Pagan Values: Pride

This June marks the 3rd Annual International Pagan Values Blogging and Podcasting Month, and I must say I’ve been looking forward to this for quite a bit. I intended to begin my participation on a different note, but I received some unexpected inspiration this morning. So, I’d like to be a bit unorthodox and quote a column that won’t publish until tomorrow morning.

“Mostly, we call ourselves Heathens, and we do so partly because we’re proud of that which makes some folks blanch. We’re people who didn’t roll over and surrender when someone told us what we had to believe when we didn’t believe it. If you have a problem with that, the problem is yours, and you’ll have to deal with it. It was your people who first called us heathens.” — Steven T. Abell

I was a bit downhearted this morning, and by the time I finished formatting this column, there was a smile across my face, I was sitting up straighter and my mood was radiantly positive. Of all the Pagan virtues, I think Pride is one that is needed more often than we think. If there is one thing that I think Heathens have a better handle on than the rest of us, I think it’s the positive expression of Pride.

Pride is not belligerence, nor is it obnoxious. It is the joyous recognition of the state of being, particularly when there has been adversity. Pride is owning your triumphs, owning your soul’s sovereignty and acknowledging “Here I Stand and Here I Stay.”

Nothing surprised me more than finding myself circling back to Wicca after years of avoiding it and seeking in Heathen, Celtic, Roman and Hellenic paths. True, it is partly because the Horned God called to me once long ago, but now I’m also wondering if it is ancestry. I know little about my ancestors beyond names and dates, but I do imagine what they must have been like. I wonder if they participated in May Day revels with trepidation, or looked to see who was looking before saluting the moon. I wonder if they stubbornly clung to their bonfire festivals of fertility knowing it could get them branded with the word “witch.”

It is with the same sort of Pride that Steven wears the name “Heathen” that I bear the name “Witch.” My ancestors didn’t call themselves Witches, but that label was a menacing threat over them every time they honored their ancestors by practicing the old ways and organizing the old revels. To some degree, it becomes a label not of religion, but cultural Pride that neither Catholicism nor dour Protestantism was able to stamp out the merry greenness of England.

Here in America it wasn’t much easier: the very fist Maypole resulted in scandal and the arrest of the man who had organized the May Day revel. While my ancestors in the South didn’t have to face the Puritans, all that was “pagan” and carried a whiff of magic was kept quiet. Around here magic and divination are things passed on quietly, with certain rules about who can be taught. My Baptist grandfather only mentioned astrology as a governing force in our lives when I failed to consult him about some minor surgery.

When you honor the culture your ancestors gave you, it’s a shame that insults are flung at you, but the tenacity in clinging to and reclaiming that culture is something of which to be proud. Whether your ancestors were converted at swordpoint by Olaf I, indoctrinated by the whip on a Protestant plantation, sent to deadly schools to be civilized, their temples confiscated or destroyed or the very practice of their faith demonized, embracing that which was taken from them openly is an act of positive Pride.