Doubt (Why I’m Not a New Ager)

“I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms upon awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt, and found her virgin in the morning”

“Doubt,

Doubt Thyself.

Doubt even if thou doubtest thyself.

Doubt all

Doubt even if thou doubtest all.”

“We place no reliance on virgin or pigeon,

Our method is science, our aim is religion.”

Aleister Crowley

I’ve been wasting time on the computer, despite having Too Much to do. Since I joined Facebook, hanging out on the computer has changed for me. I used to waste time by hanging out in religion chat rooms on Yahoo (and on MSN back when they had free chat). That could be fun, though I’ll admit that hanging with chatroom atheists became even more tedious than chatroom fundamentalists. At least with the latter I could say the word ‘spirit’ without having to digress into secondary debate for a half-hour. The good news is that on Facebook I can select discussion groups that are really focused on topics that interest me. No surprise those include Druidry and Paganism at the top of the list.

In past few days there has been a small wave of New Age visitors to one of the larger Druid zones. One woman tried to explain how the Voynich Manuscript contained the “lost language of the Druids” etc, and talked about ‘Druids of many races’ before ‘the murders’ etc. Another fellow wanted to apply Castaneda and the Celestine Prophecy to Druidism, and was looking for the Truth ‘behind’ all the world’s religions. All in all the fairly contentious Druid-oids on the boards were polite, though eventually the responses amounted to “Aw, come on…” In a few days the New Agers were gone.

One fellow described himself as a ‘possibility thinker’. He explained that when he looked at ideas his first impulse was to think about possibilities – possible connections between the ideas and other ideas, possible meanings, etc. This led him to embrace things like “The Peruvians *might* have learned or transmitted some of their wisdom through the ancient Druids.”

I found myself in sympathy with the notion of possibility thinking, and asked myself why I didn’t do more of it, and why the long-stretch possibilities embraced by some New Agers seemed so unreasonable to me. The fact is that my occult career has not inclined me to be ‘open to belief’. Rather it has inclined me towards doubt.

I suppose that’s the result of a lifetime of habit. After all, in order to even begin my journey toward Paganism I had to doubt the religious assertions of my parents and community. In the late 60s and early 70s when I was setting out the notion that all religions were part of some single great Truth was popular in some parts the witchcraft and occultism I was reading, but as far as I could see even from initial reading it just wasn’t so. I considered Blavatsky, Bailey, and the Theosophists to be nonsense on the face of it, once I read a bit, and the whole “New Group of World Servers” and suchlike early New Age stuff just wasn’t sorcerous enough for my aesthetic.

So, why did I find myself pursuing skepticism as I continued my occult investigations, where so many decide that wisdom lies in embracing lots of strange and new ideas? I dunno, maybe some people feel like a restrictive upbringing tells them that they aren’t allowed to believe in all these cool, different ideas that are out there. Thus when they reject the dogmatism and codified mytho-histories of traditional western religions, or of materialist reductionism they throw themselves open to anything that catches their imagination.

I was willing enough at first. I remained open-minded about Atlantis for a long time, waited for Edgar Cayce’s prophecies about California to come true, hoped that parapsychology would reveal the secrets of the inner planes to materialist science. Know what – none of that has happened. I guess as time wore on, and my own reading led me into scholastic basics, including the real prehistory of the world (i.e. the one they teach in colleges), real archeology (not 19th century archeology, that is) etc. Atlantis clearly became a non-starter. Blavatsky’s descriptions of the Hindu mysteries became untenable as I studied real eastern lore, New Age chakras, same deal. Maybe I was just lucky to have discovered thinkers like Crowley, Bonewits  (“Real Magic" was the best mix of skepticism and good magical advice available in 1972) and later Wilson. They made a fine antidote to, say Pauwels and Bergier.

Truly my whole occult intellectual history has been one of progressively disproving popular crap scholarship to myself. I started out really wanting to believe that modern Witchcraft was a survival of ancient Euro-Paganism, that secret brotherhoods of initiates maintained a lineage of wisdom reaching back into ancient days, that the Tarot was an occult cypher inherited from wizards of old. I no longer consider any of that true. In my migration into Celtia I learned that Graves was a fake, and that trying to fit non-Hermetic pantheons onto the Tree of Life produced bad mythography. I abandoned the idea that there could be one great mythic framework that explained all of “the mysteries”.

Anyway, I guess that I’m a probability thinker. While lots of things, maybe anything, may be possible, a much smaller set of things is probable; really only a few are likely in any given moment. I think that it is this kind of thinking that makes successful results happen. So at this point I exclude from my thinking almost all ‘speculative’ history, physics and cosmology, in favor of more traditional patterns. I consider western science to be the most reliable description of the material world, scholastic history to be the most reliable description of human history, and traditional magical and religious models (by which I mostly mean pre- or non-monotheist ones) to be the most reliable spiritual models. So in general I reject what I characterize as New Age alternative sciences and histories.

Now, one must check the bath for babies. Many real traditional methods and systems, as well as the few working modern innovations, end up shelved with New Age stuff. While many popularizations of feng shui, astrology, even energy-meridian work may be pretty much crap, that doesn’t negate their value when studied from real sources. But once I see terms like ‘Ascension’ or ‘Galactic center’ or ‘Pleideians’ I start to smell what I consider pseudo-wisdom.

I do apply this same skepticism to claims that I would love to accept. I don’t really care whether alien wise-guys want to help us, but if there were really secret survivals of ancient Pagan cults among families in Europe I’d be all a-twitter. I doubt that there are. Same deal with claims of Druidic survivals in Gaelic countries. I’ll believe them when someone produces some actual evidence of them.

This habit of doubt has taught me not to build complex webs of symbolism and prop them up as if they are True. The building part can’t really be avoided, if one is to do anything in magic. I’ve done my share of multiplying of symbols, invocations and ritual patterns, as well as various speculative mythologies. I still have not, after 25 years, created for myself a ‘pantheon’ of Gaelic Gods limited to a specific number. There are certainly reconstructionists more rationalist than me, given my willingness to go all-in for current revelation by the spirits, but I try to take a careful, scholastically-aware approach to how I mix traditional myth with current practice.

I suppose I’ve succeeded in internalizing Crowley’s advice, above. I ‘believe’ (i.e. it is my opinion that) that I live in a world constructed by my perceptions within my mind - by my sensorium and my neurological editing functions. I would like to think that humans have some deep, innate, perhaps divinity-linked ability to bypass sensory awareness and gain direct perception of reality. But I doubt it. I remain an agnostic, in that I don’t believe humans have the equipment to arrive at a certain and uncorrectable knowledge of reality. I choose fairly conservative working models of reality (barring that little business about the existence and influence of spiritual reality, my world-view is much like any scientist’s). I operate as if my working models were true, and to the extent that I get the predicted results I hold my model to be confirmed.

Worked for Ptolemy…

But no matter how elegant or satisfying, any model can be shot down with the next discovery. That’s that Method of Science thing….

The Coolest Thing I've Seen This Week

Nanocthulhu Lovecrafti

Now, it's always cool when they find new speces, and it's cool that some scientist gets to name them.
It is very cool when they decide to enshrine the Priest of the Old Ones in the halls of taxonomy.

Merry May - Season-starter Update

Hey, this is my 200th post, which I didn't notice until the next day : ). Thanks to all you readers... on we go!

Summer arrives like a train around here, big, loud and steamy. I’m glad that I had a good winter for ritual and magical work, because now the face rises from the books and shrine and turns to the fire. More time with drums, less with the keyboard.

This is my usual beginning of summer post. May is always packed – public Beltaine last weekend (our best weather in the last several years), May Party here at Tredara this weekend and then the Wellspring Gathering on Memorial Day weekend. I’ll try to produce some content here, though. I have a couple of essays in the chute, but they’ll be done when they’re done.

I’m working on a next phase for the Pagan spirit-arte methods. My moment of revolutionary zeal in the spring has set me to developing a suite of rites intended to draw the spirits back into manifestation in a specific place or region. Such a grand goal must begin with small arrangements, and presently I’m working on rites offered to the Irish god Manannan. As always my problem is in identifying  and classifying the not-god spirits. Unlike Brigid, the Mac Lir has no handy three aspects or list of titles that can provide the ‘archangels’ for the model. I’ve taken another route, and I do hope to test it this summer. I have a growing certainty that Manannan the Trickster is a correct patron for a work of re-enchanting the land.

I’m going to be doing the Court of Brigid Working again at Eight Winds Festival at the end of June. Once I get this suite of Manannan rites to a point I must go back to the original festival script of the Brigid work and see what my year has taught me about it. I look forward to getting a chance to improve it, and test the improvements on willing subjects : ). I think that soon following I will produce a published version of the rites, with the list of spirits and their sigils.

In connection with the trip to Eight Winds I expect to get a bit of time for tourism in Cali, both LA-ish and more northerly. Should be fun. Next year maybe back to the British Isles!

Then it will be off to Starwood! I’m still doing on-the-ground organizer duties, so I still try to avoid doing serious occult work at the event. It’s too bad, really, because it is my biggest potential audience of the year. Maybe one of these years I’ll redirect my energies to doing some Theurgy for the multitudes. As it is ADF will be doing some specialized teaching and the usual demo ritual and I’ll be working with that. I’ll sing at a gig or two there and enjoy what is really more of a working vacation.

Now it’s back to the mowing and prepping. It’s May Party weekend here. This is actually the oldest party on the place, having been held by L since way back in the mid-80s. It’s a secular but Beltaine-charged gathering with a nice tall maypole-dance as the sunset centerpiece. I mean to get pics this year – we’ll see how many of them are blog-friendly ; ).

Hope you are enjoying the merry month of Beltaine. May your luck be good and your life be rich.

Yes, I’m Pagan!

There’s news, eh?

Yesterday was national Pagan Coming Out Day. It’s pretty much a redundancy for me, since I’m nearly as out as one can be, without actually hanging a ‘witch’ shingle or raising an idol in the *front* yard. (The one is the back yard can’t be seen from the road.) My friends, family and bosses know, and if every co-worker doesn’t know it’s only because we have a pretty religion-neutral workplace where the subject doesn’t come up. Nevertheless I’m a Pagan, and proud to wear the label.

I must admit finding the unwillingness of some folks to adopt the label to be rather puzzling. Yes, I know it isn’t an authentic label from any ancient culture. I know it may be an invented term probably first popularized by Christians to describe the hold-outs of the Old Religion. I know that it conflates systems from multiple cultures into a mish-mash modern term that tells very little about what any individual may believe.

Too bad. I’m willing to use it anyway. I wish more people were. One of the main reasons, I think, that the term is viewed askance is that it has no clear definition in terms of religious doctrine or even cultural description. The word is in flux, and has been for 100 years. I hope to help it settle in to refer primarily to Us. It hasn’t much use for anything else.

So, I have an ongoing philosophical project to devise a definition of the word Paganism that suits what I think are the unspoken assumptions of the movement, and doesn’t insult scholarship. The first part of that isn’t possible in any absolute sense – too many will always disagree, and our theological flux is at least as wide as the flux in the word’s definition. Still, one can apply weight to one’s end of the balance, and see how it goes…

Toward A Definition of Pagan Religions

Let’s start with the schoolboy stuff. I remind us that dictionaries trail behind usage, and are commercial indicators, not legislators of the meaning of words.
I’m rather pleased to see the online Free Dictionary give:
1. An adherent of a polytheistic religion in antiquity, especially when viewed in contrast to an adherent of a monotheistic religion.
2. A Neopagan.
3. Offensive
a. One who has no religion.
b. An adherent of a religion other than Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.
4. A hedonist.
(Odd that 'hedonist' isn't on the offensive list...)

Oxford gives:
1: a person holding religious beliefs other than those of the main world religions: a Muslim majority had to live in close proximity to large communities of Christians and pagans
2: dated, derogatory a non-Christian.
3: a member of a modern religious movement which seeks to incorporate beliefs or practices from outside the main world religions, especially nature worship.
It is interesting that the current language says “the main world religions”. Just a decade ago it would surely have said “Christianity, Judaism or Islam”, and maybe not Islam.

Merriam Webster gives:
1: heathen: especially : a follower of a polytheistic religion (as in ancient Rome)
2: one who has little or no religion and who delights in sensual pleasures and material goods : an irreligious or hedonistic person
3: neo-pagan

In all three cases I’m pleased to see that neopaganism is given as one of the standard definitions of the word, and that two of the three give traditional polytheism as a/the defining characteristic. Usage has long abandoned the use of ‘Pagan’ to refer to ‘any non-Abrahamic religion’. Dictionaries are following suit, and hopefully on-line pontificators on the topic will catch up.

Also interesting is the ongoing development of the understanding of the etymology of the term.

The Online Etymology Dictionary gives:
pagan late 14c., from L.L. paganus "pagan," in classical Latin "villager, rustic, civilian," from pagus "rural district," originally "district limited by markers," thus related to pangere "to fix, fasten," from PIE root *pag- "to fix" (see pact). Religious sense is often said to derive from conservative rural adherence to the old gods after the Christianization of Roman towns and cities; but the word in this sense predates that period in Church history, and it is more likely derived from the use of paganus in Roman military jargon for "civilian, incompetent soldier," which Christians (Tertullian, c.202; Augustine) picked up with the military imagery of the early Church (e.g. milites "soldier of Christ," etc.). Applied to modern pantheists and nature-worshippers from 1908.

That’s all just as I would have said, ten years ago. Lately it has been noticed that ‘pagus’ doesn’t refer to anything specifically rural or countryside. The meaning of ‘district limited by markers’ applied to urban areas as well as to country districts. As a modern metaphor we might think of ‘wards’ or ‘parishes’. Culture being what it was in a tribal or post-tribal Indo-European nation each district would have had its constellation of temples and shrines, around which the natives would have grown up. So if ‘pagan’ has a meaning derived from its etymology (always a chancy claim…) it might be ‘local’. Pagan religion was/is the religion of the Gods of the place where you live.

In this context one can see why even later polytheist Hellenes, for instance, might have used it as a term of disdain. As cosmopolitanism crept into culture, with the establishment of multi-ethnic cities and multi-state empires in Europe, the ‘religious marketplace’ would have come into existence. Many intellectuals and fashionable aesthetes would have been interested in foreign cults, brought in strange books from eastern lands, etc. The fashion in Rome before Christ, for instance, was certainly for various mystery cults – Isis, Dionysus/Orpheus, the fashion for Judaism and the rising monotheism of the Neoplatonists. Those who clung to their local Olympian gods in the old way of sacrifice and blessing might have seemed unfashionable to the literate classes. Unfortunately, that’s all surmise on my part, until we find some snippet of text from the period. It does make sense of the term ‘civilian’ since ‘pagan’ would have most directly meant ‘local’ to the world-travelling legions.

So we find ourselves with both polytheism and locality as characteristics. That’s good so far. What we don’t find is any sense of Pagan applies exclusively or primarily to rural or countryside settings. One hears occasional complaints that ‘urban Pagan’ is a linguistic contradiction. Recent scholarship says it ain’t so.

In later usage the political church used Pagan to refer to all those who held to any of the previous cults or sects. Since the church was willing to consider all of those gods as members of Satan’s single conspiracy of demons it made it possible to imagine a single ‘religion’ that the Christian religion was set against. Thus when that church encountered the tribes of the north they recognized Paganism as well. Of course they were more or less right. The religions of Greece, Rome, Gaul, Germany, and the Isles were similar enough to be recognizable to literate commenters, though different enough to be remarked upon. But rites of sacrifice to great powers, and local cults of stone, trees, wells and springs, as well as varieties of ancestral and ghost religion would have been as recognizable as Lutheranism to a Catholic.

Here we enter a phase where the literate observers of the traditions we seek to emulate are writing from a position of active opposition to what they observe. Mostly we have the laws written by churchmen forbidding the continuing remnants of the Old Religions. In these the most common references are to the making of offerings to wells, stones and trees, along with formulaic language forbidding ‘witchcraft’ or ‘ill-working’ that surely refers to practices that would have been called part of religion by the previous generations. To me, that is enough to indicate the practice of the veneration of ‘natural’ or material presences as the habitations of spirits. That, in turn, is enough for me to refer to the Paganism the churchmen observed as ‘nature worship’.

I know that there are segments of the polytheist scene that resist the term ‘Nature Worship’. I must admit to being puzzled at that. Sure I direct my ‘worship’ (that is, my ritualized respect) mainly to the Gods and Spirits. I don’t see how the Gods and Spirits can be conceived of as outside of nature. Isn’t the idea of a ‘Creator’ that exists outside of the existing cosmic order an Abrahamic thing? Didn’t the Gods arise from the Mater-ial of the world, whether in the First Slaying or from the Cosmic Egg or the Stuff of Night, etc.? To me the whole cosmological picture of Indo-European religions places Gods, Spirits and all *inside* what one might call nature.

All that aside, if one makes offering to a spirit that lives in a tree or stone or pool, that is nature worship. To be clear, this has zero to do with one’s position on political environmentalism, or on any specific model like the Gaia Hypothesis. Traditional Paganism seems plainly to declare that divinity can be present in and as objects in the material world. It is also plainly acceptable, even desirable, to understand divinity as specifically present in or as the object. We can discuss whether some separation between spirit and matter might exist, but we’ll be doing it as we make offerings to a tree or mountain. Even those who make offerings to stars are honoring nature.

So we find ourselves with polytheism, locality and the divine-in-nature as visible characteristics of what has been previously called Paganism. Do we find those in Neopaganism? In fact we do. While the theological discussions of the nature of the Gods in Neopaganism ranges from monism to abstract duotheism to various ever-firmer polytheisms, our practice almost always includes addressing the spiritual in multiple names and persons. The ancients never asked one another whether the Gods were ‘aspects’ of one another, except in moments of philosophizing, and we needn’t either. It simply isn’t important for us to agree on how many gods there “really” are, or what their natures might be, to worship together or to accept that we are part of the same broad religious tradition, which I think it would be simplest to call Paganism.

Locality is the rule in modern Paganisms. While books may transmit broad concepts and some specific images of the Gods and Spirits, every living-room circle or one-woman shrine will make their own connections with the Powers. We can agree that all of our local Hecates are presences of Hecate, but Your Shrinage May Vary as to flavor, potencies or cult from the Hecate in the next pagus. Usually it is poets, who have to entertain in multiple neighborhoods, who have to be able to speak of Hecate (or whomever) in a way that all will recognize. If we were all to simply Pagan up, it would be entirely consistent to simply welcome every hearth-god and local cult as another aspect of the religions. Disputes about who is correct are just irrelevant to a polytheist attitude toward the practice of religion, though they were probably inevitable in the ale hall or symposium.

How nature-grounded is Neopaganism? Not enough yet, imo, but progress is being made. Re-enchanting the landscape isn’t a decision you can make on Facebook. It will take a generation or three to start to have storied places of our new Paganism in North America. Living rooms just won’t be preserved long enough. One can watch the work happening through various blog-windows on the internet as modern spiritual workers make new alliances, meet the guardians of local places, and develop local nature-based cults. Some of our success in securing and remembering storied places may be would up with our ability as a movement to develop institutional management of land and money. That can only be made easier by being willing to join together under a generic banner that makes room for all our local variants.

Finally, it seems to me that some folks resist the label ‘Pagan’ because they don’t wish to be associated with certain others people who use the term. For this I have nothing but disdain. Do these folks think they are sooo cool that they would lose cool-points by wearing the same label as less cool people? Are they concerned that their own coolness will allow less cool people to claim unworthy coolness by association? In personal style I am more like a tie-dye hippie than a business-suit professional, but if I can stand to be associated with various Euro-Pagan followers of Evola, Guenon, etc, then I think even conservative polytheists can stand to be associated with me, in order to grow a Pagan movement that can have a useful impact on western culture.

Pagan isn't a term that can tell much about the specific spirituality of any adherent. Truly the same can be said for the term Christian or Hindu. While Christianity often pretends unity around scripture and tradition the practices and beliefs of members vary widely from sect to sect, and also from believer to believer. No amount of legislated doctrine can prevent people from developing their own opinion. However 'Pagan' can serve as a general tag for most of the polytheistic, mystical paths that have grown up in or near it. We freely use the term 'bread', but to hear something called bread tells us very little about its actual composition, style or flavor. It remains a useful term, as does Pagan.

(Engage full soap-box-mode) So I really do encourage those who are polytheists (that includes animism, for me) who seek to work their spirituality in the land where they dwell with the spirits that are part of their work to be willing to stand with others in identifying as ‘Pagan’. There’s not a reason in the world not to.

Pagan Theology – Crisis of Faith, & Star’s List

Star Foster has written a nice essay discussing some of her internal process around a shift from one school of Pagan thought and practice toward another. Do read the whole piece here .

I sympathize with her, and have certainly been there. I have made two big shifts in ritual style and symbolic matrix in my occult/religious career. The first was from the local neo-wiccan system in which I did my first group ritual work, and which I helped to write into the specific tradition of an initiatory witchcraft group. New tools, new symbol-net, etc. In that case much of the cosmology and the ritual map remained familiar, and there was the advantage of rather being ready to accept the authority of the initiation to drive the shift.

The second big move was to move away from the four-square, seven-tiered cosmos of post-hermetic Wicca, in which the world-view of renaissance magic was often employed with ‘God’ snipped off the top of the ladder. As I entered a ‘Druidic’ system I took the approach fashionable in early Celtic Reconstructionism and entered a Triadic cosmos. The four principles that late Hermeticism calls the ‘elements’ are in that model arranged as a triad of Land, Sea and Sky with the Sacred Fire at the center. This reflects a number of archaic arrangements, such as the Hellenic kingships of Zeus, Poseidon and Hades. In one stroke of a leaf-blade I discarded the four elements in the quartered circle, the four ritual tools, and the seven planets (which are not very findable in Celto-Germanic lore). Likewise any traces of post-Golden Dawn duotheism from my Wiccan days were discarded in favor of a much harder polytheism.

The process of making that transition internally took years. It has been the process of helping to build a new Pagan system, now in fairly wide use, and of working at home to build an esoteric practice based on it. So I surely understand how Star might find herself at sea as she pushes off from the shore of a previous system.

Somehow, none of this ever felt like a ‘crisis of faith’ to me. I don’t actually put much value on ‘faith’ in my religion work. I don’t call what I do ‘my faith’ and I’d never speak of my religion as ‘a faith’. I rather dislike that turn of phrase as an effort to duck the primary term ‘religion’. I prefer to talk about ‘our work’ and the ‘work’ of my religion.

Maybe it was because I never had to leave behind my Gods as I shifted systems. I had been moving away from the ‘all gods/goddesses are one god/goddess’ position steadily over my whole life. I already understood my witchcraft cult as worshipping a small list of specific Gods in our traditional way, not some cosmic principle of goddess-ness. Since I was already in a pretty Gaelic system I was able to simply transplant my devotion to Brigid, Lugh, etc. from its Wiccan ritual context to a more Druidic one. Nevertheless the cosmology and ritual-pattern shift was a big one, and sometimes dizzying, especially while doing both systems at once.

So I wish Star well in her path – may her genius guide her and her daemon open her ways. The easy advice: push on, choose some practices and begin them, and keep studying. Also, keep writing about theological ideas – I love that stuff! In fact I was moved to respond to Star’s list of 10 things she wants in a religion.

1. The Gods are distinct, greater than myself, and have an interest in humankind.

This is fine. At least, there appear to be things that act like what human tales call the Gods. I don’t believe I need a coherent opinion about their ‘real’ nature to work with them, or to have a viable religion. I do have two or three favorite models of what they might “really be”.

2. Any unity beyond the Gods is not sentient. Monotheism, in any form, is incorrect.

Agree. If there is a unified field it isn’t a person, doesn’t have volition or providential will. The wills in the cosmos are multiple.

3. I am a polytheist, not an animist, a pantheist, a panentheist, a duotheist, a henotheist or a monotheist.

Here I would only quibble to say that I see polytheism as a subset of animism, really. The world is full of spirits (animism) some spirits are quite mighty, and have a special relationship of worship and blessing with mortals. Those are what we call gods. But it is a difference of degree and not of kind between a God, one of the Dead, an herb-spirit and my own spirit.

4. Religion is the bond between humankind and the Gods, and its purpose is to foster excellence and virtue for the survival of the species.

Agree entirely. I might express the second by saying that its purpose is to foster health, wealth and wisdom for the folk, and wisdom, love and power for the soul.

5. Religion is not what makes me feel good, nor is it therapy or pop-psychology.

Right. Though spiritual methods can be used for healing of any sort, including emotional or even behavioral healing, that isn’t its primary purpose. Pagan religion doesn’t intrinsically propose that most people are wounded, or that we all come to the divine in some state of weakness. Rather, Pagan religion assumes a core of strength and capability in every person.

I do think that the practice of religion, though it is often work, should make one feel good. Like any kind of work/fun deal that may include less fun parts…

6. Religious culture should be multi-generational and fully accessible.

Agree entirely. That will mean the building of Pagan religious institutions that can survive the death of their founders, probably including property, fundraising and all the surrounding deal. It also doesn’t preclude esoteric work inside the larger structure.

7. Religion is a fully realized worldview and way of being. It is not loosely-connected disparate elements. It is coherent with a vocabulary sufficient to express all of its nuances and concepts clearly, but not bound by pure logic.

This is complicated. A culture is a fully realized worldview and way of being. Religion is a subset of culture. In a multi-religion culture such as the USA, some religions make a great deal out of ‘world view’, and consider the holding of the correct opinions about this and that to be a part of the practice of the religion.

Myself, I don’t think that to have been the case in ancient Paganisms. In no case do we find a ‘credo’ of Athenian religion (to choose an example). One can find various philosophers who proposed various sets of opinions (opinion = doctrine, linguistically), but none of them became mandatory for participation in the community’s religious life. Religious life depended on observances – on making the sacrifices, remembering the nymphs of the pool and the Gods in their temples, attending the community rites. No priest would ask what one ‘believed’ (that is, what one’s opinion was) about, say, the nature of the gods and spirits.

In our modern religious supermarket environment one might hope for a Paganism that could be bound between covers. It would be comfortable if Pagan ways could be delineated and defined but I think that when we do that, and to the extent that we do that, we do something unlike what the Old Ways were. I think that religion in Athens would have been a lot like a loosely-collected set of traditions, customs and ideas. The ways of one household would not have been identical to another, and even different Athenian-kingdom villages would have had different festivals and customs. In a polytheism religion tends to become various, local and differentiated.

As to vocabulary, I’d expect a number of competing vocabularies to be the norm. In a system with no authority that determines required opinion various schools of thought will arise and compete. While members of those schools might keep some religious customs separately from one another they would also be likely to turn up together at a city festival. In this way I suppose we can talk about sects within what is still describable as a single Pagan religion. I think we find a nearly exact parallel in what is called Hinduism, which is really a family of related schools and practices, sharing myth, custom and history, but expressed specifically in what amount to different sub-religions.

That leaves any given Pagan – especially one working without a ‘village’ or largish worship group – the task of essentially creating their own hearth religion. This is a natural part of building our modern polytheism, I think. In old times hearth religion would have been based on family ancestors (probably buried under the house), the Gods associated with the family livelihood and customs, and the local land-wights whose cooperation allowed access to resources. That hearth religion would have interfaced with local village religion through the community calendar-festivals and the public sacrifices sponsored by rich people, and it all might have interfaced with some royal or tribal religion to which one went on pilgrimage once in a while. At least Ireland looks likely to have been that way…

Here’s the thing. Not a single part of that shared religion that might cross an entire island such as Eire would *require* a “fully realized worldview and way of being”. Any two cattle-barons standing next to one another might disagree wildly on what the nature of the gods was, whether there ‘really’ were Gods or an Otherworld, etc. Certainly there would have been cultural norms of opinion, and repeated tales and histories offered as evidence of the gods and spirits, but once again devout participation in religion would not have involved the holding of specific opinions or beliefs.

Incidentally, the essay discusses mystery religons, such as initiatory witchcraft, and whether they can function as complete religions in themselves. I would say that in the ancient world (or modern Hinduism) they do not. A mystery religion is a specific set of rites, images and ideas meant to produce specific effects in the initiates. It always exists inside of (or occasionally in contrast to) a larger community religion. As my own work has built a local village-style religious tradition I have been starting to feel the need for some mystery…

8. Science is not opposed to religion, and very important for humanity to study and promote. However, the languages are not interchangeable. Zeus cannot be explained by string theory any more than a libation can cure cancer.

Agree to the first. In fact religious descriptions of cosmos should be influenced by scientific understandings, even as they continue their mythic and poetic forms of expression.

We’ll see whether the languages turn out to be interchangeable. We may yet find machines with which to speak with spirits. At this time there is little to be gained in practice by mixing the metaphors of science and religion.

9. What you believe matters as much as what you do. Only when in accord with a single vision can any physical act by humans be truly effective. This applies whether you are making the next Avengers movie, or building a temple to Athena.

Disagree with the first. I tend to see beliefs as ephemera, compared to traditions. If one pursues a spiritual practice of meditation, ritual, study and reflection then one’s opinions (‘beliefs’) will change and grow with the results. In my opinion the belief should not precede the practice, or should be approached only as a proposition. As an occasional teacher I would never tell a student of Pagan religion what their opinion should be about the afterlife. Rather I would set them to honoring the Dead and honing their trance and vision skills, while studying the lore about the Dead from old times. After a year or three of that I might ask them what they have come to believe, and compare notes. It would not be important to me for us to agree, so long as we were willing to make the sacrifices together.

If one were to say that passionate commitment - dedication and focused effort - were required, then that sort of belief – as in belief in one’s ability and in the value of the work – makes sense. What one believes, for instance, about what Gods ‘really’ are, or about the afterlife, is much less important. That sort of thing needn’t be organized or consistent to have a working spiritual system. Folks like me who enjoy that sort of thing might come up with coherent models, but once again there’s no reason to pick one of those and make it official inside a religion. Let the ale-house be our collegium, sez I.

10. The religious work we do should not be for ourselves, but for the generations to come.

For ourselves and those who come after, surely. Religion should always benefit us in the here-and-now. Making ourselves stronger and wiser makes the tribe stronger and wiser, and making the tribe greater makes us greater.

A Celtic Creation Poem

Pursuant to a discussion on Facebook...

Witchcraft Again – reply to Raven.

Raven commented on one of my witchcraft posts, and he makes some objections that I keep trying to clarify to myself. I’ve been interested in the current wave of ‘Traditional Witchcraft', which has been gaining steam over the past 20 years or so. I’ve just finished a round of reading including Oates, Howard, and ‘John of Monmouth’. Fascinating stuff for history-of-occultism geeks, especially about the early 60s and the first seeds of public Paganism. None of it, however, changed my opinions in this article.

Raven in italic:

I think you are overlooking the fact that many modern Traditional Witches do not consider themselves "Pagan," and some do not even consider what they do to be a religion.

No, I’m questioning whether the term “Witch’ can accurately be applied to a magic user who isn’t working in a specific religious context.

I’m generally opposed to using the term ‘witch’ as a synonym for ‘folk-magic user.’ Folk magic is a huge category in itself, encompassing every religious type, including the modern idea of having no religion but still working magic. I’m confident that the notion of magic without religion is a modern concept, one that I tend to dismiss as a new age error.

My impression is that a huge percentage (so far as I know, all) of modern self-identified Traditional Witches have constructed their own practice from literary sources, sometimes with a cultural link to a previous generation of European-culture charmers or conjurers, but much more often without that. They’ve made it up themselves out of books, just as other Neopagans and speculative occultists do. When I see a modern Traditional Witchcraft practice that involves the worship of pre-Christian gods or spirits then I become almost certain that we are seeing a modern construct. I have yet to see convincing evidence of survival of pre-Christian worship into early modern times, especially not in northern or western Europe.

So to me either an attempt to work magic with no religious context or to work it using Pagan deities marks a system as nouveau. Those who work magic using the dominant paradigm of cultural myth and ritual, usually Christian or Muslim though there are Hindu examples too, don’t usually like to have the term ‘witch’ applied to them, or at least they didn’t before Gardner. To the extent that traditional practitioners might use the word now I’d suspect they rely on the good will that Neopagans have built for the term to let them use it with impunity.

Most of the ones I know of do indeed draw from the well of Judeo-Christian folk magic, the various grimoires (which were also used by the Cunning Folk, and which do indeed contain references to summoning the spirits of the dead) and other forms of traditional folk magic.

Yes, the cunning arte *is* traditional folk magic, with plenty of crossover from the literate elite magical tradition. However, since I think the term ‘witch’ should be reserved for a non-Christian religious position (whether Pagan or diabolical), and since the cunning-folk themselves would have refused the word, I don’t use ‘witch’ to refer to cunning men such as Arthur Gauntlet.

There are two things that ‘witch’ meant over the Christian years in Europe. First the term applied to remnant Paganism, with those who ‘offer to trees and wells’ for health etc. said to be following the teachings of the wicces. Later the term is applied to the Church’s imagined Satanic cult, with ‘witch’ referring to a specific theology and worship. Of course folk magic continued. But no folk magician called themselves a witch, (though they might have so-called their competitors) and if the Sabbats continued from their Pagan-revel origins, they were the remnants of religious practice. (I do note the possibility of actual Satanic-mythology-based witches in early modern Scotland, as proposed by Emma Wilby.)

Obviously cunning men like Gauntlet would have drawn their magical power from their relationship with ‘God’ and Jesus and the saints. They were not ‘witches’ by any definition except the unacceptably broad one of the Church: ‘anyone who uses magic.’ Again, that’s not a good definition for ‘witch’ if our goal is to have a reasonably technical vocabulary that practitioners can use to communicate.

In my mind, saying Traditional Witchcraft is "NeoPaganism" is like saying Hoodoo is "NeoPagan" merely because it's suddenly become popular.

‘Traditional Witchcraft’ does not mean ‘European folk magic’. Most folk magic isn’t witchcraft in any sense except in the sense of Church doctrine. ‘Witchcraft’, if the word is to make any sense, refers either to the survivals of pre-Christian European magico-religious practices or to the diabolical cults first imagined by the church and later imitated by occultists.

Hoodoo is a body of magical technique that can be applied inside any number of religious models. It isn’t a system in itself, really, so much as a body of method used inside a system. For most of southern conjure that system is Protestant Christianity, though there are Catholic versions and re-Africanized ones as well. Now, of course, there is lots of hoodoo tech being applied in Neopagan religious contexts. That's entirely reasonable since lots of hoodoo practice does come from Europe.

European folk magic (itself one of the sources of hoodoo) is likewise a body of technique that migrates from religion to religion over the ages. Originating in Pre-Christian, ‘Pagan’ Europe it includes plenty of material ‘leaked’ from the literate magical tradition. By the 18th century, with rising literacy, the popular publishing of the grimoires led to an even closer joining between folk and literate traditions.

European magic has been taken up by the various Neopaganisms, starting with the Golden Dawn, leading eventually into the invention of self-described ‘witchcraft’ in the 20th century. I view Cochrane as at least as much an inventor as Gardener, and consider modern, self-defined Traditional Witchcraft in the English-speaking world to be a 20th century reconstruction.

There are almost certainly real traditional folk-magic users and sellers in business. I doubt that they call themselves witches. People who call themselves witches (in English) are basically modern reconstructors. My assumption, again, is that practices such as Tapping the Bone, the Compass Round, Hedgecrossing, and skull-necromancy are modern reconstructions based on literary sources and personal inspiration. I consider them juicy reconstructions, incidentally, much closer to the spirit of world magical practice than post-masonic style rites.

...However, it is clear to me most modern Trad Craft draws from the same well that European Witchcraft has always drawn from, which to my mind makes it an authentic historic practice (practice, not "Pagan religion") that in many ways is incompatible with modern NeoPaganism.

If it isn’t religion (or mystery spirituality, if you think there’s a difference – I don’t), it isn’t witchcraft, in my opinion - it is magic. On the internet people have the ability to refer to themselves as whatever they please, and I’m not interested in quibbling over individual cases. In general I prefer words to have set meanings, and I prefer not to multiply entities needlessly. Thus, I like the term ‘witchcraft’ to refer to a specific category of magic. A look at its historical usage seems to plainly align it with magic among pagan remnants practiced during the rule of the Church, and later with those who renounced the mandated religion in favor of another, more ‘Satanic’ one (by whatever theological measure).

There are lots of good words for ‘general magic user’ out there; sorcerer, mage, conjuror, spiritual worker. I’d like to find an actual niche for ‘witch’ (sorry) that might clarify more than confuse.

That said, let me be clear that I like the Traditional Witchcraft style of reconstruction. It certainly resonates with me more than does post-Cunningham public easy-does-it Wicca, and really even more so than BTW, post-Gardnerian style witchcraft. I think that the Trad Crafters’ diligent research into the actual magical practices of the past is paying off. I just think that the efforts made to connect existing Trad Craft practice (as it is visible to a relative outsider) with any organized sects or lineages of European folk-magic before the early 20th century are unconvincing.

Every wave of Neopagan reconstructors has drawn on the best scholarship available to them in their age. Mathers’ understanding of Graeco-Egyptian magic was based on the newest material, freshly revealed, and now outdated. Gardner’s reliance on Murray was in line with the best scholastic opinion of his age. Cochrane’s reliance on Graves is perhaps less excusable, but Graves was certainly popular at the time. The entire first two-thirds of the century relied on Frazier, who is now mainly set aside. Modern Trad Crafters are reconstructing usable systems for themselves using today’s scholarship into early modern magic and folklore, non-European models of spiritism, and the Grimoire tradition. I admire the effort. If I wasn’t all bound in with this Gaelic thing I’d likely be in it myself ; ) (or maybe it would have been ATR…).