Rewilding and Paganism

Regenerative Culture Spiritual Technology
#1

So, obviously there’s a really strong thread of animism that links up with some of the powerful ideas behind rewilding. I’m really curious about how many rewilding folks are into Pagan practices. In some ways I see modern pagan practices whether it’s druidic, heathen, wiccan, or whatever as a powerful rewilding of European culture and especially it’s modern descendants. And all of these sources have powerful animistic streaks.

Being a polytheistic animistic Druid/Daoist with strong ties to my Celtic and Germanic roots, I sometimes wonder about how our relationship to the spiritual entities and powers of North America relates to whatever our ancestors did in their own homeland…

I’d love to hear other people’s take on this

#2

When people wanna know, I call myself pagan in the sense that I don’t follow a major world religion and that I find spiritual meaning in nature. But I don’t narrow it down any further to any particular practice. I just worship when I’m inspired, in the way that my inspiration leads. Usually I do this alone (something that I intend to change).

Every time I pick a worm up off the sidewalk and move it to the grass, it’s a little ritual for me.

My two cents.

#3

None of those labels or -isms feel like they apply to me, they don’t quite feel like they fit, in part because I don’t belong to a community who identifies with any of those names and also I don’t really feel sure that I want a label. And to me, the word “pagan” carries a lot of baggage.

However, I remember reading The Mists of Avalon (a retelling of the Arthur legend from the women’s point of view, focusing on the struggle between paganism and patriarchy, before the “old ways” really got squashed) many years ago, before I’d ever heard the word “rewilding”, and some of the ritual and ceremony described in the book (at least as I remember them now) really had a visceral appeal and meaning. I remember some of it (like the Beltane rites, I think? memory’s gotten a little fuzzy on this) acted out hunting, with conflict, danger, violence, sexuality, and the deer as people; while others had bent to fit the onslaught of agriculture.

That said, I smile when I see these around town:

#4

I agree with Daniel Quinn’s assessment: paganism presents a farmer’s religion, through and through. Etymologically, very much so. The word first appeared in the 4th and 5th century, from the Latin pagus, meaning “rural district.” Before it referred to a religion, it meant a rustic, villager, or civilian–in short, a bumpkin. With the rise of Christianity, what we now call paganism remained mostly in those areas, so the term “pagan” came to mean the religion of the pagans (read, farmers).

But certainly the concepts of paganism really speak to the agrarian experience. Humans live their lives at the whims of distant deities who require sacrifice and worship. I see very little of this in animism. Animism observes other-than-human persons, often persons worthy of respect, but gods sit at a distance distinctly different from that of another person. To call the sun a god says something very different than to call the sun a person, and it very much changes the relationship you can have with the sun. Gods, any kind of gods, establish an order of hierarchy. Animists see a world of other-than-human persons to whom we relate, extending a network of kinship beyond the boundaries of the human world. Paganism submits the human world in hierarchical fealty to a divine world.

I feel very conflicted about neo-paganism, though. The “neo” plays an important role, too; neo-paganism differs in many marked ways from paganism. Neglecting that plays into the origin myth of neo-paganism that it presents an unbroken tradition to ancient agrarian religions, when in fact it owes most of its philosophy, theology and symbols to a distinctly Christian tradition. Neo-paganism in truth presents a modern re-construction quite distinct in form and theory from true paganism, and I have much more respect for those groups (for instance, the Ancient Order of Druids in America, or AODA) who deal up-front with that.

Imaginative reconstitution plays a huge role in rewilding, I feel. I very much agree with the case Daniel C. Noel made in The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities. I actually have spent a good deal of time lately studying Germanic and Celtic myths, folktales and fairy tales for survivals of European animism. I feel these offer us an authentic bridge to our own animist tradition, if used in the same spirit of imaginative reconstruction that Noel writes about, or that the AODA has embraced. But I consider the first part of that exercise to involve the recognition of the pagan layer, the agrarian influences. The dying and rising god, the collection of the harvest, and other mythic archetypes that appeal to the experience of agrarian life.

So, do I consider myself a pagan? Perhaps insofar as I don’t consider myself a Christian, but I’ve never referred to myself as such. I consider your average neo-pagan closer to me than your average Christian, perhaps, but I call myself an “animist,” not a “pagan,” and I ultimately see paganism, properly defined, as no less in opposition to rewilding as Christianity.

#5

I’ve taken issue time and time again with the term “pagan”, for all the reasons Jason mentioned and then some. Of all the self-described pagans I’ve met, only two have had anything to do with a farm. Most barely practice a religion, but like to dress up and play witch.

If someone asks me if I’m pagan, I sometimes answer yes, but usually I say polytheist and/or animist. There’s no reason to use imprecise words that might just get me into arguments, so I try not to.

#6

Re: pagans with farm experience, obviously, one needn’t live an agrarian lifestyle oneself to embrace an ideology born from agrarian experience. Most domesticated people live in patterns that follow from agrarian experience, yet the vast majority of first-worlders have never farmed themselves. Doesn’t that in itself set so much of the challenge for us as people-who-rewild?

#7

My suspicion is that at the roots of the remnants of European pagan religion (and potentially in some of the neo-pagan reconstructions) lies a form of animism or polytheism that later heavily influenced the birth of the more agrarian based forms what might be more familiar to most of us.

What I’m getting at though is in truly getting in touch with our wild ancestral roots can we tap into this primal animism of the past.? Or does is matter? Is it relevant for our current times?

#8

I agree that paganism does have certain roots in agrarianism, but the story still works even if you move outside of agrarianism. The world is born a new, at least the world of most animals and plants, every spring, and dies every winter. In a smaller, and I guess, more animistic sense, this story is played out in every moment we eat, taking the sacrifice of another so we can survive. I guess that is one of the things about paganism. So often it takes the small stories that we walk every day and turns them into big stories for the year and all people. There are good consequences of this and bad consequences, we get more in touch with the turning of the world, the cyclical nature of things, but maybe at too big a scale. However, pagan-ism does deal with the smaller, it just only does it with humans. I guess the best way to put it, as I see it is that for paganism there is inner and outer, and for animists, there are many inners and many outers.

I think that druidism or wicca or some other form of paganism has a place in rewilding, providing form and a good way to relate with yourself and other humans if nothing else.

#9

I’ve actually been jotting down some notes for a book I had the idea for a month or two ago, with the current title being something like “Rewilding Neo-Paganism(s)”. It’ll probably have to wait until I finish my last class.

#10

Great website and topics, I just had to join in.

Jason said: “paganism presents a farmer’s religion…”

I agree with this, and since I’ve been interested more in hunter-gatherer lifeways than agro-ways, I’ve been grappling with this ever since I went to a few neo-pagan meetings years ago. The first was actually a “Goddess” group at full moon, and I came away feeling like they were quite disconnected from the actual land that they were sitting on. The whole thing was about imaginal journeying with drums, self-help psychology, and asking “the Goddess” for a new car, new job, new boyfriend. When the Moon rose above the horizon I pointed it out to them and they barely looked.

Well, I’m sure most groups are more in touch with nature than that and are better, but it made me find my own way alone. So I’ve been delving into my Celtic-Germanic and older European roots too, and I think it is a goldmine of animistic ways to relate to the land I live on.

One book I particularly like is “Elves, Wights, and Trolls,” by Kveldulf Gundarsson (iUniverse, Inc: New York, 2007), a Heathen collection of old folklore about relating to stones, rivers, waterfalls, hills, lakes, etc. as other-than-human people.

Since I reside in North America trying to do this has sometimes bothered me, as I don’t want to appropriate Native American worship or sacred places. But lately I’ve been investigating what anthropologists call "multivocality, " how one valley, for example, can have multiple simultaneous meanings for many different cultures or tribes. Each tribe respects the meanings, myths, stories, names, and sacred places of the other. Perhaps we Euro-Americans can be accomodated to share sacred place with First Peoples without using their specific sites. So far, cautiously, it has been working for me.

Pathfinder asks, does it matter that we try to find a primal animism from our own traditions? Yes, I think so. I believe it is possible, and absolutely needed if people are going to develop the kind of reciprocal, respectful relationship with a landscape that has sustained tribal people for untold millenia.

#11

Hi Lizard,

Thanks for joining in. I really appreciate what you said especially about your “goddess” group being so detached from their own surroundings. I also have had my most powerful spiritual experiences connecting to the spirit or spirits of the very surroundings I’m in, whether it’s a valley, the moon, a mountain, or a tree. But the inspiration for such connection came as much from exploration of my ancestral roots as it did from my relationship to specific native north american tribe of some sort…

#12
Humans live their lives at the whims of distant deities who require sacrifice and worship. I see very little of this in animism. Animism observes other-than-human persons, often persons worthy of respect, but gods sit at a distance distinctly different from that of another person.
Gods, any kind of gods, establish an order of hierarchy.

Historically this is incorrect, as far as classical paleo-paganisms. In Rome, for instance, deities could be punished for not fulfilling their part of a contract, such as by their image being thrown in a dung heap. In Northern Europe, the gods were often viewed much like allies and distant relatives. Throughout the classical Indo-European cultures, the relationship with the various spirits of the world is the governed by the same rule all relationships depend on. In ADF, we called this idea ‘*ghosti’, a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word that is the root of ‘guest’ and ‘host’, which has to do with reciprocation in relationships. This isn’t to say that some weren’t arranged in hierarchies, or used to excuse tyranny.

The confusion for modern English speakers has more to do with our insistence of the use of the word “god” to describe these entities. The term grew out of the monotheistic tradition, and carries the baggage associated. Ancient Norse peoples didn’t call their gods as such, they called them Aesir, Vanir, etc., just as the Greeks called the main entities they gave worship to the Olympians. Polytheism as a belief system assumes the limited nature of the “deities”, as well as the assumption that other peoples’ deities are just as real, as John Michael Greer points out and continually reaffirms in “A World Full of Gods”.

In reality, there is little difference at the core beliefs of polytheistic religions and animistic ones, as they’re classified by Western scholars. Typically, a differentiation is really made according to other aspects of a culture, such as political complexity. In some cases, it’s simple racism, with Western cultures getting the label polytheism and any others getting labeled animism. Shinto gets labeled as animistic, Hellenismos as polytheistic, but both share a lot, including the giving of many offerings to entities in expectation of return.

; neo-paganism differs in many marked ways from paganism. Neglecting that plays into the origin myth of neo-paganism that it presents an unbroken tradition to ancient agrarian religions, when in fact it owes most of its philosophy, theology and symbols to a distinctly Christian tradition.

Paganisms are generally lumped into three categories: Paleopaganisms, Mesopaganisms, and Neopaganisms. A lot of the ones you’re describing are considered mesopagan, though insist on being considered neopagans (Wiccans, mostly). Isaac Bonewits describes them best here: http://www.neopagan.net/PaganDefs.html. Those that can genuinely be called neopagan do not have ridiculous origin stories, and have specifically modeled themselves as non-monotheistic and generally more on valid research of indigenous cultures.

“The world is full of gods” -some ancient Greek whose name I forgot

#13

Actually they still are in the backcountry. A friend of mine was raised very young in an isolated rural Saami culture up there and “gods” are definitely seen as elder kin, distant ancestors who’ve taken on attributes of the land/world itself, not unlike what David Abram describes in Spell Of The Sensuous.

In Haitian religion which is the traditional religion I’ve been exposed to myself, there is much of that as well, there are some complexities in both though that I’ve really have the space here to go into.

#14

I definitely hear and feel what you say about polytheism/animism and ‘god’ like that Dan, I’ve always looked at those polytheistic religions and thought they felt almost mislabeled, and that deities almost carried either a. a warped view or b. a mislabel, like calling something a god when really that doesn’t quite fit it.

#15

Yep, yet again we have the obstacles of understanding cultures fairly different than our own, and dead ones yet! A big part of modern man’s misunderstanding is as much due to the propaganda of various monotheistic groups, as well as Enlightenment writers, who attempted to portray indigenous religions as ignorant, superstitious, and barbaric. In the case of Europe specifically, Christians who lived only a few generations after much of southern Europe was Christianized worked heavily to make the people think their ancestors lived in constant fear of the gods (how this was supposed to be different from Christianity, I still have no idea).

As for the use of the word god, I think it really comes down to not having a better term. English, while having its roots in heathen Germanic languages, developed as a modern language during a thoroughly Christian period. In reality, we should consider each group of these spirits we call gods separate types of spirits in their own right, instead of cramming them all under the grouping of ‘gods and goddesses’. We just tend to call gods those that have been anthropomorphized and especially remembered in our mythos. When I can, I use more specific cultural terms, like Aesir, landvaettir, etc.

But hey, these are just my humble opinions as a polytheologian.

#16

hmm, prolly should’ve jumped into this thread earlier, but life has been… um, “interesting” is a good word…

sometimes it absolutely amazes me how Jason and I have reached remarkably similar conclusions from remarkably different directions.

nonetheless, i consider myself a rewilder & (longstanding) animist, yet maintain positive relationships w/ Christ, the Vanir, and some of the Aesir.

imo, deities & religions are like every other living creature - if they aren’t changing over time, they’re likely dead. and what’s the point of following a dead religion?

i suppose some of this falls into the etic vs emic perspective issue, but that’s not something i’m really up on.

#17

Every once in a while, I’ll get a commenter on a piece I wrote, Lovesick Gods of Heaven and Earth, complaining that I’ve miscast the farming gods as villains.

Most recently, someone commented that the Norse gods didn’t desire to conquer the world, they just “held sway” over it, “as the term gods indicates”.

As I told the commenter, I won’t sit in judgement of someone else’s relationship to their landbase, and certainly the neopaganism of today looks much different than the paganism of the past (I often hear neopagans talk about “grandmother moon” - I can’t think of any oldschool european pagans mythologies who would have characterized their relationship to the moon that way) . I also do feel, when I hear the words “hold sway”, that they imply a relationship of control and influence. A relationship that doesn’t interest me anymore.

When we went from a relationship to the thing (lightning!), to a relationship to the god that holds sway over the thing (Thor!), I do think something changed. Something important. In terms of understanding ourselves, and returning to the embrace of our land, I think understanding this change will help a lot.

#18

Even saying they “held sway” is inaccurate in regards to classical belief.

More to come, after I get back from errands.

#19

In this conversation we also need to account for the impact of ‘classical pagan belief’ on the land…namely the desertificaiton of the mediterranean and the mideast.

#20

I hope that didn’t sound too poopy. :slight_smile: But I mean it sincerely. I think the condition of the landbase tells us a lot about the sustainability of the religion/ethic/relationship of the people.

Sigh. I can’t quite articulate it, but somehow this particular subject leaves me with odd mixed feelings.