morning of “an active shooter” on the campus of Ohio State University. At 9:56 am, the OSU Emergency Management Team tweeted, “Buckeye Alert: Active Shooter on campus. Run Hide Fight. Watts Hall.19th and College.” The campus was quickly locked down, and some students tweeted images from inside their barricaded classrooms.*

At noon, the campus emergency team announced that everything was secure, but all classes would be cancelled and areas of the campus would be closed for further investigation.

Paganism

Column: Bastard Children of a Slaughtering Empire

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Author’s note:
Last year at this time I wrote about being inside an ancient burial mound in Ireland for Winter Solstice. If anything, this essay is the shadow of that essay. 
I write it for the obscured, the displaced, and the massacred at Wounded Knee, and elsewhere, as well as all the other First Nations people whose lives and sacred sites are not honoured by Americans, Pagan or otherwise. And this is also for Anthony. Mound and Mountain Laid Low
I woke into world the bastard child of a slaughtering Empire. I woke into world in an old Shawnee town, but I am not Shawnee, and the town is their ghost.

Culture

Column: Lauren Pond’s “American Heathens”

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Lauren Pond’s photography had me the first time I saw the Spam. In a photoessay about Heathens, one would expect to find pictures of things like wooden statuettes, leather belts, and offering bowls – the kinds of items that have an intrinsic ritual significance, which seem to automatically activate the area of the brain designated for religion. But one does not expect to find the blue cans of meat nestled in right next to these icons. Of all the things I have read about Valgard Murray, the controversial (to say the least) leader of Asatru Alliance and owner of the items in the photograph, the depths of his predilection for Spam were not among them. But Lauren Pond’s pictures focus on exactly these sorts of details – the human quirks of religious cultures that are often drowned in the seas of theology and ritual.