Last Tuesday saw the release of the final entry in the Mass Effect trilogy of video games. The series is simply the best space opera in any media in current pop culture, and easily joins the roster of great space opera franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars, and the Battlestar Galactica reboot. (I would not object to Babylon 5 being put in that list, but I never watched more than an episode, and so cannot make the call). My initial reaction was that this video game was the best movie I’ve seen so far this year.

Throughout the series, one of the main alien races, the Asari, have been portrayed as pantheists. Setting aside the weird trope in science fiction that all alien species seemingly are only allowed to have a single religion (with, at most, heretical factions), the Asari are consistently portrayed as Goddess worshippers despite the fact that (in my play-throughs of the game, at least) all the other species are nonreligious if not atheist. Thus, if you choose to have the Asari NPC Liara accompany you on your planetary missions, her dialogue is spiced with the occasional exclamation of “Goddess”. However, Mass Effect 3 takes this feature of the Asari a bit further by routing the main plot through a temple dedicated to an ancient Asari Goddess.

Spoilers small then large after the break.
Continue reading »

Witchfather by Philip Heselton is only the second biography of Gerald Gardner ever published and is the only one published since the subsequent growth of Wicca in the four decades since he passed over in 1964. The previous biography, Gerald Gardner: Witch by J. L. Bracelin, was published in 1960 and was reprinted in 1999 with relatively little fanfare. Heselton asserts that Bracelin’s book is pretty much a hagiography, and so part of Heselton’s goal in this new biography is to present a more balanced view of Gardner and verify to the extent possible the various facts asserted in the previous biography. Heselton’s new biography also expands greatly upon its predecessor and has been published in two volumes. It is a thorough, careful and professional investigation, and this first volume, at least, succeeds at being the definitive record of Gardner’s life through the point at which he was initiated into witchcraft.

Heselton has clearly done his homework in preparing this biography. It is fairly clear from the text that Heselton has delved into a wide variety of records to document and support, to the extent possible, the facts of Gardner’s life. Heselton has dug into birth records, passenger manifests, local newspaper archives, club membership rosters and records, voting registrations, and private correspondence and journals. I guess it is possible that there might be some primary source that he missed, but it seems unlikely.

Nevertheless, Witchfather, Vol. 1 is not a dry recitation of the facts of Gardner’s life. The prose is engaging and lively, and Heselton presents a fairly unbiased view of Gardner and his journey into the Craft. It is plain from the records, for instance, that Gardner was a political conservative, and that he had a transparently untutored grasp of English spelling and orthography. Heselton does fill in various gaps in the record with plausible conjectures and opinions, but, crucially, he explicitly delineates those conjectures as such. For instance, it is clear that Gardner was, by the time he retired at the age of 52, a bit wealthier than one might expect given his years as a civil servant and the comparatively modest inheritance from his father. Given that Gardner was a government inspector of opium dens in Malaysia at the conclusion of his career, Heselton gently posits that Gardner might well have been on the take. There is no direct evidence of any such malfeasance, of course, but it certainly would fit the circumstances of Gardner’s subsequent life back in England.
Continue reading »

• The late and once Pagan Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels have been optioned for a TV series with ambitions to be the next Game of Thrones. Since the books were largely written during the most Pagan and feminist period of her life, there’s a huge potential in this series throwing a positive light on Paganism.
• Daria (yes, that Daria) posted a column up at the HuffPo yesterday.
• I bought my ticket for Hexenfest. If you’re in the Bay Area, you should go.

• There’s a stop-action animated film called ParaNorman slated for next August which features a 300-year-old witch’s curse. The film may turn out to be okay, but the witch-piñatas do not bode well.
• Sinfest has introduced a Big Wheel-riding feminist girl avenger who has been shaking up the strip and fighting The Patriarchy which led to this strip in which an animated feminist tome encounters the Bible.
• My guess is that the huge success of Game of Thrones is behind it, but there are now two different television projects in development based on Beauty and the Beast. (George R. R. Martin was a writer for the beloved TV series in the Eighties.)
• As the headline says at The Mary Sue, just take my woney.
• I missed this when PC game phenomena Minecraft officially launched in November, but the game has a surprisingly spriritual short story tacked on to the end. BoingBoing interviewed the author who is influenced by the writings of Joseph Campbell. Here’s taste of the end:
  

  and the universe said I love you
  and the universe said you have played the game well
  and the universe said everything you need is within you
  and the universe said you are stronger than you know
  and the universe said you are the daylight
  and the universe said you are the night
  and the universe said the darkness you fight is within you
  and the universe said the light you seek is within you
  and the universe said you are not alone
  and the universe said you are not separate from every other thing
  and the universe said you are the universe tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own code
  and the universe said I love you because you are love.

Every Pagan above the age of consent should see Dark of Moon because it is exactly the kind of film we have been waiting for all these years.

Pagan parents should be aware of two issues, however. First, the dialogue is pretty liberal in its use of profanity. In fact, the very first plot point in the film addresses one of the character’s unrelenting potty-mouth. The film lands somewhere between the films of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino in its “fuck” count. Second, while the film is visually chaste (a couple of botched scenes of implied male nudity, and some enthusiastic kissing) there is ample, frank, explicit, locker-room-level bantering about these twenty-somethings’ sex lives. If you are comfortable with your kids learning the name of one of the character’s dildo, then, by all means, let them watch this film.

Lest your expectations be set too high, be aware that Dark of Moon is by no means a well made film. The movie is riddled with minor errors of film craft: visual continuity errors from one shot to the next, awkward camera placements, static blocking, after-the-fact inserts that do not really match, unintentionally awkward dialogue, bizarre set direction (Why is that stuffed duck there in the kitchen? Why is it central to the composition of the scene? Why does it apparently have a white lace garter dangling from its beak?), and acting that occasionally gets down to community-theater levels of hesitancy and fumbled reactions. We are not talking Ed Wood or Harold P. Warren levels of bad film technique here: it’s just a sub-par indie film in terms of the craft. However, if you are the kind of viewer who is inclined to be knocked out of the film by these kinds of issues, then this film is, sadly, probably not for you.

Because, nonetheless, this film is great.
Continue reading »