Naturalistic Paganism
A Pedagogy of Gaia, by Bart Everson: “May Day x 2″
In anticipation of May Day on May 1st and our new semi-seasonal theme, Practice, Bart Everson discusses the connection between spiritual and political desire.
Two May Days?
International Workers Day is celebrated on the first of May all around the world. It’s an old holiday, with a history going back more than a hundred years. It might be described as a celebration of revolutionary political desire. It is also known as May Day.
Beltane is celebrated on the first of May all around the world. It’s an even older holiday with roots going back thousands of years. It has been rediscovered and embraced in recent decades as a celebration of desire. It also is known as May Day.
There must be some relation between May Day and May Day. (There are other May Days, but these are the two I love best.) Surely they must derive from the same impulse. Surely there’s a connection between spiritual and political desire.
Photo by Bart Everson
The Spirituality of Politics
I was involved in environmental activism and political organizing for many years without explicitly recognizing the spiritual dimension of such work, but of course it’s there. It’s our sense of meaning and purpose and values that drives all passionate political action. Our sense of connection to the Earth and to humanity fuels our outrage at the manifest injustices in the world. I knew what I felt; I knew what was in my heart, but I lacked a name for it. I lacked a vocabulary and an encompassing framework within which to extend and interpret these feelings beyond the political realm.
Nevertheless, for a good 25 years, it might fairly be said that my politics functioned as my spiritual practice. Any political ideology with sufficiently holistic aspirations starts to look a lot like religion. My political philosophy was almost there.
The best example of this was my involvement with the Greens. The Green Party is hardly well-established in Louisiana. We felt we were building something new but drawing on ancient wisdom. We felt we were on the fringe but with a message that would appeal broadly. We met in small groups on a regular basis. We often began our meetings with a moment of silence, and it was not unusual for a member to lead a short reflection on one of our key values. We shared food and dreams together. Does any of this sound familiar?
Anarchism vs. Religion
My Green perspectives were of the “blackened” variety — informed, that is, by anarchism.* This political philosophy opposes all forms of domination and oppression. Anarchism is especially opposed to social structures by which humans dominate other humans, but anarchism also opposes the domination of the Earth. In fact, anarchism as a modern political movement might be said to originate with the publication of What Is Property? by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. This 1840 screed argues that our system of parceling up the Earth into sections to be controlled by remote entities is fundamentally immoral.
Anarchists are generally critical of Capital, the State, and the Church. Arising as it did in 19th century Europe, it comes as no surprise that the anarchist critique of organized religion is mostly a critique of establishment Christianity. The negations of anarchism, combined with my personal experiences with organized religion, contributed to a sort of blind spot in my thinking. I did not consider myself religious, despite having a deeply ingrained religious sensibility. I considered myself to be in opposition to the very notion of religion, which I saw as just another way to keep people in chains and justify the subjugation of wild nature.
In a sense I still adhere to this critique. I continue to believe that some forms of religion do indeed function in a repressive fashion. However, as I’ve learned more about the diversity of religious experience, my perspective has become more nuanced.
Religion as a Liberating Force
There are, for example, forms of Christianity which emphasize political struggle against unjust social and economic conditions. The most familiar of these is probably liberation theology, which originated in Latin America. Less well-known is the Catholic Worker Movement, which was co-founded by Dorothy Day, an avowed anarchist. (Ironically, perhaps, Day is now under consideration for sainthood by Roman Catholic authorities.) Leo Tolstoy was arguably the most famous Christian anarchist, and his book, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, is considered a foundational text. Indeed, some think that Christianity started as an anarchist movement.
I also learned of traditions such as Buddhism. The Kālāma Sutta exhorts seekers to question everything, including all authorities, and the teachings of the Buddha generally emphasize liberation.
And so on. Many religions seem to begin with a sort of anarchic spirit which is quickly subverted, perverted, and institutionalized. We may wonder if the founders of the great traditions of the world would recognize their own teachings in the currently established practices of organized religion. No wonder anarchists are skeptical.
Paganism and Anarchism
Thus it was a source of great personal delight to become aware of the insurgency known as contemporary Paganism. There is much about Paganism that is highly anarchic. As a broad movement, it is decentralized and without hierarchy. There is no Pope of Paganism, no one who can speak on behalf of all, no one who can command the masses. (Try it and see what happens.) There is a pervasive skepticism of authoritarian methods throughout much of Paganism.
Some qualifications are in order. Paganism is a big umbrella for a broad movement, a tendency, a proclivity. For some, it is not a religion in itself, but a category for many religions which share some loose similarities; yet even this definition is flawed, as there are those who identify their religion as such: simply Pagan, with no further qualifications.
This confusion of nomenclature is just one of many similarities between anarchism and Paganism. Anarchists have identified with a bewildering variety of submovements such as anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-communism, anarcha-feminism, anarcho-primitivism, and so on. While anarchists generally revel in such diversity, this diffusion of effort has led some to call for “anarchy without hyphens” or “anarchy without adjectives.” This dynamic is very similar to the discourse within contemporary Paganism today, where the meaning of the Pagan label is re-examined and questioned on a regular basis, with some calling for unity, others for solidarity, and with regular disavowals of the label by those who feel it no longer fits.
Within the broad umbrella of Paganism there may well be any number of authoritarian religious groups, but in my (admittedly limited) experience, decentralized autonomous groups seem to be the norm. In fact, quite the opposite of being dominated by an oppressive hierarchy, the majority of Pagans in North America are both solitary and eclectic. Many Pagans communicate with one another solely via the internet and do not practice in groups at all. I suspect an anarchist critique of Pagan social structures would find fault with this extreme individualism as a product of the bourgeois consumerist mentality. We are so extremely atomized that we risk communal decoherence; we risk losing sight of a common good.
And what of the gods? The conception of the divine varies enormously across Paganism, but as a rule it’s rare to find anything resembling the Final Authority of monotheism. It’s much more common to see Pagans relating to gods and goddesses in a sort of flux of mutual reciprocity. And of course there are atheistic, pantheistic, and humanistic Pagans. All in all, there’s plenty of room for the freethinking anarchist. Moreover, many Pagans revere the Earth as sacred and divine. This resonates with the aforementioned ecological dimension of anarchism. In fact, one of the most prominent anarchist publications from a hundred years ago bore the auspicious title of Mother Earth.
I’m not the first to note these parallels. No less a seminal practitioner than Starhawk identifies herself as both Pagan and anarchist. Contemporary Paganism represents a spiritual revolution; should our politics not find a correspondingly radical expression? The interior, individual, spiritual realm and the exterior, collective, sociopolitical realm are not divorced from one another but are intimately coupled. I’m especially inclined to reflect on such matters around the first of May, which serves as my annual reminder of these connections.
International Worker’s Day
Which leads me back to my initial question: Do the two versions of May Day share a common root? Surely they must! Yet few anarchists are aware of Beltane, and it seems few Pagans in America are aware of International Workers Day.
Indeed, it’s an unfortunate fact that most of my fellow Americans think International Workers Day is some sort of foreign communist holiday, if they’ve even heard of it. They don’t realize it was invented here in America and then repressed.
After the Civil War, the battle for freedom in America continued. Former slaves fought for generations to achieve true equality in the eyes of the law. Likewise, supposedly “free” laborers still felt like wage-slaves. As Ira Steward, a machinist from Massachusetts, wrote at the time: “something of slavery still remains… something of freedom is yet to come.”
This is when working people got really organized for the first time in America’s history. A major campaign was mounted to press a radical demand: the eight-hour working day. This is something many now take for granted, but in the 1800s, longer hours were the norm, and it was not unusual for people to labor from sunup to sundown. There was little time for leisure, for recreation, for education. A vast effort went into organizing Eight-Hour Leagues across the country to advocate for legislation mandating shorter hours.
Capitalists viewed this as a very real threat, a potential shift in the balance of power. The opposition to the eight-hour movement was significant and well-funded. The result was a protracted battle royale in which the very future of the nation seemed to be at stake. The conflict was long and bloody, a critical chapter in the longer story of American labor strife, and essential to understanding how we got where we are now. Anarchists played a crucial role in these struggles, and several key conflicts throughout the late 1800s centered on a significant day: the first of May.
We can look forward from that time. Through the endorsement of the Second International in Paris, May Day became a global day of resistance and celebration, a day to remember those who have been killed, imprisoned, or otherwise oppressed in the ongoing struggle for better working conditions. Eventually it was embraced by authoritarian regimes in the Soviet bloc.
Ambivalence toward the global labor movement motivated the American federal government to establish May 1 as Americanization Day. It’s now known as Loyalty Day. In any form it has failed to gain traction in the popular imagination. While much of the rest of the world continues to observe International Workers Day in May, our Labor Day is in September. The date was chosen specifically to deflate the power of May Day.
The agitation around this particular day first began in 1867. That’s when an Illinois bill for an eight-hour day was supposed to take effect. In support of this measure, working people in Chicago staged a massive but entirely peaceful May Day march through the city. It all fell apart in the days that followed, when the bosses refused to obey the new law. Nevertheless, May Day gained symbolic force as a day for further demonstrations in subsequent years, beginning in 1886.
Why May?
Those later May Days were not so peaceful, but they were unquestionably intertwined with the ancient pre-Christian celebrations that European immigrants brought with them to America. From that point on, the two May Days were linked. There’s evidence of this in the political art of the era, which combines Pagan themes with proletarian concerns.
The question that intrigues me is this: How did May 1 happen to be chosen as the date? Was it selected because of its status as a popular Old World holiday? After all, European immigrants celebrated May Day with some enthusiasm throughout the 19th century. A popular holiday might seem like an obvious choice for a popular reform.
Another theory is that May 1 was chosen because that’s when contracts were begun or renewed in the building trades. Of course, this tradition itself likely stemmed from association with pre-Christian religious festivals in old Ireland and Britain, but the connection is convoluted and indirect. “The practical association of the day with the renewal of contracts was the original deciding factor,” writes historian Donna Haverty-Stacker. “Any rhetorical or iconographic associations with spring rebirth… came later in the development of the workers’ May Day, once it became an annual event where tradesmen could tap into such ancient cultural associations to voice their demands.”
Of course, even if the particular date was initially selected at random, it changes nothing that came after. We can still relish the richness of the intertwining histories of these May Day celebrations. We can still work to transform our world, inside and out.
A Common Impulse
Moreover, I’m inclined to recognize a common impulse at work here: the drive to connect, the power of attraction. It’s the impetus that draws people together to dance round the maypole or march in the streets, that draws humans together in love and fellowship, that draws animals together in frenzied coupling, that draws strands of DNA together in the double helix, that draws particles and planets on their trajectories. Call it Eros. I’m not saying it’s exactly the same force at work at every level; I’m not that wise. I just can’t help noticing and appreciating the similarities.
May Day represent High Spring, the season of desire. Urgency transforms our desires into action. Activated desire changes everything. This is a time to celebrate the flowering of desire, the flow of creativity, and the flourishing of our potential. All power to the imagination!
For discussion in the comments: Why do you think political discourse and activism do not play a more central role in Paganism?
* Note: I hasten to note that not all Greens are anarchists, nor are all anarchists Greens. Far from it. Anarchists are generally skeptical of electoral politics; many regard voting as fraud. As Howard Zinn said, “the electoral system is a great grave into which we are invited to get lost.” By contrast, Greens generally aim to run candidates for public office. Though I can’t speak for other chapters of the Green Party, in New Orleans our group is infused with a healthy dose of the anarchic spirit.
For Further Reading
Green, J. R. (2006). Death in the Haymarket: a story of Chicago, the first labor movement, and the bombing that divided gilded age America. New York: Pantheon Books.
Haverty-Stacke, D. T. (2009). America’s forgotten holiday: May Day and nationalism, 1867-1960. New York: New York University Press.
Proudhon, P.-J., Kelley, D. R., & Smith, B. G. (2008). What is property? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, B. R. (2010). Dark green religion: nature spirituality and the planetary future. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tolstoy, L., & Garnett, C. (2012). The kingdom of God is within you. [United States?]: Emereo Pub.
In Hero of the Catholic Left, a Conservative Cardinal Sees a Saint (New York Times)
Mother Earth at Anarchy Archives
The incomplete, true, authentic and wonderful history of May Day – by Peter Linebaugh
Kalama Sutta: The Buddha’s Charter of Free Inquiry
Bush Drives Us Into Bakunin’s Arms!: An Interview with Howard Zinn
Global Climate Convergence: Mother Earth Day to May Day 2014
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 by Maggie Jay Lee: “Myth and Mnemosyne”
Mnemosyne, whose name means Memory, was the mother of the Muses, therefore the mother of all the ancient arts. It is now well accepted that the poetry attributed to Homer goes back to a time without writing. The gods and their stories come from this world, when all knowledge was held in memory and passed down orally. It is the ways of Mnemosyne, the constraints of memory and the adaptations used to minimize these constraints, that are at the heart of mythic religions. As Marshall McLuhan famously said, the “medium is the message.” Myth is often described by modern commentators as the first attempt by humans to provide causal explanations. The line of thought goes something like this: “Because ancient peoples did not have science, they did not understand the true cause of things; so they invented fanciful stories of gods, heroes and monsters to explain why things happened as they did.” I think this is a profound misunderstanding of myth. Myths are first and foremost stories. Stories require “causal agents”, characters that do things for reasons that make sense within the narrative. Otherwise the story won’t hold together, and it won’t get told again. But I think it is the “what” not the “why” that is of central importance to myth.
Although it is found in all cultures, narrative is in certain ways more widely functional in primary oral cultures than in others. First, in a primarily oral culture, as Havelock pointed out (1978a; cf. 1963), knowledge cannot be managed in elaborate, more or less scientifically abstract categories. Oral cultures cannot generate such categories, and so they use stories of human action to store, organize, and communicate much of what they know. (Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word by Walter J. Ong, page 138).
I believe myths are rooted in the real life experiences of ancient people, experiences of nature, history and the human psyche told using the symbolic language of the mythic convention. According to Elizabeth Barber and Paul Barber in When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth to decipher myths we need to find the right “camera angle”, that is we need to figure out what the mythmakers were looking at from their point of view.
In mythology, to understand what, let’s say, the Egyptians talk about, you have to see what the Egyptians saw. We had to get into our viewfinder the Egyptian sources of their all-important mortuary supplies to see how Isis might find Osiris inside a tree at Byblos. To understand why Ptah’s creation of the universe takes place on a primeval mound of mud that differentiates itself from the waters of chaos, we have to focus on what Egyptians saw when the all-covering Nile floodwaters began to recede each year: the tip of a mound of mud here, then one there, growing in size until the whole land of Egypt gradually reappeared, completely refertilized and ready to bear new life-giving crops. Life, to the Egyptian, began each year with and on those mounds. (Barber and Barber, page 57)
Some of the most striking examples of this kind of in-situ interpretation deal with volcanoes. No doubt witnessing a volcanic eruption makes a big impression, and it is the kind of thing that people are likely to want to tell their descendants about. We can now thanks to modern science compare in-situ data from volcanic eruptions that occurred thousands of years ago with stories of explosively violent deities. Hesiod, who lived near the end of the time of primary orality, presents such deities in the battles between the Olympians and the Titans in his Theogony.
The earth crashed and rumbled, the vast sky groaned And quavered, and massive Olympos shook from its roots Under the Immortals’ onslaught. A deep tremor of feet Reached misty Tartaros, and a high whistling noise Of insuppressible tumult and heavy missiles That groaned and whined in flight. And the sound Of each side shouting rose to starry heaven, As they collided with a magnificent battle cry. And now Zeus no longer held back his strength. His lungs seethed with anger and he revealed All his power. He charged from the sky, hurtling Down from Olympos in a flurry of lightning, Hurling thunderbolts one after another, right on target, From his massive hand, a whirlwind of holy flame. And the earth that bears life roared as it burned, And the endless forests crackled in fire, The continents melted and the Ocean streams boiled, And the barren sea. The blast of heat enveloped The chthonian Titans, and the flame reached The bright stratosphere, and the incandescent rays Of the thunderbolts and lightning flashes Blinded their eyes, mighty as they were, Heat so terrible it engulfed deep Chaos. (Theogony by Hesiod as translated by Stanley Lombardo, lines 681-704)
Mott Greene, in Natural Knowledge in Preclassical Antiquity, provides a detailed comparison of this battle with the geologist’s reconstruction of the eruption of Thera that occurred in 1625 BCE and finds that the specific and unusual eruption pattern of Thera lines up precisely with the events told by Hesiod. The Barbers also relate many other stories of volcanic deities from other cultures such as the story of the Klamath Indians in Oregon. When a young soldier in 1865 asked why the native peoples never visited Crater Lake in Oregon he was told the story of the abduction of Loho and the subsequent battle between the chiefs of the Above World and the Below World, a story that matches up well with the details of the eruption that created Crater Lake. Here the descendants of those who witnessed this eruption were still following their traditional ways, living in the same area and could still connect the story with its place. The Klamath people did not know anything about the science of volcanism, but they still carried a lot of information about what happened at Crater Lake some 7,700 years ago and they knew their ancestor’s warning: “Look not upon the place. Look not upon the place, for it means death or everlasting sorrow” (Barber and Barber, page 7) Of course, not all myths are about volcanoes. Myths cover a wide range of subjects both terrestrial and celestial. What all myths share is that they personify that which is in reality not human-like. Personifying the world both made sense and was necessary for our oral ancestors.
To a certain extent all thought is metaphorical. We think via a series of analogies. To us the mind is like a computer that receives, processes, and stores data. Of course, we know the mind is not a computer, but we find it useful to speak as if it were. In fact, it is very difficult to speak of the mind without using language derived from computer technology. Not having these elaborate mechanical systems to relate to, it just wouldn’t have made sense for the ancients to talk about the world as if it were a machine. For the ancients, the basic metaphor was the person. They knew that a mountain was not a person like a human, but yet it did have a personality, a way of being in the world, a temperament, and a history that could be told in story. Unless one is high on the autistic spectrum, most people find people more interesting in general then non-humans and inanimate things, and stories about people and person-like characters are much more memorable to almost everyone than an analytic discourse (especially one without any metaphorical analogies). Stories with big characters doing grand and impossible deeds are just more memorable and entertaining and that is precisely what is found in myth. Of course our oral ancestors didn’t just tell stories they told stories in meter, full of formulaic expressions and repetition, and often accompanied by music, all of which aids memory.
Oral memory works effectively with ‘heavy’ characters, persons whose deeds are monumental, memorable and commonly public. Thus the noetic economy of its nature generates outsize figures, that is, heroic figures, not for romantic reasons or reflectively didactic reasons, but for much more basic reasons: to organize experience in some sort of permanently memorable form. Colorless personalities cannot survive oral mnemonics. To assure weight and memorability, heroic figures tend to be type figures: wise Nestor, furious Achilles, clever Odysseus, omnicompetent Mwindo (‘Little-One- Just-Born-He-Walked’, Kabutwa-kenda, his common epithet). The same mnemonic or poetic economy enforces itself still where oral settings persist in literate cultures, as in the telling of fairy stories to children: the overpoweringly innocent Little Red Riding Hood, the unfathomably wicked wolf, the incredibly tall beanstalk that Jack has to climb—for non-human figures acquire heroic dimensions too. Bizarre figures here add another mnemonic aid: it is easier to remember the Cyclops than a two-eyed monster, or Cerberus than an ordinary one-headed dog (see Yates 1966, pp. 9–11, 65–7). Formulary number groupings are likewise mnemonically helpful: the Seven Against Thebes, the Three Graces, the Three Fates, and so on. All this is not to deny that other forces besides mere mnemonic serviceability produce heroic figures and groupings. Psychoanalytic theory can explain a great many of these forces. But in an oral poetic economy, mnemonic serviceability is a sine qua non, and, no matter what the other forces, without proper mnemonic shaping of verbalization the figures will not survive. (Ong, page 68)
Of all the activities of humans, religion is one of the most resistant to change and, therefore, it is here where we would expect the old oral ways to linger longest. Ancient polytheism is deeply rooted in orality, not just the stories but the way of being reflected in these cultures (See Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy). The ancients had many deities because it was necessary. They had as many as were needed to tell their stories, and the characters that were most sacred, most vital to the wellbeing of the people, were honored with religious rites. To me ancient polytheisms are religions embedded in sacred stories, and the gods are a language of sacred symbols that point to an ineffable reality.
It is easy to see the connection between myth and orality, but does myth have any place in our world of high literacy? I think it should. While for our ancestors living in primary oral cultures the problem was how to hold on to what knowledge they had, we have a different dilemma. We have so much information that we have trouble sorting out what is important from what is trivial, what is true from what is false. We are becoming a people without a story to hold us together and to make sense of our experiences in the world. We have more and more information, but we know less and less. That which tells us who we are, where we come from, how we fit together, and how we should relate to all of this needs to be written not just in books or computer databases but in the heart. These stories need to be told and retold and celebrated with feast days in spaces full of art and song. I don’t think we should try to put on the myths of the ancients like an old coat, but rather we should seek to learn from Mnemosyne so that the Muses might visit us and bring forth from us new mythic stories for our time and place.
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.
Starstuff, Contemplating by Jon Cleland Host: “Flower Power”
We are assemblages of ancient atoms forged in stars – atoms organized by history to the point of consciousness, now able to contemplate this sacred Universe of which we are a tiny, but wondrous, part.
Blue! Yellow! Purple! Red! Flowers bring an explosion of color into our lives, especially now as we approach Beltane. The beautiful sight and smell of flowers soothes our senses like few other things can, explaining why we humans take the time to grow so many flowers on land that could be growing actual food.
Like so much of nature, flowers have a lot to teach us. Our efforts to understand the real world have given us incredible information – often far more than our grandparents had – and this knowledge of the history and workings of the world around us can power our metaphors more strongly than fictional tales. But what lesson can we take from the flowers that fill our lives with color every May?
One possible lesson from flowers is the wonderful success that cooperation can bring. Imagine what the world was like sometime more than 100 million years ago, before flowers as we know them evolved. To our mammalian eyes, the most important feature of our world then may be the towering, fearsome dinosaurs. But, if we can find a place of safety under the underbrush, and momentarily pull our minds away from the sharp teeth which killed so many of our Ancestors, a discovery awaits us. Down here, a different struggle of life is playing out, as the same evolutionary factors of competition and reproduction that we vertebrates deal with are carried out in the theater of plants and insects. Plants often face a greater challenge in moving their sperm than we mobile animals do. For millions of years, the best they could do was to use things like wind, waves, and the chance movement of insects to move their sperm (pollen).
We see a green branch in front of us – and wonder why there are more insects on this one than others? Are they eating it? Apparently not. Though we can’t smell anything different, those insects can. This plant has a mutation which has resulted in a slightly different scent around the pollen production area, and hence the attracted insects. Similar mutations include making a normal secretion edible to these insects, which are now being attracted by the scent, and being rewarded with food. Were these mutations unlucky for the plant, a waste of caloric resources to benefit some other creature? No. The benefit was well worth the few calories lost – because these insects have bumped against the nearby parts of the plant, and will carry their cargo of pollen directly to other members of this plant species, instead of it being wasted on the wind. It’s easy to see how these first fumbling mutations toward flowerhood helped everyone, and so were selected for. Both insects and flowers benefited so much that many young followed, and the co-evolutionary, cooperative partnership between insects and flowers began. Later improvements in sweeter nectar, more powerful scents, more visible flowers, and insect brains hard wired to look for those flowers followed.
Moving forward toward today, we see what a successful partnership it was! As flowers evolved to be ever more alluring, the insects slowly became expert pollinators. Their partnership spread to fill our Earth, with descendants evolving into literally millions of different flowers and insects. Though people often associate evolution with competition, flowers remind us of the often unstoppable evolutionary power of friendly cooperation, where everyone wins.
We could just see flowers only as a nice part of life – but it’s so much richer for me to see their full history too, to glimpse the millions of years of innovation, improvement, and teamwork that gives us each flower we see today, and the incredible detail behind each petal. May the beautiful flowers at every turn inspire us to remember, both on Beltane and throughout the year, the power of friendly cooperation.
The Author
In addition to writing the Starstuff, Contemplating column here at HumanisticPaganism, Dr. Jon Cleland Host is a scientist who earned his PhD in materials science at Northwestern University & has conducted research at Hemlock Semiconductor and Dow Corning since 1997. He holds eight patents and has authored over three dozen internal scientific papers and eleven papers for peer-reviewed scientific journals, including the journal Nature. He has taught classes on biology, math, chemistry, physics and general science at Delta College and Saginaw Valley State University. Jon grew up near Pontiac, and has been building a reality-based spirituality for over 30 years, first as a Catholic and now as a Unitarian Universalist, including collaborating with Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow to spread the awe and wonder of the Great Story of our Universe (see www.thegreatstory.org, and the blog at evolutionarytimes.org). Jon and his wife have four sons, whom they embrace within a Universe-centered, Pagan, family spirituality. He currently moderates the yahoo group Naturalistic Paganism.
Postpagan Ceremony & Ecology by Glen Gordon: “Regional Direction Devotional”
“Water World” by Glynn Gorick
Over the years I have found myself in the position of creating earth-centered ceremony for my Unitarian Universalist congregation. The intent of these events was to fuse a naturalistic sense of place with a loose Wiccanate structure, in order to appeal to humanists and Neopagans in attendance. One product of this work has been this regional direction devotional designed for the Pacific Northwest.
East
Called by impulse to survive, the salmon lay eggs in the east, the mountains give birth to sacred rivers, cutting pathways in the earth. The [region name] stretches into the east where the sun bursts each morning.
North
Called by impulse to survive, the geese fly from the north. The north brings us the snow -wrapped within the sacred darkness. The [region name] stretches into the north with the cold embrace of transformation.
West
Called by impulse to survive, the salmon swim from the west. Clouds come from the west, carrying sacred rain in their bosoms. The [region name] stretches into the west where the sun sinks each evening.
South
Called by impulse to survive, the geese flew to the south. The south awaits patiently for the return of the sacred brightness. The [region name] stretches into the south with the warm embrace of transformation.
Humanity
We mourn with the land as our industry confuses the seasons;, as our neglect threatens the survival of many species, as our ignorance has blinded us from our deep humanity. We gather here to touch our deep humanity through celebrating the land as our flesh and the sky as our breath.
One thing the keen observer might notice is that I start in the east and go counter-clockwise instead of clockwise as some might expect. The reasoning behind this is to follow the path of the earth around the sun and not the perceived path of the sun in the sky. Given our understanding of the earth’s gravitational pull around the sun, I feel counter-clockwise is more appropriate.
Anyone with knowledge of Pacific Northwest ecology might identify with the imagery I’ve invoked:
• On this side of the Continental Divide, rivers flow east to west.
• Salmon are a vital traditional food staple of local indigenous people, and restoring salmon population is an important conservation effort.
• The geese have prominent migration patterns during the changing of the seasons.
• The warm winds often come from the south, and the cold winds often come from the north.
• Cold air on the west of the Cascades pushes warm air eastward.
I felt it necessary for the closing to speak directly to the impact of humanity on the environment, but to end with a positive focus of re-cultivating humanity’s sacred place within the ecosystem.
I hope this serves as a practical example of how sacred ecology builds new rituals, ceremonies, and traditions from the landscape and local ecology where one lives. Also, it can be easily applied to already existing traditions. The idea is to ground religious events with local ecological awareness.
I would be delighted to hear others’ comments on:
• How do you integrate local ecological awareness and identity into your ceremonies, rituals, traditions, and celebrations?
• If you were to use the above example as a template ,what features of your life-place’s unique landscape and ecology would you be compelled to include and why?
• What role does local ecology play in your personal spiritual identity? (Whether it be Wicca, witchcraft, Neo-druid, Asatru, religious naturalist, Unitarian Universalist, deist, polytheist, Neopagan, or any other philosophy or spiritual system.)
For me, the key is to combine creative inspiration with practical knowledge of your surroundings. If you feel so moved and inspired, be free to take my words and rewrite them to be specific to your life-place and your relationship with its unique ecology. Or share a unique short sample of poetry, prose, or prayer you have created to express the intimate relationship you have with the land around you.
A version of this essay was first published at No Unsacred Places on Dec. 17, 2012.
The Author
Glen Gordon was introduced to Paganism by friends while living overseas in Europe during the late 90′s. He underwent both Wiccan and Neodruidic training during his formative years, but had not self-identified as a Pagan when his path diverged into land-centered spiritual naturalism ten years ago. His focus has been on cultivating beneficial relationships with the natural living world surrounding him wherever he lives. During this time, he discovered Unitarian Universalism and has been active in his local congregations for many years. Since 2007, he has worked on varied projects regarding BioRegional Animism, including this 5 minute video, the words of which came from a short UU sermon he gave. He has spoken on the topic of ecology and the land on a few occasions for his local congregation and facilitated a now-disbanded group of UU Pagans and spiritual naturalists. In the past, he maintained the blog, Postpagan, and is excited to share some of that material at HumanisticPaganism. Currently, you can find Glen writing occasionally for No Unsacred Places and helping achieve Green sanctuary status for his beloved UU community, where he helps create and lead ecological aware earth- and land- focused ceremonies for the solstices and equinoxes.
Mid-Month Meditation: “Veiled Woman” by B. T. Newberg
Editor’s note: We encourage our readers to take these mid-month meditations as an opportunity to take a short break from everything else. Rather than treating these posts the way you would any other post, set aside 10 minutes someplace quiet and semi-private to have an experience. Take a minute to relax first. After looking at the post, take a few minutes to let the experience sink in. If it feels right, leave a comment.
For discussion: What feelings does this image evoke? What memories does it cause you to recall? What thoughts do you have about the picture?
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