Fritz Muntean has been active in the Craft since the early 1960s. He was a co-founder of California's NROOGD trad, and holds order and honourary degrees in several other traditions. Fritz returned to university in the mid 90s and earned an MA in Religious Studies. He edited The Pomegranate: The Journal of Pagan Studies until 2003, and works to promote Pagan scholarship and the academic study of Craft organization and theology. He lives in Vancouver.
Selected articles by Fritz Muntean
- J.G. Frazer's Golden Bough: A Critical Appreciation
by Fritz Muntean (The Pomegranate, 1998) - Asherah: Goddess of the Israelites by Fritz Muntean (The Pomegranate, 2000)
- On 'Paganus' by Fritz Muntean
- Complex and Unpredictable Consequences by Fritz Muntean (The Pomegranate, 2000)
- Book review: Wiccan Covens (The Pomegranate, 2001)
- Barking at the Moon by Fritz Muntean
- The First Seven Trumps of the Major Arcana (and the Fool) by Fritz Muntean (The Pomegranate, 2002)
- The Name of the Witch by Fritz Muntean on Suburban Witch
- The Protestantization of Paganism by Fritz Muntean
- Wicca after Starhawk: a critique of The Spiral Dance and its after-effects by Fritz Muntean
- Complex and Unpredictable Consequences: THE CRUSADER MASSACRES OF 1096 AS AN HISTORICAL WATERSHED by Fritz Muntean
Fritz writes: Back in the '90s, it was traditional for the Women's Studies program at our university to show "that damn movie" -- The Burning Times -- at Hallowe'en, and for the Religious Studies department to respond by protesting (what Chas refers to as) its 'cheerful ahistoricity'. Being the one & only Pagan grad student in the dept, I was often asked to explain how so many of my fellow religionists could possibly believe in such a thing -- especially to the point of being willing to support this egregious libel against another religion. Frankly, I was as baffled as the rest. Then someone suggested that it might help me sort things out if I were to take Prof Menkis' course on Jewish Responses to Catastrophe. And this paper was the result. Of course the catastrophe at Mintz was real enough, but over the following couple of generations, the extent of the suicidal slaughter -- as well as the essential innocence, the good intentions, and the deeply religious motivations of the victim/perpetrators -- was exaggerated with wild abandon. And the blame was focused on those Christian authorities who had, in fact, engaged in heroic efforts to protect the victims. These texts were translated and widely distributed in an effort to create sympathy for the affected Jewish communities, but the long-term effects were disastrous -- and these were the 'Complex and Unpredictable Consequences' of the title. These texts may, indeed, be the origin of the Blood Libel -- the wide-spread belief that the ritual sacrifice of small children was in integral part of Jewish religious behaviour. According to Aristotle, a myth can not be a historical fact, but it should not be a deliberate fiction. Paranoid myth structures have brought grief to more than one religion, and even have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.
Furniture by Fritz