I remember my first night at my first Pagan festival, the 1998 Free Spirit Gathering. Of course, I found myself at the Fire Circle. Well, we\u2019d done dance and drum fire circles before in the Coven of Lovin\u2019 \u2014 much much smaller ones, but I knew how this worked, and so I joined in.<\/p>\n
It was a warm night, and FSG is a clothing optional event. Thus, there were some naked people dancing around with me. That was a first. Well, okay, I could deal with it. I didn\u2019t want to bump up against any sweaty naked men, but I didn\u2019t want to bump up against any sweaty clothed men either, so as long as there was plenty of space, no problem. There might have been a naked woman or two there also, but I was an adult and had seen naked women before and it was not as big a deal as it was when I was seventeen.<\/p>\n
So, a bit to my own surprise, I was okay with naked people dancing around with me. I just tried not to look too much. But I couldn\u2019t imagine myself ever joining them in their unclothed state. That was just too wild, too far out. Nope. Me, naked in a (sort of) public place? Not going to happen. No way.<\/p>\n
Oh, sure, as I got hot I took off my shirt. But as a male that was no different than going to the pool or mowing the lawn on a hot day, I was not breaking any taboos there.<\/p>\n
But as I continued to dance, I learned three important things. One: fire is hot. When you\u2019re dancing close to it on a hot night, you want maximum cooling surface exposed for sweat evaporation.<\/p>\n
Two: fire is sacred. You want to expose as much of your skin to it as you can, to best absorb its energy.<\/p>\n
Three: in this sacred space, in this time outside of time, I felt safe. I felt unconditioned. I felt free. So, after an hour or two, off came the pants.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/infamous.net\/tzp_images\/nde-tom-crop-sm.JPG\")
I danced naked around a fire to the beat of the drums.<\/p>\n
I broke one of our society\u2019s strongest taboos. The humor columnist Mike Nichols once noted, \u201cTake off all your clothes and walk down the street waving a machete and firing an Uzi, and terrified citizens will phone the police and report, \u2018There\u2019s a naked person outside!'\u201d [quoted in Lawrence, 229]<\/sup><\/p>\n There is power in breaking such a rule.<\/p>\n I used to have those dreams where I showed up at work or at school and suddenly realized, to my absolute mortification, that I was naked. But after a few years of attending clothing-optional festivals, of dancing naked around the fire or just letting myself air-dry walking back to camp from the shower, I had that dream once final time. This time, though, when I looked down while talking to someone and noticed I was naked, I said, \u201cOh. Anyway\u2026\u201d, and calmly went about my dream business.<\/p>\n I have not had that dream since. A fear so deep it reached into my dreams has been removed from my brain. That, my friends, is magic power.<\/p>\n And nakedness has that power because it is wild. \u201cCivilized\u201d people wear clothes; the \u201csavage\u201d, the \u201cwild\u201d one, goes naked.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why nudity has been found in Neopaganism since its 19th and early 20th century roots. It was part of the German lebensreform<\/i> movement of the 1890s,[Kennedy, 56]<\/sup> which came to be an influence on the American counter-culture. (It strikes me that it may also may have been, through intermediaries, the ultimate source for Gardner\u2019s practice of naturalism, but I\u2019m just speculating.) It\u2019s in the proto-Pagan writings of Whitman: \u201cIs not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability, that is indecent.\u201d<\/a>[Whitman]<\/sup> It\u2019s in Leland\u2019s Aradia<\/i>: \u201cAnd thus shall it be done: all shall sit down to the supper all naked, men and women\u2026\u201d<\/a>[Leland]<\/sup> It was used in the initiation rites of Crowley\u2019s OTO.[Regardie, 177]<\/sup><\/p>\n Nudity is a powerful way to raise energy.<\/p>\n So I make it a point to spend a little time going around skyclad at any event I can, not so much because I need that energy myself \u2014 it\u2019s already done its thing for me \u2014 but so that I can show others that it\u2019s okay to try it. To step outside the taboo and be wild.<\/p>\n But from my casual observation, it seems like fewer people are taking advantage of this primal source of power. (This is a topic that came up when our good friend Jason Mankey<\/a> had me as a guest on his \u201cRaise the Horns\u201d podcast<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Some folks, of course, just aren\u2019t comfortable being seen unclothed. But that\u2019s the point: you don\u2019t raise magical energy by doing familiar, comfortable things. And some folks are concerned about covering up from the sun, what with the hole in the ozone and all. Which is fine, but the sun does go down, and sunscreen will work its magic on all parts of you.<\/p>\n What has really startled me is that lately I\u2019ve encountered some Pagans who were not just uncomfortable going skyclad themselves but were outright hostile to the idea of other Pagans doing so. One even claimed that it must surely be illegal for adults to be nude in front of children \u2014 which would be a shock for nudist camps that have served families for decades, not to mention the local Y where kids in the locker room might see me change into my swimming trunks.<\/p>\n It seems that nakedness is a little too wild for some contemporary Pagans.<\/p>\n I am not a witch, but Peter Grey\u2019s essay \u201cRewilding Witchcraft\u201d<\/a> has been getting a lot of attention the past few months. It makes some questionable arguments \u2014 for example, the story of how the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone created an \u201cecological miracle\u201d seems to be more myth than fact[Middleton]<\/sup><\/a>, and his view that some inevitable nuclear catastrophe will eliminate all life on the planet for 100 million years is not based in any fact. The \u201cliving Earth\u201d is not \u201cfragile\u201d: life will be here on this planet in some form even if we do our absolute worst. The question that faces us is whether we can be smart and mature enough to be part of it, or whether we\u2019ll leave the Earth to other species.<\/p>\n But putting aside the ecological eschatology that makes up the bulk of the essay, Grey (perhaps incidentally) makes a broader point about \u201cwildness\u201d, one with which I agree wholeheartedly if I substitute the more general \u201cPaganism\u201d for \u201cWitchcraft\u201d:<\/p>\n I will argue that Witchcraft is quintessentially wild, ambivalent, ambiguous, queer. It is not something that can be socialised, standing as it does in that liminal space between the seen and unseen worlds. Spatially the realm of witchcraft is the hedge, the crossroads, the dreaming point where the world of men and of spirits parlay through the penetrated body of someone who is outside of the normal rules of culture\u2026.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n My argument is that witchcraft became too tame\u2026[Grey]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n 1998 was not that long ago. But in 16 years since that first festival I\u2019ve seen a distinct change in the culture, a \u201cde-wilding\u201d and therefore a loss of power \u2014 and perhaps even a loss of purpose.<\/p>\n There\u2019s an idea from Joseph Campbell that has greatly influenced my thinking and my work the past few years. In his essay \u201cThe Symbol Without Meaning\u201d, Campbell points out the difference between the direct religious experience of Paleolithic, gatherer-hunter, shamanistic cultures and the mediated priestly religions of Neolithic (and later) agricultural civilizations. That Neolithic social order, Campbell says, is dissolving in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, and \u201cwhat is required of us all\u2026is much more the fearless self-sufficiency of our shamanistic inheritance than the timorous piety of the priest-guided Neolithic.\u201d[Campbell, 189]<\/sup><\/p>\n In other words, we must get wild with our spirituality, untamed and direct.<\/p>\n It seems to me that this is why the Neopagan movement exists in the first place, a reaction to the inability of \u201ccivilized\u201d religion to deal with the circumstances in which humanity finds itself. We are on a quest for something more direct.<\/p>\n Something untamed.<\/p>\n Something unafraid to stand naked.<\/p>\n References:<\/p>\n Campbell, Joseph. The Flight of the Wild Gander.<\/i> New York, N.Y: HarperPerennial, 1990.<\/p>\n Grey, Peter. \u201cRewilding Witchcraft\u201d. <http:\/\/scarletimprint.com\/2014\/06\/rewilding-witchcraft\/<\/a>><\/p>\n Kennedy, Gordon. Children of the Sun.<\/i> Ojai, California: Nivaria Press, 1998.<\/p>\n Lawrence, Cooper and Scott Baio. Cult of Celebrity: What Our Fascination with the Stars Reveals about Us<\/i>.Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. <http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=hQDPYS13CwAC&pg=PA229<\/a>><\/p>\n Leland, Charles G. Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches<\/i>. <http:\/\/www.sacred-texts.com\/pag\/aradia\/ara04.htm<\/a>><\/p>\n Middleton, Arthur. \u201cIs the Wolf a Real American Hero?\u201d New York Times<\/i> 10 Mar 2014: A21. <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/03\/10\/opinion\/is-the-wolf-a-real-american-hero.html<\/a>><\/p>\n Regardie, Israel. The Eye in the Triangle<\/i>. Tempe: New Falcon Publications, 1993.<\/p>\n Valiente, Doreen. \u201cThe Charge Of The Goddess\u201d. <http:\/\/www.doreenvaliente.com\/Doreen-Valiente-Poetry-11.php<\/a>><\/p>\n Whitman, Walt. \u201cSpecimen Days\u201d Prose works, by Walt Whitman.<\/i> Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892. <http:\/\/www.bartleby.com\/229\/1133.html<\/a>><\/p>\n If you\u2019re interested in this idea of Neopaganism as a response to industrial civilization, it\u2019s one of the themes I cover in my book Why Buddha Touched the Earth<\/i><\/a>. You could buy a copy.<\/p>\n Or you might choose to join a new Facebook group on \u201cZen Paganism\u201d<\/a> I\u2019ve set up. And don\u2019t forget to \u201clike\u201d Patheos Pagan<\/a> over there, too.<\/p>\n And you can subscribe to The Zen Pagan<\/i> via RSS<\/a> or e-mail<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In other words, we must get wild with our spirituality, untamed and direct. It seems to me that this is why the Neopagan movement exists in the first place, a reaction to the inability of \u201ccivilized\u201d religion to deal with the circumstances in which humanity finds itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1860,"featured_media":6501,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[330,16,604,617,1077],"tags":[1239,25,1206,1173],"class_list":["post-6795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-top-posts","category-magick2","category-ritual-practice","category-the-zen-pagan","tag-nudity","tag-pagan","tag-rewilding","tag-skyclad"],"yoast_head":"\n
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