Naturalistic Paganism
Musings of a Pagan Mythicist, by Maggie Jay Lee: “Gnothi Seauton: On Being Human”
Today we hear from another of our new regular columnists, Maggie Jay Lee.
Elizabeth Vandiver states in a Teaching Company Course that the first Delphi maxim, gnothi seauton – know thyself, means, “Know what kind of creature you are, remember your limitations, remember that you are not a god, you are mortal.”(1) She interprets this as meaning in effect, “Know your place.” Donald Kagan in an Open Yale Course asserts that, ”The Greeks combined a unique sense of mankind’s high place in the natural order with a painful understanding of the limitations of the greatness and the possibilities before man […] with the greatest limitation being mortality.”(2) He goes on to define gnothi seauton as well as the second maxim, nothing in excess, as meaning, “Know your own limitations as a fallible mortal and then exercise moderation because you are not divine, you are mortal.”
Gnothi Seauton and Death
It seems that for many classical scholars the main focus of gnothi seauton concerns human limitations and death. In our culture, we are taught to believe that human potential is unlimited, that we can have whatever we want, that we can be whatever we want, if only our will is focused and strong. At least in the rich, developed world, life is longer and more secure then ever, but in the end we all still die. Yet, even death seems to have lost its pathos, so successful have we been at separating death and the grimmer realities of life from our daily routines. What is the value of believing in limitations? Do we limit ourselves if we focus on our limitations?
Aristotle in his Politics states,
“As man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst when separated from law and justice. For injustice is most dangerous when it is armed and man armed by nature with intelligence and excellence may use them for entirely opposite ends. Therefore, when he is without virtue, man is the most unscrupulous and savage of the animals.”(3)
Surely the first step on the road to injustice and lawlessness is to forget gnothi seauton, to forget what one is and who one should be. Suffering beyond what is decreed by the Moira will surely follow when humans act either like beasts, mindlessly following every desire, or like gods, taking extreme and reckless actions as if one had the perfect knowledge and abilities of a god.
Gnothi Seauton and Reverence
But what does it mean to “know thyself,” to know you are human, to know that you are a fallible mortal? What quality is produced in a person who cultivates gnothi seauton? Paul Woodruff, in his book, “Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue” makes a strong case that the virtue he calls reverence is such a quality.(4) Woodruff defines reverence, which he equates with hosietes or eusebeia and aidos, as “a well-developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect, and shame when these are the right feelings to have.” The foundation of reverence is the understanding of human limitations from which one develops the ability to feel awe for that which is beyond human control — gods, fate, nature, truth, justice and even death, respect for our fellow human beings, even though they too are fallible and imperfect, and shame when our moral failings go beyond what is normal for a human.
Reverence is an Aristotelian type virtue, which is difficult to define with the precision demanded by Socrates. Virtues are characteristic qualities in a person that lead that person to want to do the right thing. Reverence, according to Woodruff, is a virtue because when one possesses it one has the appropriate feelings of awe, respect and shame which lead one to want to behave appropriately, such as to listen, to forgive, to apologize, to accept, to show restraint when these are the appropriate things to do. The opposite of reverence is hubris. Reverence is a social virtue, which is particularly concerned with the relationship to and exercise of power.
Gnothi Seauton and Spirituality
Gnothi seauton, as I understand it, is an important pillar of my sense of spirituality. Gnothi seauton calls me to accept reality, not as I wish it to be, but as it really is. It reminds me that my understanding of reality will always be imperfect and incomplete. Many things are beyond my ability to know. Yet gnothi seauton challenges me to strive to know and understand to my fullest ability. It teaches me to accept human limitations both in myself and others. Perfection is not a characteristic of the human but the divine. Gnothi seauton forces me to confront the reality of death. It reminds me that life is fragile, short and capricious. Even in our relatively safe, modern world, we have no guarantee of a tomorrow. But it is because this life is ephemeral, that it is made more precious and beautiful, like the first flowers of spring.
Most of all, for me, gnothi seauton is about reverence, about developing a right relationship with reality, with the self, community and Nature. Reverence requires an acceptance of human limitations. It does not require that we fully understand or explain the mystery of being. In fact, it reminds us that this is beyond the capacity of the human. Instead, it calls us to accept and celebrate the mystery of being and the dance of becoming, to acknowledge that we are part of something greater than ourselves, something awe inspiring.
In my opinion, the traditional interpretation of gnothi seauton as “know your limitations as a human mortal” is not only still valid, but more important than ever. Modern humans have unprecedented access to knowledge, and an unprecedented ability to use this knowledge for good or ill. Human beings have become like a force of nature, reshaping the earth and the climate, the force for which all life must adapt to or die. Because human beings have more power than ever, it is more important now than ever to remember our limitations, to know our place, to remember gnothi seauton.
For discussion: What role does recognition of your limitations play in your spirituality?
Notes
1. Elizabeth.Vandiver, Classical Mythology (The Teaching Company, 2000), mp3 lectures and published notes
2. Donald Kagan, Introduction to Ancient Greek History (Yale University: Open Yale Courses, fall 2007, http://oyc.yale.edu), mp3 lectures and transcripts.
3. Aristotle, The Politics, as translated Donald Kagan in Introduction to Ancient Greek History with slight modifications.
4. Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001), print.
The Author
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.
Maggie is the author of a regular column here at HP. Her column is called Musings of a Pagan Mythicist.
See all of Maggie Jay Lee’s Posts
Next Sunday
What if? by Meg Pauken
Today we continue our late autumn theme of “Death and Life” with a new contributor, Meg Pauken. Our next theme for early winter will be “Beginnings”. Send your writing and art to humanisticpaganism [at sign] gmail.com by December 21, 2013.
It’s unavoidable, the looking back to what was happening last year at this time.
The health of my parents had begun a very rapid decline. It was an intense, emotion-filled and exhausting time.
This morning, I thought about the gradual and then accelerating pace of the narrowing of their lives. First it was Mom forgetting things, then she no longer drove, and finally she walked only with a walker for support. Dad played his last game of golf. The summer condo became their home, and then they moved again to an even smaller apartment. They rid themselves of a lifetime of possessions. Dad took his last steps, unassisted, on February 10, 2012. His car was returned to the dealership last March. There came a point when they no longer left their apartment.
I was reminded of the death of a star: how it collapses in on itself. The energy of its core sucking everything nearby into itself; retracting, at first imperceptibly, then faster and faster until nothing of its previous fiery glory can be detected. All that remains is a black hole.
All that remains except for one thing: the light it gave off that is still traveling through the universe, illuminating far flung planets, being picked up by telescopes unknown.
What if we are like the stars? What if the energy we emit remains in the universe after we are gone, traveling far beyond the spheres we knew, continuing to provide warmth and light?
Our jokes and our stories will continue to be told. Our likeness will appear in later generations. The advice we gave will come to mind (and continue to be disregarded). The love we gave will still be felt. Our energy, our light, radiating on through time and space.
My parents’ words still echo in my head though their physical presence is gone. The habits they inculcated and the values they taught still linger: self-sufficiency, generosity, humor. I think of them often and I tell their stories to my children. The birds at the feeder remind me of them, as does a nice glass of wine. Their energy lingers in our lives, certainly.
So, what if? What if we are like the stars? What energy am I sending off into the universe?
This essay was first published on March 6, 2013 at Tales From the Sandwich Chronicles.
For discussion: What “light” do you most hope will radiate from your life after the death of your “star”?
The Author
Meg Pauken is a writer, former lawyer and mother of two living in rural northeastern Ohio, USA. Raised as a Roman Catholic, she is a Unitarian Universalist and has felt the call of paganism since her childhood. She blogs about family and spirituality at Tales from the Sandwich Chronicles.
This Wednesday
This Wednesday, we hear from another of our new regular columnists, Maggie Jay Lee, Musings of a Pagan Mythicist: “Gnothi Seauton”.
The HPedia: Innate
Your help is needed! Please critique this entry from the HPedia: An encyclopedia of key concepts in Naturalistic Paganism. Please leave your constructive criticism in the comments below.
Innateness is a concept central to cognitive science. It refers to the predisposition of the brain toward certain cognitive tendencies. It does not mean “hard-wired” so much as “pre-wired.”
Jonathan Haidt quotes Gary Marcus on innateness:
The initial organization of the brain does not rely that much on experience… Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises… ‘Built-in’ does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience.
The concept is relevant to naturalistic spirituality in that myth and ritual may well take advantage of innate mental tendencies, such as a susceptibility to supernormal stimuli.
See also “HADD”, “Modularity of Mind”, and “Supernormal stimuli.”
Check out other entries in our HPedia.
Starstuff, Contemplating, by Jon Cleland Host: “Evolutionary Parenting and the Holidays”
Today we hear from our other of our new regular columnists, Jon Cleland Host.
Evolutionary Parenting means raising children with an understanding of the evolutionary history that made them that both connects them to their evolutionary past and gives them a sense of purpose toward future generations. Evolutionary Parenting is not easy (heck, good parenting of any kind isn’t easy). Like so much in life, however, that extra intentional effort is very rewarding.
Right now, at the beginning of December, many of us are indeed spending effort – preparing for the holidays. But which holidays? From the many available, nearly all of us are celebrating the holiday our parents taught us, perhaps including minor tweaks from our lives or our spouses. That’s not a surprise, given that holidays are one of the most common ways that values are passed on to the next generation, answering our human need for both celebration and meaning.
Why “No Holidays” Is Not an Option
Our involvement in holidays, in terms of both time and money spent on the kids, is especially clear for many of us at this time of year – showing that we care about them. After all, it is where we spend our time and money that shows what we really care about. Children know this. They see us with more unvarnished honesty than we may realize, constantly learning from what we actually do, nearly heedless of what we say. Children see through hypocrisy like a picture window, especially as they get older.
So, what then are we teaching them with our chosen holidays, which speak to our children more loudly than anything we tell them? What is all our holiday effort working to build? Because honesty is one of the most important aspects of good parenting, my wife and I carefully chose which holidays to celebrate, and how to celebrate them. Like a culture’s origin story, a culture’s holidays also must be both meaningful and real (or believable). Real, for a holiday, includes being both fun and factual. Holidays that aren’t fun backfire, leading to resentment that only teaches avoidance or antipathy towards the parents as well as whatever idea is otherwise intended. Conversely, a holiday that is fun, but has no basis in reality or fails to teach good values, is little more than rank consumerism, teaching children greed and gluttony. Does that sound like some holidays we have in America today? Is it a surprise that so many Americans have grown up to be greedy, gluttonous, and empty of deep values, having learned exactly what they were taught?
What can be done? Jettisoning all traditional holidays without replacing them is like having holidays that aren’t fun – especially when all your children’s friends are having a blast with those traditional holidays. Do we have any choice other than empty holidays based on consumerism and superstition?
The answer is yes. We do have another option, one which draws on the love, creativity, and effectiveness present in today’s parents – we can craft holidays that are meaningful, real and fun. How that’s done will vary from family to family, and so what follows are just the solutions that Heather and I have found to work well for our family. These may be a useful starting point, but ultimately it is up to each parent to find their family’s solution themselves. For many, some adjustments to their old holidays may be all that is needed, and any holiday solution must be sustainable in today’s modern culture. Too radical a departure will become an effort to maintain over the years, especially if they are celebrated on significantly different dates from traditional holidays, and are thus more likely to be abandoned over time. The rest of this already long blog post describes our family celebration.
The Cleland-Host Family Approach to Holidays Around the Winter Solstice
Obviously, our whole year of family holidays is beyond the scope of a blog post, so this will cover only the Winter Solstice, which is December 21st this year. In this darkest time of the year, the returning light and the hope that light brings has been enough to make this time sacred for literally millions of your Ancestors for thousands of years. Our modern understanding of the Universe gives us many other ideas to celebrate as well, and we have chosen stars (our Sun and other stars) as a central theme of our family Winter Solstice celebration. Included in that theme are also supernovae, the stardust that makes our world (and us), the winter season, and connection to all humans that comes from realizing that ancient people on all continents celebrated the Winter Solstice millennia ago. The Winter Solstice is, after all, the reason for the season – both meteorologically as well as culturally!
Holidays (and family cultures) must also have practices. Our traditions for the Winter Solstice are similar in many ways to practices our kids see their friends doing. They include a decorated Solstice Tree (with a star on top). Solstice lights are strung indoors and out (we point out to the kids that the different colors of the lights are like the different colors of the stars, and talk about star colors and types). Stockings are hung, as well as decorations with stars, evergreens, and snow. We open a door in an “Advent” calendar every day, counting down the days to Solstice with small surprises, and tell the stories of stardust and of Kabibonokka (the north wind) over eggnog and cookies made in the shapes of stars, snowflakes, and evergreens. See here for related resources.
This all of course culminates on the Winter Solstice itself. After weeks of anticipation, we eat a decorated ice cream Yule Log on the night before Solstice, pointing out that our bodies’ metabolism will be burning that Yule log all night. The next morning, the kids usually wake up before sunrise, and are allowed to go through their (now filled) Solstice stockings. Soon, we gather up the kids in the dark blue of morning, trekking out to see the Sun return, victorious after its long decline. The rising Sun is greeted with songs and poems, and then we take some time as a family to enjoy wherever we are — which is often the Lake Huron shoreline, as our home is in Midland, Michigan.
The kids are jumping with excitement by the time we return home, reminded that love from the Universe can make wonderful things happen. They rush out to our family’s sacred space, a stone circle in our wooded backyard, to find gifts for all. The gifts are brought into the house and opened one at a time, to start a sacred day with no work, instead having a party, visits with extended family, or other family time. If asked, we truthfully answer questions about how the gifts got out there, if those questions are supported by evidence and good reason. We never lie to the children, and they know that. When a child uses their own reason to discover that we put the gifts there, we point out that what we told them first was true, because we parents are part of the Universe, and that they are not allowed to tell their siblings, who must also figure it out themselves. So far, only our oldest child has figured it out, though his brother came very close last year, and I expect him to figure it out easily any day now.
How ever you choose to celebrate the season, our family extends the warmest wishes to you. Happy Holidays!
This article was first published at Evolutionary Christianity.
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 (seewww.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.
See Dr. Jon Cleland Host’s other posts
Next Sunday
Next Sunday, we hear from a new contributor, Meg Pauken:”What if?”
Death and Life, by Genevieve Wood
Today we continue our late autumn theme of “Death and Life” with a new contributor, Genevieve Wood. Our next theme for early winter will be “Beginnings”. Send your writing and art to humanisticpaganism [at sign] gmail.com by December 21, 2013.
Art by Anat Vaughan-Lee. Detail of cover of The Unknown She by Hilary Hart. Used with permission from The Golden Sufi Center.
To look life in the face.
Always to look life in the face
And to know it for what it is.
At last to know it.
To love it for what it is,
And then, to put it away.— The Hours (film)
We are born to die
We are born, only to die, only to cease to exist as we are. Knowledge of that ending, of a time to come without us, is terrifying to many people. So we search for immortality, guarantees, anything to predict what will come when, and how to plan for or against it. But our daily life offers no guarantees, no promises of the future except that it will come. Promises of the future can only come from faith.
How we handle the knowledge of mortality defines us in many ways. We spend our lives striving for immortality, hoping for survival against all reality. Yet in truth many of us desire certainty even more than immortality, desire to know the date and time of our death, and to know how it will happen and how to pass painlessly and with grace. Such knowledge cannot exist, of course, because even if we knew our own body’s original time limit, we constantly do things to change that and shorten and lengthen our timeframe.
This uncertainty and brevity of life, far from the apparent curse people see it as, is actually a great blessing in disguise. Only because we do not know the time of our death can we risk it, always in the hopes that it won’t be this time, won’t be us. We strive and struggle against the unknown, to learn, and grow, and become better than we were. This drive for immortality, not in the body, but in the minds of others, drives both the best and the worst of human behavior. We seek the immortality of opinion, of remembrance, and that seeking can guide us in many directions of life.
The Divine lives and dies in us
We exist, and strive, for a reason. As part of the Divine, we are separately-willed individuals that work to improve ourselves and the Universe around us when we are at our best. These drives to strive, to grow, to change and improve ourselves and others, push us only because we have a time limit, because we cannot put these desires off indefinitely, but must work at them from a young age if we hope to achieve them.
All words, however, are cold comfort when faced with mortality and the mortality of our loved ones. The Divine can seem cold and uncaring compared to personal pain and hardship. Yet, the Divine suffers, as we do, with each death, and rejoices with us in each life. Our Flame is that of the Divine, never lost or forgotten, even when we leave our bodies and cease to be separate, and are again one with the Universe.
The loss of ourselves, of our individuality, is scary to many people. We value our identities, our separateness from each other, even as we bemoan it. Anything that threatens our separateness, our knowledge of self, is a potential threat even as it is a potential gift. And so we fear death, knowing that we will no longer be ourselves when we do not wear our bodies, and fearing what we might be without them. We try to find ways to save our individuality even beyond death, beyond all knowledge into the realm of hope and faith.
But the Universe does not conform to our will and desires, much as we wish it did. Our lives end, but we are never forgotten or lost, but instead returned to the greater Universe.
Questions: What do you do in response to the fear of death? Does it help? Hurt? What blessing has mortality brought to your life? How can you live without certainty? Would life be better if we knew of how we would die?
The Author
Genevieve Wood is the founder of FlameKeeping, a pantheistic philosophy of life. In her day life she is a stay at home mother and a knitter. FlameKeeping was founded due to a lack of philosophical structures in pagan religions. The idea of FlameKeeping is that everyone and everything is part of the Divine Universe. We need to work together to improve that divine, building and co-creating the universe through our lives. We are not passive participants, we are active shapers in the future and must live as such. More information can be found at www.flamekeeping.org and in her book Kindling Our Stars, available at Lulu.com and Amazon.com.
This Wednesday
This Wednesday, we will hear from our another of our columnists, Jon Cleland Host, Starstuff, Contemplating: “Evolutionary Parenting”. Don’t miss it!
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