My Yule Sounded Alot Like Christmas Too (Part 2)

Last updated on: January 9, 2012 at 9:16 am By John Halstead

3. Paganism and Christianity

In my previous post, I proposed that the reason why there are so few original winter solstice songs for Neopagans and the reason why the winter solstice is treated as a minor holiday by Neopagans is one and the same: Neopagans have an aversion to all things Christian. A good example of this, I think, is Star Foster’s resolution to boycott Christmas this last December.

As a former Christian myself, I understand this aversion. I tend to relate all Christianity (some of which is really quite inoffensive) to the Christianity that I experienced and rejected. It took me years and real inner work to admit that the Mormonism that I rejected was just my own idiosyncratic version of it, which not all Mormons shared. Still, I tend to highlight in my mind the most obnoxious aspects of Christianity (probably as a self-justification). Of course, this is not difficult to do, since the most obnoxious people (of any faith) seem to also be the loudest ones.

Nevertheless, even as I left Christianity behind, I felt very much drawn to those aspects of Christianity which seemed to me to be pagan-ish. I developed a real fascination for the pagan Hebrew culture, which is only hinted at in the Old Testament, but probably represented the majority view. (Check out William Dever’s Did God Have A Wife, for an accessible introduction to just one aspect of this topic.) I still feel that there are some fundamental, paradigmatic differences between the two religions. Even so, the pagan elements of Christianity remain very attractive to me today.

To begin with, the line between what is Christian and what is pagan has been a vague one from the start. The Carpocratians were a sect of Gnostics founded by Carpocrates of Alexandria that claimed Christ derived the mysteries of his religion from the Temple of Isis in Egypt, where he was said to have studied for six years, and that he taught them to his apostles. The sect endured until the sixth century. (See The Arcane Schools by John Yarker.) Another group, the Collyridians, were a group of Christian heretics in pagan Arabia who worshiped Mary, the mother of Jesus, as a goddess. Epiphanius of Salamis wrote that Collyridian women offered cakes to Mary, from which they take their name. It is possible that this was a continuation of the practice of making cakes for the Queen of Heaven described in Jeremiah.

Skipping forward a few hundred years, the Christianizing of pagan cults in late Antiquity is well documented and has become an important (although probably overstated) part of the Neopagan narrative. In one conspicuous example, in 596 CE, Pope Gregory sent a mission to England and advised Augustine of Canterbury to respect the customs of the Anglo-Saxons, but to replace pagan festivals with feast days of saints and also to consecrate pagan sanctuaries to Christ.

Skipping ahead a millennium, the Protestant reformers were convinced that the Catholic cult of the saints and popular entertainments associated with holidays represented a detritus of ancient pagan religion. We can debate the specifics, but it is evident that their perception of some elements of Catholic Christianity as vestigal paganism was not completely unfounded. As Fra Colonna declared in Charles Rease’s 1861 The Cloister and the Hearth:

“Our numerous altars in one church are heathen; the Jews, who are monotheists, have but one altar in a church. But the pagans had many, being polytheists, Our altars and our hundred lights around St. Peter’s tomb are pagan. We invent nothing, not even numerically. Our very Devil is the god Pan, horns and hoofs and all, but blackened. For we cannot draw; we can but daub the figures of Antiquity with a little sorry paint or soot. Our Moses hath stolen the horns of Ammon, our Wolfgang the hook of Saturn, and Janus bore the keys of heaven before St. Peter. All our really old Italian bronzes of the Virgin and Child are Venuses and Cupids.”

While Fra Colonna may have overstated the matter, we know that Easter combines various European and Middle Eastern traditions of spring fertility rites. Also, the cult of the Virgin Mary is a continuation of the ancient worship of the Anatolian Great Mother and the Egyptian goddess Isis. (Check out Stephen Benko’s The Virgin Goddess: Studies in the Christian and Pagan Roots of Mariology.) And perhaps most conspicuously, the modern Christian celebration of Christmas replaced the northern European pagan Yule holiday and the even older Roman solar worship. In fact, it was not until 273 CE that December 25 was adopted as the date of Christ’s nativity (in lieu of the spring equinox), previously, the Roman festival, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (“birth of the unconquered Sun”).

And this brings me to one of the ideas which actually drew me to Neopaganism: the myth of the dying and reviving god. The myth originates with James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Frazer’s Bough influenced the Cambridge Ritualists, Samuel H. Hooke and Gilbert Murray, as well as Theodore Gaster, each of whom attempted to reconstruct a cycle of rites based on Frazer’s myth, synchronized to the seasonal cycle of planting and harvesting. The poet and novelist, Robert Graves, then took Frazer’s myth, gave new emphasis to the element of the goddess, and split the dying god into light and dark aspects. Finally, the Gravesian myth was gradually overlaid onto a calendar consisting of the Irish cross-quarter days and the Anglo-Saxon quarter days to constitute the Neopagan Wheel of the Year by Margaret Murray, Gerald Gardner, and those that followed them.

The interesting thing about the story of the origin of the Wheel of the Year is that it began with Jesus — specifically with Frazer’s intent to discredit Christianity by suggesting that the figure of Christ had been an outgrowth of the pagan belief in a dying and reviving vegetation spirit. In the second edition of the Bough, Frazer explicitly stated that the Christian story of the Crucifixion was derived from the sacrifice of god-kings, and that the Christ story belonged with “a multitude of other victims of a barbarous superstition.” Frazer’s purpose was not to legitimate ancient pagan practices, but to debunk all of religion, Christian and pagan, as superstition. The explicit condemnation of Christianity in The Golden Bough, however, was missing from the 1922 abridged version, which was the version most read by the public.

For Neopagans, Frazer’s modernist agenda is generally overlooked, and The Golden Bough is understood as reducing Christianity to just another form of the cult of the dying and reviving god. Ronald Hutton states that Frazer’s thesis “fostered not so much an enhanced respect for rationalism and progress as a delight in the primitive and the unreasonable.”

“[B]y placing Christ in a context of dying and resurrecting pagan deities, Frazer had hoped to discredit the whole package of religious ideas. Instead, as some of the literary use of the Bough indicates, he actually gave some solace to those disillusioned with traditional religion, by allowing them to conflate the figure of Jesus with the natural world.”

If there had not been a Jesus or a Christianity, there very likely would never have been a Golden Bough. Frazer would most likely never have written it, and even if he had, it definitely would not have become as influential as it has been (see John Vickery’s The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough).

Hutton’s book, The Triumph of the Moon, was the first book on Neopaganism that I read. So when I came to Neopaganism, I came looking for the religion of the dying pagan god and his goddess. Of course I found the goddess, but her dying and resurrecting consort was not as obvious. And I suspect that this is because of the Christo-phobia of many Neopagans.

This aversion seems strange in light of the fact that the father of Neopagan witchcraft, Gerald Gardner, did not himself see any necessary contradiction between Christianity and witchcraft. Gardner wrote in The Meaning of Witchcraft:

“It is usually said that to be made a witch one must abjure Christianity; this is not true; but they naturally would not receive into their ranks anyone who was a very narrow Christian. They do not think that the real Jesus was literally the Son of God, but are quite prepared to accept that he was one of the Enlightened Ones, or Holy Men. That is the reason why witches do not think they were hypocrites ‘in times of persecution’ for going to church and honoring Christ, especially as so many of the old Sun-hero myths have been incorporated into Christianity; while others might bow to the Madonna, who is closely akin to their goddess of heaven.”

Gardner was not alone. This attitude toward Christianity was not unusual among proto-Neopagans: (1) Dion Fortune’s writings had a profound influence on Neopaganism, especially her fiction, while the Inner Light Society she founded remained Christian. In The Winged Bull, Fortune claimed that the Christian God was just one other equally valid aspect of the One God. (2) W. B. Yeats attempted to fuse Christian and pre-Christian traditions and resisted pressure to discard Christian elements from his mythology. The Golden Dawn Order itself, to which Yeats belonged, drew heavily on Christian and Hebrew symbolism. (3) Ernest Westlake, who founded the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry in 1916 as a Quaker-inspired alternative to the Boy Scouts, sought to revive the old gods of paganism, including Pan, Dionysus, Artemis, and Aphrodite. He did not view this practice as antithetical to Christianity, however. Hutton explains,

“To Ernest himself, the attraction of paganism was not that it would replace Christianity but that it would cope with precisely those areas in which the latter had become deficient, and so (at best) to help revivify it. He coined the aphorism ‘one must be a good pagan before one can be a good Christian.’”

One might claim that these proto-Pagans had just not developed a uniquely Pagan consciousness, which would only become fully formed in the 1960’s counterculture. But consider Aidan Kelly, one of the founders of NROOGD. One can hardly think of someone more immersed in the Neopagan milieu, and yet, when Kelly left Neopaganism to return to the Catholicism of this upbringing, he reported to Margot Adler that

“He now believes that all visions of a universal Goddess come from the influence of Christianity—not the reverse. The Goddess movement is not Pagan he says, but a radically dissenting type of Christian sect. It is not Mary who is a pale reflection of the Great Goddess, he argues, it is the idea of a Great Goddess that is dependent on ideas about the Virgin Mary. The Goddess, he says, is merely a ‘de-Christianized and backdated’ version of Mary. Even the vision of Isis in The Golden Ass by Apuleius is, he believes, a creation influenced by Christianity.”

Kelly’s suggestion that the Neopagan Goddess was derived from Mary is difficult to credit. In response to Kelly, Adler herself felt compelled, at least, to point out that many pagans worship not a “saccharine” figure resembling the Virgin Mary, but fierce goddesses who are warriors and destroyers, as well as creatrixes. I have to agree that it is the figure of Mary that seems to me to be derivative.

Nevertheless, there is perhaps a sense in which the Neopagan Goddess is a product of the Christian Mary. The origin of Neopagan Triple Goddess can be traced to Robert Graves, and from him to the Cambridge Ritualist, Jane Harrison. Harrison herself related the Mother and Virgin figures of Demeter and Kore to the Father and the Son in term of their relationship to each other, being two-in-one. She states in her Prologomena:

“It has been shown in detail that the Mother and the Maid are two persons, but one god, are but the young and old form of a divinity always waxing and waning. It is the same with the Father and the Son; his is one but he reflects two stages of the same human life.”

Harrison, in turn, was deeply influenced by Sir Arthur Evans and his discoveries from Crete as she described in her autobiography. Evan interpreted the Cretan deities as manifestations of a single Great Goddess and her subordinate son and consort. According to Hutton, Evans’ interpretation was based not only on the classical legend of Rhea and Zeus, “but his insistence that she had been viewed as both Virgin and Mother, with a divine child, owed an unmistakable debt to the Christian tradition of the Virgin Mary.” In short, there is a historical debt that the Neopagan Goddess owes to Mary. If there had not been a Virgin Mary, perhaps there would not have been a Neopagan Goddess — at least not as we now know her.

While Kelly’s claim that Neopaganism is a “radically dissenting Christian sect” seems exaggerated, it does raise a valid question of whether Neopaganism is truly “post-Christian”. Kelly is not the only one who has made this claim, though. In 1996, British religious studies scholar, Linda Woodhead, presented a paper at the Nature Religions Today conference in England, which was later reported on by Jone Salomonsen. According to the Salomonsen, Woodhead had suggested:

“that the ‘new spirituality’ that today flourishes in contemporary western societies represents a single form of religiosity, and that pagan Witchcraft is merely one of its expressions. This ‘new spirituality’ is deeply rooted in European Protestantism and has arisen as a response to an increasing dissatisfaction with Christianity (and Judaism) [emphasis original] […] Although the self-understanding of Witchcraft is to reject this whole tradition, not to revitalize it, nor purify it from within, Woodhead argues that the most important context in which to understand pagan Witchcraft is a Christian Context: Witchcraft is not a new religion, but a reformation.”

Salomonsen, for her part, appeared to agree that Witchcraft is not post-Christian, but only post-church or post-synagogue, a “subcultural branch of Jewish and Christian traditions.”

In 2007, Pearson took up this claim in her Wicca and the Christian Heritage: Ritual, Sex and Magic where she argued that Christianity is the “real invisible player” in the history of Wicca. Her book is a study of heterodox Christian movements of nineteenth century Britain and France. Although she stops short of Woodhead’s claim that Wicca is a “new reformation” or a “bastardized version of Christianity”, she nevertheless concludes that

“if heresy and witchcraft are constructs of the Christian imagination [as Wiccans claim], then a Christianity that has been constructed as ‘other’ by some Wiccans is also a product of imagination.”

A Jungian might suggest that the Neopagan animus toward Christianity is a function of our projection of our “shadow” onto the Christian “other”. Our “shadow” in this case is created by our repression of our consciousness of the Christian origins of contemporary Neopaganism. In projecting our shadow onto a Christian “other”, we create a caricature of Christianity which we can then demonize.

It is not just that Christianity was the historical precedent to Neopaganism. Michael York has suggested that Neopagan theology is essentially Christian. In “New Age and Paganism”, he observes that, Neopaganism’s polytheism, which is essentially monist, is distinct from that of ancient paganisms, which are essentially pluralist. According to York:

“Contemporary expressions of Neo-paganism are to me more of an updating and rectification perhaps of an essentially Christian attitude which is different from the free-ranging and loosely defined multiplicity of personalities and forces and deities which collectively constitute the [ancient] pagan [pantheon]”

While I cannot agree with the statement that Neopaganism is a Christian sect, I do agree that Neopaganism is an outgrowth of Christianity. This is not just to say that Neopaganism arose in the context of a Christian culture, but rather that Neopaganism as it exists today would not be but for Christianity, just as the Neopagan Goddess might not be, but for the Virgin Mary. This is true often on the personal level as well as on the corporate level. On the corporate level, Neopaganism as a movement grew out of and in reaction to Christianity. On a personal level, probably most Neopagan converts to Christianity came from a Christian background. And even those who did not came, for the most part, from a culture with is predominately Christian.

Coming to terms with our Christian origins is, I believe, necessary to the maturation of the Neopagan movement. I recently read a response to Teo’s by C. Aine Pearson which went as follows:

“In Paganism, I find fundamental acceptance of the me that was, the me that is and the me that will be. Acceptance as I /am/, with encouragement toward growth that does not hinge on attempting to achieve /perfection/; acceptance that the growth I experience does not imply that I was flawed before and am /better/ after.”

Acceptance of who we were must include an acceptance of our Christian origins. I have struggled a long time to make peace with my Christian past, and I still struggle. For many years, I looked at that time as lost time, and I resented it. I did not really understand that who I was then led to me being where I am now. A book by James W. Fowler, Stages of Faith, was instrumental in helping me come to terms with accepting who I has been. And I found that the more I accepted my past self, the less anger I had at the Christian faith that was a part of who I had been.

As I said above, I still feel that there are some fundamental, paradigmatic differences between the two religions. But I wonder what might happen in our movement if we began to understand Neopaganism, not as a rejection of our Christian past, but as building upon that Christian past. I wonder if it might not make us more whole, as individuals and as a movement. So when we celebrated the winter solstice this year, I encouraged my children’s conflation of the baby Jesus with the reborn Sun God. And I sang those paganized Christmas carols with gusto.

Why I Bother With Ritual: Poetry and Eikonic Atheism

Last updated on: November 9, 2014 at 10:26 am By John Halstead

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

— Novalis

My wife hates poetry. I think she feels intimidated by it, like it’s a secret someone is keeping from her. I like poetry. Now I am no T.S. Elliot fan, but I love Rilke and Mary Oliver. The first poet I fell in love with was Jacques Prevert, who I was introduced to in high school French class. I just find Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I l Love Thee” so much more moving than the simple words “I love you.”

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Not my wife though. She’s a give-it-to-me-straight kind of gal. It’s not just poetry either. When she had to write about what she had done in the last 10 years for her high school reunion, she did it in bullet-point form. (It’s just one more way in which we reverse gender stereo-types: I like poetry and shopping, and she hates both.)

At the heart of my wife’s dislike of poetry is, I think, an assumption that there is a meaning which is hidden by the poetry and she is expected to divine. And I think that’s the wrong way to read poetry. Poetry, for me, is evocative, rather than signifying. It’s not supposed to mean anything; it’s supposed to evoke an experience, a mood, an emotion, or a memory.

Poetry recently came up in a guest blog post at Humanistic Paganism in which the author, Jake Diebolt, an atheist, asked why humanistic pagans “bother” with ritual if they don’t believe in gods. He accused humanistic pagans of being “hypocritical” and argued that ritual is unproductive navel-gazing, comparable to drug use, as well as “dehumanizing”. I responded by comparing ritual to poetry. I’m going to reproduce part of my response here.

In response to the question, “Why bother to do ritual?”, I would ask, “Why create art?” Why paint a painting when you can take a photograph? (although photographs can be art also). Why write a poem or a story when you can outline a logical argument? Why dance? Why sing? That’s what ritual is for me: art. And in Sabina Magliocco’s words, “Ritual is my chosen art form.” It is dance and poetry and song all wound together.

Jake wrote:

“Since HP [Humanistic Paganism] isn’t meant to be a literalist movement, I’m assuming a lot of people reading and contributing don’t believe that gods or spirits actually exist. The word ‘metaphorically’ comes up a lot, but all that really means is ‘I find this to be a useful and/or clever philosophical/literary construct to get my point across, so there’. I set my hand to writing fiction occasionally, so I can appreciate a good metaphor as well as the next person. I just don’t find them particularly relevant to real life.”

I think it’s a mistake to treat ritual or poetry as metaphor, if by metaphor you mean language intended to signify something indirectly. For Jake, it seems, fiction is a clever literary construct “to get a point across”, a rhetorical flourish if you will. But for me, fiction, poetry, and ritual are more than rhetorical flourishes, and they are more than a means for “getting a point across”. Poetry and ritual are best understood, not as metaphor, as pointing to a referent, but rather, in Heidegger’s sense of the word, as opening a horizon of possibility through language. B.T. Newberg explains it this way:

“The allegorical tradition has a venerable pedigree indeed. However, I can’t help but feel that each in their own way has somehow gotten it wrong. Interpreting myth x to signify meaning y has an air of finality to it that silences other interpretations.

“What myths really are, in my opinion, are deeply resonant images to which the human imagination responds by creating meaning. In the act of searching for the “true” meaning, a new meaning is created. Myths are not reservoirs containing meanings waiting to be found; they are creative stimuli midwifing the birth of the new. Each allegorist is startled to see in it something no one else has, and feels compelled to go tell it on the mountain. In truth, however, they are simply participating in an eternal process of meaning-making.”

Ritual and poetry point to something that cannot be fully expressed in representational language. Or rather, instead of pointing us to something, ritual and poetry invite us to experience something. The meaning of good poetry can never be exhausted by explanation for this reason. And the same is true of ritual.

I am indebted for this conception of poetry not only to Heidegger, but also to advocates of what has come to be called “theopoetics”, a way of using language to create space for the reader to encounter the mystery which has traditionally been called God. In his essay, “Theopoetics: that the dead may become gardeners again”, Matt Guynn contrasts theo-logical language with theo-poetical language. The former, like all logical language, approaches metaphor by trying to eliminate the “numen”, the mysterious, to get at the “meaning”. Theopoetry, in contrast, uses mystery and metaphor to evoke an experience, rather than to point directly toward a single “meaning”. Poetry is an event in and of itself, one which draws the reader into a space where meaning happens, where the divine is manifest.

I think this is what Heidegger, an atheist, meant when he said in his famous 1966 Der Spiegel interview that through poetry “we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god”; and what Rilke meant when he advised his young poet to try to “live the questions”, rather than seeking out the answers:

“Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

— Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Reading poetry is not like reading a philosophical argument, in which the reader tries to “get at” the author’s meaning. Poetry is, rather, “postmodern”, in the sense that it displaces the authority of the author. Meaning is derived, not from the author’s intent, but from the experience of the reader of the poem.

David Miller writes in his essay, “Theopoetry or Theopolitics?” that theopoetics should not be confused with “theopoetry”. Theopoetry is just poetry about God, merely an “artful, imaginative, creative, beautiful and rhetorically compelling” way of speaking about God. In contrast, for Miller, theopoetics is more radical, even subversive. Miller writes that theopoetics cannot be understand apart from the “death of God”, or the death of metaphysics, an understanding of meaning “as severed from any dependencies on transcendental referents”. Theopoetics are therefor “strategies of human signification in the absence of fixed or ultimate meanings accessible to knowledge or faith.” Miller cites Thomas Altizer, the “death of God” theologian: “To say yes to absolute nothingness is to discover the plenitude in the void.” While “theology ends with the death of god” (Altizer), Miller affirms that “theopoetics begins when theology ends.” And it is in literature and art that meaning is redeemed from the death of God.

Miller goes on to explain that poetry is, therefore, not “mere metaphor, simile without the word ‘like'”. He explains:

“It is a commonplace that poets do not like critics to tell people what their poems mean. The poet’s complaint not only has as its rationale that poems have multiple meanings and cannot be limited to singular signification. It may also be linked to the sentiment of Archibold MacLeish in his “Ars Poetica”: “A poem should not mean/But be.”

Poetry is, therefore, an “occurrence” or, as Scott Cairns writes, an “event of its own”. This is how I understand ritual too. Not as “mere metaphor”, but as an event, a way of “preparing a readiness”, of trying to “live the questions”, so as to “discover the plenitude in the void”.

So when I invoke a deity in ritual, I am not signifying an idea that I have personified, i.e., Dionysos = wine. I am, rather, evoking an experience, the experience of ecstasy for example, in the same way art is intended to evoke an experience, an experience that transcends representational thinking. Ritual isn’t about pretending the gods are real, any more than a painting of a tree is a pretend tree. Ritual is art, and art is, I believe, one of the most human things that we do. And it is partly for this reason that I feel justified in calling my paganism “humanistic”.

Ironically, I think in his statement above Jake makes the same mistake as the theistic literalists. Both approach religious language from a “metaphysical” perspective on meaning, one that is dependencies on “transcendental referents”. Although the theistic literalist believes in God and Jake does not, both assume that the meaning of language derives from its reference to a an object which exists independent of human subjective experience. Religious language is meaningful to the theistic literalist because he believes in the existence of God as some thing “out there”, a transcendent object; while Jake does not experience the language as meaningful because he does not believe in God as a transcendent object. But both assume that the meaning religious language depends on the existence of God (or gods) as a transcendent object(s).

While Jake is atheistic with regard to the existence of God, he is still, in a sense, theistic with regard to religious language. He is still stuck in a theo-logical mode of discourse. As Miller explains, if you take the death of God seriously, it also means the death of ultimate meaning. The death of ultimate meaning is an invitation to theopoetics, a mode of discourse avoids answers, dwells comfortably in ambiguity, and invites discourse, rather than seeking to end it, as does theo-logical language. In order to appreciate ritual and poetry, Jake must take his atheism further.

In her book, Alpha and Omega, Jane Ellen Harrison contrasted theology and “religion”, by which she meant ritual, in the same way that I am contrasting theology and theopoetics. She writes:

“To be an Atheist, to renounce eikonic theology, is to me personally almost an essential of religious life. I say this in no spirit of paradox, but as a matter of deep conviction. The god of theology is simply an intellectual attempt to define the indefinable; it is not a thing lived, experienced; it almost must be a spiritual stumbling block today. … It is not only that the particular forms of theology are dead, but that the idea of theology – i.e., a science of the unknowable – is, if not dead, at least, I venture to think, dying. God and reason are contradictory terms.”

Although writing well before Altizer, both were influenced by Nietzsche’s notion of the death of God. For Harrison, the meaning of religion, or as she meant it, ritual, is to be found in the experience of the indefinable, not in intellectual attempts to define it. She went on to write that “all theology is but a thinly-veiled rationalism, a net of illusive clarity cast over life and its realities”, whereas “religion [ritual] is our reaction to the whole, the unbounded whole.” “Theology,” she writes, “is the letter that killeth, religion the spirit that maketh alive.” This is why she states that one must be an atheist to be religious. To be “atheist” for her meant to renounce “eikonic theology”, that is representational thinking about God.

What this means is that my wife should not be looking for the meaning of a poem, and Jake should not be looking in the sky for the gods invoked in ritual. Jake argues that humanistic or atheistic ritual is hypocritical because the humanist/atheist does not believe in literal god-beings. I think David Miller and Jane Harrison would respond that Jake is not enough of an atheist to appreciate the meaning of ritual and poetry in the context of the death of God. The death of God is not the death of a God as a being. It is the death of all attempts to transcend our human situation and achieve absolute knowledge. While this might lead one to nihilism, it is also an invitation to discover “the plenitude in the void”. It is an invitation to poetry and to theopoetics. It is an invitation to create meaning (“Poetry” derives from poiesis, which means “to make”) through our human experience.

And that is why I “bother” with ritual.

People Who Inspire Me — Part One (Deceased)

Last updated on: September 28, 2011 at 10:51 pm By John Halstead

Each of the individuals below is someone whose writings have has a profound influence on me, but who also are people who I admire because of their biography as well.

1. John Trevor (1855-1930)

The founder of the British Labour Church. I’ve posted about Trevor before and will post about him again. I half suspect I am Trevor reincarnated (if I believed in reincarnation), our spiritual lives are so similar. I was led to Trevor’s autobiography by a quote in William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. Trevor describes a mystical experience there in terms that resonate deeply with me. But, what’s more, although Trevor begins his life as a Christian, when he looses his faith, he starts writing about religion in very “pagan” terms. I will save my quotes from his autobiography for future posts.

2. Jason W. Briggs (1821-1899)

Briggs was an Apostle in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This was the church that broke off from the main body of the Mormon church after the assassination of Joseph Smith before the Mormons migrated to Utah. The RLDS Church repudiated polygamy from the start. I grew up Mormon and did not know about the RLDS Church until my early adulthood. The RLDS Church is more liberal than the Utah Mormon church, and therefore it appealed to me during my transition away from Mormonism.

Briggs was a theological liberal and embraced the “higher criticism” of the Bible (an example of which is the “Documentary Hypothesis”). Briggs believed that Scripture should be understood in the context of the time and place in which it was written. He took very seriously the LDS idea that revelation is a process that is never final. He also advocated for an honest acceptance of the fact that Joseph Smith had practiced polygamy, something that Smith’s widow denied, and his son, then Prophet of the RLDS Church, adamantly refused to accept. Briggs left the RLDS Church in 1886 after loosing his position as an Apostle. Briggs was a role model for me during my period of struggle with my Mormon faith.

I probably will not come back to Briggs for a while, so allow me to quote from him:

“Why do you make other men’s dreams your law, but trust not yours own? Prove all things, and whatever is proved to be good, hold fast, and the rest … leave in the ante-room of inquiry. … Now if instead of trying to believe, we should try to inform ourselves as to what is worthy of belief; … We often hear … ‘you musty not trust your own judgment.’ But we ask whose then shall be trust? … If we are told to repudiate human judgment altogether, we answer we have no other …” (“Skepticism — It’s Use”, The Messenger, Vol. 2, No. 8, p. 32, 1876)

“… no subject is too sacred to preclude examination.” (Saints’ Herald, Vol. 22, No. 2, p. 47)

“Inspiration is a development, dependent upon the faculties of the mind, and corresponds with the experience, and does not transcend it. … And when we reflect on how weak and varied the faculties of the mind are, it accounts for all the discrepancies manifest in the inspiration of different ages and different people.” (“Inspiration”, September 1876 Messenger)

“We have believed too easily and too much. As such as come to a sober second thought as are compelled to ‘reconsider’–growth implies throwing off, as well as taking on.” (1886 letter to Herbert Scott)

Briggs’ writing bears a strong resemblance to Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance”, which I mention below.

3. George Smith (1840-1876)

Smith was an amateur Assyriologist who translated the Gilgamesh epic. I first read about Smith in the book The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh by David Damrosch. Smith worked for a publishing house, but spent his lunch breaks at the British Museum studying Assyrian cuneiform tablets. Smith eventually was given a post at the Museum. He made a number of important discoveries in the tablets, but the most spectacular was the account of the Great Flood, a discovery which was of profound significance to the Christian world because it seemed to confirm the account in the Bible as historical. (Ironically, the account is now understood by scholars as evidence of a Babylonian influence on the Bible’s authors.) Smith’s discovery led to him receiving financing to go to the ancient site of the library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, where Smith discovered the rest of the Gilgamesh epic, as well as the account of the descent of Ishtar to the underworld. Smith returned to Ninevah two more times, but died tragically on the third trip at the age of 36.

I love Smith’s story, because he begins without any formal education in ancient studies and, though sheer love and enthusiasm for the subject, goes on to make the most important discovery in his field, and fulfills what must have been his dream of excavating the great library at Ninevah. His discoveries also have great significance for modern Neopagans, especially the text of the Descent of Ishtar.

4. Thomas Taylor (1758-1835)

Taylor is most well known for translating into English for the first time the works of Plato and Aristotle, as well as numerous works of interest to Neopagans, including the Hymns of Orpheus, Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, and the writings of the Neoplatonists: Imablichus, Porphyry, Plotinus, Proclus, and Julian the Apostate. He is also the author of a book on The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries. Taylor never achieved any professional success and his work was not appreciated in his lifetime. He struggled financially his whole life and had chronic ill health.

Interestingly, Taylor practiced his own private reconstruction of Classical pagan religion. His worship was more than merely aesthetic; it involved pouring libations to idols, and may have even included occasional animal sacrifice. Taylor has been credited with launching the Neopagan movement in 19th century Britain.

5. Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928)

Harrison was a proto-feminist and Classical scholar. She has been called Britain’s first female career academic. Harrison was a contemporary of James Frazer and one of the Cambridge Ritualists, together with Gilbert Murray, F. M. Cornford, and A. B. Cook.

One theme of Harrison’s writing to have a profound impact on Neopaganism is the conception of a chthonic matriarchal Greek religion which predated the Olympian patriarchal cult. Harrison was influenced in this regard by Nietzsche’s concept of Apollonian and Dionysian religion. According to Harrison, the goddesses in matriarchal religion were husband-less. Though they were accompanied by a son (sometime lover), this male figure was always subordinate to the goddess. He was defined by his relation to the Goddess, not vice versa. This notion was taken up later by Robert Graves. With the coming of Olympian theology, says Harrison, the relationship between the goddesses and the gods was reversed. Harrison’s ideas had a profound influence on Arthur Evans’ interpretation of his discoveries at Crete. Curiously, Harrison herself was somewhat ambivalent about the chthonic matriarchal religion, sometimes idealizing, sometimes condemning it.

Harrison’s influence on Neopaganism is evident in Z. Budapest’s The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries. Through Budapest and Robert Graves, Harrison influenced Starhawk and an entire generation of Neopagan writers. I am going to be writing more about Harrison’s ideas in future posts.

6. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

What can one say in a short space about such an important figure in American religious history? Certainly the Emerson and the Transcendentalists were to have an important influence on two movements which have been of profound significance in my life: Neopaganism and Unitarianism. What’s more, Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” was a revelation to me at a time when I very much needed encouragement in my separation from the faith of my childhood.

“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, ‘But these impulses may be from below, not from above.’ I replied, ‘They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.’ No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”

Could there be a more pagan manifesto? Emerson’s challenge, “:if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil”, is a personal motto of mine. It expresses a radical commitment to “live from within” in spite of any judgments from society.

But Emerson is also of interest to me because of his biography. I found his diary to be as interesting as he essays. In spite of his nature mysticism, he seems to have been tempted to (small “t”) transcendentalism, as suggested by a letter to him from a friend, Carlyle:

“You seem to me to be in danger of dividing yourself from the fact of this present universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage, and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations, and such like, into perilous altitudes. I wish you returned to your own poor century, its follies and maladies, its blind or half-blind, but gigantic toilings, its laughter and its fears, and trying to evolve in some measure the hidden godlike that lies in it. Alas it is so easy to screw oneself up into higher and ever higher altitudes of transcendentalism and see nothing under one but the everlasting snows of Himalaya, the earth shrinking to a planet, and the indigo firmament sowing itself with daylight stars; easy for you, for me. But whither does it lead? I dread always to inanity and mere injuring of the lungs.”

I have struggled with the same “Gnostic temptation”, so I identify with Emerson in this regard.

7. Carl Jung (1875-1961)

Jung has probably been the greatest single influence on my spiritual life as an adult. I have written about him in previous posts and will be writing a great deal more about him. But let me say here that what interests me about Jung as a person was that his ideas were born out of experience. He himself experienced a mental breakdown and a descent into the chaos of the unconscious, which is recorded in his “Seven Sermons to the Dead” and The Red Book. He also writes about his conviction of the reality of the numinous, though he readily admits that such a conviction is beyond the realm of rational proof.

“We find numberless images of God, but we cannot produce the original. There is no doubt in my mind that there is an original behind our images, but it is inaccessible. We could not even be aware of the original since its translation into psychic terms is necessary in order to make it perceptible at all. How would Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason look when translated into the psychic imagery of a cockroach? And I assume that the difference between man and creator of all things is immeasurably greater than between a cockroach and man. Why should we be so immodest to suppose that we could catch a universal being in the narrow confines of our language? We know that God-images play a great role in psychology, but we cannot prove the physical existence of God. […]

“Speaking for myself, the question whether God exists or not is futile. I am sufficiently convinced of the effects man has always attributed to a divine being. […] I am well satisfied that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or divine.”

In a future post I will write about living people who inspire me.

Eating God Eating Us

Last updated on: September 9, 2011 at 3:59 pm By John Halstead

I have been trying to write this post for a week or so and I am still struggling with it. In my last post, I wrote about the ambivalent attitude I have about food, and how Neopagan myth has helped me to experience what Jane Ellen Harrison calls the “sacramental mystery of life and nutrition that is accomplished in us day by day”.

With that goal in mind, I have a prayer that I say before eating — when I remember, which I admit is rare — which helps me experience eating as a sacrament:

Gods are mortals,

Mortals are gods,

Living each other’s death,

Dying each other’s life.

To live the death of a being to eat it.

To die the life of a being is to be eaten.

We eat God,

And are devoured by Her.

The first part of this prayer is from the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus. I could write a whole post (or more) on Heraclitus alone, but I will restrict myself to the fragment above for now. Heraclitus was more of a poet and mystic than a philosopher. He is called the “Fire Priest” sometimes. His “philosophy” as it has come down to us in its fragmentary form is a collection of meditations on the unity of opposites in the form of paradoxical statements which resemble Zen koans.

The Greek of this fragment reads:

ἀθάνατοι θνητοί, θνητοὶ ἀθάντατοι, ζῶντες τὸν ἐκείνων θάνατον, τὸν δὲ ἐκείνων βίον τεθνεῶτες

Athanatoi thnetoi, thnetoi athanatoi, zontes ton ekeinan thanaton, ton de ekeinan bion tethneates.

The process of translation of this text is in itself a meditation on its paradoxical meaning. The literal translation is:

Immortals (the deathless) mortals (the dying), mortals immortals, living one another’s death, one another’s life dying.

This text is a meditation on the paradoxical unity of life and death, immortality and mortality, the gods and humankind.

The second part of my prayer is an exegesis on Heraclitus’ words by the philosopher, mystic, and activist, Simone Weil. A year and a half before her death, Simone Weil copied the fragment above from Heraclitus in a notebook along with the following commentary:

“To live the death of a being is to eat it. The reverse is to be eaten. Man eats God and is eaten by God”

(Complete Works VI.2., 454). The cause of Weil’s death is debated, but it is believed that, after a battle with tuberculosis, she starved herself to death.

So what does this mean? First, the prayer is a reminder that my life feeds on the death of other beings. I live by eating the flesh of slaughtered animals, grain which is cut down and ground to make bread, and the fruits that fall from the plants that grow in the earth. It is also a reminder that my death will feed the life of other beings when my body decomposes.

But there is more to it than that. And here is where I begin to encounter difficulty, because I am leaving the realm of my experience and entering the realm of speculation:

Through the process of eating and being eaten, other beings become a part of me, and I become a part of them. But this prayer also hints that, through the act of eating, we participate in something larger: the cycle of Life, God, the Goddess. Ruby Sara beautifully articulates this mystery at the blog No Unsacred Place:

“How remarkable that we can eat our god who then becomes us becoming Her becoming us.”

The idea that we become a part of God through sacramental eating is obviously familiar in a Christian culture. Possibly no better statement of this mystery can be found than in the Gospel of John:

Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life … For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.

While Christians struggle to explain the meaning of the Eucharist in terms of a the Neoplatonic philosophy or in terms of mere metaphor, as a Neopagan, I understand the god-man’s words literally. Our bodies are meat and our blood drink, for predators and parasites. And when I eat the flesh of other animals, they become a part of me. And when I die, I will become a part of other animals that will consume the flesh of my body. Thus, sacramental eating involves a conscious awareness of my own mortality. John Vickery, author of The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough, writes: “To recognize death and mortality and to live fully with that awareness is to know the only true idea of the holy available to man in this or any other century.”

But I think there is more to the mystery of sacramental eating than this. By recognizing my part in this cycle … no, by experiencing my part in this cycle, viscerally, through sacramental eating, I hope to begin to identify not just with those beings whom I consume consume and who will consume me one day as a part of the cycle of Life, but I hope to begin to identify with the cycle itself. In Neopagan terms, I hope that sacramental eating will help me to identify not just with the dying and reviving god who represents the manifest life of individual beings, but with the Goddess who is Life itself — Life with a capital “L”, Life in the sense that encompasses death as part of an eternal cycle.

Jule Cashford and Anne Baring describe the meaning of Life in this larger sense in terms the two Greek words for life: Zoe and bios. According to Cashford and Baring, ” Zoe is eternal and infinite life; bios is finite and individual life. Zoe is infinite ‘being’; bios is the living and dying manifestation of the eternal world in time.” Zoe is the whole; bios is the part. Bios is the manifest world, “the epiphany, or ‘showing forth’, of the unmanifest”, which is Zoe. And human, animal and plant life are all part of this epiphany. “Zoe is then both transcendent and immanent, and bios is the immanent form of zoe.”

(Interestingly, forms of both words, Zoe and bios, are used by Heraclitus in the fragment discussed above: Immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living [Zoe] one another’s death, one another’s life [bios] dying.)

In Neopagan myth, the relationship between Zoe and bios is personified in the Bronze Age myth of the Great Mother Goddess and her son-lover:

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

The Mother Goddess is Zoe, “the eternal source, giving birth to the son as bios, the created life in time which lives and dies back into the source.” In this myth,

“the son-lover must accept death – as the image of incarnate being that falls back, like the seed, into the source – while the goddess, here the continuous principle of life, endures to bring forth new forms from the inexhaustible store.”

And this is the meaning behind the myth of the dying and reviving god. According to Margot Adler, the McFarland Dianics quote a phrase attributed to Bachofen to explain the relationship of the Goddess to her son-lover:

Immortal is Isis, mortal her husband [Osiris],
like the earthly creation he represents.

This idea of finding a new kind life through death was expressed in an ancient prayer found in the Egyptian Coffin Texts in which the deceased identifies with Osiris, the dying and reviving god of the grain. Spell 330 reads:

Whether I live or die I am Osiris,

I enter in and reappear through you,

I decay in you, I grow in you,

I fall down in you, I fall upon my side.

The gods are living in me,

for I live and grow in the corn (Nepry)

that sustains the Honoured Ones.

I cover the earth,

whether I live or die I am Barley.

I am not destroyed.

I have entered the Order (Ma’at),

I rely upon the Order,

I become Master of the Order,

I emerge in the Order,

I make my form distinct,

I am the Lord of the Granary of Memphis,

I have entered into the Order,

I have reached its limits.

In this spell, the deceased transcends his own death by identifying with grain, something which is eaten, by mortals and gods alike. The grain grows and falls, lives and dies; but the deceased lives on as part of Ma’at, which is translated here as “Order”. Ma’at was the Egyptian personification of order in the universe, including the regularity of the seasons, what Cashford and Baring call Zoe, the Great Mother Goddess.

As I understand it, the promise of “eternal life” by Jesus in the Gospel of John (above) is not the promise of an unending life [bios] of the individual ego-self, but the promise that we may become one with that Life [Zoe] which transcends the death of the individual ego. It is eternal, not in the sense of extending into infinity; it is eternal, rather, because of its cyclical nature.

Ironically, this Life eternal can only be experienced through death.

That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die.

(Epistle to the Corinthians). Bachofen writes in his Motherright of the mystery of material nature which is manifest in

“the transformation of the seed grain and the reciprocal relation between perishing and coming into being, by which death is revealed as the indispensable forerunner of higher rebirth.”

But what is this death that is the indispensable forerunner of higher rebirth? It is not just the physical death of the body; it is also the death of the ego-self. Elsewhere, Simone Weil wrote:

“The beauty of the world is the entrance of the labyrinth. The imprudent person who, having entered, takes a few steps, is after some time unable to find his way back. … If he doesn’t lose courage, if he continues to walk, it is absolutely certain that he will arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there, God is waiting for him, to eat him. Later, he will leave again, but changed, become other, having been eaten and digested by God.”

Weil was writing here about the death of the ego that occurs when we are “consumed” by the abyss which is God or the Goddess, when we “die” to our individual lives and are reborn to the Life eternal of the gods.

R. D. Laing writes, in The Politics of Experience, about ego-death in the context of his discussion of the close relationship of madness to mystical experience:

“True sanity entails in one way or another, the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality: the emergence of the ‘inner’ archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.”

The irony is that we might experience this dissolution of the ego, in some measure, through the act of eating, which is intended to perpetuate our individual lives. But by making eating into a sacrament, the meaning of the act is inverted: God eats me, and I become part of God. Maurice Friedman calls Wiel’s imagery “inverse cannibalism”, letting oneself be eaten: “the complete denial of the self in favor of the unlimited affirmation of the Other with whom the knowing self identifies itself” (emphasis original).

Interestingly, Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, also uses the imagery of the labyrinth to describe the ego death experienced by the archetypal hero. He :

“We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us — the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

According to Campbell, in the center of the labyrinth, which is our own psyche, we shall find a god (or the Goddess), and we shall slay our (ego-)selves, and become one with the world. Elsewhere, Campbell writes that this is precisely the function of rituals of death and rebirth:

“When the will of the individual to his own immortality has been extinguished—as it is in rites such as these—through an effective realization of the immortality of being itself and of its play through all things, he is united with that being, in experience, in a stunning crisis of release from the psychology of guilt and mortality.”

This is what I hope to experience, in part through the ritual of sacramental eating. And in fact, it is possible that, of all the rituals I perform as a Neopagan, this one holds the greatest possibility for transformation.