Category: Reviews

Review: Breaking the Mother Goose Code

May 15, 2015

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A study published earlier this year out of the State University of New York – Buffalo, finding that men are more narcissistic than women, was met with jokes and derision for being yet another academic examination of the obvious, but author Emily Grijalva responded eloquently that it is precisely those things that “everybody knows” that need to be examined. Not simply because they might not be true, although (obviously) there is a chance that they are false: establishing a fundamental fact (the what) allows us to move on to questions of why or how.

I thought of Grijalva’s words when I saw the promotion for Breaking the Mother Goose Code, about Mother Goose as a surviving form of the Mother Goddess. I believe I may have heard this idea from Z Budapest in the mid-1980s, but I don’t believe she made any claim to have researched this herself. I began showing my own students a picture of Aphrodite on her goose and calling her an early form of Mother Goose, and I don’t think it occurred to me or to anyone to examine the assumption.

In Breaking the Mother Goose Code Jeri Studebaker chronicles her effort to pin down the source of the nursery character, and on the journey with Mother Goose finds a long history of suppression of the Mother Goddess. Without delving exhaustively into the patriarchal takeover of Europe and the Christian takeover of religion, Studebaker provides the background for understanding why Mother Goose is such a powerful figure and how Christianity changed her. Studebaker gives a history of the fairytale and a synopsis of the prevalent theories for how European fairytales developed. There is a more detailed examination of the German goddess Holda than most women will be familiar with, along with some discussion about the goddesses Baba Yaga, Mari, Brigid and Aphrodite. There is some examination of theater history related to the Harlequin that appears in one of the rhymes. In addition to a history of their publication, Studebaker goes through the nursery rhymes line by line and attempts to decipher them. This involves a great deal of conjecture, but apparently this author is intrepid.

Studebaker’s intuition is on track in the avenues she explores, even when she admits that her evidence is tenuous. In some cases she seems to be unaware of information that would bolster her arguments further. I do disagree with her argument about classic fairytales created as an underground Pagan resistance movement. If anything, I think these fairytales were created as allegories against rival Christian institutions. I was going to expound on this, but it’s a rather esoteric point.

There is some great supplemental material in the appendices: a glossary, a list of fairytale codewords, a synopsis of the stories in Tales of Mother Goose, two timelines, and the full text of a Holda fairytale. The author did not neglect to provide references, a bibliography, and an index, which in this case were essential.

Source: MCAD Library/Wikimedia Commons
Source: MCAD Library/Wikimedia Commons
One regrettable omission: there are no pictures. Studebaker admits that an examination of artwork was essential to her research, and she refers to this artwork frequently. Priestesses in the Goddess Movement have become accustomed to relying on pictures to enhance their understanding, and I think the Internet has fueled the demand for illustrations even more. She says that the decision to omit pictures was made to accommodate e-book requirements, but many e-books do have illustrations. In fact, e-books should be making it easier and cheaper to produce books with pictures, as well as expanding other creative borders. I am aware that the variety of e-book readers on the market makes it challenging to format manuscripts, but even in the early days of the printing press, books had illustrations. There are a lot of e-book readers out there that are marketed to consumers with features that do about everything except wash your clothes, but at the same time they are limiting the ability of authors to produce creative content. It’s not right, and authors, publishers, and consumers should not be standing for it.

All in all I really liked this book (except for the pictures – did I mention that?). I hope the author will return to the subject of nursery rhymes, including Mother Goose. While the book is a respectable 300 pages there is still a lot of gold to mine here.

Review: Naming the Goddess

January 30, 2015

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Okay, I’ve been promising to say something about Naming the Goddess for some time, so here it is. I lent the book to someone who refused to give it back, but thankfully I bought several copies. Naming the Goddess, edited by Trevor Greenfield, is an anthology by Moon Books on the subject of Goddess worship. It has a section on more general issues related to the Goddess of about eighty pages and a longer section of about 250 pages on various individual goddesses. I have been reading the book as I imagine most people will, by flipping back and forth between different sections in no particular order. Since the sections on individual goddesses are short, this is a book that you can carry around with you and read during brief moments of down time. In terms of sales, this is already one of the best-selling anthologies that Moon Books has put out, so by that measure it is an unqualified success.

I’ve been following the reviews on this book, and they have been positive. One reviewer said she thought the whole book should have been devoted to more general essays like those in the first section of the anthology. The essays in the first section are very good. Selene Fox’s short history on the goddess of liberty, Libertas, is fascinating. Robin Herne’s provocative piece asks us to consider how certain aspects of myth may be continuing to validate rape culture. My own essay is a response to the anti-Goddess backlash currently trending in the more trendy Pagan circles. Many women have come forward to thank me for writing this piece, although I have a feeling others will scratch their heads and wonder what I’m talking about. If you read my essay and have no idea where it came from, good for you. Hopefully you never will.

A criticism I have also heard is that there are already many books of this type on the market, meaning that there are a lot of encyclopedic compilations on various goddesses available. However, I think this second part of the book does fill a slightly different niche. The “goddesses of the world” texts are generally better researched, putting worship in historical and cultural context and alerting the reader to the process of syncretism, yet they lack the immediacy of an exposition penned by devotees with a true relationship with each goddess. A lot of anthologies discuss personal relationships to the Goddess, but they are more narrow in focus. There are so many entries to this section – over seventy – that while it is not comprehensive, it covers some serious ground. Also, there is a longer description of more obscure deities, such as Aine or Eris, than are generally found in encyclopedic texts. I don’t think this book duplicates anything that’s out there.

I too would like to see Moon Books come out with an anthology with longer essays such as those found in the first section of this one. These articles suggest that there is time and talent for another groundbreaking book such as Carl Olson’s 1989 anthology The Book of the Goddess Past and Present. But we’ll have to wait on that one. In the meantime, I recommend you peruse Naming the Goddess as a potential resource to add to your collection.

Review: A Kitchen Witch’s World of Magical Plants & Herbs by Rachel Patterson

August 8, 2014

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Magical herbology is an area every witch needs to develop competency in, whatever her eventual area of focus. The challenge is to gain more than an abstract knowledge of herbs, to find opportunities for hands-on learning. A Kitchen Witch’s World includes tips on ways to work herbs into your daily life and your magical routine. Over 150 common herbs are covered, which for most witches includes all that will ever be needed. Most of the herbs are easily obtained, although one important herb – mandrake – is hard to find in the United States. (Occult stores will try to sell you mayapple as “American Mandrake” instead.) The entries for each herb are fairly short, but contain a brief description of the plant or its growing habitat, which I believe is important because most beginning witches first encounter these herbs in a package.

I think what I like most about this book is that it doesn’t indulge in a plethora of correspondences. The tendency to go overboard with correspondences, to the point where it begins to inhibit learning rather than adding to it, is the bane of beginners – yet correspondences do have an important, necessary role in herb magic. I think this book sets the right balance to a thorny issue.

If you already work a good deal with magical herbs, to the point where you have begun growing your own, this book is probably not for you, and if you decide to make this your area of expertise you will outgrow this book in a few years. This is not an encyclopedia, and I think we’ve come to expect the encyclopedic approach to herbs, whether for magic or healing. If you would like to use magical herbs a bit more than you do at present, this would be a good resource to have.

A Kitchen Witch’s World of Magical Plants and Herbs is due out this fall and can be pre-ordered on Amazon.

Witchcraft Today: 60 Years On (Review)

June 27, 2014

witchtodaycover
This anthology, published today, is a look at the major branches of witchcraft that have emerged since the publication of Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today 60 years ago. The branches examined in this book have been heavily influenced by Gardner, reflecting to varying degrees not only the practices of the coven he was initiated into, but Gardner’s own reflections and innovations.

The first section of the book explains many of the most popular traditions, while the second section is a collection of personal reflections by practicing witches. There is also a brief biography of Gerald Gardner and a discussion of the climate from which his groundbreaking book emerged. You do not need to have read any of Gardner’s work to follow the articles. This book aims to give an overview of what “witchcraft today” has become and how it has matured.

I have written the chapter on Dianic Witchcraft for this anthology. It is not surprising that the Dianic tradition is included here – we usually are mentioned in any overview of Paganism and Witchcraft – but this is the first time to my knowledge that the section on Dianic Witchcraft in an overview has been written by a Dianic priestess. There has been so much misinformation propagated by those outside the Dianic tradition over the years that I think it is an important read not only for women who may be considering finding a Dianic coven, but for all witches. I think this background on Dianic Witchcraft is also important for all feminists, even those who do not consider themselves spiritual. Like it or not, a large part of the battle for women’s rights is occurring within religious institutions and frameworks.

Witchcraft Today: 60 Years On is edited by Trevor Greenfield and published by Moon Books. It can be purchased in bookstores or on Amazon.

Human and Animal Vision

April 18, 2014


It turns out that humans are highly anthropocentric in how we conceive of vision. The measures that we use tend to be areas where problems in human vision arise: focusing at distant and close range, seeing at night, depth perception, field of vision, and colorblindness. We don’t factor in things that most humans can do easily, such as recognize patterns, and we also don’t think about things we can’t do at all, such as recognize the source of diffuse light.

Here is a list of factors that vision entails (which may not be complete):


Ability to detect light (this is the core function of vision)

Ability to locate the source of diffuse light (polarization)

Ability to see in low light

Ability to see in bright light

Sensitivity to changes in contrast

Ability to see colors

Range of color vision

Ability to distinguish hues within a narrow band of color

Depth perception

Detection of movement

Ability to see stationary objects

Field of vision (including ability to see up and down as well as on a 360 degree plane)

Focusing ability (including speed of focus on near and far objects)

Ability to detect images at great distances

Clarity of vision at far and close range (accommodation)

Ability to detect shapes, both solid and outline

Ability to recognize patterns

Rapidity of image formation (analogous to frames per second in a camera)

Clarity of underwater vision

Ability to detect images below the surface of the water from above (and vice versa)

Ability to compensate for idiosyncrasies in refraction (closely related to the factor above)

Ability to compensate for movement (self locomotion as well as movement in the environment)

Formation of a single image versus split vision

Capacity for visual organs to withstand environmental challenges such as cold, pressure, and debris


I have not been able to find information comparing abilities to see and interpret auras.

So which animal has the best vision? I was a few chapters into this book before I realized what a silly question this is. Each animal has a type of vision perfectly adapted to its environmental niche. No eye or set of eyes can function in all areas extraordinarily well, because there are a few areas that are mutually exclusive and so it’s a choice between specialization or compromise. If I did have to pick the animal with the best vision, however, it would be any member of the ape family, including humans. No doubt many will not believe me and will dismiss this as more anthropocentricism. I say this because while there are animals who outperform us in every area of vision, except perhaps pattern recognition, our eyes function competently in a wide range of environments and circumstances. Our eyes do little that is spectacular but almost everything well. This is probably the main reason we have adapted to so many environments around the globe.


Source

Sinclair, Sandra. How Animals See: Other Visions of Our World. New York: Facts on File, 1985.

Photo credits: Eagle–Vtornet; Chimpanzee–Thomas Lersch

How Animals See

April 11, 2014


Most of us intuitively understand that other animals do not see the world the way we humans do, and we like to imagine how things look from their point of view. It turns out that the ways of seeing are more intricate and varied than we realize.

I am returning this week to a favorite topic of mine: vision. Over the next several weeks I will be sharing insights gleaned from my perusal of an out-of-print book, How Animals See: Other Visions of Our World, by Sandra Sinclair. This book examines eyesight in a wide range of creatures, from insects to mammals, sea dwellers to migrating birds.

I did not realize when I picked up this book how unique it is, really one-of-a-kind. Since it was published in 1985 the other books on the subject have been children’s books, which is par for the course. Books on the really interesting topics seem to be written for kids, not grownups. Lack of interest may not be the primary factor here, however. The subject matter is difficult, so much so that biologists and others who study in this area use words and concepts that most people have only a fuzzy understanding of. Sinclair spent years researching her material under the mentorship of Dr. Dean Yeager of The State University of New York College of Optometry, and Dr. Yaeger writes in his foreword that even he was forced to read outside his areas of expertise in order to assist with the project. This seems to be the kind of book that only a very bright journalist with generous assistance from experts could make comprehensible to the lay reader. Even so, I do not think I would have been able to understand this material had I not already read some basic books about human eyesight such as Relearning to See by Thomas Quackenbush, which I wrote about last year.

I have tried unsuccessfully to find a more up to date version of Sinclair’s work. I have found only two books that are close: a 2012 book called How Animals See the World: Comparative Behavior, Biology, and Evolution of Vision by Olga F. Lazareva et al and Animal Eyes by Michael F. Land and Dan-Eric Nilsson. The blurb at Goodreads boasts that How Animals See the World “…contains 26 chapters written by world-leading experts” and calls it “An exhaustive work in range and depth, … a valuable resource for advanced students and researchers in areas of cognitive psychology, perception and cognitive neuroscience, as well as researchers in the visual sciences.” Animal Eyes is billed by the publisher as “…a comparative account of all known types of eye in the animal kingdom, outlining their structure and function with an emphasis on the nature of the optical systems and the physical principles involved in image formation.” Both rather dense sounding texts assume a solid knowledge base in the visual sciences, which makes me appreciate Sinclair’s work all the more. I have to say, however, that I found even this book a stretch.

Over the next few months, look forward to juicy bits of trivia about some very weird ways of seeing.


Source

Sinclair, Sandra. How Anmals See: Other Visions of Our World. New York: Facts on File, 1985.

Following a Pagan Path

March 14, 2014

starcat
Review: Starcat’s Corner: Essays on Pagan Living
by N. Starcat Shields
Moon Books, 2013.

A friend called me on the phone awhile back, excited about some people she had met on an airplane. “They had a little girl who was named – what’s the name of your cat again?”

“Samhain?” I said.

“Yeah that’s right, Samhain. They had a two-year-old girl who was named the same name as your cat. I never heard that word in my life before I met your cat, and now I’m hearing it a second time.”

“Oh, so those people were witches,” I said.

“What do you mean, witches?”

“You know, witches. You’ve been to ritual with me and you know what a witch is. Samhain is Irish for Halloween, and who’s going to name their kid Halloween besides a witch?”

“But no, they couldn’t have been witches,” she replied. “These were normal people.”

So I guess I’m not “normal people,” I thought to myself. Leaving aside that troublesome revelation, this conversation illustrates the preconceptions people continue to hold about witches, even people who understand that we are followers of an Earth-based religion, and we don’t worship the devil, and we fly around on airplanes, not brooms. Witches are still surrounded by an aura of differentness, considered more foreign than an inhabitant of the most secluded village on Earth, unless that villager also happens to be a witch. We can be glamorous, or spooky, or impenetrable, but at any rate we are not normal.

These stereotypes are silly. A witch has far more in common with her fellow Earth citizens than most people imagine. This is beautifully illustrated in N. Starcat Shields’ book Starcat’s Corner: Essays on Pagan Living. In this collection of short essays spanning ten years we follow Starcat as she confronts the challenges of living, some of which are endemic to American life at the turn of the millennium and others which are timeless. She struggles with being a parent, reacting to a natural disaster, hanging out at the hospital while a loved one receives critical medical care. She searches for meaningful employment, makes important financial decisions, visits the chiropractor, and accepts the loss of a beloved animal companion. Her perspective on all of these things is very different from that of a Methodist or a Mormon, not to mention that of an atheist, but she successfully weathers the crises, complexities and banalities of living with decision-making processes that most would consider unconventional.

Starcat says that the genesis of these essays was a question that was posed at Vermont Witch Camp: “How do you live your earth-based spirituality, day in and day out, particularly in a culture that doesn’t share your values?” While the question became the premise for an interesting book, I have to say that I don’t think much of the question itself. To me it evokes too much of the politically correct smugness I have noted in some Pagan circles: the idea that we are the good people with the high values surrounded by a sea of the unenlightened who don’t share those values. If you’ve spent a lot of time in different Pagan communities, you know what I’m talking about.

“How could witches be judgmental?” my friend who doesn’t think witches can be normal asks me incredulously. The implication behind the question is that as people near the bottom of the scorn pile, perhaps only a step above criminals, we witches should know better. I could provide a list of reading material showing that in this respect, as well as in any other, witches are completely normal.

But Starcat’s Corner is not like that, as she reveals herself to be more interested in helping people than judging them. She is the kind of witch we all want to be. I’ll close this review with a short excerpt from Starcat’s Corner:

The negative, or shadow side, of seeking is that we may become perpetual students. Either we absorb some of the teachings and then move on, never content to delve deeply into a particular source of wisdom, or perhaps we continue to study one area so intently that our life becomes imbalanced. We are so focused on the seeking itself that we never allow ourselves to come to any conclusions about what we believe. In order to avoid being stuck in this mode, you might devote yourself to a particular set of teachings for a year and a day. If you are studying on your own, write an article or research paper that encompasses what you’ve been learning. These actions will help you shift from a mode of constant movement and passive receiving into a place of more depth and active sharing.

The positive part of seeking is the innocence of the beginner’s mind. In yoga, we are encouraged to approach each pose, or asana, as if it is the first time we have practiced it. This keeps the mind on the present moment. If we are truly seeking and open to finding wisdom, we are never jaded or cynical. We are able to take in that which we see, fully and with an open mind and heart.

Agora (Review)

January 10, 2014

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Agora is the Greek word for center, and this 2009 movie is about the many worlds that revolved around the fourth century Alexandrian philosopher Hypatia. There was Alexandria, Egypt as a center – perhaps the center – of learning and culture in the Roman Empire at that time. There was Alexandria as the center of religious and philosophical diversity. There was the maelstrom of repression and destruction by the Christian Empire directed toward Pagans which began before the birth of Hypatia and continued after her death. There was Hypatia as the celebrated center of philosophy in Alexandria, sought for her wisdom by scholars and government officials. And there was the quest for understanding how the universe functions which drove Hypatia.

So I really liked the title of this movie, but I have to say that overall I was not impressed. I did like how Hypatia was presented as obsessed with learning rather than with love, although the female porn theme of Hypatia’s devoted slave seemed a bit gratuitous to me. I also liked that the movie showed Christians of the Roman era as the intolerant fearful thugs they were, rather than the martyrs they liked to portray themselves as. The movie also underscores the repression and violence shown by Christians to the Jews. But the film was greatly marred for me by the long and frequent scenes of unremitting violence. You can’t tell this story without some violence, of course, but predictably Hollywood made gore the main course and filled in with bits of a story line here and there. I fast forwarded whenever they took out their swords and by doing so I think I watched the movie in well under half the advertised time. For some reason they toned down Hypatia’s death, which was supposed to be truly grisly. I don’t know whether they thought the audience couldn’t countenance such a beautiful actress being disfigured or if Hypatia’s actual death was too horrible for the film rating.

One theme in the movie got me thinking. Hypatia is portrayed as an atheist, which is implausible. She belonged to a Pagan philosophical school that acknowledged the gods as the driving force behind the perfection of the universe. But because she was an INTELLECTUAL and a LOGICAL person interested in SCIENCE and dedicated to the quest for KNOWLEDGE, the screenwriter evidently assumed she could not have entertained any religious notions. The Christians are accurately portrayed in the movie as opposing any thought conflicting with their ideology, but this does not necessarily mean that science is antithetical to all religion.

At one time science and religion did not exist in separate spheres. Before Christianity, Paganism was driven by the observation of nature. Or maybe that should be put in the opposite way: religion fueled a need to understand nature on a deeper level. The Babylonians developed their sophisticated mathematics to predict the wanderings of the planets, which in turn directed their magic. We can say that many of their theories turned out to be “wrong,” but that can be said for any understanding of science at any time. Theories get replaced over time with theories that are more correct, which get replaced down the line with theories that are still more correct.

There does not seem to be much interest among Pagans today in bringing a scientific understanding to our belief systems. I probably come as close as anybody with my incorporation of biological facts about animals into the folklore of my book Invoking Animal Magic, which is ironic since I don’t even have a background in the hard sciences.

I would like to see Paganism incorporate a more twenty-first century understanding of the world into our religion. Yes, today’s scientists can be incredibly narrow minded in how they see the world, but we don’t have to adopt their prejudices; we just need to steal their ideas.

A Nation of Women, Part VII

January 3, 2014

nationwomencover
Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V Part VI

This is the final installment discussing Gunlog Fur’s A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters Among the Delaware Indians. This installment again looks at how the Delaware viewed gender.

Fur insists that the Delaware men engaging in diplomacy as “women” were not berdache or two-spirit, the third-gender male in some Native American cultures such as Zuni, who adopts many feminine roles. Delaware men were adopting a feminine gender role in a limited context, not as a stable presentation across situations, and still thought of themselves as men. Moreover they referred to themselves when performing the feminine role as women and not as third-gender.

Fur does contend, however, that there was a beardache role in Delaware traditional culture. She bases this on a theory by anthropologist Will Roscoe which says that

…[M]inimum conditions for the emergence of a third (or fourth) gender role consisted of a gendered division of labor and productive responsibilities that offered women a possibility to specialize in the production and exchange of goods and food, a system of belief that did not view gender as determined by physical sex, and specific historical occurrences that opened the opportunity for the construction of multiple gender roles. Such conditions existed for both Delawares and Iroquois….

For me this is not sufficient. I would need to see some direct evidence rather than conformity to an anthropological theory to accept the idea that the berdache role was originally part of Delaware culture. I have also heard it speculated that a condition necessary for a third gender to emerge is subordination of women within that culture, which is clearly not the case with the Delaware. I have to wonder how a third gender could even have been structured in traditional Delaware culture. Not based on labor, because while labor was unquestionably gendered, these boundaries were crossed frequently. Not based on homosexual activity, because that appeared to be a not-uncommon phenomenon that did not call gender into question. Not based on dress, because men and women dressed essentially the same except in certain ceremonial capacities. Perhaps in ceremony there could have been a place for a third gender. However, Fur does tell us that during the late eighteenth century revival of traditional ceremony sex ratios were strictly adhered to, at least in the instance she describes. In this ceremony the rules on elder roles were bent to allow younger people to participate in a ceremonial capacity in order to keep the equal sex ratio intact. Although gender roles in many, perhaps even most, cases seem to have been flexible, there were instances when gender was tied to sex. This is germane to a point I will be making further on.

One thing is clear: if a third gender did exist it would have been negotiated based on needs of the community, not out of the spirit of “I gotta be me” that characterizes modern gay and transgender cultures. Elements of gender in indigenous societies cannot justifiably be pulled outside their context and applied to modern Eurocentric cultures, at least not with any theoretical integrity. Nonetheless Native beliefs about gender, as they are understood today, will doubtless continue to inform the transgender movement.

Native conceptions and experiences around gender can legitimately be utilized, however, to undermine gender theories that are presented in broad, absolute, and uncategorical terms. For example, one popular transgender theory says that to have gender fluidity, gender must be completely divorced from physical sex, with new concepts and categories introduced to reference essential biological functions such as childbirth. A careful reading of A Nation of Women does not give the impression that the Delaware considered sex irrelevant, despite the undeniable fluidity of sex roles. A feminist theory of gender abolition says that gender is always and only a hierarchy to enforce the subjugation of women. In the words of Elizabeth Hungerford, gender is “a complex social structure whose sole purpose is to distribute power and resources between the sexes. It does this unequally: see ubiquitous evidence of women’s oppression.” In Eurocentric culture – actually in most cultures – this is certainly the case. However in Delaware culture women did not occupy a subordinate place, despite the existence of a system of gender. As Fur sums it up “There was nothing subservient about Delaware women. Male and female roles were different but they did not constitute categories of a set asymmetry.”

The power of women and the flexibility of gender roles may provide a clue as to why Delaware people and culture managed to survive into the twenty-first century. It was the luck and misfortune of the Delaware to be occupying what was then the prime real estate in North America when European ships began arriving in large numbers. Yet despite early contact with settlers, numerous dislocations, and geographic fragmentation of communities, not to mention decimation of numbers due to disease and war, the Delaware survived. Fur says, “Without women’s participation in prophecy, cultural preservation, and adaptation, the Delawares could not have emerged as a nation or maintained an identity into this century.”