Always Reaching
Is the solution for the darkness within
I’m going back to school to finish my degree. For ten years I was working on a M.Div. at Cherry Hill Seminary, paying for my classes by working with the administration. I stopped in 2018, for various reasons. But now I’m going to finish. Happily, I only need one class and my thesis. A lot of the writing I’ll be doing will end up here. [Because efficiency is necessary in our time-limited world.] My committee is in place and I’ll be signed up for summer 2025 [although I’m hoping I don’t have to wait to get a jump on it.]
I’ve been listening to Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning again. In chapter 5: The Hostile Brothers, he delves into the definition of evil. This feels important right now as it did not when I was younger.
Who's really evil?
It’s hard to talk about anything that is controversial in Pagan groups. There are so few of us, that anything about which people have strong opinions can tear a group apart. But given the current political climate, I’m going there. Not because I would want the reader to agree with my opinions, but because the evolutionary function of religion is to unit…
Our world seems filled with evil and darkness right now. When I was a child, we had the threat of nuclear war. That was dark too. I read my share of post-apocalyptic fiction and was well-able to imagine a post nuclear world. Christianity [let alone the school system] had no answer for either specifically, why the Russians wanted to bomb us, or generally, why anyone would want to. Nor did Christianity provide any relief from my fear.
It seems to me now that religion, and spiritual belief and practice, should definitely do that. Christianity gave me no story that made sense. My teachers in the religion couldn’t make the stories in the Bible mean anything in a world where all life could be extinguished in a few weeks and there was nothing what-so-ever we could do to stop it. Even the Devil seems trivial under these circumstances.
Peterson delves into the question from the framework that humans have been attempting to grasp the source of our suffering for all of our existence and that mythology - in which he includes the Biblical corpus of stories - describes our intuitive grasp of the subject. Maps begins his exploration with biology and evolution, and continues into current brain science. Stories are how we understand the world. This has been well-examined by Dr. Andrew Newberg. Peterson connects story to biology and then psychology. Individuals unconsciously embody mythological themes. This is what Jung meant when he talked about archetypes.
I began my own exploration of religion at 14 and my interest has not waned. My concepts of evil have been largely Humanistic. I think that’s true of most of us in the US, as we are children of the Enlightenment, and the products of the WEIRD world. I read about evil in fiction. As a kid, I read plenty of horror stories. From a psychological standpoint, we read horror to experiment with dealing with fear and pain. We get to experience it vicariously and in complete safety while practicing how to deal with it. [Assuming, of course, that the protagonist does, in fact, win out, and there is much modern fiction in which this is not the case.]
Later in my life, I got a breath of real horror in the form of an abusive relationship, and then in raising a very broken child from teens into adulthood. My unhappiness with my life was nothing until I took on those experiences. Then I started reading history and learned the depth of what humans can do to each other. Only then did I start to see evil.
In Elaine Pagel’s The Origin of Satan, she talks about how the devil was invented in order to allow the ‘other’ to be persecuted, and when I read that, it made perfect sense to me. But Peterson rightly points out that mythology takes many generations of work and understanding, and while I swallowed Pagel’s position at the time, it is far too conscious and understanding to explain the extant stories humans have told about the doing of bad things.
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Let's talk about Satan
Pagans don’t worship Satan. This is a common misconception among Christians, which we’re going to have to continue addressing. Probably until the cows come home. It has to be done calmly, even when the Christian in question isn’t listening.
The belief that equates the devil [as a person] with evil can only work when one equates evil with static belief. Which is certainly what Christianity looked like to me when I was growing up. The Christianity of my childhood was decidedly static. The Mennonites specifically reject parts of the modern world and take the Biblical corpus literally. Yes, the world was 4000 years old, dinosaurs were faked, and women should defer to men. The Presbyterians had nothing to say about my chaotic emotions, or why I couldn’t seem to fit in at school, or even how to get some relief from my constant depression. I was supposed to accept that everything was fore-ordained, and never mind free-will. I don’t recall the adults in the Presbyterian church talking about evil in anything but vague terms. My mother never spoke of religion at all beyond telling me that she felt light when she sang with the choir.
Peterson points out that it’s taken thousands of years for humans to recognize the nature of evil and these stories are told in myths. He spends much time on order and chaos and how humans must necessarily build and protect order if we are to function in the world. However, order can become rigid and inattentive to encroaching threats or possibilities.
He discusses the story of how Osiris teaches many things to humans, thus allowing them to live well. But then he become willfully blind - he’s overly fond of a pretty box - and this allows his brother to trap him and cut him into pieces. It is his son Horus who must then battle Set to restore balance to the world.
It’s worth noting the Egyptian civilization lasted 3000 years. That’s long enough to see, and get perspective, on big human flaws. We, the children of the Enlightenment, have also seen the effects of dying gods.
Tolstoy describes the death of God rolling across Europe. He wrote at the end of the 19th century, at the same time that Marx was writing the Communist Manifesto. Tolstoy suffered from severe nihilism and lack of meaning and I wonder if the Egyptians had similar crises of meaning when dynastic struggles occurred. After all, Pharaoh was the manifestation of the divine.
Tolstoy describes his state in an allegory derived from an old myth: A traveler is trying to escape a wild beast and jumps down a well grabbing hold of a vine. At the bottom of the well is a dragon, who would simply consume him. As he dangles from the vine, two mice, one black one white, begin to gnaw on the vine. He’s going to die and it’s a rotten situation and while he’s hanging there, he notices a drop of honey on a leaf and tastes it, finding some relief.
Tolstoy wondered how people like him ie. educated and relatively wealthy, dealt with the horrendous dilemma of life. He came up with:
1) Willful blindness, although he describes it as ignorance. Tolstoy observed that people in this category are mostly women or young people. Identification with the spirit of denial is extremely tempting when the world is filled with turmoil.
2) Epicurianism, living for the pleasures of the moment, which only works if one lacks imagination.
3) Suicide, which is simply a logical conclusion to meaninglessness. Tolstoy very much wanted to take this route.
4) The last path was simply continuing to drag out a life that was evil and meaningless, despite nothing being able to come of it. He saw this as weakness.
With God being dead, Tolstoy had lost all ability to find meaning. If the world is only logic, then there is no mystery. Without mystery. There is no possibility. No matter how he strained his intellectual faculties he could find no other answer. [And this is why I often have a problem with atheists. They pride themselves in their logic, and logic can only lead to Tolstoy’s conclusions.] Like the great writer, most of us are educated and wealthy in comparison to the rest of the world.
Yet, there are even worse things in life than meaninglessness. People can do terrible things to each other, the general cruelty of existence being rendered worse by individual manifestations. Even the ancient gods deplored bad human behavior and punished it with floods and destruction. But without gods, philosophies based on resentment and antipathy easily be justify these manifestations. For those unfairly oppressed, revenge on life itself may start to look good.
That’s evil. To quote Peterson:
Evil is voluntary rejection of the process that makes life tolerable justified by observation of life‘s terrible difficulty.
But what is this ‘process’?
Satan was not invented to justify the persecution of the ‘other.’ Satan is a story of our failure to engage with the strange and unfamiliar, while still moving toward the good. It is not the strangeness or other that is evil. It is ignoring the other - the strangeness - and pretending it doesn’t exist. There lies the pretty box of rigid self-identification, rejection of creative possibility, and denial of the unknown. The known is comfortable. The unknown could kill us, literally, but also psychologically when our beliefs about what we think we know get shattered.
Therefore the process that moves us away from evil is one of voluntarily looking at what makes us uncomfortable. The only answer to suffering is voluntary continual transcendence and embracing the unknown. I know this from personal experience. [And it was very strange to hear it written down by someone else.] My life have been a continual process of questioning and recreating how I see myself. The gods have guided me in this process, sending both comfort when meaninglessness nearly overwhelmed me, and showing me possibility if I was willing to do the work.
In losing the medieval Christian God, we lost mystery and questioning. I believe that the rebirth of the old religion - Paganism - is Western Humanity’s psychic attempt to rebirth the divine, to rebirth mystery and give it voice in art and religious practice. Humans have always told stories that explain who we are and how we should live. We can still do that.
We only need to get back to asking the important questions of why we are here and at what should we aim. If we listen, the stories will come.
If you’re curious about Paganism/Heathenism/Wicca/Druidry, please feel free to message me and I’ll be happy to answer questions.
Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been Pagan since she was 14 [which was a long time ago] and been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. She has direct communication with her gods and they’ve always given her answers when she asks. [One does have to ask.] Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. Be warned.
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