Meeting the Gods

One of the many things that I need to mention in an update is that Jeff and I have been working through a book on ritual and magic together for the past couple weeks. We realized that we tended to want to just hang out and relax together in the evenings, but our primary way of doing that was watching television, which wasn't great. Since he and I are so similar in our hobbies, most of which are solitary pursuits like writing, we spent some time brainstorming what we might do together in the evenings when we just wanted to relax a bit. When we first began dating, we did regular meditative work together (following along with Emma Restall Orr's Living Druidry course), spending time hillwalking in the local park and then sitting in meditation on a particular theme, with discussion afterwards. I have fond memories of that work, and I've been feeling a revitalizing interest in more formal ritual practice now that my mundane life has calmed somewhat and we're fairly well grounded and established out here in Seattle. So we thought returning to that kind of work might be fruitful.

So we're working through Penczak's book, The Outer Temple of Witchcraft, which was one of the early books I bought years ago when I was first looking into ritual and magic in a Pagan context. I remembered this book as being a lot about the creative, aesthetic work of crafting personal rituals.... but it's definitely interesting revisiting it now that I have nearly a decade of Pagan practice under my belt (the tenth anniversary of my first Pagan ritual is coming up this summer solstice, if you can believe it!). For one thing, I don't remember the book being nearly as logically inconsistent as it actually is. Or, I should say, maybe just poorly articulated. Many of the theological ideas mentioned in the book are simplistic, but then it is meant to be a kind of "Pagan 101" type of book. On the other hand, it's been so long since I read this kind of book that it gives me a new appreciation of the hard polytheists' complaints about "soft polytheism." It also gives me new ire at being lumped in with so-called "soft polytheism," since the polytheism as it appears in Peczack's book isn't very different from my own theology. The biggest thing the book has going for it is that it includes lots of practical exercises. Maybe that's ironic, considering the usual defense of somewhat sloppy theology in modern Paganism is that it's more focused on praxis than doctrine. Many of the practices seem to be helpful and to at least have the potential to lead to real spiritual authenticity and insight. I suspect half the problem is that Chris might just not be very good at articulating some of the deeper complexities involved in a nuanced polytheistic view. It might be that on the whole, he's not even all that interested in the theological aspect, but holds lightly to just enough belief to explain why his practices are meaningful. I've always been the kind of person who needs more, who needs to engage intellectually with my practices and beliefs as well as emotionally and physically through ritual. On the other hand, I feel kind of laissez-faire about Penczak. He was obviously articulate enough to give me a viable way into a new religion back when I needed it (even though he is also probably a big reason why Wicca/Witchcraft never really resonated with me), and on the whole his sloppiness might be relatively harmless so long as it doesn't become dogmatic sloppiness used to abuse or manipulate or exploit.

After working through the introduction and doing a few basic exercises in meditation and visualization just to "get back to basics," Jeff and I moved onto the chapter on the gods (or, in the Wiccan approach, the God and Goddess and their many different manifestations). This chapter wasn't of much value in terms of its content, since Penczak spends a lot of time discussing how the various deities from different cultures fit into a broader scheme of archetypes. It might be of some interest if done carefully with a mind to comparative religion or mythology (I'm not ready to just throw my hands up and declare that there aren't any meaningful patterns among the deities of different cultures), but Penczak doesn't have the expertise to do that and in any case that would have been a book all its own. Instead, he gives a list-like run down of a bunch of different gods and goddesses, each with a paragraph or two explaining their associations within their respective culture. Much of this is perfectly fine, if a bit simplified; but there are also enough examples of him getting specifics wrong or applying his system of categorization in ways that obscure the particularities of a given deity in cultural context that, in general, it's not exactly a resource I would turn to for reliable information.

What it was valuable for, though, was prompting me to think more about how we get to know deities in general. As sloppy as Penczak's approach seems, there's something to be said for diving in and getting to know a deity personally before (or along with) doing the academic research. I realized that I tend to be a bit of a god-stalker. To use the metaphor of personal relationships with people, there's something to be said for first impressions, even if they're incomplete and maybe even false in some ways. Imagine if someone is intrigued by a new acquaintance, and so obsessively tries to memorize all of their personal and family history, scouring public records to find out their likes and dislikes and plumping the local community gossip for details.... And then tries to interact with that person in terms of all of this compiled information, as if that person were a collection of facts instead of an individual. That someone would probably be considered a creepy stalker. And one reason for that would be because they were trying to have complete control over the relationship and dictate its terms, instead of building a relationship as a mutual project with the other person. The point I'm getting at is that, if we take seriously the idea that gods are real (in whatever sense) and individual (again, not necessarily as hard polytheism defines that concept, but at least in a meaningful way) -- then we should trust that building a relationship with deity is a partnership, not a research project, and that it might proceed in an authentic and meaningful way even if we don't know "all" the facts. Knowledge and intimacy are built up between two people over years and years, and aren't necessarily things that can be gleaned from a book on ancient history. We might just have to respect that the gods are going to interact with us on their own terms, and that only aspects of their much deeper and broader realities will ever be shown to us.

This might sound obvious -- and in fact, it sounds very similar to what I've heard some hard polytheists themselves say -- and yet, I don't often see this attitude being upheld through actual behavior, especially when it comes to how people actually talk about and treat their relationships with the gods. This might be yet another place where the term "UPG" does a big disservice to the whole conversation, relegating personal relationship and personal meaning-making to the same category as "fluffy bunny" I-saw-it-in-a-dream kind of stuff and setting it in distinction to (or even in opposition with) scholarly research into "legitimate" primary sources. (The whole issue of what gets counted as legitimate and the fact that the academic world is in no way free of socio-political and personal biases is something I'm not even going to get into now.)

In any case, I'm pretty sure that I god-stalked Brigid, and this was one of the reasons our relationship got a bit stilted for a while. It'd be like getting hung up on whether your new boyfriend likes yams or not, and obsessing about the "deeper meaning" of these types of trivial details instead of focusing on aspects of your relationship that were directly relevant to both of you in the here and now. (Sure, maybe later you come to understand how that boyfriend grew up in the south as a nerdy Buddhist outsider and his dislike of yams maybe gives you some insight into that in some weird way... but without that kind of context, which is only built over time, you could totally ruin a relationship by obsessing over it and trying to "figure him out." Believe me, I know. I once dated an engineer.) I was so busy trying to make all the trivia I could find about her fit into some coherent picture, that I neglected nurturing a real relationship with her more directly.

The irony is that when Artemis showed up, it blew my desire for a Celtic-specific practice out of the water and forced me to deal with the issue of relating to a deity on her own terms. I disliked Ancient Greek culture so much for being misogynistic and patriarchal, that I refused to do the normal obsessive research that I might do otherwise. I didn't really want to totally rework my practice (and my life) in order to make my work with Artemis be culturally contextual. So what ended up happening was that over the last half a year plus, I've spent much more time connecting with her more directly (and supplementing my understanding of her and my relationship with her with research here and there when it's appropriate). And that approach has also influenced my relationship with Brigid, so that it too is getting stronger again. (Though, as I think I've mentioned, stress from the marriage and the move also probably had something to do with that.)

So now that I'm in relationship with not one, but two of the most stereotypically popular goddesses among modern Pagans... I guess the only thing left for me to do is start worshipping the Morrigan, or maybe Odin or Cernnunous, and we'll be all set to hit the fluff bunny trifecta.

~
So it was in that general spirit that I approached last night's ritual/meditative work, an exercise meant to help a new Pagan meet a couple of gods. The guided meditation involved traveling along the World Tree first to the underworld and then to the upperworld, where you would presumably meet a face of the Goddess and the God, respectively (though Penczak does say that you might encounter two goddesses or two gods, since there are deities of both genders associated with both realms). Since Jeff and I work more with the three realms of Land, Sea and Sky than with an underworld/upperworld dualism, we adapted the meditation somewhat to suit our own purposes. But I went into the ritual with the attitude of seeing whatever or whoever might show up, not trying to force any expectation or assume any definitive answers about the identity of the gods or guides or whoever if any did appear. I wanted to hold the work loosely. I also wanted to set aside my general unease with people who want to rush into relationships with as many gods as they can find, as though they were action figures to be collected. Since I tend to be somewhat introverted in my human relationships, I tend to lean towards henotheism in my spiritual life; but lately I've been noticing how I can tend to be a bit one-sided in my life at times, and so I wanted to see this as an opportunity to meet some guides or companions who would be willing to work with me towards a better balance and more "inner" diversity.

The meditation was actually kind of amazing. By the end of it, I felt like I couldn't keep a stupid grin off my face.

To begin, Jeff and I did a simple centering meditation and verbally "cast the circle" as a way of establishing sacred space. Again, I don't agree with all of the theological aspects of Penczak's approach, but in my work I've found it very useful to establish sacred space through ritual and visualization, especially when working in what is normally a mundane space like the den. (I don't do this as thoroughly when we're doing our rituals outside in the woods, and I probably wouldn't feel like it was as necessary in an indoor space established for that purpose either. But I digress because I feel the need to justify why I don't agree with the ADF Core Ritual and I'm still solidly in the Revival Druidry tradition.) Then Jeff and I spent half an hour in silent meditation, with a gentle bell going off every ten minutes so give us some indication of when we should move on to the next of the Three Realms.

I should mention that I am out of practice with visualization during meditation, so even though I'm writing this out as a narrative, the experience was somewhat more jumbled, with images and sensations sometimes repeating themselves while at other times feeling like they were just outside my peripheral vision. I seemed to improve as the meditation went on, but in general I've never been fantastic at visualizing and so when I describe things that the gods said or showed me, it's more like these were things that I was sort of made to understand, and not an experience of actually hearing words or anything.

I began by standing in front of a massive western red cedar as the "World Tree" -- it's a tree I've been to in meditation before, so old that at its base there is a hollow that goes completely through the tree, creating a kind of archway or doorway, with a small space within. I placed my hands on the bark and spoke my intent of traveling to the Three Realms to meet a god or guide to help me in my spiritual work. Then I entered the tree through the archway. To the left was an opening in the inner heartwood of the tree that led down in a spiraling staircase. I traveled down and down until eventually I emerged on a beach.

The shore was rocky, covered with tumbled stones about the size of my fist and all different colors, and the waves were washing up and down the shore, the water trickling down through the rocks here and there. The wind was strong and smelled like the sea, and gulls wheeled in the air, crying out their piercing calls. For a while, there didn't seem to be anyone there at all and I wasn't sure I was going to meet anyone after all. But then, eventually, I seemed to see the figure of a woman out in the water, sort of forming and dissolving again out of the waves and sea foam. She seemed very far away, out on the water, and I wondered if maybe the tide was at an ebb and I would have to wait for it to rise again before she would come closer. But then I got the distinct impression that I was supposed to walk out to see her. So I walked out onto the water, walking across it until I was far out from shore, at which point I kind of sunk down beneath the waves to an underwater city. Even though I was beneath the water, the city itself did not appear to be under water (in other words, it was just a normal city, not like something you'd see in the Little Mermaid or something), and I walked and breathed normally as if I were still on land. I found myself wandering around a great palace full of large rooms, with the female figure always just out of sight but still present and keeping me company. In one room, I came across a hand mirror -- it's surface was silvery and liquid almost like water, and its rim was white and glistening like pearl. It seemed to me to be connected with the moon, especially with the full moon. I couldn't see the female figure, but she was there, and I tried to ask her who she was, which goddess she might be, but I could get no answer from her. Instead, she encouraged me to pay attention to my sensations while I was in that realm and to think about other times that it reminded me of. It felt as though everything was current and flow, and that my boundaries were porous -- as if, because my body was mostly water and my surroundings were mostly water, that my own edges were blurred and in flux. When there was movement in the distance, I felt that movement ripple towards me like a current within my own body, as if everything was connected. The goddess suggested to me that this was what the deep past and the realm of the ancestors and memory was like, all things fluid and moving together, influenced and shaped by that connection; and that it was also like the realm of death, when the body dissolves back into the earth and the sense of self expands to embrace and include within it all things.

At that point, the bell rang and it was time to move on to the next realm, so I thanked the goddess and asked her to show me the way to the next realm, the Sky. She showed me a spiraling staircase that I followed, up and up, climbing a long way. At first the stair case seemed to be made of rough stone and coral, then it turned to smooth stone, then eventually to crystal and then finally, in the upper reaches, to blazing light and air itself. I came to a doorway and stepped through to find myself in a beautiful, sunlit meadow.

The landscape was idyllic, a perfect blend of spring and summer -- flowers were blooming everywhere and the breeze was fresh, but it was warm (not like how it can be a bit chilly still sometimes in the spring) and the grass was lush and the trees, too, had put out young leaves. I noticed that the leaves, and in fact everything, seemed half translucent with light penetrating them like living stained glass. In the meadow were a myriad colorful butterflies and birds flitting everywhere, the birds filling the air with birdsong, and the sky seemed huge, bright blue with huge, puffy clouds drifting through it. High above, I saw the silhouette of a hawk circling and spiraling, and it grew closer and closer to where I was walking through the meadow. Then suddenly, before me was a man with wings -- looking very much like your typical angel -- great huge wings with white feathers sprouting from his shoulder blades behind him, his whole being radiant with sunlight. I was a bit confused, and asked him if he wasn't just an expression of my animus (also feeling a bit miffed at myself for my meditation conforming so neatly to the gender dualism that I'd been trying to avoid when adapting the meditation). He seemed to shake off the question, sort of ignoring it but in a way that seemed to almost suggest that, on the contrary, my animus was more like an expression of him. His wings seemed to fade or be there only intermittently, and the hawk -- a very large hawk with feathers that shimmered golden and bronze in the sunlight -- landed on his shoulder and from then on seemed inseparable from him, so that sometimes it seemed that just the hawk alone was there. Again, I kept trying to ask him who he was, what his name was, which deity he might be, but he seemed to shrug off the questions as somewhat unimportant or besides the point. He encouraged me, like the sea goddess had, to pay close attention to my sensations as I walked through the Sky realm. It seemed like, just as in the realm of the sea, everything were connected, but in a very different way. Instead of feeling submerged and porous in a fluid world of currents, I felt everything with a certain immediacy, as if these connections moved as fast as thought -- I could see a bird in the distance, and as quickly as I spotted it, my understanding was there with it, even within it experiencing the world as it experienced it. Instead of the world being thick with connection, it seemed like the world -- space and time -- were especially thin, sort of (though I don't think that's the best way to describe it). The sky god put it into words for me by making me to understand that, in the Realm of the Sea, all things penetrated you; whereas in the Realm of the Sky, you penetrated all things. Just as the blood in my body moves in currents that I can feel in every part of me, but when I breathe, the air penetrates me, a cool breath that goes deep into my lungs. As quickly as you could recognize your ignorance or your limitations, you could master them or navigate them with ease, so that he was associated with skill and mastery and the height of civilization, as well as insight and wisdom. This reminded me of Lugh of the Long Arm, and I asked him if that was who he was -- I did not get a straight answer from him, but he did present me with a long, bright spear that seemed to be a symbol in the same way that the mirror had. Just as I experienced the movement reflected in the mirror as my own movement, currents within myself and penetrating me, so I experienced the flight of the spear as my own flight, quick and piercing through the air.

Then, the bell rang again and it was time to visit the third realm, so I asked him to show me the way to the realm of the Land. He pointed me to a place that looked at first like a bit of underbrush on the edge of the meadow, but I saw then that it was a cliff and the underbrush was in fact the canopy of a great tree. I began to climb down the tree, branch by branch, until I was back at the base of the same cedar. I walked through the archway created by its trunk, this time passing straight through as if it were a threshold.

On the other side was a lush, wild forest, thick with undergrowth, huge trees, everything teeming with life and covered with a carpet of green in mosses and ferns and mushrooms and the like. I had the sudden, overwhelming sense of movement, and I was running through the forest, bounding past trees, jumping over rocks and fallen logs, with my heart pounding in my chest. I realized at one point that I was running with a pack of hounds, like hunting dogs, though they didn't appear to be hunting but just running in a pack. I thought that maybe here I would meet Artemis, and just as I was wondering this, up ahead, there she was. She wore antlers on her head, though only small ones with one or two prongs, and she was clad in a short leather tunic. She was amazingly slender and quick, and in every way seemed to embody the energy of a deer as she bounded through the forest, her dark hair flying out behind her. For a while, I just ran with her and the dogs, but eventually I felt like if we kept up this running I wouldn't have a chance to really talk to her at all, so I called out to ask if maybe we might pause for a rest for a little while. She stopped so abruptly that I was caught up short, and her whole body was tense and listening, very much like a deer that has heard a sound and freezes, waiting to hear it again. Eventually, she relaxed and turned towards a clearing, where a pool of fresh spring water bubbled up from the earth and babbled away off into the woods as a small stream. She sat by the pool, leaning to sip some of the fresh water, and I swear it was like a Disney movie, with a bunch of animals coming out of the forest to join her. Birds flitted about in the trees, and the hounds lazed about, with a couple of deer only a few yards away leaning down their slender necks to drink. I also saw a bear, like a dark shadow moving among the trees, and this made me think of Artemis' connection with the bear and how, just then, she seemed so different from that aspect, much more like a deer. As if in response to this thought, she got up from where she was sitting, and now instead of the small antlers, she was wearing a kind of cloak made of bearskin, with the head of the bear like a hood pulled up over her hair. She began to dance in the clearing -- at first, putting her hands up like claws and doing a move that looked like it was right out of Michael Jackson's music video for "The Thriller." When I scoffed in surprise and incredulity, she got down on all fours and started dancing and scampering around -- not on hands and knees, but with her hands and feet, so that her backside stuck up ridiculously in the air as she trundled around. The joy and silliness seemed to radiate off of her and she seemed very much to embody a kind of child-like state of wonder and excitement (but in a way that was deeply wise and knowing at the same time). Then I thought of her possible connection with the moon, as well, and I asked her about that, since the sea goddess I had met seemed to be connected more directly to the moon through the silver-and-pearl mirror. Suddenly, I saw the image of the new crescent moon, just past a sliver, when you can just barely see the still-dark sphere of the rest of the moon outlined against the evening sky and the sliver of light seems less like the moon itself than like a crack between two worlds. She snatched up her bow and pulled it taut with an arrow notched, and the bow seemed to be illuminated in the same way -- which, she made me to understand, was why sometimes her bow and arrows were described as silver and sometimes as gold. She said that the realm of the sacred land was a place of liminality and edges, much more so than the other two realms. She said that we tended to think of the physical, material world as the most mundane and easy to comprehend, but it was in fact the most liminal and enchanted of all. She said that the physical world was a world of surfaces -- that we could only know the surface of things in this way, and never the inside of anything, since if we tried to break it open to get at the "inside," what was internal would withdraw and we would find ourself with nothing but just another surface. To demonstrate, she picked up a rock, and then broke it open so that instead of being a smooth, rounded stone, it was now a kind of rough geode along the broken side -- but this, too, was just a new surface now newly exposed to the world and it was still impossible to see the "inner-ness" of the thing. I understood that she was not just talking about the strange mystery of the physical, material world of nature, but also my sense of her playfulness (and pop culture references to Disney and Michael Jackson) as threatening to be somehow shallow or superficial. She was challenging me on this view, intentionally provoking me to see this realm not as superficial, but as liminal and mysterious, interconnected through those very surfaces and the way they rubbed up against all the other surfaces (and yet also withheld something far more intimate than what penetrated or was penetrating in the other two realms).

By the time the final bell rang, her joy and playfulness had become somewhat infectious, and when I thanked her and returned to the World Tree to end my meditation, I found that I couldn't wipe a somewhat goofy grin off my face.

So that experience went very well, and I am intrigued by these two new deities that I seem to have met. I'm looking forward to continuing this work and exploring these new relationships to see where they lead.

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.

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.

The Dance of Will and Surrender (Part 1)

The conversation about faith, free will, submission and discernment continues over on John's blog, and talk has turned to the nature of the will itself, and what exactly it actually means to submit or surrender one's will to an external authority. (Setting aside for a moment the nature of that external authority.)

But let me back up. I had a conversation with Jeff over dinner tonight exploring in more detail what I find to be problematic with Elani's approach to an asymmetrical faith, in which the gods are powerful and, luckily for us, benevolent and therefore demand and expect our obedience.

On the Nature of Gods (And Other Messy Things)

A few things to note: First of all, the question of an asymmetrical faith-based relationship with the gods is separate from a question about whether or not one believes they exist. This is why I think the analogy of the marriage is helpful. I have a very equal and mutually trusting relationship with Jeff, and for us the idea that either of us would be expected to "submit" to or "obey" the other (as those terms are popularly understood is) is laughable. But having an equal relationship with Jeff doesn't mean I don't believe he exists, or that I don't believe that, at least in the most obvious and mundane way, he is a separate person from me.

In other words, despite what Elani claims, hard polytheism does not require one to adopt an asymmetrical faith-based relationship with the gods. Neither does reconstructionism as an approach to one's religious tradition. These are two assertions that Elani makes several times, and as far as I can tell, they have no real basis.

However, believing that some kind of equal and mutual relationship between the gods is possible does mean that I might not agree with certain assumptions about what the gods are like. This is not a question of existence or nonexistence, or whether or not I "take the gods seriously." (Or at least, it is only a debate over existence if you take the narrow view that in order for a god to be considered "real" it must conform to your particular theology.) It is instead of a question of whether or not a person believes that spiritual relationship is defined in terms of hierarchy. The word "submission" itself implicitly relies on a concept of hierarchy, in which the human being submitting to a god is beneath that god.

I should say that reconstructionism in general does not require a faith based in a theology of hierarchy. Hellenistic reconstructionism might very well require it, since the ancient Greek and Roman cultures were notoriously patriarchal and hierarchical. Why anyone would want to reconstruct that part of our history is beyond me. (Weirdly, Elani states in one post on her blog that because she was not raised Christian, unlike many Pagans, she does not have hang-ups about issues of submission and authority — as if old psychological wounds are the only reason a person might be uncomfortable with such concepts.)

So if I don't subscribe to a theology of hierarchy when it comes to my understanding of the gods, then what do I think the gods are like?

That is a complex question, but I find myself once again going back to ecology and the idea of "natural polytheism" as I described it back in my post on NUP:

Natural polytheism embraces the science of ecology as a basic metaphor for theological inquiry. In other words, natural polytheism seeks to understand our relationship with the gods as an aspect of interrelated systems of being, consciousness and meaning.

Hierarchies are rare in the science of ecology, and where they do exist, they usually take the form of things like trophic cascades or altitudinal zonation. In other words, though we may rank things within an ecosystem, we rank them with regard to a very particular aspect of their relationship with the larger community. A hemlock is not superior (in any existential sense) to an alder simply because it happens to grow at a higher elevation; a gray wolf is not superior to an elk, which is not superior to a douglas fir. Even when we identify species that play a special or especially important role within an ecosystem — such as a keystone species, a foundation species, or an indicator species — these species are not considered "higher" or "better" than other species. Rather, their importance is contingent upon their relationship with the rest of the community; and in fact, sometimes the same species might be a keystone in one ecosystem, but not in another. It would be impractical, if not impossible, to establish some kind of ontological ranked system for all of these species, or for individuals within a species. (Except insofar as the social behaviors of the animals themselves establish a ranking within a given social group; but even these are fluid and subject to change. You'd be hard-pressed to argue that Mr. Bobo is the alpha male gorilla because of some inherent superiority that all the other gorillas recognize. There is no divine mandate for gorillas, or for gray wolves for that matter, as we got to witness at the Wolf Sanctuary in Pennsylvania last week.) The point in all of this is that, within ecology, the idea of ranking is largely a convenient construct for understanding the complex patterns of relationship that exist within a community of living (and non-living) beings; such rankings have specific contexts in which they are relevant, and they never carry the connotation of a species of individual being "superior" or "inferior." Rank, in ecology, is a matter of function and relationship, not of a being's essential nature.

How this applies to theology and the nature of deity is something I'm still working out. Basically, what I am saying is that the gods are not "better" or "higher" than human beings. They are merely different from humans. They might be bigger, or deeper, or more expansive, or alternately more focused, in how they function and how we relate to them (as compared to how we relate to, say, other human beings)... but none of this implies a superiority on their part, or the necessity of submission or obedience on our part.

Maybe an analogy will help. We do not, for instance, "obey" a forest fire. We may be helpless in the face of such a fire, and it might even have the power of life or death over us, and we cannot help but deal with the effects of a forest fire when one occurs. But this is not obedience. All this may also be true of a god — we might acknowledge that the influence of a god is overwhelming, or that a god has the power of life or death over us (this is, if I'm remembering correctly, the very definition of a deity that Emma Restall Orr uses). But acknowledging this is not the same thing as obedience.

Furthermore, certain species of trees (such as the lodgepole pine) have adapted to the regular recurrence of forest fires within an ecosystem in ways that are to their own evolutionary advantage. For instance, their cones only open when exposed to extreme heat. On the one hand, this conserves the energy which a tree puts into reproduction, for it will not create and release seeds that are then unable to compete with older, larger and better established trees. On the other hand, this adaptation takes advantage of the conditions created by the forest fire, and young seedlings flourish in the nutrient-enriched soil and the ample sunlight available after a fire has swept through and cleared the area of older, larger trees. But it would be nonsensical to say that, in this case, the lodgepole pine "submits" to the forest fire and, as a result, benefits from its submission. In the same way, we might learn how to cultivate our relationship with a god so that we can better negotiate that god's influence in our lives, even coming to embrace that influence in a way that helps us while acknowledging that we have not altered the nature of that god.... but this is not submission, so much as harmonious relationship.

A forest fire, as an event rather than a living being, is maybe not even the best example. The best example are some of the mutualist or engineer species, which not only learn how to fit themselves into a pre-existing environment, but actually actively shape their environments in ways that carve out the niches necessary for their survival and the survival of other species. My relationship with a forest fire is, admittedly, a bit one way (though I might be able to create environmental conditions that either encourage or discourage a forest fire from happening). But the bear's relationship with the salmon is mutually beneficial to both, and also beneficial to other species within the ecosystem, even though the salmon is eaten by the bear.

In this same way, I might have a relationship with a god who influences my life in a very particular way, who shapes me through that influence and guides my life. I may choose to accept and embrace that influence, but I might just as well choose to resist it or attempt to alter or redirect it through my relationship with that god. Whether I accept or resist this influence determines how it shapes me, and it also determines the future nature of our relationship. In this case, there is a mutual relationship that can be negotiated on both sides, there is a reciprocity of influence (especially if we are assuming a personal and, to some extent, autonomous or freely acting god). But what there isn't — not even a hint of — is hierarchy.

I am still exploring these ideas, and I have a lot more to say on this whole topic — I haven't even scratched the surface of my conversation with Jeff over dinner tonight, in fact — but it is late enough now that I think some ice cream and a good book are in order.

More on this in the near future.

Deity, Discernment and Faith

John Halstead shared a very interesting post the other day, titled "The role of faith and hubris in Paganism," which has sparked a lot of thought and commenting from me. Below, I'm just going to re-post some of the (far too verbose) comments I've left both on his blog, and on a response posted by one of the people he quotes in his post.

My initial response to his blog post was:

I do wonder, though, if much of the character of faith-based hard polytheism is influenced specifically by Protestant and Evangelical denominations of Christianity, particularly here in the U.S. Long before I became a Pagan, I found myself having these kinds of conversations because I was raised in a (liberal) Catholic tradition that emphasized the vital and necessary role of a person’s own conscience and a careful process of discernment in determining how to act on “divine inspiration,” always with an awareness that distinguishing the source of that inspiration can be nearly impossible. (But then again, I’m not sure if this is something that’s really common to Catholicism but not Protestantism, or if it’s something common to liberal Christianity rather than conservative Christianity, or if it’s just an accident that this was an emphasis in my childhood church and doesn’t actually represent a larger trend at all.)

Placing devotion to a deity in the context of personal discernment pretty much rules out for me any notion of handing over my will or submitting myself entirely to an external force. Not to mention — and maybe I am just not special enough to be on any god’s mailing list — I’m rarely on the receiving end of so obvious or direct a message from the gods that it includes how high I need to jump or which bridge I should be jumping from. My spiritual life is much more an on-going process of deep listening to a complex web of urges, attractions, distractions and repulsions, the various sources of which are just as often in the natural world around me or in my own psyche as in some externalized god-form (more often, I should say). I might sometimes talk about my relationship with my gods in terms of “messages” or guidance or inspiration, but it’s almost always metaphorical, not literal.

For Elani, and others, it seems like hubris to question the instructions of the gods. For me, it seems deeply arrogant to be too eager to attribute our various impulses to some external deity, to clothe our instincts or intuitions in the finery of divine inspiration as a way of elevating or ennobling them. It seems hubris to act on our assumptions that we are receiving and hearing such messages correctly, without first turning a very careful and critical eye on all of the ways our own desires, assumptions and projections might be biasing us.

Which is not to say that I don’t believe there is some transcendent divine reality that transcends not only our individual selves (and our Selves), but also our human and more-than-human/natural communities as well. But determining what influence that transcendent divinity has on our lives has, for me, always been an exercise in retrospective contemplation, where the patterns of coincidence and chance resolve into a coherent and beautiful melody even when, at the time, I was only ever bumbling along doing my best to tease out the signal from the noise.

I followed this up with a visit to Elani Temperance's blog, where I eventually succeeded (Google bugs not withstanding) to leave this comment on her post, "The girl who kicked the hornets nest (again), part 2":

I only just got home from traveling for the winter holidays visiting family, and so I was only just now able to catch up on John's post and all of these various replies. I wanted to say thanks for continuing the conversation. I wasn't familiar with your writing and John's brief quote was the first I'd heard of it -- I mention that, because I have some questions that I'd love to hear your thoughts on and, if you've already addressed them elsewhere in your prolific blog, even just a list of links of your past writing on the subject would be awesome. :)

Firstly, I was really struck by how you consistently equated a very specific kind of asymmetrical faith-based approach to religion with religion and/or organized tradition in general. B.T. touched on this already when he pointed out that it wasn't the religiousness of your approach that was threatening to him, but the more specific *kind* of faith you described. I was wondering if you could elaborate on why you don't think that other approaches (which may or may not include the kind of asymmetrical faith you have) are "religious" or "organized." You seem to suggest that traditions without asymmetrical relationship lack structure, cohesion, "solid community, shared gnosis, etc." For instance, right after quoting B.T.'s comment, you say:

"While I doubt that a more structured religious movement within Paganism will be the end of Paganism, I also think that the Traditions based upon religious commonalities will outlast the ones without them, simply because there is some 'glue' missing."

Because you seem to be equating "religion" with *your* particular approach to faith, it sounds a lot like you're saying that the only way to have an organized religious tradition is to place an asymmetrical relationship with the gods, in which the gods hold the power and authority, at the center of one's religious life. But it seems to me that we have many, many examples of long-lasting religious traditions that do not at all include your view of faith as inherently or necessarily asymmetrical. Is that what you meant to say, or have I misunderstood your point here?

Another point that intrigues me, that you didn't really get into in this post but that I'd love to hear more about, is the exact nature of how you listen to your gods. That is, how this asymmetrical relationship with them actually manifests for you. Your example of the synchronicity of the conversation with the masseuse is interesting, but it doesn't sound like anything different from the experiences someone might have if they had a more equal relationship with their god(s), or even someone who didn't believe in or have a relationship with any god(s) at all.

I left this comment on John's original post, and I'll reshare it here because I think it has some bearing:

"Maybe I'm just not special enough to be on any god’s mailing list — but I’m rarely on the receiving end of so obvious or direct a message from the gods that it includes how high I need to jump or which bridge I should be jumping from. My spiritual life is much more an on-going process of deep listening to a complex web of urges, attractions, distractions and repulsions, the various sources of which are just as often in the natural world around me or in my own psyche as in some externalized god-form. I might sometimes talk about my relationship with my gods in terms of “messages” or guidance or inspiration, but it’s almost always metaphorical, not literal.

It seems like for Elani, and others, it's hubris to question the instructions of the gods. For me, it seems deeply arrogant to be too eager to attribute our various impulses to some external deity, to clothe our instincts or intuitions in the finery of divine inspiration as a way of elevating or ennobling them. It seems hubris to act on our assumptions that we are receiving and hearing such messages correctly, without first turning a very careful and critical eye on all of the ways our own desires, assumptions and projections might be biasing us.

Which is not to say that I don’t believe there is some transcendent divine reality that transcends not only our individual selves, but also our human and more-than-human/natural communities as well. But determining what influence that transcendent divinity has on our lives has, for me, always been an exercise in retrospective contemplation, where the patterns of coincidence and chance resolve into a coherent and beautiful melody even when, at the time, I was only ever bumbling along doing my best to tease out the signal from the noise."

I guess my question for you is, how does an asymmetrical relationship with the gods help you to "tease out the signal from the noise"? If you believe that your deities really are real, external beings separate from yourself, then how do you guard against attributing your own desires and biases to them? In other words, how do you avoid making your gods "in your own image"? What process of discernment do you use to distinguish authentic communications from your deities from your own projections or sentimental imaginings? And what are those authentic communications actually like?

Sorry to bombard you with so many questions. I find this conversation really intriguing, and I hope you'll have a chance to explore some of these issues. Thanks for being willing to share and open yourself up to criticism.

I put emphasis on the part where I quote myself from the comment I left on John's post, in part because I think this is maybe the heart of the matter for me, and in part because the second version has been cleaned up a bit for the sake of clarity. For even more clarity, I ended up commenting again on John's original post after he replied to my first comment. In particular, John said:

While I do think there is a certain amount of over-confidence in polytheistic discourse, “hubris” and “arrogance” just do not seem like the right words to describe Elani’s practice. If you watch some of the videos she has posted of her practice, you will see that humility characterizes everything she does.

To which I responded:

Thanks for bringing this up -- I should have clarified more in my original comment, and I hope I didn't step on any toes by accident. "Hubris" may not be the right word for Elani's practice at all. Reading your brief quotes from her here was the first time I've encountered any of her writing, so I really didn't mean to judge her practice specifically (since I know pretty much nothing about it). Instead, I meant to offer my own definition of "hubris" in the religious sense, in the context of our definition of and relationship with deity. (In other words, "That's not a knife. This is a knife." ;))

I'm intrigued by the idea of "kharis" that Elani mentions -- it looks like this Greek word shares etymological roots with words like charity, charisma and even eucharist, all very potent words in various forms of Christianity and many of them directly related to the theological concept of grace. An emphasis on "kharis" as a kind of divine grace once again seems to put this approach to polytheism in line with more Protestant forms of Christianity, not to mention the charismatic forms of the Evangelicals in particular. I really appreciate the enthusiasm and celebratory aspect of Evangelicalism, though being an introvert myself and more inclined to personal moments of poesis, I think I'm naturally more drawn to mysticism than public charismatic movements. :)

All that said... I'm not sure merely a belief in divine grace is enough to justify submission, at least not to me. Why would anyone submit to a deity if they did not hold a belief in the goodness of that deity? It seems like that is not so much an explanation for the choice, as it is its most basic prerequisite. One could easily believe that the gods are benevolent without agreeing that this necessitates complete surrender to them. It seems like, instead, there has to be an accompanying belief that humans are as imperfect and flawed as the gods are benevolent and powerful, in order to explain why we must not merely enjoy but utterly submit to divine guidance.

I'm not particularly convinced by the argument that "willing submission" is really just another act of will. If it is, it is only in a very limited, truncated sense, it seems to me. Take, as a more mundane example, a marriage in which a wife agrees to "submit" to her husband. In practice, this might mean that she allows him to make all of the household and lifestyle decisions (and that when she makes decisions herself, she attempts to enact what she believes is his will, rather than her own). She may relie on his benevolence and love for her to guide him to take her into account when he makes those decisions. It may be that her belief in him is justified and he does his best to do right by her. It may be that she enters the marriage freely, and it might even be that she can leave any time she wishes through divorce. But none of those things change the fact that, within the context of the relationship, she does not act according to her own will but that of her husband's. In other words, she really only has one choice to make (whether or not to submit to her partner's will), and once she has made that choice, by the very nature of that choice she relinquishes her ability to make any others. I suppose that greatly simplifies life, to have only one real choice to make, but it's not the kind of simplicity that I find all that appealing, either in my personal relationships or in my spiritual ones. It's not a model I would strive to instantiate in my life.

I also do not think that this kind of submission is the same as, or the only way to express, mutual trust. Trust is most definitely an act of will. Submission seems to me to be, by definition, the relinquishment of will. "Willing submission" is, in that case, at best a description of a single specific act in which the will itself is abdicated; at worst, it is an oxymoron that only serves to confuse the issue.

But now I'm afraid I've hijacked your comment thread for my own musings! :) Thank you, as usual, for providing so much food for thought.

I have many more thoughts on this and will probably be adding another blog post here as a follow-up. In particular, I'm still very much grappling with the issue of discernment and the theological/spiritual concept of attending (in the sense of (a) deep listening, (b) full presence, (c) service -- all of which are practices which stretch and challenge the self to both transcend and deepen).

I think I am in some respects in a "dark night of the soul." But it is a dark night full of the sound of crickets. I am finding it difficult to listen not because I do not hear anything, but because the deeper I try to listen, the louder the cacophony seems to be, so that discerning some sense or meaning in it has become a challenge. This suggests to me that maybe there is an imbalance in the different ways that I approach the spiritual work of attending -- but that is a question for another blog post.

Consumerism, Social Media and Loneliness

Full disclosure: I am feeling immensely curmudgeony today. In fact, I've been feeling that way for the past several days (as is probably evident from my last post — in which I spoke too soon, several folks on TC ended up sharing some intriguing ideas and information regarding virginity in ancient Greece, so I was a bit premature in bitching about the canned responses... persistent questioning in this case paid off).

One reason for the crankiness is lack of sleep — a nightmare last night had me awake at 2 AM and I didn't fall back asleep until 4 AM, after Jeff had gotten up and headed to the airport. The nightmare involved a group of young people (three, I think, two girls and one boy) who along with some sort of teacher had staged a massacre — they initially set up a scenario where one of the girls was supposedly mauled by a savage, rabid dog and came stumbling out into the view of the crowd dripping with blood, her flesh town, and the two others were somehow also in on it, setting loose the dog and encouraging it to "sick" on anyone who attempted to run (which everyone did), resulting in a mass of chaos as people ran screaming, trampling each other, and others had weapons, knives, etc. so that the dream descended into a jumble of nightmarish images of people with their eyes gouged out and their limbs torn ragged, etc. I didn't wake up afraid, but more just didn't want to close my eyes and be subjected to the violent images again, so I worked at some light-breathing and meditative exercises (including drawing Brigid's mantle about me) while lying in bed. I did eventually fall back asleep after Jeff had left, at which point I had some sort of dream about Abed (from the TV show Community) being abandoned by his friends now that Troy was dating Britta and all his fears about loneliness and being metaphorically "stuffed in a locker" coming true after all — again, not a fearful dream, but this time a very sad one.

I'm feeling out of sorts and disconnected from people. Earlier, before the nightmare started (which was actually a dream within a dream), I was dreaming of being back at my parents' house, hanging out with my brother and Arthur. I realized how much I miss Arthur, and other aspects of living in Pittsburgh (though Arthur isn't even in Pittsburgh anymore) and how I'm still not feeling very well settled out here in Seattle. On Saturday, a cool gray day after Friday's hot and sunny weather, Jeff and I spent an incredibly lazy day hanging out; the people across the street were noisy and jubilant from early in the morning and Jeff said he heard one of them say something about it being "the day of the wedding"... which led to a bout of crying for me, remembering our wedding and how it felt very much like just one more stressful day in a string of stressful days and how hurt I'd been (still am) that none of my family had seemed as excited and happy for me that day as these people across the street sounded (and how the people who'd been nicest to Jeff and me on our wedding and honeymoon were always strangers giving us spontaneous hugs and congratulations). Jeff pointed out that, at least in his family, there has never been a wedding or baby shower that lived up to the ideal of being a truly celebratory experience — that there was always some conflict or controversy or family drama going on, always a certain extent to which people were just faking their excitement and sincerity. So Jeff spent some time with me remembering all of the beautiful things about our wedding and honeymoon, and when was the first time he felt like we were "really married" (the massage we got at the spa in Santa Fe).

Weirdly enough, though I felt wiped out and deeply sad, there was also a lightness, too, a sense of relief. Every year around Lughnasad it seems I get burnt out, and then comes a day when there's a shift in the air, a different energy, and you can taste autumn for the first time. That was what Saturday felt like, and I felt like I could completely relax, curled up on the sofa with the light falling through the low, misty clouds onto our skin so that it looked illuminated, iridescent.

Sunday we spent out in the woods again, hiking around Tiger Mountain (not up to the summit this time, but along some other trails that led to some boulders that form ancient caves on the mountainside). I found myself stressing a bit about our upcoming naturalist training and feeling that I hadn't done as much studying and research as I would have liked since the end of our spring training. I get into these obsessive thought patterns that just wear me out.

This morning, after the lack of sleep, I just find myself annoyed at how idiotic things seem to be and how much I wish I could just step aside from all of it. The latest controversy in the Pagan community is now whether or not it's discriminatory for online services like eBay and Etsy to discontinue the sale of "intangible" services like blessings and prayers, or to restrict the kinds of medical claims sellers are allowed to make for their products. I hate the fact that my community has such a persecution complex that, instead of seeing this as an opportunity to hold fellow community members accountable to a higher standard of honesty and integrity, they want to complain about discrimination. Is the Pagan community so full of snakeoil salesmen?

It especially bothers me in light of the prevalence among Pagans to complain about Christianity as some sort of homogeneous brainwashing that converted the world through intimidation and force all those centuries ago.... Today, consumerism and capitalism function in just the same way, making promises of a better, easier life if you just buy into the system, enforcing that economic model at the point of a gun and securing its interests all over the world through the use of military force. The result: the exploitation of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised in our society, people who are impoverished and marginalized, and the destruction of our environment. If Pagans as a community could muster even a fraction of the self-righteous anger about capitalist consumerism and the problems it perpetuates right here and now as they do over past wrongs (that are often exaggerated or completely imaginary — "never again the Burning Times")..... But no. Instead, they buy into the system completely, they worship gods with explicit connections to the exploitation of land and people in the name of the "freedom" of the market (Columbia, anyone?) and they get all worked up when their ability to sell superstition to the highest bidder is called into question by businesses that do not want to be associated with hucksters and frauds. They invent reasons to feel victimized and persecuted, instead of rising to the challenge of turning a critical eye on the roll that selling spells and blessings plays in their own community. If these restrictions seem to unfairly impinge on Pagans more than those of other religions, maybe we should ask ourselves why our religion is so much more deeply entrenched in capitalism and money-making than these others? Why Pagans are more willing to spend $30 on a love spell than donate $15 to protect the environment against exploitation and destruction? This is not social justice — this is the whining of pampered, privileged white kids who want to be able to profit from selling products branded with dubious "magical" claims without any expectation of accountability or integrity. Maybe I'm just becoming cranky in my old age, but I lean more and more towards the belief that the selling of religious services in general is deeply problematic. (And yeah, I do still fault Bonewits' theology of polytheism to a certain extent, for building capitalist assumptions right into the foundation of what so many folks in the U.S. think of as "hard polytheism.")

Virginity, Schmirginity

I've been trying to get a straight answer from folks over on TC regarding the theological implications of virginity for goddesses like Athena, Artemis, Hekate, etc. So far, the only direct statement I seem to be able to get from anyone is: "the ancient Greeks thought about virginity differently than we think about it today" and every once in a while the slight expansion, "for the ancient Greeks, being a virgin just meant 'unmarried'."

Which is all very well and good, if I were a middle schooler who didn't know how to use Wikipedia. But since this is pretty much the first and most obvious information I was able to find on my own with the very limited resources I have (Wikipedia aside, a bit of Googling brings up some reliable academic sources and a few articles by modern Pagans as well)... it is kind of frustrating. Sometimes it seems that these kinds of general all-purpose responses triggered by key words (virginity? I know I have my pre-formulated reply about virginity in here somewhere...) are used by modern Pagans to prop up a semblance of expertise while covering a multitude of inconsistencies and downright contradictions.

In my short time looking into this, I've found "hard" polytheists who insist on interpretations of the virginity of Greek goddesses to mean everything from "since women in patriarchal ancient Greece were not allowed to have sex outside of marriage, virginity today means you literally have to abstain from sex" all the way to "virginity was about female empowerment, and therefore today it means you should have tons of sex because sexual liberation is how we express our female power." Since I happen to think both of these extremes are poor excuses for feminism and female empowerment, I'm baffled that somehow this whole debate has been carefully managed by resorting to the same basic response, "ancient Greeks thought about virginity differently than we do today." That response leaves me asking, And.....? It's a masterpiece of social cohesion in the face of mind-boggling diversity. It's basically a way of avoiding confronting the fact that your theology says you worship distinct, separate deities, and yet these same deities seem to manifest to you (plural) in such incredibly different ways that from an outside perspective it seems odd to claim that Greek-Virgin-Goddess-X-let's-have-sex is really the same as Greek-Virgin-Goddess-X-no-seriously-cut-it-out, but Goddess-Y-let's-have-sex-oh-by-the-way-I'm-Norse just simply can't be the same deity at all, no way, no how. What I'm saying is, as someone who is not a hard polytheist in any way, the lines that get drawn seem pretty arbitrary.

Hard polytheists crack me up sometimes.

Since I'm not a hard polytheist, I don't have much of a problem is there's a huge diversity in how people relate to and interpret deities that they call by the same name. But it's seems to be that intellectual integrity could be better served by asking hard questions and laying bare that diversity in a way that can give us insights and spark new ways of relating to deity, instead of trying to act the expert. I used to buy the line that Hellenic Recons had so many more sources and resources available to them for their efforts at reconstruction than those interested in CR. But now I'm starting to think that's a load of bull and HR folks are just as deep in the process of cobbling things together from half-understood academic sources as CRs are.

In any case, here are some of my remaining questions about virginity in ancient Greek society (keeping in mind the answer could be and most likely is, "ancient Greek society was diverse and evolving, so the answer to your question is going to be complex"):

• Why would a goddess choose to be virginal? (Is the act of choosing significant, or only the state of being virginal itself? Is there a connection between the two?)
• What is the spiritual or theological significance of virginity in both goddesses and human worshippers?
• If the ancient Greeks merely equated virginity to "being unmarried," then why do so many of the myths involve women who lose their virginity through rape or trysts outside of the context of marriage?
• Why did the Greeks use the same word (nymphe) to describe both "nature spirits" of a local landscape and its features, and a "bride," i.e. a woman who is married but has not yet had children?
• In light of the answer to that question, what is the theological and/or ritual significance of descriptions of Artemis as having nymphs as companions and priestesses?
• How do modern Pagans approach and understand stories of Artemis punishing not only rapists but also the victims of rape and sexual assault?

Reflections on Ritual and Offerings

A response to Bob's post on the DOTR Network about the role of offerings and other aspects of ritual.

I have to admit that I'd already seen that article, and it annoyed me. My honors thesis work was in ritual theory, so I have an academic background in the subject that focused not only on the religious/spiritual significance of ritual in various world traditions, but also on the socio-political and aesthetic aspects of ritual practice. Coming from that perspective, that article sounded to me an awful lot like someone who attended a ritual, felt uncomfortable with the social atmosphere or the particular aesthetics used, and so projected her discomfort onto the gods by claiming or warning that they would be displeased.

This is not the first time that a Heathen blogger on Patheos has made complaints about others "doing it wrong" when it comes to ritual. I'm not sure if this is a common theme among Heathens more than other Pagan traditions, or just a coincidence, but I know I have also talked with Heathens who see the purpose of offerings to the gods as a kind of appeasement to get the gods to leave them alone. One Heathen actually compared worshipping the gods to living in your parents' house - it's nice that they pay the bills and take care of most of the responsibilities, but that doesn't mean you want them hanging around getting into your business and it's better when they're content to leave you alone. This sounds like a pretty adolescent approach to me, honestly.

I think this is one of the big issues with ritual in Paganism, especially because the Pagan umbrella is so diverse and it sometimes doesn't share a theological perspective even among members of the same group. Without a foundation in theology of some kind, ritual can quickly devolve into superstition. There are many reasons why rituals can feel powerful or feel like failures, and they don't all have to do with whether or not you've authentically connected with Spirit or the gods. The emotional, psychological, aesthetic, social and even physiological aspects all play a role in addition to the spiritual. And discerning when authentic spiritual work has been done is something I think best left up to the group who has done the work to develop and engage with the ritual practice, rather than an outsider sitting in and making judgements.

That said, I think Blaidd brings up some really good questions in his post - the practical question of what is done with the offerings perhaps being one of the more important ones. It seems to me that if ritual and offerings is to avoid becoming mere superstition, then it must be all about relationship at its core. But that means it also can't be something as simple as "our ancestors were scared of the Sidhe, so they must be appeased so they don't cause trouble" - this seems about as disrespectful to me as it would be disrespectful and prejudiced to say, "Don't walk through that neighborhood; a lot of black people live there and my parents have always said black people are dangerous." I think in general, gods and other beings, and animals for that matter, are similar to human beings: when you approach with respect and kindness in the interest of being as open and attentive as you can to the needs and desires of the Other, whoever that other is, then you are far more likely to elicit respect and kindness in turn, and this eventually builds into a mutually loving relationship. It is in presuming a relationship or taking it for granted that the disrespect (and thus the danger) lies... but again, we can't always be the judge of how others' relationship with the gods expresses itself, either in ritual or in daily life.

Jeff and I already do offerings to our gods on a regular basis - pouring libations and burning incense are parts of my regular prayer/meditation routine, and we both wear certain symbolic pieces of jewelry and clothing that represent promises we have made to our deities or simply as a reminder to think of them and offer a prayer now and then. As part of my Flamekeeping shift with the Brigidine Cill I belong to, I tend a flame once every twenty days as part of my service to Brighid. And on major holy days, especially when we have the kids with us, we make ritual offerings of bird seed and such to the local woods (and wildlife) - and we also toss "silver in the water," coins into a small blue bowl of water on the altar, which Jeff and I then save up until we have enough to change in for money that we donate to a charity. Since we do much of this on our own, it's not a big deal to us if DOTR doesn't incorporate offerings into its group/public rituals. We have an established relationship with our gods, and if other gods are involved in a given ritual, we see it somewhat like going to a party at a friend's house and meeting their relatives - we're polite and respectful, but don't presume either any special relationship or any special attention as a result. (Of course, this can be a problem if the ritual involves gods that no one performing/attending the ritual actually does have a relationship with - because that's more like crashing someone else's party and expecting special treatment from the hosts.)

So those are my thoughts on the situation. Different situations will call for different types of ritual and offerings, and I see no reason why we can't continue to have public rituals open to anyone, as long as we don't treat the gods as "plug and play" components. Public rituals that involve offerings and prayers focused on the earth or the land can still be very effective without requiring a common agreed upon theology for the most part. But perhaps it would also benefit DOTR as a whole for regular members to help each other cultivate authentic relationships with the gods or beings that each members works with in their own practice as well as in group work?