![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
21 August 2019 15:25Part of the problem with trying to develop a "Golden Dawn but for Pagans" is that they are...conceptually incompatible.
Things like: I like the Tree of Life. I like the idea that all things can be mapped onto a clear diagram, a representation of the physical and energetic world there on paper which can be traversed from points to highways. And that as an initiate, I can travel step by step up the tree, learning and empowering myself once concept at a time.
There have been earlier attempts to put Paganism onto the Tree of Life; I recently read a very good one from Ross Nichols of OBOD which sort of redesigned it. And yet, almost by definition...the energies of the land and the Landweird and the ancestors and the spirits in the earth and storm are not capable of being mapped. That's why we love them.
And while my Solar/Lunar/Stellar distinction is working for me, it keeps resisting all attempts to turn it into a Tree of initiatory stages.
Similarly, Ceremonial stuff is underpinned by a certainty - the pure white light - which you reach up to. This is vaguely but persistently identified with the Abrahamic God, and again, seems very difficult to replace with anything else. Who else but He represents goodness, purity, strength, holiness, otherworldliness, and has given His followers a promise? Who is both in some ways a person but in others an energy field? No Pagan concept can be slotted into that conceptual space. We do have thigns that cleanse, or that are good, or that are interested in our welfare. We don't, however, have that white light of godhead.
You can try and put, like, Odin up there - because he's the top - or Spirit, or all sorts of Pagan concepts. It will have an effect, but it won't have *the* effect. Because again, an important part of the Pagan is a lack of certainty.
A lack of certainty manifests in different paths in different ways. It could be Powers who are characteruistically fickle, unreliable or capricious. It could be the force of Fate or Wyrd, disrupting man's affairs. It could be the sense in any religion that sometimes magic and prayer does not work, because it is subject to a higher will or doom. Many of our traditions are hazy about the afterlife, and what you need to do to get there; or have a relavitist approach to morality, so there is no energy which represents both the Lord and all that is good. We are of the land; and the land is unpredictable, made of tides. It rises and falls. It is not eternal.
I think the idea of making "ceremonial paganism" is like trying to serve stake with a chainsaw, or knit with spaghetti - two things which fundamentally can't come together without ruining the essential qualities of each. You can knit with spaghetti, of course - but it'll make for a bad jumper and a bad meal, and you'd best just do one or the other.
At the same time, the challenge is still quite satisfying for me. Because only in attempting to do so I come to understandings like this.
Things like: I like the Tree of Life. I like the idea that all things can be mapped onto a clear diagram, a representation of the physical and energetic world there on paper which can be traversed from points to highways. And that as an initiate, I can travel step by step up the tree, learning and empowering myself once concept at a time.
There have been earlier attempts to put Paganism onto the Tree of Life; I recently read a very good one from Ross Nichols of OBOD which sort of redesigned it. And yet, almost by definition...the energies of the land and the Landweird and the ancestors and the spirits in the earth and storm are not capable of being mapped. That's why we love them.
And while my Solar/Lunar/Stellar distinction is working for me, it keeps resisting all attempts to turn it into a Tree of initiatory stages.
Similarly, Ceremonial stuff is underpinned by a certainty - the pure white light - which you reach up to. This is vaguely but persistently identified with the Abrahamic God, and again, seems very difficult to replace with anything else. Who else but He represents goodness, purity, strength, holiness, otherworldliness, and has given His followers a promise? Who is both in some ways a person but in others an energy field? No Pagan concept can be slotted into that conceptual space. We do have thigns that cleanse, or that are good, or that are interested in our welfare. We don't, however, have that white light of godhead.
You can try and put, like, Odin up there - because he's the top - or Spirit, or all sorts of Pagan concepts. It will have an effect, but it won't have *the* effect. Because again, an important part of the Pagan is a lack of certainty.
A lack of certainty manifests in different paths in different ways. It could be Powers who are characteruistically fickle, unreliable or capricious. It could be the force of Fate or Wyrd, disrupting man's affairs. It could be the sense in any religion that sometimes magic and prayer does not work, because it is subject to a higher will or doom. Many of our traditions are hazy about the afterlife, and what you need to do to get there; or have a relavitist approach to morality, so there is no energy which represents both the Lord and all that is good. We are of the land; and the land is unpredictable, made of tides. It rises and falls. It is not eternal.
I think the idea of making "ceremonial paganism" is like trying to serve stake with a chainsaw, or knit with spaghetti - two things which fundamentally can't come together without ruining the essential qualities of each. You can knit with spaghetti, of course - but it'll make for a bad jumper and a bad meal, and you'd best just do one or the other.
At the same time, the challenge is still quite satisfying for me. Because only in attempting to do so I come to understandings like this.
