July 21, 2004
I wrote that "any or all of what you see on this site might be complete nonsense". That last comment, which is a reference to the realities of gnosis, has occasionally been seized on with audible glee by some of the small minds that it has been my good or bad fortune to encounter, over the last few years of my Heathen (or semi-Heathen) experience. "Good or bad? How can dealing with an idiot be a sign of good fortune?", one might ask. Because even an idiot can, in spite of himself, become the means through which clarity is found.
Consider one of the more frequently misunderstood sections of this
page, "Discussing Sex". "Ooooh, that's a TOS
violation, I'm going to tattle on him report his misconduct to his
ISP", I can already hear one of the Internet's eternal bumper crop of
ninnies saying, while some of his cold shower loving friends drool in
eager anticipation of the thrills they will soon experience. They're in
for a disappointment, either way. There are no lurid discussions of sexual
experiences to be found in that, or any other section of this site, nor
shall there ever be, even if the TOS should someday allow such a thing.
What we're discussing in that section is sexual morality. Please keep in
mind the blog-like nature of this site, even if I haven't dated all of the
articles (yet). The point of view I began writing this site with is not
the point of view that I ended up with, and part of the point of the site
is to give the reader a sense of the experience that lead to that change
in viewpoint, the gaining of that sense being an intrinsic part of the
arguments offered. Part of those experiences was the discovery of what a
mistake I had made by fully embracing a "modern" permissiveness, and some
of the unpleasant responses that such permissiveness has brought are
discussed.
When I find myself in a head-butting match with somebody who thinks that I'm being narrowminded and oppressive because I would never have allowed somebody to start masturbating in the middle of my living room as the first course was brought out ("sir, that's not how we make white clam sauce"), perhaps I am not dealing with a future Nobel laureate. But, such was often part of the concept of "hipness" during the 1990s, when some would respond to any expression of common sense by playing the time-wasting game of "Devil's Advocate", and many showed no sign of understanding the notion of "common sense" at all. Such a notion fits in poorly with a postmodern relativism. "You have your common sense, I have mine, I'm OK, you're OK, and are the 1960s really over? Because maybe in my reality, they aren't ..."
Sigh.
"I'm OK, you're OK" would have worked in a universe in which each of us could pass through the other, unfelt and unseen, like ghosts wondering what they have ever done to deserve such a merciless solitude. But we don't dwell in such a universe, and such a notion of "common sense" must be present if we are to interact without constant warfare resulting once we've gotten to know each other and succeeded in exhausting each other's patience. Many of our New Age friends would like to deny this, but their own history, with its numerous "Witch Wars" and shortage of peace and of lasting communities bears this out. Some of these we've witnessed first hand, and presented you with documented accounts of on this site. Some have asked "couldn't you have balanced this out by telling about some of the more pleasant incidents", displaying a curious notion of what "balance" is, in that we are being asked to offer a non-representative sampling of the experiences we've had, in order to lead the reader toward a pre-conceived point of view on what the prevailing realities of life in such a community are, but beyond that, we find a more basic problem.
No pleasant incidents seem to be present to be reported, when one deals with that community, nor any pleasant episodes taking place purely within it, that we've discovered. In order to achive this kind of ettiquette driven, reality-distorting preconceived "balance" that some would demand of us, we'd have to fabricate acts of kindness and moments of compassion, decency and forgiveness that neither we, nor anybody we could find, has ever witnessed. The New Age is a failure, and the insanity one sees in "the Prima Nocturne Incident", "Saying Goodbye: Our Publisher Meets the Acolytes", "C.H.U..: A Crank with a Cause" and "Meeting the Pharoah" bear testimony to just how much of a failure it has been. These incidents also illustrate why it has been a failure, and point one in the direction of part of what must be done to repair modern Paganism, as a religious movement.
"Tempest in a teapot" is the key phrase. A recurring theme in these stories is that of the snowballing of hostilities toward the one being scapegoated. The more hatred that has been directed toward the latest object of public scorn, the more eager others are to heap abuse upon him and stonewall any defense of the one being attacked. The more praise that has been heaped upon somebody, the more eagerly (and blindly) will others rationalize the heaping of further praise, rewriting history in order to do so and ignoring contrary evidence often so easily available as to be a matter of "point and click". One can't hope for anything resembling justice or sanity under such a system, because what one obtains is no longer a discussion, but a game of "follow the leader". A small experiment might help clarify matters.
Do you have a pen or a pencil handy? If so, try to balance it on its point. Really work at it, and get it standing as straightly as you can, being sure to close the windows and doors and turn off the fan so that there is no breeze. You didn't succeed, did you? Why is that? Take a good look at the object you tried to balance. Pick it up, and holding it, first get it into that position that looks like one in which it should be balanced. The pen barely seems to press against one's flesh; one is barely aware that one is touching it at all. Now, start to tilt it downward toward the horizontal, while holding the tip in place, say against a book. Notice how the lower the pen drops, the more you feel its weight against your lower finger, and the more stongly it seems to be pushing downward? What you were attempting to achieve, when you tried to balance that pen, was something known as an "unstable equilibrium", and that's why you could not succeed. There will always be some slight, small error in the alignment of the pen, and the more it tilts in one way, the more it will be pulled in that direction by the forces that act on it until, inevitably, it comes crashing downward. But, it's only a pen, so unless you're a gnat, this is nothing to worry about.
The social analog of this physical phenomenon is, regrettably, not so benign. When the members of a subculture base their opinions on a poll of those around them, public opinion, as we have said before, takes on a life of its own, quite independent of merits of the points that are made during the discussion of an issue. Whoever gains a small political advantage in the beginning - and it can be a very, very small one - finds that the slight majority faction that he begins with becomes a commanding majority faction in short order; and conversely, those who begin with a slight political disadvantage, soon find themselves buried under a self-building landslide. Like our hypotheitical gnat, all that they can do, politically speaking, is get out of the way, because the mob is no likelier to give them a fair-minded hearing than the pen was likely to do so for our gnat.
Any subculture that builds itself around an embrace of radical subjectivism, be it Wiccan, a group of postmodernists in San Francisco, or anybody else, introduces an intrinsic instability into itself by doing so. If one accepts that idea that right and wrong, sanity and lunacy, indeed that reality itself is a subjective matter defined by the consensus of the majority, then one is left with no conceptual basis for believing that there even is such a thing as a fair-minded dissent from the majority view, and so the individual who accepts subjectivism as a doctrine is left with little reason to do anything but base his views on those of the people around him. Thus, the Witch Wars.
That which challenges us or irrationally threatens us - the point of view we disagree with, the person who looks different than the rest (and so inflames somebody's prejudice), the person who is a little brighter and better read - will inspire a tiny amount of anger. Irrational anger, perhaps - something usually suppressed - but now that we have that "unstable equilibrium" thing happening in this subjectivist community under consideration, irrational impulses, left unexamined, can do nothing else but snowball into raging emotional storms. When objective standards are cast aside, the very basis for judging one's own impulses to be unreasonable (and thus things to be controlled and dissipated through self-examination) has been cast aside in the process.
Still have that pen or pencil? I have another mini-experiment for you. This time, instead of trying to balance it on its point, lightly grasp it by the end, between two fingers, and let it hang, like it was a pendulum. It's pointing downward, isn't it? Push it off to one side, and release it. It swings back, passes through the position it was in before, swings back again, a little lower on each pass, until quite soon and very suddenly, it comes to rest - pointing downward again. Push it in any direction, and the same will occur. Why is that? Rest the index finger of your other hand against the pen as you push it away from where it would be in balance, and, again, the answer comes to you - in which ever direction you push the pen, the other forces acting on the pen resist you, pushing it back toward the position in which it was in balance, and the further off-center you push it, the more those forces resist you. What you have is known as a "stable equilibrium". Unlike the case with the unstable equilibrium, in which small errors snowballed into big ones, in this situation a small displacement from a centered position will tend to be cancelled out. The small disturbances that the environment will inevitably provide, instead or wiping away the balance, are themselves wiped away, because they can not take hold. After you get done wiping the ink off of your fingers, we'll get to what the point of all of this was.
Just as was the case with the unstable equilibrium, there is a social analog of the stable equilibrium we speak of, in the above illustration. Let us say that somebody attempts to rabble rouse in a subculture in which the ethical norm is not one of subjectivism, but instead one under which actions and positions are judged in terms of a traditional ethic, which can not easily be redefined by the will of the populace. Some set of objective standards, one might say. In trying to push past those standards, one will create an increasing level of discomfort in more and more of those who one would try to persuade to join in on the hostilities, and the further one manages push the momentary rules of the discourse that follows away from those traditional standards, the more resistance one will meet; the more of a countervailing tendency there will be to move away from the direction that standards had been pushed in, and move them back in the direction of the prevailing historical norms.
That's important. While a radical subjectivist subculture is making up its rules as it goes along, and so those inflicting an unreasonable standard on others may do so with minimal fear that it will be inflicted on them in turn, the key fact about a traditional way of life is that it is traditional, and traditions, by definition, are not things that quickly change from moment to moment. The horrible standard that would be established for one person would be established for all, and over the years, more than a few people would feel driven to object to this, enough of them for their collective will to be able to change the tradition, in many cases, before it ever had a chance to become a tradition. The norm has, as we are fond of saying, "stood the test of time", and thus earned for itself a credibility that the whims of a volatile mob do not.
Consider what will most likely prove effective, should one seek to rise to the top of each of the systems we are now considering. In the unstable equilibrium offered by radical subjectivism, backstabbing will work wonders. Even under the best of circumstances, appealing to somebody on a rational level is going to be a slower process than appealing to his prejudices, because logic comes in well defined steps that one can not skip over, while emotional outbursts make their own rules. If political victory goes to whoever seizes that first piece of ground most quickly, in establishing majority support, then it will always go to the huckster and the demagague, and never to the honest man who will refrain from taking expedient shortcuts through the truth, or to the man of reason who will patiently dissect the fallacy the demagogue sets up - only to discover that the now inflamed mob is refusing to listen to him. Nor need the con man or the underhanded politican fear the consequences of the truth coming out once passions have cooled, because they will never cool.
The longer that those who have "lied, cheated and backstabbed their way to the top" succeed in keeping their opposition outcast from the community" and keep their views and arguments from being listened to, the greater the legitimacy of that very ostracisation will be in the minds of their groupthinking audience. Their victory will be permanent, and dependent on nothing other than the political considerations of those early moments. Those who dominate a community will define its ethic. What sort of ethic can one reasonably hope for on terms such as these, in which rumor mongering and (the appeasement of those who indulge in it) will inevitably be allowed to define the consensus view of reality?
The standard of conflict resolution that results is that of a trial by combat, in which "might makes right" - but it's the political might of those who have been rewarded for their exercise of cowardice, as persuasion can come most quickly if one attacks one's opposition in its absence, where one will not be slowed down by the need to respond to that opposition's rebuttals. Picture the experience of always walking around, waiting for a knife to be shoved in one's back. In the privacy of your own home, as you read this, be honest with yourself, at the very least - is this an experience that you would look forward to? Where is the "liberation" to be found in such an experience? One of the best rebuttals to Ethical Subjectivism one could possibly ask for is to be found in the experience of living under it. If the Law is to be made for Man rather than Man for the Law, then this would be a very bad version of the Ethical Law to adopt, indeed.
Nor is it one likely to produce an enduring society, as the very acts that serve to tear a society apart are the acts that would help one arise within it. Even should one be purely a Pagan - ever notice how many of the gods concern themselves with matters that relate to the building and maintenance of a stable society? Hera - marriage, Demeter - agriculture (something that won't succeed unless property rights are honored), Hestia - the home ... hardly an aspect of running a stable, civilized society could be found that wasn't under the guidance of one or (usually) more of the gods. So, how could one possibly fight to establish a system that would do so much to destroy the work of the gods, and yet still claim to honor those gods? And, having endorsed the ethic that gives rise to such a system, how could one still believe in the wisdom of those who one claims to worship, if the core of their mission in this world is something one has endorsed the destruction of? One's very act of worship would be a lie, and rest assured, even if one can browbeat one's fellow man into silence and perceived consent, the gods will not be so easily frightened, if they are gods at all. If, on the other hand, they are not - then why are we even here? Where is the sense in worshipping a delusion?
What of the more traditional society, though? Where will success be found in rising to a position of influence within it? Remember the consideration of stable vs. unstable equilibrium from before? There is little to be gained in the long run through a rapid and underhanded effort to seize political ground and change the rules of political engagement, because the effects of an initial change in those rules will be resisted. Indeed, there is everything to be lost, because once passions have cooled and the memories of one's actions remain, social censure is likely to result. The perverse incentives of the subjectivist subculture become reversed, and this circumstance helps bring forth the prevailing relative calm that allows real discussions to occur, and a real social fabric to be woven, strand by strand, as relationships are so built. This is why modernity, which gains so much ground so quickly, in the long run never keeps it, while those "backward" traditional cultures can endure on through the millenia.
The modernist can try to destroy what the traditionalist possesses, but his own spiritual and cultural house is built on a foundation of sand, and nothing he can do can keep it from eventually crumbling, and far sooner than he imagined, at that. He who builts something destined to endure must build more slowly, but it is his home that will remain when all others have crumbled to ruin, and become so overgrown as to no longer be seen - and thus the hysteria of the modernist who can't cope with hearing the word "no" from those who will not let him remake them in his own image. Subcultures, as we say, must have evolved collective survival instincts, or they wouldn't have lived long enough to become subcultures. The traditional cultures, should they endure in the short term, will win in the end, because they offer the only places in which real, not affected, progress can occur. The only chance that the most recently fashionable version of modernity has to extend its time in this world is to engage in a kind of restraint of spiritual and cultural trade, by eliminating the competition and eliminating real freedom of choice, for the individual. How ironic that this is often done in the name of personal freedom!
That, we suppose, would be the very "freedom" that New Agers, postmodernists and their Politically Correct friends have spoken of supporting, while so often seeking excuses, however feeble, to silence those who has disagreed with them, then using the existence of a manufactured majority (among those left free to speak publicly) supporting their positions as proof of the rightness of causes that have never withstood genuinely rational criticism - using that alleged rightness as an excuse to further silence dissent, rewriting history so that the dissent is soon forgotten (or at least ignored), maintaining the illusion that the consensus arrived at, was one freely agreed upon, on an individual basis.
What one sees is the "majority faction" spoken of in The Federalist Papers coming into formation. The fact that some are surprised to see passions sweeping aside reason under these conditions is itself surprising, because this very issue was brought up centuries ago, when the rationale for the first amendment was first offered. Why the squelching of dissent through private means should achieve something other than the deplorable results expected of governmental suppression, especially when such a crusading effort has been made to make those private means put to universal use, is a mystery our crusaders for mandatory P.C. "sensitivity" (read: cowardice) never seem to address. When one reads of such laughable absurdities as arguments that the ancient Egyptians harnessed electricity, one may laugh these exchanges off as the ravings of flakes who aren't likely to be taken seriously, but such complacency would be a mistake.
The ravings of those we mention in these accounts, are no flakier than those which were seen out of Lysenko in the Soviet Union. The sad reality is that when real freedom of speech is lost, lunacy can easily define the consensus. In the 1990s, we got a taste of this reality on more than a few college campuses and in Pagandom, and the warning that History gives us is that much worse is yet to come, if we (as a society) continue down this path. Yet so many are hesitating to swerve from it. Even if individual alternative religious movements may seem to come with expiration dates one would expect to see on cartons of yogurt, the damage such faddish movements are doing to the expectation that certain values (that enable real freedom of expression in the West) will be honored is cumulative, and so far, it isn't being reversed. Bad patterns of behavior are being reinforced. This, far more than any imagined global threat abroad, is the gravest thread to Western freedom, and the thought that this precious possession may end up being tossed away without any real thought, in the name of "ettiquette", leaves some of us feeling sick to our stomachs. Some are speaking of the future of the collective freedom of mankind as if the maintenance and promotion of such were a choice on a level with the choice of which fork to use at the dinner table. We would beg the reader's pardon if we should feel that this is a childishly petty level on which to approach a very important matter.
But I digress. Let's move on.
Yes, we're conservatives by normal standards, and definitely conservative by the standard of the current P.C. era - and in the latter case, with demonstrably good reason. Attempts to radically remake societies or subcultures, in the blink of an eye, are fundamentally dangerous. These attempts never, ever work, and never will. Some will say that we've rambled our way through at least two subjects in this article - radical subjectivism and freedom of speech - but they are mistaken. These are but two sides of the same subject. Lose the recognition of the objective nature of morality, and one loses the concept of individual rights - and that's the end of any right to free expression. Conversely, if the majority can casually silence the minority, how meaningful can any assertion of the existence of objective morality be, given that the majority can never be called to answer for its failure to live up to the demands of that morality?
On finding that its collective conscience is beginning to feel troubled, all that it need do to find instant relief is silence those troublesome dissidents. Eliminate the moral objection to doing so, and one will leave that majority with no reason to do anything but take the path of least resistance, taking the teeth out of any objective moral code that might be proposed. One begins to see much of the wisdom of the Hellenic dictum "Know Thyself" - Know thou art not God. Talk of Divine kings and inspiration that transcends the need for self-examination may bring a little color into the lives of the terminally bored, but it is morally corrosive, precisely because it stifles that challenging of the unjust choices Man can so easily bring himself to make.
"Yes", somebody might say, "so let us discard all tradition and proceed according to the dictates of pure reason". "Pure reason rooted in what?", would be our response. There is no such animal. As Rudolph Carnap would say, one can not add to the semantic content of an axiomatic system through deductive means. To put it more simply, "you can't get something for nothing". For logic to honestly begin, and not lose itself (and the mislead reader) in a maze of sophistry, it must begin in a set of assumptions not derived through deductive means - our basic perceived facts of life, in the development of a philosophy (or axioms). Where do we go for these? In ethical matters, to that very tradition that some would recklessly discard for the sake of transitory fashion, which (as we've said) has stood the test of time, reflecting centuries or millenia of human experience, and thus telling us more about life than we could glean from our far briefer personal histories. Some if we were to do as our self-styled modernists would have us do, and discard all that is traditional in order to free our minds to seek the rational, we would soon find that reason would have nowhere to go, because we would have left it with far too little information to work with.
Not that it would have had much opportunity to do its work, anyway. Remember, if you lose the objectivity of morality, freedom of discourse is going to follow it into oblivion, eventually, and that eventuality shall come about disturbingly soon. For one to accept this notion that one can dispense with what has been tradition, and then discuss what custom should become, one must ignore the inconvenient reality that having done so, one would have discarded the very non-adversial, ethically rooted rules of civil engagement that allow one to have some real level of freedom of discourse to begin with. In the end, much as those who will go along with such demands might try to posture as being the champions of reason, they are left with the same old shoving match that made Neo-Pagandom the madhouse it became.
In making everything negotiable, such radical breaks with the past destroy the very possibility of clear and reasoned discourse needed to make such changes sensible ones founded in good judgement and honorable intent, not in the political machinations of petty demagogues. The conclusion to be drawn is not one that will appeal to many of the members of the Clinton generation, who spent their college years back during the late 1960s talking about how they were going to "change the world", nor is it going to please those members of instant gratification loving fan club who are somewhere near 18, right now. One needs to learn a reasonable level of patience and humility - which is not to say "wishywashiness". Looking over the recent past, one can see that if one's ambition is to make more sense than the majority consensus, that one's ambition is all too realistic. But should one feel the call to remake the world, one should go home, take a nice warm bath and go to sleep - and hope that call will have gone away by the morning. Nobody is qualified to take on the task that one will have set out for oneself. No individual and indeed, no generation.
"Know thyself?" Even the gods have shied away from the task of remaking the world in that blink of an eye. What are we to gather regarding the self-image of the worshipper if he should rush in where the lords of creation will not?
That is part of why we will not become "21st century spirits", or
whatever else the Neo-Pagans wish to call themselves this week; having
grown up with a perspective that reaches back much further than the last 3
years and 7� months, we are not about to let ourselves be hustled into
settling for any less. This is also part of why we insist on being
Traditionalists and not "Hard Reconstructionists", a term used by some of
those who pretend to recreate one of the religions of antiquity, glossing
over the fact that the details of those religions that have been preserved
by history are sketchy at best. These skeletal frameworks of religions are
generally fleshed out by those so-called "Hard Reconstructionists" though
the addition of modern material, usually visibly (and deeply) rooted in
the (usually Anglo-Saxon) cultural backgrounds of the "Recons", who feel
no need to explain why it is that, while using modern Italian traditions
to flesh out ancient Roman material (or modern Greek to flesh out
ancient Greek) is illegitimate, using modern English or Anglo-American
culture to do the same thing is perfectly acceptable. Perhaps they were
under the impression that the Caesars spoke a West Germanic language? 
This much is simply the ethnocentricism that their
culture has had a notorious amount of difficulty in outgrowing, and
requires little more in the way of a response than a roll of one's
eyes.
But let us say that all that has been forgotten over the ages was suddenly remembered, every burnt book restored and sitting on a library shelf, every festival described at length, every lost myth retold. What then? Then we would still be left with the reality that while ancient Roman (Or Greek or Egyptian or Canaanite culture) was traditional in its time and place, even in its old place, it is no longer traditional in the era we find ourselves in. At most, something derivative of ancient tradition is now traditional, and to suddenly leap back to the earlier form of the tradition would be a radical innovation in the context of our time and place, a radical break with the past, just like the ones that the Neo-Pagans are trying to make.
"But we're trying to go back to a tradition that actually existed", comes the defense. But traditions are able to restrain the expression of our passions and impulses enough to make civil society possible precisely because they are habitual, and the attempt to make a precursor to that culture habitual for the same purpose, in one bold step, puts one in a chicken and the egg situtation. For a major cultural shift to occur, even in a small group, a lot of history has to happen first. A lot has to be learned and discussed, and guess what - by making that sudden, radical break with the past, one has just shattered the conditioning that allows us to work together in peace. This puts us back to square one, following the Neo-Pagan program all over again, even if we do so with a few of the forms of ancient culture added as window dressing for what is essentially a Neo-Pagan construct - and why would it be anything else?
The very program that one would have set out would be one that called for one to imitate the forms of what had been a traditional society, while ignoring the most essential aspect of its spirit that made it a traditional society: a deep rooted respect for the value of maintaining continuity with the immediate historical past, of honoring all of one's ancestors and the traditions that they have passed on to posterity. A tradition, as we keep saying, is a living thing with a life and a will of its own. It can not be just whatever one wants it to be, and remain alive, any more than a tree can remain alive once one has cut its roots. Traditions remain alive because of that cultural continuity and because people are conditioned to preserve that continuity. In the case of the ancient Mediterranean world, so much so that despite numerous attempts to the contrary, the early Christian church never succeeded in removing all traces of Paganism from popular Christian practice. The article on the Saturnalia illustrates this point.
The paradox of Hard Classical Reconstructionism is that if it should
succeed - which it never has, to date - it will then instantly fail,
because it will have destroyed in its followers the very spirit that gives
the people the ability to maintain a traditional culture in the first
place. The movement's greatest moment of triumph will find no deeper
fulfillment than in its successful delivery of a stillborn spiritual
child. Should its participants hope for a more meaningful achievement than
that, they will be disappointed, because one can not reinforce a behavior
so often as one would in the creation of a new tradition, without making
it habitual. The heirs of those who so completely broke with their own
past in creating a Hard Neo-Hellenism (or Neo-Romanism or Neo-Kemeticism
or Neo-Canaanite religion) would not be conditioned to hold onto their own
young heritage with any greater tenacity than their immediate precessors
held onto their own, and maybe with a good deal less given the shallowness
of the history behind the new heritage. Before those new customs would
have had a chance to work its way into their bones, making the following
of them second nature to some generation of descendents, it would have
mutated beyond recognition - especially given the reality of what we've
seen happen to scholarly integrity when a respect for the value of
tradition has broken down. Before you know it, somebody has Akhenaton
speaking fluent Yoruba. In order to maintain
the integrity of a tradition, one has to have a clear image of what
that tradition has been in the past ever in the minds of those who
would live it, and if the process of calm discussion has broken down,
what is to be done when one of the rabble rousers tries to make one of
his flights of fancy part of the consensus view of what the past was?
The difference between what this hard Reconstructionism can achieve
and what we have come to expect of the "Fluffy Bunny" wing of
Neo-Pagandom will be have more posturing than substance to it.
And, indeed, (for example) on one of the mouthier "Hard Hellenic Recon" lists where people have been driven off merely for speaking out against attempts to get Christo-Hellenists (who have no history of evangelism) outcast from the larger Hellenic Reconstructionist community for their 'impurity', or merely for correcting slander directed against us in a manner that would leave nobody unclear as to who was being referred to, one can see the director of a well known New England Based Occult group who presides over an alleged "Hellenic Recon" group that is over 60% Wiccan (by its own count), being greeted with open arms as if she were one of them, even though Hellenic Wiccans, as a group, do have a lengthy history of engaging in highly aggressive evangelism in the Hellenic Recon community. Already, this so-called reform-minded opposition to the Neo-Pagan element in Hellenic Reconstructionism is well on its way to being co-opted by the very elements it supposedly gathered together to oppose, "politics as usual" prevailing. When we say that the Hard Reconstructionist movement in Hellenism is doomed to failure, we don't merely say this as a matter of philosophical speculation. There is already more than a little history backing us up on this.
Not to mention a lot of common sense. Hellenism is a culturally specific religion; so is Romanism and most forms of Historical Reconstructionism, and the cultures in question are not ones that outsiders will, in general, tend to feel at home in. For this reason, while Hellenism and related religions, taken in their full cultural context, might appeal to a few rare Teutonic Northern Europeans, the primary appeal of the full religion will be to those whose personal roots lie in cultures heavily derivative of those of Ancient Greece and Rome; ie. Southern European ethnics in particular. If you ignore the sensibilities that are a traditional part of those daughter cultures that derive from Greece and Rome, your community's attempts to grow will be dead in the water, and discarding the last few millenium or two of tradition is something that these semi- or non-assimilated ethnics will view with abhorrence. You will not be building anything, and will be left in the position of trying to hold festivals in honor of the gods, without having celebrants present.
Good luck on that one.
So, does this mean that the gods are dead? That their festivals can never be held again? No, of course not, but we will have to be patient. The "Hard Recon" approach is to say "this is what we'd like to see exist, so we will build it without compromises, today!", confusing dedication with the desire for instant gratification. The Traditionalist knows better, knowing that cultures are, as we've stated, living things with a will of their own, which die if one tries to command them. Note that even the Renaissance, created by figures far more impressive than those of Modern Paganism, for the purpose of reviving Classical culture, only succeeded in creating a new synthesis in which ancient elements were grafted onto a core of Medieval tradition. We may look and say "it's a shame that ancient religion was wiped away", but that was then and this is now, and wishing won't make two millenia of subsequent history go away. Cultures are changed, not by command, but by gentle persuasion, as each nudges the tradition toward a vision of what he thinks it should be. This is a process that takes centuries, not days. "But this means that I won't live to see that festival", a hard Recon might object. Indeed, there is an excellent chance that he won't, we concede, but then go on to say that one should seek to rise above one's individual concerns in this area, and sacrifice one's desires, finding satisfaction in the knowledge that one has acted for the greater good. "But what of honoring the gods?", our Recon might persist. What of it? How can one honor the gods more, than when one acts to help carry out their will. By doing our part to bring an enduring tradition into being that will honor them as they would be honored, we do just that, and every effort we make in that area becomes an act of worship.
As for not living to see this reach fruition - yes, mortality stinks. I won't pretend otherwise. But as anybody who works in the sciences or the arts learns early on in his career, part of the price of being something greater than yourself, be it the search for knowledge, beauty or a closer relationship between Man and the Divine, is that much of what you set in motion won't reach fruition for centuries, and sometimes one has to defer gratification so far that one does not know that one will ever see it anywhere but in one's mind's eye, as one envisions the future. That might not be good enough for some, but if you can't accept that, in the long run, you can't make a difference. At best, you might have a few strange parties along the way. That might impress a few people in the chatrooms, but do you suppose that it will please the gods? Or God, Himself?
"Perhaps not", a hard recon might counter, "but how is your vision to be realized if you are long gone before it even has a real chance to begin"? By accepting that my vision is not the one that matters. Whatever I might write, the changes I make will be modest one - a ritual or two the worshipper will take part in, before returning to the mainstream world that gives definition to his life. A tiny change in his world results. Then somebody reads of what we did, and adds his own contribution. And then somebody after that, and ... do you see where I'm going with this? It is why this site is called "the Almond Jar" - the building of such a faith community is a matter of small, incremental contributions, and in this way, by surrendering our desire for full self-actualization as creators and letting the creation evolve slowly, we keep our own inner voices from drowning out the still, quiet voice of the Divine, gently urging us in the right direction down through the centuries. The reason why I will shy away from radical, sudden changes is thus akin to the reason why I won't make the old myths politically correct, and thus reduce them to being mere stories. Because I don't speak with the voice of God or His more exalted servants, the gods, I merely strain to hear it or see the signs of it, and know that more often than not, I will fail.
If Christo-Hellenism should survive in the long run, I should be most disappointed if, in a century or two, it looked just like what I created, because that would mean that my will, and not the will of the Divine, was what was guiding it along. To seek the second is the whole purpose of conceiving it as a notion of what a religion might be, in the first place. Let it be as God and the gods, His servants, will it - and only patience will allow us to find out what that might be. Let us submit to the will of the Divine in this, for only in this way can that collective gnosis come into being through the action of History, that makes faith something more than fantasy.
I began this article by mentioning the "Discussing Sex" section of this site. I may have left you with the impression that I wandered off that topic, but not so, as you will see. As I indicated, I found myself dealing with some unpleasantly odd individuals. This was to be expected, as these experiences were had back during my "Reader Circuit" days. The "Reader Circuit" is a Pagan community located in Chicago that takes its nickname from the habit some of its elders have of advertising their events in the Chicago Reader, a free weekly newspaper, sort of a local counterpart to the Bay Guardian in San Francisco or maybe the Village Voice in New York. While many of us pick it up for its extensive listings of entertainment and cultural events in the city, it is perhaps best known (or most notorious) for its "adult services" ads, and its "match ads" (which most papers would call "personal ads"). Yes, the adult bookstore crowd was there, in force, and when I mentioned the possibility of setting up a shrine to honor Aphrodite, this made for some curious reactions, which left me with the realization that there were some things that really needed to be spelled out. Here's one of them:
This, I was expected to defend, my initial response of "what are you kidding me, no, that's disgusting", not being accepted as an answer in some circles. Did I mention that these were the "more sensitive and tolerant than thou" 1990s, and that I live in Chicago, home of the free and the strange? One does eventually learn the art of responding the foolish questions about policy with answers like "because I feel like it" or "we're doing it this way just to bother you", which is a good way of shutting down discussions that aren't worth having, especially if one then pursues the premise one has advanced with the conviction of an improvisational actor doing a scene - that is, if it's the reality one acts on as one gives one's small performance, no matter what the other person may say. Should one do that, the troublemaker's complaints have nowhere to go. But at that poin, being somewhat troubled by the question of how one is to promote reason by adopting (and thus reinforcing) the signiature practices of my more blatantly anti-rational neighbors (eg. the assertiveness training wing of the self-help movement), I still felt the need to give serious answers to insane questions, and on this occasion reaped unforseen benefits by doing so.
What addressing that bizarre non-issue in a serious way forced me to do
was go into the philosophy of aesthetics a little. In particular, in a
page entitled "Loosening up ... to an extent"
in an article in that section entitled "Sex and
the Single Pagan", I found myself confronted with the question "what
is beauty and what is ugliness", writing
"This sense of ugliness (or beauty) comes spontaneously from within. It is the product of our conditioning, which changes in time, acting on our fundamental inner natures, which don't, for the most part. An acquired taste, or that which we learn to enjoy, after preconceptions are overcome, is a reflection of an approximation of that inner nature. The approaching of the appreciation of that which our hidden inner selves would enjoy, this finding of our aesthetic selves, is what constitutes sophistication in taste. But you can't force it, and you can't deduce what it will be, through logic, or even observe, instantly, what it will be.
All you can do is let yourself be drawn to it by breaking down the barriers that stand in the way of reaching it. One gently pushes back a fear or dislike, holds it back for a little while, and sees if what was uncomfortable becomes comfortable and if one is the better for it. One can't be entirely sure of how long it will take for this to occur, even if it is going to. But the previous experiences of those who have tried what we are curious about, can give us some guide to what might be interesting to try - which inhibitions we might try to loosen, for the moment - and how hard we should try before giving up. Van Gogh often rewards the patient museum goer, who sees the beauty of his work in time, even if not quickly. Decomposing beaver carcasses never seem to grow on anyone, though. It is not a matter of society "deciding" that the former has a rough beauty, and the latter is ugly, but a memory of where beauty finally was experienced.
But, one should not dismiss or scorn the temporary delights along the way, for the pleasure they bring is real. If what we seek to draw toward is to be a reflection of our fundemental nature, then what we are to enjoy at the moment, aside from occasional efforts to break the mental blocks mentioned above, must be a reflection of our nature, as it is at the moment. The child who someday will enjoy MacBeth, should not be made to feel shame today because he is watching his cartoons. Those "less sophisticated pleasures" are things that we need to experience, at each point, for the enjoyment of that which we will enjoy at the next stage in our journey of aesthetic self discovery to be possible. If one knocks the rungs out of a stepladder because one doesn't want to be anywhere on it but its top, how far will one rise?
"Free spiritness", if it is forced, ceases to be such. If we force ourselves to experience something that, at the moment, we truly find distasteful (even if that distaste is "illogical" in the sense that it is a reflection of nothing more than our conditioning), at best we are denying ourselves that temporary pleasure we need to grow. Quite likely, though, we will be forcing something on ourselves that wouldn't be good for us, even if we achieved that perfect aesthetic self knowledge that is only approached in approximation in life.