Today we went on a Hidden Mexico tour to El Tuito, taking in a botanical garden, a village, a wood turning workshop, a bakery with an adobe oven, an artists’ cooperative, a graveyard, some ancient petroglyphs, and lunch in a stream.
Related topics
Thoughts on Planet Narnia
Brenton Dickinson has an interesting post up about his upcoming critique of Michael Ward’s theory that the Narnia books were written to illustrate the ideas of medieval planetary astrology (one book per planet). I read a bit about Planet Narnia when it came out, but have never got around to reading it, partly because I can see that the books have planetary symbolism now that it’s been pointed out, but it is not the main point of the books.
Review: Guelph Art Gallery
There are currently three amazing exhibitions on at the Art Gallery of Guelph (until 16 December): epistemologies of the moon, 1745, and Critical Mass. It is hard to say which of these exhibitions I was the most excited about, as they all address things I care about.
The God-shaped Hole
Some psychologists have suggested the existence of a “god-shaped hole” in the mind — a set of psychological functions that evolved for some other purpose (like detecting predators sneaking up behind us), but which predispose us to believe in gods, or in God, or the supernatural, or the preternatural, or something out there other than ourselves.
![fractal by insspirito on Pixabay. [Public Domain]](https://dowsingfordivinity.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/fractal-1280081_1280.jpg?w=300&h=221)
Fractal by insspirito on Pixabay. [Public Domain]
Fictional and constructed religions
What can fictional religions tell us about real religions? Are constructed religions just as valid as ancient ones? What about real-world religions based on fictional ones? One impetus for creating constructed religions is for use in jurisdictions where religious activity is imposed by the authorities – but people often find that their joke religion then takes on a life of its own.
The landscape of gender
My preferred metaphor for gender is a scatterplot (not a spectrum). If one’s assigned gender is at point (a,b) but one’s actual gender is at point (q,r) then one needs to change to match one’s actual gender. If one’s actual gender is at point (c,d) it’s quite near one’s assigned gender, so the person is cisgender.
If we model gender as a spectrum, it suggests that male and female are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and supports the gender binary, hence positioning genderqueer, nonbinary, and gender fluid people somewhere on that spectrum, whereas they might be outside it. A line is a one-dimensional model. We have more dimensions available to us than that.
Perhaps we could reimagine gender as a landscape. The mountains of the Fierce Femmes. Little Cisgender on the Wold. The village of Enby. The river of Genderfluid. Much Genderqueer in the Marsh. The valley of the Otters, near Bear Forest.
Sex and gender
Sex is assigned according to seven different biological characteristics, which can and do vary considerably. Intersex children are assigned a sex depending on how closely these seven characteristics match male or female. A lot of people have six out of seven matching a particular sex, or five out of seven. A lot of people never find out that they have less than seven matching characteristics. However, this massively calls into question that there is such a thing as two distinct biological sexes.
Furthermore, why do we attach so much importance to sex (clearly a social construct) that we are prepared, as a society, to surgically modify babies?
Gender is how you feel on the inside. You can be non-binary, genderqueer, male, female, femme, butch, gender-fluid, etc.
Culture change and cat-herding
There’s always a difficult process when one group of people feels passionately that something needs to change, and another group of people feel that the status quo is just fine, usually (but not always) because they are not affected by the thing that the first group feels is in need of change.
What tactics should we adopt to try to bring about the change? An open letter? A declaration? A community statement? A petition? Or a pledge to boycott?
Abuse happens in a culture that enables it
An accusation of abuse has surfaced against Isaac Bonewits, made by Moira Greyland, who was abused by her mother, Marion Zimmer Bradley. I never met Isaac, though I had added him as a friend on Facebook. Deborah Lipp and Phaedra Bonewits have issued a joint statement defending him. The context in which the accusation was made is also problematic, in that the book was published by an alt-right person with an axe to grind.
Whether or not this particular accusation is true, and it would be difficult to determine this long after the events described, and when the person accused is dead, it is all too easy to fall into the pattern of isolating the accused person as a “bad apple”, and failing to look at the whole barrel.
Reflections on Scythian art
Recently, we went to see the magnificent exhibition of Scythian art and culture at the British Museum in London. You can see some more of the exhibits here.
Stag plaque, 400-300 BCE, Scythian, western Asia, Cleveland Museum of Art [CC0 Public Domain]
