The president of the SRA speaks up about spiritual stereotyping

The president of the SRA speaks up about spiritual stereotyping

by Lezlie A. Kinyon, Ph.D., founder of the Society for Ritual Arts and Editor-in-Chief of Coreopsis: Journal of Myth & Theatre


 

Last week, while going through a mountain of correspondence, I received this note from a good friend and colleague whom I had asked to “spread the word” about the Lost Chord Award Concert, an event that the Society for Ritual Arts is hosting on January 23:

Dear Lezlie,
I’m hard pressed to know to whom to spread it. My pagan contacts are limited — and those in the Bay Area all seem to be low income.
But I’ll be thinking about who might be interested. Hmm…
Yours, M–

I felt obliged to answer and to expand upon that answer in this brief opinion piece.

Creating an event while also beginning the editing process for the next issue of Coreopsis: Journal of Myth & Theatre (all about Faeries), especially an event that is a “new thing”, as is the Lost Chord Award Concert, is a complex and interesting process. Particularly when one is known in several contexts as an activist and writer and, also, as a person who follows a minority spiritual path.  

Dear M–,

Outside of my academic colleagues (who know better), and as often happens to people who follow a specific spiritual path, many people mistakenly assume that because I’m Wiccan, everything I’m involved in is all about Wicca. This may come as a shock to those who think they know me, and to a few who do know me, but: I have a Ph.D. in systems and human science. Many of the people I created this journal with are, with the exception of a Buddhist therapist, an ivy-league musicologist, and our spiritually diverse editorial staff, agnostic Europeans in the systems and human sciences. They are well represented in Coreopsis as researchers who have published in the back issues.

The aforementioned artists and scholars will attend SRA events, such as the Lost Chord Award Concert in January, because they like live music and theatre, and because they understand and support the deeply held work of furthering freedom of belief. On our staff (past and current) are some few who are particularly passionate about that freedom because they personally have survived regimes where expressing a countervailing belief led to the imprisonment and death of colleagues.

Concert poster for the Lost Chord Award concert

Concert poster for the event in question. The venue is a church, the performers include a Yoruba Iyanifa and a Hungarian shaman, the promoter/designer is an atheist, the theme is Faerie, and the founder of the hosting organization happens to be Wiccan. Does that make it a Pagan event? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Everyone is welcome and everyone will have a magical time!

I believe in the right to freedom of belief and in expressing those beliefs in creative, deeply meaningful and visionary ways in art and in literary projects. I also uphold the freedom of intellectual pursuit and support research into the sciences that explore the fundamentals of what it means to be a human person on this earth.

These beliefs – coupled with the movement in the arts variously called west coast visionaries, Utopian, new romantics, faery music, and the ecstatic movement (lowercase) – informed by the countercultural movements of the mid-twentieth century, the literary genre of mythopoetics, and the humanistic movement in intellectual pursuit, creates this rich stew that informs everything we publish in Coreopsis.

Supporting Sharon Knight and Winter Jp Sichelschmidt and their ambitious Portals Project, as we will do at the Lost Chord Award Concert, also supports the movement in West Coast indy music informed – among other things herein discussed – by the literary genre of mythopoetics, born of five decades of gatherings (“cons”) by the highly popular science fiction and fantasy community and the primarily Latin American genre of magical realism. Starting with the “Inklings” (JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Lord Dunsany, and their ilk), the list of this literary genre’s founders reads as a Who’s Who of speculative fiction on three continents. Quickly escalating into fantasy art, the culture of “Filking” at conventions, and Bardic Gatherings where beginning, hobbyist and professional musicians, story-makers, and poets gathered to share their work in living rooms and cafés, these gatherings overlapped into the costumed historical re-enactment societies which also began mid-twentieth century as gatherings of geeky friends in costume, seriously exploring an historical period. Groups such as Society for Creative Anachronism, not coincidentally founded by legendary Science Fiction writer Poul Anderson at the equally legendary writer’s collective Greyhaven, the home of Diana Paxson. Anderson and Paxson, together with a number of other people, were also instrumental in the genesis of what became the “Pan-Pagan” festivals in the mid-1980s. Running through all of this was – and continues to be – a frank and honest exploration of the meaning of liberation, the many human expressions of diverse sexualities, women’s self-expression, and the ecological issues facing us all. Embedded in this mix and running though all of the threads mentioned herein is a radically different spirituality, one that knows few “leaders”, has no walls or boundaries, and maintains very little in the way of hierarchy. A spirituality of which modern Paganism and Wicca is at the heart, but which is also deeply intertwined into a somewhat tangled thread that includes what Fr. Matthew Fox in Original Blessing (1983) calls, “rituals of cosmic celebrating ” and what oft-quoted (because she was one of the first, in 1979, to publish outside of the “occult” press) Wiccan author Starhawk described in 2001 as, “…based on experience, on a direct relationship with the cycles of birth, growth, death and regeneration in nature and in human lives.”

A heady mix indeed. Add into that mix what I often describe as the “utopian dream” of the popular music and art of the late 1960s and early 1970s resulting from the twin threads of psychedelia and social consciousness and you have a treasure: a strange, golden, rainbow-colored, glittering prism of a nut that, when opened, threatens to reveal, simultaneously, the deepest truth of the human heart and the great mystery of the cosmos all around this (beautiful, verdant, moist, living) “island Earth” – our Home. Coreopsis and the SRA embrace a movement that crosses three generations and grows, despite the dismissive criticisms of the “mainstream” pundits, steadily, without fanfare (unless you count an electric guitar), without massive funding or evangelic zeal. This is a movement that grows, rather, through hope in our future, a passion for the natural world, a celebration in dance, costumery and fashion, in the visual arts and music, in poetry and story, and, in its very best egalitarian expression, in celebrations of life itself. It represents the antithesis of rigid, stifling, death-dealing, puritanical ideologies both religious and purely secular.

As artists, this is a movement worth celebrating. As scholars, a subject worth exploring indeed.

Sharon Knight and Winter Jp Sichelschmidt, this year’s Inaugural Lost Chord Award recipients, have openly expressed their beliefs. Sharon talks about “the delicious juicy-ness of being alive”. This “delicious juicy-ness” that Sharon talks about, is at the very heart of what Coreopsis and the SRA are all about. This delicious juicy-ness is that which Jeet Kei Leung, in a 2010 TEDx talk, and later, in Festival Fire, called “the transformational festival culture” (2013) born of the burgeoning outdoor music festival of the 1980s, as well as several earlier discussed intertwining strands of popular and countercultural movements stretching back into the utopian ideals of the 1960s socio-political movements. A quick Internet search will align all of these labels with emerging forms of music, dance, and art beginning in the mid-1960s and encompassing a wide range of social concerns and eco-feminist spirituality. In the words of Jeet Kei Leung, “What we get to experience at these intentional transformational gatherings is the freedom and the opportunity to come together to co-create a lived experience of the world we wish to live in, the world we need to live in. And our cultural knowledge of how to do that has been developing, evolving over, well, you could trace the lineage back in many ways…” (2010).

Coreopsis was never intended to be a Pagan journal. The Society for Ritual Arts and the Society’s publications – past, present and in the future – are all about a certain kind of art: ritual, sacred art and the folkways of all cultures, from Purimshpil to mummer’s plays, to shamanic performance to the dances of Sufi mystics. We have people working on our projects of many faiths and no faith at all.

The wider work we are doing as a Society supports scholars and artists: those involved directly with the journal and the events planned by the Society as well as the scholars who are living under repressive regimes and difficult circumstance. A perusal of the back issues, as well as the current issue, will reveal that we have published, and will continue to publish, voices from the First Nations, Christianity, Islam, atheism, Buddhism and a few other paths. The editors of Coreopsis do not have a “religious test” and never ask our scholars what their spiritual path is, we publish on the basis of excellence in scholarship and each paper undergoes an extensive process of peer review. We subscribe to the accepted ethics of scholarly publishing, as put forward by COPE: the Committee on Publishing Ethics for peer reviewed journals.

The Lost Chord Award Concert in January will also be the coming out party of our new Society, celebrating all creative, life-affirming paths and welcoming everyone equally. Including all the tree-hugging, dancing in the moonlight, lovely Pagans.

For “M,” whose e-mail began this editorial, and to my Pagan colleagues, I say to you: We are doing this spiritual stereotyping to ourselves as much as the “outside world” does it, when we conflate the idea of a journal/organization in which Paganism gets equal time with a journal/organization that is all about and exclusive to Pagan viewpoints. So, dearest friend, who do you tell about this event? Everyone, my friend, everyone and anyone who loves good music and a good party. Next year’s Lost Chord awardee will be nominated and voted upon by the SRA membership and Board, and will probably be a musical artist from some very different tradition. The process is peer-to-peer, artist-to-artist; a celebration of the music arts that is deeply meaningful, awe-evoking, and ecstatic in nature, opening the many doors in our hearts and imaginings.

As for the next pile of correspondence generated by planning an event: the next President of the Society will be in charge, and I can go back to the Editor’s Desk.

Meanwhile, friends and colleagues, put on your fanciest festival garb, your glitter and your glam, don’t forget your dancing shoes, and join the fun on January 23 when we invite the magical beings of forest and glen that Sharon and Winter, and their musical and intellectual colleagues Diana Paxson, Luisah Teish, Michael Mullen, Diana Rowan, and the members of Imager have been telling us about for the past several decades to feast and dance with us at the Lost Chord Award Concert. We’re certainly having fun planning The Event of The Season! We promise it will be delicious and juicy.

BB! Lezlie


 

Tickets are still available for the Lost Cord Award Concert at the time of publishing, and can be purchased a LostChordAward.org.

Announcing the Ritual Arts Reading List – What would you add?

Announcing the Ritual Arts Reading List – What would you add?

What works of literature define the field of Ritual Arts? Help us gather them together! Works we’ve gathered so far are listed in our new Ritual Arts Reading List. At the bottom is a short form where you can submit works that have inspired your own thinking, research or art.

We’d especially like to see:

  • published works of scientific value on the nature, causes and effects of ritual on individuals and groups
  • collections of ritual descriptions, recordings, or objects from diverse cultures
  • attempts to define or catalogue rituals, ritual theater or performance, mythologies, or any closely related topics
  • published scholarly research on altered states of consciousness
  • critical analyses of anyone’s attempts at any of the above

Check back periodically to see how this list grows over time, and send in as many contributions as you find whenever you find them. Together, we’ll create the literary foundations of this diverse field and help shape the way future artists and scholars define and support their work.

 

Check out the Ritual Arts Reading List.

A new fall ritual inspired by Mad Max: Fury Road

A new fall ritual inspired by Mad Max: Fury Road

Written by Marylyn Motherbear, a member of our advisory board.


 

 

Happy Halloween, All ~

Yolkai Scott and Clyde Mighty Scott as Furiosa and Mad Max. Photo credit to Asher Brumberger

Yolkai Scott and Clyde Mighty Scott as Furiosa and Mad Max. Photo credit to Asher Brumberger

This one was unusual for me. For reasons I’m not going to get into, I was unable to carry out any plans for the evening of ‘costumery’ and assuming a persona (which I love to do). It was the first time in my life that I haven’t costumed up at some point! Nonetheless, I gave thought as to who or what I would be.

The answer came when I was chatting with Yolkai LeFierce who planned (and I see carried out) a Mad Max Fury Road theme. Yolkai and I would often make ‘family’ costumes, our Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein among the most memorable. When she told me her Fury Road plan, she being Furiosa—How perfect is that? And how great she looked!—I asked who would I be? No sooner had the question been asked when ‘she’ came to me: The Keeper of Seeds. Since then, this persona has invaded my super-consciousness and infiltrated my life story. I had to research it. The following is a brief synopsis and a bit of dialogue that identifies the Vuvalini and the Keeper of Seeds.

The Vuvalini are a matriarchal tribe of the Clan of Many Mothers. It is the last remaining tribe of the Clan. Most of the members are old and they have no men to breed with. They originally dwelt in The Green Place. Now they are biker nomads seeking a new place to live. Notable members are The Valkyrie and the Keeper of the Seeds. Imperator Furiosa was stolen from them as a child by a Citadel war party.

Excerpt of dialogue:

Keeper of the Seeds: I like this plan…we could start again, just like the old days!
Keeper of the Seeds: [After a pause] Come here. Take a peek. (She holds open a stained old cloth bag.)
The Dag: [gasping] Seeds.
Keeper of the Seeds: These are from home. Heirlooms. The real thing! I plant one every chance I get.
The Dag: Where?
Keeper of the Seeds: So far nothing’s ‘took.’ Earth’s too sour.
The Dag: Ah! So many different kinds.
Keeper of the Seeds: Trees, flowers, fruit. Back then everyone had their field.

Blessings:
Here’s to the old ones who keep the seeds. Here’s to the strong ones who withstand the wounds…re-grow the garden. Here’s to the young ones who are tenacious in the midst of it all…keep our hearts full of joy. Here’s to the earth that brings diverse forms of life into being…teaching us how to live. Here’s to the spirit of those that have crossed over the veil, sending rays of illumination into our awareness…reminding us of the wisdom of our ancestors. The veil, so thin at this time, we can drink deep from the cup of eternity…awaken to the rising sun…feel the rains sink into the earth…nourish our body.

And so it is.

With love and blessings,

Motherbear

Finding the “Lost Chord”

Finding the “Lost Chord”

This post was written by one of our editors, Jenna Farr Ludwig, and originally appeared on her blog, synchronicityjournaling.


 

I’ve recently begun writing and volunteer copy-editing for a peer-reviewed journal by the name of “Coreopsis: Journal of Myth and Theater,” published by The Society for Ritual Arts (SRA). A few weeks ago, the journal’s senior editor asked if I would be interested in meeting with her to discuss my conducting an interview for the Fall/Winter 2015 Edition with an outstanding (Yes! I’ve listened to their music) musical team, Sharon Knight and Winter, being honored this year by SRA’s first Lost Chord Award. Before the meeting, I realized that I first needed to research the concept of the “Lost Chord,” so I could come to the meeting with at least an inkling of what we were going to be talking about.

Photo CC-BY Thea Boodhoo 2015

Photo CC-BY Thea Boodhoo 2015

During my search (Google), I discovered that there had been an organization in New England called The Lost Chord, which was committed to “a collaborative effort to nurture young talent […] and to foster a commitment to music and arts education accessibility…” That made sense in light of SRA’s similar commitments. I also discovered that The Lost Chord organization took its name from a song written in 1877 by Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame).

I know this will be hard to understand for you fans of Sullivan (The Lost Chord was wildly popular and one of the first recordings of music made for the then newly invented phonograph) and for fans of the Moody Blues’ song “In Search of the Lost Chord,” but I was completely unfamiliar with the phrase. While my good friend the Internet gave me the initial information I needed, a cluster of synchronicities over the next several days filled-in the rest of the Lost Chord meaning for me.

I was touched by the fact that Sullivan wrote the music to the Lost Chord at his terminally ill brother’s bedside. The words to the music, based on a poem by Adelaide Ann Proctor, begins…

“Seated one day at the organ, I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wander’d idly over the noisy keys;
I knew not what I was playing, or what I was dreaming then,
But I struck one chord of music like the sound of a great Amen…”

The song goes on to express how the “[sound] lay on my fever’d spirit with a touch of infinite calm,” and how frustrating it was to the artist that it could not be reproduced again by personal means, “I have sought, but I seek it vainly, that one lost chord divine/Which came from the soul of the organ and enter’d into mine.”

Photo CC-BY Thea Boodhoo

Photo CC-BY Thea Boodhoo

The lyrics end with the words, “It may be that Death’s bright Angel will speak in that chord again; It may be that only in Heav’n I shall hear that grand Amen!”

I felt a connection between song’s inspiration (a dying loved one) and my own plans that afternoon to visit a friend in San Francisco at the Hospice house where he was being given palliative care. A talented poet and lover of music, my friend had been witnessing about the importance of music and its ability to add meaning and balm to his soul in his last days. Because of this, I read the lyrics to Sullivan’s “The Lost Chord” to him during our Hospice visit. The reading proved to be providential and brought tears of sadness and recognition as well as joy to our friend and to all present at his bedside that day.

The next day, a Facebook buddy, unaware of my own interest in the matter, posted: “North and I are off now in search of the Lost Chord ~ Ommmm,” before he went trekking in the Canadian wilderness with his dog North. I found this to be a meaningful coincidence since I hadn’t been aware of the existence of “Lost Chord” before the prior day’s events. However, I didn’t exactly know how Greg’s FB announcement tied in with meaning around the transcendent experience of music.

It wasn’t long before I discovered the Moody Blues album, “In Search of the Lost Chord,” and knew exactly to what Greg had been referring: the ineffable vibration of Life in all its Beauty that connects us all in our longing for more.

Since it is written in several parts, I am including only two parts to “In Search of the Lost Chord” here, those that are relevant to this blog post:

Departure

(Graeme Edge)

Be it sight, sound, smell, or touch,

There’s something inside that we need so much.

The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound,

Or the strength of an oak, with roots deep in the ground.

The wonder of flowers, to be covered, and then to burst up,

Through the tarmac, to the sun again, or to fly to the sun,

Without burning a wing, to lie in a meadow,

And hear the grass sing. To have all these things,

In our memories hoard, and to use them,

To help us, to find the Lost Chord…

 

Photo CC-BY Thea Boodhoo 2015

Photo CC-BY Thea Boodhoo 2015

OM
(Michael Pinder)

The rain is on the roof,
Hurry high, a butterfly.
As clouds roll past my head,
I know why the skies all cry,

Om. Om. Heaven. Om.

The Earth turns slowly round,
Far away, the distant sound.
Is with us everyday,
Can you hear, what it says,

Om. Om. Heaven. Om.”

As I thought about the meaning of the songs and what all of these events meant for me, I thought, “Nothing of vibration and spirit is ever really lost, only from our mortal perspective. These chords/threads are always, in the present moment, informing the way we understand and cherish Life.”

Then I wrote a poem:

Cherish the Offerings

Today is all we have –
Cherish its offerings:
witnessing with a dying friend,
wet toddler kisses,
a shared repast.

Desire,
Laughter, tears,
anger, longing,
Nothing lasts.

Each moment, anew:
Sun rising, river flowing,
Fog descending.
Forever changing…

Scenes, thoughts, feelings –
Weft and Warp:
taking, giving,
rearranging

Patterns that captivate,
open, and
lead us, eventually,
to grasp

the meaning of Love.

Photo CC-BY Thea Boodhoo 2015

Photo CC-BY Thea Boodhoo 2015

A few minutes later, I came across a video of my friend Travis reading the Wm. Stafford poem “The Way It Is.” As so often happens with meaningful coincidence, the Stafford poem pulled all the threads of Lost Chord together for me:

The Way It Is

“There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.”

Ciao,

Jenna

The founding of the Society for Ritual Arts

The founding of the Society for Ritual Arts



Several years ago, a small group of dedicated artists and scholars began collecting academic papers, art, music, performance reviews, and everything related to myth, theater and ritual arts that was floating in the ether around them, waiting for a place to call home. (more…)