Principles of Paganism, Lesson 3
Principles of Paganism
Lesson 3: Pagan Psychology
Part One: Reading Between the Lines
I am currently re-reading a very interesting book, The Greeks and the Irrational, by E.R. Dodds, that throws a lot of light upon ancient Greek religious psychology. Like many other accounts of ancient and “primitive” religion, it interprets the evidence in terms of our own cultural prejudices, such as our assumption of psychic unity and the subjective nature of religious phenomena. By being alert to certain expressions, however, we can catch the instances where a scholar or anthropologist is wearing his cultural blinkers and discount his self-imposed limitations of understanding.
For instance, in chapter 1 of Dodds, footnote 37 (p. 21), in speaking of the goddess Hera’s erinyes or avenging spirits, he says “The erinyes of Hera have exactly the same function as those of Penelope – to protect the status of a mother by punishing an unfilial son. We can say that they are the maternal anger projected as a personal being.” Exactly – presuming the erinyes do not exist, an assumption which Dodds, like all approved (and funded) scholars feels called upon to make. What is good about Dodds is that he makes the assumptions explicitly, so they are easy to spot and discount. He is careful to avoid anachronisms, for instance, when he says that trying to decide whether people in Homeric times believed in free will or determination amounts to posing a question that hadn’t yet been asked and that, if posed to them, they would find very hard to understand (page 7). Thus, he gets quite close to what we can know of their thought processes without importing our own, beyond the assumptions we are noting here. And if we look out for words like “projection” we shall be able to get those assumptions out of the way so that we can attempt to feel the world from within the ancient skin, as it were.
Reading between the lines in the above case does not involve a simple reversal, in which we would say that the maternal anger felt by Hera is merely an introjection of her experience of her erinyes’ enmity. The maternal anger is there as well; what can be discounted, for our purposes, is Dodd’s remark that the erinyes represent a mere projection of that anger. There is nothing in the experience of maternal anger to provide evidence either way for his assumption that a projection is involved (but see my note at the end of this section). This is simply a matter, then, of preferring the modern perspective to the ancient, a custom among scholars similar to that of calling all ancient games “checkers” or “chess” rather than presenting a description of the actual games being played.
If we, on the other hand, prefer the ancient perspective we needn’t worry that in so doing we would be offending against Occam’s razor by “multiplying entities beyond necessity.” For, in the first place, it is not at all clear that positing the unity and isolation of the soul makes fewer assumptions, in the face of all available psychological evidence, than the more ancient viewpoints that allow for multiple souls and psychic permeability towards the world of spirits. In the second place, however, we are approaching the matter from a different standard of necessity, that of seeing and feeling the world as the ancients did, or as nearly as we can get to that. We want to be like the anthropologists who “go native” and thereby, in the eyes of their colleagues, vitiate the objective value of their observations. As we are not trying to be objective anthropologists, we needn’t worry about that.
As long as we are speaking of anthropologists, here is an example from an excellent anthology of monographs called African divination Systems. In the book’s introduction, the editor praises the more objective approaches of anthropologists, some of whom happened to be missionaries but nevertheless did not feel compelled (as other missionaries did) to color their accounts with deprecatory remarks (page 7). Nevertheless, here too we find the same horse-blinkers of soul unity and assumption of subjectivity of religious experiences, which can, to varying degrees, be as easily elided from their accounts as from those in Dodds.
In the course of describing divination, an anthropologist sometimes confuses his own explanation with what the indigenous peoples believe. Discussing Atuot divination in the southern Sudan, John W. Burton explains that the word for diviner, tiet, is derived from tet or “hand:”
“During the divination ritual the tiet holds a rattle in his hand, but it is said to be the jok, the suprahuman power within his body that shakes the rattle, not the tiet himself. As the Atuot say, ‘this is the jok moving within him.’ His own consciousness apparently becomes subordinate to the jok that is presumed to control his behavior…Because jao [the plural of jok] are considered to be spiritual manifestations of an individual’s inner state of consciousness – manifestations that may enter and act upon another individual – they can be spoken of as active spiritual agents.” (page 46).
The use of the passive voice in the above passage – “are considered to be spiritual manifestations,” etc., conceals the lack of a clear subject. Who considers them to be such? Not the Atuot, surely, for they believe the possessing jok to be an entity existing on its own, not an externalization of the diviner’s “inner state of consciousness.” If pressed to reply, Burton would have to admit that it is he who considers them to be such, he and his professional colleagues. This gradual surreptitious change in viewpoint could be called a case of “paradigm creep.”
The most blatant example of paradigmatic arrogance on my shelves occupies a pivotal chapter on religion in what is otherwise a wonderfully reasoned scholarly account of Mesopotamian civilization by A. Leo Oppenheim called Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization. The chapter itself bears the cautious title “Why a ‘Mesopotamian Religion’ Should Not be Written.” In it, Oppenheim proceeds along similar lines to Dodds but is more thoroughgoing in his interpretations of the four protecting spirits addressed in prayer as “externalized” aspects of the “personality:”
“All this can be characterized as the expression of a psychological experience in mythological terms. To the student of comparative religion or the cultural anthropologist, the several “protective spirits”…represent but another example of the widespread concept of multiple and external souls. The four protective “spirits” in Mesopotamia are individualized and mythologized carriers of certain specific psychological aspects of one basic phenomenon, the realization of the self, the personality, as it relates the ego to the outside world and, at the same time, separates one from the other (pages 199-200).”
Here again, the scholar doesn’t mean to imply that the ancients praying to the four protective spirits “really” mean the abstract psychological terms employed in his explanation. He is not so naïve as to commit such an anachronism; what he is doing instead is to arrogantly impose concepts from our own cultural paradigm on experiences from four millenia ago in the apparent assurance that that is what was “really” happening at the time, and also assumes that our explanations in turn will outlast our time and still be valid four millenia hence, because they are somehow objectively true. This is not paradigm creep, it is paradigm imposition.
Further examples of our cultural condescension in these matters would not be hard to produce. The literature of anthropology, classics and archaeology is rife with them. Enough has been shown here to illustrate how to spot such interpretations and, with a little ingenuity, to separate the wheat of ancient or “primitive” sensibility from the chaff of modernist debunking. By reading between the lines of such accounts, we can begin to enter imaginatively into other worlds of experience and thereby enrich our own.
A Note on “Projection”:
The other day I gave five dollars to a man who said he was broke. We were outside a diner in a parking lot. I turned to go to my car when I felt a curious tap on the shoulder, a tap that was at the same time a feeling of warmth. Looking back and up, I saw that the Sun was shining with unusual brilliance and I felt a feeling of gladness coming from it towards me. I had not been feeling particularly proud of myself for giving the man money (if anything, I felt rather cheap and was wondering what he could buy these days for such a small sum). My feelings at the moment could be described as grave sobriety. The feeling of gladness, of having pleased someone or something else, came last in the experience I had at that moment. I was not feeling it, something else was.
In like manner, Penelope (or Hera) might have felt the presence or social gesture of an erinys (singular of erinyes) coming from without, and then received the feeling of maternal anger.
I am not arguing for the veracity of these explanations, merely illustrating how dismissing such events as “projection” can misrepresent the dynamics of the experiences themselves by reversing their direction.
Bibliography
DODDS, E.R., The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1951.
OPPENHEIM, A. Leo, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1964.
PEEK, Philip M., ed., African divination Systems, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1991.
Part Two: Our Two Souls
As Michael York points out in his recent study, Pagan Theology (NYU Press), most pagan cultures posit at least two souls, and many posit more than two. These two souls are not separate in embodied life, but are closely associated, and only separate at death. York calls them the life soul and the dream soul. In Mongolian-Siberian culture they are called the suld and the ami. [1] In pagan Baltic society the life soul was called the sielas and the dream soul, the vele. [2]
The life soul is most closely associated with the personality and one's feeling of connection with natural life. The dream soul is closer to the identity of the person, the "who", and it is the dream soul that goes on dream or shamanic journeys and that goes to Dausos, the Otherworld, at death, there to await rebirth in the family or clan line. The life soul lingers by the grave for a season and receives grave-offerings. Our custom of placing flowers on a grave (even though later religion teaches the soul is not there) goes back to this belief in the lingering life soul.
Pagan cemeteries were frequently planted with trees, in the belief that the life soul or sielas, after lingering around the corpse for a while, would pass into that person's individual tree, which was associated with him/her throughout life. According to the Mongolians and Siberians, the life soul or suld does not reincarnate but after a while goes into nature as an elemental and in time [3] forgets its once-human existence. I do not know the Baltic teaching on the subject. Perhaps they believed that the sielas reunites with the vele when the latter reincarnates, or perhaps a new sielas is supplied.
It may sound strange to say we have two souls, but this is because we associate the word "soul" with our identity. Only the dream soul or vele is involved in one's identity. But much of what we think of as ourselves, such as long-standing habits of thought and feeling, actually belong to our sielas. The proof of this is that they change throughout life, and can fade when we are ill or grief-stricken.
There is an old vaudeville joke which illustrates the difference between the two souls. One person says "Pay no attention to Mr. X today; he's not himself." The other replies, "Who is he, then?" The seeming contradiction is resolved by realizing that the statement pertains to the sielas or life soul, and the question to the vele or dream soul.
When we receive a shock or a great bereavement in life, we can feel as though we had died, or very nearly so, and that we are now just going through the motions of living. What has happened is that our sielas or life soul has been injured and has shrunk, as it were. Our zest and enthusiasm are not gone, but they are very small. Sometimes one recovers from this condition, at other times one dies in it.
If the shock is sufficient, the dream soul may separate from the life soul before the body dies and may have to be retrieved from the Otherworld by a shaman. This condition is known as soul loss. Modern psychologists refer to it as dissociative trauma.
If you feel you are living posthumously, your sielas has been injured by grief or shock, and you must slowly and carefully nurture it back to health. Each day treat yourself to simple pleasures, and do not make large demands on your nerves or strength. Your spirit is convalescing, and you will know you are regaining your vitality when you really begin enjoying life again.
The occasional partial separation of the vele and sielas, allowing the vele to explore the spirit world, is a safety valve provided us by nature that helps us deal with disappointments and failures in the material world. Pagan religion taught its adherents to cultivate both souls, the outward and inward. The overall cultivation of the sielas was associated with the waxing half of the year, and of the vele with the waning half, but attention was also paid to the lunar and diurnal cycles.
When the vele partly separates from the sielas without dissociation, we feel as though we own nothing and are pure awareness. This was expressed in pagan Baltic tradition by associating the vele with the elgeta or holy beggar, a sort of wandering ascetic found in pre-christian Lithuania. [4] "What you do for an elgeta, you do for a vele," goes the old saying.
Bibliography
SARANGEREL, Chosen by the Spirits; Following Your Shamanic Calling, Rochester, Vt, Destiny Books, 2001.
___________, Riding Windhorses; A Journey into the Heart of Mongolian Shamanism, Rochester, Vt, Destiny Books, 2000.
TRINKUNAS, Jonas, ed., Of Gods and Holidays; the Baltic Heritage, Tverme (city), Tverme (publisher), 1999.
YORK, Michael, Pagan Theology; Paganism as a World Religion, New York and London, New York University Press, 2003.
Exercise: When I was very small, I liked looking at ‘the baby in the mirror.’ At this age I experienced myself as headless. When I was told (after some adult laughter at my expense) that the baby was me, and the reflection of my head was the same as my head (it isn’t), I began to ignore the sensations of my headlessness, that is, the little I can see of my head without the aid of a reflecting surface, just as I later learned to ignore the moon following me home when told it was an illusion. I internalized the reflection of my head and acquired the culturally implanted viewpoint of living inside a box looking out at the world, the view influencing the scholars mentioned in Part 1 above. When Indians and other indigenous peoples complain that the white man thinks with his head instead of his chest, they are referring to this implantation.
Try keeping your headlessness in view. You can do this even in front of a mirror, as you did when you were little. You will see a little of your head, of course: a blur for your nose, your eyelashes in strong sunlight. But in place of your head you will have the world, your visual field. Thinking will begin to seem to come from your chest, the closest part of your body you can see completely. This exercise is described (and then over-analyzed) in an important little book called On Having No Head, by Douglas Harding (Arkana, London and New York, 1987).
The practice of headless awareness promotes a quiet mind and opens our feelings to the world of spirits.
Questions for Lesson 3:
Reading Between the Lines:
- Name two assumptions scholars feel obligated to make when examining the world views of other cultures.
- What is ‘paradigm creep’? What is ‘paradigm imposition’? Give an example of each.
- How might the idea of ‘projection’ falsify the details of an experience?
Our Two Souls:
- Give an example from your own experience of the life soul; of the dream soul.
- Has your life soul ever suffered injury? Describe how it healed.
- Why has nature provided for the occasional partial separation of our two souls?
- How did the pagan institution of the elgeta (holy beggar) prepare one for the eventual separation of the life soul from the dream soul at death?
Questions from Lesson 2: Suggested Answers
- If the future is fated, in what sense do we have free will?
At birth our fate is only sketched; as we go through life making choices, our fate is drawn in greater detail.
- How do the gods seek to help us within the limits of our fate? Name two ways.
The gods help us to optimize our possibilities, within the limits of our fate, by providing us with opportunities. They send us omens and otherwise help us to be aware of our alternatives at critical turning-points in our lives.
- What are turning-points? Why is it best to recognize them clearly when they arrive?
These are points at which we still have the freedom to choose either of two paths in life. Recognizing them clearly leaves us free to choose one or the other, instead of feeling, as we sometimes do, that we really have no choice.
- What does it mean to say that one’s fate is sealed? Do the results of such a sealing always happen right away?
When we have chosen one alternative at a turning-point, circumstances begin to close in on us, leading to some final result. The result may not happen right away because the circumstances involved may be complex.
- Give an example of a triggering event in the case of a sealed fate.
When Hector killed Patroclus, Achilles’ cousin, his death at the hands of Achilles was assured.
- Why is will limited? How is will self-limiting?
Will is spiritual and spirit for pagans is a subtle form of matter; as with gross matter, there is only so much of it available at a given time and place. Every decision involves some rejection of alternatives, limiting future choices.
- As we age, we receive less vital energy, including will-energy. In what other way is usable will-energy diminished?
Will-energy can be bound up in habits, which are like knots. It takes energy to unravel habits, but the result is often a net increase in available energy.
Note: I am always happy to receive your answers to study questions, but their main purpose is to promote reflection on the lesson and some of its main points. I welcome your queries and comments. You can email me at [email protected].
[1] Mongolians divide the functions of the dream soul between the ami and suns, the conception of the latter most likely derived from Tibetan Buddhist influence.
[2] ‘Ami’ is pronounced ‘em’, and ‘vele’ is pronounced ‘vwele’.
[3] The Mongolians and Siberians say that the suld forgets its human existence after ten years.
[4] The condition of being an elgeta was temporary, undertaken for a season only.