Naturalistic Paganism

“This new way of thinking about things… attempts to actually restore some of the magic and wonder of things, and to restore meaning and desirability to life.”

Winterviews continues!  From the Solstice (Dec. 21st) till the next Cross-quarter (Feb. 4th), we’re bringing you non-stop interviews and other goodies from big-name authors.  Mark your calendar!

• Dr. Glenys Livingstone, author of PaGaian Cosmology – Dec. 21
• Dr. Chet Raymo, author of When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy – Dec. 25
• Chris Stedman, author of Nonprophet Status – Jan. 8
• Dr. Brendan Myers, author of Loneliness and Revelation – Jan. 15
• Rev. Michael J. Dangler, Druid and Senior Priest of Three Cranes Grove – Jan. 22
• Dr. Ursula Goodenough, author of The Sacred Depths of Nature – Jan. 29

Our interview with Dr. Brendan Myers concludes today with an in-depth discussion of the revelation of “presence” in nature, and a peak at his upcoming book Circles of Meaning, Labyrinths of Fear.

B. T. Newberg:  Last time we talked about the universal experiences you call Immensities, and whether gods might have some relation to them.  I don’t want to push the gods question too far, but there’s another of your key concepts that seems too relevant to pass up: your notion of presence.  One of the issues we’ve been discussing on this blog is how to talk about gods in a naturalistic way without reducing them to archetypes, metaphors, etc.  We need to find a way to let the sense of the numinous come through.  Your book Loneliness and Revelation speaks in an almost numinous way about the revelation of presence by nature, works of architecture, and other entities.  What is this “presence”?  What does it mean for something to “reveal” its presence?

Brendan Myers: Presence is, quite simply, the here-ness and the now-ness of something-that-is-not-nothing. It has to do with something’s being in front of you, available to your senses and to your contemplations.

Presence is also that aspect of a being’s identity, reality, or selfhood which that being reveals to you. It is what you experience when someone or something shows itself to you, or deliberately allows you to see and to hear what it is. And here I do mean a “being”, not an object or a mere “thing”: presence has to be revealed as a statement, a deliberate act.

But perhaps controversially, my thoughts are rather flexible concerning what could count as a presence-revealing statement. Much of the time, a being asserts its presence just by showing up. You are here, and you are now, and your very existence here and now makes a statement to others who might be in a position to see and hear it. At minimum, the statement is “I am here!”.

Remember, not all statements are expressed in words. Some are expressed in gestures, symbols, artworks, bodily postures, and other movements. And I’m also open to the possibility that animals and plants reveal presence in a similar way.

But it seems to me that the very possibility of speaking intelligibly about ethics, and the very foundation of eudaimonia, the good and worthwhile human life, begins in the revelation of presence, where two beings show themselves to each other and they do not fear.

Incidentally, my understanding of the importance of presence is one of the places where my thinking diverges away from existentialism. Existentialists always claim that existence precedes essence; or in other words, the fact of your bodily existence on earth comes before any discussion of your nature, your character, your soul, your fate or destiny, or anything else that could count as an “essence.”

By contrast, my argument is that existence and essence always come together: that the revelation of your presence is an essence, of a sort, which is always bundled with your existence. The two are inseparable, and there is probably no point in asking which one came first.

You ask about the gods. For the most part, I am inclined to leave questions about the gods to more theologically inclined pagan writers, such as John Michael Greer (his book A World Full of Gods seemed to me very well-reasoned).

I am a big fan of the idea of apotheosis, which is the immortality of a person’s life-story which continues to be told long after her death. I’m mostly convinced that the gods are, or rather were, living human beings from many centuries ago who lived outstandingly heroic or exemplary lives, and whose stories continued to be told, and exaggerated too, until they became the mythologies we have today.

Add a little animism to the mix, in the form of the belief that the souls of these people survived death and may be seen in dreams or in omens, and you have the basis of a Pagan polytheism.

The interesting thing about presence and revelation, as I have described these ideas in my work, is that while existence and presence are inseparable, it may not always be strictly necessary for a body to be in front of you for a revelation to present itself. A person’s presence can be revealed in the story of that person, even when that person is elsewhere, or long dead. You tell the story of your grandmother on the anniversary of her funeral, and she is there with you, in the story.

The storytelling event is the existing thing, inseparable from the presence. You may also experience this presence when visiting places in the world that figure into that person’s story: this is why we make pilgrimages to the birthplaces or the graves of famous musicians, for example (the graves of Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison come to mind here).

Some people may also experience something like presence revealing itself through nonhuman events, like thunderstorms, sunrises, blizzards. Some people experience presence in landforms like great mountains, mist-shrouded lakes, vast deserts, and the sea. The experience of encountering such things often produces in people the feeling of being in the presence of a god.

The idea that the world as a whole has a presence is perhaps the basis of monotheism, although I think this is a direction well worth pursuing for anyone, whether monotheist or polytheist.

Whether the god of revealed presence is the same as the creator-god of Genesis or the Koran, however, and whether the appropriate relationship to have with such a god is “worship”, is entirely another question. If the gods are presences that reveal themselves through heroic storytelling and environmental events and the like, there doesn’t seem to be much point in worshipping them, or even “believing” in them in the usual way.

As the philosopher Beaudrillard wrote, “If God exists, there is no need to believe in Him. If people do believe in Him, this is because the self-evidence of his existence has passed away.”

BTN: Experiencing presence in this way, especially through thunderstorms or mist-shrouded lakes, strikes a powerful chord.  I certainly have felt it, and no doubt many others have too.  There’s one part that thoroughly confuses me, though: “presence has to be revealed as a statement, a deliberate act.”  How is the statement “I am here”, delivered just by showing up, deliberate?  It seems quite unintentional to me, accomplished without deliberation and whether you like it or not.  To push it further, how can animals or especially plants make deliberate statements?

BM: The basic statement of presence, “I am here”, is only the very simplest, very first movement of the whole revelation. It is always bound together with whatever else you may be doing at the same time. The deliberateness of the basic statement of presence underlies or hides behind your other purposes and projects, yet also participates in them.

In the book I discovered this statement by following a method invented by the philosopher Husserl, called “epoché”, or “reduction”. The method involves looking at the world and “standing back” from all the utilitarian or practical purposes that things appear to have, in order to see what remains.

If, for example, I am watching a man plant a tree, I see that he digs a hole, places the seed in the ground, waters it, and so on. But I also see that together with these practical actions, he also exists, shows up for life, reveals his presence, makes himself available to be seen and known by others. The revelation of presence, the “I am here”, is the substance, the hypostasis, of your practical way of being in the world, and inseparable from it, no matter what it is.

Yet just showing up is only the first movement of revelation. There are three more that follow it, which account for these practical matters more closely.

Concerning animals and plants: I also understand “a deliberate act” in a very flexible way here. This is because adult human beings are clearly not the only creatures in the world who act with intentionality. Newborn babies do too; and so do our pets, as any dog owner could tell you.

We normally assume that intentionality flows from consciousness and will. But following the work of philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, I’m suggesting that the truth is the other way around: that consciousness and will flows from intentionality. Any living organism which acts intentionally – hunting for food, or turning its leaves to face the sun – is acting in an intentional way, whether it is “conscious” of its act in a human sense or not. And bound together with its way of being will be its own peculiar way to assert the basic statement of revelation, “I am here.”

A scale of complexity is in play, from the simplest and smallest intentional movements, such as a paramecium swimming, to the most sophisticated and self-aware examples, such as a human reading these words.

Perhaps we are stretching the word “deliberate” a little bit too far here; and it may also be too difficult to see this kind of intentionality in sunrises or thunderstorms. Perhaps this is my last concession to animism.

I recognize this problem right in the book itself – writers should be honest with their readers, and should not pretend to know everything – yet I’m confident that I or some future writer may be able to solve it.

In the meanwhile, let us not lose sight of the more ultimate aim of this new way of thinking about things. It attempts to understand the world systematically and logically, but without at the same time stripping away its magic and wonder. In fact, it attempts to actually restore some of the magic and wonder of things, and to restore meaning and desirability to life.

BTN: Fair enough.  And yet, perhaps this line of questioning can lead us to other insights.  Let me try to explain what I mean…

First off, how can a person deliberately reveal their presence to generations to come through story, if it is not in their power to control whether and how their story is told?  For that matter, if your story is told exaggerated to god-like proportions, how is it still a revelation of your presence, and not something entirely different?

The kind of revelation of presence described seems decidedly unintentional, completely without deliberation, a presence that goes beyond any kind of egoistic deliberation, and cuts to the heart of what we share with all things in the universe: existence itself.

If there is any deliberation, it seems like it is on the part of the beholder: we may deliberately open ourselves to seeing a presence in the person or thing before us.  We might intentionally allow ourselves to see not a “mere thing” as you say, but a “being.”  Would that be a misunderstanding of your work?

BM: In the case of storytelling, we find that the storyteller supplies the material: the words that are spoken, the act of speaking them, etc. But from that material emerges more than just the teller’s own presence. We also find the presence of the characters in the story.

Think of how an excellent actor can sometimes portray her role so well that you forget you are watching a scripted and rehearsed performance. You sense that character’s presence in the actor’s gestures or the storyteller’s words; you know that something more is there. In this way we can understand the old proverb of the Celtic bards, that a seannachie can raise the dead.

The revelation of presence is, indeed, that which cuts through the ego and reaches the very heart of existence itself. Yet I want to understand this existence without falling into the black hole of solipsism. Revelation is something that you experience, but it is not an anthropomorphic projection. There’s something out there, revealing itself to you. A closed-minded or fearful person might prevent himself from seeing it. But it’s out there nonetheless.

And the more self-aware its intentionality is, the more it will reveal to you. And the more it will want the same things that you want: to not be alone, to know that it is something-and-not-nothing, and to know that its existence matters.

And this, it seems to me, is the very foundation on which we can build healthy relations with each other, and lead worthwhile lives.

BTN:  Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts in this interview.  Or should I say, thank you for revealing your presence to us? (grin).

Before we conclude, can you give us a brief teaser about your next book?  What’s it about, and when can we expect it on store shelves?

BM: I have several irons in the fire for the near future. In March of 2012, I will publish Circles of Meaning, Labyrinths of Fear.

In this book we’ll see how sacred places, sacred writings, relics, and rituals, holy days and magical times of year, and so on, are actually representations of relationships that people have with each other and the elements of the world.

Some of these relationships environmental: they involve landscapes, animals, and the streets of your home town. Some are personal, such as families, friends, and elders. Some are public, involving musicians, storytellers, medical doctors, and even soldiers. This book studies twenty-two of them, from a variety of traditions, and shows their place in “the good life.”

Yet these relations are always fragile, and threatened by fears, from the fear of loneliness, to the fear of the loss of personal or political freedom, to the fear of death. To escape from these fears, people often trap themselves into ways of life that are bad for everyone, including themselves. This book studies how that happens, and how to prevent it.

Just this week I signed contracts for two short books to be part of the “Pagan Portals” series from Moon Books (O Books’ pagan imprint). One will be about Druidry and Celtic mysticism, the other will be about philosophy.

A few months ago I invented a strategy game that I used to teach basic political science to my students. It turned out to be surprisingly popular, so I will be publishing it very soon.

And before the end of this year, I will self-publish my first novel: “Fellwater”. This is the story of two lovers who, while having problems in their relationship, accidentally get caught in the conflict between two factions of an ancient secret society.

News and information about these projects will be announced on my web site, my blog, and my Facebook page, as publication dates arrive.

BTN: Wow, let no one say you are not prolific!

Thanks for talking with us, Dr. Myers.

BM: Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak to you and your readers!

The interviewee

Canadian philosopher and writer Brendan Myers is the author of several well-respected books on mythology, folklore, society and politics, ethics, and spirituality.  His work is studied by college professors, social activist groups, interfaith groups, Celtic cultural associations, and even Humanist societies, in many countries around the world.  In 2008 he received OBOD’s prestigious Mount Haemus award for professional research in Druidry.  Since earning his Ph.D in environmental ethics at the National University of Ireland, Galway, he has lectured at several colleges and universities in Ontario, and toured much of Canada and Europe as a public speaker.  In his varied career Brendan has also worked as a musician, a labour union leader, a government researcher, an environmentalist, and as a simple country gardener.  Brendan’s books in print to date include:

• Loneliness and Revelation
• The Other Side of Virtue
• A Pagan Testament
• The Mysteries of Druidry
• Dangerous Religion (out of print)

Brendan is also one of the hosts of Standing Stone and Garden Gate podcast.

Bio text courtesy of Brendan Myers’ Facebook page.

Get our ebooks

“I am a kind of Pagan that the modern revival doesn’t know what to do about, nor how to deal with, at least not yet. But I am a kind of Pagan, nonetheless.”

Winterviews continues!  From the Solstice (Dec. 21st) till the next Cross-quarter (Feb. 4th), we’re bringing you non-stop interviews and other goodies from big-name authors.  Mark your calendar!

• Dr. Glenys Livingstone, author of PaGaian Cosmology – Dec. 21
• Dr. Chet Raymo, author of When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy – Dec. 25
• Chris Stedman, author of Nonprophet Status – Jan. 8
• Dr. Brendan Myers, author of Loneliness and Revelation – Jan. 15
• Rev. Michael J. Dangler, Druid and Senior Priest of Three Cranes Grove – Jan. 22
• Dr. Ursula Goodenough, author of The Sacred Depths of Nature – Jan. 29

This week we chat with Dr. Brendan Myers, philosopher and proud Pagan.  In Part 1 of this meaty interview, Myers shares a little about his difficulties finding acceptance as a Pagan intellectual, and a lot about his unique philosophy rooted in virtue, courage, and universal experiences he calls “Immensities.”

B. T. Newberg: As an author of five books, going on six, you’ve grown a body of work that emerges from and speaks to your roots as a Pagan.  And yet you’ve been accused of being a non-Pagan.  Why?  What was that experience like?

Brendan Myers: There are several reasons why this accusation appeared. One has to do with the fact that I am not especially interested in ritual anymore. I certainly participate in community rituals at the festivals I attend, but I don’t feel much need for ritual in private groups or while alone at home.  I’m not interested in spellcraft either, or energy work, seeking out supernatural experiences, or developing psychic talents. And finally, in my books and other written works, I almost never speak about the gods. This has lead some Pagans, near and far, to conclude that my paganism isn’t based on “experience” anymore, and that it is therefore not a Pagan path.

This is sometimes followed by the caveat that there’s nothing wrong with not being a Pagan. But the accusation stings a little. It’s as if I’m being accused of fraud. However much Pagans talk about openness, freedom to believe, and tolerance of difference, there is still a party line to toe.

The accusation also stems from a certain stream of opinion that is popular in the modern Pagan movement, especially in the United States, where people tend to be suspicious of intellectuals. This stream of opinion holds that rationality, formal education, and intellectual or scientific analysis of things, which together are sometimes called “book learning”, are always inherently inferior to intuition, gut instinct, personal experience, and practical action.

“Follow your heart” is the slogan of this world view, as if the heart can never be wrong. And since I have pursued excellence in the intellectual side of things for all my adult life, it follows (so the accusers say) that I must be missing out on the intuitive side, and therefore missing out on a full and proper spiritual life.

This source of the accusation depends on a false dichotomy, but there’s no point in saying so to someone who believes it. They only repeat their initial claim about how intellectual people are missing out, as if repeating the claim makes it true; and then they add that any criticism of that claim is personally hurtful to them, and the discussion ends.

The reality is this: I am a kind of Pagan that the world has not seen in a very long time, perhaps not since the fall of ancient Druids, or the end of classical Greece and Rome. I find inspiration and enlightenment in the exercise of reason, and the courageous use of my own mind. When I make an intellectual discovery or an intellectual creation, I experience the same ecstasy as the shaman in his trance, and the dancer in her dance.

I reject the dichotomy between the mind and the heart, between thinking and feeling. I have as much intuition and passion as anyone, but I have an enquiring and disciplined mind too.

I am a kind of Pagan that the modern revival doesn’t know what to do about, nor how to deal with, at least not yet. But I am a kind of Pagan, nonetheless.

BTN: I think a lot of us here at Humanistic Paganism feel that way.

BM: And I will do my part to help lead us all to the island, no matter what my critics say; and I hope they will thank me, in the end.

BTN: Your brand of spirituality has been called “Pagan Existentialism.”  Is that a fair characterization?  Why or why not?

BM: I suppose it is partially fair, at least of the kind of work I’ve done in the last five or six years. I want to look first at the way people actually live and move and exist in the world, and then afterward consider the meaning, the nature, or the spirit of what we see. This is certainly consistent with the existentialist proposition that “existence precedes essence.”

I’m also concerned with questions about what it is to be alive and human, how best to relate to each other and to our environment, what a worthwhile life is, and what happiness is. These kinds of questions also concern existentialists. Even religious existentialists were more concerned with these questions than with questions like whether God exists, or how best to interpret various scriptures.

The best known existentialists – people like Sartre and Camus, and perhaps their predecessors Heidegger and Nietzsche – were atheists. I’m not an atheist. But I do have serious doubts about the usual beliefs many Pagans have about the gods.

More importantly, however, I tend to think that the human questions are much more interesting and important than the supernatural ones. For whether the gods exist or do not exist, whether magic is real or whether it is fantasy, whether we have souls and whatever might happen to us when we die, still we must live here and now, as we are, in this world, and still we must decide what to do with ourselves.

These are questions about the meaning of life. They cannot be answered by appealing to the gods, or by casting spells. They can only be answered by courageous use of human intelligence and heart.

I suppose being called an existentialist is not so bad. It means I get to hang out with people like Kierkegaard, Tillich, Bultmann, Jaspers, and Marcel. Maybe also Martin Buber, and Pico della Mirandola too, if I stretch it a bit.

I might prefer to call my work “Areteology.” This is a word I invented in my doctoral thesis to describe the study of virtue and excellence

BTN: I see, “Areteaology” because arete is the Greek word for “virtue”…

Or, maybe my work should be called “Brendanist”. But I’m sure a name like that will never catch on.

BTN: I wish it would, though personally I would change it “Brandonist”!  Ha, ha (that being my name and all).

But jokes aside…

You said you almost never speak of the gods in your books.  This stands out as a striking absence in The Other Side of Virtue, where you describe a key concept of your work: the Immensity.  This concept suggests, to me at least, a sense of the powerful, awe-inspiring, even numinous aspects of existence.  It might be tempting to interpret gods as Immensities, or Immensities as gods.  Could you give a brief description of what the Immensity is, and whether you see any potential relation to deities?

BM: The idea of the Immensity occurred to me while I was visiting a forest near Laubach, in the foothills of the Vogelsberg region of central Germany.

For many months, I had been trying to reconcile the relativism and radical individualism of our modern age, with the serious need to affirm values like human compassion, environmental awareness, and social justice. I had also been re-reading my Celtic mythology, and a number of Norse sagas that friends had recommended to me.

It was clear that the heroes of these stories had a definite moral centre. They did not hedge about with relativist disclaimers: they did what they believed to be right, and they did it with conviction.

Yet the gods, in such stories, did not tell them what to do. The gods sometimes sent heroes on quests, but only very rarely did they prescribe universal moral laws, “Ten Commandments” style. And when they did, the human beings often ignored them anyway.

I wanted to know what the logic was behind the heroic moral centre, and if that centre did not come from the gods, then where did it come from? And do we still have that centre?

A thunderstorm over the hills reminded me that there are, in this world, a few genuinely universal experiences and problems. And it occurred to me, while my friend and I were running for shelter, that these experiences could stand in the place of the law-maker gods of monotheism.

I borrowed the name “Immensity” from W.B. Yeats’ introduction to Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men, and defined it as an event, experience, occasion, or situation in human life which is experienced by everyone, at some part of her life. It tends to be surprising and unexpected, and beyond any one person’s ability to understand or control. Yet because it has these properties, it can prompt some serious soul searching, and can call the meaning and worth of one’s life into question.

That event, the Call of the Immensity, has both metaphysical and moral significance, and seemed to me exactly what I was looking for.

One might be tempted to say that the gods are Immensities. Many people experience the presence of the gods in precisely this way: a being of timelessness and greatness, whose nature and existence surpasses any one person’s ability to understand.

Suppose we accepted that proposition. We might then be tempted to infer that therefore all immensities are gods. But that would be wrong. If you know your Aristotle, that move is called ‘inverting an A-form proposition’, and is a logical fallacy (in just the same way, you could say that all cookies are delicious things, but not that all delicious things are cookies).

So, not all Immensities are gods. But this is not so bad. Remembering C. S. Lewis’ adage that a garden doesn’t have to be inhabited by faeries to be beautiful, I too find that the Immensity doesn’t have to be a god to be numinous. It just has to come from beyond the self.

In The Other Side of Virtue I identified three kinds of Immensities: 1) the Earth and natural phenomena generally, like my Germanic thunderstorm; 2) other people, which may presumably include the gods, but also includes your next-door neighbour; and finally, 3) death. In Loneliness and Revelation I added a fourth: loneliness itself. There might be more. And the search for them can be exciting!

The Call of the Immensity thus describes a robust moral philosophy that has universal appeal, yet does not infringe on anyone’s individualism, nor oppress anyone under a new or well-disguised moral absolutism.

By the way, if the Von Däniken Hypothesis (the idea that the gods were actually aliens who visited Earth in the distant past) turns out to be true, my theory would remain intact. The natural Immensities would still be what they are, and on encountering them we would still feel the call to examine ourselves, and to live heroic lives. Moral laws that issue from a god, on the other hand, would suddenly be in big trouble.

To be continued…

Join us tomorrow for Part 2 of Brendan Myers’ interview, where he talks about the “revelation of presence” in nature, architecture, and other entities.  Myers also gives us a sneak peak at his upcoming book Circles of Meaning, Labyrinths of Fear!

The interviewee

Canadian philosopher and writer Brendan Myers is the author of several well-respected books on mythology, folklore, society and politics, ethics, and spirituality.  His work is studied by college professors, social activist groups, interfaith groups, Celtic cultural associations, and even Humanist societies, in many countries around the world.  In 2008 he received OBOD’s prestigious Mount Haemus award for professional research in Druidry.  Since earning his Ph.D in environmental ethics at the National University of Ireland, Galway, he has lectured at several colleges and universities in Ontario, and toured much of Canada and Europe as a public speaker.  In his varied career Brendan has also worked as a musician, a labour union leader, a government researcher, an environmentalist, and as a simple country gardener.  Brendan’s books in print to date include:

• Loneliness and Revelation
• The Other Side of Virtue
• A Pagan Testament
• The Mysteries of Druidry
• Dangerous Religion (out of print)

Brendan is also one of the hosts of Standing Stone and Garden Gate podcast.

Bio text courtesy of Brendan Myers’ Facebook page.

Get our ebooks