More and more people have begun to reject Christianity, Islam, and other monotheistic religions, and are instead turning towards what are seen as older, earth based forms of spirituality.
Meanwhile we live in a society where 90% of the old growth forests have been cut, as the world around us becomes increasingly synthetic, polluted, and urbanized. In response there has been a growing interest in European polytheistic religions as alternative to the hierarchies of the church with it’s gnostic abstracted concepts.
However these polytheistic religions are often just as problematic as what is being rejected. There has been a lot of revisionism, presenting many of these patriarchal religions where male war gods dominate as though they are anything but – where godesses are now talked about as though the original practitioners were matriarchal and the males gods were just minor characters. Ignored also is the inherent heterosexism of these religions where often female goddesses are all based around fertility.
Yet the bigger problem lies deeper. In a blog post
I just read about Asatru (Odin worship) the blogger pointed out that these “old” religions developed through “the Iron Age up through the Viking era – that is, a few centuries BCE up through about 800-1200 CE. ” (I acknowledge the problems in using these anthropological stages as markers of ‘progression’). This is preciously my point. The old polytheistic religions of Europe were still religions that developed during a period of violent conquest, early colonization, war, and long after the rise of agriculture where people had moved into dominating the land and living a sedentary lifestyle rather than nomadic or semi-nomadic ways based on relationship and ecology. To then call these polytheist religions ‘nature based’ is like calling Christianity in it’s current context ‘community value based.’
The reality is that before there was polytheistic religions that worshiped symbolic gods of the harvest, war, fertility, or death, there was an older non-theistic religion based in place. If you want to worship nature, you don’t need a sunwheel, pentacle, or a godess to do so – go out and climb a fucking tree, sit in it’s branches, learn ecology, listen to the wind rustling the leaves through the branches, watch the squirrels, strip naked and swim in the river as the sun sets. Then do whatever it takes to stop those fuckers who wanna cut that tree cause all they see is dollar signs. You don’t need a european god or goddes to tell you life is sacred.
by Comrade Black
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I am no expert on neo paganism. All i know is that i follow my instincts and pray in my own way that has no dogma attached. To me, the connections to nature, the earth and people who defend it all are the most inspiring and compelling reasons to keep on my current path. Traditional peoples are at the forefront of fighting climate change from Mexico to the Philippines, from Guatemala to Black Mesa, from Nigeria to Japan, earth based peoples have their own ways of resisting. More privileged people see climate change without the very real genocidal human cost. Personally, i will do whatever traditional Dine elder asks of me over any follower of Bill McKibben. My mother’s great grandparents came from Ireland during the British imposed great hunger. I feel more connected to pre Xtian Celtic culture but know little to nothing. O well. I am a deeply committed frontliner nonetheless. Who knows? I don’t, but certainly follow my heart and conscience.
Great comment, thank you for posting your thoughts. Just to clarify, I am definitely not against having an earth based spirituality, far from it. There is a difference between polytheistic religion and what sometimes gets labelled animism. You can definitely connect with the earth and practice spiritually driven resistance without buying into the worship of gods.
Reblogged this on Typing Loud, Knowing Nothing. and commented:
I couldn’t agree more. I used popular 19th cent revisionist neo paganism as training wheels while I was freeing myself of the church. Comforting imagery and nice warm fireside fuzzies aside (I am all in favour of those) I like to think that in a world that includes the Large Hadron Collider we don’t have as much of a need for cultural fetishes and security blankets. It could be a fond isolated hope and I acknowledge that I may be wrong.
Dear Black,
I appreciate this post immensely. I feel that the reason that many pick up religions other than the ones forced upon them at birth has a lot to do with the symbols and the imagery involved. Punks are drawn to symbols, how many hardcore bands DON’T have a neat symbol, so I always felt like punks were taken by images that were opposite christianity, or were an affront to christianity. Using an upside cross, or pentacle for instance without any real devotion to the religious aspects of the symbol itself.
This may change as people get older. Some people start to feel some yearning for spirituality, and they may then seek practices that are more interesting than the ones they were taught as children, but again not concerning themselves too much with the uncomfortable parts of the religion and focusing solely on the cool parts; the symbols and ancient representations of antlered, bearded people dancing naked in the field…
If someone wishes to take on the burden of a religion it is important to get the whole picture and have the kind of uncomfortable relationship with their idols that any true worshiper must.
Frankly, I’m agin it. Consorting with nature does not require the knowledge of what ancient people did, how they danced or whom they sacrificed. Climbing a tree and stopping the destruction of the forest through direct action or raising awareness seems more important and in the long term more helpful to me. I dabbled as a lot of young people do and I wore all manner of symbolic hoo doo in the quest for enlightenment, but realized that it is all religion and I don’t want religion in my life. That was the key. I don’t like religions and you can dress it up in all sorts of ways but it’s all essentially the same. You can be as spiritual as you wish, you can choose to believe whatever you like, but those gods are just that. gods. I’ll do without thank you.
So, just a thought. My understanding of a lot of how written history and archaeology functions on a very basic level is that we are rarely given an accurate picture of the lifestyles and people which those practices attempt to build an understanding of. Usually for a variety of reasons, mostly popular opinion when these things are being achieved.
eg. tombs/graves/etc. of pre-Victorian people whose bodies were thought to be anthropologically female would at one point be very quickly resexed as male if further excavation showed there were weapons (to name one example) in the grave site, as fighting could only feasibly be left to men in the mind of someone in a post-Victorian society. This has led to an ongoing confusion and debate on the actual lives and genders of the many different people who were studied. An even more precise example being Celts in the Iron Age who weren’t sexed at all by their bones (which, frankly, is a difficult process), instead were sexed based on the contents of their grave sites. Really, the question of “could this person who was laid with a spear and sword possibly be female or otherwise?” is not something archaeologists have concerned themselves with up until relatively recently. As well, feminine idolatry and other artefacts that might suggest stronger links to feminine power were often undermined or sometimes disregarded entirely.
All that to say, when talking about social context of any religion- or similar topics- it is dangerous to make statements about how these religions really operated, who they focused on, etc. as the history we’ve been fed about the surrounding cultures, societies and nations do not necessarily reflect the lived relationships those people had with their goddesses, gods, iconography, etc. The system recording them has imposed it’s own values and perspectives, the system of academia in particular that these systems stem from is inherently about dominion.
Plus, if you want to talk about religion in a social context, even if we are starting with a shitty religion, due to social change, it can and will change. Look at Catholicism. For a contemporary example, look at ISIS and Hezbollah.
Reblogged this on vegan anarchist primitivist.