Defining Paganism (1.5)

The first definition of Paganism that I offered, that of Prof. Michael York, should be placed in its context, which was primarily the academic study of religion. (Amazon link to York’s published books.)

When it was published in 2003, academic interest in the study of contemporary (or neo-) Paganism had been growing, but primarily from the point of  view of Paganism as a new religious movement.

Within the academy — and here I speak mainly of the American Academy of Religion, the largest body for such study on this continent (it includes many Canadians too) — even the study of new religious movements was way off to the side. Those scholars themselves were relative newcomers to the AAR, which had its origins in the study of Christianity and which devoted most of its program sessions to textual matters.

York not only situated Paganism  as “a religion, a behavior, and a theology,” he argued that Pagan elements were found in other “world religions” too — not just “Pagan survivals” but behaviors, primarily.

I don’t mean to suggest cause and effect — one book did not do that  — but it was at about the same time that the AAR’s leadership, which had rejected a proposed Pagan Studies program unit — a permanent slot, in other words — in 1997,  relented in 2004 and granted it.

So York helped to forge a sort of non-sectarian (not Wiccan, not Asatru, not Roman reconstructionist, etc.) definition that would change people’s minds to where they no longer thought that the P-word meant “having no religion” or “follower of an obsolete religion from long ago.”

Instead, it would be a type of religion or a way of being religious. Paganism (academic definition) was everywhere.

Defining Paganism (1)

A couple of a weeks ago, on another blog, a commenter, wishing to insist that his sort of Paganism was different from some other people’s Paganism, concluded his comment by asserting that there was no overall definition of Paganism anyway.

I decided to step in and disagree, since I could think of at least two non-sectarian definitions. I offered the broad, relationship-focused definition that Michel York offered a few years ago in Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion.

An affirmation of interactive and polymorphic sacred relationship by the individual or community with the tangible, sentient and/or nonempirical.”

But what about atheist Pagans!? the commenter responded, thinking that he had me cornered.

Not a problem, I said, they fit under the umbrella too. York offered it as a definition that allows not only polytheism but non-theistic humanism and naturism/naturalism.

The commenter responded with something about “gobbledegook,” which I translate as “You are asking me to think too much and to question my position.”

But even though I know that reading comprehension is low online, I am going to break down York’s definition and talk briefly abut what I like it from a religious-studies perspective. Then in a future post, I will look at another definition, one perhaps more suited to a historian.

“An affirmation” — Not a “belief” or a “creed,” but just an understanding by practitioners that this sacred relationship exists.

“interactive and polymorphic” — whatever Pagans do, they treat as flowing both ways: “We need the gods, and the gods need us.” “We respond to the world, and the world responds to us.”  These relationships are polymorphic because they can take many shapes—not just formal worship, but all kinds of interactions.

“sacred relationship” — now here we hit rough water. The existence of “the sacred” or any “agent beyond the purview of science” is debatable in religious studies. One contingent sees the term “sacred” as meaningless (or of “mixed empirical utility”) and asserts that every action or attitude described as “sacred” can be explained within the the realms of human power games, economic games, gender games, etc. Or else it is just an accidental product of brain wiring of dubious evolutionary value.

But for now, let assume a sacred realm, as most religious people do, with which one can  have a relationship. That does not necessarily mean a theistic relationship. For more than anything, this definition treats “Pagan” as a way of being religious, not as a set of rituals or beliefs or creeds.

“by the individual or community” — Solitary Pagans, you’re covered.

“with the tangible, sentient and/or nonempirical” — this phrase covers “green religion” in Bron Taylor’s sense. Your relationship might be with Mother Ocean, as his is. Or a mountain? Or a work of art — all tangible. It may be with persons, human or other-than-human, but still characterized as sacred.

It might be with the “nonempirical,” those “agents beyond the purview of science”: spirits, gods, wights, whatever you want to call them. But the “or” still leaves room for non-theistic Pagans.

In the book, York differentiates Paganism from other ideal types of religion: Abrahamic, dharmic, and secular. But he also sees “paganism” (he does not capitalize) as appearing in other religions, for example, if Christian pilgrims visit a sacred mountain (the tangible), that is a Pagan element in their practice.

Certainly some Sunni Muslims would agree: hence the Saudi government’s destruction of sites from the time of the prophet Muhammed, including what many think was a house he lived in — these tangible elements might distract believers from The Book.

This definition, unlike the next one that I will discuss, is set out independent of culture, history, ethnicity, and so forth. It does put what seem like disparate groups into one basket — and it largely ignores groups’ claims about their own origins, lineages, and so forth.

But to return to the idea of “a way of being religious,” it does seem useful in discussing earth- and body-centered  practices (such as pilgrimage) that were previously shoved to the side in favor of textual criticism and the study of hierarchies and religious transmission from one leader to the next.

Multi-media Sutton Hoo

A multi-media site about the excavation of the Anglo-Saxon era ship burial at Sutton Hoo in1939, with archival footage from the British Musem and more.

It is often believed to be a king’s burial site, since it contained armor and weapons, a lyre, gold coins, and many rich grave goods from different places.

Books, Monopolies, and the Internet

Two articles that seem to relate to each other.

1. Having gotten the majority of the book market through aggressive discounting, Amazon is (surprise) raising prices, although their prices on academic books are still often under the publisher’s list price.

Bruce Joshua Miller, president of Miller Trade Book Marketing, a Chicago firm representing university and independent presses, said he recently surveyed 18 publishers. “Fourteen responded and said that Amazon had over the last few years either lowered discounts on scholarly books or, in the case of older or slow-selling titles, completely eliminated them,” he said.

2. Google, Facebook, and Twitter want to create “closed gardens” for their users, as America Online, Compuserve, etc. tried to do twenty years ago.  You go to the site, and you stay there. Hence Google’s elimination of Google Reader: RSS and Atom feeds are free, low-maintenance, and don’t make money.

Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started, seemingly accidentally: the battle to own everything.While Google did technically “own” Reader and could make some use of the huge amount of news and attention data flowing through it, it conflicted with their far more important Google+ strategy: they need everyone reading and sharing everything through Google+ so they can compete with Facebook for ad-targeting data, ad dollars, growth, and relevance.

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople.

New Book on Ukrainian Paganism

The Return of Ancestral Gods: Modern Ukrainian Paganism as an Alternative Vision for a Nation by Mariya Lesiv, who teaches in the Department of Folklore at  the Memorial University of Newfoundland, has now been released by McGill-Queen’s University Press in Canada.

From the publisher’s site:

In The Return of Ancestral Gods, Mariya Lesiv explores Pagan beliefs and practices in Ukraine and amongst the North American Ukrainian diaspora. Drawing on intensive fieldwork, archival documents, and published sources not available in English, she allows the voices of Pagans to be heard. Paganism in Slavic countries is heavily charged with ethno-nationalist politics, and previous scholarship has mainly focused on this aspect. Lesiv finds it important to consider not only how Paganism is preached but also the way that it is understood on a private level. She shows that many Ukrainians embrace Paganism because of its aesthetic aspects rather than its associated politics and discusses the role that aesthetics may play in the further development of Ukrainian Paganism.

An earlier article of hers, “Glory to Dazhboh (Sun-god) or to All Native Gods?: Monotheism and Polytheism in Contemporary Ukrainian Paganism,” appeared in The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, in 2009.

Joss Whedon on how your Body Wants to be Mulch — and other Wisdom

Joss Whedon returns to his alma mater to give the commencement speech.

If this had been my commencement speech, I might have remembered something about it. It’s nice to see someone with a tragic (in the old sense) view of life.

As it was, my commencement  speaker was some history or poli sci professor from somewhere . . . I don’t remember a single thing about it. I can remember what I wore that day (Reed College did not do gowns), and that is about all.

Other classes before mine had it better. One year the Æsthetes were in charge of the committee, and they brought in Anaïs Nin, in flowing garments — speaking about Beauty, I suppose — while young Æsthetes swooned at her feet. Paperback copies of her diary were not uncommon on campus.

The next year the jocks-with-brains were in charge, and they hired Heywood Hale Broun. A sportscaster!

But it was my girlfriend’s graduation, so I went, and my expectations were upended. This guy whom I had seen on TV blathering about football and racehorses while wearing loud plaid sport coats ended up giving a straight-up-the-middle talk about the eternal verities of the liberal arts. As I recall, he actually used the phrase “eternal verities,” making it both sincere and simultaneously ironic. I learned something that day.

As for my class, I knew we arrived at a rough time for the college — how rough, I learned only later. Maybe we should just have been happy that there was still a college to gradate from four years down the road.

Heathenry and the Politics of Postcolonialism

Thad Horrell, Heathen and graduate student, hurls himself against the issue of post-colonialism and reconstructed Northern religion in this article, “Heathenry as a Postcolonial Movement,” published in the online Journal of Religion, Identity and Politics, written by students in his PhD program.

His thesis is “that Heathenry is ‘postcolonial’  in complex and contradictory senses of the term. It both acknowledges and offers resistance to the imperialism of Christendom, while simultaneously trivializing colonialism and making it seem merely a thing of the past.”

I will argue that Heathenry is a postcolonial movement both in the sense that it combats and challenges elements of colonial history and the contemporary expectations derived from it (anti-colonial), and in the much more problematic sense that it serves to justify current social and racial inequalities by pushing the structures of colonialism off as a thing of the past (pro-colonial). Rather than promoting a sense of solidarity with colonized populations, Heathen critiques of colonialism and imperialism often serve to justify disregard for claims of oppression by colonized minorities. After all, if we’ve all been colonized, what is there to complain about?

This trope of resistance is employed in academic writing as well as “insider” writing. It shines through Carole Cusack’s recent Pomegranate article on the emperor Charlemagne’s “jihad” (to borrow an appropriate term) against the Pagan Saxons: “Pagan Saxon Resistance to Charlemagne’s Mission: ‘Indigenous’ Religion and ‘World’ Religion in the Early Middle Ages.”

The ideas of invasion, colonization, and resistance were important in the first years of Wicca too, although not so much since the 1950s.

Gerald Gardner played the nativist card as well, implicitly conflating the threatened invasion of southern England by the German army in 1940 with the “Gregorian mission” that brought Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England in the sixth century. (The earlier Celtic-speaking post-colonial-Roman Britain had been heavily Christian as well by the end.)

But the idea of resistance to “invasion” has put down deeper roots in contemporary Norse, Baltic, and Slavic Paganism than in the Anglosphere, I think.

The Cup that Cheers but does not Cause OCD

Caffeine is good for creative workers, whereas stimulants like Adderall do not necessarily help.

Caffeine also blocks adenosine receptors in your brain. Stephen Braun, author of Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine, once explained it as an “indirect stimulant, as opposed to, say, amphetamine which liberates dopamine, a directly stimulating neurotransmitter. By blocking adenosine receptors, caffeine allows the brain’s own stimulating neurotransmitters (i.e. glutamate and dopamine) to do their thing with greater gusto and less restraint.”

For a time in college I did experiment with a combination of coffee and the now-obsolete tranquilizer Meprobamate (a/k/a Miltown).* Two inches off the floor and flying steady. It’s a good thing that I was too poor to get seriously into that kind of thing.

 

* People calling Milwaukee “Mil-town” are too young to get the joke?

Spica, Online Cultural Astrology Journal, Launched

The Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture at the University of Wales Trinity St. David (formerly at Bath Spa University College) now has an online journal, Spica, with work by students in the MA program in cultural astronomy and astrology.

Spica is available as a free PDF here.

Articles in the premier issue include “An investigation into how counsellors/psychotherapists respond to clients who introduce astrological beliefs into therapy sessions” and “Do consumers of astrological services use astrology as a method of actively seeking divine guidance? If so, what astrological services are sought for the purpose? A Pilot Study.”

Sacred Geography in the Cumberland Plateau

Interpreting prehistoric rock art is a challenge, and I suspect that some of Professor Simek’s colleagues may well challenge his interpretation, but he has been looking at petroglyphs from the Mississippian culture and thinks that they describe a three-tier cosmology (Upper, Middle, and Lower Worlds), already attested elsewhere.

A Mississippian priest, with a ceremonial flint mace and severed head. Artist Herb Roe, based on a repoussé copper plate. (Wikipedia).

The Mississippian Culture is a term applied to people living in the area from about 800–1500 CE, contemporary with the European Middle Ages. These people  lived in fortified villages, and some built large ceremonial mounds.

Simek and his team analyzed 44 open- air art sites where the art is exposed to light and 50 cave art sites in the Cumberland Plateau using nondestructive, high-tech tools, such as a high-resolution laser scanner. Through analysis of the depictions, colors, and spatial organization, they found that the sites mimic the Southeastern native people’s cosmological principles.

“The cosmological divisions of the universe were mapped onto the physical landscape using the relief of the Cumberland Plateau as a topographic canvas,” said Simek.

The “upper world” included celestial bodies and weather forces personified in mythic characters that exerted influences on the human situation. Mostly open-air art sites located in high elevations touched by the sun and stars feature these images. Many of the images are drawn in the color red, which was associated with life.

The “middle world” represented the natural world. A mixture of open air and cave art sites hug the middle of the plateau and feature images of people, plants and animals of mostly secular character.

The “lower world” was characterized by darkness and danger, and was associated with death, transformation and renewal. The art sites, predominantly found in caves, feature otherworldly characters, supernatural serpents and dogs that accompanied dead humans on the path of souls. The inclusion of creatures such as birds and fish that could cross the three layers represents the belief that the boundaries were permeable. Many of these images are depicted in the color black, which was associated with death.

Read the rest at Heritage Daily, an online archaeology magazine. Wikipedia’s article on the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex connects with all this, particularly the section on cosmology.