Tag Archives: polytheism

The tricky side of charisma

Over at GetReligion, a blog devoted to the collision of religion and journalism, Terry Mattingly links to a story of a Pentecostal preacher in trouble.

The details do not concern me. What caught my eye was this part of the linked posting:

Again, in my opinion, this false teaching arose because church leaders saw a need to conceal the widespread sexual immorality in their own ranks. “Touch not mine anointed” is often repeated alongside the Apostle Paul’s statement that “the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.” The latter verse, from Romans, is used to rationalize how a minister can lead a completely dissipated life and still display genuine gifts of God such as the ability to preach or prophesy. The misuse of these verses has done tremendous damage within the Pentecostal-charismatic tradition.

Something that we polytheists should understand — something that I learned in my first coven — is that magickal ability or even the favor of the gods is not the same thing as moral character.

When Mattingly calls Rev. Allen “charismatic — in every sense of the word,” that is what he is saying, with his Christian terminology. The man has “the juice.” But having the juice does not mean that you trust in him other areas.

I suspect that Socrates, for instance, knew that perfectly well. Consequently, he does not discuss it. Every ancient Athenian probably knew that you could be filled with divine power — enthused — now and then, but being so enthused did not make you a philosopher.

Monotheists, however, want it all in one package: the Professional Good Man, to borrow a phrase from Elmer Gantry. Consequently, they are always dealing with clergy-corruption issues.

I had not realized that Pentecostal Christians, in particular, used Bible verses to explain away the issue. They ought to just understand that even if someone “displays the genuine gifts of [their] God,” he or she may still not be someone to listen to in other areas. Their sheep/sheepherder model of organization gets them in trouble again and again.

Blog Valhalla, Polytheism, Books and More

¶ Yvonne Aburrow’s Pagan theologies wiki has what might be the definitive list of active Pagan blogs. I am adding a link on my sidebar.

¶ Speaking of which, this blog now appears on BeliefNet’s Blog Heaven page again. Thanks to everyone who made a fuss.

¶Bedside reading: I started, put aside, but will return to John Lamb Lash’s Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief.

It is a difficult book for me to evaluate: I sympathize with Lash’s point of view, but I think that he distorts some of his sources too much in order to support his views. He wants to use Gnosticism as a path that “can provide the spiritual dimension for deep ecology independently of the three mainstream religions derived from the Abrahamic traditions.”

Gnosticism is still concerned with “salvation,” a concept largely at odds with polytheism, as John Michael Greer points out (see below). Much Gnostic thinking disparages physical existences as a “mistake,” so I am waiting to see how Lash reconciles that with deep ecology and its focus on our relationship with and as a part of nature.

Lash writes his introduction around the life of Hypatia of Alexandria, a Platonic philosopher murdered by a Christian mob in 415 CE. He wants to view her as an “urban shaman,” but I see her more as today’s tenured professor of mathematics. An intellectual through and through. Note how she elevates philosophy over erotic attraction this story of her teaching, true or not.

Reviewing Not in His Image in the Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Kirch writes:

Lash is capable of explaining the mind-bending concepts of Gnosticism and pagan mystery cults with bracing clarity and startling insight. At moments, however, he slips into a kind of New Age rant as baffling as any mystical text. “What we seek in ‘Gaia theory’ is a live imaginal dimension,” he writes in one such passage, “not a scaffolding of cybernetic general systems cogitation.” . . . .

And when he considers what he calls the “sci-fi theology” of the ancient Gnostics, he comes uncomfortably close to affirming that the otherworldly “Archons” of Gnostic myth were authentic extraterrestrials.

An interesting book, but full of special pleading.

¶I am happier with John Michael Greer’s A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism, published by the Druidic group Ár nDraíocht Féin.

Greer’s arguments for polytheism as offering a better model of the universe (including the evil and suffering in it) than monotheism and his lucid explanation of polytheistic spirituality deserve a wide hearing.

He works hard to show that monotheistic thinkers simply do not comprehend the polytheistic experience, and their arguments against it (unless enforced by violence as in Hypatia’s case) simply fail.

Indeed, ancient and modern Pagans alike have the described mystical states in which they have become aware of multitudes of divine beings filling every corner of the cosmos; in the words of the Greek philosopher Thales, they have seen that “all things are full of gods.” This is the polar opposite of henotheism; it is also among the most powerful and transforming of Pagan religious experiences.

The Snake Motif

Right before M. and I left on the road trip that culminated in my rattlesnake bite and hospital stay, I was having trouble with a blockage in the bathroom lavatory.

I did not think that I could get my large plumber’s “snake” down through the waste pipe behind the wall, and I thought of going to the hardware store and picking up a hand-operated plumber's snakesmaller one. But we were busy packing, and so I left the problem for later.

And then, five days later, came the bite from a “baby” rattlesnake and, minutes later, an encounter with a larger one who acted like a proper rattlesnake. In other words, the second one gave us a warning buzz so that we could avoid it.

Home again and still on crutches, I called Cory the plumber. He roared up the driveway in his big diesel van the following morning.

Of course I had to explain the crutches. A few minutes later, he had disassembled the drain and was carrying his electric plumber’s snake up from the van.

“I’ve had about enough of this snake motif,” I said.

“All right,” he replied, “we’ll call it an auger.”

Little snake and big snake, metaphorical. Little snake and big snake, literal.

Sometimes the only god worth worshiping is the god of irony.

There is a complicated message here about the “poison path,” I think, but I am still thinking about it.

Practical Polytheism

Practical Polytheism

I am currently reading Devoted to You: Honoring Deity in Wiccan Practice. The title is a bit of a misnomer, as one contributor, Maureen Reddington-Wilde, could be more properly described as a Greek Reconstructionist. Since I was recently blogging about Aphrodite, I’m starting with Reddington-Wilde’s chapter on Her.

Editor Judy Harrow contributes a section on Gaia; other constributors are Alexei Kondratiev (Brigit) and Geoffrey W. Miller (Anubis).

Harrow writes, “We are four Pagan henotheists, each of whom has a long-standing devotion to the Deity he or she has written about here. We are devoted. We respect and admire one another’s devotion. . . . Since modern Paganism is a high-choice relgion, we have a wide range of choices in our basic approach to religion itself. So another thing that I would hope is that this book will show you something of the range of options available to you and help you find your own comfortable place within that range.”

Vodou souls

“The Quick and the Dead: The Souls of Man in Vodou Thought” is an essay by the Berkeley, California, musicologist Richard Hodges, who writes, “In nineteenth century France, the Nancy school of hypnotism discovered a way of producing states of abandonment of the body by the personality as profound as in traditional ritual possession. This only became a minor chapter in the history of Western medical psychology. There is a deep-seated prejudice in the West against loss of control. There is such a high evaluation of the individual and his personality that it is very difficult to conceive of the possibility for the ego to relax its grip and to accept to be displaced by something higher and finer. Such relaxation is one of the fundamental states of the human psyche. The absence in the West of cultural institutions for the socialization and development of this state is one of the signs of the loss of genuine psycho-spiritual knowledge in modern times. “