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OK, Winter's halfway over: time for a completely unscientific survey. Complete this sentence:
The thing that drives me craziest about pagans is that we....
NATURALISTIC PAGANISM: A CHALLENGE
TO THE PARADIGMS OF THE OVERCULTURE
I received my third reading on the subject of whether I should take a job as a presenter at a specific online event.
Reading C: Tarot, from Lady Firespring at Sacred Spring
I got a tarot reading from Lady Silverspring. We spoke on the phone. At the start, she asked me what my purpose for the reading was, and I indicated that I had been wondering if I should take that job and at that point it was looking like no, but I wanted to go ahead with the reading because it was part of the next steps I needed to take on my career path. My friend said I should make a more open ended question, so I went with, "What's my best career move at this time?"
Surprisingly to me, although I had to laugh a bit at how much it dovetailed with internal godphone conversations I've had, the first thing that came up was that money is an illusion. I was like, "I know, sunshine is real, my cat is real, money is an illusion, but I have to treat it like it's real." And the next card was the Hanged Man, which made me laugh out loud. "Yes, Odin." I saw him in my mind's eye stroking his beard and saying "mmm" to indicate his presence.
As far as the convention job went, I should not take it, and basically, I don't have to take opportunities just because they fall out of the sky at me. The things I already decided that I want to do for money and career, that I'm already taking steps to go out and get for myself, are the things I should be doing. Those are long term and I need patience and trust and faith to keep going but that doesn't mean I just wait, I do things, and I should keep doing those things.
Another thing that came up in the reading was grief. I need to give myself space for that. I don't have to fill all my time with accomplishing things and keeping busy. My friend said the word Guardian more than once, and I let her know that that was a title Tom had now. She said he had decided to stay around as a protector instead of reincarnating and I said that was correct, Tom had been a Heimdall's man while he was alive and he had chosen to become one of Heimdall's Guardians.
After that our conversation became more general. We hadn't talked in far too long. It was a great reading. It confirmed what I had heard in my other readings, that I should not take that job, but it went farther and told me about what I should be doing instead. The tarot reading told me that my job right now is to grieve and to do the the long term things I'd already been doing before the job opportunity arrived. I should continue as I had already been doing before.
When you've been doing something for six months, and everyone around you has only been doing it for five, that makes you the elder.
Gods help us all.
That was the situation back in the early days of Paganistan. At the time, most of us hadn't been doing this for very long, but the fact that we'd been doing it longer than anyone else made us the de facto elders of the community.
Incredibly enough, the community survived anyway. It not only survived, but flourished.
You learn fast when you have to. When people around you expect you to be wise, it's surprising how wise you can actually be.
Well, sometimes.
It may well be that you yourself are in this same position: a premature elder in a young community.
There has always been something about the Wiccan Rede that has bothered me, and I've finally figured out what it is.
The Wiccan Rede, for those new to the community or coming into Atheopaganism from atheist/skeptic circles, is the only widely (though far from universally) adopted moral precept in the Pagan community. It reads: "An (if) it harm none, do what thou wilt."
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It's still one of the best opening lines that I've ever heard.
A buddy and I had gone over to 'Saint' Paul to check out the new Ethiopian restaurant.
While we were there, I noticed at a nearby table a woman with very intense eyes, giving the waiter a hard time.
Tough customer, I thought.
About halfway through the meal, I looked up to see the tough customer standing at our table. Those intense eyes were on me now.
“I like your pentagram,” she said, then paused. “I have one too.”
For thousands of years, since the very advent of human existence, there has been an evolving trajectory of religious history in Western societies.
The story passes from the earliest animism and ancestor worship to the rise of belief in gods, the consolidation of authoritarian power under monotheisms, and the complete domination of Western societies by Christianity. It continues through the Enlightenment, the steady gains of science shattering the cosmological monopoly of the Abrahamic monotheisms, the increasing tension between orthodoxy and individuality splintering these monotheisms into thousands of sects, and finally, most recently, to the rise of the Nones: those who describe themselves as having no religious affiliation at all, which is well established in most of the rest of the developed world and advancing quickly in the United States.
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