Are the gods real?

Last updated on: October 4, 2012 at 5:21 am By John Halstead

Do we worship the same gods?

Over at Patheos, Star Foster recently published an interesting post on the “Problem of the Personal Experience”. In it she explains that she recently turned down the opportunity to edit a devotional anthology to the god Hephaistos, who she worships. She writes: “The reason I couldn’t do it is because I have very strong personal relationship with Hephaistos. And all of those submissions bore little relevance to my personal relationship to him.” She goes on to explain that many of the submissions were beautiful, but she could not relate to them. To give some context, Star is a hard polytheist or deity-centered Pagan who believes that Hephaistos “truly exists” in the same way that evangelical Christians, for example, believe in their God, and she has developed a personal relationship with Hephaistos.

Although Star didn’t take her essay in this direction, I think her experience raises interesting questions about the objectiveness of polytheistic deities. Now, mind you, I know many polytheistic Pagans have had the opposite experience. In fact, one person, Anthony Hart-Jones, said so in the comments. Anthony writes that he developed a personal relationship with the Morrigan. When Anthony met another person who followed the Morrigan, he says their “mental images” bore only a passing resemblance, but the “personality” was the same.

But what happens when two people who worship the same god or goddess meet up and realize that they have very different conceptions of the deity? Are they worshiping the same god? Or two gods with the same name?

Over at PaganSquare, Hellenic Pagan Elani Temperance recently wrestled with the same issue in the context of a discussion of “unverified personal gnosis” or UPG:

“On the one hand, I believe, with every fiber of my being, in the knowledge I have been made privy of by the Gods. I believe in my experiences and they are sacred to me. They run anywhere from synchronicious events to detailed biographies and some of them I will never share with anyone, they were that special. Throughout my practice, I have allowed UGP to push me forward in my path. […]

“On the other hand, there is UPG out there that contradicts mine, that I personally think is completely incorrect or that questions everything I believe in. Needless to say, this is UPG I struggle with. I can’t view it as invalid; I respect everyone’s path too much for that, but where does it fit in with my believes? We are talking about the same Gods, right?”

(emphasis added).

From a polytheistic perspective, there are ways to explain this. If the gods are persons, then it is possible for the gods to interact with different people in different way, to present different “faces”, as it were — just as we ourselves present different “faces” to different people. In fact, we sometimes speak as if we are different people in different situations or with different company. Perhaps this is true of the gods as well.

But is there another explanation? Is it possible to provide an account for polytheistic experience that is consistent with a naturalistic premise? Is there a naturalistic explanation for polytheistic experience that does not pathologize the experience and is consistent with polytheists’ own descriptions of their experiences?

Gods as Archetypes

Both Jung and “archetypes” have fallen out of favor in contemporary Pagan discourse, but I believe that is because Jung’s ideas have been watered down so that the term “archetype” has (incorrectly) become synonymous with “metaphor”. In this Jung-lite approach, the archetypal gods understood as mere metaphors for nature. But this is not what Jung had in mind when he spoke of archetypes.

The archetypes, according to Jung (in his mature thought), are “dynamic, instinctual complexes which determine psychic life.” (“Psychological Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Collected Works, vol. 11). Jung saw the “gods” as anthropomorphic projections of the archetypes. The archetypes for Jung are ineffable and practically inexhaustible, characteristics that correlate with divine categories. Jung writes, “Psychologically speaking, the domain of ‘gods’ begins where consciousness leaves off […]” (“A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity”, Collected Works, vol. 11). He explains that the ruling powers of the psyche compels “the same belief or fear, submission or devotion which a God would demand from [humankind].”

“[…] we seldom find anybody who is not influenced and indeed dominated by desires, habits, impulses, prejudices, resentments, and by every conceivable kind of complex. All these natural facts function exactly like an Olympus full of deities who want to be propitiated, served, feared and worshipped, not only by the individual owner of this assorted pantheon, but by everybody in his vicinity.” (“The History and Psychology of a Natural Symbol”, Collected Works, vol. 11).

The archetypes are not metaphors. They are form without content, potentialities rather than actualities. Their existence can only be inferred from our experience of archetypal images, which are necessarily only partial expressions of the archetype.

Archetypes as “Other”

For Jung, the most powerful religious experiences are archetypal experiences. This was not a reductive claim, as Jung believed that the religious quest was the most meaningful aspect of human experience. Archetypal experience is “numinous”, a term Jung borrowed from Rudolf Otto. According to Otto, the essential characteristic of the “numinous” is that it is mysterious or “wholly other”. The archetypal experience, then, is an experience, to one degree or another, of “otherness” within our own subjectivity. Jung described the power of the archetypes to fascinate, possess, and overcome us.

In the New Testament, for example, Paul spoke of “another law” at work within him. (Romans 7:15-23). Jung himself spoke of another “will” operating within him. He speaks of the experience of “spontaneous agencies”, and of “elements in ourselves which are strange to us”. And he describes the consciousness as being surrounded by “a multitude of little luminosities” or quasi-consciousnesses. (“On the Nature of the Psyche”, Collected Works, volume 8).

While the empiricist in him preferred the terms “unconscious” and “archetypes”, Jung explains that “God” and “daimon” are synonyms for the unconscious which convey the numinosity, the “otherness”, of the experience better:

“[Humankind] cannot grasp, comprehend, dominate them [numinous experiences]; nor can he free himself or escape from them, and therefore feels them as overpowering. Recognizing that they do not spring from his conscious personality, he calls them mana, daimon, or God. […] Therefore the validity of such terms as mana, daimon, or God can be neither disproved nor affirmed. We can, however, establish that the sense of strangeness connected with the experience of something objective, apparently outside the psyche, is indeed authentic.

“We know that something unknown, alien, does come our way, just as we know that we do not ourselves make a dream or an inspiration, but that it somehow arises of its own accord. What does happen to us in this manner can be said to emanate from mana, from a daimon, a god, or the unconscious. The first three terms have the great merit of including and evoking the emotional quality of numinosity, whereas the latter the unconscious is banal and therefore closer to reality. […] The unconscious is too neutral and rational a term to give much impetus to the imagination. […]

“The great advantage of the concepts ‘daimon’ and ‘God lies in making possible a much better objectification of the vis-a-vis, namely, a personification of it. Their emotional quality confers life and effectuality upon them.”

(italics added).

The Experience of the Archetypes

Sometimes archetypal experiences arise out of contact with wild nature, in which case they may be identified with objects in nature, as when we name a place with the name of deity. (Perhaps this is how animism first arose.) Other times, archetypal experiences occur in the context of religious ritual, in which case they may be identified with the paraphernalia of the ritual. (This may be how totemism first arose.) In both these cases, the archetypal image may be equated with some object separate from us. But archetypal experiences do not always occur through interaction with an object. Sometimes, as in the case of dreams or active imagination, there is no external referent. (This may explain how spiritualism first arose.)

Regarding his own experimentation with active imagination (the subject of a future post), Jung wrote:

“Philemon [Jung’s personal image of the “Wise Old Man” archetype] and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. […] I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me. […] Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality.” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections).

Jung’s description of his own encounter with the archetypes here is fascinating from a polytheistic perspective. Jung acknowledges that his experience of an archetype was of a personality, something separate from what he identified as “I”. This experience of otherness within one’s own subjectivity can manifest in subtle ways such as inspiration, and in less subtle ways such as divine revelation, schizophrenia, or even so-called “spirit possession”. It should be evident that we are not speaking of mere metaphors here.

“Although everything is experienced in image form, i.e., symbolically, it is by no means a question of fictitious dangers but of very real risks upon which the fate of a whole life may depend. The chief danger is that of succumbing to the fascinating influence of the archetypes, and this is most likely to happen when the archetypal images are not made conscious. If there is already a predisposition to psychosis, it may even happen that the archetypal figures, which are endowed with a certain autonomy anyway on account of their natural numinosity, will escape from conscious control altogether and become completely independent, thus producing the phenomena of possession.” (“Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, Collected Works, vol. 9).

Jung could describe divine visitation and spirit possession as psychological, because for him the psyche was both more capacious and less unitary than what we ordinarily think of as the mind. It is indeed a “cosmos”. So is Jung saying it’s “all in our heads”? Yes. But, as Lon Milo Duquette writes, “you just have no idea how big your head is.” Jung explains:

“… the individual imagines that he has caught the [unconscious] psyche and holds her in the hollow of his hand. He is even making a science of her in the absurd supposition that the intellect, which is but a part and a function of the psyche, is sufficient to comprehend the much greater whole. In reality the psyche is the mother and the maker, the subject and even the possibility of consciousness itself. It reaches so far beyond the boundaries of consciousness that the latter could easily be compared to an island in the ocean. Whereas the island is small and narrow, the ocean is immensely wide and deep and contains a life infinitely surpassing, in kind and degree, anything known on the island so that if it is a question of space, it does not matter whether the gods are ‘inside’ or ‘outside.'”

The Nature of the Archetypes

Jung’s view on the ontological nature of the archetypes is notoriously difficult to nail down. For one thing, his views evolved over his career, so it is possible to pull contradictory statements out of different works. For another, Jung’s writing is rarely a model of scientific clarity. But perhaps the most important reason is because he intentionally maintained a certain ambiguity on this issue. Charles D. Laughlin writes:

“I believe that the ambiguity was necessitated by Jung’s inability to scientifically reconcile his conviction that the archetypes are at once embodied structures and bear the imprint of the divine; that is, the archetypes are both structures within the human body, and represent the domain of spirit. Jung’s intention was clearly a unitary one, and yet his ontology seemed often to be dualistic, as well as persistently ambiguous, and was necessarily so because the science of his day could not envision a non-dualistic conception of spirit and matter.” (“Archetypes, Neurognosis, and the Quantum Sea”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 10, no. 3 (1996)).

For Jung, the archetypes have both a material aspect (brain) and a non-material aspect (experience). New Age writers have a tendency to describe the archetypes as if they are Platonic forms, but Jung considered himself an empiricist and insisted on the biological nature of the archetypes:

“They [the archetypes] are inherited with the brain structure – indeed they are its psychic aspect. […] They are thus […] that portion through which the psyche is attached to nature, or in which its link with the earth and the world appears at its most tangible.” (“Mind and Earth”, Collected Works, vol. 10).

In spite of his commitment to empiricism, Jung rejected reductive forms of materialism. On the other hand, Jung also sought to avoid the opposite problem of psychologism, which reduced the gods to illusions. For Jung, the material and non-material aspects of the archetypes are two different aspects of the same thing, seen from two perspectives, one objective and one subjective. In philosophical terms, Jung was a “neutral monist” and adopted a “double aspect theory” to explain the relationship between the physical and the psychic.

In Jung’s view, the “gods” are term for the subjective experience of the archetypes. And Jung believed this was the only meaningful way to speak about gods. So, if I were to ask if the gods are “objectively real”, I would have to say “no” — at least not in the sense in which rocks, and dirt, and the sun are real. In Jung’s view, it makes no sense to speak of the gods apart from our own experience of them.

“… it is not possible to maintain any non-psychological doctrine about the gods. If the historical process of world despiritualization continues as hitherto, then everything of a divine or daemonic character out side us must return to the psyche, to the inside of the unknown man, whence it apparently originated.” (“The History and Psychology of a Natural Symbol”, Collected Works, vol. 11).

If human beings ceased to exist, then so would the gods. The gods have no ontological status apart from us. They have no transcendental referent. While they sometimes arise through our interaction with the world, this is not necessary. They may be a purely internal experience.

Polytheism and the Archetypes

Jungian theory explains why the experience one polytheist of a certain deity devotee could diverge from another’s. But it also explains why they are the sometimes the same, why Anthony’s experience (above) resembled that of another worshiper of the Morrigan. The answer is what Jung called the “collective unconscious”. The “collective unconscious” is a term which has been much abused and misunderstood, but I believe it can be explained from a naturalistic perspective.

In Affective Neuroscience (1998), neuroscientist and psychobiologist Jaak Panksepp writes:

“… our brains resemble old museums that contain many of the archetypal markings of our evolutionary past. … Our brains are full of ancestral memories and processes that guide our actions and dreams but rarely emerge unadulterated by cortico-cultural influences during our everyday activities.”

This statement could easily have been written by Jung, instead of a neuroscientist. Because we share a biology and because groups of us share certain cultural conditioning, we can expect that certain of archetypal experiences will be similar in two people who have not interacted before. This is why we find similar motifs in the mythology of cultures separated by time and space, and this is why Anthony’s experience (above) resembles that of other devotees of the Morrigan.

Jung’s theory of the gods is, I believe, consistent with polytheist’s own descriptions of their experiences. Polytheists often describe the gods as needing human worship to give them existence, something like an egregore. I first encountered this idea expressed in the a 1967 episode of Star Trek titled “Who Mourns for Adonis?”, and later in Neil Gaiman’s 2001 book American Gods. (I have a theory that Gaiman’s book may have had a direct influence on the growth of hard polytheism in the Pagan community.) Perhaps the idea of egregores can be seen as polytheists’ way of acknowledging the subjectivity of gods. While some polytheists insist on the objectivity of their deities, I have seen more say that the question is irrelevant to them.

Still, to speak about the gods as subjective may seem reductive to some polytheists. When the world is examined through the objective lens of science, I maintain that the gods are absent. But, of course, this is also true of many other human experiences, like love, awe, and self-transcendence — experiences which many people describe as the most “real” experiences of their lives. A neuroscientist may reduce any of these experiences to biochemical reactions or light spots on an MRI, but such an explanation does not fully account for the experience. Something is missing from the purely objective description which the poet tries to express through words, an artist through paint or other media, the musician through an instrument, the dancer through movement, and the contemporary Pagan through ritual and myth.

I have written elsewhere about the need to emphasize the “otherness” of the archetypes. Jung warned against identification with the archetypes, which he called “inflation”. By emphasizing the otherness of the gods, we avoid reducing them to mere metaphors and we preserve the sense of danger that arises from interacting with the gods. On the other hand, it is possible to overemphasize the otherness of the gods, and this is what I believe polytheists do when they insist that their gods exist as distinct beings. What Christian theologian R. H. J. Steuart wrote about the Christian God could just as well have been written about polytheistic deities:

“We are obliged to preserve the concept of the ‘otherness’ of God [or the gods] from ourselves even though we cannot use it without distorting or at least wrongly stressing it. […] It is an otherness which not only does not exclude but positively (just because it is what it is) includes and demands oneness — a oneness, indeed, which is actually more real and intimate than what we would normally describe as identification.”

Depression as a friend (updated)

Last updated on: July 18, 2012 at 3:55 pm By John Halstead

Hello darkness, my old friend

I’ve come to talk with you again
— “The Sound of Silence”, Simon and Garfunkel

Let me preface this by saying that I have never suffered from long term depression, depression that lasted years — unless you count the years of misery that preceded my leaving the religion of my birth. Okay, yeah, I should probably count that. Since then, I have experienced long periods of depression in the winter and shorter bouts of depression during the warmer months. Also, what I call “depression” is rarely debilitating. I still get out of bed, eat, go to work and so on, although the these activities are impacted when I am depressed. What helps me survive these periods is my Pagan and Jungian belief that depression, while unpleasant, is not bad.

Over at his blog, Teo Bishop has written a post about what we do when we are “stuck in the winter” of our lives. Teo’s post is worth reading — as much for what he says about daily personal spiritual practice as anything — as are the comments, many from people who suffer from long-term depression. One thing that I have learned from the pagan paradigm is that the “fallow tides” of life are unavoidable. In fact, not only is it not possible to avoid them, but we shouldn’t try to. The dark times in our lives are part of life. Our psychic lives are no more meant to be all “light and sweetness” than than any other part of the living world. This recognition helps me weather these fallow periods with a measure of grace. I suspect it also shortens their length, although it is difficult to say. I believe that, if I were to resist these periods, that I might be able to delay them, but not forever, and they would return with a vengeance.

My religion of origin, Mormonism, is what I call a “religion of light”. It eschews darkness in all forms, including depression and any form of unhappiness. Happiness, to Mormons, is a sign of grace. It means that you are living your life according to God’s plan and the Church’s rules. If you are unhappy, it means you are doing something wrong; it means you are sinning. It is no surprise then that Mormons eschew psychotherapy, which they see as a poor substitute for “living the gospel”. Going to therapy would be tantamount to an admission of guilt. This creates a Catch-22 for many Mormons because Mormon dogma encourages a kind of perfectionism which leads to depression. Just imagine Pleasantville and you wouldn’t be too far off. This is why Utah ranks number one in depression (also suicide) [see also this link] and why Utah Valley is sarcastically called “Happy Valley” — because so many people are taking Prozac.

Like Pagans, Jungians believe that depression is not something to be resisted. Jung wrote that all neurosis (in which we would include depression) has a meaning and a purpose. (CW 4.415). He writes:

“Only if we understand and accept the neurosis as our truest and most precious possession can we be sure of avoiding stagnation and of not succumbing to rigidity and neurotic subterfuge. In the neurosis is hidden one’s worst enemy and best friend.”

(CW 10.359)

“We should not try to ‘get rid’ of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is. We should even learn to be thankful for it, otherwise we pass it by and miss the opportunity of getting to know ourselves as we really are. A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it–it cures us. A man is ill, but the illness is nature’s attempt to heal him.”

(CW 10.361)

Post-Jungian, James Hillman, argues that therapeutic attempts to eliminate depression echo the Christian myth of resurrection, but have the unfortunate effect of demonizing soulful state of being:

“Depression is still the Great Enemy. More personal energy is expended in manic defenses against, diversions from, and denials of it than goes into other supposed psychopathological threats to society: psycho- pathic criminality, schizoid breakdown, addictions. As long as we are caught in cycles of hoping against despair, each productive of the other, as long as our actions in regard to depression are resurrective, implying that being down and staying down is sin, we remain Christian in psychology.

“Yet through depression we enter depths and in depths find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness. It reminds of death. The true revolution (in behalf of soul) begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression. Neither jerking oneself out of it, caught in cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering it through till it turns, nor theologizing it – but discovering the consciousness and depths it wants. So begins the revolution on behalf of the soul.”

“Re-Visioning Psychology” (1975). I can’t think of a better example of the “theologizing” of depression than Mormonism.

David Miller compares depressive states to the “dark night of the soul” in the apophatic mystical tradition and concludes:

“Could it be that the epidemic psychological depression in North America may be a concealed wish for spirituality, but not spirituality in the sense of conventional positive, literalistic religion, nor in the sense of a New Age spiritual transcendence of darkness? Could it be that the malaise so many feel really wants not to be gotten rid of, not healed, but deepened and, like the neurosis, ‘accepted as our truest and most precious possession.’ (quoting Jung)”

“If this were so, then Prozac, New Age remedies, cocaine, martini lunches, counselling, meditation, therapy, religious practice, support and recovery groups, self-help literature–all, if they imagine themselves to be to the purpose of “curing” depression and low self- esteem, may well be not only ill advised, but even counter-productive …”

(“Nothing almost sees miracles! Self and no-self in psychology and religion”, lecture given as the fourth annual Jim Klee Forum lecture at West Georgia College on May 17, 1993. A print version of the essay appeared in The Journal of the Psychology of Religion, 4-5 (1995-1996): 1-26.)

Certainly, if one is truly “stuck in winter”, this is not a condition which anyone would want to prolong. However, as a Pagan and as a Jungian, I believe the question we should be asking ourselves is not, “How do I bring this condition to its most rapid end?”, but rather, “What is it that my soul is trying to tell me?” I am obviously not an expert in these matters. My own experience includes my own depression and watching many other people struggle with depression. From I experience, I believe that the way out is not through drugs (prescribed or otherwise) or right living or positive mental attitude or visualizing white light. Sometimes the only way out of the pit is, as Dante shows us, though the bottom.

As they say, “When you’re falling, dive!”

Monika Wikman writes in her book, Pregnant Darkness: Alchemy and the Rebirth of Consciousness,

“Our deepest darknesses are pregnant with incredible life energy.

“Cultivating a living relationship with the mysteries of the psyche and psychoid depends on our ability to of into the darkness, dim the light of the ego, and attend to what appears. We descend into the darkness voluntarily when we meditate or engage in any kind of spiritual practice, dream work, active imagination, shamanic journeying, creative endeavor, and so on. We descend involuntarily through depression and crises, such as health problems, loss of love, loss of position, and so on. […]

“both of these paths, the active one where we court the soul, and the one in which crisis pulls us into the psyche, can lead us to the source of transformation and renewal.”

Is it possible then that depression can truly be our friend? our guide? and “source of transformation and renewal”?

Soul-Centered Paganism

Last updated on: June 2, 2012 at 4:46 pm By John Halstead

This post is Part 3 of a 3-part series on my evolving sense of Pagan identity. In Part 1 of this series, I admitted to being guilty of a kind of Pagan fundamentalism in my conception of the Pagan community. In Part 2, I envisioned a Pagan community consisting of (at least) three centers with overlapping areas: earth-centered Paganism, Self-centered Paganism (intentionally capitalized), and deity-centered Paganism.

From Self-centered to earth-centered Paganism

“There is a fine old story about a student who came to a rabbi and said, ‘In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God. Why don’t they any more?’ The rabbi replied, ‘Because nowadays no one can stoop so low.'”

— Jung

In their book, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America, Robert Ellwood and Harry Partin identified two of the three “centers” of Paganism discussed in my previous post:

“The unifying theme among the diverse Neo-Pagan traditions is the ecology [1] of one’s relation to nature and [2] to the various parts of one’s self. As Neo-Pagans understand it, the Judaeo-Christian tradition teaches that the human intellectual will is to have dominion [1] over the world, and [2] over the unruly lesser parts of the human psyche, as it, in turn, is to be subordinate to the One God and his will. The Neo-Pagans hold that, on the contrary, we must cooperate with nature and its deep forces on a basis of reverence and exchange. Of the parts of man, the imagination should be first among equals, for man’s true glory is not in what he commands, but in what he sees. What wonders he sees [1] of nature and [2] of himself he leaves untouched, save to glorify and celebrate them. […]

“What Neo-Pagans seek is a new cosmic religion oriented to the tides not of history but [1] of nature — the four directions, the seasons, the path of the sun — and [2] of the timeless configurations of the psyche. […]”

This has continued to be one of the most important descriptions of Paganism for me ever since I first read it. Ellwood and Partin’s book was published in 1973, before the explosion of deity-centered Paganism, and at a time when more deity-centered Heathenry was considered by many (including many Heathens themselves) to be outside the Pagan umbrella. I come back to this quote often because, not only does it identify the two strains of Paganism with which I identify, but it also implies a connection between these two.

My introduction to Paganism was through a Self-centered perspective. (Note: As described in Part 2, “Self” — which is intentionally capitalized — refers to a transpersonal wholeness which transcends, but includes, the ego. Thus, “Self-centeric” is not equivalent to ego-centric.) I saw Paganism as a modern-day mystery religion. One of the things I still appreciate about my religion of origin, Mormonism, is their temple rituals. Unlike Mormons’ aesthetically bland weekly Sunday worship in their multi-purpose meetinghouses, Mormon temple ceremonies are an example of symbolically-rich high ritual. Around the time I left the Mormon church, I came across an article (which I have unfortunately not been able to locate since) which compared LDS temple rituals to the ancient mystery religions. It should then come as no surprise that, years later, my first exposure to Paganism was through an article by Jungian therapist and Wiccan, Vivianne Crowley, “Wicca as a Modern-Day Mystery Religion”.

From the perspective of Self-centered Pagans, like Vivianne Crowley, ritual is designed to facilitate the process of psychological integration and spiritual transformation. As in the ancient mystery religions, this may be accomplished through a symbolic or ritualized death. As Harold Jantz writes in The Mothers in Faust, initiation

“as in all the great mysteries, must first make real to the initiate the meaning of death, total extinction, utter loneliness, and then lead him on, through deep ineffable terror to the mystic glowing hearth of rebirth, of constantly renewed life, of the awareness of his oneness with the totality of life.”

Sometimes this symbolic death is accomplished through “participation” in the mythic death of a fertility deity — but this was about as earthy as my Paganism got in those early years. It seems like a lot of Self-centered Paganism is like that: mainly esoteric in nature, with a romanticized conception of “Nature”, and some eco-friendly practices tacked on almost as an afterthought.

Eventually, though, I came to feel that my ritual experience was missing something. For one thing, I was conducting my rituals shut up indoors with my books. Although my rituals invoked a symbolic nature, I had no real contact with nature in my rituals. So I moved outside, which was a necessary but not sufficient step in the right direction. Around the same time, I read a couple of essays which helped me to realize that my interaction with nature was still superficial: Chas Clifton’s essay “Nature Religion for Real” and Barry Patterson’s essay “Finding your way in the woods“, which is part of his book, The Art of Conversation with the Genius Loci. I gradually came to realize that I needed to connect my Self-centered practice to my burgeoning eco-centered awareness.

Soul-Centered Paganism: Nature and Psyche

“The mystery of the cosmos before which our mind stands in awe becomes one with the mystery within us by which we ethically strive; and both come together in the sense that somehow, in a way inexpressible to us, it is all meaningful.”

— William Barrett

The writings of Carl Jung, James Hillman, Theodore Roszak (who coined the term “eco-psychology”), and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin, have helped me reconcile these two paths — at least theoretically. From these authors, I have developed a conception of nature and psyche which tries to overcome the dualism inherent in traditional understandings of these concepts.

Conceptually, I understand nature and psyche (or soul) as two different perspectives on the same thing. Step one is to propose that “nature” includes not only our physical bodies, but also that thing which we call mind, including consciousness and the unconscious. That is a proposition, I think, that would be easy for most religious naturalists to accept.

Step two is to reverse the principle: Just as nature extends “within” to include the psyche, so psyche extends “without” to include nature. James Hillman describes psyche (soul), not as something inside of us, but as something that we are “inside” of. Psyche extends beyond our individual mind to include other people and all of nature. Hence, Hillman can speak of “a psyche the size of the earth”. “The greater part of the soul lies outside the body” says Hillman (paraphrasing the medieval alchemist and doctor Sendivogius). Now this might seem to violate one of the central tenets of a naturalistic philosophy: that “mind” does not extend to inanimate things. But when I say that psyche extends beyond the individual self, I am not talking about literal animism, but rather about the subjective experience of Nature.

Jung wrote that we need to “reconcile ourselves to the mysterious truth that the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit – the two being really one”. I understand “nature” to be psyche seen from without and “psyche” to be nature seen from within. Thus, “nature” is everything inside and out of me when viewed from an objective perspective, whereas “psyche” is everything inside and outside of me when viewed from a subjective perspective. As Jung wrote:

“The psyche, if you understand it as a phenomenon occurring in living bodies, is a quality of matter, just as our body consists of matter. We discover that this matter has another aspect, namely, a psychic aspect. It is simply the world seen from within.”

Instead of some kind of mystical pleroma, the so-called “collective unconscious” becomes in this perspective all of those powers which determine our fate which are beyond our conscious self. This includes our natural environment and our inherited culture. Jung wrote that

“the collective unconscious is simply Nature — and since Nature contains everything it also contains the unknown. … Everything that is stated or manifested by the psyche is an expression of the nature of things, whereof man is a part.”

This understanding of psyche is, I think, consistent with a naturalistic perspective in so far as it avoids the dualism of a lot of talk about “soul”. Also, it gives the subjective experience its due, something which the naturalistic perspective often fails to do.

Bill Plotkin calls this ecopsychological perspective a “soul-centered” approach. A “soul-centered” Paganism can potentially combine the earth-centric drive to connect to the more-than-human world with the Self-centric search for greater wholeness, the two being facets of the same drive. From the “soul-centered” perspective, both earth-centered and Self-centered Paganism seek a transcendence of the ego and a transpersonal wholeness. Adrian Harris calls this “Self-realization”, a term he borrows from Arne Naess, the father of deep ecology. It is no coincidence that the term is also used in depth psychology. (Naess borrows the term from Gandhi’s interpretation of the Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita. And many have recognized a connection between Jungian depth psychology and the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta for which the Gita is a source.)

The Three Centers of Paganism — The green circle represents the penumbra of the “Pagan umbrella”.

Both earth-centered and Self-centered Paganism seek connection with the “other” — not Rudolf Otto’s “Wholly Other”, but Martin Buber’s and Emmanuel Levinas’ relational other. Earth-centered practice seeks this otherness or alterity in the psyche of the world (psyche tou kosmou or anima mundi), while Self-centered practice seeks it in the personal psyche. Ecopsychologists like James Hillman, Theodore Roszak, and Bill Plotkin see these two processes as connected. Hillman writes:

“an individual’s harmony with his or her ‘own deep self’ requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world. The deepest self cannot be confined to ‘in here’ because we can’t be sure it is not also or even entirely ‘out there’!”

Jung himself experienced something like this. The last words he wrote in his autobiography describe how increasing identification with the natural world led him to a decreasing identification with the ego:

“Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.”

Somatic Paganism

But how does this play out in practice? It is not enough to just go on practicing Self-centered Paganism and claim that it’s the same thing as earth-centered practice — which seems to be what a lot of Neopaganism does. An example of this is when Neopagans (mis)use Jung’s theory to facilely identify “inner” archetypes (like the “Great Mother”) with “outer” physical phenomena (like the Earth). This kind of projection is ego-centric and is precisely the opposite of what a truly Self-centered and earth-centered Paganism seeks. Nor do I think it is safe to assume that by trying to heal the earth (through direct environmental action for example) we can heal ourselves.

I confess that I do not have the answer to this problem. The two practices still feel different to me, in spite of all my theorizing that they are the same. Take my morning ritual which is more earth-centered and feels extroverted (outward-turned), whereas my evening devotional is more Self-centered and feels more introverted (inward-turned). While I can theorize that the inward is outward and vice versa, I still experience them differently.

It seems to me that, if I am to discover how to meld these two practices, there is one place where I may find the answer: my body. The body is the place where our subjective experience and objective reality meet. It is the place where psyche meets nature, where inner and outer meet and mingle, where “me” blends imperceptibly into the “other”. I believe it is through my “body-self” that I may discover and connect the “gods within” (the archetypes of the unconscious) and the “gods without” (the immensities of nature).

"Theologue" by Alex Grey — “Theologue” by Alex Grey

I was first introduced to somatic practice in the context of my early Self-centered Pagan practice, through the writings of New Age author and former president of the Church of All Worlds, Anodea Judith, on chakras. Now, I know just the mention of the word “chakra” is likely to send many naturalists into a tailspin, but if you take away all the talk about “energy”, the premise that different parts of our body can “speak” to us is consistent with a naturalistic philosophy. Unfortunately, like many New Age authors, though, Judith tries to make a science of what is an art.

In addition to helping us connect with the “inner” psyche, somatic practice can be a vehicle for connecting with the “outer” psyche of nature. Adrian Harris has studied what might be the theoretical foundations of such a Somatic Paganism in his Ph.D. work: “The Wisdom of the Body: Embodied Knowing in Eco-Paganism” [abstract] [full thesis] and on his websites: embodiment.org.uk, thegreenfuse.org, and adrianharris.org. Harris draws on the work of Morris Berman, Gregory Bateson, Merleau-Ponty, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Wilhelm Reich, and others. Harris writes in his essay, “Sacred Ecology” that deep ecology, while valuable, is still fixed in the cerebral mode of the Western philosophical tradition. He proposes an even deeper deep ecology, one which moves beyond ratio-linguistic ways of knowing to “direct experience of a wholeness rooted in the body.” “Sacred ecology” is not an idea so much as an experience, what Harris calls “embodied knowing”, a practical and pre-reflexive way of knowing, which leads to a blurring of the boundary between self and other. This blurring is expressed well in the writings of David Abram, in which he describes how we are immersed in our landscape.

Harris believes that ritual in particular has the power to move us outside of the little box that is our head (what MacIver calls “craniocentrism”). Harris cites ritual theorist, Catherine Bell, Ronald Grimes, and Nick Crossley, as well as Wiccan and Religious Studies professor Nikki Bado-Fralick, for the proposition that ritual is a somatic strategy for producing an embodied form of knowing. Not all ritual will achieve this result though. Harris is critical of the highly structured ritual of esoteric and Wiccan Pagans, the goal of which is control and manipulation. He contrasts this with the more ecstatic and organic rituals of Eco-Pagan, the goal of which is connection. In addition to his thesis, on this point, see Harris’ essays, “A personal perspective on eco-magic” and “Eco-Paganism 101”.

In his thesis, Harris identifies several practices of Eco-Pagans which help create this felt sense of connection, including:

1) meditation (like Vipassana),

2) trance — not a out-of-body experience, but an experience of what Harris calls the “deep body”, “a deep embodied self that melts the boundaries between subject and object”,

3) ritual (especially ritual involving dance),

4) the “wilderness effect”, which Robert Greenway describes as psychological effects of being in wilderness for a period of a week or more, associated with extended trips in the U.S. wilderness as well as on some U.K. protest sites,

5) listening to the “threshold brook” (the term comes from Keats’ poem “The Human Seasons”), which Harris describes as fine-tuning our sensory awareness of the organic environment which results in a “deepening sense of place”,

6) the Focusing technique of Eugene Gendlin, which is used to draw attention to the “felt sense”, a tacit internal bodily awareness (expressed in the phrase “your body knows much that you don’t know”), and

7) the Heathen practice of “sitting out” (which resembles Setton sitting).

I myself have a practice which combines some elements of Harris’ “threshold brook” and Gendlin’s Focusing, with my version of the Quaker practice of silence. I previously posted about this practice that I call Listening to the Three Kindreds. This practice combines nature, psyche, and the body, though it still treats them as distinct. If Harris is correct though, these practices can result in an experience which blurs this distinction. This is something I hope to explore more in future posts.

“Post-Paganism”

Last updated on: March 21, 2017 at 8:55 pm By John Halstead

I am a label junkie. If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you probably have realized that. I am obsessed with drawing distinctions, circumscribing every social phenomena, and labeling it with an -ism. Anyway, I’ve discovered a great new label: Post-Pagan.

Glen “Fishbowl” Gordon maintains the PostPagan blog and recently guest posted at HumanisticPaganism.com about process theology, religious naturalism, and transpersonal psychology — everything I love. But Gordon’s contribution to HP is just a taste of what he is developing over at his own site, PostPagan.com, where he writes about Unitarian Universalism, Religious Naturalism, and what he calls “Bioregional Animism”. And he calls this Postpaganry, (formerly Postpaganism … Gordon doesn’t like -isms). I noted that although Gordon says Postpaganry doesn’t belong to anybody, he has trademarked the name, and I can’t blame him. It’s a great name! Is the double entendre intentional? (post = after; post = write on a blog)

I wish I had come across PostPagan before I wrote my series on American Neopaganism. Gordon rejects the Neopagan label for all the same reasons I struggle with it: anthropomorphism, supernaturalism, dualistic thinking (matter and spirit), magic as a projection of the human will, romanticizing nature, and neglecting the very places where we stand. He distinguishes Neopaganism (heavily influenced by esotericism and Wicca) from Eco-Paganism (which he relates to Deep Ecology and animism). While I still hope to rescue the term “Neopagan” from the esoterics, I totally understand Gordon’s motivation in this regard.

I am still working my way through the prior posts, but there are a couple of areas that PostPagan explores that jump out at me as really cutting edge and critical to rescuing this this thing (whatever we’re calling it) from the esoterics. The first is what I would call “Backyard Paganism” (which is part of what Gordon calls “Bioregional Animism“), distinguished from “the cosmic-humanism of mainstream neo-paganism”. It is a challenge to take the “nature religion” label seriously, where “nature” means, not some romanticized capital-N “Nature”, but what is right outside your door, right under your feet, and right in the air you are breathing right now. It is a kind of anti-cosmopolitan call to become rooted in the immediate, specific place where we dwell.

The second is an evolving, but radical notion of polytheism which combines (1) a concept of “deity”, not as a thing or a person, but as a relationship with natural phenomena, and (2) the search for “transpersonal” experience , which is the mystical experience of the “More Than Human”, but which is not supernatural. There is a lot packed in there and I can’t wait to see how Gordon works through it!

The two areas I diverge with Gordon are (1) his disdain for Jung and (2) his suspicion of introspection. I understand both, I think. Regarding the first, I agree that Jung is (ab)used my many Neopagans as another way of avoiding contact with nature. In this way, “Nature” becomes just another metaphor in an imaginary Jungian pantheon. I think this is an abuse of Jungian theory, though, and reject the “archetype = metaphor” equation. But that is for another post. Suffice it to say that Jung and nature religion are not incompatible. If you’re interested, check out The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life.

As to the second issue, introspection, I feel this is related to the first. Introspection, or “navel-gazing”, as Gordon calls it, can be escapist, and often is. However, I have come to suspect that there is a connection between seeking to relate to the inner wild landscape of our psyche and relating to the outer wild landscape of the world. These two “natures” are connected I believe. This connection is what I call “soul”. This is something that Bill Plotkin explores in his book, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche. But that is also for another post.

Anyway, you must go to PostPagan.com and check it out! Let me just end with this post with a quote from the site which wonderfully summarizes of what Postpaganry is. Gordon writes:

“For me, postpagan is about being relevant to the here and now, whenever and wherever that may be. It is an expression of life after neopaganism. It is about pushing the premise of nature-based spirituality and religion to its logical conclusion. It is about relating to the land where you live with as little appropriation as possible. It is about creating religious traditions, symbols, and mythology, which reflects current (scientific) understanding of the natural living-world. It is about exploring non-dual and holistic thinking within the context of post-modernity and the western-world.

“[…] Postpaganry is the moment when you are the most alive and aware of the world around you. postpaganry is when that moment sweeps you away in to spontaneous ceremony and celebration of life within and all around you. Postpaganry is the place where you feel the most at home, where you connect to the natural living-world in deep and intimate ways. A postpagan is someone who looks for the sacred everywhere they go. A postpagan takes breath as sacrament. A postpagan can be anybody at any time. A postpagan is someone who feels with their whole being, and that scares them and elates them at the same time.”

American Neopaganism, Part 2: “I think I may be a Wiccan”

Last updated on: May 3, 2012 at 10:15 am By John Halstead

In my last post, I wrote that Neopaganism was a distinguishable tradition from Wicca, and one that is in some ways at odds with the esotericism in which Wicca is rooted. In spite of that fact, through a series of historical accidents, the two are now almost entirely intertwined. The way this happened is interesting.

The history of the interaction of Wicca and Neopaganism can be described in three stages. First, British Traditional Wicca lost control of its brand when it was imported to the United States. Gradually, traditional Wicca was transformed into an Americanized “Neo-Wicca”, which was heavily influenced by feminism, environmentalism, the Sixties Counterculture, Jungian psychology, and Robert Graves’ mythology — the same things which were also influencing non-Wiccan American Neopaganism.

Second, this Neo-Wicca came to be conflated with Neopaganism, in part due to the actions of Ed Fitch and Oberon Zell, which will be described below. Neo-Wicca then began to function as a Pan-Pagan tradition which was spread through Neopagan publications like the Green Egg and at Neopagan festivals and through CUUPS. This Pan-Pagan tradition became so ubiquitous that many Pagans and non-Pagans alike began to think it as synonymous with Neopaganism and its Wiccan origins became obscured.

Third, this process was accelerated, ironically, by the insistence of some traditional Wiccans that the application of the term “Wiccan” be limited to those who are initiated into a traditional coven. As a result, many non-initiated Neo-Wiccans began calling themselves “Pagan” or “Neopagan”, although their beliefs and practices were in fact more Wiccan than not. This further obscured the influence of Wicca on Neopaganism.

Stage 1: From British Traditional Wicca to Neo-Wicca

In the 1970’s, the number of Wiccan traditions in the U.S. began multiplying. Most of these were derived, at least in part, from British Traditional Wicca. I have identified at least 19 different Wiccan traditions which were created in the U.S. and Canada between 1969 and 1979. And those are just the ones that left a record. While some of these perceived themselves as being “traditional” (as opposed to eclectic), each one helped to change Wicca from its original form in British Traditional Wicca.

Obviously two of the most important influences on the transformation of traditional Wicca into Neo-Wicca were the feminist spirituality/Goddess movement, which manifested as feminist witchcraft, and the environmental movement, which helped transform Wicca from a mystery religion into a nature religion. Two other, often overlooked influences on Neo-Wicca were Robert Graves and Carl Jung. I could write a great deal about the influence of these two, but for present purposes, I will just hit the highlights.

Robert Graves was a significant influence on Doreen Valiente, Robert Cochrane, the Farrars, Fred Adams, Z. Budapest, Aidan Kelly, Starhawk, and Ed Fitch, and many others. Graves, not Gerald Gardner, is the source for the mythology that is associated with the Neopagan festivals today. In traditional Wiccan mythology, the god is associated with darkness and winter, and the goddess with light and summer. In Graves’ mythos, however, the goddess and her consort, each have different aspects in different stations of the year; no one gender is associated exclusively with one eason or one psychological type. It was Graves’ mythology, not Gardner’s, which was adopted by Neo-Wiccans. In addition, Graves is responsible for the Triple Goddess motif which is so common in Neo-Wicca. The Triple Goddess is not present in any early traditional Wiccan writings and does not occupy an important place in any of the writings of Gerald Gardner or his American ambassador, Raymond Buckland.

Jung was an important influence on Starhawk and on Margot Adler. The latter is the granddaughter of Alfred Adler, who together with Jung and Freud, founded the psychoanalytical movement. Adler consistently turns to Jungian theory to defend Neo-Wicca in her book, Drawing Down the Moon. This book, while ostensibly descriptive, also came to have an important prescriptive effect on the development of Neo-Wicca. The influence of Jung can readily be seen in the writings of the Farrars and of Vivianne Crowley, herself a Jungian therapist. 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.” A good discussion of the influence of Jung on the Neo-Wiccan and Neopagan movements can be found in David Waldron’s Sign of the Witch: Modernity and the Pagan Revival and in this essay by David and Sharn Waldron.

Stage 2: From Neo-Wicca to Neopaganism: The Pagan Way

I have described above how traditional Wicca was transformed into Neo-Wicca through the influence of Robert Graves’ mythology and Jungian psychology, in addition to the feminist and environmental movements. These same influences gave birth to non-Wiccan forms of Neopaganism around the same time, including Feraferia and the Church of All Worlds. What remains to be shown is how Neo-Wicca became conflated with non-Wiccan Neopaganism. At the heart of this part of the story is the Pagan Way.

Ed Fitch was Gardnerian Wiccan. In 1969, Fitch, together with Joseph Wilson and others, began circulating Fitch’s Pagan Way materials, which began as a “outer court” training system for prospective Wiccan initiates, but quickly grew into a “celebratory” tradition of its own. These materials were first circulated informally by mailing houses and were later published in Herman Slater’s A Book of Pagan Rituals (without attribution). The Pagan Way is important to this discussion because of how it led to the confusion of essentially Wiccan practices with Paganism generally. This was encouraged by Fitch’s choice of the name “The Pagan Way” and the title of Slater’s book, A Book of Pagan Rituals.

Enter Oberon Zell, the founder of the Church of All Worlds. Zell is one of the most influential people in the history of Neopaganism, largely because of his publication of the Green Egg newsletter, which was the most important Neopagan forum from 1968 to 1976. The publication was instrumental in the formation of an emerging identity around the name “Neopagan”. In fact, Margot Adler credits Zell with popularizing the term “Neopagan” to describe the growing movement. Zell was an unabashed eclectic. This was reflected not only in his polyamous lifestyle, but also in his religious associations. He describes his working group in 1978 as including representatives of the Anderson Feri tradition, Z. Budapest’s feminist Dianic witchcraft, Morgan McFarland Dianic tradition, NROOGD, the Mohsian tradition, and several others — all of which were eclectic traditions to begin with. In short, Zell was not the type of person to draw sharp distinctions.

The critical moment occurred when Zell, who was, as has been said, articulating for the first time what Neopaganism was, adopts Ed Fitch’s Pagan Way materials — not as a Neo-Wiccan liturgy, but as a Neo-Pagan liturgy. In one fell swoop, Neo-Wicca was forever conflated with Neopaganism. Because of Zell’s defining role in the formation of a Neopagan identity, and because of the reach of his ideas through the Green Egg, this conflation became the reality for the entire movement. And as far as I can tell, this happened as early as 1970. Ed Fitch’s choice of a single word and Zell’s undiscriminating eclecticism defined the course of Neopaganism for decades.

The Neopagan festival culture, which began in 1974, helped to further consolidate Neo-Wicca as the sine qua non of Neopaganism. Wiccan terminology and rituals forms became a lingua franca for Neopagan festivals. Another phenomena which accelerated the spread of the Neo-Wicca was the organization of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS) in 1985. Just as in the case of Pagan festivals, in spite of the nominally non-denominational nature of CUUPS Paganism, the ritual forms adopted by CUUPS chapters are predominately Neo-Wiccan.

Stage 3: What’s in a Wiccan Name?

While “Witch” was the preferred term in the 1960’s, in the 1970’s, the term “Wicca” began to increase and came to be applied to all Neopagan Witchcraft. Part of the reason for the increasing popularity of the term “Wicca” may have been the desire (conscious or not) to disassociate Neo-Wicca from the image of the witch in the popular mind. This was part of a gradual movement in Neopaganism away from the radical feminist image of the witch to the more respectable image of Wicca as a nature or “earth-centered” religion. According to Ross Nichols, the name “Wicca”:

“offered a fresh, uncontaminated name, one that could not be confused with either contemporary Satanism or with alleged medieval Devil worship. It was clean, life affirming, youthful, and by the 1990s, almost fashionable among young adults seeking alternative lifestyles.”

However, in the 1990’s, there was a backlash against the “Wiccan” appellation. Ironically, this only helped to obscure the influence of Neo-Wicca on Neopaganism. The backlash against “Wicca” was due in part to the increasing popularization of Neo-Wicca. Around 1985, the use of the term “Wicca” in published works began to increase, peaking around 2003. The number “Wicca 101” books grew exponentially. In 1996, the movie The Craft was released. In 1997 and 1998, the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed aired, both featuring Neo-Wiccan characters. These and other popular movies, television series, and books have been credited with bringing many adolescents into Wicca, as well as a “watering down” of Wicca to make it more acceptable to the general public.

In 2001, the term “fluffy” (later “fluffybunny”) was coined by the author of the Internet essay, “Why Wiccans Suck”. The epithet “fluffy” came to be applied to portrayals of Wicca that have been watered down to make it palatable for mass or teen consumption. The article was an example of a growing animus toward the “Wicca” appellation by those who did not seem to appreciate the pervasiveness of the Neo-Wiccan influence on Neopaganism. The debunking of the Wiccan origin myth by Aidan Kelly in 1991 and Ronald Hutton in 1999 only helped to make “Wicca” less popular among Neopagans.

This created the ironic situation of many Neopagans who had adopted Neo-Wiccan ritual practices and theology simultaneously trying to disassociate themselves from “Wicca”. As noted above, the phenomenon was actually encouraged by those traditionalists who insisted that one must be initiated into a coven to be “Wiccan”. That left a Neo-Wiccan with only the terms “Witch” and “Pagan” to describe themselves, even if their practice was largely derived from Wicca. Thus “Witch” and “Pagan” came to be synonymous with practices and beliefs which were Wiccan in everything but name. This is how a couple of self-described “Witches” at my UU congregation could organize a Beltane celebration where they cleanse the space with a besom broom, cast a circle, invoke the four elemental quarters, invoke the Lord and Lady … and then proclaim that they are not “Wiccan” and have, in fact, never met a “Wiccan”.

Conclusion

Where does this leave us? First, the bell has been rung. British Traditional Wicca will never regain its control over the term “Wicca”, which now has largely come to mean an Americanized Neo-Wicca. Second, Neo-Wicca and Neopaganism have become so conflated that the Wiccan influence on supposedly non-denominational or Pan-Pagan rituals is pervasive, but largely invisible to many. This has now led some to try to disassociate themselves from the term “Paganism” as well.

Now, you might wonder why I have put so much effort into detailing the line between Wicca and Neopaganism and trying to distinguish the two — I know I have wondered the same thing. This series of posts is not intended to be a “Why Wiccans Suck” essay. Nevertheless, the fact is that Wiccan practices and beliefs do not resonate with, largely because of the influence of esotericism. But there is a constellation of beliefs and practices which I do resonate with, and for which, for the life of me, I cannot come up with any better name than “Neopagan”.

Imagine for a moment that you lived your whole life without hearing of Christianity. And then you pick up a Bible and you read the gospels and you are converted. You decide you are a Christian — before ever having met a Christian. Now imagine that you go in search of the Christian community and (since this is an alternate reality) you discover that the Christianity that has become mainstream is Gnosticism. While it bears some superficial resemblances to what you read about in the Bible, it seems quite different and even antithetical to what you understood Christianity to be.

That’s how I felt when I discovered the Neopagan community. I felt like this great religious idea I had discovered had been infected by something quite foreign — esotericism — just as Gnosticism was seen by some as an infection of Christianity by Neoplatonism. In the same way that Gnosticism introduced an anti-materialism into Christianity, so I feel that esotericism, through Wicca, introduces an anti-materialism into Neopaganism. In my next post, I want to talk about three groups that have tried to take the esotericism out of Neopaganism: (1) Gaia Group, (2) TOTEG, and (3) naturalistic/humanistic paganism.

American Neopaganism, Part 1: An Imaginary Tradition?

Last updated on: May 2, 2012 at 11:27 am By John Halstead

The AmericanNeopaganism.com website which I maintain will be taken down next month. I’ve maintained it for several years now, and it’s been about a year since I made any changes to the site. All of my writing energy has gone into this blog. I’ve decided to let the domain lapse until I figure out what direction I want to take it.

When I first came to Neopaganism, it was through books. And when I encountered the real thing, I was, frankly, disappointed. Somehow, in the process of learning about Neopaganism, I had imagined something which really did not exist — a celebratory Neopagan religion without any of the trappings of esotericism or practical magic. When I left my books and made my foray into the Neopagan community, I was disappointed to discover that “Neopaganism” was generally perceived as an umbrella term and not a tradition in its own right. When asked what your tradition wasm you could not just say “Neopagan”. And I was disappointed to discover that what was perceived as “Neo-Pagan” was really Neo-Wiccan — and many Pagans seemed oblivious to this fact. Since I did not identify as witch or Wiccan (or druid or shaman for that matter), I was at a loss where to go.

So I set about to stake out some territory on the religious landscape for myself — and the American Neopaganism website was born. I specifically had the goal of defending the proposition that American Neopaganism was a tradition in its own right, distinct from Wicca, as well as from Pagan Reconstructionist traditions. In the process, I discovered that I was both wrong and right. In this post, I am going to outline what I was hoping to find. And in my next post, I will discuss how and why I did not find it. I will also discuss some groups that come (or came) pretty close.

Specifically, when I went looking for a Neopagan community, I was looking for a tradition which was:

(1) eclectic — meaning non-traditional and non-reconstructionist,

(2) open — meaning non-initiatory, and

(3) celebratory — meaning non-esoteric and eschewing practical magic.

In short, I was looking for a Neo-Paganism with all the Wicca taken out of it. In my studies, I felt I had had identified something unique, something which I called “Neopagan” — something which I felt was distinct from, and even antithetical to, the esotericism and magic which are part of Wicca.

For clarity sake, I should say that, by “esotericism”, I follow Wouter Hanegraaf in referring to a nexus of related quasi-religious movements, sometimes called the “Western Esoteric Tradition” or the “Western Mystery Tradition”, and including Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Kaballah, ceremonial magic (or “magick”), astrology, alchemy, tarot, spiritualism, and Theosophy, and the philosophies of Jacob Bohme, Franz Mesmer, Emanuel Swedenborg, Helena Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, and Aleister Crowley. The common trait among these movements is the notion that esoteric knowledge is secret or hidden and available only to a small elect group and only through intense study. This knowledge often takes the form of a system of hidden correspondences between levels of reality. “Esotericism” is often used interchangeably with “occultism”, but I believe the latter category to be broader.

By “Wicca”, I refer to an initiatory mystery religion, which blends Golden Dawn ritual forms with witchcraft folklore derived from Charles Leland and Margaret Murray. Indicia of a Wiccan tradition are: duotheism, gender polarity, eight seasonal “sabbats”, ritual drawn from ceremonial magic including casting a magic circle, calling the quarters, and “raising energy”, and the practice of practical magic. Note: I use the term “Wiccan” even for those people who identify as “Witches” and not “Wiccan”, if they fall into the category as described above.

I was uncomfortable with both practical magic and esotericism because I felt they were incompatible with my commitment to empiricism. But also the notion of magical control of nature seemed to me to be antithetical to the Neopagan attitude of reverence of and cooperation with nature. My vision of a non-esoteric Neopaganism was best expressed in Robert Ellwood and Harry Partin’s Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America:

“The unifying theme among the diverse Neo-Pagan traditions is the ecology of one’s relation to nature and to the various parts of one’s self. As Neo-Pagans understand it, the Judaeo-Christian tradition teaches that the human intellectual will is to have dominion over the world, and over the unruly lesser parts of the human psyche, as it, in turn, is to be subordinate to the One God and his will. The Neo-Pagans hold that, on the contrary, we must cooperate with nature and its deep forces on a basis of reverence and exchange. Of the parts of man, the imagination should be first among equals, for man’s true glory is not in what he commands, but in what he sees. What wonders he sees of nature and of himself he leaves untouched, save to glorify and celebrate them.”

In this view, esotericism and practical magic were not Neopagan, but rather part and parcel of the legacy of the Enlightenment goal of dominating nature.

As a result, I took issue with the common perception of Neopaganism as the “exoteric” circumference of a circle at which Wicca is the “esoteric” center. In this view, Neopaganism is a generic form of Wicca — a kind of Wicca lite. But I believed that Neopaganism had more than enough substance to be a tradition in its own right, and one which could be and should be distinguished from Wicca. In the course of my reading, I came across a few writers who agreed.

In Wicca and the Christian Heritage, Jo Pearson questions whether Wicca can even be considered a form of Neopaganism. She writes: “In many ways initiatory Wicca can be regarded as existing on the margins of Paganism.” In New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Wouter Hanegraaff observes “that Wicca is a neopagan development of traditional occultist ritual magic, but that the later movement is not itself pagan.”

Robert Ellwood and Harry Partin drew the same conclusion earlier in their Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America. Ellwood and Partin broke Neopaganism into the magical groups, influenced by the model of the Order of the Golden Dawn, the O.T.O., and Aleister Crowley, and the nature oriented groups. The magical groups, they wrote:

“are the more antiquarian; they love to discuss editions of old grimoires, and the complicated histories of groups an lineages. They delight in precise and fussy ritualism, though the object is the evocation of intense emotional power […]

“The pagan nature-oriented groups are more more purely romantic; the prefer woodsy setting to incense and they dance and plant trees. They are deeply influenced by Robert Graves, especially his White Goddess. They are less concerned with evocation than celebration of the goddesses they know are already there. The mood is spontaneous rather than precise, though the rite may be as beautiful and complex as a country dance. […]

(Partin and Ellwood offered Feraferia as an example of the latter group.) Interestingly, Partin and Elwood described Wicca as being “in the middle between magic and nature-oriented groups.” Elsewhere, Ellwood distinguished “occult groups”, which “offer initiation into expanded consciousness through a highly structured production of internal experiences and impartation of knowledge”, from “neopagan groups”, which “promote a new vision of man’s relation to nature, the archetypes of the unconscious, and the passions”.

I suggest that it might be helpful to think of Neopaganism and esotericism as two circles circumscribing different cultural phenomena with overlapping circumferences. Traditional Wicca would fall within the overlapping area, whereas Neopaganism would fall outside of the circle of esotericism.

It was this celebratory and nature-oriented side of this picture which I want to extract from the esoteric side in which Wicca was (at least partially) rooted.

I also wanted to distinguish Neopaganism from Reconstructionist Paganism (or retro-Paganism). While drawing inspiration from numerous ancient traditions and reconstructions of ancient traditions, Neopaganism is consciously and unapologetically eclectic. It does not aim to reconstruct a (paleo-)pagan past, but rather to construct a Neo-Pagan present and future.

Various names have been suggested by others for this celebratory form of Neopaganism, including “non-initiated Paganism” (Tanya Luhrmann), “non-aligned Paganism” (Jo Pearson), “exoteric Paganism (Vivianne Crowley). I chose the term “American Neopaganism” following both Aidan Kelly and James Lewis use of the term “American Tradition” to describe the Pagan Way. (More on that in the next post.)

The use of the prefix “Neo-“ was intended to distinguish American Neopaganism both from modern forms of paganism (which include Hinduism, Voudun, and others) and from modern reconstructions of ancient paganisms (such as Druidry, Heathenry, and others). Whether it dates to the 1967 organization of the Church of All Worlds and Feraferia or the 18th century Romantic Movement, Neopaganism is still a relatively new religion in comparison to the world’s religions. In addition, Neopaganism, as I understand it needs, to be distinguished from ancient paganisms, which it rarely resembles (as well as from modern reconstructions of ancient aganisms). Ancient pagans were mostly hard (or radical) polytheists, not Jungian polytheists, and not pantheists either (with a few exceptions like the Stoics). The morality of ancient pagans is also distinguishable from that of modern Neopagans, whose morality is the product of the Enlightenment and Liberalism.

The modifier “American” was intended to distinguish American Neopaganism from more nationalistic European forms of Neopaganism, including the 19th century German volkisch movement, northern European heathenry, British druidry, as well as from traditional Wicca, which was originally conceived as a revival of an ancient British religion.

The “American” modifier was also intended as a recognition that Neopaganism really a product of the American Sixties counterculture. Sarah Pike, in her book Witching Culture, dates Neopaganism to the founding of the Church of All Worlds and Feraferia in 1967. While it was undoubtedly influenced by Wicca, I argued that American Neopaganism was historically and theologically distinct from Wicca. In my view, the intellectual and spiritual grandfather of American Neopaganism was not Gerald Gardner, but Robert Graves. The White Goddess had only a minor influence on traditional Wicca, but was the inspiration behind most American forms of Neopaganism, including the Pagan Way movement, the Church of All Worlds, Feraferia, and NROOGD. These and other American groups arose in the context of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and integrated Graves’ mythology with the feminist spirituality movement (especially the Goddess movement), religious ecology (or nature religion), and Jungian psychology. It was to those traditions that referred when I wrote about “American Neopaganism”.

I was to discover, however, that it was separating the influence of Wicca from Neopaganism was more difficult than I had hoped. And it is for that reason, perhaps, that occultism and practical magic now seem to be inseparable from Pagan culture. And that is the subject of my next post.