Okay, so yesterday I promised to weigh in on the hard polytheist/soft polytheist/archetypalist/humanist Pagan food fight going on across the Pagan blogosphere. As with so many things, I'm rather late to the table on this one - most of the folks with an axe to grind have said their piece and left. Several folks ended with comments along the lines of "Well, if everyone practiced their Paganism as much as they talked about it, then we wouldn't be having these arguments."
I'm pretty sure that's wrong. The reason I think it's wrong is that the philosophers among the pre-Christian Classical Pagans of Greece and Rome had similar arguments, and it's hard to argue that they weren't practicing their Paganism. More about that in a minute.
First, let me come clean about my position: I'm a hard polytheist, meaning that my experiences of the gods are as individual persons who have a meaningful existence of their own. I'm also an adherent of process theology, meaning that I experience the gods as changing and developing over time. I'm a polypanenthist, meaning that I experience the gods as present in the forces and matter of the physical universe but also having some dimension outside it. And I'm also an archetypalist, meaning that I experience the cultural archetypes we, as humans, create and embed in our art and media as having a certain amount of power and influence of their own, despite not existing outside of the human mind.
More after the jump:
I don't think that archetypes are the same things as gods. I do think that they interact in some interesting ways, and that a god or goddess may take on an archetype as a role. The process of syncretism is, in some ways, the process of the worshippers of two deities who manifest the same archetype recognizing that fact. If it works for them, I don't think there's anything particularly problematic with someone identifying as Pagan and practicing Pagan ritual forms, but only working with archetypes - or even the cultural expressions of those archetypes. So in that sense, yes, if you're that kind of postmodernist or chaos mage and you want to do a Batman ritual, you go, girl (or guy, or appropriate-nonbinary-epithet). I think it's rude to drag the actual names of gods into it, but then, at least some manifestations of Loki seem to be enjoying all the attention at the moment.
This is, by the way, what I think a large number of dualist Wiccans are actually doing most of the time - they've identified the particular archetypes of the Horned God and the Moon Goddess or Earth Goddess and use them for their rituals, hanging the names of various deities and heroes on them as necessary. Maiden, Mother, and Crone are archetypes, as are the Oak King and Holly King. And if it works, good on them.
I'm not a monist, philosophically. Sure, I acknowledge that all up quarks are one up quark, and all down quarks are one down quark, and on some level the up and down quarks are just aspects of the Monobloc, but really - how important is that for anything on a human scale? It does me more good to act as I perceive, and what I perceive is the difference is real and meaningful; the ground of being is multiple and diverse. So I really am a pluralist; the difference between the top quark and the electron and the photon is powerful.
Similarly, while it's probably true at some rarefied level that there is a single Divinity, in the same way that it's true that there is an entity of common descent that is a single Humanity, no one ever actually deals with either one of those beings. You deal with the gods, or the people, you actually encounter. A mystic might experience oneness with all Humanity, or with the Divine, or with Every Damn Thing, and that's awesome, but that doesn't diminish the individual value and importance of Molly Ivins, or Astarte, or the oak tree in the yard, either. I prefer to deal with the individual beings, and I think it's a more meaningful, more personable thing to do in general.
For some people, they never encounter any gods at all, and while I personally can't imagine a life like that, I understand that it's how theirs works. I don't think that should preclude their participating in the Pagan community, especially if the other things we lump into the "Pagan" category - ritual, respect for nature, honoring the body and sexuality - are meaningful to them. I confess that I am puzzled why they would want to take the dangerous label, especially if they don't experience archetypes or magick either; Nature-centered agnostic, humanist, or atheist seems far safer. But if they feel the Pagan label is home, I'm not going to argue that they shouldn't have it; only that they can't claim exclusive possession of it, and if they are seriously surprised that there are those of us who genuinely do experience the gods, then they weren't paying attention when they joined up.
As for the soft polytheist versus hard polytheist divide - again, that seems like a bad argument to split the community over, given that I think we can make a pretty good case for both viewpoints occurring at least in late Classical Pagan thought. The super-syncretism that occurs for deities like Zeus or Isis looks a lot like a form of soft polytheism, sometimes mediated by archetypalism - if a god is associated with both thunder and leadership, well, it must be some barbarian culture's idea of Zeus; if it's a goddess associated with maternity, fertility, wisdom, or protection, then it must be a name of Isis. Even the atheist position can be found among the extreme philosophers, particularly the Epicureans. The sorts of intimate relationships that most modern Pagans who are theists at all seek generally aren't the sort that appear in the literary records of the Classical era. Whether that's because people who did that didn't generally write about it, or because it wasn't something most Classical Pagans sought, is unclear. But the people who did write about the gods wrote all sorts of things, and any viewpoint that accepts that the gods exist in some manner, up to and including the monist perspective, probably can be argued from one surviving philosopher or another. (Ramsay McMullen's Paganism in the Roman Empire can be terribly frustrating reading for precisely this reason - the sheer diversity with which the literate of Pagan Rome approached their gods and temples is astonishing, and non-philosophers tended not to be terribly reflective about it, at least in print!) Our current theological diversity is not unprecedented, and I suspect it's just the result of differing encounters with the gods, as it likely was at the time.
One mistake that I think a great many reconstructionist polytheists make is to assume that all of the surviving myths were intended as theological treatises within their cultures of origin. I am not allowed to make that assumption by the scholarship of my preferred ancient culture; there is no distinction at all between the literary (that is, what we'd now think of as fiction) and the mythological in Sumer, and not much of one in Babylon or Assyria - and the scholastic presenters of the translated texts are quite adamant about pointing that out. It is entirely possible that what we have from Sumer is less like Hesiod's Theogony and closer to a scribe's recording of what the court poet came up with on a dull quarter-moon's night to entertain the ensi. We may have the equivalent of Inanna fanfic, which, in some ways, means that trying to come up with a revived Mesopotamian polytheism may be far more similar to that Batman ritual than most reconstructionists would be comfortable with. It's not obvious to me, especially with the European myths that were only recorded after Christianization, that anyone other than the Hellenics has anything that hasn't been muddied by the literary/theological divide (or, more to the point, a lack thereof). Ultimately, I don't think strict reconstruction is possible, whether or not it's desirable; in the end, we have to listen to the gods to find what they want now, not depend on what someone whose words are long crumbled said about what they wanted then. And that's okay.
If the ground of being is multiple and diverse, then our relationships with it are also multiple and diverse. And that's okay. Not only do we not have to agree about it, I'm not sure it would be healthy if we all did. And that brings me back to the Pagan movement being one of common practice, not common theology. As long as we don't actively disrespect each other's experiences of the gods, including a lack of experience if that's what someone comes with, we can still share those experiences. I don't have a common theology with any of the people I currently circle with, but we're all seeking something similar, and we have similar values and practices. And that's enough.
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