Essais

Pagan Values Month

2009-06-21T23:19:00.001-05:00

I've been trying to write a post for a while, wrestling with my ideas and my experiences and trying to turn them into words that mean something to someone other than myself. But words are sometimes superfluous.

A woman died yesterday in Tehran. And, because of the wonders of modern technology, we can all watch her die. This is not voyeurism, or shock drama, or sensationalism. This is important. This is the difference that the new world makes: that in a theocratic dictatorship, in a country where protesters are shot and killed, they can deny it all they like, but we all watched her die. The news stories all say she was "allegedly shot," but we can all see her blood on the ground.

In the drafts of my Pagan Values Month posts, the emerging theme was action. It's not enough to believe something in Paganism, you must do as well. In Iran, people are trying to change the world, and I am humbled next to that. From where I sit I cannot do much, but I can bear witness. I can say, I see you. I hear you. May your gods protect you, and may the new world show you better justice than this one.

(You can watch the video at Jezebel's post here. Read the rest, too, and all the links.)

Celtic Witch

2009-05-12T09:52:00.004-05:00

I really enjoyed the Point of View column by Wood Stone in the current issue of PanGaia on being a Christian Witch. I know such a combination is less unusual in my corner of the blogosphere than it apparently is in other places, but it was a nice, well-articulated explanation of how the two fit together. She talks about wandering around in "the truth outside the walls" of sect and religion, a liminal place that's very near and dear to my heart as well.

I wouldn't call myself a Christian Witch, but I wouldn't call myself a Recovering Christian either. I gave up on Christianity when I graduated to the Bible Study classes that actually taught you what the Church believed -- when it started being obvious that "love thy neighbor" wasn't really the central point here. I dropped it all and I dropped it hard, and I found Wicca a much better fit for my beliefs, so I've never really looked back and I wouldn't feel comfortable identifying myself as any kind of a Christian today, or probably ever again. But I've found myself reading more and more about Christianity, its history and its variations, its sources in Judaism and Hellenicism, and finding it fascinating.

It was getting deeply into Celtic Reconstructionism at last that really pushed me in this direction. It seemed paradoxical at first, because Reconstructionism so often seems like "hardcore Paganism," but the more I poke at it the more I find I can't separate the Christianity out of it. Ireland was Christianized by the time we get any written records (including the still cryptic ogam stones), and even throughout most of the rest of the Celtic world, well, I'm a little skeptical about the accuracy of Greeks writing about barbarians. But in Ireland especially, Christianity and the existing paganism merged fairly smoothly, leaving us with no real way to disentangle them now.

And besides, what good does it do to ignore fifteen hundred years of history? Christian mystics shaped our understanding of the esoteric, and for most of us, our understanding of the universe is filtered through a hugely Christianized culture. While it's sometimes interesting to see if you can pick the Christian bits out of everything else...well, culture doesn't really work that way, and I don't think it's very helpful.

...sorry, let me restate that, slightly more emphatically. Culture really doesn't work that way. Christianity -- and everything that comes with it, binary dualism, strict concepts of fault and evil, organizational hierarchy, in addition to all the obvious bits -- has been a part of the way we think and live for a millennium and a half. Capitalism developed out of the interactions of state and Church. Heck, the whole pattern of the week and weekend has a connection. Obviously all of these things are tempered by other factors, but that's part of my point; you can't unpick it and expect it to make any sense.

(Halfway through writing this post I went back to reading the magazine, though, and ran into the Satanism feature. There are a million things I could say about that piece, but most of them come down to ur doin it rong. Maybe in another post.)

All of which is, of course, easier said than done, and easily confused by the fact that it's impossible to tell if two people mean the same thing when they say "modern Paganism" without a half-hour conversation on nuances. What it comes down to for me is that I want my Paganism to be part of my life, all the time, which includes the parts of my life that I can't bend into a shape more amenable to Paganism. It takes effort to understand my whole life as one entity instead of dividing it off into little compartments, but I do think it's worth it in the end, even if it means looking at some things bleeding together where I'd rather there was a line.

I learned something about myself.

2009-05-10T21:19:00.000-05:00

When I was a little girl -- like, seven or eight -- I wanted nothing more in the universe than for magic to be real. I already loved science fiction and fantasy novels (the first thing I ever saved up for was a box set of the Chronicles of Narnia) and I wanted oh so badly for my life to be like that.

I knew it couldn't be, of course. I was well aware that I was not secretly a fairy princess and wizards and dragons did not exist and the books were as close as I was going to get. But oh, I wanted.

And I was a genre-savvy little kid; I had realized that even in books about a world like our world where magic did exist, the protagonists never already understood how it worked. But because the protagonists, like me, wanted magic and dragons and fairies to exist, I reasoned that they would have read the same kind of books I did, books that explained how magic worked and what to do if you met a sphynx and so on. So logically, I figured, if magic does exist, it can't be anything like it is in books. And, somewhat less logically, I decided that it couldn't be like anything I could imagine and put in a book, either.

I wish I could explain the feeling I got then, and every time after, imagining some new way for magic to be real and then realizing, by my own logic, that I had negated that possibility. It was like a door closing -- no, slamming shut in my mind. I can still summon up that feeling that's less like a feeling than a real sense of the universe closing itself to me. It's still so vivid because it's never really gone away.

I don't know what it was that made me remember this train of thought, but it hit me last night like a hammer. This is why I'm terrible at magic, at ritual, at meditation. This is why I always stare agape at potential employers when they ask in interviews where I see myself in five years. This is why just suck it up and say it I've never dated, because all that time imagining myself in someone's arms meant I had convinced myself it would never happen, and never imagining myself in his arms meant I didn't notice when he expressed his interest. This is why I've never really had a plan for what to do with my life (although I have to say I haven't noticed any serious detriments yet). This is why I have such a hard time writing fiction. There's a broken switch in my imagination.

The nastiest part is I know I did it to myself. No one else ever told me this (although my general social ostracization probably contributed to my wanting a different life when I was eight). To the contrary, I was always encouraged to be imaginative. What I wasn't really encouraged to do was to want something so hard, but then, I always knew that what I wanted was impossible anyway. But it bled over, somehow, into being afraid to want anything at all.

Knowing what it is doesn't immediately make it better. I broke myself when I was small; it's a way of looking at the world, now. I have no idea how to change it. I think maybe, now that I know what it is, I have a chance. I hope.

celebrate spring with a crazy little thing called...

2009-05-03T18:29:00.003-05:00

Happy springtime, everyone! (Okay, I'm a couple of days late for Beltane, but it's still the weekend, that has to count for something, right?) While this winter wasn't as crushing as last year's, it's still always a relief to see the trees blooming again. Which they seem to be doing just for the holiday -- last week it was all bare branches outside my window, and now it's tiny green buds and a carpet of green, yellow, white and purple on the lawn. I'm so glad my landlord isn't interested in a tidy green suburban lawn; the weeds are so much prettier.

I didn't do anything for Beltane this year (maypole dancing at dawn? no thank you), but I don't feel too badly about that. It's the end of the semester, and I've canceled all my other social obligations in order to get my papers finished while still showing up for work on time. On the other hand, I've started to notice a pattern of emotional problems recurring at the Beltane/Samhain poles of the year; probably I ought to do something about that. (It's a terrible curse of the way the universe works that you tend to forget you need to do something about your emotional problems until you're in the middle of the emotional problems and therefore not really thinking clearly enough to do anything about them.)

I say I didn't do anything for Beltane; that's not really true. I didn't go out and join any community celebrations, but I've pretty much come to terms with my solitary religious existence. I didn't hold a ritual or cast a circle or write a liturgy, but I've also come to terms, repeatedly over the years but apparently it's something I still need to really absorb, with the fact that not everyone is cut out to be a priestess. I can know and honor my gods in my own way, but liturgy is not my thing. I love a good ritual, but it's work to create ritual, and I have other, more immediate work to do -- homework to earn my degree, work to earn money to pay the bills, work to keep my creative brain functioning while I'm doing the rest, work to maintain my friendships, work to maintain some kind of emotional equilibrium. And all of those things are things that my gods are already a part of, so ritual falls by the wayside. And I'm working on being okay with that.

(Okay, to be honest, I've got gods poking around in everything except the MLS degree. Anybody know of a God of Librarians? I'd like to say hi.)

Documentation

2009-04-08T22:32:00.002-05:00

I came to a realization last night about why I've not been meditating. I was lying in bed, not tired but knowing I had to get up at six in the morning and so really ought to sleep. My breathing had started to slip into a pattern, my mind starting to slide into an altered state, when I thought, I should grab a pen. Somehow I had acquired the idea that if I meditated -- and especially if there were visions or messages involved -- I had to write it down.

I say 'somehow,' but I know exactly where it came from. It's from that epic pile of 101 books I've read over the years. Every single one at some point indicates that if you're going to be meditating/astral traveling/spirit guide contacting/whatever, you should keep a written record of the thing. And boy, did I absorb that one. Thing is, it didn't make me keep a record; it made me not do it in the first place. (I'm sure this is not a universal problem. Then again, at the same time, I'm sure I'm not the only one.)

The thing I can't figure out is why. I am a particularly word-oriented person; I keep three blogs and a series of personal journals in addition to a latent pile of fiction mss. Writing down spiritual experiences does not help me at all. If it made an impact, I remember it; not always consciously, I admit, things do sink and resurface, but they're there. And this is experience, not academia, goddammit. We're not doing Science when we talk to the gods. And any written record I did produce would be entirely useless to anyone but me (and I can tell you, from rereading notes I wrote myself in high school, they're not very useful to me, either).

Now let's see if I can convince my academically-oriented brain of this in practice.

madness doesn't frighten me

2009-03-26T15:18:00.003-05:00

I can never see my own depression clearly until I'm walking out the other side of it. In the middle, it's all made up of maintaining, keeping myself together enough to get through the day. I've been depressed enough that I've had to spend all my breaks crying uncontrollably in the bathroom at work, but never enough that I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. That would be too much like letting other people know something about me.

Once I'm getting better, though, I can look behind me -- brief glimpses, lest like Orpheus I lose whatever it was I went down there for in the first place -- look back and say, "Wow, that was bad." In his book The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon says that most suicides happen in this place; not in the depression, which is too black and smothering to permit any action at all, but in the walking back, when you look behind you too long and realize you'll end up back there again someday. I've never been suicidal either, but I can see why you might.

Depression isn't madness, it's the place on the other side of madness, the dark mirror of the daily world. And I don't mean dark in a mystical, romantic sense, either; dark in the sense of bleak. Grey. Dull. Not even dead, but in limbo; the misery of existence without any of the spark of life.

The madness on the way back. Somewhere in between the everyday world of friends and lovers and jobs and passions, between that and the black sucking hole of depression, is the misty, colorful place of poetry and visions, of hallucinations and paranoia, of dreams and truth and ecstasy. It's not really a place you can stay for very long, and it can be hard to traverse, and sometimes you don't make it. I can't imagine seeking it out intentionally, because the boundary between that and the black hole is less a boundary than an invisible, sudden drop. But it isn't frightening.

when the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away

2009-03-02T10:48:00.002-06:00

I don't have anything to say, I just wanted to check in, really. (I aten't dead.) February didn't quite turn into the sucking black hole it usually does, but it was a near thing, and now I'm desperately waiting for spring to happen (properly, this time) so I can get on with my spring cleaning. There's just no point in spring cleaning if you can't have the windows open while you work.

I've been in a fallow period, reading and absorbing a lot of things, a few books, all you guys' blogs, and all the rest of the Universe as well. I've been doing some exploring of my inner landscape, finding it much more rich and varied than I'd thought, and finding myself much more open to contact with others, as well. Nothing solid yet, nothing that works outside of my own head, but it's early days.

More like a tentative hop, really.

2009-02-07T12:15:00.002-06:00

You know, I've been spending the past few years convincing myself that Imbolc is not first spring here in Wisconsin. Early February is more like the latter part of midwinter, here, with temperatures still in the oh-goddess-it's-cold range and ice to scrape of the windshield every morning and long underwear to be worn.

But... but...for Imbolc this year we had a January thaw. And now we're having another one. And today it's fifty degrees outside and I can hear the snow melting off the roof and I haven't had to turn the heat up yet. The official policy chéz Jen is that if this goes on for a week or more, it's become Spring, and anything else is just backsliding. Looks like we might have an early Spring this year.

blogging psa

2009-01-23T12:15:00.003-06:00

Just a note to let you know, faithful readers, that I've done some shuffling around of accounts associated with this blog for personal reasons (ie, I clicked on the wrong authorization link sometime a long time ago and finally got around to fixing it. I obviously have too many e-mail accounts).

I don't think it should actually change anything on your end, but if you've been following this blog using Blogger's tool and it suddenly vanished, or anything else like that, well, that's the reason, go ahead and put it back in.

Outgrowing? Really?

2009-01-12T22:19:00.003-06:00

It seems everyone who is anyone is still exploding over the end of deo's shadow and, more importantly, deo and Mandy announcing a conversion to atheism. And since part of the reason you start a blog is to stake out your own little soapbox to say whatever you want, I see no reason why I shouldn't contribute (although I certainly don't consider myself "anyone" of note).

Here's the thing: I've tried to read their relevant blog posts, and I just can't. It causes me too much emotional anguish. Possibly some would say that this makes me one of those people who is just in denial about their true rationalist nature, but that's not it at all. Quite the opposite, really.

It's all this talk of "outgrowing" that gets me first. However well meant, and however well it may describe personal journeys, it's condescending. Just like the conversion story, it's a cliche that carries more baggage than most people probably intend it to. Mostly, though, it's just condescending, and I've been paring condescending crap out of my life for a while now. Good-bye hardcore feminist blogs, political opinion columns...and atheist conversion stories.

Just like Jeff at Druid Journal, I am Pagan not in spite of its irrationality but because of it. And this is not in contradiction to my scholarly self: The more I learn about my brain and my culture and the world I live in, the more that irrationality seems to be supported. Discussions filled with anecdotes about why magic does or does not work seem to me to miss the point. The Universe, left entirely unobserved (if that were even possible), does not make sense. We, as living, thinking, spiritual beings, can make it make sense, with physics, with anthropology, or with religion. All of these things make sense in different ways. You can't travel to Mars with anthropology, but you can't talk to the Martians with physics. And I don't want to say there are things in this world you can't do without religion, because there's a quality of mind that atheists have, too; and I don't want to call it spiritual, because that has all the wrong connotations, but it's what gets you through three o'clock in the morning on the longest night of your life, and what carries the conversation at three o'clock in the morning when you're surrounded by friends and don't want to go to bed. And that thing, whatever it is, is important. It needs to be acknowledged, and spoken to.

I have a secret to tell you: I've never had an earth-shattering Mystery Religion Moment. I've had many small ones, but never That One that so many people seem to have. So that's not why I'm Pagan, either. It isn't because I was raised in it, or because I want a comfort zone of undemanding spiritual fluffiness, or because I'm immature enough to believe in magic (please, dear readers, read that last clause as full of sarcasm, because it is). I believe that the gods are real, although I cannot pin down a definition of "real" that works in that sentence. And I believe that I owe them something.

No, modern Paganism is not really very like ancient Paganism, nor could it ever be. I don't know that I could ever spill enough pixels on how much I dislike the idea that ancient Paganism is the authority for everything we do. No, modern Paganism is most often not rational or scientific. There is nothing wrong with rational and scientific, but that is not what we do. We do that stuff that happens at three o'clock in the morning, and we do it the best we can with a little history and a little imagination and a framework someone patched together about a century ago, because there is nothing wrong with irrational either, and we need it, too.

I celebrate myself and sing myself

2009-01-03T14:11:00.004-06:00

One would like to demarcate clearly the boundaries of the self. In fact, no essential self lies pure as a vein of gold under the chaos of experience and chemistry. The human organism is a sequence of selves that succumb to or choose one another. We are each the sum of certain choices and circumstances; the self exists in the narrow space where the world and our choices come together.

--Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

I want to print this out on a poster and put it on the wall I look at when I wake up in the morning. I want to write it in little gold letters on something I see every day. I don't know what it is about our lives, our culture, or our brains that make us think any other way, but we are not a single pure entity covered up by layers of distracting crap. We are what we are, at any given moment, doing whatever it is that we do. If I change the way I think, if I shake off old ways of being, if I improve my lifestyle and do everything I want to do, I won't be any more myself. I'll be a different me, when I change, as I always will. But I am myself right now.

2008-12-21T08:28:00.003-06:00

It never ceases to amaze me, when I do finally pull off an all-night vigil, how different the world seems when the sun really does come up in the morning.

Happy Solstice, everyone.

Atonement

2008-12-12T13:54:00.002-06:00

What do you do when you've fucked up?

Doing wrong isn't a very popular topic in Pagan circles; I have to agree with Brendan Myers when he says that all too often, we gloss over the idea of what is and isn't right and we end up with a morality that doesn't have anything to say about our everyday lives.

I pretty well bombed a presentation yesterday in class, and it was my fault. Well, partly -- the professor was pathetically unprepared to teach the class she was supposed to be teaching, and was using someone else's projects as assignments, and did a piss poor job of explaining her expectations and offering support to us as we worked. But because the professor was so unprepared, I let my standards slide farther and farther, and by the time the project was over yesterday I knew that I could have made it a lot better without a lot more work, but I didn't.

One of the things I've always held as a virtue is doing my best possible work. Even when I was working at my horrible soul-sucking job, I was better at it than a lot of people there because it was wrong to me to do a bad job just because I disliked the work. And I've never slacked off on schoolwork this much before, so it was a little shattering when someone asked a question that I was completely unprepared to answer.

My other problem here is that I have very little faith in my own ability to determine responsibility for these sorts of things; I know I have high standards for myself, but are they unrealistic? Should I cut myself some slack because it was a group project, and I probably did more work than anyone else in the group and it still wasn't up to my standards? Should I cut myself some slack because it's my first semester of grad school and I've spent the whole term fighting with my foot injury and the weird wavering boundaries of depression on top of it? Probably. But it was honestly a little bit of a relief to take responsibility for the part of it that I am undeniably responsible for: I knew there was more work to be done, and I chose not to do it. I did wrong.

I made offerings last night in atonement (and who is the God of Library Students, after all?), and now I'm doing what I can to make it better -- that class is over and done with, and there's nothing I can do about that, but I still have one more paper to write, and at least I can feel good about that one.

What do you do when you've done wrong?

(happy) winter

2008-12-03T12:07:00.002-06:00

I have this problem where the longer I go without posting the more I feel like the next post I make has to be really profound to make up for the gap. I'm trying to get over that. This is not profound at all.

I've been joking with people that I don't want winter to start, I feel like I have PTSD from last year (104.5 inches of snow, breaking a local record of some decades, not to mention a few delightful days of blizzards and/or freezing rain). It's getting less of a joke as the snow keeps falling, especially as this year I've quit my horrible job but I have finals stress to deal with instead. Oh, and thanks to the surgeon not warning me ahead of time what my followup surgery would entail, I'm back on crutches for a week. Yep, crutches. In the snow. help.

Which I think is why I was struck by a quote from a Vodou priest that The Wild Hunt posted a couple days ago:

This year, they spent what they could to honor the dead, while still trying to support the living, Josue said. 'I don't think the Gede [the spirits of the dead] will be offended,' Josue said. 'They will be concerned about the condition of the world, because they have a lot of work to do now.'"

Which I think gets at why I don't like the religion-only-in-a-crisis mode that I (and I think a lot of other casual-religious folks) was brought up with: if you only turn to your gods when you need them, you feel like you need to do a lot of work to earn that help, at a time when that work is hard/expensive/impossible; but if you've been keeping up the relationship all along, you just all pitch in together and pull through. Rather like humans do. All of which is to say that while the snow is still mildly traumatic, I'm in a much better place this winter than I was last winter.

Now if only I could walk.

Welcome to the political post of this year.

2008-11-03T18:55:00.002-06:00

You know, I'd never thought before about how close the US election date is to Samhain, but it feels very appropriate right now. You know how sometimes, when the veil is thin and everything is just right, you can feel the world changing underneath you?

Right now.

If you can vote tomorrow, do.

Meme!

2008-10-29T08:20:00.003-05:00

I'm swamped with schoolwork and Samhain preparations right now, so in lieu of actual content, I'll finally respond to the Six Random Things meme Livia tagged me with...er...last week?

1. I currently have approximately two dozen books checked out of two different library systems. I will never in my life find the time to read them all before they're due. But I just can't stop.

2. I really like making things, mostly fairly useless things unfortunately. Right now it's mostly cross stitch, but you should see the handbound book of the Shadow Unit finale I'm working on.

3. I am absolutely shit with romantic relationships. I've been asked out a grand total of twice in my life, and the second time I didn't even notice until I'd accidentally shot the guy down so hard he hardly ever talked to me again. (I am still really, really sorry about that, Rob.) But I never get bent out of shape about it unless my mom asks me if I have a boyfriend yet, so I try not to worry about it too much.

4. I'm getting a Master's in Library Science because I was too scared to go for my Master's in anthropology. That and I couldn't find an anthro school that did what I wanted to do, but let's face it, I didn't look very hard.

5. I only realized once I'd started at the library school that just because I'm getting a professional degree now that doesn't mean I can't get an academic one later.

6. I'm in fandom, and I honestly think it's the single greatest thing to come out of the Internet. (I know fandom didn't really come out of the Internet, but it did for my generation.) I almost linked to the Wikipedia page here for those of you who don't know what fandom is, but I read it over and decided I didn't like it. In brief: fandom makes stuff out of other peoples' stuff. Intellectual recycling. Reclaiming popular culture. And, okay, a significant amount of well-intentioned copyright infringement. But I love it, and it's awesome, and the people I've met through fandom are some of the best people in the world.

I'm not a fan of tagging myself, but if you read this, I'd love to see your responses, too. It's strange to think how much of myself I don't talk about on this blog, really, and I'm sure that's true for other people as well.

Back together again

2008-10-26T12:23:00.003-05:00

Oh crap, it's happened again. My Genius Idea sat and festered too long before I wrote it down, and now it's gone all moldy and pretentious and no longer useful for anything but rearranging furniture in my head. Oh, well, it was getting a little stale in there anyway.

Instead I want to talk about how much better I feel about the world now that I've got my kitchen under control again. From the middle of July, when I tore the ligament in my foot, until just a couple of weeks ago when I got stable enough to stand for the length of time it takes to make dinner, my roommate had to deal with the kitchen. And I love my roommate dearly, but she is not a kitchen person. She knows it, and it shows. She doesn't particularly like to cook (although she's better at it than she thinks), and she has an even harder time keeping up with the even-less-fun kitchen things, like dishes. (Let's not talk about the state of the refrigerator, shall we?)

I've always thought of the kitchen as the heart of a home. When I was growing up, we didn't use the front hall entrance to our house but the kitchen door, so coming home always meant walking into the kitchen. It was where I got to spend the most time with my mom, who worked until she got too sick to keep working, helping her make dinner (although my most vivid memories are still of baking Christmas cookies, her absolute favorite). It's still where we spend the most time together, when I go to visit for holidays. And in my current apartment, the kitchen is literally the physical center of the space. I step out of my bedroom in the morning straight into the kitchen (and over to the coffee pot).

And yeah, it's still a strain to stand for an hour to cook or bake. But I've finally got the dish situation under control, and I've consolidated recipe boxes with the one I inherited from my grandmother earlier this year. Friday night I made Korean barbequed beef and gai lan for dinner, and last night was this year's inaugural Teresa Neilsen Hayden Savory Pie. (The leeks were a little bland, but the next one will be better.) And now the world seems to have sorted itself out into its proper place again. I must be more of a kitchen witch than I'd thought.

where I'm coming from

2008-10-18T17:41:00.003-05:00

There are a lot of things going on in my head right now. (It's fall, that happens to me a lot.) I'm looking at Celtic Reconstructionism again, as I do every once in a while. It's inevitable for me -- I'm never satisfied with just learning something, I want to know who came up with it and where it comes from and what it meant to someone other than me, and since my abiding interest is in Ireland, I always circle back around to CR.

I'm taking a history class right now, too, and history always makes me think about the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell one another. That's what history is, after all, is stories. Humans are storytelling, pattern-making animals, and we turn our world into stories. That's what the gods are, too. Stories, and patterns. And gods.

I read this book for my history class this week, The Cheese and the Worms, about a miller in the sixteenth century who was tried for heresy. Twice. His heresy was so strange, though, that the first time around the Inquisitors stopped trying to convert him and started going, "Sorry, go back. You believe what now?" And Ginzburg, the researcher who put this together, thinks that part of the reason this guy believed such weird things was he got them from the oral culture of rural Italy, that they represented this pre-Christian ideology that still survived in the countryside.

I got really, really annoyed by that idea as I was reading the book (and subsequently writing the paper, which, guess what I'm supposed to be writing instead of this post?). Partly it's the vaguely condescending tone, but partly it's the recurrence of the phrase "pre-Christian." I think I'm sensitized to that phrase or something, whenever I see it I'm ready to be angry about the way it's used. And I've been trying to figure out just why that is, and I think for once I'm starting to get somewhere. And unfortunately it's long, and complicated, and I do still have that paper to finish. (And the other one for next week, and the draft for the week after that...)

A lot of people around the Pagan blogosphere have been talking about feeling the veil growing thin a little early this year. Yeah, I get that. It feels a little treacherous, a little brighter and clearer than it's really supposed to be. It's making it a little easier to see. (Now let's see if I can make it easy to explain.)

Watch this space.

Things that apparently take a long time to learn.

2008-10-06T12:51:00.003-05:00

What comes to fruition in the harvest season is the results of your actions.

What happens when I feel myself come alive in the fall is thoughts.

It seems a little obvious in hindsight, but I've always wondered why I never felt the way I "should" about the autumn festivals, Samhain in particular.

(I have been Thinking Thinky Thoughts today. I think they will be interesting, once I have a chance to turn them into an argument and post them here.)

Book Review: The Other Side of Virtue

2008-10-04T12:16:00.005-05:00

I finished reading The Other Side of Virtue by Brendan Myers sometime in August, and I just couldn't write it up at the time. Now I'm back in school and back into the swing of writing about difficult things, so here goes.

I'd heard good things of Brendan Myers before in my poking around at various forms of Celtic Neo-Paganism, so when The Wild Hunt did a writeup of this book, I was intrigued. For people who want books that go beyond Paganism 101: this is one of the guys to keep your eye on. (Though you could argue that an ethical structure ought to be part of 101, in reality, it pretty much isn't.)

What Myers has written here is more a theoretical book than a practical guide: not a criticism, but an observation, for people who might want to pick it up. It's a work in progress, a starting point for other Pagans to look at and start figuring out how to make it work in real life. Fair enough. I hardly expect any one person to come out with a synthesized Theory Of Pagan Ethics just like that.

I'd caution against using it as an only source for an ethical system, though. (I'd caution against using anything as an only source for anything.) The first section of the book is dedicated to historical examples of how people have theorized ethics and virtue, from the heroic model of chiefdom societies like the Celts to the social model of Classical Greece and Rome, up through the Romantics and Humanist ideas of The Good Life. It's an impressive span to cover, and you can see where his specialty is -- that is to say, it's not in anthropology, which is my specialty, and every once in a while Myers makes some broad sweeping statements that made me cringe. Overall it's a pretty good analysis, but it's better if you keep in mind the idea of ancient Greece instead of trying to equate Heroic Greece with Celtic society in general.

This is also not, I repeat, not the book to read if you're currently struggling with depression. "I recognize that depression is a medical condition," he writes on page 222, "not a deficiency of character. But I do wish to suggest that an ability to imagine a future, an ability to discern a purpose for one's life, can have a therapeutic effect on those who find their lives very difficult to bear." I've never been suicidal myself, but I have been profoundly, awfully depressed, and that sounds a lot like "just snap out of it" to me. That, coupled with the "Spirit" passage starting on 193, was what put me off this book for several months.

That said, what I do think Myers does very well is present a vision of virtue that doesn't exclude people. That doesn't mean he's come up with a way to look at the world that means that everyone is virtuous: far from it. But he's come up with a way to look at the world that means that people who disagree, people who are in active opposition, hell, even people who flat-out hate everything that the other stands for, can both be virtuous at the same time. Virtue, in Myers's conception, is in the way you look at the world, not in the ideas you have about it. Virtue is when you look at the world and think, "That is so fucking awesome. I have got to be a part of that." And that, I think, is an excellent place to start.

Harvesting

2008-09-21T13:58:00.003-05:00

It's a terrible shock to look back at this year and realize that yes, my plans really did come to fruition. I quit the job I hated that was causing me so much grief, I started school, I've got two new part-time jobs to back me up, and the world is a much brighter place than it used to be.

It's strange to think this, as I'm still recovering from a broken foot, as one of my friends struggles with replacing most of her worldly possessions lost in a flood (while still unemployed) and another is fighting depression and a terrible economy in an attempt to get out of her horrible job situation; as the economy falls in on itself and the Republicans field what might be the worst possible ticket imaginable and still their poll numbers don't go down...but I'm doing okay. I can feel the rest of the world holding its breath, but I know I can weather it.

Strangely enough, I almost feel like this is a result of feeling more connected to the world, not in spite of it. It's as if by taking my place among these events, by taking some responsibility for them, they become less scary and uncontrollable. Not because I feel like I can control them, but just because I don't feel like they can control me. We're all part of the same system, pushing and pulling one another, but I've got my claws in deep enough that nothing's going to shove me out of my place in the world. Not just yet.

It's the Equinox, and things are turning over. Time to hold on tight.

Tell Me a Story

2008-09-11T10:34:00.001-05:00

(This post has been brought to you by the winning entry for PanGaia's Pagan Fiction Contest. You're kidding me, right?)

If I read one more Pagan conversion story, I am going to scream. "Once upon a time I was not Pagan but I was unhappy and then I discovered Paganism and everything was WONDERFUL." Oh, the Augustinian conversion story, how I loathe you.

I'm not saying that story isn't true for the people who tell it. (I've told a similar one before, and I stand by it as my lived experience. It was indeed what happened.) But – it's like this. When I was in therapy, one of the questions on the entry form was about your religion, and I put "Pagan." The therapist asked me about it – I think her exact words were something like "Tell me about that." And I started telling her my conversion story.

I think a lot of people do this; it's a way of explaining process, making our Paganism seem less strange to cowans because we give them logical reasons for every step of the way. But I've started to wonder if it's really the best model at hand.

For one thing, it's also a hugely familiar story, particularly to the kind of people who like us least (Evangelical Christians). Now, I don't mean to say that something is bad just because Evangelical Christians do it (I for one enjoy oxygen, for example), but I do think there are some theological underpinnings to the conversion story that make it, at best, questionable for Pagans.

The key event in the conversion story is the conversion. It's the climax of the narrative structure: the narrator's dissatisfaction with the religion of their birth is the plot, the conversion is the climax, and the description of their current belief the denouement. This structure makes the religion – the Paganism – the least important part of the story, the aftermath of other, more exciting events. It's a happy ending, but how much do you care about a happy ending to a story other than that it's happy?

Conversion makes sense as a central point for a Christian, because Christianity has a focus on salvation. For Christians, the moment of conversion is a moment of grace, the point at which not only their life changes but literally their entire existence, their afterlife, the fate of their soul is determined. There's not a lot of theological unity among Pagans, but I don't know of any who consider the salvation of their soul to be a key aspect of their conversion.

Sure, the point of conversion is an important time for a Pagan too. It's a moment of self-realization and epiphany, and it often comes with an amazing sense of freedom. But most Paganisms are mystery religions; most of us have other stories of personal epiphanies that are much more meaningful to us than our conversion. Not all of them are suitable for sharing, certainly, but some of them surely are.

There's a lot of talk about Pagans genericizing themselves into meaninglessness in order to "fit in" with the mainstream. And while I'm uncomfortable with the idea of public circles that look more like church meetings than anything else, I'm even more uncomfortable with the idea that the stories we tell about ourselves don't mean anything, either.

Back to school

2008-09-03T12:19:00.003-05:00

It would be that the year I finally seem to be emotionally in tune with the season change is the year that I go back to school. Most of me is winding down for the autumn and winter, and the rest of me is going, "Readings! Classes! Work! Think! AAAAH!" Wow, going back to school after two years off is harder than I thought it would be.

On the plus side, I'm now at a huge university, and working in the central library (in the reference department, no less!), so what does that mean? Oooooh, research. I am delighted to discover that we have not only a giant stash of books that seems to cover most of the CR FAQ reading list, but also delightful things such as the minutes of the Gaelic League from the late 1800s on microfilm. Which, okay, is less of Pagan interest than of general geeky interest, but my god, this collection. As soon as I get off my crutches I'm going to just go play in the stacks for an afternoon.

In the meantime, injury recovery time seems like a good time to be doing research. I've been having strangely vivid and unusual dreams lately, and I've discovered I know very little about the role of dreams in a traditional Celtic system. And now, I have the resources to help me find out...

A post of links

2008-08-20T20:09:00.001-05:00

I don't usually cross-post from my Livejournal, but this is driving me crazy.

So. This thing happened recently.All about asking the presidential candidates what they think about, y'know, Jesus and stuff.

(Including questions like "The Bible says that integrity and love are the basis for leadership" and "You've made no doubt about your faith in Jesus Christ; What does that mean to you?" To draw from the first couple pages of the transcript.)

And the liberal blogs think Obama shouldn't have done it, because evangelicals are McCain's base, donchaknow. Or maybe he should have, to prove that Democrats Are Religious Too.

Aren't we all missing something here? Some larger issue beyond Who Loves Baby Jesus Most?

Oh, yeah.

(Thanks, Jason.)

Book Review: The Shark God by Charles Montgomery

2008-08-18T11:44:00.001-05:00

I bought this book – it must have been June, because I'd decided to buy myself a book for my birthday, and after I'd picked something out from the highly unsatisfactory collection of Patrick O'Brian novels, I wandered back into the history and travel section. This is always a bad idea for me. I have a terrible weakness for good history and travel memoirs. So when I saw The Shark God on the shelf – memoir, travelogue, and Melanesian syncretism – what was I supposed to do?

The Shark God is the story of Charles Montgomery's search for adventure, magic and family history in the chaos of culture, religion and politics that is Melanesia. His grandfather had been a Protestant missionary there in the late 19th century, and as a boy Montgomery had invented great stories about his grandfather's exploits, risking life and limb to bring Christianity to the poor, brown natives of these islands. As an adult, Montgomery knows that his childhood imaginings are probably unrealistic and definitely more than a little bit racist – and he's left Christianity in the meantime – but he feels a connection to the place and wants to learn more. So, as a travel writer, he does the only reasonable thing: he gets a contract to write a book.

Montgomery admits that the thing that intrigues him most about Melanesia is the apparent paradox of Christianity and native belief still existing side by side. Although almost all Melanesians are Christians of some stripe, a number of pre-Christian traditions and beliefs still have a great deal of influence on peoples' daily lives. They believe in witches and curses, in magic stones and dances, in ancestor spirits and shark gods.

I think my favorite thing about this book was that Montgomery never really seems to get it. He has a genuine interest in the religious situation, and he does his best to empathize with the people and understand what's going on. He learns that his English Protestantism is far from the only valid form of Christianity, and he really believes in at least some of the magic that he meets. But he never gets syncretism, never seems to be able to move beyond “but that's not how Christianity works” and “but that can't really be real,” even though he obviously really, really wants to. The epilogue tries to come to some kind of conclusion, but it's patently false and too much like a moral.

There are no morals through the rest of the book, just stories that mean something. Like the Anglican Bishop who lives in a house with a constantly shifting population of locals who refuse to let him live alone, because that's no kind of life at all. The priests who use the magic of Christianity to fight the magic of evil sorcerers and exploitative criminals alike. The spectacular moment when, having talked a group of rebellious young men to take him to see the famous thunder stones on an isolated island, Montgomery makes it rain.

Overall, I think what makes The Shark God a success is that (excepting that awful epilogue) it's a book written with compassion, respect, and a genuine attempt at understanding. Montgomery knows that he doesn't know better than the people he's talking to – or the people he's writing to – and while he's looking for answers that makes sense to him, he doesn't discount the answers that seem to make sense to everyone else.