Solstice Series Ends; Wicca Series Begins

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday in December we will be asking people questions about Paganism and Pagan religions and culture. Want to weigh in? Find the next question at the bottom of this post!

Why do you think Paganism has had a revival over the past 100 odd years? Is it simply due to the decriminalization of Witchcraft and divination? After 1500 years of oppression, why now?

Selena Fox responds:

The eternal Pagan Spirit of attuning to and communing with the spiritual dimensions of Nature, on this planet and beyond, has been part of the human experience across a variety of cultures and places since the most ancient of times.  As humankind grows in numbers and diversity and becomes more interconnected in this digital age, it is important that humans find ways to be in better relation with each other and with the Circle of Nature as a whole.  The Pagan resurgence is a way of helping to meet global and universal needs.

Contemporary Paganism, with its roots in the lore and customs of Nature religions and civilizations of ancient Europe and the Mediterranean, now has branches growing in many nations around the world.  The emergence of the internet and cyber communications has helped Paganism grow in scope, numbers, and influence in recent decades.  The development of festival communities, land projects, and publications also have aided Paganism’s growth and development.

Contemporary Paganism, which is a tapesty of diverse traditions and forms, is thriving because it is providing spiritual nourishment and a home for those needing spiritual paths that are holistic, celebratory, interactive, and flexible, and that honor both science and mysticism as ways of knowing, embrace equality and diversity of gender and sexual orientation, and are environmentally relevant and sustainable.

May Paganism continue to grow and prosper in 2011 and beyond.   And may there be more understanding, respect, and collaboration among Pagans of many paths, and among Pagans and those of many faiths and philosophies!

Apuleius Platonicus responds:

In 1755, Jean Jacques Rousseau published his Discourse on Inequality, in which he argued that equality is the natural state of humanity, while inequality is something artificially imposed by human beings upon each other. This sentiment was echoed 21 years later when American Independence was announced to the world with the declaration that “all men are created equal.” Four score and seven years later, Abraham Lincoln emphatically rededicated the United States to “the proposition that all men are created equal.”

But a century after Lincoln’s speech, inequality was still the law of the land. And despite significant progress since then, genuine equality remains an aspiration that we continue to strive for, rather than an accomplishment we can boast about.

The Enlightenment (exemplified by Rousseau and Jefferson), was not only a time when the ideal of human equality was declared. It was also a time when a full-throated critique of Christianity began to be heard openly in the western world for the first time in 1500 years.

As with human equality, it has been a long, difficult, and still incomplete journey from articulating the rejection of Christianity to making that rejection a reality. But we are getting there. I don’t think it is any coincidence that the same historical period (“the 60s”) that gave birth to social movements intent on finally eradicating, once and for all, all vestiges of inequality based on race, sex and sexual orientation, was also a time when the modern Pagan revival attained never before imagined success.

Previous phenomena like Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Deism, Theosophy, etc, were all imperfect and incomplete attempts to break free of Christianity and to re-establish the unfettered religious freedom that was taken for granted in the ancient world. Warts and all, Wicca and the other forms of Paganism that have arisen since the middle of the 20th century are significant improvements over those earlier efforts.

The tremendous religious freedom, and the resulting incredible range of religious diversity, that was characteristic of ancient Paganism is the goal toward which modern Paganism, properly understood, continues to struggle. Paganism is not yet another rival religious sect to be placed alongside Christianity, Islam and the other so-called “great religions”, much less is it a “New Religious Movement” akin to Raelianism, Scientology, etc. Rather, Paganism is simply what people do naturally, in terms of religion, when we are free to do as we please.

Freedom and equality are not imposed according to someone’s grand scheme. Freedom and equality are the naturally resulting conditions that exist in the absence of oppression and inequality. But if oppression and inequality have reigned overly long, then it is only with great difficulty that the natural state envisioned by Rousseau and Jefferson is discovered once again. The same kind of difficulty is evident in our still halting attempts to return to a more natural kind of religion that is free of all coercion and that naturally and spontaneously manifests the innate spirituality of homo religiosus.

But we are getting there.

That’s it for the Solstice Series. We really appreciate everyone who responded over the past month. We will be launching a similar series on January 3rd as part of our monthly focus on different Pagan traditions in 2011. We will be putting the spotlight on Wicca in January and here’s our first question:

What makes someone Wiccan? Dedication? Initiation? Practice? Belief?

If you’d like to weigh in just e-mail me your short response (250-500 words) before Jan 3rd. It’s sfoster at patheos.com.