The Deep Ecology Tree: What is Deep Ecology?

Last updated on: October 13, 2014 at 4:22 pm By John Halstead

Neo-Paganism is a nature religion which, like other nature religions, perceives nature as both sacred and interconnected. From this perspective, humans in the developed world have become tragically disconnected from nature, which has been desacralized in both thought and deed. Healing this rift is possible only through a profound shift in our collective consciousness. This constellation of ideas can be called “Deep Ecology”.

In 1972, Arne Naess coined the term “deep ecology” to contrast with “shallow” environmentalism. At the core of deep ecology is the idea that nature is sacred, meaning it has intrinsic value apart from its usefulness to human beings. The destruction of the environment is thus perceived as a desecration (literally a de-sacred-ing). In contrast, “shallow” environmentalism is concerned only with the effects of environmental devastation on human beings. Shallow environmentalism seeks to remedy the symptoms of ecological collapse without the transformation, or even the consciousness, of the “deep-seeded” cultural assumptions that gave rise to the collapse.

Deep ecologists trace environmental desecration to a spiritual crisis, one which is rooted in the Western religious worldview that divides humans existentially from other living beings and divides the natural world from the sacred realm. Deep ecologists dispute the efficacy of the stewardship model of environmentalism advocated by Christian environmentalist, because it fails to address the root of the problem: anthropocentrism. Deep ecologists contrast an anthropocentric (or human-centered) attitude toward the environment with an eco-centeric or bio-centric one. An anthropocentric perspective values nature only in terms of its usefulness to human beings. An eco-centric or bio-centric perspective perceives that human beings are interconnected part a vast biotic community in which human being have special responsibilities, but do not have any greater right to exist than any other form of life.

comment_fDoiOfwSe7WuFfhIkMoBz0iApQyNoEi0,wat Deep ecologists argue that efforts to preserve the ecosystem will not succeed until we collectively experience a transformation of consciousness from an ecologically shallow ego-centric perspective to an ecologically deep eco-centric perspective. This transformation of consciousness is referred to as the realization of one’s “ecological self” (or “eco-self”), in contrast to “ego-self”. Arne Naess’ conception of the ecological self was inspired in part by Gandhi’s understanding of self-realization as a widening one’s concept of self to include all living beings. John Seed has described his realization of his own ecological self this way: Rather than saying, “I am defending the rainforest,” Seed says, “I am the forest, recently emerged into consciousness, defending myself.”

Paul Sheperd describes this change in this way:

“If nature is not a prison and earth a shoddy way-station, we must find the faith and force to affirm its metabolism as our own—or rather, our own as part of it. To do so means nothing less than a shift in our whole frame of reference and our attitude toward life itself, a wider perception of the landscape as a creative, harmonious being where relationships of things are as real as the things. Without losing our sense of a great human destiny and without intellectual surrender, we must affirm that the world is a being, a part of our own body.”

According to David Abram, another way to think about deep ecology, or what he calls “depth ecology”, is to contrast the “flat” perspective of conventional science which idealizes detached objectivity and which seeks to view nature from “outside”. A “deep” perspective, in contrast, recognizes that we cannot escape our carnal immersion in the more-than-human world which encompasses us, enfolds us, and permeates us. Abram writes:

“By acknowledging that we are a part of something so much vaster and more inscrutable than ourselves — by affirming that our own life is entirely continuous with the life of the rivers and forests, that our intelligence is entangled with the wild intelligence of wolves and wetlands, that our breathing bodies are simply a part of the exuberant flesh of the Earth — deep ecology opens a new (and perhaps also very old) sense of the sacred.”

Deep ecology has intellectual roots in the writings of early conservationists and environmentalists, like John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson, all of whom believed that human beings are part of an interconnected biotic community to which we owe an ethical obligation. Deep ecology has inspired such movements as neo-animism, bioregionalism, and ecopsychology [which will be the subject of future posts]. The term “deep ecology” is closely related to “dark green religion”, a term coined by Bron Taylor. Dark green religion or dark green spirituality encompasses a wide array of beliefs and practices, including those of atheists, religious naturalists, pantheists, Gaians, neo-animists, neo-shamans and, of course, Neo-Pagans.

Re-Earthing and the Council of All Beings

Like Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold before them, deep ecologists trace their perspective to personal experiences of connection and wholeness with wild nature. Many deep ecologists believe there is no substitute for direct experience of the wild for people to develop an ecological consciousness. Time spent in wild nature gives rise to an intuitive or affective perception of the sacredness and interconnectedness of all life. The arts and ritual can also help break through the socialization by industrial consumer culture which separates us from our authentic ecological selves. Art and ritual can reach people on an emotional or spiritual ground when rational argument cannot. For example, photographs of undespoiled landscapes, such as the photography of Ansel Adams, have been used to good effect by preservationists.

Some activists have designed ritual processes called “re-Earthing” to deepen participants’ felt connection to nature and their concomitant political will to defend it. One such re-Earthing ritual, developed by Joanna Macy and John Seed, is known as the Council of All Beings. In the ritual, participants imaginatively set aside their human identity to speak from the perspective of an other-than-human being. Participants experience the interconnectedness of the world through process called “evolutionary remembering”. They are reminded that every cell in their bodies is descended from the first cell that emerged on earth. They then reenact the evolutionary journey of the universe, experiencing it as their own creation story. The process relies on the five senses, inner body knowing, and movement, as much as it does on words. In a process called “the Mourning”, participants are invited to feel the pain of plants, animals, and landscapes caused by human actions. Participants then give voice to grief, fear, and anger of these voiceless ones in a “Council of All Beings”. The other-than-human voices then offer to the humans present their own unique powers and knowledge to help guide and empower the humans to effect change. While the Council of All Beings might resemble a shamanic “channeling” in some ways, it can be understood as a calling forth of the wisdom and gifts that are latent in the human psyche.

Recommended Links:

“The Deep Ecology Platform” by Arne Naess and George Sessions
“Deep Ecology” by Bron Taylor and Michael Zimmerman
“Beyond Anthropocentrism” by John Seed
“Depth Ecology” by David Abram
“Radical Environmentalism” by Bron Taylor
Bron Taylor bibliography
Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings by John Seed, Joanna Macy and Pat Fleming

COMING UP: A 6-part series on the “Branches of the Deep Ecology Tree”

Confessions of a Recovering Fundamentalist

Last updated on: April 7, 2013 at 7:15 pm By John Halstead

A few months ago, I was contacted through Facebook by a lady, Eliane, in Brazil, who I had baptized while I was a Mormon missionary there. We both tiptoed around each other in our first exchange, but eventually disclosed that we had both left the Mormon church.

To put this in context, I baptized probably around two dozen people during the two years I proselytized for the LDS Church more than 15 years ago. Of all those people, Eliane’s conversion was the most important to me, because I felt that I had done something personally to accomplish her conversion, beyond just being the representative of the Mormon church who just happened to be there. I shared some personal aspects of my own story with Eliane and she later told me that, not so much what I said, but how I said it convinced her to be baptized as a Mormon. When we re-met on Facebook, Eliane told me that she was grateful for the time in her life that she had been Mormon, but she had moved beyond it. Even though I left the Mormon church over a decade ago, I felt a strange regret at Eliane’s departure from the Mormon church, and I wondered (again) if the two years I had spent in Brazil had been wasted. While both Eliane and I had moved beyond Mormonism, she seems to have done so with more grace than I.

When I left the Mormon church at age 25, I struggled with how to understand the first quarter of my life, except in terms of regret. My leaving the Mormon church was not just a change of ecclesiastical affiliation, it was part of a longer process of painful transformation. When I was Mormon, I was a dogmatic and intolerant Mormon — in a way that is not characteristic of all Mormons. And for some time after I left the Mormon church, I remained dogmatic and intolerant — just dogmatic and intolerant about different things. My wife accused me one day, after I had left the LDS Church, of not have really changed anything. Indeed, I had become the flip side of the same coin. I even brought some of that fundamentalism with me into my early encounters with Paganism. Facing up to that is a humbling experience. But how to redeem that period in my life is the question for me now.

The Middle Passage

I’ve recently finished reading The Middle Passage by James Hollis, a Jungian analyst, which is about the so-called midlife crisis. Hollis has written another book on the same subject, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, which is written for a more general (less Jungian) audience. These books build on the thesis that there are two broad stages of adult maturation. In the first stage, we seek to solidify and strengthen the ego. We accomplish this often through marriage, children, career.

In the “second half of life”, we begin to experience a growing dissatisfaction. Jung wrote that among all his patients in the second half of their lives (over 35 years old) there was not one whose problem was not, in the end, a problem of a loss of meaning. (“Psychotherapists or Clergy”, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul). This dissatisfaction signals a change which we resist at our peril. It is a change from ego-centric adulthood to Self-centric adulthood. This shift requires a a kind of death of our old self. If we accomplish this transition, then we will live the second half of our lives more consciously and with a greater sense of meaning. Those who fail to make that transition are doomed to frustration and the tragic repetition of ineffective cycles of behavior from the first half of life. In Hollis’ words: “Those who avoided the first death are haunted by the second.”

What is really interesting about Hollis’ analysis, however, is that he does not denigrate the first half of life. He sees it as a necessary stage in our human development. Indeed, according to Hollis, without a fully developed ego from the first half of adulthood, we would not have the psychological strength to endure the requisite death of the ego in the second half. The tragedy is not that we have to go through the first phase, but only that we sometimes continue to try to live in the second phase with the strategies of the first. Hollis writes:

“One must have gone around a track a few times to even know if it is a circle or an oval. Patterns, with their costs and side-effects, can only be discerned as patterns when one has suffered them more than once. In retrospect, one is often chagrined, even humiliated, at the mistakes, the naivete, the projections. But such is the first adulthood: full of blunders, shyness, inhibitions, mistaken assumptions, and always, the silent rolling of the tapes childhood. If one has not set forth and made those mistakes and crashed into those walls, then one would have remained a child. Reviewing one’s life from the vantage-point of the second half requires understanding and forgiveness of the inevitable crime of unconsciousness. But not to become conscious in the second half is to commit an unforgivable crime.“

I know that I have not accomplished the transition to the second adulthood. But I suspect that I am beginning that transition, as I struggle to find meaning in my career, in my marriage, and in my relationships with my aging parents and rapidly maturing children. Coming to appreciate the awkward period of my third decade as an unavoidably necessary stage in my development is part of making that transition to second adulthood. “What can we expect of a twenty-something year old other than to play out the script of the first adulthood?” asks Hollis. Reading this was itself a healing experience for me.

Years ago, I came across a quote, which I now paraphrase”

The secret to happiness
is leaning what is required in each stage of life.

I don’t know who said it, or even where I read it, but for some reason it has remained in the back of my head for almost two decades. I think some part of me knew that this statement, whose meaning I could barely grasp at the time, would later be important to me. And I think I am just now beginning to understand it.

Stages of Faith

Part of coming to terms with the first adulthood is also recognizing the stages in the development on one’s religiosity. A book by James W. Fowler, Stages of Faith, has been instrumental in helping me come to terms with accepting my earlier fundamentalism (which still crops up occasionally). I have found that the more I accept who I have been (including the embarrassing parts), the less anger I have at Mormonism and Christianity in general.

Fowler describes 6 stages in the evolution of an individual’s faith. Different religions cater to people in different stages. Fowler’s Stages 3, 4, and 5 are those ones that will be most familiar, as they mark the transition from adolescence to young adulthood and from the first adulthood to the second. (I’ll detail these in a future post, but if you’re interested, your can get the short outline here.)

Others have described the same stages. Hollis calls these stages: the “magical”, the “heroic”, and the “human”. Alan Watts describes these stages this way:

“In the stage of infancy, the church’s moral teaching is of necessity authoritarian and legalistic. In adolescence, intensely earnest and self-consciously heroic, following after extremely lofty ideals. In maturity, we return somewhat to earth, and find the source of morality neither in external authority, nor in remote ideals, but in the consciousness of God himself in the heart.”

(Alan Watts, Behold the Spirit).

Interestingly, Aidan Kelly describes these same three stages in his book, Crafting the Art of Magic:

“The first is the stage of childhood, during which the myths of religion, learned from parents and others, are believed implicitly. The second stage is the stage of adolescence, during which the critical intellect develops, and the objective facts of ordinary history are taken as the criteria by which to judge the plausibility or possibility of the myths, which are normally rejected as being simply false during this stage, which can last into the late twenties. The third stage is the beginnings of true maturity, in which the person realizes that the facts if ordinary history, being value-free. provide no basis for making decisions about life problems. At this stage the adult can begin to reappropriate the myths, recognizing that they are intended to be primarily statements of value, not statements of fact or history, and recognizing also that an interpretation of the myths which is much more sophisticated than that of a child must be possible; else these myths would hardly have survived for millenia as the basis for the value systems of world civilizations. One mark of true maturity is therefor the ability to tolerate the ambiguous tension between myth and history.”

Fowler goes into greater detail, and in addition to the three stages described by Watts and Kelly above, his analysis also includes earlier developmental stages (Stage 1 and 2), which almost all adult grow out of, and a later stage (Stage 6), which almost no adults ever attain.

The danger of these categorizations is that they are too rigid to account for the variety of human experience, and also that they can be used to inflate our egos as we tell ourselves that we have “achieved” a “higher” level than other people we know. But there are two lessons that I think are valuable to take away from these discussions, wherever we are in these stages: (1) we can look back and see how we have grown and (2) we can look forward to see that we still have some growing to do.

I forgive myself for my intolerance, my lack of vision, my fear, which have hindered me in my past. And I forgive myself for all the intolerance, lack of vision, and fear that I know I will continue to have in the future. But I know now that I am growing and I will continue to grow. And this is how life is meant to be.

Enroll in Living Systems at Cherry Hill Seminary

Last updated on: August 22, 2016 at 8:51 pm By John Halstead

This summer I enrolled in “Nature & Pagan Spirituality” at Cherry Hill Seminary. It was a fun and interesting class, taught by a dynamic and knowledgeable teacher, Deirdre Rogers. The class was part of Cherry Hill’s new Environmental Leadership program.

This was my second class at Cherry Hill, and I highly recommend it. If you’re not familiar with Cherry Hill, it’s a Pagan seminary with a highly respected faculty, which offers graduate-level courses online (but you don’t have to have completed a Bachelor’s degree in order to take classes). Classes usually meet via Skpye once a week in addition to weekly reading and writing assignments.

The next course in the environmental series is “Living Systems”, which will be taught by Wendy Griffin. In addition to being a leader in the Pagan community and the environmental movement, Wendy has taught for over 25 years and is responsible for helping to create the field of Pagan Studies. She is also the Academic Dean at Cherry Hill. (I was fortunate met Wendy at the Parliament of the World’s Religions last year and again at the Greening of Religions conference sponsored by Cherry Hill this year.)

Here’s a description of the class:

Living Systems Science has its roots in the ecological and biological sciences, and attempts to explain how all living systems work by exploring dynamic patterns of the relationships of organisms with their environment. This class is for the non-scientist who wants to understand the scientific principles of the Web of Life, how the relationships within the web are responding to climate change, and what we can expect given a variety of scenarios.

The class meets Thursdays at 8pm ET. The semester runs from Sept. 12 to Dec. 18. You can click here to register.

You may have heard that Cherry Hill is struggling for its survival. The best way to support this very important Pagan institution is to register for classes! Check out the full list of Fall 2016 classes, which also includes Paganism and the Body and Psychology of Religion and Paganism, as well as “stackable” courses like Queer Pagan Theology Crash Course.

Don’t Call Me A “Generic Pagan”

Last updated on: June 28, 2016 at 10:26 am By John Halstead

I’m not a Wiccan. I’m not a Witch. I’m not a Druid. I’m not a Heathen. I’m not a Polytheist. I’m not a Shaman. I’m not a Reconstructionist.

I am a Pagan.

What kind of Pagan? Well, I practice an archetypal polytheism and a naturalistic animism. That’s a bit of a mouthful. It doesn’t flow off the tongue like “Witch” or “Druid”. So I just say “Pagan”. I’m happy to explain what archetypal polytheism and naturalistic animism mean and the really interesting intersection of the two … but that’s a topic for another day.

But please, please do not call me a “generic Pagan”. And please do not refer to my rituals as “generic Paganism”.

There’s always been a tension between Pagans who define themselves primarily as Pagan, and those for whom “Pagan” is a secondary identifier, an umbrella term. Many people in the latter category refer to those in the former as “generic Pagans”.

“Generic Paganism” is such an odd term. Nobody talks about “generic Christianity” or “generic Hinduism”. There are, of course, “non-denominational” Christians, those who identify primarily as Christian, in contrast to many denominational Christians who identify primarily with their denomination, i.e., Catholic, Mormon, Baptist, etc., and secondarily as Christian. But no one refers to the former as “generic Christians”.

Everyone’s religious identity is specific, including those Pagans who don’t identify as Wiccan, Druid, Shaman, etc. We don’t have denominations in Paganism, per se, so it’s inaccurate to speak of “non-denominational Paganism”. But people do often analogize the different Pagan paths and traditions to Christian denominations, because there is a rough correspondence.

We might speak of “Neo-Paganism” or “eclectic Paganism” or “non-traditional Paganism”, but each of these terms is actually describing something slightly different. “Neo-Paganism” is a term that is useful for distinguishing reconstructionist and revivalist forms of Paganism from more prospective or forward-looking forms of Paganism. But “Neo-Paganism” includes much of contemporary Wicca, Druidry, and Shamanism, too (i.e., ADF is a Neo-Pagan Druid tradition), so it’s not useful for distinguishing those who don’t follow one of those paths from those who do.

“Eclectic Paganism” is another term that can be useful, but it can be a misleading term too. “Eclecticism” is sometimes used by traditionalists or reconstructionists to imply a lack of rigor or authenticity, which is not always accurate. The line between traditionalists and eclectics is a fuzzy one sometimes. After all, at some point, all traditions were eclectic. What really distinguishes us is how conscious we are of our eclecticism.

Likewise, “non-traditional Paganism” is another useful term, but one that doesn’t really help here either. When people talk about “generic Paganism”, they’re often talking about the rituals at Pagan festivals and conferences and CUUPs (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans) gatherings. This kind of Paganism isn’t really “non-traditional”; it is its own tradition, one heavily inspired by Wicca, but not to be confused with Wicca. Some people have taken to calling this tradition “Wiccanate Paganism” or “Neo-Wiccan Paganism”. It follows a familiar formula: grounding, casting a circle, invoking the quarters, raising energy, etc.

Oftentimes, when people speak of “generic Pagan” ritual they are describing not just the form, but the quality, of a Pagan ritual. In the interest of an inclusivity that is never really achieved, planners of public Pagan rituals often default to a “Wiccanate” ritual format that is familiar, but also tired. The lack of creativity and ritual innovation at many public Pagan events is largely responsible for the appellation “generic”; it is “generic” because it is bland and boring. This is what makes the phrase “generic Paganism” so offensive. Not all so-called “generic Pagans” are Wiccanate. My own Paganism is highly specific, even idiosyncratic. I don’t cast a circle or call the quarters. I follow a Wheel of the Year, but it is specific to my bioregion and my psychology. And I don’t think there’s anything “generic” about it.

So, what kind of Pagan am I? I’m not a Wiccan or a Witch or a Druid or a Heathen or a Polytheist or a Shaman or a Recon. I’m Pagan. (Note I didn’t say “just a Pagan”, since that implies a inferior quality too.) Admittedly, that doesn’t tell you very much. There’s not a familiar box that I fit into. But if you’re really interested in getting to know me, and not just fitting me in a linguistic box, then let’s have tea sometime, and I’ll explain.

In the meantime, let’s stop using the term “generic Pagan”. If it’s a Wiccanate ritual, they call it that. If it’s a boring ritual, then call it that. But if it’s something that doesn’t fit into any of our standard Pagan categories (Wiccan, Feri, Druid, etc.), then don’t call it “generic”. Call it “Pagan” or don’t call it anything at all, at least until you ask some more questions and understand it better.

The Awkward Adolescence of the Polytheist Movement: Defining Community at the Edges

Last updated on: April 14, 2016 at 9:03 am By John Halstead

Too Close for Comfort

In my last post, I wrote about the discomfort that we feel when it seems that others are appropriating our most sacred symbols. There is a kind of cognitive dissonance we feel when we encounter some other peoples’ Paganism that is at once different, and yet too close for comfort. It’s ironic that we can sometimes be more disturbed by the beliefs and practices other Pagans or Polytheists than we are by Christians or other religions that are less similar to our own. Why is that? I think there’s something about the juxtaposition of the similarity and the difference that is particularly threatening.

In undergraduate school, I majored anthropology and I studied the phenomenon of cultural boundary maintenance in a small Mormon community which had been divided by the emergence of a heterodox Mormon group. The heterodox group, which had begun as a private study group of orthodox Mormons, eventually came to represent a threat to the orthodox Mormon identity because the group was different, and yet all too similar to their orthodox Mormon neighbors.

As a result, I expected to find that the orthodox Mormon community working overtime to establish a new cultural boundary separating itself from the heterodox or “apostates” group. Of course, there were institutional mechanisms for this — the heterodox group was eventually excommunicated — but I was interested in how this was done extra-institutionally. What did people say about the heterodox group? What stories did they repeat? How did they mock the apostates? What was said in public and what was said in whispers? How did they reconstruct their cultural identity?

But I never really found what I was looking for. Part of the reason, I think, was because I was looking in the wrong place. I was looking on the boundaries, what some Mormons have come to call the “borderlands.” I was talking to people who were sympathetic to the apostate group, but yet remained orthodox, and to those ecclesiastical authorities charged with enforcing the boundary. I hoped they would help me find the new cultural boundary which had been drawn. But maybe I should have been looking in the center, in the heart of the Mormon community. Maybe I should have been looking, not for a new boundary, but for a reconsolidated center.

Defining Community from the Center

scatterplot_2d — The Neo-Pagan and Polytheist communities?

It seems to me there are two ways of defining community: at the edges and from the center.

The problem with defining community “at the edges” is that we end up trying to draw bright lines where there is a fuzzy overlap, and without the institutional mechanisms to enforce such divisions, the effort is largely wasted. As John Beckett has observed, as much as we’d like to draw bright lines, “religious boundaries are more like beaches, the boundaries between the Land and the Sea – they’re indeterminate and they shift all the time.”

Consider the scatterplot graph to the right, which might represent the Neo-Pagan and Polytheist communities (although I suspect that our communities are even more enmeshed than this graph). Is there a difference between the green and the blue? Yes, but where exactly is the diving line? We would have to do some serious gerrymandering to draw that line. Not to mention, who is going to enforce the line?

I think it makes more sense to define our communities “from the center” — or better yet, from multiple overlapping centers (after all, neither grouping is a perfect circle). This is what we do when we make lists to describe Paganism or Polytheism. For example, I have listed (1) nature, (2) polytheism, and (3) magic as central to Neo-Paganism. Isaac Bonewits listed (1) polytheism, (2) immanence, (3) environmentalism, and (4) magic/ritual. And here are some other lists.

Inevitably, people get upset and say that one or more of the items on the list does not describe them, or they say that something essential was left off the list. But they are looking at community “at the edges”, rather than from the center(s). These lists are not intended define where Paganism or Polytheism end, but where they begin. They describe the multiple centers around which we congregate, not the boundaries which separate us from others.

The challenge of defining community “from the center” is that you have to tolerate a fair amount of ambiguity the closer you come to the edge of your community … and this is difficult, especially when a community is in its formative stage.

The Adolescence of the Polytheist Movement

Lately, we’ve seen a lot of writing from those in the Polytheist movement*, including one or two at Patheos, about their community and the intersection with Neo-Paganism. A lot of this writing seems unnecessarily divisive from the perspective of those closer to the Neo-Pagan center(s). I would suggest that the reason for this is that the Neo-Pagan and Polytheist communities are at different stages of cultural development. And defining identity “at the edges” may be a characteristic of an early stage of the development of a religious community, just as, on an individual level, adolescents tend to define themselves in contrast to their inherited cultural identity.

Although Neo-Paganism was influenced by post-war British Traditional Wicca and had its roots the Romantic Movement, following Sarah Pike, I date Neo-Paganism to 1967, which was the year that three significant Neo-Pagan groups were organized: Feraferia, the Church of All Worlds, and the New Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn (NROOGD). That means that Neo-Paganism will be 50 years old next year! Which means that we are now working on our third generation. That’s not a really long time in the history of religions, but it’s not insignificant either.

In contrast, the contemporary Polytheist movement*, although it has its historical antecedents and ancient roots, is probably only about 15 years old — not even a generation yet. And this makes a difference for how we construct our respective identities.

The contemporary Polytheist movement is still in its formative years. In Neo-Paganism’s formative years, it was common for Neo-Pagans to define themselves “at the edges”, specifically in contrast to the Abrahamic religions. Many still do — especially when we first come to Paganism — but it seems increasingly common for us to collectively define Neo-Paganism “from the center” and content ourselves with some degree of fuzziness at the edges.

(Incidentally, it was common for Neo-Pagans, 40 years ago, to make unsupportable claims about the alleged antiquity of their faith, claims which have now been largely abandoned, just as some in the Polytheist community today balk at the suggestion that their religion has relatively recent origins.)

In some ways, the Polytheist movement is a recent outgrowth of, and a reaction to, contemporary Paganism. From this perspective, Neo-Pagans can look at what is going on in the Polytheist community as a normal stage in the development of a new religious community. I know it’s hard to watch — especially when we Neo-Pagans are made into strawmen by some in the Polytheist movement, like parents being vilified by their teenage children. In psychology, this process is called “individuation” or “differentiation.” And we should expect that some in the Polytheist movement will be highly reactive at precisely the points where Paganism and Polytheism overlap, for the same reason that adolescents tend to be most reactive to those closest to them.

This may sound condescending, but the contemporary Polytheist movement is in its adolescence, and like every adolescence, it’s awkward and accompanied by a lot of exclamatory rhetoric … but it will be outgrown.

Of course, just as there are adolescents who are wise beyond their years and more mature than their parents, there are also parts of the Polytheist movement which are like this. I suspect they are made up of people who are more concerned with cultivating a rich cultural center than with building walls at the boundaries.

So for those of us in the Neo-Pagan community, let’s have patience with our younger sister faith. And let’s not forget that older religions can still learn something from newer ones about vitality and enthusiasm. And for those in the Polytheist community who dwell on the edge, perhaps they might consider turning their gaze to the center and letting the borderlands take care of themselves.

* Note: As used above, the “Polytheist community” and the “contemporary Polytheist movement” are distinguishable from polytheistic Pagans and polytheists in the (Neo-)Pagan community. A person may be a polytheist or polytheistic without being a part of the “contemporary Polytheist movement”. As P. Sufenus Lupus Virius has explained: “Everyone who is a Polytheist is also polytheist, but not all who are polytheist are Polytheists.”

Tell Me Again That Jungians Can’t Be Pagan (edited)

Last updated on: March 22, 2016 at 8:21 pm By John Halstead

philemon-hero-940x330 — Jung’s psychopomp, Philemon

It never ceases to amaze me when someone says that you can’t believe the gods are archetypes and be Pagan. The notion that the gods might be psychological dates back at least to the 5th century BCE. In uttonis play, Trojan Women, Euripides put these words into the mouth of one of his characters: “O thou that dost support the earth and restest thereupon, whosoe’er thou art, a riddle past our ken! Be thou Zeus, or natural necessity, or man’s intellect, to thee I pray.” (emphasis added)

The claim that Jungians can’t be Pagan ignores the (at least) thousands of Pagans who hold an archetypalist view of the gods. What’s more, it ignores almost 50 years of contemporary Pagan history. I get the impression from some of these folks that they think that I invented Jungian polytheism. In fact, Jungian interpretations of the gods of polytheism were popularized by many popular Pagan writers over a period of decades, long before I called myself Pagan.

Dion Fortune

Dion Fortune (Violet Firth) was a well-known occultist of the early 20th century and is considered by many to be a proto-Pagan. She belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and founded her own occult order, the Society of Inner Light. She was perhaps best known among Pagans as the author of The Sea Priestess.

The influence of Fortune on Paganism has been documented by Ronald Hutton in Triumph of the Moon. Hutton describes her single greatest legacy to modern Pagan witchcraft to be her idea of magical polarity, the notion that erotic attraction between the sexes could be channeled into magical operations. Fortune coined the phrase, “A religion without a goddess is halfway to atheism,” and it was through Fortune’s influence that Doreen Valiente introduced a larger role for the Goddess (and hence the High Priestess) into Gardnerian witchcraft. Without Fortune’s influence, it is possible that the feminist spirituality movement of the 1970s would never have embraced Neo-Pagan witchcraft, and witchcraft would have remained an obscure esoteric tradition, true to Gardner’s conservative vision of witches as wanting “quiet, regular, ordinary good government with everyone content and happy.” (Gods forbid!)

Fortune studied psychology and actually practiced as a psychoanalyst for a time. In the course of her studies, she was influenced most strongly by the writings of Freud and Jung. Fortune frequently used the term “archetype” in her esoteric writings, and Jung is cited in both her nonfiction and her fiction. She is credited by Chas Clifton with being the first occult author to approach magic from a Jungian perspective. In her first publication, Machinery of the Mind (1922), Fortune answered the question whether the gods are real, saying that they are neither “real persons as we understand personality” nor illusions; they are rather “emanations” of a group-mind, which are powerful because of their influence over the imaginations of their worshipers. “The gods are creations of the created,” she wrote, “They are made by the adoration of their worshippers.” Whether the gods are wholly subjective or whether they have an independent life of their own, she went on, is a matter of faith.

The quote by Fortune most known by Pagans is “All the gods are one god, and all the goddesses are one goddess …” Pagans often leave off the rest of the quotation: “… and there is one initiator.” The quote comes from Fortune’s novel, The Sea Priestess (1938). There, she had one of her characters say: “… the old gods are coming back, and man is finding Aphrodite and Ares and great Zeus in his own heart“. Similarly, in her book, The Winged Bull (1935), one of Fortune’s characters says: “God was many-sided, you couldn’t see every side at once; and the gods were the facets of the One. … God was as many-sided as the soul of man.”

Israel Regardie

Another proto-Pagan, Israel Regardie is probably best known for publishing the secret ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Ronald Hutton explains in Triumph of the Moon how Gerald Gardner built his Neo-Pagan witchcraft tradition on the framework of the Golden Dawn system. If Dion Fortune deserves the credit for being the first author to explain esoteric practice in Jungian terms, Israel Regardie deserves the credit for making the connection much more explicit and for doing so in terms that are comprehensible to the non-occultist.

Just three years after Fortune published her The Mystical Qabalah, Regardie published his The Middle Pillar (1938), which was subtitled, “a co-relation of the principles of analytical psychology and the elementary techniques of magic.” In the introduction to the second edition of the book, Regardie wrote,

“The real virtue of the book lies in its correlation of the practice of magic to modern psychotherapy. For magic places the achievement of self-awareness second only in importance to the achievement of unity with God. And Jung’s definition of psychotherapy was that which enabled one to become conscious of what hitherto was unconscious.”

Regardie explained that the purpose of his book was to help others recognize that in the “deep unconscious levels lies a great storehouse of power, awareness and vitality which must not only be awakened but recognized and equilibriated for the human being to function at maximum capacity.”

Regardie relied heavily on Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. For him, God and the collective unconscious were interchangeable terms, depending only on the religious or metaphysical system one chooses. As Regardie explained, the collective unconscious includes archetypes, which are psychological forms that have been molded by repeated ancestral experiences. These take the form of gods and angels in magical practice. Elsewhere he used the words “gods” and “archetypes” interchangeably.*

Gerald Garnder

In The Meaning of Witchcraft, Gerald Gardner described witchcraft as a religion which allowed people to express “archetypal reverences” which arise “from deep levels of the unconscious.” Gardner was notoriously ambiguous about the nature of the gods of witchcraft, but one passage suggests he embraced an archetypal interpretation:

“Between the idea of the young woman he loved and the old woman he feared, man found a goddess to worship, who loved him and protected him, and at times punished him. Those modern psychologists who belong to the school of C. G. Jung tell us that buried deep in what they call the collective unconscious of humanity are certain primordial concepts which Jung calls ‘archetypes’. He defines these as ‘inherited predispositions to reaction’, and as ‘perhaps comparable to the axial system of a crystal, which predetermines, as it were, the crystalline formation in the saturated solution, without itself possessing a material existence.’ We might call them ‘primordial images’. Jung defines two of the most potent of these archetypes which dwell in the mysterious depths of the unconscious mind of man as ‘The Great Mother’ and ‘The Old Wise Man’, and judging from the description of them given in his works they are undoubtedly identical with the goddess and god of the witch cult. Dr. Jolan Jacobi, in The Psychology of C. G. Jung, says, ‘They are well known from the world of the primitives and from mythology in their good and evil, light and dark aspects, being represented as magician, prophet, mage, pilot of the dead, leader, or as goddess of fertility, sybil, priestess, Sophia, etc. From both figures emanates a mighty fascination. . . .’ These are precisely the deities of the witches, and this fact may be a clue to the mystery of the cult’s amazing endurance.”

Gardner went on to refer to Erich Neumann’s analysis of the “Great Mother” archetype and observes that, while two particular images of the Great Mother archetype — the Great Mother of Grime’s Graves and the White Lady of the Bards — are separated by a great gulf of time, “the archetype is the same.”

Doreen Valiente

Doreen Valiente was the yin to Gerald Gardner’s yang, and her influence on the development of Paganism arguably extended beyond Gardner’s. As suggested above, but for Valiente’s influence, it is possible that Gardnerian witchcraft would have remained an insignificant branch of the British esoteric community. Valiente was responsible for the introduction of a greater role for the Goddess and the mortal priestess in Gardnerian Neo-Pagan witchcraft. She revised Gardner’s “Book of Shadows” and is the author of the “Charge of the Goddess,” which is perhaps the single best known Neo-Pagan sacred text.

Valiente acknowledged the influence of Dion Fortune on her, describing her as “an occult writer who realized the true significance of the ancient gods, and their archetypal rule in the unconscious.” Unfortunately, it was almost a decade after her initiation by Gardner that Valiente published her first book, Where Witchcraft Lives (1962), and it was not until the 1970s that she began to more directly influence the broader Pagan movement.

In her first work, the influence of Jung on Valiente is already apparent. She wrote that in the “deeps of the mind” Jung had “rediscovered the ancient gods; only he calls them ‘the archetypes of the collective unconscious.’” This influence continues in her later publications. In Witchcraft for Tomorrow (1978), Valiente wrote: “In the collective unconscious of our race, therefore, dwell timelessly the images of the gods. They are the personifications of the forces of nature, and all are modifications of the primordial pair, the All-Father and All-Mother.” Later she explained:

“The gods and goddesses are personifications of the powers of nature; or perhaps one should say, of supernature, the powers, which govern and bring forth the life of our world, both manifest and hidden. … Moreover, when such a magical image has been built up and strengthened over the course of centuries of worship and ritual, it becomes powerful in itself, because it becomes ensouled by that which it personifies. The form may have started as imagination, but when that which it personifies is real, imagination becomes in truth the image-making faculty. … Jung has shown some thought-forms, such as the ‘Great Mother’, the ‘Wise Old Man’, and the ‘Divine Child’, are so universal that he calls them archetypes, dwelling as they do in the collective unconscious of mankind.”

Valiente’s greatest influence on the development of contemporary Paganism may have been through her influence on other prominent Pagans, like the Farrars.

Janet and Stewart Farrar

Janet and Stewart Farrar were initiates of Alex Sanders into Alexandrian Witchcraft and were strongly influenced by Doreen Valiente, and who was herself influenced by Jungian ideas. In The Witches’ Way (1984), the Farrars devoted a chapter to the Jungian interpretation of Wiccan ritual. They wrote that “Every witch would be well advised to study the works of Carl Gustav Jung. … Jung’s ideas strike an immediate chord with almost every witch who turns serious attention to them.” In The Witches’ Goddess, the Farrars wrote, “Every good witch, and particularly every good High Priestess, has to be something of a psychologist,” and proceeded to explain such Jungian concepts as the collective unconscious, the archetypes, the anima and animus, and synchronicity.

In The Witches’ Way, the Farrars defined the purpose of Wicca “as a religion” (as opposed to “a Craft”) to be the integration of conflicting aspects of the individual psyche and the individual psyche with the “Cosmic Psyche.” They compared ritual to dreams, as both involve communication between the unconscious and the ego: “In dreams, the necessary communication between Unconscious and Ego is initiated by the Unconscious. In ritual, it is initiated by the Ego.”

The Farrars went on to publish The Witches’ Goddess (1987) and The Witches’ God (1989), which described various feminine and masculine “archetypal” principles such as the “Earth Mother,” the “Bright and Dark Mother,” and the “Triple Goddess” (all of which they defined as “aspects” of Jung’s “Great Mother” archetype), and the “Son/Lover,” the “Vegetation God,” and the “Horned God.” While the Farrars insisted the archetypes are “real” and the gods “exist,” they nevertheless took a pragmatic attitude toward such questions:

“Each man and woman can worry out for himself or herself whether archetypal God-forms were born in the human Collective Unconscious or took up residence there (and elsewhere) as pied-a-terre from their cosmic home—their importance to the human psyche is beyond doubt in either case, and the techniques for coming to healthy and fruitful terms with them can be used by believers and non-believers alike. … Whether the archetypal God-forms are cosmically divine, or merely the living foundation-stones of the human psyche, we would be wise to seek intercourse with them as though they were divine.”

Starhawk

The most important influence Jung had on the contemporary Pagan movement was probably through Starhawk and Margot Adler, both of whom published their most important works in 1979. Starhawk’s book, The Spiral Dance, is the most widely read introduction to Paganism and has sold over 300,000 copies. Starhawk’s work draws from numerous influences and, though she does not cite her sources, the influence of Jung in her writing is readily apparent. (She does quote Jungian analyst M. Esther Harding.)

One of the most important influences on Starhawk was Victor Anderson, the founder of the Feri tradition. Anderson’s Feri tradition drew on Huna, the thought of Hawaiian thinker, Max Freedom Long. Both Huna and Feri taught that human beings have three levels of consciousness, which Starhawk calls the conscious “Talking Self,” the atavistic “Younger Self,” and the divine “Deep Self” — which is synonymous with the God/dess Within. The Younger Self corresponds to Jung’s conception of the personal unconscious and the Deep Self corresponds to the collective unconscious or Jung’s “Self,” the numinous wholeness of the psyche. In The Spiral Dance, Starhawk writes that the purpose of Witchcraft was to get these “selves” communicating. This is accomplished through ritual.

In The Spiral Dance, Starhawk explains that the nature of the Goddess is both psychological and physical, in the sense that the earth itself is a manifestation of the Goddess:

“I have spoken of the Goddess as psychological symbol and also as manifest reality. She is both. She exists, and we create Her. … We know the Goddess is not a woman, but we respond with love as if She were, and so connect emotionally with all the abstract qualities behind the symbol. … She is both internal and external; as solid as rock, as changeable as our own internal image of Her. She is manifest within each of us–so where else should we look?”

In Dreaming the Dark, Starhawk criticizes Jung’s concept of the archetypes, which she describes as a “symptom of estrangement, derived from the Platonic notion that the world itself was not the real.” She explains,

“To a Witch, the world itself is what is real. The Goddess, the Gods, are not mere psychological entities, existing in the psyche as if the psyche were a cave removed from the world; they too are real — that is, they are ways of thinking-in-things about real forces, real experiences.”

A superficial reading of this would understand Starhawk as contrasting “mere” archetypes with “real” gods. But a close reading reveals that Starhawk’s meaning is not that the gods exist as immaterial or transcendent beings, but that our subjective experience is as real as the physical world. The gods are “ways of thinking-in-things,” which she explains means “experiencing concretely,” in contrast to “thinking abstractly.” As an example, she says that “Deep Self,” “Talking Self,” and “Younger Self” are “useful ways of thinking-in-things about who we are.”

So for Starhawk, the gods are as real as the various parts of ourselves are — but they are real because our experiences are real, not because they exist independently of us. “Though the symbols, the images, do not exist outside of us who perceive them, the forces, the powers-from-within, are real. … The Goddess, the Gods, are our potential.” Thus, Starhawk’s conception of the gods is arguably closer to what Jung actually meant by “archetypes” than the popular Platonic understanding of archetypes which has been popularized and which Starhawk criticizes.

Margot Adler

Margot Adler was the granddaughter of Alfred Adler, who together with Jung and Freud, founded the psychoanalytical movement. Adler draws on Jungian theory to defend Neo-Paganism in her journalistic account of the movement, Drawing Down the Moon. Adler herself converted to Paganism in the process of researching the book. The book, while ostensibly descriptive, also came to have an important prescriptive effect on the development of contemporary Paganism.

While Starhawk did not cite her sources, Adler was quite explicit about her debt to Jung:

“Much of the theoretical basis for a modern defense of polytheism comes from Jungian psychologists, who have long argued that the gods and goddesses of myth, legend and fairy tale represent archetypes, real potencies and potentialities deep within the psyche, which, when allowed to flower permit us to be more fully human. These archetypes must be approached and ultimately reckoned with if we are to experience the riches we have repressed. Most Jungians argue that the task is to unite these potentialities into a symphonic whole.”

Adler cited Neo-Jungians, James Hillman and David Miller (The New Polytheism) and explained, “The Jungian conception that images of divinity and the sacred are representative of archetypes within the collective unconscious has given the neo-Pagan movement a conceptual framework within which it has been possible to accommodate polytheistic religious belief.”

Vivianne Crowley

Vivianne Crowley (no relation to Aleister) is a Jungian therapist, as well as an initiate of both Gardnerian and Alexandrian Witchcraft. Her influence on the British Neo-Pagan community has been significant. She also blogs here at Patheos Pagan. Wouter Hanegraaf has written that Crowley’s Jungian perspective “is so strong that readers might be forgiven for concluding that Wicca is little more than a religious and ritual translation of Jungian psychology.” (Incidentally, she is a big part of the reason why I became Pagan.)

Crowley writes in her essay, “Wicca as a Modern-Day Mystery Religion” (in Graham Harvey’s Paganism Today), that Wicca is a mystery religion which has the same goal as the ancient mysteries:

“to know thyself and to attain some form of permanent psycho-spiritual transformation involving a moving of the center of the personality from the ego (what I think of as myself), to the Self (what I truly am when the contents of the unconscious are revealed and reconciled). Interestingly, these aims are similar to those of many of the more spiritually-oriented psychotherapy movements, of which Carl Jung’s is the best-known.”

According to Crowley, Wicca accomplishes this psycho-spiritual transformation through ritual, which is an “externalization” of an inner psychological journey represented through symbolism.

In her book, Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Age, Crowley writes, “Our Gods are the archetypal forces which inhabit the collective unconscious.” She then asks the question, “If the Divine is within us, is it merely psychological, an imaginary construct? Are the outer forms of the Gods real?” In response, Crowley quotes Jung as saying that archetypal images are not mere allegories or symbols. Rather, “they are images of contents which for the most part transcend consciousness. We have still to discover that such contents are real, that they are agents …” She then goes on to explain that there is a Divine reality beyond the images, but it is beyond our human comprehension.

Postscript: Jung Himself

Jung was not a Pagan, but it is interesting to know that he hoped psychoanalysis would transform Christianity back into a pagan religion. He wrote to Freud about his hope that psychoanalysis would

“infiltrate into people from many centers to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were — a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal.”

I think that is exactly what happened … in the form of contemporary Paganism.

For more on the influence of Jungian psychology on Paganism, see:

Crowley, Vivianne. “Neo-Paganism and Psychology,” in The Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism, eds. Shelley Rabinovich and James Lewis (2002)

Crowley, Vivianne. “Carl Jung and the Development of Contemporary Paganism,” presented at Contemporary Religion in Historical Perspective, The Development of Paganism: History, Influences and Contexts, 1880-2002, organised by The Open University Religious Studies Research Group Belief Beyond Boundaries (Jan. 12, 2002)

Goldenberg, Naomi. Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the end of traditional religions (1979)

Morgan, Delia. “Ideas of the Divine in Jung’s Writings and in Wicca” (Dec. 1997)

Waldron, David. Sign of the Witch: Modernity and the Pagan Revival (2008)

Waldron, David and Harn. “Jung and the Neo-Pagan Movement,” Quadrant, vol. 32, no. 2 (2004)

*Regardie warns, though, against the psychologizing of the archetypes which, he says, “is the result of misunderstanding Jung’s theories.” To the pop-psychologist, he says, the archetypes and gods are “simply creations of the human mind–they have no existence beyond the individual human being. Pop psychology sometimes gives the impression that humans create, work with, and discard archetypes as easily as an old pair of shoes, in a kind of superficial mental role-playing game. This view does not do Jung’s theory justice, since archetypes exist externally and independently of any individual.” (emphasis original)