religious noodles
Dec. 14th, 2022 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iimpavidI'm stressed so I'm thinking about religion.
A sentiment that I keep running into, implicitly, in polytheistic spaces is this bizarre ass idea that a person being a polytheist makes them, in some way, morally good. Sometimes even morally better than monotheists. This notion is wildly incorrect and it drives me batty. This is because polytheistic faiths cannot be inherently about morality, no matter what Christian hegemony asserts on the subject.
While it is possible, even likely, that in oral histories many polytheisms did contain stories of the gods that were allegorical and intended to impart moral lessons-- and while I believe deep readings of some mythologies (original and reconstructed) that exist today can teach powerful lessons-- a lot of what survives... doesn't do that. There are a lot of reasons why. Christianity's the big one. Largely, people have been taught not to think of these religious stories as anything but entertainment and, at least in the US, people are not encouraged to think deeply about religion in general. Faith is considered, by the colonized mind, to be backwards and unscientific-- polytheistic faith, even more so. Our stories of the gods are usually splintered, mistranslated, gutted of original authorial intent, and taken out of their original cultural context, making them difficult to chew on on a deeper level.
Neopagan, polytheistic revival, and other movements from the last century are also wildly disorganized and have no set scholarly traditions. This causes great harm, to say the least, to many facets of religious organizations and the ability we as worshippers have to preserve what we know of our gods and to build a wider base of knowledge from incoming gnosis. Unlike the Christians, we don't have a teacher who, every week, picks a different piece of religious content to unpack and explain to a group of worshippers who are less inclined toward noodling constantly on matters of faith, drawing parallels between current events and texts, bringing in lessons from a wide variety of scholars and disciplines, all to help the laity better understand the myth in question.
(For a very long time, I've wanted to fill that kind of a role, but I don't think it's in the cards for me. It's a shame, because one of my pet topics is how, in one reading, the story of the events leading to Ragnarok is an excellent allegory for the consequences of unpaid wergild and family feuds. I'd love to be able to talk with someone about this some day.)
All of this attrition and disorganization and outright destruction of knowledge means that we can't easily look to stories of our gods to develop answers to big moral questions.
Even with a vibrant, rich tradition of storytelling around our gods, I still would advise against, to take a common example, modeling one's behavior on Loki's as survives in the myths without first taking a lot of time to understand the function of Tricksters-- never mind Loki's many, many bynames and other mysteries. Generally speaking, doing this is edgelord behavior (and it gives Lokisfolk a terrible reputation in every community). Generally speaking, even when you act with understanding of the role you're taking on, this is a great way to set yourself up for a lot of unwanted consequences. Loki specifically has been known to encourage people to take their hubris as far as they'd like, because the inevitable consequences of those choices are about as painful and hilarious as a goat playing tug-of-war with one's testicles. The cockiest among us ttend to pay attention more to lessons that hurt like hell.
(The infamous goat story, as it ties into Loki's binding, is another lesson, on the topic of blasphemy as was done toward Skadi... but that's a ramble for another day.)
The gods have a great many virtues, but no single one of them will be virtuous in all things and all ways. The gods are not perfect. They are limited in what they know. They have ideas and plans of their own and are often at odds with each other and can go wildly wrong. They are not obligated to acknowledge us, to love us back, to do anything at all-- although sometimes, they do. This is the nature of polytheism. Our gods are very human in some ways-- they, like us, are not inherently what we would consider "good".
If our gods are like us, flawed, and our religion does not (and in some ways cannot) provide moral guidance, that we must accept that not every single polytheist we meet is going to be "good" by our personal measure. Some of us are downright evil by any measure. This is true everywhere you go any in every single religion. I would have imagined that polytheism would force people to be a bit more honest about this fact but we humans really, really like to think of people sharing our identity groups as being better than Others.
My advice to new polytheists is always do your homework. If you feel you have sufficiently researched a group, symbol, story, or philosophy, you haven't. A truly infuriating amount of thought in current polytheism is traceable directly to "theosophy" and other early 1900's spiritualist-type movements which were predicated on violent colonization and eugenics and eventually were beloved by Nazis. That's to say nothing of the harm cults tend to do. If we want to build religions that do not perpetuate these blasphemous, evil ideas, then we have to be diligent. We have to do our homework.
One of the better ways to do this that I've found is studying languages-- learning tales of the gods that are as old as we can get hands on, studying how they've syncretized and changed over the millennia. This is no cure-all, but knowing the history, for me, makes the garbage easier to weed out, as you can't really trust "this sounds right" as a pedigree.
A sentiment that I keep running into, implicitly, in polytheistic spaces is this bizarre ass idea that a person being a polytheist makes them, in some way, morally good. Sometimes even morally better than monotheists. This notion is wildly incorrect and it drives me batty. This is because polytheistic faiths cannot be inherently about morality, no matter what Christian hegemony asserts on the subject.
While it is possible, even likely, that in oral histories many polytheisms did contain stories of the gods that were allegorical and intended to impart moral lessons-- and while I believe deep readings of some mythologies (original and reconstructed) that exist today can teach powerful lessons-- a lot of what survives... doesn't do that. There are a lot of reasons why. Christianity's the big one. Largely, people have been taught not to think of these religious stories as anything but entertainment and, at least in the US, people are not encouraged to think deeply about religion in general. Faith is considered, by the colonized mind, to be backwards and unscientific-- polytheistic faith, even more so. Our stories of the gods are usually splintered, mistranslated, gutted of original authorial intent, and taken out of their original cultural context, making them difficult to chew on on a deeper level.
Neopagan, polytheistic revival, and other movements from the last century are also wildly disorganized and have no set scholarly traditions. This causes great harm, to say the least, to many facets of religious organizations and the ability we as worshippers have to preserve what we know of our gods and to build a wider base of knowledge from incoming gnosis. Unlike the Christians, we don't have a teacher who, every week, picks a different piece of religious content to unpack and explain to a group of worshippers who are less inclined toward noodling constantly on matters of faith, drawing parallels between current events and texts, bringing in lessons from a wide variety of scholars and disciplines, all to help the laity better understand the myth in question.
(For a very long time, I've wanted to fill that kind of a role, but I don't think it's in the cards for me. It's a shame, because one of my pet topics is how, in one reading, the story of the events leading to Ragnarok is an excellent allegory for the consequences of unpaid wergild and family feuds. I'd love to be able to talk with someone about this some day.)
All of this attrition and disorganization and outright destruction of knowledge means that we can't easily look to stories of our gods to develop answers to big moral questions.
Even with a vibrant, rich tradition of storytelling around our gods, I still would advise against, to take a common example, modeling one's behavior on Loki's as survives in the myths without first taking a lot of time to understand the function of Tricksters-- never mind Loki's many, many bynames and other mysteries. Generally speaking, doing this is edgelord behavior (and it gives Lokisfolk a terrible reputation in every community). Generally speaking, even when you act with understanding of the role you're taking on, this is a great way to set yourself up for a lot of unwanted consequences. Loki specifically has been known to encourage people to take their hubris as far as they'd like, because the inevitable consequences of those choices are about as painful and hilarious as a goat playing tug-of-war with one's testicles. The cockiest among us ttend to pay attention more to lessons that hurt like hell.
(The infamous goat story, as it ties into Loki's binding, is another lesson, on the topic of blasphemy as was done toward Skadi... but that's a ramble for another day.)
The gods have a great many virtues, but no single one of them will be virtuous in all things and all ways. The gods are not perfect. They are limited in what they know. They have ideas and plans of their own and are often at odds with each other and can go wildly wrong. They are not obligated to acknowledge us, to love us back, to do anything at all-- although sometimes, they do. This is the nature of polytheism. Our gods are very human in some ways-- they, like us, are not inherently what we would consider "good".
If our gods are like us, flawed, and our religion does not (and in some ways cannot) provide moral guidance, that we must accept that not every single polytheist we meet is going to be "good" by our personal measure. Some of us are downright evil by any measure. This is true everywhere you go any in every single religion. I would have imagined that polytheism would force people to be a bit more honest about this fact but we humans really, really like to think of people sharing our identity groups as being better than Others.
My advice to new polytheists is always do your homework. If you feel you have sufficiently researched a group, symbol, story, or philosophy, you haven't. A truly infuriating amount of thought in current polytheism is traceable directly to "theosophy" and other early 1900's spiritualist-type movements which were predicated on violent colonization and eugenics and eventually were beloved by Nazis. That's to say nothing of the harm cults tend to do. If we want to build religions that do not perpetuate these blasphemous, evil ideas, then we have to be diligent. We have to do our homework.
One of the better ways to do this that I've found is studying languages-- learning tales of the gods that are as old as we can get hands on, studying how they've syncretized and changed over the millennia. This is no cure-all, but knowing the history, for me, makes the garbage easier to weed out, as you can't really trust "this sounds right" as a pedigree.
no subject
on 2022-12-14 11:05 pm (UTC)What stands in your way?
The gods have a great many virtues, but no single one of them will be virtuous in all things and all ways. The gods are not perfect. They are limited in what they know. They have ideas and plans of their own and are often at odds with each other and can go wildly wrong. They are not obligated to acknowledge us, to love us back, to do anything at all-- although sometimes, they do. This is the nature of polytheism. Our gods are very human in some ways-- they, like us, are not inherently what we would consider "good".
There's a strain of thought in Judaism that says that the Jewish God is also imperfect. For example, this. It's also hard not to take that viewpoint if you take the stories in the Torah as illustrations of what the Jewish God is like. This song was recommended during my synagogue's High Holidays preparation class.
no subject
on 2022-12-15 12:05 am (UTC)Filthy lucre lol
Truthfully, though, it's always money, with a side of spoon theory.
Most formal chaplaincy-type positions in hospitals or similar require a BA in Divinities. I can't afford to go back to school. And a chaplaincy, assuming I could get a job, is more about listening and psychology rather than teaching or exploring the gods I'm called to.
Teaching people in the pagan community in my area will require significant investment, attending paid events and spending a lot of energy talking to people to gain social credit and do the networking necessary to be invited into more serious discussion groups and be accepted into a clerical apprenticeship. It is difficult to find a sect that aligns with my values, even loosely, as there is a problem with anti-vax types of pagans in my area and my pantheon famously attracts evil.
After all of those hurdles are negotiated and pitfalls avoided, there's the process of clerical initiations. Those processes differ for every faith, even those that share the pantheon I happen to worship.
There IS one tradition that has a solid grounding in scholarly labor, good sense, and aligns with all of my values, my gods, and my current knowledge-- but the teachers are not in my area and are not currently taking on students. When they take on students again, if I'm accepted, I will have to find the money to spend to travel to the coast a few times a year for in-person training.
Which isn't to say that this particular path is off the table. I keep pretty thorough documentation of the training I'm able to get and the research and essays I put together, as they align with the criteria for the apprenticeship I'm seeking. That way, when I am able to possibly spend the money for it, I will have proof of commitment and some useful skills.
I just want to spend more time in my day-to-day life on this than I'm currently able.
Yes!! This is actually something that I found really, deeply appealing when I was studying Judaism. I've always found myself really appreciating deities who can learn from humans in return. (Truthfully, I believe that They all learn from us in many ways, but I think that us humans in Christian cultures do not often like to admit that.)
Last year, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg's newsletter discussed the imperfection of the Jewish god in the context of human suffering. It's a pretty intense essay, but I really loved it. I started noodling on it shallowly on WordPress immediately after I read it but I'm still chewing on it today.
By the way, that song is beautiful and it's going onto my playlist of faith music. Thank you. This is really beautiful and I'm going to listen to it on repeat for a long time.
I'm also going to absolutely be taking this soul kibble metaphor to heart in my own practice. My dog is going to love it and I'm going to love the little opportunities to pray, too. A lot of people I read in my faith talk about things like prayer as a skill to be developed and I think that it goes both ways-- after all, gods must make themselves very small to reach back out to us and I have to assume that takes a great deal of effort.
no subject
on 2022-12-15 01:00 am (UTC)A lot of people I read in my faith talk about things like prayer as a skill to be developed and I think that it goes both ways-- after all, gods must make themselves very small to reach back out to us and I have to assume that takes a great deal of effort.
You might then like the Jewish concept of tzimtzum, which my rabbi calls "the bagelization of God" - the idea that the divine had to retreat, to become slightly less than all it could be, to allow creation to exist at all (like a bagel with a hole in it, and the hole is where creation is).
no subject
on 2022-12-15 03:34 pm (UTC)It reminds me of a pagan poet describing the gods as being stalactites reaching down to try to touch the rising stalagmite of humanity. This is because gods, spirits in general, are entirely unique unto themselves and are simultaneously parts of greater wholes that are transcendent and archetypal-- all the way up to the metaphorical cave ceiling, which is the divine source all spirits come from, whatever we want to call it. There's no conflict or hierarchy in this idea that I'm aware of but I've seen a lot of theological arguments in pagan spaces come up because, on the surface, it seems to be a contradiction of the idea that our gods are immanent and unique.
no subject
on 2022-12-15 01:02 am (UTC)I'm also struggling with how to make my life more like I want it to be, calling-wise. I'm pretty sure I'm not called to be clergy, but I'm also dealing with a lack of money and spoons that stands in the way of me pursuing things that I would like to do.
no subject
on 2022-12-15 03:38 pm (UTC)I also wish for you to find the money and spoons to pursue your faith in all of the ways you want and need to. It's a beautiful thing, to seek the divine in this world of ours, but our societies don't always make that good work easy to get to.
If there's any way I can help support you in this endeavor, even if only through conversation, please let me know.
no subject
on 2022-12-15 03:44 pm (UTC)