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Pentacle Magazine Website
Happy Midsummer to all our members and guests. The Beltaine issue of Pentacle is out now, and is keeping up our high standard in both art and articles. The Lammas issue is currently with the printers and will be out around the 25th July. We'd also like to thank you all for making this site what it is, and would ask you to help make it better. PM Admin with any ideas, changes, improvements that you'd like to see on this site, and we'll try to make them happen.
Pentacle Magazine is still the Leading Independent Pagan Magazine in the UK. With the recent expansions to Europe, and the USA, we're getting better known all round the globe. You can pick up your copy in one of the 200 + UK Pentacle Stockists, or even treat yourself, or a friend to a Subscription. If you want to stock or advertise in Pentacle just send us a message to admin@pentaclemagazine.org and we'll get our Shop & Advertising manager to contact you.
Happy Midsummer - Jon (Admin)
Welcome to the Pentacle Magazine Website!
Greetings, and welcome to the site of Pentacle Magazine - the UK's leading independent Pagan magazine.
There are many new features here for you to enjoy, so log in today, and be part of one of the freshest, most innovative Pagan sites. Some parts of the site are only available to registered members - but this is free, so Register on the left hand side of the site. After that please drop by the forums, say Hi, and introduce yourself.
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Posted by: Maria
on Saturday, September 06, 2008 - 11:29 AM |
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Ken Campbell, who has died suddenly aged 66, was one of the most original and unclassifiable talents in the British theatre of the past half-century. He was a writer, director and monologist, a genius at producing shows on a shoestring and honing the improvisational capabilities of the actors who were brave enough to work with him.
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Read full article: 'Ken Campbell Dies on Sunday 31st August' (588 bytes more) Comments?   |
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Posted by: Webwitch
on Thursday, August 28, 2008 - 05:32 PM |
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Government declares trial that led to woman's 1782 death was ‘nonlegal’
BERN, Switzerland - Anna Goeldi was executed for being a witch more than 220 years ago — the last witch beheaded in Europe. On Wednesday, the Swiss decided the least they could do was clear her name.
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Read full article: 'Swiss exonerate Europe's last executed witch' (3076 bytes more) Comments? |
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Posted by: Maria
on Sunday, August 24, 2008 - 02:51 PM |
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Responding to a letter of protest from the National Secular Society, Stephen Hughes, the Chief Executive of Birmingham City Council, says that the Council has never blocked websites dealing with atheism and nor does it intend to – even though it is installing the new Bluecoat filtering system from the USA.
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Read full article: 'Birmingham City Council promises “atheist websites are not blocked”' (1531 bytes more) Comments? |
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Posted by: Webwitch
on Saturday, August 16, 2008 - 01:06 PM |
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SPELLING CONEST: Massey University's new magic and witchcraft paper allows students to make voodoo dolls or 'magical curse tablets' for their first assignment.
Students rarely receive an A for sending a curse to their lecturers, but that is what Massey students are being encouraged to do.
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Read full article: 'Curses, the students are doing voodoo ' (2014 bytes more) Comments? |
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Posted by: TheStranger
on Thursday, August 14, 2008 - 12:39 PM |
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Switching from beef to kangaroo burgers could significantly help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, says an Australian scientist.
The methane gas produced by sheep and cows through belching and flatulence is more potent than carbon dioxide in the damage it can cause to the environment.
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Read full article: ' Eat kangaroo to 'save the planet'' (1198 bytes more) Comments? |
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Posted by: TheStranger
on Thursday, August 14, 2008 - 12:39 PM |
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Israeli archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of a Roman temple beneath the foundations of a church.
The building, which dates to the second century AD, was found during an excavation at Zippori, the capital of Galilee during the Roman period.
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Read full article: ' Roman temple found under church' (2511 bytes more) Comments? |
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Posted by: TheStranger
on Thursday, August 14, 2008 - 12:38 PM |
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The extinction of many ancient species may be due to humans rather than climate change, experts say.
Large prehistoric animals in Tasmania may have been wiped out by human hunting and not temperature changes, a team of international scientists argue.
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Read full article: ' Extinction 'by man not climate'' (2287 bytes more) Comments? |
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Posted by: Webwitch
on Thursday, August 14, 2008 - 12:38 PM |
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The unique library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, buried beneath lava by Vesuvius's eruption in AD79, is slowly revealing its long-held secrets
STORED in a sky-lit reading room on the top floor of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples are the charred remains of the only library to survive from classical antiquity. The ancient world's other great book collections -- at Athens, Alexandria and Rome -- all perished in the chaos of the centuries. But the library of the Villa of the Papyri was conserved, paradoxically, by an act of destruction.
Lying to the northwest of ancient Herculaneum, this sumptuous seaside mansion was buried beneath 30m of petrified volcanic mud during the catastrophic eruption of Mt Vesuvius on August 24, AD79. Antiquities hunters in the mid-18th century sunk shafts and dug tunnels around Herculaneum and found the villa, surfacing with a magnificent booty of bronzes and marbles. Most of these, including a svelte seated Hermes modelled in the manner of Lyssipus, now grace the National Archeological Museum in Naples.
The excavators also found what they took to be chunks of coal deep inside the villa, and set them alight to illuminate their passage underground. Only when they noticed how many torches had solidified around an umbilicus -- a core of wood or bone to which the roll was attached -- did the true nature of the find become apparent. Here was a trove of ancient texts, carbonised by the heat surge of the eruption. About 1800 were eventually retrieved.
A cluster of the villa's papyrus scrolls, in much the same state as they were found 250 years ago, lies in a display case in the Biblioteca Nazionale's Herculaneum reading room. The individual scrolls, which extend in some cases to 9m unrolled, look not unlike charcoaled arboreal limbs left at the bottom of a campfire. A group of six rolls, compacted by the weight of volcanic debris, has emulsified into one unsightly pile.
In a corner of the room stands a device invented in 1756 by the abbot Antonio Piaggio, a conservator of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Library, to unroll the papyri by suspending them from silk threads attached to their surface with a paste of fish oil. These were fixed in place by a slice of pig's bladder. Piaggio's machine, though painstakingly slow, was used successfully until the beginning of the 20th century. The room also contains a 3m length of scroll unrolled by Piaggio's machine, with 40 columns of Greek text in a rhythmic procession.
Scholars today, using multi-spectral imaging technology, are able to decipher the otherwise inscrutable surface of black ink on black fabric of the papyrus scrolls. A multinational team has assembled to transcribe the collection. But work has stalled as they await refinement of a new technique, an application of the CT scan, which will allow some of the untouched texts to be deciphered without exposing them to the risk of further damage.
When I ask to view a papyrus fragment from the vaults, a librarian pauses to absorb the request, returning my gaze a little blankly. Just as I begin to frame a withdrawal of this possibly audacious demand, she blinks, smiles amiably, and disappears down one of the library's vast corridors. She returns carrying a gun-metal tray on which a sheet of papyrus, older than many a classical fluted column and as brittle as a desiccated insect wing, has been laid out with reverential delicacy. The glitter of ink is clearly visible under the lights. But the material itself has been scorched in antiquity, then torn and tattered in an effort to prise it open.
I am looking at one of the Dead Sea scrolls of classical antiquity: a shard of half-recovered time. It belongs, I realise, to a genre of accidental art that speaks of our relationship to the past more precisely than any intact work; it is the art of the fragment, an art that yields to us, but never surrenders.
The Villa of the Papyri is believed to have been owned by Roman statesman Lucius Calpurnius Piso, father-in-law of Julius Caesar. He was a man of wealth and refined taste. Like many members of the Roman elite of the time, Piso looked back fondly to the glories of ancient Greece. His library, written mostly in Greek, was dominated by works of the Epicurean school, which sought a salve for the troubled soul in the taming of runaway desire.
Epicurus, the creed's founder, was a fourth century BC atomist philosopher with an atheistic bent and a medicinal aim. He wanted to remedy human pain in this life rather than prepare sufferers for the next. "Nothing to fear in God," he wrote, displaying a talent for pithy distillation. "Nothing to feel in death. Good can be attained. Evil can be endured."
Shortly before 300BC Epicurus withdrew his followers to a commune outside Athens, known to all as The Garden. Friendship and frugality were its guiding principles. In fact, Epicurus would regard the modern use of the adjective epicurean as a travesty of his ideals. "Plain fare gives us as much pleasure as a costly diet," he said. True pleasure for Epicurus was a "pot of cheese", though he was thought to enjoy a tipple from a wineskin.
Ancient gossip links him with a fellow communard called Mammarion (big breasts), which only shows that the sage was human.
Epicureanism takes up a radical position in the Hellenistic world, standing apart from the philosophical mainstream. When Paul addresses the Athenians, in Acts 17 of the Bible, he speaks of Epicureans and Stoics in the same breath. Christianity, naturally, set itself firmly against Epicurean materialism and its implicit atheism. But the Stoics were equally stern disputants. Epicureans, as a result, found themselves traduced by their fellow pagans and damned by the early church. The Garden, nevertheless, flourished for some eight centuries.
"Epicurus's philosophy exercised so widespread an influence that for a long time it was touch and go whether Christianity might not have to give way before it," writes Lawrence Durrell in a tone of lament.
One consequence of Christian hostility, a kind of passive resistance, is a broken tradition. Epicureanism was ignored by the monastic scribes who transferred the works of approved authors from the school of Athens, particularly Aristotle and Plato, from papyrus to parchment and vellum. Only a few letters, sayings and principles survive from the 300 scrolls attributed to Epicurus in antiquity.
A few fragments from Epicurus's lost work, On Nature, inspiration for the Roman poet Lucretius's magisterial poem, On the Nature of Things, have been unearthed at the Villa of the Papyri. But the Herculaneum scrolls are mainly the works of an Epicurean sage named Philodemus, previously known as the author of some rather racy light verse.
These finds are contributing to a revival of scholarly interest in Epicureanism, Europe's first green philosophy, at a time when the West urgently seeks advice on living with less. Epicurean counsel sounds at times like contemporary wisdom; it provides the philosophical language for an eco-friendly art of life. A few lines from Lucretius, penned at the apogee of paganism, are equally applicable in the age of the plasma screen:
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