Naturalistic Paganism
“Atheopaganism: An Earth-Centered Religion without Supernatural Credulity” by Mark Green
a·the·o·pa·gan·ism (noun) \ˈā-thē-ō-pā-gən-iz-əm\
: godless paganism, paganism without gods
I was a Pagan for more than 20 years. At least, I think I was.
I had been raised as a rational materialist in a scientific household, but was introduced to Pagan rituals and community at age 25, and in short order felt at home there. Unlike the mainstream religions, it got a lot of things right. It didn’t have a demonstrably error-laden “holy book”, and it wasn’t as sour and mean-spirited as the various mainstream religions. Paganism’s values celebrate the natural world, revere beauty and pleasure and creativity, suspect authority, and encourage gratitude, celebration, humor and enjoyment.
I could enthusiastically embrace all of that. It enriched my life tremendously to join with my friends to ritually celebrate the turning of the Earth’s seasons, to remind myself of what each time and season means in the natural world and the agricultural cycle, and what it meant to people long ago.
That said, I believe in critical thinking, in the scientific method, and in the intellectual process. Over time, it became clear to me that in the Pagan community, most of the people around me were not viewing “gods” and “magic” as metaphors and psychological techniques, but as literal, supernatural phenomena taking place in an Invisible Dimension lurking behind the material world and driving its events. This superstitious credulity became more than my intellectual self could tolerate.
However, once I had left its practice, I missed what was right about Paganism: the ways in which religion meets the needs of humans which are not centered in cognitive thought, but rather which seek community, a sense of meaning in life, and the richness of experience that comes with presence, celebration, gratitude and awe.
So I began to explore for myself what religion is in a functional sense, how these functions correlate with the needs and appetites of the various systems of the human brain, and to ponder how “religion” could be teased apart from “superstition”. Because it was clear to me that, though most people assume as a matter of course that a religion must incorporate a supernatural component, there is no particular reason it should, other than as a habit carried over from the days when humans had no better explanations for the phenomena they experience than the supernatural.
The analytical process which led to my conclusions in this regard is captured by a much longer piece than can be included here, but which is available at the Atheopaganism Facebook page. It is a closed group, but you can request addition and I will add you.
What I decided to do was to create a non-superstitious tradition of Earth-centered religious observance: Atheopaganism. As I have done so, I have been delighted to find that many of my friends have acknowledged that they had the same difficulties with Paganism that I did, and have joined my wife and myself in our celebrations.
So…what is a religion, really?
I would contend that at root, a religion comes down to four elements:
- Cosmology: the accepted understanding of the nature of the Universe and how it works
- Values: definition of what is important or sacred
- Principles: ethical guidelines as operational “rules for living”
- Practices: rituals, holidays, and other observances
Now, at this point it bears saying that my atheistic religion in no way defines the atheistic religion. Entirely different principles and practices could be developed based in other values. But my particular flavor of supernature-free religion looks like this:
Cosmology
Cosmology is the easiest one for an Atheopagan: we cede it to science. Science is the best modality we have for understanding the true nature of the Universe, and we allow it to do its job.
Values (the Sacred)
We can’t talk about religion or define a new one without addressing the issue of what is to be considered sacred: what that means, and how it informs the values by which the practitioner is expected to live.
At root “sacredness” is an ascribed quality: an opinion. It is applied to whatever is highly valued by the tradition or practice in question, and to those objects, events and practices which evoke internal narratives which communicate the religion’s beliefs and values.
Only four things, ultimately, fall into that category for me:
The World. Meaning generally the Universe, but most specifically the biosphere: Life. It is the Earth and the Cosmos which gave rise to all humanity and which support our ability to survive. All we eat, all we breathe, all we came from is this, and it is thus holy.
Beauty. Beauty is that which inspires joy in living and which communicates the inner truth of the creative person. Beauty fills our hearts and provokes our minds, strikes us motionless with the recognition of our good fortune in being alive. Bright and dark, soaring with joy or filled with rage, we know beauty because it sets our Limbic brains to singing. It is not optional, trivial or superfluous.
Truth. Truth is the only beacon we have to light our way into the unknown future. And the more significant the topic, the more sacred is the truth about it. It is a deep wrong to deny what is true when it Affects what is sacred. This isn’t about “little white lies”. It’s about the tremendous and humbling power of Truth to bring down despotism and corruption, to right wrongs, to advance liberty, to build closeness between us.
Love. Love lights up the dashboards of our Limbic brains and provides us the courage to reach across the great gulf to the Other. It drives our kindest and best impulses, enables us to forgive what we suffer, spurs us to face down the darkness and carry on, to insist that betterment is possible, that the ugly moment needs not be the end of the story. Love brings hope where it has flagged, sometimes for years. It is the redemptive power each of us bears within us to deliver another from hell and into light.
Principles
Being a moral person is about how you act, not what you believe. These principles are an Atheopagan’s guide.
I recognize that the metaphorical is not the literal.
I honor the Earth which produced and sustains humanity.
I am grateful.
I am humble, acknowledging that I am a small, temporary being not inherently better or more important than any other person.
I laugh a lot—including at myself.
I enact regular ritual play, in which I willingly suspend my thinking mind and use the technologies of religious ritual to invoke a state of presence in the moment and heightened experience of the metaphorical.
I celebrate diversity and am respectful of difference.
I recognize and embrace my responsibility to the young and future generations.
I acknowledge that freedom is tempered by responsibility, respecting the rights and freedoms of others and meeting my social responsibilities.
I celebrate pleasure as inherently good, so long as others are not harmed in its pursuit and the Sacred is respected.
I understand that knowledge is never complete. There is always more to be learned.
I conduct myself with integrity in word and deed.
I practice kindness and compassion with others and myself, recognizing that they and I will not always meet the standards set by these principles.
Practices
Religion isn’t just belief. It is doing: the rituals and observances (daily, seasonally, or for important life events) of a religion bring its community together, lend meaning and ongoing traditions to the lives of practitioners. While my group and I celebrate something like the regular Pagan “wheel of the year” for holidays, we have adjusted their meanings a bit to remove any supernatural references, and have added elements of the modern which the old Pagan holidays do not acknowledge. Highsummer, for example (at the beginning of August) is the celebration of labor, innovation, craft and technology.
Our rituals generally follow a structure, but one markedly different from the standard Pagan rite. It is as follows:
DECLARATION OF PRESENCE. Begins with mindfulness practice to calm/center the mind. Then an action or statement is made by one or more participants to declare presence and purpose; e.g., “We are sentient beings of Planet Earth, present in this place, this moment. The Cosmos is above us, the Earth is below us, and Life is around us. Here the wise mind unfolds. Here the playful child creates. Here the wondering human gazes out to view the vast and mighty Universe. We are here, and together.”
QUALITIES. Invoking the Qualities participants hope to carry within themselves as they move towards the Intentions: “May we know and embody these Qualities, that our rites guide us forward to achieve our dreams and better the world…”
INTENTIONS. Participants express their intentions for what is to be attained/achieved/realized during the ritual, such as to celebrate and give thanks for all they enjoy, to grow closer among one another, or to align themselves with a specific hoped-for possibility in the future.
DEEP PLAY. Ritual enactment meant to symbolize and concretize the desired Intentions for participants. Activities which stimulate the metabolism and the expressive self at this time will contribute to the feeling of presence and connectedness. Can include singing, chanting, drumming or other music making; dancing or other movement; symbolic enactment of drama; creation of some kind of art or crafted object in an intentional and allegorical manner, or recitation or spontaneous creation of poetry.
GRATITUDE. Expresses gratitude at having been supported by the Qualities the participants invoked, and for all they are blessed with in their lives. Sometimes expressed with shared food and drink. May also involve expressions of commitment on the part of participants of what they will do to act in accordance with their intent.
BENEDICTION. Example: (unison): “To enrich and honor the gift of our lives, to chart a kind and true way forward, by these words and deeds we name intent: to dare, to question, to love. May all that must be done, be done in joy. We go forth to live!”
Conclusion: What It Looks Like
Atheopaganism provides the fulfillment benefits of a traditional religion, yet is rooted in what is true and open to learning, change, and constant reconsideration of itself. While it does not make promises of eternal existence, a cosmically-determined plan or magical powers, it also does not ask us to sacrifice the unique and marvelous capacities of our cognitive minds in the name of living with a pretty story.
I, for one, find this tradeoff a worthy exchange.
The Author
Mark Green is an environmental organizer, political analyst, nonprofit professional, writer, musician, science and costuming geek. He likes to think about Big Stuff. Find out more about Atheopaganism at the Atheopaganism Facebook page.
The Wheel of Evolution, by Eric Steinhart: Lammas
Dr. Eric Steinhart draws on his philosophical background to create a naturalistic foundation for the Pagan Wheel of the Year. To better understand axiarchism, the philosophy on which Dr. Steinhart draws to create a Naturalistic Pagan theology, see Part 1 and Part 2 of his essay “Axiarchism and Paganism”.
Lammas marks the first harvest, which is the anthropic harvest. At Lammas, the human species has gone extinct. Every suffering human animal has made its prayers, and the whole suffering human species has made it prayers; and the answers to all these prayers have been gathered together into a set of possible universes, a set of utopian worlds, radiated by our universe. Our universe is now surrounded by a vast plurality of anthropic utopias, alternative ways our universe might have gone, in which our axiological demands are satisfied. Within some anthropic utopia, every sick human has a healthy counterpart; every wretched human has a happy counterpart; every unjust society has a just counterpart. And yet, at Lammas, all these anthropic utopias lie in the shadow of unreality. They are merely visions, the axiological* dreams of our universe. Our universe does not need to have a mind to have these dreams or visions. These visions are not produced by thinking; they are calculated by divine computations which implement the logic of possibility.
*Axiarchism is a philosophical theory which states that reality is ultimately defined by some kind of value. The demands made by value are axiological demands. An axiological demand is a proposition whose truth follows from the nature of the thing which makes it.
The Author
Eric Steinhart is a professor of philosophy at William Paterson University. He is the author of four books, including Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death. He is currently working on naturalistic foundations for Paganism, linking Paganism to traditional Western philosophy. He grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania. He loves New England and the American West, and enjoys all types of hiking and biking, chess, microscopy, and photography.
August Cross-Quarter
Forest fire
In the Northern Hemisphere, the Autumn cross-quarter or “summer thermistice” is celebrated on August 1 as Lughnasadh/Lammas. Astronomically, the event occurs around August 6th or 7th. Due to the seasonal lag, this is the hottest time of the year in many places in the Northern Hemisphere. Those in the Southern Hemisphere celebrate Imbolc at this time.
Glenys Livingstone of PaGaian Cosmology, in keeping with decline of the length of day, takes this time to contemplate dissolution and the deep self:
“This is the season of the waxing dark. The seed of darkness that was born at the Summer Solstice now grows … the dark part of the days grows visibly longer. Earth’s tilt is taking us back away from the Sun. This is the time when we celebrate dissolution, expansion into Deep Self, the time when each unique self lets go, to the Darkness. It is the time for celebrating ending, when the grain, the fruit, is harvested. We meet to remember the Dark Sentience, the All-Nourishing Abyss, She from whom we arise, in whom we are immersed and to whom we return. This is the time of the Crone, the Wise Dark One, who accepts and receives our harvest, who grinds the grain, who dismantles what has gone before.”
Glenys invites ritual participants to contemplate their hopes for the harvest.
Bart Everson of A Celebration of Gaia describes how he bakes bread with his family to celebrate Lammas:
“We usually make corn dollies, though the materials have changed over the years. I have taken to fashioning them out of the subtropical ferns which grow in our backyard. We have a bonfire to which we commit the Brigid’s crosses which we made at Candlemas. This is a way of connecting across the year, and also of simulating the agrarian cycle on which we still depend, despite the illusions of the global marketplace. Most importantly, for Lammas, we bake bread.
“There are many mysteries wrapped up in a loaf of bread. The process of baking from scratch can connect us to history, science, culture, agriculture, and nature. The bread can be a symbol of all these connections, of our relation with the Earth and with humanity. Best of all, it’s a delicious and healthy food, which has become a mainstay of my family’s diet.”
Jon Cleland Host of the Naturalistic Paganism yahoo discussion group describes how his family observes Lughnasadh:
“We celebrate Lammas by some kind of early harvesting, such as visiting a pick-your-own blueberry farm, wild raspberry picking, or such. To see the abundance of the earth, we’ll sometime spend time wandering (or even trying to run) in a mature cornfield. It’s one thing to say “Oh, yeah, the earth is producing a lot of growth”, but quite another indeed to be surrounded by it, blinding your sight and slowing your movement – that really shows the power of this Sabbat. We usually bake bread, perhaps in a woven Celtic knot, enjoying some of it during our ritual. The ritual is held during the afternoon’s heat, not at night.”
NaturalPantheist of the Nature is Sacred blog recites the following from ADF Solitary Druid Fellowship ritual on this day:
“As I stand here on this celebration of Lammas, the sacred wheel of the year continues to turn. As my ancestors did in times before and my descendants may do in times to come, I honour the old ways. The seeds have been sown and the crops have grown, now is the time of harvest. Today is the feast of first fruits and I celebrate the ripening of the grains. The sun has begun to wane but I enjoy still the long hot days of early autumn. I give thanks for the abundant gifts of the Earth Mother.
A Pedagogy of Gaia: “How Lammas Changed My Life” by Bart Everson
What can we learn, and how can we teach, from the cycles of the Earth — both the cycles within us, and the cycles in which we find ourselves?
A Subtropical “Fern Dolly”
The Dog Days of Summer
Do you know that time in late summer, when the air seems heavy and full, and the heat gets hotter, and everything seems to slide from ripe to overripe? It’s that sultry, sticky time sometimes called the Dog Days, after Sirius the Dog Star.
It’s my favorite time of year. Most of the people here in New Orleans think I’m crazy. Maybe I am. Then again, I work in an office which is maintained at such a bone-chilling temperature that some of my co-workers resort to using space heaters in August.
After the summer solstice, our hemisphere’s axial tilt to the sun diminishes each day. Slowly the days are growing shorter, the nights longer. The light is waning. Yet, outside the tropics at least, as a rule, the warmth increases. The processes of life, fueled by the sun, do not diminish but continue waxing. Just as solar noon is not the hottest time of the day, the solstice is not the hottest time of the year. That’s because of the simple fact that it takes time for the sun’s rays to warm things up.
This phenomenon is known as the lag of the seasons, and it may be observed on some other planets in our solar system as well as our own, particularly the gas giants. It just takes a while for those big atmospheres to heat up. On Earth, the seasonal lag is largely due to all the water with which we’re blessed. The oceans function as heat sinks. Thus, places surrounded by water may have a longer seasonal lag than dry places. In San Francisco, the hottest average period is in September, but in Death Valley, it’s in July.
Those who track the progress of the sun will correctly note the summer solstice as the crown of the year. Paying attention to the rhythms of the Earth reveals another apex, less precise, but perhaps even more relevant to humanity. In much of the world, that second apex takes place midway between the summer solstice and the equinox, at the end of July or the beginning of August in the northern hemisphere (late January or early February in the southern hemisphere).
We may not be highly attuned to these rhythms, but it comes as no surprise to learn that ancient people recognized this time and celebrated it. There’s a harvest festival which the Celts called Lughnasa or Lughnasadh. It’s still known in that last bastion of Celtic culture, Ireland, where it’s called Lúnasa. To the Welsh, it’s Gŵyl Awst; to the English, Lambess or Lammas.
Lammas Altar
A Modern Harvest
Shakespeare makes a point of fixing Juliet’s birthday on Lammas Eve, a fact which is announced as soon as she first appears on stage. This bit of foreshadowing would have appreciated by contemporary audiences: she was born just before the harvest; tragically, but poetically, her life will end before she comes into the full ripeness and maturity of womanhood.
My favorite literary reference, however, comes from Robert Burns in an 1783 lyric which recounts a romantic tryst in context of the grain harvest.
It was upon a Lammas night,
When corn rigs are bonie,
Beneath the moon’s unclouded light,
I held awa to Annie;
The time flew by, wi’ tentless heed,
Till, ‘tween the late and early,
Wi’ sma’ persuasion she agreed
To see me thro’ the barley.(An updated version of this lyric can be heard in the opening credits of the classic 1973 film, The Wicker Man, noted for its folk soundtrack by Paul Giovanni.)
I was confused by the word “corn” at first. Isn’t that a New World crop? I soon learned that, in the Atlantic Archipelago, corn refers to wheat or oats or barley, whatever might be the main cereal produced in a given area — not maize. The first harvest of such grains was the occasion for the festival of Lammas.
For 21st-century Americans like myself, this celebration is almost completely unknown. It is easily the most obscure of the eight festivals in the Wheel of the Year. The four solar holidays are at least vaguely familiar as the starting dates for the four seasons, though most Americans don’t know their solstice from their equinox. That leaves the four cross-quarter days. Three of these correspond roughly with Halloween, Groundhog Day and May Day; only Lammas is unassociated with a modern holiday. In fact, August is sometimes held to be “the month without a holiday” in the American calendar.
In that obscurity, I see opportunity. We may come to this holiday without preconceived notions and set ideas. We may discover unexpected depths and make new connections if we are open to possibilities.
The Possibility of Lammas
It was at just such a time, a time in my life of opening to new possibilities, when I celebrated my first Lammas. Ever since my daughter had been born, I’d been on something of a spiritual quest. I was seeking to discover my own identity, and looking for a tradition in which my daughter might be raised — or more accurately, to which she might be exposed, as I don’t presume to find her path for her.
2013 Lammas Ritual
I was particularly intrigued with these people who called themselves “Pagans.” A photo in the paper showed a local Pagan group, the New Orleans Lamplight Circle, working to build a community garden. From that photo, I connected with the group online and kept looking for a meeting I could attend. They sponsored drum circles, meditations with Tibetan singing bowls, workshops on beneficial bugs for the garden, panel discussions on witchcraft, ice cream socials, all manner of things. At last I found something that coincided with my schedule.
And so, on the last day of July, I rode my bike out to City Park to meet some of these folks for the first time. Riding in the child seat was my daughter, 2½ years old, because this event was billed as “Lammas for Kids.” I didn’t know what to expect exactly.
What we found was sweeter than I imagined, full of beauty and meaning. We did some chants and songs with hand motions, honoring nature and the elements. There was some face painting and story-telling. We shared a simple but satisfying feast with an emphasis on bread. We also made corn dollies, traditional effigies of the harvest season. Actually we made horsies out of grass. The one I made was a little on the shabby side, but I was holding a toddler on my lap the whole time.
Participating in this celebration fulfilled a longstanding goal: I wanted my daughter to have a broad and well-rounded religious education. Mainstream Christian doctrine is easily encountered, but rituals such as this are more obscure — though becoming more visible all the time. I wanted my daughter to see that religion comes in many forms and varieties, and that it needn’t take place only in a church or a mosque or a synagogue.
Honouring the sacrifice of John Barleycorn
The Lammas-Tide of Life
Since then, we’ve continued to celebrate Lammas at home as a family. (I’m still active with Lamplight, but the chief organizer of the kid-oriented rituals moved away.) Every year our celebrations evolve a bit. We usually make corn dollies, though the materials have changed over the years. I have taken to fashioning them out of the subtropical ferns which grow in our backyard. We have a bonfire to which we commit the Brigid’s crosses which we made at Candlemas. This is a way of connecting across the year, and also of simulating the agrarian cycle on which we still depend, despite the illusions of the global marketplace. Most importantly, for Lammas, we bake bread.
There are many mysteries wrapped up in a loaf of bread. The process of baking from scratch can connect us to history, science, culture, agriculture, and nature. The bread can be a symbol of all these connections, of our relation with the Earth and with humanity. Best of all, it’s a delicious and healthy food, which has become a mainstay of my family’s diet. Inspired by the holiday, I’ve been baking bread pretty much every week for several years now. One might say that we celebrate Lammas every weekend.
On Lammas, we bake a special loaf, a bread figure. Sometimes the figure is roughly humanoid in shape, to the best of my severely limited skills. Last year, we made a one-eyed cat at my daughter’s insistence. A highlight of Lammas is tearing apart this figure and eating it. This year we’ll make a point of feeding the bread to each other.
Of all the holidays, Lammas is the closest to my heart, the best day of the year, for all the reasons enumerated above — plus perhaps one more. Lammas corresponds to where I am in the cycle of life, somewhere past my summer solstice, somewhere in my late summer, with autumn coming soon behind. That sense of melancholy on the verge of dissolution, that gentle bittersweet ache of loss, is inherent in this seasonal moment.
For me, it’s not just a celebration of the agricultural harvest but also a time to think about how we stepped into the spiral, where we’ve come since, and where we’re headed. Rituals and traditions gain power over time, as associations and resonances build. Simply doing the same thing at the same time of year can be richly rewarding. I’m looking forward to deepening our experience as we continue to move around the wheel again.
The Author
In addition to writing the A Pedagogy of Gaia column here at HumanisticPaganism, Bart Everson is a writer, a photographer, a baker of bread, a husband and a father. An award-winning videographer, he is co-creator of ROX, the first TV show on the internet. As a media artist and an advocate for faculty development in higher education, he is interested in current and emerging trends in social media, blogging, podcasting, et cetera, as well as contemplative pedagogy and integrative learning. He is a founding member of the Green Party of Louisiana, past president of Friends of Lafitte Corridor, sometime contributor to Rising Tide, and a participant in New Orleans Lamplight Circle.
Musings of a Pagan Mythicist: “Walking Sacred Paths in Hellas″ by Maggie Jay Lee
Hiking on Mt. Parnassus to the Korykeon Cave from Delphi
I recently fulfilled a dream of mine to visit some of the sacred sites of ancient Greece, the land of the Hellenes. Hellas has been for me a sustaining source of inspiration. I am a naturalistic, pantheistic Pagan. I do not believe goddesses and gods exist in any literal sense, as a species of individual, autonomous, immortal super-beings. I don’t think the deities need to exist in that way to have great meaning and significance. To me the goddesses and gods are the embodiment of the sacredness that is Nature, both the Nature inside and outside of us. My own engagement with the ancient Hellenic tradition has led me to this view. In many ways, the religion of ancient Hellas is a sophisticated Nature religion, not nature in the abstract, but of the particular Nature experienced by the ancient Hellenes. I wanted to visit Greece to be in that Nature, to experience a little bit of the places that the ancients found sacred.
My husband, Matthew, and I spent three weeks in Greece in May. For Matthew this was a special painting trip to launch his new career as a full time landscape painter, and for me it was a sacred pilgrimage, a journey to my Mecca. As I communed with the old stones, Matthew captured a little bit of its magic on canvas. May is a wonderful time of year to visit Greece when Gaia shows her most gentle face and wears all her lovely flowers. We visited archeological sites in Attica, eastern Peloponnese, central Greece and Crete. We went to the places on most people’s itinerary like the Athenian Acropolis, Epidaurus, Delphi, Knossos, but we also went to some of the less visited sites, like the temple of Artemis at Vravrona, Eleusis, Argive Heraion and the Korykeon Cave above Delphi. Of course the ruins that draw the most attention are the most spectacular, but it was the places off the beaten path and the often overlooked places on the major sites that were the most meaningful to me.
The temple of Artemis at Vravrona
At the archeological sites, the first thing I would do is run around with my Oxford archaeological guide book and try to figure out just what is what and where. I read all the signage and tried to photographically document the salient details. Most books as well as the on-site information focus your attention downward onto the details of the site, but I also brought with me Vincent Scully’s book, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture, which draws your attention outward to the landscape. Scully believed that the ancient Greeks selected temple sites based on specific landscape features that emanated the presence of the deity:
All Greek sacred architecture explores and praises the character of a god or a group of gods in a specific place. That place is itself holy and, before the temple was built upon it, embodied the whole of the deity as a recognized natural force. With the coming of the temple, housing its image within it, and itself developed as a sculptural embodiment of the god’s presence and character, the meaning becomes double, both of the deity as in nature and the god as imagined by men. Therefore, the formal elements of any Greek sanctuary are, first, the specifically sacred landscape in which it is set and, second, the buildings that are placed within it. (Scully, Kindle locations 739-743).
According to Scully many sites are positioned in relationship to either mountain cones and/or clefts flanked by twin peaks. These are equated with a single or double breast or horns, symbols of the ancient Goddess and sacred bull, which go back to Minoan and Mycenaean cultures. So orientating myself on the site also involved finding the landscape features of which Scully speaks.
Once I finished my intellectual exploration of the site, I liked to go back and walk through the site the way an ancient pilgrim might have, imagining what they might have seen and just being present with the site. Where possible I would start on the ancient sacred path to the proplyaea (monumental gateway), stopping at the site of the fountain or spring used for purification, walking the path where once stood the gifts, statues, and small treasury buildings to the deity, paying my respects at the various altars along the way to the main temple. All of these elements were present at the ancient pilgrimage sites Eleusis, Epidaurus and Delphi, which I found particularly moving.
The temple of Apollo in front of the “terrible cliffs”
There are so many wonderful details to pick up among the old stones, but by far the most powerful element for me was the surrounding landscape especially at the mountainous sites like Delphi and Phaistos. At Delphi, east of the temple of Apollo, is a stark cleft flanked by twin horns, which Scully calls the “terrible cliff”, and another cleft with twin peaks, this one more rounded and breast like, lies south of the two temple remains to Athena Pronaia. While the altar to Athena Pronaia faced east as is customary for ouranic altars, the temples and all accompanying buildings faced southward toward the “shining cliffs of Phaedriades.” Pronaia here means before, that is before Apollo, likely both geographically, as most pilgrims first came here before reaching the shrine of Apollo, and temporally, as the old earth goddess worshiped here by the Mycenaean, the Potnia of this place. I don’t know how much credence Scully’s theories about landscape are given by most classical scholars today, but I found this connection between landscape and temple to be so powerful that I think there must be some truth in it. The specific landforms associated with the sacred sites are recognizable often from a great distance, a visible connection to the Holy place. For me this was even more true for the horns of Mount Ida which rise above the Palace of Phaistos in Crete.
The twin mounds that the temple of Athena Pronaia at Delphi faces
One of my favorite sites was the Argive Heraion, located about a 15 minute drive south of Mycenae. This sacred site dedicated to Hera sits on a high terrace just below a great cleft in the mountain and provides spectacular views of the surrounding olive groves and distant mountains. There are no impressive buildings left on the site, just the foundation stones remain, but it is a very peaceful and beautiful place of great importance to the ancients. Scully believes the Heraion is aligned in reference to the cone of Argos found to the southwest of the site, but another hill not mentioned by Scully impressed me. The site contains the foundations of two temples to Hera constructed in different periods, both of which, as well as the ancient altar, face eastward toward another conical hill which to me looks very breast like. We might suspect that the priest making the sacrifice would face the cult statue in the temple, but no, according to Jon Mikalson, the priest stood to the west of the altar of ouranic deities and faced outward to the rising sun. I find this of tremendous significance. Not much is left of most of the sacred sites, often just a footprint on the ground, but the landscape is still here and to look out from the place is to see what the ancient saw, which I believe was just as sacred as the ground on which the altar stood.
The foundation of the classical period temple at the Argive Heraion
The view from the temple to Hera facing eastward
It was a wonderful trip. The archeological sites and the museums are incredible. The land and the waters are so beautiful. It was also wonderful experiencing modern Greece. We mostly got around with buses, only renting a car a couple of times, and we made a lot of our accommodations through Airbnb staying with local folks. I also loved seeing the modern religious landscape of Greece, the little roadside shrines that seemed to be everywhere and the many small chapels and churches so full of golden images and the glow of candles. To me the sacred architecture of the Greek Orthodox tradition creates a very inward focused heart space, like a mother’s sheltering embrace, so different from the ancient religious expression which is focused outward.
At the conclusion of my journey through one of the ancient sacred sites, I liked to either stand near the altar or find a quiet shady spot nearby and read the Orphic Hymns to the deity of the place. While I don’t share the Orphic theology that desires life after death over life here and now, I do really like the Orphic Hymns, and I really like the translation by Athanassakis and Wolkow. The hymns present a soft polytheistic perspective, full of syncretism, and here the goddesses and gods are the forces of Nature. I’d like to close with one of my favorites, the Hymn to Earth:
Divine Earth, mother of men
and of the blessed gods,
you nourish all, you give all,
you bring all to fruition, you destroy all.
When the season is fair, you teem
with fruit and growing blossoms,
O multi-formed maiden,
seat of the immortal cosmos,
in the pains of labor
you bring forth all fruit.
Eternal, revered
deep-bosomed and blessed,
your joy is the sweet breath of grass,
O goddess bedecked with flowers,
yours is the joy of the rain, the intricate realm of the stars
revolves in endless and awesome flow.
O blessed goddess,
may you multiply the delicious fruits,
and may you and the beautiful Seasons grant me kindly favor.(Orphic Hymn to Earth translated by Athanassakis and Wolkow)
The Author
In addition to writing the Musings of a Pagan Mythicist column here at HumanisticPaganism, Maggie Jay Lee is interested in growing a new religious culture grounded in the everyday shared world and the public revelations of science, that celebrates our relationship with Cosmos, Earth and each other, and strives to bring us into right relationship with the Nature inside and outside of us. She draws inspiration from modern cosmology, evolutionary psychology, and the myths and wisdom traditions of ancient Hellas. M. Jay is a member of the Universal Pantheists Society and the Spiritual Naturalist Society, and she has studied with Glenys Livingston author of PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion. She celebrates the creative unfolding of Gaia in west Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, two dogs and cat.
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