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.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the things that separate me from other people lately. About the masks I wear and why I wear them. And about the fundamental similarities, and differences.
Truth is, I’m very different. I’m not ‘normal,’ whatever that is. I’m normal in the sense that everyone is unique. But I don’t easily fit in with the day to day crowd. I don’t blend well. I tend to cling to that differentness a little. I hold it close and wear it like a cloak. Being different is a safe place for me. If I’m not the same as everyone else, then I can’t be judged by their standards. Their judgment has no meaning to me, because I’m outside their understanding of the world.
It’s a bit of a crutch. It was a way of letting myself negate the judgments of those around me. The problem, is that no matter how different I am, there will be those to whom I’m not strange. The sense of ‘other’ that I wrap around myself only frees me from the judgment of people not in my world. As I’ve grown in my ‘otherness’ I’ve attracted lots of people to me. Most of whom are also ‘other.’ And yet again, I’ve found myself judged. I put myself in this place of judgment, of allowing it. And I’ve grown to realize that I have to reject it out of hand.
I do not exist to be judged by others. I can not hide behind separation as a reason to deny their judgment validity. Their judgment is invalid because nobody has the right to judge me, not because I’m not part of their world.
That’s not really where I wanted to go with this post though. Just a small aside really. In truth, I wanted to focus in on a specific difference that I’ve been noticing a lot lately. I have a lot of things that separate me from most people. I’m gay. I’m pagan. I’m a nerd. I live communally. I believe in chosen family. I’m realizing though, the more I study it, how important my particular patterns are in defining who I am in a healthy way.
I was thinking about Magic this afternoon. About the energy I feel when I work magic, and the energy I feel when those around me work it. I’m becoming aware of how my pattern does not fit with the patterns I’ve been given to model. I’m male. I identify as male, and have no desire to be otherwise. But my magic is not truly the magic of Fire. My magic is not summoned by a spark. It does not burn through the world leaving a changed path where it’s been. As I am not an extrovert, I am also not Fire. I am not talking about elemental fire here. It is not that my force is not active, or even that my force is not masculine (although it feels like an androgynous force to me).
My magic is a symphony. It is a poem. It is a work larger than the striking of a match, and it builds slowly. My magic moves through time. It is like the tide. It is like weather. It does not happen instantly. There is no sudden tornado that comes out of nowhere. It builds slowly. Hundreds of small actions contribute to it. It is hard to predict, but when it comes, it can not be stopped.
I am not a bonfire, or a ray of light. I am not a vision, or a planetary convergence. My power is not a sword or spear, not a chalice, not a stone. My life is not part of a symbolic structure, it is not a codified pattern of forces. My art is just that. It is art.
I have felt judged lately. Felt pushed to turn my art into something formulaic. To somehow bind it to the pattern that the people around me want to see. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to do that. What I see, and what I hope the world can learn to see, is that an artist can follow the dictum’s of a media. He can obey the rules and create art inside a structure. But he can only do so when the structure fits the art. Starry Night could not have been expressed in realism. Falling Water could never have been a colonial dwelling.
My art, My magic, My life, will never be subject to the will of any muse but my own. While my smaller magics may fit beautifully inside the containers the world likes to see, the work of my life will never conform. You can not command the tide to rise at your will, and you can not demand the spring rain to fall only in one place.
If I am to be a force of nature, than I shall be the storm. Nourishing and destructive. The end and beginning of the cycle joined in the sacred dance.
Let my poetry be sung in this world, and the rest.
What being pagan means to me.
Recently my father asked me what I meant by pagan. He asked me what a pagan is. I’m used to fielding these sorts of questions. I’ve been a public figure in the pagan community for years now, and I get asked questions like that regularly.
I usually answer that a pagan is someone who’s spiritual life is focused on the concept of immanent divinity. A pagan is someone who realizes that the earth and all it’s creatures have some measure of Spirit or Soul, and that God/dess can be found in nature. If our discussion is longer I will say that pagans are most often pantheistic or polytheistic. Pagans in general live by one or both of two primary ethical tenets. They strive towards the ideal of ‘doing no harm,’ or towards a principle of balance with the world around them.
I gave my father the same answers I’ve given so many questioning people. Pagans often practice some form of magic and divination. They believe that symbolic reality has the power to change actual reality, or at least actual reality as they perceive it. Pagans rarely acknowledge a single spiritual authority; by virtue of divine immanence, all paths to recognizing divinity have intrinsic value and place.
It was clear my father doesn’t really get it. He’s kind of practical that way. He’s agnostic. He is a kind of scientist and academic in his own way. Of course he has no qualms about telling my mother not to leave the house on x day because he has a bad feeling, or dreamt something bad. There is an inherent conflict there, that I suspect has more to do with my fathers adoration of skepticism than any true disbelief of the principles I espouse.
But My father got me thinking. Paganism is a broad stroke category. It encompasses religious and spiritual practices so diverse that our community can’t even agree on a definition of what is and is not paganism. As much as I hate it, the best test of what is or is not paganism is a negative test. Is the religion abrahamic? Is it revelationary? Is it Ascetic? Is it purely contemplative, not seeking divinity at all? If the answer is no to all of these questions, what you’re dealing with is probably pagan of some variety.
But with that, every pagan brings their own world view, their own understanding of things to their experience. And this wild variety of people and ways of life brings a challenge to the pagan community. It is difficult for the pagan community, and I use the term lightly, to bond deeply. Differences of opinion are common place, and pagans, like people of all other lifestyles, can rarely accept that other peoples beliefs are as valid as their own, and even less often agree to disagree.
So paganism is divided. We have more religious sects than any other religious classification, primarily because every time there is a disagreement there is the potential for schism, and the pagan community schisms regularly. Unlike religious classifications that are bound together by a common book, or law, or belief in a single unifying principle, pagan organizations schism easily, and suddenly there are two denominations where there were once one.
So what does it mean to be a pagan? I can’t speak for anyone else. This is what it means to me.
Being pagan means living your life with simple reverence for the immanent divine in all things.
Being pagan means communing with yourself and acting rightly according to your own ethical standards.
Being pagan means accepting that your path is not the path for everyone, and that all journeys to the divine are equally valid and sacred.
I could add a lot more things here, but they don’t mean as much, and they aren’t quintessentially pagan to my mind. So it is.
There is a quiet certainty in the air. As though something has ended. As though something has begun. How do you describe a feeling that we don’t have true words for in English? Perhaps not in any language.
It is not expectancy. It is not finality. It is not anxiety or fulfillment. It is not completion. It is change. Do you understand? Can you understand? Can someone who is not a witch truly understand what I say when I say ‘There has been a change.’? Imagine that the world is a great body of water. Deeper than the oceans, but as clear as the most pure stream of snowmelt. Utterly clear, but so deep you can not see the bottom. This body of water is never quite still, but you very rarely see the ripples and changes that go across it. You see their affects. You see that the water seemed green, and now seems blue. You see the reflection of the clouds that aren’t actually floating in the sky. You see them move across the water, but you can’t see how the water itself is moving.
Then you see a clear distinct ripple across the surface of the water. The water is so vast that you can’t possibly determine the source from your vantage, but the ripple is clear and perfect, and where the ripple has passed the water is changed forever. This is the change I am talking about. And you do not see it. You feel it. A witch feels when there is a shift. When a stone is dropped into the depths of that water, or when water is removed. This is what I mean when I say “There has been a change.”
I feel quiet and patient. I feel the change, and I am affected by it. Of course, we know that one is always changed by perception. By perceiving the thing you are imediately changed by your very perception of the thing. Still, this affects me deeply. I do not know to what extent, just that it is there. I do not fear this change, in truth it feels as though I have been waiting for it. As though the proverbial other shoe has dropped, and clattered to the floor. A soft soled shoe onto an area rug that has muffled it’s impact.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to determine who I am now that I do not have so many roles to play. For three years I have filled a variety of roles for the Brotherhood of the Phoenix. I have been a student, a teacher, a leader, a follower, a visionary. Who am I without those roles. For now at least I am none of these things, at least not officially. Who is the person who has filled those roles? What do I do now that I do not have these structures hovering about me, defining my place in the world?
There is a part of me that craves them. That is searching for new structures to take their place. Consciously though, I am rejecting that. I can not define myself merely by the roles that I fill. It is clear that I must find a structure, but I can not find a structure that is of any creation but my own. If I am to define the role of theo, I must define it myself, with care and precision. I must reevaluate the things that are important to me. I should look at my chart of six this week and reevaluate it in the light of my unsettling lack of roles.
There is much work to do there, much to discover, but there are some things that I’ve found I know without putting too much work into it. I am meant to share myself with the world. With my words, with my body, with my spirit. I am the crucible, the vessel of transformation. There is an innate ability to contain, to impose limitations upon the world around me, that is too often shown in my life to be without purpose. But I know that I can not be that vessel until I have been that vessel for myself. This is why it is so essentially important that I create a structure in which to live. That structure must be strong, and it absolutely must be of my own creation, for I will never be able to contain a truly bright fire if I can not contain my own.
It is late at night, on March 24th. I’m sitting in bed with Vivianne here next to me, purring her little heart out, as she does. I’m feeling very lonely right now.
There is a lot going on in my life. Much of it is things that I can’t talk about openly. Perhaps I should describe a little about that. Maybe it will help it all make sense to me, just to speak about the reason we sometimes can’t say all we’d like to say.
I don’t really consider myself a private person. I kind of like to think of myself as an open book. I do recognize though, that you have to ask me the right questions if you want to really get to know me. I am not ashamed of myself, or the life I lead. In truth, I am very proud of the things I’ve done in my life, and of how I live. But there are things that I can’t share here. There are things that I can’t share anywhere. Not because I’m ashamed of them, but because they aren’t fit for public consumption.
Secrecy is a legacy in paganism. It has been vital to our communities for centuries, and I suspect important even before practicing witchcraft could get you killed. There are a lot of reasons for secrecy in our lives. Most people are afraid of what could happen if the world finds out that they’re a witch. Will the judge me? Will I be able to keep my job? Will I be run out of town? These are all valid fears. It is sad, but even today I could easily find cases where each of these things has happened recently in so-called ‘civilized’ countries. I feel sad for these people, for their fears, but I feel more sad because their fears keep them from understanding the deeper meanings of silence.
Pagans talk a lot about silence. The fourth elemental maxim is “To be Silent.” If I had a dollar for every witch who told me “Don’t talk about your magic to anyone or it will break the spell” I’d be a very rich witch. I would be a poor witch indeed if I didn’t recognize that there are times this is true, but the maxim has been watered down, as so much of our lore. Silence is not about protecting yourself from persecution. Nor is it about keeping it a secret so the magic works. Silence is a deeper concept.
We all know, whether we think about it or not, that the world is only what we perceive it to be. The world changes because your perceptions of it change. One discussion of Silence is centered around this truth. To be Silent means to be still, quiet, and patient. To be silent means to wait until your perception has changed, and to allow your perception to change. It is hard to perceive differences in yourself and the world around you if you are busy mucking around with things.
Another, equally vital concept behind Silence is the recognition that knowledge is power. In magic this is even more true. The knowledge you have translates to a type of power. That knowledge can be dangerous to yourself and others. One reason for silence is to protect people from knowledge they aren’t ready for. An even more important aspect of this same thought is that giving a person knowledge without the experience to understand it may very well ruin their ability to genuinely have the experience when they are ready for it.
These are my reasons for silence on the things that trouble me. Certainly, there are oath bound aspects to consider as well, but the truth is that if I shared all my experiences with you, I believe you would be irreparably damaged. Would you be able to have good ecstatic experiences, if I warned you about some of my not so good ones? Would you understand the mysteries that Persephone can reveal to you, if I simply tell them to you like so many parables?
So here I am feeling very lonely. There aren’t many people that I can share all my experiences with. And of those that I can, there are even fewer who I trust, who I can hold close enough to speak freely about shadows that plague me. Vivianne understands. She doesn’t need me to talk to her about it, she listens on her own, and lets me know that she loves me and that I’m not alone. But I feel alone anyway.
Star-fires child, bright and ever-burning, your fire streaks through the firmament as a constellation of it’s own. Your own sacred beauty, a thing of permanence and steady joy. A celebration of the nomads which follow your progress, their every step guided by the mysterious light that you cast.
Oh mysteries, the challenges that we find seeping through the darkness of our world, only hinted at the the shadows you cast. Yes you too have shadows. Shadows that are dark and terrifying. Shadows that cast into darkness the beauty of those nomadic souls as each dark phase passes across the sky. The demons hunt in that darkness, and your own fiery strikes can not hunt them down, for they are too quick and fierce.
No, your shadows are not things of ferocity. They are not enemies or demons to do combat with, but insidious serpents who slither in between the moments of brightness. No, your instants of attention can not banish these unconquered foes, and so they will haunt you, stalking your every moment with a patience you do not wish to posses. They wait to strike and do so, pushing you out of orbit as if it was merely the gravity of a nearby star that has drawn you. And so you journey in a new direction, always wondering what would have come of the strand of fire you were following moments ago, years ago, ages ago.
You must discipline yourself to patience oh child of the stars, whose icy tail reaches behind you as a shining legacy of your presence, affecting all around you. Your icy memories are refracting glimmers of your fire, but that prismatic glory is so faint compared to the light your nomads beg to see of you. Their souls are caught in your wake, and they gather each sparkle of light to themselves, precious as the very breath which gives them life; and yet they yearn for more. But your shadows hunt them, and they huddle around the fires they can conjure from what you do give, praying that the flames they harbor will be enough to protect them from what stalks their night.
You must discipline yourself to patience, my streaking ball of ice; you must learn to out wait your shadows. You must deny their force until it is they, and not you who lacks the patience to endure the course. You must be still and silent until your shadows attempt to force you to move again, because then their clever hands will not go un-noticed, and you might conquer them each in turn.
You must discipline yourself to patience, as even the day-star has found his place of stillness and nurtured life. You can not create from ever-present motion, but only from the quiet of the void. The wanderers who stalk your tail, yearning ever more deeply for the warmth of your own starlight, and yet you run always in motion, giving them the barest touch of your love, enough so that they will follow you always, but never enough that they might truly live. And you look behind you, gazing upon the magnificence of your trail, and the number of your followers and you rejoice in their love of you, never knowing that their patience is growing short.
You must discipline yourself to patience oh celestial being of the ancient music of the spheres of the void and cauldron. You must quiet your expansion and forgo your motion. You must stop seeking for the sake of seeking; and gather your glorious tail to yourself in the stillness of space; and you must wait until waiting is filled and the fire blossoms in your heart in earnest, filling you with the love of your nomads that you can no longer deny.
Then star child, only then, will you find the peace you don’t know you are seeking. Sit quietly. Do not sing your music merely to admire it, but where it will be heard, and where the hearing of it will be purposeful and creative. Sit quietly, and listen to the spheres that sing around you. Understand their song. Understand how your melody and harmony can complement those spheres. Sit quietly, and keep sitting until you understand patience. When you understand patience, you will no longer need to sing, because your song will be called forth from you by the very stillness you have been seeking to know. In this, is the key to your wisdom.
So I’m reasonably plugged in to the blogosphere. I value it. I pay special attention to pagan stuff. Being Pagan, and something of an idealist, I really try to keep tabs on what’s going on in the pagan world. I read WitchVox, and The Wild Hunt. I also read a lot of pagan trash. I have to ask myself Why? Why on earth is there so much trash out there where people can get to it? And why do the people writing it do so? Don’t some of these writers realize that they’re not helping anyone when they spout inaccurate data and act as though it’s some sort of pagan gospel?
It doesn’t help that sites like Associated Content make it easy for untrained, untalented, and uninformed writers to put their articles out there where they can be digested by the unwitting masses. Some of these articles are practically illiterate, almost all of them are riddled with partial or just plain bad information. Many of them are written by Wiccan newbies who believe that the world is black & white, right & wrong, and that Wicca is all about the glory of the Goddess and her joyous rituals of life.
Sorry to burst the bubble babes, but it just isn’t. The world is a diverse place, filled with more paths than there are people to walk them. This may be snarky, but I’m sick to death of seeing purported ‘news’ articles about college pagan groups whose leaders throw out tirelessly incorrect soundbites that get published. What we need is a centralized FAQ. A source where the pagan community can go to get sensical, encompassing, accurate explanations. Where can send uninformed media when they want information, instead of letting them get their information from teenie-boppers and fluffy bunnies.
As a neo-pagan who is pretty firmly entrenched upon the left hand path, I don’t want to see inaccurate data thrown around as if it were the plain and simple truth. I don’t want my way touted above any other, I just want it given equal acknowledgment.
I may be about to duplicate somebody else’s efforts, but I don’t mind. I’m going to start a pagan FAQ page here, and as I come across questions that are constantly asked, and often answered badly, I’ll put some accurate information up.
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