Summer Ides

Happy Summer Ides!  This is the time when I try to think about goals for the year in a kind of "I am the arrow that is not aimed" kind of way. 

That's the aspiration, anyway. 

The only problem with being the arrow that is not aimed is that your life can be aimless.  I suppose I need a different metaphor, like "be the target."  There; my daily affirmation can be, "I am the manuscript."  

This is also the time of year when I can write outside in the Secret Writing Grotto, otherwise known as the fort, which is doing double-duty as a grape arbor.  Mark didn't cut the grapes back quite so much this year, so they got a head start and have aggressively covered the fort we built for The Child with vines and leaves.  If the local night critters don't discover them, we might even have grapes in a week or two.

Garden Spirits

I suppose I've made a short of shrine in the back yard by placing the folate head garden sculpture I purchased last September underneath the Child Fort / arbor.   At the time, I was thinking that I might somehow attach it to a stone pillar and set it back in the laurels or other part of the shrubbery, but I think I'll see how well the grape vines grow around it next Summer.  

Who this shrine is to remains to be seen.  I'm hesitant to say "The Green Man," because of all of the Victorian back-projection of a literary figure onto mediaeval baptismal font carvings.  Perhaps attaching pink triangle earrings, or finding pink triangular tiles as a backing would give a contemporary gay flavor that would help invoke the gay male divine.  If I were feeling particularly daring or motivated enough, I might try to find some reproduction of an ancient Fascinus from Pompeii to hang near by (John promptly loses time reviewing Etsy sites...).

When I took down the Writing Pavilion for the Winter, I discovered several packets of spider's eggs (and a few attending arachnid mothers).  I used a dried stem of a poppy to deposit the silken wraps of eggs in the narrow space behind the heavy stone god's head, which felt like something out of a story.  Maybe after hordes of spiders have emerged in the spring it will have more of the numinous about it.  

If only there were a stronger feeling that the folate head were a mask that the growing things in our yard are borrowing, but right now it feels like a concrete idol.  In contrast, the Sphinx in the garden feels more like something with a secret, even if it's only knowledge about finding shade from the goldenrod.  

Now all I need is a 3ft x 4ft x 5ft slab of obsidian or basalt or hematite and I'll be able to have midnight rituals... or... something... although, now that I think about it more, it would probably be just me brooding in the candle light and shooing the cats off of it while secretly imagining a bacchanal before reprising Dot's song, "...if I were a folly girl."

Oh well. 

Wrestling With Ancient Queer Paganisms

Between Hutton and some Queer Pagan Theory from 2011 I've just recently read, I've been revisiting gay male NeoPaganism.

From Hutton's "Pagan Britain" I've gotten the idea that history and archaeology aren't the steady guides to a pre-modern Paganism I thought they were (that they were steady guides, yes; that they were guides for NeoPaganism, not so much).  Hutton seems to be taking the Many Worlds theory of the multiverse to turn history from a linear narrative and into a superposition of narratives only particularly constrained by the archaeological record (so much for steady guides).

A multiverse history enriches possibilities to model present spiritual practices based on past ones, but sacrifices specific, definitive models.  I suppose that's a good thing if history is to become a tool to navigate present choice because it increases the number of cautionary tales.  But so many choices makes choosing the future less about choosing a route on a map and more like an interpretive dance.

According to Hutton, ancient British Pagans, as evidenced by their paleolithic cave art, may have had more fluid boundaries between animals, deities and humans; between spirits, the living and the dead; and between male and female.  Applying this and other parts of the book to gay male NeoPaganism, "Pagan Britain" is both supportive and disproving of any founding stories of gay male NeoPaganism (it would be a better resource for this inquiry if it covered the Qedeshim, but they aren't British).  Gay male NeoPaganism sometimes casts The Greenman and Hern as same-sex lovers.  The Greenman is a modern development of the theories of Lady Raglan, and Hern is a literary figure back-projected onto ancient Paganisms; so the construction of them as same-sex lovers is a modern one, not an ancient founding one.  Not that I've been able to connect with any founding stories that I felt applied to my current, modern life--which leads to the Queer Theory.

The quick-and-dirty gist of what I've read so far goes something like this.  The heteronormative way of looking at things is binary, specifically gender-binary.  Early formulations of gay (male) liberation simply added another binary to the mix: straight or gay.  Male ways, gay ways, or other essentialist ways of knowing expand the heteronormative paradigm without changing it much (not changing the status-quo was a criticism of the men's mythopoetic movement).  A gender-queer world view rejects gender-binary systems; being gender queer is more about the process and practice of interacting with other folks within an analog continuum--which sounds a little like modern cave art paintings of gender and orientation.

Hmm. I'm certain that I find body and facial hair, firm torso and arm muscles, and male genitalia sexually attractive... in addition to certain scents that I'm fairly certain only males produce (pause to wonder if sexy scents are sexy inherently, or if sexy scents are sexy because sexy men are producing them... also, have I ever smelled sexy scents from a woman's body?)  I think this makes me a gay male essentialist trying to be gender queer.  

More importantly is queer theory's effect on ways of knowing.  No gender or orientation binary, no specifically gendered or oriented way of knowing.  Which might work well with the ancient cave paintings, but I am not cave art.  On one hand, if queer is a process of social interaction and not a destination or an essential identity, and if queer is a field of both/and responses instead of an either/or limit, then general, pan-cultural ways of knowing become  specific, personal ways of experiencing/experiences.  Which is freeing on one hand--no more obsessing on reconstructing gay male relationships from ancient feudal societies in order to rebuild a lost gay heritage--and feels completely unstructured on the other (quick, time to ground myself in history and re-read all those medieval and renaissance records of "The Night Police" and other criminal records of men having sex with men).

So that's the theory. Now onto the praxis.

When I think about gay male NeoPaganism, I remember that dream I had where I was a priest filling a giant rhyton which curled over my shoulders from a river so I could bring the waters back.  Or that frenzy-raising dream with Odin.  Or (cue Peter Gabriel's Mercy Street) that dream kissing Jesus.  When I remember that one gay male gathering back in 1997 where we all sat around a river bank in various states of undress sharing health tips, that feels like a gay NeoPaganism.  When I fantasize about sacred gay sex... well... I can already hear the sarcastic comments; the complaint that we don't have the space to build a giant bonfire, platform, and hot-tub; and the criticism that wanting great sex to be sacred too is greedy (and then I can hear James Broadbent talking about a visual orgy featuring tantric can-can).

When I try to think about some gay working of Hern and the Greenman as lovers, it seems like sexual attraction isn't the point, it's a metaphor for a station in the relationship between flora and fauna--and then I wonder, if gay sex is sacred, why not gay dying, or gay eating, or gay dancing ...and then I think about the "Gay Things To Do Today"/Gay Agenda joke, Heart Circles, anti-tech attitudes, Winkte-wannabes, prosperity checks, and Potlucks and I just want to run away screaming--because they aren't refreshing, they're draining.

So much for praxis....  I feel like I should just channel my inner 1960's Judith Viorst and write a poem titled "It's Hard to be Gay and be Pagan." Or just throw in the towel and write that Starhawk-esque "Spell to be Friends with Your Prostrate."   Or just mash together 1990's songs:  "As I slowly fall asleep / for a moment dreams are sacred" // "that's all I wanted, was something special, something sacred -- in your eyes...."

Home Stretch with Hutton's Pagan Britian

The latest pages of Pagan Britain are focusing on some of the more modern notions of British NeoPaganism.  There's more "such and such an idea is disproved by the record" arguments here, which is a little confusing, because for much of the book there hasn't been proof one way or the other.  I believe there are no "lack of proof is proof of lack" errors going on -- Hutton is cautious, and, once again, the interesting details are in the end notes.

The latest chapter is addressing an underground paganism in Britain during the Middle Ages.  Hutton here is addressing the theories of  James Frazer and Margaret Murray, which supposed that Christianity was a thin veneer over a native Paganism, and which took its cue from Geology and Evolutionary Biology in terms of "primitive cultures" developing into (European Colonial) "enlightened cultures."  Other than commenting that modern historians pretty much agree that no underground Pagans existed despite the notion lingering in the popular imagination, he hasn't come out and said that in so many words; rather, he's focusing on the evidence.

Margaret Murray theorized that Sheela na gigs carved on stone walls of cathedrals and castles were evidence of medieval pagan worship carried over from ancient prehistory.  Hutton says that it is "almost certain" that Murray's theory inspired  Lady Raglan's similar theory concerning foliate heads (a.k.a., the Green Man).  According to Hutton, it seems more likely the Sheela na gigs are not representatives of an underground goddess, but protective vulvas carved on to castles to safeguard them.  The foliate heads were not hidden worship of an underground Green Man, and probably started out life in Christian churches as carvings on baptismal fonts as something baptism protected against.  (More over here:  http://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2011/05/review-hidden-spirituality-of-men.html )

Hutton pause to mention that while the ancient Pagans apparently didn't secretly worship the Goddess and God as Sheela na gig and foliate head, they have become energizing elements of modern NeoPaganism.

From stone carvings, he moves to sacred trees and sacred wells.  Hutton points out that worshiping sacred trees or at holy wells is a common human action, and then points out that there's very little evidence that Christian places of worship were built on top of old pagan ones.  Various sacred trees (yew, apple) in early Christian Britain seem to have come along with Christianity from the Mediterranean. (I'm a little surprised Hutton didn't bring up Robert Graves' calendar of trees, although that might be a straw man argument by now).  Also, medieval churchmen wrote about their frustrations over the superstitious practices surrounding holy Christian wells (oh, and candles, but that's from another book).  There's a focus on Bath, which at first seems to be an outlier.  Hutton points out Bath was abandoned, and so saw no continuous worship, and that there was a Christian fashion to honor the dead with depositions of goods in water.

The more I think about it, the more candles (which may come up later) are a kind of example of what Hutton's trying to get at in this chapter.  Ancient Pagans may have used candles at some point in pre-history.  Medieaval and modern Christians certainly do.  But finding evidence of candle use in churches from 1000 AD does not mean that there were secret Pagan rites going on in churches back then (although there are accounts of churchmen being vexed with parishioners collecting Christian candle stubs as talismans and good-luck charms).

... and the last fifty or so pages await.