Naturalistic Paganism
Mid-Month Meditation for November: Panthea
Editor’s note: This is our second monthly meditation. We encourage our readers to take these posts 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. The video 3 1/2 minutes. After watching the video, take a few minutes to let the experience sink in. If it feels right, leave a comment.
This month we honor early pantheists, Spinoza and John Toland. So for this month’s meditation, we offer a pantheistic poem: “Panthea” by Oscar Wilde, read by Annika Garratt.
“Panthea” by Oscar Wilde
Nay, let us walk from fire unto fire,
From passionate pain to deadlier delight,—
I am too young to live without desire,
Too young art thou to waste this summer night
Asking those idle questions which of old
Man sought of seer and oracle, and no reply was told.
For, sweet, to feel is better than to know,
And wisdom is a childless heritage,
One pulse of passion—youth’s first fiery glow,—
Are worth the hoarded proverbs of the sage:
Vex not thy soul with dead philosophy,
Have we not lips to kiss with, hearts to love and eyes to see!
Dost thou not hear the murmuring nightingale,
Like water bubbling from a silver jar,
So soft she sings the envious moon is pale,
That high in heaven she is hung so far
She cannot hear that love-enrapturerd tune,—
Mark how she wreathes each horn with mist, yon late and labouring moon.
White lilies, in whose cups the gold bees dream,
The fallen snow of petals where the breeze
Scatters the chestnut blossom, or the gleam
Of boyish limbs in water,—are not these
Enough for thee, dost thou desire more?
Alas! the Gods will give nought else from their eternal store.
For our high Gods have sick and wearied grown
Of all our endless sins, our vain endeavour
For wasted days of youth to make atone
By pain or prayer or priest, and never, never,
Hearken they now to either good or ill,
But send their rain upon the just and the unjust at will.
They sit at ease, our Gods they sit at ease,
Strewing their leaves of rose their scented wine,
They sleep, they sleep, beneath the rocking trees
Where asphodel and yellow lotus twine,
Mourning the old glad days before they knew
What evil things the heart of man could dream, and dreaming do.
And far beneath the brazen floor they see
Like swarming flies the crowd of little men,
The bustle of small lives, then wearily
Back to their lotus-haunts they turn again
Kissing each others’ mouths, and mix more deep
The poppy-seeded draught which brings soft purple-ridded sleep.
There all day long the golden-vestured sun,
Their torch-bearer, stands with his torch ablaze
And, when the gaudy web of noon is spun
By its twelve maidens, through the crimson haze
Fresh from Endymion’s arms comes forth the moon
And the immortal Gods in toils of mortal passions swoon.
There walks Queen Juno through some dewy mead,
Her grand white feet flecked with the saffron dust
Of wind-stirred lilies, while young Ganymede
Leaps in the hot and amber-foaming must
His curls all tossed, as when the eagle bare
The frightened boy from Ida through the blue Ionian air.
There in the green heart of some garden close
Queen Venus with the shepherd at her side,
Her warm soft body like the briar rose
Which would be white yet blushes at its pride,
Laughs low for love, till jealous Salmacis
Peers through the myrtle-leaves and sighs for pain of lonely bliss.
There never does that dreary north-wind blow
Which leaves our English forests bleak and bare
Nor ever falls the swift white-feathered snow,
Nor ever cloth the red-toothed lightning dare
To wake them in the silver-fretted night
When we lie weeping for some sweet sad sin, some dead delight.
Alas! they know the far Lethaan spring
The violet-hidden waters well they know,
Where one whose feet with tired wandering
Are faint and broken may take heart and go,
And from those dark depths cool and crystalline
Drink, and draw balm, and sleep for sleepless souls, and anodyne.
But we oppress our natures, God or Fate
Is our enemy. we starve and feed
On vain repentance—O we are born too late!
What balm for us in bruised poppy seed
Who crowd into one finite pulse of time
The joy of infinite love and the fierce pain of infinite crime.
O we are wearied of this sense of guilt,
Wearied of pleasure’s paramour despair,
Wearied of every temple we have built,
Wearied of every right, unanswered prayer,
For man is weak; God sleeps; and heaven is high;
One fiery-coloured moment: one great love; and lo! we die.
Ah! but no ferry-man with labouring pole
Nears his black shallop to the flowerless strand,
No little coin of bronze can bring the soul
Over Death’s river to the sunless land,
Victim and wine and vow are all in vain,
The tomb is sealed; the soldiers watch; the dead rise not again.
We are resolved into the supreme air,
We are made one with what we touch and see,
With our heart’s blood each crimson sun is fair,
With our young lives each spring-impassioned tree
Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range
The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change.
With beat of systole and of diastole
One grand great life throbs through earth’s giant heart,
And mighty waves of single Being roll
From nerveless germ to man, for we are part
Of every rock and bird and beast and hill,
One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill.
From lower cells of waking life we pass
To full perfection; thus the world grows old:
We who are godlike now were once a mass
Of quivering purple flecked with bars of gold,
Unsentient or of joy or misery,
And tossed in terrible tangles of some wild and wind-swept sea.
This hot hard flame with which our bodies burn
Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil,
Ay! and those argent breasts of shine will turn
To water-lilies; the brown fields men till
Will be more fruitful for our love to-night,
Nothing is lost in nature, all things live in Death’s despite.
The boy’s first kiss, the hyacinth’s first bell,
The man’s last passion, and the last red spear
That from the lily leaps, the asphodel
Which will not let its blossoms blow for fear
Of too much beauty, and the timid shame
Of the young bridegroom at his lover’s eyes,—these with the same
One sacrament are consecrate, the earth
Not we alone hath passions hymeneal,
The yellow buttercups that shake for mirth
At daybreak know a pleasure not less real
Than we do, when in some fresh-blossoming wood
We draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that life is good.
So when men bury us beneath the yew
Thy crimson-stained mouth a rose will be,
And thy soft eyes lush bluebells dimmed with dew,
And when the white narcissus wantonly
Kisses the wind its playmate some faint joy
Will thrill our dust, and we will be again fond maid and boy.
And thus without life’s conscious torturing pain
In some sweet flower we will feel the sun,
And from the linnet’s throat will sing again,
And as two gorgeous-mailed snakes will run
Over our graves, or as two tigers creep
Through the hot jungle where the yellow-eyed huge lions sleep
And give them battle! How my heart leaps up
To think of that grand living after death
In beast and bird and flower, when this cup,
Being filled too full of spirit, bursts for breath
And with the pale leaves of some autumn day
The soul earth’s earliest conqueror becomes earth’s last great prey.
O think of it! We shall inform ourselves
Into all sensuous life, the goat-foot Faun
The Centaur, or the merry bright-eyed Elves
That leave their dancing rings to spite the dawn
Upon the meadows, shall not be more near
Than you and I to nature’s mysteries, for we shall hear
The thrush’s heart beat, and the daisies grow,
And the wan snowdrop sighing for the sun
On sunless days in winter, we shall know
By whom the silver gossamer is spun,
Who paints the diapered fritillaries,
On what wide wings rrom shivering pine to pine the eagle flies.
Ay! had we never loved at all, who knows
If yonder daffodil had lured the bee
Into its gilded womb, or any rose
Had hung with crimson lamps its little tree!
Methinks no leaf would ever bud in spring
But for the lovers’ lips that kiss, the poets’ iips that sing.
Is the light vanished from our golden sun,
Or is this dadal-fashioned earth less fair,
That we are nature’s heritors, and one
With every pulse of life that beats the air?
Rather new suns across the sky shall pass,
New splendour come unto the flower, new glory to the grass.
And we two lovers shall not sit afar,
Critics of nature, but the joyous sea
Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star
Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be
Part of the mighty universal whole,
And through all aons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!
We shall be notes in that great Symphony
Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,
And all the live World’s throbbing heart shall be
One with our heart; the stealthy creeping years
Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,
The Universe itself shall be our Immortality.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Source: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Panthea
The Author
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish poet and writer. He is the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and the play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
The Narrator
Annika Garratt is an artist/illustrator from Bournemouth UK. She produces colourful mixed media artwork on canvas as well as fluid ink illustrations, often based on folklore and mythological themes. Annika sells original paintings on canvas as well as fine art prints. If you have any questions about Annika’s work, feel free to contact her by email. You can also find Annika at:
Ghost story, by Ken Apple
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The theme for late autumn here at HP is “Death and Life.”
Photo by Ken Apple
I was in my twenties when my Dad died. My first Christmas without him was eight months later. If you’d called me to chat, and thought to ask, I’d have told you I was fine. Yet, that Christmas Eve I found myself walking around the dark house. Being haunted. I didn’t see him that night, though I would later. I didn’t hear him. I wasn’t thinking about him, no memories being replayed, nothing like that. I felt him, a profound sense of his presence.
For the next few years I caught glimpses of him. He would be walking along the street as I drove, or just ducking through a door. Most of those times I would look again and the image would become someone else, a man of similar age, build or body language. Those sighting have become less frequent as the years passed.
I don’t believe in ghosts or life after death. I can’t discount it philosophically but I don’t see the need for it to explain the world. Yet I’ve seen a ghost.
The ghosts in the gaps
Many of the things our brains tell us about the world, about the environment outside our heads, are wrong. A minute making love, or eating chocolate, is exactly as long as a minute in the dentist’s chair. The large screen, high-def field of vision you think you have (until you hit your forties and get bifocals) is the result of your brain fooling you. Your brain takes a picture full of holes and gaps and cleans it up, smooths it out.
Still, a minute in the dentist’s chair is longer and I don’t care what the stopwatch says. When I look out of my very own eyes the big screen high-def world is the one I see. That’s the thing about blind spots. You can’t see them. You don’t know they’re there.
Science can tell me what my actual field of vision is, or hold up the stopwatch. I accept those descriptions as accurate, as far as they go. Science can tell me that violence and anger is primarily a function of testosterone and adrenalin, but it does a shitty job of describing what rage feels like, or love, or helping us deal with them. All science can do is tell me they aren’t real. When I need to deal with how it feels to be human from inside the human head, to deal with the ghost, I must turn to art, literature, drama, sport, religion.
The narrative turn
I told this story in a certain way. I could have told it in a way which discounted my experience. I could have told it as pure psychology, with my relationship between my Dad and myself taking center stage. Each of those stories would have been true, as true as the ghost story. Each one is as true as the other, a paradox. In the Tao te Ching those paradoxes are called the Great Mystery. Sociology calls the ability to hold each of these competing ideas simultaneously “ambiguity tolerance”.
There is no need to rank them hierarchically. I do not need to decide which is more true or discount all but one interpretation as untrue, inauthentic. If I were a scientist with a hypothesis and a way of testing it, I would do those things. I would try and find the theory that most allowed me to model and manipulate this phenomenon. But I’m not, we’re not. I am a person that has had an experience and there is more than one way to understand it.
Interpreting an experience is much more like interpreting art than doing science. There are as many ways to interpret a piece of art as there are people.
The blind leading the deaf
Some interpretations will be widely accepted, will resonate with many people. Some will be wildly idiosyncratic. Each will be just as valid for a given individual as the other, but even the most widely accepted won’t work for everyone. Imagine a person blind from birth listening to the movie Star Wars and interpreting that movie without visuals or the visual library each sighted person has built up over a lifetime. Now consider a deaf person watching the same move with subtitles, with only visual cues and the written word.
Each of us takes in life the same way. Our experiences are not findings of fact and do not need to be treated as such. Certain interpretations will have a better chance of being accepted by large numbers of people. The Star Wars sound track played to a black screen would not have been a blockbuster hit. Still, it’s a valid a way to understand the movie. I can yell at the blind people about everything they are missing, but that hardly seems helpful or friendly. It’s also just as likely that they are hearing shades of meaning that totally escape me. Could we have a useful conversation about what we’re seeing/hearing, about those things the other might have missed? If we are open and polite, I hope so. Let’s try.
For discussion: In the comments below, share a time when you experienced something that was not easily explainable by your belief system.
The Author
My name is Ken Apple. I am fifty years old, I live in Puyallup Washington with my wife and youngest son. I attend the Tahoma UU congregation in Tacoma, WA. I have worked in book sales for almost twenty years, because I can’t imagine trying to sell anyone something else.
Next Sunday
Next Sunday we continue our theme of “Death and Life” with Brock Haussamen, “Seasons and heartbeats”.
The HPedia: Resonance
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.
Resonance is a term found in common Pagan expressions of myths or deities which “call to” or “resonate” with one. In such Pagan discourse, “it doesn’t resonate with me” is a perfectly acceptable reason to refrain from engaging with a certain myth or deity, without implying anything a priori negative or unsatisfactory about said myth or deity. Such lack of implied criticism is one of the virtues of the Pagan concept of resonance, and no doubt plays a role in enabling a community of such diversity to thrive together.
On one level, one might describe a certain attraction to an idea, image, or myth by saying “It resonates with me.” On another level, one might describe an experience of oneness or communion with a transcendent other as an experience of resonance.
From a naturalistic perspective, such a feeling might arise in relation to such ego-transcending entities as nature, society, or the psyche. Often it does arise following a mystical, numinous, or visionary experience (see “Numinous”, “Mystical”, and “Visionary”). A sense of resonance with one’s world may even be a goal for naturalists.
It is of crucial note that the experience of resonance does not seem to be at the beck and call of the conscious will, nor is it a product of rational, cognitive deliberation (though such can play a role in its arising). That is to say, we cannot simply will ourselves to experience it. Resonance seems rather to emerge from the unconscious as a response of the total psyche to a situation. To that extent, activities that plumb the unconscious, such as myth, meditation, and ritual, may be required to encourage its emergence.
See also “Numinous”, “Mystical”, “Transcendence”, and “Visionary.”
Check out other entries in our HPedia.
Autumn Cross-Quarter
Samhain altar by Trea Silverwolf (used with permission)
In the Northern Hemisphere, the Autumn Cross-Quarter is celebrated among Neo-Pagans on October 31 as Samhain (pron. saw-in), the Neo-Pagan New Year and origin of modern Halloween. The actual date of the cross-quarter falls about a week later on November 6 or 7. The precise date and time for the cross-quarter can be found at archaeoastronomy.com. Meanwhile, those in the Southern Hemisphere experience this time as Beltaine.
In Neo-Pagan circles, the date is sometimes celebrated as the beginning of winter, although, in the U.S., winter does not officially begin until the winter solstice, and the cross-quarter is the middle of autumn. In some places in the northern hemisphere, the last leaves are clinging to the branches and the harvest is near completion.
NaturalPantheist describes how the traditional Neo-Pagan holiday can be understood to a religious naturalist:
With the revival of Paganism, the practice of venerating ancestors, a practice of the ancient Celts once dead in the western world, has begun to grow in popularity again. As Naturalistic Pantheists, this practice should also be a part of our lives. Samhain is a time of remembrance. It is a time to honour those who have died, whether friends, family or ancestors. It is a time to remember them and to be thankful for the role they have played in influencing our lives. They are not gone, they live on within us through our memories and genes, and within the earth as their atoms are reincarnated into a thousand different creations. Samhain reminds us that one day, we too must die. It is a time take stock of our lives and to meditate on the cycle of life and death, confronting a topic we too often do our best to avoid.
He goes on to suggest some ways in which the day can be honored by naturalists:
It is traditional to celebrate this festival by eating a large feast of late harvest foods e.g. pumpkins, apples, root vegetables and barmbrack bread. It is also the traditional time for remembering our ancestors and those we have loved and lost e.g. by visiting their graves and putting fresh flowers there. Personally, I build an altar and put photos and mementos of those I have lost recently on it. This year I have spent much of the past month researching my family history in order to create a family tree and know more about the ancestors I wish to honour. On Samhain eve I perform a ritual of remembrance, lighting a candle for each person I am remembering and holding a minutes silence in respect. This year that will include both my grandmother and her dog. I am also having a party with friends, decorating the house and eating traditional foods.
NaturalPantheist also describes a Samhain ritual for naturalists here.
Glenys Livingstone of PaGaian Cosmology celebrates the Autumn Cross-Quarter by having her ritual participants bring photos of their old selves, and answer the question: “Who have you been?” The participant holds up the photo and describes the old self, to which the group responds: “Hail to you and your becomings.”
The participants also remember those who have passed on, sharing a feast of lolly snakes while observing:
“We welcome all these, whose lives have been harvested, whose lives have fed our own, and we remember that we too will be consumed, feed others with our lives. May we be interesting food. We also become the ancestors. We are the ancestors.”
Jon Cleland Host of the Naturalistic Paganism yahoo group relates Samhain to events in evolutionary history:
Just as Samhain heralds the dark quarter of the year (Samhain to Imbolc) and then the cold quarter of the year (Yule to Ostara), the Cretaceous extinction started with the dark cloud of ejecta from the asteroid impact, followed by the deadly freeze of a “nuclear” winter. Samhain also works well to commemorate extinction, which has been the fate of over 99.99% of all species that have existed on earth.
He then develops these observations into a seasonal practice:
These extinctions have made room for new species (such as us), and death makes room for new life. Samhain is thus the time to express our gratitude to those who have gone before us, those who have made our lives possible, those who have influenced us, and those who we remember. For this reason our ritual usually includes tributes to our ancestors and others. Photos of the dead can be given a place of prominence leading up to Samhain, and all can be especially remembered, even spoken to, if you like. The meditation to our ancestors can be read (see separate upload [in Naturalistic Paganism files section] for that).
Finally, Host notes that Samhain is also a time for fun:
Samhain (Halloween) parties are good, as is trick-or-treating, bobbing for apples, and decorating. Colors are black, orange, tombstone gray and sometimes bone (off white).
Share your naturalistic traditions in the comments below.
As seen from the sky, by Debra Doggett
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Today we conclude our early autumn theme of “Finding Meaning” with Debra Doggett’s essay, “As seen from the sky”.
How does a shift of perspective change our understanding of who we really are?
I stayed home from work today. The need for a mental health break didn’t come as a surprise but the courage to do it did. All week I’ve been weepy, moping around everything and everyone with unshed tears threatening to pour. Placing the call this morning was my acknowledgement that my system is in dangerous overload.
Though I didn’t understand it at first, my emotional roller coaster held a lesson within itself. For the last two years it has been my quest to develop my awareness of the world that exists around me, to understand the beauty and symmetry of life on a planet that spins through the Universe yet holds me close to its heart. Still I never gave the natural world a thought in all my wonderings about why my emotions were on a bender. Becoming aware of the connection between the inner and the outer self has been my focus and I have sought it in all that I study yet the simple act of connecting my emotions to the world around me got lost in the feelings I couldn’t understand. I looked for answers instead in events and people, in trials and tribulations and found nothing in the way of explanation.
At the end of a quiet, healing day, I remembered there was a meteor shower tonight, one that I’d been told could be seen quite well in my area between dusk and dawn. It was way past dusk but not yet dawn so I went out and looked up. A bit disappointed, I saw a somewhat clear sky with the usual tower and street lights blinking in the dark but little else. No great heavenly show or awe-inspiring vision, nothing on the grand scale my imagination conjured up.
I started to give up and go back inside to mope again but from the corner of my eye I caught a flash, a brief glimpse of light that was gone before I’d really seen it. Stepping back out from the porch, I stared hard at the night canvas. They were winks that came and went fast but they were there. Tiny bursts of light played chase with my eyes, sparkling and gone in a blink.
Hidden beneath the night stretched out above me was the Universe. Hidden beneath my tears and lost feelings was the web that held me earthbound. Does a display of movement millions of miles away cause my heart to cry? Maybe. And maybe it’s just the view of home that pulls at me. Perhaps one of those pieces speeding through the Universe used to be me, or at least a part of me. I have been told I am made of the stars, of the particles and dust of the vast, unending mural of planets, moons and celestial beings. Do I miss the journey through the expanse of space now that I am earthbound? Do I miss seeing the endless sky and the darkened glow of the Universe or is it simply that I feel my own smallness, weeping the tears of a child with the memories of birth still remnant in my mind?
I am tiny, a speck of atoms and muscle on an insignificant globe, living, eating, breathing and one day dying all in a space of time that takes up a nanosecond of eternity. And yet I am light, I am stardust and the journey of those celestial beings pulls at me, urging me to step onto a path of discovery that will one day show me my true ethereal essence as it leaves the physical realm far behind.
This has to do with aging and becoming more aware of how fragile our physical bodies are. But what’s inside has become so much stronger than it was when I was twenty or even thirty. I know most women especially dread turning fifty but I found it to be very liberating in terms of finding who I truly am, what truly exists within a rather fading physical shell. It’s about understanding the ability to transcend physical restraints and still be who you are inside, who you are meant to be.
The Author
Debra Doggett: I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. Being a writer is more than something I do. It is the way I see the world, the way I process it. I believe in the power of stories. They make us smile, make us think and give us untold moments of enjoyment. My stories come from the landscape around me and the worlds I build in my head. I am proud to be a storyteller, and I hope my work leaves you both satisfied and entertained.
Next Sunday
Next Sunday, we begin our late autumn them, “Death and Life”, with Ken Apple: “Ghost story”.
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