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 Radio1 - The Body
Provided By: Achriel
Composer: Castalia
Title: The Soul That I Am
Radio2 - The Mind
Radio3 - The Soul
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If the television craze continues with the present level of programs, we are destined to have a nation of morons.
-- Daniel March (1950)
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· Using Witchvox – a walkthrough
(Sep 02, 2009)
· Nutritionist Stephen Heuer Arrested in FDA Raid
(Jan 19, 2009)
· Spelling it like it isn't
(Aug 09, 2008)
· Funding the pagans
(Mar 08, 2008)
· Giuliani gets Robertson Endorsement
(Nov 12, 2007)
· The Dangers Of Feminism
(Aug 30, 2007)
· The secrets behind crazy airfare prices
(Aug 27, 2007)
· Petition To Rename Stretch Of 401 'Highway Of Heroes'
(Aug 24, 2007)
· Mummified Toronto child a newborn boy
(Jul 27, 2007)
· Quick Summer Meals without all the heat!
(Jul 18, 2007)
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 Topic: Books, Tomes & Grimoires
The new items published under this topic are as follows.
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Ghostly Gazetteers
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Posted by: Makarios on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 04:00 PM
111 Reads
Reviewed by John Rimmer
In reviewing other books in this series, and a similar collection from History Press, my colleague Peter Rogerson has pointed out that ghosts, hauntings and the paranormal are now as much a part of local nostalgia and the heritage industry as they are of psychical research, an impression which is reinforced by this current crop of titles.
The most substantial collection from a researcher's point of view is Darren Ritson's, although the title is slightly misleading, as the book deals mostly with the author's home area, the North-East, with comparatively little on the western half of Brigantia (which Ritson has dealt with in another book). The controversial South Shields poltergeist case is summarised, with the author taking the opportunity to get in a little retaliation to some of his critics, who may or may not include Magonia! This book has much more hands-on investiagtion than the other titles reviewed here, via Ritson's group, Ghosts and Hauntings Overnight Surveilance Team (G.H.O.S.T.S. - best acronym since Jim Moseley's Saucer and Unexplained Celestial Events Research Society - S.A.U.C.E.R.S!)
An account of an investigation of a haunting at a Miners' Welfare Institute in South Yorkshire, and the description of the almost superfluous haunting of the Blackpool Pleasure Beach's ghost-train, shows perhaps the way the ghost-story is moving: from the castles and abbeys, decayed relics of a vanished aristocracy, to the Miners' Institutes and closed-down pits of the post-industrial era, and the fading remnants of the once raucous, lively, working-class British seaside holiday.
Read the complete article: Magonia Blog
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Paganism 101: A Unitarian Exploration of the New Paganism
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Posted by: Makarios on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 02:00 PM
118 Reads
By Louise Bunn with Fritz Muntean and Kara Cunningham
Today’s Pagans revere the Earth and all its creatures, seeing all life as interconnected, and striving to attune ourselves to the cycles of nature. Pagan practices are rooted in a belief in immanence – the concept of divinity residing within.
The many contemporary Pagans who have found a home in the Unitarian community are grounding our work in the rational structure, the intellectual balance, and the humanist core values that have descended to us from the Enlightenment. We’re working to develop a religiosity that is entirely compatible with, and complementary to, modern Unitarian rationality.
The new curriculum represents contemporary Paganism as:
•A thoroughly contemporary and well-tested approach to Mystery.
•A performative, lively way of attending to the rhythms, wisdom, and demands of Nature.
•A way of using the richness of myth and ritual to build religious community.
Read the complete article: Unitarian Communications
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Grand Inquisitor's Manual, by Jonathan Kirsch
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Posted by: Makarios on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 02:00 PM
174 Reads
Reviewed by Fionnchú
Efficiently told, often convincingly argued, this surveys the late medieval and Spanish secret police, courts, and prisons where "heretical depravity" could lead to execution, a life sentence, ostracization, or exile and destitution. Kirsch extends the parallels with Stalinist, Nazi, and contemporary applications of authoritarian suppression of what an authority deems thought-crime. He strives throughout to alert us to the parallels that for nearly seven hundred years have perpetuated the crushing of what "heresy" means in its Greek derivation: "choice."
That this choice lies within the individual dissenter infuriates the forces seeking monotheism, and/or conformity of expressed opinion. Kirsch cites Kafka's "The Trial": "You can't defend yourself against this court, all you can do is confess." The show-trials and the torture were applied to not only punish resistance, but to exact the ultimate humiliation-- to reduce the accused to admit accomplices, among his or her family and loved ones.
Read the complete article: Blogtrotter
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Two Great Books On Dreams
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Posted by: Makarios on Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - 10:00 AM
202 Reads
Reviewed by Anne Hill
I have had the distinct pleasure over the past few months of immersing myself in some wise and erudite books on dreams. Here, rising to the top of the pile, are two books that I consider essential to the serious study of dreams in history and practice.
The first is by Dr. Kelly Bulkeley, former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and author of many worthy books on dreams. Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History (2008, New York University Press) is a book that finally answers the basic question: how did people in ancient cultures view dreams?
I call this a basic question, because anyone who spends a significant amount of time working with their dreams inevitably wonders how it was done in the past. In your religion, in other religions; by your ancestors, by other people’s ancestors. Dreams call us to understand our place in the world, and Kelly’s book answers the call because it addresses the problem with both comprehensive scholarship and also a deep love and appreciation for dreams.
Read the complete article: Blog o Gnosis
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Icelandic Folk Legends – Tales of Apparitions, Outlaws and Things Unseen
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Posted by: Makarios on Sunday, March 14, 2010 - 04:00 PM
245 Reads
Reviewed by Eygló Svala Arnarsdóttir
Icelandic Folk Legends – Tales of Apparitions, Outlaws and Things Unseen is a collection of Icelandic folktales translated by one of Iceland’s most widely read bloggers, Alda Sigmundsdóttir of the Iceland Weather Report, first published by Bjartur in 1997 and republished in 2007.
The small and handy book includes the translation of 12 folk stories, both stories that practically every Icelander knows by heart, like The Deacon of Myrká Church and Thorgeir’s Bull, as well as lesser known stories like The Vanished Bride and The Hidden Man and the Girl.
The collection includes a little bit of everything: ghosts, trolls, wizards and witches, outlaws, hidden people (elves), monsters and even Satan. As such the book provides a good overview of the different categories of Icelandic folk legends.
Read the complete article: Iceland Review
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The Heretic's Feast, by Colin Spencer
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Posted by: Makarios on Sunday, March 14, 2010 - 02:00 PM
229 Reads
Reviewed by Fionnchú
My son asked if one could survive only on meat. Contrarily, I looked up this history of vegetarianism to find out. Orthodoxy and conformity long allied with the herding & consumption of animals. To those in control, those refusing to eat flesh posed a social and moral threat. Not eating meat equalled rebellion against the state, the faith, and the norm.
Spencer starts with early hominids and ends with fast food. He roams necessarily widely, if focusing most modern attention to the British take on vegetarianism. Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, and India all earn ancient testimony for a long-lived counter-cultural tradition. While Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures appear to have come down harder on what become known as "Pythagorean" practices, the Hindus seem to have had a more balanced approach. A "dharma-sutra" ca. 600 BCE counselled: "In eating flesh, in drinking intoxicating liquors and in carnal intercourse there is no sin, for such enjoyments are natural, but absention from them produces great reward." (qtd. 76)
Read the complete article: Blogtrotter
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The Mystic in the Rye: JD Salinger’s Religious Fiction
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Posted by: Makarios on Sunday, March 14, 2010 - 12:00 PM
236 Reads
By Louis A. Ruprecht
While Jerome David (J.D.) Salinger died more than a month ago, on January 27, it is still difficult for me to talk about him in the past tense. I expect that his books have something to do with that—the way they play with time. Yet as the accolades multiplied in the days after his demise, one thing that struck me was the almost telephoto-focus on a single novel, his 1951 classic, The Catcher in the Rye. And the most important thing to observe about The Catcher in the Rye, is that it is the only non-explicitly religious book Salinger, a restless religious seeker, ever wrote.
There is no question but that this book has become an almost inescapable part of the implicit New American canon; scarcely a ninth or tenth grader in the land hasn’t been forced to read it. I was assigned the book in the snowy winter months of my freshman year in high school and I had the supreme good fortune of being taught the book by a very serious, and highly imaginative, scholar of American literature. He did not let the class neglect the crucial detail, revealed near the book’s end, that our stalwart narrator has been confined to a sanitorium, and may not be quite the trustworthy reporter he would have us believe him to be.
Read the complete article: Religion Dispatches
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Runic Amulets & Magic Objects, by Mindy MacLeod & Bernard Mees
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Posted by: Makarios on Sunday, March 14, 2010 - 10:00 AM
195 Reads
Reviewed by Henry
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in runes or indeed European cultural history. Macleod and Mees decline to adopt the recent fashion in academic circles for dismissing the idea that the runes had any kind of magical significance in this book, just as they refuse to pretend that different regions were hermetically sealed from one another. They steer a balanced path between emphasising the many mundane applications of the runes and their magical function, and indeed the book focuses on the latter, as may be inferred from the title.
The authors document and interpret scores of inscriptions from amulets, artefacts, monuments, and written texts, bringing incredible breadth and depth of learning to the task. Their vibrant enthusiasm for the subject matter is infectious, and consequently the book is anything but dry or boring. Indeed, there are even moments of high humour, such as a hilarious passage that recounts some of the more ribald love magic charms of the runic era!
Read the complete article: Elhaz Ablaze
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Westward Dharma, by Charles Prebish & Martin Baumann
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Posted by: Makarios on Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - 04:00 PM
214 Reads
Reviewed by Fionnchú
Buddhism beyond Asia's explored by 22 scholars in this 2002 collection. It focuses on the transformation, since the later 19c, of the Buddha's teachings into Western, and cross-cultural, and analytical transformations that try to retrieve a purer, primitive, or truer original teaching. Thomas Tweed sums up these evolving trends: "If modernist Buddhists have de-mythologized and rationalized traditional Buddhism one may say that post-modernist Buddhist practitioners secularize and psychologize modernist Buddhism." (60)
Tweed distinguishes a "migrant religion trajectory" from a "missionary-driven transmission," in turn separate from a "demand-driven transmission" as the three methods of current transfer. (62-3) He notes how the 'foreign' religion might have deliberately been fetched from abroad by sympathizers and initial converts. In the case of Buddhism, texts in Asian languages were transmitted and published, Buddhist ideas and practices were adopted, and Asian teachers were invited to lecture." (52) Westerners rely on Eastern exchange, as transport, globalization, and immigration thicken the ties rather than allow the crude models of Orientalist domination or imperial manifestation to control the emergence of a dharma-practice adapted not only to secular First World settings, but contemporary capitalist and countercultural markets all over Asia, Brazil, Oceania, and North America.
Read the complete article: Blogtrotter
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Everyday Life of the Pagan Celts, by Anne Ross
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Posted by: Makarios on Monday, March 08, 2010 - 10:00 AM
196 Reads
Reviewed by CelticScholar
Anne Ross is a well-respected writer on the Celts most of her books are on the Celtic Reconstructionist lists and that tells you a lot because as a rule they are very picky. This book is a part of a series called Everyday Life Of…The other two books in the series are The Everyday Life of the Vikings, and The Everyday Life of the Anglo-Saxons.
The book is copy righted to 1970 so right off you know it is an old book, with outdated information, though not much of it is. People who are not new to the Celtic history will probably not find anything new in this book. What impressed me though is the fact that she not only talks about the history of the Celts but their culture, society, and religion too. She starts her survey when the Celts first burst onto the scene, and ends it at 500 CE. Up front she tells you the limitations of the book and the aim she hopes to achieve with it. The limitations are as follows: limitations in the evidence available (this of course has changed from the 1970s to now), and limitations of space. The aim of the book is to find out something about the pagan Celtic world; about its origin; about the people who lived in it, what they did and how they conducted their day-to-day affairs.
Read the complete article: Celtic Scholars Reviews and Opinions
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Lady with a Mead Cup
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Posted by: Makarios on Saturday, March 06, 2010 - 02:00 PM
236 Reads
Ritual, Prophecy and Lordship in the European Warband from La Tene to the Viking Age
Reviewed by Beth
<snip> The first section uses Beowulf as a jumping-off point for examining the rites of sacral kingship—more specifically, how the scope of kingship evolved from tribal leader to warlord commanding men from many different tribes. In order to bind together such a disparate group, it was necessary to create a fictive kinship, and the easiest way to do this was for the warlord to assume the position of father while his wife took the role of mother. For this reason, the warlord was often referred to a hlaford, or loaf-giver (the one who provided food for his people). Enright argues that it would be only natural for the queen, therefore, to take on the role of the provider of drink. In this way, liquor service in the mead hall not only served as reinforcement of oaths (spoken over the horn), it also helped to create a family structure which formed the backbone of the comitatus, or warband. He also argues that the Germanic comitatus structure, along with many of the traditions connected to it, originated in Celtic custom in the late Iron Age, which the Germanic upper-class mimicked because the Celts were the more advanced culture at that time.
From here, we move into a discussion of historical warlords (especially Civilis, who controlled access to the seeress Veleda), the role of Germanic women as described by Tacitus, and females as instigators in the Icelandic sagas. Contrasting the general perception of “everyday” Germanic women as having a little bit of prophetic power with the overwhelmingly masculine monopoly on performing divinations for both the family and the state, he concludes that prophetess-queens such as Wealtheow or seeresses controlled by warlords, such as Veleda, were the exception to this, and that such women were regarded as “honorary men.”
Read the complete article: Gate of the Slain
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Beyond Belief: Skepticism, Science and Belief in the Paranormal
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Posted by: Makarios on Wednesday, March 03, 2010 - 04:00 PM
176 Reads
Reviewed by Peter Rogerson
This book by an Australian academic and member of the Australian skeptics movement, is not particularly concerned with refuting specific paranormal claims, but with a more general defence of skepticism as a mode of thought. It includes a brief history of skeptical thought from the Greeks onward, including a detailed examination of Hume's position on miracles, an examination of the scientific method, and its contrasting with various protoscientific, cryptoscientific and pseudo scientific claims.
He next examines the nature of paranormal claims and makes the interesting point that if any of these claims could be verified and subject to real scientific study, by many definitions of paranormal, they would be immediately cease to be paranormal and become part of normal science. He might have gone on to argue that if scientists then used these new findings or principles to explain further tranches of anomalous phenomena, they would be accused of 'explaining away' by paranormalists.
Read the complete article: Magonia Blog
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For All the Tea in China, by Sarah Rose
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Posted by: Makarios on Wednesday, March 03, 2010 - 12:00 PM
146 Reads
Reviewed by Fionnchú
Subtitled "How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History," so part of a genre of how one product changed our lives. Perhaps Britain more than America was so altered by the export of cheap, tasty black tea in Victorian times. Yet, Rose shows how globalization, the drug trade, rapid transport, and botanical espionage and corporate deceit managed to boost Robert Fortune into his modest role as the East India Company's operative who'd pluck Chinese tea seeds and smuggle them out in glass boxes to India, where they would become the hybrids mingled with Himalayan plants to make the black tea we enjoy today.
This would earn billions for a British empire tangled in the opium trade with a restive China, and replace that nation's supply of tea with that grown by its more reliable subjects in India. This shift kept English domination, expanded globalization, set off quicker tea clippers to bring tea to an invigorated porcelain and clay manufacturing region, and would increase health standards as less beer and more water was boiled and then brewed.
Read the complete article: Blogtrotter
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Traversing Eternity: Texts for the Afterlife from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt
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Posted by: Makarios on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 08:00 AM
256 Reads
Reviewed by T. G. Wilfong
Egyptian funerary texts of the Graeco-Roman period are less well known than their Pharaonic predecessors. This relative obscurity is partly due to their "lateness" in Egyptological terms, but also because of their diversity and complexity. Modern scholars have tended to group the earlier funerary texts into large corpora (e.g., Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, etc.), but the later texts defy such broad categorization. Many later compositions were used in a variety of configurations, and the boundaries between individual "books" could be fluid. The complexity of these later funerary texts has made their study as a whole difficult, but the volume under review here will significantly change this situation. In Traversing Eternity, Mark Smith provides an authoritative overview of the funerary literature of Graeco-Roman Egypt, with translations of some sixty texts, extensive introductory material for each and a general introduction for the corpus as a whole. For the first time, the majority of this diverse body of texts is gathered together in a single volume that is an essential resource for anyone interested in Egyptian funerary beliefs and practices of the later periods.
The documents translated in this volume come from the Ptolemaic Period (332-30 BCE) and the first two centuries of the Roman Period (30 BCE-c. 200 CE), a time when Egypt was under foreign rule and the Greek language dominated written documents in Egypt, but also a time when indigenous language and religion were still active and vital forces. The conjunction of cultures can be seen in the funerary artifacts of the time, in which Egyptian and Greek elements combined to create a new and distinctive synthesis.
Read the complete article: Bryn Mawr Classical Review
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The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science
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Posted by: Makarios on Saturday, February 27, 2010 - 02:00 PM
289 Reads
Reviewed by Y. Tzvi Langermann
Kevin van Bladel has produced an admirable study of the Arabic Hermetic tradition, fleshing out in considerable detail the evolution of Hermes' image, his identification with Qur'anic prophet Idris as well as the forces driving this transformation, and his connections, real, imagined, and still controversial, with the Harranians, the last organized group of astrolators to continue functioning within Islamic civilization. To do this, van Bladel constrains his use "Hermetic" to refer "only to texts attributed by name to Hermes" (p. 21), a definition that he admits is a bit too severe to apply throughout, but which serves well the purpose of weeding out much "Hermetic" nonsense that has no place in his book.
Part One, "Background", comprises three chapters. In the first of these, "Introduction", van Bladel establishes that the Greek Hermetica were produced in Roman Egypt. The remaining two chapters are devoted to Sassanid astrologers and the Harranian pagans, since these are the only two "special group[s] credited with possessing works attributed to Hermes and transmitting them into Arabic" (p. 66). The evidence for this transmission is very carefully reviewed. Van Bladel shows that some of the Arabic Hermetica were translated from Middle Persian. Though the texts in that language that may have been utilized by the Arabic translators are extremely scarce, the philology of Paul Kunitzsch and others prove a Persian origin. An important part of van Badel's story is taken up by complex narratives of the recovery of ancient wisdom. The Sassanians who translated Greek texts were, in their own eyes, repossessing part of the Perisan cultural heritage that had been plundered by Alexander the Great.
Read the complete article: Bryn Mawr Classical Review
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