Reclaiming the Pagan Worldview.pdf

Reclaiming the Pagan Worldview:

The Heart of Mysticism and the Return of the Old Ways

From "The Witching Way of the Hollow Hill"

* * *

In my way of thinking, what makes a person a “pagan” is not adherence to

the surface beliefs of a pagan religion, nor some strongly

individualistic way of challenging the status quo, nor even embracing an

antique religious model- in the modern day, what pass for “pagan”

religious models tend to be created by certain left-wing people to

bolster some equally-as-left-wing ideologies. True and honest “paganism”

is hard to come by.

In my opinion, being “pagan” is far from any of that- it is a matter of

changing your worldview to an older way of seeing and being, giving

reconsideration to older wisdoms, and making them relevant to you today.

There is a struggle of spirit going on- people are looking for Wisdom

and peace, and some look back to the past for hints about how others

once found it. This is a good impulse- the past has much to teach us.

But it is still a struggle, because mainstream religions strongly

disapprove of people looking too far back.

Modern mainstream religions “win” the struggle of the spirit in a new

way- they win when people have no awareness of the subtle power of

worldview, and when people do not question where the features of their

worldviews come from. In the old days, the modus operandi was for the

church to convert kings and rulers, get influence over the laws, and

kill the heretics and dissenters. But organizations like the church

couldn’t do what they were trying so hard to do, which was change the

basic worldview of the people they converted. That took centuries.

Conversion in name is not enough- to become a true follower of a

religion, you have to embrace the worldview associated with the religion

completely; and that normally only happens when you are raised from an

early age surrounded by a culture that espouses and demonstrates the

features of that worldview. Christianity took generations to “set in”

properly and fully. In the modern day, pagans have a lot of “unlearning”

to do, before they can really say “we are pagan”.

A Matter of Worldview

Nowadays, people can believe whatever they want. There is no locked,

enforced way of believing. But there IS a worldview that most people in

the west accept, people who are pagan and Christian alike, without even

realizing they accept it. Many people today feel and want so much to be

“pagan” again, and to escape the dominant Judeo-Christian paradigmatic

worldview, but it doesn’t happen overnight, just like it didn’t grow

overnight.

Some people don’t understand this- they think that being pagan is a

matter of reading some books, of making a blanket rejection of their

original religious beliefs, and taking part in “pagan” rites or even

“doing their own thing”- and nothing could be further from the truth.

The essence of paganism is found in the worldview. Worldview is a matter

of how you feel and think about things, on a deep, mostly pre-conscious

level. Worldview is normally tied up in culture, and it is a matter of

how you were raised, from day one, to think about things and see them.

“To be pagan” is to alter or change these deep patterns in your mind, to

be more in alignment with a genuine pagan worldview- and a “genuine”

pagan worldview should be based on older pagan ideas and ideals.

Hopefully, if any “modern paganism” is worth its salt, it will be

inspired by older pagan ideas that still have importance and relevance

for us today- and many do. Some features of older worldviews can be

interpreted in new ways to make them relevant. We are dealing with

organic features that changed to suit the times and needs of long ago,

so this is not odd in the least.

Part and parcel of the standard “pagan” worldview, ancient or modern, is

a sense of the sacredness of the Land; that the Sacred Land is alive and

inhabited by spiritual forces ranging from Godly spirits to the souls of

the dead, that All life emerged from the Land or from Nature, and that

all will return to it cyclically, on the tides of birth and death.

The relationship between men and women is vital to the modern pagan

worldview- the rather destructive imbalances of the past, evidenced in

antique (and in some places, persistent) social orders between men and

women, fill most modern pagans with a desire to find a healthier way for

men and women to relate. Pagan mythologies present men and women as

being created simultaneously, not one before the other, or one for the

other, as Eve seems to have been a device created from Adam to alleviate

Adam’s boredom or loneliness; in ancient Germania we have Woden creating

a man and a woman at the same time from trees; the same story gets told

in a different form in other places- and even the Greeks, before the

latebreaking “Pandora” myth, had man and woman springing up

simultaneously from the Earth itself, or from the humus and trunks of

Ash trees.

Men and women have different biological functions with respect to

reproduction, but no spiritual, mental, or any other ontological

inequalities. If men can offer women the gift of physical fertility,

women, and the feminine, offer to men the no-less vital gift of

emotional and spiritual fertility. Man’s strength is not there to hold

down and control the feminine, but to protect it and support it, for she

is the source of his life and his generations, and the secret heart of

his honor and joy- the very form of his deepest spiritual yearnings.

There is a great and holy reciprocity between the sexes, they are

needful to each other, and modern pagans tend to stand strongly on this

issue, as well they should.

The very basic pagan worldview- in common with the ancient beliefs of

all Indo-European pagans- is one of animistic fullness, with a simple,

earthy, ‘ground level’ emphasis on the idea of all things having a

spiritual dimension, and on the value of life and of human cooperative

well-being.

With the possible exception of the belief in the all important value of

Life and the Truth, there is no sense of ‘hard absolutes’; there is an

ambiguity at the heart of all things, for Nature herself is nowhere

clean and clear-cut, on any expressed level. Humans must decide, within

the context of every situation, what actions are proper and try to bring

their actions into alignment with whatever course brings about a greater

harmony. This worldview requires humans to be flexible, brave and

responsible.

This worldview has no sense of human moral depravity; no sense of guilt

or loathing for the basic organic realities of human life; a basic trust

in the dignity and goodness of mankind. Most scandalously, there is no

sense of the necessity of salvific revelations or the prophets and

saviors of revealed religions; “revelations” for those who live on the

Land, and who live as parts of the Land, are ongoing.“Revelations” can

be heard by anyone who listens in the wind or to the Land, and can be

heard daily in the interior of the heart.

The pagan worldview also has no sense of linear “salvation history”; the

world is not going to suddenly “end” one day at the behest of a heavenly

judge who will then dole out rewards and punishments. Responsibility for

making this world a better place is squarely on humans and the community

of life.

“Meaning” in life is not to be found at life’s end, or at the end of the

world, but every day, in every action and breath. The end of the world-

cycle or this era will come naturally, organically, just as it started;

it is not a heavenly catastrophe, but a natural reality, and the coming

of this “end”- which is itself a pre-cursor to a rebirth for the world-

is not the primary concern of humans, as much as living this present

moment with wisdom and peace.

Finally, and most importantly, the pagan worldview has a strong emphasis

on the surreal, supra-rational presence of the Otherworld, the immense

reality that lies beyond the boundaries of our own human perceptions and

pre-conceived notions, and which occasionally breaks through into our

“world” and perceptions in mysterious, exhilarating, or frightening

ways.

This great presence, this extra-sensory reality, is the force behind

pagan myths and legends; it is the animating principle of pagan

mythology, and the single, pervasive and omnipresent principle by which

otherwise inexpressible universal Truths can penetrate the world and

mind of man or woman. This reality is the home of the Gods, the source

of divine inspiration. Mythology is the presence of the Otherworld in

the form of ancient stories; mythology- any mythology can be thought of

as its manifestation.

Any mythology can be thought of as a gateway to a truly mystical

experience of timeless truth. Though the mythical stories themselves

don’t tend to be literally “true”, they are nonetheless still “True”,

all being expressions of great Truth. The ancients had no problems with

their myths not being literal. It was the symbolic and metaphorical

nature of these holy stories and lore that gave them power; they spoke

in the language of the Otherworld.

With the World or Against It

Having made this simple outline of a general “pagan” worldview, it seems

pretty straightforward. But modern neo-pagans tend to help preserve a

very non-pagan and decidedly non-traditional worldview, even when they

are in the grip of what they so fervently think is “paganism”.

And the problems of reclaiming a true pagan worldview today are not just

consequences of religious oppression, or the history of religion in the

west; even our modern materialistic sciences have problems. As much as

modern people (and even modern pagans) think that the sciences are

positive forces that are “against fundamentalist superstition and

ignorance”, it is a sad fact that many scientific paradigms aren’t any

more healthy than fundamentalist Christianity- the sciences too, can be

based on firmly non-spiritual and totally “we are automatically right

and you are automatically an ignorant, superstitious person for not

accepting our math and theories” attitudes. Sadly, science for many

becomes a new form of elitism, with its own dogmas and faith in its

ability to answer the mysteries of the universe.

But many pagans, thinking that science is a firmly non-Christian and

totally positive advancement, walk around trying to make our ancestors’

lore and ancient spiritual notions “fit in” with scientific-sounding

explanations; I have heard such horrid things, ranging from “the trance

state is really just an alpha state of consciousness” to “paganism and

Wicca are just quantum physics mixed with the ancient mysteries”.

I’ve heard neo-pagans actually trying to explain how their “law of

return” was firmly based on physics, and I’ve even heard neo-pagans

trying to “prove” that there is an “afterlife” with the rather tired,

pseudoscientific anecdote that goes something like this: “hey man, we’re

all just energy... electricity- and according to physics, energy can’t

be destroyed or created, it just changes form...so when we die, our

energy just changes form...”

I can’t tell you how depressing it looks when someone takes the most

precious gift of our ancestors' mythology- and all the lore and power it

contains- and tries to explain it all away in these analytical terms, to

make it more palatable to the science-dazed masses who think that things

can’t be “real” unless you can explain them in mathematical terms or

demonstrate them in a lab.

What is real and important in life cannot be so explained. A person who

thinks they can, will never reach the promise of the spiritual

worldview, nor achieve wisdom. They will join the endless mental paper

chase, which only ends in new questions, new debates, and never in

peace. They are swept away with the tools of dissection, and can chop

things into eternally smaller pieces, but never reach the bottom; they

can analyze, over-analyze, discover possible explanations, but never

find meaning.

An Older Wisdom

Our ancestors were very wise; they knew secrets to reality and about

reality that we can still access today, but only when we understand that

we need our ancestors and their legacy more than they need us- because

they weren’t savages who needed Christianity and rationalistic science

to save them from their errors; the “old days” didn’t need our ultra-

enlightened “modern day” to “fix” it’s superstitious mistakes. I’m not

saying the old days were perfect, but they did have access to a source

of wisdom that we have mostly grown unconscious to. And this source of

wisdom can spell the difference between life and death.

Let’s have a look at our ultra-enlightened modern day! Look at how we

Europeans, and to an extent, Africans and Asians, are all suffering from

spiritual amnesia, all of us, with lost memories of our ancestors, and

of who we are, and where we come from- replacing our wise pagan heritage

with foreign cultural beliefs based on guilt and misogynistic,

spiritually elitist hallucinations- look at how we have bathed this

world in blood; look at how we waste without shame; look at how we

degrade the world and environment!

And look at how our new ‘champion’ science has produced just enough

miracle technology to give us guided missiles and monstrous weapons that

could destroy the entire planet, and how it has gifted us with just

enough technology to keep most of the poor world under the oppression of

a small majority of the rich world, and just enough technology to

improve the ‘quality’ and length of life- so that we can each have 90-

100 year life spans, all the more time to feel alienated from each other

and confused, more years to suffer under the oppression of other

countries and corporations (if we happen to be born in the non-

technologically advanced world), and more hollow years of doubting the

existence of anything that we can’t see and hear and feel.

This is the curse of losing who we were and who we are. Wisdom was lost

with those things. Science would be a beautiful, wonderful tool, if we

had wisdom to temper it. But we don’t, and so science is abused and it

has become another monster, just like the old church.

I’m not saying we should destroy science; I’m saying we should restore

wisdom. Wisdom is to be found in the heart, in the fetch, in the soul,

in the feeling self- and the keys and gates to wisdom are encoded in

Mythology, and in the actual blood and spirit of each human being. What

allows access to this wisdom is trust in the self, trust for the basic

goodness and capability of humankind, and honesty to the deepest

emotions. Religions or philosophies that tell people not to trust their

own hearts are poison, designed to shackle humans in slavery.

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