Pagan Theology
Guilt
For Samhain this year our group will be putting on a ritual themed around the idea of atonement. Not the “feel bad, please forgive my rotten mess” kind of atonement, but the idea of reviewing the past year, our actions, and their effects in order to see what we can do to affect our fates in the coming year. In structuring the ritual I began to realize just how closely aligned atonement, review, contemplation, actions, effects, and other items normally associated with all these bad ideas of “sin” and “guilt” are closely aligned with the Pagan concept of fate.
For Christians all these ideas are very closely linked through the idea of punishment. You do the crime you do the time, unless you are forgiven. For Pagans it’s more of a weaving together of our past actions with how we plan to act in the future. The future is always dependent on the past and its interpretation, and if we seek to know the future we need to understand our past and what we did and what effects we caused. This balance between understanding the past, and figuring out how we are going to act in the future, seems like a very good subject to think about at this time of the new year.
But first, lets talk about sin and guilt. Oh dear, I’m already feeling bad I brought all this up…
Within the religions of the book, sin, punishment, unworthiness, and just general low self-esteem seems to be the rule of the day. Yom Kippur, the Jewish high holy day of atonement is an example of this tendency toward a focus on sin and forgiveness of sin that occupies these religions. A person can commit many different “crimes,” from those against god to against man, or even the laws of the church (or people). These transgressions are tied into your fate through the idea of punishment. If your sins or transgressions are not somehow forgiven or made up for, then you can expect bad things to happen to you either in the coming year (Judaism) or for all eternity (Christianity, always upping the ante).
In modern religious interpretations of these concepts sin becomes guilt and unhappy feelings. Guilt. If the threat of some sort of supernatural punishment fails in the face of modern science, then feelings of hurt and unworthiness can easily substitute. If the religious cannot make you scared of punishment, at least they can make you feel bad about yourself and your actions.
Ultimately I believe this is a form of bullying. Actions or thoughts that are not illegal, or even potentially harmful, are used as reasons to exclude individuals as “bad” or not worthy of belonging. Bullying is a way to exercise power, and guilt for actions that are not harmful is an easy way to accomplish that. One of the worst examples are the attempts to make homosexuals feel shame or guilt for being who they are.
Modern Pagan religions categorically reject any concept of sin, or even guilt, as a motivator for behavior or our relationship with deity. We don’t offend against the rules of the Gods and Goddesses, though we may offend them [1]. Often this rejection of sin and guilt seems to be a visceral reaction to the pervasive use of these emotions as a way to bully those who don’t conform to the norm into behaving themselves. People who are raised in homes where disapproval is a pervasive way of interacting can feel joy and relief in a religion that rejects the entire concept.
A more fundamental reason for rejecting the idea of sin is that there is no sin in the world. There is harm, there is suffering, but they are part of a balance of natural laws that provide for joy as well as suffering, for pleasure and pain. Only when you step outside of the context of the natural world, into the realm of transcendent “Platonic” ideals do you find fault independent of harm. There is harm, and hurt, and things that are to be avoided, but none of those things are somehow “against” the world. It would be as if your left arm were against your right one. It does not make sense to categorize good and evil as opposites in continual battle, rather they are manifest traits of what it is in the world. That, of course, does not justify embracing evil that does harm, but at the same time we cannot categorize as “evil” things that do no harm but are disapproved of.
Nor do can we characterize something as evil because it violates some rule. First, there are no rules, just natural laws that everyone operates under. Second, the Gods and Goddesses have better things to do than fiddle around in our affairs, like tending to their own. As the great Father and Mother they expect us to behave ourselves, but they don’t manifest and punish us if we don’t. The world will take care of that for them.
Theistically we would say that dark and light are manifest visions of the Lord and Lady, both of them embodied in different Gods and Goddesses who represent all manner of good and ill. Our Gods and Goddesses are not exclusive in their goodness, some Gods and Goddesses manifest the darkness as well. War, pain, suffering, selfishness, greed, power, hunger, and more are all embodied in various Gods and Goddesses within each tribal tradition. While we are not going to be super best friends with these Gods and Goddesses, we respect their power and can call on them to give us some of their authority, power, and decisiveness.
So, for us, sin is a meaningless concept, and we mainly seek to avoid doing harm to others because that itself is a good way to live [2].
But is there a Pagan form to the idea of rectifying bad results from the past. A friend of mine would say this is “owning your own shit.” If you have caused harm, or done something wrong, then understanding that you have done harm, and “owning” it or accepting that it is part of you, if fundamental to a Pagan ethic. From a theological perspective this means that we are applying the idea of “as above, so below” to the idea of transgression. If good and evil coexist in the world, and within the Gods and Goddesses, then they also coexist within ourselves. We are both good and evil, we have elements of both in all we do. When we own our actions we admit that we have done harm and, hopefully, seek to set it right. That is a form of sin, and atonement.
This is different from the Christian concept of sin. Instead of seeing that inherent capacity for doing harm in all of us as “evil” we see it as “natural.” Obviously common sense, ethics, and much federal and state law would say that we should try and not act on our evil natures. But we accept that it is within us and not somehow an alien that must be rejected. And, because it is part of us, we don’t need to be forgiven for it, we need to acknowledge it and do right in spite of it.
Who would we ask for forgiveness from anyway? Dagda has his own problems if the tales be true, and Morrigan would merely laugh at the insignificance of our problems. We need to be fully responsible for both sides of our natures, and not lean on the Gods and Goddesses to somehow save us from them.
Pagan atonement comes from changing that which we were, and growing into that which we could be. If we can change, and everything that She touches does change, then we can seek to change in ways that make our lives, and the lives of those around us, less hurtful, better. Reviewing our actions in the past, living with our shit for a while, can show us what we have done, and to whom. This can be actions that have caused harm to family, or to the world. No one who lives in this country, or has the ability to read this column, has done no harm. We have all harmed the natural world, we have all caused harm in many ways and places we may not even know about. What we consume leaves less for someone else (I’m talking to you: guy ahead of me in line for the new IPhone). Instead of forgiving it away we should be thinking about how to fix it.
Pagan atonement means not asking for forgiveness but rather asking about fate. What is our fate if we continue to do harm? What will happen to us in the future if we continue to do what we are doing? Will harm come back to us (maybe, like, threefold?) Can we change that fate by changing our actions?
Fate, of course, is more than just “what’s going to happen to me in the future?” Fate, in the Northern traditions, is a much more complex subject. It is the weave of the world, the relationship between all that exists and time. It carries us along as it carries along the Gods and Goddesses. This idea of fate as the underlying fabric of everything in the universe means that fate affects everything and everything we do affects our fates, as well as everyone else’s fate.
Thus Pagan atonement is more than just simply trying to review our past and minimize harm in the future. Rather it is a process by which we examine our lives, and prune or shape that which drives us away from the Gods and Goddesses and increase that which drives us toward them. Things that drive us away include hurtful actions, thoughtless work, and diminished expectations. Working for and with others for a better world, walking gently on the environment, and loving as hard as we can expand our spirits into the realm of the Gods and Goddesses. Our spirits are of the same spark as the Gods and the Goddesses but we have a long path to travel to reach them. Every now and then we see who they are and what we can be when we arrive on our journey. When we love, when we are gracious, when we have joy in the natural world, we can see where our spirits are going, we can see our fate.
Pagan atonement allows us to examine who we are, what we are doing, and what we need to do to reach the other side. What have we done that increases our spirit, and what have we done that decreases it? That is the real question for atonement, to ask how we increase in spirit until we join the Gods and Goddesses in the dance of life.
There is no sin in any of this, no feeling guilty because of who or what you are. The need to feel guilty as a way to push us toward the good is a trivial force compared to the reward that comes from becoming closer to the Gods and Goddesses, increasing our spirits until we can see their realms clearly, until we can hear their words and touch their hands. At that point we will be without need of forgiveness, and we will be fulfilled without anyone’s mercy.
[1] But what about the potential for very real trouble when we call or cross the wrong entity, or when entities that exist come into the world and our lives in ways that are harmful? I would argue that this is essentially no different than what happens with corporeal entities (family, friends, strangers) that come into your life. You may end up offending some, becoming a target of a nasty individual, or just get mixed up with bad people. If the Gods and Goddesses are entities with personalities and attributes just like what we have, you would expect those kind of reactions from them. But what I would contend they don’t do is pass judgment on our behavior based on a set of rules and regulations, and then punish us for our transgressions.
[2] Elsewhere I have argued that an essentially humanist set of arguments makes the most sense when considering Pagan ethics. A perfectly good ethical system can be derived from a deep respect for life, the right for conscious beings to make their own decisions, and the idea that we all need to get along and work together, amongst other ideas. You don’t need to introduce deity in order to develop an ethical system.