Longing and Contradiction in (Re?)Creating Modern Paganism

Longing and Contradiction in (Re?)Creating Modern Paganism

The emergence of modern Paganism in the post-industrial West in the 20^th and 21^st centuries presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities for those engaged in critical reflection on the nature of this movement, on its defining qualities, and on the specific character of pagan spirituality. The difficulties and opportunities I will describe are very much those I have personally come to identify. In engaging what I see as “difficulties” within the modern Pagan movement, I am not intending to be dismissive or judgmental. I am speaking as a Pagan who cares deeply about the issues I intend to discuss. Clarifying these complexities helps me make sense of my own experience, and I hope, may offer something to others.

I approach this set of issues first and foremost as a scholar of religion. I have studied religion for almost eight years, two of those as a teacher of undergraduates. I inhabit that strange, middle space between insider and outsider that complicates both the study of religion and the practice of it. In order to be organized in my discussion, I want to introduce three Orders of Meaning in the study of religion that I find helpful and use with my First Years. They are:

1.   First Order: The immediate experience of individual religious people in the practice of their religion.
2.  Second Order: The sustained, critical reflection of religious insiders on their own experience, and their attempt to express that reflection in organized ways to both insiders and outsiders. (Sometimes simply called “Theology.”
3.  Third Order: The theoretical perspective of scholarly outsiders, seeking to describe and explain religious practices in non-religious (i.e. social-scientific) terms. 

Most pagans would agree that our First Order experiences (which later then come to be described as “pagan”) generally have some connection to a profound, transformative relationship with the world itself. Many modern Pagans have shifted our attentions from creedal religions of the dominant culture as a consequence of some kind of powerful encounter with the physical world around them, an appreciation for plants and animals, and a positive valuation of the material. It is these experiences that continue to fuel the reflective projects of pagans seeking to explain their experiences in ways that are clear, accessible, and engaging for both insiders and outsiders.

But religion is not simply “sheer experience.” Without symbolic systems, rituals, and cosmologies, these experiences could be characterized as “nature appreciation,” not “nature religion.” And so, recognizing this, modern Pagans look to pre-Christian, paleo-pagan sources for inspiration. We draw on ancient lifeways in order to express our experiences and structure our celebratory responses. We rightly recognize that the pre-Christian religions of our distant, European ancestors also shared this quality of radical engagement with, and positive valuation of, the world. In order to do this, we turn to historical scholarship in order to gather reliable information about what the paleo-pagans “actually did.”

Note that in speaking about modern Pagans, I am discussing the experiences of Euro-descended people who have little-to-no historically continuous connection to the ancient cultures to which they seek to connect. Primarily, these are the descendants of Christian European settler colonists who attempted to reproduce their home cultures in new land, but over time the culture of those colonies transformed and became something radically new. The situation is very different for those who inherited some form of cultural identity with nearly-continuous roots in the place where they still live - broadly, modern Europeans.

Difficulties

Here is where difficulty emerges. Historical scholarship is not a neutral guide to what paleo-pagans “really did,” nor can we totally grasp the complexity of paleo-pagan life and practice through historical scholarship alone. This is not only due to the problem of sources and the implicit biases of scholars, but also to the fact that, in most non-Christian, non-Islamic societies, religion is not a separable element one can detach from human life for its own, separate analysis. Religion, for much of human history, has been deeply interwoven with the other adaptive strategies humans have employed for responding to the realities of their environments. We might even go so far as to say that before Christianity and Islam, there was no such thing as religion; only lifeways which included various techniques for managing a community and structuring human and non-human encounters. Contrary to the creedal, abstract systems at the center of the monotheisms, these techniques would have no meaning apart from their relationship to other cultural modes of kinship, food production, power and prestige, etc. Not only can we not analyze paleo-Pagan religion, we cannot pull its wisdom (however profound) forward out of its context and imagine that it will fit neatly into our own. The wisdom of paleo-pagan religions (if we can call them that) was context-dependent.

The culturally and ecologically context-dependent nature of religion is, I would hope, something all pagans would readily acknowledge. The difficulty comes when we (I think rightly) draw on ancient sources, but then lack ways of making them part of our own cultural experience. One danger is that, in our hunger for systems of meaning which speak to our experience of worldly integration, we may ultimately become consumed with mimicking ancient cultural forms, which become abstract “systems of belief” to which we direct our ultimate attention.

This is not mere speculation; I have experienced this for myself. I have grown increasingly focused on the trappings of pagan practice, and with which "hearth culture" I should choose to structure my personal practice. In doing so, I find myself studying the lifeways of the ancient Greeks and Norse, more than I spend developing my relationship to the world around me. And yet there is no ancient Indo-European culture whose Gods and lifeways "call" to me. I feel no connection to any of these ancient people through my inherited culture (White, Protestant American), nor through my "blood," which I find a difficult concept in and of itself.

The claim of many Pagans and Wiccans is that the mythologies of ancient peoples carry "universal" themes that can be embraced by anyone, and integrated into one's celebration of life and the depth experiences thereof. While I would agree in principle that story-telling communicates Truth in many profound ways, I cannot submit to the level of homogenizing these stories, which are expressions of unique cultures, tied to their specific histories and bioregions, for my own spiritual development. Nor do I find that the truth of their wisdom can be so neatly abstracted. If I could not integrate the abstracted and infinitely reinterpreted stories produced by ancient Israelites and early-first century Judeans into my life in meaningful ways, because of distance of time and space, how am I expected to do so in the case of the Norse, with whom I share no cultural connection? Perhaps it is the poverty of the White American Protestant culture of my upbringing that disconnects me from the wealth of folk traditions that still exist in many parts of the Christianized world. But while unfortunate, I cannot apologize for or change this fact. Nor can I "skip over" this part of my own identity to go hunt for connections to a past which is so distant as to be almost irrelevant.

Longing and Contradiction

The reason I spend so much time pondering this situation is because I feel it speaks to a deep and important longing among modern Pagans. We admire the non-creedal, integrated, world-affirming lifeways of ancient paleo-Pagans and hope to (re)create that form of religion for ourselves, working past centuries of religious alienation produced by religions which insist that any experience of “depth” must be “Not of this World.” But the societies in which ancient paleo-pagan religions were practiced no longer exist; if we celebrate paleo-paganisms because of their seamless integration with daily life, natural systems, and cultural milieu, then the fact that we live in entirely different circumstances means that, even if we could recover these systems, we could not successfully integrate them into our own lives, which is the goal in the first place.

We cannot do as they did and expect to reproduce the same qualities that we uphold as admirable. Simply practicing as they practiced can create a new form of practical dogmatism: the symbols and practices themselves become the priority, rather than the orientation they are meant to produce and reinforce. Also, there is the problem that religion in ancient paleo-pagan cultures (as in many modern indigenous cultures) serves to reinforce socio-cultural systems and their norms; norms to which we may, as moderns, reject out of hand, e.g. patriarchy, execution of prisoners, veneration of the State, etc.

            But neither can modern Pagans build uncritically within our own, modern, post-industrial Western culture. We recognize that paleo-pagan religion was part and parcel of the social order, and served to reinforce socio-cultural systems and their norms; this is still the case in many indigenous religions today. We acknowledge that we do not want religion to serve this function for our own culture, as we’ve seen the dangerous ways in which extremist forms of Protestant Christianity have done so in American society and politics. There are also aspects of American culture, apart from Christianity, which most pagans find distasteful. So in our attempt to (re)create a form of religion that is integrated into life in the way of non-creedal, indigenous lifeways, we run into the problem of producing a system that emerges out of a cultural experience to which we may hold strident objections. We must start from where we are, but the reality of a pluralistic society historically dominated by Christianity means that we already exist in a complex (and often tense) relationship with the signs and systems that were here before us. 

Opportunities: Back to the Orders

So what is the solution? Create a protest driven sub-culture? This can compound on the problems above. How does this sub-culture interact with the dominant culture? How does it respond? How does it avoid the pitfalls of isolationism and escapism? How can modern Pagans integrate their “pagan lives” with their “regular lives” if the sub-culture stands insistently apart?

I am not sure how to answer any of the questions above. But if we are to look for resources to help us generate creative visions of modern Paganism that critically engage the issues above, we need look no farther than our own, modern context.

            The profound opportunity of modern paganism, especially humanistic, scholarly-engaged paganism, is that this movement is creating a conversation among religious "insiders" that spans all of the Orders of Meaning mentioned at the beginning of this post. We are self-consciously engaged in creating religion; and as much as we may want that to happen "naturally," in the way of all other religions of the past, our historical situation makes that approach highly unlikely. The very existence of the comparative study of religion as a field has made modern Paganism possible. The existence of modern Paganism as a site of resistance to prevailing cultural and moral norms gives it a critical stance that members would be wise to embrace. Even the rise of modern science, which has carved out an imaginative space in which moderns can reflect on their lives and world in non-Christian ways, has had a role to play.

Those engaged in reflecting on modern Pagan experiences (2nd Order work) would benefit from engagement with the 3rd Order scholarship in religion, because that scholarship allows for a broader view of the modern pagan project. It roots this project in the wider context of religion as a human activity. In understanding religion as human activity, we come to see better the ways in which it speaks to all parts of the human self, integrates into the fabric of human life, and gives voice to the full range of human experiences. By working consistently within this wider field of vision, we may hopefully avoid a tendency toward parochialism - not because our goal is a kind of Universalism, but because we refuse to focus on the details of localized symbol systems rather than the human-world relationship itself, which is at the core of our 1^st Order experiences.  

Michael York writes, "Paganism is an affirmation of interactive and polymorphic sacred relationship by individual or community with the tangible, sentient, and nonempirical" (Pagan Theology, 161). By "polymorphic," he means "multiple forms." Any form a Pagan chooses to use to affirm this relationship, as long as it works for that person and helps to build community, is, I argue, a valid form of Paganism. I am not interested in arguing which forms/models/symbolic systems individual Pagans ought to use in order to do this. But I do argue that serious, 2nd Order work on the part of scholars like myself ought to consider the relationship to be our primary concern, and ought to ask whether our forms of expression are enabling or hindering that primary relationship.

For those engaged in 2^nd Order work like myself, I would argue that we ought to ask ourselves not "What is the content of our religion?" (Polytheism? Animism? Pantheism?) but rather, "What kind of religion are we building?" "What orientation toward the world are we seeking to give shape and expression?"  For it is not the symbolic content that makes a practice pagan. For me, and I would think for many humanistic Pagans, paganism cannot only be the attempt to revive ancient paleo-pagan practice for modern people. As much as I honor that goal, it is not enough. I say this as a person who has done serious scholarly work in the past, and considers themselves a historian. For me, in order for Paganism to be a religion I can live, I must resist the temptation to turn it into yet one more historical pet-project. Historical and sociological research have dominated my academic life up unto this point; however, now that I am seriously pursuing 2nd Order work as a self-identified Pagan, I know that I have to shift gears. This is difficult for me, and represents a serious level of dedication. I once promised myself and others that I would never do theology, and here I am, about to enter a Philosophy and Theology program in order to engage these questions in a sustained and critical way. My hope is to engage emerging modern philosophies – like ecstatic naturalism and process philosophy – from a Pagan perspective, in order to see how these might help frame Pagan experience in ways that speak to the modern heart and mind.

As much as I value 2^nd Order activity and intend to pursue it as an academic, it is important to note that this work is supplemental; it is not an exchange for the actual being and doing of Paganism. My speculative engagement with these philosophies ought to support that being and doing, not replace it. The problem with the abstract is not that it is abstract, but that it is divorced from lived experience. By engaging critical issues, we challenge ourselves to live more deeply, more authentically, and more thoughtfully as a consequence. Whether we honor the Aesir or the Goddess, meditate silently or pour out offerings, let our practice affirm our sacred relationship to this world and its many Beings – however we envision them.