This is my first post in a while. In ’24 I was going through quite a few personal transitions. I’m happy to say that the muse has returned. I have focused a lot on Pagan celebrations and Pagan traditions in previous blog entries. Now I feel ready to go into the deeper aspects of Paganism and how it is relevant today. So with that, I felt it was appropriate to start with an article entitled “Why Paganism?”
Walking and stumbling on the path to Earth connection
Why Paganism? Fundamentally, the times call for human beings to connect with the Earth in a way we haven’t for a few thousand years. The climate crisis and other Earth crises are warning signs of a fundamental shift that has needed to occur in humankind’s relationship with the Earth. However, linking modern Paganism with this need hasn’t always been as straightforward as it might seem. In this article, I will share some of this journey I have been on in making those connections.
I was lucky to participate in a cross-country walk for the environment. A hundred of us or so walked from Los Angeles to New York over a period of nine months. We lived out of tents, and for that nine months we were immersed in the outdoors. My view of the world changed radically. I reveled in what was not only the beauty around me, but a spiritual connection with the Earth. I realized that this third hunk of rock from the sun was a living thing . I was part of the Earth.
After the cross country walk, I moved back to my native Chicago. I found myself living in a basement apartment in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. Amidst the bricks, cement, and steel, I felt more distant from the Earth than I had before.
But one early evening, I heard through the open windows a rustling of a few leaves as the wind picked up,. It felt like the wind was calling me outside. So I walked outside, and watched as low dark clouds played out a drama in the sky. I felt compelled to drum along with it using the wallet and keys in my pocket. It was at that point I felt a calling to seek out local Pagan groups in Chicago.
I ended up finding what was literally a Pagan Unitarian Church. Unitarians believe in the validity of all religions and encourage people to find their own paths. I learned that this ethos was quite consistent with what modern Paganism was in practice.
I learned a lot, but with the local community it seemed like the connecting with the Earth was a lower priority. The main priority seemed to be reviving traditional pre-Christian magical traditions. Each ritual seemed to involve calling deities—most often Greek ones. I simply couldn’t connect it with my understanding of the Earth. So after about five years, I left the Chicago Pagan community.
I pursued other spiritual paths in the intervening years, but I always had a keen interest in tuning in with the Earth. It seemed illogical not to spiritually focus on the threats to our Earth coming from us humans. But these paths either mentioned this as an afterthought or did other things I couldn’t agree with. Then on January 8, 2020, I suddenly had this urge to research Celtic Paganism. The urge came while I was listening to folk musician Julie Fowlis singing in Scottish Gaelic. This was the beginning of a winding path that has been nourishing me ever since.
Putting spirituality in perspective in the face of rigid religiosity
People have valid reasons for believing that religion is an anachronism in today’s modern world. Modern religions can be rigid and sometimes antithetical to independent thinking. An ethnic group’s religious claim to land is fueling a genocide right now in the Middle East. The notion of the “End Times” present in both Christianity and Islam has fueled a certain type of fascism. People are arbitrarily deciding what is “good” and “evil” in our world. This is usually based on personal preferences and backed up by out of context quotes from ancient holy books. In essence, human beings are declaring themselves Lords and Saviors over other beings, and trying to impose a hell on the rest of us that they think is “God’s Kingdom.” In the face of all of that, why even trifle with any sort of religion or spirituality?
This world-wide wave of fundamentalism across many religions is, in many ways, a reaction against scientific rationalism. The scientific method is by far the best way of opening up objective truths. Our society has advanced so much because of it. But it’s not without its own problems. The chief one is that it is an instrument in imperfect human hands. As a graduate student, I saw a lot of very clearly biased and poorly constructed studies published in scientific journals. Acceptance of scientific fact is not automatic. either–the findings of a scientist who discovered the importance of washing hands as a protection against infection was ridiculed and ignored for some fifty years. Finally, many “believers” in scientific rationalism employ a logical fallacy that insists that something doesn’t exist unless it can be proven by scientists.
Paganism can sometimes reflect scientific rationalism without employing that logical fallacy. With what we know about the sun and the Earth, wouldn’t it be completely rational to engage in worship of these things?
A question of belief
The question of belief is often presented to us as whether or not to believe in God. Monotheistic religious people believe there is, atheists believe there isn’t. Agnosticism basically believes that we don’t know for sure.
I would argue that agnosticism is the most intellectually honest position. If someone claims to have experienced God, there really is no way to prove it. Similarly, atheism lacks proof because you can’t prove a negative.
Agnosticism can still open the possibility to spiritual discovery. There is a lot of room to accept the possibility of certain things existing without insisting that they are literally real. This is novel thinking to many believers in an infallible God. But it has plenty of precedent in human spiritual history. It opens up the possibilities of phenomena whose realness is unproven, but which people have nevertheless experienced. Probably the best example is such phenomena is ghosts. Their existence has never been proven by science. But they’ve been reported by different cultures all over the world since time immemorial.
Modern Paganism–its current limitation and possibilities
The advent of modern Paganism is an effort by primarily of those of European heritage to search for truths that had been blotted out when Christianity replaced—often by force—the indigenous, polytheistic religions that had existed before. Some of the information about these religions was well preserved, as is true of Hellenic and Roman Paganism. Other traditions, such as Norse and Celtic Paganism, have been largely lost. While a lot of this heritage has been reconstructed, it’s an open question as to how accurate those reconstructions are. Similar phenomena are occurring among indigenous peoples in other parts of the world.* These traditions are more Earth-oriented because their ceremonies hearken back to a time when they marked and celebrated the cycles of the Earth.
But it is worth noting, too, that many of these reconstructions, particularly among those of European descent, hearken back to an agrarian time. Understanding the Earth’s cycles has always been important for agriculture. While agrarian societies haven’t caused the level of destruction to the Earth that industrial societies have, they’ve still plowed fields and divided up parcels of land, destroying habitats and causing extinctions of species. We can learn a lot from these revived Pagan traditions. But I don’t see them as necessarily the be-all and end-all as far as tuning in with the Earth is concerned.
For all the problems that self-described followers of Jesus and Muhammad are causing in this world, it must be noted that the two founders of the religions were spearheading reform movements against a backdrop of corrupt and morally decrepit societies. At a time when human activity is destroying so much of our ecosystem, could we not consider the possibility that the times might be calling for a similar spiritual reform movement?
What might an Earth-oriented Paganism look like
So then, what would this practice look like?
Contrary to what many may believe, polytheism is not itself a necessary precondition for calling oneself Pagan. I was not sold on polytheism during my first round as a Pagan, and after leaving the community the first time, I drifted back to monotheism for a while. I think it’s entirely possible for you to believe in God with a capital G and be a Pagan. There are, in fact, Christian Pagans out there. For me personally though, in the intervening years between my first and second encounter with Paganism, I began to sour on the reference to capital-G God. I just couldn’t pray that way because of the way such an entity was being invoked by imperfect humans to impose their will on others.
Because I didn’t feel inspired by the polytheism that I encountered in my first round of Pagan experiences, I decided that focusing my worship on the Universe felt like a good place to start. I saw the Universe as essentially an entity that brought us all into being, but not carrying what was essentially a human agenda. Worshiping the Universe could be another form of monotheism. But when extended to include the Earth and her ecosystems, it could also be seen as a form of animism. Animism is distinct from monotheism and polytheism by focusing on living things or things like mountains, lakes and even rocks.
For a lot of people, this framing of the Divine works, but for me it didn’t. In my mind, I had a hard time feeling like I could communicate with the Universe. I also didn’t feel like I could communicate with a nearby large lake or mountain unless I was right there. In one poem, I described worshiping the Universe as feeling to me like “trying to grab handfuls of space.”
I reluctantly turned back to polytheism, starting with the broad archetypes of “God and Goddess,” however, it reminded me too much of the Paganism I’d engaged in before. Over a period of a few weeks, however, these archetypes became more specific as Mother Earth and Father Sky. A few weeks later, a series of experiences helped me discover Elen of the Ways, and I also felt called to research Celtic deities until I felt drawn to two of them.
By this time, I’d concluded that the Universe is generous enough that it will tune in with us through whatever way it makes sense for each of us. Once that connection is made, the Universe could then lead us on other paths. People who believe the deities literally exist under the name they have are referred to as “hard polytheists.” People who see these deities as archetypes or representations of something greater are referred to as “soft polytheists.” My belief is somewhere in between hard and soft polytheism.
What does this connection with the Divine look like?
Connection with the Divine could occur in many ways. People might think about the deity they feel connected with when they pray. Maybe people will think about them when they go to bed and wake up with realizations the next day. Some will do divination practices such as tarot or runes to get a sense of what their deity is trying to tell them. Some will look for signs that occur in daily life. Other people will offer direct prayers.
The way I connect is unusual, and is perhaps tied to the fact that I write a ton. It’s through my writing that ideas most easily to come to me. Sometimes, through this method, I’ve been told things that don’t make sense, only to later learn things that validate what I’ve been told.
Is that proof that I am talking to a deity? I’m open to the possibility that maybe my efforts to connect Elen of the Ways and the other deities may simply be a means of tapping other parts of knowledge in other parts of my own mind.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that this is indeed the case, and that the knowledge that I’m tapping is simply from a different part of my brain. What if these experiences are only possible due to belief in these deities? Or, what if this different part of my brain isn’t just me? Many spiritual sages do say, after all, that the notion of us being separate beings is an illusion.
Freedom from dogma
When stepping outside of human notions such as religion, dogma, belief, infallibility, perfection, and other ways we categorize spirituality, we begin to lose the mental traps that a lot of dogma springs on us. This would include both spiritual or secular dogma. We could argue that the modern Pagan movement is, on one level, one effort to tap knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual experiences denied to us by dogma that was locking us out of free thought. We are free to take this path wherever it may lead us.
The problems that our world is facing demand new ways of thinking and free exploration of ideas. When you think about it, the world we live in today is at a greater turning point than what existed in the fifth century BCE or the first and seventh centuries CE—all of them being centuries in which major world religions emerged. We have so lost touch with the Earth that the ability of life to thrive on Earth is an open question. You could argue that this is the most spiritually significant time in perhaps ten thousand years, when we first started leaving behind our nomadic ways and cultivating the first human settlements.
So that would be my answer to “Why Paganism?”
*It’s important to note that they don’t use the European term Paganism to describe themselves. We should remember that “Pagan” is a European word. To apply it to non-Europeans without their permission is disrespectful.