Neo-paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity

By John Halstead

A living relationship with the wild natural world is our birthright as human beings. But centuries of civilization, patriarchy, transcendental monotheism, reductionist science, and capitalism have broken the connection between humankind and nature. To be Neo-Pagan today is to reclaim our original relation with the world. It is nothing more and nothing less than to be fully human again. To (re-)learn what this means, we need to strip away the layers of estrangement that have accreted to our collective soul over the centuries. So we look back to our pagan ancestors. Though separated by time, there is a connection between us and them. We carry it in our flesh and blood. At our most fundamental, we are still the same human beings we were then. We can be pagan again today because we live under the same Sun and on the same Earth, we feel the same wind blowing through our hair and the same rain falling on our skin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9780359886135

John Halstead

John Halstead is a native of the southern Laurentian bioregion and lives in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago. He is one of the founders of 350 Indiana-Calumet, which works to organize resistance to the fossil fuel industry in the Region. John was the principal facilitator of "A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment". He strives to live up to the challenge posed by the statement through his writing and activism. John is Editor-at-Large of HumanisticPaganism.com and edited the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans.

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Neo-paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity

Neo­­-Paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity

Published by Lulu.com

E-Book Edition 2019

ISBN 978-0-359-88613-5

Copyright © John Halstead 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro­duced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy and recording, without prior written permission of the author.

Cover: (right) Pythagoreans celebrate sunrise, 1869 painting by Fyodor Bronnikov, public domain; (left) public domain

Also by the Author

Author

Another End of the World Is Possible (Lulu 2019)

The Gods Are Not Good: An Introduction to Jungian Neo-Paganism (forthcoming)

Editor and Contributor

Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans (Lulu 2016)

Contributor

Pagan Planet: Being, Believing & Belonging in the 21 Century

(Moon Books 2016)

The Greening of Religion: Hope in the Eye of the Storm (Lulu 2017)

Connecting to the Sacred Divine (forthcoming)

Dedication

To the Goddess:

I blasphemed the Lord and Giver of Life for Thy sake.

Yet am I not ashamed, for in forgetting the Sun

I am become the Sun—Thy Son

Yet a thousand times more Thy Lover.

— Frater Achad, The Fox Glove

Introduction: The Neo-Pagan Experience

It’s high summer, mid-way between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. I’m standing in a ring of a few dozen people in small woodland on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin. A horn sounds from somewhere. In the distance, up the trail, I see a fig­ure that I can barely make out, human or mostly. He has the body of a man, but the head of a deer, antlers proudly displayed. He is naked and his body is painted with strange sigils. He runs towards us, holding a flaming torch high in the air. My heart pounds in my chest. I feel a strange surge of fear mixed with joy.

***

I’m gathered with about two hundred people in a large hotel confer­ence room in San Jose, California. The lights are turned down. There is an altar to the Indian goddess Kali in the center of the room. Kali is a face of the Divine Feminine, her dark face, her wild self, the Goddess manifest in the physical world and in our own bodies. We dance furiously around the altar while drums beat loudly. I feel remarkably unselfconscious and at home in my body.

***

I’m walking along the beach in Florida with my wife. She walks into the warm Gulf water and pulls out a giant clam shell, cov­ered in seaweed, barnacles, and other life forms I can’t identify. That’s disgusting, I say. This is your Goddess, she replies, smiling. It’s the slimy side of her, I say sarcastically. This is life, she says back. Her words resonate through me, as if an ora­cle has spoken.

***

I’m gathered with my extended family in a grove in Fish Lake National Forest in central Utah. The grove is part of a forest of quaking aspens called Pando. Over 80,000 years ago, Pando was born from a single seed. Now it is the largest living being on the planet, stretching over 100 acres and consisting of over 40,000 individual trunks. My wife tells my mixed-faith family the story of how the Hebrew patriarch, Abraham, planted a grove and called on his god there. She explains that, in the He­brew Bible, grove is a euphemism for and symbol of the god­dess, Asherah, the wife of Abraham’s god. She invites everyone to pour a libation of water and contemplate the gift of nature and of our lives.

***

I’m standing on a rocky outcropping of the Pacific Ocean along US Highway 1. The wind is blowing around me and breakers are crashing below me. My chest is filled near to bursting. I throw my arms wide and laugh. This is it! I keep repeating. Thank you ... Thank you ...Thank you.

***

It’s a weekday morning and I’m standing in front of my bath­room window facing the rising run. I recite an invocation of the Indian god, Indra, adapted from the Rig Veda. I raise my hands in a gesture of praise and welcome. Later, when I walk outside to go to work, I take a moment to bend down and touch the ground, pushing through the grass to touch the cool soil. I recite a poem by the poet, Mary Oliver, which calls me to the present moment. The sound of birds chirping comes into focus. The taste of the morning air intensifies. I feel more alive than before.

***

I’m in my yard and I smell burning autumn leaves on the wind, and I hear geese calling from above. Or it’s the first snow of win­ter and the world seems like it has been reborn. Or it’s a crisp spring morning and I discover that the Dogwoods have sud­denly blossomed, and it seems like a miracle. Or it’s a summer afternoon and I’m eating a really ripe, juicy mango and letting the juice run down my face. Everything feels right with the world.

***

These moments epitomize for me what it means to be Neo-Pa­gan—moments when I felt most alive, when I felt at home in my body and in the world, when I was swept away into unselfcon­scious celebration, when I was moved to spontaneous cere­mony.

The -ism in Neo-Paganism implies that it is a philoso­phy. And it is that. It is also a set of spiritual practices. And it is also a religious community. This book describes Neo-Paganism in all of these ways. But more than that, Neo-Paganism is an experi­ence. It is an experience of relationship with the wild liv­ing world.

This relationship is our birthright as human beings. But two hundred years of capitalism and industrialism, three hundred years of Enlightenment philosophy and reductionist science, two thousand years of Christianity and transcendental monothe­ism, and five thousand years or more of patriarchy and civiliza­tion, have all done their work, breaking the connection between humankind and nature. To be Neo-Pagan today is to reclaim our original relation (Emerson) with the world.

Another way of saying this is to say that to be Neo-Pagan is nothing more and nothing less than to be fully human. To learn what it means to be fully human, we need to strip away the lay­ers of estrangement that have accreted to our collective soul over the centuries. So we look back to our ancestors, to those who lived prior to the Scientific Revolution, prior to Christianity, prior to civilization.

The idea that any form of contemporary Paganism is a sur­vival from pre-Christian or prehistoric times is rubbish. There is, nevertheless, a connection between us and those pagans who lived so long ago. Ancient paganism was an atavistic response to being human in a more-than-human world. No secret knowledge had to be passed on orally through the centuries for paganism to survive. We carry it in our flesh and blood, in our DNA. It is a func­tion of our co-evolution with the living world.

We can be pagan again today because we live under the same Sun and on the same Earth, and we feel the same wind blow­ing through our hair and the same rain falling on our skin, as did our ancestors. There are many differences, of course, be­tween us and those pagans of long ago. But at our most fundamen­tal, we are still the same human beings we were ten thousand years ago. The most ancient of values, said poet Gary Snyder, are the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.[1] These are the values of paganism, then and now.

All of this is to say that the experience of paganism is availa­ble to everyone, whether or not they call themselves Neo-Pa­gan and whether or not they have ever participated in a nomi­nally Neo-Pagan ritual. The experience is as common and yet as enigmatical as a dandelion.[2] The most I can hope to do with a book like this is to help clear a little space in the reader’s soul so they can experience it too.

A Note on Terminology

In 2017, Neo-Paganism celebrated its 50th anniversary[3] as a new religious movement. Some people believe that Neo-Paganism is old enough now to question the appropriateness of the Neo- pre­fix. But in the history of religions, Neo-Paganism is still a rela­tively young religion and religious studies scholars continue to refer to much older religions (like Mormonism, which dates to 1830) as New Religious Movements (NRM).

Furthermore, the term, Paganism, without the qualifying prefix, has come to be understood as an umbrella term, referring to a wide variety of related, but distinct religious movements, in­cluding Neo-Paganism, as well as Wicca and various reconstruc­tionist Paganisms and devotional polytheisms. These latter fall under the Pagan Umbrella, but are distinct from Neo-Paganism.[4]

Where Pagan is used herein, without the Neo- prefix, it refers to the family of religions under the broad Pagan Umbrella. Where Neo-Pagan is used herein, with the Neo- prefix, it refers to a specific religion under the Pagan Umbrella, related to, but distinct from, Wicca and the rest. It is the purpose of this book to describe Neo-Paganism in its broad outlines.

Pagan and Neo-Pagan are capitalized herein where they refer to the contemporary Pagan and Neo-Pagan religious commu­nities. The words are capitalized when used as nouns or adjectives for the same reason that Christian, Catholic, Mor­mon, Hindu, Buddhist, and so on, are capitalized. Where pagan is not capitalized herein, it refers to ancient pa­gans predating the modern era, like the ancient Celts, Egyptians, and Norse, who did not refer to themselves as Pagan. Various spellings of Pagan and Neo-Pagan are used by other au­thors who are quoted here, sometimes capitalized, sometimes not, sometimes hyphenated, sometimes not. These spellings have been left intact where those authors are quoted directly (ex­cept where indicated by brackets).

---

[1] Gary Snyder, Myths and Texts (1978)

[2] Lester Mondale, The Practical Mysticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Alfred Stiernotte (ed.), Mysticism and the Modern Mind (1959)

[3] In New Age and Neopagan Religions in America (2004), religious studies scholar, Sarah Pike, marks 1967 as the beginning of the Neo-Pagan move­ment, with the incorporation of Fred Adams' Feraferia and the founding of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (NROOGD). This is also the year that the Church of All Worlds filed for incorporation. The following year, it would become the first state-recog­nized Neo-Pagan church.

[4] Isaac Bonewits described both British Traditional Wicca and reconstruc­tionist forms of Paganism as forms of Meso-Paganism, in contrast to Neo-Paganism. Isaac Bonewits, Defining Paganism: Paleo-, Meso-, and Neo- (1979, 2007) [https://www.neopagan.net/PaganDefs.html]

A New Cosmic Religion: Elements of Neo-Paganism

Neo-Paganism is in its essence the worship of the pow­ers of this world, beautiful or terrible, but all in a circle un­der the turning sky above, which is One.

— C.A. Burland, Echoes of Magic (1972)

Neo-Paganism is a new religious movement that began in the United States in the 1960s, with literary roots going back to mid-19th century Europe, as attempts to revive what their founders thought were the best aspects of ancient pagan ways, blended with modern humanistic and pluralistic ideals, while con­sciously striving to eliminate certain elements of traditional West­ern mono­theism, including dualistic thinking and sexual puritanism.[5] The distinguishing characteristics of Neo-Paganism include a perception of divinity as immanent, a multiplicity of deities, both feminine and masculine, a commitment to environ­mental responsibil­ity, and a creative approach to ritual.

Religious studies scholars, Robert Ellwood and Harry Partin, gave the following description of Neo-Paganism in their 1987 survey of Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America:

"The unifying theme among the diverse [Neo-Pagan] tradi­tions ... is the ecology of one’s relation to nature and to the various parts of one’s self. As Neo-Pagans under­stand it, the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches that the hu­man intellectual will is to have dominion over the world, and over the unruly lesser parts of the human psy­che, as it, in turn, is to be subordinate to the One God and his will. The Neo-Pagans hold that, on the contrary, we must ... cooperate with nature and its deep forces on a basis of reverence and exchange. Of the parts of [human­kind], the imagination should be first among equals, for [humankind’s][6] true glory is not in what [they command], but in what [they see]. What wonders [they see] of nature and of [themselves they leave] untouched, save to glorify and celebrate them.

"What Neo-Pagans seek is a new cosmic religion ori­ented to the tides not of history but of nature—the four di­rections, the seasons, the path of the sun—and of the timeless configurations of the psyche. They seek not that morality that comes from imposing the will on reluctant flesh, nor the mystical trance that is the fruit of asceti­cism, but the expansiveness of spirit that comes from al­lowing nature and rite to lower the gates confining the civi­lized imagination. For them, this is the spirit called up by the names ‘pagan’ and ‘polytheism.’ ...

[Neo-Pagans] seek to restore a proper balance between masculine and feminine symbolization of the sacred. They seek to recover a sense of wonder and respect as reli­gious feelings toward nature in all its moods and to­ward the human body and psyche. Thus they want to find a new totality, perhaps in reaction to a schizo­phrenic culture. They look for it in a new cosmic religion that vehemently rejects the religious value of history, while it radically affirms the religious value of raising the level of consciousness through stimulation of the imagi­nation by ritually creating a suggestive and sacred mi­lieu.

Elements of Neo-Paganism

One common way to describe Neo-Paganism is to suggest a list of elements, beliefs or characteristics of Neo-Paganism. Due to the amorphous and non-dogmatic nature of Neo-Paganism, such lists are problematic. It is inevitable that certain people who identify as Neo-Pagan will be inadvertently excluded, while oth­ers who do not identify as Neo-Pagan will be unintentionally in­cluded. All such lists must be read with the understanding that no single element is a necessary condition of identification as a Neo-Pagan and that the list as a whole is not exhaustive. If we were to translate such lists into a pictorial representation, it would be better to think of them as scatter plots (which have no definite boundaries), rather than Venn diagrams (which do). With all the above caveats, lists of elements of Neo-Paganism can still be instruc­tive.

According to religious studies scholar, Michael York, author of Pagan Theology (2005) and The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and NeoPagan Movements (1999), the elements of Neo-Paganism include: [7]

corpo-spirituality

an appreciation of or worship of nature

a this-worldly focus

an understanding of enchantment

a plurality of the divine or deific pluralism

a humanistic grounding

hedonism or a sanctification of pleasure

To this list, York sometimes adds:

an emphasis on individuality, freedom, self-determina­tion, and personal responsibility

a local focus

a celebratory attitude

a sense of the awesome

an ethical concern

The UK Pagan Federation lists the following elements of Neo-Paganism:

Love for and kinship with Nature, reverence for the life force and itsever-renewing cycles of life and death

A positive morality, in which the individual is responsi­ble for the discovery and development of their true na­ture in harmony with the outer world and community

Recognition of the Divine, which transcends gender,ac­knowledging both the feminine and masculine aspects of Deity

Historian Ronald Hutton, author of Triumph of the Moon: A His­tory of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (1999), lists the following characteris­tics of Neo-Pagans:

They accept the inherent divinity of the natural world and re­ject the notion of a transcendent creator.

They embrace a simple ethic of freedom to satisfy individ­ual needs and desires and pursue personal growth and happiness, while avoiding harm to others.

They reject any notion of a divinely prescribed law and con­cepts of sin or salvation.

They believe that divinity can be both masculine and femi­nine and that women may exercise religious power as effectively as men.

They turn for symbolism, kinship, and inspiration to the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the Near East.

In The Sign of the Witch: Modernity and the Pagan Revival (2008), historian, David Waldron, defines Pagan consciousness as a belief that:

Divinity is immanent.

Divinity manifests itself as masculine and feminine.

We should live in concert with nature.

We should individually and together pursue personal growth and spiritual fulfillment.

In general terms, Neo-Paganism may be described as:

A life-affirming religion

A nature/Earth religion

A feminist religion

An eclectic religion

A sacralization of psychology

Each of these elements will be discussed below.

A Life-Affirming Religion

Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfy­ing life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.

— James Leuba, The Monist (1901)

Neo-Pagans seek to live life in the present, in the here and now, rather than seeking to escape into heaven or nirvana. The Neo-Pagan ethos focuses on enjoying and celebrating the fact of life itself. Rather than living life in terms of religion, Neo-Pagans seek to live their religion in terms of life. To Neo-Pagans, life is to be lived as fully as possible in harmony with pleasure, responsibil­ity toward others, and personal growth. As the existen­tialist, Albert Camus, declared, If there is a sin against life, it consists not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.[8] The Transcendentalist, William Wordsworth, expressed this senti­ment too:

Not in Utopia,—subterranean fields,—

Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!

But in the very world, which is the world

Of all of us,—the place where in the end

We find our happiness, or not at all![9]

Ancient pagan religions were fertility religions. They sought to promote the growth of grain and the abundance of herds through prayer and sacrifice. Neo-Pagans embrace a broader con­cept of fertility, one that is not only physical, but also mental and spir­itual. We humans can create, not only through physical reproduc­tion, but also with our hands and minds, through art and science, commerce and industry, social relations and per­sonal develop­ment. As Wiccan priestess, Doreen Valiente, ex­plained, There is a spiritual as well as a material fertility; and human life is a desert without it.[10] Along the same line, Wiccan priest, Ed Fitch wrote, [I]n the old days a material fruitfulness was needed for life, but now the craving is for fruitfulness within the soul itself.[11]

This is what Henry David Thoreau meant when he said he wanted to live deliberately and to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.[12] This sense of life abundant is what some Neo-Pagans call energy. It is experienced when we live in the present, in our bodies, in the tangible world of sense, and as part of the sensual rhythm of nature. Dancer and choreographer, Mar­tha Graham, explains:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.[13]

Finding and cultivating this energy is one of the goals of Neo-Pagan spirituality.

For Neo-Pagans, the sheer, intoxicating joy of being alive is a religious experience. Neo-Pagans sing, dance, feast, laugh, joke, and have fun during their religious rituals. Spiritual feminist, Ka­ren Clark counsels:

[Neo-]Paganism is a spiritual practice that calls us to a joy­ful, sensual communion with nature and our bodies. Take a walk on the wild side with your unruly, untama­ble pagan nature. Turn up your favorite music and dance from the inside-out. Eat a bowl of the ripest, sweet­est fruit you can find. Make love to your partner as if you are made of one skin. Breathe the blue of the sky deep into your lungs. Spin yourself dizzy under the moon­light. Be radically, delectably, unapologetically alive![14]

For Neo-Pagans, joy is seen as a pathway to the divine. This senti­ment was expressed well by Algernon Blackwood, the au­thor of the short story, A Touch of Pan, which describes the epiphany of the god, Pan, to a group of contemporary English men and women:

He came with blessing. With the stupendous Presence there was joy, the joy of abundant, natural life, pure as the sunlight and the wind. ... There was sweetness, peace, and loveliness; but above all there was—life. He sanctioned every natural joy in them and blessed each pas­sion with his power of creation. [15]

An Earth-Centered Religion

You have forsaken heaven to pay divine honor to earth.

— Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Hea­thens

Neo-Paganism is often described as an Earth religion or na­ture religion. It has been called the Green Party at prayer. Most Neo-Pagans practice an Earth-centered spirituality. For them, the quintessential component of a Neo-Pagan identity is the perception of the divine manifest in the physical world. Many Neo-Pagans are pantheists. (See the chapter on Neo-Pa­gan Beliefs.) Neo-Pagans valorize physical space as a vital ele­ment of spirituality and maintain a this-worldly focus in their religious lives. Modern life has the tendency to cut us off from kinship with the world of living nature, until we feel as if we are a cog in a great machine. Neo-Pagans seek to restore a sense of our oneness with nature. It is for this reason that Neo-Pagans cele­brate the seasonal festivals called the Wheel of the Year (which will be discussed in the chapter on Neo-Pagan Practices).

The history of Neo-Paganism is part of a larger history of na­ture religion in the West, beginning with the American Transcen­dentalists and religiously-motivated conservationists like John Muir. These men and women appreciated a religious dimension to our relationship with the environment. The origins of Neo-Paganism in the late 1960s and early 1970s coincided with the growth of the environmental movement. Two of the first Neo-Pagan organizations in particular, Feraferia and the Church of All Worlds, both founded in 1967, intentionally styled them­selves as nature religions, in contrast to the so-called re­vealed religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Feraferia is a fellowship for the religion of nature and the commonwealth of wilderness, wrote Feraferia’s founder, Fred Adams.[16] Adams was inspired by Thoreau and Muir, among oth­ers. In the first issue of the Feraferia newsletter, published in 1967, he explained:

The only way to reunite [humankind] is to reunite [hu­man­kind] with nature. ... When [humankind] forgets that [they are] an animal, [they also become] inhumane. [Hu­mankind] will become humane toward [humans] only when [they become] humane toward all nature. The in­ner nature of [humankind] has been disastrously sev­ered from the all-enveloping nature of wilderness.[17]

Adams sought to restore the vital link between visionary na­ture within and ecological nature without.[18]

Similarly, the Church of All Worlds was described by one of its priests, Tom