Historical Mush

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:

We interrupt our usual programming . . .

So normally what I write about here is all Pagan religious stuff, or at least religion-adjacent stuff like sex and politics.  You know, nice polite conversation.  (And yes, I'll have something to say about the recent cross-blog food fight on the Pagan/polytheist quasi-divide, but not tonight.)  Alas, given that I don't particularly want to link to one of my more personal blogs off of Twitter (for what should be presumably obvious reasons), I'm going to have to take a stab here into something far more outre and controversial: video game journalism.

Yeah.

So Bob Chipman, a movie critic under the name of MovieBob and a video game critic under the name of The Game OverThinker, recently authored a book and published it through Bang Printing by way of Fangamer.net: SMB3: Brick By Brick.  The intent is to perform the equivalent of a shot-by-shot analytic review of a movie for what he considers "The greatest game ever made."

I've been a fan of his for a little over a year, having stumbled across some of his videos for the Escapist around Yule '11 and then re-discovering him again through the Game OverThinker videos the following spring.  He was one of the guests at the SGC 2013 convention this last weekend, and one of the reasons I decided to skip out on the local SF/fantasy litcon the same weekend and go to a video game con halfway across the state instead.  (FWIW, I don't appear to have missed much, despite the lack of filking.)  The book debuted at SGC, so I picked up a copy at his autograph session on Friday.  It's not long - 205 pages, 4.5" x 7" - so it was a fairly fast read.

At this point, I want to reiterate that (1) I'm a fan, so this is likely not a completely objective review of the book, and (2) it's effectively self-published - Fangamer.net is not exactly a mainstream press.  So keep both of those in mind throughout the following.

I'm going to split this review into two parts behind the jump: Part The First will be on the actual content (spoiler: it's pretty good but not quite what I think the original idea was aiming for), and Part The Second will be on the book as a book, including layout and other publishing issues.

Scheduling

Why is it that almost everything I want to do conflicts with something else I want to do?

In this particular case, it was OwlCon (a local gaming convention that I volunteer for and have a long history with) and PanTheaCon this last weekend, but there's another one coming up on the first weekend in March, and another one in June.

On the bright side, my moon circles seem to have gotten to something approaching critical mass, so that's nice.  Resolving the internal theological chaos may be a little difficult - I have a couple of generic Wiccaform duotheists, a handful of pantheists, a UU panentheist who just likes ritual, a devotee of Brigid, a Discordian who doesn't so much worship Eris as try to point her away from himself, an animist refugee from a spiritually abusive strain of Christianity who is at the Any Other God/dess stage, and at this one coming up, someone whose personal pantheon is nearly evenly split between the Khemetic and Asatru pantheons.  Given that I'm sticking with pan-Near-Eastern at this point, this could get interesting.

It has recently come to my attention that the current estimate for the number of Pagans in the US is between 300,000 and 400,000.  (We will leave aside terminology bumming for the moment.  That includes self-identified Pagans, Wiccans, Druids, and the various more specific reconstructionists.)

The current estimate for the number of WELS Synod Lutherans is about 380,000.

Apparently I am the same level of minority no matter what religion I am.

Leaving Some Things In The Past

One of my immediate ancestors was a balls-out racist.  My father's father was raised with the attitudes common to the descendants of Southern plantation owners of the time, and embraced them without reservation.  For him, the term we dance around as an obscenity far greater than "fuck" was the primary term he had for Americans of African descent, although he condescended to use "colored" as a genteel euphemism for the few he thought were people of quality.  As far as I know, he took those attitudes to his grave.

He was also a cold and distant father, borderline emotionally abusive, to his sons, although I am given to understand that he treated both his wife with tenderness and respect, and his daughters with at least a gentler hand.  He had the usual toxic ideas about masculinity, and despite not being religious in the slightest, he was at least passively homophobic.  His oldest two sons think he was an alcoholic, although one of them is a teetotaler and thinks this about anyone who drinks more than a glass of wine a week.  He was very much a product of his time and culture, and his freethinking was his primary rebellion against it; in fact, his support for his younger daughter entering a profession and postponing marriage is the only one I can think of.  (Edit: he was also not actively anti-Semitic, which was somewhat unusual at that place and time, but not wholly unheard of, especially among WWII veterans.)

And yet, as I mentioned before, this is one of the two ancestors I know the names of for whom I feel comfortable doing any ancestor reverence for (the other is my paternal grandmother, his wife).  On a day when we celebrate civil rights, and do right reverence to a cultural ancestor and martyr to whose name my grandfather would invariably attach an unpleasant epithet, it seems particularly difficult to balance the good a man did - lives saved on the battlefield, vision saved in a doctor's office, being a loving husband - with the evil he did right beside it, and the evil he passively or actively supported.

Still, we do the same, don't we, when we Pagans are called to our various gods?  We are turned back towards cultures that held to values we find repugnant now.  Racism as we know it is a phenomenon of the Age of Empires, but prejudice against one's neighbors comes standard with the empires of old, whether Roman, Greek, Assyrian, Egyptian, or elsewhere and elsewhen.  We have no historical cultures free of sexism, and many where women were treated abominably; while there are many whose policies on sexuality are preferable to our culture's, there are none I can point to and call truly sex-positive.  The idea (loosened from the idea of race) that one human being can and even should non-consensually own another is pervasive in the ancient world.  And many of these values were at least ascribed to the gods; Athena, in particular, was the mouthpiece of some terribly misogynist views, but she is far from the only, or even the worst, of these.

I think that I, at least, have hope that people, spirits, and gods alike continue to evolve.  I would like to think that the gods are not ignorant of the flow of human history - that Liberty has become a part of many goddesses, including Athena.  I would like to believe that the dead, when they see each other without the veil of skin between, understand the harm of treating each other as less than human, and of supporting the social structures that do the same even without any individual ill-feeling.  And my experiences, though small and sometimes confusing, tend to point in that direction.

At any rate, there is much work to be done here, whether the ancestors join us gladly in that work or not.  And if not, then there is that much more work to be done, to turn them, too, around.

What's in a Name?

So, there are a number of bloggers in the Pagan blogosphere who have decided that "Pagan" is the wrong label.  A large number of them are of the hard polytheist and/or Reconstructionist strain, although not all of them.  And there have been a number of reaction posts about them from folks who do still claim the label.

One of the better posts has been P. Sufenas Virius Lupus's post on the Queer I Stand blog, Bringing Back The Gods, which pointed up some of the various branches of the large clump of practices we call Pagan that have been leaning away from theistic language, much less polytheistic.  Christine Kraemer replied with Three Legs on the Pagan Cauldron: Must Pagans Be Polytheists?, which points out that polytheism is only one of three major threads of the Pagan conglomeration; she identifies the other two as "earth-based spirituality" and "Goddess worship," although that last is qualified somewhat.

While I would argue that there are some other threads in Pagan identity that are almost as important as those three, if not more so (I personally would argue that "magick/divination/energy work" has been at least as important in the development of the Witchcraft traditions, and that the presence or absence of that thread is one of the huge stumbling blocks between Witches of any stripe and the hardcore Reconstructionists), I basically like Kraemer's argument.  It to a certain extent illuminates why I function well in the Pagan community but rarely feel quite at home.  As far as I can tell, I've always been at heart both a cosmos-worshipper (I'll not limit it to Earth; much as I love Terra Mater, a lot of my personal worship has been sky- and water-focused) and a polytheist, and for me those are largely welded together.  I didn't have to be told about dryads and naiads; I just needed to find out their names. And I took a wide turn through Goddess Spirituality over the course of my 20s, which I desperately needed to do to shed the dead skin of the Yahvism I was brought up in, but that largely didn't stick.  All of my patrons are goddesses except for the Green Man, who I think is really more a daimon than a theos - but I don't think of Them as aspects of The Goddess, except in the sense that I think of myself and the Spouse and my lovers as aspects of Humanity.  I mean, from a certain point of view, it's true that we are, and They are, but that's not generally how any of us think of ourselves, and it's not terribly useful when dealing with us.

That's fine for me, but it doesn't really help much when dealing with members of my community who are nature-focused Goddess worshippers who couldn't care less about the names by which they call divinity.  And more and more, I'm realizing that the Fun Maven contingent largely falls into that category, or more properly pair of categories.  It's not that they have any animosity towards those of us who care about historical accuracy; they just don't care, and can't imagine why we would.  This also seems to be the default orientation of CUUPs groups, which saddens me greatly - who the Queen of Heaven is that we're offering these cakes to is of great concern to me (hint: it's one of Astarte, Asherah, or Shapshu), but for them, that there is a Queen at all is sufficient revelation.

I mentioned the magickal thread a couple of paragraphs ago.  I'd be lying through my teeth if I didn't admit that it was almost as strong a thread drawing me to my current path as polytheism and cosmos-worship were, and that's one of the reasons that I still call myself a Witch despite not really identifying with Wicca per se.  And, despite caring about historicity, it's one of the reasons I don't really fit in with most of the Reconstructionist groups - most of them limit magick to either liminal roles or very specific circumstances, if they accept it at all.  Like most practitioners, I simultaneously know that it's a load of tosh and experience that it works, often quite powerfully, which seems to be the standard paradox of magick.  And while the festival Fun Mavens are often as into magick as I am, the CUUPsers tend not to be.

However, one of the reasons I still quite like Pagan as an identity is that it is more explicit about (or at least inclusive of) the polytheistic aspect than Wiccan or Witch is, while not so specific as to start cutting off some of the magickal or earth-focused aspects, like many of the specific Reconstructionist labels do.  While "Polytheist" is certainly accurate in my case, it does leave out both the cosmos-worship aspects (some polytheists did that, some didn't) and the magickal aspects (many historical polytheists were quite suspicious of magickal practices, nearly as much so as the monotheists turned out to be).  I also associate Pagan with more sex-positivity than most of the other available labels, too, although I know that's not always an accurate association.  Still, of what we have, it does best in my case.  Until someone comes up with something better, I'll stick with it.

The Temple and the Bed

I've been wrestling a bit with notions of sacred sexuality recently.  Part of that is part and parcel of having grown up raised by a Catholic, even if the greater part of my own religious education was Protestant; the notion that there is something sacramental to, if not marriage, then the various things it's bundled with in the eyes of the church, not least of them sex and reproduction, is tenacious.  Since the latter is pretty much off the table for me on this turn of the great wheel, sex it is, then.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of difference of opinion on whether sacred sex was part of common practice in the Near East in the pre-Christian era.  I'm reasonably comfortable with the idea that it was part of esoteric and magickal practice in that time and place, mostly because it ends up being part of at least one group's esoteric teachings in pretty much every culture, largely because it works.  But in many times and places it's been esoteric precisely because it's perceived as problematic, if not perverted, by the culture at large.  It's not clear whether the Mesopotamian-Levantine cultures were more open about it or not, mostly because there's not a whole lot of direct evidence.  We know that there was prostitution, and that not all prostitutes were lower-class.  We know that some temples had priestesses in many different positions, some artistic, some administrative, and some ritual.  And there are hints and suggestions in the surviving artwork that some rituals required male and female nudity, or at least exposure of the penis and/or breasts.  As far as hard evidence goes, that's about it.

Purity codes were a big thing in the region at the time.  The Hebrew Bible is full of them, occasionally conflicting.  And the Hebrew purity codes take a hard line against a large number of sexual acts, although not prostitution per se.  In many cases, the justification isn't so much "the Lord thinks this is gross" as it is "this is what the other people do, and you're not them, so don't".  There has been a great deal of ink spilled over the idea that this is code for "these acts are sacred to other gods, and you're not theirs, so don't".  I admit, the idea is in some ways appealing - perhaps Yahveh hates Teh Buttsecks, but Ba'al, Asherah, and Astarte are very much in favor of it.  Unfortunately, the documentation left by those other nations is incomplete, and does not tell us whether this is so, or whether they had their own purity codes in which they said not to do those same acts for other reasons.

On the other hand, the Greeks seemed to think that there was actual temple prostitution going on in Assyria/Babylon.  At least, their travelogues state outright that there was.  They don't seem to think much of it, but then, the Greeks never seemed to think much of traditions that differed from their own, and they exoticized other cultures pretty much the same way we do.  So, even if they terribly misinterpreted what was going on, there seems to be some sort of officially sanctioned sex going on on temple grounds at least somewhere in the region.  But once again, those who were actually participating in it, who understood the rules and the rationale, didn't leave records of their own.  So we basically have two fairly prudish sets of literate people, with their own agendas against the practitioners, accusing the Levanto-Mesopotamian peoples of inappropriate religious sex.

The Ba'al saga doesn't have much to say on the matter, except for some weird tension between Ba'al and Asherah that causes problems in the translation.  Asherah is mentioned holding an object - most translations say "spindle" - that Ba'al later has a very bad reaction to when it appears on his banquet table.  It is unclear why, but Ba'al's reaction suggests that the object has sexual connotations of some sort.  In two of her other appearances in the preserved stories, Asherah's appearance before El causes him to immediately start talking about sex, including a few dirty jokes, but then again, they're married.  Still, in the sparse material we have, Asherah does seem to have an immediate association with some sort of sexuality; it isn't a stretch to suggest that there might have been at least symbolic sexual rites in her temples.  The same is loosely true of Astarte, Ishtar, and Inanna in their respective stories, and perhaps Cybele and Atargatis as well.

At any rate, sacred sexuality doesn't have to be part of the exoteric rites for modern Pagans to add it to their own practices.  It's more that it would be nice to know what was done before so that we can adapt it, rather than trying to come up with something from what we now have; a lot of what we've got borrows heavily from Hindu and Taoist practices, and if one is going to go around appropriating peoples' culture, better it be ones your own culture didn't oppress (by virtue of their having been long gone).

Wheres and Whats

One of the big motives for the contemporary NeoPagan movement as a whole, especially in the US and Britain, is reunion with Nature.  Over and over, I hear words of reverence and love for the natural world, its plants and animals, the earth and the sea and the sky, the weather and the stars above them.  This makes sense, of course - ecological consciousness is one of the major threads of NeoPaganism.

It also makes me think the vast majority of my fellow-travellers are city slickers, though.  Pure, unspoiled Nature is a thing of beauty, to be sure, and should be protected - but we can't live there anymore.  We're not wild humans, and most of us haven't been for 11,000 years.  Less, in the case of the Native Americans and a few other groups like the San, but even they had agriculture and carefully groomed herds of buffalo, or tamed cattle and regular grazing routes.  Even the Native Australians weren't truly wild humans, although perhaps they came the closest to preserving that strain.  No, we're domesticated, just as surely as our dogs and our cattle and our wheat are, and we can't live in the wild.

Which is, I think, one of the reasons there aren't many gods that represent truly wild Nature, and the ones that do tend to be rather dangerous ones from the perspective of the culture that honored them.  Seth comes to mind, and he wasn't so much Nature as the desert and its nomads - not wild people, either, but perhaps less thoroughly domesticated as Egypt was.  Pan was marginal, quite literally - he wandered not the truly wild areas but the liminal spaces where the edges of civilization met the edges of the wilderness.  Oceanic gods and goddesses tended to be portrayed as not the closest friends of humanity, and often in momentary or periodic conflict with those that were - think of Poseidon versus Athena, or Yamm versus Ba'al.

The earliest gods are often the ones most clearly concerned with urban humanity, such as it was at the time.  Inanna in particular is all about civilization, bringing the me, the tangible and intangible things that made civilization possible, to humanity.  The Great Mother goddesses of Syria and Asia Minor wear crowns that echo the tops of their city walls.  The gods of the outdoors are overwhelmingly gods of agriculture and weather, not of the unspoiled wild.  In fact, those places were cared for by smaller spirits - dryads, naiads, and the like.  They had their devotees, even shrines, but not temples.

I'm not going to argue against the Nature-focus of my fellow Pagans; I think it's a good thing, especially the reverence for Gaia as a whole.  But I think it does get in the way of building community in the larger sense, especially among polytheists (whether hard or soft).  In particular, it seems to get in the way of pushes towards permanent shrines and temples; an awful lot of Pagans are quite insistent about worship properly being outdoors.  Perhaps we could be looking towards Shinto for ways of reconciling Nature-reverence with more complex and permanent community praxis; it seems to work out well for them, at least at home.

Dice and Ancient Days in the New Year

In another context altogether, I mentioned that I played role-playing games as a teen, and I did become Pagan in college, and indeed I was introduced to Paganism (specifically an idiosyncratic form of NeoDruidry and Eclectic Wicca) by two friends in my college gaming group.  While I would argue with anyone from the anti-gamer end of Christian fundamentalism that there was no cause-and-effect relationship between my being a gamer and my leaving Christianity, I am compelled to consider, given the appearance of a correlation, whether there might have been a common cause.  Certainly they were both part of throwing off the "good girl" identity given me by my parents, but I doubt simple rebellion would have lasted this long, and not only am I still quite Pagan, but I'm also still a gamer, although not as frequently as I might like.  A skeptic might suggest that both require a vivid imagination, and to some extent that's probably true.  There is a certain amount of role-playing, in the theatrical/LARP sense at least, to doing good ritual.  In my case, I think there's an inherent love of symbolism going on in both cases - in gaming, representing a complete character in a collection of numbers and descriptors; in ritual, representing meaning in forms both improvised and archaic.

Elsewhere in that conversation, I pointed out that some young men of my acquaintance in high school were permitted by their parents to play the Marvel Super Heroes FASERIP system, but not AD&D, because of the "Satanic" stigma attached to AD&D in those days of the Satanic Panic and in our notch of the Bible Belt.  Another interlocutor mentioned something similar regarding his gaming group and other non-D&D-based RPGs; both the Call of Cthulhu games and the various White Wolf World of Darkness games were mentioned.  While it could be argued that, in those days when Watchmen was still new, that the Marvel RPG really was somehow more innocent than AD&D, the same was certainly not true for the others.  I suspect that if the particular wingnut fundies who has their knickers in a twist over AD&D had read either the CoC rulebook or the Vampire: the Masquerade basic sourcebook, they'd have burst a blood vessel.

Speaking of the World of Darkness, I realized quite recently that my current pan-Near-Eastern trio of matron goddesses make a fairly good Weaver-Wyld-Wyrm set.  Of course, I don't have the same negative associations that the WoD lycanthropes do with those archetypes.  And my oldest matron, the one I knew was at the core of my deepest self well before I steeled myself to walk away from the church, I recognized first in the Monster Manual, twisted and oversimplified as the depiction of Her mythology was.  So perhaps the gamer connection goes deeper than I'd like to admit.

Of course, I don't play AD&D anymore, and haven't since 2nd edition.  My system of choice has been GURPS for a long time, and when I GM (which is most of the time), I usually prefer modern or futuristic settings to pseudo-medieval or Tolkienesque ones.  Two of my Yule gifts this year were a set of electronic six-sided dice and a set of wooden ones.  The first are a bit silly, but they were from the Spouse - part of his recent soldering kick - so I appreciate the thought and the effort that went into them.  The wooden ones, though - I've toyed with the idea of creating a divination method using dice for quite a while.  The ancient Near Eastern cultures cast lots to determine the divine will; d6 should do just fine.

Beloved (if still less than grateful) Dead

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.

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).

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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!

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."

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.

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.

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.