Sympathy for Sympathetic Magic (original) (raw)

Into the Windwracked Wilds, by A. Deborah Baker – The third book in the Up-and-Under series sees Avery, Ziv, the Crow Girl, and the Drowned Girl Niamh continuing their journey. This includes their getting swallowed by a mosasaur, who is surprisingly nice about it. They then meet up with Jack Daw, another bird person and the son of the Queen of the Swords. This Queen, ruler of the Kingdom of Air, is a cruel person who makes strange bargains, steals people’s hearts, and turns them into monsters. As the Up-and-Under series was written in-universe by an alchemist, it has a lot of elemental symbolism, and discussion of which monarch rules what aspects of the world.

The Golden Bough, by James George Frazer – I’d been interested in this book for a long time, but only just got around to reading it. I think my dad owned a copy, and it was mentioned in Patrick Maund’s annotations for Robert Pattrick’s Unexplored Territory in Oz. It’s a study on ritual magic throughout the world, focusing on the similarities between different cultures, and how many of them relied on the principle of drawing connections and trying to affect the environment by imitating it. For instance, banging on metal could be used to try to attract rain. Another recurring theme is that of ritual sacrifice, proposing that early cultures would often kill their kings to ensure the progression of the seasons and a good harvest, but over time these rituals would become purely symbolic and eliminate the murder. The title comes from the bough that the Sibyl gave Aeneas to allow him to enter the Underworld, which Frazer identifies as mistletoe and associates with the death of Baldur in Norse mythology. It belongs to the same general trend as the works of Robert Graves and Joseph Campbell, taking the idea that there are many similarities in myths from areas nowhere near each other, and trying to categorize them all in a way that doesn’t always work, a good basic idea that’s stretched a bit too far. Although it remains popular, it isn’t that well regarded by modern anthropologists. It also definitely reflects its time in its constant value judgments about the cultures represented, constantly referring to some people as “savages” with primitive beliefs, and a general attitude of modern monotheism being somehow more sophisticated than animism or polytheism, the progression from one to the other being something pretty much all societies go through. And the word “Aryan” appears a lot, and while obviously Frazer couldn’t predict the Nazis’ appropriation of the term, there’s still a bit of racism in the inherent association of genetics and culture with a language group. It is, however, quite interesting in the sense that it delves into and draws associations between a lot of different mythologies. Seanan McGuire’s Seasonal Fears quotes the book and seems to draw a lot of ideas about seasonal personification from it.

Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End, by Bart D. Ehrman – Ehrman’s strength is in explaining the scholarly consensus on Biblical topics in a way that’s easy to understand. This book is, as suggested, about the book of Revelation, a very controversial one throughout history, and the cornerstone of some American fundamentalism. The main theme here is that, like most apocalyptic works, it was meant for an audience of the time, not for people centuries later. It’s about the future, but mostly the very near future as John of Patmos predicted it. While perhaps not all of it can be fully understood, a lot of it is pretty clearly symbolizing Rome and its empire, using references that would have been easy to grasp back when it was written. Ehrman also notes how violent the book is, how its view of Jesus is very different from the one in the Gospels, and how it revels in the potential death not only of persecuting pagans but of other Christians as well. I’d read a lot of this stuff before, but it was still a quite interesting read, and a pretty quick one at that.

This entry was posted in Alchemical Journeys, Alchemy, Animism, Authors, Christianity, Fundamentalism, Greek Mythology, History, Magic, Mythology, Norse, Oz, Religion, Roman, Roman Empire, seanan mcguire, up-and-under and tagged a. deborah baker, aeneas, aeneid, anthropology, apocalypse, armageddon, baldur, bart ehrman, bible, gospels, human sacrifice, into the windwracked wilds, jesus, joseph campbell, mistletoe, patrick maund, revelation, ritual, robert graves, robert pattrick, sacrifice, seasonal fears, sibyl, sir james george frazer, the golden bough, underworld, unexplored territory in oz, virgil. Bookmark the permalink.