Naturalistic Paganism
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Yesterday, Courtney York posted this on the HP Facebook page:
Hello! I’m very new to Paganism. I’m a naturalistic pagan and for all of my life, I thought that I was just not going to ever discover a religion to be a part of. After I described my beliefs to my sister, she linked me the website HumanisticPaganism and I was blown away. I have never EVER found a belief system that even remotely was like mine but naturalistic paganism is a perfect fit. I cried after reading the blog and ever since then I recognize as a Naturalistic Pagan — since I already was one!
I remember feeling the same way when I first discovered this site. This is why this site is so important. We are providing a spiritual home, albeit a virtual one, for Humanistic and Naturalistic Pagans who might otherwise be unable to find a home in Paganism or other forms of Religious Naturalism. This is why I think it is important that HP expand its outreach. There are many more people who might join our community, but have never heard of us or even conceived that we might exist.
We have five days left in our Indiegogo campaign. We are about half way to our goal. If we can raise $538, we will be able to place an add at The Wild Hunt (and help support The Wild Hunt at the same time). A contribution of $10 or more will earn you a shout out at HP. A contribution of $25 or more will get you a link to the website or blog of your choice.
Thank you for your support.
John Halstead, Managing Editor
Seasons and heartbeats, by Brock Haussamen
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Today we continue with our late autumn theme of “Death and Life”with Brock Haussamen’s thoughts on aging. In the comments below, share your thoughts about how the aging process has affected your spirituality.
“My heart pumps in, pumps out, pumps in, while the seasons pump the life of the planet, year in, year out. The globe’s temperature, moisture, and light pass by in a rotation that brings forth sprouting, blooming, fading, dormancy, sprouting—the cardiac coordination between the planet and its life.”
Age: 68. These days the seasons are less like a perfume to me and more like a clock.
When I was young, autumns were my favorite–painfully romantic, full of yearning and the future, life-enhancing and lonely at the same time. The smoke in the air and the cold freshness made me want to run around, run anywhere. I loved playing football because it required running around fast and then falling on the ground, a favorite activity of boys which I think remains the basic appeal of the sport.
Each season had its flavor and power. Winter’s were perhaps the mildest—cozy, private, a little claustrophobic. Spring could be “the cruelest month”—I think it depended on how my love life was going—but the renewal everywhere made me lightly happy. Summer brought its sex appeal, but the absence of school was a real emptiness. I couldn’t live up to summer’s fullness and high expectations. When the Beach Boys sang, “There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues,” I was relieved to know I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
These days, decades later, either my senses are declining or sheer repetition has taken the intensity out of each season, or both. Though autumn is still my favorite and summer still less than idyllic, now I’m more caught up in watching the plants grow and fade and feeling in awe, not so much of the season itself, but of the inescapability of the changes, the daylight lengthening or shrinking, the air turning warmer or cooler. Lovely as it all is, it’s the relentlessness of the cycle that gets to me now.
Sometimes I think, one less summer left, one less autumn to go.
The other rhythm I’m aware of these days is my heart’s. It has been irregular for periods, enough so that I no longer take it for granted when it’s regular. As this autumn was coming in, it struck me that the seasons also are a heartbeat. My heart pumps in, pumps out, pumps in, while the seasons pump the life of the planet, year in, year out. The globe’s temperature, moisture, and light pass by in a rotation that brings forth sprouting, blooming, fading, dormancy, sprouting—the cardiac coordination between the planet and its life.
My heart will run down—is running down—my seasons will run down and run out, but my inclusion in the endless beat of the seasons all these years—the inclusion of every living thing in the rhythm that carries us along—has been a taste of immortality.
The Author
Brock Haussamen: I grew up in New York City and now live in New Jersey, where I taught English for four decades at a community college, a profession I found varied and rewarding. I’m married, with family in the area.
I retired in 2006 in part to fight poverty as best I could, at every level I could–locally, nationally, and in Africa. I’ve become a local volunteer and on-line advocate and along the way have learned fast about the economic, political, and legal issues that accompany poverty.
I also found myself thinking more about the central questions that catch up with us sooner or later: What is my purpose? How will I face death? What do I believe in? I have always liked the descriptions from science about how living things work, about the history of the earth, about the nature of the cosmos. But I could not put those pictures together with my questions. Gradually I came to see that life’s history over 3.8 billion years stood inside and throughout my being and constituted my livingness at its core. In my blog at threepointeightbillionyears.com, I’ve been exploring the variety of ways in which our experience is anchored not just in our evolution from primates but in the much longer lifespan of life itself.
Next Sunday
Next Sunday, we continue our theme of “Death and Life” with NaturalPantheist: “Thoughts on Death and the Afterlife”.
The HPedia: Energy
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.
In Contemporary Paganism, “energy” typically refers to a vaguely-defined metaphysical or pseudo-metaphysical force connecting various objects in the cosmos. It often plays a role in describing ritual experiences or explaining how magic is thought to work.
This notion of “energy” has little, if anything, to do with the concept in physics, other than a very loose analogy. It probably is more worth comparing and contrasting with concepts of subtle forces in other cultures such as mana, prana, chi, and so on.
From a naturalistic standpoint, there seems to be little evidence supporting such subtle forces, yet “energy” might still be used in a loose, colloquial way to describe a “powerful” or “moving” empirical sensation.
Check out other entries in our HPedia.
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”.
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