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When a new spiritual tradition becomes established within a society, both are changed. In a way this is like when one of us enters on to a spiritual path. While certainly changed in the process, we cannot each help but give our practice and beliefs an individual interpretation. This is the core reason spiritual traditions diversify over time, as is certainly the case with NeoPaganism.

At the individual level, this growing diversity often reflects the richness of individual encounters with the sacred. As such, I think it is a good thing. That’s probably good because whatever I might think about this happening, it takes place within every tradition anyway.

But to say that diversification at the individual level is good does not imply that diversification due to societal impact is also good. Sometimes it is bad, and sometimes it is very bad.

This negative side is particularly the case when a culture assimilates a new religious tradition, one of the worries that triggered my Solstice post. Usually a new religion’s initial adherents will be people dissatisfied with their society. It speaks to them of something otherwise missing, as Paganism most certainly spoke to me. The nature of reality takes on new dimensions, dimensions that do not fit with the dominant cultural norm, and creating pressure for it to change.

But as a new tradition grows it incorporates larger numbers of people who are much less critical of their society. This growth therefore adds at least two new groups to its religion’s constituency. First are people who while less at odds with their society, are attracted anyway to the growing religion for one reason or another. It is with this group that the new tradition’s transformative powers have their greatest potential. In joining, people learn new ways of relating to Spirit, others, and themselves.

The other group numbers those identifying their careers with the religion’s success. In seeking to promote its growing numbers they will seek to address people at the level of their own knowledge and values. The most familiar examples are the Christian appropriation of Pagan holy days for their own celebrations and observances. To a point I think this is both unavoidable and desirable. Spirit is everywhere and can be honored everywhere.

But this approach can be carried too far. If it happens, the new tradition can lose sight of what it originally was. Before it happens there will be legitimate debate as to where such a line may lie. But we know the line exists ands that the world’s major religions have repeatedly stepped across it. Here are several examples.

Early Christianity disproportionately attracted women, slaves, and the poor. They were generally the least appreciated members of Classical Pagan society, and therefore potentially the most open to thinking about spirituality in new ways. When under Constantine and his successors Christianity was assimilated into the Roman Empire as an integral part, even a preferred part, it attracted very different people. Many were mostly interested in successful careers and being Christian now helped whereas once it had hurt. As they and others joined, the church transformed itself into a bulwark of imperial power and an avenging force against those deemed doctrinally mistaken who threatened the new ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Ironically, the first people persecuted by the church in Rome were other Christian sects. Later anyone who differed from what called itself “orthodoxy” became victims as well. Pagans and Jews became victims. Completely lost from sight was Jesus’ message of love, his dislike of religious and social hierarchy, the value of forgiveness, and much else. It was interpreted away as completely as George Bush’s lawyers have interpreted away the Constitution.

Mohammed abolished slavery and raised the status of women, many of whom exercised considerable authority while he was alive. After his death but in his name slavery became reestablished. It still exists in some Muslim regions. The treatment of women declined to the low level it had existed in the barbarian Arab tribes before Mohammed’s teaching. Yet these people call themselves Muslims, followers of the Holy Koran. In fact they assimilated the Koran into the tribal values the Prophet had denounced.

My third is from memory as the relevant book is 3000 miles away in storage. Some time ago I had been , indeed I still am, impressed with many of the Buddhists I met. It seemed to me then that perhaps here was a spiritual path that was superior to others, a view Buddhists eagerly encouraged. I began reading more about it. When reading a history of medieval Tibet I came across an account of where the Dalai Lama of the time sent troops to kill the Panchen Lama of the time. I know of nothing in the Buddha’s teachings to justify such actions, even if carried out “compassionately.” And I know of plenty to argue otherwise. But the Buddhists I met were akin to Wiccans I know, spiritual outliers in their society. In medieval Tibet their own ecclesiastical hierarchies were in power, and constituted the path to success for would be members of the Tibetan elite.

In our own country the early Baptists allied with Jefferson and Madison to separate church and state. They also opposed slavery and sought to increase the status of women. But when northern Baptist missionaries went South to spread their gospel, they discovered that the movers and shaker of Southern society disliked such values. They changed their tune in the name of saving souls. Seeking to save souls, they lost theirs as Baptism in the South assimilated into a religion welcoming slavery and the deep subordination of women as the “will of God.” As to their historical alliance with Jefferson and Madison, well the less said the better.

I think I am on good grounds to say that any significant institutional and doctrinal alternation of a religion away from its original teachings, at least in societies based on hierarchy and domination, weakened or destroyed those teachings. If my statement is an over statement, it is not one by much. And so I am in the seemingly paradoxical position of not opposing people’s personally based modifications in practice and even doctrine while at the same time vocally and insistently warning against cultural assimilation.

Why is this a seeming paradox? Because we cannot be removed from the societies of which we are a part. Not mentally, anyway. All of us have been deeply and powerfully molded by our society. We embody and reflect our culture. So we cannot help but have our individual interpretations reflect the society and culture within which we live and which helps make us who we are. But I oppose cultural assimilation.

I think the way out of this confusion begins in asking whether a particular modification or adaptation reflects an individual’s personal spiritual experience, or whether it reflects an effort to make that path more relevant or easily accepted by OTHER people. The more it is the latter, the more it is to be looked at suspiciously because it is adopted strategically, and not simply representing a expansion of the heart or a personal spiritual insight.

Genuine spirituality enlarges our circle of care, as I explained in my previous post on Spirit and Politics. In doing so it changes us. In so doing it weakens the cultural norms that divide people from one another, provoking suspicion, or justifying war and violence. We are then able to renegotiate our relation to our culture from a position of greater compassion, kindness, generosity, and love than we had earlier possessed. To the degree we do this culture is reshaped by the actions of individuals with a stronger connection to the sacred.

When the norms and institutions of the culture are stronger, the reverse happens and the religion is appropriated by the culture to strengthen it, on its terms. Religion becomes a bulwark in defending the cultural status quo. It serves the interests of power and of ecclesiastical organization. The people and organizations involved increasingly confuse secular mundane goals with those of Spirit. The actions of Catholic clergy in covering up child abuse is a good case in point.

In scriptural religions those parts of the text able to be interpreted to strengthen authority, subjugation, and obedience are emphasized, whereas the more transformative parts of the text are neglected. Hierarchy replaces the community of practice. Jesus never mentioned abortion, and it is highly debatable whether he mentioned gays. They were certainly not his priority. But he continually criticized the rich and their selfishness as well as the necessity of ministering to the poor. And he apparently practiced what he preached. Of course that kind of thing challenges Mammon, the real god our society worships, although in Christian drag.

The Challenge to Pagans
Paganism is not scriptural and so the challenge assimilation presents us is different. We are a religion of practice more than dogma, and so it is here that the threat lies. We have many practices that often can lead a person into a direct encounter with a deity. How people interpret their encounters is their own business. But during the encounter they can be transformed in ways they find valuable, as was true for me.

Our society is deeply suspicious of such encounters. Its secular dimension regards them as fakes or evidence of derangement. Its Judeo-Christian side regards them as real but demonic.

As a culture we elevate our day to day mundane awareness to be the human norm and usually the human ideal. As an ideal it is challenged only by the belief that blind faith is superior, a complete turning off of the mind’s ability to think for itself. Those Christian traditions that brought their followers into personal ecstatic experience have lost or downplayed it. The Quakers quake no more. Pentecostals safely hem in their ecstatic encounters with rigid ideological interpretations, ensuring that the threat of personal illumination in unexpected ways is kept safely corralled. The ecstatic aspect of Christianity was not central to it, and even if it had been, would likely have been discouraged for when someone can listen directly to Spirit, their need for a Priest withers.

NeoPaganism has its first popular roots in the 60s. For the first time millions of young Westerners sought deliberately to alter their awareness not to retreat from their emotional and intellectual sensitivity as with alcohol, but deliberately to cultivate a still greater sensitivity, the better to gain greater insight into reality. Meditation, entheogens, trance, ritual – all these practices and more began entering into the experience of millions during this time. And that wave of spiritual opening has by no means flattened out.

The utter irrationality of our “War on Drugs” indicates the fear our society as a whole has of gaining nay deeper understanding of itself. Both of its major sources of authority about the nature of reality fear altered states of awareness. Reality can be learned only through mainstream science or, alternatively, by reading a book.

We need to be wary of dissolving this unique dimension of Pagan spirituality in the name of seeking greater respectability. For us to do so is like artists allowing the color blind to control the contents of their palette. It is way too easy to keep our words and forms while emptying them of content.

This will happen to some degree anyway as we become more respectable, for people will want to get involved who are not much interested in encounters with deities. And such a dimension to our practices offers a safe haven for people who are just looking around, undecided if what we do is for them. But it must never become the dominant dimension or we lose sight of who we are and how we can contribute.

So I do not mean to inveigh against Pagan-lite practices among people who only want that kind of experience. They can be both valuable and fun dimensions of our practice. But I want to warn the rest of us to treat them with care. There is a great ego charge in acting as priest or priestess before several hundred people, a charge often greater than that we feel in the intimacy of a coven. That is the attraction that feeds the danger.

Those of us who have tasted deeper levels of encounter and transformation face the challenge of maintaining and making available these other deeper ways to those who ask. I believe the way to accomplish this is to be particularly protective of those aspects towards our practice that are both central to us and LEAST easily co-opted into more familiar religious and organizational forms.

I think there are two. First and foremost is our focus on the Gods as approachable, and able to be directly experienced, whoever we think They are. Drawing down the Moon is central to what Wiccan identity has been. Similar approaches enabling us to encounter the Gods exist in other traditions.

Second is a focus on covens, groves, and similar small groups. These groups are too small and often evanescent to support a professional “clergy” or indeed any powerful hierarchy. If someone is a member of a tradition and has a falling out, he or she has the option of forming their own independent group that will flourish or not as they and the Gods determine. Such groups have no appeal to careerists.

The encounter with deity changes us in ways our society cannot easily control, and covens and similar groups are too small to support professional priests and priestesses.

If these two practices are preserved and strengthened, I personally do not care what other things might arise from our tradition’s closer encounter with American society and culture. But if we focus instead on big public Sabbats, and during them do not focus on the Gods, as was the case with the Solstice ritual I criticized, we may have a lot of fun eight times a year, but at a deeper level we will be irrelevant. And we will deserve to be.

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