What Does It Mean For The Gods To Exist?

and other essays

Creative Commons Edition

Tom Swiss

Copyright © 2016, Tom Swiss
CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0
All other rights reserved

First printing: 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68419-340-0

Infamous Productions
2119 Arlonne Drive
Catonsville MD 21228
www.infamous.net

Creative Commons License
This edition of What Does It Mean For the Gods to Exist?: and other essays by Tom Swiss is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Contents

Preface to the Creative Commons Edition

Preface

An Introduction, and a Buddhist Earth Deity

Festival Paganism as Pilgrimage

The Quiet Side of Magic

Has Pagan Environmentalism Failed?

Martial Arts as Magical Practice

Five Principles of Magic

Wild Naked Pagans

Wild Naked Minds

The Burners and the Pagans

Gratitude, Schmatitude

Ferguson: Righteous Anger and Wrathful Deities

Contemplative Druidry by James Nichol (Book Review)

Santa Claus and the Nature of the Gods

A Fae Footnote

Not Invulnerable

Gods Save Us From Glorious Struggles

Religion, Identity, Practice, Doctrine, Is, and Ought

My Best Superbowl Sunday Ever

The Aesthetic Component of Religion

What Does It Mean For the Gods to Exist?

Pagan Atheist???

Super-Kings With Special Substance

What Does It Mean to Exist? Anatman…

…and the Ouija Board

And, What About Numbers?

And, What About the Brick?

Questions Need Context

“What does a Zen Pagan Atheist ritual look like?”

Invite and Ask

Keep people moving

Challenge Accepted

Keep It Simple

Leave Space for Co-creation

The Politically Incorrect Pagan

You — Yes, *You* — Can Dance (If You Want To)

I Don’t Know

Ares and Athena in the Baltimore Uprising

Was the Buddha a Humanistic Pagan?

“So Siddhartha sat down under a tree”

The Buddha’s “Apatheism”

The Buddha and the Earth Goddess

Buddhism as a “Forest Religion”

The Fire Circle – All Kinds Magic Worked Here

The Only God to Whom Jupiter Must Bow

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Preface to the Creative Commons Edition

This edition of What Does It Mean For the Gods to Exist?: and other essays by Tom Swiss is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

It is available to you at no cost, and you are permitted - indeed, encouraged! - to make exact copies and share them. Please don't sell copies (it's rude to sell copies and not pay the author a cut), please don't make altered copies (except as necessary for technological compatibility, it's rude to change an author's work), and please leave the author's name on it (it's rude to not properly attribute a work). Otherwise, please share and enjoy.

This edition differs from the standard-copyright commercial version in that, since you have not paid for it, it interrupts you several times to ask you to support the author — sort of like a public television or radio pledge drive. You can do this by by making a direct monetary contribution (even a dollar helps), by purchasing a copy of the paperback version or the commercial e-book, by buying other books or merchandise from the author, or in other ways suggested at infamous.net/support. (Should that URL disappear in the future, a web search for the title of this book will most likely turn up the author's on-line presence.)

Thank you in advance for your support.

Preface

The essays that follow were written in 2014 and 2015. Most of them appeared on the “Agora” group blog on Patheos, and this volume contains my complete run on that blog. Also included here are “The Aesthetic Component of Religion,” which was written for the Patheos Public Square on Religion and Visual Art (and published there as “Experiencing Art: Beyond the Symbol”), and “Was the Buddha a Humanistic Pagan?”, which was written for John Halstead’s Humanistic Paganism site.

I’ve removed some blog housekeeping content and taken the opportunity to fix some small errors of grammar and the like, and reformatted things for the ebook media, but made no substantial changes in content.

Since blogs tend to be products of their time I’ve included the original publication dates for each piece.

An Introduction, and a Buddhist Earth Deity

May 23, 2014

Hello! Welcome to The Zen Pagan.

“The what Pagan?” some Pagan readers may be wondering; and perhaps “The Zen what?” may be heard from Patheos Buddhist, if this should leak over there.

But if prior discussions are any guide, some readers are saying “Oh! Yes, that’s it!” For several years I thought that my friend Mike Gurklis and I invented the term “Zen Pagan” in the late 1980s, but I’ve found that others have discovered it independently – including, interestingly enough, John Lennon. So if the term resonates with you in some way, you’re not alone.

There’s much to say about this Zen Paganism: from how the Buddha obtained enlightenment while sitting under a tree and calling on the Earth to bear him witness, to the Greco-Buddhist culture that arose in Gandhara in the wake of the conquerors Alexander and Ashoka and gave us the first Buddha statues (styled after images of the Greek pantheon), to how Aleister Crowley’s roommate was one the first Westerners to become a Buddhist monk, on up through Mr. Lennon’s identification as a Zen Pagan and what it all suggests to us going forward. We’ll be investigating such topics in future episodes, but today I’d like to offer an introduction by telling you how I found a Buddhist deity of the Earth…or he/she (it’s complicated) found me.

Friends, meet Jizō, the Bodhisattva of the Earth.

It was the summer of 1992, if I recall correctly, and I was in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead show at RFK Stadium. Considering what usually goes on substance-wise around such events I may not be the only one to have had contact with a deity that day, but my introduction had nothing to do with psychedelic drugs. (Not that time.) It was about a work of art.

I walked past a vendor who had various tapestries and cloth paintings on display, and was caught by an image of an androgynous Buddha-like figure. I looked briefly and then walked on; I was in graduate school, money was tight, and I hadn’t come here to buy stuff. But something drew me back.

“Do you know what those Chinese characters mean?” I asked.

“Hmm. It means…‘Earth Buddha’,” he replied.

Earth Buddha! Now that was interesting. I had been bringing Zen and Taoist ideas and stories into our eclectic Pagan circles for about two years now, and here was a hint that there might be some sort of Earth religion in orthodox Buddhism. So I bought the painting and put it on my bedroom wall.

That was all I knew about it for a few years. At one point I taught myself enough to try to look up those characters in a dictionary: the first was indeed “earth,” the second I couldn’t figure out, and the last two were “Bodhisattva” — not a Buddha, but a being of great compassion and wisdom. As the Zen teacher Jan Chozen Bays puts it, a Bodhisattva is “a person who is fully enlightened, completely awake to the Great Mystery, who could chose to merge with the Mystery forever, but looks back and sees others suffering and turns back from that merging to help the others.”1 You may have heard of the great Bodhisattva Kannon, a.k.a. Avalokiteśvara, a.k.a. Kwan Yin, the figure sometimes called the Buddhist “Goddess of Mercy.” It turned out that this figure on my wall was another being of that order.

A few years further on (sometimes it takes a long time to get the joke, doesn’t it?) in 2002, I had the opportunity to visit Japan thanks the hospitality of my friends Eric Wiegmann and Robin Gunkel. Eric used to be a Buddhist monk, and even though his background was in Tibetan rather than Japanese Buddhism he helped educate me as we toured various temples. One statue that we commonly saw, not just in temples but standing out at the roadside, was a bald-headed fellow often adorned with a bib, sometimes with children’s toys left in some sort of offering or memorial. Eric explained that this was Jizō, a guardian of children. And for a few more years (drawing out the joke) that was all I knew.

I returned to Japan for three months in the spring of 2007, with the intention of learning more about the culture and religion. One day I visited the National Museum in Nara, and found an exhibit explaining more about Jizō. I learned that he is seen as a guardian of all those on the paths of rebirth, especially those in hell realms, and of travelers in general. As a traveler far from home this interested me greatly, so I turned to the web to learn more. I found that Jizō is portrayed carrying a staff that he uses to pry open the gates of hell, and a gem that lights the way.

Hey, I thought, the figure in that painting hanging on my wall back home has a staff and a gem.

Then I took a look at the kanji for Jizō’s name, which means “Earth-Store” or “Earth-Womb” Bodhisattva. Yep, I’d had Jizō hanging on my wall all these years but had to travel to the other side of the planet to figure it out. (Seated depictions like the one I have are rare in Japanese art, where he’s almost always shown standing, so I don’t feel too bad for not recognizing him right away.)

Earth Store Bodhisattva

Besides a rescuer of those in hell, and savior of children, Jizō is a patron deity for firefighters (who also enter into hells to save other beings).

Where does the Earth enter into this mythology? The 14th century Zen master Bassui tells the story of a man who had not achieved enlightenment but had a very compassionate mind. So he spent his time building bridges and roads for the people to travel on. In this work he carried earth and mud on his back, until he realized that his own true nature was the same as that which he carried. And so the Buddha named him the Bodhisattva of the Storehouse of Earth, and his vast compassion was used as a metaphor to show that our true nature is everywhere.2 It’s an invocation of the Earth’s nature as that which supports us on every step of the journey.

There is certainly more to this relationship between Buddhism and Earth religion, and we’ll get to that in some future episode when we’ll explore why the Buddha touched the Earth. You can learn more about Jizō in Jan Chozen Bays’s book Jizo Bodhisattva, and in the Wikipedia entry for Ksitigarbha, his/her Sanskrit name.

A Jizō statue in Minō, Ōsaka.

1 Bays, Jan Chozen. Jizo Bodhisattva: Modern Healing and Traditional Buddhist Practice. Boston: Tuttle Pub, 2002. p 5↑

2 Bays, p 242↑

Festival Paganism as Pilgrimage

June 20, 2014

Around 11,000 years ago — six millennia before Stonehenge was built or writing was invented — people started coming to the site known as Gobekli Tepe (“Belly Hill”) in what is now southeastern Turkey to erect a 25 acre complex of stone circles. It’s the earliest known human-made place of worship, constructed by our gatherer-hunter nomadic ancestors. What sort of rituals they performed there, what their notion of the divine was, we don’t know and may never understand for sure. But it may be the case that pilgrimages to this site, and the massive effort to coordinate the building and to feed the pilgrims, set the stage for the Neolithic revolution and the dawn of civilization.3

People did not live long-term at Gobekli Tepe, they traveled there for whatever sort of rites were done, and it’s interesting to think that pilgrimage, travel for religious reasons, seems to predate civilization. In order to make spiritual progress, we have to keep shaking up our neurological patterns, and from the Islamic Haj to Zen monks wandering like “clouds and water” (unsui), travel is an excellent way to do that.

And it strikes me that the circuit of summer Pagan festivals provides something along this line. Pilgrims come from hundreds, even thousands, of miles to places like to Ramblewood and Wisteria to form periodic communities, temporary autonomous zones that appear, disperse, and reappear. The idea also applies in some degree to Burner events (Burning Man and the official and unofficial “regional” Burns) and even annual music festivals — and the emergence of music festivals that deliberately include some aspect of consciousness-raising is an interesting development — but I’d like to stick with festivals that identify as “Pagan” or “Pantheist” or “Magical” in some way here; specifically my “home event,” the Free Spirit Gathering, from which I’ve just returned.

I’ve been involved with FSG since 1998, in roles ranging from kitchen help to President of the Free Spirit Alliance, the 501(c)3 corporation that produces the event each year. So I can’t offer anything like an unbiased review. What follows are some personal musings and a bit of a look behind the scenes.

FSG takes place each year in mid-June (this year it was June 10-15) at Ramblewood, a private campground about an hour north of Baltimore. It’s my experience that one’s time at a festival like this can be anything from a deep magical transformation to a raucous party — sometimes both. For me, this year’s event was something like a physical therapy session: difficult, painful at times, but strengthening. For others I spoke to it was a time of breakthroughs and firsts, such as the woman who performed in public for the first time at our Bardic Circle. Some came with longtime romantic partners and deepened their connection, others made new…friends…during the festival. Children were welcomed to their first Gathering, while one man confided in me that liver cancer might make this his last one. (May the Fates be kind and make it not be so.)

I repeated my role as Master of Ceremonies for the festival, a position for which I literally wrote my own job description last year, keeping the energy flowing between our large group rituals, our concerts, our Bardic Circle (like an open mic with a spiritual mission), and our nightly drumming and dancing Fire Circles. With the rainy weather it was the Fire Circles that took most of my focus, but with indefatigable folks working setup and a Fire Crew who can make anything burn regardless of the weather, we overcame all obstacles and once again made mankind’s oldest magic.

The theme for this year’s Gathering was “Home is Where the Hearth Is,” and so it seems appropriate that the images that stick in my mind from this one involve fire. Watching the firelight reflect in a rain puddle, drops falling almost in time with the drums; dozens of performers in a ring around a candle, a symbolic flame, at the Bardic Circle; or coming down to the remains of the fire Sunday morning after working magic until dawn, and finding a score of butterflies sitting on the ashes, basking in the warmth and energy.

It was hard work, but I’m proud to have been a part of putting on a great festival. And I learned some important lessons about leadership and trust. However, I’m looking forward to heading to the Starwood Festival in a few weeks, where I will not be responsible for anything other than teaching a few workshops!

3 Curry, Andrew. “Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2008. <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-temple-83613665/?all>

Scham, Sandra. “The World’s First Temple.” Archelogy, Volume 61 Number 6, November/December 2008. <http://archive.archaeology.org/0811/​abstracts/turkey.html>

Schmidt, Klaus. “Göbekli Tepe – the Stone Age Sanctuaries. New results of ongoing excavations with a special focus on sculptures and high reliefs.” Documenta Praehistorica 37 (2010): 239-256. <http://arheologija.ff.uni-lj.si/documenta/authors37/37_21.pdf> ↑

The Quiet Side of Magic

July 18, 2014

I started composing this episode of “The Zen Pagan” at Wisteria on the day we affectionately call “All ‘T’aint’s Day” — ‘t’aint the SubGenius “X Day” festival that ended yesterday, and ‘t’ain’t Starwood yet. This lull between festivals (see our prior episode about festivals as religious pilgrimage) is a delightfully quiet interlude. There are still things to do; I can walk down the road and visit other camps, or take a dip at the swimming hole, or I can pull out my guitar or one of the instruments that I have no idea how to play and mess around musically for a while. But sometimes I find myself just sitting, looking at nothing in particular, listening to the trees moving in the wind and the birds chirping, alone with my thoughts.

Many people apparently hate that idea. Just before I left Baltimore I happened to read about a new study by psychologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard, which found that people were so adverse to being alone in a room for a little while (six to fifteen minutes) with nothing to do but think or daydream that some would rather give themselves painful electrical shocks than do nothing for that time.

Lead researcher Timothy Wilson said “Those of us who enjoy some down time to just think likely find the results of this study surprising – I certainly do – but our study participants consistently demonstrated that they would rather have something to do than to have nothing other than their thoughts for even a fairly brief period of time.”

Contemplation is not something that we value much. It’s common to blame new technology, social media and text messaging and the like, for exacerbating this, but this research found similar behavior in different age groups and suggests the these always-on connections fill a pre-existing desire rather than creating a new one. Of course a study on living subjects can’t tell us how things were a century ago, but the trend seems to go back a good long way. Thoreau’s contemporaries thought him quite odd when he went off to live in the woods alone.

The Kamakura Daibutsu (“Big Buddha”)

Buddhism, of course, takes a rather opposite tack; “right meditation” is part of the “Eightfold Path,” and so as a Zen guy (in my own fashion) I’m down with that. (Though Buddhism also recognizes that meditation is a hard thing — I think it was the Zen teacher Brad Warner who noted that it’s so hard that we build huge statues to the Buddha, whose main claim to fame was being good at sitting still.) But I’ve also been thinking about the problem in a more Pagan/magical context lately, something I’ve come to call “the quiet side of magic.”

Magic, Uncle Aleister tells us, is “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” Change! Will! Every intentional act, Crowley says, is a magical act! Very active, yang terms here. From paleolithic tribal sympathetic magic to the medieval magician conjuring spirits to do his will to the witch’s healing charm, magic is about getting shit done. Right?

Or is there a yin side as well? A receptive side, more about listening and contemplating? Dion Fortune refines Crowley’s definition and says that magic is about changing consciousness at will, a more internal transformation. We can go back to the ancient Greeks and the Oracle at Delphi’s advice, “Know Thyself.” And further back to paleolithic tribal societies, where the shaman’s eye turns to an inner realm during a vision quest; while one may meet various spirits and powers in that other realm, they are aspects of ourselves, and it is a contemplative and introspective process.

I was fortunate here at Starwood to attend a workshop by Jeff “Magnus” McBride, famous both as a stage magician and for his understanding of ritual, where he spoke about an archetypal model of the development of a magician. He talked about how a performer evolves from the yang, externally-active Trickster and Sorcerer to the more yin, internally-active Oracle and Sage. The huge active spectacle of a David Copperfield is the Sorcerer in action, while David Blaine frozen, still and unmoving in the middle of Times Square, is an example of the Oracle, turning inward.

The wizard Ged in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea novels might be a fine fictional example of the path of the contemplative magician. Where Harry Potter and Gandalf fight to overcome lords of evil who seek to rule the world, A Wizard of Earthsea sees Ged moving from a Trickster who defends his village by summoning fog to confuse invading soldiers, to a Sorcerer (in McBride’s labeling) who summons powerful spirits on a dare…and then turns to a journey inward as Oracle as he struggles against a personal shadow. He emerges from his trials not merely a fighter with supernatural powers but truly a wizard, a wise one, who plays the Sage, the adviser and councilor, to the protagonists of the next two novels.

If you have not yet read the Earthsea novels, do so, you’re in for a treat. You should ignore the TV miniseries that was made of them a few years ago, which was disavowed by Le Guin. But perhaps that is part of the issue here — Gandalf’s Balrog-wrestling or Potter fighting Death Eaters makes for more spectacle on the screen than Ged’s quest for self-knowledge. It’s harder (not impossible, but harder) to make a blockbuster movie or popular novel about personal discovery. So we have to jazz those stories up. We turn Ged into an action hero in the TV adaptation, and we put miracle stories into the biography of the saints and sages.

It’s just harder to talk about internal transformation… as Lao Tzu told us thousands of years ago, the Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao. And so we use metaphors of action in the physical world to point the way. But when we forget the metaphor, when we forget that the real story isn’t Gandalf’s spells but Frodo and Sam’s determination and loyalty, that what ultimately made Harry Potter a hero wasn’t his skill with a wand but the willingness to sacrifice himself to protect his friends, then we lose the substance.

It seems to me that to be a great magician is to be able to sit quietly when it is time to sit, and to be able to act boldly when it is time to act; to be able to listen and to speak, to see and to do — and to know when the time is right for each.

Has Pagan Environmentalism Failed?

July 23, 2014

My first karate sensei was a no-nonsense fighter of the old school, a Marine Corps Vietnam vet who earned his black belt in the Kyokushin-kai, a system notorious for full-contact knockdown sparring. Sometime early in my training the discussion turned to practical self defense, and Sensei Neal mentioned a student who complained to him that the basic upper block, jodan uke, hadn’t worked when the student was actually attacked by a man with a club (a piece of pipe or a baseball bat or something, decades later I don’t recall).

The student got his arm broken, and Sensei Neal pointed out that since the attacker had intended to break his skull and a broken arm is much less bad than a broken head, the technique had worked. Of course we can imagine better outcomes by dodging the blow, or by avoiding the situation entirely, but I remember this story anytime the issue of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good — or the less bad — comes up.

One of the themes I explore in Why Buddha Touched the Earth is how the Pagan revival is in part a response to the urbanization and industrialization of the past few centuries. While we can trace this back as far as the end of feudalism in Europe and the resulting destruction of the commons and process of “land enclosure,” it really starts to pick up in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. And it is at this time that we see a counter-tendency starting to arise, in the form of Romanticism. In my mind the elevation of the pastoral seen in the work of Romantic poets like Keats and Shelly represents the earliest stirrings of the Neopagan movement. We can see it stretch forward through the writings of the American Transcendentalists, and then the late 19th and early 20th century British literature that made the countryside the home of spirits and even gods (e.g., Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows).

From the implicit literary paganism of the early part of this period to the explicitly religious Paganism of the 1960s and 70s, this movement has been a voice of warning: “Something valuable is being lost.”

As we look around at the ecological crisis that faces us today, it’s reasonable to ask if this movement has failed. But like the karate student with the broken arm, we have to ask that not in comparison to a perfect outcome, but to what the result would be if we did nothing. Would we have an significant environmental movement at all if it were not for this soft voice in the background whispering, “There is something sacred here”?

For some years I have been fascinated with the example of Japan, a nation with an ancient native pagan religion that holds individual rocks and tree to be sacred but is also one of the most technophilic societies on the planet. Japan has had its ups and downs on the ecological front: in the early Edo period, deforestation nearly led to disaster, but people quickly figured out the links between cutting down trees and landslides and flooding. In the samurai days a remarkably sustainable means of farming was in place. But with the Meiji restoration of the mid-19th century, rapid industrialization — a political necessity, perhaps, to catch up with the West and avoid the colonial fate of India and China — led to environmental devastation. By the 1960s Japan was one of the most polluted places on Earth.

The scars of this time are still visible, and modern Japan is certainly no eco-paradise. But there is also a growing recognition, moreso I think than in the West, of the crisis, and a greater willingness to change. (It is not a coincidence that one of the significant attempts to date to address climate change is the Kyoto protocol.) There have been massive efforts at reforestation, and Japanese energy efficiency and recycling programs are exemplars to industrialized nations. I think that this would not be the case without the influence of the forest religion Shinto.

The next few decades will tell whether we figure it all out in time, whether we make the switch to sustainability in time or whether we wreck the ecosystem to the point that human civilization proves to be a failed experiment. But if it were not for those have brought a Pagan voice to the topic for the past two centuries, we’d be in a deeper hole than we are; and we will not get out of it without a deeper consideration of nature as sacred.

Martial Arts as Magical Practice

August 15, 2014

“…understanding the ultimate truth and spiritual forces involved”? I’m not sure about that…

The paperwork for my promotion last spring to godan, fifth degree black belt, has finally caught up to me. I got a piece of paper that says I understand “the ultimate truth and spiritual forces” involved in karate. I’m not so sure about that, but it’s signed by a living legend in the martial arts world, a man whom the famous Zen roshi Hakuyū Taizan Maezumi once wrote was the “ideal type” and had “wonderful insight and understanding.” So who am I to argue?

(I make it a rule, when talking about my wacky “Zen Pagan” ideas on-line, to not identify the style of karate I study. I’m very proud of that school, but I do this to emphasize that I’m not speaking on the school’s behalf or in my capacity as a karate teacher, and also so that search engines don’t flag these writings as being relevant to it. But it’s hardly a secret, five seconds with the search engine of your choice can reveal it. And heck, in this case it’s in the photo.)

My Zen is mostly Karate Zen. I’ve managed to cultivate a seated mediation practice only because I started with the moving mediation that is karate. The relationship between the budō (martial ways) and Zen supposedly goes back 1,500 years to the legendary Buddhist monk Bodhidharma, who came from India (or maybe Persia) to the Shaolin temple; he both founded Ch’an (the Chinese word for Zen) and taught physical exercises that developed into the Asian martial and healing arts. Seven centuries later in Japan it happened that Zen arrived there around the same time as the shogunate got started, and the new sect formed lasting bonds with the new warrior class bosses. (The legend of Bodhidharma is probably bunk but it’s a good story.)

Most readers will recognize the idea that there are “spiritual forces” of some sort in martial arts training. You’ve watched the old Kung Fu TV show or The Karate Kid or that clip where Bruce Lee says “Be water, my friend.” I hope that even if the mall ninjas at the local McDojo didn’t quite live up to that, you’ve encountered some hints of the real thing.

But a few weeks ago during a discussion at Starwood I found myself saying that the martial arts can be a magical practice. That’s a more specific idea, and I’d like to take it as the topic for this month’s column.

So what do we mean by “magical practice”? This might be old hat for well-read Pagans in the audience, but it’s worth getting specific for people new to these ideas. And if I don’t nail this down, my fellow budoka who read this might think that I’m suggesting that advanced practitioners can perform supernatural feats, the sort of stuff demonstrated by various charlatans.

When I speak of magic here I’m speaking of it in a context that arose during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when certain philosophical societies became interested in the use of ritual as a tool for spiritual growth and transformation. We can get a sense of what magic means in this sense from definitions and comments offered by several experts on the topic:

Aleister Crowley: “Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will….Every intentional act is a Magical Act.”4

And Crowley in another piece: “Our Ceremonial Magic fines down, then, to a series of minute, though of course empirical, physiological experiments, and whoso will carry them through intelligently need not fear the result.”5

Dion Fortune: Magic is “the art of changing consciousness at will.”6

Margot Adler: “Magic is convenient word for a whole collection of techniques, all of which involve the mind. In this case, we might conceive of these techniques as including the mobilization of confidence, will, and emotion brought about by the recognition of necessity; the use of imaginative faculties, particularly the ability to visualize, in order to begin to understand how other beings function in nature so we can use this knowledge to achieve necessary ends.”7

Ross Nichols: “Ritual is poetry in the realm of acts.”8

Charles Leland: “And so all was, and is, in sorcery a kind of wild poetry based on symbols, all blending into one another, light and darkness, fire-flies and grain, life and death.”9

(The spellings “magick” or “magik” are sometimes used to distinguish this ritual practice from the performing art of illusion and prestidigitation.)

To attempt a synthesis of these ideas, I propose:

Five Principles of Magic

Magic is distinguished by the intentional use of imagination to raise and direct psychological energy in order to alter consciousness in a manner conducive to a specific desired change.

Magic has an external side, where the desired change is a visible result, the achievement of some practical end.

Magic has an internal side, where the desired change is a matter of self-cultivation, of contemplative understanding: the quiet side of magic.

Magic is a subtle practice, in which we leverage small forces and seemingly minor matters to produce large results.

Magic is an art, operating in the realm of the poetic and the beautiful, of metaphor and symbolism.

(I should note that while some believe that the alternation of consciousness we are talking about includes some sort of psychic faculties or the ability to communicate with supernatural entities, this not a necessary point of dogma for the modern magician. A skeptical reductionist or a philosophical materialist is no more banned from the Art Magickal than from the arts of poetry, painting, or music.)

So. Let’s see how traditional martial arts stack up against these ideas.

The martial ways use imagination to direct the most primal form of psychological energy: the drive for survival. The martial arts bring us right up against life-and-death — nothing else concentrates the mind, alters consciousness, quite as strongly as that. But if we make that too literal students die and we run out of training partners, so the confrontation with death must be imaginary. We visualize the opponents in kata, we simulate deadly combat when sparring by pulling our punches or using dulled weapons or protective gear. If we do not engage our imagination to make those conflicts real, it’s just a dance of the most spiritless sort.

Are there aspects of martial arts training that are about external change? Definitely. Someone is trying to hit me, and through the skills of my budo training I cause a Change in conformity with my Will which removes their ability to harm me.

And are there also internal aspects? Yes. A fighter must not learn just action but also calm, the still point in the maelstrom. Anybody can get angry and throw a punch but such a situation will usually not end well. To act correctly, to see and decide calmly in the midst of combat (sporting or real), requires a deeper practice. (We also speak of “internal” versus “external” martial arts, but this is a somewhat different context.)

Are the martial arts a subtle practice? Undoubtedly. A small amount of force properly applied can cause a person to go flying through the air or collapse to the ground. Victory and defeat, success and failure, turn on fractions of a second and fractions of an inch.

And are we in a realm of art and metaphor? We call them the martial arts for a reason: we speak of the beauty of a kata or of a technique combination.

But metaphor?

I speak of being light on my feet, but my weight as measured on a scale does not change. I talk about being rooted, but no roots emerge. I tell a student to extinguish an attack like a wet blanket falling on a fire. When I break a board, in my mind’s eye my hand is moving through nothing but air. In some exercises I visualize ki (known as qi in the Chinese arts) as a light moving through my body, and my movements are stronger.

Why is this? The body movements and mechanics needed for competence are just too complex for the rational intellect to execute in realtime. We must invoke the unconscious, the intellect, the non-rational mind; and it speaks in metaphor and in symbols.

There’s nothing supernatural in the result, nothing that couldn’t be analyzed after the fact by physics and physiology. (Though it’s possible our current understanding of the relevant physiology is incomplete — after all, we are talking about a science that just discovered a ligament in the knee.) But such analysis will not get you to the point of being able to do these things.

The martial arts are magic. Those looking to understand magical practice might want to look to the example the arts provide, and those involved in martial arts training may want to look at magic for ideas to deepen their training.

“…Change may be effected by application of the proper kind and degree of Force in the proper manner through the proper medium to the proper object.” — Crowley

4 Crowley, Aleister. Magick Without Tears. Hermetic.com hypertext edition. <http://hermetic.com/crowley/magick-without-tears/mwt_01.html> Chapter I. ↑

5 Crowley, Aleister. “The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic.” The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King. Hermetic.com hypertext edition. <http://hermetic.com/crowley/goetia/the-initiated-interpretation-of-ceremonial-magic.html> ↑

6 Quoted in Starhawk. “A Working Definition of Reclaiming.” <http://reclaiming.org/​about/directions/definition.html> ↑

7 Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon. New York, N.Y: Penguin/Arkana, 1997. p 8 ↑

8 Quoted in Shaffer, Alison. “The Three Elements of Druidic Ritual.” <http://meadowsweet-myrrh.blogspot.de/p/druidic-ritual.html> ↑

9 Leland, Charles G. Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches. London: David Nutt, 1899. <http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/aradia/> Appendix, p 108 ↑

Wild Naked Pagans

September 12, 2014

I remember my first night at my first Pagan festival, the 1998 Free Spirit Gathering. Of course, I found myself at the Fire Circle. Well, we’d done dance and drum fire circles before in the Coven of Lovin’ — much much smaller ones, but I knew how this worked, and so I joined in.

It was a warm night, and FSG is a clothing optional event. Thus, there were some naked people dancing around with me. That was a first. Well, okay, I could deal with it. I didn’t want to bump up against any sweaty naked men, but I didn’t want to bump up against any sweaty clothed men either, so as long as there was plenty of space, no problem. There might have been a naked woman or two there also, but I was an adult and had seen naked women before and it was not as big a deal as it was when I was seventeen.

So, a bit to my own surprise, I was okay with naked people dancing around with me. I just tried not to look too much. But I couldn’t imagine myself ever joining them in their unclothed state. That was just too wild, too far out. Nope. Me, naked in a (sort of) public place? Not going to happen. No way.

Oh, sure, as I got hot I took off my shirt. But as a male that was no different than going to the pool or mowing the lawn on a hot day, I was not breaking any taboos there.

But as I continued to dance, I learned three important things.

One: fire is hot. When you’re dancing close to it on a hot night, you want maximum cooling surface exposed for sweat evaporation.

Two: fire is sacred. You want to expose as much of your skin to it as you can, to best absorb its energy.

Three: in this sacred space, in this time outside of time, I felt safe. I felt unconditioned. I felt free. So, after an hour or two, off came the pants.

I danced naked around a fire to the beat of the drums.

I broke one of our society’s strongest taboos. The humor columnist Mike Nichols once noted, “Take off all your clothes and walk down the street waving a machete and firing an Uzi, and terrified citizens will phone the police and report, ‘There’s a naked person outside!’”10

There is power in breaking such a rule.

I used to have those dreams where I showed up at work or at school and suddenly realized, to my absolute mortification, that I was naked. But after a few years of attending clothing-optional festivals, of dancing naked around the fire or just letting myself air-dry walking back to camp from the shower, I had that dream once final time. This time, though, when I looked down while talking to someone and noticed I was naked, I said, “Oh. Anyway…”, and calmly went about my dream business.

I have not had that dream since. A fear so deep it reached into my dreams has been removed from my brain. That, my friends, is magic power.

And nakedness has that power because it is wild. “Civilized” people wear clothes; the “savage,” the “wild” one, goes naked.

That’s why nudity has been found in Neopaganism since its 19th and early 20th century roots. It was part of the German lebensreform movement of the 1890s,11 which came to be an influence on the American counter-culture. (It strikes me that it may also may have been, through intermediaries, the ultimate source for Gardner’s practice of naturalism, but I’m just speculating.) It’s in the proto-Pagan writings of Whitman: “Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability, that is indecent.”12 It’s in Leland’s Aradia (“And thus shall it be done: all shall sit down to the supper all naked, men and women…”)13 and Valiente’s “Charge of the Goddess” (“as a sign that ye are really free, ye shall be naked in your rites”).14 It was used in the initiation rites of Crowley’s OTO.15

Nudity is a powerful way to raise energy.

So I make it a point to spend a little time going around skyclad at any event I can, not so much because I need that energy myself — it’s already done its thing for me — but so that I can show others that it’s okay to try it. To step outside the taboo and be wild.

But from my casual observation, it seems like fewer people are taking advantage of this primal source of power. (This is a topic that came up when our good friend Jason Mankey had me as a guest on his “Raise the Horns” podcast.)

Some folks, of course, just aren’t comfortable being seen unclothed. But that’s the point: you don’t raise magical energy by doing familiar, comfortable things. And some folks are concerned about covering up from the sun, what with the hole in the ozone and all. Which is fine, but the sun does go down, and sunscreen will work its magic on all parts of you.

What has really startled me is that lately I’ve encountered some Pagans who were not just uncomfortable going skyclad themselves but were outright hostile to the idea of other Pagans doing so. One even claimed that it must surely be illegal for adults to be nude in front of children — which would be a shock for nudist camps that have served families for decades, not to mention the local Y where kids in the locker room might see me change into my swimming trunks.

It seems that nakedness is a little too wild for some contemporary Pagans.

I am not a witch, but Peter Grey’s essay “Rewilding Witchcraft” has been getting a lot of attention the past few months. It makes some questionable arguments — for example, the story of how the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone created an “ecological miracle” seems to be more myth than fact,16 and his view that some inevitable nuclear catastrophe will eliminate all life on the planet for 100 million years is not based in any fact. The “living Earth” is not “fragile”: life will be here on this planet in some form even if we do our absolute worst. The question that faces us is whether we can be smart and mature enough to be part of it, or whether we’ll leave the Earth to other species.

But putting aside the ecological eschatology that makes up the bulk of the essay, Grey (perhaps incidentally) makes a broader point about “wildness,” one with which I agree wholeheartedly if I substitute the more general “Paganism” for “Witchcraft”:

I will argue that Witchcraft is quintessentially wild, ambivalent, ambiguous, queer. It is not something that can be socialised, standing as it does in that liminal space between the seen and unseen worlds. Spatially the realm of witchcraft is the hedge, the crossroads, the dreaming point where the world of men and of spirits parlay through the penetrated body of someone who is outside of the normal rules of culture….

…

My argument is that witchcraft became too tame…17

1998 was not that long ago. But in 16 years since that first festival I’ve seen a distinct change in the culture, a “de-wilding” and therefore a loss of power — and perhaps even a loss of purpose.

There’s an idea from Joseph Campbell that has greatly influenced my thinking and my work the past few years. In his essay “The Symbol Without Meaning” Campbell points out the difference between the direct religious experience of Paleolithic, gatherer-hunter, shamanistic cultures and the mediated priestly religions of Neolithic (and later) agricultural civilizations. That Neolithic social order, Campbell says, is dissolving in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, and “what is required of us all…is much more the fearless self-sufficiency of our shamanistic inheritance than the timorous piety of the priest-guided Neolithic.”18

In other words, we must get wild with our spirituality, untamed and direct.

It seems to me that this is why the Neopagan movement exists in the first place, a reaction to the inability of “civilized” religion to deal with the circumstances in which humanity finds itself. We are on a quest for something more direct.

Something untamed.

Something unafraid to stand naked.

I hope that you won't be afraid to visit infamous.net/support and choose a way to support my writing with a contribution or purchase. Buy a book, buy a t-shirt — buy an autographed print of the carefully posed nude photo of the author that accompanied this essay when first posted to the web! Thank you.

10 Quoted in Lawrence, Cooper and Scott Baio. Cult of Celebrity: What Our Fascination with the Stars Reveals about Us. Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. <http://books.google.com/books?id=hQDPYS13CwAC&pg=PA229> p 229↑

11 Kennedy, Gordon. Children of the Sun. Ojai, California: Nivaria Press, 1998. p 56↑

12 Whitman, Walt. “Specimen Days” Prose works, by Walt Whitman. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892. <http://www.bartleby.com/229/1133.html>↑

13 Leland, Ch II, p 13↑

14 Valiente, Doreen. “The Charge Of The Goddess.” <http://www.doreenvaliente.com/​Doreen-Valiente-Poetry-11.php>↑

15 Regardie, Israel. The Eye in the Triangle. Tempe: New Falcon Publications, 1993. p 177↑

16 Middleton, Arthur. “Is the Wolf a Real American Hero?” New York Times 10 Mar 2014: A21. <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/opinion/is-the-wolf-a-real-american-hero.html>↑

17 Grey, Peter. “Rewilding Witchcraft.” <http://scarletimprint.com/​2014/​06/​rewilding-witchcraft/>↑

18 Campbell, Joseph. The Flight of the Wild Gander. New York, N.Y: HarperPerennial, 1990. p 189↑

Wild Naked Minds

October 10, 2014

So the last edition of “The Zen Pagan,” on “Wild Naked Pagans,” attracted a few thousand hits the first weekend it was up. I don’t know if we’ll draw that sort of crowd this month. We’re going to be a little bit more sedate, at least on the outside, as we focus on the “Zen” part of “Zen Paganism” and discuss the wild practice of getting in touch with the naked mind… by sitting perfectly still.

That might seem like a contradiction. And perhaps it is — this is Zen we’re talking about after all, a path known for paradox. But anyone who thinks meditation practice is tame should consult the legends of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Here’s how Paul Carus, an early Western scholar of Buddhism, summarized the legendary encounter between the meditating Buddha and the tempter demon Mara:

Mara caused a whirlwind to blow, but in vain; he caused a rain-storm to come in order to drown the Buddha, but not a drop wetted his robes; he caused a shower of rocks to come down, but the rocks changed into bouquets; he caused a shower of weapons–swords, spears, and arrows–to rush against him, but they became celestial flowers; he caused a shower of live coals to come down from the sky, but they, too, fell down harmless. In the same way hot ashes, a shower of sand, and a shower of mud were transmuted into celestial ointments. At last he caused a darkness, but the darkness disappeared before Buddha, as the night vanishes before the sun. Mara shouted: “Siddhattha, arise from the seat. It does not belong to you. It belongs to me.” Buddha replied: “Mara, you have not fulfilled the ten perfections. This seat does not belong to you, but to me, who have fulfilled the ten perfections.” Mara denied Buddha’s assertion and called upon his army as witnesses, while Buddha declared: “I have no animate witnesses present;” but, stretching out his right hand towards the mighty earth, he said: “Will you bear me witness?” And the mighty earth thundered: “I bear you witness.” And Mara’s elephant fell upon its knees, and all the followers of Mara fled away in all directions. When the hosts of the gods saw the army of Mara flee, they cried out: “Mara is defeated! Prince Siddhattha has conquered! Let us celebrate the victory!”19

(The idea of the Buddha appealing to the Earth for support is certainly interesting for people interested in so-called “Earth religion,” isn’t it?)

We don’t need to believe that demons like Mara have a physical existence outside of our own minds and culture in order to recognize the truth of this encounter. There’s some wild stuff inside our heads, beautiful and terrible to behold. And there are many systems that claim to offer guides to the territory, or that claim to have a sure-fire way to tame the wild. From ancient yogic practices to Western ritual magic to Timothy Leary’s Eight Circuit model of the brain, detailed maps and systems abound.

But there’s another way to approach the wild. That’s to go in without paying too much attention to the reports of others and take a look for yourself, to appreciate it for what it is.

There’s both a risk and a reward to that. You might miss someone’s advice about a must-see sight, or their warning about a hazard. But you also won’t be bound by outdated or inaccurate reports. You won’t fall prey to rumor, or be biased and see only what you’re told to see. You’ll have a chance to see for yourself things as they are, without a narrative or values imposed by someone else.

To do this takes some trust both in our own ability and in the nature of the territory. We can’t do this if we’re afraid of the wild.

Should we be afraid?

That is certainly the message of some religious paths and philosophical schools. You, in the wild state, are wretched. (That’s why nakedness is sinful. Cover your shame!) The universe is wretched. Left to its own nature life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, a war of all against all, sinners in the hand of an angry God, headed straight for Hell at any moment, and only Divine — i.e., Super-Natural, Unwild — Intervention can save us.

Zen, thank goodness, takes a different view. Yes, the Buddha started with the premise that life is dukkha — a word usually taken as meaning “suffering” but which has also been translated as “out of joint,” in the sense of a slipped axle or a dislocated shoulder. That could sound like an echo of the “wretched universe” school, but the Buddha proceeded immediately to see the end of suffering as within our reach through a fairly simple (difficult, certainly, but simple) program of right living and right thinking, without Divine Intervention.

And Zen draws also on roots in the naturalist philosophy of Taoism, which found perfection in untamed nature and sin in the artifice of civilization. Between its Indian Buddhist and Chinese Taoist roots (and a bit of spice thrown in from Japan) Zen has developed the attitude that our fundamental nature, just as it is, is enlightened Buddha nature.

As one of my favorite Zen lunatics, Ikkyū, put it, “don’t worry please please how many times do I have to say it / there’s no way not to be who you are and where.”20 Or as the 20th century Zen master Shunryu Sukuki once told his students, “Each of you is perfect the way you are…and you can use a little improvement.”21 There’s a little Zen paradox for you, but the important thing is that there is nothing to worry about. You are already perfectly who and where you are.

And so we can trust the wild of our own mind, without imposing someone else’s structure on it. As Gary Snyder said, “[Wild] means self-organizing. It means elegantly self-disciplined, self-regulating, self-maintained. That’s what wilderness is. Nobody has to do the management plan for it. So I say to people, ‘let’s trust in the self-disciplined elegance of wild mind.’”22

If we have trust in the wild mind, then we don’t have to do anything to it, we don’t have to fear it, we don’t have to learn some special system to be able to see and understand it.

We can go into the wild and just sit and watch.

19 Carus, Paul. The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil. Open Court, 1900. <http://www.sacred-texts.com/evil/hod/hod10.htm>↑

20 Ikkyū, and Stephen Berg. Crow With No Mouth. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1989. p 33↑

21Chadwick, David. Zen is Right Here: teaching stories and anecdotes of Shunryu Suzuki. Boston: Shambhala, 2007. p 1↑

22 Carolan, Trevor. “The Wild Mind of Gary Snyder.” Shambhala Sun, May 1996. <http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=2071&Itemid=0&limit=1&limitstart=2>↑

The Burners and the Pagans

November 7, 2014

I recently went to Playa Del Fuego, the East Coast regional “Burn” held over Columbus Day / Indigenous Peoples’ Day weekend each year. (They also do a spring version each Memorial Day.) It was a cold, wet, and muddy festival… rather like this year’s Free Spirit Gathering in that respect.

Though PDF is a larger event with a lot more techno music and a lot less drumming, and more flaming art and less ritual, there are some similarities with large Pagan festivals like FSG and Starwood. Also some overlap in attendees — every night at PDF I ran into a few people who I knew from one of those Pagan festivals. While PDF does not consider itself a religious event, in some sense it represents the same sort of pilgrimage to a temporary community that religious festivals have embodied for thousands of years.

I haven’t been to Burning Man (yet — if you have an established camp and would like to invite me to come give a talk, I think that would count as business travel for tax purposes, contact me…), but PDF is an “official” regional Burn and operates according to the “Ten Principals” that Burning Man Founder Larry Harvey wrote in 2004. Indeed these formed the basis of my favorite piece of art at PDF this year, the “Princip-Poles,” which invited attendees to write their thoughts on a pole for each of the principals before they were all burned.

I don’t think we’re going to set Patheos on fire here, but I thought I might take that idea and run with it a bit, with a little Pagan-ish refection on the Ten Principles based on my experience at a few PDFs and discussions with Burners. Do we perhaps see some parallel evolution here with Pagan festivals? Could a Pagan event be built upon the Ten Principles?

Radical Inclusion

Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.

While I’ve been referring to these events as “Pagan festivals,” you certainly don’t need to identify as “Pagan” to attend. FSG explicitly welcomes “people walking all kinds of paths — Wiccans, Druids, Heathens, Pagans, Vodouisants, Santeras, Polytheists, Monotheists, Pantheists, Atheists, [and] Animists” (and I happen to know that its attendees have also included folks who identify as Buddhist, Christian, and Jewish), while Starwood proclaims itself “a celebration of diversity and alternatives in belief systems, lifestyles, and spirituality” with “a community of explorers fresh from their many journeys through realms both alien and familiar.” All are welcome.

Gifting

Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.

How many times has a bottle of something fine been shared as a gift around the fire? My good friend Joe Galitsky used to lay out breakfast for everyone at dawn at Bonfire Night at Starwood, and I’ve made it a habit the past few years to go around handing out wine and chocolate. (Remember, strangers have the best candy.) I have a number of small treasures that were freely gifted to me at festivals for no apparent reason other than the generosity of the giver. Gifting may not be as explicit at Pagan events as at Burns but it’s certainly part of the culture,

Decommodification

In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.

Now here we have a difference, at least on the surface. While any sort of commerce is frowned upon at 10 Principles events, Pagan events not only have vendors selling stuff but often allow them to advertise in the program guide or otherwise help sponsor the event. Festival presenters and performers are often paid, or at least “comped” on admission. (Disclosure: I’ve been comped or paid as a presenter, performer, or staff member at several Pagan or Pagan-ish events. )

On the other hand, we’re not talking big-ticket sponsorship by multi-national corporations here, but rather the sort of very small businesses that anti-corporate “buy local” activists like to support, who are sometimes lucky to break even on their appearance at events. An FSG vendor once told me a joke about a doctor, a lawyer, and a Pagan festival vendor splitting a big lottery jackpot. Asked what they’re going to do with their winnings, the doctor talks about endowing a hospital, the lawyer wants to found a free legal clinic, and the vendor says, “Well, I guess I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing until the money runs out.”

If we compare this with the commodification that has come to surround Burning Man in practice — such as concierge service to set up camps — it may be that the formal acceptance of some small level of commerce at Pagan events has in practice been a better defense against commodification. Or perhaps Burning Man has just suffered more from proximity to Silicon Valley and its concentration of wealthy but hollow people who like to adopt a veneer of spirituality and bohemianism; East Coast regional Burns like PDF seem reasonably safe from commodification for the moment.

The Princip-Poles

Radical Self-reliance

Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.

When the weather’s good and everyone you’re camped with is on the ball and everything is going well, it’s possible to go to a festival or a Burn and not be challenged at all.

That’s why the best stories are about the times when things didn’t go well. That FSG where you danced around the fire in driving rain. That cold and wet Starwood where everyone ducked under a pavilion for shelter and an impromptu karaoke and liquor drinking session broke out. The mud burn at PDF where you managed to help your friend in the wheelchair get across camp without sinking into a pit.

Those times, in other words, when you were challenged to discover and exercise your inner resources, to grow to meet a challenge.

Radical Self-expression

Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.

For the past few years I’ve run the Bardic Circle at FSG, and I’ve often performed in the Bardic Concert at Starwood. We do love our bards, don’t we? These Bardics are more than open mics, they’re invocations of the creative and expressive spirit that encourage everyone to find and share their gifts. And I mean everyone — I’ve lost count of the number of people who have performed in public for the first time at the FSG Bardic.

Communal Effort

Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.

Events like FSG and Starwood are certainly community efforts. Yes, there is an “official” staff that puts them together, but everyone is encouraged (even expected) to collaborate through volunteering. The Free Spirit Alliance (the groups that puts on FSG) is a member organization that was founded to provide a social network in the days before that meant Facebook.

Civic Responsibility

We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.

Festivals and Burns are temporary autonomous zones, but they take place within a larger community. FSG has often had a canned goods drive, and more recently the Free Spirit Alliance has been looking for ways to work with charities in the “off season.”

Leaving No Trace

Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.

We are, most of us would say, a “nature religion.” Respecting the environment is at the core of Paganism. Wisteria, the campground where Starwood is held and a Pagan community in its own right, is dedicated to restoring a former strip mine site (and is doing a fantastic job). FSG and Starwood have both featured workshops on permaculture farming and other topics related to sustainable living.

Participation

Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.

Magic, I have often said, is not a spectator sport. The fire circles that are the heart of FSG and Starwood invite the participation of all, to drum or dance or sing — or to serve, helping maintain the space, make sure celebrants have food and water to keep them going, and the like. An expectation for everyone to do a volunteer or “community service” shift to help with the operation of the festival also encourages participation.

Immediacy

Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.

As I discussed in Why Buddha Touched the Earth, the Pagan movement emerges in part from a desire to make religion an immediate experience again, to get back to the direct mystical experience of shamanistic practice rather than something moderated by a priestly middleman.

So all in all, there seems to be quite a bit of overlap between the values and ideals of the community around Burning Man and similar events, and the festival Pagan community. A more conscious and deliberate attempt to share ideas could be fruitful.

Gratitude, Schmatitude

November 21, 2014

I am, by nature, a contrarian. When the GPS navigation program on my phone tells me “In 500 feet, turn right” sometimes I’ll talk back to it and say “Says who?” Any attempt to command me immediately creates within my mind a desire to do the exact opposite. This may not be wise or mature, but that’s the way things work in my brain.

So when someone comes along heavily pushing a certain attitude, it doesn’t inspire me, and often kindles the exact opposite. This is the case with the push we see in contemporary American spirituality toward “gratitude.”

No, thanks. (No offense, neighbors.)

Consider the words of America’s favorite pop-guru, Oprah Winfrey: “The single greatest thing you can do to change your life today is to start being grateful for what you have right now. No gesture is too small when done with gratitude.”23 Or to take a more serious and weighty example, I recently stumbled across a quote from the Zen teacher Norman Fischer: “Honestly, I can’t understand why we don’t burst into tears in gratitude and relief every time we meet another person.”24

Now maybe talk like this makes you feel warm and fuzzy. If that’s the case, then the rest of this probably won’t apply to you, and you might want to move on. But personally, when I hear someone say “Give thanks!” I want to respond “Don’t tell me what to do!”

Or, perhaps more accurately, “Don’t tell me how to feel!”

To truly see and acknowledge one’s real feelings, to see the dependent arising of emotion, to be honest with one’s self about the contents of one’s own heart, is a difficult task. (Perhaps even a more difficult one for men than for women in a culture that dissuades men from expressing emotion, but that’s opening a can of gender politics that I don’t want to get sidetracked on right now.) If I am not — right here and now in this present moment — feeling grateful, then to pretend to gratitude is a lie. And that is not a path conducive to spiritual growth.

If you’re feeling angry, grumpy, irritable, frustrated, or grief-stricken, then go ahead and honestly feel that way! I might suggest that you look at how these feelings arise, examine to what degree they are real and to what degree phantoms, but don’t paper over your emotions with false gratitude just because some “spiritual teacher” tells you that feeling one way is better than feeling another.

(That’s not to say that one should treat other people badly based on those emotions, of course. It’s fine to be grumpy — as Ikkyu wrote, “I like my anger my grouchy furious love.” But it’s not fine to let that grumpiness lead you to be a dick. Follow the minimal social niceties, say “please” and “thank you” and tip your bartenders.)

You have to start from where you are. So if you’re not willing to right now truly be where you are, you can’t start, you can only be lost.

But — you knew there was a “but” coming here, right? — it certainly is a worthwhile thing to cultivate within oneself the capacity for positive emotion, for the recognition of beauty.

So I’m not going to tell you to be thankful, even as you’re about to be bombarded with that message over the next week. (And then with messages about BUY! BUY! BUY!) But I will suggest that you consider what you can do to improve your ability to recognize and enjoy beauty. And that includes not just the beauty of music or painting or poetry, but the beauty that can be found in contemplation of the deep interconnectedness of all things, of our interdependence and interbeing with the entire universe.

The sweet potato on my plate that becomes part of my flesh connects me in the most intimate way with the checkout clerk at the grocery store, with the produce stocker, with the truck driver who brought it there, with the geochemistry that produced the oil that burned to move the truck, with the lumberjack who cut down the tree that was turned into the cardboard for the box it was shipped in, with the farmer in their field, with the soil and the air and the rain that nurtured the vine and the tuber, with the sun’s nuclear fire 93,000,000 miles away. If any of these factors is removed the sweet potato is not there, and I starve. The basic day-to-day dependencies of this so-called “individual” stretch over millions of miles, not to even consider the long-term history of these carbon atoms, the origins of these quarks, and the like.

That is all just fact, regardless of how I feel about it at any given moment.

But when I stop to think about that fact, when I really try to wrap my head around it, I often perceive something beautiful about it. Sometimes, on a good day, it is the most profound possible feeling of beauty. And that perception is its own justification, it is simply a pleasant experience. I can recommend that others try it just as I might say “Mmm, taste this sweet potato, it’s good.” Not to say “you should feel this way,” but rather “if you take this specific action, I believe you will likely find the result agreeable.”

If we can put down preconceptions about how things “should” be and look deeply at how they are, at our true relationship with existence, we might find all sorts of positive feelings arising. We might — or might not — call one of them gratitude or thankfulness. But we have to start at the right end of the process.

I won't promise to feel grateful — one can never promise a feeling — but I do think it would be beautiful if you were to visit infamous.net/support and support my writing with a purchase or contribution. Every little bit helps. Even contributing a dollar means a lot. Thanks.

23 Quoted in Whitten, Tammy. “The Alphabet Challenge: 26 Days to Peaceful Thinking.” WomenManagingStress.com <http://www.​womenmanagingstress.com/​the-alphabet-challenge/>↑

24 Fischer, Norman. “The Last Word: Just This.” Talk #2 in the 2014 Bay Area Sesshin, Angela Center. 29 Oct, 2014. <http://everydayzen.org/​teachings/​2013/​httpedz-audios3amazonawscom02thelastwordjustthis​_bayareasesshin_2014-20-29mp3> ↑

Ferguson: Righteous Anger and Wrathful Deities

December 5, 2014

So I had something planned for this week’s post, something clever about the upcoming Yule holiday and the “bliss bestowing hands” mentioned in the ox-herding pictures, a riff on Geri Larkin’s recent piece about how we each have our gift to give.25

But it rings hollow, so hollow, in the aftermath of Ferguson, after we’ve had hammered home the lesson that in contemporary America a police officer can kill you with no consequence at all.

That this is especially true if you’re a black male should be obvious, from the way that Darren Wilson described Michael Brown as a demon impervious to bullets, to the way 12-year old Tamir Rice was executed on sight by cops to whom he apparently looked like a 20-year-old adult, to the senseless negligent homicide of Akai Gurley by an NYPD officer who was brandishing his firearm with no rational cause.

But if you think whiteness will protect you, consider the deaths of Kelly Thomas and James Boyd, and the beating of Matthew Clark and Gregory Malandrucco.

Racism is part of the problem, but there is more at play here.

The job of the police is to enforce order. Not just any order, of course, but the existing social order, the status quo of the power hierarchy. And as that power hierarchy becomes more and more unjust, of course more brutal and repressive means will be necessary to preserve it. “No justice, no peace” is not a threat, it’s a moral law of the Universe: injustice can survive only under a rule of force, which generates its own opposition. Or as the Discordian Law of Eristic Escalation says, “Imposition of Order = Escalation of Chaos.” (And Fenderson’s Amendment: the tighter the order in question is maintained, the longer the consequent chaos takes to escalate, but the more it does when it does.)

The occasional appearance of this sort of police state is a logical consequence of the fundamentally Neolithic structure of our civilization and our mainstream religion, of a culture that believes that “property” is real but that “mysticism,” the direct and immediate aesthetic religious experience, isn’t. Said “property” must be defended, which means any disturbance in the social order must be put down forcefully.

If you’re not outraged by all this, you’re not paying attention.

Righteous wrath is the only suitable human response — but it is also a dangerous one if that wrath is not properly targeted. To look at such a situation and think “we need to change who is on the top and the bottom here!” is not to resolve the injustice but only to shuffle around the victims and the perpetrators. Our wrath must be against the whole structure that creates victims and perpetrators of oppression.

Buddhism realizes the place of wrath, and assigns significant deities to its proper function — the “wrathful deities.” The foremost such deity in Zen, and perhaps in Japanese Buddhism is general, is Fudō-myōō, the Immovable Wisdom King known in Sanskrit as Ācala. Wreathed in flame, fearsomely fanged, bearing a demon-subduing sword and a rope to bind demons (or, in one account, to lasso the damned out of hell), Fudō-myōō directs the energy of our anger along the path of salvation.

Gary Snyder invoked him in his powerful poem “Spel Against Demons”:

Down with demonic killers who mouth revolutionary
slogans and muddy the flow of change, may they be
Bound by the Noose, and Instructed by the Diamond
Sword of ACHALA, the Immovable, Lord of Wisdom, Lord
of Heat, who is squint-eyed and whose face is terrible
with bare fangs, who wears on his crown a garland of
severed heads, clad in a tiger skin, he who turns
Wrath to Purified Accomplishment,

whose powers are of lava,
of magma, of deep rock strata, of gunpowder,
and the Sun.

The anger over Ferguson and these other incidents of police brutality, and over the unjust social structure that precipitates them, will not go away. Almost certainly it will be fed by fresh incidents. There will be fear and terror and horror. But with immovable compassion, may we directly our anger wisely. May the fire of our wrath be a furnace to burn away the dross, and not a hell-flame to torment those we might mistakenly call “enemy.”

Fudō-myōō. From the collection of the Nara National Museum.

25 Larkin, Geri. “Out of the Blue.” Lion’s Roar. 6 Nov 2014. <http://www.lionsroar.com/​blue/>↑

Contemplative Druidry by James Nichol (Book Review)

December 12, 2014

Despite my pride in my matrilineal Celtic heritage, and although I’ve been honored to participate in rituals held by various ADF Groves, I am not a Druid. But when James Nichol’s Contemplative Druidry came in, our editor decided that as “The Zen Pagan” I was the go-to guy for the contemplative side of Paganism in general. So my reaction to it may be a little backwards from what the author intended — instead of justifying a contemplative approach to a Druid reader, in this case it’s justified a form of Druidry to someone with a more contemplative practice.

The Druidry here is mostly that of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids (OBOD), a primarily British group. Like me, my fellow American Pagans are probably more familiar with the somewhat different Druidry of Ar nDraiocht Fein (ADF). The inimitable John Michael Greer, a member of both groups, has written a comparison which can be found at the ADF website; in short, where ADF is a church with a more recently added initiatory current, OBOD is an initiatory mystery school with a Universalist approach. I could have used a bit more background about OBOD’s Druidry, but a few minutes with DuckDuckGo (my internet search engine of choice) was sufficient to fill me in enough to follow the discussion.

Nichol came to be interested in a more contemplative approach to his Druidry after a mystical experience in June 2007, “triggered simply by noticing and contemplating a wild rose, growing on the banks of the river, an experience “which only “lasted a few moments” but caused “a subtle shift of awareness” for several weeks, where he “woke up every day with a sense of joy and connection.”

This experience eventually led him to renew his study of the Shambhala school of Tibetan Buddhism, as well as other forms of Buddhism, and then to propose to the OBOD leadership a program of “contemplative exploration.” This book is the result of that exploration.

Nichol’s role here is more editor than author, summarizing the discussions of fifteen English Druids (including Nichol himself). Thus, rather than a detailed discussion of one perspective the book presents a diversity of voices — the depth perception of multiple perspectives. I found this to be a strength, but a reader looking for a deeper justification of contemplative practice, or detailed instructions for practice, may find it a disappointment.

The first section of the book relates bits of the participant’s back-stories, from their childhood spiritual experiences to how they came to identify as Druids. It gives a composite portrait of the sort of person who is attracted to a contemplative path within Druidry/Paganism. The second section looks at the practice methods they’ve adopted: formal meditations, both solitary and group; walking in nature; and integration into daily life. As Nichols notes, “…[F]ormal meditation is not our only kind of contemplative practice. Just being in nature and walking the land are major settings for contemplation. So are chanting, movement and methods that involve creative arts and crafts. So are the activities of daily life. In many ways the essence of our contemplation lies not in what we do, but the presence and awareness we bring to it.”

The third section looks at the benefits of contemplative practice for the individual, as a sort of “recharging,” a antidote of the busyness of modern society, and as a foundation for more outwardly directed work; and at what it can bring to Druidry as a whole, as a resource for a more mindful community living. A concluding section (prior to an appendix with more details about how the collaborative process worked) presents Nichol’s conclusions and suggestions about how to foster a contemplative current within Druidry.

While all the participants in this exploration are Druids, there is enough diversity in their experience that I can recommend this book to readers interested in a broad survey of contemplative trends in Paganism. It also perked up my interest in the OBOD form of Druidry, so I’ll be doing some further reading on that.

Santa Claus and the Nature of the Gods

December 19, 2014

(A philosophical venture onto thin ice)

It’s once again that time of year when we are surrounded by images of the most successful American demigod. His priests are donning their red ritual vestments for the annual blessing of children. Stories from his mythos are featured on TV. Elementary school students across the nation are rehearsing songs about his bounty to be performed at “Winter Holiday” pageants that put a non-denominational veneer on a Christian holiday — a holiday that is itself a veneer on ancient Pagan celebrations of the solstice. And soon sacrifices of milk and cookies will be left out to curry favor with him.

Illustration from Clement C. Moore’s Night Before Christmas, circa 1870. Illustrator Unknown

Sophisticated cynics know that it’s a bunch of bunk, of course. There is no jolly old elf at the North Pole. There is no magic sleigh, no one coming down the chimney, and your parents are going to eat those cookies.

And yet…and yet…somehow, the gifts still end up under the tree. We tough-minded cynics and bah-humbugers still find ourselves softening up for a few days, a little more susceptible to break into a hearty ho-ho-ho or experience an unaccustomed warmth in the center of the chest, a bit more likely to find ourselves giving a damn about our fellow humanoids.

Even wars of imperialism have been known to pause for gift-giving and expressions of fellowship, to the great consternation of nationalists and warmongers.

To stop war, even briefly, takes more than a fictional character in a children’s story. There is a truth — an experiential truth, not a supernatural one — behind the myth.

There is magic afoot here, something that changes consciousness and the world.

Santa Claus may not be “real” in the sense of a material substance immediately evident to our senses or measuring devices. But as an aspect of the human experience, he’s as real as a poem — say, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” — or as the number eight, as in “tiny rein-deer.”

There are millions of copies of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” which exist as material objects, ink on dead trees or magnetic or electrical patterns in computers. Yet none of these copies is the poem itself. Does this mean that the poem itself does not exist? Even the most positivist philosopher would make such a claim only in an academic debate, not in “real life.”

There are millions of mall Santas and parade Santas and Christmas garden Santas, yet none is Santa Claus. Does this mean that Santa himself does not exist?

Or does it mean that we’re looking in the wrong place?

As Francis Pharcellus Church of the New York Sun wrote in his famous 1897 reply to eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon,

Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond.

We could label Church’s reply as a lie, of course. We could declare ourselves a-Santaists and be done with it. But when Church wrote “Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus,” he was not operating in the context of the objective, material world.

He was not suggesting that a zoological expedition be mounted to the North Pole to capture those rare flying reindeer, or that experts in industrial efficiency be sent to bring Santa’s manufacturing methods to the factories of the United States. If he had, clearly he would be a liar or deeply confused, and a-Santaism would be the correct response.

But if we understand the realm in which Church was operating, a more sophisticated response is required — one which does not deny that material-realm a-Santaism but that is also capable of going beyond it.

And so ol’ Saint Nick actually makes a decent starting point for a deep consideration of the nature of the gods and goddesses. Are the deities real? Is Santa Claus real? The question can only be answered meaningfully when we agree on a context.

A Fae Footnote

It’s interesting that Church makes reference to “fairies dancing on the lawn.” Recall that this was before the Cottingley Fairies or Peter Pan’s Tinker Bell — a fairy so delicate that children’s skepticism could kill her. We’re dealing with a little bit older and more dangerous understanding of the fae folk here.

While there was a bit of a craze for paintings of fairies in the late 19th century, even the small butterfly-winged subjects of those paintings cavorted about scantly clad — or nude! — in stunning violation of Victorian convention. And perhaps we might think less of Tinker Bell and more of Puck of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, a different sort of faery:

“Can you wonder that the People of the Hills don’t care to be confused with that painty-winged, wand-waving, sugar-and-shake-your-head set of impostors? Butterfly wings, indeed! I’ve seen Sir Huon and a troop of his people setting off from Tintagel Castle for Hy-Brasil in the teeth of a sou’-westerly gale, with the spray flying all over the Castle, and the Horses of the Hills wild with fright. Out they’d go in a lull, screaming like gulls, and back they’d be driven five good miles inland before they could come head to wind again. Butterfly-wings! It was Magic—Magic as black as Merlin could make it, and the whole sea was green fire and white foam with singing mermaids in it. And the Horses of the Hills picked their way from one wave to another by the lightning flashes! That was how it was in the old days!”

There’s an edge of terror in those fae folk — just as there’s an edge of terror in Santa, with his surveillance capabilities that the NSA can only dream of, and his capacity to punish the naughty. (Sometimes assigned to his partner the Krampus.)

Books make great Yule gifts! By purchasing a hard copy of one of my books as a gift at infamous.net/support, you can also support my writing. You can also find there other gift-able merchandise. Thank you for your support.

Not Invulnerable

January 2, 2015

Over at the New York Times philosophy blog “The Stone” Todd May recently posted a piece titled “Against Invulnerability” in which he argues against philosophies that claim that “we can, and we should, make ourselves immune to the world’s vicissitudes.” Central to these philosophies, he says, is the belief “that we can extricate ourselves from the world’s contingencies so that they do not affect us.”26

In opposition, May claims that “Most of us want to feel caught up in the world. We want to feel gripped by what we do and those we care about, involved with them, taken up by them. The price of this involvement is our vulnerability.” And to a certain degree I concur with that, as I’ve written before. But I have to take issue with May’s claim that Buddhism teaches the sort of “invulnerability” that he describes.

I’m not sure that Stoicism teaches this the way he claims, either. I’m much less familiar with that philosophy (though I do like to quote a friend’s description of me as “stoic, in a fuzzy sort of way”) but let’s look at the argument that May offers:

Invulnerabilism recommends that we secrete a distance between ourselves and the world so that ultimately it cannot touch us. The extremity of such a view can be illustrated by reference to the Stoic’s ratification of the ancient philosopher Anaxagoras’ reported remark upon hearing of his son’s death: “I always knew that my child was a mortal.” It is possible perhaps that some few among us can reach this degree of distance from the world. But the question is, do we want it?

I don’t know what else Anaxagoras might have said about his son, perhaps some other remarks on the record somewhere indicate that he was a callous or distant parent. But no such conclusion can be reached from this quotation.

Observing that those we care about are mortal is not in any way to distance ourselves from the world. It is the very opposite. It is acceptance of the way the way the world in fact is. That can only bring us closer to reality, closer to the world.

And that is certainly in harmony with the teachings of the Buddha.

The idea that one should seek to distance oneself from the world is expressly refuted in the mythology around the Siddhartha’s enlightenment. This was supposedly the last temptation that Mara, the tempter demon, the Lord of Illusion, offered: after trying to distract the seeking prince with the usual fleshy pleasures, and then trying to scare him off with claims of his unworthiness (which the prince refuted by calling upon the Earth to bear him witness), after Siddhartha had achieved his enlightenment the tempter had one more trick up his sleeve: “Yes, oh Prince, you have reached highest perfect enlightenment, and good for you. But think of how hard it was to get here! Only a truly extraordinary individual like yourself could ever achieve such a thing. If you go back and start trying to preach to the rabble, if you try to teach others, no one will understand you and you’ll just end up disappointed. Why don’t you just stay here, soaking in your enlightenment?”

The Big B, remember, had already mastered his human desires to the utmost degree. He had almost died from extreme ascetic practices. Had he decided to just keep sitting under that tree in perfect meditative bliss, detached and distant from the world, until his body gave out, he could certainly have done so.

He had the ability to completely distance himself from the world.

But he didn’t.

He told Mara, “Some will understand.” And he came back to the world of everyday human society. He preached and he taught, and he dealt with the jealousy of the leaders of other sects, and he survived several assassination attempts, and he dealt with the petty day-to-day matters of running a community of monks, and he got his hands dirty (figuratively) trying to deal with his society’s classism (in the caste system) and sexism, and he got his hands dirty (literally) taking care of sick monks.

To claim that the Buddha was “distant” from the world is a terrible misunderstanding of what he did and taught.

Now, the Buddha’s wisdom does begin with accepting the world as it is, and this acceptance of the way things are leads us to the understanding that things are often not the way that we desire them to be, a situation called “dukkha” — often translated as “suffering” but others have suggested that “stress” or “disjointedness” might be more accurate.

Let’s look at an example of this that May uses. As a native New Yorker, he feels a “foreigner” in suburban South Carolina:

Sometimes I tell myself that my life is certainly far better here than most other lives on the planet. And this is certainly true. But it rarely seems to me to be helpful in those periods where I feel an exile. Instead, it leads more to an attitude of “it’s bad for almost everyone, except the lucky few.” That hardly counts as wisdom, and does little to comfort me. But suppose I think of it differently. Life is contingent. The very same trajectory that led me to South Carolina also gave me my family, my opportunity to study philosophy, many of the friends I have and much else.

Consoling oneself with thoughts of how we have balanced the pleasant with the unpleasant may give some comfort. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s a shallow practice and so the relief will likely be short-lived.

I don’t have qualifications to give May any “official” Buddhist advice about his feelings of exile. But if I were to fake it, rather than advising him to distract or console himself with thoughts of how other factors make up for that unpleasantness, I’d advise him to sit with that unpleasantness for a while. Really look at it. Accept its existence. See what it’s made of. He might find that most of his feelings about it are self-generated drama. With some practice and some time, he might discover that the “New York” that he yearns for is not anything based on his actual experiences of the city, but that he’s in love with a mental projection, an advertising campaign about how New York is. Maybe that seemingly solid feeling is actually hollow. It might just pop like a soap bubble.

Or maybe he would find that his love of the hustle and bustle of New York is solid, that he will always be unhappy without the noise, the crowds, the energy, the art, the diversity, the smell of urine in the subways. Perhaps its his attachment to his career and to his South Carolina suburban social circle, to leading the “right sort” of professional life as he’d imagined it, that would pop like a soap bubble.

What we find in pursuing the Eightfold Path is not invulnerability or distance from the world, but rather a better idea of our true connection. That’s why the mythology of Mahayana Buddhism is packed with compassionate Bodhisattvas who hear the cries of the world. But if you would do good in this world you must act from a place of calm and from clear sight, from acceptance of the world as it is — and of acceptance of yourself as you are.

Thousand-Armed Kannon from the Tokyo National Museum. All those arms are to reach out and help, to connect.

26 May, Todd. “Against Invulnerability.” New York Times Opinionator. The Stone. 27 Dec 2014. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/27/against-invulnerability/>↑

Gods Save Us From Glorious Struggles

January 16, 2015

A few months ago science fiction writer and blogger Cory Doctorow dug up a fascinating 1940 review by George Orwell of Hilter’s Mein Kampf. What makes this review timeless, and relevant and important today, is that Orwell nails what it is about authoritarianism — beyond the charisma of any individual leader — that makes it attractive to so many. This is key to understanding today’s headlines, to see what motivates both ISIS fighters and American cops: the glory and beauty of the struggle.

Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades….All three of the great dictators [Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin] have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has aid to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.27

American propagandists eventually caught on, and found ways to turn mundane civilian activities into ways to join the struggle. Saving cooking fats or joining a carpool could be part of the war effort — however little effect they might have on the practical aspects of the war, they keep morale up.

The lesson here is not just about World War II or 20th century dictatorships. Whether it is a flaw in our current civilization that we might manage to exorcise in a few more centuries, or is something hard-wired into the monkey brain that we’re stuck with forever, it’s a fact of life in the here-and-now that we’re suckers for a glorious struggle.

US WWII civilian propaganda poster. Everything can be part of the struggle!

We want our lives to have “meaning” and that implies a plot, a narrative arc; and that in turn implies a narrative conflict. And man-vs-man or man-vs.-society are easy conflicts to find and to understand.

When Conan the Barbarian (riffing off an actual statement by Genghis Khan) says that what is best in life is to “crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women,” there is something within us that resonates. (Don’t tell me it doesn’t. I’ve heard too many peace activists quote that line.) The glory of conquest! Or at least the glory of the fight — better to die on our feet than live on our knees, right? Struggle against the vile enemy! Danger and death beset us, but glory awaits we happy few, we band of brothers.

And if there are no enemies at hand? Then some may easily be constructed. Somewhere, sometime, someone has genuinely done you wrong, or wronged someone you love; and if the offenders themselves are not available, someone within convenient reach can be linked to them, cast in the role of an ally of darkness. And we can take pride in holding the line against those barbarians, protecting the truth faith.

Ah, the true faith. Because religion provides a ready-made us-versus-them narrative. It has little to do with the actual teachings of the religion, which in most cases are ambiguous at best or contradictory at worst on the topic of violence. But you don’t even need to know what those teachings are, as so-called “Islamic State” recruits cramming with Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies demonstrate.

It seems to me that the role of religion in fostering violence is less about doctrine or dogma than about religion in its social function, its definition of a community — which, by nature, defines people who are outside that community. And that’s all you need if you’re looking for people against whom to engage in glorious struggle. You can substitute any other way to define a community, any other glorious us-versus-them narrative — Marxism, capitalism, the sham of “democracy,” one’s choice of recreational pharmaceuticals (think beer-drinking cops beating pot-smoking hippies), a sports rivalry, whatever — and get about the same result.

27 Quoted at Doctorow, Cory, “Orwell’s review of Mein Kampf.” Boing Boing. <http://boingboing.net/2014/08/17/orwells-review-of-mein-kampf.html>, <https://docs.google.com/file/d/​0BzmBhYakPbYtT3k5cDd4Sm1SRUE/​view?pref=2&pli=1>↑

Religion, Identity, Practice, Doctrine, Is, and Ought

January 30, 2015

One of the joys of social media is that it doesn’t always follow the short attention span of the 24/7 news cycle. If you follow someone who shares an article that’s a few months old, suddenly embers of an old debate can flare back up and shed a little light, heat, or both.

I keep a weather eye on Zen teacher Brad Warner‘s blog and Facebook page, because beside liking his writings I got to scope him out in person at Starwood a few years ago and determine that he’s not a cabbage but an actual human being. I don’t always agree with him, but I’m interested in what he has to say.

He recently linked to an months-old entry at the blog of Ron Crouch, an insight/Vipassana meditation teacher, regarding the blow-up between Ben Affleck and Sam Harris on Real Time with Bill Maher. Brad’s post ignited a long Facebook thread, and put me in mind of a few points about religion and identity that I think need to be addressed (and which also make for a good followup to our last episode).

But since Harris is a controversy magnet I want to say a few things about him first. Sam Harris is a smart guy, and we’re both atheists (after our own fashions) with an interest in mystical experiences and meditation and the martial arts. I think he and I could have some interesting discussions over a few drinks.

But in some ways Harris is deeply confused about how the world works, and that makes some of his political opinions dangerous. One of these points of confusion is the social nature of religion, and this is a confusion that Crouch seems to share — though not to the point of crossing the line into Islamophobia as Harris unfortunately does. I don’t get the impression that Crouch would claim that “We are at war with Islam” as Harris has.28

Anyway. Enough skirting of ad hominem. I’d like to address the claim that Crouch, in defense of Harris, makes about religion and identity. According to Crouch, all ideologies are “toxic beyond imagining,” in that they “hack” the normal and healthy formation of psychological identity:

One does not just think that it is true that Jesus is the son of the creator of the universe, one becomes a “Christian.” One does not merely think that Mohamed met with an angel, one becomes a “Muslim.” One does not just believe that the proletariate will eventually seize the means of production, one becomes a “Communist.” And in my own little corner of the world, one does not just believe that the Buddha discovered an exit from being born over and over again, had psychic powers or was omniscient, one becomes a “Buddhist.”

…

It is not overstating the case to say that if we used the same critical faculties to evaluate such claims that we use to choose car insurance, all superstitious and utopian ideologies would disappear in a day. But because these kinds of ideas disrupt the process of identity-formation, taking it over, we refrain from saying, or even thinking, the obvious to avoid offending others or frightening ourselves.29

When I look at my own experience, though, this is not what I find.

Now you may be surprised to learn this, but I wasn’t born a Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordian Transcendentalist. I was born into a Catholic household and raised Catholic, in the manner of my Polish and Irish immigrant great- and great-great-grandparents. (Though with a New Age twist — Dad had Edgar Cayce books on the shelf, and Mom believed she lived a past life in Atlantis. Have I mentioned I grew up in the 1970s?)

That Catholicism was a big part of my identity up until my teens or so. But I did not become a Catholic by intellectually considering and then accepting the doctrines of the Church. It was more the case that I learned to identify myself as a Catholic — not as a result of deliberate teaching and intellectual instruction, but in the same way that I learned to speak English and to root for the Orioles, through a process of imitation.

As I grew up I was taught that Catholics accepted a certain set of doctrines, and only later and vaguely was I taught some details of those doctrines. For a while I accepted those I found congenial and neglected those I did not. It was only when I was asked to make a formal acceptance of the whole shebang that, taking the prospect of Confirmation more seriously than my peers, I found it necessary to walk away, out to a space where I could start to think for myself.

In other words, the casual chain was exactly backwards from the story that Crouch is telling. I did not accept the proposition that the poor old carpenter-rabbi known to history as Jesus was the son of the creator of the universe and thus become a “Christian”; rather I became, through an almost osmotic process, a Christian and thus learned to nod at the accompanying doctrine. (For a few years, at least.)

“But you were just a child!” one may object. Well, yes, but that is how most people absorb their religion. Carl Sagan wrote that “Many people have inherited their religion like their eye color,”30 and that really is an on-target analogy. But even when religion is not inherited that way, when there is a conversion, the cultural aspects of a religion usually come first, the dogma later.

Consider the famous conversion of Sammy Davis Jr. to Judaism.

He did not sit down with Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions and read up on the doctrines of various faiths and choose Judaism as a set of intellectual propositions. Instead he met a couple of rabbis who impressed him with their attitude toward life and their cultural customs. “Jews have become strong over their thousands of years of oppression and I wanted to become part of that strength….I wanted to become a Jew because the customs of Judaism held a cleanliness that no other philosophy on this earth can offer.”31

We might argue that it ought not be that way. Certainly some of us, through whatever combination of circumstance, have found ourselves distanced from our native cultures and without another one ready to grab on to; we were sufficiently alienated to step back and consider the matter intellectually. Those of us who have been though that process might consider it a superior way to form a relationship with religious practice, that everyone ought to do that.

But it is a dangerous confusion to base our politics on ought instead of is.

When people like Harris make arguments of the form

People form their religious affiliation as a matter of selecting intellectual propositions.

These people are Muslim (or Christian or Jewish or Hindu or…).

Therefore we know that they wholeheartedly accept this set of propositions that define Islam (Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism…).

they have mistaken how most people experience religion, right at step 1, confusing how people ought to form their religious affiliation and personal identities with how they in fact do so.

And when people call for armed conflict on the basis of such mistaken reasoning, it’s nothing less than tragic.

Crouch suggests that if we applied critical thinking to religion the same way we apply it to consumer choices, supernaturalism would quickly fall. But I think he is mistaken in believing that critical thinking plays much of a role in our consumer choices! If it did, surely all the money and energy put into the black magic of advertising would be a waste. Critically thinking profit-oriented companies would stop useless appeals to emotion and culture in favor of intellectual arguments about the suitability of their products for various applications.

But the “rational consumer” is a mostly a myth found in economic theories divorced from reality. People don’t shop like that.

And they don’t worship like that either — the “rational adherent” is a character in sociological theories that aren’t reality based.

28 Harris, Sam. “Mired in a religious war.” Washington Times. 1 Dec 2004. <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/dec/1/20041201-090801-2582r/a>↑

29 Crouch, Ron. “In Defense of Sam Harris, Sacred Cow Butcher.” Aloha Dharma. 28 Oct 2014. <https://alohadharma.com/2014/10/28/in-defense-of-sam-harris-sacred-cow-butcher/>↑

30 Sagan, Carl. Broca’s Brain. New York: Ballantine Books, 1980. p 339 ↑

31 Davis, Sammy, Jr. “Why I Became A Jew.” Ebony Feb 1960. <http://books.google.com/books?id=F9umweXiDtgC&lpg=PA1&pg=PA62>↑

My Best Superbowl Sunday Ever

February 13, 2015

The every-other-week nature of The Zen Pagan sometimes makes for delays between an event that inspires a column and the column itself. The Big Game will be a fading memory by the time you read this, but I started writing this installment of TZP on Superbowl Sunday — one of those strange holidays of American secular religion. And while it’s not very meaningful to me (which is why I’m sitting in an anarchist coffeehouse/bookstore writing this instead of glued to a TV), I am reminded of another Superbowl Sunday, twenty-three years ago, a day which for me involved no football but did involve an LSD-catalyzed mystical experience.

I’m ending a longstanding policy of silence regarding my drug use by writing about this, but I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations has passed and that I’m safe if it becomes known that I used an “illegal” (skipping over the questionable validity of various drug laws) psychedelic drug over two decades ago. As for more recent use…I shall maintain my silence.

As cracks start to open in the ban on psychedelic research, and with the use of psychedelics remaining a popular clandestine activity at festivals (including both Pagan festivals and Burns), it seems to me a good idea to spend a little time considering the idea that psychedelics can be a useful catalyst (not a sole cause) for producing a genuine and worthwhile mystical experience.

I don’t want to be cavalier here — drug use has risks. This should be obvious regarding hard drugs but let me state it explicitly: heroin is a bad lifestyle choice, crack is whack, and meth is a fast-track to looking like a zombie extra for The Walking Dead. And when you buy something on the black market you’re taking a risk. This was starkly illustrated to me a few years ago when I found myself kneeling in a puddle of oily water and urine, rendering first aid to a young man having a seizure from some impure club drug.

But even pharmacologically safe substances can pose dangers to our personal development if we misunderstand their nature.

I would like to suggest a metaphor: psychedelic drugs are power tools for changing consciousness. They are like chainsaws. They can cut you up, and so by no means should children play with them. Adults should learn the appropriate safety rules, and should consider whether a less powerful and dangerous tool would be better.

But sometimes, a chainsaw is just the thing to get the job done.

Those cautionary notes in place…that Sunday two decades and more ago, head full of Albert Hofmann’s problem child, was a defining moment in my life. It was not my first psychedelic experience; that had come at a Grateful Dead show (yes, really, sometimes life is that cliche) the year before. And that had been pretty significant — when I got home found my mind overflowing with ideas, and grabbed a notebook to start writing. It was a connection with the act of writing that I’d never experienced before. Looking back, I found a note in the margin of that notebook: “Be able to say, ‘Well, it was an acid trip at a Dead show that got me writing again!’” Which is true, maybe. I’m not sure if my book, this blog, or my pages and pages of poetry would all ever have happened if I had Just Said No.

But fast-forward almost a year to that Superbowl Sunday 1992. That day I spent in the company of my friends M. and N., and in addition to those magical pieces of paper we indulged in a bit of old-fashioned cannabis, making many jokes about a “Super Bowl“, yuk yuk. I got restless at some point and went for a walk through the neighborhood, getting a kick out of throwing snowballs at a “Drug Free School Zone” sign (both left- and right-handed, experiencing a dialog between my cerebral hemispheres in the process). When I returned home M. had the idea to walk over to the nearby shopping mall — he needed a new pair of shoes, if I recall correctly, and somehow it became a mission, a grand quest, to go in search of a pair.

I don’t think we found the shoes. And along the way we encountered something that would have been odd enough in the DC suburbs even without the drugs: two men out falconing. A large bird of prey suddenly alighted on a tree in front of me, and we looked over the crest of the hill to see two men with big leather gloves, one with another falcon (or hawk, maybe, I’m not an ornithologist) perched on his hand, apparently out after the rabbits who lived in the scrub brush on the hillside. A reminder that life is both as beautiful as the hawk’s flight and as terrible as the screaming death of the rabbit caught and rended.

All these years later (plus, you know, the drugs) I’m not sure if it was before or after the falcons, or before or after the sporting goods store. And I don’t recall who it was who dove onto the snow first. But one of us had the urge to make a snow angel, and the other two joined in. And so the three of us ended up on our back in a vacant field, looking up at a sky which the grey heavy snow-clouds had left, partly blue and partly puffy white.

And that’s when he appeared to me.

I suppose we’ve all seen things in the clouds. “That one looks like a sheep.” “That one looks like face.” And “I dropped acid and saw God” is a cliche. But cliches grow because they have a root in the truth.

And so it was that I saw in the heavens a dragon (Chinese style), made of clouds and walking among the clouds, striding toward me, looking right at me with complete benevolence and acceptance. He looked down on me and breathed, the breath of life, a rainbow hexagonal lifeline that reconnected me to the sky.

There were no words but I knew, the way one knows things in dreams, that this was a “he,” the Sky Father if you will; and if I were to verbalize his message to me it would be something like “You belong here. I accept and love you fully.” That was the insight, the opening, the crack in the wall, the current that started flowing, the circuit that was activated.

And it was something I desperately needed to hear/feel, as a young man who was the grown-up version of a bullied child.

Here’s how much my life changed as a result of that blessing: at the time I was a grad student in Computer Science, and was the stereotypical geek. I embodied an old joke: “How can you tell the extroverted computer scientist? He looks at your shoes when he’s talking to you.” I had essentially not dated since my freshman year of undergrad, and except for one drunken fumbling attempt on a hotel room floor (please don’t ask) was a virgin.

But a few weeks after this experience I was emboldened enough by my sense of actually belonging in the universe to dance with a lady at a club, which led to a date, which led to my first real relationship, with regular sex and sleepovers and all. Yes, it only lasted for a few months, but it was the definite passing of a threshold.

It is important to point out that I had been doing a lot of self-cultivation before this. A psychedelic can only act as a catalyst, speeding up a reaction that would have happened anyway given enough time and energy. If you are utterly lost and directionless and take a psychedelic, you will be utterly lost and directionless in a faster and more energetic manner. You have to build the circuit, carve the channel, before you add the energy.

My vision might have lasted ten seconds, or maybe it was five minutes…I don’t know. Again it is cliche to say that this happened outside of time, but it is true. I heard M. or N. say something and knew I had to return to time, sat up and looked around at the snow and my friends, and it was all the same as it had been a few minutes before.

Except I now had a secret lodged deep in my heart, about my relationship with the cosmos.

So, psychedelic drugs? There are hazards, but all in all, I believe their careful use can be beneficial.

The Aesthetic Component of Religion

February 14, 2015

“Zazen Ultraman”. Digital art by the author.

One of my favorite things in the world is the thirty-foot-high bronze Buddha statue known as the Daibutsu (literally, “Big Buddha” or “Great Buddha”) in Kamakura, a small city located in the hills outside Tokyo.

There’s another ancient bronze Daibutsu in Nara, near Kyoto; and while Nara’s Daibutsu is both older and larger — and the regional pride I soaked up during the months I lived in Osaka means I usually favor the Kansai region (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Nara) in its longtime rivalry with Kanto (Tokyo, Yokohama, Kamakura) — I have to give the edge to the Kamakura Daibutsu because of its outdoor location.

This is one of those art-by-accident things: over five hundred years ago a tsunami destroyed the temple buildings but was unable to do much to the 120-ton statue itself. So Kamakura’s Great Buddha sits in the open air, wooded hills for a backdrop, immovable in his centuries-long meditation, undisturbed by the fury of the elements.

The early Buddhists would be shocked by both of these giant Buddhas, or indeed by any statue of their teacher. (For purposes of this discussion I’m going to punt on the distinction between the historical Shakyamuni Buddha and the various cosmological Buddhas of later Buddhism.) For the first few centuries of Buddhism, artists rarely if ever created depictions of their main holy man, instead using symbols such as an empty throne or footprints marked with the “Wheel of the Law.” There seems to have been a sort of anti-idolatry philosophy in effect, either formally or informally. (The practice of making statues of the Buddha was probably adopted later from the Greeks when the remnants of the Hellenistic empire of Alexander met the expanding Indian Buddhist culture of the emperor Ashoka.32)

There’s a certain sense to that anti-idolatry. A famous Buddhist analogy (popularized by a Bruce Lee monologue in Enter the Dragon) speaks of teachings as a finger pointing to the moon, and the importance of not focusing on the finger. If religious art is to be a pointer to a religious experience, it must not be too captivating, must not tempt the viewer’s eye to stick on the finger rather than continuing on to the moon.

The same idea is likely at the root of the Islamic prohibition on images of Muhammad that has caused such trouble recently. It is entirely reasonable for Muslim teachers to be concerned about people focusing on the messenger and not the message, and even to discourage artistic depictions of their Prophet as a means to keep a check on idolatrous tendencies to miss the moon for the sake of the finger.

Now, when I say there’s a reasonable concern, I don’t mean I agree with a ban. Yes, there is a potential pitfall of mistaking the map for the territory, of setting the bottle of medicine up on a pedestal for admiration rather than taking the stuff. But to turn “there is a hazard here, beware” into “there is sure damnation here, woe unto thee!” is an error — perhaps one of the most common in the field of religion — creating a black-and-white, Manichean morality.

And to then turn that religious teaching into a civil law, enforced by the sword or the gun, is a grave sin, going far wide of the mark.

It’s a shame not just because it results in people being ostracized, caged, beaten, or killed, but because it limits the tools that we have available to create religious experiences.

In his magnum opus The Meeting of East and West, F.S.C. Northrop wrote about two distinct functions of art and how they match up with two separate components of the nature of things. Our experience has a theoretical component, and one function of art is to convey aspects of that theory via analogy and symbolism. This was how the majority of Western art, particularly religious art, worked prior to the 19th-century Impressionist movement. But our experience also has an aesthetic component, immediately and empirically given, and art can be an experience of this component for its own sake.33

Consider the contrast between Christian art and Taoist art. Almost any classical Christian art will portray Jehovah or Jesus or angels or some saint. It will make reference to some narrative or bit of doctrine. The Sistine Chapel’s portrayal of the Creation, Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” any given painting of the Crucifixion, or Madonna and Child, or the nasty death of some martyr: they all assume some familiarity with the Christian mythos, and seek to inspire the viewer relative to that. Its appeal to someone not familiar with the narrative can be limited.

I’m reminded of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Captain Picard is stranded on a planet with an alien whose language consists solely of references to his culture’s mythos — mysterious utterances like “Shaka, when the walls fell!” Entirely comprehensible to his fellows, but baffling to the Enterprise crew.

“The Creation of Adam,” Michelangelo

Lest the reader think I am singling out Christianity, the same applies to much of Buddhist art. The painting on my wall of a pop-eyed bearded man standing surfboard-style on a reed is meaningless to someone not familiar with the story of Bodhidharma, but it serves to remind me of certain characteristics of that red-bearded barbarian. This theoretical aspect of art is a fine and useful thing, but it is not the entirety of art or of human experience.

In contrast we have the Taoist tradition of naturalistic art. (This is also true of much Zen art, as Zen is a descendant of Chinese Taoism as well as of Indian Buddhism.) A Taoist painting makes no reference to history or myth, but instead attempts to convey something about the nature of things, to evoke an aesthetic experience. Yes, if we want to play art critic or historian it’s useful to know a little about the concepts of yin and yang or to be able to quote the Tao Te Ching, but one doesn’t need any such knowledge to be moved by the grandeur of a landscape view or the mystery of a boat on misty river.

“Boating Near Lake Shore With Reeds,” artist unknown (formerly attributed to Ma Yuan), mid-13th century China

Such works attempt to evoke a moment of what Zen calls “mushin,” “no mind”; “mind” in this context refers to the theoretical, intellectual, voice-in-the-head sort of consciousness, so necessary to getting things done but so incapable of producing satisfaction on its own. Joseph Campbell explained this sort of experience as one which “evokes in us a sense of existence” as opposed to “an assurance of meaning.”34

…[E]ven a brief shock (say, for example, when discovering the moon over city roofs or hearing a sharp bird cry at night) can yield an experience of the order of no-mind: that is to say, the poetical order, the order of art…. In fact, both the magic of art and the art of magic derive from and are addressed to experiences of this order. Hence the power of the meaningless syllables, the mumbo jumbo of magic, and the meaningless verbalizations of metaphysics, lyric poetry, and art interpretation. They function evocatively, not referentially; like the beat of a shaman’s drum, not like a formula of Einstein…. [W]e have had, for an instant, a sense of existence: a moment of unevaluated, unimpeded, lyric life — antecedent to both thought and feeling; such as can never be communicated by means of empirically verifiable propositions, but only suggested by art.35

Operating evocatively, the Taoist artist may speak of “becoming one” with their subject: losing their “self,” opening up to the aesthetic experience, and in so doing being able to put the “soul” of their subject on paper.36 As Northrop puts it, “in their paintings they portray the aesthetic manifold primarily, and the external three dimensional objects, which Westerners tend to seek for in these paintings, only incidentally, if at all” — recording an experience rather than a set of objects.37

The Kamakura Daibutsu was probably intended by its sculptor to symbolize some theoretical aspects of one or another school of Buddhism. But in wiping out the temple, the hand of nature turned viewing the statue into an overwhelming aesthetic experience. An old wall conceals the Daibutsu as one enters the temple grounds; and so when the viewer turns the corner and beholds the huge old thing out under the vast sky, reflecting direct sunlight, a companion-piece to the hills and the trees, the immediate experience can be the sort of which Campbell speaks — a brief shock that momentarily silences the jabbering monkey-mind, a crack in time through which the Pure Light may shine directly, with little reference to the theoretical or verbal doctrines of Buddhism. The combination of the sculptor, history, and natural forces have created the possibility of an experience of enlightenment.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps by writing about it I have ruined the shock for you; if you should travel to Kamakura and fail to have a mystical experience upon your viewing of the Daibutsu, I’m sorry. (No refunds.)

But this is why we must continually create bold new art, and rediscover and reinterpret that which is ancient and forgotten. For that which has no capacity to surprise us has no capacity to cast magic upon us or to enlighten us. If art is to be a means of inducing actual experiences of the Divine, rather than merely another means of passing on the doctrine of some religious sect, it must remain free to experiment, to question, to shock, even to offend and to court charges of blasphemy.

You can purchase prints of “Zazen Ultraman” or other pieces, or support my writing in other ways, at infamous.net/support. Thank you.

32 Fields, Rick. How the Swans Came to the Lake. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, 1992. p 14-16 ↑

33 Northrop, F.S.C. The Meeting of East and West. New York, NY: Collier Books, 1968. p 303-306 ↑

34 Campbell, Joseph. The Flight of the Wild Gander. New York, N.Y: HarperPerennial, 1990. p 186 ↑

35 Campbell, p 186-187 ↑

36 Northrop, p 340-341 ↑

37 Northrop, p 330 ↑

What Does It Mean For the Gods to Exist?

February 27, 2015

Pagan Atheist???

I have been confidently identifying myself both as an “atheist” and a “Pagan” (among other labels) since at least 1997. Maybe longer, but that’s as far back in my e-mail archives that I can find myself stating it explicitly.

In the spaces that I frequented in those days, it was not a controversial stance. My real-world Pagan community was my own eclectic circle where we had Christo-Pagans and self-initiated Wiccans and folks into Druid stuff and I was throwing in bits of Taoism and Zen — who was going to argue?

On-line, we had the net but the web hadn’t become a big thing yet. Most of us were still on dial-up and blogs were still years away. We didn’t even have MySpace yet, let alone Facebook and Twitter. USENET newsgroups and private mailing lists were where the important discussions happened, and regularly posted FAQ (“Frequently Asked Questions”) documents were important works of the on-line culture.

And that culture was still weighted towards programmers, engineers, and scientists. We were still griping about “The September That Never Ended,” when AOL suddenly let a bunch of non-technical people into our party.

So the “Frequently Asked Questions about Neopaganism” written by hacker Eric S. Raymond had some authority with on-line Pagans. It stated: “[M]any neopagans are philosophical agnostics or even atheists; there is a tendency to regard `the gods’ as Jungian archetypes or otherwise in some sense created by and dependent on human belief, and thus naturally plural and observer-dependent.”38

(Raymond — or ESR, as we hackers know him — was a Wiccan priest at one point, and also a devotee of Zen, so his 1995 essay-length spiritual autobiography “Dancing With the Gods”39 is an excellent read for Zen Pagans. Unfortunately he sort of went nuts after 9/11, falling into paranoid conspiracy theories, Islamophobia, and climate change denialism;40 my citation of his older work here is most definitely not an endorsement of this more recent batshit craziness. May he be healed.)

I got no push-back on my “Pagan atheist” identification more severe than an occasional raised eyebrow — and even those mostly came from Christians upset at my double heresy.

“Pagan” and “atheist” have both been part of my presenter bio for about thirty-five events (counting each year’s edition of annual ones separately) spread over a decade and a half now. Neither the Pagan Police nor Atheist Agents have yet come to take me away.

I don’t know if times are changing, or if it’s an east coast/west coast thing, or something that’s mostly in the Pagan blogosphere. Or maybe also including “Zen” and “Taoist” and “Discordian” in that bio have made me seem non-threatening to people so I haven’t been drawn into the conflict. But when I made it out to PantheaCon recently and heard from such prominent atheist/humanist Pagans as Mark Green (of Atheopaganism fame) and John Halstead (The Allergic Pagan next door here at Patheos), I was surprised at some of the travails they related, people telling Pagan atheists that they are not valid Pagans.

In fact the intersection of atheism and Neopaganism goes back centuries. One root of the Neopagan movement was the poetry of British Romantics. Percy Bysshe Shelley was part of a social set that sought a replacement for Christianity and helped shape our Neopagan notions of the deities;41 he wrote of the “Sacred goddess, Mother Earth / Thou from whose immortal bosom / Gods and men and beasts have birth”42 and once raised an altar to Pan and wrote of such worship as the “true religion.”43 But he was also a devoted amateur scientist and was expelled from Oxford for writing a tract titled The Necessity of Atheism (He was also a vegetarian and an anarchist. I love this guy!)

As happy as I was to meet some other atheist Pagans, I was struck by something about the language that Mark Green uses. He speaks of a distinction between “believing…gods to exist in a literal sense” and seeing them as “meaningful metaphors.”44

With all respect to Mark, I think that doesn’t quite catch it. Metaphor is a literary device, it’s something that we recognize intellectually. It seems to me weak tea for discussing the Shining Ones.

I think we need to look deeper and do some philosophy. To answer the question “Do the deities exist?” we need to answer two questions, just two trivial little matters:

What is a god?

What does it mean to exist?

We have here two fundamental questions of theology and ontology that have had philosophers quibbling for thousands of years.

So, what the heck, there’s already so much gibberish on these topics that I don’t think I can make the problem any worse!

Believe it or not, I can't go into the store and buy what I need with my theological and ontological speculations. Please consider making a financial contribution or purchase at infamous.net/support. Thank you.

Super-Kings With Special Substance

Imagine that we could grab a sample of typical citizens off the streets of various civilizations throughout history, from the Sumerians to today, and quiz them about ontology — the branch of philosophy that studies existence. I think we would get a naive sort of realism. This brick? It exists, our subject replies, what a stupid question. The unicorn that the town drunk said he saw behind the tavern? It does not exist, it’s a fiction or a delusion or a lie. A good story, though, the bit about that unicorn and the blacksmith’s daughter is true even if it’s not, you know, “factual.” The number three? It exists — see, I have three coins in my pocket. (You think I can’t count or something?) People like you and me? Of course we exist, we’re standing here talking to each other.

And if we also asked them about theology, if we asked them to describe the primary deity of their culture’s pantheon, I think the picture that would emerge is that of a king but even moreso — a super-king, a magic king. Indeed, in some cultures a king could be promoted to godhood.

The idea of kings is central to the hierarchical social structure that has been with us since we became farmers and city-dwellers. Every citizen controls some bit of land, from the peasant’s plot to the lord’s realm; and each man has power over some number of people, from the head of the peasant household ruling his wife and children to the chief of the whole nation. The kings are the ones on the top of their various heaps, the ones who rule the most land and the most people.

And even though I’m a Zenarchist who looks forward to Universal Enlightenment and the subsequent abolition of the state, I have to acknowledge that a lot of people find that hierarchy very comforting. Someone is in charge. People can know their place in the social order.

But why stop there? It’s an obvious extrapolation to follow that curve upward: there must be a ruler of the whole world and everything we see, the sun and the moon and the sea and the rains. It would take power far beyond what any mortal has to rule all that. Magic power. And this ruler would have a royal court, of course. There’s your head deity and your pantheon.

And that heavenly king is comforting to a lot of people too. There is not just a social order but a cosmological order. God is in his heaven and all’s right with the world.

Even most citizens of the nominally democratic United States believe in the heavenly King of Kings — and we’ll leave for another time the problematic implications of spiritual monarchy in a democracy. (The Athenians at least had Zeus’s kingship of the gods be subject to limitations.)

The point I want to emphasize here is that there is a common and unsophisticated notion of deity which I think at least in part comes from projecting hierarchical social structure upwards. As below, so above.

And it’s worth pointing out that only as that agricultural social structure has started to fall apart the past few centuries — starting with the humanism of the Renaissance and moving through the birth of modern science in the Enlightenment and the whole-scale social change of the Industrial Revolution — has atheism been able to find any sort of social opening. It would be interesting to trace the parallels between the rise of philosophical atheism and the rise of philosophical anarchism. Maybe as we’re figuring out that we don’t need kings on earth, we don’t need them in heaven. Again, as below, so above.

Put this “common sense” ideas of deities and of existence together you get the gods — and goddesses, but let’s be honest, the power dynamic in religion has historically been as sexist as it is in politics — as super-powered super-royalty. Kings (and Queens) and Princes of the Universe, Lords (and Ladies) of All, possessed of the power to bend and shape the world to their liking, as real and as independent of human beings as bricks are (at least according to our common sense), but made of a more rarefied sort of substance not subject to the constraints of normal matter.

Under that set of definitions, I confidently assert that reason leads us to conclude that no gods exist, that they are like the town drunk’s unicorn: fiction, delusion, or lies, perhaps useful as metaphors, but not real. Not only that, but not being a big fan of kings I’m downright glad to say that no such gods exist. Ha! I thumb my nose at the empty heavens!

But these are not the only notions of “realness” or of deity out there.

I want to look at some alternative ideas, but I want to be clear that I’m just pointing out a vast range of possibilities, not claiming that I have the True Understanding of the nature of existence and of the gods. (Not yet, at least.)

What Does It Mean to Exist? Anatman…

Existence is a weirder thing than we think of in our day-to-day life. Let’s consider for a moment the existence of a subject near and dear to my heart: me. According to the teachings of Buddhism, in a sense I do not exist.

I don’t mean that there’s some conspiracy to present a fake author, or that everything we experience is a dream or a simulation a la The Matrix. The teaching called anatman (Sanskrit) or anatta (the Pali equivalent) says: okay, your physical body exists, you have emotional reactions and senses like sight and hearing and touch and time, and you perceive the world and you have memory and intellect. But nowhere in these piles of stuff, these skandhas, is there a self that’s separate from it all, an atman.45 If you take me apart there’s no self in there, any more than if you disassemble an old style mechanical watch you’ll find the “watchness” in there somewhere.

The “watchness” of the watch exists only as a relationship of the pieces and of the external world — mostly the owner who keeps winding it and uses it to tell time, but also the watchmaker, the owner’s wife who gave it to him as a gift, and so on. The “me-ness” of the thing we call by convention “Tom Swiss” exists only as a relationship of the pieces — body, memories, perceptions — and of the world, both physical and social. “Dependent arising,” as the Buddhists say.

“I” exist only as a set of relationships that includes the food I eat, the air I breathe, the sunlight that powers the photosynthesis that makes all that possible; and also all the other humans with whom I participate in the social interaction that makes thought possible. (No interaction, no language; no language, no thought as we usually understand it.) The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hahn often speaks of “interbeing.”46

It’s like the punchline of a famous Mullah Nasrudin story: “I am here because of you, and you are here because of me.”47

If “my” existence is so conditional on the world around me and on other people…what should we expect about the deities?

…and the Ouija Board

And if that’s a puzzler, consider for a moment the Ouija board. Or any sort of automatic writing controlled by more than one person at the same time, but Charles Kennard’s good old “talking board” (a brand originally made in Baltimore,48 hometown pride) is probably familiar to American Pagan readers. Odds are good that you played around with one a little when you were a kid, or at least knew someone who did.

If you’re using a Ouija board solo and holding a conversation with some sort of Other, from a skeptical perspective it’s easy to say that the Other is an aspect of your own subconscious mind, that you’ve worked yourself into a disassociative state. It’s weird and tells us some interesting things about the mind, but doesn’t bring up any ontological issues.

But if you’ve ever experimented with using one with a partner (or several people, a Ouija-a-trois) and you’ve been able to have some sort of sensible conservation with some sort of something…what was it?

If, as skeptical atheist types, we discount supernatural disembodied spirits, and if we assume our fellow Ouijaers weren’t engaged in some conspiracy to fool us, what was on the other end of the line? It seems that these conversations were held with a mind whose physical correlate was not a single brain, but a shifting collection of the neurons of two or more brains, linked not only by the usual synapses but by non-conscious verbal and non-verbal communication between the people holding the planchette. A weak sort of group mind — “weak” in the sense of not absorbing the participants. Not a mob, not a Borg.

I don’t mean that this “group mind” is anything supernatural or paranormal or telepathic, just more subtle than we usually encounter.

So, consider: what sort of weak group minds might arise in the subconscious minds of an entire society over a long time? Could the right sort of ritual function as a talking board to let them communicate?

And, What About Numbers?

When we asked our hypothetical typical citizens about the existence of various things, we went from bricks to numbers to people. The discussion of anatman and group minds shows us that the question of the existence of personal “selves” is blurrier than we thought, but surely we can put our faith in the existence of numbers. Mathematics is the purest of the sciences. Right?

Actually there is a long-standing debate here.

In general philosophy, there are two sides (more or less, not counting some fringe positions) on the question of the reality of abstracts. There are the platonists who take the position attributed to Plato, that abstract ideals exist, that in addition to (for example) coins existing, there is also the universal of circularity, which exists independently.49 And there are nominalists like Thomas Hobbes50 and John Locke51 who believe that what exists are particulars, and that general, universal terms are just convenient names.

The debate found its way into mathematics in the 20th century, and so we have platonists who argue that numbers and the other entities of mathematics objects really exist, though they do so outside of space and time; and nominalists who say that numbers are just conventions of thought or language, not real things.52 It’s important to understand that this is a contemporary controversy, not something belonging to medieval times or classical antiquity.

If we can’t agree on whether numbers exist, how can we say anything about the gods?

And, What About the Brick?

Well, numbers are for egghead mathematicians anyway. At least we can say with 100% solid certainty that the brick is real. Right?

Well…

Richard Feynman was one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, a Nobel prize winning physicist often said to be the greatest mind since Einstein. He was a man of broad curiosity, and as a graduate student tried to see how far he could get in various fields. He once dropped by a seminar on Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality, where the students were discussing the idea of an “essential object.” The professor asked Feynman whether an electron was an essential object, but Feynman hadn’t read the book and no more idea what an essential object is than I do.

So Feynman asked the philosophy students, “Is a brick an essential object?” He explained:

What I had intended to do was to find out whether they thought theoretical constructs were essential objects. The electron is a theory that we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real. I wanted to make the idea of a theory clear by analogy. In the case of the brick, my next question was going to be, “What about the inside of the brick?” and I would then point out that no one has ever seen the inside of a brick. Every time you break the brick, you only see the surface. That the brick has an inside is a simple theory which helps us understand things better. The theory of electrons is analogous. So I began by asking, “Is a brick an essential object?”53

Here we have a Nobel Prize winning physicist saying that we can almost, but not quite, call electrons real. And saying the same thing about the inside of a brick. According to Feynman both are theoretical constructs which should be distinguished from reality.

(The philosophy students, as in all good stories about philosophers, proceeded to vigorously disagree and could reach no conclusion on whether a brick was an essential object.)

If we can’t agree that bricks are entirely real, what do you want from the gods?

Questions Need Context

My own answer to this puzzle is contextualism: we can only say that a thing “exists” in a certain context. There is apparently a philosophical name for this (what a disappointment to learn that I’m not the first to think of it!): “ontological anti-realism.”

Philosopher David Chalmers has an explanation of that, but first hang tight for some philosophical jargon that we’ll need to decode it.

Ontology is the branch of philosophy that deals with what exists. An ontologist is one who practices ontology. A metaontologist, then, is one who gets meta- about ontology and tries to figure out what system (if any) of ontology we ought to use.

We discussed the distinction between platonists and nominalists a few paragraphs back when we asked if numbers are real. Platonists say abstract ideals are really real, nominalists say they’re just convenient names.

Mereology is the branch of ontology that deals with the relationships between parts and the wholes that they form. “Mereological sum” means (informally) a whole formed by combining two parts.54 Mereological universalists say that if you take any two things and put them together, you really have a new thing; mereological nihilists say that only the most basic building blocks really exist.55

With that, we can handle Chalmers’s explanation:

For example, the ontologist may ask: Do numbers exist? The Platonist says yes, and the nominalist says no. The metaontologist may ask: is there an objective fact of the matter about whether numbers exist? The ontological realist says yes, and the ontological anti-realist says no.

Likewise, the ontologist may ask: Given two distinct entities, when does a mereological sum of those entities exist? The universalist says always, while the nihilist says never. The metaontologist may ask: is there an objective fact of the matter about whether the mereological sum of two distinct entities exists? The ontological realist says yes, and the ontological anti-realist says no.

…

Ontological anti-realism is often traced to Carnap (1950), who held that there are many different ontological frameworks, holding that different sorts of entities exist, and that while some frameworks may be more useful than others for some purposes, there is no fact of the matter as to which framework is correct.56

So to deal properly with the gods, perhaps we need several different ontological frameworks. Or “reality tunnels,” as Robert Anton Wilson would have called them.57 When we ask “Do the gods exist,” we have to ask, “In what framework? In what context?”

Within a ritual, the gods invoked exist — not as metaphors, but in the same way that Hamlet exists during a staging of the play that bears his name. If your Hamlet is only a metaphor, I don’t think your play will be very good.

But if I’m working out a physics or engineering or programming problem, or trying to understand a biological process, the gods do not exist.

The gods do not exist when I make my personal budget, and praying to them won’t help my checking account, as much as I could use a miracle. But when I try to figure out how to lead my life along lines that bring prosperity to all, maybe I can use a little divine guidance.

If I am doing healing work and the person I’m working on wants me to pray for them — their gods exist. For purposes of that work, I’m a believer, and I will call upon whatever deities work for them: “I am of all faiths in my fashion,” as Neil Gaiman’s Morpheus remarked.58

On the other hand, when I found myself doing CPR on a friend (he’s fine now), while I was deeply aware of the gravitas and even the “energetics” of the moment, of the intimacy of my lungs being the breath of life for another, I was not praying. Reductionist biomedicine was the call of the moment.

But when I went to Japan a few days later while he was still in a coma, I made it a point to visit a temple of the Medicine Buddha and pay my respects. Not because I thought Yakushi is a super-king who could reach out from some other dimension to heal my friend, but because it seemed the aesthetically best thing to do; and because doing so could change my own mind a bit, and telling others about it could change their minds just a bit, and so create a change in our actions: the subtle way that magic works to produce change in the world. And it’s natural (in the sense that our brains are wired for it) for us to put a human-like face on that subtle flow of attention, intention, and energy — a flow that exists as more than metaphor.

Some might call this approach cowardly or wishy-washy, but I like to think of it as abandoning a futile quest for an non-existent singular, ultimate, and final truth.

I believe that we can keep multiple views, and build a sort of “depth perception” that can give us a much richer life. I’m an atheist and I’m also a Pagan, and there’s no more conflict here than between my right eye and my left eye.

38 Raymond, Eric S. “Frequently Asked Questions about Neopaganism.” Version 4.0, 1992. <http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/paganism.txt&, originally posted to USENET groups talk.religion, talk.religion.newage, alt.pagan, news.answers. ↑

39 Raymond, Eric S. “Dancing With The Gods.” 10 Jul 1995. <http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/dancing.html> ↑

40 Raymond, Eric S. “Why We Fight — An Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (2.0).” 26 December 2003. <http://www.catb.org/~esr/aim/>&lt;br/&gt;“#1054: Eric S. Raymond.” Encyclopedia of American loons. 24 May 2014. <http://americanloons.blogspot.com/2014/05/1054-eric-s-raymond.html>&lt;br/&gt;“Eric S. Raymond.” RationalWiki. 9 Feb 2015. <http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Eric_S._Raymond&amp;​oldid=1421750> ↑

41 Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon. Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1999. p 23-25 ↑

42 Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Song of Proserpine While Gathering Flowers on the Plain of Enna.” In Hutchinson, Thomas ed., The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Oxford edition, 1914. <https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/shelley/percy_bysshe/s54cp/volume25.html#section213> ↑

43 Quoted in Hutton, p 25 ↑

44 Green, Mark. “Why Atheopaganism?” <https://atheopaganism.wordpress.​com/​atheopaganism/> ↑

45 Keown, Damien, and Charles S. Prebish. Encyclopedia of Buddhism. New York: Routledge, 2007.<https://books.google.com/books?id=D1pcAgAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PT734> p734-738

Hahn, Thich Nhat, and Peter Levitt. The Heart of Understanding. Berkeley, Calif: Parallax Press, 1988. p 9 ↑

46 Hahn, p 3 ↑

47 Shah, Idries. The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin. London: Octagon, 1983. <https://books.google.com/books?id=czZufrUnl0wC&amp;pg=PA2> p 2 ↑

48 McRobbie, Linda Rodriguez. “The Strange and Mysterious History of the Ouija Board.” Smithsonian.com 27 Oct 2013. <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-strange-and-mysterious-history-of-the-ouija-board-5860627/> ↑

49 Hawton, Hector. Philosophy For Pleasure. New York: Philosophical Library, 1949. p 21-22 ↑

50 Duncan, Stewart. “Thomas Hobbes,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/hobbes/#2.3>. ↑

51 Hawton, p 67-68 ↑

52 Bueno, Otávio, “Nominalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/nominalism-mathematics/>↑

53 Feynman, Richard P. and Ralph Leighton. “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character. New York: W. W. Norton &amp; Company, 2010. <https://books.google.com/books?id=7papZR4oVssC&amp;pg=PA70> p 70 ↑

54 Varzi, Achille, “Mereology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/mereology/>. ↑

55 Sider, Theodore. “Against Parthood.” In Karen Bennett and Dean W. Zimmerman, eds., Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, volume 8, 237–93. Oxford: OUP, 2013. <http://tedsider.org/papers/nihilism.pdf> ↑

56 Chalmers, David J., David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman. Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford New York: Clarendon Press, 2009. <https://books.google.com/books?id=6nqzIi16CY0C&pg=PA77> p 77 ↑

57 Wilson, Robert A. Cosmic trigger : Final Secret of the Illuminati. Tempe, Ariz: New Falcon, 1993. p vii ↑

58 Gaiman, Neil. “Ramadan.” The Sandman: Fables and Reflections. New York: DC Comics, 1993.↑

“What does a Zen Pagan Atheist ritual look like?”

March 13, 2015

I’m making vague plans (most of my plans are vague until the last minute) to invite a few people over for the equinox for a small ritual and a meditation session. When I mentioned this to a friend, she inquired, “What does a Zen Pagan Atheist ritual look like?”

Which is a pretty good question and one I’m still figuring out the answer to. I don’t have a liturgy, but I do have some principles and some preferences.

I devoted a chapter of Why Buddha Touched the Earth to a general theory of magical ritual. Here, a ritual is understood as a set of actions performed with intent to manipulate mental symbols in such a way as to create some desired change in our state of mind. That change in our mental state may be a precursor to a desired change in the physical world, but the work starts within.

In order to create the ritual environment, intent is clearly established and non-ordinary time and space are invoked by some demarcation of boundaries. The ritual itself involves raising power–which may be conceived of as either an external power invited in, or an inner quality invited to come forth–by setting up some excitement or tension through non-ordinary behavior; directing that power so as to effect the intended change; and then resolving back to “normal” reality so that the change can be fixed upon it, not limited to the ritual space.

But, I didn’t say anything in that chapter about what I prefer. It’s like writing about music theory without telling you whether I prefer rock or Bach. (For the record, I like J.S. okay–you can sometimes find me hanging out listening to Classical Revolution Baltimore–but honestly you’re more likely to find me rocking out.)

So here are some notes on a few things I do or don’t like in ritual. These aren’t intended to be “this is right, this is wrong” but an expression of personal taste. If ritual is “poetry in the realm of acts,” as Ross Nichols said, there’s nothing wrong with preferring a sonnet or free verse or a haiku, and maybe these will get you thinking about what you and those you work with prefer or don’t care for in your rituals.

Invite and Ask

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a reflexive contrarian. So when you tell me during your ritual, “Now, you each come up to the altar and do such-and-such,” you step on one of my buttons. Who are you to tell me what to do? Didn’t I get into this Pagan thing to escape religious authority?

It’s a small change, but “Now, my friends, I invite you to come up to the altar and do such and such” creates a very different response. Oh, an invitation? I like to be invited to do things. I got invited to the party! Hooray!

Sometimes it can be even better (to me) to say “Now, I ask you to come up to the altar and do such and such.” Hey, this person is asking for my help to accomplish this ritual. I’m significant in this!

Keep people moving

I was raised Catholic, and while I’m feeling much better now, I’m willing to give the Church some credit where it’s due. Many people have joked over the years about Catholic aerobics — sit, stand, kneel, sit, stand, kneel — but it gets the blood moving and breaks the long Mass up into more digestible pieces. Even Zen folks, renowned for sitting in stillness, mix it up with walking mediation.

And that goes double for outdoor rituals when it’s chilly out! Please, let us move around and warm up a little, even if it’s just walking around the circle from quarter to quarter.

Challenge Accepted

Certainly one of the most transformative rituals I’ve ever been through was my promotion to shodan, black belt. It was transformative because it was hard, culminating in several dozen (I lost count) rounds of sparring against people who had already achieved that level. It was both a test and an initiation. I was sore for a week.

Of course fighting is not part of ritual. (Generally. I did see a great Holly King / Oak King fight staged with flaming weapons one time…) but, challenge should be. That which we easily obtain, we value little.

Mark Green led a very nice little Atheopagan ritual at PantheaCon, which involved invoking the spirit of compassion to assist us with letting go of some past failing, some incident we were dragging around with us. That was a challenge because it meant taking out some past disappointment and looking at it, doing some hard spiritual work. (Honestly, I’d rather strap on my sparring pads and go fight!)

Keep It Simple

When I was in Japan years ago, I made it a point to go to Mount Kurama. I was quite excited to visit a sacred mountain that was both the birthplace of reiki and a place where the great karate master Gogen Yamaguchi had spent much time training and mediating. But when I got to the main temple I was disappointed. It was a dark candlelit space with various gold ornaments and with deep resonant chanting, and it should have felt like a Place of Mystery…but somehow, my impression was that it was trying too hard.

So I continued my hike up the mountain. And I ended up (by following a pretty lady hiking in flip-flops, who then disappeared, one of those occurrences I keep in my “weird stuff” file) turning off into a sacred grove of trees. Pretty much just the trees, with a small shrine, rather plain, off to one side; on the other, log benches for sitting or services or whatever. Hanging on a tree, a handmade (probably by a child) ema, a prayer-card.

The contrast with the gaudiness of the temple was striking. This was the right way to do it. Overblown production values suggest (to me) a lack of substance.

Handmade ema on Mt. Kurama.

And related to that…

Leave Space for Co-creation

Suppose I was leading a healing ritual. And, suppose that as part of the ritual, I asked you to visualize light flowing from the sky, down through your body, and into the person we wish healed. I invite you to visualize this light, this healing light that’s going to do this person so much good, this golden light…

Golden light? Shoot. It looked blue to you.

Sometimes, providing less detail is more effective and can draw people more deeply into a work by encouraging them to fill in the blanks.

From a writing perspective, Ursula Le Guin’s amazing story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a master class in this. In order to make her point about social justice (which, by the way, seems more and more relevant every day), she must portray an almost-perfect utopia. But, she knows that what is perfect to one reader is annoying to another. So, she says, “Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.” Of course this is not all the description she gives, she sketches in the lines to guide the reader’s fancy in creating — perhaps co-creating is a more accurate word — the utopia.

So when she knocks the pins out from under it, the effect is that much stronger than if she had set it up all herself.

Of course in ritual we’re not (generally) trying to set participants up for a fall in that manner, but I think the lesson holds: let the “readers” of your ritual have a little space to be co-creators, and they might end up more connected to it.

The Politically Incorrect Pagan

At PantheaCon 2015, there was a tempest-in-a-teacup controversy about a satirical newsletter (titled “PantyCon”) taking a jab at long-standing Pagan organization Covenant of the Goddess over that group‘s well-intentioned but tone-deaf statement about the killing of Michael Brown and the “Black Lives Matter” movement. The controversy continued in the Pagan blogosphere in the weeks after the convention…

March 27, 2015

From time to time, I find myself sitting in a room (physically or metaphorically) where almost everyone is nodding sagely at the words of a few folks who are leading the conversation, leaders who are smarter and more charismatic than I, when I feel a sort of itch between my shoulder blades. And that itch prompts me to make a more careful scan of the room, makes me take a more careful look at the faces (physical or metaphorical) of the folks around me, and makes me realize that not everyone agrees. But no one wants to be the one to speak up and offend the consensus, to be the only one who disagrees. Conformity is a very powerful social motivator. So things, sometimes important things, go unsaid.

And sometimes, at a time like that, my tutelary deity, the Great and Good Lady Eris Discordia, pelts me with golden apples until I say something, until I point out the emperor’s nakedness, the elephant in the room, the turd floating in the punchbowl.

Sometimes I’m right. Sometimes I’m wrong, but at least the point gets addressed. Either way, sometimes I have to go away for a while afterward lest my presence provoke a fistfight.

So it is with the “PantyCon” brouhaha and its sequelae in the blogosphere and social media. Since no one else seems to want to say it, I will: the fake workshop listing in the joke program was legitimate satire and the authors don’t owe anyone an apology. (An explanation follows for those not familiar with the controversy in question.) If anyone owes an apology, it is those who were calling for the authors to be ejected from the conference.

Because I am boldly rushing in where angels fear to tread and am sure to be piss off some friends (and worse, maybe get props from the sort of people I usually consider opponents), let me try to head a few things off ahead of time:

While I’ve been around the Pagan scene for a while and am somewhat known in some circles of it, I am new to PantheaCon. I admit that it’s more than a little cheeky to walk into a new group and say “you’re doing it wrong.” On the other hand, if that group is claiming to represent a broader community of which I am a part, yes, I will “go there.” Whether I have the dignitas to make that meaningful…well, that’s up to you.

Racism and ethnic discrimination remains a real problem in this country. This is true regarding racism against Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic/Latino Americans; but without denying any of those problems, in the current context we’re mostly talking about racism against African Americans. We remain a disappointingly segregated society.

And, it’s easy to miss that segregation if you’re on the white side of the gap. It took me a few years after I moved in to my current neighborhood until I realized how lily-white it is — and even that was only after a visitor from South Africa of all places pointed it out to me! (My neighborhood is so white that I think my housemate is the first black guy to live in my subdivision in at least twenty years.)

There is shit that African Americans have to deal with that I will never experience. One element of that — a long-standing problem which has just recently come to the attention of many white folks and even some upper- and upper-middle-class black folks — is the greatly increased risk of police brutality that African American men face. Thus the #BlackLivesMatter campaign.

But of course there are a thousand less dramatic forms that racism and racial bias takes. It’s not just about black men being beaten by cops, it’s about a well-loved local black musician asking me to hail a cab for him because it won’t stop for him. It’s about resumes with distinctive African-American names being less likely to get an invitation for an interview than those with a “white” name. It’s about bizarre cover photos on college catalogs that show a black guy struggling to keep up as well-dressed white guys cruise to victory, and living in the same country with fools who think that it’s socially acceptable to display the symbol of an anti-American pro-slavery terrorist group on their car.

All that said, these points do not imply that anyone who is speaking out against racism has their facts straight. They do not even imply that someone who thinks they are speaking out against racism is actually doing so.

For those who are not familiar with the Great PantyCon Kerfluffle of 2015, let me attempt to summarize. Set the Wayback Machine for early December 2014, when many of us were reeling from the news that after a ridiculously flawed grand jury proceeding, known dishonest cop Darren Wilson would not face charges for his shooting of Michael Brown, despite the existence of immediate eyewitness testimony that Brown was surrendering — more than sufficient to meet the “probable cause” standard for an indictment.

Many Pagan groups issued statements decrying the situation. One, the Covenant of the Goddess (CoG), a Pagan group of long standing, issued a statement that was widely regarded as ham-fisted and tone-deaf. In my estimation it was well-intentioned but failed for two reasons: it was blandly unspecific, which is just poor writing; and it used the phase “all lives matter,” a problematic phrase that, at best, shows a failure to understand how viral hashtags like “#BlackLivesMatter” work and influence broader discussion in the modern media environment and, at worst, is rooted in a dismissal of the fact that racism is part of the problem with police violence. CoG did apologize, withdrew the statement, and issued a draft of another version…which has also inspired some controversy and discussion of the place of CoG in the Pagan community.

Skip forward now to PantheaCon. The convention has for many years had a parody zine called “PantyCon,” with no official sanction from the organizers. This year it included a fake workshop announcement that was an obvious skewering of CoG’s missteps:

Ignoring Racism: A Workshop for White Pagans
Large Umbrella Pagan Group

Isn’t all this talk of social justice and racism just tiring? Don’t you wish you could just ignore it and put out meaningless statements of pure pablum? We’ll discuss how to ignore requests for consideration by pagans of color, cover up racist actions of high-ranking members, and pretend that you don’t understand the resulting outrage. Remember, #AllLivesMatter, except when it’s uncomfortable or inconvenient.

Large Umbrella Pagan Group has been around for long enough that they think they can get away with this stuff.

Nothing too remarkable so far. An organization bound up in its process and internal politics does something kind of dumb and gets targeted with a harsh zinger over it.

What is remarkable is that some folks at PantheaCon decided that this satire constituted harassment — not of Covenant of the Goddess, but of “Pagans of Color.” It was reported that that the staff was actively investigating to find out who wrote it, and if the con staff discovered who wrote the parody the author would be ejected from the conference.

To her great credit, Glenn Turner has made a much more calm statement on the PantheaCon website: “For those who want me and PantheaCon to ban or target offending people or groups – we will do so only if we determine that it is an entrenched problem with a person or group.” So I’m not sure if there was some mistaken reporting there, or if there were staff talking about immediate ejection with no attempt at conflict resolution, but they were overruled.

The claim of harassment — which has been uncritically passed along in discussions on blogs and social media — is based on the idea that the parody “triggered” some attendees. The whole concept of “triggers” is a disturbing trend towards controlling the speech and expression of others, an unquestionable trump card in any discussion whereby any disagreement can be conflated into harassment or a threat.

I am sorry when someone suffers a trauma, a large one or a small one. But we do not have a general duty to refrain from expression or actions solely on the basis that they might remind someone of their past trauma. Such a proposition immediately leads to absurdity where no one can say anything.

This is not to deny that people feel upset. I’ve never found it useful to tell someone who reports feeling a certain way, “No you don’t!” But when we are setting policies, when we are acting as calm, compassionate, but disinterested citizens working for the general good, we must use our critical thinking skills and ask whether a person’s feelings are based on accurate perceptions. And we must balance temporary emotional upset against the long-term values of free expression and free debate to create norms and processes of conflict resolution, not of censorship and expulsion.

None of this is meant to excuse actual harassment or threats. I stand foursquare against anyone who tries to violate the fundamental rights of others, and to the best of my ability I will use my presence, my words, and if necessary my fists, to stop them. But that’s far away from anything that happened here. (There have been rumors of threats and harassment unrelated to the parody, though I can find no direct reports of such.)

We can’t have the much needed conversation on race if every time the subject comes up, someone is going to shut down other speakers by saying “this is ‘triggering’ me!”

Some of those complaining about the parody have demonstrated a problematic ignorance about satire. They complain that it’s not funny, or that some people think it’s describing a real situation. But being legitimate satire doesn’t imply that something is going to make you laugh. A satirist wields the pen like a scalpel, and the surgery is not painless.

To take a famous example, there is nothing funny about the proposal that the children of the Irish poor should be slaughtered for food. Swift aimed to vex his readers, and it is widely said that many at the time (and some readers today!) failed to recognize the satire. (Though I can’t find any reliable source for this.) But such foolishness is not Swift’s fault; if anything he deserves praise for bringing an important truth to light, as those skewered on the rapier of his wit continue to push forward and impale themselves further.

But what best illustrates the absurdity of the response to this satire is a fact buried in an explanation-cum-apology posted anonymously by the PantyCon authors:

The PantyCon is, and always has been, an explicitly anti-racist, trans-supportive, anti-kyriarchical, feminist publication. The only direction we punch is up.

It was a POC [Pagan of Color] member who first raised the idea of writing up a piece taking on the actions of COG and other groups in the wake of the numerous incidents of police violence against Black men and the #BlackLivesMatter movement. As is pretty standard for the PantyCon, the actual text was written by whoever had time and then tweaked by everyone involved before printing. [Emphasis added.]

This is the unacknowledged truth that’s making me itch. Those who wished to silence the PantyCon authors, to have them ejected from the conference, would be silencing the voice of a “Pagan Of Color.” Every self-described “ally” talking about how offensive this satire was and urging us to listen to the voices of Pagans who aren’t white, has fallen into a twisty little loop of self-contradiction.

By assuming that a white writer was responsible for this piece, by not thinking that a black Pagan might respond to this situation with biting satire, they have fallen into a real racism much more dangerous than what they have falsely seen in this parody.

It feels good to get labeled an “ally” by a member of a group that’s been the victim of oppression or discrimination. Self-righteousness is quite a high. (Ask me about animal rights and veganism sometime so I can get a hit.)

But like any high, it can distort one’s perception of reality. Beware.

You — Yes, *You* — Can Dance (If You Want To)

April 10, 2015

Several years ago my karate teacher took up competitive ballroom dance. I’d never seen her compete — or indeed, any competitive ballroom dancing — until a few weeks ago, when I got a call from her asking me to come to the Baltimore Dancesport Challenge and see if I could put my shiatsu skills to work to help her dance instructor, who had pulled a muscle. Because dancers are show biz folks, and show biz folks live by the motto “The show must go on,” he was still dancing on that injured leg when I arrived. So I had the opportunity to sit and watch for a while.

The dancers spanned about a half-century in age, and I was struck watching one boy who couldn’t have been more than six, first dancing (with great focus and discipline for a kid his age!) with a girl a few years older and a foot and an half taller, and then standing on the side freely bopping around to the beat.

Ballroom isn’t my thing, but that kid’s frolicking reminded me that the same joy in movement underlies both the oh-so-civilized fancy dress organized performance sport of ballroom dancing and the unbridled primal frenzy that finds expression when we dance around the fire.

We are a dancing people. When I was writing Why Buddha Touched the Earth and wanted an opening scene that would immediately give non-Pagan readers some insight, I wrote about the opening ritual at Starwood and the spiral dance that’s part of it, how a friend looked back at me as we danced and exclaimed, “I love being religious!”

Years later, when that friend was on crutches after an injury, we still danced at FSG, taking one slow lap around the fire while she leaned on me. (It’s sort of a tradition for us that FSG doesn’t officially happen until we dance together.)

If you can hobble, you can dance.

(Heck, you don’t have to be able to hobble. I’ve danced around the fire with people in wheelchairs.)

This is important to me because dance is one of the ways I connected to my body, found my physicality. When I was a kid I was so uncoordinated that during gym class I was sent off to special sessions where a teaching assistant would play catch with me in an attempt to improve my hand-eye coordination. It took me forever to learn to ride a bike. I was the last to be chosen whenever teams were picked, and when I played rec league sports I spent as much time on the sidelines as the coach could get away with before he put me in at the least vital position.

Whether it was because I spent too much time reading and not enough in physical play, or whether my klutziness drove me to spend more time inside my head, I was disconnected from my body.

“Now wait a minute,” those who know me may be objecting. “Tom, you’re a fifth-degree black belt in karate. Your coordination is well above average. We see you dancing around the fire, and your Facebook wall is full of photos of you out on the dance floor. You’re known for usually being one of the most footloose dancers on the floor when the music starts.”

And that’s true, but it’s all learned and trained. There’s no natural grace behind it. And I got to learn that only because I found patient teachers in the karate dojo, and friends who didn’t tease me on the dance floor. Call it part of my personal rewilding, if you like.

That’s why the whole #finddancingman story hit me sort of hard.

If you’ve missed this story when it blew up last month, the short version is that back in February one of the boards on the notorious website 4chan (“/pol/ – Politically Incorrect”) had something vile called “The Official Friday Fat Shaming Thread!!!” You can guess what a fine sample of thoughtful consideration of the obesity epidemic that was. But one particular post somehow was too much even for the bottom-dwellers of a fat-shaming thread on 4chan. Two photos of an overweight man, the first of him dancing, the second of him looking down at the floor with a dejected look, and the caption: “Spotted this specimen trying to dance the other week. He stopped when he saw us laughing.”

Quite a few of the 4chan posters pushed back on this, and the photos and the story of the shaming went viral. It ended up with tens of thousands of dollars being collected with the idea to throw a party for Sean, the man who was bullied, and to the start of a new anti-bullying campaign, the Dance Free Movement

Now, satirist and “internet personality” Maddox, a.k.a. George Ouzounian, has some contrary thoughts about the whole phenomenon that are worth considering. Maybe Sean didn’t really want to be the center of a global social media phenomenon and feel-good narrative but is trapped in it now. So let’s not necessarily take this as a model of how to behave when similar cases come up.

But let us do stand up on an individual level when we see bullying. And let us always invite each other to dance.

Would you help me pay the cover at the club some night? You can contribute and support my writing at infamous.net/support. Thank you.

I Don’t Know

April 24, 2015

I happened to hear a story on today’s today’s Interfaith Voices (a radio program I recommend highly, part of my usual Sunday afternoon NPR binge) about a couple who fell in with a cultish Buddhist teacher; and how one of them, Ian Thorson, ended up dying on a sort of meditation hermitage retreat in the Arizona desert.

It was a sad tale, but all I could think of as I listened was how much certainty in their teacher — indeed, not just in their teacher but in their understanding of what he had to say– it took to follow these bad ideas all the way into death.

You should never be that certain of a religious or philosophical teaching. (Or a political one, for that matter.)

Zen has something important to say on this topic. Its origin myth has Emperor Wu of Liang interrogate Zen’s “First Patriarch,” Bodhidharma, about Buddhism. (It’s quite possible that Bodhidharma never actually existed, but we shouldn’t let that stop us from learning from this myth.)

Emperor Wu was an enthusiastic convert to Buddhism: he wrote about the topic, gave lectures on its scriptures, and is credited with collecting the first canon of Chinese Buddhist writing.59 He wanted to hear that this had racked up a whole bunch of “merit;” that he was guaranteed a favorable rebirth or something.

But this was not the sort of Buddhism that Bodhidharma was preaching. So Bodhidharma told the emperor that all this effort had earned him no merit. (It’s a brave thing to tell a guy who can have you beheaded on a whim that he is Doing It Wrong.)

When the Emperor dismissed him by asking “Who are you?” — i.e., “I’m the Emperor, jerkwad, who the hell are you to tell me what’s what?” — Bodhidharma gave an answer that has echoed through the centuries: “I don’t know.”60

Some teachers have called this “don’t know” the very heart of Zen. The 20th century Korean Zen master Seung Sahn often expressed the importance of “don’t know” mind, e.g. “Don’t know is before thinking. Before thinking is your substance and the universal substance; its name is primary point. So, don’t know is the absolute, the correct way, and true life.”61 In budo Zen we refer to it as shoshin, “beginner’s mind.” The Karate master Tadashi Nakamura quotes Zen master Shunryu Suzuki’s famous admonition that “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s there are few,”62 and adds “When we gain a little knowledge about someone or something, then the mind puts up barriers; it forms opinions, preconceptions, and judgments, which inhibit true knowledge.”63

There are many layers to this “don’t know,” but one of the most important is its warning against certainty. (After reading the @pentametron Twitter feed for a while, I ended up phrasing this as a couplet in iambic pentameter:

The road to hell, it seems to me,
Is often paved with certainty.)

Certainty is what leads to the burning of heretics and the harsh punishments of well-intentioned prohibition laws: we are so sure that your soul will be damned to eternal torment if you pray the wrong way that we will torture you into repenting. We are so sure that drinking a beer or smoking a joint or having sex with the wrong people or in the wrong way will ruin your life that we will break down your door and haul you off at gunpoint to stop you.

It’s what leads cultists to self-mutilation and suicide, and soldiers and terrorists to commit massacres.

I think we could all do with a little more “don’t know” and a little less certainty. Maybe, just maybe, the teaching you’re following is wrong. Maybe the teaching is right but you’ve misunderstood it.

Even if you think you’ve heard the direct word of God(dess)(s/es), please consider that you may have heard him/her/them wrong.

Of course we can’t be paralyzed by indecision, we have to go forward with our best understanding of the information available to us. But, we should always leave room for the possibility that new empirical data will overthrow our theories. We must beware of irreversible commitment — such as death — to an idea.

59 Creel, H.G. Chinese Thought From Confucius to Mao Tse-tung. New York: Mentor (New American Library), 1953. p 159 ↑

60 Watts, Alan. The Way of Zen. New York: Mentor (New American Library), 1961. p 91-92↑

61 Sahn, Seung. Teaching Letters of Zen Master Seung Sahn. Kwan Um School of Zen, 2008. <http://www.kwanumzen.org/online-resources/teaching-resources/teaching-letters-of-zen-master-seung-sahn/>, <http://www.kwanumzen.org/wp-content/uploads/0401_0500.pdf> p 741↑

62 Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. New York: Weatherhill, 1988. p 21 ↑

63 Nakamura, Tadashi. Karate: Technique and Spirit. Tokyo: Shufunotomo, 1986. p 22 ↑

Ares and Athena in the Baltimore Uprising

May 8, 2015

Sometimes I hate being right. Months ago, I wrote

“The anger over Ferguson and these other incidents of police brutality, and over the unjust social structure that precipitates them, will not go away. Almost certainly it will be fed by fresh incidents. There will be fear and terror and horror.”

But, I didn’t think that it would hit quite so close to home so soon. I suppose that piece on wrathful deities was my Zen take on the topic of state violence; this week, my Pagan take and some Baltimorean reflections.

As a middle class white guy who has survived into his forties and whose criminal activity is pretty minor, I don’t have a lot of interaction with the police. There have been a handful of traffic tickets over the years and a few times I’ve filled out police reports on stolen property (fruitlessly). There was the time my housemate was being stalked, and I talked to the Baltimore County police as a witness and testified in court; there was also the time I was illegally stopped by the Baltimore City police while I was walking to a park that they claimed did not exist, part of the city’s harassment of the PowWow and the DIY arts scene — which is pretty small beer compared to their other crimes.

For those not familiar with the area, I should explain that Baltimore is the largest “independent city” in the U.S. Baltimore City and Baltimore County are entirely separate political entities, with their own governments and police forces. I grew up and currently live in Baltimore County but am somewhat active in the city’s cultural life. I’m a white kid from the suburbs and I don’t claim to speak for the people of Sandtown or any other Baltimore neighborhood; but I do understand that what happens within the city limits affects me both directly and indirectly, so I’ve been watching the problems with the Baltimore City police for years.

(Not that the County cops don’t have problems too, like breaking into a house and killing a resident in a blitzkrieg “no knock” raid in search of a suspect who wasn’t even there and who was later acquitted of the original charges against him.64 One of the invading cops was killed, and of course the mainstream media coverage has portrayed him as a hero, never mind that he was engaged in unjustified police violence and was shot by a man defending his home. Need I point out that this happened in a heavily African-American neighborhood, and that it’s very unlikely to have gone down that way on my very very white street just two miles away? One does have to wonder if the attitudes and practices of the city police filter out to their colleagues in the suburbs, or if its just the same general rot at the heart of American policing affecting both groups.)

The first time I met a Baltimore City police officer socially, I was introduced by his daughter’s boyfriend. I guess that identified me as friendly, because within few minutes that member of Baltimore’s finest was telling me about his recent arrest of a petty criminal — a purse snatcher, if I remember correctly. “And when I caught the guy,” he said, “of course I gave him one” — he pantomimed punching — “for trying to get away.” (At least that’s the best I can remember his statement twenty-some years later.) It wasn’t a reluctant admission, not something that had happened in the excitement of a physical struggle, it was a proud claim.

Honestly, if a purse snatcher had happened to get punched an extra time or three by a victim I’d hardly be troubled about it. After all, I teach people how to punch and kick and stomp people who might try to rob them. I’ve even taught basic self-defense classes at the Free Spirit Gathering and Starwood. While I teach the principle of only using the necessary and proportionate force for self-defense, if a student happened to go a tiny bit over that line I wouldn’t be inclined to judge it a sin. I might even wag my finger about it while smiling on the inside. Or, even if a police officer got a little overheated in a physical struggle and threw an extra punch or two and then acknowledged the error, I’d file it under de minimis and let it go.

But, this was a cop bragging about some deliberate “street justice” that he’d dealt out to a bad guy. Someone who was supposed to be a trained and dispassionate professional with a duty to respect the rights of a criminal suspect, but who instead administered extrajudicial physical punishment to a suspect for trying to run.

I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit these past weeks, as Baltimore deals with the killing of Freddie Gray by police after an encounter which seems to have been provoked by nothing more than Gray trying to run away from a group of cops. A group, by the way, that included one officer with a disturbing history of violence including threats of murder.65

If you find it incredible that the Baltimore City Police Department would continue to employ a man who had made drunken threats of murder, you don’t know the BCPD. This is the force that kept Gahji Tshamba on the roster after he shot a man while drunk in 2005; he stayed a Baltimore cop until he murdered an unarmed veteran in 2010.66 BCPD cops are arrested for personal or professional charges at a rate that one researcher estimated to be eight times the national average.67

After Gray’s death, minor violence broke out on April 25th when a protest march headed towards the baseball stadium at Camden Yards. One factor in the violence seems to have been how protesters were harassed by drunken sports fans.68 (The rest of the city was quiet that night. I was in Station North that evening, and everyone at Joe Squared had a frustrated laugh over the exaggerated news coverage.)

The shit didn’t really hit the fan until two days later, when paranoid police overreacted to rumors of planned youth violence, shut down a public transit hub immediately after schools let out, then began to be aggressive with students. Unsurprisingly, students returned the aggression, and things spiraled out of control for the rest of the night.69

In Baltimore, police killed Freddie Gray, and police provoked the rioting. Across the nation, we’ve seen the story of police aggression play out again and again.

Do ancient Pagan spiritual traditions have anything to say about this?

Many people don’t realize that the whole concept of a police force as we know it, as a large standing force of full-time enforcers for the state, is a recent invention. London’s Metropolitan Police Service, generally regarded as the first modern force, wasn’t established until 1829, under a plan drawn up by Sir Robert Peel.

These first modern police tried to walk a fine line between the necessary structure and discipline, and a desire to avoid being seen as an army enforcing the dictates of the government.70 The “Peelers” were issued a set of general instructions that included an admonishment that they were “To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”71

The first modern police force in the United States was established in New York City in 1845. These early American forces had some aspects that seem amazing today–they tried to adopt an even more democratic model than the Peelers, with police nominated by ward leaders of the neighborhood where they lived and worked, and acting more as public service agencies than law enforcers. This went to the point of the police including among their duties sheltering the homeless and feeding the hungry.

But, the “democracy” of the time was corrupted by political machines, and policing jobs became patronage positions. In the first half of the 20th century American policing moved in a more “professional” direction which isolated cops from ordinary citizens,72 broke the Peelian principle the police and the public are one, and set the stage to the militarization of policing of the past few decades.

And so policing as we know it is too new for any traditional pantheons or mythologies to address directly. But there are more general lessons about violence, aggression, and defense that can be applied.

One such lesson is found in the contrast between the two ancient Greek deities of war: Athena and Ares.

Athena, goddess of wisdom, was not only full-grown but fully armed and armored when she sprang from the head of Zeus. Called “valiant in war” by Homer, she was the tutelary deity of Athens and second only to her father in the devotions of that city-state. Classicist Jane Harrison notes that “The rising democracy took the ancient figure of the local Korê and set her as rival and counterpoise to Poseidon, the old god of the aristocracy;”73 her origins seem to be tied to those of democracy itself. She was not only a warrior but a jurist, known for her sense of justice; also the inventor of weaving. She taught humanity how to make not just such useful mechanisms as sails, the plow, the axe, and the wheel, but also the flute and the trumpet.74 Truly she was and is a goddess of many sorts of craft and creativity, and when she fights, it is to protect that which has been created.

Compare her with Ares, the aggressive bringer of death not only in war but in famine and pestilence, the thoughtless destroyer of whom Harrison says “He is splendid and forceful, but never really respected….Ares is a god, but he is unhonoured by the orthodox gods, the Olympians.”75 In sharp contrast to Athena — and all too reminiscent of American police today — Ares was known for his lack of good judgment and his disregard of justice. At various times he finds himself humiliated by Hephaestus and by Otus and Ephialtes, the sons of Poseidon.

Every time Ares and Athena opposed each other – including during the Trojan War, one of the defining events of Ancient Greek civilization – it was Ares who lost.76 The lesson of the myths is clear: aggression leads to failure. It falls to wisdom.

It’s not entirely accurate to see the Greek and Roman gods as equivalent, as we sometimes do in discussing classical mythology. As Padraic Colum wrote,

It is important to separate the Greek and Latin mythologies: Iuppiter, though akin to, is not the same as Zeus; Iuno is not the same as Hera. Minerva is not the same as Athena, Neptune is not the same as Poseidon. “The Romans worshipped not gods, not dei,” writes Miss Jane Harrison, “but powers, numina”:

These numina were only dim images of activities. They had no attributes, no life histories; in a word, no mythology.77

But with that warning in mind, it’s noteworthy that where the Greeks had an almost disdainful attitude toward Ares, the Romans had Mars as the central figure of their worship78, claiming him as the father of their founders Romulus and Remus.79

And, given the American Founding Fathers fondness for Rome, their preference for a Republic that ended in Empire over the original Democracy, perhaps we see here one of the faults at the very heart of our nation.

Aggression and brutality in the fashion of Ares have marked our foreign policy since the late 19th century. And that came home starting with the Nixon administration and coming into full flower with the Reagan era — the birth-time of so many of our contemporary national ills. It was Reagan’s Attorney General, William French Smith, who said that “The Justice Department is not a domestic agency. It is the internal arm of the national defense.”80 We have here the American government bringing the brutality of war fully and consciously and deliberately into our law enforcement.

Our society is too much Aresian and too little Athenian. We are too ready to give in to the easy mindless rage that ends in defeat and humiliation for the aggressor and destruction for their victims, rather than the difficult, judicious, creative — but still valiant and strong — way of wisdom. The problem is not merely political: it reaches to the deep spiritual level of how we see our relation with ourselves and the world.

But in the history of policing, in those Peelian principles and in the early American police who took care of citizens in need, we can see another way, one that follows the democratic maiden Athena.

64 Anderson, Jessica. “Family member criticizes raid that killed Balto. Co. officer, relative.” The Baltimore Sun. 29 Jan 2014. <http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2014-01-29/news/bs-md-co-rasheed-stanford-20140129_1_rasheed-stanford-officer-jason-schneider-tevon-smith>
“Rasheed Standford found not guilty in officer’s death.” WBALTV. 23 May 2014. <http://www.wbaltv.com/news/rasheed-standford-found-not-guilty-in-officers-death/26120334> ↑

65 Laughland, Oliver and Jon Swaine. “Baltimore police officer who chased Freddie Gray had pattern of violence – court filings.” The Guardian. 23 Apr 2015. <http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/23/baltimore-officer-who-chased-freddie-gray-had-pattern-of-violence-court-filings> ↑

66 “Off-Duty Officer Fatally Shoots Unarmed Marine.” WBALTV. 7 Jun 2010. <http://www.wbaltv.com/Off-Duty-Officer-Fatally-Shoots-Unarmed-Marine/8927622> ↑

67 Bialik, Carl. “Baltimore’s Police Officers Have Been Arrested At High Rates.” FiveThirtyEight. <http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/baltimores-police-officers-have-been-arrested-at-high-rates/> ↑

68 Soderberg, Brandon. “How drunk sports fans helped spark Saturday night’s post-protest violence.” City Paper [Baltimore]. 28 Apr 2015. <http://www.citypaper.com/bcpnews-how-drunk-sports-fans-helped-spark-saturday-nights-violence-20150428,0,75331.story> ↑

69 Brodey, Sam and Jenna McLaughlin. “Eyewitnesses: The Baltimore Riots Didn’t Start the Way You Think.” Mother Jones. 28 Apr 2015. <http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/how-baltimore-riots-began-mondawmin-purge> ↑

70 Balko, Radley. Rise of the Warrior Cop : the militarization of America’s police forces. New York: PublicAffairs, 2013. p 29 ↑

71 Home Office [UK]. “Policing by consent.” GOV.UK. 10 Dec 2012. <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/policing-by-consent> ↑

72 Balko, p 30-32 ↑

73 Harrison, Jane. Myths of Greece and Rome. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1928. <http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/mgr/index.htm> p 16 ↑

74 Gibson, Michael, and Giovanni Caselli. Gods, Men & Monsters from the Greek Myths. New York: P. Bedrick, 1991. p 56 ↑

75 Harrison, p 40 ↑

76 Gibson, p 41-42 ↑

77 Colum, Padraic. Orpheus: Myths of the World. New York: Macmillan, 1930. <http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/omw/index.htm> p xv ↑

78 Colum, p xv ↑

79 Colum, p 107-108 ↑

80 Balko, p 139 ↑

Was the Buddha a Humanistic Pagan?

May 24, 2015

“So Siddhartha sat down under a tree”

Let’s start with a quick overview of the Buddha’s story. About 2,400 or 2,500 years ago a young prince in what is now Nepal, Siddhartha Gautama of the Shakya clan, became more interested in spiritual matters than in politics and government. (Or perhaps his father was an elected chieftain in a sort of republic rather than a king – the history is at best shaky.)

The legendary version involves a prophecy made at his birth, an incredibly sheltered childhood, and his sudden discovery as a young man of the existence of old age, sickness, and death. Almost overcome by the shock, Siddhartha discovered the existence of spiritual traditions. Thinking these must hold an answer as to how to deal with the suffering he had just learned about, he left home – abandoning his wife and son – to go study various meditation systems.

He sought out the best teachers and quickly mastered their techniques for altering consciousness, but wasn’t satisfied. Looking for another option, he gave extreme asceticism a try. He completely overcame all his fleshly desires – and becoming immune to the desire to eat, came within a hair’s breadth of dying from starvation. That wasn’t the answer either.

So Siddhartha sat down under a tree (later known as the Bo Tree or the Bodhi Tree) to figure things out.

He eventually had a mystical enlightenment experience and a conceptual breakthrough which he expressed as the Four Noble Truths:

Life is marked by “dukkha” – suffering, stress, out-of-jointness, dissatisfaction.

The origin of this suffering is our desire that things be other than they are, our clinging to some of the temporary phenomena we encounter and our fear and aversion to others.

A solution to this is possible.

The way to this solution is a program of intellectual understanding, ethical living, and mental training – the Eightfold Path.

He started giving lectures on these ideas, and attracted a large group of followers who started calling him the “Awakened One” – the Buddha. He spent the rest of his life teaching these concepts and developing a religious community (which eventually included his abandoned wife and son) to propagate it.

The Buddha’s “Apatheism”

Now the story as I’ve given it here makes the Buddha sound like a philosophical naturalist, and that’s probably not the case. The stories of his birth and enlightenment feature various deities and demons and there are also tales about his supposed “past lives” that would, if taken literally, require some sort of supernatural soul. Mahayana Buddhism in particular was happy to absorb deities and spirits and tales of the supernatural as it spread to other cultures, and its sutras are as full of miracle stories as the scriptures of any world religion.

The earliest written records of Buddhism weren’t created until centuries after his death so it’s hard to know how much of this supernaturalism originated with the Buddha himself and how much was retconned in later. But it’s likely that the Buddha believed in at least some sort of supernatural phenomena.

But it also seems from the scriptures that when the Buddha was directly asked about such matters he would reply that they were irrelevant to the point he was trying to make. We might call him “apatheist” – he was apathetic regarding the existence of deities and other supernatural phenomena.

More importantly it’s clear the Buddha never claimed to be carrying out any sort of divine will. The core of his teaching is entirely about the human experience of suffering. And his suggested solution is not to give yourself over to a god or to pray for salvation – indeed, some of the myths have it the other way around, with gods learning from the Buddha. The Buddha’s recommendation is for each of us to change our lives and our way of thinking and experiencing through our own efforts.

If we define “religious humanism” as taking a human-centered rather than a deity-centered perspective on the big questions, the Buddha’s teachings definitely qualify.

The Buddha and the Earth Goddess

There are also some striking elements of nature spirituality in the mythology of the Buddha.

The legend of his enlightenment as told in the Lalitavistara Sutra has him tempted by the demon Mara, who claims that Siddhartha has no right to seek enlightenment. Mara claims that the accolades of his army of demons show that it is he, not Siddhartha, who has the right to the prize, and challenges Siddhartha to produce a witness on his behalf. Siddhartha reaches down and touches the ground, and the Goddess of the Earth responds.

…He then spoke this verse:

“This earth supports all beings;

She is impartial and unbiased toward all, whether moving or still.

She is my witness that I speak no lies;

So may she bear my witness.”

As soon as the Bodhisattva touched this great earth, it shook in six different ways. It quivered, trembled, and quaked, and it boomed, thundered, and roared. Just as a Magadhan brass cauldron, when struck with a wooden log, chimes and reverberates, so did this great earth sound and reverberate when struck by the Bodhisattva with his hand.

Then the earth goddess in this great trichiliocosm who is called Sthāvarā, along with her retinue of one billion earth goddesses, began to shake the entire great earth. Not far from where the Bodhisattva was sitting, she broke through the earth’s surface and revealed her upper body, adorned with all sorts of jewels. She bowed toward the Bodhisattva, joined her palms, and spoke to him:

“You are right. Great Being, you are right. It is just as you say. We bear witness to this. But still, my Lord, you alone are the supreme witness in the worlds of gods and humans and the supreme authority.”81

This strikes me as highly significant. According to the mythology of Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddha’s spiritual authority comes not from a sky deity like Jehovah/Allah, Zeus/Jupiter, Amaterasu Okami, Indra, Thor, Horus, or Indra, but from a earth deity, an embodiment of the living and supportive world.

Buddhism as a “Forest Religion”

Of course this is a legend created well after the Buddha’s death and so doesn’t tell us much about his own attitude. But if we take the legend of the Bo Tree as being at least partially true, the fact that he went there rather than to a mountaintop or a cave or a desert is important.

Consider what his state of mind might have been like at this time. He had tried the spiritual paths available in his culture and found them all wanting. He had pushed himself almost to death and not found what he was looking for. This would create a intense spiritual crisis. Where could he turn for support?

He went to the trees. The Buddha achieved his enlightenment while sitting alone under a tree. Buddhism is at root (so to speak) a forest religion, and the legend of the Buddha touching the Earth may be a mythological expression of this.

Of course neither humanism nor Neopaganism were established ideas in the Buddha’s time. But there are enough resonances that Humanistic Pagans might legitimately claim him as a forebear, bringing a human-centered and nature-appreciative perspective to the spiritual quest millennia before science and the unpleasant side-effects of industrialization started pushing Western thinkers in that direction.

81 Dharmachakra Translation Committee. The Play in Full: Lalitavistara, version 2.22. <http://read.84000.co/browser/released/UT22084/046/UT22084-046-001.pdf> p 243 ↑

The Fire Circle – All Kinds Magic Worked Here

May 22, 2015

“As old as human memory and deep within the myth collective / Gathering around a Fire is like a Pagan prime directive.” — Doktor Billy Bardo (a.k.a. William J. Thorpe)

We’re moving into summer Festival season, which means the return of one of my favorite things in the Universe — Fire Circles, those late-night bonfire drum and dance circles that are the heart of large Pagan gatherings. (For those of us not living in drought conditions or other fire hazards, that is.)

Or perhaps I should say that when done well, Fire Circles are one of my favorite things, weaving together a brilliant variety of energy into a unique bit of structured improvisational magic. But a bad night at the fire, with a bunch of novice drummers all trying to be louder and faster than each other and people standing around the fire blocking dancers and folks generally behaving in a low-consciousness manner, is a tragedy of wasted potential, a great deal of sound and fury signifying nothing but frustration.

So what does it take to have a Fire Circle that doesn’t suck?

There are a lot of ways to do it. I’ve heard from Very Very Serious people who believe that there should be no talking or laughing going on while there is drumming. (I am not making that up.) I’ve heard Billy Bardo deliver his famous Fire Circle Rap and I’ve watched and learned from the Free Spirit Gathering’s Firegoddess for several years. I’ve talked and worked with people who prefer the highly structured yet still fluid “Alchemical Fire Circle” model developed by Jeff “Magnus” McBride and Abigail “Spinner” McBride, and I’ve danced with people who didn’t give a damn about magic but just wanted to get drunk and dance and party — not knowing that this, too, is a form of magic.

I’ve danced to the drums around the Starwood Bonfire — rumored to be large enough to be seen from orbit — and around candles in nightclubs and interfaith churches and warehouse studios.

In those discussions and debates — and sometimes heated arguments! — I’m come to the conclusion that the Fire Circle at a large Pagan gathering should welcome and invite as many types of magic as possible. Not necessarily all at once (that could be a bit of a muddle) but allowing them to arise and dissipate in their own natural flow.

I call this principle “All Kinds Magic Worked Here.” That came from a little mini-vision, a quick flash, I had while in the middle of an extended on-line discussion of the Fire Circle. I saw a ritual gate with a sign across the top with those words on it– probably inspired, somewhere in my brain, by a sign that used to appear on the Saturday Night Live music stage: “All Kinds Music Played Here.”

That sort of magic where drummers and dancers trance all night? We do that. The sort where you sit off to the side with a friend you haven’t seen in too long and share a bottle of mead? We do that. The sort where you smile at a lovely member of the appropriate sex and manage to catch their eye as you both dance around and a little while later are headed up the hill together? We do that. The sort where you’re all confused and hurt over something and someone says, “come walk around the fire with me” and just as you do, someone “coincidentally” starts a chant, like it was just for you? We do that. The sort where there’s a lacuna in the drumming, a hiatus, dead air, and someone steps out into the firelight and tells a beautiful story? We do that.

All Kinds Magic Worked Here

So how do you set the stage for that magic? That’s where something I call “The Fire Circle Triangle” comes in.

Physically, fire requires a triangle of elements — oxygen, fuel, and heat — to burn. Take away any one of these, and you don’t have a fire.

Fire Circles also rely on three elements: fire tenders, drummers, and dancers.

Fire tenders (and water carriers and other caretakers of the space) start the fire and keep it fed, and are responsible for keeping everyone safe and healthy. They often have to maneuver through the circle carrying heavy things. Give them the right of way and much love, for without them the circle is cold.

Drummers (and chanters, and other makers of joyful noise) take the heat and light of the fire and turn it into sound that reaches our hearts. Do not block them from the fire’s warmth, and give them space and much love, for without them the circle is silent.

Dancers (and flow artists and walking meditators and others who move to the beat) take the energy of the fire and the drums and transmute it into motion that moves our spirits. Do not crowd them into the fire, or block their path around it. Give them space in which to move and much love, for without them the circle is still.

Put these together and all kinds of magic can happen.

The Only God to Whom Jupiter Must Bow

June 12, 2015

Boundaries have been much on my mind this week.

It started when I was contacted out of the blue by a ex-paramour with whom things had not ended well. I hadn’t heard from her since, and seeing her text message stirred up more than a little emotional consternation. I replied that I needed to draw a boundary, that unless we were going to start with an apology from her for some past behavior I didn’t have much to say.

I don’t know where that will end up. It was the first time in quite a while that I’ve had to so explicitly draw a line, but stating and enforcing boundaries is an essential part of our mental and spiritual health.

Boundaries in their role as both endings and beginnings are also on my mind because this will be my last column for Agora. The good news (at least I hope you agree it’s good news) is that this is because The Zen Pagan will soon be its own full-fledged blog here at Patheos Pagan! (I’m going to ask our indefatigable Agora editor Dash to put a link here to the new blog when it’s up.) But this change too is the crossing of a line, a passing of a boundary.

The Romans had a god for that: Terminus, the god of boundaries. His name may bring disturbing connotations to a modern American English speaker, from phrases like “terminal illness” to the sanctuary of Terminus in The Walking Dead — without any spoilers as to what our heroes find there, the name itself is designed to invoke apprehension, “the end of the line.”

But consider also “computer terminal,” a place where with the right incantations unlimited information is available; or “airport terminal,” where we can quite literally take flight, the dream of ages; or “battery terminal,” a point of power, where the power of the lightning itself is harnessed for our use.

Terminus was an overseer of boundaries, and each boundary is both an end and a beginning. Death is a terminus, yes — but so is birth. Our life has two ends, just like a piece of rope or wire, and it’s merely a habit of language that we do not refer to birth as a terminal event. So let’s not carry any negative associations we have about the word “terminal” into our consideration here.

According to Plutarch, it was the ancient king Numa, successor to Romulus, who originated the worship of Terminus:

He was also the first, they say, to build temples to Faith and Terminus…Terminus signifies boundary, and to this god they make public and private sacrifices where their fields are set off by boundaries; of living victims nowadays, but anciently the sacrifice was a bloodless one, since Numa reasoned that the god of boundaries was a guardian of peace and a witness of just dealing, and should therefore be clear from slaughter. And it is quite apparent that it was this king who set bounds to the territory of the city, for Romulus was unwilling to acknowledge, by measuring off his own, how much he had taken away from others. He knew that a boundary, if observed, fetters lawless power; and if not observed, convicts of injustice. (Plutarch, Numa 16)82

Plutarch contrasts Numa’s emphasis on peaceful boundaries with Romulus’s militarism and expansionism:

Why is it that they [the Romans] were wont to sacrifice no living creature to Terminus, in whose honour they held the Terminalia, although they regard him as a god? Is it that Romulus placed no boundary-stones for his country, so that Romans might go forth, seize land, and regard all as theirs, as the Spartan said, which their spears could reach; whereas Numa Pompilius, a just man and a statesman, who had become versed in philosophy, marked out the boundaries between Rome and her neighbours, and, when on the boundary-stones he had formally installed Terminus as overseer and guardian of friendship and peace, he thought that Terminus should be kept pure and undefiled from blood and gore? (Plutarch, Roman Questions 15)83

Ovid writes of later rituals, of blood sacrifice to Terminus and of a corrupted interpretation where boundaries are for other nations, not for Rome, and how during the building of a great temple to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva there were many old altars to be relocated, but the augurs contacting the deities found that Terminus would not be moved:84

O Terminus, whether thou art a stone or stump buried in the field, thou too hast been deified from days of yore. Thou art crowned by two owners on opposite sides; they bring thee two garlands and two cakes. An altar is built. Hither the husbandman’s rustic wife brings with her own hands on a potsherd the fire which she has taken from the warm hearth. The old man chops wood, and deftly piles up the billets, and strives to fix the branches in the solid earth: then he nurses the kindling flames with dry bark, the boy stands by and holds the broad basket in his hands. When from the basket he had thrice thrown corn into the midst of the fire, the little daughter presents the cut honeycombs. Others hold vessels of wine. A portion of each is cast into the flames. The company dressed in white look on and hold their peace. Terminus himself, at the meeting of the bounds, is sprinkled with the blood of a slaughtered lamb, and grumbles not when a suckling pig is given him. The simple neighbours meet and hold a feast, and sing thy praises, holy Terminus: “Thou dost set bounds to peoples and cities and vast kingdoms; without thee every field would be a root of wrangling. Thou courtest no favour thou art bribed by no gold: the lands entrusted to thee thou dost guard in loyal good faith….What happened when the new Capitol was being built? Why, the whole company of gods withdrew before Jupiter and made room for him; but Terminus, as the ancients relate, remained where he was found in the shrine, and shares the temple with great Jupiter. Even to this day there is a small hole in the roof of the temple, that he may see naught above him but the stars. From that abide in that station in which thou hast been placed. Yield not an inch to a neighbour, though he ask thee, lest thou shouldst seem to value man above Jupiter. And whether they beat thee with ploughshares or with rakes, cry out, ‘This is thy land, and that is his.’”…The land of other nations has a fixed boundary: the circuit of Rome is the circuit of the world. (Ovid, Fasti 2.639–684)85

There are no stories about Terminus in your Bullfinch’s Mythology, and you probably didn’t talk about him in your social studies unit on Greco-Roman myths back in elementary school. The only significant mentions of him outside of classics and academia that I know of are a poem about aging by Ralph Waldo Emerson (a sort of polar opposite to Tennyson’s “Ulysses”) and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman story “August” (collected in Fables and Reflections).

And Gaiman’s story is amazing.

In it, Terminus, “He who walks the boundaries,” is “the only god to whom Jupiter must bow” because “boundaries are the most important of things.” Gaiman’s Morpheus (a being beyond the gods, the anthropomorphic personification of Dream) appears to Augustus Caesar as a favor to Terminus, to help Augustus steer Rome towards a bounded future rather than a world-conquering one.

Gaiman was clearly inspired by the tale of how Terminus would not yield to Jupiter at the building of the Capitol Temple. And perhaps he was inspired also by Plutarch’s contrast between Numa and Romulus’s versions of Rome — he’s just the sort of writer who would see something like that and ask “What if there was a conscious choice here for the future of Rome, on the level of a struggle between the gods?”

In the paucity of ancient myths about Terminus I’m quite content to steal Gaiman’s.

The god before whom Jupiter must bow. A god of peace and justice, of limits on power. Terminus is not much spoken of today but perhaps this is a god to whom we should pay far more attention. So many of our troubles are rooted in a failure to agree on, abide by, and enforce boundaries; from our personal relationships to issues of state power and civil liberties to international disputes.

And so as I close out my column here on Agora and open a new project, I sing thy praises, holy Terminus.

82 Plutarch, The Parallel Lives Vol I, Trans. Bernadotte Perrin. Loeb Classical Library, 1914. <http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/​E/​Roman/​Texts/​Plutarch/​Lives/Numa*.html#16 > p 363 ↑

83 Plutarch, “Roman Questions,” Moralia Vol IV. Trans. Frank Cole Babbitt. Loeb Classical Library, 1936. <http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/​E/​Roman/​Texts/​Plutarch/Moralia/Roman_Questions*/A.html#15> p 29 ↑

84 See Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 3.69.3–6: e.g. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, The Roman Antiquities Vol II, Trans Earnest Cary. Loeb Classical Library, 1939. <http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/​E/​Roman/​Texts/Dionysius_of_Halicarnassus/3D*.html#69.3> p 247 ↑

85 Ovid, Fasti. Trans. James G. Frazer. Ovid. Loeb Classical Library, 1931. <http://www.theoi.com/Text/OvidFasti2.html> Book II. ↑

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Christine Hoff Kraemer, David Dashifen Kees, and Jason Mankey for letting me have the soapbox on Agora.

As always I’m indebted to sites like the Sacred Text Archive, Hermetic.com, LacusCurtius, and The Theoi Project for making so many books about religion and mythology freely available.

And thank you for supporting my writing at infamous.net/support.

The following public domain images were obtained via Wikimedia Commons:

Fudō-myōō: https://commons.​wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:​Fud⁠%C5%8D_My%C5%8D%C5%8D.jpg

Santa Claus: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/​File:​Santa’s_Arrival.jpg

Thousand-Armed Kannon: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/​File:​Senju_Kannon.jpg

WWII “Ride With Hitler” propaganda poster: https://commons.​wikimedia.org​/wiki/File:⁠%22WHEN_YOU_RIDE_ALONE_​YOU_RIDE_WITH_HITLER​%22._%22JOIN_A_CAR-SHARING​_CLUB_TODAY​%22._-⁠_NARA_-_516143.tif

“The Creation of Adam”: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/​File:​The_Creation_of_Adam​.jpg

“Boating Near Lake Shore With Reeds” via Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: http://www.mfa.org/​collections/​object/download/36788

Photograph of board breaking kick captured from video provided by Sensei David Smith.

Painting of “Earth Store Bodhisattva” from the collection of the author by unknown artist; photograph by the author.

Other photographs and images by the author.

Cover images:

Pan: “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” by Paul Bransom, from frontispiece to K. Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, 1913 Charles Scribner’s Sons ed. Via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/​File:​Frontispiece_to_The_Wind_​in_​the_​Willows.png

Fudō-myōō: from the collection of the Nara National Museum via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.​wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Fud⁠%C5%8D_My%C5%8D%C5%8D.jpg

Eris: from the collection of the Antikensammlung Berlin/Altes Museum, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons​.wikimedia​.org/​wiki/​File:​Eris_Antikensammlung_​Berlin_​F1775.jpg

Benzaiten: statue in Minō, Ōsaka, photograph by the author.

Athena: attr. Brygos Painter, c. 490-480 BC, from Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo credit Marie-Lan Nguyen, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/File:​Athena_owl_Met_​09.​221.​43.jpg

Jizō: statue in Minō, Ōsaka, photograph by the author.

Fūjin: statue at Taiyū-in Reibyō, Nikkō, Japan, photo by Frank “Fg2” Gualtierivia via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/File:Taiyuin-Fujin-Dsc3719.jpg

Prometheus: Heinrich Füger, “Prometheus bringt der Menschheit das Feuer.” Via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/File:​Heinrich_fueger_​1817_​prometheus_​brings_fire_to_mankind.jpg

About the Author

Tom Swiss describes his spiritual path as “Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordian”, which usually baffles questioners enough to leave him alone. He is the author of Why Buddha Touched the Earth (Megalithica Books, 2013) and blogs as “The Zen Pagan” for the Patheos Pagan Channel.

He has previously served as President of the Free Spirit Alliance, and since the turn of the century has built a reputation as a lecturer on subjects spanning the gamut from acupressure to Zen and from self-defense to sexuality, drawing on his training and experience as a shiatsu therapist, a karate instructor, a poet, a singer/songwriter, an amateur philosopher and spiritual explorer, and a professional computer geek.

Find out more about his wacky adventures at www.infamous.net.