My Pagan Manifesto
By adrien rain burke
I thought some of my Pagan (or at least not-conventionally-religious) friends might like this piece I wrote in response to a Christian's assertion that Christianity is both more historical and ethically relevant than Paganism on a list I belong to.
Well, someone named Jesus really appears to have lived and taught his philosophy around the time ascribed to him. All of the miraculous details with which his life was later embroidered were ascribed to other incarnated gods for centuries before that time - including his birth date at the winter solstice, in a stable, to a virgin, the miracles of turning wine into water, raising the dead, curing the blind and sick, etc. They were the Stock in Trade of numerous 'mystery' religions, of which Christianity was the last and ultimately most successful - Mithraism, the Cult of Isis, and the Dionysian Mysteries were the most prominent before Christianity took over and incorporated so much of their iconography and folktales into its body of thought.
The historical Jesus was one of quite an interesting tradition of Jewish humanism (which did not end with him, either), whose message of non-legalistic morality and a kind of almost socialist sensibility - spiced up with a wicked sense of humor and an unfortunate tendency to tell long pointless stories - was opposed by the more theologically and hierarchically inclined, apparently, and earned him their enmity, which did him no good when he ran afoul, bigtime, of the Roman empire. There's little indication that he intended his message for 'gentiles' (even referring to them as 'dogs' on one occasion) when he first began, but he seems to have softened toward them later on. Which shows he was capable of growth: an important human - but not godlike - trait.
A 'Christ-like' message of loving-kindness is quite common among the world's philosophers - and a worthy one, too - but is never terribly successful without the aura of god-hood and always, the message becomes one of "faith rather than works." In other words, yeah, Jesus could turn the other cheek, but we don't have to do that because we are mere sinners and he - oops! I mean He was a Deity - it will be quite enough to have Faith in Him to be forgiven for our sins and go Heaven - and we can conveniently skip all that stuff about loving one's enemies. So Christians can go on crusades and peace-loving Buddhists can persecute Hindus - and all of them are quite safe in doing so, because they are already forgiven. They are 'Saved.'
I was raised in a convent school, where a certain ethic of responsibility toward my fellow humans was taught (hereinafter referred to as Catholic Guilt) - in spite of some glaring hypocrisies - and I am grateful for the kind of education that the nuns were willing to provide even girls from very poor homes (although we were never allowed to forget who we were). But I had too many questions - which even the beloved priest could not answer - so many and so at odds with what I was being taught about the nature of things, that eventually it seemed kinder not to ask them.
I am not a religious person, but I am curious. One of my art teachers once said something that sums it up - "the mind is on a relentless search for meaning." With all the hours of theological argument practiced in catechism classes for 8 years, I took my search outside of the Catholic Church. In desperation, I even read the bible, and came to understand why the church discouraged anything but the sweetest or most simple, heroic 'bible stories.' The real bible was at odds with all the values of modern humanism, and certainly with Roman Catholicism; it seemed to me a cruel document - a history of people in the violent dawn of civilization - and while it is apparent that our own era is capable of every bit as much cruelty and violence, it has become necessary for us to lie about it, to whitewash it, and attempt to justify it. Who knows? Perhaps the next step will be to actually stop it (OK, I am probably too much of an optimist.) Even now, however, there are 'good Christians' who justify any barbarism committed in wartime by the Old Testament.
There is, of course, no historical record at all of the existence of Cernunnos, or Rhiannon, nor would I want there to be. They represent forces of nature that surround us and fill us - and they, too, are not always sweetness and light. The forces of nature are mysterious, dangerous, and beautiful, and no amount of scientific or religious reductionism will ever make them less so. We live on the edges of several mysteries, both scientific and spiritual - we walk in mist at the edge of an infinite sea. That mystery is where I find the most joy. The prosaic, legalistic god who has gained respectability through common usage interests me less than the wonder of that sea and that mist.
Now for the VIRTUES of Paganism - especially modern Paganism. Whether pantheistic or polytheistic - or atheistic, there is little tendency at present to proselytize or spread the 'word' by fire and sword - May it always be so!- perhaps the remembrance of the fires of Toulouse and Scotland and so on, have given Pagans a sense of proportion in these matters. In contrast to the respectable, because familiar, god of common usage, Paganism finds divinity in the natural world - in animals and plants and even rocks, in addition to humans and the supernatural. In this time of overused resources and an abused earth, massive die-offs of the many species (without which we may not be able to live on this planet at all) any religion that respects and reveres nature has an immediate claim to my approval. We really have no other home, and it will be a very long time before we can ever comfortably occupy any other planet at hand. Maybe never. Besides, how could a Creator sensitive enough to have made such beauty permit us to use it (rape it, according to one rape-approving modern Christian commentator) without reverence or responsibility?
And then, I am a woman and I believe I am equal to men - not only that, but I believe that I have a right to choose my own destiny and live my own life without the need for expressly male authority. (As an anarchist, I would prefer no authority - but that is a different argument.) European Paganism is not as gynophobic as the patriarchal religions, and I find in that a great deal of 'relevance to modern day ethics.' After all, the buying and selling of women as wives and concubines, as practiced righteously in biblical times, has long been taboo in the West - no matter what it says in the bible!
Of course, Catholicism has female saints and the near godlike figure of Mary - who is a reminder of earlier mother goddesses (early Christians even converted some old statues of Ceres, Demeter, and Isis for the purpose!)- but she - and all female saints - are primarily valued for their submissiveness to the will of the obviously and eternally male god.
The Protestants were quite correct to abandon this feminist remnant of Paganism - there is no element of female equality in Christianity or its antecedent, although there is the occasional, small heroic rebellion. The women of patriarchal religions are chattel, producing generations of 'begatted' patriarchs without a single feminine name being mentioned - and their sexuality is rigidly controlled to ensure the 'legitimacy' of the male line. Men's virgin daughters are offered to abusive mobs, and are sacrificed in thanksgiving for victory, and in contrast to the mercy shown to Isaac, no god stays the father's hand. It is my opinion that the bible can be fairly read as one long antifeminist argument. But one of the side effects of patriarchy is to deny the importance of women at all - sometimes even questioning whether women have a soul. To admit that an entire religious tradition may exist primarily to control and distribute the available pussy is unthinkable to male supremacists. (Heaven knows, they rarely give it a thought!)
Only read between the lines. . . .
Beginning at Genesis, I cannot bring myself to believe in a deity which created so many many diverse people and chose only one tribe to gift with his protection and love and the 'truth' - waiting many centuries (in Christian thought) before reversing the position, deciding to include anyone not born into that chosen tribe, and singing the very new tune of universal love. (Incidentally, equality was one of the most beguiling attributes of those 'mystery religions' that flourished in Jesus' time.) Since (having read the bible) I can only regard those ancient writers of the bible as inventive, yet provincial barbarians, gradually groping their way to an understanding of who they were and what their place in the scheme of things was (as with all other ancient peoples) I early on turned to other religious teachings in the search for something to believe in. All of them were initially very satisfying as fields of study, but ultimately, since none of them produced the peace they craved and extolled - quite the opposite in fact, and all of them were hopelessly wrong on scientific* details (actually Hinduism, with its vast reaches of time and space, is closer than any - but the social system it produced is not to my liking) I began to realize that MY religion lay somewhere in the FUTURE.
(*Which begs the question, while Jesus was going about preaching his admirable doctrine of love and peace, why couldn't he have mentioned by the way, the earth is actually a sphere and revolves around the sun, or discuss the double helix of DNA? But no, these earth-born divinities - supposedly all-knowing - who might have proved their godhood once and for all with a little provable science - prefer to keep us all in the dark.)
But back to the Future. MY religion would follow science fearlessly, having no sacred silly preconceptions to protect, and respect all of our fellow creatures, regard humans as equal, make room for many speculations on the ultimate nature of things. MY religion would understand that natural beauty is a sacred thing. And on a personal note, MY religion would honor all living things as part of the one great whatever.
MY religion did not yet exist. But Paganism does provide room for that kind of thinking, and if I were a religious person - which sadly, I am not - I would probably be an active Pagan. Unfortunately, my time is taken up with trying to fight for what I DO believe, since nature and equality, peace, and our fellow mortals, the animals, are always threatened by both believers and non-believers. In all of these things I find much relevance to modern day ethics - in fact I find them essential to any system of philosophy that I could possibly embrace.
So from being a fallen-away Catholic, I have crossed a huge divide to being a lackluster non-practicing Pagan.
Blessed Be, anyway.
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