It is a strange thing to revere a person. A thousand small cults have sprung up around different personalities, some with justification, some by sheer force of that individual’s ego. It would seem more appropriate to admire what someone has done, based on how it benefitted the world at large, than it would to arbitrarily assign holiness to someone based on their own assertions.
Which brings us to one Edward Alexander Crowley, poet, mystic, mountain climber, and modern expounder of the religion of Thelema. A number of things have been said about this man, most of them wrong or wrongheaded. What is certain is that he was a talented self-promoter, and managed to gather around himself people who were enamored of his message and willing to further that message after his death. Over time, that message has been conflated with the man himself, so that many Thelemites strive to live up to his example and model their views on what they take to be his.
But the question remains: what did Crowley actually do to deserve this adulation? The material products of his life are the Holy Books of Thelema (admittedly a treasure for which we must thank him) along with a million or so other volumes of mediocre poetry, and a billion pages of self aggrandizing bombast. Within these are, admittedly, some of the most valuable instructions on magick in the modern world. He also took over an esoteric society, rewrote its rituals, and transformed it into a tool for disseminating his “new” doctrine. These are impressive, but any sales representative with an eye for opportunity could do much the same.
In the end, people idolize Crowley because he told them to, bullying, browbeating, and cajoling their adoration at nearly every turn. Crowley’s occult knowledge was second hand. His contribution to society outside of his small group of initiates was minimal, and continues to be so.
At about the same time in history, another man revered by a sizable group of human beings was busy trying to kick Crowley’s countrymen out of his homeland. This was, of course, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a small and soft spoken lawyer. His ideas share a number of points of agreement with Crowley (as well as more than a few direct disagreements). For instance, Gandhi’s belief that the individual conscious act was the most important aspect of any change or lack thereof. His entire life’s work could be considered an act of Love Under Will. Gandhi set about to do something, had purity of will and purpose, and did it.
Crowley died nearly penniless, with only a few eccentrics supporting and caring for him. His “revolution” according to his version of Thelemic principles never came to pass. The “reasons” for this are irrelevant. The simple fact is that, by his own terms, Crowley failed.
It is for these reasons that I submit that Gandhi was an effective Thelemite, and Crowley was not. Gandhi was able to drive an empire from his backyard using only sheer force of will. Crowley used the same force to mainly gather around himself a group of people who admired him. Today, many Thelemites follow suit, doing little more than developing networks of mutual admiration and intellectual incest.
Success is your proof…
My purpose is not to promote Gandhi as a hero. I only mean to point out something about the nature of a doctrine with individual excellence at its core. It’s fulfillment is, almost by definition, a subjective matter. If the individual is the only measure, or the opinion of those with almost identical content in their heads the only standard, we will end up with blatant contradictions with reality. Like a Great Prophet whose cult never grows above three thousand.
There is a point at which ones Will has to meet with the greater context in which one lives. This requires both the ability to see that context, and the willingness to abandon a priori assumptions and ideologies that may not be applicable. A lack of these two things creates little more than “a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
A woman is walking down an urban street. She passes by an Indian restaurant, A Chinese restaurant, a vintage record store, and a bookstore. One building is gingerbread Victorian, another 1930s Art Deco. In the bookstore she is likely to find volumes that were originally published in 1400 as well as current bestsellers. The record store may contain music that someone composed for a royal court three hundred years ago. History is encoded into her very surroundings. She can move back and forth in time as her fashionable shoes click against pavement that was built on top of cobblestones.
We live in an era where the artifacts of nearly every past era are available to us. Some are accessible for free in the vast archives of the internet. Others must be purchased. Nearly everything can be purchased. This is the result of five hundred years of deliberate imperial expansion on the part of several Western powers. The irony is that the narratives which supported that expansion became less and less viable the more the conquerors became involved in the daily lives of those they conquered. Today we are not so much invaders as necrophiles, building a world from the ruins of the past.
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I do not think it would be too extreme to say that most human behavior is based on fear. Much of this fear is based in the dance we engage in daily with death. Ignoring it, thinking about it, worrying that it will happen to us before we are ready, or that it will take our loved ones. Trying to forget the fact that it will happen, without question or quarter, drives our perceptions and motivations much more than we acknowledge on a regular basis.
Religion, too, arises from this fear. Humanity has always wanted some assurance that, when the inevitable does happen, their being will somehow continue, and that the forces they encounter beyond the veil which can never be withdrawn will be friendly to them. The irony is that all this fear based wishing quite often leads to the opposite experience. “All we are is the result of what we have thought,” and if we spend our lives terrified, we are likely to die that way.
Then there are the multitudinous distractions. The television programs that are so important to keep up on. The toys that are so important to have. And the relationships that are supposed to fulfill us, the partners that will never change or disappoint us. None of these things, of course, ever nourishes us completely. Relationships with others come the closest, but there is still that gnawing, clinging feeling. It is as if we are standing in a rushing river, trying to find a bubble in the roaring foam to comfort us and keep us company forever, before we are washed away to sea.
We have what we need, but we ignore it. The Stone That Was Rejected arises from the bedrock experience of mortality, and so we push it aside as equally uncomfortable. The Obligation that comes with it is too great. From the awareness that we are all going to die, no matter how many houses we own or beautiful people we fuck, there can emerge the understanding that there is no difference between any of us, and each is already perfect. Just not perfected. The latter requires work, and letting go.
The Stone has also been referred to as Innate Wisdom. We know full well the truth, and that we are playing games in order to avoid it. The sophistication with which these diversions seduce us from our basic nature is stunning. It is like a mirror over which we place a thousand costume jewels, simply to avoid seeing our reflection.
Modern life provides us with so much that we forget that all these wonderful things are the result of directed will toward solving a specific problem. It often feels as if a machine has done all this, that all our efforts are part of a mechanism rather than the cooperation of thousands of people to create the world we live in. This is the amazing thing: that we cooperate in maintaining a world that in many ways does not serve us, but do not see it as cooperation. It’s “just my job” or “the way things are.” It’s the way things are because we keep doing things that way.
Our Wills are so buried and denied because we are afraid of where they will lead us. And we are afraid of losing something we consider important. Our lives, loved ones. Our identity. It is really this fragile shell of personality that we are addicted to. Its needs are so important and we will devise a thousand reasons to act in ways we know are unhelpful, simply to look after those needs.
Again, all that energy is being put toward guarding “a burning house.” It is easy to forget that we are the fire. As long as we deny our Wills, we have nothing important, and once we have embraced our Wills, nothing important can be taken from us.
This is the Adamantine Jewel at the core of our being. Nothing can tarnish, destroy, or steal it form us. Once it is uncovered, there is nothing we cannot do or have.
Or so says the voice, talking over my shoulder, while I type words this Shell only half believes…
It’s interesting to watch a phrase transform over time. Usage often indicates the function of the phrase in the context of a community’s current relationship with the rest of the culture. A meme, such as “The Burning Times” can serve, among other functions, to increase or decrease the distance the individual employing it intends to create between a subculture and its parent.
The idea of the “Burning Times” seems to excite less solidarity these days as it does animosity toward the people who reference it. It has become one of the several tropes that will have the “anti-fluffy” crowd (who spend an inordinate amount of time evaluating others’ practice, to the extent that I often wonder if they’re doing much of anything else) target one for the sort of viciousness once reserved for heretics. The stated reason for this is that historical inaccuracy causes the mainstream to look down on Pagans.
There are a number of reasons why I find this debatable. What I really think is going on is a generational shift from the counterculture pose of the mid-seventies through the early nineties to the more (for lack of a better term) integrationist bent of the current decades. Very early uses of the phrase (in the works of Gardner) seem to be mainly aimed at giving a pedigree and also of justifying the secrecy and obscurity of the teaching. The Wiccans of that period were arguably bohemian, at least some of them, but not counterculture. Gardner was, after, a postal worker. In the seventies, we see the Craft develop into a spiritual path for radicals, and as an adjunct to the women’s movement. The usage of “The Burning Times” changed accordingly: into a narrative of past persecution that formed the template for all future persecutions of women and indigenous peoples.
The years through which we currently pass are of a different character entirely. Whether we like to admit it or not, the conservative backlash against the counterculture has marked our thinking. In some ways, this was a good thing, in others bad. One of the more detrimental outgrowths was the Neoconservative movement, which began as an internal reaction to some of the New Left’s more “radical” aspects and drifted steadily rightward. The early core of the Neoconservative movement was heavily academic, and brought with it both a sense of being part of an empowered elite (mostly through the influence of Leo Strauss, who is far less egregious than the movement created by his “followers”) and the new disciplines of postmodernism such as Deconstruction.
It was this latter that allowed them to “reframe” many policies, such as international interventionism, that were extremely unpopular at the time. They also became masters of co-opting the language of the oppressed, much in the same way that Ayn Rand attempted to with her insistence that the wealthy were the most oppressed group in the world. One would hear a Neocon referring to “prejudice” against the wealthy or “bigotry” against those who stood for “traditional values.”
The Neocons understood the media better than the Left, because they either owned them or were part of “think tanks” who conducted studies on how to use media and language to maximum effect. The furor over “political correctness” was almost entirely orchestrated by media moguls connected to the Neoconservative movement. In many cases they outright lied, insisting that people were being fired for not employing the most ridiculous linguistic spaghetti to describe simple differences between people. There is absolutely no proof that the term “political correctness” was used in the specific sense that it is used to day before the Neocons used it that way in the 1990s. Before that, it was an ironic term used by some sectors of the New Left. Regardless, the stigma of being thought “PC” can be quite difficult to remove.
This is just many of the ways in which our current culture has been marked by the Neoconservative movement. Long after the actual political clout of the New Right fades, we will still be hearing the phrase “PC” as a snarl word, with all the unexamined assumptions that it brings to the table.
Bringing it back down to the micro level of the relationship of Modern Paganism to the broader culture, I think the current reaction to the “Burning Times” meme is a manifestation of the overall tendency to deradicalize and identify with the mainstream. We saw early, but still quasi-radical in praxis, movement in this direction with the attempt to disidentify with Satanism. This was, it must be noted, almost never attempted simply by pointing out that Pagans don’t (generally) believe in Satan. The point was not distinction but self defense. Thus the image of Satanism promoted in the mainstream was tacitly accepted and made the target of sometimes open hostility. That this was also helping to criminalize a religion, something should never occur in a country with a separation of church and state, didn’t seem that important at the time. Twenty years on, the damage is clear.
Personally, I think courting or even expecting the respect of the average secular/agnostic zombie is a waste of time at best. I think we will primarily receive a kind smile and a damnation by faint praise. But, given that Modern Pagans emerge from the same cultural stew as others in our society, the shift seems inevitable. Our use of language and our attitude toward memes such as “The Burning Times” will adjust accordingly. I can only hope that sacrificing our distance will not prove to be a mistake. We can only know what the change will look like after its done happening.
It is often the case that foundational ideas go unexamined, for the simple fact that looking too closely might mean major changes in the way people engage with a particular system. In the mundane world, for example, the entire edifice of the pseudo-science of “economics” would crumble if the majority of its practitioners were to come to a real understanding of the how the concepts they take to be axiomatic are actually informed by archaic, religiously inspired ideologies. The case with the concept of “Immanence” in the Pagan community is, I think, a good deal less severe. However, it is not a good idea to keep promoting a concept without exploring its full implications.
As a first step, I think it would be fruitful to look at how the concept is generally understood in the context of Modern Paganism. The term “Immanence” also appears in classical theism, but with a rather different implication than in our community. In classical theism, God Himself is a transcendent being. He is conceived of as larger than, more powerful than, more wise and compassionate than, any other being in the Cosmos. Yet He is also immanent in that He is close to us, and to an extent present in everything. It is important to point out that a doctrine espousing a totally transcendent God existing outside of an utterly corrupt material universe is very rare. There is a tension in Christianity on which is more important, but most accept that God is both transcendent and immanent. I bring this up because the manner in which immanence is presented in many Modern Pagan contexts could lead one to believe that all Christians are Manichean Gnostics. This latter belief was, in fact, considered heresy from the beginning.
The main contrast here is that, generally speaking in Modern Paganism, rather than a property of an essentially transcendent being, immanence is taken to be the entire story. It is often simply explained away as “everything is divine.”
Which leaves us with an interesting quandary: if “everything is divine”, why bother having a religion at all? Indeed, how does this statement, taken on its own, even have meaning? If I say that everything is purple, this is easily refuted by pointing out that my own skin is conspicuously not. The primary way to determine a quality is to note its absence.
This is not so much an issue of a bad idea as it is an oversimplification of a good one. The actual literature on the subject is a bit more detailed, and gives us the picture of the Cosmos, particularly “Nature,” as a complete being in and of Herself. Where the published matter on the subject fails is in determining how we could get “out of harmony” with this being, or even how anything ultimately harmful to Her could actually occur. It fails because many of the writers on the subject are opposed to hierarchy of any kind, seeing metaphysical hierarchy as a justification, in all cases, for oppressive political hierarchies.
But, if we are to actually address the problems of oppression and environmental degradation, we will need to understand that establishing a value of any kind necessarily involves a hierarchy. One cannot value something without devaluing that which would harm, degrade, or lessen that which they value. Otherwise, we are simply saying that it is a nice thing to have, but other people’s ideas of what is nice are also… nice. This leaves us with absolutely no room for any activism whatsoever. The values of the person who would put us all in jail for even caring about restoring wetlands or protecting a woman’s biological freedom are, if “everything is divine” just as much a holy prerogative as the desire to protect them. This is, of course, unacceptable to most if not all Pagans.
Of course, the concept of the Cosmos as a living entity is not new. It is, when you get right down to it, the conclusion that nearly every wisdom tradition has come to over time. It is the Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalah and the Buddha Nature in Vajrayana. What is new is the sociopolitical overlay. And what that lacks is what I would argue is the necessary polarity of transcendence against which immanence gains its meaning. Without that, we are left with a platitude that bites its own tail if followed to its logical end.
It’s really an example of how context creates meaning. Context transcends the particular words or symbols used in a communication. It determines their import, provides the ground from which their meaning is intended to grow. But those words and symbols, by virtue of being embedded in that context, are imbued with that meaning. Take them out, and they are just words, mere scribbles. The word “love” for instance means something very different in a letter to ones beloved than it does in a nationalist screed. But there are those, I suppose, who will say that it’s “good” no matter where it is.
If we understand the context of over-arching (ergo transcendent, since determinant and of greater importance than any single part) values, the idea that “everything is divine” becomes intelligible. It merely needs the caveat that we don’t always see that divinity, or don’t always honor it. We fail in this respect because we have lost the vision of the whole, or “the golden thread that leads you to the heart of Eleusis.” Without that vision, all our grand assertions are little more than words which, while they may make us feel good, do little to improve ourselves or the world we live in.
We live in a beautiful, divine Cosmos. Modern Paganism is one of the few religions to make a point of valuing this world, for itself, rather than as an “illusion” or a testing ground for souls. Historically, I think this may actually be unique. While our ancient forbearers certainly had a this-worldly focus, there was also much that could be considered “transcendent” and “otherworldly” in the cosmologies of these older traditions. We make a mistake if we project our own ideology into the past.
Nearly every Paleopagan tradition that we know of divided the Cosmos into at least three Worlds, Upper, Middle and Lower. The relationship between these Worlds depended largely on the culture, but nearly all placed some kind of determinant agency on a realm that existed apart from the strictly material aspects of reality. While the manifest universe in which we dwell may have been considered valuable and holy, this holiness depended on some Outside in which our world was a partaker.
The question then becomes: what do we mean when we say “the world is holy”? If we simply worship “Nature” we are left with a confusing heap of different approaches, all of which begin to seem like shouting at our own psychological projections. The idea of “Nature” is largely a Romantic construct that depends on several metaphysical assumptions that must also be unlocked before we are actually speaking about anything intelligible rather than simply emotive.
Doing so is beyond the scope of what I really want to talk about, which is the more immediate origins of the idea of Immanence as it is conceived in Modern Paganism. It is important to remember the general background of the majority of us, and to contrast this with the people’s of the past, and indeed the rest of the world. Generally speaking, Modern Pagans come from middle to upper middle class backgrounds in industrialized, Western cultures. These cultures enjoy a very high standard of living compared with less “advanced” nations, and the lives of those living in them are generally free of the extreme privations of those living in the “developing” world. (The discussion of the ideology behind the words in quotes is, again, much too involved to enter into here.)
For most of human history, life, we must be frank, sucked. Life expectancy was incredibly short. Most people were either slaves, serfs, or soldiers. There was no such thing as “credit” for the majority of individuals. You either had the money for what you needed, or you went without. A plethora of diseases awaited you, and people died of maladies that today require a single visit to a doctor and a course of antibiotics. One could expect to die relatively young, with a great deal of pain, after a difficult struggle to survive.
We should remember this when we criticize the “otherworldly” religions of the past. These were not just arbitrary abstractions created to manipulate gullible populations. They were, in part, very honest responses to existence as most people experienced it. In this context, Gnostic hatred of materiality becomes a little more understandable.
It is uncertain exactly how Paleopagans viewed the relationship between the different realms of existence they conceived. This is mainly because many of these cultures were oral, and generally didn’t have time to sit around and philosophize about cosmology. The exception, of course, being Greece. And Plato could hardly be characterized as a philosopher of Immanence, at least in the sense we tend to use the term. Iamblichus, on the other hand, arguably could.
I would conjecture that most Paleopagans simply took their place in the Cosmos for granted. Somewhere in the middle. They were embedded in the thick of existence, and simply assumed a continuity between this world and the next.
Modern Pagans, however, do not and will never have this kind of relationship to the world. We have both Christianity and the Industrial Revolution between us and that world-view. The Romantic movement grew out of a response to the latter, and created the pastoral, somewhat saccharine concept we think of as “Nature.” (The answer to this was “nature red with tooth and claw” and the corruption of Darwinism to serve the needs of the industrial elite.)
What we have inherited, then, is a more refined sort of separation between “natural” and “unnatural.” Things human society creates are, from this perspective, inherently bad. The only “good” is the unspoiled, wide open fields and forests. Very few Modern Pagans talk about the divine being Immanent in a sewer drain, though this is what one would be led to if they took the idea of everything being holy to its logical conclusion.
We are embedded in a different set of contexts than Paleopagans, including Indigenous survivals that could be considered late examples of such. I feel it is important to recognize this, because failure to do so renders much of our theology meaningless. If we are simply regurgitating Romantic notions about “Nature,” that makes us an historical curiosity, not a living tradition.
I bring this up because it is quite likely that the socioeconomic context which created Modern Paganism is on its way out the door. The energy sources which power our technologies, which in turn provide our abnormally high standard of living, are running dry. As the people in control of the centralized systems of distribution play politics, it becomes increasingly unlikely that viable alternatives will be coming soon enough to stave off the collapse of industrial civilization.
What will a post-collapse Paganism look like? Will our theology adapt to the circumstances, or dig in its heels and become the kind of dogma we tend to shun? The latter possibility may seen unthinkable right now, but remember what happened to Neoplatonism when it met with Jewish Apocalyptic sects at the fall of Classical civilization. No one would have imagined then that a doctrine based on communal love and voluntary simplicity could become the Church of the Inquisition.
In later posts I will go deeper into the concept of Immanence. This post was mainly necessary as an acknowledgment of the context, which I have seen little of.
Modern Pagans have a long standing dislike of dogma, for very good reason. In spite of the comfort inherited beliefs might offer, ultimately they stifle personal growth and tend to linger long after the world around them has rendered them moot. Examples from history are numerous, and to cite them would be to belabor the point. Paganism is a religion about life, and dogma, in the final analysis, is a kind of death.
In place of orthodoxy, or common belief, Pagans have orthopraxis, or common practices. Doctrines are sparse, rituals are many. But there is a general skeleton and a basic trajectory that nearly all Pagan rituals share. A Pagan visiting another’s Circle will usually only need to ask which direction the Circle is cast from and which Tool is used for Fire. Beyond that, the multiplicity of Gods and Traditions tends toward an “it’s all good” approach.
For the most part, this is a good thing. But, like all good things, it has its downside. It is also possible for someone to have a good grasp of the mechanics of ritual and to subscribe to the most utterly absurd notions concerning those rituals. I do not intend to indicate any particular model or approach, but rather, a lack of any coherent example of either.
Animism, for instance, is a perfectly viable perspective. As Chaos Magicians know, when you approach the Universe from a particular perspective, it tends to oblige with examples. But one should understand Animism inside and out, not just adhere to a perspective because they “like it.” Very few things grate on my ears than people saying they “like” a particular philosophy or metaphysical system. A system is not like soda or cigarettes. Brand loyalty doesn’t enter into the picture. The question is does one grasp their chosen viewpoint to the extent that they could explain it clearly to someone who hasn’t heard of it before?
“Significance” is slippery. To a certain degree we are always a step behind the reality curve, since our minds are conditioned by past habits. Orthopraxis gives us an anchor in the phenomenal Universe while we sort out our relations with the Causal. But not being able to give real arguments for our current outdated (even by an hour) model will ensure that we never truly understand.
In a sense, this is a deeper challenge to dogma. Superficially we can all agree that holding beliefs “just because” they are part of their religious tradition is at best lazy, at worst a recipe for irrelevance. However, it is often the case that we hold core assumptions that are unexpressed and inform our choices without our knowing it.
A common thread is a good thing. But, like a dogma, the motions of ritual can become just motions. To go beyond this, we need to look at what we do, and our assumptions about it. The drama of “significance” is ever changing, and we don’t want to get stuck in the third act when the Universe is working on the climax.
The Word, and the rational intellect, can be credited with creating human civilization. This is not only because reason is necessary to communicate important facts such as where a building’s foundation should be or how many swords are available for “N” number of warriors. The Word, in the Hermetic sense, creates a story that a civilization then embodies. This story determines what can and cannot be conceptualized until a new Word is uttered by a Magus to come.
Given the great power of the rational intellect, one would easily understand that it is crafting the world as well as describing it. This is generally not the case. The Word is in the hands of both Tahuti and his Ape. Tradition has it that the Magus is followed by the Ape of Thoth, who ensures that all his words will be misunderstood. The Word, once the pure expression of a Cosmic Mystery, has now become trapped in a thicket of its own ramifications and reifications. Like all contingent phenomena, it is ultimately impermanent and unsatisfactory.
Which brings me, as usual, to Ken Wilber. (Really this obsession is unhealthy. I should get help.) In his AQAL map, intellectual development is said to be “necessary but not sufficient” for spiritual development. This is, I feel, like most things which are spoken, both true and untrue. Wilber’s teleology demands that the monkey learn to speak before it can climb to the heights of the Non-dual.
But what if it learns to speak lies? Can it ultimately learn anything else?
One gets the feeling that it wouldn’t matter. The development of the cognitive faculty would, in itself, be the sole requirement. As the Cosmos is in process, every statement we make can be considered true, false, and meaningless, depending on what point in time we are discussing. The mind can be thought of as a great spoon, dipping again into a boiling soup of events, concepts, wars, famines, movie premiers, and pornographic ice cream wrappers. The spoonful it brings out of this chaos it calls “reality.” But it tends to go for the same kinds of food each time, since it has now defined that which it has not picked out before “not food.”
Even so, we must learn to use the spoon. To simply sit on the edge, trying to make sense of the swirling chaos, will not serve us. And we must learn to discriminate, since there are poisons in that stew as well as nourishment. Knowing it is all temporary, we can enjoy the meal without expecting it to be the same every time.
The Ape of Thoth is both our adversary and ally. His jokes are annoying, and he always makes us look like fools. But he also helps us by showing us that the universe doesn’t play by our rules. We only have a certain degree of control over anything, and the Ape is there to help us laugh when we try too hard.
Eventually, when we have learned how to work with the Ape, we can even begin to ignore those poisons we had to avoid. The mind is capable, if developed beyond mere analysis, of transmuting these poisons into wisdom. But it takes time, and we must pay our dues to the Ape before Tahuti will speak to us in plain english.
When I first encountered Neopaganism, it was fairly common to see a harsh assessment of Christianity in much of the material. On an interpersonal level this was even more pronounced. Christianity was said to be misogynist, hierarchical, and generally everything that Pagans were against. As Paganism has become more prevalent, I have noted a change in the public attitude (though not generally amongst Pagans when encountered face to face). The approach seems to have shifted toward “playing nice.”
A sentiment I hear expressed so often I can’t help wondering if people are thinking when they say it is “If you want to be respected, you have to show respect.” Which is fine, as far as it goes. It just misses the point of talking about religious beliefs and their implications. The question is not whether one can relate socially to another human being without insulting them. This is basic courtesy. Most, if not all, Christians are ultimately caring individuals who want what they see as the best for their fellow human beings. What really needs to be asked is whether religious beliefs have social and ethical impacts, and whether these impacts can be evaluated as generally beneficial or generally harmful. In other words, is what a Christian sees as “the best” really the best, or a collection of insane nonsense that leads people to hurt one another.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I think the answer is a little bit of both, depending on the individual and the sect. “Christianity” as such is only identifiable by generalities. Some of these generalities are problematic on their own, but don’t become actual issues until someone decides to put a particularly pathological spin on them. For instance, focusing on an episode of extreme pain and mutilation as the center of ones religious beliefs seems, from where I sit, psychologically unhealthy. But it only becomes an ethical issue when people start actually nailing themselves to crosses in an effort to emulate it. We are, in such cases, a little too squeamish about saying “Moron, don’t nail yourself to a cross.” But then I’m of the “it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye” school of cultural relativism.
But it’s not as if Christianity is a foreign belief system for most of us. Even those who grew up in more “secular” environments still assimilated the assumptions that our collective metaphysic inherited from the dominant belief system. Atheism is basically addressed at those assumptions, as much as it would like to generalize its critique. Which is the main reason why I think we, as Pagans, still need to look critically at Christianity. Forget about what Christians think about us, or even what one type of Christianity teaches. We are the future and they, in the final analysis, are the past.
If we are to move forward into something like a civilization, we need to start looking at the mistakes our ancestors made. These mistakes generally arose from a Christian viewpoint. Yes, to a certain degree this does cast the religion in a negative light. But it is the light shone by their own actions, over centuries. The cumulative, historical effects of the religion and its God do not reflect well upon it.
“What’s done is done,” as they say. To blame modern Christians for these things is only partly just. To the extent that they maintain a literal belief in the Bible and an adherence to doctrines that denigrate the material world, sexuality, women, and the various cultural others, I think it fair to point this out. In the end, however, it is largely beside the point. It is very difficult to maintain beliefs which run counter to the evidence of ones senses and the prevailing tendencies of the age. These things are slowly being sloughed off, even if those holding on to the detritus are especially tenacious and bombastic about it.
What is really important is to look inside, and see how many of the old ghosts are still in our own machine. It is even possible that some may still be worth keeping around. But we’ll never know if we place ourselves in a corner where saying anything even remotely critical of Christianity is considered out of bounds and cause not to take someone seriously. That is simply silencing for political convenience. Something we have had a great deal too much of in the past, and which is beneath us.
It’s always interesting to run into ethical debates in the Pagan community. I have a distinct feeling that the most common form in which Pagan ethics are expressed, the Wiccan Rede suffers from the same predicament that many rules of thumb do when they move from a very small population of intimates to a larger group without the same group dynamic and unspoken mutual understanding. The first Gardnarians probably had relatively similar notions about what “harm none” meant, and what it could reasonably include. When the Rede hit the shelves of the local big box bookstore, however, it encountered a much more diverse audience.
One thing I’ve seen relatively little of is a discussion of what sorts of occupations can be considered more logically appropriate for modern Pagans. I would think the way we spend eight hours of our day would be something of a major concern. Often, what I see is off hand remarks along the lines of “it’s not what you do, it’s who you are.”
I can see how this would be a way to resolve a conflict. And, of course, it is incredibly difficult to find any work right now, let alone work that aligns with ones values. But it introduces an interesting set of philosophical concerns that ache for some anal retentive bastard like myself to examine. I have an idea where this division between what one believes and what one does for a living might come from. If we start the phenomena of “Modern Paganism” at the point where we have documentation, this puts our origins in England. England, as we all know, is a Protestant country, and the “Protestant Work Ethic” generally followed the early colonizers of the Americas and Australia. (Yes, I’m aware that Australia was a penal colony. But I’m not talking about individuals. I’m talking about established cultural patterns.) This ethic, which in its extreme, Calvinist form actually takes material wealth, however gained, to be a sign of grace, relies heavily on the doctrine of Sola Fide or “Faith Alone.” The most dramatic verse used to hammer the irrelevancy of “good works” is found in Isaiah 64,6: “All your righteous acts are as filthy rags.”
Sola Fide is a response to the Catholic notion of salvation through good works. This is actually a complex debate between the two groups of Christians, and is generally beyond the scope of this blog. (Not to mention the ability of the current author to delve too deeply into the waters of Christian theology.) The general idea, however, is that “good works” as such are likely to give one a big ego. You start thinking you’re better than other Christians (as a Christian you’re automatically assumed better than non-Christians) who are born in sin just as you are. No matter how good you do, you’re always going to fall short. So, it’s better to cultivate a love of God, which should lead to your actions being pleasing to Him.
Whether we like it or not, we as Modern Pagans have inherited at least the broadest implications of this ethos. It’s more than just a religious dogma. It forms a huge part of the cultural matrix of our society. I think it no accident that its adoption on a broad scale roughly coincides with the ascension of the mercantile bourgeoisie in the early modern period. Neither did Max Weber.
Examining this outlook, I think, is important for Pagans to do. The underpinning of it involves something that we are theologically opposed to: the idea that the world we live in is a fallen creation. That subsequent generations of Puritans have, by their grace-filled lives, contributed to the self fulfillment of their own views, need not concern us.
An interesting contrast to the doctrine of Sola Fide is the Buddhist concept of Sila or moral training. Buddhism, like existentialism, does not separate a person’s identity from who they are. Rather, it explicitly denies a permanent “self” that could be “good” or “bad” and focuses on the relationship between ones thoughts and actions. The world itself (contrary to popular understandings of Buddhism) is taken in many cases to already be enlightened. We just have to catch up. The way we catch up is to refrain from harmful actions and engage in positive ones. This pretty much covers the Eightfold Path in toto. The Precepts are basically commentary on that one idea.
It’s important to remember that Buddhism doesn’t really consist of “dogmas” in the theological sense. It consists mostly of advice. Very pragmatic advice that actually tends to work. One doesn’t decide to practice Right Livelihood because it’s a religious doctrine. They undertake Sila because they view it as inseparable from the Path to Enlightenment.
Pagans may or may not be interested in “Enlightenment” by one definition or another. But I do think we should look at the question of intention and its relationship to action. What kind of world do we want to live in? What do we value? Is the way we spend our forty (or more) hours a week likely to preserve what we value and contribute to the sort of world we want to live in, or destroy our treasured world and our hope for the future?
In the end, the question of “what we really want our world to be” may be more important that the specific instance of what we get paid to do. If we really find that out, we may be able to figure out the rest without much effort.
