PaganSquare


PaganSquare is a community blog space where Pagans can discuss topics relevant to the life and spiritual practice of all Pagans.

  • Home
    Home This is where you can find all the blog posts throughout the site.
  • Tags
    Tags Displays a list of tags that have been used in the blog.
  • Bloggers
    Bloggers Search for your favorite blogger from this site.
  • Login
    Login Login form
Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Polytheology

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 Some Thoughts on a Pagan Catechism by Ezra Pound

 

“Think what god it may be.”

According to American poet and critic Ezra Pound (1885-1972), this is what you should do when encountering a god.

Published at the very end of the First World War, in 1918, Religio, or the Child's Guide to Knowledge is a curious work, a kind of pagan catechism: variously flippant, obtuse, and profound.

Do we know the number of the gods? he asks, and answers: It would be rash to say that we do. [One] should be content with a reasonable number.

Pagan for more than five decades now myself, I would still be hard put to come up with a better answer.

One phrase from Religio has haunted me for years.

How should one perceive a god, by his name?

It is better to perceive a god by form, or by the sense of knowledge, and after perceiving him thus, to consider his name or to “think what god it may be.”

“Think what god it may be.” For all its sense of playfulness, Pound here touches upon the warm, beating heart of polytheist experience. When encountering the divine, the monotheist has no need to wonder Who; but the pagan—the thinking pagan, at least—always must. Which god, among all the Many, might this one be?

“Think what god it may be.” Pound cites the phrase in quotation marks: is it really a quotation, or just meant to present as one? Certainly, it bears the hallmark of being the words of some venerable Greek or Roman author, wise in the ways of the gods: Cicero, perhaps, or Homer. Certainly it evinces a depth of understanding beyond what we would expect from irascible old Ezra Pound, Fascist sympathizer and anti-Semite that he was.

Last modified on

 

I am a cauldron bubbling over. I've just finished reading Gus diZerega's God is Dead, Love Live the Gods: A Case for Polytheism.

(You can see some my reflections before reading the book here.)

I won't at this point attempt a full-scale review of this rich and nuanced work. (Stay tuned.) One thing, though, is clear to me: that to do justice to What Is in all its dazzling multiplicity may well require multiple theologies.

(Outrageous as such a suggestion might be, it somehow seems consonant with a worldview grounded in the Many.)

I would suggest that we need at least two theologies, one for the Elder Gods, one for the Younger: to vastly oversimplify, the gods of “nature” and the gods of culture, respectively.

Though both are gods, They're not the same.

The ancestors regularly distinguished between, if I may, two modalities of divinity. In most surviving pantheons, the Olden Gods, the “nature” powers, tend to get relegated to the background; it's the Younger Gods—the ones with human faces—that stand in the forefront with their temples, cultuses, and fancy myths. As we think through the implications of modern paganism, we need to keep this distinction in mind.

Different gods, different theologies.

DiZerega's work deals almost exclusively with the Younger Gods. As he sees it—to (perhaps unfairly) oversimply his rather more nuanced thought—they are, essentially, “egregores”: creations of the human mind. (This, of course, is not to deny that they have an existence and a reality of their own.) That's why they vary so much from culture to culture.

Like virtually all other contemporary pagan theologians, his treatment of the Elder Gods is minimal, in this case, a single sentence: “We do not often, if ever, see the same deity manifesting independently in very different cultures, except in very general terms, such as Mother Earth” [diZerega 192].

Yet surely this is not so. Earth, Sun, Moon, Sea, the Winds, Thunder....I could go on. These gods arise in pantheon after pantheon because they are the undeniable ground of reality. (That They should show Themselves differently to different people in different places should surprise no one.) They are not egregores, though egregores may form around Them. (In this instance, one can hardly avoid thinking of grit and pearls.) We see here a clear distinguishing characteristic of the Old Gods: They may not be understood without reference to the non-human world.

These categories of gods, Younger and Elder, are not, of course, mutually exclusive. Take, for example, the Yoruba and Afro-Diasporic goddess Oshún. As an Elder Goddess, she is goddess of the River Oshún, in what is now Nigeria. As a Younger Goddess, she is goddess of love, beauty, female sexuality, etc. As I see it, the danger lies in the detachment of one from the other.

Last modified on
Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Gus diZerega
    Gus diZerega says #
    Actually I do not believe the younger gods are egregores or thought forms. There is a aspect of the latter in them, which I think
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    I'm always reminded of the poet Simonides who, when asked by Dionysios of Syracuse, "What is a god?" stalled for as long as possib
  • Mark Green
    Mark Green says #
    I wrote on what you are calling the Elder Gods back in 2015, and actually pointed people to your writing. I specifically define th

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Of Gods and Bodies

Possibly the most disquieting sentence that I've ever read opens Robert Graves' retelling of one of the Greek myths:

One day Mother Earth was visiting Athens.*

Say what?

Also up there on my list of theological “What-duh-f**k?” moments is Isaac Bonewits' “Invocation to the Earth Mother”:

Thou Whom the Druids call Danu,

Come unto us.

Thou Who art Erde of the Germans,

Come unto us.

Thou Whom the Slavs call Ziva,

Come unto us....*

 

Half a mo here. We're calling Earth to come to us?

Last modified on
Recent comment in this post - Show all comments
  • Thesseli
    Thesseli says #
    Exactly.

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Differently Theological

Some would say that the pagan religions are non-theological.

If by this we mean that pagan religions tend not to have 'systematic' theologies, I would agree.

But I prefer to think that we're just differently theological.

Drawing on the word's original meaning (theos, 'a god' + logos, 'word') theologian David Miller defines theology as 'thinking and talking about the gods.' (Miller's 1974 The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses was a pioneering work of contemporary polytheist thought.)

No system required, no seminaries involved. Thinking and talking about the gods.

That's something that pagans do all the time.

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Other Cloaks

It's one of the more pressing questions of contemporary pagan theology.

What happened to the pagan gods during the centuries of the Great Interruption?

Did they fall asleep? Did they go away?

In the Baltics, the Old Ways lingered long. In Latvia, the Thunderer of the old pantheon—Perkons (= Perkunas, Perun, etc.)—came to be identified (among others) with “Saint” Martin.

“Martin carries nine Perkonses under his cloak,” was the saying.

Did the Old Gods abandon their people?

No, indeed. They've never abandoned us, and They never will.

They wrapped Themselves in other cloaks and waited.

Last modified on
Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    That's a great question, Anthony, with more than one answer. But one of those answers is surely the most surprising of all: They h
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I'm familiar with the notion that the Saints and Superheroes are the old gods in disguise. I kind of like that notion actually.
Fighting the Good Fight: Steven Dillon's Case for Polytheism

In his new book, The Case for Polytheism, philosopher Steven Dillon sets out to prove that belief in the existence of multiple “disembodied consciousnesses” (i.e. gods) can be rational, logically coherent, and intellectually credible.

And, for the most part, he succeeds—for one already inclined to belief, at least. Though this diehard polyatheist (= non-believer, but culturally polytheist), for one, remains unconvinced, Dillon is hardly to be faulted for not achieving the impossible. To have attempted the impossible in the first place in itself constitutes heroic endeavor.

Dillon's argument, however, is handicapped by an unexamined premise that he shares with John Michael Greer, whose World Full of Gods is also a notable contribution to the field of what the late Isaac Bonewits was wont to call “polytheology.” This is the premise that all gods ever worshiped by anyone, pagan or non-pagan, have the same ontological existence.

Now, to contend that many gods exist is by no means the same as contending that all gods exist. Is the polytheist to be permitted no skepticism whatsoever? Is to love the Many necessarily to be party to everything that the human heart has ever dreamed?

Last modified on
Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • tehomet
    tehomet says #
    Lost Gods of the Witches! Bring it on.
  • Lizzy Hood
    Lizzy Hood says #
    I will be looking forward to reading your book, sir.
American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting - I

November 2014

San Diego, CA 

Day One: Friday

The Pacific Surfliner Amtrak train arrived in San Diego at 1:00 a.m. on Friday, having boarded the Coast Starlight in Emeryville at 6:10 a.m. on Thursday.  Due to confused arrangements for lodging, I had no place to stay.  Took cab to home of my niece Ally and crashed on inflatable mattress in their living room.  The good news is that I got to spend a little time with her, her spouse Lisa, and their darling little Rockwell, aged 19 months, on Friday morning.  I taught him a new word.  He was identifying animals in one of his picture books.  He liked to go “hoo, hoo” when he saw owl.  He could say something approximating “sheep,” but didn’t have sheep’s sound.  I said “baaa, baaa” in a really croaky sheep voice, and he cracked up.  Now he has another word in his vocabulary: “baaa.”  Meaning I blew off the early Friday sessions I’d planned to attend.

Ally dropped me off at a hotel where I was staying for one night, thanks to my friend Megory Anderson of the Sacred Dying Foundation.  Checked in and made my way to the colossal San Diego Convention Center, where I picked up my nametag and bag.  (Purple this year, and sturdily made.)

Feeling a bit lost in the vastness of this convention center, I headed for familiar territory and found myself at the Forum on Religion and Ecology, Yale University, annual luncheon.  I decided to stay for a while because the luncheon was headed by John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker; John Grim and I had participated in The Biodiversity Project[1] Spirituality Working Group[2] at a small retreat near Madison, Wisconsin, in 1999.  The first person I encountered whom I knew was Bron Taylor, headed for this luncheon.  I was fortunate to have a little time for one-on-one with Bron, when we shared optimism about the emphasis on climate change at this AAR, and considered more recent changes in radical environmental activism with the death of such notables as my friend Sequoia in 2008.  I chatted with some of the organizers for a while because we were early, and learned that one of them, a man from Vermont, has a son who is a grower in California.  You never know.

Soon we were joined by Graham Harvey, Doug Ezzy, and others.  As I listened to every person in the room -- I would guess more than 100 -- introduce her or himself and say something about where they were working (universities, graduate students, NGOs, et al.), I was pleased to hear all the references to ecology, nature, climate change, and the like.  Of course, some went on and on explaining what they were doing, and that had to be checked so there was time for everyone else to speak.  I said I was from Covenant of the Goddess and Cherry Hill Seminary, indicating that CHS was the first and only Pagan seminary and that it operated in cyberspace (green, ya know), and that I lived in a county in a metropolitan area that, thanks to some far-seeing wealthy environmental activists and not to me, is zoned 70 percent open space.

I wasn’t able to stick around for very long because I left for a tête-à-tête with a Pagan pal from Colorado before the conference got too crazy.

Here are examples of a few of Friday’s sessions that intrigued me but that I couldn’t attend 

★      Religion and Media Workshop, “The History and Materiality of Religious Circulations,” a day-long seminar “designed to foster collaborative conversation at the cutting edge of the study of religion, media, and culture…[exploring] the history and materiality of religious circulations.”

★      Dharma Academy of North America (DANAM), “Polytheology: The Vision of Plural Divinities,” featuring, among others, papers on “Conceptualizing Divinity: One, None, or Many”; “Conceptualizing the Divine: How Hindu Deities Are Presented in High School World Religions Courses in Canada”; “Devotions of Attachment and Detachment & the Myriad Divinities of Jainism”; ”When Hanuman Became a Jain: The Miraculous Story of Babosa”; “Deities, Bodhisattvas, and Buddhas: Nontheism in a Theocratic Universe.”

       

Last modified on

Additional information