Abstract: In this presentation I'm articulating a reasonably complex line of thought. My central thesis is that the Pagan scholar occupies a unique position which differs from that of both the theologian and that of other kinds of scholars. Pagans have lost a his tory and a continuity of the past which it is our primary concern to restore.To make this argument I consider the history of the relationship of Christianity to Paganism, the relationship of natural philosophy founded on Paganism to science, and academic attitudes toward Pagan religion. I note the dangers inherent in assig ning magical effects to psychological causes. Finally, I make suggestions about developing native Pagan standards for Pagan scholarship.
What does it mean to be both Pagan and a scholar? What it means more than anything else is to hear, over and over, that most Pagan scholarship is bad scholarship. Academics say it. Christian theologians say it. And Pagans say it. At a Temple Grove social I threw the flyer advertising this event in front of a lively group of educated and intelligent Pagans. One of them picked it up, read the title of my lecture, and commented: "The state of Pagan scholarship? Terrible."
Why is this? Why is this the automatic response? There's widespread anticipation that what I'm doing today is offering a critique of the inadequacies of Pagan scholarship. And I do have some criticism. But I found as I asked myself these questions that the core issue wasn't competence, the core issue was authority--authenticity. Who gets to make judgements about Pagan scholarship and using what standards?
There is a strain of anti-intellectualism in Pagan religion, which partly stems from mistrust of the academic treatment of Paganism. This results in a certain lack of vigorousness in research and in thinking and a rejection of any idea of standards. So there's a lot of sloppy work out there. Intellectual Pagans, feeling to some extent beleaguered, criticize the shoddy work they see passing as scholarship. So there's a division among Pagans about the value of scholarship.
It's important for us to remember that the Pagan mistrust of academia is neither unfounded nor unreasonable. I want to examine past academic attitudes towards Pagans and what is happening in academia today. The first thing to understand here is that until the last five years academics referred to what we are calling Pagan religion as magic. The term religion meant Christianity. Current discussion in the social sciences, in anthropology, and in the classics recognizes this, and there is a substantiv e move to dismiss the term magic from academic discourse altogether.
Christianity developed in a Pagan milieu specifically in competition with Paganism, and centuries ago Christian theologians defined Pagan religion as magic as one move in the continuing campaign to suppress Pagan religion. Discussing the academic defi nitions of religion and magic Murray and Rosalie Wax in 1963 specifically drew attention to that:
"...there is [an]...ancient, Western attitude which judges magic by spiritual and moral standards. During the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church attached the label of magic to a variety of deviant religious practices, ranging from the remnants of heathen, pre-Christian rites to sophisticated perversions of the Catholic Mass...the Christian saw (magic) as a...blasphemous perversion of religiosity."
Here is a thing that is hard to accept. The origin of the distinction between religion and magic predates Christianity. However, it originates in a specific place. Christopher Faraone in 1992: "...prior to the Hellenistic period the only group of an cients (and they were a very small band) who regularly cast aspersions on the use of and beliefs about protective statues, divination, homeopathic purifications, and other 'magical' rites are the philosophers who...are probably our least trustworthy witne sses to traditional piety." The philosophers were wealthy men who attracted small handfuls of students who spent their days discussing how to think about the world. They didn't represent the religious understanding of the people of their place and time, and in fact the populace was deeply suspicious of them, calling them the equivalent of atheists and faulting them for failing to provide appropriate reverence to the gods.
These were the first academics attending the very first academies, and the people who laid the groundwork for the modern academic assessment of Pagan religion. Christian theologians picked up on the distinction in the continuing war against Western Eu ropean Paganism. In the last century academics have in turn picked up the idea. Referring to Pagan religion as magic makes it possible to make hostile judgements about Pagan religion while cloaking them in the garb of objectivity. Listen to Barb in '63 :
"I have not come to bury the term 'Magic"; but neither do I want to praise what it denominates (as certain neo-gnostic occultists are nowadays inclined to do). The fundamental difference between magic and religion is still the same as it always was. One the one hand, we have the religious man, offering his adorations in humble submission to the Deity;...On the other hand, we have the magician, attempting to force the supernatural powers to accomplish what he desires and avert what he fears."
So religion, meaning Christianity, involves prayer, and magic, meaning Paganism, involves commanding powers. In fact magic provides a kind of polestar to define all the characteristics you wouldn't want in your religion. Religion deals with the sacre d, unites people in community, is moral, while magic deals with the profane, is individualistic, is divisive, and is absolutely immoral. Magic is also practiced by primitive people, as opposed to the sophisticated and complex practitioners of religion.
Hans Dieter Betz in 1991 provided the following analysis: "Religion used to be treated, without further questioning, as positive," while magic is negative. The social sciences have held that humanity develops from the more primitive to the more comple x. Primitive people believe in magic, then develop religion, and finally develop the true conception of the universe, which is science. Betz says: "This view of religion is now outdated, to be sure, but it is still held by many in present society who be lieve it corresponds to scientific evidence..."
What's science got to do with it? Well, the term magic has also been used to mean the opposite of science. The Waxes in '63: "Within anthropology, the intellective conception of magic may be traced to that student of comparative religion, Edward B. T ylor. He suggested that magic was "an elaborate and systematic pseudo-science...a 'hurtful superstition' that had dominated Europe in the past and could come to do so again..."
Now you have three terms--magic, religion, and science--which can be used to define each other. That's useful. Magic is also everything you don't want in your science. It's based on faith and on the manipulation of supernatural powers, is practical, crude and shallow, while science is a the discovery of a body of rules describing the nature of physical reality.
When magic is contrasted with religion what is meant is Pagan religion as opposed to Christian religion. When magic is contrasted with science what is meant is Pagan science as opposed to Christian science. Brian Easely in 1980 provided an extensive analysis: "'Modern science' emerged, at least in part, out of a three-cornered contest" between the Church, natural philosophy or natural magic, and mechanical philosophy.
The original academics, the philosophers, Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, argued that reason was the most important human faculty, and that you could understand the world by sitting and thinking about it. The Church inherited this notion. Reason is the most important faculty for investigating the world.
Then in the thirteenth century translators brought lost ancient Pagan texts and Islamic texts into Latin and the romance languages. The Western Europeans people who read these texts and developed ideas and practices based on them called themselves nat ural philosophers or natural magicians. Most of them were Christian, a few converted to Paganism and called for a return of Pagan religion to Western Europe.
Much more than religion, though, they were interested in what we now call science. Easley says: "As magicians stressed, it was quite impossible for philosophers to discover the occult qualities of things by the use of reason; they were discoverable on ly through experience..." Their radical notion was that instead of just sitting and thinking about something it was more helpful to actually look at it and try to understand it. They also talked about the kinds of things we study today, the influence of the stars and the subtle forces of the planets.
Not surprisingly they developed into powerful healers, as they responded to what the person in front of them was really saying instead of what they thought the person ought to be experiencing. They turned into social critics as they worked with a mise rable and exploited populace. The Church was threatened by their religious ideas and the wealthy by their politics. Easely says: "By the time the Rosicrucian manifestos had appeared in print naming the Pope as the Antichrist and calling on all Christian s to prepare for the coming Spiritual and Social Restoration, a Christian counter-attack on all aspects of magical thought and practice was well under way...The thrust of this attack was the familiar one of declaring terrestrial matter to be devoid of all occult properties peculiar to natural magic..."
Remember the Church was killing natural philosophers, so there was real motivation to figure out a way for observation of the world and the Church to co-exist. Mechanical philosophy grew out of an attempt to preserve the idea of really looking at the world around us and also preserve the Church's economic dominance. So a third viewpoint emerged. Mechanical philosophy, says Easely, "took the audacious step of declaring matter to be totally inert...Thus Rene Descartes spoke for all mechanical philosop hers when he declared categorically that 'there exist no occult forces in stones or plants...in fact there exists nothing in the whole of nature which cannot be explained in terms of purely corporeal causes, totally devoid of mind and thought."
The extra bonus mechanical philosophy offered is that the world suddenly becomes, instead of a living being, a collection of inert stuff. You don't have to be careful about what you do with stuff, you can do whatever you want to with it. Stuff includ es other animals besides humans, by the way. Easley: "Descartes (insists) that animals are no different in principle from the various kinds of mechanical machines constructed by men..."
Easley touches on the hostility mechanical philosophers felt for natural philosophers: "Any departure from the mechanical philosophy is by and large a heresy that must be fought over bitterly before its adherents can claim victory..."
So the antipathy between religion and magic, or Christian religion and Pagan religion, has its roots in the conflict of the fifth century when Christianity initially suppressed Western European Paganism, and the reopening of that conflict in the thirte enth century with the return of Pagan religion to Western Europe. The antipathy between science and magic, or Christian science and Pagan science, stems from the economic conflict between natural philosophers representing the social underclass and mechan ical philosophers representing the interests of wealthy exploitation.
Which is a very interesting history, but is it relevant? I pointed out earlier that social scientists have recognized the inherently political nature of the hostility academics have displayed toward the discussion of magic, or Pagan religion. Surely academics no longer have any reason to be hostile toward practitioners of Pagan religion?
Tikva Frymer-Kensky in 1992 discussed her own reaction to her initial encounter with Paganism:
"As histories and theologies of 'the Goddess' appeared, I became increasingly disturbed....My first reaction was scholarly bemusement: how could people write about goddesses when they couldn't read any of the ancient literature? This soon passed into a form of territorial protectiveness: goddesses, after all, were my turf...(the writers) trivialized and invalidated my area of expertise: if you could discover all you needed to know about the Goddess from inside your soul and mind, why should anyone stu dy Sumerian and Akkadian?..."
Here is Ronald Hutton in 1991:
"..the relationship between religion and magic. Historians, theologians and anthropologists seem to be in general agreement upon the distinction between the two. Religion consists of an offering up of prayers...Magic, by contrast, consists of a contr ol worked by humans over nature by use of spiritual forces, so that the end result is expected to lie within the will of the person or persons working the spell or the ritual...Thus magic of any kind cannot, strictly speaking, be described as 'paganism'".
"Now that the principal argument for the existence of a surviving medieval pagan religion has been demolished..."
Here he is simply asserting that Pagan religion did not survive in Western Europe by the familiar declaration "it's not religion, it's magic".
And here is John Gager in 1992, writing about Greek curse tablets:
"Did they work?
"Until recently, the very idea of asking such a question would have seemed absurd. Of course this stuff doesn't work! Indeed, from the time of Sir James Frazer to the present, the ruling assumption has been that spells, charms, and amulets cannot wor k-by definition. Once again, the initial assumption sets the agenda for the ensuing discussion and interpretation...because the beliefs are assumed to be false...What would happen, however, if we changed our initial assumption and began with the idea tha t these beliefs and practices must have worked..."
And I pause here, because he comes so close to actually granting some measure of truth claim to Pagan science. And then he softens it: "must have worked in some sense...Of course, we need not assume that they worked in the same way that the participan ts themselves believed..."
And here we come to the modern argument against the truth claims of Pagan religion and Pagan science: they're making it up in their heads. I'm talking about the psychologization of magic, an extension of the idea that there is reason extracted from th e observation of the real world. What happens inside our minds does not effect what happens outside our minds, in the world. Magic is not an objective observation of the world, but rather a projection of what we wish to have happen onto our experience. Magic isn't real. Magic is inauthentic.
And so we must examine the notion of objectivity.
In his 1991 work on ancient British Paganism Ronald Hutton discusses Caitlin Matthews' life work, and you have to wonder what she ever did to this guy to deserve two full pages of academic dressing down. He concludes, "The result is perfectly sound th eology, and...is of great practical utility to many people...it is a pity that writers as able as Caitlin Matthews have not given themselves over more to a quest for objective truth, whether the result has utility or not."
His statement assumes that there is such a thing as objective truth and represents the academic as an objective observer of that truth, a very scientific point of view. But it is in precisely that claim to objectivity that the truth claim of science b egins to break down. There's this secret, actually, that there isn't any science which measures up to science's standards for itself. Everyone's always thinking that some other science somewhere else is the real science, since this one isn't really obje ctive at all.
What's a real science? Paleontology, the study of bones? I'm indebted to Gordon Cooper for this reference. Roger Lewin in 1987: "Johanson readily agrees that paleoanthropology is not different from other sciences in this respect. 'The fossil finder s themselves have often brought with them their own personal prejudices and beliefs...We see discoveries as bolstering our specific interpretation of what the family tree should look like.' Leakey's view is similar. 'In our family we were working with t he human sciences, and I was never shown examples of objectivity in the true sense of what science is supposed to be like."
How about archaeology? This is Bruce Kuklick in 1993 discussing the University of Pennsylvania digs at Nippur in the 1880s: "...they were as much creating as discovering what came to be known as the Ancient Near East. One cannot dissociate archaeolog ical triumphs from their connection to Western ideas about progress and civilization that grew up coordinately with the construction and reconstruction of ancient Mesopotamian culture...The narrative showed how a single civilization--that of the Ancient N ear East--contributed to that of the early Judeo-Christian world and, consequently, to the linear evolution that led to the urban West."
"I want to look at the techniques of investigation that emerged in archeology...The most simple and powerful was that of seriation, of judging deposits lower in a series of deposits as being evidence of something older rather than something higher..."
"The concentration on the discovery of a fundamental spatio-temporal ordering, I believe, helped give archaeology its reputation for objectivity. It is about fundamental, bedrock truths that can literally be excavated."
"It is plausible to argue that strata are as much interpreted as given..."
How about the translation of ancient languages? Frymer-Kensky in 1992: "Part of the scholarly ferment in recent years has been the realization that the reader is always present in the reading of texts, and that the present is always part of the inter pretation of the past. There is no such thing as the totally objective recovery of history...Gone is the naïve assumption that knowledge is absolute and absolutely attainable."
Lewin in 1987: "In fact, a completely unbiased, unprejudiced exploration of nature is a methodological impossibility...Without a set of expectations to act as a guide, such a search would be a chaotic and largely unprofitable enterprise....Preconceptio ns are rarely acknowledged, because this, after all, would be 'unscientific'. And yet preconceptions are an individual scientist's guide to how to view the world with a degree of order that allows structured questions to be asked..."
How you look at what you look at determines what you see. Why you look determines how you see it. This opens the whole issue of motivation.
It is clear that Christian theologians intend to further the practice of Christian religion. The academic's motivation is less clear, hidden as it is behind the cloak of objectivity. Academics write to increase personal prestige, to entice students t o classes, to achieve tenure, to attract funding. Academics can feel threatened by Pagan scholars on their turf.
At present there's a certain flattening of discussion going on among Pagan leaders. The world community of religious leaders attempts to heal the conflicts between religions. The Pagan contribution is to relinquish our anger at the conflicts between Christianity and Paganism, a movement I fervently support. At the same time we must not lose sight of the fact that Paganism suffers from the destruction of the past. I mean the phrase literally: our connection to our Pagan past was deliberately cut. T o be a Pagan in the west today is to engage in construction and reconstruction, to look for surviving Pagan customs and to revive Pagan practices.
The suppression of Pagan religion and the denigration of Pagan science is built into the fabric of the dominant culture. Christian theologians criticize Pagan religious practice precisely for being reconstructed, cut off from the past and therefore in authentic--for being based on scholarship. Academics criticize Pagan scholarship for being theologically motivated, for being based on a desire to discover and reconstruct Pagan religious practice.
I submit that engaging in scholarship in order to inform on Pagan religious practice is the defining act of a Pagan scholar. I am tired of hearing that Pagan scholarship is bad scholarship simply because it is Pagan scholarship. I suggest that we rec ognize that our methods, motivations, and results are unique to ourselves and that we cease to cede the authority to pronounce on the authenticity of Pagan scholarship to theologians and to academics. I suggest that only the people in this room can judge the value of the work produced by the people in this room.
Immediately the concept judgement brings up the idea of standards. I suggest that we, as Pagan scholars, begin to articulate native Pagan standards for the judgement of the excellence of our work.
And it's hard. Because the first thing we do is go for the academic standard. And that's okay. There is going to be a certain amount of modeling or even appropriation of the standards of academic scholarship and the terms and insights of Christian t heology as we develop our own native explanation of the world which serves the combined function of theology and scholarship. But we must make those standards, terms and insights truly our own and avoid the error of once again sliding into relinquishing the right to judge the excellence of our work to theologians and academics. When we borrow a term or a standard we must articulate why we are doing this and how it functions to further Pagan religion.
We must be prepared to counter academic criticism of Pagan scholarship not on the academic's terms, but on our own. Let's first challenge the scholar's motivation. No two scholars produce the same product. It's not possible. The paper, the thought itself, issues from a unique individual's unique experience of the world. Let's put the speaker back in the speech. Whenever any scholar offers a work I want to know who that person is, what their motivation is for doing it.
I especially want to know the motivation of the Pagan scholar engaged in the criticism of other Pagan scholars' work. I'm simply not going to accept any longer the argument that the one who is offering the criticism is simply interested in the objecti ve truth. All too often we invoke the pretense of objectivity, the worn distinction between the subjective observer and objective reality, to attack rival viewpoints or to enforce orthodoxy or vent personal spleen. Whenever a Pagan scholar points to ano ther's work and says, "Look, here is an error!" I look past the pointing finger to the person behind it. Why are you saying that? How do you benefit?
What I'm about to do is reasonably risky. I've done it before and one of my friends objected--don't do that, don't be that vulnerable! I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and talk about my background and my motivation for presenting these ide as in this forum in an act of unilateral disarmament, or at least disclosure. I am a writer with a published non-fiction work not in history and a former newspaper reporter. I am a high school graduate with a degree in library card, an independent schol ar trooping faithfully to the Suzzalo once a week. I am a British Traditional priestess and a Ceremonialist. I am taking this stand as a deliberate outsider to the academic world. I arranged my life so as to occupy the position of standing for the alte rnative. And I take this stance, that Pagan scholars differ from academics and from theologians, partly out of a sense protectiveness. I see that there are Pagans doing very important work who are under attack from without and within because they have t he temerity to be doing the work. I want to foster an environment where Pagan scholarship can take place freely, without harassment from without or within.
So the first standard of Pagan scholarship that I advocate is to reveal the scholar within the work and to unveil the motivation for engaging in the work. The second standard is that the work should produce good magic.
I've said the defining act of the Pagan scholar is to inform on Pagan religion. There has to be a result. It took me years to understand this. I'd say, okay, I found this speech of Demosthenes against Timarchos, and he says Timarchos' mother initiat ed him into the worship of Sabazios and she did these things: rubbing him with clay, reading him a poem, and giving him a snake to wave saying "The evil I flee, the better I find". I'd present this proudly, thinking it was obvious what you do with this i nformation, and people would say, so what? So you have to spell it out. So what is, I make a ritual to Dionysos Sabazios that involves rubbing people with clay, reading them a poem, and giving them plastic snakes to wave around.
Good scholarship is that which leads to good Pagan practice, and bad scholarship is that which doesn't.
I'm going to use Diana Paxson as an example of good scholarship. She came up here recently to do a Norse oracular trance ritual, one that she has reconstructed. She led the ritual by telling us what sagas she'd read that had given her the information about how to construct the rite. One saga included a description of the song that was sung to send the seer into trance, including the key words that induced and ended the trance. Another source mentioned Odin invoking this trance and beating something . She knew drums worked to invoke trance, so she was going to beat a drum. Then she did the ritual, induced trance in a priestess, and gave every participant the opportunity to ask the oracle a question. She handled the magic flawlessly, taking partici pants down below the world tree and back again, and making sure none of the participants followed the designated oracle into trance.
Let's see what she did right. First, she knew she was making a reconstruction, and said so. Next, she read everything she could get her hands on. Next, she weighed the relative value of the sources--sagas recorded by Christian priests were undoubted ly affected by the priests, but commentary by the priests was definitely less valuable. Next, when there were holes in the reconstruction she had to fill in, she used her knowledge of the magical techniques of other cultures, and she flagged that this wa s what she was doing. Her skill as a scholar is part and parcel of her skill as a priestess.
The magic and the research feed back into each other. You read, make a reconstruction, do a ritual, evaluate the results, and go back to the library to refine your understanding. I made a ritual which involved invoking Dumuzi and Inanna on a priest a nd priestess. There were eight pairs of people who did this channel. The priest of one of the pairs started screaming at the festival participants that they weren't worshipping him properly. I stepped in to the priest, took the god off him, grounded hi m, and went back to the books. The other priests hadn't gotten anything like that result and I wanted to know what was going on. It turned out that Dumuzi was a composite god composed of four deities--the one I was working with, Ama-ushum-galanna, god o f the storehouse; a wheat god; a bull god; and a child god who was drowned in a marsh and mourned yearly. So I knew that if I didn't care which god I got, I could call Dumuzi, but if I wanted the date god I should invoke Ama-ushum-galanna specifically.
So what makes good magic? What's the most important thing in Pagan religion? Well, when the deity comes when you call, doesn't disappear on you, and is the deity you were looking for, that's good magic. When you do a ritual expecting to get a result and you get that result--you invoke trance in a medium and you get trance in that medium, a trance which you can end at any time safely for all parties--that's good magic.
Finally, I want to talk about our relationship to the past. It is certainly not necessary to reconstruct an ancient practice in order to practice Pagan religion. It isn't necessary to learn about the practices of other extant Pagan or Pagan-friendly religions, Hinduism and Voudon, in order to practice Pagan religion. There is however a tendency to lean on the authority of the past to validate the practices of the present. This leads to a kind of scramble to find something someone somewhere in the h istory of the world did that looks like the thing we want to do to cite it as validation. Similarly, there's a kind of backdating going on, where Pagan scholars will project the practice of the present backward in time to a people in the past and say, th ose people did it. There is also a fuzziness of thinking that makes vague generalizations: "Witchcraft has been practiced since Paleolithic times". Finally, there is the wholesale invention of a history. The Brotherhood of Mithras is not a survival of the ancient practice, however much we would like it to be.
It's in this area that Pagans make the kinds of statements that most often lead to criticism and even ridicule both from Pagans and non-Pagans. And it comes, again, from this search for authenticity in Pagan religion, the criteria of authenticity bein g the venerable age of the practice. The theologian, the academic and the intellectual Pagan attack these positions on the basis of lack of objective truth: it didn't happen that way, the statement is absurd on the face of it. Removing the concept objec tive truth, putting the speaker back into the picture, allows us to take a more compassionate approach to dealing with this issue. Clearly there's a real need here and that need must be addressed. One approach would be to label all such squishy historie s as mythical rather than untrue, differentiating the approach of a story told as history, from the kind of history that leads to religious reconstruction, which may be more factual but less useful.
We must also remain sensitive to the possiblity that the person offering the criticism is continuing the ongoing attempt to sever Pagans from the Pagan past. A friend of mine recently had a chance to spend time with a Lithuanian. Latvia and Lithuania only converted to Christianity a century or so ago, and formany years was dominated by the Soviet Union which suppressed the overt practice of Christianity. So there's a lot of extant Pagan practice there. Listening to this Lithuanian talk my friend sa id he kept saying to himself that's just folklore, that's just folklore, until it hit him that what he'd been told was just folklore really is the practice of Pagan religion.
I didn't get to finish thinking through our relationship to the past before I had to actually come give this presentation. It made me pretty frantic, it's not finished! Then I realized that I didn't have to finish this thought. I'm just one voice. All these points are just the starting places for discussion. We've only just begun to explore the ramifications of a religion which is not based on a single privileged revelation encoded in a text which provides a standard of orthodoxy, but instead a re ligion based on construction and reconstruction engaged in by many individuals. We've only just begun to explore the ramifications of a worldview which does not admit to a single objective reality comprehended by disembodied intellects, but recognizes th at the comprehension itself changes the individual and the world. There is no one view of Pagan scholarship, but as many views as there are people in this room.
The metaphor I'm fondest of at the moment is the gamelan. Gamelan is a type of music which comes from Indonesia. It's created by a group of musicians playing metallaphones. A gamelan contains a number of gongs, little high ones and big deep ones. T he musicians strike the gongs in particular rhythms, and the combination of all the sounds makes the music. A lot of parts make up the whole. Some of you may have heard the an ensemble from some of the Northwest colleges, or a gamelan performing at Folk life.
The experience of the gamelan goes beyond many parts making up the musical whole. If you study this music you discover that the people listening to it, the audience, themselves comprise part of the performance. No one person is expected to have the s ame experience of the gamelan as any other. The truth of the experience of the gamelan only emerges from the combined experience of all the people listening to the music.
It's that kind of combined, disciplined, coordinated and yet individual effort that I hope to see Pagan scholars engage in. We represent a worldview which the dominant culture turned away from and finds, much to its surprise, that it once again requir es. I think we have the opportunity to make some real changes in the world. We certainly have the opportunity to shape an experience of the world which is uniquely Pagan.
The Latvians and Lithuanians sang their way to freedom, you know. They held huge rallies and sang songs asking for their independence unti lthe Soviet Union had to give it to them. I'm hoping that we will sing our way to freedom. So I think of this gathering as a gamelan, and I've just struck the first big bass gong note.
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copyright © 1997 Brandy Williams