The Path of Paganism

April 27, 2017 By John Beckett

After a journey of over three years, my first book The Path of Paganism is out. I got my author copies two weeks ago – I started getting Facebook messages from people who got their pre-ordered copies on Tuesday.

If you didn’t pre-order, it’s now in stock for immediate shipment from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or direct from Llewellyn, the publisher. I hope Barnes & Noble will stock it in their stores, but I have no way of knowing if they will or won’t – if you see it, please let me know. I will have copies for sale at DFW Pagan Unity Fest on May 20 at Arlington UU Church, and at other events where I’m speaking.

I do not intend to turn Denton CUUPS circles into book selling sessions, but I’ll have copies with me – if you want to buy one, just ask. Plus our Beltane is going to be awesome this year – if you’ve ever thought about driving or flying to Denton for one of our rituals, this would be the one.

If you want an objective review, read this one by Claire Dixon at The Wild Hunt.

This is the story of The Path of Paganism.

I always wanted to write a book.

I had dreams of being a rich best-selling novelist who worked from home. That dream was complicated by the fact that I can’t write fiction worth a damn. While I would have gotten decent if I had worked at it, I’m much better suited to writing non-fiction.

I started this blog in 2008 with no intention of doing anything other than working through some religious thoughts and sharing them with whoever wanted to read them. The blog has its own story – what’s important here is that I learned to write blog-length essays very well.

When I moved to Patheos in 2013 my traffic exploded, and I started getting a regular question: “when are you going to write a book?” My stock answer (that I stole from somewhere I can’t remember) was “I don’t have a book-shaped work in me.” I’m good at writing 1000-1500 words on the topic of the day. I had no idea how to write a book of 50,000 to 100,000 words.

Former Patheos Pagan Channel Manager Christine Kraemer suggested that maybe my book was already in my blog. I could take The Four Centers of Paganism, go into more depth, add some rituals and exercises, and have a short but useful book.

All of a sudden the way was opened.

Procrastination and false starts

Saturday night was Imbolc. I promised Brighid I’d write the book. Time to get busy. – Personal journal, February 2, 2014

I never had much of a relationship with Brighid, but She’s been the unofficial patron of Pagans in Denton since long before I moved to Texas. And She is a Goddess of Inspiration. For whatever reason, She wanted this book written. What do you say when a Goddess asks you to do something? I said yes.

I put a matrix together with the Four Centers and how I wanted to explore each one. And that’s all I got done. 2014 was a difficult year for me, for many reasons that are no longer relevant.

In 2015 I threw out the matrix. There wasn’t a book in the Four Centers. But my own practice – individually and with Denton CUUPS – had solidified to the point where I had something I could teach… and that I felt a need to teach. When people asked me “where do I begin?” I had no good references for them.

Another a bit of wisdom I can’t remember where I heard says “if the book you need doesn’t exist, it’s your job to write it.”

The four sections of the book came first: foundations, practice, intermediate practice, and advanced practice. Chapters came next – the topics that needed to be covered in each section.

Started writing the book today. – Personal journal, April 4, 2015

I wrote about 2000 words and then stopped.

What to say?

Writing time is always a problem. I’ve got a blog to maintain, a CUUPS group to support, and I have a day job that pays the bills. How was I going to get all that done and write a book?

When I did have time to write, I encountered another problem: what was I going to say that I hadn’t already said on the blog? For example, I knew I needed to cover the Gods, but how many blog posts have there been about my experiences with Them? What else do I have to say that I haven’t already said?

Maybe the book was already written. Maybe the value of a book isn’t in giving readers brand new words but in giving them the material they need, organized in a logical, progressive manner. Maybe the value is in giving them something tangible they can hold and highlight and refer back to in a year or five. Plus a lot of people who buy Pagan books don’t read Pagan blogs.

I had seen a few Pagans who turned blog posts into books – I didn’t like them. They read like blog posts that had been copied and pasted into a book. No, if I was going to build a book from blog posts, I was going to build a real book that would look and feel and read like one thing.

All I had to do was sift through seven years of blog posts and tease a book out of them.

Building a book

Book is coming along. I’ve got over 120,000 words in Scrivener, almost all from blog posts. I’ve dumped and rearranged – now it’s time to start editing. – Personal journal, June 22, 2015

I got some good book-writing tips from Morpheus Ravenna, who wrote The Book of the Great Queen in 2014. Her most useful tip was to get Scrivener, a book writing program. It was far easier writing and editing in Scrivener than in Word.

I was aiming for a 90,000 word book, more or less. That would bring it in at about 300 pages – enough to feel like I had produced a substantive work, without making it so long no one would want to finish it. I needed to start cutting.

I also needed to blend and smooth a lot of material. If something is important to me, I tend to blog on it multiple times, often saying the same thing from a slightly different perspective. That works well with blogging – it doesn’t work at all for books. I had to take out repetitive material, as well as move sections from one chapter to another where they would fit better.

That’s a lot of work and it wasn’t moving along.

“Tell him to do Brighid’s work before I come for him.” – Ecstatic message from the Morrigan, July 12, 2015

That message could be interpreted a couple of different ways and none of them were pleasant. Time to get to work. I put a schedule together to finish the book by the end of the year, and I committed to working the schedule. And I did.

Making progress on the book. I’ve done the blog dump, the organization, and the first edit. Now I’m in the second edit, with the primary goal of giving the book one voice: open, but unapologetically polytheist. – Personal journal, September 2, 2015

The biggest pain in all this? My grossly inconsistent style in referring to deities. Sometimes Gods, sometimes Gods and Goddesses, sometimes goddesses and gods, and in some of the early posts God/dess. And then the there’s the capitalization of pronouns – all that had to be manually changed to one consistent style.

Initial feedback

A book is not finished when you’ve written the last word. Someone else needs to give it an honest look. I had four “alpha readers” – people I know and trust, but all chosen for slightly different reasons.

Cynthia Talbot was first. She’s my closest friend, advisor, and fellow priest. Much of what I write about (in the book or on the blog) she’s experienced with me. Jason Mankey brought the view of someone who’s been writing longer than I have and who recently published his own book. Sean Harbaugh brought the perspective of a senior ADF priest, and Yvonne Aburrow brought the perspective of a British Unitarian Pagan.

All four alpha readers had constructive comments, ranging from “this isn’t clear” to “you’re using this word wrong.” But their overall feedback was positive. I felt good about the finished book – this convinced me the “build a book” process had worked.

I asked Kristoffer Hughes to write a foreword – he enthusiastically said yes. It helps an unknown author to have an established author associated with a book, but I also wanted his feedback. Kris has been my biggest cheerleader from the moment I told him what I was doing.

Selling the book

The major publishing companies generally won’t touch previously published material. Fortunately, there are several independent publishers who will. And print-on-demand services have made self-publishing a viable option. I assumed I’d go one of those two routes. When an independent publisher contacted me out of the blue about publishing a collection of blog posts, I figured that was it.

Early on, both Jason and Kris told me I should send it to Llewellyn, who had published their books. After reading the final draft and before writing the foreword, Kris virtually insisted I try. I liked that idea – over the years Llewellyn has published some things I wish they hadn’t, but they’re the biggest player in the game, and they can get a book in more hands than anyone else in the Pagan world. I really didn’t think they’d want my book, but as Kris told me “what do you have to lose?”

So I contacted Elysia Gallo, Acquisitions Editor at Llewellyn. I had met Elysia briefly at Between the Worlds in 2012. She remembered me, and while she was non-committal, she agreed to look at the book. I sent it to her the Monday before Thanksgiving, 2015.

She liked it, and wanted to present it to the Llewellyn Acquisitions Committee. Because of holidays, conferences, and other projects, that didn’t happen till early March. But the committee liked it and offered me a contract. I got it on March 11, 2016.

The publishing process

It takes a long time to make a book. I’ve written about this during the process (both here and on Facebook) so I’ll summarize briefly.

Editing: Elysia sent me six pages of comments and recommended changes. 80% of them had me smacking my head and saying “that’s much better – why didn’t I write it like that in the first place?” 10% were “I’m OK either way and you’re the publishing professionals, so we’ll do it your way.” The final 10% were things where I said “no, it needs to stay the way I wrote it and here’s why.” Those things stayed the same. It was a very collaborative process and everyone’s first priority was to make the book the best it can be.

Title: My working title was Gather Under the Oaks. That connected it to my blog “Under the Ancient Oaks.” And I like the image of a Druid teaching under a tree. I thought it was a nice, poetic title, but I wasn’t thrilled with it. Llewellyn’s editors were concerned that didn’t tell someone who picked up the book in a store what it was about – they proposed The Path of Paganism. I’m good with it. They kept my subtitle An Experience-Based Guide to Modern Pagan Practice, which describes what the book is all about.

Cover: I’ve seen some great covers from Llewellyn, and I’ve seen some awful ones. I gave them examples of both.

The purpose of a cover is to sell the book, but please – find something serious and dignified. I will scream and throw things if someone puts a cute cover on it. – E-mail to Elysia Gallo, March 31, 2016

I could not be happier with the cover. It says visually what the title Gather Under the Oaks tried to say verbally, only better.

The finished book

Someone on Facebook asked me how it felt to finally hold my book. At first, it was no big deal. I’ve been finished with it for so long I’ve been disconnected from it. But the more I thought about it, the better it felt.

I wrote a book. More than that, I wrote a book that didn’t exist. There is a dearth of 200-level Pagan books – this is one. There was nothing that provided a good introduction for Paganism as I practice it – now there is.

I hope all of you find it helpful, now and in the years to come.

Pieces of Eight

August 4, 2016 By John Beckett

Pieces of Eight

by Gordon White
published by Amazon Digital Services, July 2016
Kindle only: $4.44

Another month, another book by Gordon White of Rune Soup. Or so it seems, anyway. This is the third book Gordon has published this year. Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits was published in February by Scarlet Imprint. The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality was published in March by Llewellyn. And now at the end of July we have Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments, self-published by Gordon on Amazon as an e-book only. Why e-book only? Gordon explains on his blog.

Gordon White keeps the long-running Rune Soup blog, which I read religiously. He’s produced the Rune Soup podcast for the past 34 weeks, never missing a week. I hear him on other people’s podcasts once or twice a month. He recently started a subscription-based newsletter (but subscribing is free) called The All Red Line. And did I mention he just moved from London back to his native Australia?

Two years ago I stirred up a bit of controversy with my thoughts on the old saying “a poor magician is a poor magician.” My point was that a magician who doesn’t have their stuff together probably isn’t someone you want to be taking advice from, magical or otherwise.

By that standard, Gordon White is someone you should listen to very, very carefully.

Is Pieces of Eight really a chaos magic book? Gordon asks “what could possibly be served via the publication of another chaos magic book? Perhaps nothing.” It is certainly not a book that tells you how to do chaos magic – there are already plenty of those already available. Its stated purpose is “to dropkick the discourse into the twenty first century.”

In all three of his books, Gordon has said his purpose is to provide context for magical study and practice. Whether your path is magical, esoteric, or religious, context provides grounding. It helps you understand not just what you’re doing but why you’re doing it, who did it before you, and what it means. That’s particularly important with magic, which our mainstream world insists is fantasy and nothing more.

Every wizard needs to build rather than rent a metaphysics. And such a metaphysics needs to not only improve the success of your practical enchantments but also allow you to interrogate reality in an increasingly sophisticated way.

At the last Between the Worlds conference in 2015, organizer Ivo Dominguez Jr. stopped me for a brief hallway conversation and said my Four Centers of Paganism needs a fifth center: the search for the way the universe works. I’ve never written about that because it struck me as a rejection of science, even though I knew Ivo didn’t mean it that way. After this year’s tidal wave of Rune Soup magic, I’m finally starting to see the wisdom in Ivo’s statement. If the universe doesn’t run strictly on Newtonian physics, and if quantum mechanics and string theory are less certain and far less provable than advertised, then how does the universe work? I’ve long said there are many things about the nature of the universe that are beyond our capacity to know and I stand by that statement, but perhaps I’ve been a little too quick to abandon the search.

Materialism, it must be understood, is a premise of science, not a finding.

Another element of context is history. I’m not an occultist – I haven’t read all of the classic texts Gordon recommends. But I’ve read some of them, and I’ve read many in my own traditions, especially in Druidry with its emphasis on bardic work.

Learn and tell your history or lesser people will tell it for you. This is your lore. Keep it.

Most of the magic in Pieces of Eight involves working with spirits.

I would suggest that ongoing interaction with the spirit world is a naturally occurring, entirely normal, component of human existence. If that is indeed the case, then the need to elevate Animism to the Big Worldview Table is only increased. [In the “for what it’s worth” department, Tuesday’s post on animism was entirely written before I started reading Pieces of Eight.]

I’ve never been particularly fond of spirit work, or at least, not fond of working with certain kinds of spirits. I do regular work with Gods, ancestors, and nature spirits. When it comes to the kind of spirit work taught in the grimoire tradition, I’ve probably still got some residual fear of demons left over from my Christian upbringing. But…

What magic has to offer for the interested – if slightly foolhardy – seeker, is a set of protocols honed from centuries of spirit contact.

There’s a whole tradition here that’s at least two thousand years old and is probably as old as humanity, in one form or another. Because it’s Western, and because we stand in a line whose religion has been Christianity for a thousand years or more, many of the invocations and incantations are explicitly Christian. Gordon basically says not to worry about it, that we’re part of this tradition, that “real” Christianity is simply a revision of late Greek and Roman paganism, and that Protestantism (especially the low church, Evangelical variety) is to blame for our hang-ups with it. There’s some truth to that – truth that to this day is denied in conservative Protestant churches.

Perhaps if I had grown up in a non-religious family, or if I had grown up in a high church Anglican environment, I might be able to work with Gordon’s suggestion. It would certainly make learning this sort of magic easier – there’s so much more documentation of it than from the Northwest European traditions that call to me. But I didn’t grow up in that environment. I grew up in fundamentalist Christianity and I’m not interested in opening that door again, even slightly. I’m a Druid and a polytheist – I’ll gladly and thankfully learn what I can from the grimoire magicians, but their path is not my path.

As soon as I heard the title Pieces of Eight, I knew there would a be a pirate theme to the book, though perhaps it would be more appropriate to call it a subtext. In the Introduction, Gordon says

Chaos magic is always the pirates to the Victorian orders’ Royal Navy. And like the pirates of the Golden Age, its existence improves both itself and those it preys upon.

I’m in strong agreement with this.

This is what we do. We map these dangerous roads not to defeat or change Power – the new boss is ever the same as the old one and it is politically and historically naïve to think otherwise – but to build better lives outside the grasp and beyond the site of monoculture.

For all my deep exploration and practice of polytheism, animism, and magic, I’m still very much a Unitarian Universalist who wants to build a better world here and now. At the same time, I’m enough of a realist to understand that better world isn’t going to be fully manifest any time soon. So Plan B is to gather a community of like minded folks who want to study, practice, and work to make our own lives better, so we will have the skills and inspiration to do what we can to create a better future.

Practical enchantment is not a path to spiritual development. But living in a universe where practical enchantment works does make that quest just a little bit easier.

That’s why I study magic, even though my first calling is as a Druid and a priest. And sometimes, there’s a little overlap. Or more than a little.

The Sybils were, in Gordon’s words “superstar prophetesses and goddesses.” There is documentation of them as far back as 500 BCE and they were considered ancient even then. Their tradition continued well into the Christian era. Gordon says “the Sibyls are back.” When I read the descriptions of their proclamations, they sound an awful lot like the kind of ritual possession Diana Paxson has written about and I have experienced.

Now, imagine what someone with some natural talent for ecstatic communion and communication with the Gods and spirits could do if that was their job – if the community supported them physically and financially and regularly sought their guidance.

That’s context we don’t have. Yet.

I enjoyed Pieces of Eight. I downloaded it the same day it was released and I read it in a little over three hours (which leads me to believe that if it was a physical book, it would be 120 pages or so, depending on font and page size). It cleared up some things in my mind, and tied together a lot of loose ends from the Rune Soup blog and from Gordon’s first two books. He says that if you read all three, you’ll be able to read his fourth book, which cannot be written.

I feel like I’ve read Gordon’s fourth book, but I can’t implement its teachings. Or perhaps, I’m implementing them in ways he did not intend – which likely are ways he wouldn’t approve of. But while I do not consider myself a chaos magician, I’m following in fine chaos magic tradition: “trialling a lot of things and retaining those that work.”

So far it’s working.

So, who should read this book? Gordon says “it should not be the first book you read on magic but anything between second and final is fine.” Perhaps this is true for those who come to magic from an occultist perspective, but for those who come through the more usual paths of Wicca, folk magic, or pop culture magic, more reading and mainly a lot of practice is required. This is a “300 level” book, in large part because its minimalist approach requires a lot of familiarity with basic magical concepts and techniques.

Then again, if you read this book and every time you come across something you don’t understand, you go looking for books and practices and teachers who can teach them to you, you’ll end up with a first class magical education.

The bottom line: if you have an interest in this sort of magic, you’ll want to read Pieces of Eight.

Believing in the Postman

January 21, 2016 By John Beckett

Is contemporary Paganism splitting, perhaps schisming? That’s the proposition of The Matter Of The Gods by Jonathan Woolley, posted on Gods & Radicals last month and also published in A Beautiful Resistance. Woolley says it is, and he comes down strongly in favor of one side of the split. He says:

Let us not worry unnecessarily over the matter of the gods; but explore it with curiosity, and accept the inevitably of many answers to the same questions. Let us leave belief—and all the problematic baggage that it carries—behind.

For there are far more important conversations; over how we should govern ourselves, about the security of our water and our weather, and about who our friends (and enemies) are. Because the more situated, the more contemporary, the more specific in time and space, the more rooted in the pragmatic concerns and the lived experiences of people today our spirituality is, the more like the wisdom of the ancients it becomes.

There is much to like in this essay. Woolley’s history is solid, especially his point that since the demise of Christianity’s death-grip on personal belief and practice in the West, religion has become diverse and complicated and beautifully so. As I discussed in my last post, most people’s definition of religion is filled with unexamined Christian assumptions, many of them straight out of Victorian colonialism. But that definition doesn’t hold true in the rest of the world, and it need not hold for us.

But Woolley falls into this same trap when he examines the state of contemporary Paganism:

It is assumed that the question “What is Paganism?” can be answered with reference to a particular set of ideas, that owe their validity to a single authoritative source. In doing this, we treat Christianity – with its emphasis on just such an arrangement – as the gold standard to which we must aspire.

Woolley looks at several models of Paganism (including my own Four Centers of Paganism) but says they’re an attempt to force us into “a community joined by common belief.” This is a misreading of the Four Centers model, which is not a definition but an attempt to describe what people who go to Pagan events, buy Pagan books, write and comment on Pagan blogs, and generally identify as Pagans think and do. Belief is part of that, but only one part, and for many it’s far from the most important part.

Still, Woolley is right that there’s a split between polytheists and other Pagans, to an extent that some polytheists would take issue with my use of the word “other” in this sentence. This is a natural and inevitable part of the maturation of Paganism. We’ve moved from the joy of being freed from religions that don’t fit us to deep theological and philosophical contemplation (though there have always been people doing deep thinking and devoted practice). And our deep contemplations are leading us toward many expressions of Pagan and polytheist belief and practice, not one.

I have long argued that in order for polytheism to become widespread, it must be as accessible and welcoming to the plumber and the accountant as it is to the mystic and the priest. If Jonathan Woolley wishes to devote himself to “practical concerns” and pour an occasional libation, so be it. Our movement – and our world – needs radicals and activists as much as it needs theologians and ritualists. Let each of us do what we’re called to do and honor the Gods in the ways They require of us.

Where I take issue with this essay is the contention that the Gods and our thinking about the Gods are unimportant.

Woolley repeats a famous quote from author Terry Pratchett:

Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman. (1)

Terry Pratchett was brilliant and funny, and for his audience (far more Sci-Fi and fantasy fans than actual witches and Pagans) this quote was perfect. It emphasizes that we best know the Gods through first-hand experience, not through unreflective acceptance of someone else’s ideas about Them.

But too many Pagans and would-be polytheists take this quote a bit too literally. We know the postman exists, of course. Mail appears in our box every day. Outgoing mail disappears and a few days later we get confirmation it arrived. Sometimes we see our postman in the neighborhood, and on rare occasion we may actually speak to him.

But the vast majority of the time we don’t think about the postman. We don’t even think about the things he does for us. We just walk to the box with certainty that the mail will be there, or if the box is empty, with certainty that we got lucky and no one sent us junk mail or a bill today. We take the postman for granted.

We never notice that the postman is actually a woman named Carolyn who has two children and skates in roller derby on the weekends, who loves sushi and spends her vacations hiking in the mountains. Because we never talk to her, we never hear about the mystical waterfall she found in Colorado or the time she got caught on the side of a mountain in a thunderstorm and thought she was going to die. (2)

We just see the mail coming and going. We know the postman exists, but she isn’t very important to us.

For many polytheists, not only is believing in the Gods not sufficient, neither is knowing Them at the level we know the postman. We will only be satisfied with knowing Them at a level where we understand Them as real, distinct, individual beings with sovereignty and agency. We must know Them as persons, not merely as roles.

Our beliefs are our attempts to correlate our experiences of and thoughts about the Gods with the experiences and thoughts of our ancestors and of our fellow polytheists. They are not creeds to be recited verbatim – we are not so arrogant as to think we know everything that’s important about any one God, much less the Gods in general. Rather, they are working hypotheses, constantly subject to revision as our experience and knowledge grow.

I do not want polytheism to become a network of clerical and monastic orders where pious levels of devotion are required for admission. We need those clerical and monastic orders (and a bunch of individuals doing pious levels of devotion) but we also need plumbers and accountants… and activist academics. At Imbolc, there is room at Brighid’s altar for everyone to make an offering, including those who only know Her as an Irish Goddess who may or may not have a connection with a Catholic saint of the same name.

Jonathan Woolley is right – the Western legacy of Christianity has left us with the unworkable idea that all religions should either convert or converge to one. But there are already many polytheisms: some revived, some reconstructed, and some – such as the African Traditional Religions – that have existed continuously for thousands of years. Many Gods, many ways.

While we need not and should not fight over belief, neither should we discount it. Some just want to pick up their mail, but others want to know the Postmen in all Their glorious wisdom and might.

(1) from Witches Abroad, 1991.

(2) Morpheus Ravenna discussed this idea in more depth in her keynote address at last year’s Many Gods West conference.

Polytheism Among The Druids

September 24, 2015 By John Beckett

If you want to talk about the weather, you can strike up a conversation with a stranger in the grocery store. If you want to talk sports, you can probably find someone in your office or school who shares your love for your local teams (get well soon, Tony and Dez!). But we’ve all been warned “don’t talk about religion and politics.” That’s good advice if we’ll only heed it – it prevents a lot of needless fights.

But what if you really want to talk about religion? What if you need to talk about religion? It’s one thing if you belong to a large church with lots of educated and experienced members, but Pagans are lucky to have a small group of nearby people who follow their tradition. Many of us are solitary practitioners.

I’m fortunate to have a small but very deep group of Pagan friends in Denton CUUPS. But even with that, I still look forward to the religious conversations I have at the various Pagan gatherings I attend.

I lost track of how many times I heard “can I talk to you for a minute?” at last week’s OBOD East Coast Gathering. I’ve come to expect this and I really enjoy it. But this year’s conversations seemed to be deeper and more serious than in previous years. In particular, I heard a lot of questions and comments around polytheism.

At first, this struck me as odd. In the Four Centers of Paganism model, OBOD is strongly Nature-centered and Self-centered. One of the early Bardic grade lessons explains the various views of divinity, but it does not promote one view over the others. Many – probably most – OBOD members consider Druidry to be spirituality rather than religion. OBOD’s inclusiveness is one of the reasons it’s the largest Druid order in the world.

That inclusiveness is big enough to include polytheism. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that rather than being surprised, I should have expected this interest. While the conversations I had at the ECG are private, there are some common themes that flow from them that tell us why polytheism is rising among the Druids.

The Gods are moving. Any conversation about our relations with Gods with agency must begin with the Gods themselves. They are moving – calling people to Their service as priests, devotees, scholars, warriors, artists, musicians, and in the many ways we serve that which is greater than ourselves. Some people are pursuing the Gods on their own, but most seem to be responding to visions, dreams, and messages that are vague when viewed in isolation but that are quite clear within the context of Paganism.

We can guess at what They’re up to – I’ve had great fun watching followers of Morrigan and followers of Odin comparing notes – but all we can do is guess. But while we can’t know why They’re moving, we can clearly see that They are moving.

They’re recruiting in fertile ground. If you want apples, you’ve got a better chance to find them at a grocery store than a clothing store. You’ve got a better chance of finding good apples at a farmers’ market than at a big box store. You can get apples at Wal-Mart, but how much better will they be if you can get them straight from the orchard?

In our skeptical, materialist culture, the Gods could bodily appear on a downtown sidewalk and at best They’d get a few odd looks. I hear some polytheists talk about dealing with ancient and primal Gods who don’t seem to understand contemporary Western culture (or maybe They just don’t like it), but They are wise enough to figure out what’s fertile ground for planting and what’s a spiritual wasteland.

OBOD doesn’t teach polytheism, but it does teach how to build connections with Nature, with our ancestors, and with ourselves. It teaches imagination, purpose, and labor. That doesn’t mean every Bard, Ovate, and Druid will become a polytheist, but it does mean those who diligently work with this material are more likely to see the Gods for who and what They are than the average person on the street.

The stories of our ancestors remind us they were polytheists. It’s hard to hear your friends in a crowded, cheering football stadium, but if you know they’re there you can listen for them and you can hear them. The loudest voices in our culture scream there is only one God, and the second loudest scream there are no Gods. That makes it really hard to hear the voices of the many Gods unless we know to listen for Them.

The stories of Cerridwen, Brighid, Arianrhod, and many others – some of whom are so ancient They are known only by Their functions – all remind is that in the not-so-distant past our ancestors recognized and honored many Gods. If they were polytheists, it’s not such a stretch to understand that we can be polytheists too.

Working with the land brings us into relationship with its spirits. Spend a little time outside and it becomes clear that Nature is alive. Pay attention and you start to understand that Nature and all its creatures are alive in much the same way that we’re alive. And if we have spirits, so do they.

Perhaps you see this as animism. Perhaps you see it as manifestations of the Gods and fae. Perhaps – like me – you see it as both. Regardless of how you understand Nature, working with Nature – as OBOD and most other Druid orders teach – will bring you into relationship with the spirits and the Gods of Nature.

OBOD teaches some very effective spiritual technologies. Most attempts at religious inclusiveness end up being the proverbial mile wide and inch deep. This is the genius of OBOD: the spiritual practices it teaches can be used in a polytheistic setting, in a pantheistic setting, in a non-theistic setting, and even in a monotheistic setting.

OBOD is a Druid order – its teachings are presented in a Celtic Pagan context. But they are applicable in any tradition, and that is by intention. The skills and practices I learned in the groves of the Bards, Ovates, and Druids remain helpful as I attempt to grow deeper in my devotion to the Gods who call to me.

OBOD is not a polytheist order and I strongly suspect it will never become one. That’s OK – its teachings are meaningful and helpful to many people with many different ideas about the Divine. But for a growing number of us, those ideas include polytheism.

Fish Is Not Just Fish

August 27, 2015 By John Beckett

Many of us like to talk about how Paganism is a religion (or religions) of doing, not believing. Here on this blog and in other venues I’ve emphasized that if you do the right thing, I don’t care why you do the right thing. Doctrinal purity is not required to dance the Maypole – it’s not even required to participate in our devotional rituals.

A religion of doing and not believing (or that de-emphasizes believing) is good, but it will only take you so far. Maybe that’s far enough for you, and if so that’s fine. But if you want to understand why you do what you do, or how doing this can lead to that, or if you want to try to figure out what it all means, then you’re doing to have to dig deeper. You’re going to have to draw some distinctions.

When I was much younger I had a business trip to Sweden (in January – there was about six hours of daylight each day). Even though I’m a monolingual American, I had no trouble traveling alone – almost everyone in Sweden speaks English. One night I was at dinner with my Swedish co-workers and the fish was especially good. I asked “what kind of fish is this?” And guy sitting next to me said “fish.” I said “yes, but what kind of fish? What species of fish?” He said a name in Swedish – of course, I didn’t understand that. Eventually the waiter brought out a restaurant translation guide and looked up the English name (haddock, if I’m remembering correctly after all these years).

The fish tasted great no matter what you call it. But if I wanted to be able to order it again, or if I wanted to look up where it’s found and whether or not it’s being overfished, I needed to know its name, in words I could understand.

Cathy doesn’t like fish. To her “fish is fish.” I like fish, and I like some better than others. I like haddock and cod better than tilapia or catfish. I love Alaskan salmon so much I can’t stand eating Atlantic salmon any more. For me, fish is most definitely not just fish.

Who’s right? I think we all recognize that’s a silly question. For Cathy, “fish” is all she needs to know. I want to know what kind of fish… and if it’s Alaskan salmon, I want to know if it’s Coho, Sockeye, or Chinook.

Whether we’re talking fish or religion, deep understanding requires drawing clear but often subtle distinctions between things that are very similar but not exactly the same. It requires precise definitions, and definitions are boundaries. Many Pagans react badly to boundaries, particularly if other people draw them. Many of us are more concerned that “nobody’s going to tell me what to think!” than with coming to a better understanding and appreciation of our religion.

As we grow in spiritual depth, as we concentrate more and more on one of the Four Centers of Paganism, it becomes necessary to draw more boundaries and more precise boundaries. Not to declare some beliefs or practices “good” and others “bad” any more than haddock is empirically better than tilapia, but to say “this is different from that.” These differences may be subtle and they may unimportant to some Pagans, but to the devout practitioner they are critical to their continued spiritual growth.

With all that said, let’s go back to talking about polytheism.

Poly means many, and polytheism is the acknowledgement of and engagement with many Gods. But not all ideas about the many Gods are the same. Not everyone who says “I believe in many Gods” means the same thing. Arguing about who’s right is useless, but understanding the difference is crucial.

This is proving to be a hard distinction to draw with rhetoric alone, so I’d like to offer an example. Go read this piece by Jason Mankey. Jason is trying to help a friend and fellow Pagan find the right God to include in his ritual. Here’s an excerpt:

The deities we call should make sense theologically and mythologically. In the scenario outlined above the presence of the god Pan doesn’t make theological sense. Pan is not a god of the harvest, and while it’s true that his father Hermes shepherds souls, that’s not something that’s ever been associated with Arcadia’s favorite goat-son. A deity is going to bring their attributes to the party (or ritual) and you want those attributes to line-up with what’s going on in ritual.

Is this polytheism? Of course it is. It acknowledges that there are many Gods and they aren’t interchangeable – they’re not all the same. It’s thoughtful and respectful. Anybody who says Jason Mankey isn’t a polytheist isn’t paying attention.

Now go read this post about a ritual Denton CUUPS did in honor of Cernunnos.

Then the drumming started and we began calling His name. At that point the script stopped. As I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions, I’m not comfortable with unscripted rituals. I like order and predictability. But I serve a God who is wild and free, and He only tolerates my obsessive orderliness so much.

His presence, which had been mild but undeniable since we started setting up (what, you think a Forest God is going to sit quietly outside the door till He gets a proper invitation?) became overwhelming. Someone shouted. Someone got up and began to dance. Then another got up, and another, and another. Before long we had a whole line of people dancing, spinning, and chanting around the altar.

Cernunnos! Cernunnos! Cernunnos!

Do you see the difference? Do you feel the difference? This isn’t finding the right God for a seasonal ritual or a magical working. This is acknowledging a God as a person, honoring Him, and facilitating an ecstatic experience of Him. The first includes the Gods – the second puts the Gods front and center.

The issue isn’t which approach is right, or even which approach is better. The issue is recognizing that the two approaches are different. I’m uneasy with a “plug and play” approach to Gods, but if someone else does it, that’s between their Gods and them. There are many Gods and many people, so there are many ways the two will engage and interact.

Why is this important? If you walk into a restaurant, do you really want the waiter to say “it’s all fish”? The Pagan and polytheist communities have a regular influx of seekers who have lived their entire lives in a culture where it’s assumed there is one God – at most. When they start looking inside the Big Tent of Paganism, most don’t know what they’re looking for.

Perhaps they’ve had a first-hand experience of one or more of the many Gods and they’re looking for some context to help them understand it. Perhaps they’re trying to get away from an abusive religion. Perhaps they’ve always felt something special in Nature, or when reading mythology, or when looking at ancient sites and artifacts.

Many of these people are looking for the Gods. As a Druid and a priest, it’s not my place to tell them how they should approach the Gods. But it is my responsibility – and the responsibility of every other Pagan and polytheist – to help them distinguish between the various approaches so they can understand the differences and find the one that calls to them.

The current problem is that we don’t have clear, widely understood language to differentiate between the very similar but critically different kinds of polytheist fish. A couple years ago the term devotional polytheist started to be used to describe the Gods-centered approach, and Galina Krasskova wrote a very good book with that title to explain and teach its practices. But the term doesn’t appear to be sticking – I don’t see it in use regularly, especially by people who could legitimately claim it as their own.

I suspect there’s a fear that if we qualify our polytheism, some other polytheism will come to be seen as normative. In theory every polytheism should be named or otherwise distinguished, because every polytheism I know or know of adds beliefs and practices to the affirmation of the genuine existence of many Gods.

I don’t have a solution to propose, and I absolutely do not like fighting over ownership of terms. But in the interests of clarity and for the sake of those who are seeking, we desperately need to find ways to recognize and appreciate the differences in how different people understand and interact with the many Gods.

Fish is not just fish.

Hospitality in Practice

June 21, 2015 By John Beckett

Over on the Nature’s Path blog, CUUPS Continental President Rev. Amy Beltaine has a piece titled Right Relationship and Drawing the Circle Wide. She gets right to the point in the second paragraph: “Sometimes Pagans are the marginalized group. And sometimes Pagans are the agents of oppression, colonization, and marginalization.” I encourage you to read her post and to carefully consider the examples she provides – they aren’t isolated incidents.

I’m a Big Tent Pagan – I want Wiccans and Druids, Hellenists and Heathens, kitchen witches and tree huggers and everyone else working together to support each other and build a better world. At the same time, I strongly support self-identification. If you say “I’m not a Pagan” then I’m not going to call you a Pagan, even if I think you belong in the tent. There is no clear unambiguous definition of Paganism. The Four Centers model is my best effort to describe Paganism, but defining it still eludes me (and everyone else as well).

These vague boundaries make it easy for us to assume a person, practice, or tradition is Pagan (and therefore ours) when it isn’t. Amy says what needs to be said and I’ve written on this before:

Presenting culture implies that you understand that culture. If you’ve appropriated it, if you’ve taken the bits that look interesting to you, if you’ve taken the glory and ignored the suffering, then you don’t understand what you’re doing. It’s inaccurate and inauthentic. [And it] ignores the insults such appropriations are to the people the culture is stolen from.

Amy has some ideas that are worth discussing and she asks for further suggestions. As for me, I think part of the solution to this problem is a recommitment to the virtue of hospitality.

Hospitality was a virtue to our ancestors because they lived in a harsh environment where refusing to take in a stranger was tantamount to saying “I don’t care if you live or die.” When we practice good hospitality, our actions tell our guests “you are valued” – not because you may someday join our group or because you may throw $20 in the basket, but because you are a living, breathing, sentient being who possesses inherent dignity and worth.

Some hospitality is pretty basic stuff. Greet your guests as they arrive. Talk to them and listen while they talk to you. Make sure they know what they need to know to participate in the ritual. Accommodate their needs. These are simple matters but they aren’t always easy, and if we don’t make them a priority we may overlook them.

But hospitality goes much deeper than this. In a society where Black people can be massacred in church and are consistently treated more harshly by the police, where unemployment among Native Americans is 50% higher than among whites, and where immigrants are vilified, we have an obligation to be especially hospitable. Not just to embody our own virtues and not just to honor our guests, but to set a good example for our wider society.

Don’t make assumptions. Don’t assume the Black person who comes to your circle is interested in Voodoo. Don’t assume the visiting Santero doesn’t share your love of animals. Don’t assume the blind person isn’t going to be able to fully participate in your ritual. Approach everyone with an open mind and a closed mouth – let them tell you who and what they are in their own way and on their own terms.

Respect traditions that aren’t yours. Don’t assume you know enough to lead a ritual in a tradition you have only a passing familiarity with, particularly if that tradition is alive and active. If you’re interested in Native American spirituality, support Native artists and writers. Syncretism is a valid, time-honored religious approach, but remember Sam Webster’s warning: “tech is transferrable – culture is not.”

Don’t run down other traditions. Not every Pagan had a bad experience in Christianity and some of us who did still have Christian friends and relatives. We don’t want to hear their religions insulted for a straw man argument or a cheap joke. Even where we have valid disagreements with other religions, a public ritual isn’t the place to expound on them.

Make your rituals inclusive. Avoid gender essentialism and heteronormativity. Accommodate your members and guests with mobility issues. Make sure your rituals are representative of all your community.

This does not mean every ritual should be least common denominator, vague generic Paganism! Denton CUUPS is far more polytheist than most CUUPS groups, and most of our rituals include offerings to Gods, ancestors, and nature spirits. If I’m leading the ritual (or Cynthia, or Conor, or several other members) you won’t hear an invocation of The Goddess – you’ll hear invocations of Danu, Morrigan, Brighid, or Athena. But this year’s Ostara ritual was led by our New Thought-trained matriarch and it did include invocations of Goddess and God. Yule will led by our Wiccan-trained Education Officer and I imagine it will too.

Do what you do deeply and authentically. Then when you do something different, do it deeply and authentically too.

Make the path to membership clear. What does full inclusion require? At what point can a new member take an active role in ritual? In leadership? When – and under what guidance – can they lead a ritual in their tradition?

When Conor Warren led our first-ever Hellenic ritual (and his first large public ritual) last year, I served as co-coordinator. I gave some basic feedback and made sure there was nothing inappropriate for a CUUPS event (I didn’t expect anything and there wasn’t, but as an officer I had an obligation to make sure). It went very well. Conor is leading another Hellenic ritual this year. I’m available if he wants my help, but it’s all his at this point.

CUUPS is open to all who share our values and support our mission. Our challenge is to be welcoming and hospitable to all we encounter, where ever they fit into – or outside of – the Big Tent of Paganism.

Why Pagan Theology Is Important

June 11, 2015 By John Beckett

Over on the Patheos Atheist channel, Bob Seidensticker has a good piece titled Your Religion Is a Reflection of Your Culture—You’d Be Muslim if You Were Born in Pakistan. There’s a very strong correlation between the religion of birth and the religion practiced as an adult. Conversions do happen (I’m proof of that) but they’re fairly rare, particularly outside the West.

I came to pretty much the same conclusion many years ago – it’s the biggest reason I could not remain in Evangelical Christianity and became a universalist, the path that would eventually lead me to Paganism, Druidry, and Unitarian Universalism. The odds on salvation vs. damnation are highly dependent on where and when you’re born, and that gross unfairness is incompatible with a God who is supposedly both all-powerful and all-loving.

Seidensticker’s piece is good, but I want to explore the implications of one of the comments made by someone using the name MrCorvus:

IMO, logically, either all religions are correct (many paths to God) or they are all wrong (religion is man-made).

The other option, that one religion is correct and all the others are wrong, doesn’t make any sense to me. It would imply that an all-powerful, loving God decided that the fate of your eternal soul would come down to a crap shoot on where and how you happened to be born and raised.

This is a question of theology – the study of the nature of the Gods. There’s a been a bit of an uptick in postings on Pagan theology lately. Sable Aradia has a nice recap, which includes my piece on the Four Centers of Paganism, though I see the Four Centers as a work of religious studies, not theology.

Last week on PaganSquare, Gus diZerega wrote about Why Pagan theology is so unimportant among Pagans. If we lived in a Pagan bubble, perhaps Gus would have a fair point – but we don’t. We live in a culture that is saturated with Christian assumptions, something MrCorvus’ comment illustrates perfectly. He sees only three possibilities:

one God, one way – the conservative Christian position
one God, many ways – the universalist Christian position
no God, no ways – the atheist position

There are two unstated assumptions here, both of which flow out of our nominally-Christian culture. The first is the assumption that either there is one God or there is no God. The polytheist option – that there are many Gods – is never considered. Perhaps MrCorvus has the Victorian attitude that polytheism is something primitive that all good educated people have abandoned, but more likely he’s simply never given the idea of many Gods the first thought.

Pagans don’t proselytize and we have no need to convert MrCorvus or anyone else. But he is representative of the general population from which we draw, and the society in which we live and work. How many people hear the call of the Gods but will never respond because they can’t imagine that Athena and Odin and Morrigan are anything more than characters in some old stories?

Getting good Pagan theology into mainstream conversations lets everyone know there are more possibilities than one God or none. Many Gods is another option.

The second unstated assumption is that any religion must either be correct or wrong, with the most important question being what happens after death. Christianity is – at least in its conservative forms – a death-preparing religion. It’s about “getting right with God” so you’ll go to heaven when you die. What you do in this life is only important to the extent it prepares you for death, whether that means holding the right belief, belonging to the right church, or performing the right actions.

What’s never considered is that perhaps what’s most important isn’t what happens after death but what we do here in this life. Our ancient pagan ancestors developed the field of philosophy to address this question: how should we live? Paganism is a life-affirming religion.

There can be no objective certainty in religious matters. We all have reasons why we believe and practice what we believe and practice, but at best we have evidence to support what we think and feel is right. We never have proof. Neither does anyone else.

So rather than asking if a religion is correct or wrong, a Pagan or a polytheist would ask if a religion is more helpful or less helpful… or in some cases, if it’s harmful. Does it help you connect to other people, other generations, and other species? Does it help you connect to the Gods and Their virtues and values? Does it help you identify your core values and then live in harmony with them? Does it help you live in ways that are responsible and sustainable? Does it help you deal with the Big Questions of Life? And perhaps most importantly, does it help you live a meaningful life?

There is reason to doubt the historicity of the Marcus Aurelius quote I see on Facebook from time to time, but it’s still true:

Live a good life. If there are Gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are Gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no Gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

Bob Seidensticker is right: your religion is a reflection of your culture. And Western culture is filled with Christian assumptions, many of them unstated. If we are to make Paganism and polytheism accessible to ordinary people who need and want what our religions offer, we’re going to have to challenge unstated assumptions like these, and we’re going to have to offer well-reasoned, well-articulated alternatives.

And that’s one of the reasons Pagan theology is so important.

Paganism – A Guide for the Nonreligious

March 31, 2015 By John Beckett

Sometimes I write because I have something I need to say. Sometimes I write because the Gods have something they want me to say. But other times I write because people have asked questions and I do my best to answer them. This piece falls into the last category.

It’s a little ironic – while I’ve had quite a spiritual journey throughout my life, “nonreligious” has never been a term anyone would apply to me. Even in my most skeptical days, something deep inside always whispered “there’s more.” But I’ve always done my best to be honest and objective, and to understand the difference between knowing and believing.

What do I mean when I say “nonreligious”? Perhaps you grew up in a family that followed no religion, or that paid only lip service to the outer forms of mainstream religion. Perhaps you’ve been harmed by toxic religion in one form or another and want no part of it. Perhaps you simply can’t believe what some religious people say you have to believe. Perhaps you’re disgusted by the hatred and violence done in the name of religion (so are the vast majority of Pagans).

Despite all that, something brought you here, to this website and this blog post. Maybe someone you love is Pagan, and you want to understand why this is so important to them. Maybe something deeper calls to you. Maybe you’re just curious. Why doesn’t matter – you’re here, so read on.

There are many forms of Paganism. Attempts to define Paganism usually succeed only in starting arguments. However, when you look at what Pagans do and what we value, there are four centers that we gather around: Nature, the Gods, the Self, and Community. Most of us are part of multiple centers – I’m primarily a Nature and Deity centered Pagan, but I also have Self and Community centered elements in my practice.

I’m a polytheist – I have experienced many Gods, so I order my life around many Gods, even though I can never be completely sure I’m right. Other Pagans are pantheists, who find God or Goddess everywhere. Some Pagans are non-theists – they find value in Pagan practices and in the natural world, but they aren’t convinced that Gods exist.

There are far more Pagan traditions than we have room to cover in this brief introduction: Wicca, Druidry, Heathenism and the various ethnic re-creations, ceremonial magic… the list goes on and on and on. Paganism is at least as diverse as Christianity and what is true of one group may not be true of another.

We can be passionate about our beliefs and practices. One of the purposes of religion – any religion – is to connect to something bigger than yourself. Connecting with the Gods, with our ancestors, with Nature and the spirits of Nature, or just with each other is a powerful experience. It motivates us to think about how we live and to order our lives so as to live in greater harmony with those around us.

It may cause us to take on religious obligations that strike you as unnecessary or eccentric. Know that there is a reason behind them, even if that reason is only to strengthen the connections between ourselves and the others within our tradition, whether those others live in this world or in an Otherworld.

We have no mission to convert you. We’ve found something good and we’d be happy to share it with you if you’re interested, but unlike some religions, we don’t think our way is the only way, even if it is the only way for us. We don’t get “Goddess points” for converts, and we recognize that the Gods call who They call. If you’re happy being nonreligious that’s fine with us.

We don’t care what you believe. We care what you do. The modern, Western, Protestant-influenced world puts far too much emphasis on religious belief. For most people in most of the world throughout most of history, religion has been about who you are and what you do. While some beliefs are more likely to be true than others, fighting over unprovable propositions seems pointless.

Beliefs are important in how they cause you to live your life. In particular, we care greatly how you treat other people and the natural world. It doesn’t matter if you care for the Earth because you believe it’s the body of the Great Mother Goddess or because you believe the Earth is a living being or because you believe it’s the only planet we’ve got so we’d better take care of it. What matters is that you care for the Earth.

We’re happy to have you participate in most of our events. You don’t have to be a Pagan to dance around the Maypole or sing a hymn to Nature. If you pour an offering to a God, we don’t care if you see that God as a real being or an aspect of a Divine force or as a metaphor for Their values and virtues. We value doing the right things, not thinking the right things.

But some of our activities are closed. While Paganism as we practice it is a modern thing, we draw on the heritage of our ancient ancestors, including the heritage of the mystery traditions. These are restricted to those who have experienced them before or who are experiencing them for the first time. This is to preserve the mysteries for those who will come afterwards, and to keep them from being profaned (i.e. – trivialized) by someone who has heard the words but has not experienced them and thus cannot understand their deeper meanings.

If you’re curious, ask. Most Pagans feel a strong urge to not proselytize – we aren’t likely to preach to you. And although the state of religious tolerance is far better than it was 15 or 20 years ago, we still encounter prejudice and bigotry – we’re likely to keep our religion to ourselves unless we know and trust you. But if you’re curious, ask. None of us are experts on all forms of Paganism, but we can tell you what we do and why it’s important to us. If we don’t know something we can point you toward books and websites that will help.

If the Gods call to you we hope you’ll answer Them. If They don’t, then we hope you’ll respect us as we attempt to live our lives in the way we’re called to live them.