From the UC Berkeley graduate lectures page:

Tanya Marie Luhrmann's work focuses on the way that objects without material presence come to seem real to people, and the way that ideas about the mind affect mental experience.  Her previous studies have analyzed phenomena such as witchcraft, charismatic Christians, and psychiatrists.  Her widely acclaimed third book, Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry (2001), offered an ethnographic study of the American psychiatric community and examined how economic and ideological pressures in psychiatry shape the experiences of psychiatrists and patients alike.  Of Two Minds was awarded the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology.  In her most recent book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (2012), Luhrmann looks at the ways in which practitioners within American evangelical Christian communities come to experience God as a being with whom they can engage in direct communication with through acts of prayer and visualization.  When God Talks Back was named both a New York Times Notable Book and a Kirkus Reviews Book of the Year.

Enjoy - this is an interesting talk.

Witches, Psychiatrists, and Evangelicals with Tanya Luhrmann - Conversations with History

Published on Jan 6, 2014

(Visit: http://www.uctv.tv/) Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Stanford's Tanya Luhrmann for a discussion of her work as a psychological anthropologist. Professor Luhrmann looks back at her formative experiences and reviews her insights on how different communities—witches, psychiatrists, and evangelicals—learn to experience their world through practice and adjustment to the ambiguities of the modern world. Series: "Conversations with History" [1/2014]

Watch Häxan (1922), the Classic Cinematic Study of Witchcraft Narrated by William S. Burroughs (1968)

Very interesting and exceedingly strange, somehow, to see this silent film with an added jazz soundtrack and with a narration by none other the Beat icon William Boroughs. Brought to you by Open Culture, of course.

Watch Häxan (1922), the Classic Cinematic Study of Witchcraft Narrated by William S. Burroughs (1968)

January 21st, 2013


Some pictures from the silent era, like F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, couldn’t look more clearly like ancestors of the modern horror film. Tracing the distant origins of other forms — of documentary, say — proves a trickier task. Hence the value of a movie like Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan, also known as Witchcraft Through the Ages, which not only mounts a nonfictional investigation into humanity’s perception of “witches” throughout the ages, but does so with the aid of dramatic sequences as eerie as any of Count Orlok running amok. Given that Christensen’s meticulously researched historical creation demanded a larger budget than any other Scandinavian film to that point, you could also view it as an antecedent of today’s visually elaborate, spectacle-intensive blockbusters. Like many well-known silent films, Häxan has undergone multiple releases, each running different lengths, with different scores. You see above the 1968 version, which reduces Christensen’s original 104-minute cut to a brisk 77 minutes and accompanies it with a jaunty, richly incongruous five-piece jazz score by Daniel Humair.

Atop the music we hear the history of the persecution of “witches,” from the primitive era to medieval times to then-modern times, when the idea of the “hysterical woman” gained purchase in the zeitgeist. Narrating this story in the 1968 version is none other than writer and Beat icon William S. Burroughs, who, despite his flamboyantly artistic personality, delivers an ultimately sober analysis. The film takes the position that witchcraft, far from a reality in and of itself, arises and re-arises as an invention of the superstitious, the irrational, and those disinclined to understand the nature of mental illness. If that subject sounds more suitable for an academic paper, remember that this research comes delivered by the bold visual strokes of proto-horror silent film, close reading of the fifteenth-century inquisitor’s treatise Malleus Maleficarum, and the man who wrote Naked Lunch.

via Biblioklept

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~ Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

UTNE Reader - The Meaning of Halloween and a History of Witchcraft

In the spirit of the day. These two article comes from the UTNE Reader. Happy Halloween!

The Meaning of Halloween

10/29/2012 

by Terri Mach

  

 
Editor’s Note: A reader's recent tip reminded us about a collection of articles from the October/November 1986 issue of Utne Reader about Halloween, contemporary witchcraft, and feminist spirituality. In celebration of the holiday, we’ll be posting a few of our favorites online until the 31^st.

Witches celebrate eight festivals each year, known as sabbats, which coincide with the changes in the seasons. The solstices (December 21 and June 21) mark the days when winter and summer, respectively, begin. The spring and fall equinoxes (March 21 and September 23) mark the two days of the year when the hours of the day are equally divided between day and night. These four days were very important to ancient agricultural societies and were occasions for great celebrations.

The four other sabbats are known as cross-quarter days and represent festivals that were important to herding societies: Candlemas on February 2; Beltane on May 1; Lughnasad on August 1; and Samhain, or Halloween, on October 31. Of the four cross-quarter days, Halloween is probably best known by nonpagans. In herding societies, Halloween marks the new year. It signifies the time of year when herdsmen thinned out their livestock for the winter, killing for their meat those animals that looked as if they wouldn’t survive the colder weather. Thus, Halloween is the Witch’s new year.

Halloween also marks the late harvest—the time of year when vegetation dies off and days grow shorter and darker.

“Halloween is the time when we are going into the dark,” says Antiga, a Minneapolis Witch, “and one thing about Witchcraft is that darkness is not necessarily associated with evil. The seed lies in darkness under the earth and is quiet all winter before it comes to life in the spring. In societies not as industrial as ours, people rested during the dark. It’s a whole different energy in the winter than in the summer.

“According to pagan legend, Halloween is also the time when the veil between the two worlds, the world of the dead and the living, is thought to be the thinnest. The reason people dressed up on Halloween was that they thought the spirits were all around them, and they were afraid the spirits might take them along with them. The people dressed up as spirits so the [visiting] spirits would think they too were spirits and wouldn’t take them to the world of the dead.”
 
Excerpted from the Twin Cities Reader (Oct. 30, 1985) and reprinted in Utne Reader (Oct./Nov. 1986). 

Image: A Halloween trick-or-treater in Redford, Michigan, 1979. Photo by Don Scarbrough, licensed under Creative Commons. 

* * * * *

Witchcraft Yesterday and Today

10/30/2012

by Starhawk

Editor’s Note: A reader's recent tip reminded us about a collection of articles from the October/November 1986 issue of Utne Reader about Halloween, contemporary witchcraft, and feminist spirituality. In celebration of the holiday, we’ll be posting a few of our favorites online through the 31^st. 

On every full moon, pagan rituals take place on hilltops, on beaches, in open fields and in ordinary houses. Writers, teachers, nurses, computer programmers, artists, lawyers, poets, plumbers, and auto mechanics—women and men from many backgrounds—come together to celebrate the mysteries of the Triple Goddess of birth, love, and death, and of her Consort, the Hunter, who is Lord of the Dance of Life. The religion they practice is called Witchcraft.
 
Witchcraft is a word that frightens many people and confuses many others. In the popular imagination, Witches are ugly old hags riding broomsticks, or evil Satanists performing obscene rites. Modern witches are thought to be members of a kooky cult, which lacks the depth, dignity, and seriousness of purpose of a true religion.

But Witchcraft is a religion, perhaps the oldest religion in the West. Its origins go back before Christianity, Judaism, Islam, before Buddhism and Hinduism. The Old Religion, as we call it, is closer in spirit to Native American traditions or to the shamanism of the Inuit people of the Arctic. It is not based on dogma or a set of beliefs, nor on scriptures or a sacred book revealed by a great man. Witchcraft takes its teachings from nature and reads inspiration in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, in the flight of birds, in the slow growth of trees, and in the cycles of the seasons.

The worship of the Great Goddess, which is at the heart of Witchcraft, underlies the beginnings of all civilizations. Mother Goddess was carved on the walls of Paleolithic caves and sculpted in stone as early as 25,000 B.C. In 7000 B.C., cities arose in Asia Minor that developed a rich, Goddess-centered culture, combining agriculture, hunting, and early crafts, in which women were leaders. From excavations done in the 1960s, we get a picture of an egalitarian, decentralized, inventive, and peaceful society, without evidence of human or animal sacrifice or weapons of war.

Similar cultures flourished in the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, India, Central America, South America, and China. For the Mother, giant stone circles, the henges of the British Isles, were raised. For Her the great passage graves of Iceland were dug. In Her honor sacred dancers leaped the bulls in Crete. Grandmother Earth sustained the soil of the North American prairies, and Great Mother Ocean washed the coasts of Africa. Her priestesses discovered and tested the healing herbs and learned the secrets of the human mind and body that allowed them to ease the pain of childbirth, to heal wounds and cure diseases and to practice magic, which I like to define as the “art of changing consciousness at will.”

In the great urban centers, as society became more centralized, a new type of power developed: the ability of one group of human beings to control another. War became common. And as warfare came to shape culture, women were driven from power, and the rule of men over women ensued. This rule brought with it the system of inheritance through the father. This made the sexual control of women necessary to ensure that a father’s children were truly his. In Europe, the Middle East, and India, this move toward patriarchy was intensified by invasions from the warlike Indo-Europeans, who venerated male sky-gods and glorified battle.

The change to patriarchy was not an instant process. The old cultures resisted, and the transition lasted thousands of years (from approximately 4000 to 1500 B.C.) in Europe and the Middle East. The written myths and legends of the Old Religion that have come down to us all date from the transitional era.

Yet the concept of Mother never completely died. In India, She survived (and still does to today) in village celebrations and in the goddesses of Hindu worship. In Greece, She became the goddesses of Olympus. Her worship lived in mystery cults and folk traditions as well as in the healing practices and rituals of the “pagans” (from the Latin, meaning “country dweller”). The Great Mother was also Christianized as the Virgin Mary, whose worship is especially strong to this day in Latin America.

Those who held to the Old Religion of the Goddess were called Witches, from the Anglo-Saxon root wic (wicca is another name some use for witchcraft)—meaning “to bend or shape.” They were shamans, healers, benders and shapers of reality, strongly tied to village and peasant culture, linked to the land and the round of seasonal celebrations.

As the culture of Europe changed in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, Catholics and later Protestants persecuted Witches as a way of breaking down the peasants’ cultures in order to open the land to more profitable exploitation; to increase the power of the male medical profession by driving women out of healing; and to consolidate social control by attacking sensuality, the erotic, and the mysterious. Torture, terror, burning, and outright lies were their tools, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of victims (some estimate as many as nine million), primarily women, established the aura of fear that still surrounds the “Witch” and the Western view of suprarational powers and abilities.

After the persecutions ended in the 18^th century came the age of unbelief. Memory of the Craft had faded, and the hideous stereotypes that remained seemed ludicrous, laughable, or tragic. Only in this century have Witches been able to “come out of the broom closest,” so to speak, and counter the imagery of evil with truth.
 
Excerpted from Yoga Journal(May/June 1986) and reprinted in Utne Reader (Oct./Nov. 1986).

Image by Lapatia , licensed under Creative Commons .