…maybe it’s not even pagan theology that annoys me. Maybe it’s just pagans in general, or perhaps human-persons, full-stop.
I don’t read ‘pagan’ blogs, which seems silly since I have one — duh. But, I don’t, and the reason is because of the name-dropping, circular dialogue, fantasy-role-play feel of so much that I find when I do venture out.
I am an animist. I don’t do the spirits-flying-about, patron-deity-from-Greece-of-someone-living-in-California, thing. Or heaven forbid, take one of the many feminine aspects of sovereignty acknowledged by one of the over 300 túath in Ireland, single that principle out (the Morrigan) as a battle queen, ‘The’ soverignty goddess,etc, and then transport her to North America and imagine she has any interest there.
I realize that may sound dismissive to someone who does believe those things: especially to someone who grew-up in a christian home, disillusioned with religion and culture–with modernity in general– and sought something different….
For that person, what they saw, heard, or felt in the discovery of the Old Religion, no matter where that religion originated or the culture informing it, had a significant impact on their life.
It still annoys me. The reason it annoys me is the lack of cultural understanding of the religion being resurrected, and a lack of current world view examination on the part of the practitioner.
If current world view were taken into account, most North American pagans (and good lord, what other title can I use? that’s another type of crazy making – this dissecting of terms – pagan, polytheist, monist, blah) would find that they carry within them the basic premise taught within christianity: that god(s) are disembodied entities that exist in a plane of reality so expansive from our own, that they are omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.
Lest I come across overly curmudgeonly, or dogmatic, I want to be clear that it’s not personal. I have no issue with the human-persons involved. It does concern me a little that in a modern capitalist culture, where alienation and anomie reign supreme and our REAL connection with the natural world — of which we are an intimate part — has been divided by a scientific worldview, that pagans engage in more intellectualizing and writing about gods/religion/spiritual practice/pantheons than living a pagan life. It is dangerously close to being just another escapist occupation for a species cut-off from the ecstatic merger with nature that we are biologically designed for.
For myself, I view the world around me as living – genuinely living. Not metaphorically, or on some simpler level than myself. That type of thinking smacks of human centrism and has been the cause of much environmental harm. No…the trees that are my friends (and not all trees are) don’t need dyads or gossamer spirits inhabiting them anymore than I do. They are living creatures with their own language, world view, and culture. Same goes for …. the various Winds, or Hurricanes, or the Robin that eats peanuts in my garden. They are alive. Their experience of the world is so alien to my own that I may never understand or really Know them, but by the gods, I respect them.
I have found in my searching that if you go far enough back, all our ancestors were animists. And that is good enough for me!
> Or heaven forbid, take one of the many feminine aspects of sovereignty acknowledged by one of the over 300 túath in Ireland, single that principle out (the Morrigan) as a battle queen, ‘The’ soverignty goddess,etc, and then transport her to North America and imagine she has any interest there.
what about when they show up and bug you? ’cause both you and i know they sometimes do that.
I have a few thoughts, which are naturally only relevant to myself. As the search for knowledge and understanding is ultimately a very personal journey. My annoyance isn’t synonymous with personal judgement.
The old Faery warning about finding reflections of what we bring, comes to mind. RJ Stewart, in his own teachings, discourages exposure to popular fiction for this reason. Much the way Ivo described the “talking board” and the “watermelon candy” (or whatever that was), it seems these other-than-human-persons we communicate with use the images stored in our heads.
We see this same principle at work with horses. If you hold an image in your mind of what you want the horse to do, the horse responds (I just did a quick search for the article about this which came out recently, but couldn’t find it.). Psychologists have also studied this in experimental fields, as it relates to consciousness. What they found is that some people hold memories from their pre-verbal time when they not only understood conversations happening around them, but communicated non-verbally to other non-verbal babies.
In Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous, he touches on this extra-sensory way of perceiving and discusses how it is normative in oral cultures. I suspect this was once our primary method of communicating, and that it still is for most life in the universe–including earth herself.
If this is the case, it reasons that as we go seeking communication with the ‘life’ around us (which many might call gods, but I call other-persons), that ‘life’ will search for a way to communicate back. All of this is experiential in the extreme – all of it. We have no way to verify that anything we hear or perceive is who or what we think it is: not anything. Because I reject the notion of omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence as an individual trait (I do believe when we collectively communicate, it can be the case), I am more inclined now to ask who it is in my immediate environ that is trying to communicate. Barring that, I look for a collective message — which could be Ivo’s “line of communication” or “groupie” effect.
To reiterate, what annoys me about this phenomena of pagans focusing on or primarily working with / talking about other-persons from distant geographic locations, is how it takes us out of our local environment – it disembodies us, to some extent.
well, you know i’m with you on the importance of the local. it’s not clear to me, though, that those attempting to worship deities from other cultures are *necessarily* locating their spirituality “out there, on the ancestral land that we have never visited.” i see a lot of folks making attempts to worship deities in local places that might be pleasing to them — like honoring dionysos at the local vineyard. it’s that whole theology of “american gods,” that we can carry our deities with us and they become different and new, nurtured by the local ecology and shaped by the landscape in the same way that we are.
i don’t think any consciousness exists without a connection to the physical, and i think you’re right that the life around us reaches out to us using the symbols we know. i think it’s also true that religious people are not always able to distinguish wishful thinking and fantasy from reality. it’s possible to practice paganism in a way that neglects the body and neglects the land.
still, i think there is more to place than geography. there is the way in which the body itself is a place, and it is the physical matrix through which the gods relate to me — and yet they are more than manifestations of my personality.
it’s harder to work with the local in an urban setting. in the places where i’ve lived for the last three years, it’s as if the land has been silenced; it’s hard to get more than a weak response. i’ve even been places where the land was psychically tainted and to ground, i had to reach back to land i knew. i constantly advocate for pagans to connect to the sacred land outside their doorstep and yet i often feel helpless, with my already limited energy, to make much progress on that myself. being present to my body and to the people around me already requires an enormous amount of effort.
one of the interesting things about working with a coven of humanists and deists is that they seem to have almost no interest in the historical origin of the gods. functionally speaking, for them the gods are ways to talk about the local agricultural cycle (we have a lot of gardeners and hikers). we use some historical names, but really what we’re invoking is the growing earth, the lusty flesh, the energies of daily cycles, sun and moon, day and night. there are ways in which this kind of practice seems more shallow than the polytheist practice i do, and ways in which it can be deeper and more about the land and the here and now.
all of which is to say, i think that an intense engagement with any form of paganism tends to eventually lead one to have to deal with local energies. it’s also possible (especially when one doesn’t have any guidance) to maintain a shallow practice that doesn’t encourage one to be challenged in any way, in the same way as the stereotypical “sunday christian.”
I see I never responded to this! Naughty, me!
I’m with you on the ‘American gods’ thing. At least, I understand that cultural concept. What worries me, or in the case of this post irritates me, is when American pagans don’t localize. Very often what I see is a re-enactment, not only of another societies paradigm, but of another time period all together! I realize that humans, in various times and places, have looked backward. For instance, I have heard scholars describe the Iron Age in Ireland as being characterized by its cultural nostalgia for the neolithic.
Yet, if we continue to look backward and refrain from genuinely localizing, we will never grow into our own as a spiritual movement. The worldview must become relevant for today. And I’m sorry, but iron helmets on an altar with spears and such have no cultural significance in modern American society. (In the event anyone reading this practices anything similar to what I am ranting about, please remember – this is a rant. I really am not trying to engage in ad hominems.)
Interesting post. And while I understand and above all, respect your views, and I mean that, I have to ask you one question. Trees do not have Dryads living in them, correct? Why not? Trees have Bugs and grubs and critters living in them so why not Dryads? Just asking, I hope you understand, just so I can better understand your views.
OK I lied, another question, same vain again. The Fey, do they exist in some form or not, for you this is. and what about Spirits of the land/house/area?
And Yes, I could not agree more, all Faiths and Paths started off as Shaman Based, apart from eg Judiusm et al and Roman, who borrowed from the Greeks to start with. So yes even those could be classed as starting off as Shaman based, somewhen, (about 10,000 years at least).
So I am guessing that you are Native American type, rather than Wicca or Heathern (Norse). But what about if the Person has strong ties with the Gods Country of Origin, and therefor The Christians the World over (apart from Italy and the Med) Should not be feeling the Power of the 3 O’s nor God, And yet the new Pope is from South America. Could this be why the Christians do not have God getting in touch with them when they pray. And no I am not Having at go at anyone, if you have read my pages or posts you will know that, But I think that it would bore you.
So Hedgewitch or Shaman? personal choice methinks. Top Cool
Hi, Thanks for stopping by. I describe myself as an animist. That is because my world-view is such that I view all of the earth as having consciousness. When I say dryads do not inhabit trees, what I am getting at is the western conception of souls so prevalent in pagan ideology. I personally prefer to view the tree as alive, with his or her own culture and Mind. This is much the same worldview most ancient Europeans would have had, including the Irish. Going back to the dryad idea, to say a female spirit inhabits oaks is basically to say the oak itself is a shell, available for occupation for “spirit” inhabitants. This is, for the most part, how we in the west think of ourselves, i.e. our bodies are just shells, or homes for our otherworldly ‘spirit.’ I take exception with this way of thinking. It is ingrained in us, and hard to tease apart the threads, but I firmly believe the ancient pagan mindset had no concept of this separation of matter from spirit.
OK, so everything has a consciousness, fair point, accepted, even Rocks and stones? Ah, I understand now, thanks for that, and yes I totally agree with you on the aspect that the Tree is alive, and it’s own mind, feelings etc. How to say this without coming of narked, of which I promise you I am not. Fair point about the Tree being an empty shell, but I think my Ancestors, and myself would never think about a tree like that, but for me, it is possible for a Dryad to “Reside” within a Tree, in the same way as a Woodpecker would, simply because they can. They do come in various sizes, and the little one the size of a bee, while the big ones are human size, or larger. Now a human sized one could not live in a tree, but the little ones might, just my musings.
So what do you think happens with our bodies when we pass over? My thoughts are that my Kai (Spirit) is judged and either I pass onwards to become one of the Fey, or I am reborn as something back on Earth, now this could be Animal, Vegetable, or mineral, depending on the lesson I need to learn. And going on the myths and the Gods of my Irish Culture, the Transmigration of the Soul is how lessons are learned.
But a very interesting idea, and just for the furtherance of my own knowledge, I would like to know what you believe will happen at death.
Hi Traci–I just wandered over here via Patheos and am really enjoying your blog. Could you expand on what you mean by “culture” in this sense? I’m a Pagan sociologist so I’m totally fascinated by the idea of trying to apply the term to our non-human community members!
Hi Nicole, and thanks for reading! When I talk about culture here, I’m referring to the broader meaning of values, beliefs, ideas, and so on. It could be that in Permaculture the concept of ‘guilds’ is similar, but I can’t really say. My thinking is purely speculative, and experiential. I can see that certain persons, perhaps Oak and Holly, enjoy living near one another. I can also see that Oak-persons seem to prefer living in community. With science offering more and more data concerning the shared communication systems of various other-than-human persons, it seems reasonable to speculate that those other-than-human persons also share certain values, behaviors, beliefs, ideas, etc. It is a struggle to pull myself up and out of the human, and western, centric worldview I was socialised into – the one that narrowly defines culture – but it’s a fun journey!
As a side note regarding communication, I recently stumbled across this research and it looks fascinating: http://www.biocommunication.at/
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