Toward Ecosophy

Well, that was unexpected...

Monday's regular "Magic Monday" ask-me-anything post here on my Dreamwidth account featured, among many other things, questions from a young man who was troubled about certain aspects of his habit of masturbating to pornography. He noted that it felt very much as though some being outside himself was pushing that habit on him. This is far from the first time I've heard the same thing from people in his position, and -- as I normally do on my Magic Monday posts -- I responded to him on the basis of classic occult philosophy, which holds that: 

a) malign spiritual entities exist, and can manipulate the minds of unwary human beings; 

b) human sexuality is not simply a physical process, but involves the subtle levels of reality as well;

c) certain sexual behaviors can, under some circumstances, attract malign spiritual entities, who feed on the subtle substances emitted during those behaviors. 

(I should probably note that I consider these statements to be true, not merely because they're part of classic occult philosophy, but because I've found consistently that they provide better explanations of the cosmos than other points of view.) 

So we had a lively and, I hope, constructive conversation about how to deal with the situation using standard magical practices, and I figured that was that. This afternoon, though, I found that it went a great deal further than that -- because Rod Dreher (that's him in the picture), a regular columnist for The American Conservative, had read the discussion and posted a long article of his own about it, titled "Porn Is Demonic, Says Top Occultist,"  and using it to push the idea that pornography ought to be banned. Of course the result was a fine donnybrook in the comments page, with Christians denouncing Dreher for citing an occultist, Neopagans insisting huffily that most Neopagans don't agree with me, a great deal of back and forth about Dreher's proposed remedy, and much more. 

Since Dreher included a link to my discussion in his article, I'd like to comment a little on his essay and a few of the comments on it -- not least because Dreher garbled what I said in some important ways. A good deal of that garbling came from the inevitable differences between the ways we see the world, but not all. 

So let's cover some of the basics. 

1. Is pornography demonic?  Strictly speaking, that's like asking how much virtue weighs; there's a category error involved. Pornography consists of images and texts -- that is, material things -- that are made by a great many people for a great many reasons, mostly but not entirely centering on a desire to make money. Do malign spirits encourage some people to make these things, and others to consume them? The latter, to judge from the comments I've fielded, seems to be true in some cases, and I'm not prepared to deny that both may be true in many cases. That doesn't justify insisting that every image of a person not wearing clothes is demonic. 

2. Is masturbation bad? Like alcohol, or any other source of pleasure, it's harmless to those who can be moderate about it and problematic to those who can't, and issues of addiction can get involved. Yes, malign spirits can involve themselves in that latter point. The terror of sexual pleasure that Christianity borrowed from late Greek philosophy has probably caused more human suffering than any other single bad idea in history -- but the opposite of one bad idea, you know, is typically another bad idea, and obsessive sexual addiction is no more healthy than obsessive sexual repression. 

3. Are the malign spirits I'm talking about demons?  Not in the Christian sense. A great deal of Christianity remains stuck in a quasi-dualist worldview in which every spiritual entity is either an angel or a demon -- that is, either a servant or an opponent of the Christian god. That impressively narrow view isn't the worldview of classic occultism (and it's not well supported by the data from human spiritual experience worldwide, either). To occultists, the cosmos is full of a vast profusion of spiritual beings, most of which are serenely uninterested in human beings and their concerns. In the cosmos, there are certain beings who, under some circumstances, prey on human beings. Are they all servants of One Big Bad Guy? No. As Eliphas Levi pointed out a long time ago, unity is a divine characteristic, and the most notable common factor of the patterns of behavior we call "evil" is that they conflict with one another. So instead of a Satanic "Lowerarchy," in C.S. Lewis' phrase, that end of the realm of spirits is a vast penumbra of vague, quarreling, dissentient beings pursuing their conflicting goals at each others' expense -- and occasionally at ours. 

Yes, I know Christians disagree with that. They're entitled to their opinion, even if it's wrong. 

4. What about the Pagans who insist I don't speak for all Pagans? I never claimed to do so. Most of the people these days who call themselves Pagans -- a term I don't use for myself, btw -- are Neopagans; they belong to a new religious movement that's been active in the Western world since the 1940s (though, in the usual way, it's backdated itself to the dawn of time). I don't belong to that movement. The Druid faith that's my spiritual home got started in the early 18th century; the late Isaac Bonewits, who did more than anyone else to publicize the label "Neopagan," spent much of his career saying nasty things about my kind of nature worship, denouncing it as "Mesopagan." The occultism that frames my philosophical and practical take on the issues we're discussing, in turn, began to emerge in the 19th century, drawing on material from the Renaissance and, through that, the late Classical era. Those are the traditions I draw on. I don't claim to speak for those, either, and neither can anyone else -- we don't do Popes, you know. 

5. Should pornography be banned? Er, and how well did that work in the past? Slapping a legal ban on pornography would simply provide organized crime with a new and lucrative cash flow. That will probably be very welcome to them, since they're losing the very substantial income they've gotten until recently via cannabis sales, but that's all it will do. It's not the job of governments to enforce moral virtue; it's the job of organized religion to teach and persuade individuals to embrace moral virtue. When you see religious spokespeople calling on governments to ban something for moral reasons, what you're seeing is a church admitting its own incompetence at one of its core jobs. 

Those are the points that come to mind at first glance. No doubt others will come up as the conversation unfolds. I would like it to be a conversation, for what it's worth. 

Update: I was pleased to note that Dreher has posted an update to his essay discussing my response in a typically thoughtful fashion. Of course he disagrees with me about core issues -- he's an Eastern Orthodox Christian, I'm a polytheist Druid occultist, I'm sure we would agree that the sky is blue but getting much past there might take some work -- but I consider it promising that the two of us can disagree civilly about issues that cause a lot of flying saliva in other contexts.