{"id":4059,"date":"2010-09-01T01:10:36","date_gmt":"2010-09-01T06:10:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paganpages.org\/content\/?p=4121"},"modified":"2010-09-01T12:18:45","modified_gmt":"2010-09-01T17:18:45","slug":"principles-of-paganism-lesson-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/2010\/09\/01\/principles-of-paganism-lesson-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Principles of Paganism, Lesson 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

Principles of Paganism<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lesson 3:\u00a0 Pagan Psychology<\/strong><\/p>\n

Part One: Reading Between the Lines<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am currently re-reading a very interesting book, The Greeks and the Irrational<\/span>, by E.R. Dodds, that throws a lot of light upon ancient Greek religious psychology.\u00a0 Like many other accounts of ancient and \u201cprimitive\u201d 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

For instance, in chapter 1 of Dodds, footnote 37 (p. 21), in speaking of the goddess Hera\u2019s erinyes<\/em> or avenging spirits, he says \u201cThe erinyes of Hera have exactly the same function as those of Penelope \u2013 to protect the status of a mother by punishing an unfilial son.\u00a0 We can say that they are the maternal anger projected as a personal being.\u201d\u00a0 Exactly \u2013 presuming the erinye<\/em>s do not exist, an assumption which Dodds, like all approved (and funded) scholars feels called upon to make.\u00a0 What is good about Dodds is that he makes the assumptions explicitly, so they are easy to spot and discount.\u00a0 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\u2019t yet been asked and that, if posed to them, they would find very hard to understand (page 7).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And if we look out for words like \u201cprojection\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>\u2019 enmity.\u00a0 The maternal anger is there as well; what can be discounted, for our purposes, is Dodd\u2019s remark that the erinyes<\/em> represent a mere projection of that anger.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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 \u201ccheckers\u201d or \u201cchess\u201d rather than presenting a description of the actual games being played.<\/p>\n

If we, on the other hand, prefer the ancient perspective we needn\u2019t worry that in so doing we would be offending against Occam\u2019s razor by \u201cmultiplying entities beyond necessity.\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We want to be like the anthropologists who \u201cgo native\u201d and thereby, in the eyes of their colleagues, vitiate the objective value of their observations.\u00a0 As we are not trying to be objective anthropologists, we needn\u2019t worry about that.<\/p>\n

As long as we are speaking of anthropologists, here is an example from an excellent anthology of monographs called African divination Systems<\/span>.\u00a0 In the book\u2019s 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).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

In the course of describing divination, an anthropologist sometimes confuses his own explanation with what the indigenous peoples believe.\u00a0 Discussing Atuot divination in the southern Sudan, John W. Burton explains that the word for diviner, tiet<\/em>, is derived from tet<\/em> or \u201chand:\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring the divination ritual the tiet<\/em> holds a rattle in his hand, but it is said to be the jok<\/em>, the suprahuman power within his body that shakes the rattle, not the tiet<\/em> himself.\u00a0 As the Atuot say, \u2018this is the jok <\/em>moving within him.\u2019\u00a0 His own consciousness apparently becomes subordinate to the jok<\/em> that is presumed to control his behavior\u2026Because jao<\/em> [the plural of jok<\/em>] are considered to be spiritual manifestations of an individual\u2019s inner state of consciousness \u2013 manifestations that may enter and act upon another individual \u2013 they can be spoken of as active spiritual agents.\u201d (page 46).<\/p>\n

The use of the passive voice in the above passage \u2013 \u201care considered to be spiritual manifestations,\u201d etc., conceals the lack of a clear subject.\u00a0 Who considers them to be such?\u00a0 Not the Atuot, surely, for they believe the possessing jok<\/em> to be an entity existing on its own, not an externalization of the diviner\u2019s \u201cinner state of consciousness.\u201d\u00a0 If pressed to reply, Burton would have to admit that it is he who considers them to be such, he and his professional colleagues.\u00a0 This gradual surreptitious change in viewpoint could be called a case of \u201cparadigm creep.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/span>.\u00a0\u00a0 The chapter itself bears the cautious title \u201cWhy a \u2018Mesopotamian Religion\u2019 Should Not be Written.\u201d\u00a0 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 \u201cexternalized\u201d aspects of the \u201cpersonality:\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAll this can be characterized as the expression of a psychological experience in mythological terms.\u00a0 To the student of comparative religion or the cultural anthropologist, the several \u201cprotective spirits\u201d\u2026represent but another example of the widespread concept of multiple and external souls.\u00a0 The four protective \u201cspirits\u201d 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).\u201d<\/p>\n

Here again, the scholar doesn\u2019t mean to imply that the ancients praying to the four protective spirits \u201creally\u201d mean the abstract psychological terms employed in his explanation.\u00a0 He is not so na\u00efve 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 \u201creally\u201d 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.\u00a0 This is not paradigm creep, it is paradigm imposition.<\/p>\n

Further examples of our cultural condescension in these matters would not be hard to produce.\u00a0 The literature of anthropology, classics and archaeology is rife with them.\u00a0 Enough has been shown here to illustrate how to spot such interpretations and, with a little ingenuity, to separate the wheat of ancient or \u201cprimitive\u201d sensibility from the chaff of modernist debunking.\u00a0 By reading between the lines of such accounts, we can begin to enter imaginatively into other worlds of experience and thereby enrich our own.<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

A Note on \u201cProjection\u201d:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The other day I gave five dollars to a man who said he was broke.\u00a0 We were outside a diner in a parking lot.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 My feelings at the moment could be described as grave sobriety.\u00a0 The feeling of gladness, of having pleased someone or something else, came last in the experience I had at that moment.\u00a0\u00a0 I was not feeling it, something else was.<\/p>\n

In like manner, Penelope (or Hera) might have felt the presence or social gesture of an erinys<\/em> (singular of erinyes<\/em>) coming from without, and then received the feeling of maternal anger.<\/p>\n

I am not arguing for the veracity of these explanations, merely illustrating how dismissing such events as \u201cprojection\u201d can misrepresent the dynamics of the experiences themselves by reversing their direction.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n

DODDS, E.R., The Greeks and the Irrational<\/span>, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1951.<\/p>\n

OPPENHEIM, A. Leo, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization<\/span>, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1964.<\/p>\n

PEEK, Philip M., ed., African divination Systems<\/span>, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1991.<\/p>\n

Part Two: Our Two Souls<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Michael York points out in his recent study, Pagan Theology<\/span> (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<\/em> and the ami<\/em>. <\/tt>[1]<\/a> In pagan Baltic society the life soul was called the sielas<\/em> and the dream soul, the vele. <\/em><\/tt>[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/em>, 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.\u00a0 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.<\/tt><\/p>\n

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 <\/tt>[3]<\/a> 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.<\/tt><\/p>\n

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.<\/tt><\/p>\n

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. <\/tt><\/p>\n

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.<\/tt><\/p>\n

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.<\/tt><\/p>\n

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.<\/tt><\/p>\n

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\u00a0 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.<\/tt><\/p>\n

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<\/em> or holy beggar, a sort of wandering ascetic found in pre-christian Lithuania. <\/tt>[4]<\/a> \"What you do for an elgeta, you do for a vele,\" goes the old saying.<\/tt><\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n

SARANGEREL, Chosen by the Spirits; Following Your Shamanic Calling<\/span>, Rochester, Vt, Destiny Books, 2001.<\/p>\n

___________, Riding Windhorses; A Journey into the Heart of Mongolian Shamanism<\/span>, Rochester, Vt, Destiny Books, 2000.<\/p>\n

TRINKUNAS, Jonas, ed., Of Gods and Holidays; the Baltic Heritage<\/span>,\u00a0 Tverme (city), Tverme (publisher),\u00a0 1999.<\/p>\n

YORK, Michael, Pagan Theology; Paganism as a World Religion<\/span>, New York and London, New York University Press, 2003.<\/p>\n

Exercise: <\/strong>When I was very small, I liked looking at \u2018the baby in the mirror.\u2019\u00a0 At this age I experienced myself as headless.\u00a0 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\u2019t), 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Try keeping your headlessness in view.\u00a0 You can do this even in front of a mirror, as you did when you were little.\u00a0 You will see a little of your head, of course: a blur for your nose, your eyelashes in strong sunlight.\u00a0 But\u00a0 in place of your head you will have the world, your visual field.\u00a0 Thinking will begin to seem to come from your chest, the closest part of your body you can see completely.\u00a0 This exercise\u00a0 is described (and then over-analyzed) in an important little book called On Having No Head<\/span>, by Douglas Harding (Arkana, London and New York, 1987).<\/p>\n

The practice of headless awareness promotes a quiet mind and opens our feelings to the world of spirits.<\/p>\n

Questions for Lesson 3:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reading Between the Lines:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Name two assumptions scholars feel obligated to make when examining the world views of other cultures.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      \n
    1. What is \u2018paradigm creep\u2019?\u00a0 What is \u2018paradigm imposition\u2019?\u00a0 Give an example of each.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
        \n
      1. How might the idea of \u2018projection\u2019 falsify the details of an experience?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        Our Two Souls:<\/p>\n

          \n
        1. Give an example from your own experience of the life soul; of the dream soul.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
            \n
          1. Has your life soul ever suffered injury?\u00a0 Describe how it healed.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
              \n
            1. Why has nature provided for the occasional partial separation of our two souls?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
                \n
              1. 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?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                Questions from Lesson 2: Suggested Answers<\/strong><\/p>\n

                  \n
                1. If the future is fated, in what sense do we have free will?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                  At birth our fate is only sketched; as we go through life making choices, our fate is drawn in greater detail.<\/p>\n

                    \n
                  1. How do the gods seek to help us within the limits of our fate?\u00a0 Name two ways.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                    The gods help us to optimize our possibilities, within the limits of our fate, by providing us with opportunities.\u00a0 They send us omens and otherwise help us to be aware of our alternatives at critical turning-points in our lives.<\/p>\n

                      \n
                    1. What are turning-points?\u00a0 Why is it best to recognize them clearly when they arrive?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                      These are points at which we still have the freedom to choose either of two paths in life.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

                        \n
                      1. What does it mean to say that one\u2019s fate is sealed?\u00a0 Do the results of such a sealing always happen right away?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                        When we have chosen one alternative at a turning-point, circumstances begin to close in on us, leading to some final result.\u00a0 The result may not happen right away because the circumstances involved may be complex.<\/p>\n

                          \n
                        1. Give an example of a triggering event in the case of a sealed fate.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                          When Hector killed Patroclus, Achilles\u2019 cousin, his death at the hands of Achilles was assured.<\/p>\n

                            \n
                          1. Why is will limited?\u00a0 How is will self-limiting?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                            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.\u00a0 Every decision involves some rejection of alternatives, limiting future choices.<\/p>\n

                              \n
                            1. As we age, we receive less vital energy, including will-energy.\u00a0 In what other way is usable will-energy diminished?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                              Will-energy can be bound up in habits, which are like knots.\u00a0 It takes energy to unravel habits, but the result\u00a0 is often a net increase in available energy.<\/p>\n

                              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.\u00a0 I welcome your queries and comments.\u00a0 You can email me at quicksilver101445@yahoo.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

                              [1]<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

                              [2]<\/a> \u2018Ami\u2019 is pronounced \u2018em\u2019, and \u2018vele\u2019 is pronounced \u2018vwele\u2019.<\/p>\n

                              [3]<\/a> The Mongolians and Siberians say that the suld forgets its human existence after ten years.<\/p>\n

                              [4]<\/a> The condition of being an elgeta was temporary, undertaken for a season only.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

                              Principles of Paganism Lesson 3:\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Like many other accounts of ancient and \u201cprimitive\u201d 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s erinyes or avenging spirits, he says \u201cThe erinyes of Hera have exactly the same function as those of Penelope \u2013 to protect the status of a mother by punishing an unfilial son.\u00a0 We can say that they are the maternal anger projected as a personal being.\u201d\u00a0 Exactly \u2013 presuming the erinyes do not exist, an assumption which Dodds, like all approved (and funded) scholars feels called upon to make.\u00a0 What is good about Dodds is that he makes the assumptions explicitly, so they are easy to spot and discount.\u00a0 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\u2019t yet been asked and that, if posed to them, they would find very hard to understand (page 7).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And if we look out for words like \u201cprojection\u201d 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\u2019 enmity.\u00a0 The maternal anger is there as well; what can be discounted, for our purposes, is Dodd\u2019s remark that the erinyes represent a mere projection of that anger.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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 \u201ccheckers\u201d or \u201cchess\u201d rather than presenting a description of the actual games being played. If we, on the other hand, prefer the ancient perspective we needn\u2019t worry that in so doing we would be offending against Occam\u2019s razor by \u201cmultiplying entities beyond necessity.\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We want to be like the anthropologists who \u201cgo native\u201d and thereby, in the eyes of their colleagues, vitiate the objective value of their observations.\u00a0 As we are not trying to be objective anthropologists, we needn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 In the book\u2019s 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).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Discussing Atuot divination in the southern Sudan, John W. Burton explains that the word for diviner, tiet, is derived from tet or \u201chand:\u201d \u201cDuring 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.\u00a0 As the Atuot say, \u2018this is the jok moving within him.\u2019\u00a0 His own consciousness apparently becomes subordinate to the jok that is presumed to control his behavior\u2026Because jao [the plural of jok] are considered to be spiritual manifestations of an individual\u2019s inner state of consciousness \u2013 manifestations that may enter and act upon another individual \u2013 they can be spoken of as active spiritual agents.\u201d (page 46). The use of the passive voice in the above passage \u2013 \u201care considered to be spiritual manifestations,\u201d etc., conceals the lack of a clear subject.\u00a0 Who considers them to be such?\u00a0 Not the Atuot, surely, for they believe the possessing jok to be an entity existing on its own, not an externalization of the diviner\u2019s \u201cinner state of consciousness.\u201d\u00a0 If pressed to reply, Burton would have to admit that it is he who considers them to be such, he and his professional colleagues.\u00a0 This gradual surreptitious change in viewpoint could be called a case of \u201cparadigm creep.\u201d 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.\u00a0\u00a0 The chapter itself bears the cautious title \u201cWhy a \u2018Mesopotamian Religion\u2019 Should Not be Written.\u201d\u00a0 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 \u201cexternalized\u201d aspects of the \u201cpersonality:\u201d \u201cAll this can be characterized as the expression of a psychological experience in mythological terms.\u00a0 To the student of comparative religion or the cultural anthropologist, the several \u201cprotective spirits\u201d\u2026represent but another example of the widespread concept of multiple and external souls.\u00a0 The four protective \u201cspirits\u201d 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).\u201d Here again, the scholar doesn\u2019t mean to imply that the ancients praying to the four protective spirits \u201creally\u201d mean the abstract psychological terms employed in his explanation.\u00a0 He is not so na\u00efve 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 \u201creally\u201d 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.\u00a0 This is not paradigm creep, it is paradigm imposition. Further examples of our cultural condescension in these matters would not be hard to produce.\u00a0 The literature of anthropology, classics and archaeology is rife with them.\u00a0 Enough has been shown here to illustrate how to spot such interpretations and, with a little ingenuity, to separate the wheat of ancient or \u201cprimitive\u201d sensibility from the chaff of modernist debunking.\u00a0 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 \u201cProjection\u201d: The other day I gave five dollars to a man who said he was broke.\u00a0 We were outside a diner in a parking lot.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 My feelings at the moment could be described as grave sobriety.\u00a0 The feeling of gladness, of having pleased someone or something else, came last in the experience I had at that moment.\u00a0\u00a0 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 \u201cprojection\u201d 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.\u00a0 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paganpages.org\/emagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}