{"id":10263,"date":"2016-02-18T15:45:45","date_gmt":"2016-02-18T20:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/allergicpagan\/?p=10263"},"modified":"2016-02-16T16:11:36","modified_gmt":"2016-02-16T21:11:36","slug":"climb-a-fucking-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/allergicpagan\/2016\/02\/18\/climb-a-fucking-tree\/","title":{"rendered":"Want To Be A Pagan?: “Climb a Fucking Tree!”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"maxresdefault\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I rarely reblog anything here, but I came across an article entitled, \u201cTo Rust Metallic Gods: An Anarcho-Primitivist Critique of Paganism\u201d<\/a>, published at Hasten The Downfall<\/em>, and I have been wanting to share it for months now. This article spoke to both my dissatisfaction with contemporary Neo-Paganism (which arises mostly from the influence of occultism) and my belief in its potential (which is centered around its interaction with neo-animism). The salient part of the essay is excerpted below:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 While I find some personal value in the Five Elements notion, many Wiccans [I would substitute \u201cNeo-Pagans\u201d or \u201cWiccanate Pagans\u201d here] allow it to emphasize abstraction and reductionism, disconnecting themselves from the multitude of real life elemental manifestations.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 Wicca has many sacred ritual implements, including broomsticks, candles, cauldrons, chalices, crystals, daggers, grimoire, incense, pentacles, and wands. Most of the rituals however continue the pagan legacy of separation, in that they have no bioregional root. If Wicca can perform its rituals on a space station, with no biosphere, does it really count as \u201cnature worship\u201d at all? We must acknowledge the spectacle of \u201cinvoking\u201d or \u201csummoning\u201d elements, familiars, spirits, or deities in this way, versus direct and intimate relationship with the living wildness. Paganism, as a pastoral-agrarian phenomenon, meant subduing lands and subjugating species. Nature became abstract, alien, outside. Monstrous and threatening. Pagans ritualized from a sense of lost connection, while still maintaining separation. Paganism substituted the symbolic for the sensory. Neo-paganism and Wicca perpetuate these flaws.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo where does this leave those of us of European descent, who wish to live a more \u201cspiritual\u201d and earth-centered existence? I invite pagans to deepen their bonds to wildness and vitality, to hone sensation more than honor symbols, to root into place. Rather than treating the elements as mystical and external, find your strand in life\u2019s web of relations. Go back to the source. Toward wildness directly. Toward animism. Greco-Roman and European paganism all contained animist aspects, since paganism arose from animist roots. Many folk tradition components may yet have redeeming value. Not necessarily the obsession with monstrous outsiders like dryads, dwarves, elves, giants, kobolds, nixies, nymphs, wyrms, or werewolves, but special connections to springs or stones or trees. Many accounts indicate Indo-European worship of sun, fire, and moon directly. Appreciation for lunar and solar cycles. Solstice and equinox celebrations. Reverence for rivers, forests, marshes, hills. Altars and shrines for local spirits. Feasts, bonfires, and revelry. Rites of passage. Sounds kinda nice without all the focus on crops, livestock, cities, royalty, and war. The animist aspects still prove viable.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 Animism arises from empathy, intimacy, kinship, self-transcendence, sensuality. Animism means to approach a landbase with child-like wonder, to approach the world openly. Open to anomaly, not bounded to archetype. A non-dualistic approach to subject and object, matter and spirit. Each year civilization brings more precise control, more imposed order. Bind your heart to your landbase. Feel its pulse, bear its scars. To sanctify domestication means to renounce wildness. To sanctify the urban means to extinguish vitality.<\/p>\n

\u201cI could point the reader to various writings on animism\u2014and I have my own in the works\u2014but I\u2019d just as soon advise: place your hands in moss and soil. Feel a river\u2019s flow. Watch the dance of dragonflies. Behold the wonder of thunder and lightning. Speak with birds, hear their song. Conjure fire by friction. Feel the movement of wind. Practice tracking and botany. Chant and sing and dance together around campfires! Forage! Climb a fucking tree! Whatever you do, do not adapt to the cage of the city with rituals of alienation. To rust metallic gods means to resist that which eradicates wildness and vitality. Free your feral heart, and find kinship among the bonfires. For ruins, not runes.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The author\u2019s injunction to \u201cclimb a fucking tree\u201d is inspired by Comrade Black\u2019s essay, \u201cNeo-Paganism is Not the Answer \u2013 Climb A Fucking Tree\u201d<\/a>, published at Profane Existence<\/em>. Where the Hasten The Downfall <\/em>article was critical of Wiccanate Neo-Paganism, Black takes aim at polytheistic reconstructionism:<\/p>\n

\u201cMore and more people have begun to reject Christianity, Islam, and other monotheistic religions, and are instead turning towards what are seen as older, earth based forms of spirituality.<\/p>\n

\u201cMeanwhile we live in a society where 90% of the old growth forests have been cut, as the world around us becomes increasingly synthetic, polluted, and urbanized. In response there has been a growing interest in European polytheistic religions as alternative to the hierarchies of the church with it\u2019s gnostic abstracted concepts.<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever these polytheistic religions are often just as problematic as what is being rejected.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 The reality is that before there was polytheistic religions that worshiped symbolic gods of the harvest, war, fertility, or death, there was an older non-theistic religion based in place<\/em>. If you want to worship nature, you don\u2019t need a sunwheel, pentacle, or a goddess to do so \u2013 go out and climb a fucking tree, sit in its branches, learn ecology, listen to the wind rustling the leaves through the branches, watch the squirrels, strip naked and swim in the river as the sun sets. Then do whatever it takes to stop those fuckers who wanna cut that tree cause all they see is dollar signs. You don\u2019t need a European god or goddess to tell you life is sacred<\/em>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not all Pagans are interested in practicing a nature religion.\u00a0 But I am.\u00a0 And I know many others are.\u00a0 And these authors speak to my longing for a more primal spirituality: a spirituality not of the gods and goddesses of<\/em> the Earth, but of the Earth itself \u2014 and of earth, of dirt, of humus-rich loam \u2014 a spirituality of place, a spirituality of wildness, a spirituality of the tangible, a spirituality of life.<\/p>\n

Grok Earth. Praise to the Mama! Thou Art Goddess.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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