31 Days of Offerings – Day 17-18: Community Redefined

Offerings don’t have to be a solely Pagan affair. We do too much separatism, for people who claim to believe that the world itself is sacred.

Last weekend I was heavily involved in helping to run this conference (see also here, where a group that participated has reviewed it), for which I’ve been on the planning committee most of this year (and I do a lot of their publicity, and was their social media person, and tweeted on the day, and, and…). I’m still recovering! I’ve not really talked about this much in Pagan circles, because, well, Christian.

But I grew up in a Christian context (actually I was about 30 when I left church), and I believe my Wyrd is tied to that community. It is part of my Work. I’m not doing a PhD on Christianity and disability for my health (and definitely not for my wallet). I believe I have a calling, and activism around disability and churches is part of that calling.

Photo: St Martin-in-the-Fields church, London

Other offerings I give to a broad interfaith local community include inter-faith educational work, work with the Druid Network, and various other things that I do with the aim of improving dialogue between religious communities and serving the local community generally.

Ultimately, as well as an offering to the people around me, this is also an ancestor offering. Most of my ancestors were Christians. Social justice and Christianity was important to many of them, I gather from stories told about a few of them.

My exploration of the story of Narnia and its less-acceptable characters is all part of this tangled web of a spiritual-religious journey that never ends. My relationship with a very liminal deity probably is too.

I am a proud non-active Anglican (while also a polytheist and modern druid), living on the edge of the community that is itself living on the edge of the churches: the community of disabled Christians. Religion isn’t always about belief. In fact, in most of the world, it isn’t really. We’ve taken American evangelicalism and tried to apply it to Paganism as well as to every other religion in the world – but religion for most people is about action, much more than belief. Do the stuff. Embody your practice. Be.

Liminality. It’s not just about Otherworlds. ;)

New Blog: on Stories

I’m exploring the Sacred Story a lot in my spirituality at the moment. The power of stories and myths, both ancient and modern. Including the Christian Story. Since I suspect a lot of readers won’t want to be bothered with spirituality of that particular kind, I’m going to be talking about these things on a new blog. It’s called Lampposts and Other Light. Do feel free to follow me over there.

Druidry stuff will still go here – I’m not going away! :)

Wishing you peace and a good day, my friends.

My Goddess has a Sense of Humour: Random thoughts of the day*

Asking Her why I feel blocked in a particular situation led to: my need for a miracle (the Star), the suggestion that I do a deal with the Devil, the Empress and Emperor side by side (Beara looking the Christian god in the face, hand on hips, going “Is she yours or mine?”), and the Hermit (me, getting in the way of myself). That’s all a pretty good picture of how I’m feeling at the moment.

The above picture shows the Battlestar Galactica tarot deck I’m working on. It’s not finished, but I already adore it. I’m currently working on Wands, which are a difficult suit to start with. Lots of Gaius Baltar, for some reason. I also want to start on a Narnia oracle deck soon. That should be easier: grab the characters, let them speak.

On an entirely different note: I was just discussing April Fools with another person with Asperger’s, on twitter. We agreed that we rather hate it. Tell us something and we’ll believe you. Why wouldn’t we?! Metaphor. I find it difficult.

What I’m reading at the moment: Devoted ed. by Alkistis Dimech (wonderful), When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God by Tanya Luhrmann (also very good, though I keep forgetting it among all the other things I’m reading), The Poet’s Ogam by John-Paul Patton, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life by Meredith McGuire (excellent) and The Druid’s Primer by Luke Eastwood (review to follow as soon as I finish it). I want to write more book reviews at this ‘ere blog, so let me know if you’d like me to share my thoughts on any of the above.

In pain and illness news: Things are really quite bad at the moment. I can’t do much with my right arm (too much sitting at the computer typing – what’s a postgrad student to do?) and my lower back is all messed up as usual. I’m pondering how these things relate to embodied spirituality, at the moment. I’m learning so much from my participants, whose bodies frame and contain their spiritual lives much more than mine does.

In other news: Dilly Cat!

This is a shot I took lying on the floor alongside the bed in my office. She likes ‘under the bed’ a lot at the moment. But she’s willing to come out for cuddles when it’s quiet.

*I’m hoping ‘Random thoughts of the day’ posts will be a new series here. You will be hearing more pointless ramblings from my life. Rejoice.

Pagans, Quantum Physics and Rationality

In my experience, Pagans are amazing at skepticism, logic and rational argument – when it comes to other people’s religious or spiritual beliefs. Most Pagans that I know could tell you a lot about how Jesus is not the only dying-and-rising god that ancient societies ever thought of, or how Christmas was influenced by pre-Christian pagan traditions.

But many of these Pagans are not so good at deconstructing their own beliefs on certain things. People with fantastic minds, who I love talking to, and who I’ve heard demolish other people’s ideas, somehow often fall short of that intelligence and philosophical sharpness when it comes to common Pagan beliefs. Their own beliefs.

And one of the worst ways this happens is when the topic of quantum physics comes up.

Quantum Physics: Proof of Magic?

This week, Fire Lyte linked to this post on his Facebook wall.  The response was… interesting. Lots of people trying to prove that the writer of the article didn’t know anything about quantum physics. Not looking at their own beliefs.

There are repeating comments that I hear on this subject a lot. Comments that are loaded with logical fallacies. I’ve heard statements from Pagans on quantum physics that demonstrate the following fallacies:

– Argument from complexity (similar to an argument from ignorance): “Science is proving so many weird and complex things! So quantum physics could prove that my candle magic caused my pay rise!” Yes, it could, though the probability isn’t high, given what we know about quantum physics so far. Now come back to me when it does prove that and when we have evidence of this. Yes, science is proving some complex and weird things these days. We cannot use that to assume that it will prove what we want it to prove.

– Argument from silence: the idea that, since something cannot (yet) be disproved, it is proven. “The universe is a weird place. There are things in the universe that we will never be able to explain. We just can’t know everything!” We cannot argue that, because science shows that there is much about the universe we don’t understand, it proves that anything is possible. It specifically doesn’t do that.

– Ad hominem attack: an attack on the person who is writing/arguing, rather than on their arguments. “That person doesn’t know anything about quantum physics!” Doesn’t prove that you do. This argument should at least be followed up with “And here’s a link to some evidence that I’m going to use to argue my point. It is reliable because it is published in a respectable peer-reviewed scientific journal. It is backed up by these six other articles from six different reliable journals, and this conference paper, and this statement from the scientific community.” If not, you haven’t proven anything by attacking one individual, rather than focusing on their argument.

– Shifting the burden of proof: “Can you prove to me that quantum physics doesn’t cause magic to work?” No, I can’t. But the burden of proof is on you, not me. As Carl Sagan said, “Extrodinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

– Correlation proves causation: thinking that, because two things coincide, then one must be caused by the other. “Every time I get acupuncture I feel better. This must prove that quantum mechanics causes it to work.” That’s great. There may be all manner of reasons why that treatment is helping you. I have enormous faith in the badly-named ‘placebo effect’, which would be better called ‘the human body’s self-healing effect’. When I go for reflexology and acupuncture, I’m working on my body’s self-healing mechanisms. Also, quantum physics exists. There’s absolutely no reason why one should have anything to do with the other.

(Note: This is stretching the bounds of the correlation fallacy, a bit. I think it’s relevant. Tell me if you disagree!)

– Mind projection fallacy: i.e. because this belief matters to me, it’s relevant to everyone – and my opinion is worth more than your facts. “I believe quantum theory proves magic, and my opinion is just as valid as any scientist’s”. No, no, it’s not. Come back when you’ve studied quantum theory to doctorate level. In the meantime, I’ll be listening to the experts.

– False equivalence: “Homeopathy causes a quantum leap in a person’s physiology” (a direct quote from someone I know) – using the term in a way that scientists don’t use it, and confusing two different meanings of the word in the process. Here, the informal term ‘quantum leap’ has nothing to do with the physics term ‘quantum’. The statement is basically nonsense. (Sorry.)

I suspect there are many more logical fallicies in these arguments that I haven’t spotted yet. Have you seen any others? Let me know!

Your Mind Turned To Mush

You have an amazing mind. We all do. We’ve all won the lottery when it comes to consciousness, to quote Simon Clare. Evolution, one of the most exciting processes on the planet, has gifted us with thinking minds. Unfortunately, human beings get very attached to our irrational beliefs, again for reasons of evolution and our past survival. In the distant past, being able to see the pattern of a tiger moving between the trees was probably vital for our survival. Now, though, we hang on to that pattern-finding faculty even when it’s not necessary. We see patterns and call them magic. And we have all the right in the world to believe in magic. (I do!) What we can’t do, because we’ll never succeed, is argue that there is objective proof of that magic in science.

Why does it matter? Because we look like total idiots when we do it. Ultimately, if you want to make logical fallacies all over the place and demonstrate that your mind has turned to mush, you go right ahead. It doesn’t bother me. But you’re wrong. And if you want to be right – as your constant arguing suggests you do – then you may want to go away and educate yourself about science. Use that fabulous mind of yours – especially about your own beliefs. If you don’t, someone else will.

You won’t lose anything. You stand to gain a lot, though.

On another level, I guess I want to be a member of a religious/spiritual group that doesn’t talk rubbish. I was a member of evangelical Christian churches for a long time. My bullshit meter eventually exploded. I happen to think that the Pagan community can do better. Our community should be full of thoughtful, intelligent, well-read people who test our claims against reason, reality and science. I’ve met us. We’re clever people!

Faith Can’t Be Proven

Ultimately, some things will always be about faith, and unprovable. I believe in fairies, for fuck’s sake. What I don’t do is try and prove fairies with science. (Though now I want to draw a picture of gleeful fairies preventing me from proving them through science by messing up all my experiments.)

You have the right to your beliefs. Your right to impose those beliefs on others is much more limited. “Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.”

And if you’re trying to persuade people of something using science, you’d better have a damn good grounding in what that science means. I don’t – I have GCSE science grade B (i.e. I know that plants contain chlorophyll and some basic formulae about mass and force). What I do have is a Master’s in Sociology and I’m a couple of years away from a doctorate in Religions. I stick with what I know, which is learning everything I can about why we believe what we believe. And what effect that has on the rest of society. That matters to me. I believe it should matter to all of us.

Now there’s a belief that’s probably full of logical fallacies…!

If you like podcasts, a great one on rational thinking, logic, philosophy and religion is the Reasonable Doubts podcast. And they have a wonderful Polyatheism section where they go over the highly unlikely pagan myths of the past. They’ve just started a three-week series on Cuchullain. Enjoy!

I’ll leave you with a link to a relevant article. Problem-Solving ‘Magic’ of Quantum Physics

Cross-posted to Accidental Auguries.

Interfaith

Oath-breaking is an absolute taboo for me, as an Irish polytheist. I know that many ex-Christian Pagans feel that any promises they made to the Christian God were made in ignorance or in coercion. But mine was an oath that I wanted to take, where I knew very clearly what I was doing, what I was promising, and who I was promising it to. Maybe if I could have seen a couple of years into the future, I wouldn’t have taken it. But I’m only human.

Are We There Yet? Assessing the Road Ahead

This is my first post for the Cauldron Blog Project, for which the topic is ‘Resolutions, Habits and New Beginnings.’ It’s also my first ‘A’ post for the Pagan Blog Project 2014. (Yes, I’m doing that again! I might not manage two posts per letter, especially since I’m doing two blog projects at once, but we’ll see…)
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I’m very good at saying ‘It’s about the journey, not the destination’. In reality, I’m impatient. I want to get somewhere. I sometimes forget to stop, take stock, and remember that I always am somewhere.

V is for… Volcanoes

The landscape of Mount St Helen’s transformed my thinking about Chaos and Creation.

I is for… Icon

(So here I am, talking once again about a Christian thing that, for me, merges with Pagan things. I should really give up and call this ‘Leithin’s Interfaith Blog’.)

I adore icons. Especially Byzantine and Russian ones.

Early Byzantine icon of Mary

Icon simply means ‘image’, but the term is generally used to mean sacred imagery, particularly of Eastern churches, where icons are painted in Byzantine or Russian styles^[1]. Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches are full of icons. If you’ve only ever been in bare, late modern churches, in their dull community-centre-like buildings with no pictures or representations of the Divine, you’re missing out.

Saint Sophia and her daughters – Byzantine (picture from Wikimedia)

There’s so much to say about iconography that entire books have been written about it. Here’s just one thing: images of Mary and the child Christ, probably based on earlier images of Isis and Horus ^[2].

Statuette of Isis nursing Horus – Late Period-Ptolemaic Period, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Isis nursing Horus. Penn Museum. Photo by Jocelyn Dale, Flickr (CC)

Mary and Christ – Byzantine icon

Protestant churches don’t like icons, or images of God in general. Their rejection of them is based on the second of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not make to you any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” In short: don’t make idols. There’s a long history of Protestant resistance to Catholic/Orthodox iconography that goes along with that. Anglo-Catholic churches (the ones I used to go to) have re-embraced iconography. And there’s always this tension there – this oft-repeated mantra of it’s not an idol, it’s an icon. But I looked at the statue of Mary in my church and didn’t see ‘something that points to Mary’. I saw Mary. To all intents and purposes, it was a beautiful, glorious idol to me.

And here’s a funny thing. In Christianity, I was a huge fan of icons, especially traditional ones, like those above. But when I started honouring my Gaelic gods, in a religion/spiritual path that’s all in favour of representing deities with idols or pictures, I suddenly didn’t want to. I was no longer forbidden from making a “graven image” of my gods – in fact, it was encouraged – but now, I couldn’t do it. I had pictures of the Morrigan and Arianrhod for a while, but they became… insufficient. It was like I was trying to capture a divine essence that cannot be caged in images.

I still have this picture on my wall above my deity altar:

Relief from the temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath. Photo by Mary Harrsch, Flickr (CC)

It’s from the shrine of Sulis Minerva, in Bath, but it’s not the goddess – it’s probably either a representation of local land spirits, or worshippers. For me, it captures the essence of Sulis Minerva – not in an image of her, but in the faces of those who honoured her.

And, yes, part of it is the difference between this and this. There are hundreds of years of tradition and spirituality behind each Eastern Orthodox icon. The artwork is some of the most beautiful that you will ever see. Each one says, my god (or honoured ancestor) is worth some serious craftswork. Now, admittedly, neopagans don’t get commissions of a lot of money from a rich church allowing them to spend months, maybe more, on each image they create of their god(s). And I’m sure there are some serious craftspeople out there, making absolutely beautiful images of their deities. I just haven’t seen the ones that call to me (yet). And I think that’s mainly because – well, how can a statue of Lugh compare to this?

Photo by ghewgill – Flickr (CC)

And how can a painting of Arianrhod compare to this?

Corona Borealis – by Cristóbal Alvarado Minic – Flickr (CC)

And how could an image of Cailleach Bhearra ever compare to this?

Healy Pass, Beara Peninsula, Cork

I find the gods in the things that embody them – the trees, the sea, the wind, the mountains, and the simple little candles that stand for each deity on my altar. So when I learnt, from writers like Miranda Green, that the Celts probably didn’t have much in the way of physical representations of their gods, at least before the Romans arrived, it all made a lot more sense. Ronald Hutton says it’s not clear whether or not the Gaelic and Brythonic tribes honoured the land as a manifestation of deity or the divine. And certainly, not all the Gaelic gods are land deities. But Cailleach Bhearra is a mountain goddess and Manannan is a sea god – and while they may not quite be gods of those things, they are those things. Bhearra is as much the mountains as the stones that make them up. Manannan is as much the sea as the waves and the gulls and the shoreline.

I suppose I’m talking about a kind of polytheistic animism. I’m good with that. My icons are in the world around me.

But I’ll always love the reminder of forbidden, illicit worship of the divine embodied in *things* that Christian iconography first pointed me towards. The icon was my first way in to understanding that the divine is creation, and creation is divine.

Statue of St Gobnait. Ireland

Statue of Mary, at the side of the road in Co Cork, Ireland. You can see these on every corner in rural Ireland.

 

[1] John R. Hinnells, A New Dictionary of Religions

[2] Victor Lasareff (1938), ‘Studies in the Iconography of the Virgin’. The Art Bulletin.

D is for… Deities: Defining the Divine

Disclaimer: This post is about my experiences. I sometimes have difficulty communicating the idea that I’m talking about *me* alone, and not trying to universalize any of my ideas. But this post is just about me. Me me me. Got that? Good. :P
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I’m a polytheist. I actually believe that the gods exist. Really and truly, and outside of our minds, and everything.

Why yes, I am that naive. ;)

Cailleach Bhearra, as imagined by the Irish Film Board.[1]

C is for… Crafting A Prayer, and (Anglo-)Catholicism

This all started with a thought.

And the thought was: I miss my rosary. I should make prayer beads.

Three strings of beads, for Land, Sea and Sky. (I’ll join them together at some point. Looking for something for the centre.)

It was a stunningly terrible idea. My hands don’t work too well. It’s taken a while. But what can you do when an idle thought becomes an obsession, one that has now been all-consuming since Lughnasadh? As idle thoughts are wont to become.

 

The rosary was my first serious connection with the mystical. Mary is a rather complex force in my life. I grew up Protestant – Pentecostal, in fact, with all the speaking-in-tongues and falling over that any growing girl could scoff (at). I never touched the mystical that way, though I knew plenty of people who did. Yet it was mostly weirdness to me, with an occasional side order of bonkers. I liked the singing (mostly). I was Puritan in my piety. I prayed a fair bit. I faithfully sought the mysteries – I thought they had to come eventually. But I didn’t experience anything numinous until years later.

And then the sudden, majestic holiness of an Anglo-Catholic* church: its haughty rafters, its cryptic prayer-chapel nooks, its brilliance in a hundred liturgical colours. I exchanged the babble of tongues for the exultation of silence, the raspy guitars for the furtively whispered Hail Mary, the gushing clamour of prayers for the aching loneliness of choral music, the distant Father God for a very immanent Queen of Heaven, incarnated in a glorious statue that wore its own rosary – and a veil at Advent. The first time I touched that rosary (golden calf of an idolatrous people), the sheer, illicit physicality of it, I knew what Julian of Norwich meant when she said “For in man is God, and God is in all.”¹

(Catholicism. Gateway drug to Paganism!)

Mary still has a place on one of my altars. We don’t talk much anymore. Ever full of grace, she moved aside so I could find the gods of my ancestors. Mostly, she’s now just a small Russian icon by a little white candle. A reminder.

But sometimes the Queen of Heaven decides she’ll have a moment of my time, thank you. Like, say, when I started writing this nice light post about beads.

It’s only fair. Really, she was the first deity I ever encountered.

These prayer beads are not Mary’s rosary. They were made to honour the depths of the sea of the dead, the endless reaches of the hills of the daoine sídhe, the blazing heights of Caer Arianrhod. These days my gods are truly immanent.

But they are not the Ones who taught me how to pray.

Be it unto me according to Thy word.

 

C is also for Cat, so have a Merlin bonus picture.

Ancient wizard. In box.

*Anglo-Catholicism is an English form of Catholicism. It has Roman Catholic roots, but there’s no pope (lots of Mary, though). It’s a very beautiful tradition, and it kept me in the church for quite a few years after I’d have left otherwise.

[1] Juliana, & Wolters, C. (1982). Revelations of Divine Love. Harmondsworth: Penguin.