I'm making some effort to catch up on posts as the year ends. Getting my writing-hinges all oiled up. Back to some practical stuff soon, too...
I’ll put my cards on the table. My goal is to demote the word ‘worship’ from
its specialized place of honor or disdain in modern times. I want to normalize
it, and strip it of its special status.
Let’s
start with the schoolboy stuff:
From
Wikipedia (because I know this one is accurate)
“Worship
is an act of religious
devotion usually directed towards a deity. The word is derived from the Old English
weorþscipe, meaning worship, honour shown to an object, which has been
etymologised as "worthiness or worth-ship"—to give, at its simplest,
worth to something.”
From the Free Dictionary:
wor·ship
n.
1.
a. The reverent love and devotion accorded a deity, an idol, or a sacred
object.
b.
The ceremonies, prayers, or other religious forms by which this love is
expressed.
2.
Ardent devotion; adoration.
3.
often Worship Chiefly British Used as a form of address for magistrates,
mayors, and certain other dignitaries: Your Worship.
[Middle English worshipe, worthiness, honor,
from Old English weorthscipe : weorth, worth; see worth1 + -scipe, -ship.]
From
Merriam Webster
1:
chiefly British: a person of importance —used as a title for various
officials (as magistrates and some mayors)
2:
reverence offered a divine being or supernatural
power; also : an act of expressing such reverence
3:
a form of religious practice with its creed and ritual
Remembering
that dictionaries are only commercial efforts to compile usages, I especially
note two things. First, in no case is worship said to involve personal
abasement, bowing, scraping, etc. Second, I note that worship is not reserved
for any specific category of being. It is extended to gods, ‘supernatural
beings” (never mind…), and honored humans.
Here
we must, once again, discard the weight of historical western religious
thinking. The central principle with which so many of us were raised is that
only “God” is worthy of worship. In that model worship is a special position of
the emotions and intention that elevates “God” above all other things. All
other beings can only be approached with some lesser degree of emotion and
intent – often described in English as reverence or devotion. The Roman church uses Latin terms:
Latria
vs. Dulia and Hyperdulia: Latria
is sacrificial in character, and may be offered only to God. Catholic and
Orthodox Christians offer other degrees of reverence to the Blessed Virgin Mary and to the Saints; these
non-sacrificial types of reverence are called hyperdulia
and dulia,
respectively. In English, dulia is also called veneration. Hyperdulia is
essentially a heightened degree of dulia provided only to the Blessed Virgin.
So
this is the deeply-written core notion of western religiosity – that worship
belongs only to the Highest, the Most True, the Ultimate, etc. I think this is
among the most important notions to discard as we attempt to regain an
understanding of ancient ways. It is an imposition of monotheism, for the most
part.
When
approaching a word with thick layers of meaning I like to return to
etymological origins. I know this isn’t the end of any story about a term, but
I like it for clarification. The term worship does not have, at its base, any
reference to the divine or spiritual. Instead it refers to the human act of
giving honor or respect to another.
Perhaps
we should begin at what may be the strange end for westerners – the worship due to other people.
“the five central religious duties or
"sacrifices" of the Hindu householder: paying homage to seers, to
Gods and elementals, to ancestors, to living beings and, manushya yajna,
"homage to men," which includes gracious hosting of guests.”
In
English we find ‘worship’ applied to magistrates and other ‘worthies’. There is
simply no reason to consider worship to be some high and special position of
the heart, reserved only for the highest and most-special things. It is proper,
in my opinion, to offer worship to anything in life one finds worthy of
respect.
In
fact, that would be my own definition of worship in a Pagan context:
The ritualized
expression of respect and honor.
The
ritualization part can feel funny for modern people in our informal age. In
more formal times ‘ritualized respect’ included proper forms of address and
detailed rules for social interactions. For some periods and in some places
this ritualized respect might have included a degree of ‘bowing and scraping’
(when your lord can kill you or make you rich at a whim, there’s this
tendency…). More commonly it includes exchange of gifts, mutual obligation and
mutual respect between me and the powers that I worship. In some extremely
formal situations, such as eastern guru-worship we see the material presence of
a teacher treated as the idol of a deity. That’s strange for moderns, but fully
within the spirit of the traditional idea of worship. Most notably for us it
again illustrates that worship in a polytheistic context is not limited to the highest
or ultimate being.
In
the same way, worship does not require any sense of hierarchy or
superiority/inferiority. Kings pay ritual respect to other kings, farmers to
farmers and, yes, gods to gods. I fall back on Hindu tales again, where when
one god petitions another for aid they are plainly said to worship and
sacrifice to them. Hellenic story is less specific, though we plainly see gods
petitioning other gods for aid. In modern Hinduism the pious greeting is the ‘Namaste’
or “Namaskar’, understood to mean “The god in me greets the god in you with
worship”.
Durga is worshipped by other gods. |
In
this we can understand that no being is omnipotent. No being shapes the world
through personal will alone. All beings exist in relationship, depending on the
power and good-will of others for our successful lives. All beings must
maintain relationship with other beings in order to work our will – even individual
gods. Thus it is not abasement or acknowledgement of superiority that drives
worship, nor need it be based on overwhelming awe and wonder. Simply the need
or desire to establish relationship is all that is involved in the basic idea
of worship.
In
ADF we sometimes do a style of rite in which we pass the toasting cup, and each
present toasts to those spirits that are important to them. Strictly ethnic
Pagans might be appalled at some of our rounds, as people toast gods of various
cultures, ancestors, nature spirits and, often enough the spirits of living
animals, especially their personal companions. While I find a degree of humor
in worshipping one’s housepets, I can’t really fault it. It seems proper to
respect and honor those you allow to live with you, and thus proper to express
that respect in a sacred way. Worship is no more fraught than that.
Next,
I find that Pagan worship in no ways requires or assumes exclusivity. There is
not the slightest notion from ancient lore that the gods were jealous of one
another, or that they ‘competed’ for worshippers. While households, occupations
and districts might have their favorite local powers it was understood that
people invoked the gods at need, through the customary methods of offering and
asking. On the other hand too much is made of ‘categorizing’ the gods (love,
war, etc). If a worshipper had a relationship with a powerful spirit that would
be the first spirit one asks for aid, even if one is asking a mother goddess
for victory in strife. When travelling it was normative, and good manners, to
worship the gods of the house or land in which one found oneself. The notion of
loyalty to one’s gods did not commonly include exclusivity.
Some
religious models suggest that reciprocity is impiety – that we ought to worship
because the gods are too wonderful not to worship, and that asking for things
in turn is impious. There is great value in generating experiences of awe and
wonder in the personal mind. However, I think that from a Pagan perspective we
must set aside the notion that worship is primarily a response to awe.
Certainly approaching powerful spirits is like approaching a Tesla coil – it produces
effects. Those effects are, themselves, desirable, and lead to repeated action.
However I don’t think we need some moth-to-the-flame motivation for worship –
self-interest is a noble enough cause. We worship because it is good to worship
– it produces good for us, andfor the spirits with which we interact.
Proceeding
from that I would suggest that Pagan or magical worship is not primarily a
position of the heart, but a deed of the hands. Worship is accomplished through
willed action. Usually this is ritual action – making an offering, reciting a
charm in a spirit’s name, etc. It can be a purely internal action - such as a
visualization and silent invocation – but it is deliberate, conscious and
focused. The spirits may or may not be concerned with the ‘sincerity’ of the
action, so long as the proper ritualized respect is shown. My experience is
that the more intimate one’s relationship with a god or spirit becomes the more
this stuff matters, though even my hearth gods do not seem to require every offering
to be made from the very sweetest position of my heart.
These
positions – mutual worship, non-exclusivity, the piety of reciprocity, and
praxis-preference – are easy to find attested in lore. Forgive me for not
tracking down citations for this blog post.
I
suppose my goal here is to rinse away some of the recent accretion of nonsense
on the fine old idea of worship. It’s no big deal. When you offer a guest a
drink on arrival it is worship. When you leave a harvesting-offering for an
herb or tree spirit it is worship. When you place your ancestors’ pictures in a
place of honor it is worship. From there of course one proceeds to the other traditional
elements of worship – singing hymns, giving praise, offering food and drink.
What guest would not be pleased by such kindnesses?
This
is why I do not hesitate to say that I worship my ancestors, or the
land-wights, or the ground I walk on. It’s only right, and no big deal.
5 comments:
Trying to redefine how we use words is a huge undertaking and one I have been taken to task over a few times myself.
I support and wish you lots of luck in promoting this paradigm shift.
Yeah, I know. I just hate seeing good, solid terms hobbled by popular sentiment. Let's at least know what stuff means at its core.
thank you for clearing up something I have been having issues with. you said it clearly and in such a way that I can wrap my mind, such as it is, around it. thank you sir.
Splendid piece,thanks. There's one use of the word I'm surprised you didn't quote, as it fits this paradigm remarkably well: Until 1928, the Anglican marriage rite had the couple say to each other. "With this ring I thee wed. With my body I thee worship. And with all my worldly goods I thee endow." In the modern revision, at least in the Episcopal Church, that became "...and with all that I am and with all that I have, I honor you."
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