During this past week, I've done my best to avoid a lot of the identity-angst in the online Pagan community, mostly by writing here instead of replying to blog posts and social media comment threads where I might become food for trolls. But there has also been a strong current of energy going on that has led me to write a number of in-depth blog posts for Meadowsweet & Myrrh, which will be going up over the next few weeks.
I'm not even sure what prompted it, but today I wandered over to TC to check in and see how things were going (in part because it's my flamekeeping shift)... and I found that this had been going on. Another amazing riot of UGP and SPG centering on the Lady of the Stars/Brighid. It is so awesome to see such a vibrant and open conversation going on about the nature of the gods.
Part of me wants to chime in, but part of me feels like I've been away too long and I don't know if I could really get a foothold anyway. I've never really felt like I "fit in" with the TC folks, and I kinda feel like the reason the LotS group fell apart before was partly my fault (though maybe that's just ego-centric guilt talking). I know that Finn and Aster (and I think Tana) have continued to work together on exploring Brighid/LotS, and when we first got out here to Seattle, I did briefly mention it to Finn, but her response was one that seemed to suggest that it was something they were working on — like, it was "their thing" — and I would be welcome to learn about it when they were ready to share, but they weren't interested in me being involved in that work. I didn't want to intrude, so I just let it go. But part of me did feel a little sad, because I did so very much want to be able to practice with others. Sometimes I worry that I come across as too... keen, and it makes other people feel like I'm shutting them down or they just don't want to share because I'm in the middle of my swirling knife dance and they don't want to stick a limb out and get nicked. ("Keen" like the new young cop on the beat whose overly eager and going to get himself into trouble, so nobody wants to hang around him and the old-timers just shake their heads and brace against the eager energy and wait for the new guy to get some smarts knocked into him. But in the meantime, there's a lot of patient eye-rolling that goes on behind his back.)
Anyway, as a result, I think I struggled a lot with my relationship with Brighid over the past couple years because I didn't really have a community who was willing to support me and work with me in my relationship with her, and so like a lot of other things that I try to do on my own, I start to get really hard on myself and things kind of fall apart and collapse into a pile of frustration and guilt over it. Bless his heart, Jeff is pretty awful when it comes to shared practice and worship, because his gods are very much his personal posse and he always seems to talk about them like they're primarily concerned with him and his life, and there's not really much room in his approach to them that calls for group or community worship. I've really enjoyed our solstice rituals in part because it's my only real chance to have some kind of group practice, and I don't think it's a coincidence that for the past two years, these solstice rituals have mostly focused on stars and such. For last year's ritual, we specifically invoked Brighid in her aspect as Lady of the Stars, the guiding star on the darkest night though also closely related to the rebirth of the new sun. This year, we focused on the bear and her associations with the winter and the darkness of the cave as a place of rest and rebirth.
It's going on half a year since I suddenly stumbled upon a relationship with Artemis, and though she is very much the maiden hunter and moon goddess to me, she is also connected with the fresh wellsprings of cleansing waters, the wild forested mountains, and the bear. In fact, during this time of the year, her bear aspect seems especially pronounced and she even seems to have a bit of a "motherly" aspect to her -- though maybe it's more the midwife vibe, since she is definitely not the "mama bear" personality that is so readily evoked by people like, say, Sarah Palin (ugh). Anyway, the point is, I have this sense of her as a bear goddess, deeply connected both with the fresh waters of springs and rivers (and with the salmon of wisdom, to do a little cross-cultural myth mixing), and also with the stars, since the bear as a sacred animal has always for me been connected with the Great Bear constellation and the starry night sky (in fact, I've often called on the bear in ritual as the "starry bear of midnight").
So this thread over on TC about the Lady of the Stars seems interesting to me, especially since it began with some opening comments about Sulis and other "water related" goddesses. Artemis is, for me, very strongly connected with water, more than Brighid ever was for me, really. And she is very strongly connected with the stars as well.
Yet Brighid, who is still lingering and hasn't gone away, also has a strong connection to the stars. In both cases, there is a wildness there, a primordial feeling... but whereas with Artemis the wildness is quiet, rippling and dark (sometimes sleek like a deer or wolf, sometimes much more bear-like and somewhat lumbering, but swiftly), with Brighid the wildness is roaring like a furnace, dark but fiery like the heart of an intense flame, hot and active. I think of Artemis like the sweat of ecstatic dance or the wild chase of the hunt; whereas Brighid is the sweat of labor, the sweat of the forge and creation. Artemis sings like a bowstring, Brighid sings like a hammer on an anvil.
After writing the post on the bear that will be going up on Meadowsweet this coming Friday, I asked Jeff to read it. I wonder if maybe part of the reason I'm feeling more connected to Artemis, especially in her bear aspect, is because in some ways the bear is a totem for our family. Jeff has always felt very strongly connected to the bear, and his UPG connected it with Apollo but also somewhat with Odin. I have never really had any spark of connection with either Apollo or Odin, and there wasn't much of one with the bear, either, at least not for a long time. But now, it seems like the bear is becoming a powerful presence in our household.
Of course, when I asked Jeff to read my post, his response was that he liked it but that wasn't really what he associated with the bear.
So... still by myself in my worship, I guess. I read about other people getting together to talk about the gods and maybe practice together, even if only informally, and I wonder why I'm always on the wrong side of the UPG/SPG. Like in that meditative journeywork I did a while back, always having to linger just outside the bonfire's circle of light, listening to other people sharing stories but always having to dance to my gods on my own.
Showing posts with label UPG. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UPG. Show all posts
Monday, January 14, 2013
TC and LotS Synchronicities - Bear and Star
Thursday, January 3, 2013
The Dance of Will and Surrender (Part 2)
I admit, I have largely lost my train of thought about the nature of will and our relationship with the gods (in no small part due to the intervention of scavenging trolls all over the original comment thread — but I've already digressed on that point enough). I'm going to try to recapture some of what I was thinking last week when I wrote Part 1 of this post, but it's likely to be somewhat messy. In the meantime, there have been several other ideas bumping around in my head, and I'd like to make more of an effort, on a regular basis, to get these thoughts down in some form before they fly off again.
So.
It would be easiest to jump back into this conversation by looking again at the example of Elani and the way she describes her relationship with her gods within the context of Hellenismos. I don't mean to pick on her, or to pass some sort of judgement on her relationship with her gods in any general sense since I am admittedly working from only a very brief familiarity (and I can appreciate that you can't possibly say everything in a blog post, so I'm sure her spiritual life is much more complicated that that brief glimpse afforded by blogging).... But she provides a useful example of some of the stumbling blocks that I find presented by an asymmetrical approach to deity relationships within hard polytheism.
I should also mention that Elani did respond to the barrage of questions I left in a comment on her blog post, and while she didn't really address some of the stickiest of my sticking points, she did bring up some interesting things to consider, in a roundabout way.
The first is that she says, for her, religion "always has a foundation in one or more asymmetrical relationships. Although the level of asymmetricallity varies within Traditions, and even more so within individual practitioners, the very nature of the Gods (as non-human, and often more powerful) disallows symmetricallity."
This was a very helpful way of putting it, because it made me see immediately that we were taking for granted different assumptions about the nature of asymmetrical v. hierarchical relationship. I was assuming (and I don't think I'm wrong) that when Elani speaks of "asymmetrical relationship" with the gods, she always means a hierarchy, in which the gods are superior to human beings. It seems to me that, for her, the only alternative to this hierarchy is "symmetricality" [sic], a symmetrical relationship.
I don't think I really agree with this dichotomy. It seems to me that there are many different kinds of relationship that are neither hierarchical nor symmetrical, and many of the examples I listed in my last post, drawing on analogies from ecology, would probably be considered neither. I am making some assumptions here, again, but to me the idea of "symmetry" suggests a certain kind of sameness — not simply equality, but furthermore a very specific kind of equality. Just looking at the most common definition of symmetry: "the correspondence in size, form, and arrangement of parts on opposite sides of a plane, line, or point; regularity of form or arrangement in terms of like, reciprocal, or corresponding parts." In other words, symmetry implies not only equality, but similarity. If we imagine a line that divides humans from the gods, a "symmetrical" relationship would see the gods as reflections of humanity "corresponding in size, form and arrangement." It would make sense, then, that the only way to avoid this kind of symmetry between humans and the gods is to insist that the gods are more powerful, bigger, better, superior; in short, to insist on hierarchy.
And this is where I differ from Elani most basically, and perhaps the place where all my stumbling blocks with hard polytheism come from. It seems to me that, although hard polytheists like Elani (and it's hard to say how widespread this particular conception is, but gods forbid I be accused of "over-generalizing"!) insist on the separateness of the gods as distinct, discrete beings, they tend to imagine the gods in very anthropocentric terms. (It seems to me that even this insistence on separateness has its roots in anthropocentrism, actually, since a defining aspect of human experience -- perhaps the first recognizably "psychological" event we experience after birth -- is the experience of our separateness, our perceived individuality.) In some ways, I see the gods as much more "other" than these hard polytheists do, and that otherness is not merely a matter of possessing a greater degree of power, knowledge, etc. It is an otherness that is deeply and numinously Other, and so does not conform to our expectations of what it means to be separate or individual or discrete entities.
I'm reminded of Thomas Nagel's famous philosophical essay, "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?" In which he says, "The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism." He goes on to argue that there are insurmountable obstacles to us being able to effectively imagine the subjective experiences of (i.e. "what it is like to be") life forms that are vastly different from us. Personally, I think he goes a bit too far and maybe doesn't appreciate just how flexible and variable consciousness (and its many diverse altered states, including imagination) can be in both humans and other animals. And I'm going to hang this article link here, which provides a better break down of some of the other problems with his ideas. But this conversation about the otherness of the gods reminds me of Nagel mostly because, in the end, Nagel is arguing against reductionism and materialism. In a weird way, although I think probably hard polytheists would disagree with me, I'm trying to do the same thing. To me, the hard polytheistic approach to the gods is reductionist and limiting. It also reminds me a bit of that episode of Star Trek the Original Series, when Kirk meets Apollo, who turns out to just be an alien who pulled a fast one on the earthlings a few millennia ago. It also reminds me a bit of the amusingly nonsensical Ancient Aliens theorists who see in every description of ancient polytheistic gods the evidence that aliens from another planet visited earth and literally instructed humanity in some of the earliest evolution of civilization. In both cases, you have a vast underestimation of the human capacity for creativity, adaptation and invention, and a vast oversimplification of the source of those capacities which would rather suppose some external but basically anthropocentric entity than a more complex understanding of consciousness.
And if comparing hard polytheists to a bunch of New Age nutjobs doesn't explode a few heads, I don't know what will.
I'm getting off the point.
As for the rest of Elani's response, she describes the kinds of physical and psychological sensations and impressions she receives that she interprets as messages from the gods, noting that she's never "heard voices" or anything like that. These are... less than convincing, but she admits as much, so we can leave it there. In the end, her opening remark sets the tone for her entire response, when she says, "I'm going to try to answer them as logically as I can, but a large part of my practice is not based on logic. Faith, on principle, lacks a certain logic, but that has never held me back from having it." (emphasis added) Hello again, you old Cartesian dualism! For the record, I think this dichotomy between "faith" and "reason" which sets them at odds with each other is nonsense. There is no reason why trust, devotion and a sense of mystery (that is, in other words, what I mean by the word "faith") cannot also be logical. In fact, the radical doubt of Descartes is itself illogical on close examination, and a certain degree of trust (for instance, trusting in the truth of your premises, or trusting in the process of logic itself) is necessary in order for logic to even function. I can't say for sure what Elani means when she says her practice is "not based on logic" or that faith "lacks logic".... and part of why I can't say what she means is because I don't think she actually knows what she means, and that is precisely the breakdown that she is trying to describe and excuse. What this sounds like, however, is the recurrence of New Age warm-fuzzies in hard polytheist/Reconstructionist garb. This would be fine — I'm all for a deeper appreciation of intuition and the complex role that nonrational forms of knowledge play in our understanding and experience of the world — except that far too often I see hard polytheists and Recons setting themselves up as anti-New Age, as more grounded in facts and scholarship that we "neo-Pagans." Scratch a hard polytheist, and you find her blood as warm and fuzzy as any New Ager (she is, perhaps, just more embarrassed about showing it and slaps the bandage of piety and "UPG" on it in an attempt to hold herself together in some sort of respectable way).
That's a rather mean way of saying it, though. A better way of saying it is that we have a lot more in common than we often like to think, and I suspect it's more ego than logic (or faith) that interferes with our ability to meet on common ground to have actual fruitful conversations about our differences. I have to admit, though, it bothers me that when Elani writes that she would not want to presume to define anyone else's relationship with the gods, this is taken as an example of humility, whereas when a "neo-Pagan" (i.e. someone who is admittedly not a reconstructionist or hard polytheist) says the same thing, they are accused of fluffiness, relativism and romanticism.
In any case, if I can't get Elani to think critically about her practice, I can at least try my hand at it myself, admitting that I'm working from limited information. Let's take her example of her relationship with Zeus. When talking about her relationship with deities, she writes:
There are several things that bother me about this example.
(a) Who's directing who? Elani's example seems like it's meant to illustrate how she puts her faith in the gods and trusts the instructions and messages she receives from them. And yet, in her own example, she is the one giving the orders. Or rather, making the request. She may not expect her request to be granted, but she obviously hopes it will be. There is no indication that Zeus told her to leave the house without an umbrella. It doesn't even seem like she has any particular reason for not taking an umbrella with her (I don't know what her "outside rounds" include, maybe there's a reason she can't bring an umbrella? in any case, she doesn't specify, so I can only assume that it's not relevant to her point). In other words, it seems like this is not so much an example of trust in the gods' guidance, as a deliberate test of their kharis (benevolence or grace).
(b) What is the lesson in being wet? I can think of several, of course, only the first of which is learning to be more grounded in my body and in touch with the seasons of the natural world and all their patterns and moods. (And I've certainly been caught off guard in enough rainstorms to appreciate when the gods feel a need to make this point if I wasn't getting it through my thick head voluntarily.) But I'm interested in what Elani thinks is the point of her potentially getting wet. Let's pretend Elani lives in, say, Texas (I don't know where she actually lives, but this will make for a useful thought experiment). Supposing that Zeus is more concerned with alleviating the crippling drought in the midwest than making sure one of his worshippers stays dry, he may decide to let it rain regardless of Elani's offerings. But does that mean that he specifically wants Elani to get wet? I don't see why. It seems to me, supposing that things work as Elani seems to believe they do and Zeus really does have this kind of direct control over the weather, that whether or not Elani gets wet is totally irrelevant and beside the point from Zeus's perspective. If Elani assumes that there is some special reason why Zeus would let it rain despite her offerings and prayers, doesn't that again place herself at the center of Zeus's concerns? And isn't that more than a little arrogant?
(c) Are petty deeds really examples of piety? Because in the end, she's not the Wicked Witch of the West and she's not going to melt if she gets a little rain on her. She most likely won't even catch a cold. But let's assume some other example of this kind of thinking: The mother whose child gets sick but refuses to take him to a doctor because she believes that God (or Apollo) will keep the boy alive or let him die, according to his divine plan. That's pretty extreme, and I think a lot of people find this kind of "faith" dangerous rather than admirable. (The classic counterargument to this one is, of course: Who's to say that God didn't inspire doctors to develop various medicines precisely so the boy's life could be saved?) How about another example: The Hellenist who doesn't replace the batteries in her smoke detector but leaves offerings (and lit candles) on her altar to Hestia, believing that if her house burns down it must have been Hestia's will. Or who makes offerings to Hermes and then drives around at night without a seatbelt, or headlights? Or who makes offerings to Aphrodite and then has unprotected sex, risking pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease? Or who makes offerings to Zeus, and then not only leaves the house without an umbrella, but goes golfing near a bunch of tall trees in the middle of a thunderstorm? My point is, when facing real potential risks, I very much doubt that Elani (or most people, regardless of the strength of their faith or who they have faith in) allow faith to trump common sense precautions. (On the other hand, she seems to be saying otherwise in this post — apparently she'd be willing to risk someone else's life, if not her own.) I've never had any indication from any of the gods that they feel honored by recklessness, or that it is hubris to guard against potential harm. Wearing a seatbelt, using contraceptives, having a working smoke detector, and carrying an umbrella with you when you think it might rain.... I find it hard to imagine that any of these things are offensive to the gods. In fact — and maybe this is just me imagining the gods in my own image — I'm more inclined to think they're offended by deliberate recklessness and stupidity, than by common sense. After all, if you're taking risks that might harm you, don't you think the gods who enjoy your worship (and may, depending on your beliefs, even have created you and have something invested in your future) want you to take care of yourself?
(d) Who's making it rain anyway? My final problem with Elani's approach is that, as a hard polytheist, I assume that she not only believes in Zeus as a distinct and separate being, but also believes that so are all the other rain and thunder gods — among them, Thor, Indra, Set, Oya, Lei Gong, and the Thunderbirds of Native American traditions. So let's imagine, now, that Elani lives out here in Seattle, and she makes a petition to Zeus to keep it from raining. But I make offerings to Thor because I want it to rain (make up a reason, I don't know, I just like rain). Regardless of whether or not it rains: which god gets to decide? According to the hard polytheistic view, Zeus and Thor are two different deities, but according to the traditions to which they each belong, they are each responsible for thunderstorms. So, are Zeus and Thor battling it out to determine who gets to turn the great water spigot in the sky? If it does rain, does that mean that Zeus wanted it to rain on Elani, or does it mean that my offerings to Thor were more effective? If it kept raining on Elani every time I petitioned Thor, would that be enough evidence to convert Elani to Heathenry?
This is also the issue with Recons who are cultural purists while also being hard polytheists. I was devoted exclusively to Celtic deities for most of my time as a practicing Pagan — partly because those are my own ancestral roots, and partly because I believe in the vital importance of understanding cultural context — and then Artemis came knocking on my door. And it was definitely Artemis. And like plenty of folks who think of themselves as hard polytheists, I had to accept that I couldn't wedge her into the role of a Celtic moon/wilderness goddess just because I wanted to stay within the tradition that I was comfortable with. (And to be fair, the very first thing I did was start studying up on the cultural context of ancient Greek religion, so that I could better understand Artemis and her new place in my life. But I'll be damned if that means I'm embracing patriarchy or hierarchy for the sake of historical accuracy.) So.... if Reconstructionists are, by and large, hard polytheists who believe that the different gods from different cultures really are unique and separate deities, then how can they at the same time believe that the gods of their specific tradition have control or power over universal forces or events, like weather, or disease, or fire, or any of the other areas for which most cultures have deities of one kind or another. Back when I was a monotheist, it might have made sense for me to believe that the rain was a sign from God, because there was only one and he could do whatever he wanted. It may even have made sense back in the days before very much international travel, when deities were worshipped in particular locations and were believed to have power over that particular land or cultural group, but not necessarily any further. (This was, lest we forget, the main reason that the Hebrew god Yaweh was so controversial -- he wouldn't stay put, but claimed to be mobile and to go with his people into disapora. The only way this made sense to the polytheists at the time, including the Hebrews themselves, was if they supposed that he was therefore more powerful than all the other gods.) When you're dealing with multicultural and/or diasporic hard polytheism, which is what most modern Pagans are dealing with, it becomes much more difficult to accept a literalist view of the nature and powers of the gods.
To be fair, I may be vastly oversimplifying Elani's view, not to mention the views of other hard polytheists. But these are the kinds of questions that I can't ignore or overlook, and I suspect that they are the kinds of questions that Elani avoids in declaring that her practice is "not based on logic." There is nothing wrong with admitting when we run up against mysteries and paradoxes when grappling with these huge questions, but it is during those times that I think reason and critical thinking can be invaluable tools (so long as we don't turn them into weapons to be wielded violently to force the world to conform to our expectations). This is also the time when poetry and metaphor and mythos become incredibly important, but these too suffocate and die under the weight of literalism.
In a roundabout way, this brings us back to the question of free will. We are talking about the powers of the gods and their influence over the natural world, of which we are obviously a part. This challenge of a multicultural world is one reason I include animism and pantheism along with polytheism as descriptions of my particular approach to theology. In the same way that I might be able to provoke a forest fire by striking a match, I do believe that the gods have a relationship with the natural forces of the world, and that through the medium of the natural world they manifest and express themselves just as an artist might express themselves through clay or paint or music. But I do not usually equate the gods directly with those natural forces, and if I want it to rain, or I feel bitten and beleaguered by the wind, I'm just as likely to address the storm itself. Where my animism shades off into polytheism is a bit murky, made murkier by the fact that I do also believe in the Song of the World, a kind of harmony running through and uniting everything in a single pattern (hence, my pantheism). I do not necessarily believe that the gods are all merely manifestations of a Single God, but I do believe that the melodies of their existence are dominant harmonies in this World Song in which all of our melodies have a part. For me, the Song of the World is very similar to the Daoist concept of the Dao or Way, which is both a guide and "just the way things are." The gods are just as beholden to the Way as we are, and they cannot violate it any more than we can.
But if this is true, then what of free will? Is there even such a thing, if we are all being guided and shaped (and stuck in) the Song of the World?
This question came up in a slightly different way with Dave, in the comment thread in response to John's original post, and it's what inspired the title of this too-long two-part post. The issue was, if someone claims to have submitted willingly to some external authority, isn't this itself an act of will? In other words, is it even possible to give up one's free will?
So we're coming at the question from two directions. On the one hand, if we are inextricably enmeshed in the Song of the World, an endless web of relationship and interconnection, of cause and effect, beholden to powers greater than ourselves and even to our own powers and capacities of which we might not know the full extent.... then in what sense do we have "free will"? But on the other hand, if every action is a manifestation of will, even the choice not to act or to allow another to dictate our actions, then how can we ever say that we have relinquished our will? From one perspective, we never had free will at all; from the other perspective, we can't ever be rid of it.
My understanding of will is that it is very much like a muscle. It is something that is innate to us in potentia and to a certain extent manifestly, but it is also something that we have to develop and maintain in order for it to be effective. Like a muscle, the will is not exercised either from being always lax and passive, or from being always tensed and resistant -- instead, we develop our will and keep it strong by learning how to dance. A dancer knows when to tense a muscle, and when to allow it to go limp, and either or both are often needed in order to accomplish a particular move or to avoid an injury. A dancer is in a constant conversation with gravity, and in the same way, our will is in a constant conversation with the World Song in which it is enmeshed. It is against the World Song and the many other beings around us that we exert ourselves when we tense our will, and it is to the World Song and those others that we surrender ourselves when we relax. For that matter, this is true of everyone else as well — we are dancers whose hands are not only linked, but sewn together, and so the surrender or resistance of others has a direct bearing on our own expression of will. When we are in relationships that demand that we always be limp and relaxed, we find our wills growing weak, atrophied from disuse; likewise, when we are in relationships in which others are always limp and submissive, we find ourselves constantly under the pressure of supporting their weight, and our wills, like muscles, lock up under the unrelenting strain. In both cases, such relationships cause us and others harm. (And I'll note that, from what little I know of dance, the partner being lifted needs to be as strong and sure in her movements as the partner doing the lifting.)
A healthy will is one that sometimes offers resistance and sometimes relaxes. It is also flexible and able to be stretched, and like a muscle, stretching can often seem to be a strange, even paradoxical combination of tension and relaxation. (My favorite example of this is the breathing technique that Jeff taught me for yoga, in which during the in-breath you "push" your body into the proper alignment -- f'ex, pushing your heels into the floor, or your hips into the air -- and during the out-breath, you deliberately relax your body as much as possible while maintaining that position. When done correctly, you do not seem to move at all, but the internal rhythm is there.) Healthy muscles do not "submit" to gravity, but work with the reality of its existence in ways that honor the appropriate place of both tension and relaxation. The same is true for a healthy and well-developed will.
As for the gods... they play us like instruments. When we are rigid, we cannot respond to their touch. When we are limp, we cannot sing. The same is true for everything in the world; the gods play the world itself as an instrument. Brigid plays fire with her fingertips, tripping her toes across sunbeams like a harp, stirring deep earthy tones from the rising waters of the hot springs. Artemis calls in the wind that howls like a baying hound through the trees, or places her hand on the drumhead of the moon to mute the sounds of midnight for a moment of rest. This is poetry. This is metaphor. This is the Song of the World.
So.
It would be easiest to jump back into this conversation by looking again at the example of Elani and the way she describes her relationship with her gods within the context of Hellenismos. I don't mean to pick on her, or to pass some sort of judgement on her relationship with her gods in any general sense since I am admittedly working from only a very brief familiarity (and I can appreciate that you can't possibly say everything in a blog post, so I'm sure her spiritual life is much more complicated that that brief glimpse afforded by blogging).... But she provides a useful example of some of the stumbling blocks that I find presented by an asymmetrical approach to deity relationships within hard polytheism.
I should also mention that Elani did respond to the barrage of questions I left in a comment on her blog post, and while she didn't really address some of the stickiest of my sticking points, she did bring up some interesting things to consider, in a roundabout way.
The first is that she says, for her, religion "always has a foundation in one or more asymmetrical relationships. Although the level of asymmetricallity varies within Traditions, and even more so within individual practitioners, the very nature of the Gods (as non-human, and often more powerful) disallows symmetricallity."
This was a very helpful way of putting it, because it made me see immediately that we were taking for granted different assumptions about the nature of asymmetrical v. hierarchical relationship. I was assuming (and I don't think I'm wrong) that when Elani speaks of "asymmetrical relationship" with the gods, she always means a hierarchy, in which the gods are superior to human beings. It seems to me that, for her, the only alternative to this hierarchy is "symmetricality" [sic], a symmetrical relationship.
I don't think I really agree with this dichotomy. It seems to me that there are many different kinds of relationship that are neither hierarchical nor symmetrical, and many of the examples I listed in my last post, drawing on analogies from ecology, would probably be considered neither. I am making some assumptions here, again, but to me the idea of "symmetry" suggests a certain kind of sameness — not simply equality, but furthermore a very specific kind of equality. Just looking at the most common definition of symmetry: "the correspondence in size, form, and arrangement of parts on opposite sides of a plane, line, or point; regularity of form or arrangement in terms of like, reciprocal, or corresponding parts." In other words, symmetry implies not only equality, but similarity. If we imagine a line that divides humans from the gods, a "symmetrical" relationship would see the gods as reflections of humanity "corresponding in size, form and arrangement." It would make sense, then, that the only way to avoid this kind of symmetry between humans and the gods is to insist that the gods are more powerful, bigger, better, superior; in short, to insist on hierarchy.
And this is where I differ from Elani most basically, and perhaps the place where all my stumbling blocks with hard polytheism come from. It seems to me that, although hard polytheists like Elani (and it's hard to say how widespread this particular conception is, but gods forbid I be accused of "over-generalizing"!) insist on the separateness of the gods as distinct, discrete beings, they tend to imagine the gods in very anthropocentric terms. (It seems to me that even this insistence on separateness has its roots in anthropocentrism, actually, since a defining aspect of human experience -- perhaps the first recognizably "psychological" event we experience after birth -- is the experience of our separateness, our perceived individuality.) In some ways, I see the gods as much more "other" than these hard polytheists do, and that otherness is not merely a matter of possessing a greater degree of power, knowledge, etc. It is an otherness that is deeply and numinously Other, and so does not conform to our expectations of what it means to be separate or individual or discrete entities.
I'm reminded of Thomas Nagel's famous philosophical essay, "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?" In which he says, "The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism." He goes on to argue that there are insurmountable obstacles to us being able to effectively imagine the subjective experiences of (i.e. "what it is like to be") life forms that are vastly different from us. Personally, I think he goes a bit too far and maybe doesn't appreciate just how flexible and variable consciousness (and its many diverse altered states, including imagination) can be in both humans and other animals. And I'm going to hang this article link here, which provides a better break down of some of the other problems with his ideas. But this conversation about the otherness of the gods reminds me of Nagel mostly because, in the end, Nagel is arguing against reductionism and materialism. In a weird way, although I think probably hard polytheists would disagree with me, I'm trying to do the same thing. To me, the hard polytheistic approach to the gods is reductionist and limiting. It also reminds me a bit of that episode of Star Trek the Original Series, when Kirk meets Apollo, who turns out to just be an alien who pulled a fast one on the earthlings a few millennia ago. It also reminds me a bit of the amusingly nonsensical Ancient Aliens theorists who see in every description of ancient polytheistic gods the evidence that aliens from another planet visited earth and literally instructed humanity in some of the earliest evolution of civilization. In both cases, you have a vast underestimation of the human capacity for creativity, adaptation and invention, and a vast oversimplification of the source of those capacities which would rather suppose some external but basically anthropocentric entity than a more complex understanding of consciousness.
And if comparing hard polytheists to a bunch of New Age nutjobs doesn't explode a few heads, I don't know what will.
I'm getting off the point.
As for the rest of Elani's response, she describes the kinds of physical and psychological sensations and impressions she receives that she interprets as messages from the gods, noting that she's never "heard voices" or anything like that. These are... less than convincing, but she admits as much, so we can leave it there. In the end, her opening remark sets the tone for her entire response, when she says, "I'm going to try to answer them as logically as I can, but a large part of my practice is not based on logic. Faith, on principle, lacks a certain logic, but that has never held me back from having it." (emphasis added) Hello again, you old Cartesian dualism! For the record, I think this dichotomy between "faith" and "reason" which sets them at odds with each other is nonsense. There is no reason why trust, devotion and a sense of mystery (that is, in other words, what I mean by the word "faith") cannot also be logical. In fact, the radical doubt of Descartes is itself illogical on close examination, and a certain degree of trust (for instance, trusting in the truth of your premises, or trusting in the process of logic itself) is necessary in order for logic to even function. I can't say for sure what Elani means when she says her practice is "not based on logic" or that faith "lacks logic".... and part of why I can't say what she means is because I don't think she actually knows what she means, and that is precisely the breakdown that she is trying to describe and excuse. What this sounds like, however, is the recurrence of New Age warm-fuzzies in hard polytheist/Reconstructionist garb. This would be fine — I'm all for a deeper appreciation of intuition and the complex role that nonrational forms of knowledge play in our understanding and experience of the world — except that far too often I see hard polytheists and Recons setting themselves up as anti-New Age, as more grounded in facts and scholarship that we "neo-Pagans." Scratch a hard polytheist, and you find her blood as warm and fuzzy as any New Ager (she is, perhaps, just more embarrassed about showing it and slaps the bandage of piety and "UPG" on it in an attempt to hold herself together in some sort of respectable way).
That's a rather mean way of saying it, though. A better way of saying it is that we have a lot more in common than we often like to think, and I suspect it's more ego than logic (or faith) that interferes with our ability to meet on common ground to have actual fruitful conversations about our differences. I have to admit, though, it bothers me that when Elani writes that she would not want to presume to define anyone else's relationship with the gods, this is taken as an example of humility, whereas when a "neo-Pagan" (i.e. someone who is admittedly not a reconstructionist or hard polytheist) says the same thing, they are accused of fluffiness, relativism and romanticism.
Zeus and the Umbrella
In any case, if I can't get Elani to think critically about her practice, I can at least try my hand at it myself, admitting that I'm working from limited information. Let's take her example of her relationship with Zeus. When talking about her relationship with deities, she writes:
This means that--when it comes to the Theoi--I say 'how high' when They say 'jump', regardless of what is requested of me. It also means that I put my faith in Them. When I pray and sacrifice to Zeus the Thunderer for a day without rain as I do my rounds outside, I don't bring an umbrella. I trust that Zeus will either honor my prayer through kharis, or will have good reason not to. Who am I to go against His wishes and stay dry, regardless? To me, that is hubris.
There are several things that bother me about this example.
(a) Who's directing who? Elani's example seems like it's meant to illustrate how she puts her faith in the gods and trusts the instructions and messages she receives from them. And yet, in her own example, she is the one giving the orders. Or rather, making the request. She may not expect her request to be granted, but she obviously hopes it will be. There is no indication that Zeus told her to leave the house without an umbrella. It doesn't even seem like she has any particular reason for not taking an umbrella with her (I don't know what her "outside rounds" include, maybe there's a reason she can't bring an umbrella? in any case, she doesn't specify, so I can only assume that it's not relevant to her point). In other words, it seems like this is not so much an example of trust in the gods' guidance, as a deliberate test of their kharis (benevolence or grace).
(b) What is the lesson in being wet? I can think of several, of course, only the first of which is learning to be more grounded in my body and in touch with the seasons of the natural world and all their patterns and moods. (And I've certainly been caught off guard in enough rainstorms to appreciate when the gods feel a need to make this point if I wasn't getting it through my thick head voluntarily.) But I'm interested in what Elani thinks is the point of her potentially getting wet. Let's pretend Elani lives in, say, Texas (I don't know where she actually lives, but this will make for a useful thought experiment). Supposing that Zeus is more concerned with alleviating the crippling drought in the midwest than making sure one of his worshippers stays dry, he may decide to let it rain regardless of Elani's offerings. But does that mean that he specifically wants Elani to get wet? I don't see why. It seems to me, supposing that things work as Elani seems to believe they do and Zeus really does have this kind of direct control over the weather, that whether or not Elani gets wet is totally irrelevant and beside the point from Zeus's perspective. If Elani assumes that there is some special reason why Zeus would let it rain despite her offerings and prayers, doesn't that again place herself at the center of Zeus's concerns? And isn't that more than a little arrogant?
(c) Are petty deeds really examples of piety? Because in the end, she's not the Wicked Witch of the West and she's not going to melt if she gets a little rain on her. She most likely won't even catch a cold. But let's assume some other example of this kind of thinking: The mother whose child gets sick but refuses to take him to a doctor because she believes that God (or Apollo) will keep the boy alive or let him die, according to his divine plan. That's pretty extreme, and I think a lot of people find this kind of "faith" dangerous rather than admirable. (The classic counterargument to this one is, of course: Who's to say that God didn't inspire doctors to develop various medicines precisely so the boy's life could be saved?) How about another example: The Hellenist who doesn't replace the batteries in her smoke detector but leaves offerings (and lit candles) on her altar to Hestia, believing that if her house burns down it must have been Hestia's will. Or who makes offerings to Hermes and then drives around at night without a seatbelt, or headlights? Or who makes offerings to Aphrodite and then has unprotected sex, risking pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease? Or who makes offerings to Zeus, and then not only leaves the house without an umbrella, but goes golfing near a bunch of tall trees in the middle of a thunderstorm? My point is, when facing real potential risks, I very much doubt that Elani (or most people, regardless of the strength of their faith or who they have faith in) allow faith to trump common sense precautions. (On the other hand, she seems to be saying otherwise in this post — apparently she'd be willing to risk someone else's life, if not her own.) I've never had any indication from any of the gods that they feel honored by recklessness, or that it is hubris to guard against potential harm. Wearing a seatbelt, using contraceptives, having a working smoke detector, and carrying an umbrella with you when you think it might rain.... I find it hard to imagine that any of these things are offensive to the gods. In fact — and maybe this is just me imagining the gods in my own image — I'm more inclined to think they're offended by deliberate recklessness and stupidity, than by common sense. After all, if you're taking risks that might harm you, don't you think the gods who enjoy your worship (and may, depending on your beliefs, even have created you and have something invested in your future) want you to take care of yourself?
(d) Who's making it rain anyway? My final problem with Elani's approach is that, as a hard polytheist, I assume that she not only believes in Zeus as a distinct and separate being, but also believes that so are all the other rain and thunder gods — among them, Thor, Indra, Set, Oya, Lei Gong, and the Thunderbirds of Native American traditions. So let's imagine, now, that Elani lives out here in Seattle, and she makes a petition to Zeus to keep it from raining. But I make offerings to Thor because I want it to rain (make up a reason, I don't know, I just like rain). Regardless of whether or not it rains: which god gets to decide? According to the hard polytheistic view, Zeus and Thor are two different deities, but according to the traditions to which they each belong, they are each responsible for thunderstorms. So, are Zeus and Thor battling it out to determine who gets to turn the great water spigot in the sky? If it does rain, does that mean that Zeus wanted it to rain on Elani, or does it mean that my offerings to Thor were more effective? If it kept raining on Elani every time I petitioned Thor, would that be enough evidence to convert Elani to Heathenry?
This is also the issue with Recons who are cultural purists while also being hard polytheists. I was devoted exclusively to Celtic deities for most of my time as a practicing Pagan — partly because those are my own ancestral roots, and partly because I believe in the vital importance of understanding cultural context — and then Artemis came knocking on my door. And it was definitely Artemis. And like plenty of folks who think of themselves as hard polytheists, I had to accept that I couldn't wedge her into the role of a Celtic moon/wilderness goddess just because I wanted to stay within the tradition that I was comfortable with. (And to be fair, the very first thing I did was start studying up on the cultural context of ancient Greek religion, so that I could better understand Artemis and her new place in my life. But I'll be damned if that means I'm embracing patriarchy or hierarchy for the sake of historical accuracy.) So.... if Reconstructionists are, by and large, hard polytheists who believe that the different gods from different cultures really are unique and separate deities, then how can they at the same time believe that the gods of their specific tradition have control or power over universal forces or events, like weather, or disease, or fire, or any of the other areas for which most cultures have deities of one kind or another. Back when I was a monotheist, it might have made sense for me to believe that the rain was a sign from God, because there was only one and he could do whatever he wanted. It may even have made sense back in the days before very much international travel, when deities were worshipped in particular locations and were believed to have power over that particular land or cultural group, but not necessarily any further. (This was, lest we forget, the main reason that the Hebrew god Yaweh was so controversial -- he wouldn't stay put, but claimed to be mobile and to go with his people into disapora. The only way this made sense to the polytheists at the time, including the Hebrews themselves, was if they supposed that he was therefore more powerful than all the other gods.) When you're dealing with multicultural and/or diasporic hard polytheism, which is what most modern Pagans are dealing with, it becomes much more difficult to accept a literalist view of the nature and powers of the gods.
To be fair, I may be vastly oversimplifying Elani's view, not to mention the views of other hard polytheists. But these are the kinds of questions that I can't ignore or overlook, and I suspect that they are the kinds of questions that Elani avoids in declaring that her practice is "not based on logic." There is nothing wrong with admitting when we run up against mysteries and paradoxes when grappling with these huge questions, but it is during those times that I think reason and critical thinking can be invaluable tools (so long as we don't turn them into weapons to be wielded violently to force the world to conform to our expectations). This is also the time when poetry and metaphor and mythos become incredibly important, but these too suffocate and die under the weight of literalism.
Returning to Natural Polytheism and the Question of Will
In a roundabout way, this brings us back to the question of free will. We are talking about the powers of the gods and their influence over the natural world, of which we are obviously a part. This challenge of a multicultural world is one reason I include animism and pantheism along with polytheism as descriptions of my particular approach to theology. In the same way that I might be able to provoke a forest fire by striking a match, I do believe that the gods have a relationship with the natural forces of the world, and that through the medium of the natural world they manifest and express themselves just as an artist might express themselves through clay or paint or music. But I do not usually equate the gods directly with those natural forces, and if I want it to rain, or I feel bitten and beleaguered by the wind, I'm just as likely to address the storm itself. Where my animism shades off into polytheism is a bit murky, made murkier by the fact that I do also believe in the Song of the World, a kind of harmony running through and uniting everything in a single pattern (hence, my pantheism). I do not necessarily believe that the gods are all merely manifestations of a Single God, but I do believe that the melodies of their existence are dominant harmonies in this World Song in which all of our melodies have a part. For me, the Song of the World is very similar to the Daoist concept of the Dao or Way, which is both a guide and "just the way things are." The gods are just as beholden to the Way as we are, and they cannot violate it any more than we can.
But if this is true, then what of free will? Is there even such a thing, if we are all being guided and shaped (and stuck in) the Song of the World?
This question came up in a slightly different way with Dave, in the comment thread in response to John's original post, and it's what inspired the title of this too-long two-part post. The issue was, if someone claims to have submitted willingly to some external authority, isn't this itself an act of will? In other words, is it even possible to give up one's free will?
So we're coming at the question from two directions. On the one hand, if we are inextricably enmeshed in the Song of the World, an endless web of relationship and interconnection, of cause and effect, beholden to powers greater than ourselves and even to our own powers and capacities of which we might not know the full extent.... then in what sense do we have "free will"? But on the other hand, if every action is a manifestation of will, even the choice not to act or to allow another to dictate our actions, then how can we ever say that we have relinquished our will? From one perspective, we never had free will at all; from the other perspective, we can't ever be rid of it.
My understanding of will is that it is very much like a muscle. It is something that is innate to us in potentia and to a certain extent manifestly, but it is also something that we have to develop and maintain in order for it to be effective. Like a muscle, the will is not exercised either from being always lax and passive, or from being always tensed and resistant -- instead, we develop our will and keep it strong by learning how to dance. A dancer knows when to tense a muscle, and when to allow it to go limp, and either or both are often needed in order to accomplish a particular move or to avoid an injury. A dancer is in a constant conversation with gravity, and in the same way, our will is in a constant conversation with the World Song in which it is enmeshed. It is against the World Song and the many other beings around us that we exert ourselves when we tense our will, and it is to the World Song and those others that we surrender ourselves when we relax. For that matter, this is true of everyone else as well — we are dancers whose hands are not only linked, but sewn together, and so the surrender or resistance of others has a direct bearing on our own expression of will. When we are in relationships that demand that we always be limp and relaxed, we find our wills growing weak, atrophied from disuse; likewise, when we are in relationships in which others are always limp and submissive, we find ourselves constantly under the pressure of supporting their weight, and our wills, like muscles, lock up under the unrelenting strain. In both cases, such relationships cause us and others harm. (And I'll note that, from what little I know of dance, the partner being lifted needs to be as strong and sure in her movements as the partner doing the lifting.)
A healthy will is one that sometimes offers resistance and sometimes relaxes. It is also flexible and able to be stretched, and like a muscle, stretching can often seem to be a strange, even paradoxical combination of tension and relaxation. (My favorite example of this is the breathing technique that Jeff taught me for yoga, in which during the in-breath you "push" your body into the proper alignment -- f'ex, pushing your heels into the floor, or your hips into the air -- and during the out-breath, you deliberately relax your body as much as possible while maintaining that position. When done correctly, you do not seem to move at all, but the internal rhythm is there.) Healthy muscles do not "submit" to gravity, but work with the reality of its existence in ways that honor the appropriate place of both tension and relaxation. The same is true for a healthy and well-developed will.
As for the gods... they play us like instruments. When we are rigid, we cannot respond to their touch. When we are limp, we cannot sing. The same is true for everything in the world; the gods play the world itself as an instrument. Brigid plays fire with her fingertips, tripping her toes across sunbeams like a harp, stirring deep earthy tones from the rising waters of the hot springs. Artemis calls in the wind that howls like a baying hound through the trees, or places her hand on the drumhead of the moon to mute the sounds of midnight for a moment of rest. This is poetry. This is metaphor. This is the Song of the World.
Labels:
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will
Thursday, January 5, 2012
More on Reconstructionism as a Religious Methodology
Seren,
Thanks for your response! I was hoping someone with more "insider insight" would jump into the conversation. :) A lot of what you say makes sense and helps to put my impression of CR as an outsider to the community into some perspective. I think perhaps it's the lack of books written by CRs about what CRs "actually do," as you point out, that can sometimes leave those of us not immediately part of that community with the impression that a lot of CR is all talk and little actual living practice. (There's no reason why CR has to prove itself or make its practices available to people outside of the community, of course! I'm just saying that I wonder if that's one of the places where the confusion arises.)
I'm also interested in what the general principles for the CR approach are, exactly, and if there's somewhere where these are actually outlined and explored in detail. In the CR FAQ there are references here and there (usually when answering questions about who does or does not count as CR) to a community with a shared set of principles.... but I haven't been able to find a place where those principles are actually explained and clarified. You yourself mention how Rua's book "doesn't represent CR, and at times represents concepts and ideas that are antithetical to it." I haven't read the book, so it might be hard to answer this question: but I wonder if you'd be able to actually say what those concepts or ideas are that are antithetical to CR? Is it the methodology he uses, or the conclusions he comes to, or both?
The Fomorian issue is a good one of what I was talking about when I said that some of the criticisms seem to be theological rather than historical in nature. My own academic background is in comparative religious studies, and I've done field work that involved observation and interviews with people in various religious communities, as well as primary and secondary source research of historical traditions (for instance, I worked as a research assistant for a time with a professor studying the propagandist literature produced in Germany during the Protestant Reformation). In my experience in the field of comparative religious studies (and this may be different from the more historical/archeological approach), it is notoriously difficult to extrapolate theological concepts from cultural artifacts alone. Your review of Rua's book (thanks for the link!) goes into a bit more detail about why you think some of his conclusions are wrong and what evidence he doesn't take into account that you think he should have.... but it still seems to me that the question about whether or not the Fomorians are "evil"/adversarial or not is a theological question, and not something that can be definitively settled purely through academic examination of the remaining historical evidence. It may be that there were different opinions and approaches to that question even among the ancient Celts themselves. There is very often a distinction between the "official" view of a tradition's clergy or educated class, for instance, and that of the lay or working class, and in both cases some or even most of the evidence for these differences may be lost to time, with perhaps only the preserved "official" version or the wide-spread lay version surviving, or enough of both surviving as to leave us with only a vague and seemingly contradictory view. Sometimes the very same cultural artifacts (like sacred texts, ritual objects, designated sacred temples or spaces, etc.) were interpreted in vastly different ways by different members of the same religious community. And this makes drawing conclusions about the specific theologies of religious communities that are no longer accessible or able to speak for themselves often extremely difficult.
I'm inclined to agree with the idea that viewing the Fomorians as "evil" is a simplified and probably inaccurate view.... but that's in part because of my own contemporary liberal tendencies towards inclusivity and tolerance (you could even accuse me of being a bit P.C.) that makes the concept of "evil" in general distasteful and not very creditable to me. I'm completely willing to admit that I have no way of definitively proving if my ancestors held that same view, and they very well may not have. It is possible, after all, that even without taking all of the evidence into account, Rua may have inadvertently come to the correct conclusion. My impression is that the legacy of modern historical research is actually full of that kind of thing happening, while historians with very sound methodology can still end up with the conclusions that were in retrospect wrong or biased in some way.
Which again brings me back to the question of what exactly are the shared principles or approaches that CR uses? I've read through the CR FAQ and nothing there is all that different from the approach that I take - but clearly, I find my own balance of scholarly research, community feedback and personal interpretive and experiential engagement. (I am definitely not just haphazardly throwing together whatever bits and pieces I happen to like, which seems to be CR's biggest beef with non-reconstructionist folks.) To what extent, in your experience, does the CR criticism of non-CR approaches depend more on the conclusions that are reached than on the actual method of reaching them? I'm not so much saying that CR seems restrictive - but that it seems [i]selective[/i] in a very specific way. And I'm interested in what actually guides or informs that specific way of being selective.
(One example, for instance, is the very idea that the starting point is the question, "how did they [our ancestors] do it?" [i]Why[/i] is that the starting point? What assumptions about the the concept of authenticity itself underlie the belief that ancient cultural traditions are more authentic than modern ones, or that academic scholarship is more authentic than UPG? You have to start somewhere, sure, but I'm really curious about the reasons for starting there in particular. My guess is that trying to thoroughly answer that question will give more insight into the more subtle, less conscious ways in which CRs balance methodology, UPG and community-identity.)
Again, sorry this is so long! Thanks for indulging me with all my questions! :)
Sunflower,
Thanks for these links! I've now spent a good hour reading through a bunch of these old threads - with the result that I feel like maybe I'm being a bit redundant. ;) A lot of the points that Catja brings up really hit the nail on the head as far as what I'm trying to get at. I'm not at all a professional scholar like she is, but my experience in academia pretty much jives with her experience: that (a) modern scholarship thrives on "the gaps" which open up new possibilities for exploration and study, (b) a working, living religion will inevitably have to make certain leaps in order to overcome such gaps, and so (c) modern research is not the same process as reconstructing a religion, and you're going to run into contradictions and conflicts if you try to make them the same. Since my academic background is actually in the comparative study of religions, I tend to like to poke at "the gap" represented by point (c) in CR and other Recon communities because the scholar in me is like, "Oooh! Unexamined assumptions that guide the evolution of a unique religious community! Fetch me my research poking stick!" Which I guess can make me seem kind of obnoxious. :-/ But really it's just because I'm really fascinated by those questions and, regardless of what my own spiritual tradition is, I really enjoy finding out what other religious communities do and why.
Seren is taking the brunt of my questions right now, unfortunately, because I tend to bombard the people who will tolerate my questioning with demands that they explain all those other people who won't. ;) But like I said, I hope I'm not being too clumsy or hurtful in my enthusiasm.
Finn,
That may well be, and I definitely didn't mean to imply that CRs don't ever have authentic relationships with deities. I guess I was just saying that, for me personally anyway, it would be a real stumbling block to have to constantly worry about how my relationship with deity measured up against the expectations of the community and the standards of academic research, especially when both of those tend to be moving targets a lot of the time. Perhaps this is actually why CRs tend to be quieter and more careful about sharing their personal practice? And maybe a few folks (like Erynn Rowan Laurie, f'ex) being a bit bolder and willing to share would help mitigate the misconception and even alleviate some of that anxiety? It's a delicate subject, and very personal, though, so....
I think you're probably right about the role that the clergy (in this case, the Druids) played in establishing and maintaining a structured religious tradition in ancient Celtic societies - though, like I mentioned to Seren above, there is almost always also some discrepancies and differences of opinion between a community's educated class and its lay/working class. My point is more that, even with the Druids acting as a class of informed tradition-keepers who built up a collective body of practice and theology (or at least, theology to the extent that they did) - this is still very different from the way modern academics approach historical/scholarly research today. Very different. Sunflower's links to Catja's stuff above says it way better than I could, though, but that's basically my point.
Darkhawk,
I think this is a really good point - and that your footnote is also right on track. I think it's also important to remember, when striving to be "scholarly" in one's approach, that actual academics go through 3 - 7+ years of additional training and education above and beyond undergrad in order to be accepted members of the academic community. Much of that additional study is learning the processes (and limits) of the academic community itself. For that reason alone, academic work is not [i]really[/i] available to absolutely everyone - there is always going to be a lot of reliance by non-academics (even in, or especially in, Recon) on what academics are able to make available to the general public in ways that can be readily and widely understood, let alone practically applied to reconstructing a religion.
But depending too much on the divine inspiration of those who have a god-phone is a big problem, you're absolutely right. It's the other extreme that you can too easily swing towards. One of the original draws for me about Paganism was that it put a good deal of emphasis on making the tools available to anyone and everyone to kind of "build your own god-phone" (to overstretch the metaphor ;)) - in other words, to give you the tools and practices to help you cultivate a direct relationship with the divine for yourself. I'm of the belief that this is something anyone can do, and that there aren't just chosen individuals who have a better connection to the divine than others.... But it is, like academic work, something that requires a certain degree of training, practice and on-going commitment. For that reason, it doesn't [i]really[/i] avoid the same problem as the scholarly approach. There is the same caveat to divine inspiration as there is for academic work - in theory it can be available to anyone, but in practice not everyone will be willing or able to make the necessary commitment.
This is one reason that I really dislike the term "UPG" and how it's used, and tend to avoid using it myself if I can. I like to refer to a person's "interpretive and experiential engagement" instead. Why? Because there is really no such thing as an entirely individualized, private "UPG." All interpretations and experiences are interpretations or experiences [i]of[/i] something - and they are always influenced in one way or another by the socio-cultural contexts of the people having the experience or making the interpretation. That is why it is an interpretive or experiential [i]engagement[/i] - a person is engaging with something else, either a deity, a landscape, a human community, a cultural symbol, or some combination of these things or any number of others. An experience or interpretation might be more or less unique to that individual, but it is never entirely and purely solitary.
So the distinction between UPG as private or solitary, and academic/scholarly work as the primary corroborative approach to developing a shared community understanding is, I think, a false one. There are many, many ways in which communities can build a shared spiritual tradition that does not rely on or borrow from the methods and processes of academia. I bristle a bit when Recons/CRs talk about UPG as though it were entirely private and solitary in distinction from the community approach of academic scholarship. To me, this seems to ignore the fact that an individual's interpretive framework of their experiences is always going to be shaped by their membership in one or more communities, and so the way they integrate and understand these moments of personal "gnosis," inspiration or imagination cannot be entirely separated from the cultural or communal contexts they belong to.
Rather, I think it's more likely that those moments designated as "UPG" just tend to be more deeply influenced by modern culture than by the ancient pre-Christian cultures that the Recons/CRs are striving to reconstruct. When a person has a sudden inspiration about how modern physics and Jungian psychology (both modern, scientifically-grounded theories)might work together to explain a dream they had recently, it's called UPG. When a person has a sudden insight into how the connection between two pieces of archeological evidence help to explain the meaning of some ancient text (which may itself have been a poem or dream recorded by some long-dead priest), it's called research. The difference is in the relative value that the Recon/CR community places on the cultural artifacts and perspectives involved.
That said, I don't have much experience with non-CR Recons, and only a little bit of experience of CR at that. But I totally agree that CRs, IMLE, tend to be the most UPG/mysticism-friendly of the Recon communities.
Thanks for your response! I was hoping someone with more "insider insight" would jump into the conversation. :) A lot of what you say makes sense and helps to put my impression of CR as an outsider to the community into some perspective. I think perhaps it's the lack of books written by CRs about what CRs "actually do," as you point out, that can sometimes leave those of us not immediately part of that community with the impression that a lot of CR is all talk and little actual living practice. (There's no reason why CR has to prove itself or make its practices available to people outside of the community, of course! I'm just saying that I wonder if that's one of the places where the confusion arises.)
I'm also interested in what the general principles for the CR approach are, exactly, and if there's somewhere where these are actually outlined and explored in detail. In the CR FAQ there are references here and there (usually when answering questions about who does or does not count as CR) to a community with a shared set of principles.... but I haven't been able to find a place where those principles are actually explained and clarified. You yourself mention how Rua's book "doesn't represent CR, and at times represents concepts and ideas that are antithetical to it." I haven't read the book, so it might be hard to answer this question: but I wonder if you'd be able to actually say what those concepts or ideas are that are antithetical to CR? Is it the methodology he uses, or the conclusions he comes to, or both?
The Fomorian issue is a good one of what I was talking about when I said that some of the criticisms seem to be theological rather than historical in nature. My own academic background is in comparative religious studies, and I've done field work that involved observation and interviews with people in various religious communities, as well as primary and secondary source research of historical traditions (for instance, I worked as a research assistant for a time with a professor studying the propagandist literature produced in Germany during the Protestant Reformation). In my experience in the field of comparative religious studies (and this may be different from the more historical/archeological approach), it is notoriously difficult to extrapolate theological concepts from cultural artifacts alone. Your review of Rua's book (thanks for the link!) goes into a bit more detail about why you think some of his conclusions are wrong and what evidence he doesn't take into account that you think he should have.... but it still seems to me that the question about whether or not the Fomorians are "evil"/adversarial or not is a theological question, and not something that can be definitively settled purely through academic examination of the remaining historical evidence. It may be that there were different opinions and approaches to that question even among the ancient Celts themselves. There is very often a distinction between the "official" view of a tradition's clergy or educated class, for instance, and that of the lay or working class, and in both cases some or even most of the evidence for these differences may be lost to time, with perhaps only the preserved "official" version or the wide-spread lay version surviving, or enough of both surviving as to leave us with only a vague and seemingly contradictory view. Sometimes the very same cultural artifacts (like sacred texts, ritual objects, designated sacred temples or spaces, etc.) were interpreted in vastly different ways by different members of the same religious community. And this makes drawing conclusions about the specific theologies of religious communities that are no longer accessible or able to speak for themselves often extremely difficult.
I'm inclined to agree with the idea that viewing the Fomorians as "evil" is a simplified and probably inaccurate view.... but that's in part because of my own contemporary liberal tendencies towards inclusivity and tolerance (you could even accuse me of being a bit P.C.) that makes the concept of "evil" in general distasteful and not very creditable to me. I'm completely willing to admit that I have no way of definitively proving if my ancestors held that same view, and they very well may not have. It is possible, after all, that even without taking all of the evidence into account, Rua may have inadvertently come to the correct conclusion. My impression is that the legacy of modern historical research is actually full of that kind of thing happening, while historians with very sound methodology can still end up with the conclusions that were in retrospect wrong or biased in some way.
Which again brings me back to the question of what exactly are the shared principles or approaches that CR uses? I've read through the CR FAQ and nothing there is all that different from the approach that I take - but clearly, I find my own balance of scholarly research, community feedback and personal interpretive and experiential engagement. (I am definitely not just haphazardly throwing together whatever bits and pieces I happen to like, which seems to be CR's biggest beef with non-reconstructionist folks.) To what extent, in your experience, does the CR criticism of non-CR approaches depend more on the conclusions that are reached than on the actual method of reaching them? I'm not so much saying that CR seems restrictive - but that it seems [i]selective[/i] in a very specific way. And I'm interested in what actually guides or informs that specific way of being selective.
(One example, for instance, is the very idea that the starting point is the question, "how did they [our ancestors] do it?" [i]Why[/i] is that the starting point? What assumptions about the the concept of authenticity itself underlie the belief that ancient cultural traditions are more authentic than modern ones, or that academic scholarship is more authentic than UPG? You have to start somewhere, sure, but I'm really curious about the reasons for starting there in particular. My guess is that trying to thoroughly answer that question will give more insight into the more subtle, less conscious ways in which CRs balance methodology, UPG and community-identity.)
Again, sorry this is so long! Thanks for indulging me with all my questions! :)
Sunflower,
Thanks for these links! I've now spent a good hour reading through a bunch of these old threads - with the result that I feel like maybe I'm being a bit redundant. ;) A lot of the points that Catja brings up really hit the nail on the head as far as what I'm trying to get at. I'm not at all a professional scholar like she is, but my experience in academia pretty much jives with her experience: that (a) modern scholarship thrives on "the gaps" which open up new possibilities for exploration and study, (b) a working, living religion will inevitably have to make certain leaps in order to overcome such gaps, and so (c) modern research is not the same process as reconstructing a religion, and you're going to run into contradictions and conflicts if you try to make them the same. Since my academic background is actually in the comparative study of religions, I tend to like to poke at "the gap" represented by point (c) in CR and other Recon communities because the scholar in me is like, "Oooh! Unexamined assumptions that guide the evolution of a unique religious community! Fetch me my research poking stick!" Which I guess can make me seem kind of obnoxious. :-/ But really it's just because I'm really fascinated by those questions and, regardless of what my own spiritual tradition is, I really enjoy finding out what other religious communities do and why.
Seren is taking the brunt of my questions right now, unfortunately, because I tend to bombard the people who will tolerate my questioning with demands that they explain all those other people who won't. ;) But like I said, I hope I'm not being too clumsy or hurtful in my enthusiasm.
Finn,
That may well be, and I definitely didn't mean to imply that CRs don't ever have authentic relationships with deities. I guess I was just saying that, for me personally anyway, it would be a real stumbling block to have to constantly worry about how my relationship with deity measured up against the expectations of the community and the standards of academic research, especially when both of those tend to be moving targets a lot of the time. Perhaps this is actually why CRs tend to be quieter and more careful about sharing their personal practice? And maybe a few folks (like Erynn Rowan Laurie, f'ex) being a bit bolder and willing to share would help mitigate the misconception and even alleviate some of that anxiety? It's a delicate subject, and very personal, though, so....
I think you're probably right about the role that the clergy (in this case, the Druids) played in establishing and maintaining a structured religious tradition in ancient Celtic societies - though, like I mentioned to Seren above, there is almost always also some discrepancies and differences of opinion between a community's educated class and its lay/working class. My point is more that, even with the Druids acting as a class of informed tradition-keepers who built up a collective body of practice and theology (or at least, theology to the extent that they did) - this is still very different from the way modern academics approach historical/scholarly research today. Very different. Sunflower's links to Catja's stuff above says it way better than I could, though, but that's basically my point.
Darkhawk,
I think this is a really good point - and that your footnote is also right on track. I think it's also important to remember, when striving to be "scholarly" in one's approach, that actual academics go through 3 - 7+ years of additional training and education above and beyond undergrad in order to be accepted members of the academic community. Much of that additional study is learning the processes (and limits) of the academic community itself. For that reason alone, academic work is not [i]really[/i] available to absolutely everyone - there is always going to be a lot of reliance by non-academics (even in, or especially in, Recon) on what academics are able to make available to the general public in ways that can be readily and widely understood, let alone practically applied to reconstructing a religion.
But depending too much on the divine inspiration of those who have a god-phone is a big problem, you're absolutely right. It's the other extreme that you can too easily swing towards. One of the original draws for me about Paganism was that it put a good deal of emphasis on making the tools available to anyone and everyone to kind of "build your own god-phone" (to overstretch the metaphor ;)) - in other words, to give you the tools and practices to help you cultivate a direct relationship with the divine for yourself. I'm of the belief that this is something anyone can do, and that there aren't just chosen individuals who have a better connection to the divine than others.... But it is, like academic work, something that requires a certain degree of training, practice and on-going commitment. For that reason, it doesn't [i]really[/i] avoid the same problem as the scholarly approach. There is the same caveat to divine inspiration as there is for academic work - in theory it can be available to anyone, but in practice not everyone will be willing or able to make the necessary commitment.
This is one reason that I really dislike the term "UPG" and how it's used, and tend to avoid using it myself if I can. I like to refer to a person's "interpretive and experiential engagement" instead. Why? Because there is really no such thing as an entirely individualized, private "UPG." All interpretations and experiences are interpretations or experiences [i]of[/i] something - and they are always influenced in one way or another by the socio-cultural contexts of the people having the experience or making the interpretation. That is why it is an interpretive or experiential [i]engagement[/i] - a person is engaging with something else, either a deity, a landscape, a human community, a cultural symbol, or some combination of these things or any number of others. An experience or interpretation might be more or less unique to that individual, but it is never entirely and purely solitary.
So the distinction between UPG as private or solitary, and academic/scholarly work as the primary corroborative approach to developing a shared community understanding is, I think, a false one. There are many, many ways in which communities can build a shared spiritual tradition that does not rely on or borrow from the methods and processes of academia. I bristle a bit when Recons/CRs talk about UPG as though it were entirely private and solitary in distinction from the community approach of academic scholarship. To me, this seems to ignore the fact that an individual's interpretive framework of their experiences is always going to be shaped by their membership in one or more communities, and so the way they integrate and understand these moments of personal "gnosis," inspiration or imagination cannot be entirely separated from the cultural or communal contexts they belong to.
Rather, I think it's more likely that those moments designated as "UPG" just tend to be more deeply influenced by modern culture than by the ancient pre-Christian cultures that the Recons/CRs are striving to reconstruct. When a person has a sudden inspiration about how modern physics and Jungian psychology (both modern, scientifically-grounded theories)might work together to explain a dream they had recently, it's called UPG. When a person has a sudden insight into how the connection between two pieces of archeological evidence help to explain the meaning of some ancient text (which may itself have been a poem or dream recorded by some long-dead priest), it's called research. The difference is in the relative value that the Recon/CR community places on the cultural artifacts and perspectives involved.
That said, I don't have much experience with non-CR Recons, and only a little bit of experience of CR at that. But I totally agree that CRs, IMLE, tend to be the most UPG/mysticism-friendly of the Recon communities.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Authority and Relationship in CR
Part of my reply to a conversation on TC about different Celtic traditions:
I guess that's where I start to feel uncomfortable with CR. My understanding is that folks in CR approach Celtic Reconstructionism as first and foremost based upon academic/scholarly work, turning to UPG only to "fill in the gaps" that scholarship can't. This reminds me a lot of the "god of the gaps" approach to monotheism that has caused so much trouble among modern Abrahamic religions when faced with the conflicting authority of "inspired" sacred texts and scientific knowledge - except in this case, CR comes down firmly on the other side of that divide. What's ironic is that in both cases, each religious community comes down in favor of external authority. The CR approach says it is better to trust the external authority of careful and objective scholarship and research than the personal interpretive and experiential engagement that they call "UPG" - and the literalist/fundamentalist monotheists say it is better to trust the external authority of ancient sacred texts as the "word of God" than the attempts of science and scholarship as merely human (and therefore flawed) endeavors to discover truth. But in both cases, the emphasis is on finding a trustworthy external authority (the only difference is how "trustworthy" and "external" are defined).
Maybe it's my own streak of stubbornness - but I'm not keen on religions that emphasize external authority over personal relationship. I much prefer spiritual traditions that emphasize the difficult but necessary work of balancing and, when possible, reconciling the two. One consequence of the CR approach, for instance, is that while it tends to emphasize a "hard polytheism" that views the gods as real, distinct beings - it also undermines the CR practitioner's ability to engage authentically with them in the present, since he or she is expected to ignore or at least distrust any insight about or experience of them that contradicts the external authority of current academic scholarship. To me, that seems a bit like trying to be friends with someone while constantly comparing what they say and do against their high school report cards and SAT scores. Sure, that kind of information can give you insight into who they were and who they've become (and it provides an "objective," standardized measure that I guess would be helpful in catching a perpetrator of identity theft), but it seems an odd way to try to cultivate a relationship in the here and now. And what's especially weird to me is that the ancient Celts did not even have a concept of "objective scholarly research" - so the very attitude that such research should take precedence over "UPG" is pretty much by definition not part of the worldview of ancient Celtic tradition.
I think CR folks would respond (and have responded) that Celtic Reconstructionism is inherently a modern phenomenon and so obviously it will be influenced and shaped by the knowledge and culture of modern Western society. That's great, as far as it goes, but it's basically another way of saying that they feel comfortable picking and choosing the ways in which they strive to emulate ancient Celtic cultures. That's something we all have to do, in the end, if we want to have any kind of Celtic-inspired spiritual practice today. It's the unspoken, unacknowledged assumptions that underlie the process of picking and choosing that make me uncomfortable.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Shared Insights into Brighid's Stellar Aspects
Something I shared just now over on TC's LotS group:
In November 2010, a bunch of us over on the old Cauldron forum had a moment of what might be called "unverified shared gnosis" about the stellar aspects of Brighid - when our individual UPGs seemed to converge on a shared understanding that, though common among us, was not necessarily reflected in the traditional lore and mythology about Brighid.
I've been thinking more about this phenomenon recently, and how it might be part the evolution of the gods in mutual relationship with our own growing scientific and technological understanding of the natural world. I'm no expert on comparative mythology, but I don't really know of any ancient deities that were both solar and stellar in nature, or any ancient cultures that believed that the stars were actually suns like ours that were small because they were so far away (if there were any, I think they were probably pretty rare at least). Now with our scientific understanding of the relationship between our sun and the stars in the night sky, it makes sense to me that a solar/fire goddess like Brighid would have a latent stellar aspect that might be coming to the surface in light (pun intended!) of our expanding knowledge.
So I like to keep my eyes open for other examples of this emerging understanding of Brighid as a stellar goddess. And I thought here might be a good place to for all of us to share any examples that we come across.
One that I found just today, in fact, was in the book The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality by Jason Kirkey. In one section, he's telling a story about a time in his life when he was "apprenticed to winter" and struggling with a certain spiritual aimlessness, when he decided to go out walking among the hills of Ireland. Lost in a thick mist, he felt the spiritual winter melting away and Brighid's warm presence prompting him to joyous laughter. As he began to make for home, he realized he'd been completely turned around and didn't know which direction to head in to get back to the harbor village where he was staying - when suddenly, despite it being three in the afternoon, a single star appeared in the mist as a guiding light. He set off in that direction, making his way down the hill - and the star grew brighter and brighter as he neared. He writes (emphasis mine):
He describes this event as occurring in early February right around Imbolc, but of having a feel about it that reminded him strongly of a solstice, so much so that he intuitively thought of the star leading the wise men in the Christian story of Jesus' birth.
This passage struck me so strongly for a couple of reasons:
- First, only a few days ago, I led a Druidic solstice ritual for my family (husband, stepkids, parents and brother, nine of us in total) in which we honored both Jesus as a deity of the newborn sun and Brighid as a stellar goddess. In Irish folklore, St. Brigid is known as the "midwife of Christ" and during our meditation and candle-lighting ceremony I used the story of the star guiding the wise men to tie into the idea of Brighid as a stellar goddess and creatrix helping to "give birth" to our most intimate star, the sun. That only a few days later I should read a passage in a book linking Brighid the goddess not just to Imbolc but to the winter solstice through exactly the same story was pretty powerful.
- Second, the very fact that after describing his sense of Brighid's presence, Kirkey goes on to describe a profound experience of being guided by a star.... a star that, in fact, turns out to be the sun! And not just the sun, but the sun reflected in water! Ummm..... Fire In Water anyone? This experience of disorientation where distance blends "up" and "down" until they are indistinguishable and a reflection below can seem like a star from above is something I myself experienced earlier this fall while on my honeymoon - traveling through the flat desert of Utah at sunset, gazing westward it seemed to me that I was not looking up into a rose-gold sky, but looking down from a great height out onto a strange sea whose waters were illuminated by the golden light of the setting sun, with the dark shapes of clouds scattered like islands in that water. So again, there's this blending of fire and water in connection with the sun. In my case, this was just before our first night of camping out beneath the stars in a national park that's considered one of the best star-gazing sites in the country.
What's interesting is that, even though he mentions Brighid only a paragraph earlier and in the context of this same story, Kirkey doesn't himself make any explicit connection between her presence and the sudden appearance of the sun-[i]qua[/i]-star. It's not as though he's intentionally trying to make that connection with his story - but the relationship seems almost inescapably obvious considering some of the Unverified Shared Gnosis of this group.
I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this, or if anyone else has come across examples of this kind of unexpected shared gnosis in other places!
In November 2010, a bunch of us over on the old Cauldron forum had a moment of what might be called "unverified shared gnosis" about the stellar aspects of Brighid - when our individual UPGs seemed to converge on a shared understanding that, though common among us, was not necessarily reflected in the traditional lore and mythology about Brighid.
I've been thinking more about this phenomenon recently, and how it might be part the evolution of the gods in mutual relationship with our own growing scientific and technological understanding of the natural world. I'm no expert on comparative mythology, but I don't really know of any ancient deities that were both solar and stellar in nature, or any ancient cultures that believed that the stars were actually suns like ours that were small because they were so far away (if there were any, I think they were probably pretty rare at least). Now with our scientific understanding of the relationship between our sun and the stars in the night sky, it makes sense to me that a solar/fire goddess like Brighid would have a latent stellar aspect that might be coming to the surface in light (pun intended!) of our expanding knowledge.
So I like to keep my eyes open for other examples of this emerging understanding of Brighid as a stellar goddess. And I thought here might be a good place to for all of us to share any examples that we come across.
One that I found just today, in fact, was in the book The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality by Jason Kirkey. In one section, he's telling a story about a time in his life when he was "apprenticed to winter" and struggling with a certain spiritual aimlessness, when he decided to go out walking among the hills of Ireland. Lost in a thick mist, he felt the spiritual winter melting away and Brighid's warm presence prompting him to joyous laughter. As he began to make for home, he realized he'd been completely turned around and didn't know which direction to head in to get back to the harbor village where he was staying - when suddenly, despite it being three in the afternoon, a single star appeared in the mist as a guiding light. He set off in that direction, making his way down the hill - and the star grew brighter and brighter as he neared. He writes (emphasis mine):
The impossibility of the moment was weighing on me. How could there be a single star shining so bright through the mist in the afternoon? At any moment, I expected to reach the star, now a vaginal opening of light through the mist, and be born back into the world. A wind blew suddenly. The mist thinned. Briefly I glimpsed a world which was foreign to me, inhabited by streets, cars, and fishing boats. In Ireland people tell stories of glimpsing the faery people and their paradisiacal world. I felt like running back to the stones to tell them my tale of glimpsing a human world full of both beauty and confusion. My star was the sun reflecting off the harbor. So disoriented, my perception within the mist had dissolved all heights and depths within each other; externally and internally. Here there was unity between Heaven and Earth.
He describes this event as occurring in early February right around Imbolc, but of having a feel about it that reminded him strongly of a solstice, so much so that he intuitively thought of the star leading the wise men in the Christian story of Jesus' birth.
This passage struck me so strongly for a couple of reasons:
- First, only a few days ago, I led a Druidic solstice ritual for my family (husband, stepkids, parents and brother, nine of us in total) in which we honored both Jesus as a deity of the newborn sun and Brighid as a stellar goddess. In Irish folklore, St. Brigid is known as the "midwife of Christ" and during our meditation and candle-lighting ceremony I used the story of the star guiding the wise men to tie into the idea of Brighid as a stellar goddess and creatrix helping to "give birth" to our most intimate star, the sun. That only a few days later I should read a passage in a book linking Brighid the goddess not just to Imbolc but to the winter solstice through exactly the same story was pretty powerful.
- Second, the very fact that after describing his sense of Brighid's presence, Kirkey goes on to describe a profound experience of being guided by a star.... a star that, in fact, turns out to be the sun! And not just the sun, but the sun reflected in water! Ummm..... Fire In Water anyone? This experience of disorientation where distance blends "up" and "down" until they are indistinguishable and a reflection below can seem like a star from above is something I myself experienced earlier this fall while on my honeymoon - traveling through the flat desert of Utah at sunset, gazing westward it seemed to me that I was not looking up into a rose-gold sky, but looking down from a great height out onto a strange sea whose waters were illuminated by the golden light of the setting sun, with the dark shapes of clouds scattered like islands in that water. So again, there's this blending of fire and water in connection with the sun. In my case, this was just before our first night of camping out beneath the stars in a national park that's considered one of the best star-gazing sites in the country.
What's interesting is that, even though he mentions Brighid only a paragraph earlier and in the context of this same story, Kirkey doesn't himself make any explicit connection between her presence and the sudden appearance of the sun-[i]qua[/i]-star. It's not as though he's intentionally trying to make that connection with his story - but the relationship seems almost inescapably obvious considering some of the Unverified Shared Gnosis of this group.
I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this, or if anyone else has come across examples of this kind of unexpected shared gnosis in other places!
Labels:
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