The role of faith and hubris in Paganism

Last updated on: March 21, 2017 at 9:05 pm By John Halstead

Last week I came across a word that, ten years ago, I would never have thought to see in a Pagan context: “faith”. In fact, I came across it several times:

The first time I noticed it was after reading Christine Kraemer’s post “Opening a Pagan Theological Dialogue” at the Sermon in the Mound. Encouraging Pagan theo/alogy is a subject dear to my heart. Christine provided a link to her book on Amazon, Seeking the Mystery: Introduction to Pagan Theologies. After downloading the sample, I purchased the book, and I am enjoying working my way through it. One part in particular caught my attention: the discussion of “hard polytheism”. There I read this fascinating quote from Hellenic polytheist Sarah Kate Istra Winter’s blog, a forest door:

“I fear that paganism may not have the strength to last in the long-term if we ourselves do not firmly believe in our spiritual reality. You don’t see Christians following up a discussion of accepting Jesus into your heart with some caveat like ‘or if you don’t believe in Jesus, just imagine a similar loving entity or warm light.’ Or ‘if you need the help of a saint and don’t like any of the ones you’ve read about, just invent a new saint in your mind that betters suits you, and contact them.’ As if these things are all the same. Yes, I know that many Christians go in the opposite direction and become strictly orthodox, insisting on every detail of belief, and I also know that this is what many pagans are reacting to. But it’s time to stop reacting and start building a real, solid faith that will last – and for that you need, well, faith.“

I came to Paganism through authors like Starhawk who explicitly denied that faith had any role to play in Paganism, so to see faith invoked in this context came as a bit of a shock.

Then I saw Jason Mankey’s post about the Connecticut shootings, “Sometimes Faith Has No Answer”. And then Eddie responded to my post about my love/hate relationship with Paganism by saying that he uses the term polytheist instead of Pagan “since I have faith and all that jazz.” And finally, I came across this striking description of faith by Hellenic polytheist Elani Temperance on her post, “Self, in relation to Deity”:

“[…] when it comes to the Theoi–I say ‘how high’ when They say ‘jump’, regardless of what is requested of me. It also means that I put my faith in Them. When I pray and sacrifice to Zeus the Thunderer for a day without rain as I do my rounds outside, I don’t bring an umbrella. I trust that Zeus will either honor my prayer through kharis, or will have good reason not to. Who am I to go against His wishes and stay dry, regardless? To me, that is hubris.”

Wow! That’s not just faith, but if-they-told-you-to-jump-off-a-bridge kind of faith! Who are you to go against Zeus’ wishes? I couldn’t help but respond:

“You are a beautiful and incredible human being is who you are. Who is he to say you have to get wet? The polytheistic gods, as I understand them, are not necessarily “good” and they are not omni-benevolent. They are as flawed as human beings, but they just have more power. Why bow down to power, if it is not paired with virtue?”

Elani explains that she is able to maintain boundaries with human beings, but not with the gods. That kind of faith makes no more sense to me in the context of divine beings than it would in the context of human beings.

Faith means different things to different people of course. It could mean believing in something without any rational or experiential basis for such a belief. I don’t think this is what most people mean when they say they have faith. I think this is what people mean when they talk about other people’s faith. But faith can also mean being “faithful” or true to a relationship when the object of that relationship is no longer present. It means continuing to worship the gods when they do not manifest. Continuing to believe in their goodness when bad things happen. It is not so much a belief in things you can’t see, as continuing to act as if the persons (whether a spouse or the gods) you have a relationship with are present when they aren’t.

It is in this sense that polytheists seem to use the word “faith”. Indeed, Christine Kraemer introduces Sarah Winter’s quote above with these words:

“Hard polytheists tend to take the issue of belief much more seriously than other Pagans. Like other Pagans, they usually emphasize that their belief in the gods is based on their personal experiences of them. However, hard polytheists see belief as a necessary part of the passion and devotion that is part of a committed relationship.”

This got me wondering about how faith might come into play in other forms of Paganism.

The four centers of Paganism

I recently attempted a description of the Pagan community, not as one umbrella, but as multiple overlapping penumbrae. I suggested three possible “centers” for these overlapping circles: deity-centered, earth-centered, and Self-centered (or Self-centric). In the comments to my post, it was suggested that a fourth center was needed, community- (or folk-)centered. Most people within the Pagan community fall into the overlapping area of two or more of these circles, but I think they are still useful categories for describing Pagan experience.

Each of these groups has a unique way of relating to the “other” that transcends our individual selves. Each defines that “other” differently. Each gets something different out of the relationship. And each has different challenges which arises from the nature of the transcendent with which the group seeks to enter into relationship.

1. Deity-centered Paganism and faith

In some ways deity-centered Paganism resembles other theisms, including charismatic forms of Christianity and the bhakti cults of Hinduism. For deity-centered Pagans (i.e., polytheists), the gods are that which transcends the individual. Polytheists seeks to enter into relationship with the gods, and passionate devotion is what primarily characterizes that relationship. An increased sense of power is what the gods bring to the relationship; power is what distinguishes the gods of polytheism from mortals. The unique challenge presented by deity-centered Paganism arises from the nature of the gods, specifically from the fact that the experience of the presence of the gods is transitory.

Most polytheists will not feel their presence all the time. And sometimes, when they are invoked, they do not come. Thus, polytheists seek to develop faith for the times when the presence of the gods is not experienced, and for this reason faith seems to be a core virtue of deity-centered Paganism.

2. Earth-centered Paganism and re-enchantment

Earth-centered Paganism can be described an extension of deep ecology. It has been called “dark green religion” by Bron Taylor. For earth-centered Pagans, the earth or nature is that which transcends the individual. Earth-centered Pagans seek to enter into a relationship with nature, and a sense of wonder is what primarily characterizes that relationship. Faith has no role in earth-centered Paganism, because the earth is always present, in a way the gods are not.

The unique challenge presented by earth-centered Paganism arises from the nature of Nature, specifically from the fact that nature demonstrates no particular love or care for the individual. Connecting to something which does not care about us can be a challenge. Thus an experience of interconnectedness with the non-human or more-than-human world is a core virtue of earth-centered Paganism. This sense of interconnectedness is sometimes called “re-enchantment”, and it refers to an expanded awareness of the nature of reality and of our participation in the natural world which Levy-Bruhl called “participation mystique” and Owen Barfield calls “original participation”. A feeling of being part of a greater whole is what Earth-centered Pagans get out of the relationship.

3. Self-centric Paganism and insight

Self-centric Paganism exists in the overlap between Paganism, esotericism, and the New Age. It resembles both Jungian psychology and Advaita-Vedantic philosophy which underlies some forms of yoga. For Self-centric Pagans, the “Self” is that which transcends the individual. The “Self” is the wholeness which gives rise to, but extends beyond, the normal waking conscious identity or “ego” which we commonly call our “self”. Self-centric Pagans seek to enter into relationship with the Self, and identification is ideally what characterizes that relationship. Self-centric Pagans seek to disassociate from the ego-self and identify with the Self. A new identity is what Self-centric Pagans seek to get out of the relationship with the Self. The unique challenge presented by Self-centric Paganism is the fact that it is so easy to confuse the ego-self with the Self. (Psychoanalysts call this “inflation”.) Thus, the Self is often more elusive for Self-centric Pagans than even the gods are for deity-centered Pagans. This is what St. Augustine meant when he said “God is closer to me than I am to myself.” For this reason, insight is a core virtue for Self-centric Pagans, because insight is what enables us to distinguish the ego from the Self. Ironically, in spite of the elusiveness of the Self, “faith” not usually a word that is used to describe the relationship of Self-centric Pagans to the Self. I wonder why this is so. Do Self-centric Pagan not need to have “faith” that the Self exists?

4. Community-centered Paganism and love

For community-centered Pagans, the community is that which transcends the individual. The relationship between community-centered Pagans and the community is ideally characterized by love. Like earth-centered Pagans, what community-centered Pagans get out of the relationship is a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves. The unique challenge presented by community-centered Paganism arises from the conflict between individual and group needs. Thus, love is a core virtue of community-centered Paganism, since love is what enables us to identify the needs of others as our own. It is perhaps also necessary to community-centered Pagans to have faith in people or to be faithful to the community, so it could be said that faith is also a core virtue for community-centered Pagans. However, unlike deity-centered Pagans, community-centered Pagans will likely never doubt the reality of the existence of the community.

“Thou art God.”

Thus, the nature of the transcendental to which different Pagans relate defines the role that faith plays in that relationship. The thing that distinguishes deity-centered Paganism from the other three groups seems to be the degree to which deity-centered Pagans insist on the otherness of the gods. Each of the groups has an “other” which in some sense transcends the individual self, an “other” which might in some sense be called “God”: Nature has been described a “God” by pantheists. Jung and Vedantic philosophers describe the Self in God-terms. And anthropologist Emile Durkheim famously equated society with God: “God is Society, writ large”.

Each of the groups seeks to enter into a relationship with their “God”. But what distinguishes deity-centered Paganism is that polytheists do not seek to identify with the gods. Earth-centered Pagans, for example, seek to experience a sense of interconnectedness with the natural world, one that may border on mystical identification. Self-centric Pagans seek total identity with the wholeness which is the Self. And community-centered Pagans seek some degree of identity with their community. But deity-centered Pagans maintain a strict boundary between their sense of self and the identity of the gods. For a polytheist to identify with the gods would be hubris. In this sense, perhaps it is not an absence of boundaries that characterizes Elani’s relationship with the gods, but precisely the opposite. Which brings me back to Elani’s statement above about her own if-they-told-you-to-jump-off-a-bridge kind of faith.

Perhaps it is because other kinds of Pagans in some sense identify with their respective “Gods” that they would never ask the question Elani asks: “Who am I to go against the gods?” Earth-centered, Self-centric, and community-centered Pagans might all respond: “Who are you? Thou art God.” Thou art God! That’s something that a deity-centered Pagan could not say, and perhaps that is what most fundamentally distinguishes polytheism from other forms of Paganism.

Polytheists like to claim that the multiplicity of gods breeds a kind of pluralism that makes intolerance and acts of religious violence less likely. But as an earth-centered and Self-centric Pagan, I see more similarities than dissimilarities between polytheism and the monotheisms. And I wonder if what really distinguishes Paganism from the Abrahamic faiths is not the number of gods, but the belief that in some sense we are God. A polytheist would call this hubris and a monotheist would call it heretical. (At least an orthodox monotheist would. There have always been mystical strains within the monotheistic traditions which sought union with God.) But for many Pagans, the hubris of the statement, “Thou art God/dess”, is an article of, well, faith.

Embarrassment and the twin threats to Paganism: Shallowness of the mind and of the heart

Last updated on: November 24, 2012 at 10:33 am By John Halstead

In my last post, I wrote about “Being Ashamed by Paganism” (which was really about “embarrassment” not “shame”). For me, the most interesting and challenging response came from Alison Leigh Lilly, who suggested that embarrassment can be “an invitation to growth”. Alison discusses her own experience of embarrassment (at poorly executed ritual) and being the subject of someone else’s embarrassment (because of her enthusiasm).

I agree with Alison that my embarrassment says more about me than it does about the object of my embarrassment. Specifically, it says more about my relationships with those whose judgment I am anticipating than it does about the people whom I find embarrassing. Alison writes, “The times when I felt most worried about being judged as shallow or silly because of my associations were the times when I was least secure about my own reasons for doing and believing as I did …” That’s definitely true in my case. My embarrassment at some aspects of Paganism cannot really be separated from my own unsettledness over my religious identity.

I also agree with Alison that embarrassment can be a sign of a shallow engagement with the object of one’s embarrassment. Although I don’t think this is always the case: Sometimes embarrassment is a expression of a legitimate concern.

Alison sets up a dichotomy between the values of “sincerity” and “competence” (reference to an earlier post of hers), suggesting that those who value competence more than sincerity are embarrassed by any form of sincerity:

“I’ve noticed that those in the Pagan community who worry overly-much about the competence or incompetence of others are often just as embarrassed by expressions of sincerity, regardless of the competence with which that sincerity is expressed.”

She then equates the sincerity side of the equation with the (feminine) “emotional, nonrational aspect of the self” which is devalued by the (masculine) “detached, professional, rational” self. Allison places me in the latter category:

“While John locates his love of Paganism in the feminist and process theologies that have informed his understanding of deity as the nondiscriminating All-of-All, it seems his response to his own embarrassment is to step back into the role of the discriminating gentleman of refined tastes who finds himself discomfited by the overly-emotional and seemingly irrational exuberances of his fellow Pagans.”

I think it it is critical to emphasize here that emotional exuberance is not what I find embarrassing about Paganism. In fact, as I have written before, one of the things I love about Paganism is its Dionysian character:

“A Dionysian religion breaks down social structures and breaks down the walls of the ego. As Harry Byngham (aka “Dion”), chief of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, wrote: “Our Dionysian morality is not ‘safety first’, but ‘vitality first.” Neopagan religion is not a religion of good behavior, but a wild religion, a religion of ‘drums, moonlight, feasting, dancing, masks, flowers, divine possession’ (Robert Graves).”

(See also my post on “Why I Don’t Dig the Buddha”, in which I contrast the serene image of with Buddha with the image of the passionate and ecstatic Dionysus.) My issue with public Pagan rituals is not an excess of emotion. For example, the one CUUPS ritual that I do attend with my family is the Beltane celebration at which we dance around the maypole, which is the most exuberant celebration of the year.

Having said that, I believe that the Dionysian and the Apollonian sides of any social movement need to be balanced. As Walter Kaufmann writes in his Critique of Religion and Philosophy: “Undisciplined vision, unexamined intuition, and sheer passion are the fountainheads of madness, superstition, and fanaticism. And cleverness and patience without vision are the expense of spirit in a waste of subtlety.”

Alison is correct that I do understand deity as the “nondiscriminating All-of-All”, but I don’t think that means we’re not supposed to discriminate. Starhawk writes in her novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing:

“One of the names of the Goddess was All Possibility, and Madrone wished, for one moment for a more comforting deity, one who would at least claim that only the good possibilities would come to pass.

“ ‘All means all,’ she heard a voice in her mind whisper. ‘I proliferate, I don’t discriminate. But you have the knife. I spin a billion billion threads, now, cut some and weave with the rest.’ ”

The “knife” Starhawk refers to above is the power of discrimination. Healthy growth comes from a combination of Dionysian vitality and Apollonian discrimination. Just as a fruit tree must be pruned to produce healthy fruit, so must a religious community.

At the end of her post, Alison too comes to the conclusion that self-analysis is critical for community building:

“Creative endeavors falter under the yolk of constant editorial critique and oversight. If we cannot allow ourselves to be whole, messy people in public when we are in community with each other, then our spiritual community will remain largely an excuse for private posturing and play-acting. […]

“But even though creative work is hindered by constant criticism and self-analysis, it is equally handicapped if attempted in isolation. Creative work engages with the resistance of the medium, and the creative work of community-building absolutely demands that we overcome our embarrassment to have real conversations with each other about the things that matter, and that we do that openly and publicly. We can’t do that if we are politely escorting those who disagree with us to the exit, but we also can’t do that if we expect those disagreements to be pleasantly shelved for the time being while we all light candles and hold hands in a circle together. The one is a recipe for intolerant theology, but the other is a recipe for shallow practice.“

Indeed, it is precisely the shallowness of the public face of Paganism that embarrasses me. And it was to this that I referred when I contrasted the silliness of much of public Paganism with the “seriousness” that I longed for. The “seriousness” that I have been talking about does not exclude sacred play or ecstatic self-forgetfulness. (In fact, I recently wrote about the “one needful thing” in UU worship being “enthusiasmos or personal abandonment”.) It does exclude both uncritical belief and shallow engagement. It does exclude ritual and practice which only engage the “light” side of ourselves, the parts of us that we are comfortable facing. It does exclude naive appeals to invisible parental figures in the sky (whether one or many) or to irrational “magical” technologies to save us from the difficult challenges of life. And I believe that circling the wagons, imaging white light, and handing our “protection stones” is a shallow response to the challenges that our community faces from the wider culture — both emotionally and intellectually. There is an emotional shallowness and an intellectual shallowness, and both should be discouraged for our community to thrive.

As Starhawk says in The Spiral Dance:

“If Goddess religion is not to become mindless idiocy, we must win clear of the tendency of magic to become superstition. Magic — and among its branches I include psychology as it purports to describe and change consciousness — is an art. […] The value of magical metaphors is that through them we identify ourselves and connect with larger forces; we partake of the elements, the cosmic process, the movement of the stars. But if we use them for glib explanations and cheap categorizations, they narrow the mind instead of expanding it and reduce experience to a set of formulas that separate us from each other and our own power.”

If we are to avoid “mindless idiocy”, as Starhawk says, we must discriminate. While we should place a high value on inclusiveness, inclusiveness cannot be our highest ideal. A community which exercises no discrimination is no community at all. Where we draw these lines has to be negotiated in community, but there should be no doubt that the lines have to be drawn. Discrimination means saying no to the extremes — on both sides. We need to say no to “rainbow-chasing smurf-worshipping” (as someone phrased it in the comments to my last post), just as we already say no to the more racially-motivated forms of heathenry. For some reason, the Pagan community seems more comfortable drawing these lines on the right than on the left, but both extremes are just as damaging to the health of our movement. Just as intellectual competence is no excuse for emotional shallowness, so emotional sincerity is no excuse for intellectual shallowness. We need a religion which manifests both intellectual and emotional depth, and I believe (with my heart and my mind) that Paganism can be this religion.

Being Embarrassed by Paganism

Last updated on: November 16, 2012 at 6:57 pm By John Halstead

Years ago, when I was deciding whether to leave the Mormon church, one of the recurring thoughts I had was that, by continuing to associate with the Mormon church, I was (mis-)representing to the world that I shared all the same beliefs and the same ordering of values as the Mormon church. I felt that, the Mormon church no longer represented me, so it was disingenuous for me to go on representing the Mormon church. To put it bluntly, I was embarrassed to be Mormon. I was attending law school and I was increasingly sympathetic to the three perceived “threats” to Mormonism identified by Mormon apostle Boyd Packer: homosexuals, feminists, and intellectuals. It got so that I stopped telling people that I had attended Brigham Young University for my undergraduate degree.

After leaving the Mormon church, I slowly came to realize that the Mormon community is not as homogenous in beliefs or values as I had thought. There are plenty of gay Mormons, feminist Mormons, and intellectual Mormons. While the LDS church is an authoritarian institution with a more or less well-defined orthodoxy, there are plenty of people who feel more or less comfortable in the church community who do not share all of the beliefs and value orderings as the leaders of the church. This may come as no surprise to someone who was not raised Mormon. But from a very early age I had been taught by Mormons that Mormons were all the same, that we all believed the same things and shared the same values. This belief was reinforced by my observations of what people said and did at church. Little did I know that beneath the ritualized conformity of the Mormon Sunday worship service, there was a surprising amount of diversity. I still feel that the Mormon church institution actively works to level out that diversity, but it persists nonetheless. While I have no doubt I would ultimately have decided to leave the Mormon church in any case, I think that if I had realized this earlier, then my decision would have seemed somewhat less obvious to me at the time.

Years later, I discovered something called Paganism. As I have written before here on this blog, I discovered Paganism in books, and it was not for several years until I began to interact with the Pagan community — through CUUPS (the Unitarian Universalist Pagans), Pagan Pride Day, pagan festivals and conventions (like Pagan Spirit Gathering and Pantheacon), and through other public Pagan rituals. While it may seem strange to non-Pagans that a person would begin to identify as Pagan before ever having met another Pagan, this is actually not uncommon in the Pagan community. Many Pagans today discover Paganism through books or the Internet, and some may never interact personally with the larger Pagan community.

When I did begin interacting with other Pagans at public events though, I was . . . disappointed. There, I said it. In fact, I was embarrassed. Paganism for me was a rich and complex tradition with the potential to transform consciousness and, dare I say, save the soul of the world. But the public face of Paganism seemed to me silly and naive. I’ve written before what I love about Paganism and what I hate about Paganism, so I’m not going to go over it all here again. And I’ve laid out what my Pagan beliefs are before also, so I’m not going to rehash that. What I want to do here is explore this embarrassment.

This experience of embarrassment has come to a head in several ways recently. First, I recently had a job change and had to interview for the new position. I realized that my prospective future employer may very well Google my name. And that would lead them directly to my Pagan identity. Not only do I blog here, but I have contributed posts to the Humanistic Paganism community blog and have been a more or less active commenter on other well-known blogs, like Star Foster’s now-defunct Patheos blog. When I first corresponded with B.T. Newberg, who runs the Humanistic Paganism blog, he very easily connected me to both the American Neopaganism website I was maintaining at the time and the website of my employer.

I had intentionally used my name here and elsewhere as a matter of principle, and I admire other people who do the same. I feel that the use of “craft names” and internet handles perpetuates a feeling of persecution that many Pagans feel, as well as perpetuating the perception that Paganism is not a serious religion. (Just check out one of the many Pagan name generators online and you’ll see what I mean.) However, when it came time to change jobs, I seriously considered contacting B. T. Newberg to ask him to remove my full name from my posts at the Humanistic Paganism blog. And I just saw that B.T. had another author who did remove his contribution entirely due to employers Googling his name. In the end I didn’t, at least in part because of the futility of it (since changing my name on posts would not have eliminated the Google “hits” immediately), but also because I am proud of my Paganism.

And here’s where we get to the crux of it. I was not embarrassed about my Paganism. I was embarrassed by “their” Paganism. I was afraid of being associated with the public face of Paganism as I have come to know it. Basically, I found myself feeling something similar to what I felt years ago when I was leaving the Mormon church. This embarrassment came up a couple more times recently: once when my father told me that a friend of his was checking out my blog and again when a couple I go to the UU Church with, whom I greatly admire, asked me if I attend the CUUPS rituals, because they were thinking about checking it out. Both time I had this same gut reaction — a fear that they would think I was like “those other Pagans”.

Now all of this will probably seem very harsh to some ears, and I expect some people are going to give me slack for it. I probably deserve it — I’m not nearly as inclusive as many Pagans are. But I know I am not alone in this. One of the favorite pastimes of Pagans is to mock “those other Pagans” as being too [fill in the blank]. Paganism has very little of that sense of unity that so characterizes Mormonism. And yet, Paganism does have a public face. It is the face that is presented through CUUPS, through Pagan Pride Day, and through other public Pagan events. Some parts of these events I do like, but a lot of it leaves me feeling mostly embarrassed.

That was why I was excited to read Teo Bishop’s recent post “I Felt Ashamed at Pagan Pride”. It turns out that Teo’s embarrassment was not so broad as my own. His specific embarrassment concerned how a certain public ritual was handled in the face of some heckling by spectators. But Teo’s post did touch on some of the things I find very embarrassing about Paganism: The ritual at issue involved imagining “a ball of white light” which enveloped the circle. And the purpose of this ritual as stated was “protection”, which was expressed by the distribution of stones to everyone which had been blessed and inscribed with a pentacle and the word “protection.” Teo was embarrassed about the ritual because of how it excluded the spectators. But I would have been embarrassed, and in fact I am embarrassed reading about it, for different reasons. To me, the ritual Teo describes is flighty New Age drivel and not fundamentally different from praying to an all-powerful monotheistic God to save us from everything bad in the world. This single ritual would not be a major concern for me, but for the fact that I think this type of ritual is characteristic of the public face of Paganism. And it is something I absolutely do not want to be associated with.

I came to Paganism via feminist theaology with its pantheistic conception of divinity informed by process theology. This kind of Paganism offers a radically new conception of divinity and its relation to humanity. The Pagan Goddess is not “Yahweh in drag”, but a whole new kind of God. With Catherine Madsen, I affirm, “as someone who has known only the Father God, but as someone who has known the world: its droughts and floods, its extremes of climate, its strange combination of tender bounty and indifference”:

“However certain one may be that one is loved by some presence in the universe–and it is possible, at moments, to be very certain of that–that same presence will kill us all in tun, will visit our lovers with sudden and devastating illness, will freeze our crops, will age our friends, and will never for one moment stand between us and any person who wishes us harm.”

(Catherine Madsen, “If God is God She Is Not Nice: Roundtable Discussion”, in the Journal in Feminist Studies in Religion, vol. 5 (1989)). The Pagan deity I know as “Goddess” is not a comforting deity. In Starhawk’s words, the Goddess is “All Possibility” and “all means all”:

“I proliferate, I don’t discriminate. But you have the knife. I spin a billion billion threads, now, cut some and weave with the rest.”

(Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing). Thus, I believe the only “protection” to be found is that which we carve out of the real world with our own hands, not in spells or prayers. (For more on this, see my post “God is Change. Shape God.”)

As a humanist and a naturalist, I cringe at the sound of anything that smacks of magic: whether it be an spell of protection or a prayer to God to save us from disease, disaster or death. Similarly, as a Jungian, I am suspicious of all forms of religion which seek to divide the world (or ourselves) into good parts and bad parts and banish the latter. Paganism, as I understand it, is radical in its acceptance of the world as it is, the constructive and the destructive; the tragic side of life must be integrated, not exiled.

Admittedly, my “brand” of Paganism, informed by feminist thealogy, process theology, humanism, and Jungian psychology, is not representative of Paganism generally or even common. But I believe that only when Paganism is informed by these things, as well as the insights of “deep ecology” does it truly represent a possibility for transforming ourselves and the world. The ritual which Teo described reflects not just a variation on a theme. It is a Paganism that I do not recognize. It is a Paganism of wishful thinking and self-delusion. It is a Paganism which suffers from the same flaws as the 60’s counterculture hippie movement from which it sprang: an overemphasis of idealism over realism, endemic disorganization, and an inability to communicate its vision to the wider culture. And it is frankly a Paganism I am embarrassed to be associated with.

I suppose this is unavoidable in any religious community. Mormons have to deal with the image of fundamentalist polygamists. Catholics have to deal with the image of pedophile priests. Conservative Christians have to deal with the image of the Todd Akins of the world. Muslims have to deal with the image of the jihadists. I guess, in the big picture, its not such a big deal that I have to deal with the image of New Age “white lighters” and hippie nudists. Still, it’s enough to make me wonder sometimes if “Pagan” is what I want to be.

The Complete Works of Carl Jung (UPDATED)

Last updated on: June 16, 2015 at 3:00 pm By John Halstead

[UPDATE 6/16/15: Jung’s Collected Works can now be downloaded from Scribd.com.]

Christmas has come early for this Jungian Pagan. I have been on the hunt for Jung’s writings on the Internet and have not met with much luck … until now. Finding certain publications by Jung is very easy, but Jung was a prolific writer. His Collected Works span 18 volumes, not including the bibliography and general index. While it is easy to lay hands on collections of excerpts of Jung’s writings, like The Portable Jung, The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung, and so on, a complete set of his Collected Works is not easy to find. And his Collected Works does not include everything he wrote. There are also two volumes of letters, the quasi-autobiography entitled Memories, Dreams, Reflections, his Red Book, interviews collected in C.G. Jung Speaking, and numerous other letters and essays, both published and unpublished. So far, I have been unable to find a reliable and complete bibliography of Jung’s writings. In spite of the incompleteness and other limitations of the Collected Works (see Sonu Shamdasani, “The Incomplete Works of Jung”, in Who Owns Jung?, ed. Anne Casement (2007)), any serious student of Jung needs a copy, and until now I have not had mine. But I found a link with six .rar files which contain all 20 volumes of the Collected Works in .rtf and .pdf format. And the .rft (rich text format) documents are searchable. This is like Christmas for me.

There are some Jungian books I still want hard copies of:

The Red Book, ed. Sonu Shamdasani (I’ve been relying on this electronic copy and it’s just not the same, especially because of the artwork.)

Psychology and Religion by Jung (I want a cheap hard copy I can mark up.)

Jung Stripped Bare: By his biographers, even by Sonu Shamdasani

A Guided Tour of the Collected Works by Robert Hopcke (to complement my recent discovery of the electronic copy of the collected works)

The Sungod’s Journey through the Netherworld: Reading the Ancient Egyptian Amduat by Andreas Schweizer (from a Jungian perspective)

Other books I want to check out are:

Who Owns Jung? ed. Anne Casement

Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung’s Red Book by John Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani (to be published August 2013).

On Behalf of the Mystical Fool: Jung on the religious situation by John Dourley (my favorite interpreter of Jung)

Growing Up Jung: Coming of age as the son of two shrinks by Micah Toub (I read the first chapter of this and it was good.)

Psyche and Matter by Marie-Louise von Franz (one of Jung’s students and one of his the first interpreters)

Jung: A journey of transformation by Vivianne Crowley (a Pagan author)

Edge of the Sacred: Jung, psyche, earth by David Tacey (another great interpreter of Jung, who is highly critical of the New Age appropriation of Jung)

Journeys Into Emptiness: Dogen, Merton, Jung and the quest for transformation by Robert Gunn

Individuation and the Absolute: Hegel, Jung, and the path toward wholeness by Sean Kelly

Nietzsche and Jung: The whole self in the union of opposites by Lucy Huskinson

A Jungian Interpretation of the Goddess

Last updated on: November 4, 2012 at 6:24 am By John Halstead

John P. Dourley is my favorite interpreter of Jung. Author of numerous books on Jung, including A Strategy for a Loss of Faith, The Psyche as Sacrament, and On Behalf of the Mystical Fool: Jung on the Religious Situation. You can read a couple of his essays online: “The Foundational Elements of a Jungian Spirituality” (Scribd) and “Jung and the Recall of the Gods” (.pdf). My favorite, however, is his book, Goddess, Mother of the Trinity (1991). Unfortunately the book is out of print and hard to find in libraries. I was fortunate enough to track down a copy at the Chicago Public Library. So I thought I’d give a summary of it here.

Following Erich Neumann, Dourley offers a Jungian interpretation of “the Goddess” which equates the archetypal Mother Goddess with the unconscious. The unconscious is defined as that “unlimited and creative largess” which is the “deepest ground of the psyche”. According to Dourley: “Culturally we are an uprooted people because we have lost living touch with her vivifying and unifying energies.”

“Mother of the World” by Nicholas Roerich

This creative “matrix”, the unconscious, seeks to become fully real-ized (made real) in consciousness or the ego, which Dourley (following Jung) describes as its child. The Goddess, thus, gives birth to her child, consciousness, so that in the child she may come to know herself.

“The consciousness thus born moves, in the life of the individual and of humanity collectively, by the native rhythm of the psyche itself toward a sympathy as extensive as the embrace of the matrix mind which creates it and, in turn, seeks to become fully conscious in it. … In this manner does the mother of all consciousness seek to become real in each individual centre of consciousness in a process of mutual completion.”

The symbol of the Goddess and her child expresses well the relationship between consciousness and its divine matrix (the collective unconscious) as one of organic unity. Following Jung and Neumann, Dourley’s understanding of this deepest dimension of the psyche is best expressed by images of maternity and creativity.

However, this “birth” is not a one-time event, for the birth of consciousness is always necessarily partial, never total. The “inexhaustible creativity” and “infinity fecundity” of the Goddess seeks ever greater fulfillment through its expression in the human consciousness. The wholeness of the Goddess “can never be more than approximated in history.” According to Dourley, the claim that any one religious constellation exhausts this process of revelation is the substance of “psychic idolatory”. Consciousness must, therefore, always return to its source in the unconscious in order to expand the scope of its “empathy”.

According to Dourley, re-entering the womb of the Great mother is a “universal psychospiritual necessity”. The child, thus, must return to its mother, the Goddess. This return to the source is conceptualized as either a marriage with the Goddess (an incestuous one) or a return to the womb: death (self-sacrifice), followed by a rebirth. Dourley describes the unconscious matrix as “she who creates, destroys and renews human consciousness”. Thus the Goddess is not only Mother, but also Lover and Destroyer (see Robert Graves’ The White Goddess). The cyclical process, called “individuation”, repeats itself again and again in the psyche (both individual and collective) in an organic and dialectic process of ever-increasing mutual self-completion. In this reciprocity, the individual is redeemed through the ingression into the Goddess, and the Goddess is redeemed through her manifestation in the individual, or rather through her “progressive incarnation in existential life.”

This movement alternates between separation and reunion of the unconscious and consciousness, the Goddess and her child, which is perceived by the conscious ego as birth and death, respectively. When successful, this re-entrance into the Mother’s re-creating depths and the subsequent return to consciousness becomes the rhythm of a person’s life, a cyclical movement into into and out of the divine matrix which Dourley describes as “the ego’s love affair with the Great Goddess”.

The process is driven teleologically toward an ultimate and complete union of the ego and the unconscious, toward a wholeness which Jung calls the “Self”. Through each cycle the unconscious becomes progressively more incarnate in consciousness, and the scope of consciousness’s “empathy” increases. The move toward wholeness is a “paradoxical combination of greater personal integration and extended universal empathy.” According to Dourley, the goal of this development of consciousness is not perfection, but rather “completeness”.

Ironically, however, this process of increasing completeness demands the periodic death of the conscious ego. The ego

“constantly dies in its conflicted and restricted consciousness toward patterns or resolution of opposites and broader, more encompassing empathies, in a process that can never be completed in a lifetime, but can never be avoided without the sin of self-betrayal.”

Mythologically, this process is revealed in the numerous myths of dying gods and goddesses (or heroes and heroines), i.e., Ishtar, Osiris, Ba’al, Odin.

It is the desire to resolve the oppositions inherent in the conscious life which drive the ego to its death. These oppositions are manifest in myth as the slayer of the dying god or hero, he who is the dark twin of the god, both the same and “other”. In the womb (or the underworld), the god or the hero discovers “the unifying symbol which bears to consciousness the energies and more embracing empathy of resurrected life”.

But two pathologies can interfere with this process. While there is a healthy “nostalgia for the source from which we came” which pulls the ego toward the feminine and toward death, there is also a pathological

“refusal or inability to return to the conscious world with the re-creational energies given by the Goddess. As Jung explains, ‘As the Godhead [Goddess] is essentially unconscious, so to is the man who lives in God[dess].’ This is the fate of the addict and the truth of the mystic. The former can get in but not out. The latter can do both.”

“Consciousness once immersed in its transforming origin, must resist the temptation to give itself forever to her enticing dissolution.”

On the other hand, there is also a resistance to the return to the source, as it requires the ego “to forego the comfortable certitudes of a perspective, often gained with considerable pain.” The extreme form of this resistance is what Dourley refers to as “patriarchal consciousness”. It is

“every form of consciousness which prefers to remain within itself, to rely exclusively on its rational powers and willful energies and, so, to refuse the invitation of the Goddess to death and renewal in a life-long process with which the ego can and must co-operate but never control.”

This “refusal to re-enter the womb” is manifest in the myths of those gods and heroes who refuse the call of the goddess, i.e., Gilgamesh, Jehovah, Cuchuclain. Elsewhere, Dourley writes that, in Jungian terms, patriarchy “describes the pathological consciousness of members of wither gender when their conscious mind is severed from its roots in the archetypal and so divested of the experience of humanity’s native divinity.”

According to Dourley, in emphasizing the reality and power of the collective unconscious, Jung

“opened up to the twentieth century the possibility of the recovery of the Goddess which, when fully appropriated, can make less radical understandings of her nature and power look trivial and, when depicted as one among many deities rather than their common source, self-defeating.”

Jung Resources for Pagans

Last updated on: March 21, 2017 at 9:00 pm By John Halstead

I have just created a new menu on the side of my blog which contains links to Jung resources. Check it out. Most of these are hard-to-find writings by Jung himself. Jung’s writings, I have come to discover, are very hard to find on the Internet.

I also created a reading list of secondary sources for Pagans with an interest in Jung:

Americans and the Unconscious by Robert Fuller

Jung: A feminist revision by Susan Rowland

Jung and the Jungians on Myth by Steven Walker

Jung and the New Age by David Tacey

“Jung and the Recall of the Gods” by John Dourley

“Jung, Mysticism and a Myth in the Making” in Studies in Religion, vol. 30 (2001) by John Dourley

“Jung’s Metaphysics” in International Journal of Jungian Studies (2012) by Jon Mills

“Jung’s Psychologising of Religion” by Robert Segal in Beyond New Age: Exploring alternative spirituality, eds. Steven Sutcliffe and Marion Bowman

“On the Importance of Numinous Experience in the Alchemy of Individuation” by Murray Stein

Paul Tillich, Carl Jung, and the Recovery of Religion by John P. Dourley

Religion and the Spiritual in Carl Jung by Ann Ulanov [hard to find]

Remaking Men: Jung, spirituality, and social change by David Tacey

The Archetypal Imagination by James Hollis

The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s myth for modern man by Edward Edinger

The Discovery of the Unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry by Henri Ellenberger

“The Foundational Elements of a Jungian Spirituality” by John P. Dourley (Scribd)

The Goddess, Mother of the Trinity by John Dourley [hard to find]

“The Holy Grail of the Unconscious” in The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2009 by Sara Corbett

The Intellectual Autobiography of a Jungian Theologian by John Dourley, includes “Tillich, Jung and the Mystics”, “The Psyche as Sacrament”, and “Love, Celibacy and the Inner Marriage” [hard to find]

The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the gods and goddesses by David Miller, with an appendix by James Hillman, “Psychology: Monotheistic or polytheistic”

The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis: Individuation and integration in post-Freudian theory by Suzanne Kirschner

The Religious Function of the Psyche by Lionel Corbett

The Symbolic Quest by Edward Whitmont

The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s anticipation of psychoanalysis by Jon Mills

Tracking the Gods: The place of myth in modern life by James Hollis