Stories Are a Way to Model Moral Codes
Myths tell us what's important and why
Other than the 9 Noble Virtues, Pagans don’t have a moral code that’s obvious to Christians and Jews. I think this is part of the difficulty we can have in communicating to them who and what we are. If you don’t know what to expect, wariness is natural. They don’t know what we’re aiming at, let alone how to understand it.
I write fiction under a pen name. [Mine - Selina Rifkin - never gets spelled right.] The world I’m writing in is a place where the gods never stopped talking to intelligent beings and the gods manifest, interfere with the intelligent races, and even grow and change. For the purposes of world-building, I had to think about what kind of world we would have had if the Catholic Church hadn’t co-opted ancient pagan philosophy and sacred spaces.
This has become a useful exercise in theology and morality. While we live in a distinctly Christian culture [which I certainly prefer to the alternatives] I’ve been thinking about how we might have gotten to some of the excellent things about the West without that strong Christian influence. Ideas thread their way through history, and Augustine was a Manachean and then a Neoplatonist before he became Christian. He embraced Plato’s ideas and carried them forward. Greek philosophy continued to influence the Christian religion, especially once the printing press was invented. The ideas of less well-known Greek philosophers became available to the merchant class where they were debated. All were interested in the best way to live, and the best way to act.
The Quest for a Moral Compass by Kenan Malik presents a history of moral thought from Ancient Greece, to Christianity, the Enlightenment, and up through more modern ethical philosophers such as Sam Harris.
I find how people decide what is right and wrong fascinating. While every culture is different, there are some remarkable similarities in the moral codes of various religions. For example, every religion agrees that murdering one’s fellow practitioners is unacceptable, as is lying, and stealing. The fact that we can all agree those things are bad is the basis of moral codes.
What is considered right and good has changed over the span of history.
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. There was a time when kings were seen as infallible manifestations of the divine.
Human sacrifice is now rare, and illegal nearly everywhere. It is explicitly forbidden in the world’s major religions. But it was also bad in Ancient Greek polytheism. The only such incident in mythology is the death of Iphengia. This is not described in a positive light. In the later version, the girl is saved and Artemis replaces her with a doe.
Blood feuds were forbidden as a point of law in the Ten Commandments [Which are pre-Christian] [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 people in his image. Christians like to claim this one, but Jews would differ. 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.] But the idea that one shouldn’t own slaves arose among the Greek Stoics and the Jewish Essenes. When economics made it practical, Christianity originated the abolition movement, and slavery slowly became illegal [although it still exists underground in various forms.]
Kings were divine. That stopped with Christianity. However, the change might have had as much to do with increasing populations and economic activity as it did with religion. [I haven’t spent much time looking at this one yet. It’s a new-to-me-idea.] Now we have various forms of representative rule instead.
All of these are good. Over time, our morals have changed, and in profound ways. This change has been for the better. I believe the arc of these changes indicates humans have access to an indefinable power that will guide us toward better behavior if only we’re willing to listen. That might be the Pagan gods or a monotheistic deity. There is reasonable evidence both from evolutionary biology and psychology that it is better to have a religious community and a belief in something greater than ourselves. Certainly, my gods guide me. I ask for help and the answer comes.
The moral stance on proper behavior and how we should orient ourselves in the world is told in myths. Myths tell us what mattered to the ancient pagan -and Jewish - people, and seeing how stories change over time allows us to track the way values change, as with the story of Iphegenia. It wasn’t enough for Homer to speak of the girl’s dreadful death, Ovid felt the need to erase it entirely, writing a new rendition that allowed for her escape. The tale of King Arthur is another example. The oldest mention of anything having to do with such a person appears in the 6th century [Gildas] and refers to Ambrosius Aurelius. But slowly the story grows and changes until it becomes a moral tale about the value of courtly love.
How might the stories of the Greeks, or the Norse, or the Celts have continued to develop if they had had room to do so? What modern values might they have arrived at? What stories would they have told their children?
Some ancient values are no longer ours. The Greeks took a dim view of hope. All three were slave cultures and the Norse even have slavery as part of an origin story. I believe someone would have changed that story.
We still can. We cannot change what has already happened, and re-writing history is unwise, to say the least. But as creative Pagans, we can make new stories and reclaim the theology that was ours. Theology that could integrate Paganism into a wider community of religions and let us go about our lives with a moral compass as clear to non-Pagans as the Ten Commandments.
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.