Pagan Culture - Earth Wisdom

Connections - Into the Forest

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In the forest, nothing stands separate.

There’s a ravine near my home where I often walk. The entrance is through a graveyard, where only a chain link fence separates the gardens of the dead from a jungle of untended growth, a green cleft that slices through the city. I find this shadowy, forested otherworld strangely entrancing. One of my favorite spots is a kind of “giant’s causeway,” an elevated road running high above with its enormous concrete supports sunk deep into the forest.

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The Stag Who Bears the Sun

head_Archer Antlered creatures hold a central place in our imaginations.

It’s an image familiar from popular culture: a stag with head proudly lifted, antlers encircling the sun or some other radiant symbol. The shining stag has become a mute symbol of everything from hunting-themed video games to alcoholic beverages— but it has roots in a more glorious past, in which it drew us, even against our will, to something greater than ourselves.

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A Guide to Pagan Camping

A Guide to Pagan Camping:
Festival Tips, Tricks and Trappings
Lori Drake, Rotco Media, 2011
3.5/5 Broomsticks

When festival time rolls around, this new Guide makes a great addition to your hoard. Though rough in spots, and occasionally in need of an editor, Ms. Drake’s compendium of practical advice provides a welcome addition to your festival fun.

Longtime vets of the festival circuit, Lori and her husband manage the indie music label Rotting Corpse Records. After seven years of blogging about their experiences, she realized that it was her posts about camping and festivals that attracted the most attention. Compiling and refining her observations into book form, Drake released A Guide to Pagan Camping just in time for festival season. Her effort is our gain.

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The Moral Lives of Animals

wp-24_reviews_01The Moral Lives of Animals
DALE PETERSON, BLOOMSBURY, 2011

Apes, Rules, and Natural Law

Presenting academic knowledge to a not-necessarily-academic audience can be difficult for even the best writers. Zoology is not as obscure as, let’s say, quantum physics, but still presents challenges. Dale Peterson is a fine writer for such a job.

He understands the science very well, partly through his own research as well as through his personal friendship with Jane Goodall. He also has a doctorate in English, which means he understands storytelling, narrative, and words. Indeed the very first chapter in the text is about words: especially words which describe moral ideas, and assign moral standing to one thing and not to another. But the same opening chapter is also about stories. He opens with a personal story about being chased by an angry elephant through a thicket in western Africa. He also explores his thesis through other, better-known stories. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, probably the finest love story about a man and a whale ever written, features prominently here. Melville’s story is about human characters with radically different attitudes about what that whale might be thinking, or even whether it is thinking at all. It’s a very good choice for a story through which to explore Peterson’s topic. So if you don’t have much of a background in biology or anthropology, have no fear.

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