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Adorations to Khnum

Gangleri's Grove - Blog — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 03:43:09 +0000

Today I discovered that a colleague has written a set of Adorations to Khnum. I'm very, very happy to share these with you:
http://goldentrail.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/adorations-of-khnum/#comment-583

Time for a little chaos

Chance Samedi — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:51:45 +0000

I’m on a journey again. Walking. Just once I’d like to fly or something…maybe I’ll see if a friend will loan out their feathers or something next time I travel. I don’t know this part of the forest…Wait. Forest? Seriously? I don’t have a reference of a forest. Even the spiders live in the swamp. [...]

Pagan Blog Project: C is for Cultural Misappropriation

thefluiddruid — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:49:15 +0000

Another cheery post from your resident Heathen theologian today, but this is something that has been weighing on my mind of late and which I’ve discussed with many of my colleagues quite recently so I’m going to talk a little about it here: cultural misappropriation — what this is, how we do it, and even more importantly, how we can avoid doing it.

Let me begin by saying that at its heart, I believe that the reconstruction of Pagan religions is the restoration of what once were indigenous traditions. Heathenry is the contemporary amalgamation of all those ancestral practices that once formed the indigenous religions of Germanic and Scandinavian Europe. Likewise Hellenismos is the contemporary amalgamation of those practices that once formed the indigenous religions of ancient Greece. Romuva is indigenous Lithuanian Paganism, Celtic polytheism the indigenous practices of the ancient Celts, etc. etc. — indigenous that is before the destructive spread of monotheism. The spread of Christianity across Europe was a cultural and moreover a religious genocide (I do not use that word lightly. If one studies Lemke’s original definition of the term which he created, it includes willful destruction of religious and cultural practices. The term was later watered down via the UN at the insistence, largely, of the Americans who did not want a UN precedent to be established that might lead to America being held responsible for the genocide of its native peoples).(1) We who are today embracing Paganisms and various polytheisms are in fact, engaged in the attempted restoration of our sundered indigenous traditions. That is good. That is absolutely necessary in today’s world. Indigeny is, to my mind, the only possible key to a sustainable future for our planet. Moreover, it’s about time and the sooner we cast off the shackles of monotheistic hegemony the better. That being said, there are problems that all of us engaged in this work must face. One of them is that of cultural misappropriation.

Pagan Blog Project: D is for Divine Feminine

Gangleri's Grove - Blog — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:44:43 +0000

(I'm posting this a couple of days early thanks to a positively crazy school schedule:)

I do not expect this to be a particularly popular post. If you are greatly enamored of the concept of “The Divine Feminine,” you might want to skip this one, because I’ll say right up front, that I am not and this article, however brief, is going to explore the reasons why. Oh, I worship numerous Goddesses I simply don’t embrace the fuzzy thinking inherent in what I consider to be the incredibly dismissive idea of one great "Divine Feminine." After all, you don’t hear us talking about “the Divine Masculine” do you, even when we’re discussing various Gods? No, I didn’t think so—at least I haven’t and I hope I never do.

What prompted this particular article? Well, I teach at an interfaith seminary and to date, I am the only polytheistic faculty member. I’ve been surprised at the learning curve this often entails for some of my students (and I have a lovely bunch of students, deeply engaged, spiritual people who are going to make fantastic clergy) and even other faculty. I recently overheard a comment in the course of my teaching about honoring “many Gods and the Goddess.” …..so the Gods are individuals but the Goddesses are an undifferentiated, monolithic unit? “Divine Feminine,” “the Goddess”: the language itself –linguistically-implies less sentient beings and more an idea, a philosophy, a paradigm. No, I don’t think so. Moreover, I grow intensely weary of hearing otherwise sensible people talking about “the” Goddess. Which One? Which Goddess? To a hard polytheist steeped in his or her ancestral traditions, such comments are not only inaccurate but borderline disrespectful and possibly blasphemous. To a philologist, it’s just sloppy (in English we have definite and indefinite articles for a reason after all) and to a historian of religion, historically inaccurate.

Why is it so important for people, and it seems to be very important given the emotional hold this idea has on folks, that there be one unified female force? We are not monotheists. We can celebrate the glorious diversity of the Divine without the need for over-syncretization. Why is it so important to imagine that all our many Deities are One (or at best, Two)? Moreover, “feminine” in our culture, in the way we English speakers use language is not in fact synonymous with ‘female.’ Do we really want to consistently and consciously invest our many Goddesses with the issues inherent in the limited way we view “femininity”? ‘Feminine’ and ‘masculine’ are polarizing and highly charged words within our cultural matrix. Do we really want to reinforce artificial (and very binary) gender roles every single time we conceptualize Divinity?

Most of us are coming from monotheism, which is inherently binary (if there is one true way after all, then its opposite must also exist). It takes time to shed that conditioning. None of us come into our new religions completely clean of monotheistic influence. How could we? We all grew up in an adamantly monotheistic culture and I think this is very important to remember. One step between polytheism and monotheism is that of pantheism (Deity in everything, not necessarily differentiated) and panentheism (Deity in everything and also independent of everything but also largely undifferentiated). It is into this undifferentiated mass that it seems many people coming into our communities fall. Sadly, it is a step not that far removed from monotheism itself.

Historically, the Goddess spirituality movement was perhaps a necessary corrective to two thousand years of male-centric monotheism and its abuses. However, I question even the use of the term “sacred feminine,” since its origins lay in a western glorification of Hindu religious culture (a good place to start one’s own research is “Drawing Down the Moon” by M. Adler if one doubts my historiography). Instead of turning our eyes to reclaiming our own ancestral traditions, we first took a roundabout tour through Eastern religious traditions during the hippie years. Tack on second wave feminism and you have this fixation with “The Divine Feminine” along with a certain politicizing of the idea of Goddesses in general. How we engage with the Holy Powers should not be an expression of our political and social agendas. The Gods and Goddesses are not there to fix everything for us nor are They manifestations of our social angst. They’re certainly not manifestations of our own unconscious. Engagement should exist on its own, cleanly, with the goal of adoration and respect, honoring and offering, of maintaining these very ancient contracts between our world, each and every one of us, and the world of the sacred.

In fact, one of the main reasons that I am so adamantly against this idea of “Divine feminine” is where in practice it leads. Does it really matter, after all, if you pay attention to specific culturally developed rites and rituals, traditions and taboos by which individual Goddesses have been honored for generations if indeed They are all one Goddess? It’s tremendously self-serving.

I was discussing just this topic with my colleague and friend Kenaz Filan (you can find hir blog at http://kenazfilanblogspot.com) who weighed in with the following:

"I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I'm not at all sure that "the God and the Goddess" are a major improvement over "the God." Hell, in some ways I prefer the Catholic approach of turning Gods into "saints" and "angels." Saints and angels are venerated, honored and respected in their own right. I'm not sure a theology that turns Hathor, Freda, Erzulie Freda, Aphrodite, Athena, the Morrigan, Brigitte, Isis, and Lakshmi into one big bland mushy ill-defined "Goddess" does that at all. The Catholics reduce the Gods to saints: the "Divine Masculine/Feminine" folks reduce them to mere symbols which exist only as "facets" of a greater whole. And those symbols can then be co-opted for the political agenda du jour, used as "tools for personal understanding" and what have you. Instead of the seeker serving the Gods, the Gods are used to serve the seeker."

And that, my friends, is the definition of impiety, arrogance, hubris, and several other equally ill-considered things. A theology that keeps the Holy Powers safely distant from human affairs, a theology that is unlikely to impact or interfere with one's life in any way, a theology that gives the devotee nothing to fear and nothing to which to aspire, and most of all, nothing to obey is, (to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, who hit the nail on the head with this one), the absolute antithesis of what any spiritual or religious experience should be. (Thank you, again, Kenaz, for bringing the original quote by C.S. Lewis to my attention).

I'm again paraphrasing part of our conversation when I note that the idea of "The Divine Feminine" and "the Divine Masculine" do precisely that. They're overly-broad, extremely nebulous spiritual cop-outs for people who can't see their way toward actually engaging with the personification of the Powers. They turn the Deities into (again quoting Kenaz here) "spiritual clay which worshippers can fashion in their own image." Again, that is the last thing authentically engaged spiritually should be. Spiritual engagement, after all, is not about us, nor is it something that should fall under the rubric of some fuzzy self-help movement.

Now are there Deities that fall very clearly into distinct gender roles and categories? Of course. There are even those Who behave in ways that our culture views as more stereotypically "feminine" or "masculine." One of the points that Kenaz noted, however, was that 'if you look back at the myths, you'll also see that there was a great deal of gender bending. You have Odin wearing women's clothing to learn seidhr; you have the bearded Aphrodite, you have a recognition not that the Gods are constructs, but that gender roles are constructs and there is great power to be had for those who are willing to challenge them. I find that far more empowering and liberating than a Z Budapest/fratboy theology which reduces men, women, and Gods to their genitalia."

I don't think I can put it any better than that.

(thank you, Kenaz, for your willingness, while doing diaper duty with your baby girl, to hash these ideas around with me).

Unspinning the Web of Spider-Goat

geobear7 — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:07:19 +0000

By Dr. Mae-Wan Ho Institute of Science in Society Breeding transgenic goats for spider silk is unethical, and passing surplus goats onto the public food chain unsafe; the project has never been subject to regulatory risk assessment and there is … Continue reading →

Protected: The In-Between

Chance Samedi — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:02:47 +0000

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: The In-Between

Chance Samedi — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:02:47 +0000

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Now for something completely different…GradHacker!

Katy Meyers — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 22:39:02 +0000

While mortuary archaeology is my focus and my passion, I am also deeply involved in GradHacker. GradHacker is a collaborative blog that was started by Alex Galarza and myself. Our authors include graduate students from a variety of programs and institutions who write about ‘hacking’ grad school. I mean ‘hack’ in the sense to make … Continue reading »

Pantheacon Controversy: Roundup of Links

Gangleri's Grove - Blog — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:37:36 +0000

I've been too busy to follow the Pantheacon controversy again this year, being as I am in the middle of a grueling school term. That being said, i think that it's raising very important issues within our shared community spaces that need to be brought to light, that need to be laid on the table for challenge and discussion--most especially when it's uncomfortable to do so.

Here are a couple of excellent articles (the wildhunt one has tons of pertinent links) that will help fill readers in on what's going on and how this year's conference progressed. So for those interested, check them out:

Wild Hunt Recap: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wildhunt/2012/02/pantheacon-unity-diversity-controversy.html

another recap:http://onewitchsway.com/2012/02/unity-diversity-and-the-patheacon-fail/

an interesting article on the nature of "rights": http://www.theprovocation.net/2012/02/rick-santorum-and-z-budapest-two-sides.html

and: http://doingmagick.blogspot.com/2012/02/prhttp://doingmagick.blogspot.com/2012/02/proud-of-pagans-budapest-protest-at.htmloud-of-pagans-budapest-protest-at.html

and: http://marispai.huginnpress.com/2012/02/21/d-is-for-debacle/

this heart-rending and heart-felt letter provides a different perspective:https://pncminnesota.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/letter-to-the-editor-ciswomen-only-ritual-at-pantheacon/

Sitting in Starbucks, eating GMOs

Rady — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 07:14:43 +0000

By Robert McCollough Across the country rage is growing about GMOs and their being unleashed one after another on the country. While Europe, despite immense pressure from the Clinton administration, initially banned them, the FDA hid 40,000 documents indicating their … Continue reading →