So I was supposed to run a Samhain ritual for our sabbat group (it's not really a circle, much less a coven, but since we're not really associated with a specific UU church anymore it feels weird to call us a CUUPs circle, even if we are still loosely affiliated with the national group) on Monday. Since that was the full moon, I cancelled my moon circle for this month. I didn't spend as much time and energy writing the ritual as I'd originally intended, but it was a substantial amount - and then no one showed up but me and the hosts. Three's not really enough for bells, whistles, and candles (or is that book, bell, and whistle?), so we decided to just do a basic dumb supper instead. It was nice, but not very ritual-y.
I then debated trying to run the ritual tonight instead, but it seemed unlikely that I could get enough people together on such short notice. So instead, I have candles and incense burning at my tiny ancestor stele. Tomorrow, I'll put out fresh candles and incense, and the bourbon they asked for. (I still don't have any tobacco - I think I'll have to find a pipe store, or maybe a botanica.)
One of the people who missed the Monday ritual is attending on a very elderly relative in the hospital. One of the people who did make it recently lost a sister to the Great Below. A friend of a friend has had a stroke and can't communicate to her caretakers to get her priestess for what might be her last rites. My own grandmother died a few days after a Samhain. And, of course, the latest incarnation of Huracan is making a deadly pass across the eastern seaboard. It is definitely the dark half of the year.
Blessed Samhain, Winterfinding, and/or Dia de los Muertos to all of you.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Ripples
Amazon had a sale on Grateful Dead MP3s recently, so I picked up a best-of. I'm not a huge fan, and never have been, but I like them well enough, and - more to the point - I hang out with enough musicians that eventually, someone is going to ask me to sing "Uncle John's Band" while they jam out. It's kind of like "Hey Jude" that way - everyone knows it, no matter what their normal musical style is.
On a parallel track, I also recently, as a fumbling way of completing an assignment I was given, ended up constructing a small ancestral shrine. (I also dropped a cinder of burning frankincense, and melted a hole in a plastic pot before I noticed. Fortunately, it was on concrete and I had a watering can at hand, so no harm done except to the pot.) It's a eclectic, or possibly syncretic, hodgepodge of elements. The central piece is a small cedar stela, marked with a solar winged disc (a symbol for Shapshu of the Corpses, one of the Ugaritic protectors of the dead), an eight-pointed star (specifically Astarte's symbol, but it shows up a lot in Levantine and Mesopotamian religious art in the context of various heavenly deities, not just Astarte/Ishtar), and the names of both of my paternal grandparents. It's currently flanked by two jar candles (the sort you see in the Hispanic foods section of the grocery store, with various saints on them), and has a spot for incense in front of the stela (stick incense, now, after the goof with the resin incense). I need to see if I have any photos I can scan and print to add, at least temporarily.
I don't normally do a lot of regular ancestor veneration; I've historically avoided it on the grounds that it would be disrespectful to my ancestors' beliefs. This is particularly true on my distaff side, unfortunately; every ancestor for whom I know more than a name was a rock-ribbed devout Lutheran, and the same will be true of my mother when she joins them. I am fairly sure that, even if they have found out by now that there is more than they imagined, they would still be grossly offended by being offered veneration due (in their minds) only to their god. And my father's father's line runs to standard Southern Protestantism, although they seem to have been generally less devout than my maternal side.
But my father's mother's side is Catholic, and Louisiana Catholics at that. My paternal grandmother was a fairly devout Marian; I trace some of my initial respect for the female Divine to her reverence for the Mother of God. She was also a bit of a drama queen and attention-seeking scene-stealer. At some point in my contemplation of the assignment, I realized that, orthodoxy or not, anything that involved someone making a big fuss about her, in Mary's name, would probably not displease her. And her husband lost whatever vestiges of his childhood Presbyterian faith he still had on the battlefield in WWII; he might dismiss the whole project as foolishness and nonsense, but he wouldn't find it offensive in the same way that my two-church-founding, organ-playing, Bible-loving maternal grandfather would. So - fair enough. There's a Virgin of Guadalupe candle for her, and a plain red candle for him.
So what happens? They complain that I didn't get them tobacco and bourbon instead of incense.
*facepalm* Talk about your ungrateful dead!
But then, why should they be any different in death than in life? And, at least they turned up. And - well, they're right; they were both smokers and social drinkers all their lives, and part of ancestor reverence is to get them what they want(ed). And I can get them tobacco and bourbon, even if I don't remember their brand (and they get pipe tobacco; I am not buying them cigarettes).
On a parallel track, I also recently, as a fumbling way of completing an assignment I was given, ended up constructing a small ancestral shrine. (I also dropped a cinder of burning frankincense, and melted a hole in a plastic pot before I noticed. Fortunately, it was on concrete and I had a watering can at hand, so no harm done except to the pot.) It's a eclectic, or possibly syncretic, hodgepodge of elements. The central piece is a small cedar stela, marked with a solar winged disc (a symbol for Shapshu of the Corpses, one of the Ugaritic protectors of the dead), an eight-pointed star (specifically Astarte's symbol, but it shows up a lot in Levantine and Mesopotamian religious art in the context of various heavenly deities, not just Astarte/Ishtar), and the names of both of my paternal grandparents. It's currently flanked by two jar candles (the sort you see in the Hispanic foods section of the grocery store, with various saints on them), and has a spot for incense in front of the stela (stick incense, now, after the goof with the resin incense). I need to see if I have any photos I can scan and print to add, at least temporarily.
I don't normally do a lot of regular ancestor veneration; I've historically avoided it on the grounds that it would be disrespectful to my ancestors' beliefs. This is particularly true on my distaff side, unfortunately; every ancestor for whom I know more than a name was a rock-ribbed devout Lutheran, and the same will be true of my mother when she joins them. I am fairly sure that, even if they have found out by now that there is more than they imagined, they would still be grossly offended by being offered veneration due (in their minds) only to their god. And my father's father's line runs to standard Southern Protestantism, although they seem to have been generally less devout than my maternal side.
But my father's mother's side is Catholic, and Louisiana Catholics at that. My paternal grandmother was a fairly devout Marian; I trace some of my initial respect for the female Divine to her reverence for the Mother of God. She was also a bit of a drama queen and attention-seeking scene-stealer. At some point in my contemplation of the assignment, I realized that, orthodoxy or not, anything that involved someone making a big fuss about her, in Mary's name, would probably not displease her. And her husband lost whatever vestiges of his childhood Presbyterian faith he still had on the battlefield in WWII; he might dismiss the whole project as foolishness and nonsense, but he wouldn't find it offensive in the same way that my two-church-founding, organ-playing, Bible-loving maternal grandfather would. So - fair enough. There's a Virgin of Guadalupe candle for her, and a plain red candle for him.
So what happens? They complain that I didn't get them tobacco and bourbon instead of incense.
*facepalm* Talk about your ungrateful dead!
But then, why should they be any different in death than in life? And, at least they turned up. And - well, they're right; they were both smokers and social drinkers all their lives, and part of ancestor reverence is to get them what they want(ed). And I can get them tobacco and bourbon, even if I don't remember their brand (and they get pipe tobacco; I am not buying them cigarettes).
Friday, August 3, 2012
Taking Our Chances
Pretty much everyone who's had much exposure to Christianity has probably heard of Pascal's Wager. You may not know what he knew a thing or two about wagering; he's not the father of mathematical probability - that distinction goes to Fermat - but he was instrumental in developing it beyond its initial foundations.
In case you don't know Pascal's Wager, it goes something like this: Either God exists, or he does not. Either you believe, or you do not. If God does not exist and you do not believe, nothing happens. If God does not exist and you do believe, you miss out on some of the joys and pleasures of this world. If God exists and you do not believe, you will be tortured for all eternity. If God exists and you do believe, you will exist in eternal bliss. Since the reward for believing if God exists is essentially positive-infinity, and the reward for not believing if God exists is negative infinity, it doesn't matter what the payoffs are if God does not exist; as long as the probability that God exists is not zero, the rational thing is to choose to believe.
Now, there are a lot of problems with that, starting with the question of whether one can, in fact, choose to believe (Calvin had some opinions on that subject). The biggest objection brought by most mathematicians is that Christianity and atheism are not the only two options - Islam is usually brought up, and sometimes Hinduism and Buddhism as well.
It turns out that there's a Pagan version of the wager, which in at least some form predates Pascal by quite a bit; it's sometimes known as the skeptic's wager, but it stems at least in part from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (thanks to Libby Anne for this particular formulation), so I'm going to call it Aurelius's wager.
And Aurelius's Wager goes something like this: Either the gods exist, or they don't. Either the gods are just, or they are unjust. We may act with justice, or with injustice. If the gods exist and are just, then we will be judged according to whether we have been just or unjust. If the gods exist and are unjust, then we should not care what they think. If the gods do not exist, and we act unjustly, then we will be remembered with infamy. If the gods do not exist and we act justly, then we will at least be remembered well.
Note that Pascal's wager is actually covered in Aurelius's. A god who is capable of inflicting a non-finite punishment on a finite being, and does so, is clearly not a just god. Indeed, if a god did so, the just thing to do would be to either struggle against it, not to serve it. As Huck Finn said, "All right, then I'll go to Hell."
Star Foster wrote yesterday about rejecting Jesus Christ. I actually have a bit of a soft spot for the rabbi Yeheshua ben Miriam; for a man of his time, he was remarkably progressive. I think his followers were far more mired in conventional thinking, and the religion they founded got co-opted by the Empire a couple of centuries after Aurelius. But I have no love whatsoever for Yahveh, and the above is part of it. I have absolutely no way to square Yahveh's behavior with a just god, no matter how his prophets attempted to spin him later. So - I will not worship him, in any form. If you go back far enough, to before Yahveh and El were syncretized, I will happily worship the physical, fallible El who loves humans and is concerned with (although not perfect about) justice. I have no problem with Mary Theotokos, and the deified version of her kid I can take or leave, depending on the context. But Yahveh the Lonely, the Angry? The sky-father who divorced Asherah and disowned Baal? No, not him.
I've actually had this argument with a couple of atheists. They wanted to know what would happen if, as Yahveh did to Abraham, one of my gods told me to sacrifice someone. They seemed to be startled when I told them "I'd say no," as if accepting a god's existence meant always obeying it. But I agree with Aurelius - an unjust god is not worth obeying. (I'll admit, the fact that I think the gods have a fairly limited influence on one's afterlife also helps.)
In case you don't know Pascal's Wager, it goes something like this: Either God exists, or he does not. Either you believe, or you do not. If God does not exist and you do not believe, nothing happens. If God does not exist and you do believe, you miss out on some of the joys and pleasures of this world. If God exists and you do not believe, you will be tortured for all eternity. If God exists and you do believe, you will exist in eternal bliss. Since the reward for believing if God exists is essentially positive-infinity, and the reward for not believing if God exists is negative infinity, it doesn't matter what the payoffs are if God does not exist; as long as the probability that God exists is not zero, the rational thing is to choose to believe.
Now, there are a lot of problems with that, starting with the question of whether one can, in fact, choose to believe (Calvin had some opinions on that subject). The biggest objection brought by most mathematicians is that Christianity and atheism are not the only two options - Islam is usually brought up, and sometimes Hinduism and Buddhism as well.
It turns out that there's a Pagan version of the wager, which in at least some form predates Pascal by quite a bit; it's sometimes known as the skeptic's wager, but it stems at least in part from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (thanks to Libby Anne for this particular formulation), so I'm going to call it Aurelius's wager.
And Aurelius's Wager goes something like this: Either the gods exist, or they don't. Either the gods are just, or they are unjust. We may act with justice, or with injustice. If the gods exist and are just, then we will be judged according to whether we have been just or unjust. If the gods exist and are unjust, then we should not care what they think. If the gods do not exist, and we act unjustly, then we will be remembered with infamy. If the gods do not exist and we act justly, then we will at least be remembered well.
Note that Pascal's wager is actually covered in Aurelius's. A god who is capable of inflicting a non-finite punishment on a finite being, and does so, is clearly not a just god. Indeed, if a god did so, the just thing to do would be to either struggle against it, not to serve it. As Huck Finn said, "All right, then I'll go to Hell."
Star Foster wrote yesterday about rejecting Jesus Christ. I actually have a bit of a soft spot for the rabbi Yeheshua ben Miriam; for a man of his time, he was remarkably progressive. I think his followers were far more mired in conventional thinking, and the religion they founded got co-opted by the Empire a couple of centuries after Aurelius. But I have no love whatsoever for Yahveh, and the above is part of it. I have absolutely no way to square Yahveh's behavior with a just god, no matter how his prophets attempted to spin him later. So - I will not worship him, in any form. If you go back far enough, to before Yahveh and El were syncretized, I will happily worship the physical, fallible El who loves humans and is concerned with (although not perfect about) justice. I have no problem with Mary Theotokos, and the deified version of her kid I can take or leave, depending on the context. But Yahveh the Lonely, the Angry? The sky-father who divorced Asherah and disowned Baal? No, not him.
I've actually had this argument with a couple of atheists. They wanted to know what would happen if, as Yahveh did to Abraham, one of my gods told me to sacrifice someone. They seemed to be startled when I told them "I'd say no," as if accepting a god's existence meant always obeying it. But I agree with Aurelius - an unjust god is not worth obeying. (I'll admit, the fact that I think the gods have a fairly limited influence on one's afterlife also helps.)
Friday, July 20, 2012
Given For You
A number of people in the broader Pagan blogging community, especially those who identify as polytheists rather than pantheists or duotheists, have been talking about "daily practice" as a discipline lately. Most of them seem to mean something like "daily prayer and/or meditation" by this.
I'm not sure I think that's necessary. I'm tempted to say I don't think it's historically accurate, at least in that it's generally pictured as daily private practice. Most daily prayers, poems, and hymns in the historical Pagan eras were done quite publicly, in temples or their courtyards, in shrines, and in theaters.
What you and your deities come to an agreement on is, of course, between you and them - P. Sufenas Virius Lupus has a great post up on this. If that means singing a daily hymn, or meditating for ten minutes every morning and every evening, then great! But I don't think it looks much like what the gods have traditionally asked for.
It seems to me that what most historical Pagan traditions had instead was regular (not necessarily daily) sacrifice, and other similar ritual actions (such as decorating the votive statuary for a particular deity). I personally find it more meaningful to offer libations and incense to my broad polypantheon of deities on something resembling a semi-regular basis. While I see myself as needing improvement here, it's more of a matter of getting a better schedule together and determining what the likes and dislikes of each deity are.
None of this is meant to downplay poetry, hymnody, or prayer. I've commented multiple times that I think we need more Pagan hymns - we have plenty of chants, and those serve many admirable purposes, but they don't replace longer-form songs, and we don't have enough. And I'd like to see more for individual deities, more than generic Goddess-hymns, although I'd like to see those too.
Beyond that is the matter of honoring one's ancestors. I have a hard time with this, partly because my mother-line ancestors are all hardcore Lutherans and would have the taciturn and stoic equivalent of a major hissy at the idea of being the recipient of veneration. There are similar issues with my father-line ancestors, although the immediate past two, my paternal grandparents, are pretty much okay with it from what I can tell so far. It's not that I don't want to - it's that I'm not entirely convinced I wouldn't be doing so against most of their wills. So far, I've mostly been going on the "should you choose to receive these offerings" model, which has not gotten me much in the way of results one way or the other.
At least the ancestors don't need more than household shrines. I am still awkwardly aware that most of the historical praxis for my gods assumes public shrines at a minimum, and in most cases public temples. And I don't know if we'll ever have that again - at best, I can imagine grounds owned by Pagan organizations with places for small, permanent shrines and shared larger ritual spaces. I suppose part of being NeoPagan is learning anew how to respect the gods as a religious minority in a larger culture. That we tend not to be wealthy doesn't help. And "appreciate the journey" has never been very satisfactory for me.
I'm not sure I think that's necessary. I'm tempted to say I don't think it's historically accurate, at least in that it's generally pictured as daily private practice. Most daily prayers, poems, and hymns in the historical Pagan eras were done quite publicly, in temples or their courtyards, in shrines, and in theaters.
What you and your deities come to an agreement on is, of course, between you and them - P. Sufenas Virius Lupus has a great post up on this. If that means singing a daily hymn, or meditating for ten minutes every morning and every evening, then great! But I don't think it looks much like what the gods have traditionally asked for.
It seems to me that what most historical Pagan traditions had instead was regular (not necessarily daily) sacrifice, and other similar ritual actions (such as decorating the votive statuary for a particular deity). I personally find it more meaningful to offer libations and incense to my broad polypantheon of deities on something resembling a semi-regular basis. While I see myself as needing improvement here, it's more of a matter of getting a better schedule together and determining what the likes and dislikes of each deity are.
None of this is meant to downplay poetry, hymnody, or prayer. I've commented multiple times that I think we need more Pagan hymns - we have plenty of chants, and those serve many admirable purposes, but they don't replace longer-form songs, and we don't have enough. And I'd like to see more for individual deities, more than generic Goddess-hymns, although I'd like to see those too.
Beyond that is the matter of honoring one's ancestors. I have a hard time with this, partly because my mother-line ancestors are all hardcore Lutherans and would have the taciturn and stoic equivalent of a major hissy at the idea of being the recipient of veneration. There are similar issues with my father-line ancestors, although the immediate past two, my paternal grandparents, are pretty much okay with it from what I can tell so far. It's not that I don't want to - it's that I'm not entirely convinced I wouldn't be doing so against most of their wills. So far, I've mostly been going on the "should you choose to receive these offerings" model, which has not gotten me much in the way of results one way or the other.
At least the ancestors don't need more than household shrines. I am still awkwardly aware that most of the historical praxis for my gods assumes public shrines at a minimum, and in most cases public temples. And I don't know if we'll ever have that again - at best, I can imagine grounds owned by Pagan organizations with places for small, permanent shrines and shared larger ritual spaces. I suppose part of being NeoPagan is learning anew how to respect the gods as a religious minority in a larger culture. That we tend not to be wealthy doesn't help. And "appreciate the journey" has never been very satisfactory for me.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Mud and Storm
It's supposed to rain roughly every other day here from about mid-June to about mid-July, from about 4 pm until shortly after sunset. The oppressive heat of the day evaporates the water from the Gulf, it drifts over land and starts condensing as it hits the cooler upper air, and we get our daily 60% chance of late afternoon and evening thundershowers.
It didn't do that last year, because there was a massive high stuck over the entire state of Texas all summer, and we had a ridiculous drought with wildfires instead. (Actually, the drought had already started the previous winter, but no one noticed because we were all complaining that it was so damn cold.) It's not doing it this year, either. June was pretty hot and dry, pushing us into mild drought again. Starting about a week and a half ago, though, we started getting daily thunderstorms - but at 4 in the morning instead of four in the afternoon. They've slowly drifted forward (along with my sleep cycle) over the course of the last week or so; today's just started at around 3 pm (and in fact blipped the power while I was typing this).
And then, every few years, Huracan roars out of the Gulf to remind us who's boss around here. His last incarnation was named Ike. The laws of probability are such that saying we're due for another visit is wrong, and we've had a quiet Atlantic hurricane season so far, despite the Gulf being quite hot - probably because the prime storm-formation area off of Africa is only average temperature-wise, and there's rather a lot of dry air floating around to inhibit storm formation.
(Note: I got interrupted for about 45 minutes here by a lightning-related power outage.)
One of the reasons, I suspect, that I've been feeling the pull of the Levantine pantheon is that tension between the desert behind, the storm above, and the sea before. The association of Asherah with the sea, vague as it is based on our current sources, matches some of my other sea-deity associations, and of course the defeat of Sea at the hands of Storm is more palatable when Storm is in turn bested by Desert (who then has to be defeated by the Lady of the Beasts to revive the Storm, another note missing from the Babylonian version of the story). Before I came to Texas, the desert was a far-away threat, even farther away than the mountains, but now, desert and ocean alike are only a few hours' drive away. One or another may encroach for a summer (especially when we humans have been feeding them so poorly; the fumes of internal combustion only stoke their fury), only to die at the hands of another and return on the next wheel of the year.
Io, Ba'al Hadad! May you keep drought away from our doorstep a little longer.
It didn't do that last year, because there was a massive high stuck over the entire state of Texas all summer, and we had a ridiculous drought with wildfires instead. (Actually, the drought had already started the previous winter, but no one noticed because we were all complaining that it was so damn cold.) It's not doing it this year, either. June was pretty hot and dry, pushing us into mild drought again. Starting about a week and a half ago, though, we started getting daily thunderstorms - but at 4 in the morning instead of four in the afternoon. They've slowly drifted forward (along with my sleep cycle) over the course of the last week or so; today's just started at around 3 pm (and in fact blipped the power while I was typing this).
And then, every few years, Huracan roars out of the Gulf to remind us who's boss around here. His last incarnation was named Ike. The laws of probability are such that saying we're due for another visit is wrong, and we've had a quiet Atlantic hurricane season so far, despite the Gulf being quite hot - probably because the prime storm-formation area off of Africa is only average temperature-wise, and there's rather a lot of dry air floating around to inhibit storm formation.
(Note: I got interrupted for about 45 minutes here by a lightning-related power outage.)
One of the reasons, I suspect, that I've been feeling the pull of the Levantine pantheon is that tension between the desert behind, the storm above, and the sea before. The association of Asherah with the sea, vague as it is based on our current sources, matches some of my other sea-deity associations, and of course the defeat of Sea at the hands of Storm is more palatable when Storm is in turn bested by Desert (who then has to be defeated by the Lady of the Beasts to revive the Storm, another note missing from the Babylonian version of the story). Before I came to Texas, the desert was a far-away threat, even farther away than the mountains, but now, desert and ocean alike are only a few hours' drive away. One or another may encroach for a summer (especially when we humans have been feeding them so poorly; the fumes of internal combustion only stoke their fury), only to die at the hands of another and return on the next wheel of the year.
Io, Ba'al Hadad! May you keep drought away from our doorstep a little longer.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
People of the Library
I am starting to be concerned about the number of books I am buying.
Not, let me assure anyone, for financial reasons - while none of my hobbies are cheap, we are a DINK household, and I can easily decide to buy less yarn and more books (or fewer books and more beads, or any one of a number of other swaps) in a given month. It's more a matter of space. Our apartment is really the bottom half of an eighty-year-old house, and while it's quite generous for what we're paying, space is still somewhat limited. In particular, I'm about to start having to stack the bookshelves in my study double-deep, as I don't have the space to buy another bookshelf.
Someone out there is suggesting that I thin the stacks and haul the books I don't need to the local used bookstore. It's true that there are several books on the shelves, mostly dating from my just-post-college dalliance with dualistic Dianic Wicca by way of feminist religion, that I probably will neither read again nor use as reference, and I could stand to get rid of them - but Mary Daly and Carol Christ, though I never really agreed with the first and often disagree with the monist tendencies of the latter, are both huge influences in my sorting-out period, when I set Yahveh down and began deciding what my theology actually looked like. I'm not sure I want to part with those. I do have a stack of books that need to be donated, but most of them are the leftovers from several donations I got from other people who were moving, simplifying, or cleaning out after a death in the family, and most of them have to do with either cooking or kinky sex rather than religion. (In both cases, it's not that I don't like the books as that the specific flavors aren't quite to my taste. I am having much better luck finding cookbooks that fit my rather particular palate than kink books. But I digress.)
No, the big reason for the sudden explosion of text is that I've been digging into what we know historically about the ancient Near East and its religions, including a few forays into the Hellenized and Roman periods, and quite a few of the books I want on the topic (a) aren't available as ebooks, and (b) are in fact out of print. So in many cases, it's a simple matter of having to grab them now or waiting until later, when they might not be available at all and will very probably be more expensive if they are. That many of these were either explicitly textbooks or apparently assigned reading in some college courses means that there's the weird predatory business of used textbooks rattling around as well.
I wish publishers would quit writhing around about the business models for ebooks - no, it's not fair that Amazon and Apple and Barnes & Noble get to jack you around like this, but if you'd gotten on the stick earlier, you'd be more in control of your own electronic publication and distribution, and you didn't, so take your spanking from the Invisible Hand of the Market and deal with it like big boys and girls. There's really no reason for anything to ever go "out of print" in electronic form when "printing" is a matter of file transfer. In fact, publishers and authors lose sales when things go out of print, and if there's no loss in paper, ink, transportation, & storage costs, there's no reason to ever lose that sale. It's the cost of the physical object and its maintenance that's the weight on the publisher's shoulders, and on my bending bookshelves.
The paper-lovers are having a fit out there. Well, I love the feel and heft and smell of a proper paper book, too - and reading a paper book during a power outage is certainly easier. There is certainly much to worry about as far as proprietary file types and device obsolescence go, too - but I think those concerns are somewhat overblown. Paper books have their own planned obsolescence, too; it's just longer. I've had cheap paperbacks from the '60s and hardbacks from the '40s disintegrate in my hands. Sure, most printers use better paper now (which is one reason books are so dang expensive), but no book will last forever, and most of them won't outlive their owners by more than a generation. I've had a housefire. The documents that were on my hard drive mostly (not all - there was some damage) survived. The books that were in the room where the fire started did not.
Have you ever seen a burned book? I have. It burns from the outside in. I have picked up what looked like bricks of charcoal, opened them, and seen perfectly readable text in the middle. The information was all still there, just as it is in the closed book on the shelf - but the act of reading it crumbled the medium under my fingers. If I had had cloud backups, if they'd been on the e-reader (which I didn't have yet) in my backpack (which was with me, and thus not in the room that burned), if the information had lived in more than one place, I'd've still had those books. I've never personally lost a book to water, but I've seen seen piles of mildewed paperbacks sitting on street corners for pickup after Ike, after every flood. Digital isn't an ideal solution, but paper isn't as permanent as you think.
I'd love to relieve my groaning shelves and fill some digital library, backed up on device and server and thumb drive, such that every new purchase only added a few hundred K to drives that can store millions, billions. I don't want the shelves empty - I just wish the nature of the business wasn't such that having too many interests left them overcrowded.
Not, let me assure anyone, for financial reasons - while none of my hobbies are cheap, we are a DINK household, and I can easily decide to buy less yarn and more books (or fewer books and more beads, or any one of a number of other swaps) in a given month. It's more a matter of space. Our apartment is really the bottom half of an eighty-year-old house, and while it's quite generous for what we're paying, space is still somewhat limited. In particular, I'm about to start having to stack the bookshelves in my study double-deep, as I don't have the space to buy another bookshelf.
Someone out there is suggesting that I thin the stacks and haul the books I don't need to the local used bookstore. It's true that there are several books on the shelves, mostly dating from my just-post-college dalliance with dualistic Dianic Wicca by way of feminist religion, that I probably will neither read again nor use as reference, and I could stand to get rid of them - but Mary Daly and Carol Christ, though I never really agreed with the first and often disagree with the monist tendencies of the latter, are both huge influences in my sorting-out period, when I set Yahveh down and began deciding what my theology actually looked like. I'm not sure I want to part with those. I do have a stack of books that need to be donated, but most of them are the leftovers from several donations I got from other people who were moving, simplifying, or cleaning out after a death in the family, and most of them have to do with either cooking or kinky sex rather than religion. (In both cases, it's not that I don't like the books as that the specific flavors aren't quite to my taste. I am having much better luck finding cookbooks that fit my rather particular palate than kink books. But I digress.)
No, the big reason for the sudden explosion of text is that I've been digging into what we know historically about the ancient Near East and its religions, including a few forays into the Hellenized and Roman periods, and quite a few of the books I want on the topic (a) aren't available as ebooks, and (b) are in fact out of print. So in many cases, it's a simple matter of having to grab them now or waiting until later, when they might not be available at all and will very probably be more expensive if they are. That many of these were either explicitly textbooks or apparently assigned reading in some college courses means that there's the weird predatory business of used textbooks rattling around as well.
I wish publishers would quit writhing around about the business models for ebooks - no, it's not fair that Amazon and Apple and Barnes & Noble get to jack you around like this, but if you'd gotten on the stick earlier, you'd be more in control of your own electronic publication and distribution, and you didn't, so take your spanking from the Invisible Hand of the Market and deal with it like big boys and girls. There's really no reason for anything to ever go "out of print" in electronic form when "printing" is a matter of file transfer. In fact, publishers and authors lose sales when things go out of print, and if there's no loss in paper, ink, transportation, & storage costs, there's no reason to ever lose that sale. It's the cost of the physical object and its maintenance that's the weight on the publisher's shoulders, and on my bending bookshelves.
The paper-lovers are having a fit out there. Well, I love the feel and heft and smell of a proper paper book, too - and reading a paper book during a power outage is certainly easier. There is certainly much to worry about as far as proprietary file types and device obsolescence go, too - but I think those concerns are somewhat overblown. Paper books have their own planned obsolescence, too; it's just longer. I've had cheap paperbacks from the '60s and hardbacks from the '40s disintegrate in my hands. Sure, most printers use better paper now (which is one reason books are so dang expensive), but no book will last forever, and most of them won't outlive their owners by more than a generation. I've had a housefire. The documents that were on my hard drive mostly (not all - there was some damage) survived. The books that were in the room where the fire started did not.
Have you ever seen a burned book? I have. It burns from the outside in. I have picked up what looked like bricks of charcoal, opened them, and seen perfectly readable text in the middle. The information was all still there, just as it is in the closed book on the shelf - but the act of reading it crumbled the medium under my fingers. If I had had cloud backups, if they'd been on the e-reader (which I didn't have yet) in my backpack (which was with me, and thus not in the room that burned), if the information had lived in more than one place, I'd've still had those books. I've never personally lost a book to water, but I've seen seen piles of mildewed paperbacks sitting on street corners for pickup after Ike, after every flood. Digital isn't an ideal solution, but paper isn't as permanent as you think.
I'd love to relieve my groaning shelves and fill some digital library, backed up on device and server and thumb drive, such that every new purchase only added a few hundred K to drives that can store millions, billions. I don't want the shelves empty - I just wish the nature of the business wasn't such that having too many interests left them overcrowded.
Monday, July 2, 2012
Ave Discordia
A number of my friends are Discordians. (I almost started with "some of my best friends are Discordians," but let's not go there, mm?) Both the Spouse and my next-closest male friend identify as such, the first fairly casually, the other as seriously as one can and still be what he considers a proper Discordian (which is never more than ha-ha-only-serious).
In my recent fumblings in Near-Eastern historical paganism, one thing that I've found is that various deities of the underworld - Nergal and Ereshkigal, Reshep, Shapshu-Pagri, etc. - have rites and sacrifices, but Death itself - Mot, in the Canaanite literature - does not. Even when Death is figured as a deity, and is mentioned (usually as an antagonist) in the myth-cycles, It's not actively worshipped, perhaps out of a sense that we will all offer It a great enough sacrifice eventually, or perhaps out of a more pragmatic idea that it's not a good idea to invite Its full attention to one's-self.
Personally, I generally feel much the same way about the gods and goddesses of discord. I understand why others might not, and I certainly understand the urge to worship trickster-deities of various sorts. I confess to being confused when my Discordian friends frame Eris that way, though, as that's not really a role She plays in any of the extant myths. I am also perplexed by those who claim to worship "chaos" by way of Discordia, as Kaos is a deity in Its own right in the Theogony. As a worshipper of Tiamat, aka the Tohu half of Tohu-wa-Bohu (and yes, for those of you who play AD&D, the second half of that is related to Bahamut, go give yourself a d20-shaped cookie), I grok worshipping the primeval chaos at the base of all things. But that's not the same thing as discord. Chaos is the wellspring of good order; it comes first and gives form to it. Discord breaks already-existing good order. (It also breaks bad order, and I do understand that that's a major part of the appeal, but we'll leave that aside for the moment.)
Someone out there may be scratching their head as to how I can honor Tiamat and be leery of Discordia. Part of it has to do with how dead gods work, which is different from how gods of the underworld or gods of death work (and now all three of them are running around this post!), and part of it is the difference between the cosmic and cthonic, on the one hand, and the human scale and the social, on the other. The second is far more dangerous, for me. Tiamat was involved in only one war, and She didn't start it; Eris started the Trojan war, and has been part of every one ever since, even though she's not fundamentally a war goddess.
I understand acknowledging Discord, on the grounds that not inviting Her to the feast attracts Her attention in a worse way than inviting Her. In that She is more perceptive than Mot, she requires more attention to keep Her happy, and satiating Her is not so costly. But, despite the fact that She is Matron to the two most important men in my life, I don't understand the attraction beyond that. (In one case, he feels that She chose him rather than the other way around, and given his relationships with mortal women, that does match a recurring pattern in his life, albeit one that I think is perhaps a bit unhealthy.)
It turns out (despite the fact that He is a trickster, and a fine one, as well as being a deity of discord, lies, and perhaps betrayal, although some of that may be spin from the Christian monks who wrote many of the myths down) that many Heathens have the same reaction to Loki that I do to Eris. There also seems to be some question as to whether the pre-Christian Heathens actually did Him honor or not, and therefore whether it is appropriate for modern Heathens to do so. There was apparently some controversy about this at this year's Trothmoot. I get this, although the fact that He has a more broad purview than She does makes me more willing to deal with Him personally, and less confused about why anyone who had a choice about it would choose Him. In response to the controversy, some of his devotees are organizing a Month for Loki to blog about, and otherwise honor, Him. I get this, too - if you do honor Him, and he's been cut out of a central rite, it only stand to reason to honor Him on the peripheries.
Of course, Loki has recently sprung into the broad popular culture, too, via his comic-book-cum-movie fictionalized form in the Avengers movie (and the Thor movie before that), with the highly-attractive and expressive visage of Tom Hiddleston. And, true to form, he has deeply divided the fandom into those who woobify him, those who love him evil-laugh-and-all without the woobification, and those who hate him as a character. I find the fact that He has managed to spread discord in two different communities simultaneously, in two vastly different ways and in different forms, perhaps far more amusing than I should.
Ah, well. No need to speak ill of the gods, even if I see my work as opposed to theirs. Hail Loki, and ave Discordia!
In my recent fumblings in Near-Eastern historical paganism, one thing that I've found is that various deities of the underworld - Nergal and Ereshkigal, Reshep, Shapshu-Pagri, etc. - have rites and sacrifices, but Death itself - Mot, in the Canaanite literature - does not. Even when Death is figured as a deity, and is mentioned (usually as an antagonist) in the myth-cycles, It's not actively worshipped, perhaps out of a sense that we will all offer It a great enough sacrifice eventually, or perhaps out of a more pragmatic idea that it's not a good idea to invite Its full attention to one's-self.
Personally, I generally feel much the same way about the gods and goddesses of discord. I understand why others might not, and I certainly understand the urge to worship trickster-deities of various sorts. I confess to being confused when my Discordian friends frame Eris that way, though, as that's not really a role She plays in any of the extant myths. I am also perplexed by those who claim to worship "chaos" by way of Discordia, as Kaos is a deity in Its own right in the Theogony. As a worshipper of Tiamat, aka the Tohu half of Tohu-wa-Bohu (and yes, for those of you who play AD&D, the second half of that is related to Bahamut, go give yourself a d20-shaped cookie), I grok worshipping the primeval chaos at the base of all things. But that's not the same thing as discord. Chaos is the wellspring of good order; it comes first and gives form to it. Discord breaks already-existing good order. (It also breaks bad order, and I do understand that that's a major part of the appeal, but we'll leave that aside for the moment.)
Someone out there may be scratching their head as to how I can honor Tiamat and be leery of Discordia. Part of it has to do with how dead gods work, which is different from how gods of the underworld or gods of death work (and now all three of them are running around this post!), and part of it is the difference between the cosmic and cthonic, on the one hand, and the human scale and the social, on the other. The second is far more dangerous, for me. Tiamat was involved in only one war, and She didn't start it; Eris started the Trojan war, and has been part of every one ever since, even though she's not fundamentally a war goddess.
I understand acknowledging Discord, on the grounds that not inviting Her to the feast attracts Her attention in a worse way than inviting Her. In that She is more perceptive than Mot, she requires more attention to keep Her happy, and satiating Her is not so costly. But, despite the fact that She is Matron to the two most important men in my life, I don't understand the attraction beyond that. (In one case, he feels that She chose him rather than the other way around, and given his relationships with mortal women, that does match a recurring pattern in his life, albeit one that I think is perhaps a bit unhealthy.)
It turns out (despite the fact that He is a trickster, and a fine one, as well as being a deity of discord, lies, and perhaps betrayal, although some of that may be spin from the Christian monks who wrote many of the myths down) that many Heathens have the same reaction to Loki that I do to Eris. There also seems to be some question as to whether the pre-Christian Heathens actually did Him honor or not, and therefore whether it is appropriate for modern Heathens to do so. There was apparently some controversy about this at this year's Trothmoot. I get this, although the fact that He has a more broad purview than She does makes me more willing to deal with Him personally, and less confused about why anyone who had a choice about it would choose Him. In response to the controversy, some of his devotees are organizing a Month for Loki to blog about, and otherwise honor, Him. I get this, too - if you do honor Him, and he's been cut out of a central rite, it only stand to reason to honor Him on the peripheries.
Of course, Loki has recently sprung into the broad popular culture, too, via his comic-book-cum-movie fictionalized form in the Avengers movie (and the Thor movie before that), with the highly-attractive and expressive visage of Tom Hiddleston. And, true to form, he has deeply divided the fandom into those who woobify him, those who love him evil-laugh-and-all without the woobification, and those who hate him as a character. I find the fact that He has managed to spread discord in two different communities simultaneously, in two vastly different ways and in different forms, perhaps far more amusing than I should.
Ah, well. No need to speak ill of the gods, even if I see my work as opposed to theirs. Hail Loki, and ave Discordia!
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Show Us Your Scepter
There are a few inherent problems with being a NeoPagan polytheist. The biggest one is that "Neo-" out in front.
It's been a long time since someone tried to reincarnate a dead religion. Oh, the Abrahamic and Dharmic faiths go through revivals, sure. The form of Judaism we currently have exists because a bunch of priests of Yahveh went and made up a version of his cult that was not just henotheistic but monotheistic - Yahveh wasn't just the best god, he wasn't even just the only one that ought to be worshipped; now, he was the only god - and projecting that view back into their cultural history. (No one had made that claim since Akhenaton, but somehow this time it stuck.) None of the various Christian churches look anything like the ones Paul founded in the 30s and 40s CE. Etc., etc.
But reviving the old Classical Pagan practice in any form goes at least somewhat against their own ethos. All of the various cults practiced in Classical Greece and Rome, and presumably the portions of the Near East and Europe that were under their control at the time, respected "the customs of the forefathers" - ta patria. The cults were communal; while individuals certainly had their own devotions, the rites required priests, oracles, temples, and a critical mass of worshippers for sacrifices and rituals. Much of the important parts were never written down, or written only as lists - this many sheep, the hymn to Atargatis seven times, three handfuls of incense. Those lists were often essentially outline notes; they were reminders to jog the memories of the priests, scribes, and functionaries, who had been through the ritual so many times they didn't need more.
I, on the other hand, am a person practicing practically alone. As far as I know, there isn't another Levanto-Mesopotamian Syncretist Pagan - well, anywhere. The Natib Qadish are probably as close as it gets, and if there are any in Texas, I don't know about them. I haven't done this since I could talk. I don't know what the lists are shorthand for, most of the time. The myths that I have are fragmentary, and I don't know what role they played - moral fables? Just-so stories? - in the lives of the general worshippers. There are no temples, and not likely to be any soon; there aren't even shrines, unless I get it together to build one. I haven't been trained as a priestess, and I can't be - there's no priest left to do it. And worst of all, this isn't the custom of any of my forefathers (or foremothers). By descent, I'd have to be either a Celtic Pagan or one of the many flavors of Heathen (probably seithr or Vanatru). So from the perspective of the people who did it, my right to this practice is somewhat suspect.
And yet - does that matter? I know there is a cultus for the Phoenician gods in Lebanon; whether a genuine remnant or a rebirth, I do not know. Nor do I know whether they would welcome my pasty white colonialist ass. But the goddesses that call to me have Akkadian and Ugaritic names. Unverified personal gnosis is a messy thing, but at the end of the day it's often all we've got.
All of which is to say, I did tonight's solstice ritual for the CUUPs group I still find myself practicing with (despite now rather regretting my brief foray into Unitarian Universalism*) using the Canaanite deities, El and Asherah and Rahamayu, Shaharu and Shalimu and Shapshu, and trying to use a generally Levantine format. I don't know if I succeeded, but the other participants seemed to get something out of the ritual, and my matrons are at least not displeased with me.
I intend to stay part of the local Pagan community. I have no issues with the standard Wiccaform ritual (despite differences in flavor and language, even this ritual didn't stray too far from it), and often get something out of even the most vaguely-Celtic-by-way-of-Tolkienesque rituals if the people running them are any good. I like the magickal and divinatory practices, the energy-working, the sex-positivity, the tree-hugging respect for Nature, and the general respect for the female divine, and I can't get that anywhere else. But it's getting harder and harder to deal with duotheistic monist fluffybunnies and the folks who are there for the sacred party. I don't want the monarchical hierarchy that went with them back in the day, but I want temples. And imagining how they would be if they had gotten to live and grow for two thousand years, instead of being torn down for the marble and limestone to build churches and mosques, is very, very hard, especially without a community to do it with.
*A ha-ha-only-serious joke: "What's a Unitarian? A person who believes there is at most one god."
It's been a long time since someone tried to reincarnate a dead religion. Oh, the Abrahamic and Dharmic faiths go through revivals, sure. The form of Judaism we currently have exists because a bunch of priests of Yahveh went and made up a version of his cult that was not just henotheistic but monotheistic - Yahveh wasn't just the best god, he wasn't even just the only one that ought to be worshipped; now, he was the only god - and projecting that view back into their cultural history. (No one had made that claim since Akhenaton, but somehow this time it stuck.) None of the various Christian churches look anything like the ones Paul founded in the 30s and 40s CE. Etc., etc.
But reviving the old Classical Pagan practice in any form goes at least somewhat against their own ethos. All of the various cults practiced in Classical Greece and Rome, and presumably the portions of the Near East and Europe that were under their control at the time, respected "the customs of the forefathers" - ta patria. The cults were communal; while individuals certainly had their own devotions, the rites required priests, oracles, temples, and a critical mass of worshippers for sacrifices and rituals. Much of the important parts were never written down, or written only as lists - this many sheep, the hymn to Atargatis seven times, three handfuls of incense. Those lists were often essentially outline notes; they were reminders to jog the memories of the priests, scribes, and functionaries, who had been through the ritual so many times they didn't need more.
I, on the other hand, am a person practicing practically alone. As far as I know, there isn't another Levanto-Mesopotamian Syncretist Pagan - well, anywhere. The Natib Qadish are probably as close as it gets, and if there are any in Texas, I don't know about them. I haven't done this since I could talk. I don't know what the lists are shorthand for, most of the time. The myths that I have are fragmentary, and I don't know what role they played - moral fables? Just-so stories? - in the lives of the general worshippers. There are no temples, and not likely to be any soon; there aren't even shrines, unless I get it together to build one. I haven't been trained as a priestess, and I can't be - there's no priest left to do it. And worst of all, this isn't the custom of any of my forefathers (or foremothers). By descent, I'd have to be either a Celtic Pagan or one of the many flavors of Heathen (probably seithr or Vanatru). So from the perspective of the people who did it, my right to this practice is somewhat suspect.
And yet - does that matter? I know there is a cultus for the Phoenician gods in Lebanon; whether a genuine remnant or a rebirth, I do not know. Nor do I know whether they would welcome my pasty white colonialist ass. But the goddesses that call to me have Akkadian and Ugaritic names. Unverified personal gnosis is a messy thing, but at the end of the day it's often all we've got.
All of which is to say, I did tonight's solstice ritual for the CUUPs group I still find myself practicing with (despite now rather regretting my brief foray into Unitarian Universalism*) using the Canaanite deities, El and Asherah and Rahamayu, Shaharu and Shalimu and Shapshu, and trying to use a generally Levantine format. I don't know if I succeeded, but the other participants seemed to get something out of the ritual, and my matrons are at least not displeased with me.
I intend to stay part of the local Pagan community. I have no issues with the standard Wiccaform ritual (despite differences in flavor and language, even this ritual didn't stray too far from it), and often get something out of even the most vaguely-Celtic-by-way-of-Tolkienesque rituals if the people running them are any good. I like the magickal and divinatory practices, the energy-working, the sex-positivity, the tree-hugging respect for Nature, and the general respect for the female divine, and I can't get that anywhere else. But it's getting harder and harder to deal with duotheistic monist fluffybunnies and the folks who are there for the sacred party. I don't want the monarchical hierarchy that went with them back in the day, but I want temples. And imagining how they would be if they had gotten to live and grow for two thousand years, instead of being torn down for the marble and limestone to build churches and mosques, is very, very hard, especially without a community to do it with.
*A ha-ha-only-serious joke: "What's a Unitarian? A person who believes there is at most one god."
Friday, June 8, 2012
What I'd Like To Do
There seems to be a common experience among the Authenticity Cop wing of Paganism, one that pushes those of us who like talking and thinking about our religion (as opposed to those who are content to Just Do It, a viewpoint that was slammed shut for me by being brought up Lutheran and which I often envy deeply) towards either fairly traditional initiatory British Traditional Witchcraft or towards the various reconstructionist groups. My problem, so far, is that the group I want - the syncretistic Mediterranean-to-Mesopotamian one that covers what would have been the myriad religious and magickal traditions of the Babylonian empire at its height - doesn't exist. There's a Sumerian group in Texas, but (a) they don't quite meet my Authenticity Cop standards, and (b) I'm more interested in Babylon, Canaan, Syria, and Phoenicia than I am in Sumeria per se. The group I was dedicated into is mostly Celtic-focused with a sort of Dianic underpinning; while I still enjoy working with the members of the group, and want to finish my work with them, I don't think of them as my permanent home. The other group I'm working with is a CUUPs group and a bit of a mish-mash. I'm as dedicated as any to the prospect that Paganism is bound by common practice rather than common theology, but it would be nice to at least be working with people I shared some basic assumptions with.
A few months ago, Star Foster over at Pantheon posted a list of ten of her "unshakeable personal truths" that were making it difficult for her to find fellowship with most Pagan groups. I thought it might be an interesting exercise to go through the list and investigate where I agree and disagree. The parts in italics are direct quoted from the linked post.
1. The Gods are distinct, greater than myself, and have an interest in humankind.
This matches my experience exactly, and it's one of the things I constantly stumble over in my interactions with my fellow Pagans - I get and respect duotheism, even if it doesn't model my reality, but the ones who are clearly monotheistic or atheistic and still identify as Pagan weird me out.
2. Any unity beyond the Gods is not sentient. Monotheism, in any form, is incorrect.
Change "sentient" to "sophontic" and I more or less agree. I suspect that galaxies, galactic clusters, and the cosmos-as-a-whole have consciousnesses of a sort, and perhaps even something like personalities, but I don't think they have the sorts of awarenesses that could be described as "thinking" or "choosing" - and even if they did, I don't think they'd be the least bit concerned with us.
3. I am a polytheist, not an animist, a pantheist, a panentheist, a duotheist, a henotheist or a monotheist.
I am a polytheist, an animist, and a panentheist (and, to add one not on the list, a weak humanist). I am not a pantheist (except in the very vague sense outlined in #2), a duotheist (although I acknowledge that many of those in my circles are, and that this matches their perception of the divine, just not mine), a henotheist (although I have no problem with henotheists or monolators; I'm just not called to be that specific - polyamorous even here, I guess), or a monotheist (completely irreconcilable with my experience of the world). I am also not an agnostic or an atheist; I don't think the gods are merely metaphors or psychological archetypes (although they do tend to get caught up with both, especially in mythmaking).
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.
I agree with the first part, and the second part is, for me, one of its many purposes. I see forging that bond between humankind and the gods, for the mutual benefit and enjoyment of all parties, as a purpose in and of itself - the primary purpose of religion. Fostering virtue is up there on the list, along with learning how to exist in harmony in the world, but it's that relationship that I see as the sine qua non of religion.
5. Religion is not what makes me feel good, nor is it therapy or pop-psychology.
I agree with this as stated, but there are aspects of religion and ritual - in particular, the repair of personal and community bonds with the gods - that can certainly be therapeutic, and if you're Doing It Right, ought to be. Similarly, if you are not behaving in a harmful way, or against the strictures of the gods you serve, and your religion is consistently making you feel bad, then you need a better religion.
6. Religious culture should be multi-generational and fully accessible.
I would add that this doesn't necessarily mean that every religious activity must be multi-generational and accessible; there is a place for, for instance, physical activities that not everyone is able to perform, whether due to age or infirmity, in individual rituals, for instance. But on the whole, I agree, and this is something the modern Pagan groups have had problems with - for instance, the local festival is on a very rough campground that is difficult to navigate for those who walk with canes, crutches, or wheelchairs.
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 it’s nuances and concepts clearly, but not bound by pure logic.
I'm not sure I understand the first part. I'm fairly sure that all of the modern Abrahamic and Dharmic religions actually encompass multiple worldviews, for instance, and I'd be leery of a reconstructionist Pagan practice that had a One Right True And Only worldview, so I suspect I'm missing something in the phrasing. I agree with the second sentence and I wish to the Gods the last were true - one of my constant frustrations is how badly the English vocabulary for religion has been purged of the proper words for magick, polytheology, and immanence.
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.
THIS, this, this, a thousand times this, glory and halleluasherah! And for me, this related back to my lament in #7 - we keep using words for magick and religion that probably were all right to use that way a thousand years ago, but since then they've migrated into Queen Science's kingdom, and they belong firmly to her, now - we need to find better ones, or at least a good way of marking these to show that we're not mushing them together.
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.
I've seen too many important things happen by synchronicity, carelessness, or simple dumb luck to agree with this. For me, what you do is far, far more important than what you believe. Intent may be magick, but it pales next to actual words and deeds. Having said that, being in accord with one vision makes it far more likely that an act will have wealful rather than harmful effects - provided the vision was wealful to begin with . . .
10. The religious work we do should not be for ourselves, but for the generations to come.
I'd say both. Who knows whether what we imagine future generations will want and need will in fact be useful for them? What fills a need now will likely fill it later, too.
So, all in all, more agreement than disagreement, which is better than I've gotten with about 90% of the local Pagan groups, alas.
A few months ago, Star Foster over at Pantheon posted a list of ten of her "unshakeable personal truths" that were making it difficult for her to find fellowship with most Pagan groups. I thought it might be an interesting exercise to go through the list and investigate where I agree and disagree. The parts in italics are direct quoted from the linked post.
1. The Gods are distinct, greater than myself, and have an interest in humankind.
This matches my experience exactly, and it's one of the things I constantly stumble over in my interactions with my fellow Pagans - I get and respect duotheism, even if it doesn't model my reality, but the ones who are clearly monotheistic or atheistic and still identify as Pagan weird me out.
2. Any unity beyond the Gods is not sentient. Monotheism, in any form, is incorrect.
Change "sentient" to "sophontic" and I more or less agree. I suspect that galaxies, galactic clusters, and the cosmos-as-a-whole have consciousnesses of a sort, and perhaps even something like personalities, but I don't think they have the sorts of awarenesses that could be described as "thinking" or "choosing" - and even if they did, I don't think they'd be the least bit concerned with us.
3. I am a polytheist, not an animist, a pantheist, a panentheist, a duotheist, a henotheist or a monotheist.
I am a polytheist, an animist, and a panentheist (and, to add one not on the list, a weak humanist). I am not a pantheist (except in the very vague sense outlined in #2), a duotheist (although I acknowledge that many of those in my circles are, and that this matches their perception of the divine, just not mine), a henotheist (although I have no problem with henotheists or monolators; I'm just not called to be that specific - polyamorous even here, I guess), or a monotheist (completely irreconcilable with my experience of the world). I am also not an agnostic or an atheist; I don't think the gods are merely metaphors or psychological archetypes (although they do tend to get caught up with both, especially in mythmaking).
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.
I agree with the first part, and the second part is, for me, one of its many purposes. I see forging that bond between humankind and the gods, for the mutual benefit and enjoyment of all parties, as a purpose in and of itself - the primary purpose of religion. Fostering virtue is up there on the list, along with learning how to exist in harmony in the world, but it's that relationship that I see as the sine qua non of religion.
5. Religion is not what makes me feel good, nor is it therapy or pop-psychology.
I agree with this as stated, but there are aspects of religion and ritual - in particular, the repair of personal and community bonds with the gods - that can certainly be therapeutic, and if you're Doing It Right, ought to be. Similarly, if you are not behaving in a harmful way, or against the strictures of the gods you serve, and your religion is consistently making you feel bad, then you need a better religion.
6. Religious culture should be multi-generational and fully accessible.
I would add that this doesn't necessarily mean that every religious activity must be multi-generational and accessible; there is a place for, for instance, physical activities that not everyone is able to perform, whether due to age or infirmity, in individual rituals, for instance. But on the whole, I agree, and this is something the modern Pagan groups have had problems with - for instance, the local festival is on a very rough campground that is difficult to navigate for those who walk with canes, crutches, or wheelchairs.
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 it’s nuances and concepts clearly, but not bound by pure logic.
I'm not sure I understand the first part. I'm fairly sure that all of the modern Abrahamic and Dharmic religions actually encompass multiple worldviews, for instance, and I'd be leery of a reconstructionist Pagan practice that had a One Right True And Only worldview, so I suspect I'm missing something in the phrasing. I agree with the second sentence and I wish to the Gods the last were true - one of my constant frustrations is how badly the English vocabulary for religion has been purged of the proper words for magick, polytheology, and immanence.
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.
THIS, this, this, a thousand times this, glory and halleluasherah! And for me, this related back to my lament in #7 - we keep using words for magick and religion that probably were all right to use that way a thousand years ago, but since then they've migrated into Queen Science's kingdom, and they belong firmly to her, now - we need to find better ones, or at least a good way of marking these to show that we're not mushing them together.
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.
I've seen too many important things happen by synchronicity, carelessness, or simple dumb luck to agree with this. For me, what you do is far, far more important than what you believe. Intent may be magick, but it pales next to actual words and deeds. Having said that, being in accord with one vision makes it far more likely that an act will have wealful rather than harmful effects - provided the vision was wealful to begin with . . .
10. The religious work we do should not be for ourselves, but for the generations to come.
I'd say both. Who knows whether what we imagine future generations will want and need will in fact be useful for them? What fills a need now will likely fill it later, too.
So, all in all, more agreement than disagreement, which is better than I've gotten with about 90% of the local Pagan groups, alas.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Stranger in a Familiar Land
Been chewing on this for a few days - forgive the links not being fresh-out-of-the-oven.
The contemporary NeoPagan revival has happened almost completely in what might once have been called Christendom. There are lots of reasons for this, one of the chief among them being, that outside of Christendom and its Islamic counterpart, the "old religions" never really went away. Buddhism, the only Dharmic religion with a conversion imperative, was and is pretty good at existing alongside the forms and practices of indigenous religious practices. Hinduism is an indigenous religion, as is Shinto. Confucianism and Taoism also live alongside the various Chinese traditional practices (and each other, for that matter). And while Judaism isn't exactly an indigenous practice, in many ways it has more in common with Hinduism than it does with its Abrahamic descendants. In short, the only places where the local PaleoPagan practices were suppressed enough to create a need for NeoPaganism are the places where the Abrahamic religions with the conversion imperatives suppressed them, and Christianity has a head start on Islam.
Unfortunately, that means that we all come at the myriad gods with a head full of, at a minimum, Christian religious language, and in the majority of cases Christian theological ideas as well. For those of us who were brought up not merely nominally Christian but active in our (or, more often, our parents') churches, there's a double whammy. We cease being Christians when we realize that we no longer believe the right things; I personally spent many years identifying as a heretic, one whose beliefs are not orthodox [i.e., right-teaching], before I took the label of Pagan. But we don't become Pagans because we have orthodox Pagan beliefs; there are none! Being Pagan, even NeoPagan, is a matter of what we do and the experiences we have. If there is ortho-anything in NeoPagan circles, it's orthopraxis - right-practice. And each grove, coven, house, temple, and circle seems to develop its own orthopraxis; other than the two Wiccan standards of creating some sort of sacred space and raising energy by some method, even within Wicca every group does it differently - and non-Wiccan groups may do both of those, or only one, or neither.
At any rate, talking about "faith" in a Pagan context is slippery at best and actively harmful at worst. On the one hand, when we're talking with Christians, especially ones who are somewhat sympathetic, it makes sense to use language that's familiar to them and easy to understand. I'm guilty of referring to NeoPaganism as a "faith tradition" in the context of such conversations, myself, albeit with the caveat that it's actually a broad cluster of traditions. I've also pointed out in conversations both with other Pagans and with Christians that I "have faith" in my gods in exactly the same way I "have faith" in my friends and lovers, not in the way that most Christians "have faith" in Jesus or Yahveh (although, being honest with myself, my relationship with Jesus as a late child bears more resemblance to my relationship to the Green Man now than it does to what the church of my upbringing expected it to be).
Finchuill, in "Faith or Fides,"suggests that the words we want as Pagans (especially as polytheists) are "confidence" or "fidelity" (which share the root) rather than "faith" in our gods. I'm in general agreement with this, especially with his point that, especially in Protestantism, "faith" is about an inward process or struggle, and a polytheist Paganism is largely external - not that there isn't plenty of internal work, but we are fundamentally about ritual - again, what we do and who we are, rather than what we believe. Still, it's a tricky bit of language to pull off in a religious climate that takes sola fides as a given - never mind that "salvation" is an even less-relevant concept to us than "faith" is.
P. Sufenas Virius Lupus, in "Christianity Through a Polytheist Lens," goes deeper into the problem of accidentally ceding theological territory to Christianity through our use of language that isn't really meant for polytheist ideas and practices anymore. (It was, once, of course - I have had several arguments with atheists and agnostics who complained that what I worshipped weren't "real gods," and I have had to explain that the word "god" means what Odin and Thor and Tyr and Frey and Loki are, and did long before the monotheos got labelled with the morpheme.) There's a strong tendency by monotheists to assume that humans have generally evolved towards monotheism - this despite half of them not believing (there's that word again) in actual evolution! And if by that they mean "adopt this or you won't live to reproduce," then there's some evidence for that, I suppose, but I don't think that particular memeplex is heritable in the way they seem to be assuming - if it were, I'd probably have fallen no farther than an eclectic and syncretic Catholicism instead of all the way into idol-worshipping, Ba'al-honoring, Asherah-pole-erecting Paganism. I also like his post's defense of cataphatic mysticism - I failed a college course on ancient Jewish mysticism once because I couldn't wedge my head into the idea that the "beyond words" sorts of mystical experiences were somehow more true (or at least more worthy of study) than the more sensory and sensible sort.
For me, at least, the tension between speaking enough of the same language to make sense to monotheists and not being drawn into reinforcing their terms and worldview is pretty severe. To a certain extent, it's the usual "the master's language" problem all over again, although at least in this case we can make a much clearer case for reclamation - English was a polytheist's language once, and can be again. It's a matter of us being clear about what we mean, and that means talking about what we do and experience, not just what we believe is true.
The contemporary NeoPagan revival has happened almost completely in what might once have been called Christendom. There are lots of reasons for this, one of the chief among them being, that outside of Christendom and its Islamic counterpart, the "old religions" never really went away. Buddhism, the only Dharmic religion with a conversion imperative, was and is pretty good at existing alongside the forms and practices of indigenous religious practices. Hinduism is an indigenous religion, as is Shinto. Confucianism and Taoism also live alongside the various Chinese traditional practices (and each other, for that matter). And while Judaism isn't exactly an indigenous practice, in many ways it has more in common with Hinduism than it does with its Abrahamic descendants. In short, the only places where the local PaleoPagan practices were suppressed enough to create a need for NeoPaganism are the places where the Abrahamic religions with the conversion imperatives suppressed them, and Christianity has a head start on Islam.
Unfortunately, that means that we all come at the myriad gods with a head full of, at a minimum, Christian religious language, and in the majority of cases Christian theological ideas as well. For those of us who were brought up not merely nominally Christian but active in our (or, more often, our parents') churches, there's a double whammy. We cease being Christians when we realize that we no longer believe the right things; I personally spent many years identifying as a heretic, one whose beliefs are not orthodox [i.e., right-teaching], before I took the label of Pagan. But we don't become Pagans because we have orthodox Pagan beliefs; there are none! Being Pagan, even NeoPagan, is a matter of what we do and the experiences we have. If there is ortho-anything in NeoPagan circles, it's orthopraxis - right-practice. And each grove, coven, house, temple, and circle seems to develop its own orthopraxis; other than the two Wiccan standards of creating some sort of sacred space and raising energy by some method, even within Wicca every group does it differently - and non-Wiccan groups may do both of those, or only one, or neither.
At any rate, talking about "faith" in a Pagan context is slippery at best and actively harmful at worst. On the one hand, when we're talking with Christians, especially ones who are somewhat sympathetic, it makes sense to use language that's familiar to them and easy to understand. I'm guilty of referring to NeoPaganism as a "faith tradition" in the context of such conversations, myself, albeit with the caveat that it's actually a broad cluster of traditions. I've also pointed out in conversations both with other Pagans and with Christians that I "have faith" in my gods in exactly the same way I "have faith" in my friends and lovers, not in the way that most Christians "have faith" in Jesus or Yahveh (although, being honest with myself, my relationship with Jesus as a late child bears more resemblance to my relationship to the Green Man now than it does to what the church of my upbringing expected it to be).
Finchuill, in "Faith or Fides,"suggests that the words we want as Pagans (especially as polytheists) are "confidence" or "fidelity" (which share the root) rather than "faith" in our gods. I'm in general agreement with this, especially with his point that, especially in Protestantism, "faith" is about an inward process or struggle, and a polytheist Paganism is largely external - not that there isn't plenty of internal work, but we are fundamentally about ritual - again, what we do and who we are, rather than what we believe. Still, it's a tricky bit of language to pull off in a religious climate that takes sola fides as a given - never mind that "salvation" is an even less-relevant concept to us than "faith" is.
P. Sufenas Virius Lupus, in "Christianity Through a Polytheist Lens," goes deeper into the problem of accidentally ceding theological territory to Christianity through our use of language that isn't really meant for polytheist ideas and practices anymore. (It was, once, of course - I have had several arguments with atheists and agnostics who complained that what I worshipped weren't "real gods," and I have had to explain that the word "god" means what Odin and Thor and Tyr and Frey and Loki are, and did long before the monotheos got labelled with the morpheme.) There's a strong tendency by monotheists to assume that humans have generally evolved towards monotheism - this despite half of them not believing (there's that word again) in actual evolution! And if by that they mean "adopt this or you won't live to reproduce," then there's some evidence for that, I suppose, but I don't think that particular memeplex is heritable in the way they seem to be assuming - if it were, I'd probably have fallen no farther than an eclectic and syncretic Catholicism instead of all the way into idol-worshipping, Ba'al-honoring, Asherah-pole-erecting Paganism. I also like his post's defense of cataphatic mysticism - I failed a college course on ancient Jewish mysticism once because I couldn't wedge my head into the idea that the "beyond words" sorts of mystical experiences were somehow more true (or at least more worthy of study) than the more sensory and sensible sort.
For me, at least, the tension between speaking enough of the same language to make sense to monotheists and not being drawn into reinforcing their terms and worldview is pretty severe. To a certain extent, it's the usual "the master's language" problem all over again, although at least in this case we can make a much clearer case for reclamation - English was a polytheist's language once, and can be again. It's a matter of us being clear about what we mean, and that means talking about what we do and experience, not just what we believe is true.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
If This Is Purity, Adulterate Me, Baby!
Cutting Edge's The Virgin Daughters:
A few thoughts:
A lot of the language and set-up of this is indistinguishable from the language and set-up of the husband-chasing reality TV shows; it's obvious that they share a lot of assumptions - that what a woman wants isn't sex per se, but the trappings of romance combined with physical opulence. (I'm reminded of a friend of mine's recent discovery that an on-again off-again girlfriend of his was flirting heavily with him at a party at a ritzy hotel, despite him not having anything to do with the surroundings; it was the ritziness itself that was the turn-on for her.) I find this disturbing, honestly, especially when connected with the idea that young men have to bribe a woman into a sexual relationship (whether marriage or otherwise). There are other linguistic similarities, too - the constant references to "princesses"(which rhetorically makes the dads all kings here) and "fairy tales" (which at least acknowledge the unreality of it all, and do hardcore Christians really want fairie lore, with its fae godmothers and witches and other powerful independent magickal women, creeping around their daughters?). The refrain of "you're beautiful" - it's almost as if they can't imagine a woman with any worth other than her beauty, although I imagine they'd argue that they're really talking about spiritual beauty.
When the dad asks, "How cool is that?" regarding a woman having only ever kissed one man, I legitimately wanted to throw up (even ignoring how much he coaches his daughter through the other interviews). There's nothing cool about that at all. Even if I were completely monogamously inclined, I can't imagine never sharing affection with other people. These are, by and large, people who tend towards larger families, even if they're not technically Quiverfullers. How can they imagine that love for your children can only get larger, but love for your, you know, lovers is finite and gets divided up? Should a youngest child be hurt that zir parents have already given away their hearts to two, three, or more other children before them? If hearts are large (and I agree that they are), they are large in all directions, not just in storge. The mom agreeing with that kind of language is creepy, too - I understand having regrets over relationships that didn't work out, but that somehow translating into not having "a whole heart" for the man she married is nonsensical.
The whole "Daddy is everything for a little girl" motif reeks of emotional incest, as does the faux-marriage and the partnered dancing with the fathers. The ownership paradigm is also out in full force - the girl passes from her father's "protection" into that of a young man whom the father has thoroughly vetted, his duly appointed substitute. The pledge they read at the ball itself is pretty terrifying, as is the line "let me tell you who you are." It's already a scary thing for a teen girl to be discovering her identity; confusing a father's paternal love with his desire to define you for yourself - that's pretty horrific.
I am a bad person; I laughed out loud at the line about the '70s being "milder" than now. The Long Hangover was easily one of the most tumultuous times in US history; it's when the Silent Generation finally woke up. The current mess is a mess, sure, but it's moderate by comparison. Then again, several of the parents express deep regret for their histories - which would have happened in the '70s to the '90s.
"But what if you don't like the way he kisses?" Ah, there's the rub. This is all about a lack of female desire, an attempt to explain it away, to pretend it isn't there. Girls don't care how a boy kisses; they care about the size of the diamond he puts on her finger. Girls don't care if their husbands can't get them off, as long as they're good providers and put them up on a motherly pedestal. What rubbish. These men are afraid that if a girl has an orgasm, if she has preferences, if (God forbid) she has kinks or is queer, then their good Christian boys won't be able to satisfy her. The womb belongs to their God, but a clitoris is the Devil's plaything (and the G-spot is Ashtoreth's terrain; also, perhaps, the mouth, considering that they put such deep emphasis on kissing).
There is one success story, in the girl who escaped - by the same deep magick of the uterus. I only hope the other girls find their way out by less traumatic means, and that their parents manage to love them anyway.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
So Many Relationships
Has anyone noticed that there's an awful lot of All-But-One-Privilege going around?
For those who aren't already familiar, All-But-One-Privilege (ABOP, for short) is the condition in which you are a member of all of your culture's privileged groups except for one. An awful lot of groups fighting against a specific oppression, at least in the US, are founded by ABOPs, and there's probably a good reason for that: if you're only oppressed in one specific way, then you have enough avenues for expression and opportunities for networking provided by your other privileges to organize and get your message out. In fact, it's probably necessary. But it can become a problem when the privilege you lack is the only one you see.
The canonical example is the white, heterosexual, monogamous, middle-to-upper-middle-class women who were most of the second-wave feminists. Their work was powerful and important and I (and all modern USian women) owe them an enormous debt - but their record on reacting to other ways the kyriarchy oppresses people was mixed at best and shamefully bad at worst. They did, eventually, grow to accept white, monogamous, middle-to-upper-middle-class lesbians, but it took too long. While they incorporated academic class critique easily, often this faltered in practice, with working-class and poverty-class women failing to hear their voices and choices represented in the movement. And their near-total failure to incorporate black, Native American, or Latina perspectives is still one of the great failings of feminism, even here on the third wave. We're getting better, but it's been fifty years and there are still some massive lessons not fully learned.
Another example, a more successful one in some ways, is the gay movement. This was all about white, male, cis, middle-to-upper-middle-class white homosexuals when it first started, and largely stayed that way, with a few bones thrown to lesbians (if they were Kinsey 6es) and an acceptance of certain forms of genderqueerness (and outright hostility to others), until the '80s. In the reaction to HIV and AIDS, several things changed, oddly quickly from my point of view: suddenly the lesbians were full members, possibly because they stepped up and volunteered at a time when a number of the previous volunteers were no longer able to, and the movement went positively schizophrenic about its nonstandard sexual minorities. The public face of the movement split into those who were adamant about being as "normal" as possible - lily-white, cis, monogamous, vanilla - and those who were in-your-face about their queerness - more racially diverse, campily genderqueer, everything from polyfidelitous to promiscuous, more accepting of bisexuality and pansexuality, and proudly displaying all kinds of kink. As better treatments for AIDS became available, these two groups drifted back together, and the "we're just like you only gay" types seemed to at least internalize the increased diversity message, even if they still seem embarrassed about the camp drag and the leathermen/leatherdykes. It's still not perfect - especially if you're bi/pan or a transperson who is serious about transitioning and not interested in playing with gender - but it's better than it used to be. In some ways, intersectionality is making more inroads in the QUILTBAG movement than the feminist one, and that's sad.
The USian atheist movement seems to be hitting this particular wall these days. It's largely a movement of white, heterosexual, well-educated, middle-to-upper-middle-class men. The only privilege they lack is religious privilege. Now, this is serious - the culture is still very hostile to non-Christians in general and atheists in particular. I don't mean to downplay it; in fact, as a member of a non-Christian religion, I get a lot of the same blowback, and it can be very painful. But the combination of Elevatorgate and the reactions several nonwhite, queer, trans, and disabled bloggers have gotten from the 'establishment' among the American Atheists have also made it very, very clear that racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual privilege are alive and well - and probably cutting down on the number of people willing to be out-and-proud atheists. The Occupy movement, similarly, is united by their lack of economic privilege - and showing deep signs of failure to recognize other types, although again, some individual Occupy groups are doing much better than others.
I don't have a solution. The outspoken presence of multiply-oppressed people in a group clearly helps, and it helps the most if they are well-spoken and can point out unfair treatment concisely and immediately, but it's not a panacea (otherwise bell hooks would have been sufficient to solve the racism problem in feminism). A general commitment by the group as a whole to not be dicks to each other also helps, but theoretically all minority religious groups have that already, and look how that's turned out so far. I think movements need ABOPs to get mainstream traction - poor, trans lesbians of color in polyamorous D/s relationships are more likely to get published in the Enquirer than the New Yorker or an academic journal. Can we call on Spider-Man to help us - "With great privilege comes great responsibility"? I don't know, but maybe it's a start.
For those who aren't already familiar, All-But-One-Privilege (ABOP, for short) is the condition in which you are a member of all of your culture's privileged groups except for one. An awful lot of groups fighting against a specific oppression, at least in the US, are founded by ABOPs, and there's probably a good reason for that: if you're only oppressed in one specific way, then you have enough avenues for expression and opportunities for networking provided by your other privileges to organize and get your message out. In fact, it's probably necessary. But it can become a problem when the privilege you lack is the only one you see.
The canonical example is the white, heterosexual, monogamous, middle-to-upper-middle-class women who were most of the second-wave feminists. Their work was powerful and important and I (and all modern USian women) owe them an enormous debt - but their record on reacting to other ways the kyriarchy oppresses people was mixed at best and shamefully bad at worst. They did, eventually, grow to accept white, monogamous, middle-to-upper-middle-class lesbians, but it took too long. While they incorporated academic class critique easily, often this faltered in practice, with working-class and poverty-class women failing to hear their voices and choices represented in the movement. And their near-total failure to incorporate black, Native American, or Latina perspectives is still one of the great failings of feminism, even here on the third wave. We're getting better, but it's been fifty years and there are still some massive lessons not fully learned.
Another example, a more successful one in some ways, is the gay movement. This was all about white, male, cis, middle-to-upper-middle-class white homosexuals when it first started, and largely stayed that way, with a few bones thrown to lesbians (if they were Kinsey 6es) and an acceptance of certain forms of genderqueerness (and outright hostility to others), until the '80s. In the reaction to HIV and AIDS, several things changed, oddly quickly from my point of view: suddenly the lesbians were full members, possibly because they stepped up and volunteered at a time when a number of the previous volunteers were no longer able to, and the movement went positively schizophrenic about its nonstandard sexual minorities. The public face of the movement split into those who were adamant about being as "normal" as possible - lily-white, cis, monogamous, vanilla - and those who were in-your-face about their queerness - more racially diverse, campily genderqueer, everything from polyfidelitous to promiscuous, more accepting of bisexuality and pansexuality, and proudly displaying all kinds of kink. As better treatments for AIDS became available, these two groups drifted back together, and the "we're just like you only gay" types seemed to at least internalize the increased diversity message, even if they still seem embarrassed about the camp drag and the leathermen/leatherdykes. It's still not perfect - especially if you're bi/pan or a transperson who is serious about transitioning and not interested in playing with gender - but it's better than it used to be. In some ways, intersectionality is making more inroads in the QUILTBAG movement than the feminist one, and that's sad.
The USian atheist movement seems to be hitting this particular wall these days. It's largely a movement of white, heterosexual, well-educated, middle-to-upper-middle-class men. The only privilege they lack is religious privilege. Now, this is serious - the culture is still very hostile to non-Christians in general and atheists in particular. I don't mean to downplay it; in fact, as a member of a non-Christian religion, I get a lot of the same blowback, and it can be very painful. But the combination of Elevatorgate and the reactions several nonwhite, queer, trans, and disabled bloggers have gotten from the 'establishment' among the American Atheists have also made it very, very clear that racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual privilege are alive and well - and probably cutting down on the number of people willing to be out-and-proud atheists. The Occupy movement, similarly, is united by their lack of economic privilege - and showing deep signs of failure to recognize other types, although again, some individual Occupy groups are doing much better than others.
I don't have a solution. The outspoken presence of multiply-oppressed people in a group clearly helps, and it helps the most if they are well-spoken and can point out unfair treatment concisely and immediately, but it's not a panacea (otherwise bell hooks would have been sufficient to solve the racism problem in feminism). A general commitment by the group as a whole to not be dicks to each other also helps, but theoretically all minority religious groups have that already, and look how that's turned out so far. I think movements need ABOPs to get mainstream traction - poor, trans lesbians of color in polyamorous D/s relationships are more likely to get published in the Enquirer than the New Yorker or an academic journal. Can we call on Spider-Man to help us - "With great privilege comes great responsibility"? I don't know, but maybe it's a start.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Shouldn't it be Wonder Moon?
Like everyone else, enjoying the Supermoon tonight.
Probably not like everyone else, enjoying it with a stick of incense in hand. So many interesting memories associated with the Full Moon - Ave, Luna!
Probably not like everyone else, enjoying it with a stick of incense in hand. So many interesting memories associated with the Full Moon - Ave, Luna!
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