Quest Magazine

Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion

By Michael York
New York: New York University Press, 2003. Hardback, x + 239 pages.

"Paganism views humankind, nature, and whatever the supernatural mayor may not be as essentially divine." So writes Michael York in this groundbreaking book, one much needed to shed light on today's evolving spirituality, York, Director and Principal Lecturer of the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cultural Astronomy and Astrology, as well as Director of the Bath Archive for Contemporary Religious Affairs, Bath Spa University College, UK, not only is an accomplished scholar but an active researcher.

At the outset, he reminds us of the correct definition of the word "pagan" which comes from the Latin word for "peasant." Christianity began in cities and country folk clung to the old-time religion, (I can vouch for this personally because 40 years ago I was studying Russian and needed to look up the word for "peasant" in my atheistic Soviet dictionary. To my amazement, one of the definitions was Kristian!) So paganism in the broadest sense is any religion that views the natural world as sacred. Further, York traces the word "cult" to its association with culture, agriculture, and cultivate. Thus he is not just writing about Wicca, Witchcraft, and magick but about the distinction between the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which are monotheistic revelations given by God through a historic individual and those religions that celebrate the holiness of the seasons, the multiple personifications of archetypal processes punctuated by the movements of the solar system, the natural elements, and the divine interplay of masculine and feminine (creative and receptive) of gods and goddesses as aspects of a hidden source of Spirit. Buddhism seems a borderline case. Though Gautama Buddha was an historical figure, he never claimed to be a messenger of God, but offered the world a wise and compassionate way out of suffering.

Michael York centers his study on his rich personal and joyous experiences in India, Nepal, China, and Japan while living and participating, as well as documenting, the fervent earthy celebrations of the ordinary population in contrast to the transcendent views and teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. His accounts were riveting and brought a new perspective to many memories for me. I realized afresh that since many of us also believe in a "spirituous earth," that being a Nee-pagan is not necessarily a heretical posture but one leading us, with the help of theoretical physics, to a new appreciation of the spiritual glory and wonder of the cosmos (a Greek word meaning "beauty"). The book itself concerns paganism as religion, behavior, and theology. As one reads, one discovers the really valid aspects of the pagan approach despite the fact that the term itself is so encrusted for many by semantic prejudice and negative associations. By York's definition any dedicated environmentalist would classify as having pagan tendencies. Perhaps what many people celebrate unconsciously, more and more of us are approaching more consciously. There is a hilarious section on what the unconscious secular symptoms of paganism can produce.

Perhaps, York could have given some credit to the author of some of the Psalms, who praises the earth and its creatures, or mentioned some of the truly poetic passages in the Koran of the same nature, or even mentioned St. Francis and especially Celtic Christianity which never ever has excluded nature. Granted that these attribute creation to one God, but even in polytheistic religiosities there seems to be an underlying inference of an invisible Unity, the diversity of which is acknowledged as manifesting in aspects and relationships to be personified and worshiped. Hopefully there will be a sequel to this truly important work that will further address paganism in the West with more about the Celtic tradition which is corning to the fore.

As Jesus says in the Gospel According to Thomas, "Heaven is spread upon the earth, but men do not see it." Therein lies the wisdom of many pagans.

Michael York has laid the intellectual groundwork for a new approach to theology, one which hopefully might reconcile the appalling feuding ones of our time. We need to celebrate the earth, because though Spirit may give us Life, it is Mother Nature that gives life form, and perhaps that is a symbolic message of Incarnation.

-ALICE O. HOWELL

January/February 2004

The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth

by Joan Halifax
Harper San Francisco, 1993; hardcover.

It is one of the necessary paradoxes of spiritual development that as one progressively disidentifies with the physical body and its passionate life, one exchanges or transmutes-matter for wisdom, thereby birthing a new body of authority. For Joan Halifax, noted educator, humanist, and transcultural peregrinator, that body is as big as the planet and its ethnographic myriad of peoples. Halifax's The Fruitful Darkness, a superbly wise and humble poetics of self-inquiry, transformation, and dynamic compassion, is the perfect illustration of this process. Her book is a wise-woman's account of how she discovered “new flesh in my mind,” how she found “the gold of compassion in the dark stone of suffering” - and how we all might, should we emulate her.

But that stone- that dark inchoate mass of unknowing, of the shadow, silence, woundedness, and subterranean life-is ultimately fruitful. My life is the instrument through which I might experiment with Truth, says Halifax, who artfully employs key tableaux from her life of continuous initiation and quickening to exemplify the principles of her alchemy. She draws equally from her experiences in anthropology, deep ecology, Buddhism, and indigenous shamanism, inspiring us with the breadth of their fusion in one body of understanding. At the heart of all discourses, suggests Halifax, is the wound, the unexpiated pain. But from out of the personal wound that is identical with the World Wound comes the fruit of unrestricted empathy.

Halifax's The Fruitful Darkness is a marvel of meditative reflection tempered with autobiography, a sensitive contemplation of the tenfold path by which Halifax seeks, on our behalf, “to weave my way back into the fabric of Earth.” There is gold in the darkness, she assures us, which we may mine through the ways of silence, traditions, mountains, language, story, non-duality, protectors, ancestors, and compassion. Each of these ways represents an element in her fugue of a fruitful darkness. Over the decades Halifax has traveled the inner and outer landscape with numerous lucid companions - Buddhist teachers. Huichol shamans, Native American elders, poets, scientists - whose presence and insights enrich her text. She honors all voices, puts her ear to the ground to listen to all members of the vast natural sangha of the planet, the community of biological beings, including whales, dolphins, stones, even extinct species, forests, rivers, now in the realm of planetary ancestors. “The true language of these worlds opens from the heart of a story that is being shared between species,” she says. “Earth is a community that is constantly talking to itself, a communicating universe.”

To listen you must learn the ways of silence, solitude, and emptying. Only then can you find the place where the roots of all Jiving things are tied together, that point of non-duality, the root with no end, which is the life of the Earth, “this great distributive lattice” upon which we all live. Then, grounded, rooted, in touch with the Earth, we can practice intimacy, simple communion, warmth, and mercy with the world, says Halifax. The Fruitful Darkness, comprised of “observations, notes, stories, and realizations,” is the meticulously crafted, honestly sung log book of her journey down and in.

After voyages through revelatory terrains, mountains of illumination, both actual and symbolic, through the Yucatan, Tibet, the Sahara, the Sierra Nevada, she knows: “We have greatly underestimated our true identity.” Early in her life she understood she, must spend time in the mountains, that she must be what the Shintos call yamabushi, one of those who lie down in the mountains. In 1987 she fulfilled a 25-year-Iong intention, to make the perikerama, the circumambulatory pilgrimage on foot around Tibet's awesome Mount Kailas. Even to arrive at this 22,000-foot-high giant, after weeks of jeep travel and overland walking, is a triumph. Kailas, like all majestic mountains, is so utterly daunting precisely because it mirrors our own Buddha nature, our true wild, cosmic identity: the mountain within is the more awesome.

The recognition of this staggeringly simple fact fabricates the body of authority. “Little was left of me psychically or physically after circling it,” Regrettably for the reader, because she conveys texture, tone, and ambiance of place so vividly, Halifax is assiduously spare in her autobiographical delvings and changes meditative locale long before we've drunk fully enough from each well she has bored and presented to us. But that is the mark of a mature work, a few strokes, deftly, masterfully executed, no indulgence, no superfluity, no posturing- just the bone of experience. Maybe there isn't anything else to say: being there is the revelation. “Realizing fully the true nature of place is to talk its language and hold its silence.”

Halifax, on behalf of the constituents of her body of authority –“all my relations” - urges us to reconnect with the body of Earth. We must awaken from our delusions of a separate self alienated from Nature the environment, and our fellow humans, correct the grave perceptual errors that have sealed us in a psychocultural cocoon that imperils the planet. The Earth Herself, through her polyphony of acknowledged tribal voices, will aid us. “The wisdom of elder cultures can make an important contribution to the postmodern world,” Halifax argues. This elder wisdom takes articulate living expression not as schematics, theories, and constructs, but as a direct experience of “stillness, solitude, simplicity, ceremony, and vision.”

Western culture needs a strong purification in the autochthonous sweat lodge of the native peoples' worldview, says Halifax . Our goal, in part, is the attainment of what Buddhism calls the six Natural Conditions (or Perfections) which we find in the deep, soul-making ground of fertile darkness. Let us aspire to generosity, wholesomeness, patience, enthusiasm, communion, and wisdom, says Halifax, and grow incomparable roses from the garbage of our civilization. Reconnected, our wounds make a door into the World Body, a gate through which our spirit-hand reaches in phototropic trust to what is moving towards us. The body of authority is the wisdom of “interbeing,” our unassailable identity with the world. Halifax deserves our thanks for showing us how to travel a long way to find a bit of true nature. “The yield of the journey is ex pressed by the light pouring out of the window of our interior worlds, the deep ground of our actual lives.”

-RICHARD LEVITON

Autumn 1993

Magical and Mystical Sites: Europe and the British Isles

by Elizabeth Pepper and John Wilcock
Phanes Press. 1993; paper.

My first trip to Europe was a mixture of shock and embarrassment. Like so many North Americans, I was tot ally unprepared for its inescapable wealth of sacred sites. Little do we know of the day-to-day spirituality still alive in Europe, or of its traditions of alchemical pilgrimage routes, sacred sites, special museums. Pepper and Wilcock's book is welcome for planning a meaningful trip.

What began as a personal project to research mystic sites throughout Europe has resulted in a practical guidebook. Most such books are printed in Europe, making them hard to come by in the U.S. Wonderfully illustrated, this volume includes a useful bibliography for further research.

I would have wished for a book three times this size, and one filled with local maps. At least we now have an easily obtainable guide for worthwhile pilgrimage travel planning.

-KENNETH O'NEILL

Summer 1993

Revelations: Vision, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation

Elaine Pagels
New York: Viking, 2012. 246 pages, hardcover, $27.95.

Of all the books in the Bible, none has aroused as many complex and contradictory emotions as the book of Revelation. A work that for centuries hovered on the edges of the New Testament canon, it was for years regarded with suspicion both by the Eastern Orthodox church and, later, by the Protestant Reformers; many today view it as the source of all apocalyptic excesses. And yet it retains an uncanny power and has inspired countless works of art. Indeed, wrote Boris Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago, “All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St. John.”

The latest figure to explore this elusive work is Elaine Pagels. Best-known for her groundbreaking book The Gnostic Gospels, Pagels is also the author of such well-known titles as Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. In her latest book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, she turns her attention to this last and most perplexing book of the Bible.

Pagels’s book falls into two parts. In the first she discusses Revelation itself, its author, and what he may have been trying to say in the context of its time (following conventional views, she dates it to c.90 a.d.). She then explains how and why the book came to be included in the New Testament canon.

Like most scholars, Pagels believes that the John who wrote Revelation was neither the apostle nor the author of the fourth Gospel. From the book’s prose style—which is the crudest in the New Testament, with many usages suggesting that its author’s first language was probably Aramaic—she contends that the author was a second-generation Jewish convert to Christianity. This John would have known about, and possibly witnessed, the cataclysmic destruction of Judea by the Romans in the Jewish War of a.d. 66–73. For him, the great villain was Rome, the “great beast.” Indeed, as she notes, the famous number of the beast, 666, is now generally identified as the numerological equivalent of the name “Nero Caesar.”

In essence, then, Pagels agrees with much of current scholarship that portrays Revelation as a coded tirade against the Roman Empire. She plants its historical background firmly in the context of John’s time in the late first century a.d. But why should this crabbed book have been given entry into the canon of sacred scripture?

The answer, Pagels tells us, has to do with the uses to which the book was put in later centuries. As early as the second century a.d., the great villains of John’s apocalypse began to be identified more and more with Christian heretics and less with the beast of Rome, particularly by Irenaeus of Lyons, the chronicler and opponent of so-called heresies. This trend continued in the fourth century, when Constantine’s conversion to Christianity turned the Roman Empire into the greatest benefactor of the nascent Catholic church rather than its greatest enemy. The chief enemy then became Christians who did not agree with the mainstream church. According to Pagels, Athanasius of Alexandria, one of the chief formulators of Catholic Christianity, “found an unlikely ally in John of Patmos— especially as Irenaeus had read him. For . . . Irenaeus interpreted God’s enemies, whom John had pictured as the ‘beast’ and the ‘whore,’ to refer not only to Rome’s rulers but also to Christians deceived, by the false teacher he called Antichrist, into false doctrine and into committing evil” (emphasis in the original).

In fact the Antichrist is not actually mentioned in Revelation (the term appears in the New Testament only in the first two epistles of John), but by the time of Athanasius, it was easy to insert this dark and ambiguous figure into Revelation’s demonology. For Athanasius himself, “Antichrist” was a pliable term, suitable for use against his archenemy, the bishop Arius, whose formulation of Christology differed from Athanasius’s, and even against Constantine’s son, the emperor Constantius, who sent Athanasius into exile.

Pagels’s story stops in the fourth century, but it is easy to see how Revelation’s enigmatic figures of evil could be projected onto the villains of any era. The Protestant Reformers saw the church of Rome itself as John’s whore of Babylon. In recent centuries, the beast has been identified with Napoleon, Hitler, and even Henry Kissinger. The full name of Ronald Wilson Reagan has three sets of six characters, leading some to argue that the beast was none other than the Great Communicator. And if you have any doubts about the continuing vitality of these symbols, I suggest you run a Google search for “Barack Obama” and “Antichrist.”

Nevertheless, Pagels’s book does not stray past the age of Athanasius. In fact the work as a whole has a hint of the perfunctory about it. Her characterization of Revelation does not do justice to the enormous number of controversies about its composition. Some scholars argue that the core of the book was written, not by a Christian, but by a follower of John the Baptist, and that the explicitly Christian sections, particularly in the book’s first three chapters, were added later. I also wish Pagels had addressed some of the ideas of the British biblical scholar Margaret Barker, who argues, for example, that the Greek of Revelation is so astonishingly bad because the text was first written in Aramaic.

I bring up these points to suggest that scholarly opinion about this text is almost as rich and diverse as the apocalyptic speculations, but Pagels addresses none of these issues here. We are left with the usual view of a unitary Revelation written by somebody named John around the year 90. Pagels fares better with her discussions of figures such as Irenaeus and Athanasius, but in the end, Revelations is a lackluster work, written, I suspect, not so much out of fascination with the topic itself as out of frustration with today’s fundamentalisms. Revelations might appeal to a reader who knows little about this text, but anyone who knows more is bound to be disappointed.

Richard Smoley