Additional Observations…Gods, Goddesses, and History

While the FAQ page relating to modern paganism and tolerance touches on many of the second-week topics from our course, I want to add some additional comments and resources for you to consider.

We opened the week with a discussion of four tiers of 'religious' system:

1. animism,
2. ancestor worship
3. chthonic gods
4. monotheism

Let us consider each of the first three in turn.

Animism and Magic

"Anima" and "Ruach" are Greek and Hebrew words for air/breath/wind. In most of the ancient Western cultures, as in many other cultures around the world, the words for air or breath were intimately connected with the efficacy of life. Words, as manifestations of breath, also became important elements of creative power in magical traditions of humanity, leading to the fuller traditions of myth we encounter in every human culture.

The foundations of myth studies are deep and varied within the Western tradition. Sir James Frazer and other 19th century anthropologists defined "animism" in terms of the dominant European concept of the soul. As you read about the ideas of Frazer, Campbell and others, reflect upon how the ideas weigh against your direct experiences with the great texts of our tradition. This was part of a religious-cultural ideology of the time. Today we define animism in slightly different terms that ground our broader understanding of human "religion" and "spiritual" action in the world, relating the concepts also to our psychological development through the life cycle.

James Frazer’s work includes formal definition of magical concepts. We distinguish magic from prayer by their levels of intention-magic seeks to control or enjoin forces of nature, while prayer seeks to invoke powers of supernatural entities for favor. To some extent, all purposeful action is a kind of incipient "prayer," since it must rely upon principles learned in the course of experience, though not necessarily explicitly known. But we tend to pray for things we believe are possible and not in our power to achieve. One can easily see the open ground for confusions of agent and effect with such a definition. Thus, there are types of magic and types of prayer, creating a range of expressed behaviors that cut across cultures.

One might also say that magic tends to go straight for the subordination of "mystery" while prayer acknowledges the mysterious as a kind of hopeful action. The difference between a magical rite and a prayerful ceremony, then, is also difficult to discern. Both engage the "unknown" and may confer power on the individuals or groups wielding them. Consider the faith healer who, whether by sleight-of-hand magic or Divine assistance, "cures" his client. In either case, the "healer" has done nothing-the result is a ruse or the action of another-yet he or she may gain prestige or real power over other people who believe in the efficacy of the cure. If this sounds like psychology, that is because magic and prayer are very much wrapped up in dispositions of the human mind wielding symbols. Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, argues that the Shaman who provides the myth to be enacted and thereby interpreted by the patient is merely doing the reverse of the Western psychologist who interprets the myth provided as a story to the healer.

Nor are the issues of magic, deception, and fear of "dark forces" new. Jesus was accused of dealing with a devil in order to perform miracles-a crime punishable by death at the time under both Jewish and Roman Law. When it comes to the distinction between magic and prayer, our cultural dispositions take us in a particular direction. Our modern viewpoint, however, may cause us to "see" historical cases selectively. Was Joan of Arc a Saint, a witch, or a lunatic-and we should recall that "lunatic" implies a person under the influence of powerful, outside, natural forces. So the answer to the question depends upon who we might ask, and we must remember to filter that response through the political and social climate of the time and place. Was Rasputin a true healer, or just extraordinarily lucky in his pronouncements and applications to the son of Nicholas and Alexandra. Must there always be something "theatrical" and over-stated about the spiritually gifted?

Evidently, many cultures think so. We know that the "healers" of traditional cultures maintain beliefs and actions that might have them committed in our culture. We also know that the liturgical traditions of Greece, Japan, and ancient Israel all have much in common with inherent theatrical traditions of their time. The "ritual drama" is an old and widespread form, manifest in much of the material on myth we will encounter in this class. The readings and exercises of this unit push you to draw connections between the foreign and the familiar, and to look anew at the historical foundations of our religious culture for the obvious signs of a rich animism, a healthy plethora of gods and goddesses, and a strong tendency to theatrical performance.

Ancestor Worship

Ancestor worship is a natural outgrowth of the life-cycle, kinship processes running through time, and the known/attested connections of "historical" generations. We can view how ancestor worship operates in segmented and alliance-based kinship systems by viewing the biblical genealogies of Torah and other books of the Hebrew bible. The similarity of Hebrew stories in Genesis to classical Greek works will also become apparent, significantly since the Greeks (like most people of the ancient Mediterranean region) actually did actively honor the ancestors with prayers and offerings. Though the Hebrews did not parallel this "worship" of the ancestors, they certainly honored them through the retelling of the Torah stories and obedience to the "God of the fathers."

As it turns out, the "ancestral honor" part of religious forms of the Greeks and Hebrews are also paralleled in most traditional societies organized on the level of tribes and chiefdoms. In these preliterate societies, oral traditions maintain the "received" set of ancestral connections and exploits (often edited through time to reflect historical fortunes). It is exactly these kinds of oral traditions that were redacted together to create Genesis, with the result that one particular version of genealogy was given a more lasting form. Some parallel Greek traditions were solidified at about the same time, and refer to almost exactly the same historical period as that of the Torah-around 1500 years before the Common Era. A brilliant analysis of the Greek system of ancestor worship (and its Indo-European basis) is found in 19th century study by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges entitled The Ancient City (1864), based upon close readings of classical Greek works, Roman law, and ancient Sanskrit documents. Consider, for example, that the first act of Orestes when he returns from exile is to pour milk and honey on the grave of his father, Agamemnon, or that it is the complete breaking of ancestral responsibilities that drives Oedipus and his family into ruin. These kinds of story elements contribute to Fustels reading of the ancient Indo-European religion.

Throughout the written ethnographic observations of anthropologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries come additional descriptions of similar systems working through the oral tradition. Perhaps the most celebrated of these come from Melanesia, and other parts of Oceania. Ancestor "worship" usually takes the form of maintaining a kind of social relationship with deceased relatives who remain, in turn, concerned with the events and actions of the living. Archaeologically, we may see evidence of these relationships in mortuary customs, including such practices as cleaning and maintaining the bones of the dead, placement of graves or charnel houses to allow access by the living, and a wide variety of extended or annual remembrance ceremonies.

As we begin to consider ancestor worship, we must also take into account how kinship considerations enter into mythology. We encounter basic kinship ideas in myths, for the "structures" of kinship are often co-extensive and parallel to the structures of action we call "mythos" (or plot). But "mythos" also occurs on a highly stylized landscape-what I call a "mythscape"—which is part geographical reference and part kinship reference.

Examples from the Apache, the Australians, and the Irish show how myths and folklore, together with their broader cultural associations, are intimately tied to individual places and formal patterns of landscape. The examples help students understand how stories, family associations, politics, and religion rely upon parallel and intricately connected territorial connections.

Chthonic Gods

The ideas of the totem and the ancestral god have often been elaborated into extraordinary characters presented in myth and folklore-including creator gods of diverse form. The basic idea here is that we can conceive of beings whose existence is both mind-independent and prior to or totally removed of our own. Such beings can be visualized as powerful and primary-existing before the world as we know it. They are "chthonic" gods who are found in all human foundation stories, and are especially prominent in the mythos of origins created by the early cultures of Western civilizations.

In pure forms of animism, such as that of the Shinto concept of kami, notions of spirit define constructions of the experienced world—nature as perceived. This kind of animism lacks the anthropomorphism or zoomorphism that we encounter along with rituals of "impersonation" of the spirits in many cultures. Yet with or without some construction of the spirit appearance, animate forces are typically conceived as somehow "older" than our human spirits, originating out of nothing or in primary acts of creation by a few chthonic entities.

Animistic beliefs extended beyond humanity also reinforce the idea of original beings much more directly than ancestor worship. We typically "experience" our parents and children in our life cycle, and usually also other kin removed by as much as two or three generations. The five core generations of kin categories constitute a cultural structure of empirically known "others" filling our world. When we extend many generations back in time, we rely on accounts of our deceased elders which we believe because they fit the patterns of our own experience and are in the lived experience of our immediate elders. Yet, working back in time, it is a large leap to connect these ancestors to some other species "known" in our current experience-the fox or deer seen as an animal in our present and a "grandfather" in our spirit past. Yet much of totemic thinking is based on just such equations.

The Hebrew creation story has humanity created in Gods image—"male and female created He them." Still, we attribute qualities and powers to God that are never extended to people; we assert kinship to a form that is essentially unlike us (some say in appearance, other say in spirit). Did we get our physical form from God, or our spirit (ruach, or the breath of life), or some other essential quality? Western theologians differ on the answer to the question, seeking help in other scriptures. Thus, God appears as a "firebrand," "a shadowy spirit," and as "a man" in Genesis, as well as in the lineage of the covenant tracing from Adam through Noah to Abram/Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel. The toledoth formulae ("these are the generations of") of Genesis create the connection of humanity to a chthonic entity who began our world amidst darkness and chaos.

Other cultures perform the same logical operation. The ruling family in Japan today can trace an uninterrupted human lineage back for over 1200 years to the assertion of filiation to the Sun among the chthonic characters of Japanese creation myth. The Mayans follow their inheritance from historical tribes back to the latest creation, the last coming after a series of failed attempts by chthonic beings to create people for the Earth. The Algonquian Indians of northeast North America trace their heritage back to an original man and woman, transformed leaves fallen from the primal tree growing on the back of a turtle floating in the chthonic lake. The world is filled with peoples descended from constellations, rivers, ancient beasts, raging winds, or the raw energy of thunder and lightning, smoke, and mist.

Each culture envisions the gods in a particular way, constructs god-stories from unique needs or concerns, and builds the subtle lines of confirming connection to humanity through the everyday events of seasons, work, play, and the life cycle. It is sometimes difficult for us to escape the ethnocentric notion we derive from our Western heritage. We encounter the others gods as made up, strange, mysterious, or (if we believe they exist) probably threatening or evil manifestations of the anti-god in our own tradition. These are deeply engrained tendencies, even for those who are not monotheistic believers from any of the four or five major traditions of the Western God. When we read the work of Joseph Campbell or Elaine Pagels, it becomes evident that the Western God sometimes possesses rich qualities that are not widely believed, which makes it easier to find productive comparison with the gods of other cultural traditions; such realization is a double-edged sword to the extent that in order to productively compare gods across traditions, the essentially "constructed" nature of god concepts (i.e., the cultural definitions of gods are not part of whatever mind-independent or chthonic existence they might enjoy) must be accepted. Otherwise the question becomes one of "Who is right?" rather than "What are Gods potentials?" Another way of saying this is to argue that any definition of God, by virtue of its cultural form, must necessarily be inadequate because we do not experience all of the dimensions of the universe (Note: such a statement is not far removed from the kinds of statements made by "string theorists" in modern physics).

It should be clear that comparative theology, especially in a cross-cultural world context, requires a certain tolerance for metaphor, acceptance of human limitations to "know" things, and a premise that all cultural traditions contain something of deep interest to us, namely, the keys to how humanity relates to the puzzling, changing, and sometimes insubstantial phenomena all around us. For the mystic of any tradition, this is not a large problem, while for those concerned with being "right" or having the "true concept" of something, such pursuit can become (for them and others) a living hell. Rather than close this discussion on a negative note, let us recognize that the deepest, fullest theology of any cultural tradition produces some very common approaches to ethical human behavior, once we take into account differences of context, human needs, and other surrounding factors.

MODERN FEMINIST WITCHCRAFT:

BACKGROUND FOR CULTURAL COMPARISON

I prepared this tutorial as a preparatory reading connected to the assignments on “The Feminine Divine” in my course on the Anthropology of Religion. It seems appropriate to share it here as elaboration on my lecture concerning male and female divinity and emergent gender metaphors of the modern witchcraft movement. I will post a separate piece on magical tools and the wheel of the year. The present essay is not intended to be a “comprehensive” introduction to feminist witchcraft or the cultural contexts in which it must be considered. However, the notes here will help students work through some issues of the actual relationships among feminism, witchcraft, and monotheism (especially Christianity). For those who might want more, follow the links at the end of the essay.

Ideas About Paganism

Since the 15th Century, European Christians—both Catholic and Protestant—have controlled or employed the definitions of “witchcraft” in popular consciousness. The ideas used by institutional religion to identify witches came, in the main, from fears of “evil magic” that are common to many cultures around the world. European folk culture involved many popular beliefs to account for unfortunate events, often focusing attention on someone in the community who was different, who was vulnerable to legal attack, and who often possessed something that could benefit one of the accusers. That is, European and American witchcraft allegations often can be traced back to community feuds, jealousy over possessions, or other forms of spitefulness. Sometimes folk healers were the targets of accusations. Ordinary people sometimes approach “healers,” including “shamans” of most traditional societies, with considerable caution. This is because their work involves the spirit world, use of uncommon herbal remedies, or simply unusual behaviors. Some of the distance created between these practitioners and ordinary people in cultivated, intended to keep people from seeking “cures” for every small thing that happens to them. Underlying the idea of the witch, then, was a very ordinary human being who sometimes performed a positive function in the community. This “wise-woman” or “wise-man” idea of the witch has been especially cultivated in recent writings, though in fact there is little evidence that what such people practiced in Europe over the past several centuries is actually “old knowledge.” This point is strongly documented in Ronald Hutton’s book Triumph of the Moon, a history of the cultural foundations of modern British witchcraft, including Wicca.

What is clearest is that the vast majority of Western witchcraft allegations were against women—usually older women unattached to a male by marriage—and that, once accused, women were much more likely to be punished for witchcraft than were men (see Barstow, Witchcraze). Out of the historical context of European colonization, the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-reformation, and other cultural tendencies of the 15^th-17^th centuries, the broad lines of Euro-American witchcraft ideology were formed. Thus, even today, there is a popular tendency to create a broad division between major institutional religions and traditional religions, linking Confucianism, Hinduism, Shinto, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism as “undeniably” religious teachings alongside the institutional monotheisms, and everything else as “pagan” or “heathen.” This does not mean monotheists accept these other religions, but instead that they accept the legitimacy of these practices “as religion.” One key to this acceptance is that these religions are tied to “scriptures.”

Traditional religions of Africa, Asia, Australia, North and South America, and Oceania, on the other hand, are linked with the ancient practices of Europe as “pagan,” with the connotation that they represent “demon” or “devil” worship. A major source of these associations is the dominative process of European and American colonization, mission programs associated with colonization, and the syncretism that marks some forms of Christianity in the colonized world. The “devil worship” themes are expressed strongly in films from Disney’s Snow White and Hocus Pocus to like Rosemary’s Baby, Wicker Man, The Craft and The Blair Witch Project. Among demonized syncretistic religions, Afro-Caribbean religions like Voudun and Santaria receive especially sensational treatment in public media and films (The Serpent and the Rainbow, Angel Heart). These associations are also apparent in the modern vampire canon, expressed in such films as Interview With a Vampire, Dracula 2000. Even the film Stigmata, ostensibly a positive representation relating to Gnostic Christianity, uses the devices of contagious magic and horror harkening back to The Exorcist to represent an unusual excursion into the supernatural.

Alongside historical associations of Western witch trials, as well as highly popular, recent, relatively “positive” depictions such as Tara and Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, treatments in film have witches potentially tapping into demonic power. At best, the depth of potential of evil connection is never lost, even with a long line of popular witches who are attractive, ordinary, nice but “culturally exotic” young women with dark potentials (Bell, Book and Candle; Witches of Eastwick, The Craft, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Practical Magic, Charmed, Buffy),.

The idea of “witchcraft” is rooted in the neo-pagan revival which began in the 19^th century as a confluence of interests of “Masonic lodge” groups and the Romantic movement in the arts, and evolved into formal adoption of ancient European institutional paganism by some groups and the establishment of a “Dianic” or feminist witchcraft movement by others. Thus, pagan can apply today to a host of different organizations and ideas, some “traditional” to the extent they pursue animistic ideas or nature religion borrowed from any number of traditional cultural contexts, others derived from or reactive to Western monotheism, and a few completely novel or creative attempts to “regain” a religion focused on nature. At the same time, most neo-pagans today are quite removed from “New Age” religion (though there is some overlap) mainly because “New Age” connects to the mystical elements of monotheism or adaptation of institutional Eastern religion to a Western context. Both paganism and “New Age” religions have pejorative connotations in some Christian communities. This is because pagan religion is seen as directly inviting demonic association through magic, while New Age indirectly allows such association through meditation, yoga, and other practices of “mind control.”

Paganism as Religious Ideology and Practice

It is very difficult to generalize about modern paganism. Margo Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon—a work on American paganism that has seen two very successful editions—surveys ideas from the many spiritual paths comprising American developments between the 1960s and 1980s. Yet Adler offers few principles that can be universally applied in the pagan community. The same is true of British paganism, though Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon achieves a somewhat better conceptual synthesis. Still, there are a few ideological and practical elements that set paganism apart from monotheism. Taken together, these two domains of difference account for a highly diverse neo-pagan praxis. Some forms of paganism are only slightly removed from mainstream Christianity and Judaism, while other forms constitute systems more comparable to Hindu or Shinto religious forms.

As religious ideology, paganism presents several characteristics that set it apart from monotheism:

1. A thoroughly immanent concept of divinity, often expressed as an animistic concept of nature.

2. A strong belief in the efficacy of some form of magic, divination, or power channeling.

3. A tendency to solitary or small group religious practice.

4. Rejection of “dogma” and “orthodoxy” or large-scale institutional controls of congregations.

On the level of practice, we may observe a wide array of differences from orthodox monotheisms. Almost none of these are universal, but each applied sufficiently strongly to many groups to mark a group as neopagan:

1. An elaboration of “ritual performance” (enacting myths) as a basis of religious celebration.

2. Incorporation of total group and egalitarian participation in ritual observances.

3. De-emphasis of static hierarchy through rotation or sharing of responsibility.

4. Gender equality or parity.

5. Expressive spontaneity in liturgical forms.

6. Emphasis of outdoor settings for ritual.

7. Emphasis of family or fictive kinship as a foundation of religious sharing.

8. Tolerance of difference, and an absence of proselytizing.

Additional historical and experiential works, some quite recent, explore details of the modern pagan community. I consider them essential reading for anyone who wants to express an opinion about the modern neo-pagan movement. . The historical work by Ronald Hutton already noted, The Triumph of the Moon, is the most authoritative history of modernist British witchcraft. It has a balance of consideration between pagan “self-definition” and “creativity” versus claims about “tradition.” Additionally, Starhawk’s Spiral Dance and Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon provide essential history for American witchcraft. Finally, several personal testaments, compilations of liturgy, and experiential introductions are helpful, especially Phyllis Curott’s Book of Shadows, Janet and Stewart Farrar’s, The Witches Bible Compleat, Starhawk’s Dreaming the Dark and her recent The Earth Path. Within all of these sources, one will find a strong appreciation of humans as “gendered” selves, so that a substantial element of modern witchcraft is a form of feminism. Hutton’s book evaluates some of this tendency, but Curott and Starhawk represent feminist, ecologically conscious, and activist neo-paganism in its most direct expressions (I say this at risk of excluding some important voices of feminist earth-based religion, but if you encounter Starhawk and Curott, you will also then discover all of the others).

Immanence, Feminism, and Christianity

Finally, paganism is not entirely removed from Christianity inasmuch as there are substantial Christian movements engaging immanent deity, various mystical practices, and resistance to orthodox interpretations of scripture. Of course, some of these paths will be called heresies by other Christians, even though they pursued lines of Christian thought that were extant in the early centuries of the Christian church. Several lines of work deserve notice here.

First, the modern Catholic mystic Margaret Starbird (not a pen name, but her actual married name) pursued theology at Vanderbilt University, but developed most of her work in a worldwide search for connections that make sense of gospel reports about Mary Magdalene and the other women in the tradition of Jesus. Alongside Morton Smith’s important book, Jesus the Magician, Starbird’s four key works offer both personal testimony and resounding scholarship, all leading her away from orthodox Catholicism and into harmony with a number of neo-pagan writers. At the same time, the depth of Starbird’s theology is Christian, perhaps more like the “original” Christianity than anything the past 1700 years have produced. Like some of my own gospel work, Starbird is convinced that early gospel texts include mystical puzzles—numerological and allegorical—that link Christianity to other monotheistic mysticisms, especially Kaballah. More than that, Starbird’s ideas about the significance of Mary Magdaline have helped inspire renewed interest in the Gnostic tradition, ire and skepticism from orthodox Christians, and one of the sub-plots of Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code. Unlike the equally important studies of Elaine Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels, Beyond Belief), Starbird’s mix of testimony and scriptural interpretation attempt to do more than put a new modern face on Christianity—she wants to restore Christianity to what she considers its proper form. That form involves a powerful complementarity of masculine and feminine principles for the Church, not only manifest in the life of Jesus, but reflected also in his relationship with the Magdalene and her “true nature.”

Elaine Pagels’ recent book, Beyond Belief, also offers a testimony inspired by modern experience with the Church, a deep historical understanding of the sources Christian thought, and a lifetime of study of the earliest Christian texts, especially the Gospel of Thomas, one of the key documents of the Naj Hammadi collection of texts recovered in Egypt in the late 1940s. Pagel’s work not only grounded a critical feminism within theological scholarship, but has continued to develop strands of mystical connection that were forced from orthodox views relatively early in Church history. The Christianities she exposes, not only as historical facts but as contemporary potentials, involve immanent deity, mythic understanding of scripture, and connection with diverse theologies outside monotheism, including much of feminist neo-pagan practice.

A large part of the rejection of monotheism by neo-pagan women and men has to do with the extreme phallocentrism of the traditions. These same people typically also reject phallocentrism in neo-pagan groups—and there is plenty of male-centered behavior in some pagan groups. Connection with paganism, however, offers a relatively “clean slate” from which to start building meaningful spiritual connections that do not rely upon deeply engrained cultural roles that limit women’s humanity. This is precisely because paganism is so diverse, lacking in heavy-handed doctrinal groups, and also lacking bodies of received scripture and interpretation designed to keep people in line. On the other hand, the renewed investigation of the first three centuries of Christianity now includes not only the assessment of old sources but the exploration of the full array of sources from Jewish and Christian circles, and the Greco-Roman world in which the operated. While such investigation may not change orthodox Christian viewpoints, it does open up avenues of real connection between modern Christians and pagans in the Western tradition, as well as to the mystical traditions in the monotheisms generally. In this sense, neo-pagan ideas are closely connected to the heart of a religious cultural revitalization that is ongoing, and that offers a real challenge to fundamentalist branches of all the monotheisms. As issues like abortion, gay marriage, the death penalty, surrogate motherhood, AIDS, ethnic cleansing, cloning, global warming, nuclear energy, nuclear weapons proliferation, developing world debt, and international terrorism become more critical issues, this kind of cultural connection, linked as it is to divine immanence, may also become more and more important.

REFERENCES

ADLER, Margot.

1997. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. Penguin.

BARSTOW, Anne Llewellyn.

1994. Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts. HarperCollins.

BROWN, Dan.

2003. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday.

CUNNEEN, Sally.

1996. In Search of Mary: The Woman and the Symbol. New York: Ballentine.

CUROTT, Phyllis.

1999. Book of Shadows: A Modern Woman's Journey into the Wisdom of Witchcraft and the Magic of the Goddess. Broadway Books.

FARRAR, Janet and Stewart.

1984. The Witches Bible Compleat. Magickal Childe, Inc.

HUTTON, Ronald.

2001. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford U. Press.

PAGELS, Elaine.

1979. The Gnostic Gospels. Random House.

1995. The Origin of Satan. Random House.

2003. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. Random House.

SMITH, Morton.

1978. Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? Berkeley, CA: Seastone.

STARBIRD, Margaret.

1993. The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail. Santa Fe, NM: Bear and Company.

1998. The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine. Santa Fe, NM: Bear and Company.

2003. Magdalene’s Lost Legacy: Symbolic Numbers and the Sacred Union in Christianity. Rochester, VT: Bear and Company.

2003. The Feminine Face of Christianity. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.

STARHAWK

1979. The Spiral Dance. HarperCollins.

1982. Dreaming the Dark. Beacon Press.

2004. The Earth Path. HarperCollins.