On Myth, History, and Pagan Origins

[ecosophia]

Back in 1999 I wrote an essay titled "Myth, History, and Pagan Origins" and submitted it to The Pomegranate, a journal of Neopagan scholarship active back then.  I'd been encouraged to submit something to "the Pom," as it was usually called in the Neopagan scene, by Fritz Muntean, one of the prime movers at the journal, whom I'd met at a Neopagan event the year before. I admit I was surprised by the request, as my previous venture into Neopagan history had not exactly gone over well.  (It was an essay titled "The Red God," cowritten with Gordon Cooper, which was published in Gnosis in 1998.  It pointed out that much of what became Gardnerian Wicca was derived not from some notional medieval witch cult but from Woodcraft, a youth organization founded by Canadian-American writer Ernest Thompson Seton. I'm sure my readers can imagine what the response to that was like.)

Still, I wrote an essay, focusing on the historical claims made by Neopagan groups and discussing their parallels with other origin myths, and mailed it into the Pom.  It was duly published, in mildly mutilated form -- the editors deleted the bibliography and about half the footnotes that supported the argument -- and then someone didn't get around to mailing me the next issue, so I didn't have the chance to respond to the denunciations in the letters column. (I have no idea if this was deliberate, but it certainly worked out that way.) I shrugged and went on to other things. 

Fast forward to this month. In discussing socialism over on the main blog, I mentioned the article, for reasons that will be clear to anyone who reads it; someone asked if it was still available; regular reader and commenter Robert Mathiesen kindly chased down a copy and forwarded it to me, and I've posted it as a page on my blog site; you can read it here. (Read it now if you dislike spoilers.)

The basic argument of the essay is that the core historical narrative of the Neopagan movement was borrowed intact from that of Christianity. In place of Eden, insert ancient Pagan societies; in place of the Fall, insert the arrival of Christianity or patriarchy, depending on the specific flavor of Neopaganism we're discussing; proceed straight through the narrative, and point for point, it's all there -- the chosen people, the long age of persecution, the redeeming revelation, the rising spiral of conflict between good and evil that good is destined to win, the inevitable coming of the New Jerusalem, and the rest of it. 

This isn't just a matter of origins, though. Myths are the narratives we use to project ideas of meaning, purpose, and value onto the universe, and the myths we believe shape our behavior and largely determine the results we get. That's why Marxism, which has an identical historical narrative -- for Eden, insert primitive communism; for the Fall, insert the invention of private property, and so on -- has turned into a messianic faith prone to debates over doctrine that would have impressed medieval scholastics, and likewise prone to quite a few of the less pleasant habits of historic Christianity. 

So, too, the Neopagan movement.  In 1999 it had only taken a few tentative steps in the direction of imitating Christianity; since then, as I predicted, it's gone a lot further down the same road; and at this point, as the Neopagan movement slides further down the slope of its decline, large parts of the movement have gone full-on Calvinist, obsessing about original sin (that's spelled "white privilege" these days) and engaging in orgies of self-abasement and purity crusades in an attempt to convince themselves that they belong to the elect. To judge by what one of my readers who still follows the scene has passed on, the latest fad is denouncing Permaculture™ as racist because it wasn't invented by indigenous women of color. Since indigenous women of color make up a submicroscopic percentage of Neopagans -- it's overwhelmingly a movement of middle-class white folks -- I have started to wonder how soon they'll cancel themselves. 

Be that as it may, the lesson to take from this is that myths matter. The stories you tell yourself about who you are and how you got here aren't value-free; they determine your behavior and can turn into your destiny. Choose your myths wisely -- and don't try to pretend to yourself that the narratives you project onto the inkblot patterns of the cosmos are "just the way things are."

Comments

Interesting Synchronicity

[davidtrammel]

I believe it was a comment in last week's MM that pointed to one of your Well of Galabes posts ("Three Lessons in Operative Magic", which made me realize I'd either missed or had not taken particular notice of that earlier blog. I went back and began re-reading the posts.

I was struck how your observations of the way concrete thought and abstractions play out across the three periods of a society, The Unicorn, The Phoenix and The Dragon, and how at the decline of the process, during Dragon time the abstractions have so gotten out of wack from concrete examples.

That was 2014 and now in a short six year period nearly half of all the population believes a set of abstractions about the way the World is and works, that is completely opposite of what the other does. And that we have bands of magicians on both sides dueling to make their abstraction the one that wins.

Wow, I need more popcorn...

Re: Interesting Synchronicity

[ecosophia]

I'm going to be revisiting those posts sometime soon with an eye toward building on the ideas I sketched out there. Mind you, that'll require another reading of Giambattista Vico, because he was the thinker who got me past some common bad habits of modern thought and made it possible for me to understand the barbarism of reflection...

Try this at home...

[(Anonymous)]

As I said on Magic Monday, this essay rather nicely explains quite a bit in politics and neopaganism right now. It also hits the most important reasons why I wandered away from the neopagan scene for fifteen years or so – lack of appreciation of origin and lack of vision for potential. Fortunately, I stumbled upon Green Wizardry. So… based on what you’ve been saying about myth… it seems the humorous origin myth of the Green Wizards that’s been going around among some garden enthusiasts here in Lakeland is headed in the right direction… With that in mind, “The Red God: Woodcraft and the Origins of Wicca” sounds like a good cautionary tale. Might you have a link? And… any tips on developing an origin myth without the usual neopagan or con artist faceplants?
Many thanks,
Rusty

Re: Try this at home...

[migrantharvester]

I’ll second the request for a way to read “The Red God”. I’ve been trying to get my hands on a copy for years - emails to the people who handle Gnosis magazine back issues haven’t gotten me anywhere...

[migrantharvester]

Both this and the original essays feel prescient to me. They are starting to unlock something I haven’t been able to put a finger on as I have been deep in research trying to unbury the stories of my ancestors’ settlement of Utah and of their war with the Timpanogots/Utahs/& other tribes (which has been all but erased from consciousness). The mythic outlook of the Mormons parallels those that you describe here (in more ways than one, including the communist take ironically enough) I think that reducing the 30-40 year war to remove the natives to a few isolated and disconnected “battles” in time was what my people had to do to maintain their mythic outlook and their ‘persecuted’ status.

I’ve observed myself and people that I know who have also taken leave of Mormonism grapple with this myth, and try on various versions of it (including the neopagan and communist) or other mythic outlooks to try to make new sense of the world. I guess what I am facing now is how to find or to build a myth that includes/faces the tragedies of the past as well as lays the groundwork for living in a way that improves the world... or that at least picks up the charge of cleaning up the messes that we’ve inherited. Your way of writing about the histories (myths) of druidry has always been really helpful - and like this essay, inspires me to take the power of my mythic outlook into my own hands. Thanks!

[ecosophia]

I'm not at all surprised that the Mormons would have a similar myth, since they're a Christian offshoot and have the usual claim to be the original version brought back after the usual long period of persecution et al. (Joseph Smith here fills the same role as Karl Marx, Gerald Gardner. Marija Gimbutas, et al.) As for how to handle myth intelligently, why, start by learning as many stories as possible, and take a hard look at what happened to the people who used them to understand the world...

Choosing your myths...

[brenainn]

Very interesting. How might one wisely discern which myths to embrace? Is it a matter of interpretation or are some myths just bad to their core? In my particular situation, I've found it helpful to interpret most Christian myths in an allegorical or spiritual sense. Gospel of Thomas 113 about the kingdom of heaven already being present strikes me as a kind of mystical esoteric interpretation that focuses on the individual and not some cosmos ending event that separates the good and the bad. The canonical Gospel of John has a similar saying. Is there an interpretation of the common Neopagan myths that would avoid devolving into the present situation of messianism? I have some conservative Pagan friends who report being cast out of covens and other groups as heretics, more or less, for not signing onto the far left "woke" culture.

Re: Choosing your myths...

[ecosophia]

The Gospel of Thomas is actually a very useful resource here, as it presents a very different vision of Christianity, one that isn't interested in apocalypticism or the standard historical narrative but focuses instead on salvation through gnosis here and now. As for a revised Neopagan myth, you'd have to change the entire dynamic -- ditch the three-phase good/bad/good linear history entirely, and either see Paganism as something that cycles in and out of popularity over long cycles of historic time or come up with some way to account for the coming of Christianity that doesn't assign it the role of the Blue Meanies in the movie Yellow Submarine.

I once tried to envision the Neopagan version of history in another mode, and the result was a short story called "The Horsemen," which was about those wonderful ancient matriarchies, with their habit (according to Robert Graves et al.) of sacrificing young men each year to the Goddess, and how that looked from the perspective of one young man. I never even tried to get it published.

[(Anonymous)]

Fascinating stuff. I'd always thought that the problems with both Marxism and Neopaganism were more of a "What you contemplate, you imitate" variety, but you've convinced me that it goes deeper than that.

A question: Would you say that Heathenry has a different core narrative? I've heard you say that it's a Piscean religion, and certainly the sacrifice of Odin indicates that, but are there differences between that faith and Christianity that run deep enough to explain its success among the Deplorables?

[ecosophia]

Heathenry has been wobbling back and forth between several core narratives. It's got the standard Neopagan narrative, with old Norse culture as Eden, Christianity as the Fall, etc., but I've also seen some interesting variants. One that strikes me as rather useful is on the order of, "Yeah, other faiths come and go. We're still here." Thomas Taylor liked to use that for his mystical Neoplatonist Hellenism, and it worked -- the Hellenic revival he kickstarted has had a quiet but pervasive presence in the English-speaking world ever since. So it might be worth trying with a Norse accent...

[kylec]

Thanks for the essay! The first thing I notice is that while my own myth is very cyclical and Druidical, it's equally valid and invalid as the Christian narrative, in that it's simply another possible map of the territory, with its own strengths, weaknesses, and uncharted territories.

To take it a step farther, Stephen Wolfram has been writing quite a bit on his blog about some exciting new concepts in physics based on his simulations. They include the notion of different spaces *coughplanes*, with physical space corresponding to Newtonian physics, branchial space to Einstein's relativity, and rulial space perhaps to quantum mechanics *cough,physicalastralmental,cough*.

Wolfram states:

I’ve always assumed that any entity that exists in our universe must at least “experience the same physics as us”. But now I realize that this isn’t true. There’s actually an almost infinite diversity of different ways to describe and experience our universe, or in effect an almost infinite diversity of different “planes of existence” for entities in the universe—corresponding to different possible reference frames in rulial space, all ultimately connected by universal computation and rule-space relativity.

Link

Which makes me think of the Cos Doc, and the solar logos to which we belong. Even the way we experience our physics could be an artifact of how our Lords of Flame evolved, with no other universe beholden to it. While different societies have myth to color experience, even seemingly universal human experiences are colored by being human, and humanity by the solar system to which we belong.

Of course, that relativity is also an artifact of my own myths, and I'm sure there are other valid ways of looking at that, too. ;)

[ecosophia]

Wolfram interests me a great deal; though mathematics is far from my strong suit, I've worked my way through A New Kind of Science and own a copy -- it's on the shelf next to Bucky Fuller's Synergetics, one of the few books I know of that's tried to do something similar. Approach what they have to say as metaphor, and the possibilities just keep unfolding...

[avalterra]

"Choose your myths wisely."

That struck a loud note in me. Especially when it is coupled with the fact that modern movements, be they political, spiritual, or even agrarian, keep falling into the dominant Christian myth structure. It makes sense, its just incredibly annoying.

It feels like the Christian myth is strong because it provides a lot to its believers. It gives them a reason to believe they are, or can be, the elect. It provides them a means to achieve, or cement, that status. It gives them a unifying enemy. It provides a reason for their suffering (the fall) and reason to believe that things can be better because they once were (Eden) and a means to strive towards this new Eden. All things that can keep people very motivated and active.

But other mythic cycles must have also provided some of these things and maybe others I can't see because of my own cultural bias. Are there any resources for looking at other mythic structures? Or is this unexplored territory?

AV

[ecosophia]

I don't know of any explorations of myth in these terms -- you've got the social interpretations and the psychological interpretations, but the cognitive-philosophical interpretation seems to have been neglected. Reading a lot of myths and learning about their cultural and historical context is a good step in that direction.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for this. The Pom still exists by the way.

What I have noticed is how Woke culture is now dominant in the Neopagan scene. As you said we are moving from a spiritual to an explicitly political scene. I follow a fairly Big Name Pagan on faceplant and she tacitly encourages her followers to denounce others for the crime of "cultural appropriation" but some of them go too far with the witch-hunts and then she has to try and rein them back in. I notice denunciation of others for not being ideologically pure enough is a constant theme. The former OBOD Chief is apparently suspect, but the current one isn't, probably because of identity politics.

The problem with many of these people is they don't know or care to know the historical facts. Therefore they don't need any evidence to say 9 million women were burned as witches. They are also very fond of re-enacting the Karpman drama triangle with the evil patriarchal Christians as the persecutors, the innocent women with their herbal tinctures as the victims and then the triumphant High Priestess Neopagans like Starhawk or Z Budapest, et al, as the Rescuers and Saviours of these poor benighted women.

You were like Toto in the Wizard of Oz when you looked hard at the myths they live by. I doubt they minded being compared to Marxists - but comparing them to those evil patriarchal Christians! How dare you, JMG!?

[ecosophia]

Hmm! I had no idea the Pom still existed, but then I've been very far outside the Neopagan scene for a good long time now. Many thanks for the reference to the Karpman drama triangle -- I'd learned to call that the Rescue Game, out of old Transactional Analysis literature, and it's good to know that it hasn't been forgotten, just renamed. As for how dare I -- well, the four magical virtues are to know, to dare, to will, and to keep silent...

[(Anonymous)]

I remember reading once that J.R.R. Tolkien was writing with an eye towards a mythology for Britain. The Lord of the Rings doesn't have the fatal flaw of the Arthurian myths, of course. I wonder, if that vague memory of mine is correct, if this is why? It would certainly make sense.

One of my teacher friends lamented people not respecting government authority (in the matter of mask wearing) today and I suggested that perhaps teaching kids from anti-government tales starting with Robin Hood was not the way to get respect for government authority. Yet another synchoninity.

BoysMom

[ecosophia]

You're quite correct. The original version of his legendarium, The Book of Lost Tales, was explicitly written as a mythology for England; its setting, Tol Eressea, was England, the elven capital at Kortirion was Warwick, and so on. The fatal flaw wasn't there but the core dynamic of Tolkien's fiction, the image of a time of glory in the past whose last fading remnants are trickling away in the present, was very much there and accounted for.

As for respect for government authority, you don't get respect unless you earn it, and our governments today don't exactly earn respect...

[weilong]

It took me a long time to realize that the whole modernist worldview I was taught in school (with its Big Bang creation story, and everything else from atomic theory to evolution) is the mythology of our time. That includes some exceedingly useful myths; but ultimately their value lies in their utility. Their veracity, in the sense of what we think of as objective truth, is debatable, and perhaps beside the point.

[ecosophia]

Excellent! Yes, exactly -- it's a narrative we use to try to make sense of the world. Like other cultures at this phase of the normal life cycle, we've replaced an old set of myths with a new set which uses the habitual notions of our age of reason instead of the old theological notions of our age of faith -- but they're still myths, and have no more to do with the world as it is than the theological models do.

[syfen]

I wonder if a distinction could be made between a spiritual practice based on myth, and a spiritual practice that gives rise to myths. I'm currently reading a book called "The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao," that talks about the way native traditions give to rise to and recreate myths. Well it doesn't talk about it directly, but it certainly explores the concept. Instead of the processing being politics to myth, myth to practice. Most surviving traditions transit the other practice to myth to politics.



That is probably the problem with "breaking away" from a thing, as it were. To break away from the thing you inevitably define yourself by the thing in question.

[ecosophia]

All spiritual practices are born from myths and all spiritual practices give birth to myths in turn. It's an ongoing cycle. As for breaking away from something, got it in one: instead of breaking away from X (and thus tying yourself to it), break toward Y (and thus go someplace genuinely different.

Woodcraft etc.

[ritaer]

I didn't recall that you had written "Red God." I gave away my Gnosis collection some time ago, but I recall having read the essay. Of course that was pre ArchDruid Report, so I wouldn't have associated your name with anything else I had read. I bought Seton's autobiography in a new edition last year. Pretty interesting guy. Did you know that when he turned 21 his father presented him with an itemized bill for his upbringing, including the midwife's fee? What kind of mind thinks that way?

_The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why An Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future_ by Cynthia Eller points out that a matriarchal past, if it really happened is not a foundation for greater power for women now. After all, if we had the power and lost it to men, how can we claim to be superior? If I recall correctly Elizabeth Gould Davis (_The First Sex_) claimed that the leaders of the peaceful matriarchal cities found the pastoral warriors of the invading tribes more sexually attractive than their "sensitive new age guys"- my words, not hers. Sigh. Interestingly, DNA analysis has produced more evidence of actual women warriors, or at least of women buried with weapons. Still not evidence that they dominated their culture, since they are a minority of the "warrior" burials.

Rita

Re: Woodcraft etc.

[ecosophia]

I thought Eller's book was very solid. As for Davis' claim, it's been a source of frustration for men for a couple of decades now that so many women insist that they want men to be sensitive and gentle and kind, but any man who acts that way can count on being spurned by women in favor of "bad boys" who act the way women insist they don't want men to act...

Changing narratives, turning points, and the future

[esingletary]

Reading that essay and hearing you talk about the reactions to both it and The Red God, another important detail in the history of contemporary Neopaganism comes to mind. In 1999 the same year you published this essay, Ronald Hutton’s excellent history of Neopagan Witchcraft, Triumph of the Moon came out. He had almost an identical Thesis, and even included a chapter on the Woodcutters, and took a sympathetic approach towards contemporary Neopaganism trying in his way to leave behind the Burning Times in favor of a narrative that treats the phenomenon as a creative triumph of the modern British imagination. As a historian, he very much thinks of history in terms of narratives, and points out that it is a dynamic living and ultimately divergent discipline in which the same facts are time and time again filtered through different Cultural paradigms (in Blood and Mistletoe he spends 20 pages outlining everything we know about Druids and then nearly a thousand pages exploring the last thousand years of cultural paradigms that have plugged those facts into all manner of narratives).

Hutton’s book exploded into the Neopagan conversation from 2003 to 2010, met resistance and pushback, but by 2010, had mostly been accepted by all but a minority fringe who slowly trickled out of the conversation altogether. There was still some controversy around the Burning Times narrative when I came on the scene in 2007, but these days if Burning Times, Margaret Murray, or Ancient Witch Cults come into conversation it’s usually in the context of embarrassed nostalgia for teenage years.

Interestingly, that was almost around the same time period that contemporary Neopaganism peaked, and it was in the subsequent years that the Calvinization you pointed out the movement was only just taking baby steps for fossilized into its present form. I think part of what happened was they were offered a triumphant narrative. One that gave them a place among the great Western intellectual traditions of the 20th century, but it came with the caveat that they could no longer sing in a unified voice that “our patience and endurance through the Burning times and now, have given us the strength to keep our vow.” They could no longer claim the keepers of the old ways were dispersed among the nations even now... and their myth was so tied to this identification with the persecuted minority, and with their identification with the indigenous Pre-Christian European Pagans that instead of embracing an identity as cultural creatives, they instead turned their attention to secular versions of the same myth.

The thing about doing that was that they could no longer claim identification with the persecuted groups… they could no longer say “we” when talking about the troubles facing indigenous peoples, etc. And by still trying to cling to the old narrative without being able to place themselves into it, awareness of their own privilege was magnified. And so… they became the villains of their own myth, leaving the movement to cannibalize itself. In order for the Burning Times myth to function, you have to be the one getting burned… When your own tradition becomes one of the torch holders instead, rooted not in ancient wisdom, but in a narrative of colonization, Western expansion, and commoditization of indigenous folkways… things start to get really awkward… And the results pretty closely mirror what’s been happening where little by little, elements of the tradition get trimmed away (starting with distancing from the older traditional groups and conservatives, then distancing from Goddess worshippers, then distancing from theists altogether, and so on down the line in an attempt to sterilize it t fit into an acceptable political narrative until there’s nothing left…

I think the best model for the way the tradition will fade out is going to be much closer to what happened to Russian Anthroposophy than to the colorful collapse of Theosophy. With that, certain members of the Russian Anthroposophical Society formed Vol’Fila, or the “Free Philosophical Association,” which eventually drowned out the more mainstream Anthroposophists then started trimming away problematic elements little by little before finally disbanding altogether in 1923. That might be a useful history to look into at some point in mapping out the future history of Neopaganism.

Re: Changing narratives, turning points, and the future

[ecosophia]

Well, we'll see. You may be right that it just trickles away into irrelevance, but there's still plenty of room for a grand self-defeating gesture or two...

[seasidehermit]

I never quite got around to noticing the Christianity was NeoPaganism's original sin. I just thought of it as the mainstream norm the immature rebellious type sets themselves up in knee jerk opposition to while kidding themselves that this means they have escaped its influence. I got the sense that if society had ever actually given NeoPaganism the respect and legitimacy they claimed they wanted, most of its followers would instantly lose all interest in it (probably why those temples never got built).

Maybe if I had, the descent into Woke Culture would've surprised me less.

On a related note, I remember a while back in one of your essays, you'd said that NeoPaganism represented a failed attempt at a fringe movement to win mainstream acceptance (as opposed to gay men, who succeeded), that there were reasons why that failed but the question was left there because you were trying to make another point. I've been curious since, what are the reasons why that failed and was always going to fail?

[ecosophia]

The rhetoric of marginalization that pervades the witch stereotype. It was central to the Neopagan self-image that Neopagans were marginal figures, persecuted and scorned by the mainstream, and so a good many of them went out of their way to behave in ways that guaranteed that they would keep being persecuted and scorned by the mainstream, or at least laughed at. That guaranteed they would never become part of the mainstream.

[(Anonymous)]

I'd also like to see "The Red God," if getting it back in circulation can be arranged.

There are a variety of things that I like about Wicca, having dabbled in it in the past, and one of the things I've been brooding on recently is if it might be possible to salvage some of the better parts when the core "Witchcraft" narratives of marginalization and exclusion are so prone toward self-marginalizing and self-excluding behavior.

If a substantial portion of Gardner's Witchcraft in fact derives from Seton's Woodcraft, then I wonder if it would be possible re-establish a Woodcraft core and do an end run around the "Witch" business.

If I understand correctly, the main narrative of Woodcraft is that of the ruffian who, through the initiation of the wilderness and with the support of their tribe, becomes humane, well adjusted to the world of nature, and capable of utilizing their innate passions toward constructive purposes, all while gaining some freedom from the imbalances and narrow view of industrial civilization.

There seems to be a great deal of potential there for a lot of things . . . .

[ecosophia]

Woodcraft is right out there waiting to be picked up and revived. There's plenty of material available for free online -- here's the 1917 manual, when it was just for boys, and here's the 1921 edition, expanded for both genders; go looing for books by Ernest Thompson Seton and you can find much more. Go looking for John Hargrave's books on the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift (one of the two British branches) and there's even more. There have been a few not very effective attempts to relaunch it, but I'm convinced it could be reborn as something very potent and beneficial.

As for the myth -- no, it's not quite that. The myth is that there's another way of life; simpler, stronger, cleaner, healthier, more in tune with nature and with your own human nature -- and it's waiting for you. All you have to do is gather up your courage, embrace it, and join the tribe of those who have already done so. They're waiting for you too, and they'll welcome you...

[(Anonymous)]

JMG, can I ask a question that didn’t occur to me till just now? We’re all pretty much agreed that the Internet, present company excepted, is awful these days and so we’re limiting our use. Suppose you need to research something—do-it-yourself flea control, let’s say, as you and the Corgi are both tired of scratching. Wanting to stay off the Internet as much as possible, you go to the library to do your research—and the nice lady points you towards the Internet. 😳. What can we do to protect ourselves in situations where we’re forced to be on it?

—Lady Cutekitten

[ecosophia]

The internet sucks but it also has an astonishing wealth of information. I do a lot of research on it. My rule is that I never just go surfing -- I use the internet when there's something I want to find -- and when I find it, I download it and leave the internet. Oh, and I use DuckDuckGo rather than Google, which is very unhelpfully biased.

[(Anonymous)]

Choose your myths wisely.

So then it isn’t “What is the meaning of the Cosmos?” but rather “What is the meaning that I’m projecting for myself onto the Cosmos?” (And “Is that meaning helpful to me?”)

[ecosophia]

Exactly. Whisper this: you can say "What spell of meaning do I choose to cast upon the cosmos?"

[(Anonymous)]

Western religious traditions have developed what I call a "Chain of custody" and authenticity obsession. For Christianity, this was not a problem when they developed the New Testament. But centuries later we see them fighting about when the world was created. Eastern traditions have no such hangups. They all liberally borrowed from others, and no is worried too much about it.

Ramaraj

[ecosophia]

Exactly. The idea of the primordial Dharma, the truth that was there from the beginning and is present everywhere and at all times, is a good corrective to the frantic struggle to have the one and only truth you see so often in Western faiths.

Plato, Marx and Christians

[(Anonymous)]

Perhaps tangential but Dan Carlin had mentioned in one of his podcasts how the Catholic Church took Plato’s concept of utopia and ran with it. A leadership made up of wise unmarried men who would have the best interests of the community at heart and of course the relevant critique of yours of the problems there. That coupled with Marx’s ideal state and how much Plato he “borrowed” in Das Kapital.
I would argue either thats it’s own mythic structure or mimics the rhyming scheme mentioned. We might even say the same thing of the wokesters. Just replace wise men for women at the top...
Basically if the basic structure of mythology is Abrahamic the basic structure of the “ideal” government is platonic.

Re: Plato, Marx and Christians

[ecosophia]

That makes perfect sense. The Christian church in late antiquity borrowed a great deal of Platonism, so I could see it having borrowed that as well. And yes, it would explain a lot if the Republic were the monomyth of the managerial classes...

That 1999 Essay Hasn't Aged A Day

[(Anonymous)]

... and it has given me a valuable insight:

"Hey, you are a fish. And you are living in this stuff called water."

And I waggle a fin or two, and ponder: what are things like where water isn't?

We've all been marinated in the Christian mythical narrative since infancy; it's not a surprise to me that people attempting to create "new" religions would still be shaped by it.

- Cicada Grove

Re: That 1999 Essay Hasn't Aged A Day

[ecosophia]

Exactly. The "new" religions are popular precisely because they accord with widely held mythic schemes.

[claire_58]

Good evening JMG,
Fascinating couple of posts. It seems to me that in one of your ADR blogs you commented that spirituality (or possibly magic) was a refuge for politically powerless marginalized people. I think you were talking about feminist neopaganism or Wicca at the time and that you specifically referenced voodoo as an example of this phenomena. If so it makes sense that these religions or spiritual traditions would morph into political movements once they gained power or credibility or whatever. That was the goal all along. That was the original motivation for their practice.
Also I would like to call your attention to Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade. She makes a distinction that is, I believe, more that just semantics. She explores the power dynamics that are easily misunderstood when terms like 'patriarchy' are used. 'Power over' or 'dominator power' is contrasted to 'power to' (personal power or ability) or 'partnership power' in the case of collective action. This distinction is important because it moves away from the 'men oppressing (perpetrator) women (victim)' trope. This language allows men's and women's actions to be seen as an expression of their world views rather than as an expression of inherent moral stature or socially prescribed roles.
The sequence of idyllic prehistory, crises, conflict etc you've outlined is very apparent. However her description of the rise and fall of these two competing world views in the historical period seems closer to the wax and wane of yin and yang in eastern dualism or the cyclical history that constitutes many non-Western cosmologies.

[ecosophia]

The discussion of magic as the politics of the excluded was in one of my posts about the Kek Wars. As for Eisler, interesting. Everyone I've known who was into her book was also deeply into the "Blame the Menz" theory of history -- roughly, everything that's wrong with the world has a penis -- so, having read quite a bit of that literature earlier, I rolled my eyes and didn't read her. Does Eisler consider the possibility that too much chalice might be just as problematic as too much blade?

Exploring myths

[(Anonymous)]

How useful are Joseph Campbell's books in digging into the world's myths?

Re: Exploring myths

[ecosophia]

I didn't find them useful at all. He forces myths into the Procrustean bed of his "monomyth" and leaves out far too much of the actual diversity and complexity of myth. My advice is to go direct to the source; your public library can get you books of myths and legends from many parts of the world. Start reading them and before long you'll have a good sense of the world of myth.

[(Anonymous)]

The constant use of "oppression" and " marginalized" is the exact reason I wrote off witchcraft communities, books, and any media that comes out of the neopagan scene. I also felt that these buzzwords and magic clashed quite a bit. If one can work effective magic and receive real world results can one really use the word oppressed?

[(Anonymous)]

I also felt that these buzzwords and magic clashed quite a bit. If one can work effective magic and receive real world results can one really use the word oppressed?

The "oppressed" also can't make their living as authors for a certain Crescent Moon associated publishing house, or as pay-to-pray online witchcraft teachers. ;)

he latest fad is denouncing Permaculture™ as racist because it wasn't invented by indigenous women

[(Anonymous)]

of color? Oh really? It has been a few decades since I read Mollison's Big Book, but I believe I do recall that he emphasized learning from and incorporating indigenous gardening and farming folkways. Is not recent research showing that people have been creating what are or were very nearly self sustaining agricultural systems since the Neolithic Revolution? Have the Neopagan ideologues not heard of biochar? Which technique, BTW, seems to have been independently developed in the Amazon and in West Africa.

Re: he latest fad is denouncing Permaculture™ as racist because it wasn't invented by indigenous w

[ecosophia]

Ah, but that simply means that he was engaging in cultural appropriation. The rhetoric of wokesterism is nothing if not all-encompassing.

[(Anonymous)]

I've been watching people in the #resistance genealogy movement cast out their ancestors who were slaveholders or other perceived racists. When they ran out of their own family trees, they picked up others' family trees, found something distasteful, and condemned them out on social media. It's been ugly. None of the existing big names in the field have condemned any of this behavior or offer an alternative vision.

It seems like after reading your essay its an attempt to have people be filled with shame for their past (which they had no control of) because of the chosen facts historians have used. The myth of the fall, the righteous remanent, and the ideal utopian ending are all present.

The idea that if any of us were to be dropped back in time we would act any differently is ludicrous. Me put back then with the same religious and cultural upbringing my ancestors had would certainly have behaved the same way they did. We each act within what we perceive to be the limited set of choices available to us at any given time (We don't eat ice cream for breakfast, dress in long pink robes when we go to the store, etc etc). We are very controlled by those around us, often without any notice on our part.

I'm so glad this essay came up and you shared it. Perfect timing for me in what I face in my work. Thank you.

resistance genealogy

[neptunesdolphins]

That is a new one. The people I used associate with did that - their ancestors were evil for owning people. Oh, the agony. Oh, the woe. Oh, the martyrs' crown. They wallowed in it without doing any Ancestor work such as forgiving or elevating or dealing with problematic Ancestors.

I fell into the trap when I explained I had relatives that were Baptist Missionaries in India. I do have an altar to them as they are Ancestors (separate from the ahem Pagan ones). I was quickly brought up by the short hairs and told that my missionary ancestors were not as evil as theirs.

I realize it was a contest in being once again the heroic martyrs and victims.