Navigating Allyship

The other day I was talking with a family member when they noticed both my ears had been pierced. This lead to a discussion of the 1980’s practice of signaling one’s sexual orientation by piercing only the left or right earlobe. “Nobody does that now,” I said. “If I really wanted to signal my gayness with my earrings, they’d be little pink triangles.”

“What’s a pink triangle mean?” they asked.

I was surprised, because I thought the meaning of the pink triangle was ubiquitous.

“The pink triangle was used by the Nazis during World War II to mark folks as homosexual in the concentration camps,” I said. “The symbol was reclaimed in the 70’s and 80’s, most noticeably by the AIDS activist group, ACT-UP, and paired with the slogan ‘Silence = Death’.”

The conversation veered away from the pink triangle to other “socially undesirables” and how terrible 1940’s German fascists were.

I left the conversation amazed at the power of denial and the contaminate erasure. It’s not like pink triangles were created yesterday; and I know that my family member has been aware that gay people existed ever since the character of Jack Tripper in the 1970’s sit-com “Three’s Company,” if not since my coming out in 1996 and other extended family members’ comings out before hand.

I also left reviewing a different conversation the day before I’d had with a colleague about U.S. Executive Orders and DEI, during which she reminded me, “I’m a black woman.” This jostled me out of my default observational seat at the intersection of being white, middle-class, white-collar, cis-gendered, male, and gay. I’ve concluded that I need to be less Corvallis-White-Boy Clueless and up my game as an ally.

February Blues

Lately it feels like I'm walking a labyrinth—and not the fun type where you find serenity waiting for you after an arcing, meditative walk; or the exciting type where an animal mystery is at the center; or even a magical one with singing Muppets. No, I'm talking the anxious, mirrored labyrinth where the strings you tie to milestones break after you go around silvered corners, leaving you unable to navigate back to places you can only see through the reflected turns. All you have are broken strings in your hands and troubling redoubled likenesses of things yet to pass. Occasionally, you return to a milestone knotted with with broken strands leading in multiple directions. Walking backward won't help.

I obviously need to spend more time making art, gardening, and spending more mindful time with Mark—and less time on social media.

Frazer and The Scapegoat

I continue to read “A Century of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.” Last week’s humorous moment occurred when I was in a discussion where folks were tossing around the words “ontology” and “epistemology” and I was glad that I had been obliged the day before to make a study glossary with those very words in order to follow an early chapter, “Hypothesis and Theory.”

The latest chapter I’m reading, "The Hebrew Bible Scapegoat: Complicating a Frazerian Typology,” explores the connections (or not) between the Greek pharmakos expulsion tradition; the Leviticus 16 goat pair—one for YHWH, one for Azazel; Frazer’s interpretation of the scapegoat; and surrogate victim concepts in Joshua 7. The gist of this chapter is that Frazer popularized the 16C through 19C misinterpretation of az, “the goat,” azel, “that goes away” (i.e. the scapegoat) as a victim saddled with the sins of a group or community.

The most surprising (and Metal) passage concerned the Leviticus 16 ritual of purification, which involves sprinkling the Ark of the Covenant with drops of YHWH's sacrificed goat’s (and bull’s) blood from the high priest’s fingers (followed by more blood sprinkling around the Tent of Meeting).

As a fantasy fiction writer, usually I think of the blood in Blood Magick as a magical power source or a substance valuable to demons or other-world beings, not as a ritual detergent. Although, now that I think a little harder, I have written a story where blood was used as part of a ritual barrier.

(Pause to wonder what demons would use somebody’s blood for, anyway... and now that I think of it, what's the magical difference between a virgin's blood and a non-virgin's blood... I mean, has there been a double-blind study with virgin and demon control groups to see if just insisting that one is a virgin (or a demon) is a placebo?)

After reading this latest chapter, my new favorite word is caprine; followed by pharmakos (the Greek expulsion ritual), which is related to the words pharmakeia (medicine) and pharmakon (drug, poison, spell).

A Long Awaited Book

I had been waiting for two weeks for a book to arrive. I'd read that it might take up to twelve business days, so I was slightly annoyed when I got an email thirteen days out that the book was getting ready to ship.

Waiting turned into a game I would play with the dog: whenever she would bark at the door and try to inhale any air diffusing in from underneath the door (because wicked monsters are obviously advancing upon the house with dirty work in mind), I would say, "What? Is it my book? Are you telling me my book is here?"

When I came home from work a few days later and there was a package leaning against the door, I shrieked, ”It’s here! It’s here!” Then I had to let the dog sniff the package so she would know that there were no dog toys in it.

Gleefully anticipating the revelations of poetical back-projection onto the historical and archeological records, and the wholesale fabrication of ancient spiritual practices, I placed the spine of "A Century of James Frazer's The Golden Bough: Shaking the Tree, Breaking the Bough" flat on the table and went through the process of folding the first and last pages against the inside covers until I had reached the center of the book.

Then I sat down with tea, pen, and Post-it Notes to enjoy and annotate the book, which is a collection of essays from a symposium on the impact of The Golden Bough on folklore, comparative religion, and anthropology. The main question of the book is, "If Frazer's The Golden Bough is so flawed, why are academics in the humanities still using its methodologies?"  

So far I'm only fifty pages in, and the arguments are, 1) not everything in the Golden Bough is wrong, 2) there are some universal human social structures, 3) if we look at it as a work of historical fiction, it presents some useful and inspiring metaphors, and 4) the massive ethnological record Frazer and his predecessors was a work that should be reassessed, but not ignored.  

I think my favorite part so far was the part in Ronald Hutton's essay, wherein he pointed out that Frazer wanted to turn people off of the folly of religion (both Christianity and its perceived Pagan roots), but, ironically, Frazer wrote so luridly of the sex and violence in the prehistoric and savage rites that his readers were entertained and titillated by it.

How I laughed and laughed as I wrote the Post-It note annotating that entry—Oh Horror! I've just discovered that Post-It Notes are not that great for books!  (Looks in dismay at shelves of annotated books in his research library.)