The 'Authority' of Paganism

In some of my Facebook religious discussions, someone asked what we rely on as ‘proof that Paganism is real’.  It took some discussion to arrive at his actual question. He was discussing religion with a convinced Christian, who held up his Bible as ‘proof’ of his religion, and was poking around for a way to answer that without attempting to discredit the claim of the Christian. This is a goal I admire – we should have good answers of our own, and not rely on disproving the authority of someone else’s scripture, no matter how well-barrelled the fish may be.

                Because our OP was new to Paganism, I begin with some basics. Always worth a bit of restatement…

'Paganism' can, for the sake of this discussion, be defined as "the naturally-occurring religious impulse of a local area" By naturally-occurring I mean that it hasn't been brought in by preachers or prophets, and reflects the tradition-whose-beginnings-aren't-remembered. by 'religious impulse' I mean the human inclination to make relationship with a perceived 'spiritual' reality - with the persons and beings seen to reside in the world. by 'local area' I refer to the worship of beings local to the religion - the god of *that* mountain, *those* stars.

Paganism like that isn't revealed by the divine to mortals as commandments and prescriptions. Rather it grows out of the nature of humans, matter and the divine, the same way plants and animals grow, and the way that music or poetry has grown among humans. It "just is". The rest is detail.

To be fair, one should look at a little of that detail. The Pagan religions that early Christians knew were the indigenous and traditional religions of Europe and the Middle East. While modern historians have theories on where those cultures came from, and how they grew, for those living in Rome or Ireland the ways were just the ways - the stuff people had always done to keep relationship with the spirits. They didn't have an original prophet, or a 'founder'. They didn't have a 'scripture' on which the Ways were founded, they were a collection of customs, ways and specific artistic inheritances (hymns, images, etc) that together made up the 'religion' part of life.

Our modern Paganism is a set of efforts to reclaim the kind of spirituality enjoyed by the ancients. We observe the work of modern polytheists (there are a few 'pagan' religions still in business, unbroken, but not many), study the records of pre-Christian religion in Europe, cobble together experiments and try them, and through all that we devise ways of relating with the spirits that we hope resemble those of the ancients.

Some specific modern Pagan systems can be said to have founders. Gardnerian Wicca, specific Asatru organizations, ADF all have known histories. However in every case members of the systems take them home, experiment with them and vary them as local conditions warrant. There is no original 'authority'.

Perhaps that's what your original discussion was really about - what is the *authority* of Paganism? Christianity places great store in the authority of their scriptures, allegedly authored by their God, and thus the Final Document in all disputes. Paganism neither needs nor wants any such thing, and never did. In my spirituality the Authority of the divine rests in my own heart. The divine is distributed among all things, and that includes us humans. When I decide to approach the greater divine (the gods, etc) I do it by my own will and work, informed by the teachings of others like me in the past. Certainly the spirits give their input and inspiration, but they are partners in the work, not lords of it. Paganism has the authority of nature - it exists because it was natural for it to exist, and nature is the true depiction of the divine.

The Wisdom Way, pt 1

Beyond Sacrifice and Blessing 

We’re trying to build a religion. By ‘we’ I refer to myself and my colleagues in ADF. For the past 30 years we have been researching and designing symbol sets and ritual patterns that provide the framework on which a religion can stand. Our work is proceeding well. We have dozens of local congregations, serving thousands of Pagans across the US. (Our formal membership number hovers around 1500, but our Groves serve a vastly larger number in local communities. Check our reorganized website here)

The fact is, we have a religion up and running – a family of religions, really. Being polytheist, local cult varies widely, different Groves worship different Gods, etc. We are unified by our ritual customs and by our common vision of polytheism restored to the common discourse of the modern world.

However we are a very young religion. We are grown from shallow soil – the enthusiasm and amateur scholarship of late-20^th century Neopaganism. We are rooting well, but our real growth is still ahead. I see two important directions for our growth. Both are implicit in our ideas, but not very much expressed. The two may be related in various ways.

First, I think we can benefit by inventing and rediscovering formal methods of spiritual technique. My most usual shorthand for ‘formal methods of spiritual technique’ is ‘magic’. Formal methods bring the system closer to the living voices of the spirits, and stand as a counterweight to the high pile of rationalism produced by our scholastic inclinations. Readers of this blog will have watched me make some efforts at this, and more will be forthcoming.

The second large branch of religious work before us is the work of helping mortals to be happy. We have begun that work through our rituals of blessing. In ancient days such rituals may have been all the comfort offered to people by religion.

The Point

If I were to set a primary goal for spiritual practice (and this after long consideration of terms like ‘enlightenment’ and ‘liberation’) I might propose that it should make us happy – or at least happier. Note that here I’m not referring to some mystical adventure goal, of heroic conquest of reality. Rather I’m asking what good should a spiritual practice offer to the non-adventurer, to the “householder”, as they say.

Spiritual growth and magical power – those have commonly been the goals of occult spirituality. However any review of the histories of magical arts shows that these goals do not, in themselves, result in happiness for the individual.

Happiness for the individual is the common-sense base that seems to me, at least, to be a believable goal of life. As human animals it is our business to enjoy the world we find ourselves in, to learn to understand our bodies and other material things so that we can interact pleasantly and productively, even to apply our imagination and creativity to increase beauty and utility in the world.

I’m going to be trying to write a bit on this topic. It feels presumptuous, rather, but that’s never stopped me before. I’ve gotten a bit of age on me, watched both myself and a number of other people live life, and devoted myself, off and on, to spiritual work. I find myself with this or that notion about the subject of happiness.

What It Is.

Let me skip further prologue and propose my tripartite notion of ‘happiness’ .

Happiness is composed of contentment, fulfillment, and delight. When these are present, properly mixed for the individual, that individual knows happiness.

1: Contentment: On the first level this refers to satisfaction of basic biosurvival needs. Food, Housing and Sexual Release are powerful basics. If they are not met sufficiently to the individual, it’s hard to move on toward happiness. Some mysticisms try to short-circuit psychological dependence on these basics. That’s a difficult road; for the householder it is simply the work of life to meet these needs. When one can ‘come home’ to a safe, personal space in which ones needs are met, the physical end of contentment is met. Further issues surrounding contentment are often tied in with the second category.

2: Fulfillment:  Each of us is born with a specific set of potentials and inclinations. While we may be 80% similar to any other person born in our time and place, there are balances of brain chemistry, variances of perception and chances of programming that bring each of us toward adulthood with a unique personal profile. In order to be happy, it seems to me that the individual must have some expression of and recognition of those potentials. Our ‘dreams’ and aspirations must achieve some manifestation.

3: Delight: (or ‘joy’, or ‘peak experience’) The human nervous system has the potential for very intense experience. Beyond the day-to-day management of our lives, we can know great experiences of joy, delight, terror, pain, wonder and despair. The ancients tell us how important such experiences are to the formation of a fulfilled life. Notably, experiences of pain and harm make deep tracks in our neurology and memory. It can be especially valuable to balance those with powerful experiences of joy, wonder and delight. For many people sexual experience fills this need, but there are many other methods.

Why It’s Good

Isn’t this obvious? Maybe. It’s good, first, because it feels good. Why does happiness feel good?

There are various brain-chemistry reasons involved, but never mind that. Mainly it feels good because it is freedom from stress. When our material and psychological needs are not met, we experience a sense of general alarm that activates fight-or-flight reflexes. This makes us anxious, twitchy and suspicious, and reduces further our sense of contentment. When those needs are met and we are experiencing regular moments of delight our general sense of alarm and concern relaxes. Our sense of contentment increases, which frees resources to work toward greater fulfillment.  The very work of fulfillment can produce peak experience, as goals are met, though special occasions of sensory or spiritual pleasure are still important.

That’s a long way round to assert that ‘happiness is good’, but that’s philosophy fer ya.

What Does Religion Have To Do With It?

It does not seem that in Pagan times people went to their temples to seek relief from emotional or financial turmoil. The cares of mortal life - confusion, indecision - were not the provenance of priests or ‘clergy’ (the latter term didn’t exist). There was no model that said that the human self is essentially broken or in error, and so priests did not make it their business to advise the folk on how to live, or seek the ‘cure of souls’.

That job, in the literate cultures of which we have record, fell to what the Greeks called ‘philosophers’ – people who undertook to comprehend how human life works, and how one can make it work well. They created systems that were called ‘bios’ (my Greek is nonexistent) meaning ‘way of life’. Various philosophers prescribed various notions, from naked exercise to vegetarianism, from pietistic devotion to rationalist skepticism. This supermarket of lifestyles was the norm for seekers in the ancient world.

Modern people expect their religious practice to help them be happier and more successful. For many modern practitioners of religion, their church serves as a primary social institution, in which they seek to meet many of their fulfillment needs. Some even seek basic material needs through their churches, especially in context of ‘charitable’ work.

Two such systems have had special influence in the modern world. The first is Buddhism. The Buddhist method isessentially a ‘way of life’ (in the Hellenic sense) that prescribes various moral and lifestyle stances, along with a system of mental management meant to soothe the passions and promote rational judgment.

The second is Christianity. Christianity was in fact mistaken for ‘a philosophy’ by early Pagans. The notion of wealth-renouncing preachers standing under trees proclaiming ‘the Good’ was familiar to Hellenes – their philosophers were the usual culprits. Christianity also offered a code of morals combined with a method of spiritual practice.

Let me mention one other major model of moral and spiritual formation that has greatly influenced the Pagan movement – the training systems of Masonry and their related schools.  In these models the student is given a series of moral lessons as they proceed through the teachings. In more mystical versions the lessons accompany teaching of occult techniques intended to grant wisdom and power to the student. This model had a primary influence on early Wiccan teaching. The three ‘degrees’ of that form of witchcraft are used as a progressive schooling toward spiritual growth and magical power. This ladder-model attempts to combine some of the sense of the ‘spiritual adventure’ of mysticism with the moral soundness of the householder life.

Whatever opinion one may have of these paths in history, every modern Pagan is influenced by the models of ‘religion’ that they present. We are trained to expect aid and comfort, emotional support and the alliance of higher powers from our religions. Much of modern Paganism seems little concerned with this kind of work. However those who are entering our systems from more popular ways will have those expectations. They will expect a religion (i.e. a way of connecting the individual with the divine) to come complete with a way of life (guidelines and methods for living well and being happy).

The ancients sometimes called their spiritual goal “The Summum Bonum; True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness”. With the understanding that True and Perfect things are seldom real in the world, that old formula seems to me to be a fine expression of the goal of spiritual self-work.

                So I’m going to have this topic on my burners. How do I think happiness can be achieved in various circumstances? What are the personal internal mechanisms that produce and maintain happiness? I’m going to avoid quoting various modern science, unless something particularly striking comes along, in favor of present what amount to nothing more than my best guess. Don’t worry, there will still be plenty of Paganism, occultism and magic. There will even be moments when the two topics converge.

Carry the Fire

Last night we worked our annual Samhain sacrifice. This Samhain marks, incidentally, the thirtieth birthday of Ar nDraiocht Fein (ADF) the Pagan church in which I situate most of my work. Thirty years is a good record for a Pagan group, and we’ve done it without any shut-down-and-restart incidents. Thirty solid years of continuing effort at the restoration of polytheist religion to modern times; I won’t ask forgiveness for a moment of bragging, but I’ll be done.

One of our former Archdruids (who I’ll call by the name everyone calls him, “Fox”) has recently undertaken an in-depth personal study of the Indo-European customs surrounding sacred fire. There will be publications coming, starting with a trickle of articles in ADF’s magazine, ‘Oak Leaves’, so I won’t even try to summarize all of the wonderful treasures of lore that he has found. However we have generated one new bit of custom and ritual that found expression for me in last night’s rite.

The ancient custom was to place the
hearth-fire in the center of the house.

In traditional European Paganism, the fire in the home’s hearth is highly sacred. It is separated from common life by taboos, customs, and observances and treated, in essence, as the presence of a deity in the home. It is fed and cleaned, put to bed each night and wakened each morning with ritual and incantation. The hearth fire is center of what can be called the ‘domestic cult’ in traditional Paganism, the realm of family and daily life.

An Aukuras - a Baltic
Fire altar.

Religious ritual in traditional European Paganism often centered around another sacred fire, lit in ritual space on a raised fire-altar. This fire is, again, the very presence of the divine in the Grove, and receives the offerings and carries the voices of the people as we speak with the spirits. From Vedic lore to (posited) Druidic ritual, it is fitting to refer to traditional ritual as ‘fire worship’.

Ritual Fire is lit from domestic fire. The spark is brought from the hearth of the person sponsoring the sacrifice, or from the hearth of the city or village in some cases, and lights the sacrificial fire. Thus every fire partakes of the primal spark. That primal spark is extinguished and regenerated at regular intervals, as part of the calendar customs. In Rome and Persia, Spring Equinox was the traditional season for this custom. In Gaelic countries it seems to have happened twice yearly, at Samhain and Bealtaine.

So, at this past spring equinox, Fox and our current Archdruid, Kirk Thomas, ritually lit new

That's a big one a' those!
I want a fire-churn!

fire using a fire-bow. The fire was lit as part of a ritual intention to grow the spiritual and organizational unity of Our Druidry, to be a Hearth fire for our folk. That fire has been preserved and is slowly passing among ADF households and groves. We received it at our Clergy Retreat, and are undertaking to keep it lit perennially, until it is renewed next spring.  So far so good.

Yesterday we brought it for the first time from our hearth to the hall where we work our rites. We set up the hearth-fire on it’s own shrine, making it part of our usual custom of providing a ‘purification station’ for folks to do pre-ritual water-and-smoke cleansing. There’s a whole complex of ‘cleansing water next to hearth-fire’ that makes this especially satisfying. The spark was then carried from that purification altar and used to light the ritual fire.

This was a very satisfying beginning to our new ritual year. Things are coming, things are changing.  In the rite, the omen of blessing was:

• Nion - translation: support - tree: ash. Implies strength, communication (alternate translation is 'letters') and connection "Weaving of Women" is a gloss.

• Coll - trans: Hazel (one of the fews that is actually named for a tree); Wisdom, poetic inspiration. "Fairest of Trees"

• Straif - trans: sulfur - tree: blackthorn connotations of protection and the sidhe, from the tree; connotations of transformation from the chemical nature of sulfur. "Increasing of Secrets"

So, I'd say that the Grove was offered strength and connection, wisdom and magic inthat omen, a very good sign for the season, and in light of coming work.

As Our Druidry (and all of the neopagan, polytheist restoration) continues to grow deeper, both nationally and locally, I think we’ll see more examples of the materializing of ancient Pagan customs of respect and power. Let us carry the fire – hearth to hearth, temple to temple, until it warms us all.

A Samhain Charm

Dear Gods and Poet's Fire! have I neglected this blog for an entire month?? Please forgive me, dear readers. Review my previous excuses for discussions of just how busy my life continues to be - October has been no more slow. Much of that is my fault, of course. Likewise it's my fault that I've just been easily distracted.

I'm slowly grinding my way out of my writer's block, and stuff will be coming in the next weeks. Thanks for still reading - newer readers should find plenty of old stuff while I get my poo together.

Fair notice, the current offer of the Leabhar Mor will stay up until Sunday night or Monday morning, then vanish for an unknown (but not brief) length of time.

The Host of the Bitter Dead

Among spirit-worshipping peoples, the care of the Dead is vital to the maintenance of a tribe or family's luck.

Mortal spirits are mighty, and each deserves the offerings and reverence of their folk. Fate being what it is, many humans die without those comforts. In older times one might be slain along the road, and lie unknown in the green. One might fall as one of hundreds in battle, bones left for crows. In our day one may die under a bridge, without resources or love. One may die in a natural disaster, corpse swept away from all care. Tradition teaches us that a bad death makes a bitter spirit, as surely as does a bad life. Each year's turning creates a new crowd of bitter Dead. Throughout the Indo-European world the notion of the host of the unshriven dead was a source of spiritual and possibly material danger. In Gaelic lore the 'host of the unshriven dead' is sometimes called the sluagh sidhe. 'sluagh' means 'host' in the sense of crowd, and the sluagh arises in swamps and mires (a common place to die unknown) to haunt and harm the living.

Last year this charm came to my mind late - only in time for Yuletide. I want to repost it at a more proper season. It is useful at this time of year to aid us in directing offerings to these beings, to calm their hearts and bring them back to the Fire. It could also be useful in some cases of 'haunting', but I haven't tried that yet.

Let an offering of bread, honey and ale or wine be prepared, along with a small fire, or candle to be lit even if the rite is worked at a more formal ritual fire.

Begin with whatever prayers and offerings to the gods and spirits are proper to your work, and then prepare the fire so that the food offerings can be placed before it.

• Let the blood of the Dead water the root of the Tree.

Let the Hazels of Wisdom grow from deep roots.

Let wisdom, strength and love nourish every being, by the rising of the light.

• Often do we honor the Ancestors, blessed and beloved.

With them we share warmth at the Shrine of the Hearth.

Many are those who die who we know not,

Yet human kinship does not stop at the garth’s wall.

• All our allies among the Dead, help us to speak to the Lost.

Elder Wise, Grandparents of our lines,

Join your voices with ours in love and mercy

For all the Host of the Dead.

• Hear me now, all you lost spirits

All who died suddenly, without warning;

All who died unjustly, or by the hand of another;

All who died alone, in unknown places, or in deep waters;

All who died without the embrace of kin.

• We make these offerings to you, for your rest and peace

That you no longer be lost

That you no longer be angry

That you no longer be vengeful

But be welcomed at the Fire.

(Lay the bread offering, and pour honey upon it)

We honor you with this gift of bread and ale

(Lay the Ale or wine offering)

Though we may not name you,

We have not forgotten you

(Light the small fire or candle)

• This small fire we light for you,

As the small sun of Yule morning will rise.

Let it be as a hearth of warming

Where peace prevails

And all feast as friends

With the Blessing of the Gods.

Host of the Dead, accept my sacrifice!

Tredara.Org Website Launch

I'm pleased to announce that we're trying to cling desperately to the coat-tails of the 20th century by launching a website for our nascent 'facility'.
Tredara.org - bookmark it today  (please...)

With the expansion of our acreage and our coming retirement from wage life, we are preparing to launch our land as a formal Pagan sanctuary and center. This web-site is a step in that direction.

This is a placeholder site, but I'll be adding to it over the winter. While it will be of interest to local Pagans, I hope to make the site of interest to the general Pagan and occult reader, as I do with this blog.

For now I'm not centralizing my web-presence at this site. My stores at Lulu and Cafe Press will still be up, and I'll figure out how I want to link them.
Watch that space!

Leabhar Mór Offer

Last spring I offered this relatively complete collection of my work-to-date. Here’s the blurb:

A mega-grimoire of rituals and teaching in an artful style. The text combines

material from Ian's books Sacred Fire, Holy Well, The Book of Summoning, The Book of Vision and Draiocht with a measure of new material. The core rites and works of the Court of Brigid are also included, making this my most complete Druid Grimoire to date. While the bulk of the work is composed of ritual scripts and texts there are many chapters of teaching as well, from the basics of Irish polytheist symbolism to the secrets to gathering and using magical power. 

 With fifteen full-page illustrations and dozens of symbolic drawings, magical diagrams and sigils, the Great Book is a rich and inspiring trove of magic – a tome fit for a wizard’s oratory! 

The book was fairly well-received, and I sold enough copies to be happy with the project. I also reserved a few copies that were donated to various event-fundraising auctions this summer. I have gotten a steady stream of requests for another chance to buy the book, and so I am offering it again, only until Samhain of this year.

Here’s the link for my Lulu store. 

If there are folks who were enjoying the extreme rarity of the title, I doubt this offer will be a huge dent in that factor. While the on-demand nature of the publication prevents me from providing signed copies by mail without an additional $20 or so in shipping costs, I do promise that though I may re-offer this very occasionally, I will never sell more than 81 copies of this edition. Of course if you find me at events I'll be happy to sign them.

Apologetic Update

Man, I can’t find the mental time to write squat this month.

I could, and can, justify some of that with the work I’ve been doing outdoors, prepping and polishing the barn and new grounds. We had a very successful Starwood thank-you party last weekend – a major site-manager hurdle for my season. As the winter arrives I’m sure I’ll be back to work at the keyboard.

Proof-of-life wise, here are some photos…

The bonfire at the Starwood Party, Built by Jason I hisself,
and lots of other folks, of course. Nice chimney-log...

Yr Humbl, and Kim, off for a ride on the golf-cart.

Here's the new barn fully in business. Painting that sucker took a while...

The Nemeton after the Fall Equinox rite,
fire still blazing. May we all reap a good harvest!

Invocation Teaching in Sept.

A Voice From The Shrine

Practical Methods of Invocation of the Gods

Sept 28 , 2pm

Aradia’s Garden 

Eastlake Ohio

In the Old Ways the gods and spirits lived among the folk, present in the shrines and sacred spaces inherited from tradition, or in new ones made by worshipers. In our efforts to restore the Old Ways for modern times, we must rely on ourselves and our own skills to open the ways to communion with the divine in the persons of the Old Gods.

In this instruction and workshop, Ian will discuss the methods known to ancient and traditional ritualists, and how they can be adapted for modern use. Beginning with just a small dose of history and theory, we will approach invocation for solitary work, for family and small-group rites and for Pagan group worship.   We will discuss the use of images and talismans, how to make an effective shrine, developing personal devotions, and the place of trance and vision in invocation. The program will conclude with a small exercise or ceremony, demonstrating some of the day’s principles.

$25; Pre-registration is preferred, phone registrations are welcome at Aradia’s Garden.