New Short-Term Research Fellowships from CGPIT
December 22, 2022
My Center for Global Polytheist and Indigenous Traditions at Indic Academy is offering a new round of research fellowships:
Indic Academy’s Center for Global Polytheist and Indigenous Traditions, which seeks to foster mutual understanding and alliance among all polytheist and indigenous traditions worldwide and aid in their maintenance, interpretation, renewal and promotion, invites applications for two research fellowships of 40,000 INR per month for 3 months to undertake research on the present state of indigenous polytheist traditions other than those of India and European/Western revivalist polytheisms. Such traditions include, but are not limited to, African Traditional Religions (ATRs); African Diaspora traditions such as Vodoun; Daoism and Chinese “folk religion”; Vietnamese Đạo Mẫu; SE Asian Satsana Phi; Mongolian Tengrism; Japanese Shinto; Korean Mugyo; Indigenous or “folk religions” of Oceania; Australian Aboriginal religions; and the Indigenous religions of the Americas. These can include New Religious Movements (NRMs) rooted in traditional beliefs, and syncretic traditions incorporating Buddhist and even limited Christian or Muslim elements, as long as they involve the explicit veneration of Gods and spirits clearly distinct from the major tradition and related to prior Indigenous traditions. The research is to evaluate the current state of practice and prospects for revival of Indigenous religious traditions, emphasizing the contemporary situation, rather than the historical background. The work is to take the form of a dossier on the tradition in question with relevant demographic information and practical recommendations for the tradition’s advancement, and which would ideally form the basis for a graduate-level research program.
The idea of these fellowships is to incentivize work on surviving, continuous polytheist traditions from a perspective of understanding their challenges and prospects. It’s about planning for their renaissance, instead of merely cataloging their past. The exclusions applying to Hinduism and Indic traditions, on the one hand, and Western revivalist polytheisms, on the other, are a matter of focus, as these are already intensively studied. (To be clear, Indian students are highly encouraged—indeed, they are largely anticipated—but the projects they work on are to be outside the Indic sphere or the Western revivalist category.) Large traditions like Daoism and Shinto are of course intensively studied as well, and hence applications for fellowships to study them will be evaluated strictly, based upon the applicant’s grasp of the kind of engaged scholarship we are trying to foster. We are not seeking to merely feed the academic pipeline of disposable “research”, but to develop a pool of scholar-advocates on behalf of these traditions.
Please apply here.
POLYTHEISM AND INDOLOGY now available internationally in paperback and ebook, THE WAY OF THE GODS available on additional ebook platforms
December 6, 2022
My latest book, Polytheism and Indology: Lessons from The Nay Science is now available in paperback from Amazon (affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3XZALQD) and in ebook editions for the Kindle (affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3Fw8UQX), for the Kobo, from Google Play Books, and from Apple Books.
In other news, my prior book, The Way of the Gods: Polytheism(s) Around the World, previously available in paperback from Amazon (affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3XUQVuF) and in ebook editions for the Kindle (affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3P2IfhH) and from Google Play Books, is now also available for the Kobo.
Next week I will be doing a live event to spread the word that people can still enroll for my course, of which only five of thirty sessions have met at this point. The course is fully accessible to asynchronous participation, and there aren’t assignments to worry about, so it’s easy to catch up. Register at the link above.
Of course, you don’t need to wait—you can enroll for my course now:
Live Webinar with Rhyd Wildermuth
October 13, 2022
On Sunday, Oct. 30th I will be hosting a live webinar with Rhyd Wildermuth at 9 AM EST, 3 PM CET and 6:30 PM IST. Rhyd and I will explore the meaning of the revival of sundered polytheist traditions, the ideas and values that it embodies, and the broader significance of this movement in the contemporary world.
Rhyd Wildermuth is a druid, a pagan polytheist, a political theorist, and a prolific author on topics related to paganism, animism, environmentalism, and political issues. He lives in the Ardennes and is devoted to Brythonic, Germanic, Gaulish, and other gods, as well as to ancestors and local land spirits.Rhyd is also the co-founder and director of Ritona a.s.b.l., a not-for-profit publishing organisation advocating for pluralism, tolerance, and respect for indigenous and non-industrial ways of being in the world.
Among other titles, he is the author of Being Pagan: A Guide to Re-Enchant Your Life [Amazon affiliate link] and the forthcoming Here Be Monsters: How To Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other. His writing can be found at From The Forests of Arduinna.
Register here: https://indicacademy.zoom.us/…/WN_albYBvzYRiCmMQL5HuMubA
UPDATE: The video of this event is available HERE
The Way of the Gods: Polytheism(s) Around the World
October 8, 2022
(Note: contains Amazon affiliate links) My new book, based on the lectures I gave for my INDICA course Introduction to Polytheism last year, is now available in paperback and Kindle editions from Amazon; the ebook edition is available as well from the Google Play store. Here’s the description:
Polytheisms may well be the world’s most undervalued cultural resource. From the dawn of history until quite recently, the default religious orientation on the planet was to recognize an open-ended plurality of unique divinities that manifest in every realm of natural and social life. By hosting a plurality of Gods, polytheistic civilizations exhibit maximum diversity in maximum solidarity – each one is a multiverse. Polytheism has been at the heart of the most ancient and resilient civilizations on Earth. Yet polytheist traditions have been stigmatized and persecuted for centuries, countless of them have been eradicated and prejudice against them and the very idea of a multiplicity of Gods continue to distort how they are perceived both by outsiders and in many cases even among their participants. This book offers an overview of continuous and revived polytheistic traditions from around the world together with critical discussions of the issues affecting them and their reception, offering a basis for further study and comparison.
Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3MdXCCB (#advertisement)
This Thursday (9/22) at 9:30 AM EST, 2:30 PM in Nigeria, 7 PM IST, don’t miss my live conversation with INDICA/CGPIT fellowship recipient Oluwo Olakunle Olawole, creator of The Ifá Priest Podcast, available on multiple platforms. Register at the link above.
Blog Post at Indica Courses Site
September 1, 2022
New Course: Introduction to Western Civilization
July 31, 2022
Registration is now open for my next class with Indica Courses, which begins October 1st and will run until May 6th.
Here is the course description:
The success of Western powers in multiple domains in the so-called ‘modern’ era has enabled the Western civilizational perspective and its self-understanding that emerged during that time to present itself to the rest of the world, not as one perspective among others, but as the universal and definitive human perspective and as the culmination of the world’s intellectual and spiritual development according to principles supposedly objective and self-evident. The hegemonic position of this civilizational perspective makes it essential that the basic elements of the Western paradigm of thought referenced by Western geopolitical power as the source of its legitimacy be grasped and critiqued. This course, using as its basis a standard, widely assigned collection of readings used to construct the ongoing and open-ended ‘Western Canon’, seeks to provide the foundation for such awareness, so that students may both appreciate the wisdom in this intensely contested tradition as well as recognizing its hazards.
Please spread the word, and I hope to see you there!
“On Amazonian Polytheisms” in OSCILLATIONS
June 18, 2022
It’s always an honor to share my work with the open access journal Oscillations: Non-Standard Experiments in Anthropology, the Social Sciences, and Cosmology. (See their mission statement here.) This piece, “On Amazonian Polytheisms” is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Way of the Gods: Polytheism(s) Around the World, which is based on the course Introduction to Polytheism that I gave last year with INDICA Courses.
https://oscillations.one/Assets/Publications/On+Amazonian+Polytheisms
This Indica Course juxtaposes two epics, two soteriologies (accounts of salvation), and two ontologies (accounts of the nature of Being Itself).
Plato’s Republic is an epic of philosophy, supplementing Homer’s epics in the Hellenic tradition, while the Mahabharata is an epic bearing its philosophical interpretation within itself throughout, for those who have discerned its interpretative principles, but which manifest a comprehensive philosophical perspective especially in the Bhagavad Gita. Without presupposing that the accounts in these two texts, albeit from kindred cultures, should be the same, this Indica Course seeks to bring them, and the experiences of divinity that inform them, into a dialogue.
Guided by the question ‘What is justice?’ Plato, through his dramatic protagonist, his teacher Socrates, establishes that it is to be found in the well-ordered soul, but that in order to discern the order of the soul, one must look to the state, in which one finds this order writ large. Socrates soon finds that the state, and hence the soul, finds itself ineluctably at war, and traces this struggle, within and without, throughout the text, which reaches its climax on a battlefield, with a vision of the souls of every kind of creature facing their ultimate choice. The Mahabharata, too, concerns a state at war and the war within the soul, as seen from many sides and in countless forms. In its climax, also on a battlefield, Arjuna, called by duty to destroy those who are as close to him as his very soul, appeals to his God to save him with an account of dharma, of the nature and ground of right action in the world, seeking as well that knowledge which alone may guide him in the most fateful choice of his life.
Henadology 