Archive for ‘Paganism’

« Older Entries  |  
June 18, 2013

Writing in the Rain: Towards an English Mythology

The Dorset Ooser: His significance is now obscure.

It is a peculiarity that England – the country to have lead the way more than any other with the contemporary Pagan revival – has in fact no coherent pantheon or ancient mythology of its own. We have a great many pieces of folklore, traditional rites, interesting characters, places and themes, but there has never been – either in Ancient Times or Modern – an attempt to synthesise or unite them in a common set of stories. Countries with a far more vigorously attested ancient mythology – Greece, Iceland, Russia, Italy, Ireland – were all relative latecomers to Paganism. Although there are many good historical reasons why, the problem is that English Paganism has not yet filled this void completely. There is of course a really popular English Pagan myth – that of the Horned God and the Triple Goddess, worshipped by Witches, who are themselves the subject of a myth all their own. And this is the myth I’d like to examine.

I am speaking of course of the myth of the persecution of Europe’s witches by “the Church”, of the fertility cult they enacted and the God and Goddess they worshipped. As myths are wont to, it has captured the imagination of many – but due to its roots in history, rather than mystery, it has had a short-lived efflorescence. Within 20 years of its birth, the “Witch-Cult Hypothesis” was rejected by academe, within 50, it had fallen out of favour in the country of its birth, even amongst Wiccans.

In my view, this myth has boasted other less obvious shortcomings. Firstly, it isn’t truly English. As a “Pan-European” legend, it is not rooted in the rolling hills, grey skies and mirrored waters of this green and pleasant land, but in a much wider ethnoscape – one in which all Christian peoples persecuted by their priests, not just the English, have purchase. As such, it isn’t really the “English” legend that we might like to balance the legends we find in other lands. Rather, it’s the antithesis to the concept of Christendom – a cultural critique of the overarching narrative of a triumphant Roman Christ who liberated our beleaguered continent from itself. Instead, the Witch Cult Hypothesis suggests that the people of Europe aren’t/weren’t truly Christian in their hearts, or that only threats and violence made them so. This may be true in places, but this process was begun and over long before the time when the supposed persecutions were imagined to have taken place, having been more a feature of Christianisation rather than Inquisition.

The other issue I have with the Witch Cult as an English myth is that it owes as much to Victorian conceits of lumping gods and cultures together into ill-conceived, grand categories as it does to ancient history or the worldview of the rural cultures it apes after. Suggesting that all gods are facets of the One, all goddesses are reflections of Her may be a profound spiritual truth, but it’s very bad anthropology. Small-scale, localised societies such as those which make most Pagans misty-eyed often show great interest in particularity; knowing the difference between this and that stream, these and those mushrooms, the season now and the season is given great importance. Gods are not assumed to have universal significance, nor are “our” gods meant to be connected, necessarily, to those of one’s neighbours. Zeus is NOT Thunor is NOT Taranis is NOT Thor is NOT Taran. They are each very different beings, with their own personalities, histories, cultus and spiritus. In this way, the gods are like humans – although emphasising the oneness of Mankind can teach many things, ignoring the fact that we are all different people can have terrible side-effects. Just as I have similarities with other Geminis, so Thunder Gods share certain similarities. In this regard, I see the divine realm as no different to the human.

Another thing that makes me feel a little frustrated with the WCH as a local myth is that it is very limited. In comparison to the huge variety to be found within most traditional cultural worldviews, detail in the WCH is thin on the ground. Two gods. A Great Rite. A single rede. A rumour of genocide, and the promise of grandmother stories. That’s it.

This doesn’t mean that the Witch-Cult Hypothesis and the dimensions of it that modern Wiccans adhere to is bad. It’s only that it’s the beginnings of a tradition, not the whole of one. As for the pseudo-historical witch hunt, it’s certainly not what I’m looking for from Paganism. If I wanted a persecution narrative, I could identify with my sexuality, or my Jewish relatives on my mother’s side. If I wanted one binaristic divinity, there’s plenty of that in Hinduism and Catholicism. What I want is something local.

Now, none of this is to suggest that nobody in England has tried to devise a mythology to go with our homeland. In fact, plenty of people have – but sadly, most (all?) of them aren’t Pagan. C.S. Lewis, despite never setting out to create an English myth, created in Narnia a joyful arcadia that reminds me deeply of my homeland. JK Rowling’s depictions of witches and wizards in the Harry Potter series is – sociologically speaking – sometimes alarmingly similar to the British Pagan community; with batty-named people who all know each other living in secret, keeping the magic alive. Eva Ibbotsen, an Austrian author whose work I devoured as a child, masterfully syncretised all manner of English magical creatures into singular, coherently English bestiaries for her novels. But the two leaders in this field of mythopoeisis are, in my humble opinion, JRR Tolkein and Susannah Clarke.

Notable about their work is the way in which it is designed around the setting, rather than the other way around. Tolkein, whose expressed purpose was to create a myth for the English people, created landscapes, languages, peoples and angelic beings that have proved so captivating that he has literally set the mould into which the majority of contemporary, world-builder fantasy is cast. Unfortunately, though, Tolkein’s work had the weakness (as far as his aim of mythologizing England was concerned) of not being sufficiently rooted in England, its heritage and localities. With my observations about traditional, localised societies in mind, it’s easy to see how Tolkein’s corpus – despite being amazing myth – failed to be an English one. His creativity got the better of him; by re-inventing everything, Tolkein divorced Middle Earth utterly from its roots as a spiritual twin of the country in which he grew up.

What lies beyond the gates: England could do with another good mythos, in my view.

Susannah Clarke has not made the same mistake in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell; under her pen, Northern England is a place both otherworldly and immanent. It is not some strange dominion named Menegroth that is guarded by mystical woodland, but the city of Newcastle. It isn’t someone we’ve never heard-of named Theoden who is faced by the Storm Crow, but rather Edward III. She captures the essence of what Pagan spirituality is about – a throbbing animism that enchants body and soul, by tugging you down into the very land you live with – and gives it life within her pages. As Liz Williams remarked to me when I enthused about JS&MN: I found myself wishing very deeply that her invented history of English magic, with its carefully footnoted faux-scholarship, had been the real history.

And yet… England does have a rich and well-documented magical history. It isn’t without good reason that Romanticism flourished here, that The Tempest was written here, that some of the English language’s greatest fantasy writers have worked here, and that Paganism, in modern times, was born here. Great magicians – from Dee to Ashmole – have sweated, strained, and spellcast in some of our greatest institutions. Ancient monuments cover the land, as do funny little stories, with more being made all the time.

Why? Because these hills, springs, woods, and rivers sing. They demand our attention, generation after generation, and insist upon our expressing what we think and feel from living amongst them. And though we have of late wrapped ourselves in the trappings of modern life, that power still has the same grip upon us it always had. All that advanced technology has bought us is the opportunity to put our fingers in our ears, and pretend to each other that we’re not listening. Or, in some cases, write down some sheet music.

—

With this in mind, I think somebody (probably me), needs to set about fusing that history into a mythos. But rather than be “fake” scholarship, as the previous attempt was, I intend to participate fully as a scholar, and then from there embark upon writing works of fiction, clearly bracketed as such. If Tolkein’s life shows nothing else, it proves that fiction can be just as profound as fact. Indeed, it becomes more so, if fact has inspired it.

Posted in "Britishness", Narnia, Paganism, Social Anthropology, Writing | 1 Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
March 17, 2013

In defence of aesthetics: A review of The Spirit of Albion

Although Damh’s folk songs are very popular, I don’t think the film based on them actually reflects authentic Pagan values.

Damh the Bard is one of Britain’s more popular Pagan Folk artists. He’s released seven albums, a whole bunch of songs, and is an experienced ritualist. I’ve never spoken to him at length (though I have chatted to him briefly at a couple of OBOD gatherings – he’s the Pendragon of the Order), but he seems like a genuine, affable guy, with a real passion for music and a great, down-to-earth style.  His popularity, especially down in Sussex where he is based, is not inconsiderable, and a couple of years back of collection of songs were turned into a musical (Mamma-Mia style), which eventually grew into a full-length feature film – The Spirit of Albion.

It’s hard reviewing a film that someone you know, or at least, someone in your social circle, has been involved with. It’s even harder to give a critical review, especially if it’s really critical. So I’ve felt pretty wary about writing what I’m about to pen here – I’ve put it off for months. But the more time has passed, the more I believe what I want to say needs to be said.

The Spirit of Albion was a terrible film.

When I first sat down to watch it, I was wishing very much for it to be good. Sure, I knew the production values couldn’t be that huge, nor would the acting be of Academy Award standard, but, I reasoned, as a member of the British Pagan community, I could surely look past all that, and enjoy it for what it was; a low budget film, expounding views and dealing with themes close to my heart, in a way a more “mainstream” production never could. It’s the charm of the village panto, or the school play – I like it not because it’s “perfect”, but because it’s family. Besides, I spent £16 on the damn thing.

Anyway, before I get out the knives, I’ll give you a brief plot summary. Spoilers ahoy (not that you should go on from this blog to watch it).

Three young people – Esther, Annie, and George – are beset by ever-so-modern problems. Esther is stuck in a boring office job; Annie is a vivisectionist drug-addict; while George is a recently bereaved peace activist. None of them show any interest or enthusiasm towards the landscape or folklore, until three strangers – who turn out to be Ceredwin, Herne, and The Mórrígan – spirit them to a woodland glade, where they are walked through their life stories (and why they’re shit) by Robin Goodfellow and Arianrhod. Along the way, the gods educate their mortal charges about the loveliness of nature, and what this has to teach us. Eventually, it turns out that George is actually dead, and he is taken off into the afterlife, while Esther and Annie are left to carry on their lives with a newfound sense of connection to the world around them.

So what makes it a terrible film? I wasn’t expecting Emmerich, so why should I judge it so harshly? Well, there are two things the Spirit of Albion is. It is a representation of Paganism and it is an amateur film. And it is against both of these standards I’m judging it here.

Return to the Earth: The coming home experience is a pivotal Pagan conversion narrative. So why doesn’t The Spirit of Albion use it?

Firstly, Paganism. What the Spirit of Albion is trying to be is essentially a Pagan conversation narrative. I say trying, because there is nothing remotely Pagan about the structure of how Esther, Annie and George come to be Pagan. What they have is a mystical moment, out in the wild, where they go from being mooks of modernity, if slightly frustrated ones, into full-blown Cauldron Born. But this is a Christian conversion story. It’s Paul on his Road to Damascus. It’s Moses in the Desert. But it sure as shit isn’t Doreen Valiente at Dafo’s table.

The more common Pagan conversion narrative is very different. Rather than feeling transformed by an act of the Divine, most Pagans argue that rather than convert, they are returning to a primordial state – both socially and personally. As individuals, we “come home” to Paganism – rediscovering magic we felt, often as children, in some earlier phase of our lives. As a group, we are revivifying atavistic urges – to paraphrase Andy Letcher, another Pagan bard – in an attempt to bring to life earlier, more authentic forms of humanity. As Pagans, we don’t convert, we re-vert.

Given their use of a basically Christian narrative, it’s rather vexing to see Christianity depicted in an almost uncompromisingly negative, ineffectual light. This becomes understandable, when you realise that this is not Paganism of a non-Christian kind, but of an anti-Christian kind. We Pagans are painted as the opposite of Christians. Goddess vs. God. Priest vs. Priestess. Prayer vs. Magic. Oppression vs. Freedom. Black and White vs. Green and Grey. As Paganisms go, this is film is as simplistic is it gets – Jesus puts on his wizard’s hat, conjuring up characters from myth and literature recast as skydaddies for a modern audience, with little appreciation for history or locality. This isn’t Christo-paganism (a fine and noble tradition), or even cherry picking; this is a superficial cut and shut of both traditions.

There were hundreds of other little details that irked me. How the Horned God – and not a Goddess – was responsible for helping a vulnerable woman find her power. The fact that George was killed off – and told off – for being an activist. How The Mórrígan was depicted as solely a death goddess. Feminism, activism, and the study of history – all crucial parts of the Pagan tradition – being systematically ignored or maligned. It just feels like EgoTrip have not done their homework – that they’ve not bothered learning about what Pagan spirituality actually involves, and have instead stuck firmly to the Waterstones-bookshelf variety of the tradition.

Youtube has helped transform the way in which content creators produce and share their work.

But it’s not just as a piece of Pagan art this film fails to impress. We no longer live in an age when low production values justify a poor product. This is a time of Youtube, where technology has made creating and distributing films a hell of a lot easier and cheaper. Apple, Google, Adobe and other software companies have turned what were once rarefied fields into viable areas for hobbyists. CGI. Video-editing. Music-editing. A new generation of dynamic, skilful, and ingenious content creators have raised the bar for all amateur and low-budget filmmaking, producing great films, even for niche audiences, on a shoestring budget.

And yet still there exists a rump of the for-profit video industry, that has yet to wake up or capitalise (it seems) on this flush of new possibilities. Manufacturers of daytime television, adverts for ambulance chasers, and substandard pornography – and, perhaps, EgoTrip – still seem to be making good money producing content not even half as good as what the likes of Tomska, Kermitcasson and KickthePJ produce with much smaller budgets. But what these Youtubers have done – as their back-catalogue of work demonstrates – is work hard to constantly learn and improve. This has evidently paid considerable dividends, and I wish the Spirit of Albion team had done likewise. Because the unfortunate fact is, that the Spirit of Albion looks nowhere near as polished as Divinity, despite the fact that Drew Casson had precisely zero budget and less years experience than the EgoTrip Media team.

In my view, the dual failure of the Spirit of Albion – failure to be a deep and insightful depiction of Paganism, and failure to be a decent piece of low-budget filmmaking – actually communicates something rather important about the condition of Paganism itself at present, at least in Britain. We’re in danger of losing something rather precious – our authenticity.

Andy Letcher: Argues that hard work has a vital role to play in bardic creativity.

Andy Letcher, who I’ve mentioned above, presented a very good lecture at the Mount Haemus lectures this year in Salisbury. In it, he argued persuasively for a Bardism not just rooted in inspiration, but also in pure and simple hard work. Getting good at something isn’t just about having a nice idea, Andy argued, you have to be sufficiently accomplished at whatever your medium is to actually express that idea so others can enjoy it. Inspiration comes and goes, but in anticipation of its coming we must practice. The ancient bards worked so desperately hard to become the best possible vessels of inspiration they could be. I see no reason why we shouldn’t do the same; to represent the enchantment we feel authentically.

Because that’s what modern Paganism is about, in my view – while Christianity is (or, was) a call to a new morality, the new Paganism is at its heart a defence of aesthetics; claiming as we do that just because something is made-up doesn’t mean it isn’t real. We do this by harkening back; to the days when things like beauty and craft meant something more than an accomplishment that you could put on a dating profile, a hobby, or a way for a fortunate few to make money. To days when inspiration was holy, and a Muse was a Goddess rather than something a state of laughter. We take what was an earnest heartache for the Romantics and give it ontological depth and weight. The Gods are fiction – made up. And so are Men. And they are just as real as anything else, for all that – because they are well-made.

The Spirit of Albion, though, is far distant from this central virtue. Its engagement with its subject matter is appropriative and insipid; showing little care and attentiveness to the true history and culture of the very tradition it seeks to explore. As such, the characterisation of the divinities and humans it includes is flimsy at best. By not having honed their craft as much as other low-budget content creators, the makers of Spirit of Albion have failed to do Paganism justice, and have become a pale imitation of the Pagan movement’s authentic values as a result.

Unlike my previous negative reviews, where I’ve critiqued work whose producers most likely will never read my blog, there is a relatively good chance that the makers of the Spirit of Albion will read what I’ve written here. If they do read this, I’d like to apologise in advance if any of my remarks that hurt their feelings – I know, from your vlog and elsewhere, how passionately you believe in this film, and how you gave it your all. That passion and love is totally beyond reproach; in fact, it ennobles our entire tradition. My aim isn’t to antagonize, embarrass, or upset you. I commend the fact that (unlike myself), you have actually made something. All I ask – nay, challenge – you to do, is this: Do better. Because you can. I know you can.

Posted in Feminism, Paganism, Reviews, Social Anthropology, Writing | 3 Comments »

September 27, 2012

REVIEW: The Chronicles of Narnia Film Series and Planet Narnia

 

The Chronicles of Narnia: An epic film series, in more ways than one.

 

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article concerning my mixed feelings about The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis. I’m still mulling over how best to approach the project I mentioned at the end of that piece – writing a more contemporary version of Narnia – but I decided to write something more about the series, because over the past couple of days I’ve been watching the recent Disney adaptations of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader on DVD, and I had some thoughts on them.

I remember when I first saw The Chronicles of Narnia in the cinema I enjoyed them all thoroughly. They were exciting, cleverly written, visually stunning, well acted and beautifully imagined. Andrew Adamson is an accomplished director, with such greats as the first two Shrek films under his belt, so it’s unsurprising that he should turn out three perfectly formed adaptions of the books. In fact, I remember liking them so much that when Skandar Keynes – the talented actor who plays Edmund with precocious confidence – joined my former college at Cambridge the year before last while I was doing my Masters there, I was so star-struck I didn’t corner him about the films, despite my long-time interest in the industry and in Narnia itself. I did, however, try to sell him a RAG Blind Date form one evening. But that, along with how I met Tilda Swinton’s nephew on the train from London to Cambridge, is a story for another time.

A couple of things stood out as being particularly memorable. Firstly, the casting in all three films was utterly inspired. James McAvoy cleverly combined in Tumnus the perfect measure of weakness and likeability; Georgie Henley’s Lucy was spot on whilst William Moseley looked (and sounded) as though he just stepped out of the books. Casting Spanish actors as the Telmarines was a point of genius, whilst avoiding casting ethnic minority actors as Calormenes in Dawn Treader was a disaster avoided. The sublime Peter Dinklage turned Trumpkin into a far more believable character than he was in the books – Lewis’ attempt to satirise sceptical academics in Trumpkin’s person jarred with his reputation as an accomplished warrior – while whoever asked Dawn French to give voice to Mrs Beaver deserves a knighthood. The next thing that really struck me was the music – Harry Gregson-Williams’ scores, with notable contributions from some of my favourite artists such as Alanis Morrisette and Imogen Heap were so good I was listening to them for months afterwards. And as a lover of “ordinary Narnia”, I really appreciated the artistic direction’s attention to detail in Narnian homes.

Like other reviewers, the one thing I found mildly disappointing, though, was how Adamson chose to make Prince Caspian into a war story. What worked so well with Wardrobe – telling the story as straight as any Hallmark movie – failed miserably as a strategy for approaching Caspian. This is odd, though, because Prince Caspian is, at heart, a war story – it is the tale of how a wronged prince fights to free his kingdom from tyranny. So why didn’t Adamson’s treatment do Prince Caspian justice, in the views of some?

 

Planet Narnia, by Michael Ward

I think the reason can be found in an amazing book I read on the Narnia series a couple of years ago – Planet Narnia, by Michael Ward. Ward puts forward the fascinating thesis that each book in the series reflects the traits of one of the planets in classical astrology. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, is a jovial book – that is to say, it is a book thematically aligned with the planet Jupiter. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, with the heavy use of gold, the presence of many dragons and the suggestive use of the word “Dawn” in the title, is a book written in a solar vein. Prince Caspian, according to Ward, is Lewis’ treatment on Mars.

On one level, this seems to fit rather neatly with Adamson’s choice to portray Caspian as the Enemy at the Gates with fauns.  Mars, after all, was the Roman god of war, so it only makes sense that his book (and its film) should be about warfare. However, a deeper understanding of Mars’ significance dispels such superficiality; Mars was not simply a god of slaughter, like the Greek war-god Ares, but rather a god of necessity. For the Ancient Romans, Mars was their go-to divinity in all situations where your life was on the line – not just in a fight, but in all the basic acts of living, from hunting to agriculture. Mars was syncretised with the woodland god Sylvanus, to become the embodiment of Nature – the realm of base needs. It is for good reason that victory in Prince Caspian is won by an army of trees – the trees are Mars’ people.

In this way, Mars is also connected with other gods who shared the woodland realm, and yet lack planetary influence – such as Baccus, who makes an appearance in the book, but not the film. Also through his syncretism with Sylvanus, Mars becomes a god of wild abandon and rusticity, first amongst the genius loci of the Tiber river valley; a world lamentably overcome by the cladding of civilisation as Rome (and Narnia) became progressively more civilised.

Ward’s observation – that Prince Caspian is a fully martial, rather than military, story – explains certain otherwise bizarre elements to the novel. The revival of Narnia’s genius loci in a Baccic romp; the fact that very little fighting actually takes place, except through proxies; the prevalence of trees – all of these elements become elegantly poignant when you apply the perspective suggested by Ward.

Adamson chose instead to flatten the complexity of Lewis’ martial vision, by focusing solely on the negative consequences of martial energies. In this way, the plot became a boys’ own war story – with the addition of several battle sequences, and a refocusing upon Peter and Caspian vying for power. Although this was a reasonable thing to have two brave young men doing, this same feature was largely absent from the book.

This reassessment of the martial themes within Prince Caspian extends into another sphere – the trope of necessity. They didn’t need to go down to Beruna, they didn’t need to attack Miraz’s castle, they didn’t need to wait so long before reaching out to Aslan – but they did so anyway. Unlike in the books, where it is insisted that everything is done because of direst need, Adamson bends the plot to incorporate even more profoundly unnecessary behaviour. Much of war, Adamson seems to be saying, is driven by the unnecessary vanity of boys, and of men playing games of power. This flatly contradicts Lewis’ own view on the subject; which in Prince Caspian at least seems to be that war is very much justified, so long as it is a matter of survival.

What’s illuminating about this is that Adamson is shown to have toed a much more faithfully Christian line here, than Lewis ever did. Jesus is a renowned pacifist, who would have had no truck with the martial call to arms in defence of life and limb. Adamson’s choice of bringing Lucy’s simple faith in Aslan to the fore, at the expense of the rampant animism of the original novel really hammers home the point that it is God, not ourselves, in whom we should trust to save the day. This is particularly evident in the disparity between the final few scenes of the film and what occurs in the books. While in the books Aslan roars once and for all to rouse the talking beasts, trees and rivers from their torpor, in the films he roars a number of times. This minor change shifted the tone of the animist assault upon the Telmarines considerably – rather than a reawakened landscape casting off the yoke of a foreign oppressor, the (few) walking trees and the river god seemed to be little more than anthropomorphic weapons, conjured by a singular Aslan who is very much in control of them.

In my view, though, Caspian is in no way a “bad” retelling of the original – in fact, I would say it makes a “better” Christian fantasy than the original. Prince Caspian – with its revived gods, astrological prophecies, personal landscape, and valorisation of the martial ethic of doing what you must to survive – is probably the most profoundly Pagan of all the Narnia books. By stripping out much of Lewis’ embellishments in favour of a more straightforward critique of war, Adamson has returned Prince Caspian to a far more evenly Christian keel.

However, the reason why people have criticised the film so much, and the reason why I can’t bring myself to watch it all the way through again, is that Lewis’ original is so much cleverer. The intricately woven dialogue between Pagan and Christian influences that so typifies Lewis’ writing was almost entirely abolished in this second instalment of the series, in favour of something far more simple and digestible for Midwestern moviegoers. But it still feels like a wasted opportunity.

I could criticise Adamson for this, but to be honest I’m loathed to do so – I think it’s a legitimate interpretation of the text (it is ultimately Aslan who saves the day, not Peter or Caspian), and it certainly doesn’t make The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian a bad film. A film does not need to brave in order to be well made, or enjoyable. But what this does remind me of is how, even if I want to give the Pagan side of Narnia greater emphasis – I can’t leave the Christian aspect out completely, without seriously impoverishing the source material.

Something to think about, at least.

Posted in Disney, Fan Fiction, Narnia, Paganism, Reviews | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
August 26, 2012

UPDATE: Scottish Roman Catholic Church and Spiritual Warfare against Equal Marriage

[[This is quite exciting, I've always wanted to say this, so here goes: STOP PRESS]]

Yesterday, when I was putting the finishing touches to my article on Christians conducting spiritual warfare, I had the vague notion in my head that Christians praying for their God to intervene in the political process directly was an American problem. Britain’s churches have long been declining into a slow quiescence for decades; they wouldn’t do anything as morally problematic as interfering in matters of state (especially social issues which don’t effect them).

Oh, how wrong I was. The Roman Catholic Church in Scotland is planning to conduct a campaign of prayer against equal marriage legislation tabled in the Scottish Parliament.

According to a letter that will be read out in sermons today in Catholic Churches across Scotland, Catholics in Scotland will be asked to “pray for our elected leaders, invoking the Holy Spirit on them, that they may be moved to safeguard marriage as it has always been understood, for the good of Scotland and of our society”.

Invoking Spirits (even a Holy one) against someone else is dangerous ground. It is a violation of the target’s autonomy, and unless your justification is top-notch (i.e. you have consent), then you’re playing with fire. Although I doubt the feeble prayers of Scotland’s shrinking Catholic congregations will sway the Scottish legislature, I am concerned that this sort of activity will leave Scottish Catholics open to a rather unpleasant karmic return.

Regardless: as an energy worker, even if a bit of a newbie, I feel called to do something. So I make a caim around the Scottish Parliament, its Members and its staff – may they be free and unencumbered by outside forces, spiritual and temporal; so they might vote in accordance with their own consciences. So Mote It Be.

Posted in Paganism, Queer Stuff | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
August 25, 2012

Thor and his Hammer: Why Dawkins doesn’t understand Deity

Thor and his Hammer: Quite that ridiculous to believe in?

I’ve already mentioned the atheist’s Rottweiler Richard Dawkins before on this blog, but I haven’t dwelt much on his worldview. However, his views are something I’ve given quite a lot of thought to in the past. I’ve heard him speak, and even got to ask him a question directly afterwards – the answer, as it happens, was singularly unsatisfying. I’ve never been very keen on him – both because of his attitude to education as a whole, and his intellectual outlook. While he dismisses theology, he totally ignores anthropology; not seeing fit even to mention the extensive and detailed ethnographic studies that social scientists have conducted on religious belief in his own work on this subject. This is probably because (as I discovered) his experience of cultural anthropology “nearly sent him screaming from the classroom”. He doesn’t much expand upon what his objet d’horreur was, other than his terse assessment of cultural anth as postmodern and “strange” (note: it isn’t), although if his subsequent choice of specialism in biological anthropology and his negative view of the AAA’s (Anthropological Association of America’s) choice to drop references to “science” in its guiding principles are anything to go by, he probably felt it wasn’t scientific enough.

I’ve explained why this view is misplaced elsewhere; if you place science on an explanatory pedestal, then the truth claims of almost every other province of human activity unravel. But I’d like to say that Dawkins is a particular grievous offender for claiming special pleading for subjective views he happens to approve of. He frequently waxes lyrical about how beautiful the universe is, how important humanist ethics are, while nonetheless affirming that only science can give us true knowledge, and that any non-scientific belief is foolish.

But I also have a theological beef with Dawkins. One of his favourite point-scoring tricks with monotheists is referring to the fact they don’t believe in Thor, despite the fact other people have done in the past (he doesn’t seem to accord present-day Pagans any significance). If you’re an atheist with regard to every other god, so he says, why not go one god further?

Apart from this being mildly irritating (there’s obviously a tone of “I mean, nobody believes in Thor anymore, do they?”) there’s a real problem here, and one that most Christians miss – Thor is really quite a different sort of being to the monotheistic God. The Almighty is an omni-being – all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-benevolent and so on. Thor is not. Thor, powerful though he may be, has limits. All pagan gods do. And this is vitally important conceptually, as a great many of the logical incoherencies within monotheism that atheists mock spring from the presumed all-powerful nature of their god. If Thor operates within limits, we have an explanation for why our prayers for protection aren’t always answered.

Secondly, and more importantly, Pagan gods by and large do not fit under Dawkins’ definition of God as “a creative intelligence”. We do not believe our gods made the things that fill the world. They are those things. Or rather, they are the spiritual and archetypical personifications of those things. Thor is an ancestral, cultural embodiment of the forces present in the sky, the oak and the hammer. He isn’t something that may-or-may-not-exist that you have to have faith in – you feel his presence, as surely as you see the colour blue or feel a sense of strength when you stand firm against adversity.

Now, what that sense of Thor-ness might be from a scientific perspective is something we can discuss. It might be solely a symbol, knitted together in the human brain. Or he might be some morphic field or archetype, equally real to any other force. Or there may have been some historical person, euhemerised into a god by his followers. Or there might be another reality, from which the Aesir hail. There may even be a large, big chested being rolling around loudly in the clouds. All these views (except the last one) are ones different modern-day pagans believe. None of them are refuted, or even addressed, by contemporary atheism.

As I’ve said in the past, modern day theology seems to be dominated by an academic tug of war between polemical atheists and monotheists, with little being done to actually explore the issue of who and what gods, or God, might be really. Thor definitely exists, even if he does so as a mythical rather than physical being, and we don’t yet understand the science of religion and belief well enough to say which one of those possibilities is the right one. The same can be said of all gods.

I consider myself to be a post-atheistic thinker. I accept that the stage-magician-cum-watchmaker of Paley and co. probably does not exist, and so I have begun to explore what manner of things the religious impulse might be responding to. From this perspective, the simplistic worldview of Dawkins and his coterie of New Atheists seems very simplistic. Atheism is obvious – as obvious as the Sun going around the Earth and the Earth itself being flat. To see the truth behind these naive observations, a variety of perspectives are called for.

As such, I do long for the day when I can meet Richard Dawkins on the floor of the Cambridge Union, and when he snidely asks me why I believe in some gods, and not others, I can truthfully answer. “But Richard, I believe in all of them”.

Posted in Paganism, Social Anthropology | 10 Comments »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
August 25, 2012

Hideous Strength: A Pagan Perspective on Spiritual Warfare

Dangerous: Although most Christians eschew such practices, the spiritual warfare movement represents worrying departures from correct ritual procedure.

One of the things I really like about writing this blog is the quality of the comments I get in return. Even though I’ve been a bit sloppy with responding to them over the past couple of months – I’ve had a lot to do in terms of job and PhD applications – I’ve really appreciated the profound and sometimes personal comments people have been willing to make on what I’ve written. It’s also been interesting to see the range of people reading my articles; both Christians and Pagans have had insightful things to say.

I used to be a Christian myself, and there is much about the faith I find wonderful. I see my movement away from Christianity less as a loss of faith, and more a broadening of it. Although I have no problem believing that Jesus Christ was divine, I don’t believe he was anything special in that regard. As Thales once said “all things are full of gods”. Why should first century Messianic prophets be any exception? As for the centrality of the Bible, my primary critique has never been addressed by any Christian I have confronted – if the people in the first century were presented with miracles to convince them of Christ’s superlative divinity, why are we expected to convert on the basis of a bunch of nth-hand correspondences? Thomas needed to see before he believed, and he became an apostle. I demand nothing more, and I’m supposedly going to hell for it.

But I disagree with lots of people, it’s by no means a cause for concern. What does worry me, though, is something that the Pagan community over in the U.S. has been writing about for some time; the danger posed by conservative Christian groups engaging in what is, in essence, magical practice in order to support their evangelical and theocratic agenda. It is my view that this “spiritual warfare” is a deeply troubling development.

Most of the criticism has centred around the so-called New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement, who held a 40-day prayer vigil last year to “change the atmosphere over the city of Washington D.C…. preparing the way for our legislators to function on a different playing field as we release 40 days of light over the city.” These people aim at reforming the entirety of American society to fit with their own Bible-centred worldview; a vision in which Paganism, clearly, has no place. A great many American Pagans rallied in response, and held a number of private and public rites in defence of the gods, particularly the local goddess Columbia, the genius loci of the American capital. Their piety is to be commended, and I am hopeful that it will be successful.

I find the NAR’s behaviour to be morally reprehensible. However, that’s not to say I necessarily come down against them for using magic in an attempt to see their political goals manifested. I certainly know of Pagans in this country who have used magic for broadly political ends; encouraging spiritual awakening and warding off the predations of consumer industrialism on our natural and cultural heritage. I’ve done similar things myself. Such practices certainly fly perilously close to disregarding the free will of others, but that isn’t to say they’re not justified. Personally, I don’t have much truck with free will – freedom is a matter of degree, and none of us are totally independent from anything. A spell directed by one individual at another without consent is an abuse, but I’d say more general rites – that operate in the collective realm – consent ceases to be as much of a factor. Instead, moral consequences of the rite, rather than its relationship to free will, become the key consideration.

That’s where the NAR has erred – in their desire is to smash our gods with the supposed power of their own. The divinities we worship are not evil, therefore attempts to remove their influence are themselves malignant. Further, there is a deeper problem. I fear that these collective spells done by Christians (for that is what they are) seem to lack the ritual procedures other magical practitioners put in place to protect the celebrants. Do Christians have their equivalent of casting circle, or purification beforehand? Do they get grounded properly afterwards? I’m not sure. And the problem with this sort of uncontrolled magic, as Gandalf once said of the Palantir, is that you don’t know who else might be watching. By practicing in this way (especially by setting their intent on so grand a goal) the NAR movement is leaving itself wide open to being possessed and manipulated by malevolent spiritual forces.

Protection: It is much easier to protect oneself from negative magic, than it is to use negative magic effectively.

So how does this apply to my posters? Well, one of them – a “Russ Weekwald” suggested I check out a series of videos produced by a Dr Del Tackett as part of The Truth Project. Curious, I went over to his website, and was greeted by yet another Christian group desperate to get me to believe them. The problem was, that the DVD Dr Tackett had produced was also accompanied by a “platform of prayer”, in which the good doctor would be praying for “God to do his work” and convert me himself.

Now, that’s magic. From my perspective, praying and spells are just different ways of focusing intent. What’s more, because the Truth Project will pray for me (as a viewer) by name, it’s directed at me personally. Unless I give him my express say-so (and I don’t), such acts of prayer are a huge violation of my autonomy; and, because the universe works on a principle of return – Dr Tackett can surely expect to reap a whirlwind of disempowerment if he tries to get his god to override my will without my consent. What the NAR have to look forward to, though, I dread to think.

So I am glad that the majority of Christians who have posted on my blog show no such interest in converting me, or using prayer in such abusive ways. Respect is always appreciated!

Posted in Paganism | 2 Comments »

Tags: , , , , , , ,
August 15, 2012

Divine Signs: Lumping and Splitting

Sulis: One of a whole pantheon of British gods.

Recently, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research into the ancestral gods of the British Isles. I’ve often thought it odd that as one of the key nations in the revival movement, we should show such a limited interest in our own gods. The reverence of Irish, Welsh, Greek and Norse gods is somewhat commonplace, but English gods (of which there are many) get a surprisingly small amount of attention. I personally suspect this is due to a lack of accessible information about them, directed at a popular audience. I think this is a real shame, and I hope it will change.

So far, I’ve been concentrating on R.G. Collingwood’s Roman Inscriptions of Britain, and have found a huge number of local gods, about which we know a little and can guess quite a bit more via the interpretio romana. As I’m dealing with a-lot of the source material the founding members of Druidry, Wicca and other modern paths may have directly or indirectly drawn upon, I can also see where a lot of their ideas came from.

Take the Lord of Wicca, for example. His dual role as the sacred king, doomed to die to make the crops fertile, and the wild hunter-shaman of the wintery woods, is a straight-up combination of Freyr and another, less known god; Nodens. Nodens, also known as Nodons, Nodonts, Nudens, is a god associated with hunting, dogs, healing and fishing. He had a major cult centre at Lydney in Gloucestershire, but (as I have been discovering) was worshipped across Britain, although frequently in the form of his alternate in the interpretio – Mars. Mars-Nodens seems to be one of the most popular gods in Roman Britain, up there with Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the Dea Matronae – the Mother Goddesses. I’ve found inscriptions devoted to him across the length and breadth of the country. His explicit association with Mars is one connection, but another suggestive link to other gods is the linguistic similarity of his name to the figures of Nuada (in Ireland) and Llud (Wales). In these persons, the theme of losing a hand (but it being restored at some later date) appears, which also indicates a further connection – to the Germanic God Tiw or Tyr, who was also associated with Mars.

Now, does this mean that a single divinity – with many different names – was worshipped across Europe? That seems to be the conclusion drawn by previous writers. The God’s powers of regeneration, his association with wildness, fertility, just violence and sacrifice all spring from this densely woven fabric of associations. But to me, I think lumping all these very different beings together is a bit dodgy. In Rome, Mars was more associated with warfare than healing – that association is a decidedly Celtic viewpoint. Similarly, Tyr is a god of justice rather than a healer. Unlike Nuada, he never regains the hand he sacrifices to the forces of chaos. Explaining away these differences does a disservice to their plurality of these different beings, and I think neglects their clear differences as characters.

I think the root of the “lumping” school lies with a desire to create analogues to the Christian divinity. This tendency can be most clearly seen in Goddess Spirituality, which denies the existence of a nasty, patriarchal God (boo), and affirms the existence of a loving, matristic Goddess (yay!) In my view, though legitimate engagements with the sacred, these views simply aren’t supported by the source material, which if anything suggests a huge number of local gods, similar to that seen in many polytheistic countries. Each tribe would have its own collection of divinities, embedded in their own history, culture and landscape.

That isn’t to say there are no lines of continuity though. Clearly, there is something shared cross-culturally under all this Nodens-Mars-Tyr business. Ultimately, I think the key theme is “necessity”. Across pre-Christian Europe, there seems to have been a spiritual concern with the issue of what to do in a tight spot, and that concern manifested in different ways in different contexts. In Norse culture, that manifested with a warrior sacrificing his sword-hand for the good of All, and therefore gaining a sense of justice and authority over the thing and the laws it gave. In Roman Britain, that same need presented as a hunter king, who rewarded those who propitiated him with a good catch and a healing hand. Just like the trickster figures of Native American spiritualities, European gods are variations on a theme. To me, it seems what is shared is not a single god with many masks, but rather a common archetype – a divine equivalent of a star-sign. Nodens, Mars and Tyr are like cousins; sharing a basic energy, but manifesting it in different, locally specific ways.

Posted in "Britishness", History, Paganism | 2 Comments »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
June 19, 2012

Tarot: A rationalist’s guide to why it works

This weekend I’ve been back in Cambridge reading fortunes at May Balls. The pay is good (though not as much as it would be for individual readings) although it’s pretty exhausting, reading tarot for three hours solid. It’s occasionally a little dispiriting too, especially if you’re working the queues outside the ball. When you ask people in the queue if they’d like a reading, one of your hyper-intellectual student clientele, usually a man, will regard you with scorn and say “No(!)” in a very get-away-from-me-now-you-superstitious-dickwad sort of a way. Then there’s the always-hilarious moment when a skeptical student haughtily questions your intelligence (“Q: Did you go to university?” – how is this relevant to my entertaining you, I wonder) and looks utterly dumbfounded when I reveal that I’m just as educated as them (“A: Yes, I went to this one actually”). The assumption is that if you read Tarot, you must be some kind of credulous fool, or a charlatan, or both.

The thing is that most people’s assumptions about Tarot, and divination more generally, are basically flawed. They think it amounts to a supernatural ability to access transcendentally valid foreknowledge of future events. This popular image, promoted by Hollywood (it makes for great cinema), paints a picture of those with oracular abilities as chesty, dulcet beauties, who gaze soulfully into the eyes of the hero whilst prognosticating in loose vowels and doubtful archaisms. As I have neither the bust nor the feminine grace of Jane Seymour, I’m sure most of the gentlemen I met in the queue were disappointed that they couldn’t manfully deny the influence of fate in their lives, before promptly ravishing the gift of foresight from me in demonstration of their powers of self-determination, a la Roger Moore in Live and Let Die.

Unfortunately for them, movie Tarot is about as reflective of the real practice as movie science is of the scientific method. Just as Hollywood’s ludicrous attempts to incorporate plate tectonics or viral epidemiology into ripping yarns make the average geologist or pathologist wince, so it is with genuine occultists watching magic on the silver screen.

The first thing that is worth clearing up is that Tarot doesn’t say what Will [Definitely] Happen. The main work of any Tarot spread is not to say what the future holds; it is to analyse the present situation of the quierent. Only three card positions out of the ten in the Celtic Cross spread, for example, are directly concerned with the future. And there’s a reason for this: Tarot assumes the future is what we make of it in the present. Our daily choices alter our future. Try it. Get up and go pour yourself a glass of water. Done it? There. You weren’t going to do that when you started reading this article. You’ve changed your future. Congrats.

This principle is also illustrated by the types of cards that comprise any Rider-Waite Tarot set (the one I use). This traditional iteration of Tarot consists of the Minor Arcana – four suits, each of which corresponds to a classical element and an aspect of life (emotions, creativity, intellect and practical concerns) – and the Major Arcana – a set of cards that together compose a sort of Bildungsroman; beginning in ignorance (The Fool) and progressing through choice, refinement and change to ultimate completion (The World). The basic meanings of the cards are obviously not geared towards predicting specific events, but towards personal development. Like a work of great literature, the Rider-Waite Tarot deck deals with universal human themes in such a way that you can use it to reflect upon your own life’s course. The aim isn’t prediction in any scientific sense, but rather a sort of self-gnosis, that supports better living in the world.

The rationalist might ask: if this psychological blueprint is so good, why dress it up in pretty pictures and symbols? The answer, in my view, is that the symbolism is what makes it so good. It makes it fun. It encourages the imaginative, creative aspects to the human psyche to engage with a process that would otherwise be rather dry. Denuded of this playful aspect – perhaps into some HR event-compatible “Rider-Waite Lifemapping System” – Tarot would not engage quierents (or readers) to the same degree, and therefore would not be as affecting. Play is the major way in which humans learn, and let’s not forget that Tarot is first and foremost a game of cards.

This is as much I am sure of. There are other things I have observed in my time as a reader, though, that lead me to think there might be more to it than the use of play to empower introspection. The awkward truth is, that Tarot works. Despite being based on the random process of shuffling some cards, Tarot seems capable of answering questions, and scoping out the current situation of a person (not to mention probably consequences of this) with unnerving accuracy. Even my dad, who is an arch-rationalist, was disconcerted when my reading for him turned out to be super accurate.

Now, I am well aware of the positivist argument for why Tarot appears to work. A mixture of cold reading, combined with interpretive drift, positive bias (a tendency to remember positive results and ignore negative ones), and a suitably general and mutable regime of meaning. Personally, I have no problems with this explanation. When skeptics like Derren Brown attempt to explain away divinatory techniques’ effectiveness by claiming their insights are broad enough to apply to anybody and draw on human interaction to seem real, they miss the point – it is the fact that they are universally applicable and resolutely social that gives them their power. Even if the mechanism is pure psychology; Tarot still works. Like performance art, the bundle of symbolic cards and psychological tricks can be used for good, or for ill – to manipulate or to help. But it’s still an effective way of altering perception and assisting self-reflection. Then of course, there is what the Tarot books themselves say about the power of intuition and the spiritual forces at work behind the cards. These claims are non-scientific, and therefore they are difficult to address scientifically. Personally, I view them as simply another way of talking about the same processes I have mentioned above, although I can understand if they might be off-putting to a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist.

Still, I wonder if there might be more to it than that. I wonder if the numerical structures within Tarot (14 cards in each of four suits, 4 of which in each suit correspond to personalities + the major arcana) are uniquely effective at throwing up meaningful patterns when attributed significance in terms of a life’s course. I wonder if human shuffling is a truly randomizing act (friends often bring up the same cards but in a different order; suggesting to me that there may be some unconscious process by which individuals may imitate how their friends shuffle the pack). I wonder if the imagination, so crucial to Tarot’s effectiveness, might have some deeper order that Tarot as a practice reveals and harnesses. I wonder if all of this comes together to produce something that is more effective than is often assumed.

Posted in Paganism, Social Anthropology | 2 Comments »

Tags: , , , , , ,
June 14, 2012

A Faun’s Exile

Narnia is a realm dominated by one voice – the roar Aslan of the East. He has cried out many times in our history, drowning out all others. Sometimes in love, sometimes in anger. Sometimes with great cause. But only ever when it has suited him.

- Cybil of Beaversdam.

There is a deep magic, unknown to most. There is a deeper magic, unknown even to the wise. Then there is the deepest magic – known to everyone.

- Piphallow.

 

 

I first read the Chronicles of Narnia when I was six. The triple volume we had in our house contained the first three books in the series – The Magician’s Nephew; The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe; The Horse and His Boy. I can still remember the front cover now; a thick, starry-blue border, edging around a rolling green landscape that swept up to high mountains beneath a clear sky. In the foreground stood the Great Lion himself; Aslan looking gold and glorious as always. It was an evocative image, and it drew me in.

My parents were surprised and overjoyed when I started reading it off my own bat. I devoured the books; first reading The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, then The Horse and his Boy, and finally The Magicians Nephew. I remember whisking my way through pages and pages of text, whilst my friends at school were still stumbling through picturebooks. Words like “gifted” were bandied about over my head in hushed tones.

 

I didn’t care about that, though. I was worlds away  – dancing with fauns, fleeing from wolves and exploring the lantern wastes. I was in love. In love with Narnia, its people, its places, its culture. It was a vision of a totally animate world; and yet, one that was still earthy – it wasn’t some ethereal Neverwhere, hard to imagine separately to its bookish casings – it felt like (what I now call) ethnography; a thick description of a real place with realistic people. There are plenty of less-than-pleasant parts of Lewis’ vision – the sexism towards adult women, the blatant xenophobia, the authoritarian glint in Aslan’s leonine eye – but I didn’t notice any of it. To my six-year-old mind, the nasty hobby-horses of Lewis’ rode past unnoticed; the Christian allegory, 1950s ethnocentricism and 1930s misogyny moving over my head, perhaps intended to be visible to older children. What did stick with me was the obvious Paganism upon which Lewis drew – the walking trees, the speaking beasts, the divine waters. I recognized them at once as friends and true gods, following them into the wild, forgotten places of the text, whilst Lewis played his Game of Thrones in the wide, open country of chapter upon chapter.

 

Because Lewis did focus upon heroes. Heroes, by and large, I didn’t really care about. Peter, Edmund, Eustace, Jill, and even Lucy seemed rather old-fashioned to the millennial me. I was frustrated by how I was expected to only empathise with a person if they hailed from my own world. I felt patronized even at age six by this authorial choice. It was for this reason that my favourite in the series was The Horse and His Boy; here was a book where those irritating Pevensies and their fellow travelers only got involved at the edges. This book is also, incidentally, populated by characters who have the least interest in Aslan – Shasta and Hwin barely knows who he is, Aravis doesn’t care, Bree doesn’t get him at all despite using him as something of a battle-standard.

But what I really loved about Horse was that it gave a precious insight into ordinary Narnia. Towards the end of the book, Shasta, on his way to the capital of Archenland, manages to find his way into Narnia proper. There, he meets a community of everyday Narnians – dwarves, fauns, talking beasts. Simple people, leading their uneventful, happy lives in the forest. He spends a-few short hours amongst them, eating bacon and seeing what he’s been missing all those years in the south, before rushing off to save the day. The narrative follows him, but my heart remained in those quiet woods. I read that chapter again and again, wishing the pages would open up and lower me down gently onto a bower of golden leaves and celandines; only to be greeted by a band of dwarves with a kettle on the boil.

 

I read the rest of the books only later, receiving them a couple of years later at Christmas. I loved Prince Caspian – the trees and awakening gods avenging themselves on dull Telmarine Narnia struck a chord that still sounds in my heart today. As The Voyage of the Dawn Treader didn’t actually take place in Narnia, and ended in what seemed at the time to be a sort of fuzziness I couldn’t pierce (i.e. Christian allegory) so I didn’t much care for it. The Silver Chair, overwhelmingly bleak, had brief points of relief for me in shedding light on the irascible marsh-wiggles and a positively Bosch-esque winter celebration when Eustace, Jill and co. return to Narnia.

 

Then I read The Last Battle. Each page left me feeling worse and worse. Here was the land I loved being torn to pieces. The trees being felled, the waters stilled, the animals broken as dumb beasts. Things got worse, and worse. And then, when all seemed darkest – Lewis rewarded me with the utter annihilation of Narnia, and most of its people, in fire and death.

 

What replaced it? A heroes reunion. Christian Allegory. More Pevensies. In short, everything I cared least about, was assured salvation!

 

The Narnia I loved – that magical Arcadia half-way between dreaming and waking – was replaced by something I found utterly incomprehensible. Like an onion, but bigger on the inside – what utter madness, I remember thinking, that doesn’t make sense at all! My visual imagination struggled to grasp this eschatological bulb, trying to imagine it as simultaneously England-and-Narnia-and-Everywhere all at once. I failed. The Christian intention of the books, once entirely invisible to me, had now become all there was to see. Sad though it is, Aslan’s Country seemed entirely foreign to me.

 

I was ten at the time, and I cried. I cried because I didn’t understand why Narnia had gone, or if it had gone, at all. I cried because I felt that all those nice, ordinary Narnians – simple people, who asked for nothing except a peaceful life – must’ve been exactly the sort to be tricked by Shift and his idiotic donkey-lion… who (and I really couldn’t believe this part) was allowed into this post-Narnia place, despite the fact that he had shown exactly the same level of ignorance that the others had done; they had been damned, yet he had not. I cried because I knew the Narnia I had believed in, was, in the eyes of the author, gone. And what’s more, he felt that was a good thing.

 

Now I am older. I ended up converting to the faith that Lewis himself followed – Anglican Christianity – in the vain hope of recovering some of the mystery I had felt close to in reading those first books, and that had been thoroughly banished by the Last Battle. Rather ironic really. I now realize that it was at around the time that I read that damn book that the rot to set in – the gradual loss of innocence that was less about becoming interested in stockings and lipstick and boys, as Lewis might have it, and was more about believing the world didn’t actually have any magic in it at all. Lewis successfully broke the spells woven through my Pagan heart, by shattering it in two – for a while, anyway. In the depression that followed, I was vulnerable in precisely the way that Christianity is so adept at addressing. As such, I became a Christian.

In the end, Christianity did little for me. It energized the worst parts of my character – the self-righteous, self-hating, self-denying tendency that I still have trouble with – and left me feeling harrowed and guilty over my sexuality and my philosophical outlook. I spent years worrying about being gay and about possibly doing something that would get me sent to hell. The voices I heard on the wind told me I was safe. But the angry words of other Christians told me something different. I doubted.

 

Gradually, though, I was guided back into Paganism. Those voices in the wind revealed themselves as gods, not one God and saints. Those angry words were shown to be vacuous and fearful by plenty of good education and reflection. At Cambridge and through Druidry, I found my community – my Narnia. And now, after all these years, I’ve found myself again too.

 

Personally, I think authors need to take responsibility over what they write. The impact children’s books have on those that read them can be immense. I am sure that the Narnia books are one of the formative influences in my life. So much of my pleasure and pain has flowed from the triumphs and mistakes of Lewis’ work. His vast knowledge of Pagan, particularly Classical culture, flowed into the Narnia books – where the themes they created helped nourish my love of the same. However, his hamfisted, doctrinaire submission of those themes to Christian allegory helped quicken the despair I felt as I lost the magical sensibilities of my childhood.

 

So: I figure that an update is necessary. A Narnia for the 90s. Or the Noughteens. Regardless, just as I have peeled back my own character’s Christian patina and liked what I saw beneath, so I’m going to try and do the same for Narnia; and see what happens!

Posted in Fan Fiction, Narnia, Paganism, Writing | 7 Comments »

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
May 9, 2012

Beliefnet joins The Telegraph’s campaign against Paganism

Just over a week ago, I covered Cristina Odone’s vapid and inflammatory comment article in The Daily Telegraph on the decision to include Paganism as a possible topic of Religious Education classes in Cornish state schools by the county council. It was pretty well received by my fellow Pagans, but it was entirely ignored by Ms. Odone, despite my pestering her on twitter a little. So I headed off to my tribe’s Beltane celebration in Wiltshire, hoping that her silence indicated that the issue was ready to die quietly.

Beliefnet: A centre for seekers, but has Senior Editor Rob Kerby let it down?

When I returned, however, I discovered that the shit was very much still being stirred. Rob Kerby, Senior Editor at Beliefnet, one of the largest English language multifaith blogs, had written an article entitled “What can the Third World teach us about witchcraft?” Kerby’s answer to this question is never unambiguously stated, but it seems to fly in the direction of witchcraft being nothing more than a base superstition that, in Africa and the Islamic world at least, is used to justify persecution and violence. Quotes from Odone’s article sit pride of place, crystalising her point that Paganism is an illegitimate faith not worthy of respect by monotheists, and that the recent rights Pagans have gained are nothing more than a conspiracy by milquetoast liberals who want to destroy good Christian values. Kerby naturally goes further, hinting that this same belief in witchcraft could lead to child abuse and witch hunts.

Humbug: Christopher Howse is another Telegraph columnist who objects to Cornish educational policy.

At the same time, the Telegraph has vomited out another ill-informed and bigoted anti-Pagan article, this time by Christopher Howse. Howse re-articulates many of the points of the Kerby article, revisiting the Cornwall schools topic with typical Telegraph bluster.

Howse’s problem with Paganism being included in the syllabus is twofold. Firstly, he argues that “Just as French lessons and maths lessons do not merely teach about French and maths but train children to speak the language and add up, so religious education has its practical application.” Presumably, Howse is also against teaching History in schools, for fear that young children might end up becoming Vikings.

Secondly, Howse states, “The other problem is that if paganism is taught alongside the religion that children’s parents practice at home, it implies that paganism is a religion just as well-founded as Presbyterianism or Islam. It’s like teaching Esperanto alongside French.” This is a strange point to make, given the fact that there are a great many Pagans in Cornwall; there are certainly more Pagans than Muslims in the county, if the fact that the Islamic Community Centre in Truro boasts itself as “Cornwall’s only Mosque” is anything to go by (contrast with Boscastle’s famous Witchcraft Museum, the three Pagan Federation Moots in the county and the numerous witchcraft practitioners and groups in Penzance, Bodmin and elsewhere).

Howse frames these bad educational analogies with two broader themes – firstly, he echoes Kerby by saying that “It seems there are now two kinds of witchcraft: the bad kind that black people believe in, and the kind that should be celebrated because it is believed in by Cornish people.” He concludes by parroting the age-old favourite of the seasoned witch-burner – the affirmation that there is no historical continuity between contemporary and ancient Paganism. Howse relates this specifically to the issue of Cornwall’s stone circles, which have featured prominently in this debate so far, as justification for the importance of Paganism in Cornwall’s heritage. “But nobody knows what standing stones represent.” Howse protests. “The astronomical, social, ritual, pacific or bloody uses they might have had are lost in prehistory. They might have been linked with spring flowers or with human sacrifice. No one knows.”

Such grand pronouncements about the dangers of witchcraft beliefs, our ignorance of the religious practices of our far ancestors, and the absolute discontinuity of pre and post-Christian spirituality are proof positive, if ever it was needed, that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Both Howse and Kerby draw on academic literature selectively to bolster a shamelessly pro-Christian agenda. As an anthropologist I have studied each of these themes in quite a bit of depth – the fact that I am still a Pagan should say something about the validity of Howse and Kerby’s assessment.

Glamour: Modern usage of “witch” and “witchcraft” by occultists forms part of a programme of rehabilitation and renewal. Rather than deny magic utterly, contemporary pagans seek ways of addressing the underlying bigotry and fear that encourages witchcraft accusations.

Firstly – witchcraft. Witchcraft accusations are indeed a widespread cultural phenomenon, and serve, as such anthropologists as Evans-Pritchard, La Fontaine and MacFarlane have argued in the past, as both an explanation for misfortune and making such misfortune meaningful by relating it to social concerns about negative forces, such as jealousy or malice. But, as Jason Pitzl-Waters has pointed out over at Wild Hunt, witchcraft accusations, in Africa especially, have been pushed to further violent excesses by the actions of Christian evangelists – with Christian dualism reframing the personal grievance-fuelled workings of a curse-wielder into a moral assault of cosmic scope. The same can certainly be said of Medieval Europe – although witchcraft was very much part of pre-Christian Roman culture; fear of infernal maleficium only reached its overzealous peak under the authority of the Christian churches.

In addition, I feel that Kerby and Howse’s articles don’t just mistakenly apportion blame onto Pagan shoulders, they also fundamentally miss the point of why present-day pagan occultists use the terms “witch” and “witchcraft” at all. Unlike the thoughtful priests and Enlightenment philosophers who attempted to end the violence and terror of witch trials by denying the existence of magic entirely, present-day Pagans attempt to avoid purges by redeeming the individuals and practices that often empowered them. Reflecting the Jungian process of reclaiming the Shadow by accepting it and learning from it, the witch is transformed from poisoner to prophetess, from hexer to healer. If a person is so jealous, lonely and isolated that they are willing to harm their fellows, we need to think about why, rather than hanging first and asking questions later. Contemporary European witchcraft attempts to hamstring superstitious hysteria by inviting us to re-cognize, rather than demonize, the figure of the witch.

Many roots: Pagan continuity is not measured by confessions of faith or institutional survival, but through threads of tradition that have survived the Christian era and are being re-woven in new ways in the modern day.

As for Howse’s bold assertions concerning continuity, what this amounts to is little more than a piss-poor reading of the past fifty years of historical research into the origins of contemporary Paganism. It is not sufficient to simply hold up Murray as a straw man and knock her down without telling us whose gloves you are wearing when you do it. Ronald Hutton, a leading historian of British witchcraft and Paganism, was one of the major players in the systematic deconstruction of Murray’s claims, but as he points out in Triumph of the Moon, there are in fact four distinct streams linking ancient and modern Paganism – it’s just that an underground, organised witch cult is not one of them. Instead, high magic, folk magic, folk ritual and the love of classical art, poetry and philosophy have all contributed to the resurgence of Paganism in the modern age, and all have their roots in pre-Christian practices and beliefs. This does not constitute the sort of confessional or institutional continuity that Christianity and Islam can boast, but given the fact that Pagans tend to be wary of belief-related labels and formal institutions, it should be obvious that these things are not crucial articles of faith for us. Instead, it is the sort of loose, experientially motived tradition that you find in traditional religions the world over that characterizes both modern and ancient European Paganism, and links the two together. Paganism has not survived as a hidden form of “anti-Christianity” (as cool as that seems) into the modern age. It is its own kind of cultural assemblage, with its own lineage and patterns of authority that have to a great extent remained intact.

People of the Stones: Contemporary practice may not be entirely consistent with what was done in earlier centuries, but can any Christian church boast as much?

As for stone circles, we actually know a great deal about them, thanks to extensive archaeological research. We know they had astrological significance, being aligned to important points of the solar year, and that they were potentially used for rituals relating to the dead and possibly healing. If later European religious practices are anything to go by, they probably involved ritual processions and clockwise circumambulation. Steven Waller has suggested that the design of Stonehenge was inspired by interference patterns in sound. Regardless of their original function, subsequent generations to the builders have all placed their own interpretations on these ancient structures, and modern pagans are no different in this regard – much like early Christians building on pre-Christian religious sites. Exploring these shifting understandings and comparing them to contemporary archaeology would surely be an informative exercise for schoolchildren.

Howse, Odone, and Kerby all show an all-too widespread attitude amongst Christians; that denigrates anything that doesn’t fit within their own, narrow worldview. And because Christianity is so widespread, such odious opinions get far more airtime than they deserve, discouraging seekers and poisoning public sentiment. As a young person, I was put off pursuing my true spiritual calling because of angry old men like Howse telling everyone that Paganism was silly, even dangerous, superstitious nonsense. I fortunately have realized my mistake, but not after losing many years, trying to shoehorn my soul into a Christian mold. Although Christianity is a beautiful faith for many, it was profoundly incompatible with my own state of being, and left me closeted and self-hating. I feel it is up to Pagans and open-minded Christians to challenge individuals like Kerby, in order to make things that bit easier for people who are seeking the right spiritual path for themselves.

Posted in Paganism, Social Anthropology | 5 Comments »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Entries  |  
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 769 other followers