Pagan Tropers Unite!

Indeed.

The main reason I got into Paganism is because I believe that every region should have it's own religion. All the Major religions stifle local culture and try to force every one to submit to a religion that began on the other side of the world.

BTW Fallen Máni is running a currently free promotion, in case you want to check: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079SSP8X2

Well, I was poking around Wikipedia and discovered that in the first week of February, someone edited the Tagalog deities article. Haik now has a whole paragraph in his blurb, PLUS a mention in Amanikable's newly-expanded blurb! And then Lakapati's pronouns were edited to be gender neutral!

Apparently, Amanikable and Haik have a very dualistic relationship (Amanikable being the god of tempests and tsunamis, Haik being the god of calm seas and good weather), which is a spooky coincidence to my version of Haik having Yin-Yang Bomb symbolism in The Crocodile God. Also yaaaaaaay, this means I can bring Amanikable into my various stories as Haik's Foil.

Whoever did that, thank you.

Rad

I started reading Betwixt & Between by Storm Faerywolf, a light introduction to Blue Rose, his own lineage of the Feri Tradition ( although he prefers the spelling "Faery" ). It's pretty interesting, there are a lot of things I want to draw inspiration from for my own thing I've got going on. Of all the Western magical / religious paradigms, the Anderson Feri resonates with me the most, even more than Theistic Satanism and demonolatry. I think this is because it emphasizes ecstatic experience, queerness is actively celebrated as divine, and magic isn't just mind games.

edited 18th Feb '18 1:47:59 PM by nekomoon14

Costumes in Black Panther had Philippine influence and I am totally all right with that. Because if Lea Salonga can play Erzulie and Dante Basco can play a role written for a Jamaican boy then yes that and Hanuman is a-okay by me. They're fine! We're fine. It's fine. This is fine.

I will be killed on that hill, I can only hope to the sound of Carl Douglas' Kung Fu Fighting.

This is pagan because Bast, Hanuman, I loved that there's Animal Spirits In Natural Habitat Astral and Urban Astral in Black Panther, and Erzuli not in Black Panther, and also my pantheon is canon-divergent Neverland pirates. The pirate queen that my version of Captain Hook has that weird frienemies thing going on with turned out to be a waaaay aged-up canon-divergent Wendy Moira Angela Darling. I don't expect to meet Rufio, but it's neat that the backstory Dante Basco made for the character highlights "Lost Boys" as an immigration issue in Bangarang.

Neato! I read an excerpt from that author about reclaiming "warlock" (as an exonym, the only oath arguably being broken being the Christian covenant, so it wasn't a matter of secret legacy covens with jerks or douchecanoes being excluded and labeled warlocks.)

Yesssss, I saw that article and I was so happy.

Yay for ecstatic Faerie traditions! Most of them seem pretty prone to the cute-Hollywood-fairy-with-wings idea, so I didn't really learn much about them, but that subset sounds cool!

It's too quiet in here, b'sides most of y'all don't plan on sleeping anyway:

That was fey as hell, shamanic as hell, witchy as hell. Gorgeous. I could listen to Heilung for literally hours.

Okay, so I didn't place in the Book Pipeline contest because apparently The Crocodile God is too similar to The Shape of Water. But not really, because the main reasons for similarity were that both stories are extremely mythic in tone, with Star-Crossed Lovers of which one member is a sea-god. ...Yeah.

This is apparently too much of a risk for prospective audiences who may not be able to tell the difference between "a fish-man implied to be a sea-god gets caught by the government and almost experimented on, then falls in love with a mute girl who rescues him," versus "a Tagalog sea-god with crocodile tattoos finds his reincarnated wife in California, is mistaken for an undocumented immigrant, and goes on the run with her while dealing with his trauma regarding the Death of the Old Gods."

Haik got fuck-all insulted at this "Viewers Are Morons" technicality and stewed along with me for about a week.

Then today, my months-pending friend request to the Samoan dancer I based Haik's story-appearance on was accepted. I've been following him for a while as a fan, and today I remembered that I actually DID send him a friend-request.

He also announced today that he's now officially one of Te Vaka's new dancers (as opposed to a consistent guest-artist.)

I don't know what this means, but yay for jumping up to One Degree of Separation?

edited 15th Mar '18 12:07:31 PM by Sharysa

I caught up on the second and third season of CarmillaTheSeries and now I want to read Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth her stories and hymns from Sumer by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer or at least re-read Truth or Dare by Starhawk.

But am currently digesting Marie-Louise von Franz's Alchemy that I supposed was going to cover the history of Alchemy and how they apply to Carl Jung's psychology but...despite being an easy read that I blew through in two and a half days, and right on with commentary on the human condition pertaining to processes of the psyche (at least at the point of my life that I am reading it), it...is pretty eyeballs deep in Jungian psychobabble from the get-go. And still reads like an academic lecture from 1959, with a sort of Kitchen Sink Fantasy pick-and-mix version of world religions—at least Dr. von Franz checks herself with how the view of the Queen of Sheba stated as an alchemical allegory would only be that way to white people; and immersing myself in Jungian and Alchemical gender binary after so long losing my taste for it and now it's like they're saying that everyone is trans (cisgendered dudebros having an Anima or feminine repression that acts as a spiritual guide and expression; cis-femme people having the same in an Animus—and, an ecstatic text I think in the portion dedicated to the Aurora consurgens, the archetype Sophia rambles and raves into masculinity, which wouldn't even be notable among all the other ecstatic mystical descriptions of the cosmos and reducing that to vague recipes and alchemical procedures, except that the binary is so stressed in every other facet of every alchemical text contained.)

(It's predictably more Abrahamic in the medieval portion of the lecture than on the classical, but these were heretical texts for all its pious faith, and that as well as an entertaining digression when von Franz must argue with a theologian in the audience about whether a monk may commit Onanism and be psychologically and spiritually healthy instead of poor dear Dr Franz giving a lecture on Alchemical texts...doesn't waken my Catholic schoolkid survivor flinch. I cannot credit my own maturity for that.)

I'm remembering a bunch of thesis interviews I think it was on the entertainment industry here in Metro Manila, and every single person interviewed outright *said* that the key to "success" is to make the stories mababaw for a Filipinx audience, which means slapstick, scantily-clad models...nothing to touch the heart or challenge the mind. It wasn't even defended in terms of what most successfully meets the bottom line, or like the speaker wished that they could remain more idealistic and innovative, it seemed just...matter-of-fact to these interviewees that all we fellow countrymen are mindless consumers of mindlessness.

I guess it's not a phenomenon unique to this one nation that the indie/alternative stuff is generally way better that giant corporations mainstreaming stuff, and it was maybe 12 years ago these interviews were conducted so I hope management has changed up a lot since then but yeah...

But hey, I heard Guillermo del Toro submitted that fishman script to the production company that was setting out to make a cinematic universe type movie franchise like the superhero movies were doing, but with the classic monsters (Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster...swamp thing?)

And they rejected the script, despite it being perfect for the project, so del Toro released it independently. That's the version I heard about the background of the Shape of Water anyway.

Still sucks that the people you sent yours to based their judgement on the most surface-y of aesthetic, though. If the criticism were more like "speculative fiction is so expensive to stage" or even "Polynesia has already been represented, we're looking for a different ethnic flavor-trend of the month" then that would be waaaaaayyy offensive, but, I would at least have the slightest impression that they'd skimmed the dang thing.

The thing is, they DID read the first 15-ish pages, in addition to the synopsis I wrote. Apparently, despite the fact that Crocodile God has a "very cool" cultural theme right from the get-go, it's still not enough that my story is basically a Polynesian/Tagalog sandwich, drenched in Tagalog sauce, and served with a generous side-dish of Filipino Diaspora Issues.

Of all movies The Crocodile God's prospective script would have a shared aesthetic with, I would have thought the "recovering lost culture" theme would be too similar to, you know, MOANA.

Oh look, more weirdness happening.

There is a spirit calling himself Dave. Right now he just wanders around being chill and trying to manage my freakouts. And right at midnight on March 20, he was like "wait girl, don't go to sleep yet, I got you a birthday present! CHECK FACEBOOK!"

So I did, and nothing happened, so I forgot about it. I think the present was actually for today, and for me it's really really shitty.

This year's mercury retrograde isn't playing games, bruh.

First bad decision: I tried to write a Facebook message longer than two sentences on my phone, instead of waiting to get home and send it on my laptop. (The message was about a paragraph long, saying "Hello, publishing company, I think you should check out The Crocodile God on my Facebook artist's page! "The Crocodile God" is a story about [Insert short synopsis]. Check it out if you're interested, it's on my artist page [insert a direct and easy-to-click link]!")

Second bad decision: I didn't double-check who the other person was before I sent my message. Because you know how long-ish messages take up the whole of an average palm-sized phone screen? And they often block out the name of the message's potential recipient?

So yeah, I just mindlessly pressed the arrow key and two seconds later, I find out that I sent this message (WITH A LINK TO MY ARTIST PAGE) to Dave Kuresa, newest member of Te Vaka, instead of the actual publishing company I meant to message. (I must have pressed my older fan-gushing message to him by mistake because TINY SCREEN AND CRAPPY CLUTTERED APP.)

Technically I sent him an "oh shit, sorry for the mistake" message for damage control, buuuuuuut I also want to crawl in a corner and die of embarrassment right now because I DON'T KNOW IF HE'S GONNA LAUGH IT OFF AND SAY IT'S FINE, OR IF HE'S ACTUALLY GONNA VISIT MY ARTIST PAGE WITH ALL MY CONCEPT ART AND ANGRY FILIPINO POETRY AND SHIT.

Currently torn between checking my phone every five seconds or turning it off for twenty years.

The spirits are laughing at me. Someone make them shut up.

If I happen to die of embarrassment, avenge me by making Facebook messenger less shitty.

edited 21st Mar '18 10:42:19 PM by Sharysa

Got to sit in on my roommate's structuralism class. (Development of one anthropological theory.) I was more interested in diffuse symbolism versus condensed symbolism, but there was more on anti-ritualism...which was coincidentally the same idea that I've been reading from Marie-Louise von Franz. Whenever a religion becomes too codified, a compensatory sect will then form and claim to have the living spirit, and the previous sect will be rendered orthodox. The professor said that ritual-heavy religions were a product of community stability...but, my roommate suggested (and I agree more with this) that heavy ritualism compensates for instability in a society instead. I suppose it's a case by case basis.

The professor was also very interested in the linguistic similarity between Bicolano and Indonesian (Bahasa, I'm guessing, not Javanese) because linguistic vestiges of a precolonial deity—Tuan, not Allah—is the same in some parts of Indonesia and some parts of the Philippines. That segment was totally my jam because I've lived in both places.

To err is human! I hope you feel better soon!

I'll probably feel better in a week. According to FB, he saw my messages at 9:44pm yesterday, so I copied my first message and sent it to the ACTUAL publisher a couple minutes ago. (While cringing. A lot.)

They don't accept incomplete manuscripts, but I will totally do a formal submission email after I finish the story and reach at least 50,000 words.

Response was pretty damn fast because they literally responded right now, but it was also kind of DEAD considering it's such a new company (apparently it started up in 2016). Alsoooooo, not too happy about poking around their website—they're apparently calling for more diversity because their current author roster is literally 9/10ths white, as in "one Asian author and nine white girls."

More niggling bad vibes: Two of the said white authors lived in or are currently living in Asia, and one explicitly mentioned that living in Asia inspired her to write East Asian stories.

If this was a California city, it would be Berkeley. I like Berkeley, but between the crazy rents AND hippie fake-positive racism, I don't want to LIVE there. Dave Kuresa was the most diverse part of my interactions regarding this company, and he wasn't even supposed to be there.

Pop culture thingy got me looking up Sumerian mythology and culture...for fanfiction-writing reasons, or more for fanart (Bling! Proto togas! Fringe dresses from 3500 BCE!) I remember sitting in for an archaeology class about it...before I was Interested interested, just because I thought it could be interesting.

According to the notes, which did have a lot of introduction about how to best guess from the architecture that a complex society had a dense population, specialization (differences in implements that can be found), and societal stratification (if there was a "bad part of town")...

The oldest city to stand for example was Catalhoyuk which was in the area currently between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. (But the city's heyday was back in 7000 BCE).

But to the cradle-of-civilization that's more my interest right now: Mesopotamia at around 4000 BCE was the development site of numerous city-states, so many have probably not been discovered yet (or maybe I meant when I wrote this, that the professor said that the cities are mentioned in written records of the time in neighboring cities but no materials have been discovered? It could be nifty for original fiction writing purposes to have wriggle room to invent one.)

But anyway, it seems they all tended to write in cuneiform even though they had their own languages—and, they tended to go to war with each other a lot.

The city of Kish was defeated by the city of Ur, which was defeated by the city of Uruk from where we got the Epic of Gilgamesh...and then Akkadians came in and killed the Sumerian language while adopting cuneiform, and then Babylonians conquered them.

...And some of that was in the Sumer part of Mesopotamia.

Matters of archaeological influence to emerge from this stirring pot of complex societies and warring city-states are: the Uruk ziggurat, the Babylonian walls, high towers all over the place, the wheel, the 12-month year, the 360-degree circle, and Assyrian glasscrafts.

Edit to Add: How could I forget that godsdamned Ea-nasir who collected his hate mail in the form of stone tablets and we now know something very specific about life over there 4000 years ago.

edited 3rd Apr '18 6:32:08 AM by Faemon

Sumerian and Actual Ancient Society (not just Greek or Roman)! One on hand it's fascinating, but on the other hand it intimidates me because I can't read half of the names.

I re-read Joel Kotkin's book The City which I didn't finish and was kind of harsh on because it seemed to me that the Middle Kingdom was only considered notable because Marco Polo wrote about it.

Upon re-reading, I misjudged this book. The text also only considers Singapore notable only because Raffles conquered it, and Tenochtitlan notable only because Cortés conquered it. Angkor Wat and [[‎https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_I_of_Mali Mali]] don't seem to make mention at all, but I suppose I should read the whole thing to make sure. Not to be ungrateful to Kotkin. Not like I've published anything as extensively researched recently.

At least the segment on Mesopotamia seems thorough enough, and a big part of the thesis statement is that cities were—contrary to the Jade-Colored Glasses of contemporary secularism—sacred spaces by default and design...which I like, except for the details I just complained about.

@Sharysa

?

Berkeley has a big problem with people who think cultural appropriation is "culture sharing" whether we want to share or not. When they're called out on it, they usually go "BUT I'M HONORING YOUR CULTURE AND YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL."

Me asking more about cultural appropriation here would be in order?

No worries. Cultural appropriation is when a person takes bits of a culture they weren't born into, but doesn't give credit to the people of that culture, or get to know them in a meaningful manner.

For example, a lot of white people in Berkeley do yoga, drink "chai tea," and call themselves Buddhists because "the religion is so chill and open-minded." They are appropriating Indian (especially Hindu) culture. Their interest is from a good place, in that they enjoy Indian culture, but they probably don't know any Indian-Americans.

Then, American yoga classes get stripped of all spirituality/religion to focus on "omg such awesome exercise!", and are frequently too expensive for anyone but other rich white people to attend.

Last of all, they probably don't know any Indian Buddhists who could make sure they understand Buddhism from an insider's point of view, and they probably weren't initiated or even instructed in the religion, aside from self-help books and Internet articles. Hell, being "Buddhist" may only be that they meditate for an hour a day and have a Buddha statue somewhere around the house. So they're not real Buddhists, so much as "people who do a couple of Buddhist things and walk around CALLING THEMSELVES Buddhist."

That's Cultural Appropriation(TM).

edited 3rd Apr '18 8:33:05 PM by Sharysa

It depends on the context. I'm usually of the Clifford Geertz school of thought that "culture is public property because attribution of meaning is human nature and public domain" but of course I have personally experienced the Eye Twitch or the sheer ick of having my culture and having people such as myself just...so arrogantly misrepresented by people who can keep getting away with it.

I don't know if you have ever felt "the Ick" of even interpersonally being misrepresented, maliciously or carelessly, it's not only frustration but it's ick. I hope you have not, but if you have...imagine it bigger, not necessarily worse in your heart, but like...it's not just a matter of getting far far away from one jerk who willfully misunderstands you and unrepetantly misrepresents you to all your mutual acquaintances. It's reminders of that ick...everywhere. Or that, the only time you're remembered as a person at all, is when somebody has gotten you pegged so wrong.

Cultural appropriation is a good phrase to describe "the ick", but depending on the context it can be a neutral term.

Examples:

Cultural appropriation is “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission ... when the source community is a minority group that has been oppressed or exploited in other ways.”

— Who Owns Culture? by Susan Scafidi, Fordham law professor

"Two ways in which cultural appropriation can be harmful are easily identified. The first sort of harm is violation of a property right … The second sort of harm is an attack on the viability or identity of the cultures or their members. Appropriation that undermines a culture in these ways would certainly cause devastating and clearly wrongful harm to members of the culture … Other acts of appropriation potentially leave members of a culture exposed to discrimination, poverty and lack of opportunity.”

The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation (edited by Young and Brunk)

"Griffiths (1994) described appropriation as the exploration of the ways in which the dominated or colonized culture can use the tools of dominant discourse to resist its political or cultural control."

— Key Concepts in Post-colonial Studies by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. (1998, Routledge.)

The Danger of a Single Story speech by Chimamanda Adichie there should be a transcript up somewhere but I can't seem to find one that doesn't automatically make me download it as a PDF.

Also this review that compares and contrasts Disney's Pocahontas with Moana.

I hope that helps!

edited 4th Apr '18 12:21:47 AM by Faemon

Oh boy. Thanks to writing a story called "The CROCODILE God" for a year, and finally mentioning Sobek in the latest chapter, croc-bro arrived in my meditation last night. There was much panicking.

He was very adamant that I "called" him, since he knows the gods call me a babaylan and I referred to him in the story as "His Lordship, pointed-of-teeth."

He basically showed up and started going "YOU. BABAYLAN. YOU CALLED ME. COME HERE!" He was clearly in the grip of some kind of godly instinct, so he needed a few minutes to calm down before I could explain (and more importantly, when he could PROCESS) that I was writing a story and didn't mean to invoke him.

Sobek's voice is ridiculously loud and animalistic, which is part of the reason everyone besides Haik kept freaking out—he basically had No Indoor Voice until he shapeshifted to a complete human, and even then he was still loud and his sentences were really basic and short. Haik pointed out that Sobek has a crocodile's head, so he's not used to things like "volume control" and "saying please."

Nope, nope, nope. Keeping Sobek at a healthy ten-foot distance for a while.

edited 11th Apr '18 9:52:39 AM by Sharysa