Hullo again.

Whoa. Long time no see.

There are a lot of questions that have been wracking my brain lately: Should I become a vegan? Can’t we all just go back to worshiping rocks? What is the value of self-responsibility in Paganism? What defines us as Pagans? What is the role (and what could it be) of sexual imagery in Paganism?

And at the moment, I don’t have answers for any of these. Well, I do have answers–they’re just not all that well thought out thus far. But I’m thinking… so much thinking.

Maybe I should do more dancing, too.

Anyway, all I wanted to say was Hullo. I haven’t stopped writing, I’ve just haven’t been doing so right here right now. Soon, though… soon.

… Blessings of The Lake be upon you, too.

The Kabbalah Fallacy

I’d like to comment on something very particular that I’ve heard come out of the mouths (or fingertips) of several Pagans lately: Namely, that Kabbalah was the original form of Judaism, and that Judaism has, since its Kabbalistic foundation, well-neigh degraded into something restrictive, totalitarian, evil, etc.

WTF, mate. Here’s a good example of what I’ve been calling the ‘Kabbalah Fallacy’: “I’m no expert on the Kabbalah, but I know enough to realize that Jewish mysticism is very different from modern Judaism and Christianity.  (How something so full of wisdom managed to give birth to dogmatic, patriarchal religions is beyond me; I’ll just point out that humans have a way of royally screwing things up and that this is a classic example!)”

I’m talking specifically about the “something so full of wisdom managed to give birth to dogmatic, patriarchal religions” part. The historical fact of the matter is that the exact opposite is true, that is, that that which this author is calling dogmatic and patriarchal is, in fact, that which itself gave birth to “something so full of wisdom.” Judaism as such developed alongside ancient Levantine polytheism and, by 586 BCE when Solomon’s temple was destroyed, the tradition was highly developed and supported. Only six centuries years later, in the 13th century, can we begin to speak of Kabbalah as such, setting aside various traditional ascriptions to biblical figures. Kabbalah grew up in Spain out of various Jewish influences as well as Neo-Platonism and influence from Islam. Kabbalah is the outgrowth; it’s not the other way around.

Though Kabbalistic literature obviously grew out of previous sources, among them Jewish Apocalyptic literature and oral traditions, it is impossible to speak of Kabbalah as it is known today–and ESPECIALLY of the Hermetic Kabbalah and the even later New Age Kabbalah (which incorporates various “Eastern” concepts like the Chakras)–as if it pre-dated Judaism itself. It strikes me as inane that the same groups of folks who constantly berate Abrahamic faiths cling so powerfully to what is essentially a flow-chart of YHVH’s attributes.

So, to all the Wiccans or Thelemites or Ceremonialists or Chaotes out there (among others) who “Just hate Abrahamism, no reason” (as I heard an acquaintance blather a few weeks ago), put down your wands and stop casting your circles and let go of the Kabbalah. The Kabbalah, that is to say, essentially JUDAIC esotericism, is where ALL of the Wiccanate Pagan religious structures come from. So, and this is just reason number 1, I think we need to shut up about Abrahamism because the hypocracy is making me sick.

Redefinitions: The Parliament and “Re-establishing” Ourselves

I’m sure a lot of folks are obsessively reading about the Pagan presence at the Parliament of World Religions happening in Australia right now. I haven’t been as caught up on things as perhaps I’d like to be, but hey, it’s Finals Week and I’ve got other things to think about!

Anyway, Ruby Sara sent me this link, which leads to the blog “Pagans at the Parliament” and an article on questions of definition and redefinition within the Pagan community. The author describes an event at the Parliament in which Paganism was defined as “a collective term that most aptly defines Indigenous cultures of pre-Christian Europe”; and then the author discusses the implications that this definition would have within the community and the community’s changing relationship to both “indigenous religions” and “New Religious movements.”

Now, this definition takes a knife to the current Pagan community, leaving out Wiccans, and Chaos Magicians, Reiki-ites, and a bunch of other folks whom identify as Pagans (or might) but whose practices are definitely not Indigenous or pre-Christian, and which have little to do with ancient European culture. This is, of course, quite close to a few things that I have proposed myself: Elsewhere I, too, have supposed that Paganism would do best to redefine itself as consisting of those pre/para-Christian (for lack of a better word) practices and belief systems and then that other folks (Wiccans, etc) would need to find themselves new labels. It’s because I don’t think Wicca or Chaos Magic or Reiki – or Chakras, Thelema, purple velvet, quartz crystals, Angel magic, the Goetia, and a bunch of other things that are now acceptable Pagan practices – really have anything to do with earth-centered spirituality, awareness of the Earth as Mother, or religious Polytheism. And so, for earth-centered, Mama-revering, polytheistic religious movements to evolve into anything worth anything, they need to leave behind this  extra baggage.

So then we’re left with at least two groups. The ‘new’ “Pagans” and the other folks; and I suspect that, if this splitting of the current Pagan community were to take effect, the Ceremonial Magicians wouldn’t hang out for too long with the Reiki-ites and the Crystal Healers, and so we’d end up with a lot of smaller communities. The question that the article from the Parliament goes on to raise, then, is how would the international, interreligious community come to identify these communities: As indigenous religious movements, or as “New Religious” movements?

While I’m not sure it’s at all very useful to try and put these movements into any of various categories – especially if we’ve only got two choices – I do think it’s inevitable that the discussion will come up, and that both “indigenous” and “new religious” are categories that would come up in that discussion. Personally (and this is where I’m disagreeing with the folks at the Parliament and the article I linkd to above), I don’t think any of us have any business identifying as “indigenous” practitioners. Why not? I have several reasons:

(We have no business identifying as indiginous:) 1) Because it would distract the entire interreligious community from the plight of already extant and, overwhelmingly, endangered indiginous religious communities. I think that it is nothing less than a further cultural appropriation for Pagans to set themselves beside groups that have struggled literally for their lives in the face of colonialism, of language extinction and the loss of cultures, and who are still struggling.

Of course I am not arguing that the ethnic peoples of Europe (or North Africa or the Middle East, for that matter) never struggled to keep their traditions alive. I am saying that those struggles were by-and-large lost, and that any reclamation of these traditions is at best a successful reconstruction and at worst a disrespectful parody. So,

2) We are not indiginous because we do not represent the survival of living traditions, but are fundamentally reconstructions. To deny the impact of this reconstructive process on our traditions today would be lying to ourselves. I think this applies equally to what we can call “hard” reconstructionist movements like the modern “Recon” Pagan traditions (Nova Roma, Norse Reconstruction, Natib Qadish, etc) as well as to “soft”* reconstruction movements like Traditional British Witchcraft or Rumova, which downplay the role of reconstruction per-se in their practice and, I think, can claim a greater degree of affinity with the past. ((Take a look at this old news report that chronicles the re-establishment of Rumova in Lithuania, and note that it takes place in Lithuania at an ancient site, with Lithuanians and not in the back room of some American occult bookstore. It’s an important difference, I think.))

So, then what are we? Personally, I have no problem being part of a New Religious movement (which is a semi-technical term used in various fields to describe religions that have cropped up over the last few hundred years, and which covers well-established New movements like Tenrikyo but also various UFO traditions like Raelianism and other things). We must admit to ourselves that all of the stuff we do now is new – otherwise, we’d already have gone through all the growing pains we’re experiencing now!

But perhaps New Religious movement doesn’t fit either, since we are so concerned with practices and beliefs from the past. Perhaps, then, to put us into one of these pre-existing categories isn’t useful at all, and maybe we should (as a community) put forward another designation. Perhaps “Re-established.” Think about it: “We, Pagans, practice re-established religions.” Here we aren’t tredding on the toes of living indiginous traditions, nor are we ignoring our link to the past. “Re-established” conveys our past and our present, and speaks to both “soft” and “hard” reconstructionist communities.

Just thoughts, my friends. Tell me what you think!

(*) Note: What I’m getting at here by making a distinction between “hard” and “soft” reconstructionism is really a spectrum, and I’m just trying to make a point that there are those among us whose primary concern is reconstruction and those who are more concerned with living in modern ethnic traditions. Though now I’m wondering whether the distinction is really one between Paganism today in Europe vs. that in America… hmm. Perhaps.

She Is No Jewel

(inspired by Thalia Took)

Ornament of Heaven! Courtesan!
Star of Stars! Queen of Dew!

No!
Keep these names from my Lady’s ears!
- She is no jewel, no prize.

She is stained with Red and laughs in battle.
Gore and lambs’ blood–these she offered up to God.
She drags her own Father through the dirt.

O Anat, Beautiful-eyed!
She holds the head of Our Lord
And sets beetles in the dust.
She scatters Our Lord’s bones among the barley,
And men amidst the field.

What is She waiting for?

Why isn’t it snowing, yet?

Growing up among the northernmost hills of the Missouri Ozarks, just where the plains meet the river valley, I can remember once wondering whether Winter was the only season. I was perhaps six or seven, and my life revolved around the cycles of school: Summer was that in-between time, something that happened between the end of school (dreaded, since it meant the end of daily contact with my friends–I lived several miles from the closest nearby friends, and had no neighbors) and the return of school buses and backpacks in September. Summer was fleeting and hard, 115 degrees and higher with levels of humidity that made it rain, at least in my mind, nearly constantly. Winter, on the other hand, came like an ice age that lasted until I had forgotten what summer had been like and thought that the snow would never melt. Even during my own life time, the snow in mid Missouri has transformed from that fluffy white stuff we associate with Christmas movies into a much more jagged, shatter-prone frost and freezing rain that encases everything outside in a thick layer of clear glass.

And so, now, as December begins, why isn’t it snowing? Perhaps it has to do with Global Warming–perhaps not. That’s not the important thing to me, not right now. I ask myself… what is She waiting for? Is She waiting for us to notice? It feels kind of like as if the sun hadn’t come up: It’s so strange that no one has even noticed yet. Over the last few months, I’ve been dreading the falling of the last leaf from the last tree: Barren, skeletal trees have always been one of the distinguishing features of the winter for me, having grown up in and around wooded places. But now I see the last yellow leaves in the trees and consider time, and winter, and waiting.

Sticking Around

Are we human, or are we dancer?
My sign is vital, my hands are cold.
And I’m on my knees, looking for the answer.
– The Killers, Human

You may have noticed that I’ve been pretty fed up with NeoPaganism for quite a while now. I have theological, political, and even liturgical axes to grind, and more and more recently I’ve been taking people to task about it. And yet, I was pretty floored the other day when a friend asked me a fairly simple question: “So, Johnny, why do you stick around?”

Simple questions rarely warrant simple answers, but let me try to explain… This “explanation” may amount merely to an exercise in thinking it all out for myself. Let me start by describing exactly what my “sticking around” entails.

I’m not a Wiccan. I’m not (really) a Reconstructionist. Nor do I identify as a “solitary,” whatever that means, since I do involve myself with a community of Pagans here in Chicago. I formally belong to one Pagan organization, but I find myself moving further and further away from it because of theopolitical differences. So, I find myself swimming around in that vaguely-defined space “between Paganisms.”

It’s easy to believe whatever you want and still be a Pagan, in the no man’s land. What’s hard is having to deal with everyone else, I guess.

Therefore, “sticking around”, for me, involves a cleaving to the community or communities into which I have integrated myself over the last 8 (although especially 3) years. I stick around because I care about the future of Paganism, being aware that the movement(s) is painfully young and still forming. I stick around because all of my friends are Pagan. I stick around because, well, when someone asks me what religion I follow I am only now growing unabashedly comfortable proclaiming, “I’m Pagan.” I stick around because there’s no other religious movement out there that allows me to engage in various practices and paradigms that I hold dear. I stick around because I hope, someday, that Paganism will become the eco-Feminist neo-ancient dada mindfuck that I wish it were today.

I guess this has become less explanatory than I had hoped, and more emotional. I’ve said before that there are three ways in which to deal with personal differences between you and your religious community: 1) Leave. 2) Learn and grow along with the difference. 3) Rebuild the community as you are able. I’m choosing the latter option, but feeling it out as I go. Maybe I’ll have left by next month–but I don’t think so. I’d rather do the work. Paganism is important to me, as much as I hate it some times, and I’m not always exactly sure why that’s the case. That’s why I stick around, I guess: To figure out why I can’t seem to get away from the tree-huggers, the horn-raisers, the circle-casters, and the bread makers.

Upon Reading “Believers, Beware”

I just bought a book: Believer, Beware: First-person dispatches from the margins of faith, which was compiled by the editors of Killingthebuddha.com. As with any group of short memoirs, this book has its ups and downs, but for the most part essays are well done.

But then there’s Velvet. Fuck you, Velvet.

Velvet didn’t really write an essay. She ranted, and Sharlet and Manseau (Killing The Buddha’s head editors) wrote down what she said. Velvet, incidentally, is the only Pagan in Believer, Beware. That means that the only Pagan these guys could find to talk about Paganism is some incoherent “elven witch” who can’t seem to keep her babble out of her nonsense. Everything she says is straight out of a badly-written, poorly read Wicca 101 book with too much fuckupery thrown in. It makes me irate. Fuck.

Is this who we are: idiots? I can’t tell for sure, but it seems to me that at the end of the “interview” Sharlet and Manseau can’t help but make fun of poor Velvet. There’s a mouse. Maybe it’s Loki? (Yeah, right they mumble under their breath).

We have so much potential. If we actually ever lived up to what we say we are (and you know my thoughts on this–feminism and eco-centris plus polytheism), then we would be filling works like Believer, Beware to the brim. We should be the cutting edge! We should be countercultural! We should at very least not be a joke. Folks wonder why anyone with any integrity is leaving Neopaganism? It’s because they’re tired of the joke.

Hmph.

Mother Night, Lady Crocodile!

Night Mother, Lady Crocodile!
The stars are your many teeth,
The darkness your painful scales.
Hidden in the reeds of the riverbed
You pause, ice-blooded,
Breathing in the scent of gazelles
Breathing out your fury and frost.

The Litany of the Children of Nox (Draft)

A boy called Life was playing amongst the breasts of his Beloveds when the Mother wrapped the world in her ghostly presence. The child became afraid and ran from his village, tripping over brambles and thorns as he went, scraping his knees and palms–the blood was an offering for the Dogs.

One dog chased the boy, then two. They chased him through the woods and marshes and deserts, up onto the peak of the highest mountain, where he was surrounded by shadows and the glowing eyes of the Stars. There the Dogs cornered him, and there the Dogs spoke, words dripping like molten ice from their red tongues. And when the Dogs spoke, the Stars hummed with a shining Darkness and they spoke words like colliding galaxies or torn spiders’ webs.

And the Dogs said,

We are loss. We are fear. We are famine and failure and forgetting. We are the Children of the Night Mother, birthed by her alone in the palace at the end of the world. We are her flesh and her fingertips.

And the boy, who had ran so far and for so long that he had become a man, said,

Gods who are the flesh of Night, do not raise your hands against us, for we too are the children of Night.

And the Stars said,

We are hatred and ill-health. We are old age and fate. We are misery, and mockery, and mortality. We are the Children of the Night Mother, birthed by her at the mouth of Hell. We are her feet and her breath and her back.

And the Man said,

Gods who are the flesh of Night, spare us from your dark fury, for we too are the children of Night.

And the Dogs sat up and became two handsome Gods, and said,

We are Sleep, we are Death. We are the brother-fathers of Dream and Destiny. We are Fate and Friendship, the Golden Morning and the Honey-Hued Dusk. We are the Children of the Night Mother, birthed in the folds of her infinity. We are her hands and her breasts and her heart.

And the Man, whom Old Age had taken and made frail, said,

Gods who are the flesh of Night, shine your bright eyes upon us, for we too are the children of Night.

And the Stars, whose faces now became the faces of women and men and children and the Dead of the Earth and Demons of the Pit, said,

We are fury and hatred, violence and toil. We are strife and sex and secrecy, we are doom. We are the Children of the Night Mother, birthed in the expanses before the beginning and beyond the end. We are her hair and her bones and her blood.

And as the Old Man died, having learned the infinite names of the Children of Night, whispered,

Gods who are the flesh of Night, hold our heads against your breasts, let us play among your shining eyes, you who are our Beloveds, for we too are the children of Night.

(Or something like that…)

Hey

Sorry I haven’t spoken up in a about a week! My studies have just picked up again, and only now am I settling back down into the swing of things. So, expect more to come from Johnny Rapture over the next week! Until then, enjoy a horrible couplet:

From one cup to the next, I swell with love;

From one meeting to the next, I swell with love.