In construction
Is it possibly to derive ethical views from pagan values?
Assuming we can use the term 'pagan' to capture a specific set of religious practitioners - it's unlikely they would be able to come up with an agreed list of values. Its the nature of paganism to be vague about these things. Even so here are are some possibilities.
pagan values
1. Cause no unneccessary harm
I've a feeling that might be a self-evident truth.
You have to be pretty bloody minded to think the opposite.
Can you think of a counter example?
2. The necessity of polytheism
Some would say monotheism is the only necessity.
But true monotheism is rare.
For example, Christianity is a good example of polytheism masquerading as monotheism. The complexity of nature implies a natural polytheism
3. The plurality of ultimate truth
A great deal of effort has been devoted to the discovery of one 'ultimate truth' or one 'Theory of Everything.' But theories such as Godel's Theorem of incompleteness surely imply this issue will always be unresolved. In which case ultimate reality is always plural - which is expressed in certain pagan mythology such as that the world comes into being from the interaction of a god and a goddess.
4. Tolerance
5. Principle of Honour
6. Compassion
Issues:
Abortion
Conflict
Death and Burial
I take it Caliban's long comment is intended for the issue of 'Death & Burial'. He seems to be saying that the intellectual paganism of the classical period (Greeks and Romans) is responsible for a loss of the richer attitudes to death and the otherworld, traces of which are still discoverable in older cultures. It's an interesting idea and one that is evidenced in the literature. It maybe goes hand in hand with the idea that magicians of the period were such trouble makers that they provoked their own demise. Certainly it can't all be blamed on the Christians - bad as they were - the first laws against magick were enacted by Augustus way before the Christian hegemony.
The high culture of Egyptian had three classes of sentient being-
the ankhw, the akhw and the neterw -
the living, the spirits and the gods.
All that talk of 'spiritualism' is really about the Akhw - the spirits of departed who have some continued existence - sometimes in a way helpful to us sometimes not so. Death customs may be for the benefit of the deceased or serve some other aim - perhaps display or redistribution of wealth. Nothing so far implies an afterlife in some otherworld. The Akhw live amongst us not somewhere else, if they did maybe they would be less troublesome? Some death customs clearly do implie an otherworld - as for instance when someone is buried with a sword presumably to do some fighting on the other side. The death customs I like seek to return the body to the biosphere in respectful but also quick and efficient manner. The departed spirit is reborn or otherwise reintegrated into the living world of those that come after. That to me seems a more pagan way.
Divorce
Drugs - use & abuse
Ecology
Euthanasia
Gambling
Medicine & its limits
Politics
Sexuality
Sexual politics
A dialogue - please leave your feedback
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3 comments:
As a spiritualist, I am never certain whether I am a pagan or not. After all, it seems rather strange to deny Christ his position as one of the world’s great religious teachers, even though I admit my personal Christology needs further clarification. On top of this, etymologies of the word “Pagan” tell us it means “countryman”, “rustic” or “bumpkin”, and although I hail from Hampshire- with a suspicion that poetry is written for country folk by country folk- I have lived over half my life in London. Therefore, as I stand before you in my usual luminal position.
5. The Underworld
A few weeks before he died, Franz Kafka wrote in one of his Blue Octavo Notebooks, “There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the evil in the spiritual world, and what we call evil is only a moment in our eternal evolution”. Well, autumn is the season of the dead. The traditional time when we remember our ancestors (both literary and otherwise), and recall their trials as well as their tribulations before we reach beyond the eco-politics and Romantic philosophy of modern western paganism into the numinous promise of renewed light. Perhaps this is why I have come to understand Spiritualism as more than a series of “Pagan techniques”, but rather as a sophisticated religious ideology in its own right. For me, it is the esoteric thread between theology and the visionary arts, the very key to unlock the sigils and seals of sacred texts. As I wrote in a recent blog, “Spiritualism is part of my being, like air and laughter”. This implies, of course, that spiritualisms practice and perfection is primarily found in the context of worship. Indeed, without the necessary checks and balances offered by a Coven, Hearth or Church family, the work of even a gifted Medium or talented healer may fall into mere entertainment or prurient paranoia. In an unfortunate sense, their monadic and psychic gifts are reduced to yet another form of therapy on an already overly extended medicinal agenda. Only worship prevents this religious diminution by opening the world around us to the realities beneath its surface.
Having said that, to what extent the earliest accounts describing the conditions of the deceased in Indian, Greek or British pagan literature reflect much older conceptual schemes is open to debate, even though I would contend that the immensely rich mystical systems of India are probably the most representative. From the outset, the Sanskrit hymns sing about the various bodies used by the Atman as well as the social ambiguities surrounding the physical remains of the dead person. Clearly, age-old customs concerning the cadaver ranged from barbaric cremation ceremonies to the subtlties of Vedic ritual. They explained that the physical body would disperse into sky, earth and water, while the eyes, breath and limbs go back into their cosmic equivalents; sun, wind and plants. Moreover, bodily liquids were likened to the air, or in other words, the middle realm between sky and earth. As one of the death hymns states:” For Yama press the soma; to Yama offer the oblation; to Yama goes the well-prepared sacrifice, with Agni as its messenger”. Therefore the founders of our civilisation understood the physically dead as permeating the environment with their wisdom and compassion, while the irreducible self learned to transcend both time and space.
By contrast, the hedonistic pleasures of early Greek pagans led to increasingly reductionist views of the after-life. Sadly the poets became obsessed with loss. Consequently, the fate of the psyche or shadow-image was seen as simply the perpetuation of an enfeebled double beneath Erebus. At death, it was said, this double descended into a twilight realm where (still mindful of its former estate), this radically depleted left-over bemoaned its passing. In an often cited passage from book 11 of the Odyssey, the hero Achilles is briefly re-animated by the blood of a sacrificed goat to say, “Nay, speak not comfortably to me of death, oh Great Odysseus. Rather would I live upon the earth as a hireling of another, with a landless man who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead that be departed”. Among the Greeks any idea of an elevated immortality came through the timely intervention of the mystery cults- first the Eleusian and shortly afterwards the Dionysian and Orphic schools. These faiths and formulas managed to both focus and deepen a developing public concern that something essential had been mislaid. Certainly, only the “pure” who had been initiated into the secret rituals (detailing a true worship of Demeter), were promised a privileged destiny following death. As one of these elect students tells us, “blessed is the man who has beheld these holy acts; but he that is uninitiated and has no share in the holy ceremonies, shall not enjoy a like fate after his death, in the gloomy darkness of Hades”. Thus one can only conjecture that the Greeks suffered from the taint of caste, an elitist poison proving hard to resist.
6. Other realms
Curiously, this metaphysical imbalance was redressed by Northern European pagan literature, particularly among the Irish and Welsh Bards. In their striking poetry and thought-provoking prose many other planes of existence are referred to, including the world of the fairy folk. As Evens-Wentz pointed out in his masterly work “The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries”, these beings were sometimes seen as nature spirits and at yet other times they were the fay, that is to say departed ancestors. It was said that some of them went to take possession of the mounds and tumuli within which an entire supernatural world could be encompassed. There were also fields of happiness such as Mag mell, and lands beneath the sea where lay Tir Fo Thuinn which awaited the very fortunate few. Conversly, dark and sinister spheres also threatened those who had betrayed their tribe, or possibly theatres of warfare for those who intended to help the Gods in their struggle against the Demons. Further, there were fearful domains of hungry giants and desperate phantoms. Fascinatingly then, it seems an almost Vedic flavour sweetened British “death literature” as it mapped a path through endless worlds for every soul seeking the mysteries of the Pleroma.
7. Conclusion
Unlike the Victorians, we can all openly talk about every sexual possibility, but it has become something of a clique that we moderns can’t talk about death. We either ignore it or pretend that this angel will somehow pass us bye. However, death poses the ultimate existential question and spiritualism in all of its forms has responded by powerfully producing comparative cartographies of the realms beyond. As Shakespeare allows Hamlet to admit, “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we shuffle off this mortal coil, must give us pause”, which if correctly understood, is a strident defence of those who prize higher states of consciousness against the limitations and mechanisms of the mundane; limitations thrown aside in every act of worship.
I agree with all the suggested principles. My husband and I came up with a summary: "Connect and balance". Connect = empathy with the other (covers point 1, 3, 4 and 6) and balance = dynamic equilibrium (sort of covers 2 and 5).
If you finish this as an article, I'd definitely like to blag it for the Pagan Theologies wiki.
I think ethics and theology are a stumbling block for a lot of Pagans because they assume that they are dry and rational, whereas Paganisms are about lived experience. But we can express our theology however we want - the term was coined by a Pagan anyway.
There is an excellent essay series on handling conflict within a pagan organization at http://home.mn.rr.com/bichaunt/Trolls/index.html
As for politics, it is my view that religion has no place in politics and vice versa. I keep my religious beliefs seperate from my political beliefs.
I have more to add later, but I'm headed to bed right now.
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