Values From The Age Of Aquarius

Note: This is another post for International Pagan Values Month.

When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars

I have been thinking about the post I wrote yesterday on sources for pagan values, and I have realized (partly because of a conversation that I had about the post with my brother) that there is at least one big gaping hole in my presentation. In a nutshell, my thesis was that as pagans we should be looking to nature and the pagan past–mythology in particular–for our values and not just taking western liberal values and looking for a pagan justification for them. While I do think that we should be looking for authentic sources for our values, and I do think that just adopting western liberal values and inventing a pagan justification for them creates a morally meaningless religion, I presented the two options as a false dichotomy. My assumption was that if pagans have values that do not come from nature or mythology, they must simply be spouting out liberal pop culture values. While I think that is in fact what Brendan Myers does in The Other Side Of Virtue, it is not fair to accuse all pagans of doing the same. The problem that dawned on my shortly after writing my post is that I left out a major and significant source for the majority of pagans: the Age of Aquarius!

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation
Aquarius! Aquarius!

Okay, so the song is more than a little over the top. I kid because I love. But in all seriousness, when we talk about modern paganism, we’re including a lot of people who self-identify as pagans that are heavily (if not primarily) influenced by the 20th-century New Age movement. Whether or not it was that way from the beginning, Wicca has pretty much adopted New Ageism whole-cloth, and even though it makes the Reconstructionists’ heads asplode, Wiccans are by far the most numerous of the self-identifying pagans. In any case, the New Age movement has its own set of values, a utopian vision of a world of peace, free love, spiritual connectedness, and enlightenment (and probably also vegetarianism): the Age of Aquarius. And because so much of neopaganism draws on New Age sources, these Aquarian values are held by so many neopagans that they go virtually unquestioned outside of Reconstructionist circles.

I’m not really talking about whether Aquarian Utopianism should be a source for pagans to derive their moral values from; I’m saying that it is in fact such a source. Not for all pagans, no, but it is prominent enough that it deserves mention and a seat at the table. And when we are talking about “pagan values,” their prominence among pagans and New Ageism’s influence on neopaganism generally is such that it is not unreasonable to say that Aquarian values are pagan values.

Aquarian values are not ancient, the way our pagan heritage and our mythology are (and they’re definitely not ur-primoridal the way nature it elf is), but that does not make them somehow invalid. As John Michael Greer is usually quick to point out, the age of a spiritual tradition has nothing to do with its valididty; a functional, productive religion is functional and productive whether it is a billion years old or was invented last week. They have not yet stood the test of time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t. And for us, the only thing that matters really is whether they work.

The trick is that we as pagans need to be at once mindful that the New Age Aquarian vision is a major source of our collective values, and simultaneously mindful that it is not our only source of values. It is not the be-all end-all; there should not be an automatic presumption of Aquarianism. The easy mistake that I think a lot of pagans make is simply to buy into Aquarian values whole cloth without really thinking about what they are doing. The lessons we get from nature, from mythology, and from our pagan past may completely contradict what Aquarian New Ageism teaches us, and although I do think that a reasonable neopagan could conclude that in such a situation, Aquarianism trumps its opponents, I don’t think that’s the kind of decision one can make responsibly without thinking it thorugh and realizing what one is doing.

If we do add Aquarian ideals to the mix of mythology, heritage, and nature, then the result is a pretty diverse set of sources from which we can derive our values. This is a situation that invites careful thought, deliberate scrutiny, and difficult weighing. It also means that different pagans are going to come up with different answers. Paganism is pretty diverse, so that won’t really change anything–hells, look around at the pagan values blog carnival I linked to at the top and you’ll see evrything under the sun represented–but if we’re all going to come under the same umbrella, we need to have some kind of common ground, especially in critical areas like moral reasoning. If we can at least acknowledge the sources for our moral values, then we are in a much better position to think critically about them ourselves and discuss them with each other and with non-pagans in a principled and productive way. And if despite our differing conclusions, we actually do share a common set of moral sources, then we have more common ground than we otherwise might think we do.

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
The Age of Aquarius
Aquarius! Aquarius!

Read Full Post »

Khaire Aphrodite!

To honor Aphrodite, Sannion has put up three goddess-related posts on his Livejournal, and as I am myself a devotee of the Cyprian, I wanted to share them with my readers. First, he shares a meditation he wrote on the cosmic significance of Aphrodite:

We think of her primarily in connection with our courtships and pleasant dalliances – and she is certainly there. But she is also a cosmic goddess (Aphrodite Ourania), driving on the heavenly bodies in their eternal dance through the bleakness of space, and she is the force that bonds communities together on both the familial and political level (Aphrodite Pandemos), and she governs form itself (Aphrodite Morpho), for all bodies are a collection of random molecules following an ordered pattern, and without her influence they would spin off into nothingness. And no less importantly, Aphrodite is the source for our yearning for the immaterial, for something greater than ourselves, something spiritual, eternal, beyond what we can see, and feel, quantify and categorize. The mystic fervently praying for union with god, the poet dreaming of another world, the philosopher seeking to plumb the mysteries of the universe – are not all of these, in their own way, under the spell of Aphrodite?

It is love that makes life worth living, love that allows us to conceive of “life” as something more than just biological existence, love that opens our eyes and hearts to the wonder of existence and fills us with a longing for more and more of it, until our souls are quenched and our being spills over with an abundance of experiences and emotions and everything else that makes us human and more than human.

I think there’s more to it than that, even, especially when you consider that some myths of the birth of Aphrodite have her emerge from the sea, spawned by the severed genitalia of Uranus himself. Aphrodite emerges from the most primal of cosmic sources (both from the ur-god of the universe and from the sea i.e. the murky and mysterious origin of life on earth), moreso than any of the other Olympian gods or goddesses, and that can be neither mere coincidence nor quirky, meaningless tale. As a goddess she is fundamentally connected to the primordial cosmos and the beating heart of what it means to be alive and a part of the universe.

Sannion’s next post of the day is an exploration of conceptions of Aphrodite in Greco-Roman Egypt, a natural place for him to go since he’s pretty much explicitly a Greco-Egyptian syncretist. Although I myself am not, I do think there is a lot of insight to be gained from ancient Egyptian religion, especially for a worshipper of the Hellenic gods. In any case, Sannion focuses on the funerary aspect of Aphrodite. As usual, I am interested in any conception of the goddess that goes beyond pigeonholing her as a living embodiment of Valentine’s Day (especially since I originally came to know Aphrodite in her aspect as a goddess of war). I think one of the trickiest things about the Hellenic gods in general is that most of them have an easy handle as “the god of [something],” and it is easy to forget that they are all complicated, multifaceted figures with diverse personalities, correspondences, and significances. Sannion explains, however, how these different conceptions and seemingly diverse or even unrelated aspects can be tied together:

Concerns with death are an organic outgrowth of being a goddess so intimately, so fundamentally connected with the processes of life. (You can’t have one without the other, and if you dig deep enough you’ll discover why.) The abundance of life that is her blessing was so great, so powerful that it could transcend the artificial boundaries of death – opening up onto an even greater fullness of life. This was done by aligning themselves with her, by becoming suffused with her divine identity until it was their own… [s]tuff like this really makes you wonder.

Finally, Sannion treats us with a description of his visit to a rose garden as intentional worship of the goddess:

As I walked down the rows and rows of flowers I was struck by the beauty and complexity of nature – and how much Aphrodite is involved in all of it. I mean, why are there so many different colors of flowers? It serves no definite purpose … except that it does, really. Seduction. The flowers are trying to attract the plump little bees to come and rub up against them so that their pollen will spread and their species survive. And further, they’ve learned to produce colors that appeal to us humans so that we will plant more of them and protect them and ensure that they thrive. I kept flashing back to things that Michael Pollan had said in Botany of Desire (which is a really great book that you should read if you haven’t already) and how charming Aphrodite was behind it all. I mean, those flowers first sprang up when her delicate feet touched the earth as she rose from the waters in primordial times…

So, I just sat there blissing out and overwhelmed with gratitude, and then all of a sudden I could feel Aphrodite, and she was so warm and beautiful and loving and soft, and I basked in her presence for a while, feeling so peaceful and content and happy.

The way he describes Aphrodite pierces me to the center of my heart because I know the feelings he is describing so intimately. Whatever the true nature of the gods is, I am certain that they are at least in some sense real in a way that transcends the individual’s purely subjective experience. While different people experience different facets of the same deity at different times, there seems ot be just too much that really is the same about people’s experiences. Sannion and I are tapping into the same force or presence, whatever we want to call it. She is real, and she is powerful, and she exists at the very quick of what it means to be a human being:

That is who Aphrodite is – one of the greatest and most important goddesses that man has ever known.

Read Full Post »

Searching For Pagan Values

For those of you who don’t know; June has been deemed International Pagan Values Blogging Month. I’ve been planning a bunch of posts, but June has been pretty busy between military stuff and studying for the bar, so I’m only just now getting around to writing some of them. This is really my foundation post, though: the point is to set up a framework I can use to talk in more detail later about what is and is not a pagan value.

For Christmas last year my beautiful and sexy wife gave me a copy of Brendan Myers’s The Other Side Of Virtue. I was excited: the book had been at the top of my wish list, and I was eager to read it as soon as possible. I was beginning to seriously think of myself as a pagan without reservation, and I had been grappling with issues of morality and ethics fairly intensely for the previous half-year, both academically (I took a class on the philosophy of law), and on my own time (I read a ton of C. S. Lewis, in particular The Abolition Of Man, which I heartily recommend. In any case, I had questions of morality on my brain, and what looked to be a well-thought out, serious treatment of morality and ethics from a pagan point of view promised to be right up my alley.

I was seriously disappointed. I won’t go through a blow-by-blow of my problems with the book, because the big picture suffices: in The Other Side Of Virtue essentially starts with modern western liberal values and he attempts to retroactively justify them using pagan myth and tradition. While I applaud the general idea of asking some of the hard questions in a pagan context and adding pagan voices to the big debates out there, I think that Myers went about the whole thing the exact wrong way. He started with an a priori acceptance of modern liberal values and he constructed an argument for them in pagan terms, instead of starting with the mythology and philosophy of paganism and deriving values from those sources. What Myers writes is neither challenging nor transformative but merely philosophically sycophantic.

If pagan ethics are identical to mainstream liberal ethics, then morally speaking, paganism has nothing to offer us but a justification for what we wanted to do anyway. If having a religion looks exactly the same as not having a religion (thanks, Jack), then in a diverse and pluralist society where—like it or not—there is a religious marketplace, that religion will die because it ceases to serve a meaningful purpose. Certainly it will not be vital.

This problem is not somehow unique to paganism: in my experience it is a major problem in Christianity, too. One of the biggest problems I had with some of the Episcopal parishes we visited when I was looking for a Christian church home was that it seemed to me that far too many of them preached an unchallenging gospel that was in practice little more than a hearty stamp of approval of the values and behaviors already practiced by the congregants.

I am not trying to say that personal preferences and socially derived values should play no role in a person’s spiritual path. That would just be ludicrous; there needs to be a certain degree of interplay as your religion influences you even as it is influenced by you. But if we are just looking for a spiritual veneer to install over what we already believed anyway, then we are wasting our time.

Values have to come from somewhere—they have to have a source and a derivation. If we are doing what Myers models in The Other Side of Virtue, i.e. trying to fashion an essentially fictional religious/spiritual justification for our already-held values, then we are fooling ourselves into thinking our values are based on something other than what they are really based on. We misunderstand our spiritual tradition, our values, our religion, and ultimately ourselves.

The alternative then is to figure out what the source for our spiritual and religious values is, or should be, and try to work forward from there, without a preconceived notion of what the answers need to be when we’re finished (our own biases will inevitably creep in, which is a compelling argument for having this process go forward in community where we can check each other, criticize each other, inspire each other, and learn from each other—hopefully ultimately winnowing out the worst of our biases). As pagans, we do not have one single authoritative source. We look instead to mythology, the beliefs of our pagan ancestors, and to nature herself as the basis for our morals and values. At this point I do not necessarily want to suggest what those derived values are, but merely to suggest the framework we use to answer the question.

A prime example of this value-derivation in pagan community is the Nine Noble Virtues followed by some Germanic Reconstructionists. Although these nine virtues are not exlicitly spelled out anywhere in the Lore, modern Germanic pagans have gone back ot the sagas and eddas and found the application of a fairly consistent set of moral rinciples, and from that they have constructed the list of Nine. This is the kind of thing all pagans should be doing! We should be going back to our sources, seeing the values that are embodies in them or expressed by them, checking them against each other, and in the end identifying those values that are truly pagan values.

As we do this, we need to realize that it is entirely possible that we will derive spiritual and religious values that conflict with our other social, cultural, political, and civic values. This is bound to happen because these values are derived from different sources. It’s not a bad thing. It means we have to grapple with the inconsistency, and deal with the reality of being forced to weigh conflicting values against each other. We will find ourselves engaging in a mature, ongoing fluid process of moral reasoning. Sometimes there won’t be a conflict at all, and sometimes different sources can fill in the gaps left by their counterparts.

This process may also involve some rude awakenings as we begin to discover that some of our very favorite values are not really pagan values! That is not to say that they are not valuable, or that we should not hold them as guiding principles in our lives, but we may need to recognize that there are many valued that are held by pagans without themselves being pagan values, and that those values may actually conflict with their truly pagan counterparts. As I said, this may create some tension as we try to work out or simply live with the inconsistency, but if we actively engage in the process the result is an endgame of unmatched moral maturity.

Important addendum: Values From The Age Of Aquarius.

Read Full Post »

The Lavender Dionysus Office

I had a dream a couple of nights ago, a complicated, long dream that was very dependent on this series of adjacent locations in the dream-landscape. Among these locations was a set of purple and lavender office buildings, the nondescript two story office-suite kind you find in the suburbs that is invariably three-quarters full of doctors, insurance salesmen, and after-school tutors, and is one-quarter full of empty space. But unlike the ones you find in real life, this one was purple, and although I remember no sign, I understood that somehow these offices belonged to the god Dionysus, or at the very least to some organization or corporation that represented him.

I do not remember clearly what I did while I was at this office, but I remember sitting in a reception area and possibly filling out some paperwork. I might have flipped through a coffee-table book in the waiting area. I interacted with a moderately friendly receptionist: businesslike but not unpleasant.

Somehow in the middle of this fairly mundane corporate bullshit, the presence of the god was unmistakable. Either his presence permeated the completely contradictory surroundings, or I have a major lacuna in my sense of the narrative: it is possible that something extremely significant happened, some direct contact with the god, and I remember the approaching sense of divinity and power leading up to the event and the power receding afterwards, but the event itself is like a lost period of time, something like what UFO abductees often report.

In the dream I think I knew what was going on, but now in the waking world, the details of what role Dionysus was playing, what benefit I got out of our meeting, and exactly what I was doing there is all kind of obscure and abstract. Something and nothing at the same time, and I’m not entirely sure how it related to the other elements of the dream landscape (a thick wilderness, a military installation that reminded me of Sand Hill at Fort Benning where I did basic training and infantry school, a police academy, a series of rural roads, a witches’ sabbat, the offices of a nameless law firm, and a cyborg super-soldier created by the Department of Transportation to defend roads under construction and he had this sweet gun that shot blue pulses of massively destructive kinetic energy), but at the conclusion of my business in the purple office building of Dionysus, I was told very clearly (by a representative or the receptionist maybe) that the office would henceforth be forever closed to me. I was never to return.

I’m not sure what this means. Am I no longer to worship Dionysus? Was his role in m life only as a gateway god, to lead me to more and fuller experiences with his Hellenic co-deities, but not to stay with me for the long run? Was it a message that formal worship of Dionysus is for some reason not appropriate for me? The dream was completely suffused with the trappings of formality: government, offices, law, military, law enforcement. And then I walked out of the office into the night and witnessed the witches’ sabbat I mentioned earlier. Is the message that I am to leave Dionysus alone now, or is it somehow specifically connected to the formality of the setting? As I have mentioned in a few previous posts, I have been a little worried for awhile that I have neglected Dionysus in my zeal to worship Aphrodite and the other gods and goddesses, and also because I can’t really figure out a way to worship him or even directly interact with him that makes sense to me. His presence in my life has been powerful, but it has never felt right to transform it into anything resembling the regular, formal worship of the other gods?

In myth, Dionysus was worshipped separately in Bacchic rites, out in the wilderness away from the demos and the religious/cultural/political structures that Greek religion otherwise revolved around. Is this dream somehow significant to that distinction? I’m just not sure. Shit, maybe it was just a weird dream.

Read Full Post »

Midsummer Flummox

Here it is, the summer solstice, one of the most significant pagan holidays, and I’m just not sure how to celebrate it at all. I’m still kind of stumbling about with regards to how to express my newfound faith. I have been developing a fairly close relationship with my gods, and that has brought a lot to me spiritually, but I still am looking for some kind of practice that will tie my spiritual life together more fully. And I am still convinced that an exclusive devotion to Hellenismos just is not the right answer for me. I have more to say on that than I said in that earlier post, but it is a bit off-topic at the moment, so it will have to wait.

I have an attraction to Druidry, and I have continued to think hard about the Ancient Order of Druids in America, but that path doesn’t seem to have quite clicked yet. Part of that is pure laziness on my part and chaos in my life (annual training with the National Guard, studying for the bar exam), but a lot of it is pure stalling and hesitation or a lack of a clear beginning, a point at which I commit myself and say “okay, I am actually going to do this, starting today. I’m not really sure what is holding me back.

But in any case, I’m sitting here on the longest day of the year, feeling like it should be somehow both festive and spiritually significant, but feeling that it is in fact neither. And I’m not sure what to do about it. I kind of wish I had some like-minded pagans to celebrate and worship with. Actually, that’s one of the reasons I’ve been looking into the ADF: they have a grove (relatively) nearby, with even a group of Hellenic druids who get together to worship separately.

Any ideas?

Read Full Post »

50 Things I Love

Inspired by Katie Langston (her blog is blocked right now so no linky) and my beautiful and sexy wife Katyjane, I am going to compose a list of fifty things I absolutely love.

1. Katyjane
2. Beer
3. Led Zeppelin
4. Jim Morrison (I would lick his torso)
5. Eating pancakes with my three-year old
6. I Walk The Line
7. The Cthulhu Mythos
8. Heavy metal concerts
9. MRE cheese and crackers
10. Getting a good night’s sleep
11. A Ford Mustang convertible
12. Tarot
13. Talking about religion
14. Trust and estate law
15. Iron Maiden
16. Battlestar Galactica
17. Conan
18. Pretty much everything written by C. S. Lewis
19. Road trips with katyjane
20. Cowboy boots
21. Rattlesnake-skin cowboy boots
22. The way I feel after I go running
23. All Along The Watchtower (the Hendrix version)
24. Mythology
25. Being outside
26. Laying down in the grass with someone I love
27. A clean house
28. Honeysuckle
29. London
30. Black Hawk Down
31. “The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
32. Rick Hurd
33. Wolverine
34. Riding my bike, when I am wearing my awesome socks with flames on them
35. The last thirty minutes of The Road Warrior
36. Alaska
37. Tattoos
38. The Episcopal Church
39. Feudalism
40. Enabling my wife to buy unreasonable amounts of yarn
41. When my one-year-old daughter says “happy happy happy”
42. Grapheme-color synesthesia
43. Autumn
44. Goya (the artist, not the brand of food)
45. Going out to eat
46. When my wife beats me at video games
47. Thanksgiving
48. Giving money to panhandlers
49. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
50. My big fat evil vicious cat

Read Full Post »

Personal Gnosis: Artemis

So the following experience seems entirely appropriate given that the moon is basically full right now. Also it just occurred to me that the last time I went on a kind of pilgrimage to the wilderness, I kept encountering deer: they kept suddenly jumping up from nearby and running away, scaring the shit out of me.

I have been thinking about Artemis and Apollo a bit lately, and I have been wrestling with Artemis quite a bit. For some reason, I find her terrifying: there is something primal about her, sexual but untouchable and untouched, something about her as a goddess of the hunt but also the protectress of babies and children that just puts her close to the jugular vein of human existence, frighteningly close to our primordial origins. Maybe it’s the story of Aktaion, but to me, Artemis is fearsome and panic-inducing. She reminds me of the First Slayer, from a particularly weird episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: primal, destructive, female, savage, and above all a huntress.

I prayed to Artemis as I was putting my children to bed two nights ago–the night before I had my forgotten revelation from Artemis and her brother–and I felt a brief presence, malevolent and disapproving. It made me feel tight inside and frightened.

Last night, I was thinking about the experience, and feeling a bit anxious about it–I prayed to Artemis to ask for her forgiveness if I had done something to wrong or slight her, but the panic I felt became almost a tangible thing. I didn’t really know what to do. I will admit that I am no stranger to anxiety, and the dark and twisty fear I was feeling was not unlike other times I have felt varieties of anxiety attack, so I decided to use a meditative trick I have learned, and try to embrace the panic and feel its roots instead of trying to run away from it. Only I visualized it in terms of the goddess: instead of trying to run away from Artemis, in fear for my life, I decided to turn and face her, to be present to the goddess not in spite of my fear, but fully embracing my fear.

The panic went away immediately, and I was overcome by a powerful kind of euphoria–of the same general category of experience as I felt when I first experienced the divinity of Aphrodite, but of a different flavor. It was milder, lasted shorter, kind of a mini-mysticism. It was brief, more like a mini-contact than a full-blown spiritual euphoria, but it was warm, and it was good. Like for just a moment I was being touched by some incredibly powerful spiritual conduit–just a taste, nothing more. And the fear was completely gone.

I am resolved to make a sacrifice to Artemis, to thank her for her presence and to acknowledge her power.

Read Full Post »

Apollo and Artemis: Oracle

Two nights ago I was awake in the middle of the night, because I had been up with the baby, and I came to this sudden and complete awareness that I had received a prophetic revelation from Apollo and Artemis. But I was groggy and sleepy, and when I woke up the next morning, I could not remember what this revelation actually was. I still can’t.

Read Full Post »

I Had A Dream About Jim Morrison

Last night I had a dream about Jim Morrison. It was long, vivid, and disconnected, so this might not make a lot of sense. I also don’t remember it perfectly (sometimes I remember dreams better than others), but here goes.

I was going for a run at night, maybe in New York City, and my plan was to listen to L.A. Woman while I ran one way, and then to turn around and listen to it the other way, but someone stopped me, some friends of mine stopped me for some reason and it interrupted my run. I had a tattoo of Jim Morrison’s face on my leg (in my dream, that is; in real life I have a rad tattoo of Odin riding on Sleipnir on my leg), but I don’t remember when that really came into the picture.

I went with these friends over to an apartment where a bunch of other friends of mine were hanging out, including Jim Morrison. I was really nervous because in this dream he was theoretically my friend, but I completely hero-worshipped him, and I wanted him to like me, but I knew it was chancy.

In short, he let me down. He ignored me. He was busy hanging out with my other friends, having fun with them. He didn’t even wave or say hi, he was so wrapped up with having a great time that he did not even notice I was there. Later on, I kept trying to hide the tattoo of him, because I did not want people to know how I felt about him and thus how hurt I probably was because he ignored me.

Read Full Post »

Katyjane’s Photo Blog

My beautiful and sexy wife has started a new blog to showcase her amazing photography. She is really talented and has developed a style that is really unique and worth paying attention to. Go, check it out, bookmark it, add the feed to your reader, whatever you have to do. And yes, she does weddings.

Read Full Post »