Remembering The Queen of Heaven

March 19, 2011 By Jason Pitzl-Waters 34 Comments

“We will not listen to the things you’ve said to us in the name of YHWH. On the contrary, we will certainly do all that we’ve vowed. We will make offerings to the Queen of Heaven, and pour libations to her as we used to do – we and our ancestors, our kings and princes in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem – because then we had plenty of bread and we were satisfied, and suffered no misfortune. But since we ceased making offerings to the Queen of Heaven and pouring libations to her, we have lacked everything and have been consumed by sword and famine. And when we make offerings to the Queen of Heaven and pour libations to her, is it without our husbands’ approval that we make cakes in her likeness and pour libations to her?” – Jeremiah 44:15-19, translation by Graham Harvey, from the Hebrew text of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, excerpted from “The Paganism Reader”.

I suppose it is somewhat appropriate that I mentioned a Christian sect obsessed with battling the “Queen of Heaven” yesterday, because today I’m looking at a new flurry of press about Her, or as they phrase it, “God’s wife.” The notion that the God of the Jews, and later the Christian God, was once part of a polytheistic landscape is fairly uncontroversial among scholars. Several books have been published on the subject, “The Hebrew Goddess”, “Did God Have a Wife?”,  “Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan”, and “The Early History of God”, among several others. NOVA on PBS even mentioned it back in 2008 for their “The Bible’s Buried Secrets” program. But modern journalism has a short memory, and the story has a new hook via Exeter University’s Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who’s presenting a new BBC production (coincidentally) entitled “The Bible’s Buried Secrets”. Stavrakopoulou and her BBC series have been making the rounds at The Daily Mail (sorry, I still don’t link to them), The Guardian, and The Telegraph.

“Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou has been given a primetime BBC Two series, The Bible’s Buried Secrets, in which she makes a number of startling suggestions. [...]  The idea that God had a wife is based on Biblical texts that refer to “asherah”. According to Dr Stavrakopoulou, Asherah was the name of a fertility goddess in lands now covered by modern-day Syria, and was half of a “divine pair” with God. Dr Stavrakopoulou is a senior lecturer in the Hebrew Bible at the University of Exeter, and gained a doctorate in theology from Oxford.”

Her suggestions are so startling that the story got picked up in America by Discovery News.

“In 1967, Raphael Patai was the first historian to mention that the ancient Israelites worshiped both Yahweh and Asherah. The theory has gained new prominence due to the research of Francesca Stavrakopoulou [...] “After years of research specializing in the history and religion of Israel, however, I have come to a colorful and what could seem, to some, uncomfortable conclusion that God had a wife,” she added. Stavrakopoulou bases her theory on ancient texts, amulets and figurines unearthed primarily in the ancient Canaanite coastal city called Ugarit, now modern-day Syria. All of these artifacts reveal that Asherah was a powerful fertility goddess.”

Her conclusions may indeed be “colorful,” but they are hardly new, as I pointed out above. Discovery News actually does a decent job in taking what were mostly warmed over press releases in the UK and giving the story some depth. Showing that Stavrakopoulou’s research is part of a long continuum of thought and study on this topic, interviewing other scholars to emphasize the points being made in her new show.

The ancient Israelites were polytheists, [Aaron] Brody [director of the Bade Museum and an associate professor of Bible and archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion] told Discovery News, “with only a small minority worshiping Yahweh alone before the historic events of 586 B.C.” In that year, an elite community within Judea was exiled to Babylon and the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. This, Brody said, led to “a more universal vision of strict monotheism: one god not only for Judah, but for all of the nations.”

The Discovery News report is also refreshing in that it avoids discussing her “fragrant air” and “good carriage” as John Preston at The Telegraph does. There’s a certain bitter irony in discussing the looks of a presenter on a program that touches on how the power of women was willfully erased from history. In any case, while the subject of God’s wife may not be new, reminding the world that monotheism didn’t spring forth whole-cloth, that it was artificially constructed and forcefully maintained by its early adopters is still quite needful. Especially in an age where the mere hint of a resurgent Western polytheism, and the endurance of polytheism around the world, seems to bring out irrational anger, fear, and hatred in certain corners.

Filed Under: Paganism, Religion Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , 34 Comments

Quick Note: Update on The Wicker Tree

November 14, 2010 By Jason Pitzl-Waters 4 Comments

It’s no secret that we here at The Wild Hunt are big fans of the 1973 cult film The Wicker Man, and are very much looking forward to writer/director Robin Hardy’s recently completed “spiritual sequel” The Wicker Tree; so I was pleased to hear that Hardy screened a 12-minute teaser of the film this Sunday at the Abertoir Horror Festival in Aberystwyth.

Robin Hardy will show a 12-minute promo of The Wicker Tree at the Abertoir Horror Festival in Aberystwyth on Sunday 14 November. The new film features a cameo by Christopher Lee who starred as Lord Summerisle in the original Wicker Man … “I am happy with this film because it is in the same genre as The Wicker Man, although it is not a sequel. There are lots of songs, sex, comedy and something terrible happens when you least expect it.”

Two interesting tidbits from the BBC piece is that Hardy was motived by the (unintentionally, awfully) comedic Nicolas Cage-starring 2006 remake to return to working on a follow-up to The Wicker Man (“That film took the original plot and threw away the rest of what made the original film work.”), and that he’s already at work on the third film in the “Wicker trilogy”.

“Mr Hardy has just finished writing a script for what he describes as ‘the third film in the Wicker trilogy’, The Wrath of the Gods, which he intends to start filming next year.”

The Wicker Tree is due to be released in 2011, but will it draw crowds? The Guardian thinks the original is one of the best horror films of all time, and it still receives generous critical praise, not to mention the ever-renewing cult fanbase, so there should be enough excitement for the film to give it a decent chance at wider success. If so, here’s hoping the 88-year-old Hardy is spry enough to finish the third film! We will, naturally, keep you updated on release dates and other related news items. Now to see if the Daily Mail will rage at the BBC for being too Pagan friendly because it covered this film.

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The BBC is too Pagan-friendly? Really?

November 2, 2010 By Jason Pitzl-Waters 21 Comments

The BBC in the UK, like many news-gathering organizations around the world, spent some time covering modern Pagans during the Halloween/Samhain season. I thought their article by religion correspondent Robert Pigott was pretty standard stuff, meet the Pagans, talk about Samhain, interview Ronald Hutton, mention some recent stories Pagans have appeared in, and wrap it up. But it appears I’m wrong, the article, according to Damian Thompson, a religion reporter and blogging editor for the Telegraph, was an “utterly fawning” exercise in sucking up to Pagans.

“But this potted history of paganism is very heavily sanitised. There’s no mention at all of the overlap between paganism and various forms of Satanism – or the much broader overlap with the far Right. In northern Europe, some pagan movements have celebrated Aryan cultural and racial purity for the best part of a century. In the words of the historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, author of a brilliant study of the Neo-Nazi movement entitled Black Sun, Nordic racial paganism or Odinism is a “spiritual rediscovery of the Aryan ancestral gods … intended to embed the white races in a sacred worldview that supports their tribal feeling”, and expressed in “imaginative forms of ritual magic and ceremonial forms of fraternal fellowship”.

Needless to say, the white witches of Weymouth celebrated by the BBC are deeply opposed to this variety of paganism. But over the years there have been ferocious ideological battles between Lefty, feminist pagans and their racially obsessed but equally Green Odinist rivals, and there has been more contact between the two camps than the official representatives of British paganism would care to acknowledge.“

Hours after Thompson, who is also director of the deeply conservative Catholic Herald, lets fly with his threadbare conspiracy theories involving Paganism and baffling BBC-bashing, the Telegraph runs an article seemingly constructed largely from press releases by The Christian Institute and the Christian Legal Centre.

But the decision to give so much air-time to a minority event has raised eyebrows at a time of a 16 per cent cut in the corporation’s budget. It also brought into question how the BBC reacted to more traditional religious events. Andrea Williams, director of the Christian Legal Centre, said: “It’s not always healthy to represent such beliefs as paganism as mainstream, particularly when our national faith is so often pushed to the edges, “It’s vital that our national broadcaster remembers our great Christian heritage and all the precepts that come from it that are good for the nation. I would like to see this more clearly recognised.”

Before you can say “wag the dog” the “controversy” is getting noticed by Gawker, and the Daily Mail, never one to miss out on a good controversy involving Pagans, does a barely adequate re-write of the Telegraph piece.

Andrea Williams, director of the Christian Legal Centre, said: ‘It’s not always healthy to represent such beliefs as paganism as mainstream, particularly when our national faith is so often pushed to the edges. ‘It’s vital that our national broadcaster remembers our great Christian heritage and all the precepts that come from it that are good for the nation. I would like to see this more clearly recognised.’ The decision to allow so much air-time to the minority event in Weymouth, Dorset, was questioned at a time of a 16 per cent cut in the corporation’s budget.

See what I mean? As for the controversy, and the supposed “marginalization” of Christians (you don’t see us complaining about being marginalized during Christmas or Easter), would there even be an uproar if it weren’t for the Telegraph’s own conservative Catholic blogger (who is never mentioned in the later article) and the instantly available pull-quotes from two conservative Christian organizations? It just seems desperately manufactured, an opinion that is only strengthened by the fact that the Telegraph and the Daily Mail (again following the Telegraph’s lead) are both currently (and luridly) covering the story of a diversity handbook given to police officers that includes Pagans.

“The PC’s guide to arresting a witch: It’s normal for people to be naked, bound and blindfolded and whatever you do, don’t touch their book of spells…”

You get the picture. As for the BBC, as spokesperson remarked that “we don’t have anything to say on this.” To which I say: I’m proud of the BBC.

ADDENDUM: BBC editor Kevin Bakhurst responds at greater length to accusations of “neglecting” Christianity.

“It was Halloween. A good chance, we thought, to explore the background to paganism. I would simply suggest that the decision to cover some aspects of paganism on one day indicates an interest in the fact there is in the UK a range of faiths – and among some a lack of faith. Our reporting should be seen in the context of BBC News’s wider coverage of religion and religious events where stories, as ever, are based on topicality and editorial merit. And Christianity – being the country’s main religion – still remains the faith with the most coverage.”

Bakhurst also notes that the BBC got flak for giving too much coverage to the Pope’s recent visit, maybe the Christian critics were too busy reading the Daily Mail to notice that distinct lack of marginalization?

Filed Under: Paganism, Religion Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , 21 Comments

HuffPost Tackles Religion and other Pagan News of Note

February 25, 2010 By Jason Pitzl-Waters 15 Comments

Top Story: While traditional media outlets continue to cut back on their coverage of religion, there’s been a slow expansion on the Internet. Beliefnet, one of the first Internet religion-news hubs, continues to reign supreme in terms of size and traffic, but it’s starting to see some competition from sites like Patheos and the Newsweek/Washington Post-supported On Faith. Now, another new-media contender is entering the God(s)-beat, as the left-leaning Huffington Post launches a religion section.

Site founder Arianna Huffington explains:

“Like all our sections, HuffPost Religion will bring you the latest news — in this case about all things religion-related — served up in the HuffPost style. It will also be home to an open and fearless dialogue about all the ways religion affects both our personal and our public lives. And it will do so in a way that moves beyond the pigeonhole depictions of both the faithful and the agnostic we see so frequently — and also beyond the tired assumption that God is a card-carrying member of one political party or another.

HuffPost Religion is being edited by Paul Raushenbush, an Associate Dean of Religious Life at Princeton University and an ordained Baptist minister. As a passionate and brilliant religious thinker, pastor, writer and college dean, Paul is ideally suited to the challenge of presenting multiple viewpoints and insights, as well as the real-world implications of religion for American life.”

Some of the big-name contributors include Jim Wallis, Deepak Chopra, Sister Joan Chittister, and Eboo Patel. But will HuffPost Religion cover modern Paganism? I’ve received some initial signs from folks working there that they are looking to add Pagan voices to the section, so we’ll see how things play out in the weeks ahead. Patheos, Beliefnet, and On Faith all now include a Pagan perspective (to varying degrees), so I can’t imagine HuffPost Religion will be far behind (especially since they have Pagans writing for them in other sections). I’ll keep you posted on developments.

In Other News:

An Earth-Based Discussion: Thorn Coyle has posted the audio from a panel discussion she led at this year’s Pantheacon on the question: “Earth-Based: Are We Really?”

“Organized by T. Thorn Coyle, this panel features Weiser authors T. Thorn Coyle, Diana Paxson, Zee Budapest, Orion Foxwood, and Lon Milo DuQuette. Discussion spans our definitions of ourselves as Earth- based, Nature-Based, Cosmos-based, etc. and addresses some of the problems of our times as well as positive media influences such as the movie Avatar.”

I briefly covered (and live-tweeted) this panel in my Pantheacon coverage, so I’m glad to see the audio for it released. While the panel didn’t really dig too deep into the question of how “earth-based” modern Pagan traditions really are, there were some fascinating and insightful things said and discussed, and I highly recommend checking it out.

The Fake Child Sacrifices: Earlier this year I noted the story of Ugandan anti-human-sacrifice campaigner Polino Angela, who claimed to have personally killed several children, including his own son. At the time I was deeply skeptical of his claims, seeing them as a strong echo of similar stories peddled by various ex-Satanists and Witches in America. Nor was I the only one to wonder if Angela was fabricating the story, and if he wasn’t, why he wasn’t in custody for his crimes. Now the house of cards has come tumbling down, as he’s been arrested for lying to a public officer.

“He allegedly repeated his claims to a Ugandan police officer and has been charged with “giving false information to a public officer”. He denied the charges and was remanded in custody in Lira Central Prison. Police officer Godwin Tumugumye, an officer at Lira Police Station, said BBC correspondent Tim Whewell is also wanted by the police over the case, reports Uganda’s New Vision newspaper.”

In another report, it’s come out that Angela was paid 200,000 Uganda shillings to play up child sacrifice, and has now confessed to lying.  If only we could do the same to some of the professional “ex”-workers in America. As I said in my initial post on this story, it isn’t that I don’t believe children aren’t being abducted, abused, and killed in several African nations. There’s of plenty of evidence for that. I also acknowledge that some witch-doctors are indeed killing and mutilating certain children for various reasons. But the lurid portrait painted by the BBC, with help from Mr. Angela, raised many of my old “Satanic Panic” red flags (most notably the idea of a centralized sacrifice industry/conspiracy). I’m glad that the truth has come to light in this story.

Max Beauvoir Declares War: After Tuesday’s incident in Haiti, where a mob of Christians drove off a small group of Vodouisants performing a ceremony for the dead, Vodou leader Max Beauvoir says it’s war.

“It will be war, open war,” Max Beauvoir, supreme head of Haitian voodoo, said at his home and temple outside the capital. “It’s unfortunate that at this moment where everybody’s suffering that they have to go to war. But if that is what they need, I think that is what they’ll get.”

You can see a photo essay of the inciting incident, here (thanks to Jennifer for the link). Since the clash of religions, Haitian officials have ensured that Vodou practitioners will be able to perform ceremonies at Cité Soleil in the future, but that seems cold comfort to those who were driven away with stones. However, not everyone in Haiti is seeing a religious war in the future, Mambos Elsie Théanou Joseph and Silviana Désir are busy working to feed and shelter the homeless, while Catholic priest Rev. Frantz-Michel Grandoit sees a new unity developing between Christians and Vodouisants.

“Humanity doesn’t want us to be separated,” said the Rev. Frantz-Michel Grandoit, a Catholic priest. Grandoit has planned several interfaith prayer vigils with Voodoo priests, including a three-day national prayer for rebuilding, held earlier this month and sponsored by the Global Network of Religions for Children, an international nongovernmental organization. In a ceremony at the Croix-des-Bouquets temple earlier this month, priestesses and parishioners knelt at the base of a tree trunk, lighted candles and solemnly chanted prayers for the earthquake’s victims and for the future of their country. “Hold Haiti’s sweet hand!” they sang as they threw water on the tree trunk and conjured up what is known as the Veve, a mystical symbol embodying the Voodoo deities. “Save us! Give us grace and deliverance!”

So while Max Beauvoir is an important voice right now in post-earthquake Haiti, we must remember, despite his claims, that Vodou has no “supreme chief” that all Vodouisants, Mambos, and Houngans bow before. Beauvoir leads a faction, a group of practitioners who have acknowledged him as their leader, and is not a Vodou “pope”. Reporters must move beyond Beauvoir, and talk to many practitioners from different areas to get a fuller picture of religious interactions in Haiti. To be sure there are those how want a religious war, but I would say there are also many who want a sense of national unity to trump theological differences at this critical stage.

The UK Reburial Issue: The BBC tackles the issue of reburying “pagan” remains, and interviews Druid priestess Emma Restall Orr, and representatives from Honouring the Ancient Dead, about the connection some modern Pagans feel to their pre-Christian ancestors.

“Pagan groups are increasingly asking for human remains and grave goods from pre-Christian burials to be returned to the ground, and their voices are being taken increasingly seriously in the museum world.”

As I’ve said before on this site, there is no consensus among British Pagans on this issue, with many, most notably Pagans for Archeology, opposed to the reburial of ancient human remains. It would have been nice for the BBC to get more perspectives on this, rather than simply portraying HAD and Orr as representative of Pagan stances on this issue.

That’s all I have for now, have a great day!

Filed Under: Paganism, Religion Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 15 Comments
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