On Heritage

I came across a MediaMatters news item dealing with the recent Fox News treatment of Wicca and Paganism (for the record, it's Fox News, I'm not surprised and only mildly outraged).  As I am wont to do, I posted some replies in the comments section, which went down in flames shortly after when MediaMatters pulled the article.  But I wasn't posting in response to people making various horrible statements about Pagans and Wiccans.  I was mostly responding to other Pagans and Wiccans tossing around some of the old nuggets we've been recycling for over a decade now.

By now most Wiccans I know are well aware of a number of important details about our history.  I'm sorry if this is old news to any of the few folks who read this blog.  Given the crowd I run with, I'm sure it is.

So here goes.  We are not ancient Pagans.  We are not older than Christianity.  Christian holidays are not Pagan holidays in disguise, nor are those our holidays to claim.  With all that stated, let's get into the details.

So let's start with the age of Wicca.  By now a growing number of modern Wiccans are coming to the sensible realization that Wicca can't be demonstrated to have existed in any form substantially similar to today prior to Gerald Gardner.  Personally, I have little doubt that the New Forest coven existed in some form roughly similar to Gardner's description.  But by Gardner's own admission what he introduced to the world had an awful lot added and changed.  And with the aid of Doreen Valiente and others, what was to become Wicca, and the wider Wiccan-inspired world around it, was something other.  Inspired, yes.  Beautiful, yes.  Meaningful, yes.  But not the same.  But beyond that, there is little evidence of predecessors to New Forest existing prior to perhaps the mid-1800's at the earliest.

But even if there was, could we claim an ancient heritage stretching back to Rome, Athens, Gaul, Thebes, and Scandinavia?  Hardly.  If we suppose for a moment that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and we assume there were groups we simply haven't found yet because of their secretive nature, frankly I don't think it changes the picture at all.  If that were true, comparing us to the Religio Romana, Hellenism, or the cult of Isis, you'd expect some broad similarities.  Aside from the fact that both contain mystery cults and both share some names for their deities, Wicca and any and all ancient paganisms are strikingly different.  If there is some unbroken lineage yet to be discovered, it is one of the longest games of telephone ever undertaken and the end result is very much the same as the childhood game.

We have polytheistic reconstructionists out there.  They don't, so far as I am aware, claim direct, unbroken heritage with ancient Egypt or Rome.  They attempt to, through archaeology, resurrect the practices of our ancestors as best they are able with material gained from scientific and scholarly endeavor, and not through 1600 years of word of mouth.  And many, though not all, are quite incensed by our insistance that we can claim some substantial piece of those cultures.

But beyond that, conceptually, we have some very incongruous components in Wicca as compared to anient Paganisms.  Mixing pantheons alone brings us into contrast with the ancients.  There was the Religio Romana, under which one could worship any number of deities from any number of cultures.  And in that faith there were numerous attempts to adopt other pantheons as reflections of the Roman deities, but make no mistake, they would not have considered all Gods one God and all Goddesses one Goddess.

Neo-Platonists were by and large Pagans who had an idea of a universal Good, through which all things were derived and in that there were forms that descended from that Good with gradually more recognizeable, but more flawed forms.  Whispers of Gardner's Dryghten.  But even they didn't have a single God and a single Goddess as a functional layer in there.  If you brought up the idea to them, they might be willing to discuss it as it wasn't necessarily completely out of touch with their philosophy.  But the fact that it could fit in that world view, doesn't mean it ever did.

So let's again assume that somehow there was a development over the centuries and all the Pagan holdouts got together and formed such a framework, and let's say that made it to today, we would still, at best, be a derivative of that group, and not of the various ancient cults and religions themselves.

Now that we've established that, let's look at holidays.  A common item tossed about is that Pagan holidays, and therefore Wiccan holidays, were the inspiration behind modern Christian holidays.  First off, many of those assumptions are simply incorrect.  The timing of Easter, for instance, was derived from Judaism, another faith with a luni-solar calendar, and a much more logical connection.  As it was a centrepiece issue of the Council of Nice, there's actually a good amount of documentation supporting that, as opposed to Ostara.  Ostara, itself, was a month in one of the Germanic societies of the day, but it was not a holiday and there's substantial doubt it was a Goddess.  Plus the Easter/Ostara connection only really exists in English and a few other Germanic languages.  Christmas was, indeed, likely timed off of Saturnalia, but beyond a date on a calendar, it got precious little else from it.

So how about the celebrations?  The Yule logs, the eggs, Santa, Halloween, etc?  Those came not from ancient Pagan traditions, but from folk traditions.  Some of them, like Santa hearkening back to Odin, do have some whispers of Pagan roots, but they bear as much similarity to Christianity as they do to Wicca.  That is, not very much.  And again, these various traditions are different in almost every culture that celebrates them.  Those that are more universal now, like the Christmas tree, came first through a single cultural tradition, over a thousand years into Christian domination in Europe.  They are at best an extension of globalism and consumerism.

But say we scrub every single last shred of Pagan or folk influence out of modern Christianity and it would still be Christianity.  And that is probably my biggest gripe with the 'you got your celebrations from us' argument.  So what if they did?  It's not a central part of their faith, just a fleeting public expression of it.  It doesn't take anything away from the credibility of Christianity.  But claiming that we have some sort of intrinsic ownership of those holidays stretching back over the millenia takes away from our credibility.

So what ARE we, anyway, if we aren't that?  If Wicca is not ancient, is it valid?  Absolutely.  And in my view, we are the culmination of a variety of religious and philosophical ideas as well as numerous cultural currents in Western society.  The secret societies, the great poets honoring the old Gods, the mystics and cunning men.  The spiritualists and ceremonial magicians and cultural sentimentalists.  THEY are our heritage.  And we should be very proud to call them our forebears.  And as Wicca and Paganism start to look more and more like ancient and contemporary Polytheisms and Animisms, we can know that our history validates our modern path as much, if not more so, than a legendary lineage.

The Witch's God and the Witch's Goddess

So I'm stuck in a rut on theology for a bit, because it's what's mucking about in my head.  What has me spinning is the widely understood concept of the Wiccan Goddess and God.  Let me be absolutely clear, I'm not initiated.  So I don't pretend to know what goes on inside of initiatory Trads with respect to theology.  Frankly, it makes no difference to me.  I use the term Wicca strictly in reference to the system which has sprung up around Gardner, Cochrane, etc. with full understanding that it grates on the nerves of some initiated Trad folks.  I mean no offense, I assure you, but language is at best a near proximation of human thought, and a clumsy tool with respect to the divine.  So Wicca it is, caveats included.

I have come to find tremendous meaning and depth in the symbols of Wicca.  The Turning of the Wheel and the celebrations surrounding them, the triple Goddess and the God of the hunt.  The focus on the four classical elements and the ritual structure of it, as diverse as it may be.

I find myself less drawn to the things that make it 'witchier'.  Any of the forms of fortune telling such as scrying, runes, tarot, etc, really just don't speak to me.  Some of the non-divinatory pieces commonly found as trappings such as numerology and astrology really don't fit either.  And they don't need to as none of them are quintessentially necessary to Wicca or Paganism, from my experience.  Perhaps it's a knee-jerk geek reaction.  Skepticism nearly to a fault is a hallmark, for better or worse, of the modern science community and for good reason.  Frankly, skepticism is to science what food is to us humans.

So I guess what I'm really saying is that I'm not entirely sure I'm a Witch so much as I'm a Pagan.  (queue the terminology forestorm)

I've also come fully to the realization that I am a hard polytheist, something I hear is becoming, or perhaps has always been, the case in Wicca.  But more so than that I find myself disagreeing quite firmly with the idea of archetypes and thought-forms as a conception of deity.  I don't see the Wiccan Goddess and God as symbolic of all gods and goddesses.  The semi-popular Wiccan hymn  that starts with a chant of "Isis, Astarte, Hecate..." kind of grates on me for that reason.  Nor do I see those goddesses and gods as aspects of the divine feminine and divine masculine.  In short, I feel the Wiccan God and Goddess are as real, tangible, and distinct as the old gods and goddesses.  To put a stamp on it, if I get anything at all from Neo-Platonism or any other form of monism (as in mono meaning one, not monastery), it isn't in the form of "All Goddesses are one Goddess, all God are one God".  Perhaps it all boils down to a single, unknowable entity, and perhaps that doesn't make a lick of difference to me if I can't know it.

So now that all the gods and goddesses are their own beings and we aren't being reductionist, am I about to pick myself a pantheon and become a reconstructionist?  Kind of.  To me the Triple Goddess and the Horned God are very much the central characters in my divine space, and they have been for the whole of my life as a Pagan.  For whatever one might say about Wicca, its age, and its lineage, its central deities speak to me as themselves, not as core representations of others.  And they do so louder than the others.  And so while I feel I've had a connection with Demeter and Papa Legba of late, I'm not a priest of either so much as an... admirer, we'll say.

But that has left an interesting issue in my head.  One that makes me wonder about whether or not the ancients struggled with it, too.  And what's more it makes me wonder how reconstructionists and revivalists (my term here.  I'm meaning groups that revive worship of specific pantheons without strictly aiming for authenticity) wrestle with it.  If these are my chief deities, but I recognize the validity and stature of the other deities, how do I reconcile that with the fact that many of the other deities cover the same 'turf', so to speak.  Can you view Odin, Apollo, Zeus, etc as real divine characters with their classical roles and myths without having to confront the inherent issue with overlap?  With some deities, it's not a problem.  Deities of love, war, oceans, etc, can easily share divine territory (yes, I'm getting middle-school mythology here.  I know the traits of the gods are not that simple).  But what of chief deities?  What of the Norns and the Fates, who are said to govern all of destiny?  The tale of Demeter and Persephone governed the Greek seasons, but there were others that served the same function.

Do I reoncile that by simply picking a winner?  Do I take the truth versus factual distinction here by saying these are simply allegories?  I'm inclined to take the latter path.  As a science geek I know well how writing developed (at least so far as archaeology tells us) and that it had multiple likely origins.  And certainly Odin didn't give the Egyptians heiroglyphs, nor did Thoth scratch out early Chinese characters on turtle shells thousands of years ago.  But they are, in fact, real to me and their stories are important, if symbolic.  And here I am in Religions 100 again learning about truth versus fact.

I suspect I have a lot of meditating, ritual, and research to do before I come to any kind of satisfactory conclusion here.  And I'm sure the conclusion is not nearly so important as the meditation, ritual, and research.  But I think finally, over the past year, I feel I finally get what the gods are telling me.  And while I don't have the whole picture, I've got some substantial pieces.

Other species, extinction, and extraterrestrials

One of the things that has been leveled against the religious of any and all faiths is the human-centric viewpoint many of them have. And furthermore, the geocentric viewpoint. That's part of the reason I wrestle with the topic of interplanetary paganism, but it raises some other interesting thought experiments.

Life lesson?  It happens.  Work with it.

One of the big ones I always wonder about is reincarnation. Not all pagans, and not even all Wiccans believe in reincarnation. I happen to be one who does. There are a lot of questions, theological and otherwise, with reincarnation. Whole books can be and have been written on the topic. But one of the common conceptual debates for those who believe is that of inter-species reincarnation. On a conceptual level I can see no reason why we couldn't be reincarnated as an animal. Our paths in life are often guided by the lessons we are to learn at a given time (I wrestle with the question of 'toward what end?' and whether that's important) and I think life as an animal could be a valuable one. And who among us pagans, or even among animal lovers, has felt the intelligence and empathy in the eyes of a pet or even a wild animal?

But what about extraterrestrial life? Could we reincarnate entirely outside of our planet? Just something to think about. I, personally, say yes to that question. Before you go thinking I'm just a sci-fi geek (and I am), I do so because I believe that with the evidence we have from the numerous planet finding missions like Kepler, there's sound reason to believe life exists elsewhere. Every other natural phenomena we find is found in more than one example in the universe, I think it's almost silly to presume that everything happens regularly in the universe but life just so happens to be the only thing that happened once.

And what of the Fairy folk, of demi-gods, etc? Who's to say they aren't viable incarnations? I'm not the first one to raise that possibility. Not by several millenia.

That face is as wise as any owl I've seen.

Stepping away from reincarnation, let's take it from the approach of totem animals, animal guardians, etc. Often we hear of pagans finding totem animals, spirit guardians and the like typically from the stock of woodland, land-dwelling creatures. I'm not saying we pick those spirits, it's a collaborative process, to be sure and often we are the ones being chosen. But what of the other species who never appear on that list? Couldn't a wombat or a capybara serve the same role? Or, sticking closer to home, are oppossums and garter snakes simply uninterested in the role? Or are they and are we simply not paying close enough attention? Perhaps we should open our ears, eyes and spirits to guidance from the creatures last-picked on the guardian animal team, so to speak.

Pay some respects to grandmother Paraphysornis

For that matter, what of our ancestors? I attended a festival at which we thanked a grandmother tree whose roots remained, but whose trunk and branches had been removed years ago. And you could feel her presence in that space. Could we not speak to and thank the spirits of animals for which there is no living representative? Granted we don't want to open our ears too far. Life has been around for arguably billions of years. That's a lot of noise. But one of my prized finds which has featured on my altar from time to time is a fossil worm I found in Arkansas. As a Geology geek, this worm was an incredible find. Rarely do soft-bodied critters show up so nicely. But as a pagan, fossils have always spoken to me loud and clear "we are as important to this planet and its history as the wolf or the raven!"  And so it takes a place of honor on account of its age and the fact that it has survived to tell its tale to me where millions like it went without a trace.  There's a host of incredible animals that have walked this planet, some of them are actually our ancestors. Do they have anything to say to us? Would we know their voices if they did?

Hey, it's cousin Plesiadapis.  You never call, you never write.  I'm your cousin for Pete's sake!

So I've been thinking about what I'm writing in these blog posts. Are they sometimes silly? Yeah, that's how I write. And I'm all over the place, asking questions I could go a whole pagan lifetime without asking and I'd be just fime. But for all that, I take these questions seriously. It's important to me that my faith make sense both spiritually and logically. And exploring my faith is as much to me a thought experiment as it is an experience dancing around a Beltaine fire or calling my corners. For whatever the gods have meant for me to learn in this life, they've made a pretty strong point that what I'm good at is taking the bigger view, cracking jokes, and obsessing over details.

Relations with the Gods

Here's one that has turned over in my brain more the past year or two than any other.  How do we relate to Gods and Goddesses from different pantheons?  That's a pretty wide question, so let's narrow the scope a little, here.  Let's presume a hard polytheistic approach to deity, as anecdotal observation by various respected pagans suggests is more an more the case as modern Paganism continues to develop.  I'm also approaching from that angle as it's more and more my take on deity.  And let's stick to a ecclectic Wiccan approach to ritual, though by no means do I feel the need to.

Papa Legba's Veve

Now, I know how I've decided to relate to my deities, and while I wrestle with details, I think I've come across a reasonable approach.  That being I recognize other deities and give them their due honor, but after much struggle, I find it difficult to adopt them within my regular practice.  For instance, I was recently drawn to Papa Legba, of the Vodun traditions.  He and I have some history outside of actual practice and belief, and we share a lot of commonalities such as language and travel.  But Papa Legba has a very particular way in which he likes to be approached and, as with many Loa of the Afro-Carribean traditions, he does not get drawn down.  He rides you.  You might take a Religio-Wiccana approach to it and say that the spirits riding you is very much akin to drawing down a deity.  And in some respects, you'd be right.  But that is not the view of Vodouisants, at least so far as I understand it.  And so, while I pay my respects to Papa Legba, I have chosen not to incorporate him directly into formal ritual.  I'm not saying other pagans need to approach it this way, it's just how I have.  Indeed, it's critically important given the format of modern paganism that each practitioner arrives at their understanding organically.

So how have pagan groups approached others worshipping their deities?  Neo-pagans I think have it right on the head in that from what I read of it, it was an orthopraxy, not an orthodoxy, at least with respect to European traditions.  It was more important to conduct the ritual appropriately to the deities with whom you associated than to which deities you conducted your rituals.  That, however, greatly oversimplifies it.

In Greece, for instance, Zeus was the head of the Gods and the others fell in rank below him in some fashion or another.  He wasn't omnipotent, infallable, or even exclusive, but he was the top of the heap and while other Deities were recognized, Zeus and his family of Gods and spirits were always the heart of Greek worship and practice.  And what's more, there was a way in which you paid your respects to the Greek Gods, often in the form of sacrifice.  And that way was not the way they are addressed through some modern rituals, particularly outside of the reconstructionist mold.  I feel adopting them whole-cloth as deities within my own circle is somewhat like vigorously shaking the hand of a previously uncontacted tribesman.  He'll have absolutely no idea what I'm getting at by that gesture, and may or may not get a warm fuzzy feeling from me doing so.

The ancient Romans, on the other hand, engaged in what is often referred to as Religio Romana, that is, they tried to find analogues between their own Deities and the Deities of other cultures.  And in many cases there is evidence that those other cultures obliged when they fell within the Roman sphere.  Again, the Romans had their pantheon of Deities.  And while they were far more willing to adopt other deities as officially recognized cults within the empire, you still paid your respects in a very particular way to the state Deities, while privately addressing the deities and spirits of your family, home, and city in their own unique ways.  This, perhaps, is closer to the modern Neo-Pagan approach.

But again, it wasn't the whom, it was the how.  You were free to conduct ritual or prayer to Apollo, indeed you'd be expected to in Rome, even as an outsider.  But you'd be expected to do so appropriately.  And again, the four elements, drawing-down, divine couple approach of Wiccan-inspired paganism is not necessarily in keeping with that.  So am I not allowed to pay respects to Artemis?  Certainly that isn't the case.  But I get a little uneasy addressing her using ritual as I've learned it.

Pan

And here's where it gets interesting to me.  The Romans took their Religio Romana tack with respect to the Greek pantheon.  I think anyone who has had even the slightest education in the classical Greco-Roman world is familiar with the striking similarities between the Greek and Roman Deities.  In large part that's because the Romans did their best to fit the Greek Gods into their world view.  Did they view them as 'aspects' of the Roman Gods?  I think that depends on the Roman in question and the time period.  And I think some argument could be made for both having in some sense been true.  This, of course, gets more complicated as you get further into the commonalities in Indo-European, Afro-Carribean, etc deities.  But that's a topic for another post.

In all of this I've found myself walking away from the idea of aspects.  Indeed I think I've always felt a little uncomfortable with calling the Goddess of Wicca by Astarte or Diana or the God by the name Pan.  To me they are not forms of the triple Goddess or Horned One written about in so many books despite their similarities, but are entirely their own character.  However, in my view they are, perhaps, related.  This view is developing as I go along and as I find myself drawing closer to the divine.

From what I've seen, I'd agree with the hypothesis that modern pagans are drifting more toward polytheism. And I think we are headed quickly for a Roman-style model of recognition of deities, though I don't think state deities are part of that picture.  It is, in essence, almost a Unitarian Universalist approach, but distinctly pagan flavored.

Death and rebirth at the bottom of the ocean

I'm starting to write some of the short geology stories, and I'm finding it difficult, but enriching. The writer in me wants to draw all sorts of analogies, but the universe and the planet operate on such grand time scales that their beauty is hard to express in terms of our short seasons and lives.

As pagans, we see the seasons of the year as they come and go. The phases of the moon as it passes. The signs of the zodiac, for those that follow it. The children of the Earth see these cycles, and need these cycles. But for the Earth herself, they are like seconds on a clock, passing very quickly. To her there are greater, deeper cycles. And we can see those cycles if we pay enough attention.

Deposition cycles are some of the clearest examples. They read like tree rings, telling stories of periods from years to millenia to eons. And when you know what you are looking at, it is absolutely awe-inspiring to see it.

Some of the biggest, most beautiful structures, that fit the cyclical view the best, are turbidites. In the deep oceans on the continental shelf, there is a constant flow of gravel, sand, and silt laid down from rivers like the Mississippi or the Nile. They slowly pile up in a rather haphazard sort of way until, like an overbirdened snow pack, they give way and rush down the slope in huge avalanches of sediment, burying everything in their path. These sheets are tens, hundreds, even thousands of miles across and travel miles down slope.

What makes them so beautiful, and so breathtaking is how the sediment settles out. Just like in your middle school science class, the debris sorts itself by size, first depositing gravel, then sand, then silt, then clay. The richest, finest layers settling out on top With layer upon layer piling up like this, you can see nice, clean lines indicating each cycle. And in the clay layers you can often find tracks and even remains of plants and animals that, in a grand cycle of death and rebirth, thrived on the rich, marine beds before themselves being buried in preparation for the next cycle.

And just like the animals of the temperate climates above the waves need the cycles of cold to lay down what is to become new, rich soil for spring, here life needs the renewal of rich mud upon which to build the next generation.

And so the wheel turns. As above (the waves), so below.

Interplanetary Pagans

So here's one from way back in my days as a baby pagan in the 90's. I've asked this one before, and eventually I arrived upon the fact that I was over thinking a bit and just slow down. But the question is still unanswered, and perhaps is one of those questions that has more than one answer.

Much of the pagan world focuses on cycles of nature and peculiarities of the local environment. When I lived near the ocean, my practice keyed into that. In a few short years my family had developed a handful of traditions and rituals that would make no sense without the ocean and tides.

But what about space? My one case of personal celebrity mania is on Elon Musk, a man who speaks with certainty about travelling to Mars and starting a colony there. But what would paganism be there? There are seasons. There is weather. Some of it would be hard to work with, but it's there. But what of the four elements? Fire is pretty hard to come by on Mars. Water as well. Wind and earth are no problem at all. Can the four element model adapt to that reality? I suspect so, but what would it look like?

And how about the Moon? This was my original hangup. There's a little bit of water there. And an inch or two of atmosphere that is so completely unlike our own, even scientists hesitate to call it an atmosphere. And that's not even dealing with the fact that the lunar cycle is effectively meaningless on the face of the Moon. On the other hand, you are standing on the very face of the Lady. How's that for a personal connection with deity?

And there are complications with even wider patterns in space flight. For those who follow astrology, the rising and setting of the Sun in the houses are tricky. The planets have a whole new characteristic of motion that basically throws the whole chart out the window. I'm not an astrologer. Perhaps that issue is more solvable than I imagine, but it takes a little thought to work it out.

And how about casting runes or using a pendulum from orbit? Or pouring libations when the libation in question neither falls nor has any desire to stay in the libation dish, to say nothing of the irritation of one's fellow space fliers by the crumbs and stain-inducing liquid from cakes and wine.

Perhaps I am over thinking this. I know I am. But it's not without precedent. A few years ago some devout Muslims flew in space. They had to get official word from an imam as to when they needed to pray and how they work out where Mecca is from orbit. Paganism will adapt to space just as it adapts to areas with a rainy and dry season versus the temperate four. But what will Martian paganism look like?

The deeper story of stones

Since I was very young, I took an interest in nature. Not just nature, but rocks. Like the dinosaur geeks so many boys my age were, but I ended up taking some coursework in it and it has played a role, as one might expect, in my pagan faith.

And one important thing I learned from that point of view is that the story of rocks are as important as the correspondences they represent. In my view, perhaps more so. I'm not pretending I'm the first one to come up with this. But it is a point of view I hold quite deeply.

As a geology student, I was taught how to read the rocks. How to look at individual crystals, their shapes, sizes, and orientations. How to look at the angles the ancient beach sands are sloped at and the criss-crossing bands of quartz running through them. How to look at whole mountain ranges and tell the story of the skin of our Earth. It dawns on me that while geologists eventually break out their mass spectrometers, chemicals, and polarizing microscopes, the end result is always a story. And stories are what paganism is all about.

These stories are ancient and modern, dynamic and catastrophic, and yet quiet, still and slow. You can go to Hawaii and find crystals that are minutes old. In the deserts of Western Australia, you can find crystals that are nearly as old as the Earth itself. And I am blessed with the background to look at one rock face, today, and tell a story billions of years old. (Please don't read this as me being a professional Geologist, I am at best a skilled amateur.)

I tried to write all of this down once. But I think the better angle is to write a series of short stories about these deep cycles. I'm terrible about commitment, at least with respect to personal habits. So I'm not going to promise a weekly feature, but I'll try to write something semi-regularly.