No Gods, Only Men
29 September 2019 09:28It's a real problem, I think, for new pagans not having anyone to pray to. They've got a sense of wanting to do witchcraft and loving the natural world and feeling connected to the ethos and community of paganism - but a religion without gods lacks a certain everything. Like Stephen King said about the Shining movie: "a big shiny cadillac with no engine inside".
Now I have gods, everything is easier: prayer is spontaneous, sincere and I feel its genuine benefits in return. There's a reason why rituals happen and when and why, and that makes them easier to write and remember; they have an internal logic.
What we generally say to new pagans is that the journey is the point; thst the act of seeking is as valuable as the destination. That's kinda true, in the sense that, I don't think anyone ever arrives at a finished faith: even followers of the book find their spirituality developing over time, becoming more rich & organic.
But equally - we say that Paganism is orthopraxic, not orthodoxic: created by what you do more than what you believe.
And you really can't...do anything meaningful without that faith being real. Like, you don't know what to ask for or to celebrate or why you take certain actions and not others.
Even basic actions, like washing your hands before ritual or doing the Qabalistic Cross, or doing a meditation which empties the mind vs one which stills it or teaches it to visualise - all of these have meaning, have purpose, and how are you to choose the reason when you don't yet have an underlying meaning? For example, Pagan meditation uses visualisation, but Zen meditation says that visions and dreams are false illusions and not the goal. Which is right? Depends what tradition you're in, what the purpose of the meditation is.
I'm currently uploading the Fencraft papers which are like "how to start building your own religion", explicitly aimed at new Pagans of all paths to speed the tricky figuring out bits. My practice became so much easier and more joyous once that bit was over. And I am still seeking and tinkering and deepening what I'm doing, but it's so much better and more meaningful than the rites I used to do.
I think it's also why Paganism becomes so technique-focused. Meditations, circle casts and spells are to some extent universal, and so we focus on training up these Lunar skills. But that's not Paganism. That's a...career path *within* paganism. And similarly, I feel increasingly critical of how self-focused Paganism is. I went to an open ritual and we talked about how the waning of the year and the equinox affects *us*. We said welcome and farewell to the spirits, but the bulk of the rite was about *us* (hey, another Lunar characteristic).
Is this good? Possibly. There's nothing wrong with using metaphor and ritual to reflect on our own lives, but it does lead to a certain...shallowness, I suppose, that I sense off a lot of paganism, that it is all about the magic and the aesthetic and what one can get out of it, more than a deep and abiding sense of the divine.
These past few months are the first time I've felt able to see what I do as a religion, because there's gods in it now. Not just a desire for the numinous, but some actual numen.
Now I have gods, everything is easier: prayer is spontaneous, sincere and I feel its genuine benefits in return. There's a reason why rituals happen and when and why, and that makes them easier to write and remember; they have an internal logic.
What we generally say to new pagans is that the journey is the point; thst the act of seeking is as valuable as the destination. That's kinda true, in the sense that, I don't think anyone ever arrives at a finished faith: even followers of the book find their spirituality developing over time, becoming more rich & organic.
But equally - we say that Paganism is orthopraxic, not orthodoxic: created by what you do more than what you believe.
And you really can't...do anything meaningful without that faith being real. Like, you don't know what to ask for or to celebrate or why you take certain actions and not others.
Even basic actions, like washing your hands before ritual or doing the Qabalistic Cross, or doing a meditation which empties the mind vs one which stills it or teaches it to visualise - all of these have meaning, have purpose, and how are you to choose the reason when you don't yet have an underlying meaning? For example, Pagan meditation uses visualisation, but Zen meditation says that visions and dreams are false illusions and not the goal. Which is right? Depends what tradition you're in, what the purpose of the meditation is.
I'm currently uploading the Fencraft papers which are like "how to start building your own religion", explicitly aimed at new Pagans of all paths to speed the tricky figuring out bits. My practice became so much easier and more joyous once that bit was over. And I am still seeking and tinkering and deepening what I'm doing, but it's so much better and more meaningful than the rites I used to do.
I think it's also why Paganism becomes so technique-focused. Meditations, circle casts and spells are to some extent universal, and so we focus on training up these Lunar skills. But that's not Paganism. That's a...career path *within* paganism. And similarly, I feel increasingly critical of how self-focused Paganism is. I went to an open ritual and we talked about how the waning of the year and the equinox affects *us*. We said welcome and farewell to the spirits, but the bulk of the rite was about *us* (hey, another Lunar characteristic).
Is this good? Possibly. There's nothing wrong with using metaphor and ritual to reflect on our own lives, but it does lead to a certain...shallowness, I suppose, that I sense off a lot of paganism, that it is all about the magic and the aesthetic and what one can get out of it, more than a deep and abiding sense of the divine.
These past few months are the first time I've felt able to see what I do as a religion, because there's gods in it now. Not just a desire for the numinous, but some actual numen.