Round the Herne

 The theme for September's Suffolk Jungian Circle (virtual meets, 7.30pm on the last Wednesday of the month - let me know if you want the link) is Jung and Christianity. Having chosen the topic, we all rapidly realised that it was a vast topic that could fill multiple meetings - but this is by way of a taster. For the actual meeting different people will each tackle a sub-topic of their choice. This recording cuts off as, despite the best laid plans, someone knocked at the door and I cannot work out how to pause a video recording and splicing two videos into one is too much of a headache to bother with. The final topic that I didn't get to was to touch on a point by Blum, which could probably be a whole debate in itself, that the Christian doctrine of the soul and accompanying personal salvation fits nicely with Jung's individuation, Further, Blum argues that the modern world has gone to Hell in a handbasket by treating people as merely functions and therefore replaceable r...

 A ramble about how different philosophies conceptualise the root and nature of human worth. This was partly sparked off by researching the story of Prometheus stealing fire from Olympos and giving it to humanity to bring them out of their previous leaden state. This meander skirts around issues of what the basis of human worth is, how it relates to legal personhood, and whether there is a sense in which all people are of equal value, what that actually means, and to what extent such notions are universal. Avoided talking about Kant and Burke, but if this generates a discussion I might do a follow-up going more into their ideas.

 This short ramble is just a few ideas around the topic of the genius loci - the spirit of place, as understood by the Ancient Romans. I had a guest spot last night on an American online radio talking about my books, including the murder mystery anthology (A Dangerous Place) one of whose themes is the power of the genius loci to shape and influence the people who live within its sphere. This recording picks up on some of those ideas and reflects further on the idea of how we interact with the entities that take up residence in a location where we also spend a great deal of time. If I can marshal my thoughts in a more coherent fashion in the near future, I shall do so - having been laid low with an infection, today is the first time I have felt able to say something even as meandering as this.

 The video is a reflection on the story of Demeter and her daughter Kore (later Persephone) from a Jungian point of view. This is primarily as a basis for discussion in the Suffolk Jungian Circle at the end of the month but, as ever, it might be of some interest to others as well. I have included reflections on how the myth can be understood and applied in psychological contexts from the viewpoints of Kore, her mother Demeter, and her eventual husband Hades.

 A reflection on Jung's ideas around the Intuitive personality type, mainly for the benefit of members of the Suffolk Jungian Circle preparatory to our monthly discussion group. Hopefully I haven't made all Intuitives sound like Professor Trelawny out on the screaming piss with Doris Stokes - that's not what Jung wanted to say at all. They are just very good at picking up on things that most other people would miss!

 This is my reading of Saki's short story, 'The Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh' (1919). Aside from being an amusing diversion it is a reminder that some people bring great joy by their arrival in our lives whilst others bring great joy only when they depart our lives. It is never a great idea to be one of the latter. Apologies for the rubbish accents, I really must try and acquire some better silly voices.

Having received a few questions about the previous recording of the talk on Jungian Shadow concepts at the Ipswich Moot, I decided to create this deeper look into the topic which answers those questions as well as going off in other directions. This meander contextualises what the Shadow is, how it has been projected on to pagans, how it might be thought of within modern pagan communities, and how the Shadow can be worked with via ritual etc. If there are an additional questions which people would like answered, feel free to send them in by email or as comments on this post.

One of the few benefits of social media (there are plenty enough disadvantages to it) is that you get to talk to people you'd never otherwise meet. Recently I have been chatting to a pagan man from Georgia - the country adjacent to Turkey and Armenia, not the state in America - about various aspects of religion, mythology etc. Knowing nothing whatsoever about Georgia, I decided to learn a little more about its ancient religions and traditions. I came across this story, about a boy apprenticed to Vakhraca. Not at all sure if I have pronounced the name correctly, but Vakhraca is referred to as the devil in one account. Given that he emerges from a stream, I did wonder if he might once have been the spirit of the water course. Whatever the figure in the story was originally, the tale of shapeshifting is reminiscent of other form-changing battles between an older wizard or witch and their young apprentice. These stories crop up a lot and may well suggest some kind of initiatory proc...

Some time ago I posted about the early Catholic thinking on the sin of invidia (these days called envy) and its background in earlier Roman philosophy. To briefly recap, the sin of invidia from a Catholic stance is to place our resentment that others have something which we do not above and beyond a somewhat Panglossian faith in God to make the absence of the desired-for thing worth enduring. The earlier view emphasised that this was not simply a matter of brooding self-pityingly on what the lucky swine next door has, but the active wish to deprive them of it ~ the caustic view that if I cannot have a thing then nobody else should have it either. Nietzsche's take on envy was sightly different, in that he saw it as a more noble form of honesty although one with numerous pitfalls. Nobody has everything they want and we should aspire to be honest when we see someone with a possession, a relationship, a skill or personal quality that we would dearly like but cannot (yet) have. For...

This is another in the series of meandering druidic philosophical reflections (for once not in the kitchen), this time contemplating the nature of language and what we understand by the truth of words. A brief bit of Wittgenstein (but not so much as to make your brain bleed). I'll probably follow up on this at some stage in the future, and see where the musings on linguistic determinism go to.

On the evening of Thursday 17th August, my two elderly dogs and I were walking on Broom Hill, Ipswich (the side close to Valley Road & Westwood Avenue). Two large off-leash rottweilers appeared out of nowhere and attacked both my dogs and me, as I fought to kick the damned things off. The owners were way behind and were clearly not rushing even though they must have heard these monsters baying, my dogs screaming in pain, and me bellowing at the things to fuck off. By some miracle the little Jack Russell was bruised but not otherwise wounded. My husky was badly bitten on his head, stomach, flank and rear, and had to be taken to the vet for stitches - costing £370. The damage to his belly was seconds away from disembowelling him. My leg and hand were bitten (blood everywhere by the time we got home) and I was given a tetanus booster and antibiotics. The irresponsible buggers made no effort to apologise or ask if either I or my dogs were harmed. What makes this matter worse, for m...

 I recorded a rather rambling podcast for the Pagan Federation virtual moot. This is almost the same, but in this version I remembered to say what I forgot to say in their version. The theme set was 'Food for the Soul' and so I've reflected on the way in which storytelling - from novels to family narratives to mythical sagas - shapes our lives (scop's them, if you want an Anglo-Saxon pun) for the better or worse. We feed our bellies with bread, but our souls with sagas. One day I might transmute these disparate ideas into something cohesive, but at the moment you'll just have to endure the meandering version. I've been asked to write something a bit clever for an anthology ardently read by people who are very, very clever (and some who just think they are). I'm wary of doing so because they also seem to relish ripping one another apart in the way that posturing academics and pseuds in equal measures are prone to do. If I ever manage to produce ...

Two days ago the sad news was announced that British character actor Geoffrey Bayldon had died at the grand age of 93. Younger readers may not recognise the name, he having been retired for a while, but those old enough to remember Worzel Gummidge and Catweazle certainly will know him as the both the Crowman whose magic brought scarecrows to life, as well as the ancient time travelling wizard who landed in 1970s Britain to discover the perverse magic of electrickery and telling bones. He also appeared in a long old list of TV shows and films. His magical characters inspired me with the visual image of Doctor Winter, a real life Cunning Man who lived in the 1700s and early 1800s in Ipswich. When writing fiction I find it helps if I can put a face to my characters, so often draw on both celebrities, people I know, and random strangers I see whose faces interest me. I wanted to restore Winter to life as the sleuth in a short story called 'A Doctor Calls' (part of the crime anth...

Over the summer I spent a week holidaying in Sicily - the first time I have been on a plane in about 30-ish years. My brain has been rather all over the place since getting back, and it has taken me a while to marshal my thoughts sufficiently to share the experience. There are a number of different angles I shall approach over the next few posts. We met up with many relatives and friends of Francesco, and dined out a great deal. At one particularly impressive meal I was asked to conclude the evening with a story. Only a small number of the people at table spoke any English, and I currently have only about a dozen words of Italian. So the story of Pomona and Vertumnus was conveyed by a combination of Francesco's translation of my words, a sprinkling of what little Italian I do know, and even more body language than usual. Edward Sapir claimed that language shapes thought (a concept now known as linguistic relativity)- people thinking in Dutch will do so very differently from someo...

There's a chap who lives a few streets away from me and whom I sometimes bump into whilst walking the hounds. He is always very pleasant and seems well informed on many issues. He's also a devout Christian (not sure which denomination), and often talks about religious matters. Recently he spoke to me about the destruction of antiquities by Daesh in what is now Islamic State territory. He sympathised about how horrified I must be by their historical loss, but then suddenly said that - as some of the temples were associated with "Baal worship" - maybe their loss was a good thing as it would save people from being tempted into devoting themselves to Baal. It was an awkward moment where I wondered whether to laugh, cry, or rage. By the time I'd made up my mind, he'd already gone on his way. I don't even know where to really begin with this sentiment - it is horrifying when members of one religion crow about the destruction of the sites sacred to another, ...

Last night I, like so many other people, saw the horrific news coming out of Orlando about the massacre of over 50 people dancing the night away in a gay club. Just as disturbing, though thankfully with a bloodless resolution, police elsewhere in America stopped a heavily armed man on his way to slaughter people at a Gay Pride march in Lo Angeles. I don't know if these two murderous lunatics were in contact and had coordinated their attacks, or if it was just some bizarrely improbably coincidence. My partner and I instantly recalled the bombing of a London gay pub n 1999. Numerous incidents of violence against LGBT people hit the mass media, such as Daesh hurling people off high buildings in accord with their reading of the Koran. There are plenty more incidents around the world that never reach the headlines, and even more that are never reported to start with because people don't see the point, are too afraid of further reprisals (or losing their jobs etc. as a result of the...

Listening to this brief clip of Stephen Fry talking about God on the Gay Byrne Show reminded me (at approximately the halfway mark) of a very similar sentiment presented the equally dazzling ~ though much less avuncular ~ intellect of the late Gore Vidal. Messrs Fry and Vidal share a number of traits in common, not least their avowed atheism - both in the sense of doubting there is any evidence for a deity but also in the notion that the monotheist vision of Him is so unappetising and hypocritical that both men preferred to eschew the idea of having to crook their knee to Him. Both men also made the same claim in favour of the Ancient Greeks (was Mr Fry influenced by Mr Gore here?) The American author once stated that, if he were obliged to choose a religion, it would be that of the Olympian Gods - and for much the same reasons as advocated by our erudite Englishman in the above interview. Regardless of whether we look at the deities of Olympus, Asgard, Tian, Aaru, or most other po...

Many readers will doubtless have one or more works by Marion Zimmer Bradley on their shelves. Whilst she became a Christian in the latter years of her life, she had a tremendous impact on the emerging pagan community of the English-speaking world – most especially through her Avalon stories. Bradley has now joined the ranks of those tarnished celebrities whose unsavoury sexual tastes have been exposed during the last couple of years. Her ex-husband and fellow author, Walter Breen, had himself been arrested for child molestation in the early 1990s and died in prison. Recent claims by Bradley’s daughter, Moira Greyland, have declared that not only was the late author aware of what her husband got up to but, to some extent, participated with him. How accurate such claims are it is hard to assess, however many pagans on the Net are declaring that they will clear their shelves of her books, feel unable to ever read them again, and so forth. Without dwelling on the specifics of this cas...

A lifelong Doctor Who fan, I was saddened by the death of actress Elisabeth Sladen in 2011. For those not in the know, she was one of the most popular female companions to have appeared on the show, accompanying Jon Pertwee and later Tom Baker ~ she even had her own short lived spin off show back in the day. When the series was revived, she returned to make a guest appearance alongside David Tennant before being given a successful spin-off on children’s TV. She led a gang of teenagers who defended the Earth from alien threats. The teenagers were an ethnically diverse bunch but, in reading about the actress the other day, I was surprised to find that they would have become even more divers, had not Ms Sladen’s untimely death lead to the cancellation of the show. The teenager who played her adopted son, Luke, was scheduled to come out as gay in a future episode. It was surprising to read that this would have made Luke the one of the first gay central characters in any BBC children’s sho...

The meaning of life is a topic that has taxed the greatest (and the least able) minds since the dawn of human existence. It was brought to mind again recently in a discussion with a friend who suggested that having a meaning to one’s life was vital to good mental health. Numerous psychologists, philosophers and scholars agree that both a sense of purpose, and the degree of spiritual reflection that precedes finding a purpose, are highly beneficial. It is better to have a sense of why you are here than to merely trudge from day to day in a largely pointless routine. In fact, many have argued that just having a purpose in itself is actually far more important than the exact nature of the purpose. One of the key questions in the matter of meaning is the source of that meaning and what is actually more than a linguistic nicety ~ doe we discover the meaning of our lives, or create it? That is to say, is the meaning already determined (whether by a god, Wyrd, karma or anything else)...