Polygamy in My Family Tree

Last week I stumbled on a couple of Ask Me Anything threads that Lindsay Hansen Park did on Reddit last year and back in 2015. Lindsay is the executive director of Sunstone, a sometime poster at Feminist Mormon Housewives and the creator of the Year of Polygamy podcast. The AMA threads (here and here, in case you’re curious) were really fascinating. Reading what Lindsay had to say about expanding the definition of what it means to be Mormon and claiming a Mormon identity on her own terms really resonated with me, especially in light of the things I have been thinking and writing about for the past couple of weeks. Really compelling stuff that hit me in an unexpectedly close way.

So I decided to give the Year of Polygamy podcast a try. One of the facets about claiming a Mormon identity for me is taking ownership of all of what Mormonism means, including the ugly, dark and strange parts. For me, Mormonism isn’t just like a club I belonged to that I can walk out of and wash my hands of it. I was born into a Mormon family, was raised in the church, graduated seminary, served a mission, and married in the temple. Mormonism formed me in a deep way that I can’t just minimize or ignore. I decided that meant finding out more about Mormonism’s relationship (past and present) with polygamy.

In an one of the early podcast episodes, Lindsay encourages her (mostly Mormon or Mormon-adjacent) audience to look into their family history and see how much polygamy is there. That sounded interesting to me, so when I got home from work that night, I hopped onto the internet and started poking around on FamilySearch to see what I could find. Turns out it’s not actually that hard to figure out–there’s not a big scarlet P on the polygamists, but if you look for male ancestors in the second half of the 19th century and pay attention to how many marriages they had, the timing of those marriages, and the timing of children from those marriages, you can read the story between the lines. And, as it turns out, HOLY SHIT MY FAMILY TREE TURNS OUT TO BE JUST RIDDLED WITH POLYGAMISTS.

Virtually every ancestor on my maternal grandfather’s line since 1840 has been a polygamist or a descendant of polygamists. That’s crazy.

I mean, this should not have been a revelation for me. I know I have pioneer ancestors, which means I have plenty of ancestors in the right time, place and religion. But it’s not like my family brags about (or even ever talks about) their polygamist history. So for me, growing up, polygamy was a weird, embarrassing thing my church used to do a long time ago but stopped doing a long time ago and it’s tricky because it’s hard to understand why but it’s all sort of abstract and hypothetical or dry and historical.

But nope. It’s not really like that at all, is it? These people were my flesh and blood. Their DNA is swimming in mine. The experiences of these people (men, women, their children) living in and surviving polygamy shaped and formed my family and ultimately shaped and formed me in ways that are not obvious but are nevertheless there.

I’m not 100% sure how to unpack this all, but it just struck a nerve pretty deeply in a really raw, visceral way. Polygamy isn’t just some weird thing that the church I used to go to did back in the 1800’s. Polygamy turns out to be part of who I am–I am the descendant of sister wives and their children. It’s not someone else’s history; it’s mine. It’s pretty heavy.

Also, for the record, the Year of Polygamy podcast is pretty great and you should listen to it, especially if you are Mormon or Mormon-adjacent.

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Is Truth, Therefore Nothing?

And I said, “Is truth, therefore nothing, because it is not diffused through space–neither finite nor infinite?”

And you cried to me from afar, “I am that I am.”

-Augustine, Confessions 7.10.16

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Jesus Says: “It Wasn’t Me.”

One time I went on a short hike in the Wisconsin woods with my beautiful and sexy wife and our kiddos. We were mobbed by mosquitos–-more than I have ever seen at once in my entire life, and I spent a chunk of my childhood in Alaska, where the mosquito is the state bird. We showered ourselves in industrial-strength, hazardous-chemical, deep-woods mosquito repellant until our skin was on fire, but it did nothing. My exasperated five-year old son finall asked in anguish why Jesus made mosquitos, to which my wife replied “I don’t know, why don’t you pray and ask him.”

A moment of silent hiking later, my son pipes up, “Mommy, Jesus says he didn’t do it.”

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An Observation Regarding Pentecostals and Mormons

Over on Tim’s blog, a self-described Pentecostal showed up in an old comment thread, and (as is my habit) I asked him if he handles snakes. This was his response:

Uh . . . no. No Pentecostal did that until George W. Hensley started the practice in 1912, 12 years after Pentecostalism began. He was still a rather new convert and was praying in a mountain reading a passage in Mark when he received some weird revelation. Pentecostal denominations quickly labeled serpent handling as fanaticism and it has only ever been a feature of some churches in Appalachia. It is not a characteristic of Pentecostalism, neither now or in the past.

Why do you ask?

All I know about it is what I’ve read (having never encountered a serpent handler before). They believe, according to their interpretation of Mark 16:17-18 that serpent handling and drinking poison (some serpent handlers may also consume strychnine) are commanded in Scripture.

These activities will only take place when participants perceive the direct intervention of God. In other words, they wont do it unless “the anointing” is present. Deaths are explained by these people in the following ways: 1) the anointing was not present, 2) such deaths prove to outsiders that the snakes are poisonous and have not been defanged, 3) God wills their death.

I do hope you realize that the vast majority of Pentecostals are not serpent handlers. I would point out that people who assume that will be looked on as terribly ignorant and offensive by Pentecostals.

Now, I realize that the historical and organizational relationship between Appalachian snake-handlers and mainstream American Pentecostals is not even remotely similar to the relationship between fundamentalist polygamist Mormons and the mainstream Mormon Church, but Shane’s response may as well have been cut-and-pasted and searched-and-replaced from a mainstream Mormon’s reaction to being confronted about polygamy.

The only difference is that, as a bonus, Shane’s response also just drips with prejudice and snobbery towards Appalachian people.

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Shout at The Devil: Satan, Heavy Metal, and the Great God Pan

He’s the wolf screaming lonely in the night;
He’s the blood stain on the stage.
He’s the tear in your eye being tempted by his lies,
He’s the knife in your back; he’s rage!

You want to experience the Horned God right now? Go and grab a copy of Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the Devil and put it on the record player. Turn it up. Listen to it. Feel it. Get into it. There he is—lurking under the surface of the music, ready to burst out at any minute with a raging hard-on and an urge to do violence. This is the music your parents were afraid you would listen to, and for good reason. This is Pan’s music, and Pan is everything they were afraid of.

Rock music has a long tradition of flirting with the Devil, but with a few notable exceptions, these musicians don’t worship the actual Devil of Christianity. The Devil of rock and roll is not really anything like the Satan found in the Bible or in modern Christian theology. Some Christians might be bothered both by the content and the imagery of rock and metal, but not actually because they accurately represent the Christian Satan in a theological sense. The Christian Satan is a fallen angel who is miserable because he is separated from God, and as a result, he wants to make humanity as miserable as he is by tempting them to sin against God and thereby separate themselves as he is separated. That same motivation is often ascribed to the Devil of rock and roll, but it is falsely ascribed. It is a reaction, a fear-motivated impulse that rock and roll deliberately provokes because it pushes people’s boundaries and forces them to confront everything that rock and roll and its Devil stand for. But under the surface, it has nothing to do with Christianity’s Satan.

The Devil of rock and roll is a different Devil: he is instead the Devil of the occultists, the magicians, and the romantic poets. And whether the Christian Devil was in fact deliberately distorted in the Middle Ages to look and act like a pagan horned god or whether that idea is a modern conceit, the romantic occult Devil, who came much later, was most definitely and intentionally modeled on the pagan Horned God. This intoxicating devil inspired the poets and magicians who inspired the musicians of the twentieth century. It’s no accident that the first real heavy metal album, Black Sabbath’s self-titled record, is completely and totally immersed in the imagery of Satan. This Devil was a god of libido, of power, of freedom, a god of fear and lust, a god of the revel, of nature, of the night, a god of secrets and rage, a god who stands as a guardian of or even a living embodiment of the inexhaustible wellspring of the universe’s raw, primal, and sublime essence. His worship ran counter to the Church and its theology, but not because he was a part of the Church or its theology. He was a Devil, but he was not Christianity’s Devil: he was in fact Pan. Pan, the horned god of the Greek shepherds, whose music inspired fear and panic and sexual lust, Pan the god of the wild places and the lonely, magic, dangerous corners of the earth, the Great God Pan. When the romantics and occultists looked to the gods of the ancient pagans, Pan stood out from all of them because he represented a direct, divine connection to that raw stuff of the universe that the Church of the Middle Ages did its best to monopolize, control, and intermediate. Pan stood out and invited the occultists to come and feel his power directly, through ritual but most importantly through the revel. And heavy metal gives us both, in spades. Heavy metal gives us the real Devil, the Devil that human beings hunger and thirst for.

He’ll be the love in your eyes, he’ll be the blood between your thighs
And then have you cry for more!
He’ll put strength to the test, he’ll put the thrill back in bed,
Sure you’ve heard it all before.
He’ll be the risk in the kiss, might be anger on your lips,
Might run scared for the door…

People fear Pan because Pan cannot be controlled. Pan is wild; Pan is free. Pan is unpredictable and the unpredictable makes us uncomfortable. It doesn’t fit in our neat categories; it doesn’t follow our made-up rules.

By invoking his imagery and creating music that is a perfect channel for his divinity, heavy metal has served him and worshipped him more purely than perhaps any other modern human endeavor. Heavy metal stands as a dangerous and powerful testament that despite Plutarch’s report and the wishful thinking of Milton and Browning, Pan is not dead at all. Like nature itself, and like his sometime father Dionysus, Pan can never die. Pan returns and demands that we deal with him. Pan has a hold on all of us, whether we like it or not: we are all dark and dangerous, we all have the urge to create and destroy, we are all animals playing at being human. And when we hear a song like “Shout At The Devil” we can’t help but feel who we really are.

But in the seasons of wither we’ll stand and deliver—
Be strong and laugh and
Shout! Shout! Shout!
Shout at the Devil!

Feel the swagger, the sexuality, the aggression in the music. Feel it in your body, as your body answers. That is Pan. Pan’s music is rough and savage, but no less powerful and intricate than Apollo’s hymns. Apollo calms us, but Pan arouses us. Pan shows us a side of humanity that is frightening but real, and even essential. It’s not evil—it’s who we are. Modern pagans shy away from talking about the Devil because they are afraid of being misunderstood or maligned. And maybe that’s fair, but I think it’s a mistake. Pan is the Devil, and that’s a good thing. He is the Devil in the best way possible, and I say embrace that. Put the record on. Turn it up. Throw up his sign. You know how it’s done.

Listen to it! Listen, and shout at the Devil!

(Article originally published in Hoofprints in the Wildwood: A Devotional Anthology for the Horned Lord; song lyrics from Mötley Crüe’s song, “Shout at the Devil” written by Nikki Sixx)

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An Authoritative Revelation

This morning, my son revealed, unprompted, the flavors of the various colors of dragons. I would advise you to arm yourselves with this information.

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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!

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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.

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Resigning Over Proposition 8

After some discussion with my beautiful and sexy wife, prompted by a discussion on Tim’s blog, I have decided to formally have my name removed–for real this time.  The Church’s involvement in California’s Proposition 8 was just plain evil, and I no longer wish to have my name associated with that kind of organization.

To the Mormons complaining about the “persecution” they are receiving because of Prop 8, I say tough shit.  Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.  The Church heavy-handedly pushed to take away a group of people’s marriages.  That is just plain evil.  All members of the Church who pay tithing, participate actively, sustain their leaders, and give their loyalty to the Church–especially to the degree they have covenanted in the temple endowment ceremony–are complicit.  They may not have voted in California, and they may even personally have been against Proposition 8, but their moral and material support for and loyalty to an organization that does things like this is hypocritical and reprehensible.

If the reverse happened, and the Government tried to disarm Mormon marriages, members of the Church would be up in arms.  Oh, wait; that’s exactly what happened over polygamy! The hypocrisy makes me retch.  The reactions of gays and people who are sympathetic to gay rights have shown amazing reserve, compared to what would happen if the tables were turned.  The Church is not being persecuted; the Church is doing the persecution, and the persecuted are angry about it.  Surprise, surprise.

I have intended to have my name eventually removed for quite some time.  Barring a visitation from the Angel Moroni or something, I’m simply never going back to activity in the Church.  But likewise, until not I have not had a pressing reason to have my name actually removed, and I’m kind of lazy.  But I can’t in good conscience be counted as Mormon after Proposition 8.  So, I’m out.  I’ve written my letter, and I am posting it ASAP.

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Sorry To Disappoint My Atheist Friends

I know I promised that I’d come back and try to articulate exactly why Till We Have Faces was so significant to me, but I’ve been at a loss for the last week.  I’ve tried to explain it to my mother, my wife, and to my brother, and each time I’ve ended up saying, “Trust me; you’ve just got to read this book.”

The best that I can manage is to say that after reading it, there’s no way I could say I don’t believe in God.  I felt like the narrator’s struggles with deity often were very close to mine, and I found myself identifying with her anger, angst, and anguish.  I particularly was moved by her first trip to the valley, and her frustration at not being able to see divine things, but almost being able to see them- just a glimpse, but not enough.  But the resolution of the novel so completely wiped all of that away, and not in a cheap or trite way, but in a way that seems like the kind of thing that would be true about a god.

When her charge against the gods answered itself, I was reeling.  When the Fox admitted that he was right about how religion missed the point entirely, but at the same time he was so horribly wrong, I felt like I was experiencing revelation.

All of my concerns about God are resolved on at least a basic, primal level by the mere fact that despite all I have to say, God is.  I guess that’s the best that I can do.

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