dreams of home

36. Rev. Robert Lee (Skip) Ellison, The Solitary Druid. Ellison is a former Archdruid of ADF and wrote this book in response to questions he used to receive in that capacity from solitary Druids. It's a 101-level book, and viewed in that light, I think it's better than most other pagan 101 books I've read. I particularly liked the extensive quotations from classical writers on the historical Druids. I do think he could have distinguished more clearly between what we know of historical Druidry and what is Neopagan lore, e.g. in the section on Ostara/Eostre, and in places I wanted more citations in order to be able to check some of his statements for myself, but there is far less fluff here than in most such works. I was particularly pleased to see a passage stressing the diversity of cults in ancient paganism and the fact that two deities may be cognate without being the same entity. I found the section on sexuality a bit odd - it takes up nearly half the second chapter of the book, which to my mind creates a bit of an overemphasis, and some of the classical texts he cites as evidence of a positive attitude towards homosexuality and/or non-monogamy amongst the ancient Celts actually seem suggestive of homo- or polyphobia to me. This is a shame, because he cites enough unambiguously positive examples to stand on their own. I would also have liked to see some discussion of the ethics of magic, given that binding spells are discussed. But overall, this is a good introduction, and I will definitely be adopting and adapting some of the ritual texts.

37. Ian Corrigan, Sacred Fire, Holy Well: A Druid's Grimoire. Corrigan is another former Archdruid; this book is more at the 201 level and has a stronger focus on magic, although I was reading it primarily for ritual inspiration. It is not an academic work and has no citations, but as far as I could tell, it is based on sound scholarship. It also has some gorgeous illustrations. Again, I was a little surprised to see no discussion of ethics, and I also felt there were some minor inconsistencies in the way spirit allies were described, but I can't fault the book in any other way.

38. Rev. Robert Lee "Skip" Ellison, Ogham: The Secret Language of the Druids. The title of the book is a little misleading, because Ellison does not actually claim that Ogham was a language; it may well be a case of choosing a title that will sell. It's a good basic introduction to Ogham as a writing system and a symbol set for divination, with a clear distinction drawn between Ellison's own interpretations and those found in historical glosses. This one does have a discussion of the ethics of divination.

39. Crystal Blanton (ed.), Shades of Faith: Minority Voices in Paganism. Pagans of colour write about their experiences. As with any such anthology, some pieces engaged me more than others; some were very moving.

40. Carol Oates, The Summer Prince. A freebie I found while looking for no.41; the Fae come to steal away a girl, but of course there's a twist. Pretty standard YA romance, but quite enjoyable.

41. Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince. This one is great - a post-apocalyptic dystopian take on the Gilgamesh epic, with strong female characters, in a setting where bisexuality is unremarkable and possibly even the norm. It left me hoping for a sequel, and I will definitely be checking out more of Johnson's work.

42. Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo. Fantasy set in West Africa. I gather it's a retelling of a Senegalese folk tale, which means I miss most of the references, but that didn't spoil my enjoyment.

Bechdel scores
The Summer Prince (Oates): Pass. The female protagonist talks to a named school friend about, er, the plot twist.
The Summer Prince (Johnson): Pass. It's a matriarchal setting, so there are lots of named women characters, and they talk to each other about a range of things.
Redemption in Indigo: Pass. The protagonist talks to her sister about bees and cooking and other things; there are probably also some scenes between her and some religious sisters that pass, but I'm not going to check right now.

This book has been causing a certain amount of excitement on some of the pagan blogs I read, so I thought I would review it separately from my normal booklist for easier linkage.

The full title is Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World: Eostre, Hreda and the Cult of Matrons. A large part of Shaw's intention in writing it is to begin to challenge a perception that pre-Christian Germanic paganism was homogeneous by examining the claim that Eostre was a pan-Germanic goddess known in Germany as Ostara. Eostre is known to us from a single historical source, Bede's De Tempore Ratione, written to explain the names and timing of various Christian feasts. Hreda is mentioned in the same source.

Shaw begins with an introduction to the linguistic models and methods he intends to use. He then gives an overview of some relevant features of Romano-Germanic religion, focusing in particular on votive inscriptions to the Matronae (matrons, who may be goddesses, ancestors or deified ancestors; inscriptions to similar figures also occur in Romano-Celtic religion.) Shaw points out that these often have names related to particular localities or kin groups, but that some inscriptions refer to the Matronae of a wider group such as a tribe or group of tribes. He notes that the latter type of inscriptions seem to be set up by worshippers who are at some distance from their home area, implying that a worshipper who was outside their home locality, but e.g. still within or near the territory of their tribe, might offer to the Matronae of the tribe as a whole rather than those of their home area.

This leads into Shaw's chapter on Eostre. He begins by setting out Bede's claim that two of the Anglo-Saxon months were named after Eostre and Hreda respectively. He then outlines how the existence of a goddess Ostara was extrapolated from Bede's remarks and the form of the word for Easter in certain Germanic languages, and notes that some scholars have reacted against this extrapolation by doubting that Eostre existed at all. Some other scholars, however, have suggested that Eostre could be etymologically related to the Austriahenae, a group of Matronae to whom a large number of inscriptions have been found near Morken-Harff in Germany. Based on a linguistic and etymological analysis of the words Austriahenae, Eostre and other relevant terms, Shaw rejects the suggestion that Eostre's name relates to a word related to "dawn" or "spring". Rather, he concludes that while Austriahenae and Eostre are not the same entity(ies), they are probably the result of the same naming convention; both effectively refer to the matron(s) of a group that identified themselves as "eastern", probably geographically and/or in relation to neighbouring groups. Thus, Eostre may well have been the matron of a local Kentish group, and this would be consistent with the fact that dialects outside Kent appear to have had a different name for this month. He also notes that copies of Bede's writings seem to have been sent at a very early stage to the diocese of Mainz, which is in the part of Germany where we find the earliest occurrences of a word related to our "Easter" . Thus, it is possible that Bede himself, or other Anglo-Saxon missionary activities around Mainz, are responsible for the use of related words for Easter there.

A chapter on Hreda follows, adopting a similar approach, but here Shaw finds the evidence much less clear. He does not rule out the possibility that her name is related to a word meaning "quick", but he also notes that this word is itself a fairly common element in human names of the period. This means we cannot conclude that Hreda was some sort of "goddess of speed"; she may simply have been the matron of a kin group whose name used this element. Alternatively, there is some evidence that the name may be related to an ethnic designation referring to Goths or a Gothic sub-group. Against the background of the known naming conventions, therefore, both etymologies appear to point to a group matron rather than to a functional goddess.

Shaw's scholarship appears to me to be very careful and thorough, and the book is both short (less than 100 pages if you disregard the indices and endnotes) and extremely readable for an academic work. I highly recommend it to anyone who has an interest in historical British, Germanic and/or Celtic paganisms.

26. David Rosenberg, Battle for the East End: Jewish Responses to Fascism in the 1930s. David is the founder of the excellent East End Walks, and this book essentially covers the same ground as his Anti-Fascist Footrpints tour, which Bessy and I took last month. ( Read more... )

27. Richard Holloway, Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt. This is the autobiography of Richard Holloway, the former Primate of the Scottish Episcopal Church, who now writes from a secular humanist perspective. It was a Christmas present from a dear friend, and I enjoyed it greatly. It's painfully honest and very beautifully written; even the passages on Holloway's time in the Gorbals have a lyrical quality at times, which is surely a sign of a great writer. ( Read more... )

28. Jodie Taylor, From Seed to Tree: A Children's Yoga Sequence. I came across this while looking for something else and was entranced by it; it does pretty much what you might expect from the title, with engaging text and illustrations.

29. Ceisiwr Serith, A Book of Pagan Prayer. Two sections of this were recommended reading in the study guide I am using for my ADF work, but I ended up reading the whole thing. It does a good job of catering to a fairly broad range of pagans, whether using a Wiccan, Druidic or reconstructionist framework. I especially liked that Serith includes not just suggested texts for prayers, but sensible advice on how to write your own.

30. Gede Parma, By Land, Sky and Sea: Three Realms of Shamanic Witchcraft. ADF Druidry works with the Three Realms of Celtic mythology rather than the four elements preferred in Wicca and much ceremonial magic, and having previously read Parma's Spirited and liked his writing style, I was interested to see what he had to say on this topic. ( Read more... )

31. Marjane Satrapi, Embroideries. This was kindly lent to me by yoyoangel after I mentioned how much I enjoyed Satrapi's Persepolis. It features several of the former's female characters, gathered together over tea in a Tehran apartment and taking advantage of their menfolk's afternoon nap to talk freely about their sexuality. It's beautiful and touching and very much in line with other things I have read about Iranian women's culture, and I highly recommend it.

For those of you who are keeping track of my exploration of graphic novels, I should probably note that yoyoangel also lent me V for Vendetta, but I bounced off it quite quickly; the visual style just isn't one that appeals to me, but I'm glad to have tried it.

18. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons. Interesting analysis challenging the idea that tragedies of the commons can only be prevented by state intervention. Ostrom presents a number of cases, from three different continents, in which the commoners have successfully regulated the use of the commons by horizontal agreements - in some cases, over centuries. She uses these cases to identify a series of factors that she believes must be present in order for self-regulation to succeed, and then tests these against some examples of cases where self-regulation has failed. Fairly convincing, albeit a little more academic in places than I was really looking for.

19. Ardin Lalui, There is No Otherwise. I believe this is only available via Amazon; I downloaded it before I began trying to stop giving money to Amazon. It's a coming-of-age story set amongst Texan ranch hands. I read it because I'd enjoyed Call No Man Father so much. This has the same sparse style, and I did enjoy it a lot, but the plot didn't grip me in quite the same way.

20. Ellen Ghyll, Chicken Feed. A market community is suffering under the rule of a new owner; meanwhile, one of the stallholders has noticed that the offenders who come to the market on a work detail from the local prison seem to keep disappearing. Another Amazon-only book, as far as I can tell; I read it for free via the Amazon Lending Library. I'm glad I didn't pay for it, because I thought it was pretty dreadful. The writing is very pedestrian, too many of the characters are stereotypes - especially the women - and the resolution to the "missing prisoners" subplot is downright offensive.

21. C.M. Gray, Shadowland. A retelling of how Uther Pendragon became King of the Britons. An enjoyable yarn, but the writing was a bit uneven. I got particularly annoyed with the deliberate archaicisms in the dialogue: if your novel is going to make a big deal of a cultural clash between Celts and Saxons, please don't put Olde Englishe speech patterns in the mouths of your Celtic characters, and if you must use "thee" and "thou", FFS get the grammar right. I think I found this particularly jarring because Gray had clearly done enough research to get the names and territories of the Roman-era Celtic tribes right; shame he didn't think to give the same care to their language.

22. Adam Michie, Orientation. I borrowed this from boxcat, and I won't say too much about it here because I want to talk with him about it in person; but the basic gimmick is that a Spurs* fan, disillusioned with the commercialism of the Premiership, decides to follow Leyton Orient* for a year to see if League One can rekindle his enthusiasm for football. He happens to pick the year of Orient's best FA Cup run in decades, and many of the games he watches are ones I was at myself - good memories.

*For those who aren't in the UK and/or don't follow sports: these are two London football (soccer) teams, and the Premiership is two leagues above League One. The FA Cup is a competition in which teams of all leagues can play against each other.

Bechdel scores:
There is No Otherwise: Fail. There are more than two named women, but they don't talk to each other.
Chicken Feed: Pass, just. Three women agree to move in together for mutual support, but the reason they need support in the first place is that they have all been cheated on by the same man and are all now pregnant.
Shadowland: Fail. There are more than two named women, but they don't talk to each other.

I've often said that I don't get on with graphic novels, but talking to dr_d, I realised that's not universally true; I got on very well with the collected Dykes to Watch Out For and with Persepolis. The common factors I can see there are (a) relatively simple monochrome artwork; (b) a relatively high words-to-images ratio; and (c) a political storyline filtered through (d) the experience of a small group of "ordinary" people. I'm not sure which of those factors are the most significant, but I will note that I like Calvin and Hobbes in black and white, but think it looks weird in colour. By way of additional context, graphic novels I have not got on with include Neverwhere (finished it, but felt distinctly "meh" about it despite loving both the book and TV versions) and Sandman (leafed through a couple of volumes on separate occasions and bounced off almost immediately both times, although so many people have recommended it to me that I may try again at some point). Given that, geeks of my friendslists, what other graphic novels should I try?

9. Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday. Yes, that's a Foyles link rather than an Amazons one as previously - I'm trying to reduce my dependence on Amazon because of its unethical business practices. Anyway, this is a collection of autobiographical pieces. I found it interesting mainly as an exercise in spotting themes that recur in Vonnegut's fiction. One of the most persistent of those fictional themes is that of guilt-by-complicity, which also surfaces here, e.g. in Vonnegut's speculation that he may be the only person to have benefited from the firebombing of Dresden (via the royalties from Slaughterhouse Five). The notion of artificial extended families also makes an appearance, and there are some typically trenchant comments on the writing process. Enjoyable, but probably only for someone who is already fairly familiar with Vonnegut's work.

10. Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus. A college lecturer loses his job to a McCarthy-like inquisition and goes to teach at the nearby prison instead, where he gets caught up in an ill-fated escape attempt. One of Vonnegut's more political novels, similar in that respect to Jailbird, which I reviewed last time (DW/LJl). Like Jailbird, it appealed to me a lot. Here is Vonnegut on the trickle-down theory: "The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow."

11. Ardin Lalui, Call No Man Father. I can only find this on Amazon, where I read it for free via the Kindle Lending Library. It's a modern-day Nativity story in the form of a novella, written in a beautifully sparse style, which I loved. I would have preferred a slightly clearer resolution at the end, but I am definitely going to read more of Lalui's work.

12. Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box. A collection of early short stories; most didn't really appeal to me. I'm not usually a short story person anyway.

13. Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos. The narrator is the ghost of a shipbuilder who follows the ship he was working on when he died, which is about to set out on a cruise to the Galapagos Islands when war breaks out. The tourists on board, along with some local girls they've rescued, become the last surviving humans. As in many of his novels, Vonnegut gives away in the early chapters much of what is going to happen later on, so that any suspense comes from not knowing how it will happen. It worked quite well for me for the first half of the book, but I started to lose interest in the second half as the answers became increasingly obvious. This is the last of the Vonnegut books I bought as part of a Kindle promotion, so if he's not your thing, these posts should now become more interesting.

14. Tove Jansson, A Winter Book. A collection of Jansson's semi-autobiographical prose. I wanted to like this, because Moomins, but I just didn't get on with her authorial voice, at least as translated here.

Bechdel scores:
Hocus Pocus: Fail. There are a number of named women characters, but they only ever talk to the narrator (not too surprising, since the novel takes the form of a fictional memoir.)
Call No Man Father: Fail. A waitress checks whether the character who represents Mary is okay, but neither of them are actually named in the story.
Bagombo Snuff Box: Pass, sort of. Two named women resist a man's attempts at manipulating them and "talk about their lives instead", but we don't get their actual words, just reported speech.
Galapagos: Pass. Most of those on board are women or girls, several of them are named, and they talk to each other about various things. A lesbian relationship between two of them is strongly implied.
A Winter Book: Pass. Jansson (or her alter ego) talks to her partner about the process of packing up the house they share on a Finnish island. In the earlier stories she also talks to her mother, but I don't think the mother is named.

7. Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick. Deformed twins who communicate telepathically disguise their intelligence from the adults around them until late childhood, when they drop the pretence out of remorse for the effect it has had on their parents. This does not go as they expect; if anything, their parents seem even more disgusted by the combination of an intelligent mind and an "ugly" exterior. A barrage of experts are brought in to diagnose the twins and decide how they should be dealt with. Eventually, one is committed to an asylum. The other, the viewpoint character, is educated and eventually becomes President of the United States just as it is on the point of collapse; he uses what is left of its resources to create artificial families by giving everyone a new, randomly-generated middle name, and sure enough, people begin to bond with and take care of those who have been assigned the same name. (This idea has had a bit of a life of its own in Internet culture; you can, for instance, generate your own artificial name here, and I've come across people who made semi-serious attempts to implement the idea of building extended networks around such names.) Vonnegut wrote it after the death of his sister, and it's a meditation on the nature of relationship. Apparently he considered it one of his weaker works, partly because he wrote it in a free-associative style rather than carefully planning the structure. I enjoyed it quite a lot and didn't really notice any difference in the style or structure compared to the other Vonnegut books I've read; you may judge for yourselves whether this says more about Vonnegut or about me. Apart from the relationship theme itself, there were some quite observant asides:

Of their parents' small-talk: "They appeared, as they had always appeared to Eliza and me, to be under some curse which required them to speak only of matters which did not interest them at all."

Of their parents' reaction to discovering that their children have intelligence after all: "Without knowing what we were doing, Eliza and I were putting the traditional curse of monsters on normal creatures. We were asking for respect."

I also quite liked Vonnegut's metaphor for the noise of a decaying city towards the end of the book: "a disease of silence".

8. Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird. This is my favourite of this promotional batch so far. Walter Starbuck is wrongly jailed for his supposed part in the Watergate scandal; but although innocent of that particular crime, he knows there are other ways in which his hands are not clean. As he tells his story, he asks whether wisdom and goodness are even possible in the messy world in which we find ourselves. Meanwhile, an eccentric old woman is buying up every company she can and making unorthodox staffing choices. Soon, Starbuck crosses her path and finds himself drawn into her plan. Vonnegut's politics are more clearly on show here than in his other books, and there is a strong thread of labour history, which has been an interest of mine since I was a teenager and had a Marxist history teacher. I love the passage in which Starbuck cynically reflects that all his reports as the President's special adviser on youth affairs could be summed up in one telegram:

"YOUNG PEOPLE STILL REFUSE TO SEE THE OBVIOUS IMPOSSIBILITY OF WORLD DISARMAMENT AND ECONOMIC EQUALITY. COULD BE FAULT OF NEW TESTAMENT (QUOD VIDE)".

I also find myself pondering his comparison of the state to a pyramid fraud:

"I am now moved to suppose, with my primitive understanding of economics, that every successful government is of necessity a Ponzi scheme. It accepts enormous loans that can never be repaid. How else am I to explain to my polyglot grandchildren what the United States was like in the nineteen-thirties, when its owners and politicians could not find ways for so many of its people to earn even the most basic necessities [...] And then suddenly [...] a man who two years before had patched the holes in his shoes with cardboard suddenly had a Jeep or a truck or an airplane or a boat, and unlimited supplies of fuel and ammunition. He was given glasses and bridgework, if he needed them, and he was immunized against every possible disease. No matter where he was on the planet, a way was found to get hot turkey and cranberry sauce to him on Thanksgiving and Christmas. What had happened? What could have happened but a Ponzi scheme?"

Bechdel scores:
Slapstick: Pass. Eliza, the female twin, speaks to one of their female nurses about her working conditions, and to a female psychologist about the latter's experience of starvation. Their mother later insults the same psychologist after she speaks disparagingly of the children. Towards the end of the book, a girl chairing a meeting of one of the artificial families speaks to a woman in the audience to reassure her that the family will look after her.
Jailbird: Pass. A young woman and her grandmother talk about whether or not beauty matters.

I think you may appreciate this line from All the Fishes Come Home to Roost by rachelmanija, describing the library in the ashram where she grew up:

"It was overstocked with peculiar New Age manifestos, gloating predictions of the imminent end of the world, and ranting tracts advocating political theories so out-there that they were neither left nor right, but something like orange."

(Emphasis in the original; note that Rachel is USian and will not have had UK politics in mind when she wrote this. Also, the book is excellent, and many of my readers would probably enjoy it, although that doesn't make up for the trauma that provided a lot of the material. Trigger warnings for child abuse and sexual harassment.)

No, not the radio station, the London Buddhist Centre ;-) I've been missing group meditation lately and also feeling like I'd like to explore Advaita/Buddhist philosophy a bit more. Advaita is a non-dualist philosophy of Hindu origin, sufficiently similar to some Buddhist lines of thought that the historic proponents of each used to get accused by their co-religionists of being heretics and secret adherents of the other. It was taught by several of the Hindu teachers who were involved in introducing yoga to the West, including Swami Sivananda, whose disciple Vishnudevananda founded the tradition of yoga I follow. I'd thought I was doing okay just focusing on Christian practice, but the truth is that my actual beliefs are far more easily expressed in Advaitin terms than Christian ones these days, so I suppose it was inevitable that eventually the need to express that in my practice as well would reassert itself.

I thought it would be useful to find something a bit closer to home than the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre in Putney, so I thought I'd give the LBC a try. Unfortunately, I don't think it was what I was looking for. The people were nice enough, and the style of practice - while different - is certainly something I could get used to. They teach two techniques in alternate weeks. This week was metta bhavana, which is a technique to develop compassion; the other is mindfulness of breathing, which I'm already familiar with, so I guess I picked a good week to go. The metta practice basically involves successively thinking compassionate thoughts towards yourself, a friend, someone you feel indifferent towards, someone you dislike, and finally expanding gradually out from the people around you to wish the whole world well. The format in each case is to mentally repeat "May X be happy... may X be well... may X be free from suffering... may X make progress." I had no problem with that and relaxed into it quite happily, but I was not so taken with the general atmosphere in the centre. They have three classes going on at once, and for some unknown reason arrange them so that they all break for tea at the same time, which results in absolute hubbub in the tea room as everyone crowds into a space that is basically too small to hold them. A sizeable number spill over into the shop, and there's a lot of excited talking. There were also several fairly intimate PDAs between people who were evidently partnered; I wouldn't mind in any other setting, but I prefer my meditation space not to be sexualised. It was a huge contrast to the much more peaceful and focused atmosphere at SYVC. I don't think I'll be going to LBC again.

The only place I know in North/East London that does Sivananda-style satsangs (group meditations) clashes with MCC. I do still love MCC and the Eucharist, so giving that up isn't an option, and I'm too involved there now to miss a lot of Sundays. There is a vipassana meditation group in East London that meets one Friday a month, which I might try when the schedules align properly (vipassana being another Buddhist technique); failing that, I might try to go to SYVC once a month or something and see if that's enough to scratch the itch. Poly scheduling - just as tricky whether your loves are people or religions ;-)