Pagan Rites for Queens GOP Council Candidate

The Village Voice, Sept. 24 2009
By Tom Robbins 

Forget the mayoral, comptroller and public advocate races. The best political show in town is taking place in Bayside, Queens where leaders are wrestling with the question of whether a strong Republican city council nominee should be forced from his race — just because he’s a card-carrying pagan.

The candidate in question is GOP council nominee Dan Halloran who was revealed in a September 17 story in the Queens Tribune to be a member of a religious organization that is, well – heathen. Here’s how the Tribune described it:

“Halloran is the ‘First Atheling,’ or King, of Normandy, a branch of the Theod faith of pre-Christian Heathen religions assembled in the Greater New York area. A group of dedicated fellow pagans swear their allegiance to him through oaths of fidelity, allowing luck from a series of ancient gods – specifically the ‘Norse’ or ‘Germanic’ gods Odin, Tyr and Freyr – to pass through the King to his kinsmen.” Read the rest of the story.

King Arthur was a ‘genocidal warlord,’ claims new book

The Telegraph, Sept. 27, 2009
By Anita Singh 

The valiant English hero of modern legend, as depicted in the BBC One children’s series, Merlin, bears no resemblance to the historical reality.

Dr Simon Young, a historian and expert in Celtic studies, claims in The Celtic Revolution that Arthur was a hero of a very different kind for the Celts.

“Arthur was not supposed just to return his people to happiness but to entirely wipe out their neighbours – the English,” he said.

“He almost certainly was a historical figure and there are three or four major candidates. Warlords in the fifth and sixth centuries lived in an age which was extremely unpleasant and very violent. Read the rest of the story.

Book Review: ‘A History of Christianity’

The Guardian, September 19, 2009
Reviewed by Rowan Williams 

A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years  by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The provocative subtitle alerts you to the fact that this is going to be much more than a textbook. Diarmaid MacCulloch begins with what turns out to be one of many tours de force in summarising the intellectual and social background of Christianity in the classical as well as the Jewish world, so that we can see something of the issues to which the Christian faith offered a startlingly new response.

Greco-Roman religion had ended up with an uneasy mixture of the cult of the emperor (increasingly odd as the empire became a military dictatorship constantly changing hands after bloody conflicts) and a chaotic plurality of local rites and myths. The Jewish world was marked by a lively tension over how Jewish identity was to be understood. What Christianity brought into all this was a definition of Jewish identity that opened up to become a definition of human identity independent of any particular state apparatus; it created, you could say, the very idea of a religion as a form of belonging together that did not depend on political loyalties. Read the rest of the story.

Book Reviews: ‘Sitting with Sufis’ and ‘The Garden of Truth’

The Christian Century, September 22, 2009
Reviewed by Marcia Hermansen 

Sitting with Sufis by Mary Blye Howe and The Garden of Truth by Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Sufism, the mystical path within Islam, like other inner traditions such as Yoga and Kabbalah, has both an element of philosophical esotericism and a dimension of practice that can more easily be popularized. The two books under review engage Sufism from very different perspectives. Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an Iranian-American emeritus professor of Islamic studies and author of numerous books on Islam and especially Islamic mysticism. He is the recipient of prestigious awards in religious studies and has delivered the Gifford Lectures. Mary Blye Howe is an American Christian who approaches “interspirituality” through encounters with other religious traditions at the level of embodied practice. She also is the author of A Baptist Among the Jews. Read the rest of the story.

‘Web-bot project’ makes prophecy of 2012 apocalypse

The Telegraph, September 24, 2009
By Tom Chivers

Conspiracy theorists on the web have claimed that the bots accurately predicted the September 11 attacks and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, and that they say a cataclysm of some sort will devastate the planet on 21 December, 2012.

The software, similar to the “spiders” that search engines use to index web pages, were originally developed in the 1990s to predict stock market movements. Read the rest of the story.

Scholars seek to rescue image of John Dee, last royal wizard

The Guardian, September 20, 2009
By Maev Kennedy 

A group of international scholars are meeting in Cambridge today to rescue the reputation of the last royal wizard, Dr John Dee, from the false charge of sorcery that has dogged him for 400 years – undoubtedly fuelled by his use of a crystal ball to communicate with angels, and collaboration with a conman who assured him the angels had suggested a spot of wife-swapping.

Dee is variously regarded as one of Europe’s greatest scholars and scientific thinkers – and as the man who cast horoscopes for Queen Mary and her Spanish husband, Philip, suggested the most auspicious date for the coronation of Elizabeth I, and called up the wind that scattered the Armada. He may also have inspired Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest, and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist.

Objects he owned that are now in national collections have not helped clear his reputation, including transcripts in the British Library of dialogues with angels, and his crystal ball, wax tablets inscribed with magical symbols, and black obsidian mirror, in which he hoped to see the future, at the British Museum. Read the rests of the story.

Making Magic With Music

New York Press, September 17,2009
By Linnea Covington

Aside from being a wandering minstrel, Larkin Grimm also tucks the occupation of shaman into her well-worn cap. 

“All great artists are shamans,” says Grimm. “Everyone who is a musician and goes into an altered state of conscience is a shaman, and music puts you in that altered state of conscience.”

This mystical connection between a musician and their audience was one of the many reasons Grimm teamed up with the Ordo Templi Orientis, also known as OTO, to curate the Musicka Mystica Maxima Festival, a new sort of event featuring musicians who all practice magic, kicking off Monday at Santos Party House. Read the rest of the story.

The Holy Grail of the Unconscious

The New York Times, September 16, 2009
By Sara Corbett 

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome. Read the rest of the story.

Rosicrucian Museum’s been a South Bay icon for 81 years

San Jose Mercury News, September 14, 2009
By Laura Riparbelli 

Walking through the pillared museum entrance, visitors are immediately immersed in ancient Egypt, a mysterious world unlike the one in which they live. Replicas of Egyptian gods, four human mummies, 25 mummified animals, jewelry and much more line the walls.

Ancient Egypt has traveled to the de Young Museum in San Francisco with King Tutankhamun’s tomb on display, but why travel to San Francisco when residents can feel the same rush of Egypt-mania in Santa Clara County?

San Jose’s Rosicrucian Museum, an 81-year-old institution with more than 150,000 visitors annually, is home to the largest collection of Egyptian artifacts on the West Coast and is the only museum in the world to be designed in ancient Egyptian architectural style. Read the rest of the story.

Book Review: ‘The Celtic Revolution’

Daily Mail, September 14, 2009
Reviewed by Peter Lewis

The Celtic Revolution by Simon Young

As I understand it, the word ‘Celtic’ equals ‘legendary’. Nobody seems to agree on who the Celts were. Some doubt they ever existed. If they did, did they matter? 

According to this surprising new work by a historian of the Dark Ages, whose reputation is fast rising, they mattered very much – as much as the Greeks and the Romans. For their legacy helped form the way in which modern peoples like ourselves see the world.
. . .
Their way of life was based on warfare. They lived in tribes which were constantly fighting their neighbors over cattle and wealth. They fought stark naked, roaring and making a terrifying  din. Read the rest of the story.