Pagan Theology
Pagan theology: Paganism and Existential Faith
Do you believe in the Gods and Goddesses?
I would suspect that many Pagans would answer: “don’t know,” “maybe,” or “doubt it.” Fair enough. Neo-Paganism accommodates a lot of different theologies, including those that border on atheism, deism, pantheism, pantheism, or Gnostic monotheism. However there is also a literalist interpretation of our religion, one where the Gods and Goddesses exist as real entities. For those of us who believe in their existence, the idea of faith poses a particular challenge. What does it mean to have faith in the existence of the Gods and Goddess, and what kind of responsibility does the acceptance of that faith impose on us? What have we who believe been given by the Goddess, and what does she expect in return [1]?
Kierkegaard presents us with one possible, and very challenging, formulation of the requirements and responsibilities of faith. He speaks of a “leap to faith” [2] meaning that when you accept religious faith you move from a place where evidence and apparent paradox prevent you from belief, to one where such things are irrelevant to your understanding of deity. The idea that you believe in the Gods and Goddesses, while at the same time they do not manifest themselves in the world in a truly tangible form (i.e. directly, as in sitting across from Matt Lauer on the Today Show) does not matter, it is replaced by the knowledge that comes from transcendent experience, experience that cannot be duplicated in the world. Faith requires you to suspend reason, to transcend to a place where the paradoxes of religious belief do not matter anymore.
This, of course, is not easy, and we are constantly bombarded by things that cause us to question our faith, or lose it entirely [3]. For us (as opposed to Christians) it is the thrill of constantly re-finding our Gods and Goddesses in the natural world that sustains our faith and makes it continuous. Once committed to the faith of a Pagan it becomes much more difficult to lose faith as the Gods and the Goddesses are right here with us, immanent in the natural world.
While, as I said above, the Gods and Goddesses do not directly manifest, our belief does change the way we perceive the world. What others would see as coincidence, we see as action of the deities in the world. What others would dismiss as fantasy or imagination, we see as direct access to the presence of the Lord and Lady. The change in view that comes with Pagan faith is what makes the world magical, and what allows us to refresh our faith in the absence of tangible, concrete, evidence.
In order for Christians to have the same experience as Pagans Jesus would have to had remained in the world as the incarnate god. If he had, then the wonder and fascination, and reverence, we have for the world might have led Christianity down a very different path. But he did not, he ascended, leaving the world as the source of evil and not wonder, and the transcendent as the source of wonder and reverence. Our Gods and Goddesses have not gone anywhere, they remain with us, and their continued presence makes for a faith that thrills in its constant contact with them. Our renewal comes from these contacts; contacts that are written in ritual, amongst us as a community, and in the natural world.
For Kierkegaard this faith was overwhelming, both personally and socially. Ethics and laws do not matter to someone who has such a faith. The ability of god (or the Gods and Goddesses) to overrule human behavior or norms may occur at any time. The story of Abraham and Isaac is a central example of this absolute, absurd, nature of faith. The knowledge of the Jewish God led Abraham to be willing to do anything, include sacrificing his son, because he knew that his God existed. For those who have faith, who really believe, the challenge is clear: they must act out what they believe.
Such existential requirements don’t really work for Pagans the way they do for fundamentalist Lutherans. For the Christians sin and redemption represent a set of compelling requirements that challenges them to act out what they believe. Our Gods and Goddesses have requirements, and penalties for those who transgress or offend them [4], but they are not transcendent, or all powerful, the way the Christian god is. Instead of leveling requirements and making commandments, our Gods and Goddesses give us particular and peculiar requirements, tailored to their personalities and to our own. They do not ask us to avoid sin, or to have any other specific engagement with society or the world for the matter. Instead they talk to us dimly through ritual and have remembered beliefs. They whisper, and those whispers are easily lost in many different ways. Their whispers require careful attention to hear, and encourage us as much as tell us what to do.
For Pagans, unlike Kierkegaard, the other side is joy and wonder. When we are out in the forest or mountains (or beach if you prefer), we smell and feel the wonder of the growing, living planet. When we are with those we love, whether within circle or within the family, we feel intimate and close to those we are with. We have a joy that comes from knowing some other, either another that brings power and peace (the natural world) or another that brings intrigue, ideas, and love (other people).
But we still have the same problem that confronted Kierkegaard and others: if we have made that leap of faith, what do we do on the other side [5]? If we see the world as filled with spirits, a world of wonder and excitement, then what do we do because of that? What change must happen in us, and in the world?
One way to understand what must happen is to examine the nature of the Gods and Goddesses. The Gods and Goddesses represent the natural, and the social, world. They are part of the natural world, the same world we experience when we are within nature. But they are also individual entities, individuals, who can be experienced in the same way that we experience other people. Except the Gods and Goddesses do not have material form, they are experienced through ritual, meditation, and unmediated [6] personal experience. This experience leads to the same joy, wonder, and inner satisfaction that we experience when interacting with nature or loved ones, only many times increased due to the fact that we can get even “closer” to the Gods and Goddesses as we do not need to use our senses to experience them.
This wonder, this experience that does not come through senses, leads us directly to the change that occurs as we move from a “religious” Pagan to a “faithful” Pagan: magic. Magic comes into the world through the change in perception that occurs when Pagan’s have faith in the existence of independent, individual, deities in the world. Because the deities are immanent in the world, the world becomes divine. And a divine world is a magical, wondrous, mysterious world that allows for all kinds of workings, changes, and effects that do not occur through other experiences or belief systems.
This magical view of the world is tied directly to faith, and thus avoids any and all criticism that comes from applying scientific [7] or pseudo-scientific criteria to magic. Magic exists and works because we have faith, faith backed up by direct experience of the Gods and Goddesses in the world.
This sense of wonder in the world, brought on by the presence of the Gods and Goddesses is, I believe, the third great pillar of Pagan theology:
The first pillar is the immanence of the Gods and Goddesses in the world.
The second pillar is acceptance, from which comes multiplicity of deity.
The third pillar is joy and wonder in the unmediated experience of the world, from which comes magic.
While these may not be the only pillars, they are the ones I have discussed in these columns so far. They, in my opinion, represent a underlying foundation behind a lot of what we do, say, and write about in the modern Pagan movement.
[1] This sounds a lot like “meet the new boss, same as the old boss…” True and false. It is true that faith in existence of deity pretty much leads you to the same truth claims and issues no matter what exactly the deity that you believe in looks like. The responsibility of faith requires that you make some decisions about how the world is organized, otherwise its not a very strong belief. However at the same time Paganism is different than book religions in that it embraces a radical acceptance of the other, including other religious viewpoints. So while we may not believe they have the right belief, we do have the basic, bedrock, requirement to allow those other deities and beliefs to have the same claim on truth and respect that we claim for ours.
[2] From which the “leap of faith” arose.
[3] Here we have to depart ways from the Lutheran Kierkegaard, who sees the central paradox in the incarnation, and who sees constant renewal of faith as a necessary counter to the tendency to drift, a renewal that is necessary.
[4] Though those trials can be seen two ways. A tourist who steps barefoot on thistles in front of a main stone in a Celtic circle may interpret the encounter as disapproval of such dilatants messing around with the God of the place. (Certainly the locals will see it as such.) But another interpretation might be that the God is testing her, placing a message on the path of faith, that not all is easy or simple, and that faith is more than posing or claiming it, it is keeping it despite hardship or pain.
[5] Kierkegaard is no help here, as he was a misogynist, crazy, reactionary.
[6] By unmediated experience I mean experience that happens independent of the senses in the world, that we do not actually see, touch, or smell them. This does not preclude unmediated sensory experience, only that the experience does not come through interaction with objects in the world through physical senses. It’s a mystical or shamanistic experience, if you will.
[7] In several previous columns I’ve discussed various concepts of magic. This is my fundamental concept and theoretical basis for magical workings: that the divinity in the world, as expressed through our mystical wonder at our engagement with the world, allows us to see the world in a new, magical light. We change, the world does not change, and through our changes magic comes into being. I will elaborate on this idea in future columns and try and place it within a framework of an overall theory of magic.