Lame Terminology in Neopaganism

Wicca-derived modern neopagan slang terms like “newbie” and “getting thwapped” have absolutely no place in even moderately reconstructionist pagan religions.

“Newbie” is a term implying resentment towards beginners. It’s appropriate in something like online gaming, where beginners can be annoying and in the way. Whether or not it’s appropriate in Wicca or other witchcraft practice is none of my business, since I’m not a Wiccan or any other kind of witch. But in [recon] polytheist faiths, that kind of attitude towards new believers makes no sense whatsoever. We should be embracing, welcoming, and guiding new believers, not resenting them and being annoyed at them. Why on earth would we want to discourage people from coming back around to the gods of their ancestors? Sure, just like new believers in any faith, their (our) heads are probably full of leftover ideas from wherever they came from, but the response there should be gentle (or firm, as the case may be) correction, not personal resentment. Direct your ire toward the religion(s) that gave them unhelpful ideas, not toward them for having them. New believers are not in the way; they are an essential part of a living, thriving faith community.

“Being thwapped” is a flippant and disrespectful term for a powerful and sacred revelatory mystical experience. It stems from an casual attitude towards the gods that is born from neopagan beliefs about the nature of divinity that have no place in a truly polytheistic (or any kind of true theistic) faith. But even if you believe that the gods are mere psychological archetypes, they still are potent and powerful archetypes that should be honored and respected. Being casual about them is dangerously disrespectful, if you believe they actually exist in any real sense.

Between the lore we have from the ancients and analogous modern living polytheist faiths we have plenty of vocabulary–specialized, tested, specific vocabulary that properly expresses what we are trying to say the way we should be saying it. Relying on modern neopagan slang to define our spiritual lives essentially allows modern neopaganism to set the terms, and it undermines many of the core concepts of our faiths.

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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.

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Polytheistic Possibilities

Or, other ways of explaining the experiences I have had…

So, having personally experienced the presence of two separate divine figures–Dionysus and Aphrodite–I immediately assumed that the next step was Hellenistic Reconstructionist Polytheism.  Simply put, it didn’t work.  I have an intuition about where to go from here, but I am still assuming some kind of variation of ful polytheism, that (probably, I guess, more-or-less) multiple distinct gods exist and can interact with human beings.  But that is not the only possible explanation–there are others.

Before Aphrodite came on the scene, I realized that in many ways the story of Dionysus has stong parallels to the story of Jesus.  I recognized the possibility that I was getting at Jesus through Dionysus somehow, that Dionysus was a pagan step on the path to Jesus Christ.  This would definitely be consistent with C. S. Lewis’s assertion that you have to learn to be a good pagan before you can learn to be a good Christian.  Even with Aphrodite in the mix, this isn’t out of the question–Aphrodite, a divine female figure, could easily be a shadow of Mary or of the Mormon Heavenly Mother.  I’m not sure what to make of all of this, though.  My intuition says that my experiences with Aphrodite have been too… much like Aphrodite, too sexual and too warlike, to seem like a plausible aspect of a Christian divine female.  In any case, I think that if my paganism is a step on the road to ultimate conversion to Christianity, it’s more of a wait-and-see thing than a suddenly-realize-it-was-Jesus thing.  I’m not closed ot the possibility that I’m really talking about Jesus after all, but I’m also not really convinced.

Another thing I am acutely aware of is the fact that I really haven’t strongly experienced the reality of more than two deities–Dionysus and Aphrodite.  I could certainly be dealing with a male/female dualism, which is a hallmark of Wicca’s fertility religion, and probably some other variations of paganism aswell.  Even to the extent that I have intuition about other deities–Hera, Zeus, and Odin–I might simply be talking about various masks or manifestations of an ultimare divine male principle and an ultimate divine female principle.  I am also open to this interpretation.  Although my immediate reaction is to reject it, I realize that the rejection might be a knee-jerk product of my long-standing prejudice against Wicca and my age-old belief (really a product of Mormonism) that only Reconstructionist paganism–marked by decidedly hard polytheism–is valid and legitimate.  And furthermore, I don’t necessarily believe in magic (hmm… future post?  you can count on it), or feel any desire to practice any kind of magic as a part of my spiritual life.

At the moment, those seem like the most significant and plausible alternate hypotheses.  On the other hand, my spiritual life is still growing and developing in its infancy, and so whether my hard/soft polytheism or one of these alternates hapens to be true may not ultimately wind up mattering.  For now I am going to act the same way towards the gods regadless of what they really are and how they relate to each other.  Most important to me right now in terms of my spiritual development is how I experience them and how they relate to me.

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