Lineage and the Like
Ξ April 19th, 2008 | → | ∇ Paganism |
On my way home from UofC, where I had dinner and hung out with John.
There is too much light on the el. It’s dark out. Night has truly fallen and there is blackness outside the windows. There are cars rushing past, and street lights, but it is dark. And the el is lit up by fluorescent bulbs that cast everything in their sickly too-white glow, everything seems dingy and unkempt. They sterilize the air, the energy of the world seems dimmed by the light. Not that being inside this steel worm doesn’t have anything to do with that, but the light is harsh. It’s cruel.
John and I talked, as we do, about a great many things over the course of the evening. One of those things, one that I don’t spend enough time thinking about myself, is the weight that people tend to put on lineage. On certifiability. On historical precedent.
There is a cultural understanding that if something has been around centuries, it must somehow be valuable. It must be preserved. There is this concept that if it has been around a long time it DESERVES to be preserved on no merit other than it’s age.
I find myself feeling the same twinge of annoyance I feel when a senior citizen attempts to tell me that he or she DESERVES my respect because of their age. Age does not equate to value. I know some very old people who are very worthy of respect. Who have humbled me with the lives they’ve led and the strength of their character. I have also met plenty of older people who have done nothing to earn my respect, and yet attempt to demand it of me.
To sit with this tangent for just a few more moments, and to be clear, everyone deserves to be treated as a human. They deserve a common respect and courtesy due to everybody and everything. Beyond courtesy, respect can only be earned, and surviving 80 years in itself is not enough to earn that respect. More importantly, the determination that you deserve my respect makes it fairly certain that you don’t. I give my respect to people who are sincere, who have integrity, who have faced the challenge of being human and still manage to exist without bitterness or self-righteousness. Demanding my respect puts a lie to those truths.
Back to topic. This same concept of age determining value is something that we face constantly in the world. And perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a serious point of contention for much of the pagan community. But we all know that just because something has been around a long time, doesn’t mean it should be preserved. Civilization has a long tradition of changing long-standing patterns. Why we place this importance on unchanging traditions I’ll never know. Particularly since there are no traditions which do not change. Everything is mutable, growing and evolving through time.
It’s true I value the process of initiation. The sharing of common experience and mystery is something that there is no replacement for. I also value the process of traditional schooling. Of Master-Apprentice relationships. I find deep truths in the traditional teachings of native and aboriginal peoples, and in the celebration of rituals that have been in existence for decades or centuries. It’s good to have values, and to place value in the things that have helped shape you and the world around you. But lineage and tradition are not the only valuable things in our community.
Innovation, creativity, drive. These are also valuable commodities. Too often I see people dismiss the thoughts and experiences of other people because they haven’t had this training, or that experience, or don’t belong to a specific organization. If there is one thing that neo-pagans especially should remember, it’s that our experiences are always valid and that they define us. As neo-pagans we daily share in experiences and understandings that the majority of the world would dismiss as heresy or fantasy. So why do we so often do the same to other members of our community?
We have a bad habit of hypocrisy in the pagan community. We say “My craft is more lineaged and traditional, it is more pure. My way is right.” and we dismiss the plausibility of value or validity in the experiences of others. We deny their credibility because it gives us power to do so. When you or I deny someone else’s validity, we place ourselves in a position of superiority, and the surety that lends us gives us the confidence we need to face our demons in the rest of society.
I recognize that I am as guilty of this as the next person. I am not greatly lineaged, but I am proud of my lineage and training. I am deeply proud of my experiences and study. I am a leader in my community, a guide and a teacher. And it is really easy to write off anyone who can’t make similar credible claims. Particularly when those claims, seem specious or out of line with my own experience. I know damn well that my experience is vastly different than the experience of cowans. I know too that my experience is different than that of my teachers and family. What makes my experience any more valid or valuable than the experience of anyone else?
One of the big traps is all the lies. We live in a culture inundated with liars and lying. We expect the media to lie to us. We expect our culture to deceive us. And true or not, we assume that anyone who we don’t have first-hand experience with is lying to us about their experiences. They very well might be. I could easily be lying to you when I say that I’ve felt spirits of the land move me. That I’ve seen true Will-o-the-wisps. How are you to know?
But why immediate distrust? Why do you assume that I’m lying or deluded. Have you had experiences that other people would think you’re lying about? That you made up to aggrandize yourself?
Why are we so damned afraid to take people at face value? I suspect that it comes down to that power idea. If the experiences of the people we talk to are real, then we aren’t powerful. We aren’t superior, we’re just normal. More importantly, if we accept the validity of other peoples experiences at face value, we find ourselves against logical challenges. Their experience and my experience can not both be true.
They can both be true, but that’s a discussion for another time. But what would happen if we just took them at face value? What would change in our community? What if instead of telling each other and the media how hokey and false that other group of people are, and how we’re the real thing, we started telling each other how beautiful and valuable we are? What if instead of calling each other fakers, we were able to value one another simply for the uniqueness and individuality we each bring to the table?
Could it be that the reason we can’t present a single honest face to the public is none of us are willing to let that face be real? The truth of paganism is very simple my friends. We are a vastly diverse community of people who share some similarities and common points of experiential and revelatory recognition of the divine, but choose to celebrate and honor that divine in an uncountable variety of manners, each of which is equally valid and beautiful in it’s own right.
Maybe if we started trying to remember that truth, we wouldn’t have to spend so much time fighting each other and the media, and we could all get on with our lives.
