A Christian Take on Contemporary Paganism

I was extremely gratified to read Paul Louis Metzger’s recent post about contemporary Paganism at Patheos, entitled “Idol Makers”.

Metzger succinctly, but accurately (in my opinion), tackles such issues as the Pagan materiality (i.e., idolatry), the spectrum of beliefs about the ontological nature of divinity, and the gendering of divinity.  Addressing himself to fellow Christians, Metzger warns against an overly simplistic understanding of contemporary Paganism.

“We Christians need to be on guard in our understanding of such movements as contemporary Paganism. We tend to lump all of modern Paganism into one general and distorted category. We often fail to account for the vast complexity within the movement and articulate Paganism accurately.”

He also suggests that Christians may be at least as prone to the charge of idolatry as Pagans: “While we Christians would not wish to divinize the creation, we should also guard against turning our own creations into idolatrous machines that wreak havoc on what God himself as made.”  Definitely go check out his post.

Am I an animist?

Don’t let us imagine we see the sun as the old civilisations saw it. All we see is a scientific little luminary, dwindled to a ball of blazing gas. In the centuries before Ezekiel and John, the sun was still a magnificent reality, men drew forth from him strength and splendor, and gave him back homage and lustre and thanks. But in us, the connection is broken, the responsive centers are dead. Our sun is quite a different thing from the cosmic sun of the ancients, so much more trivial. We may see what we call the sun, but we have lost Helios forever. We have lost the cosmos, by coming out of responsive connection with it, and this is our chief tragedy. …

Who says the sun cannot speak to me! … What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us. … We can only get the sun by a sort of worship; and the same with the moon.

– D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

I found myself excited about a new blogging project called, the Animist Blog Carnival which is organized by Adventures in Animism.  (Unfortunately, all the links are now broken and the blog appears to have disappeared.  I hope it reappears.)

Each month, a different blog “hosts” the Carnival by gathering all the related posts into one place.  All “animist types” are invited to participate by blogging on that month’s theme.  For the purposes of this project, “animists” is an inclusive term, and can include pantheists, naturalists, eco-pagans, polytheists.  If you want to participate, just post your contribution on the first of the month and send the link to that month’s host.  Each month there is a different theme.  May’s theme is “Place Magic”.

So I set about writing my contribution for May.  I found myself struggling with it.  For one thing, I have an ambiguous attitude about magic.  But there are ways around that.  “Magic” can mean so many things.  But still I struggled, and as I did so, I had this nagging thought: “Am I really an animist?”

The Animist Blog Carnival defines “animism” very broadly and technically includes me, but I’ve never really resonated with the term.  Finally, I read Traci’s post at A Sense of Place entitled, “I’m an Animist: and what that means”.  It’s a great post and I urge you to read it.  There are two intertwined themes that seem to run through Traci’s explanation of animism: relationship and personhood.  Traci explains:

“I do have relationships, both with human and other-than-human persons, and I nurture and cherish those connections. …

“The Sun, as a Great Power, is someone I want to develop relationship with.  By attending to the presence of the Sun, and actively communing, I forge connection.”

I understand attending — attending to presence, attending to place, attending to connection.  But I do not understand the unconscious phenomena of the world as persons.  I do not understand calling the Sun a person.  Now, if this is just a rhetorical flourish intended to help us look at natural phenomena in a different way, I can appreciate that.  But, reading Traci’s writing and that of other animists like Graham Harvey, it seems like the idea of personhood is more than metaphor for them.

Traci describes the Ash near her front door as “a living person, who possesses a worldview, culture, and language distinct from my own.”  In fact, many animists talk about “salmon persons”, “tree persons”, and even “rock persons”.  But what does “personhood” mean?  Traci explains in the comments that, for her, the term “personhood” implies relationality and reciprocity.  Also implied in the concept is the notion of rights.  Animists want to see the rights of all “persons” respected.

I have some kind of mental block when it comes to the idea of inanimate nature as persons.  The philosophical naturalist in me balks at any suggestion of personification.  Animals, trees, other plants: these I see as alive.  And so, in some sense, I can understand them as “persons”.  I can enter into a relationship with them, not the kind of relationship I have with humans, but a kind of relationship anyway.  And I can respect that they have certain rights.  But rocks?  What about inanimate matter?

Whenever I am having difficulty grasping animism, I turn to David Abram.  In an interview by Derrick Jensen, Abram explains what it means for a rock to be alive:

“Often when discussing these notions, people will say, ‘Okay, well, sure, humans are alive.  Other animals, okay, I can get that –  critters have their own lives, sure.  And even plants, I get that they’re alive.  But stones?  Rocks?  Matter?  No way! The matter of which this table or that chair is made?  You’re going to tell me that it’s alive?  I can’t go there — forget it! — that’s just inanimate matter.’

“People always want to draw the line somewhere.  But you see, it’s drawing the line at all that’s the problem: the idea that at bottom matter is ultimately inert, or inanimate.  The word ‘matter,’ if you listen with your animal ears, is basically the word ‘mater,’ or mother.  It comes from the same indo-european root as the word “matrix,” which is Latin for ‘womb.’

“We all carry within us an ancient, ancestral awareness of matter as the womb of all things, a sense that matter is alive through and through.  But to speak of matter as inanimate is to think of mother as inanimate, to imply that the female, earthly side of things is inert, is just an object.  If we want to really throw a monkeywrench into the workings of the patriarchy, then we should stop speaking as though matter is in any way, at any depth, inanimate or inert. 

[...]

“If we speak of matter as essentially inanimate, or inert, we establish the need for a graded hierarchy of beings:  stones have no agency or experience whatsoever; bacteria have a minimal degree of life; plants have a bit more life, with a rudimentary degree of sensitivity; ‘lower’ animals are more sentient, yet still stuck in their instincts; ‘higher’ animals are more aware; while humans alone are really awake and intelligent. In this manner we continually isolate human awareness above, and apart from, the sensuous world. It takes us out of relationship with the things around us. If, however, we assume that matter is alive and self-organizing from the get-go, then hierarchies vanish, and we are left with a wildly differentiated field of animate beings, each of which has its gifts relative to the others. And we find ourselves not above, but in the very midst of this web, our own sentience part and parcel of the sensuous landscape.“

So, for the animist, there is no such thing as inanimate matter.  All matter is animate, and thus alive in some sense.  I think modern science can be invoked to support this notion that a matter is in motion on some level.  And if we can accept the idea that all this matter is part of a complex self-regulating system (Gaia), then I can see how it all could be said to be alive.  In this sense, I can understand rocks as part of that “field” of animate matter that we are immersed in.  This is what I think D.H. Lawrence was describing in his essay on New Mexico:

In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive.  There were only deeper and deeper streams of life, vibrations of life more and more vast.  So rocks were alive, but a mountain had a deeper, vaster life than a rock, and it was much harder for a man to bring his spirit, or his energy, into contact with the life of a mountain, and so he drew strength from the mountain, as from a great standing well of life, than it was to come into contact with the rock.  And he had to put forth a great religious effort.  For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos. mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life.  To come into the immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy.  This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion …

How does that get us to personhood?  I think that I can relate to rocks, not as persons, but as part of Person — that field of animate matter which many Pagans and religious feminists call “Goddess”.  Calling rocks “persons” is still a stumbling block for me, but I think I may get to the same place by calling rocks part of a Person, Goddess.

I suppose, technically, this is a form of personification.  Personification, as the term is typically used, means ascribing human qualities to non-human nature.  But I don’t think that is what I am doing when I speak of Goddess.  Animism recognizes that the term “person” is broader than the term “human”.  Personification, then, need not mean ascribing imputing human characteristics, like consciousness, will, intention, and so on, to things that do not have these qualities.  Rather, calling something a “person” means that we can enter into a “personal” relationship with that thing.  It means that that “thing” is more than a thing — more than a dead thing, it is a living be-ing.

I don’t know if this is enough to qualify me as an animist.  But I think that being an animist is must be less about the abstract ideas I have been discussing above, and more something that you feel in your bones.  Spring is in full swing here in the Midwest.  The dogwoods are in full bloom and their petals are heaped along the edges of the sidewalks.  The air feels thick with new life.  The birds are busy in the nest in my gazebo.  The sun is shining and a cool breeze blows through the open windows of my house.  On a day like this, it is easy to feel myself connected to, nay, immersed in, the material world.  On a day like this, it is easy to feel that the world is overflowing with other-than-human persons.  Bird persons, tree persons, and one vast Person, whose body encompasses the bright sun and the blue sky, the wind and the clouds, the soil and the grass, and the blood in my veins and the water in my cells.  This is my kind of place magic.  So, for today at least, I am an animist.

Religion vs. Therapy

Over at Patheos, in a post entitled, “another false divide”, deity-centric hard polytheist Aine makes a case that worship of the gods should benefit the worshiper as much as the worshipee.  Believe it or not, this is something of a radical statement to make in the polytheistic community.  Aine’s post is in response to the belief, common among hard polytheists, that religion is about serving the gods, not self-improvement.  Aine writes:

“But I am so sick, and so tired, and just all together done with this idea that you’re a bad religious person if you are actually concerned with your own well-being and how the gods and spirits can help you in that way.”

Aine acknowledges that this attitude is in response to “the grabby-hands behavior a lot of religious folk, like myself, have seen, where the gods are considered tools to be utilized and just archetypes to play around with in your mind.”  But, for Aine, the pendulum has now swung too far in the other direction.  Aine writes: “I think the sentiment that the gods aren’t pretty tools is useful, for those of us who are trying to find other like-minded folk, but I also think the ‘religion isn’t therapy’ has become damaging.”

For Aine, devotion to his gods is about a reciprocal relationship, and devotion to the gods and personal healing are not mutually exclusive:

“My religion has helped me more than I can ever say, and so have the gods and spirits. I return to them as much as I can, in exchange for what they have given me. But I would not have the courage to reach out if I was convinced that serving the gods meant just offering them and approaching them as a perfect being, or one that was not aching for them and their healing, and my religion would be much weaker.“

And, as Aine explains, working on oneself is part of a healthy relationship: “I could not serve the gods if I were not involved in mirror work, pulling myself apart and stitching myself together again, breaking my perceptions and forming new ones.”

While Aine and I differ about the nature of the gods existing as persons “outside” of us, and I take exception to Aine’s juxtaposition of the words “just” and “archetypes”, I nevertheless really enjoyed this post.  It exposes the common ground which exists between those following deity-centric and Self-centric paths.

I have difficulty understanding the kind of self-denying other-directed forms of worship that hard polytheism represents, and I have a kind of gut reaction revulsion whenever I see it.  The words of Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet come to my mind unbidden: “O calm, dishonourable vile submission!”  But I know that’s my ego raging against the “dying of the light” (Dylan Thomas).  In my calmer moments, though, I admit that there is something appealing about a kind of spiritual surrender to a divine “other”.  As Aldous Huxley explains in The Devils of Loudun:

“Introspection, observation and the records of human behavior in the past and at the present time, make it very clear that an urge to self-transcendence is almost as widespread and, at times, quite as powerful as the urge to self-assertion. Men desire to intensify their consciousness of being what they have come to regard as ‘them selves,’ but they also desire — and desire, very often, with irresistible violence — the consciousness of being someone else. In a word, they long to get out of themselves, to pass beyond the limits of that tiny island universe, within which every individual finds himself confined.”

I think it possible to interact with the gods as “other”, even surrender to those gods, without necessarily believing that they are “outside” of us.  This act of surrender is something that I want to explore in future posts.

Longing and Grace in Lev Grossman’s The Magician King

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing. …

– Rilke

You, the great homesickness I could never shake off …

– Rilke

I know I promised a follow-up to my post about Lev Grossman’s book The Magicians.  I had a lot of thoughts for a follow-up, but then I picked up Grossman’s sequel, The Magician King, and I was lost.

(Warning: while I will not give the whole book away, there may be some spoilers in what follows.)

Quentin and the Hero’s Quest

The Magician King is a worthy sequel to The Magicians.  In it, the protagonist, Quentin, finally learns the lesson that he did not learn in the first book: that the sense of meaning that he longs for is not to be found in magic or in other magical worlds, but in an inner transformation for himself.   At the end of the book, Quentin is standing literally on the precipice of yet another (even more) magical world, when he realizes the truth of the statement made by Ember, the god of the magical world of Fillory: the hero is not the one who wins the prize; the hero is the one who “pays the price”.

The scene reminded me of the trailer for the just-released Iron Man 3 movie, in which the Mandadrin tells Tony Stark: “I’m going to give you a choice: Do you want an empty life, or a meaningful death?”  Being the hero means dying.  (This may be a literal or symbolic death, and the hero may return, but he must first die.)  As Hemingway said: If the hero has not died, the author just has not finished the story.  (For more on Quentin and his quest for meaning, see my previous post on The Magicians.)

Julia’s Story

But The Magician King is at least as much about Julia, as it is about Quentin, and its Julia that I want to focus on.  Julia is a character that only makes three appearances in the first book: first as Quentin’s teenage friend and unrequited love, second as a tortured emo-type begging Quentin for the magic he has, and finally as a mysterious and powerful “hedge witch” (a magician who has gained magic power outside the official structure of magic training academies like Brakebills).  The Magician King shifts back and forth between the main drama of Quentin and Julia’s quest to save Fillory and flashbacks to Julia’s past, where Grossman fills in the gaps between the three appearances she makes in The Magicians.

Julia is a different character than Quentin.  While both are geniuses, Julia is much more the rationalist than the romantic Quentin.  She excels at math and science and she prefers to know things than feel things.  She is a sensing-thinking type on the Myers-Briggs scale.  Julia, it turns out, was denied admission to Brakebills, the magical academy that Quentin attended.  She gives up college, family, and any hope of a normal life as she sets out to find her own magic.  Eventually, she discovers an underground magical community on her own.  She quickly rises to the top of the community, gathering spells or “levels”.

The creme de la creme, she discovers, is a handful of Mensa-type geniuses like herself who live in villa in Provence calling themselves “Free Trader Beowulf” (an allusion to the Traveller role playing game of the 80s).  When the group maxes out on the available magical knowledge (250 “levels”) and works out all the possible permutations, they then try to take their power to the next level — the level of the gods.  And here, in the last quarter of the book, is where Grossman enters territory that will seem very familiar to the contemporary Pagan polytheist.

Julia and the Quest for Healing

Julia and her new friends theorize that the gods and monsters of the world’s mythology must be beings who were once magicians but who took a quantum leap in their knowledge and power, and that divine power is just another form of magical technology.  So they set about to find one god in particular, a goddess related to Diana, Cybele, Isis, and the Black Madonna of Chartres.  They call her “Our Lady Underground” or “O.L.U.”  (Only a group as pedantic as the Free Traders would give a goddess an acronym for a name.)  Pagans will recognize O.L.U. as the archetypal Mother Earth Goddess.

What I found most interesting, however, was how this group of super-intellectual, left-brained, atheistic, hedonistic, and power-seeking magicians, whose “intellectual gag reflex” is triggered by even the mention of religion, gradually becomes transformed by their search for Our Lady Underground.  They first set out to “strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art” from their subject, and approach it coldly, intending to “study gods the way an entomologist studies insects”.   In spite of this, the nature of their goal slowly transforms the Free Traders:

“A new atmosphere had settled over the house at Murs.  It had always been a basic tenant thee that luxury and comfort were integral parts of the magical lifestyle.  Not just for its own sake, but as a matter of principle.  As magicians–Murs magicians!–they were the secret aristocracy of the world, and Goddamn it, they were going to live like it.

“Now that was changing.  Nobody said anything.  And certainly no edicts came down from Pouncy [the group's leader], but the atmosphere became more spartan.  The serious nature of their investigation was cooling and tempering their collective mood.  Less wine came out with dinner, and sometimes none at all.  The food became plainer.  Conversations were conducted in hushed tones as they would be in the halls of a monastery.  And an attitude of seriousness and austerity was taking root among them.  Julia suspected some of the others of fasting.  From a high energy magical research center, Murs was turning into something more like a religious retreat.”

One night Julia has a powerful dream of O.L.U.:

“She came in the form of a statue of herself.  The one from the crypt at Chartres, stiff and cold.  The statute gave Julia a wooden cup.  Sitting up, Julia lifted it to her lips and drank like a ferverish child being given medicine in bed.  The liquid was cool and sweet, and she thought of the Donne poem about the thirsty Earth.  Then she lowered the cup, and the goddess leaned down and kissed her, with her hard, gilded icon’s face.

“Then the statute broke apart, its outside crumbling like an eggshell, and from inside it stepped the true goddess, clear at last.  She was grave and unbearably lovely, and she held her attributes in either hand: a gnarled olive staff in her right, a birds nest with three  eggs in it in her left.  Half of her face was in shadow, for the half of the year she spent underground.  Her eyes were full of love and forgiveness.

“‘You are my daughter,’ she said, ‘my true daughter. …’”

That same night, Pouncy finds himself actually praying, with spectacular results.

It is not initially clear what magic represents for Julia.  For Quentin, magic represented meaning.  But it seems to mean something else to Julia.  Julia had been broken by her discovery of magic and her subsequent denial of access to it.  This wounding sends her on a quest for magical power through the the magical underground.  She intends to take, by sheer force of will, what had been denied to her.  But, like Quentin, she is never satisfied.  The search consumes her, and she cuts all ties with family and friends.  Her behavior resembles that of an addict, and it takes its tole on her body and her mind.

Eventually though, she finds a home with the Free Traders.  Like her, the Free Traders are all wounded individuals.  (Something common among the Brakebills alumni actually.)  One condition for entrance into the Free Traders is that one be clinically depressed or disturbed, a condition which one must prove by producing one’s prescriptions.  One day, just before the group invokes Our Lady, Pouncy admits to Julia that what he hopes to gain from O.L.U. is not power, but healing: “I want her take me home with her,” he says.  As it turns out, Julia desires the same thing.

Longing and Grace

In the end, I think the Grossman’s Magicians series is about longing, a longing that I think is very common, perhaps universal.  It is a longing that we sometime project outward and experience as a sense that there is something “wrong” with the world.  It is a longing which the both Quentin and Julia seek to satisfy with profane magic, only to discover that this kind of magic does not fill the hole in their soul.

This longing is, I think, a longing for William James’ “more” — more life — what C.S. Lewis calls “that other larger, stronger, quieter life” (Mere Christianity).  “Not God, but life,” writes James Leuba, “more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.  The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.”  (The Monist, vol. 11, p. 572, quoted in William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience).  D.H. Lawrence describes this “one underlying religious idea” thusly:

“the conception of the vitality of the cosmos, the myriad vitalities in wild confusion, which still is held in some sort of array : and man, amid all the glowing welter, adventuring, struggling, striving for one thing, life, vitality, more vitality : to get into himself more and more of the gleaming vitality of the cosmos. That is the treasure. The active religious idea was that man, by vivid attention and subtlety and exerting all his strength, could draw more life into himself, more life, more and more glistening vitality, till he became shining like the morning, blazing like a god.”

(D.H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places).  And that is precisely what Julia and the Free Traders each seem to be searching for — godhood, not as an expression of power, but of a “larger, richer, more satisfying life”.

But if there is one thing that the religious sages and mystics agree on, it is this: that this “more”, this “other”, has to meet us half way.  As Heidegger famously said in his Der Spiegel interview:

“Philosophy is not able to effect a transformation of the world.  This is not only true of philosophy, but of all human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a readiness, through thought and poetic creation for the appearance of the god.”

And this, I think, is what separates religion from profane magic.  Like technology, profane magic is a function of an isolated subject exerting his or her will on an objective, inert world.  But religion, as the etymology of the word implies, is a relation between two subjects, Buber’s “I-Thou”.  And this why the Free Traders’ search takes the religious turn.  It is not more power that they want — it is more life.

I recently attended a lecture of the Central Indiana Friends of Jung society given by Donnamarie Flanagan entitled “Keep the Longing Alive and the Transcendent Function Will Come”.  The transcendent function is Jung’s term for the transformative power of the autonomous psyche to unite opposites (a conscious thesis and an unconscious antithesis) through the creation of a new symbol (synthesis).  It can be likened to the Christian Holy Ghost.  It is through the transcendent function that the process of individuation (becoming a whole person) is effected.  Flanagan writes in the handout she gave us:

“The longing that can be named is not the deep longing of the soul.  It is often imagined as a profound homesickness, but where is home?  No more than we can name the object of our longing, can we achieve it by effort.  The best we can do its wait for the transcendent function’s work of grace to provide the linking symbol.  Yet, the symbol itself points beyond itself toward mysterium.”

In Jungian terms, the sense of longing that we feel is the “religious function” of the psyche.  It is a longing for reunification with the Self — Jung’s God-concept — which is often symbolized by the Mother archetype.  She represents

“homecoming, shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends. Intimately known and yet strange like Nature, lovingly tender and yet cruel like fate, joyous and untiring giver of life-mater dolorosa and mute implacable portal that closes upon the dead.”

(CW 9, P 172).  She is Rilke’s “great homesickness” that we can never shake off.  This is what the Free Traders (at least Julia and Pouncy) long for, and this is, I think, why their quest becomes a religious one.

We try to kill this longing in numerous ways, with food, alcohol, television, and myriad other distractions and obsessions.  But, according to Flanagan, we must keep this sense of longing alive.  While we cannot unilaterally effect the reunification that we desire, which can only happen by the mysterious grace of the autonomous psyche, we need to consciously create and hold a space where this transformation can happen.  This is what I think Heidegger meant when he spoke (above) about “preparing a readiness”.

This can be one function of ritual, of prayer, and of a kind of sacred magic.  The purpose of this kind of prayer would not be to satisfy our wants, but to actually draw out our most fundamental longing.  “Give us this day our daily hunger,” should be our daily prayer, says Flanagan (quoting Gaston Bachlard).  And this can also be the purpose of a different kind of magic from the profane magic that Quentin learns a Brakebills and Julia learns through the magical underground.  It is not magic as technology, but magic as an encounter with that “other”, that “more”, which gives life its vitality and its sense of meaningfulness.  It is a magic which cannot be forced.  It is a magic which happens in the place where longing and grace intersect.

New post at Pagan Square: Jung’s Shadow Trinity

Check out my new post at PaganSquare, which explores Jungian Neopaganism as the Shadow side of Christianity.

 

 

Not leaving the Church alone: Sunstone Kirtland Conference

I don’t often write about Mormonism here, and when I do it’s usually as a leaping off point to talk about Paganism or Jungianism.  For those of you who don’t know, I was raised Mormon and left the Mormon Church formally by having my name withdrawn from the Church roles in 2001.  I now infrequently attend the Mormon Church with my wife and kids, which often results in my posting something using Mormonism as a foil.  This past weekend, my wife and I spend the weekend at a small Sunstone conference in Kirtland, Ohio, the site of several important landmarks in Mormon history.  And it was such a positive and profound experience, I have to share it.

Mormons have an annoying saying about apostates and those who leave the Mormon church.  They say, “The leave the Church, but they can’t leave the Church alone.”  I find this statement annoying because it reflects an ignorance about the pain that the Church causes, a pain which those who chose to leave it may still feel acutely.  The statement itself is really a function of the Mormon desire to return to blissful ignorance.  Apostates are an unwelcome reminder that all is not well in Zion.  Since nothing can be wrong with the Church, someone must be wrong with the people who leave it.  As Richard and Joan Ostling write in Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (2007):

“The thin-skinned and image-conscious Mormon can display immature, isolationist, and defensive reactions to outsiders, perhaps because there is no substantive debate and no ‘loyal opposition’ within their kingdom. With some, it almost seems that the wilderness is still untamed, the federal ‘polyg’ police are on the prowl, and the Illinois lynch mob is still oiling muskets and preparing to raid Carthage Jail. All too often Saints use the label ‘anti-Mormon’ as a tactic to forestall serious discussion.”

To be fair, the statement is also a reaction to some really aggressive anti-Mormon propaganda which the Mormons have endured over the decades.  Some really nasty stuff that the Mormon Church does not deserve.  Having said that, not every former Mormon is “anti-Mormon” and not every cogent criticism of the Church’s doctrines, policies, and practices is truly “anti-Mormon”.  There are some people who exist on the margins of the Mormon Church who remain faithful to it, hoping to reform it from within.  Some recent baby steps the Mormon church has taken toward greater inclusiveness and honesty suggest that these efforts might even be somewhat effective.  These include minor changes to the LDS scriptures, the most significant being in reference to the 1978 grant of the priesthood to the Black males; permitting women to pray in the LDS General Conference for the first time ever, and the semi-official apology given by a Mormon General Authority to representatives of the Mormon LGBT community for the pain caused by Prop 8.  Like I said, baby steps.

The Sunstone conference was held in Kirtland, OH this past weekend.  It is a (much) smaller version of the Sunstone Symposium.  The Sunstone Symposium is a gathering of (mostly) liberal and (mostly) faithful Mormons (and members of the Community of Christ, formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).  When I was a member, I only heard of Sunstone spoken of in whispers like it was a coven of Satanists.  The Church had previously officially condemned independent symposia like Sunstone. When I finally went for the first time, I discovered a community of faithful LDS dissenters that I had never known existed.  My wife and I attended to be part of a panel discussion about couples who survive one partner leaving the Church.  The panel was later published in the Sunstone magazine and you can read the article here.  I discovered that the Sunstone community consists of people who love the LDS Church, its history, and its people, and who want to see it become better.  Honestly, had I known this community existed, or rather, if I had known of the size and vibrancy of this community, I may have remained a member of the Church longer.  And really, I had no excuse for not knowing of its existence.  Already before I left the Church, I had discovered the Sunstone Magazine and, especially, Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought.  I even have a brother-in-law who works in the independent Mormon publishing industry.  But as it was, the final straw for me was when a Mormon General Authority made a statement to the effect that there are no loyal dissenters in the Mormon Church, effectively denying the reality of Sunstone.  Honestly, I was just waiting for that straw to drop.  The rest was just me gathering up my courage to do the inevitable.

Anyway, my wife and I attended the Conference primarily to hear Jennifer Finlayson-Fife and Natasha Helfer Parker give a workshop on faith transitions and LDS relationships.  My wife is a marriage and family therapist, aspiring sex-therapist, and (obviously) wife of a post-Mormon Pagan, so this was right up our alley.  Natasha is also a family and sex therapist, and is The Mormon Therapist over at Patheos, most well known for the stance she recently took on masturbation.  Jennifer is a sex therapist who works close to where we live and who counsels patients experiencing faith transitions.  Natasha and Jennifer recently were the guests of a great podcast on cognitive dissonance and faith transitions at the Mormon Mental Health Podcast and Mormon Stories Podcast.  It was a great workshop, and I’m going to be writing more about it in a future post, because it deserves its own separate treatment.

Other highlights of the Conference included a panel discussion of dual-faith Mormons, which included Latter-day Saints (all prominent Sunstoners) who also attend Episcopalian, Catholic, Baptist, and Unitarian churches — all for different reasons, but many of them having to do with aesthetics, music, and liturgy.  Two of the members of the panel were a gay couple who were united by their LDS identity, but split by their “bi-religiosity”.  My wife could have been on that panel as well — and for that matter, so could my kids.  It was a great discussion and very encouraging.  I was very glad my 14-year old son was attending that session as well.

There was also a panel about the Mormon disconnect with Easter (and to a lesser extent Christmas).  I experienced this disconnect myself this past month.  I attended the sacrament service at the Mormon church and then drove over to catch the Unitarian service.  There was only one reference to Easter in the Mormon service, and it was the bishop making the point that every Sunday is Easter for Mormons.  It wasn’t until the Unitarian service that that it actually felt like Easter, which is ironic, since the vast majority in attendance were not Christian.  I didn’t attend the panel on Mormons and Easter at the Conference, but I am really hoping to get a recording.

And we also attended a presentation by an Evangelical contrasting Paul’s conversion experience with Joseph Smith’s “First Vision”, the foundation experience of the Mormon “Restoration” (which I’ve blogged about here).  It was a little “apples and oranges”, but it was interesting to see how Joseph Smith’s account of his First Vision evolved to match his evolving theology.

But the real highlight of the Conference was the closing plenary session, which actually took place in the main hall of the Kirtland Temple.  I won’t bore you with the full history of the temple, but suffice it to say that it is a very unique building, built in the 1830s, and considered by Mormons to be one of the holiest places on earth.  The Temple is actually owned by the Community of Christ (much to the chagrin of many Mormons), which is why we were able to have the plenary session there.  The session began and ended with prayers to God the Mother and God the Father, a fact which my wife pointed out (to my pleasure) to my 10-year old daughter and my 14-year old son.  (Mormons acknowledge the existence of Heavenly Mother, but do not speak to her, much less pray to her.)  The highlight of the closing session was a talk given by LDS former Bishop Kevin Kloosterman about his journey toward being an LGBT advocate.  Kevin was extremely humble and emotional throughout his talk.  His story is one of a man who was at first indifferent to the suffering of LGBT Mormons, who gradually became aware of the terrible burden carried by LGBTs (of all faiths and none), and then, almost accidentally (I would say providentially), became an LGBT advocate.  He even received a death threat at one point.  You can see an earlier talk of Kevin’s here.   I was so moved, I found myself singing the opening and closing hymns, “I Need Thee Every Hour” and “The Spirit of God”, with fervor, regardless of my doctrinal disagreements with the literal meaning of the text.

I tried to impress upon my children the meaning of this event, but for them it’s probably par for the course.  But if you had told me 10 years ago that I would have been sitting in the Kirtland Temple praying to Heavenly Mother and listening to a talk on LGBT rights, I would have laughed at you.  Admittedly, there were only about two dozen people there — hardly a groundswell — but the Mormon Church itself began with only a handful of people.  And for every person in attendance, I know there are hundreds or even thousands with like sympathies.  I was honored to be there, and I want to thank the Conference organizers for this wonderful event.

The following morning, my family and I attended church at the Community of Christ.  It was a pleasure to hear a sermon which incorporated both Mormon scripture and the ideas of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Mormons typically avoid including any “outside” not-officially sanctioned sources in their religious studies and Sunday services) and delivered by someone with an acute sense of social injustice paired with a sense of divine grace.  We had the fortune of attending the same day that there were two baptisms, and, drawing on Bonhoeffer, the speaker described the act of baptism not as a cleansing of sins, as “an immersion in the world.”  That is a concept I can get behind as a Pagan, and it is precisely what informed the ritual baptism which I wrote for my own children (and blogged about here).  It was also a relief to hear the speaker condemn the religious exclusivist discourse which plagued the Community of Christ and still plagues the Mormon Church.

We then took the historical tour of the Kirtland Temple (conducted by the Community of Christ representatives) and other Mormon historical sites (conducted by Mormon representatives).  Suffice it to say that the contrast between the tours revealed some subtle differences between the respective paradigms of the two churches, and the LDS tour left me longing for the more ambiguity-tolerant atmosphere of the Community of Christ.

There is more that I could write about, but I will leave it at this:  Since my son identifies as Mormon and my wife will always be Mormon at heart, there will never be a time that I can foresee when I can “leave the Church alone”.  I’m like a divorced parent, who must still co-parent with his ex-spouse.  But as long as there are people like the ones I met this past weekend, I will be glad to remain on the fringes of the Mormon community — as a Mormon-friendly Pagan.

My Defining Moment

“God is dead. [...] And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? [...] What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?”

– Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Over at Patheos, bloggers are being asked to write about their “defining moments”, “moments where we move from our chosen path……it is in those moments that our future is determined and our faith is tested.” John Beckett and Jason Mankey have posted their responses which are great to read.

When I think about defining moments in my own spiritual journey, the moment that pops immediately into my mind was a realization I had in the year 2000. I don’t even remember where I was. I just remember my internal experience of the realization. It was the culmination of what seemed like a long and difficult struggle to make sense of my Mormon faith. And when it hit I felt all the exhilarating fear and joy that such realizations bring.

The realization was this:

I had created God in my own image.

Or rather I had created God in the image of a part of me: the stern, cold, judgmental part of me. I realized that this Being whose disapproval I had felt breathing hot and heavy down upon my for 25 years was actually me. It all made sense. It was like looking in the mirror for the first time.

That moment was a defining moment for me. I realized then that I didn’t know who God was at all. And it opened me up to seek another image of God, a God of universal love, who I eventually found (strangely) in the words of Alanis Morissette’s song “You Owe Me Nothing In Return”. Of course, I then realized that that God of universal love was me too.

I’ll give you countless amounts of outright acceptance if you want it
I will give you encouragement to choose the path that you want if you need it
You can speak of anger and doubts your fears and freak outs and I’ll hold it
You can share your so-called shame filled accounts of times in your life and I won’t judge it [...]

You can ask for space for yourself and only yourself and I’ll grant it
You can ask for freedom as well or time to travel and you’ll have it
You can ask to live by yourself or love someone else and I’ll support it
You can ask for anything you want anything at all and I’ll understand it [...]

You can express your deepest of truths even if it means I’ll lose you and I’ll hear it
You can fall into the abyss on your way to your bliss I’ll empathize with
You can say that you have to skip town to chase your passion and I’ll hear it
You can even hit rock bottom have a mid-life crisis and I’ll hold it [...]

That led me to the further insight that, if I had unconsciously made God in my own image, I could do it again, but this time with more wisdom and grace. And that led me to embrace Paganism. Voltaire wrote: “If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.” Similarly, Benjamin Disraeli, wrote: “Man is born to believe. And if no Church comes forward with its title-deeds of truth to guide him, he will find altars and idols in his own heart and his own imagination.” When I discovered Paganism, it seemed like a religion that embraced this truth. It was the perfect vehicle for making gods. If all gods are created by us, I thought, why not embrace the fact and go about doing it consciously. To me, invented religions, religions of the imagination, like The Church of All Worlds and Jediism and seemed to be the most true, because they were the most honest.

Eventually, though, I realized that we do not so much make the gods as discover them, running wild beneath the surface of the world and our minds. At the very best, god-making is only partially conscious endeavor. As James Hillman explains, “Just as we do not create our dreams, but they happen to us, so we do not invent the persons of myth and religion [i.e., the gods]; they, too, happen to us.” (emphasis Hillman’s). I learned that William Ingham was right, when he wrote in 1872: “An invented religion may serve the purposes of a philosopher; but dying men and women call for a revelation and a ‘living God’” (Lectures on the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion) — although not quite in the way that Ingham meant it.

But all this began with that moment when I realized that “Heavenly Father” (The Monster at the End of this Book) was little old me — that was my defining moment. It led me to leave the Mormon church, it led me to discover the grace of God within me, and eventually it led me to Jungian Paganism.

Who wants to be a magician?

“There is another world, and it is this one.”

– Paul Eluard

I recently got turned on to Lev Gossman’s novel, The Magicians, after reading a review by Matthew Bowman on the Peculiar People blog on the Mormon channel at Patheos. So I bought the book, and I just finished it. It was excellent. As Bowman explains, The Magicians, is like Harry Potter, “if Harry Potter coped with his angst through cynicism, sarcasm, and eye-rolling, like real humans.”

Bowman’s review caught my attention for two reasons. First, he compares The Magicians to Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, which I absolutely loved. But it is a curious comparison, since Revolutionary Road has got to be the most disenchanted book ever written. It is starkly, painfully realistic. (I went into a months long depression after reading it.) Both Revolutionary Road and The Magicians reveal that the emptiness of middle-class suburban life is not the result of geography, but really an internal emptiness that we carry with us wherever we are. Revolutionary Road does this by giving its characters a chance to escape (to France), a chance while they proceed to sabotage out of fear and lack of imagination. In contrast, The Magicians does this by actually allowing its characters to escape, first to a magical prep school (Brakebills) and then to another Narnia-like dimension (Fillory). In both instances, the characters fail to realize that they cannot escape the emptiness within themselves.

When the main character in The Magicians, bright but socially awkward Quentin, is carried away to Brakebills, at first he is in heaven. Magic is real and he is going to be a magician. Magic is hard, both mentally and physically, but Quentin loves it all the more. What can be more exciting to a nerdy teenager? But eventually, Quentin finds himself unsatisfied and unhappy. The more he is able to bend physical reality to his will, the more desperate he becomes. “Wasn’t there a spell for making yourself happy?” he wonders.

Magic, for Quentin, has become disenchanted. It becomes mere technology. It becomes mundane. He longs for purpose, for meaning. And he doggedly looks for these things outside of himself. He longs for adventure, for a quest, for a great evil to fight, i.e., all forms of meaning exterior to himself. Specifically, he longs for Fillory, the fictional world of the fantasy novels of his childhood which resemble C.S. Lewis’ Narnia. In short, he longs for magic, which is of course ironic. The magic of Fillory which he longs for is not technological, but “religious”. At one point, after Quentin expresses his desire to live in Fillory, Quentin’s girlfriend, Alice (also a student magician) remarks:

“That’s what makes you different from the rest of us Quentin. You actually still believe in magic. You do realize, right, that nobody else does? I mean, we all know that magic is real. But you really believe in it. Don’t you.”

The other thing that caught my attention about Bowman’s review was this quote:

“And magic, as a marvelous speech partway through the novel informs us, is the last resort of those people who hurt so much that they are never satisfied with the fact that our desires alone cannot force reality into what we want it to be.”

The speech in question is delivered by Brakebill’s headmaster on the eve of Quentin’s graduation. He declares that what makes the students magicians is not that they are more intelligent or more brave or more good than anyone else. It is because they are unhappy, they are wounded, they are in pain. And magic provides them the power to “break the world that has tried to break them.” It’s an optimistic perspective. And it’s also untrue, as the rest of the story demonstrates. Being magicians, the characters never really have to grow up. (They never move beyond the “magical thinking” phase of development.) “Can a man who can cast a spell ever really grow up?” muses the headmaster. And, upon graduation, the characters proceed to squander their gifts, and their lives. Because they are magicians, they never have to face hard, unyielding reality … until they do.

And ironically they discover it in the fantasy world of Fillory, which turns out to be a real place, with real danger, and (as Fillory’s Aslan-like character instructs them) not just a themepark created for their entertainment. And when enough people have been hurt and enough people have died, Quentin has to face the fact that he cannot escape himself or the gaping wound in his soul. No magic, no other world, will fix it. Right before the climactic denouement, Alice challenges Quentin:

“Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”

And, at the end of the book, it seems that Quentin never really learns this lesson.

I recognized myself in Quentin (just as I did, embarrassingly, in Yates’ Frank Wheeler). I’ve written here before about my teenage fantasy of being whisked away to a fantasy world of swords and sorcery. Specifically, I longed to be Margaret Weis’ character, Raistlin, from the Dragonlance novels.

While I was neither as physically challenged, nor as mentally disciplined as Raistlin, I liked to imagine that I was, exaggerating both my sense of persecution and my self-image as “special”. Reading Grossman’s The Magicians got me wondering about what its is drove (drives) me to this fantasy.

I like science fiction too, but there is no doubt that fantasy is my preferred … well, fantasy. For one thing, I’m pretty sure that the future will look more like William Gibson’s Neuromancer or Blade Runner than Star Trek. But the real reason I prefer fantasy is magic. What makes fantasy different from science fiction is not whether they are set in the past or future — the difference is magic. Sure, advanced technology is great. It offers the same sense of power, control over one’s world, that magic does. But it’s still not magic. Arthur C. Clark, the author of the science fiction novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, wrote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And while that true in a sense, it’s also not true in another sense. We live in a magical world now, in the sense that many of the technologies we take for granted would appear to be magic to someone living only 200 years ago. But we don’t experience them as magic. And that’s because technology is not magic. This becomes clear in Grossman’s novel, when magic becomes disenchanted for Quentin, as it becomes a mere technology for manipulating his environment.

What’s the difference between magic and technology then? I think that the difference is this: Magic is meaningful. Technology is not. Magic is the experience of “something more” — that same something that Quentin kept searching for, looking for around every corner. Magic, like meaning, is something that has be be believed in. Belief is irrelevant to technology. And, most importantly, magic has to come from within, while technology is external to us.

This is what Quentin never realizes: The magic that he is looking for, the world of meaning and purpose, has to be found within himself, or not at all. It seems trite, but it is so hard to learn, as I know from experience. (I continually have to relearn it.) And in fact, Quentin doesn’t learn it. (I just learned started the sequel, The Magician King, and Quentin is still looking for a quest to fill the hole in his soul.) And neither do April and Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, for that matter.

And this is the same concern that I have about magic in Paganism. I fear that either it becomes just another technology that contributes to the disenchantment of the world (see Wouter Hanegraaf, “How Magic Survived the Disenchantment of the World”, Religion, vol. 33 (2003)), or else it becomes a form of escapism, another way of avoiding reality. Real magic, I would argue, is never “used”; it is experienced. And that, I think, will be the subject of a future post.

Panentheism: The Dancer and the Dance

 How can we know the dancer from the dance?
– W.B. Yeats

Theism, Pantheism, and Panetheism

In his latest effort to tell the Pagan world why everyone is wrong and he is right, Sam Webster has taken aim an panentheism, the belief that God is both transcendent and immanent.   Webster dispatches panentheism in one paragraph explaining that it is “logically untenable” for God to be All and then some.

Panentheism represents one of three logical possibilities for describing the nature of God’s (you can substitute “Being” or the “Ground of Being” for “God” here) relation to the world.  Either God is “wholly other” than the world (transcendental theism), God is the world (pantheism), or God is both other and the world (panentheism).  (Incidentally, polytheists and “pluralist” Mormons don’t really fit any of these categories because the gods they worship are not ultimate Being, but rather particular beings in the universe of beings.)  Webster tries to make the case for pantheism in his post.

Each of these options — transcendental theism, pantheism, and panentheism — have their problems.  In his rush to get to the one-and-only Truth, Webster overlooks these.  What I have come to believe is that each of these options is both right and wrong.  Or rather, they each tell us something about the nature of God-Being-Ground.

Transcendental theism tells us that God is “wholly other”, A≠B — i.e., the Creator is a completely separate ontological category from creation.  The problem this creates is: how does the one interact with the other?  The logical outcome of transcendental theism is either a fundamental dualism in which God and the world are radically separate and, consequently, nature (including humankind) is alienated from God, or a monism which sees the world as unreal or illusion.  Christianity is an example of the former, and it tries to overcome this problem (mythologically) with the Incarnation.  Some forms of Buddhism and Hinduism are examples of a monism which sees the world as maya.  Both of these propositions — world as separate from divinity and world as illusion — are unacceptable to most contemporary Pagans, who view the world as neither fallen nor illusory.

Pantheism has its own problems, namely, if the World is God, then why do we need two different words for the same thing.  What does it mean logically to say that A=B? In addition, pantheism may imply determinism, to the extent that past, present, and future are seen as one.  Finally, pantheism does not explain the human experience of alienation that gives rise to transcendental theisms.

Pan-en-theism is the third option.  According to David Ray Griffen, in Sacred Interconnections (1990), panentheism means that “God is not remote and separate from nature, but immanent within it.  Yet at the same time God is the unity which transcends it.”  Panentheism has been espoused (in various forms) by as diverse thinkers as the Spinoza, Hegel, Meister Eckhart, the Transcendentalists, Teilhard de Chardin, Heidegger, the Process Theologians, contemporary Goddess Thealogians, and many more.  See John Cooper, Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers.  Recognizing the logical problems of both a God that is wholly transcendent and a God that is wholly immanent, panentheism tries to strike a balance between the two.  Or, if you are feeling less charitable, you might say that it doubles down on the logical inconsistency by not taking a position: A=B≠B.

Panentheism and pantheism both share the proposition and the world and God are in some sense “one”.  However, panenthism differs from pantheism and resembles transcendental theism in that it preserves the “otherness” of God.  It is significant that pantheists often (mis-)understand panentheism as collapsing into transcendental theism, while transcendental theists see panentheism as just another form of pantheism.  However, panentheism is distinguishable from both philosophies, even as it tries to preserve the insights of both.

Panentheism affirms that, the world is “in” God, but God is not entirely identical with the world.  That is, God is not limited to the world; God is also the wholeness which transcends the world.  This wholeness includes not only the manifest world, but the “unmanifest” or latent potentialities which have not been real-ized in nature.  The philosopher Hegel illustrates this through analogy to the growth of a plant in his opus, The Phenomenology of Spirit:

“The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant and the fruit now emerges as the truth instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.”

In this analogy, the world is the blossom/fruit and God is the “life of the whole” which includes both the blossom and the fruit.  Thus, panentheism thus tries to preserve the concept of the “otherness”, but transforms it into an otherness which, paradoxically, does not exclude, but includes.

I’m not going to argue that panentheism is superior to transcendental theism or pantheism.  Here’s what I want to say about these three options: People have been arguing about this question for literally millennia, and will continue to do so.  The history of Christianity can be seen as a pendulum swinging between the poles of transcendence and immanence.  See Stanley Grenz & Roger Olsen, 20th Century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age (1992).  And Indian philosophy is at least as rich in nuance on this issue.  And while I lean in the direction of panenthism (and pantheism when in a pinch), I think all three deserve some respect.

But I do want to try to explain here how I understand panentheism and why I think it is a beautiful idea.  I will be speaking here, primarily in mythological, not logical, terms, so this is not a direct response to Webster.  If the issue could have been resolved logically, I think we would have done it in 2000 years of Christianity and 3000 years of Indian philosophy, not to mention other traditions.  (Ancient Western paganisms seem to have been more concerned with worshiping a multiplicity of gods beings rather than Being as such.  Although there were exceptions, like the Stoics and Neoplatonists.)  If you’d like a more logical explication of panentheism, I recommend Philip Clayton’s In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on the Presence of God in a Scientific World (2004).

Panentheism in Paganism: The Dancer and the Dance

For me, panentheism finds mythological expression in the Neopagan Goddess, who represents the Sacred Whole, and her consort, the god, who represents nature in all its particularity, which includes you, me, the sun, the trees, the rocks, all in this given moment.  The relationship between Goddess* and her consort expresses the mystery of diversity within unity.  In Joseph Campbell’s words, the Great Goddess is

“the arch personification of the power of Space, Time, and Matter, within whose bound all beings arise and die: the substance of their bodies, configurator of their lives and thoughts, and receiver of their dead.  And everything having form or name—including God personified as good or evil, merciful or wrathful—was her child, within her womb.”

Masks of God, Vol 3: Occidental Mythology (1964).

Robert Graves’ mythology provides a historical starting point for the panentheistic Neopagan divinity.  Graves’ Triple Goddess is an ever-changing, but never-dying Great Goddess of the cosmos.  Quoting Apuleius, Graves’ Goddess declares: “I am she that is the natural mother of all things [...] manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses.”  Graves’ god-consort is the son, lover, and ultimately the sacrificial victim of Goddess.  The god is born and dies, but Goddess — while she changes from maiden, to mother, to crone, and then to maiden again — is never born and never dies.

Graves’ mythology was adopted by Starhawk and popularized in her book, The Spiral Dance, the title of which is a metaphor for Goddess herself:

“The Goddess is the Encircler, the Ground of Being; the God is That-Which-Is-Brought-Forth, her mirror image, her other pole.  She is the earth; He is the grain.  She is the all encompassing sky; He is the sun, her fireball.  She is the Wheel; He is the traveler.  He is the sacrifice of life to death that life may go on.  She is the Mother and Destroyer; He is all that is born and is destroyed.”

According to Starhawk’s model, the god is the mortal dancer and Goddess is the immortal Dance.

As John Cooper explains, Starhawk

“locates transcendence in the depths of an immanence in the world.  Transcendence in her theology is the primordial unity, the ‘unbroken cycle,’ the Life Force beyond sexual differentiation. This basic reality is ontologically deeper that the polarity of forces that generate all the creatures in the world.  It is their source and the context in within which they exist.  [...] Thus Starhawk affirms all the essential ingredients of panentheism.”

Starhawk likely borrowed the name of her book from the Spiral Dance (also called the “Meeting Dance”) originally performed by the New Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn (NROODG) tradition of Neo-Wicca, with which she associated.  Interestingly, in 1972, the original NROOGD coven (the Full Moon Coven) hived off the “Spiral Dance Coven”.  Later, another coven hived off called “The Dancer and the Dance Coven”.  The NROODG was itself heavily influenced by Robert Graves’ The White Goddess.

Starhawk may also have borrowed the panentheistic conception of Goddess from Frederick Adams.  According to Margot Adler, Adams’ (unfortunately-named) “Nameless Maiden” (Adams had a less-than-avuncular preoccupation with divine maidens) “spins a cosmic dance from which all things come into existence, each of them unique and particular.”  She is the

“‘transcendent unique,’ the creatrix of all uniqueness.  All entities she creates interrelate with her, but never lose their individual essence.  Thus she represents polytheistic wholeness as opposed to monotheistic unity.  An analogy to this might be a symphony, where each note is differentiated, but the whole is something beyond a ‘unity’.“

Subsumed within pantheistic “transcendental unique” are what Adams calls “the Goddess-given Gods”, which include the Mother, “the Source and Center”, the Son, “creative separation”, the Father, full “particularization”, and the Daughter, “creative return”.  Over this four-step movement, or dance, is Adams’ Nameless Maiden who is “the Mysterious Wholeness of the Four which consist in their dynamic separation.”  (Unfortunately, I have not been able to corroborate Adler on this point.  According to Hans Holzer, Adam’s theology includes a Great Goddess, her son and daughter, Kouros and Kore, seven planetary gods, and lesser spirits, arranged hierarchically.)

Another possible source of of the panentheistic conception of Goddess is the McFarland Dianic tradition, which also was influenced by Robert Graves, and may have influenced Starhawk in turn.  The Dianic witchcraft tradition, now called the McFarland Dianic tradition (MDT) to distinguish it from Z. Budapest’s feminist Dianic tradition, was created in 1971 by Morgan McFarland and Mark Roberts.  Unlike both traditional British Wicca, which viewed divinity as essentially a polarity of male and female divinities, and feminist Dianic witchcraft, which viewed divinity monotheistically as a parthenogenic female, the McFarland Dianics occupied a middle ground, viewing divinity in terms of an immortal Creatrix and her mortal male consort.

Margot Adler describes the group’s beliefs thus:

“The Goddess is seen as having three aspects: Maiden[...], Great Mother, and Old Crone, who holds the door to death and rebirth.  It is in her second aspect that the Goddess takes a male consort, who is as Osiris to Isis.  To show this relationship, [McFarland] Dianics quote a phrase attributed to Bachofen: ‘Immortal is Isis, mortal her husband, like the earthly creation he represents.’  Thus there is a place for the God, but the female as Creatrix is primary.”

From the no longer active McFarland Dianic website [http://crystalillumination2012.org/]:

“In the McFarland Dianic Tradition the Goddess was never born, and She never dies. She always was, is, and always will be. She is the fertile Void at the Center from which the universe is born.  Another important concept is Immanence. The Goddess is immanent in Her creation. She is not separate from Her creation, she is Her creation. … Her Son and Consort is the Mortal principle that is born, dies and is reborn in an ever-repeating cycle of birth, death and rebirth. The God also is of the Goddess. You could say that He is Her male aspect.”

One of the most common forms of the Neopagan Goddess is the Triple Goddess who is Maiden, Mother, and Crone (Wise Woman) in one and who is symbolized by the phases of the moon: waxing, full, and waning.  (Some people add a fourth, dark phase for the new moon, which represents death.)  Paul Reid-Bowen explains in his book, Goddess as Nature: Towards a Philosophical Thealogy, how the Neopagan Triple Goddess represents the Cycle of which her aspects are only parts:

“[T]he three aspects of the Goddess, Maiden-Mother-Crone, are theaologically understood not only to be pre- and post-patriarchal models of female identity, but also a dynamic whole: three aspects of a unity.  And, while extensive thealogical energy has been invested into charting the character and meaning of each of these different aspects of the Triple Goddess, I am concerned with how the model functions as a dynamic whole.  Notably, the model of the Triple Goddess is understood to have metaphysical significance because it is thealogically understood to illuminate broader patterns occurring within the whole construed as nature.  The Triple Goddess emphasizes not only changes, cycles and transitions in terms of a female life-pattern, but also with respect to cosmology and ecology (lunar and seasonal cycles) and existential and metaphysical processes and states (birth/emergency, growth/generation, decay/degeneration and rebirth/regeneration).”

“[...] the model of the Goddess as Triple introduces themes relating to transitional change (both in women and nature) and also cyclical recurrence within a unified whole (understood as the Goddess as nature).  The Goddess, according to this model, may be viewed as always changing, while at the same time manifest within recurrent patterns.”

“Thus, the triplicity of the Triple Goddess evokes a notion of diversity and difference within nature, while the unity of the Triple Goddess symbolizes the Sacred Whole, the unity of nature, expressed in the cycle of birth-growth-decay-regeneration.”

Zoe and bios: the unity of Life

In their book, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (1993), Anne Baring and Jules Cashford illustrate the relationship of Goddess to the world using Karl Kerenyi’s distinction between the two Greek words for “life”: Zoe** and bios.  According to Baring and Cashford, Zoe signifies the eternal and the infinite, while bios referrs to the finite and individual life, the latter being a manifestation of the former.  Together they reveal the two facets of existence: eternal and transitory, latent and manifest, potential and actual, invisible and visible.

“[...] two different Greek words for life, zoe and bios, as the embodiment of two dimensions co-existing in life. Zoe is eternal and infinite life; bios is finite and individual life. Zoe is infinite ‘being’; bios is the living and dying manifestation of the eternal world in time.”

Baring and Cashford explain that bios represents the “manifesting” or epiphany (the “showing forth”) of the unmanifest Zoe, which both transcends and gives rise to bios.  “Zoe is then both transcendent and immanent, and bios is the immanent form of zoe.”

Baring and Cashford use the image of the moon to explain the relationship between Zoe and bios:

“The moon was an image in the sky that was always changing yet was always the same. What endured was the cycle, whose totality could never be seen at any one moment. All that was visible was the constant interplay between light and dark in an ever-recurring sequence. […] The whole was invisible, an enduring and unchanging circle […] Symbolically, it was as if the visible ‘came from’ and ‘returned to’ the invisible – like being born and dying, and being born again.”

Cashford elaborates on this theme in her book The Moon: Myth and Image:  “Zoe is an image of the cycle, and bios is an image of the individual phases: bios is born from zoe, dies back into zoe and is reborn from zoe, as the phases follow each other in the pattern of the cycle.”

Baring and Cashford also find this dynamic expressed in matrifocal myths of the Bronze Age about a “Great Mother” and her son-lover or her daughter:

“[…] the Goddess may be understood as the eternal cycle of the whole: the unity of life and death as a single process. The young goddess or god is her mortal form in time, which, as manifested life […] is subject to a cyclical process of birth, flowering, decay, death and rebirth.”

“In the goddess culture the conception of the relation between creator and creation was expressed in the image of the Mother as zoe, the eternal source, giving birth to the son as bios, the created life in time which lives and dies back into the source.  The son was the part that emerged from the whole, through which the whole might come to know itself.”

“[…] the familiar drama of zoe and bios, in which the son-lover must accept death – as the image of incarnate being that falls back, like the seed, into the source – while the goddess, here the continuous principle of life, endures to bring forth new forms from the inexhaustible store.”

In this view, the hierosgamos, the sacred marriage, of the Mother Goddess with her lover takes on added meaning: it represents the mysterious connection between Zoe and bios.  “The sacred marriage, in which the Mother Goddess as bride is united with her son as lover, reconnects symbolically the two ‘worlds’ of zoe and bios, and it is this union that regenerates the earth.”  From this perspective, ancient pagan and contemporary Neopagan rituals are mythic dramas in which celebrants become reconciled to death and reaffirm their trust in the eternal Life (Zoe) which promises that, as darkness is always followed by the light, so death is followed by rebirth — albeit in a different form.  The re-connection of Zoe (eternity) to bios (time) through myth and ritual permits a shift of consciousness from the particular life of the individual to the supra-individual life of the cosmos.  Cashford explains:

“Then what, at the level of bios, appears as dismemberment, appears, at the level of zoe, as transformation.  The challenge of the Mystery rituals was to shift the consciousness of the participants from bios to zoe, from looking at life in pieces to experiencing life as one complete whole.“

This is the mystery that the Presocractic philosopher Heraclitus sought to express in here:

athánatoi thnetoí
thnetoì athántatoi
zôntes tòn ekeínon thánaton
tòn dè ekeínon bíon tethneôtes

Mortals are immortals
and immortals are mortals,
living each other’s death
and dying the other’s life.

According to Baring and Cashford, the patriarchal solar god-culture severed the connection between Zoe and bios.  Mythologically, the god refuses the hierosgamos with Goddess that is both consummation and death (see the Epic of Gilgamesh).  The god’s origin in Goddess is forgotten and the god becomes Creator of a creation from which he is separate and which he orders from without.  And with the changes in myth a new psychology and a new social order prevails.  Nature and the sacred are split.  The divine is “othered” and placed beyond the reach of humankind in a transcendent realm.  Nature becomes an object over which the disembodied rational spirit exercises its dominion.  Darkness (the unmanifest) is no longer seen as part of the cosmic cycle; it becomes mere absence, something negative, to be fought rather than embraced.  Eternity is no longer the cycle of death and rebirth, but an unending life which can only be hoped for by the individual.

Through a panentheistic understanding of divinity, Neopaganism seeks to unite Zoe and bios again, to reconnect the divine and nature, the eternal cycle of Life with all of our particular lives and deaths.  This union is not a static identification, as in pantheism, but a dynamic dance between the two, Zoe and bios, Goddess and god.  As Harry Byngham, Chief of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, wrote so eloquently in 1923:

“Life springs out of the star-tissued womb of Nature as the virile son of the all-Mother.  Life seeks reunion or religion with Nature, his mother, not however, by falling back into her arms and surrendering once more to some primordial slumber and dream, but by striving away from and with her, searching her, playing with her, dancing before her, wooing her, overcoming her, until she, who is eternally young as well as eternally old, responds like a maiden to his life and will and power, and, in the transfiguring ecstasy of union a new cosmic consciousness is conceived.”

There’s still some patriarchal “power-over” language in this quote, but I still like the imagery of striving, searching, playing, dancing, and wooing to express the mystery of the relationship between the immanent and the transcendent.

* Note: I use “Goddess” intentionally here without the definite article “the”, to emphasize the nature of Goddess as Be-ing, as opposed to a being.  Indeed, it would be appropriate to understand “Goddess” not as a noun, but as a verb (i.e., Goddess-ing).  I also defend the gendering of “Goddess” as (1) a necessary counterpoint to the traditional gendering of the transcendental God and (2) as an appropriate metaphor for the the source, ground, or womb of manifest existence.

** I capitalize Zoe to emphasize its supraordinate nature.

Quote: The path to heaven

the path to heaven
doesn’t lie down in flat miles.
It’s in the imagination
with which you perceive
this world,
and the gestures
with which you honor it.

From Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Swan”

My Pagan practice consists of the gestures with which I honor the world and the imagination which perceives it.