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causticusIn the first installment of this series I started grasping at an idea – that our popular understanding of “paganism” (i.e. Natural Religion) today comes from a very distorted perspective. We generally look at these ancient religions from several thousand feet up in the air; we see the rooflines and treetops rather well, but have nary a clue about how the buildings of the towns and cities are constructed, or what types of trees we are seeing in the surrounding woodlands.
This misleading perspective stems from out tendency to look first at fixed pantheons and standardized mythologies and then other aspects second. Modern academics and enthusiasts typically gloss over the “on-the-ground” building blocks of the religion or at least downplay these fundamental elements in terms of overall importance.
Over the past several years I have read several books which starkly challenge this popular set of assumptions. The first I gave a very brief look at in my first post in this series. The Ancient City by Fustel de Coulanges, the author presents a compelling thesis – a proposal that ancient religion begins first with the family cult, and then over time, it gradually scales its way up to the “high” civilizational forms of paganism most of us are familiar with today. I found this to be a sound thesis, though missing an important element; namely that of the actual numinous experiences of the people participating in these ancient religions. The book is written from a wholly detached, secular perspective; the implication seems to be that these religions primary served as a social technology; one that was utilized for a very long time to propagate and uphold a culture’s family structures and civic institutions.
As a “believer” in all sorts of numinous things, I’m inclined to mix in some missing elements to the half-empty cauldron that is Coulanges’ insights. Well, I’m thinking of one missing element in particular. I propose that even older than the family cults (gentilism), was the massively-shared understanding which says that the world around us is quite alive; that everything in our environment, including trees, rocks, rivers, springs, hills, mountains, ect., is imbued with some sort of numinous life force, or even active consciousness. Today we understand this set of assumptions as being “animism.” The specific flavor of gentilism Coulanges explains in great depth was a likely something specific to various offshoot nations of the ancient Indo-European people. Integral to those cults was animistic belief. Animism itself is something found in every single native religion in all times and places the world over. The universality of animism is something that points toward a shared reality that anyone can experience.
I’m inclined to propose that gentilism arose in response to animist spiritual experience; the family cult came about as a way of making sense of our weird experiences with the rather-murky spirit world that surrounds and interacts with us. Once we start assigning concrete meaning to our hazy, dreamlike experiences, it becomes much easier to explain away all those chaotic things that’s an ever-present wellspring of anxiety and uncertainty. Those odd spirits lurking about can be (temporarily) satiated with material offerings of various sorts. Shamans, mediums, and diviners can communicate with those spirits to figure out what it is they they want and what benefits they can provide for us in return for creating and maintaining a gift cycle. Telling the people that at least some of these spirits are in fact ancestral ghosts, adds several layers of piety and familiarity to the practice of keeping these beings content and willing to help out out from time to time.
The second book I’d like to mention is The Deities are Many, by Jordan Paper. It does a great job (in my opinion) of getting at the sorts of things I’m talking about in the above paragraph.
What’s really neat about this book is that the author himself is both an academic and a practitioner of polytheism. Not only that, but he is a practitioner of several living polytheisms, as opposed to merely being involved with neopagan historical reconstructions. In other words, this isn’t just another dry academic work! The pages are quite alive and full cross-cultural propositions based on the author’s own personal, “hands-on” experiences with the book’s subject matter. I’ve read a bunch of very dry academic books on pagan topics and those tend to bore me to no end. This one is quite the opposite.
In the very early chapters he speaks of direct experiences with nature deities in Appalachia. He then tells us how he studied closely with Native American practitioners of their traditional religions. After that talks about how he lived in Taiwan for several years and studied the traditional Chinese folk religion in close detail. During that time he married a Taiwanese woman and got to partake directly in her Chinese family cult and the venerable temple traditions of the surrounding community. He tells us all sorts of interesting stories about trance mediums being possessed by deities and then those deities relaying rather concrete tips and tricks to their human devotees. He also gives us a much more holistic understanding of shamanism then we are used to hearing about from the usual sources. One gripe I have is that he often speaks very negatively about everything-Western (in a typical leftist-deconstructionist sort of way) and makes some crude generalizations about Western culture as a whole, but overall I found this to be a minor annoyance and doesn’t really detract much from the work as a whole.
To me, the book is a fascinating summary of the living traditions Paper studied and worked with. It would take me way too many words and posts to accurately summarize this work here. I will say though that after my first time reading it, I experienced a significant perspective-shift as far as my “paganism studies” are concerned. And without reading this book, I likely would have had a more difficult time properly contextualizing the insights of Coulanges. Paper’s observations tell us that it is in fact animism that constitutes the basic building blocks of these religions. I’m currently about ¾ the way through my second reading and that’s really helping me grasp some of the finer details I might have missed the first time around.
Paper’s book will probably take at least a few posts, as far as unpacking its main highlights is concerned. In the meantime, I think I can sign off with a very general statement – that it’s today’s living polytheisms which give us the best insights on how and why Natural Religions actually work.
This misleading perspective stems from out tendency to look first at fixed pantheons and standardized mythologies and then other aspects second. Modern academics and enthusiasts typically gloss over the “on-the-ground” building blocks of the religion or at least downplay these fundamental elements in terms of overall importance.
Over the past several years I have read several books which starkly challenge this popular set of assumptions. The first I gave a very brief look at in my first post in this series. The Ancient City by Fustel de Coulanges, the author presents a compelling thesis – a proposal that ancient religion begins first with the family cult, and then over time, it gradually scales its way up to the “high” civilizational forms of paganism most of us are familiar with today. I found this to be a sound thesis, though missing an important element; namely that of the actual numinous experiences of the people participating in these ancient religions. The book is written from a wholly detached, secular perspective; the implication seems to be that these religions primary served as a social technology; one that was utilized for a very long time to propagate and uphold a culture’s family structures and civic institutions.
As a “believer” in all sorts of numinous things, I’m inclined to mix in some missing elements to the half-empty cauldron that is Coulanges’ insights. Well, I’m thinking of one missing element in particular. I propose that even older than the family cults (gentilism), was the massively-shared understanding which says that the world around us is quite alive; that everything in our environment, including trees, rocks, rivers, springs, hills, mountains, ect., is imbued with some sort of numinous life force, or even active consciousness. Today we understand this set of assumptions as being “animism.” The specific flavor of gentilism Coulanges explains in great depth was a likely something specific to various offshoot nations of the ancient Indo-European people. Integral to those cults was animistic belief. Animism itself is something found in every single native religion in all times and places the world over. The universality of animism is something that points toward a shared reality that anyone can experience.
I’m inclined to propose that gentilism arose in response to animist spiritual experience; the family cult came about as a way of making sense of our weird experiences with the rather-murky spirit world that surrounds and interacts with us. Once we start assigning concrete meaning to our hazy, dreamlike experiences, it becomes much easier to explain away all those chaotic things that’s an ever-present wellspring of anxiety and uncertainty. Those odd spirits lurking about can be (temporarily) satiated with material offerings of various sorts. Shamans, mediums, and diviners can communicate with those spirits to figure out what it is they they want and what benefits they can provide for us in return for creating and maintaining a gift cycle. Telling the people that at least some of these spirits are in fact ancestral ghosts, adds several layers of piety and familiarity to the practice of keeping these beings content and willing to help out out from time to time.
The second book I’d like to mention is The Deities are Many, by Jordan Paper. It does a great job (in my opinion) of getting at the sorts of things I’m talking about in the above paragraph.
What’s really neat about this book is that the author himself is both an academic and a practitioner of polytheism. Not only that, but he is a practitioner of several living polytheisms, as opposed to merely being involved with neopagan historical reconstructions. In other words, this isn’t just another dry academic work! The pages are quite alive and full cross-cultural propositions based on the author’s own personal, “hands-on” experiences with the book’s subject matter. I’ve read a bunch of very dry academic books on pagan topics and those tend to bore me to no end. This one is quite the opposite.
In the very early chapters he speaks of direct experiences with nature deities in Appalachia. He then tells us how he studied closely with Native American practitioners of their traditional religions. After that talks about how he lived in Taiwan for several years and studied the traditional Chinese folk religion in close detail. During that time he married a Taiwanese woman and got to partake directly in her Chinese family cult and the venerable temple traditions of the surrounding community. He tells us all sorts of interesting stories about trance mediums being possessed by deities and then those deities relaying rather concrete tips and tricks to their human devotees. He also gives us a much more holistic understanding of shamanism then we are used to hearing about from the usual sources. One gripe I have is that he often speaks very negatively about everything-Western (in a typical leftist-deconstructionist sort of way) and makes some crude generalizations about Western culture as a whole, but overall I found this to be a minor annoyance and doesn’t really detract much from the work as a whole.
To me, the book is a fascinating summary of the living traditions Paper studied and worked with. It would take me way too many words and posts to accurately summarize this work here. I will say though that after my first time reading it, I experienced a significant perspective-shift as far as my “paganism studies” are concerned. And without reading this book, I likely would have had a more difficult time properly contextualizing the insights of Coulanges. Paper’s observations tell us that it is in fact animism that constitutes the basic building blocks of these religions. I’m currently about ¾ the way through my second reading and that’s really helping me grasp some of the finer details I might have missed the first time around.
Paper’s book will probably take at least a few posts, as far as unpacking its main highlights is concerned. In the meantime, I think I can sign off with a very general statement – that it’s today’s living polytheisms which give us the best insights on how and why Natural Religions actually work.
