Aloha,
On 11/12/2007 at 5:21 PM Chas S. Clifton wrote:
>I would bet that Caedmon put the term into the mind
>of whoever might have put the paper into Gardner's book.
Half jokingly, I blame the reading room of the British Museum
for many of the inspirations and cul-de sacs of modern Neo-Paganism.
I imagine one or the other founding figure browsing for this
or that intriguing term or notion, coming upon, say, Caedmon's
poetry. And pow! Bob's your uncle! New liturgy...new rituals...
new cultural appropriations...and such like...
>Think of it -- California Witches incorporating the work
>of a divinely inspired (or so he believed) 7th-century
>Yorkshire cowherd who became a Christian monk.
I agree, it's fascinating, even in the Spock sense.
But it's also not as extraordinary for things like this to happen in
the context of California as it may seem. This thread got me to
thinking about the cultural resources in California again.
Looking just at the San Francisco Bay Area, there's a diverse
and deeply rooted art/literary/spiritual/occulture/intellectual/
academic community.
Academically, the twin stars are Stanford University and the
University of California, Berkeley, around which revolve a goodly
number of other colleges, schools, institutes, libraries, and museums.
You could study or find out about anything at this group of
academies, by asking somebody from this group of academics.
Similarly for poets, artists, writers, occultists, spiritual types, etc.
Early English devotional poetry, for instance, could become a local
craze...
So a California Neo-Pagan borrowing Caedmon for liturgy could
have happened, even without Valiente doing it first in England.
More interestingly to me, the term *Dryghtyn* appears not to have
survived in any Christian usage that I could find. More recent English
terms supplanted it. But it may be that some of today's Christian
innovators are taking up the term in liturgy, borrowing it from
what they find in Neo-Paganism. Intriguing sort of cross influence.
Musing Abundant Cultural Resources! Rose,
Pitch
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