Let's Not Get Washed Away

We can drown, or ride the river

Steven Smith, author of Pagans and Christians in the City maintains that polytheism persisted beneath the surface of Christianity, a substrate that never left. Smith sees this substrate as chaos and disorder. He associates it with multiple things that the ancients considered to be acceptable practices, and there’s no doubt that as modern humans we would not want to go back to those practices. Slavery, and sex with children was normal in Greece and Rome and he’s not the only one who views paganism itself as chaos. Louise Perry cites him in her essay We Are Re-Paganizing, and I addressed another such article here.

Such essays are worth reading for any modern Pagan, unpleasant as it may be. Denying that our spiritual ancestors had practices that we would - and should - find completely unacceptable is to deny the boundaries of existence. Pretending we have no limitations won’t keep gravity from squashing us flat when we jump off a building. As humans, if we want to survive, then we have to acknowledge the limitations of the embodied world [conservatism] It’s important to understand the cultural institutions that allowed people who came before us because those institutions contributed to our survival. [Chesterton’s fence.]

But also as humans, we can seek to innovate our way around such limitations [progressivism]. That innovation can be technological, economic, ethical, philosophical, or even religious.

We’ve done it before.

There was a time when human sacrifice was entirely acceptable. There was a time when someone killing a kinsman meant a blood feud. There was a time when slavery was normal for nearly every culture.

Human sacrifice is now rare, and illegal nearly everywhere, and is explicitly forbidden in both the world’s major religions and in Ancient Greek polytheism. [The only such incident in mythology is the death of Iphengia. This event is not described in a positive light. Alternatively, the girl is saved and Artemis replaces her with a doe.] Even the Romans, used as an example of a dissolute society by Perry, did not find human sacrifice to the gods acceptable [although it should be noted that the definition of ‘human’ did not extend to fallen Vestal Virgins or hermaphroditic infants.]

Blood feuds were forbidden as a point of law in the Ten Commandments [Thou shalt not murder] and condemned much earlier in the story of Cain and Abel. To kill other humans without justification [ie., self-defense or war] was to show contempt for the creator who made us in his image. Violence outside the battles of caste warriors is condemned in the Mahabharata, one of Hinduism’s sacred texts.

Slavery was the norm in the ancient world, except for India which solved the labor problem with the caste system. [Whether or not that was a better solution is debatable.] Christians like to claim that slavery was abolished because of their religion, and I believe we should be giving major credit to Christians for that. It was Christian arguments coming out of a Christian country that at last did the job. However, the idea that one should free one’s slaves has roots in pagan stoicism and grows forward into the Jewish Essenes before finally being taken up by Christians. The idea doesn’t come to full fruition until after the start of the Industrial Revolution which rendered human labor less profitable than the use of machines. [Oh yes, that nasty profit motive. Terrible. Just terrible.]

Over time, our morals have changed, and in profound ways. This change has twisted its way through religions and philosophies and has slowly made humans better. If the Middle Eastern and European Pagan world had not been steamrolled by Christianity, we would still have come up with the ideas that make humans better than we were 300,000 years ago. Good ideas increase the ability of humans to survive. Good ideas increase our collective well-being and our ability to create beauty and connect with mystery. The arc of these changes indicates [to me] that humans have access to an indefinable power that will guide us toward better behavior if only we’re willing to listen.

21st-century Pagans can choose how we innovate integrating old philosophies with new ideas; old myths with new understandings of what it is to be human. We can create new stories that weave together the old and the wildly new. We don’t have to settle for the fragments of story that defined 20th-century Paganism. We have access to a greater array of human knowledge than any generation before. We have a perspective that the High Modernists and Romantics of the 19th century did not. [I was just chatting about this with one of my writing buddies.]

With humility and guidance from the gods, we can filter through that flood of information to learn how to become better individuals, and then how to reach out and help our families, and our communities, and eventually tell better stories about who we are. Stories we can pass to our children and grandchildren.

Paganism - and paganism - is one way of connecting to the unseen world that is the source of goodness. We are part of a river of ideas, growth, and human development. Let’s be part of the river and not the log jam that gets washed away in the flood.

Pagans have things to fix if we aren’t going to fade into oblivion. If you’re Pagan [or Heathen] and believe we have practices that could be part of a vibrant community of religions [as was the case in the ancient world] then subscribe now.

Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has 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. 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.