As I said previously, I am Pagan and I have values, but there has been, in the past, some doubt that my values were Pagan enough.. Nevertheless, “My Pagan Values”:
I) Earth-based Spirituality (not just Nature-based.)
II) Structure & Infrastructure
III) Scholarship & Contemplation
IV) Community
V) Educating the Younger Generation
I) Earth-based Spirituality (not just Nature-based.)
I like Nature in small doses, but cities are magical, too. In “The Magic of Place” (newWitch Magazine, Winter, 2008), pp. 17-20. Rev. Galina Krasskova wrote “The land remembers. I know that within modern Paganism and, to a lesser degree, Heathenry, city life is often viewed as somehow less sacred, less connected to the natural rythyms and cycles of nature than rural life. And in some cases that might be true, but I have found over the years that there is powerful magic inherent in cities–just as much as may be found in the most deserted of country dwellings.”
Krasskova lists “Five Steps to connecting with the Gods–in your hometown”;
1) “Learn the folklore of your city…Getting to know the spirit and energy of your hometown is the first step toward incorporating that awareness into your regular work.”
2) “Create magical places of your own. Find places that call to you and begin incorporating them into your ritual work.”
3) “Honor the spirit of your city…In Norse tradition, vaettir (singular: vaet) are land and nature spirits. The spirit of a city is something like a large vaet. Honor it as an ally just as you might honor spirit allies or ancestors.”
4) Honor the ancestors of your city…Go to the local cemetery. Walk around and read the headstones… Bring offerings to the dead, even if they are not your dead, and do so in the name of your ancestors.”
5) Create a public altar…Set up a public altar to the Deity of your choice after honoring that Deity regularly for a month…It is the perfect way to combine honoring the Gods with experiencing the energy and spirit of your city or town…[N]o matter where you are, you’re standing on sacred ground.”
II) Structure & infrastructure
I was not meant to be a rolling stone, holding each sabbat in a different park or lodge, doing ritual out of a trunk. I do not like wondering if we will have potable water, a place to plug in the coffee pot, a porta-potty within a block’s walk… I don’t like standing around for twenty minutes while we figure out how to keep the candles from blowing over. I don’t like wondering if I am going to give someone food poisoning because I couldn’t keep my potluck dish at the right temperature. When you do ritual over and over in the same place, that place fills with power and becomes part of the ritual.
I am not enamored with spontaneity–writing a new ritual eight times a year, fumbling with printouts and miscues. Again, when a particular ritual is done regularly, it gathers power. Time and again I am reminded that Pagans don’t need temples or churches, that a familiar liturgy somehow rots your spiritual roots. Sorry, but I hear commitment phobia. I want a spiritual home, be it ever so humble.
And we are still a very young religious movement–we are still in the process of developing the comfort literature, the scholarship, and the spiritual reflection that makes provides the underpinnings of older religions. Of all the things I left behind when I left Christianity, I miss that inherited richness. I value books like The Pagan Book of Living and Dying, by Starhawk and M. Macha Nightmare and Philosophy of Wicca by Amber Laine Fisher. I look forward to books that go beyond spellcasting and how to write (yet another) ritual.
III) Scholarship & Contemplation.
Here’s where I tend to rub fellow Pagans the wrong way. I ask a lot of questions, I don’t settle for easy answers. If Paganism is so wonderful, why did so many Pagans convert to Christianity? The Galatians were a Celtic people. They were early adopters of the Christian religion, and they spread the new faith from the Middle East through Spain and into Ireland. Why? They were not forced; what did they gain? If the Neo-Pagan movement is to be more than a flash in the pan, I think we have ask ourselves questions like this and think about the answers. (For starters I recommend The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity by Richard Fletcher.)
IV) Community
Many Pagans place high value on self-reliance. Family and neighbors make up their safety net. Let the Christians build their busybody charities. Charity is just a vehicle for proselytizing and telling other people how to run their lives..
The truth is, we are all caught up in a global web of interdependence, and when the wind blows, the whole web trembles. Pandemics, economic woes, climate chaos, an increase in hate crimes… In a essay “The Coming of Deindustrial Society: A Practical Response,” (October 5, 2004) John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), wrote:
The key to making sense of constructive action in a situation of impending industrial collapse is to look at the community, rather than the individual or society as a whole, as the basic unit. We know from history that local communities can continue to flourish while empires fall around them. There are, however, three things a community needs to do that, and all three of them are in short supply these days.
First, a community needs some degree of local organization. Our present culture here in America has discarded most of the local organizations it once had, in favor of a mass society where individuals deal directly with huge government and corporate institutions. This has to be reversed. The recent move to reinvigorate civil society is a step in the right direction. Joining or creating a local community group, and helping to revive local civil society, will help provide your community with voluntary networks of cooperation and mutual aid in difficult times.
The second thing a community needs in the twilight of industrial society is a core of people who know how to do without fossil fuel inputs….Survival skills such as organic gardening, low-tech medicine, basic hand crafts, and the like need to be learned and practiced now, while there’s time to do so.
The third thing a community needs is access to basic human requirements, and above all food. Very large cities are going to become difficult places to be in the course of the approaching collapse, precisely because there isn’t enough farmland within easy transport range to feed the people now living there…What’s needed is the framework of a production and distribution system around which this can take shape.
Greer recommends:
One often-neglected but useful resource is the old fraternal orders – the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Grange, and so on…Joining such an organization, or some other local community group, and helping to revive local civil society is a crucial step that will provide your community with essential networks of cooperation and mutual aid in difficult times. The Stormwatch Project website is specifically aimed at helping fraternal orders and similar organizations get ready to fill such a role.
We need to move away from self-reliant individuals to self-reliant communities that will look after our elders, our children, our sick, our economically challenged members.
V) Educating the Younger Generation
And speaking of our children, I tend to cringe when I hear folks say, “I had religion crammed down my throat when I was a kid. I am not going to force my beliefs on my own kids! If they are interested in doing ritual, fine. Let them discover their own beliefs! Everyone has to find their own path.”
O-kay! For the last eight years this country has been in the grip of conservative Christianity. Suck all the oil out of the ground, blow up mountaintops and scoop out all the coal, foul the oceans and strip the rain forests? It doesn’t matter because we are living in the End of Times and the Rapture is on the way. Base our political alliance with Israel on biblical prophecies? Legitimize religious or gender discrimination with Bible verses? Turn a blind eye to science because it doesn’t fit somebody’s creation myth?
No, no, no, no, no! This tired old world desperately needs some new ways of thinking and acting. We need to impress upon our kids that Time is a spiral; that what goes around, comes around. We need to impress upon our kids that we are all embedded in a web of living systems. We need to teach them that death is a natural part of life–that we do not have to hold off death with heroic medicine or worship the unborn. The Goddess holds us at the beginning and the ending of our existence on Earth and does not let go! We remain a part of the Spiral; we reject that End of Times mentality.
We need to make them understand that the founders of this country had a spectrum of religious beliefs, and that discrimination based upon the Bible is religious discrimination! We need to teach them that any system of science sufficiently advanced IS indistinguishable from magic AND any system of magic sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from science.
And those, friends, are my Pagan Values.
