The North West Passage

A recent article on Witchvox.com asked, “Where have all the Gardners and Crowleys gone?” (Full article here, and author Juniper’s home page here.) The more general question that the author was asking, it seems to me, was: Where are all the innovators, the trailblazers, the elders? Why do we no longer have people of the intellectual and imaginative calibre of the pagan ‘big names’ of the early to mid 20th century?

Her answer to that question was twofold. For one, she claimed that pagans treat their elders and innovators rather badly; and two, the innovators themselves quickly become jaded as the fruits of their life-long labour goes disrespected or forgotten. A third answer was also implied in this sentence: “Because we buy white-lighter, easy-to-read, fluffy little books when we should be buying the books Chapters and Barnes and Noble refuse to sell.“. Well, as a writer of books that are certainly not fluff and white light, you can imagine this caught my attention right away.

So my question for this week concerns the innovators in our movement, and how we treat them. Is Juniper correct when she says that the community itself, because of a predisposition to exploit and disrespect such people, tends to prevent them from emerging? Or, in your experience is there an emerging culture which recognises, benefits from, and respects such people? Who do you turn to when you need advice, or help, or information about your path, or even just a kind word once in a while? What qualities do they embody which makes you want to turn to those people, and not others?

Are there people today who are doing the kind of trail-blazing, innovative work that people like Gardner and Crowley once did? Another way to put this question, as my friend Susan Hurrell put it, “what living pagan author would you pay $100+ to hear lecture for 2 hours?”* For that matter, what living author of any spiritual tradition would you pay $100 to hear?

I will post my own list in a few days.

*You don’t have to include me on your list. I already know that I’m still a small time writer, and much of what I write about these days is only tangentially related to paganism anyway.

Today is International Women’s Day.

So, the question of the week, naturally, is, What (if anything) are you doing for it?

In her often-quoted 1979 essay “Why Women Need the Goddess“, Carol Christ said:

Religious symbol systems focused around the exclusively male images of divinity create the impression that female power can never be fully legitimate or wholly beneficent…

The simplest and most basic meaning of the symbol of Goddess is the acknowledgment of the legitimacy of female power as beneficent and independant power.

My question for this week – and I mean this question with honest curiosity – concerns female power: political, economic, social, personal, spiritual. Is female power just the same as any kind of power, but that it happens to be wielded by women? Is it the case that the whole Goddess movement has a mainly political point, namely, the shifting of power into the hands of women, and the symbol of the Goddess is only a political device intended to achieve that result? Upon reading Carol Christ’s essay, that is the impression that I get, at least in the first few pages. Or, is there something distinct and different about female power? Does power wielded by women do different things, or aim for different purposes? Is it exercised in a distinct kind of way? CC’s essay says that power in a Goddess-centered context is “exercised in harmony with the energies and wills of other beings“. This suggests that female power is more collaborative and cooperative. Is she right? Is there something distinctly “female” about cooperation?

Or, is it really obvious from these questions that I haven’t studied much feminist thought, and that I’m asking entirely the wrong questions about female power?

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote the following about temples, in a collection of essays entitled “Figuring the Sacred”:

What is most remarkable about the phenomenology of the sacred is that it can be described as a manner of inhabiting space and time. Thus we speak of sacred space to indicate the fact that space is not homogeneous but delimited—templum—and oriented around the “midpoint” of the sacred space. Innumerable figures, such as the circle, the square, the cross, the labyrinth, and the mandala, have the same spatialising power with respect to the sacred, thanks to the relations these figures establish between the center and its dimensions, horizons, intersections, and so on. All these phenomena and the related phenomena by which the passage from profane to sacred space is signified—thresholds, gates, bridges, pathways, ladders, ropes, and so on—attest to an inscription of the sacred on a level of experience beneath that of language.

My question today concerns sacred architecture. And before you say we shouldn’t build temples at all, but should worship our gods (or whatever) in our homes, or in fields and natural settings, or wherever you happen to be, think about the needs in the mind that temples can satisfy. We’ve been building temples for thousands of years now. Christian churches and cathedrals are built to meet specific social, political, and psychological needs: they replicate temples described in the Bible, such as the Temple of Solomon, or the New Jerusalem described in the book of Revelation. They are meant to give the seeker a taste of the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet long before Christianity, there were magnificent temples dedicated to numerous gods, goddesses, powers, heroes, and ideas, all over the world.

If you could design and build a temple, what would it look like? What would the landscape around it be like? Would it be designed to resemble the Central Mountain, or the World Tree? Or, would it resemble a cave, a woman’s birth canal? Would it replicate a temple of the ancient world, now in ruins? Is there an existing temple that is a favourite of yours?

Illustration of a Romano-Celtic temple, circa 2nd century C.E.

In early February, Celts celebrate a festival sometimes called Imbolc, sometimes called Candlemas, sometimes called Saint Bridgit’s day; each of these names signifying a different thematic emphasis or a different kind of ceremony related to the season. The ‘original’ theme, if I may speak broadly of such things, was the theme of winter’s end and summer’s immanent arrival – the sign in the environment heralding this theme was the flowing of new milk from the udders of the ewes. When I was living in Ireland, I noted that around this time of year the hawthorn trees started to flower, followed by the gorse trees, for the first time.

I celebrate the signs of the coming of springtime at this time of the year. But I live in Canada, not Ireland; and I live in a part of Canada where winter might persist for another two months or more. It thus makes no sense to celebrate the arrival of the spring. Indeed I suspect that for us Celtic Canucks, Imbolc is a celebration instituted for no better reason than to cheer ourselves up during the dark, cold, miserable, and boring months of winter.

But that might not be such a bad reason after all.

My question to one and all for this week concerns celebrations. At this time of year, what do you celebrate? Do you look for a calendar date, or for an observation in nature, to start the celebration? How do you celebrate it?

And for my readers in Canada and in American states that border Canada: Might it make sense to shift the celebration of Imbolc from the calendar day of 1st February, to the day in which the snow starts to melt for the first time in whatever place you are living? This year, that is what I am doing. When 1st February came around last week, it was still frickin’ freezing and overcast and dark, and so I just wasn’t in the mood to do any celebrating (well, partly because I had a cold). But today, with above-freezing temperatures and full sunlight for the first time in months, I’m much more inclined to do something for the season.

This week’s question inspired by “Pinch Pennies Save Planet” blog, and in particular by this post about celebrations in early February.