Jeannie's Place

(as seen on the_wildhunt):

The Canadian Women's Film Board documentary series about Goddess Worship, Women and Spirituality, is finally out on DVD!!!! This cool 3 film set was made in the early 80s and, while sort of dated now, is still a really good look at the beginnings of the Goddess-centered pagan movement, including extensive interveiws with Starhawk and Margot Adler. (And some of the I know from folks from the DC Pagan community are also featured). A young Canadian harpist and singer by the name of Loreena McKennitt wrote and performed music for the series, and we all know where she is now.

I want this set more than I can say. Its been years since I've seen it and would love to own it. I've the old VHS recordings on my Amazon wish list but they are really hard to find and I would MUCH rather have the DVDs. Its too bad that these had to appear at a time when we will be perpetually broke for the forseeable future...

Brent is happily situated at home with his brand new XBox360. It was my 5th anniversery present to him and he's having quite a good time with it. Luckily most of the old XBox games we own are backwards compatible with the new system and he's making his way through Lego Star Wars II at the momment. Since the old XBox has been out of commission for almost a year, its like having a bunch of brand new games to play.

I also placed our order at Amazon today. Its mostly made up of music, but I did grab the first season of Dead Like Me for Brent and Ronald Hutton's Stations of the Sun for me. I've been waiting to get back to that book for some time. Let's see if I can get through it this time without throwing it against the wall and screaming with frustration.

Hutton is a fine historian and as a cataloguer of ancient traditions, he's great. But he is not an archaeologist, anthropologist or ethnogarpher. I find it extremely frustrating that there are pagans who have read his works and feel that they can make grand pronouncements about things without doing further research. (Example: I got into an argument earlier this year over the age of Chalk figures with a woman who refused to acknowledge the Uffinton Horse C14 date because Hutton states that all the Chalk figures are from the 18th and 19th centuries.) Hutton belongs to the Anit-Frazer school of folklore and therefore feels that there are no survivals of tradition from the ancient pagan past (Frazer claimed that every folk tradition had its roots in the APP). The problem with the Anti-Frazer camp is that they rely heavily on medieval written records to prove their point and deny the fact that tradition can (and is) transmitted orally for multiple generations before it ever gets written down. Within Stations of the Sun alone, I found him contradicting himself several times within the first 4 chapters. He makes grand statements and then proves himself wrong by providing linguistic or ethnographic information that he isn't trained to interpret. I came very close to writing him a letter the first time I tried to read the book, letting him know all the places where there were contradictions. I didn't finish the book because it was borrowed from the library and had to go back and I've been waiting to by myself a copy until I was in a place where I wouldn't want to rip it to shreads every time I came across a contradiction. I think I'm in that place now and we'll see if I'm right.

BTW- just for the record, I fall somewhere between Hutton and Frazer. I feel that there are definately more modern traditions but there are also traditions that do have much older roots. I don't think that you can make blanket statements about folk tradition in general. You need to look at each tradition on its own and make a judgement from there. This is especially important when dealing with traditions that have been adopted/reclaimed by the modern pagan movement.