Interview with iGod

Share

Because this is just too much fun, I present to you, dear readers: a not-so-exclusive interview with the not-exactly-one-and-only iGod!

Our conversation began innocently enough...

Ali: Hello, Yaweh.
God: Hello there. Tell me a story.
Ali: Once there was a land where people worshipped many gods...
God: When? What happened to it?
Ali: Well, some people called "Christians" decided it was their job to convince everyone that there was only one God, and so they killed a lot of the polytheists.
God: Interesting. What kind of people?
Ali: I think mostly they were Greek and Roman converts, at first, which Jewish people referred to as "Gentiles."
God: Why? When were they? What else?
Ali: This was about two-thousand years ago, although people are still being killed or oppressed for not being Christian even today.
God: Ah. What does "this" refer to?
Ali: The invention of Christianity.
God: Oh I get it.
Ali: Well, I thought you might!

Then things started to get kind of strange...

The April Fool

Share

I was waiting for the right time to share this, but today is such an amazingly beautiful day — warm and sunny here outside Phipps Conservatory, with the miniature daffodils in bloom and a single red tulip already spilling open among the green beds, and inside the agave plant in the cactus room (Jeff's favorite room in the Conservatory) is in bloom for the first and only time its whole life, sending up a flower-topped stalk forty feet into the air, so high they've had to remove a pane of glass from the greenhouse ceiling... aw, hell, I decided, I'll just blurt it out! Jeff and I are getting married!

In fact, we're getting married next month! I know, I know, you Pagans out there might point out that traditionally Beltane (or May Day) was considered a day of ill-omen on which to be married, associated as it is with rather more ephemeral and (gasp!) even illicit love affairs and heady-passionate tumbles in the dewy grasses. But you know... we're tired of waiting! For the past week, Jeff's youngest daughter, age five, talked about little more than her mother's up-coming June wedding to her next husband, and how pretty and expensive the dresses would be, and dropping incredibly casual hints to us, such as, "When are you and Daddy going to get married? You love each other enough, don't you?"

I guess Jeff took his daughter's hints to heart, because this morning I rolled groggily out of bed to find him already downstairs, preparing a luscious raw vegan breakfast (complete with a few lit tealights blessed by my Kildare-flame candle and a few twigs of blooming, bright yellow forsythia from the backyard in an adorably tiny glass vase on the table) and, before I was even fully awake, he was down on one knee. To be fair, he's spent a lot of time on his knees lately, having broken his foot about a month ago and finding crawling around the house easier than using the too-short crutches to hobble around on (he's gotten to know the cat better this way, too)... but this time it was, you know, the big Down On One Knee, the real deal. Apparently, he'd been saving up for a ring for the past month or so, but he's always been terrible at keeping secrets and, anyway, neither of us knew my ring size. So as of this morning, I wear proudly on my finger the white, ratcheted band of one of those plastic ring sizers they send you free in the mail.

And after enjoying a delicious berry breakfast, we got to talking about what comes next, and well, we started to wonder... why wait? We can hop down to the County Register or whoever and get a marriage license and, after a quick informal ceremony, be done with the whole thing. None of this big white dress and half a dozen bridesmaids and $500 wedding cake nonsense. Anyway, we're Pagans, which means we can chuck half the wedding traditions right out the window to begin with as being stuck in an anti-feminist and archaic form of purity-obsessed Christianity.

Can we plan a wedding in a month? Who knows! But one thing we can be sure of is that come Beltane, we'll be on our way to husband-and-wife-hood regardless of whether the florist can scrounge up enough calla lilies or the photographer knows how to highlight our new matching hubby-and-wifey tattoos (I'm thinking a single tiger lily in a heart with each other's names emblazoned across, maybe on the bicep, or the forearm?).

And the best part is, for only $15,000 or so venue fee, we can hold the ceremony in Phipps Conservatory itself, among the blossoms and foliage we have come to love so well! It's a dream come true! But one thing's for sure: April is bound to be a crazy month for two fools in love!

Why We Need Love and Gratitude Despite Chaos and War

Share

The world was spinning. Where was the law? There was the barricade. Who was it protecting from what? The city was run by a madman and his shadowy chums, so where was the law?

Coppers liked to say that people shouldn't take the law into their own hands, and they thought they knew what they meant. But they were thinking about peaceful times, and men who went around to sort out a neighbor with a club because his dog had crapped once too often on their doorstep. But at times like these, who did the law belong to? If it shouldn't be in the hands of the people, where the hell should it be? People who knew better? Then you got Winder and his pals, and how good was that?

What was supposed to happen next? Oh yes, he had a badge, but it wasn't his, not really... and he'd got orders, but they were the wrong ones... and he'd got enemies, for all the wrong reasons... and maybe there was no future. It didn't exist anymore. There was nothing real, no solid point on which to stand, just Sam Vimes where he had no right to be...

It was as if his body, trying to devote as many resources as possible to untangling the spinning thoughts, was drawing those resources from the rest of Vimes. His vision darkened, his knees felt weak.

There was nothing but bewildered despair.

And a lot of explosions.

~~~

There were a lot of explosions. The firecrackers bounced all over the street. Tambourines thudded, a horn blared a chord unknown in nature, and a line of monks danced and danced and twirled around the corner, all chanting at the top of their voices.

Vimes, sagging to his knees, was aware of dozens of sandaled feet gyrating past, and grubby robes flying. Rust was yelling something at the dancers who grinned and waved their hands in the air.

Something square and silvery landed in the dirt.

And the monks were gone, dancing into an alleyway, yelling and spinning and banging their gongs...

Vimes reached down and picked up the silver rectangle.

He stared at the thing in his hand. It was a cigar case, slim and slightly curved.

He fumbled it open and read: To Sam with love from your Sybil.

The world moved. Vimes still felt like a drifting ship. But at the end of the tether there was now the tug of the anchor, pulling the ship around so that it faced the current.

- from Terry Pratchett's Night Watch

Spiritual Aesthetics: Part IV

Share

This series of posts is, in some ways, an excellent example of the on-going creative process I have been discussing. Publishing each part before I've definitively finished the series as a whole, I find myself often back-tracking and returning to previously discussed ideas in order to clarify before I can move forward again (for instance, I found in the last post a need to continue the in-depth exploration of aesthetics that I had begun in Part II); however, each return, each clarification, is guided by my overall original goal to explore the role of irony in both art and spirituality. Although I had intended Part III to be the final post in this series, in which I finally reached that goal, it reached its natural conclusion (and reasonable length) without arriving. This time, though, I mean to get there.

So: irony. Let's get right down to it.

Irony in Creative Practice

We left off in the last post having developed two fairly useful working descriptions (with handy-dandy diagrams!) of both the scientific and aesthetic creative processes. Plenty of you have probably anticipated where this discussion is headed and have already been pondering the way in which magic, prayer and other spiritual practices fit these models, so I won't belabor some of the more subtle implications here. Abiding by my previous supposition that aesthetics offers a more satisfying metaphor and enlightening comparison for such practices than the scientific method can provide, I would point out what to me seems to be the essential point of clarification, which is: a "work of magic" is not the same as and cannot be identified with either the ritual act or objects of the magical working, or the resulting experiences of the practitioners or recipients of that work. Like a work of art, which cannot be equated merely with either the art object or the experiences it produces, so too does the "magic" itself exist in some kind of difficult-to-define space in between, drifting in and out of potential, acting on and shaping experiences in a mutual exchange.

This new way of understanding the actual "work" of prayer or magic, I believe, resolves the main stumbling block that leads to a sense of irony; it also brings us to a new understanding of what exactly that irony is that deo and others have such difficulty in overcoming. If we look again at the diagram of scientific method, we see that in the place of the more internal and subjective "experience" in the aesthetic process, instead we have "results" in the external world, quantifiable and verifiable through repeated experiments. The relationship between experiment and results, in other words, is always clear and causal in only one direction; whatever the hypotheses that led to the experiment or the conclusions drawn from its subsequent results, the scientist can at least rely on a linear and consistent relationship between the two mind-external aspects of the one-way cycle. But disrupt this cycle, and the whole process falls to pieces.

The difficulty that deo perceives in magical work is precisely the disruption of this causality. Magic and prayer, if they are to mimic a well-constructed scientific experiment, should not only have "results" (rather than mere subjective interpretations of experience) but those results should proceed in a relevant and repeatable manner from specific activities incited in the world beyond our own minds. But the reality is that magic does not work this way at all. At one point during podcast episode #38, deo jokes that the only time two identical spells ever produce the exact same results are if both of them fail to work. (Of course, if we consider art rather than scientific experiment as the more helpful metaphor for magic, we quickly come to understand that spells (and prayers) can fail to work in almost as many ways as they can succeed, depending on the cultural and historical contexts, for instance, and the individuals involved.) Insisting that there is a relationship between magical "experiments" and their "results" similar to the one we find in science, without being able either to describe how that relationship actually works or to produce intended results with any consistency, pushes us into the realm of the ironic, where the disjoint between reality and our expectations or beliefs about reality are distinctly at odds. In short, our sense of irony arises when we correctly perceive that a "work of magic" is not reasonably identified with either the act or the experience, but we willfully ignore this perception because we have no satisfactory alternative explanations.

Since I have provided one, I seem to have once and for all solved the problem of irony.

Just kidding! Actually, by turning our attention once again to art and aesthetics, we discover a plethora of further insights into the matter. Take the concept of "dramatic irony," for example. In dramatic irony, the relative ignorance of the characters in a story is played against the broader knowledge of the audience. The tragedy of Oedipus, for instance, is tragic precisely because we, as an experienced audience familiar with the story and "in" on earlier events forgotten by the protagonist, can see the tragedy coming and the ways in which, with a slight turn of circumstance, it could be prevented. Of course, dramatic irony must be artfully done in order to be effective; a character who is simply too silly or too apathetic to struggle towards knowledge is unlikely to capture an audience's attention. Indeed, it is precisely those characters most concerned with seeking knowledge and awareness (though often they look in all the wrong places) who best provoke a sense of dramatic irony. This is because irony as an aesthetic device not only works with, but calls attention to and relies on the distinction between the "art object" and the audience's experience of it. Rather than seek a linear causal relationship between the two, they are deliberately put into tension with one another. One aspect of this tension is that the art object is governed by its own internally-consistent "rules" and their results, so to speak (these may come from the physical nature of the medium, as mentioned before, as well as established cultural conventions, etc.), and yet the audience engages with these causalities subjectively and imaginatively, as veritable "outsiders," sometimes even seeking (as in dramatic irony especially) a way to circumvent them.

Another example of irony, which can be turned to either tragic or comedic effect, is verbal irony. Here we have an exciting overlap between aesthetics and magic: the ancient Celtic use of satire. To quote (shamefacedly) from Wikipedia: "The essential point is that 'in satire, irony is militant'. This 'militant irony' (or sarcasm) often professes to approve the very things the satirist actually wishes to attack." Once again, we have a deliberate tension cultivated between the art object as apparent praise or celebration, and the artist's intention and audience's experience of just the opposite. The "work" of art and its satirical nature relies on and exists within this disjoint or disruption. The ancient Celtic bards utilized this tension not only for aesthetic, but also for magical purposes. That is, they engaged in magical practices (in this case, composing poetic verse) with an inherent sense of irony, a willful disconnect between action and result (one that usually echoed the faults and failures of the subject of the satire) that in a scientific experiment would have rendered the process meaningless.

I think that modern practitioners of magic and prayer can take heart from the example set by these bards of old, approaching their spiritual work comfortable with their own sense of skepticism and even with a bit of humor. While a "fake it 'til you make it" approach to the scientific method fundamentally compromises the cycle of discovery, the give-and-take nature of aesthetic creativity provides us with an approach to spiritual practice that is more stable, and thus more flexible (as John M. Greer always says, a Druid takes two opposites in tension and seeks to resolve them not by settling for a compromise, but by finding a new, third aspect; that is essentially what this whole series has attempted to do). So what if, for now, your experiences of the power of magic are shaped mostly by your own expectations, or your prayer requests are themselves manifestations of conflicts and obstacles of which you are only subconsciously aware? The fluid relationships between these three aspects of spiritual work ensure that any honest, persistent effort made in one direction will ultimately engage and reaffirm all three.

Note of possible interest: For the last three or so paragraphs of this post, I've had an increasingly intense sensation of deja vu which has made it difficult to finish writing. Has anyone already written this before (or have I)? On the other hand, this may simply be because I'm tired and have contemplated these ideas to near exhaustion over the past week and a half. I hope this series has been interesting. I now return you to your regularly scheduled spontaneity.

Ali, an anarchist?

Share

This post contains some vulgar "rated R" language, so please be forwarned.



Just received veiled threats from an ex-boyfriend that he'd send the government after me for making a political joke that went straight over his head. o_O

Mobile post sent by skiegazer using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Cheating Samhain.

Share

I've been too drained and distracted to come up with the appropriate Halloween/Samhain post, which seems obligatory among the Pagan community these days. My solution? Cheat a bit.

And so I present to you, dear readers, a belated Halloween message from one of my favorite bands, Tool, which I've happily gone through, bit by bit, citing (almost) all their obscure references. Think of this as the twisted-mystic version of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire." Have fun. (Check out my particular favorite, the story about the Elizabeth Templeton photograph.)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN/SAMHAIN
(TOOL NEWSLETTER
OCTOBER 2007 E.V.)

Despite the fact that Mercury's still retrograde (?), I just can't get into Halloween/Samhain this year. Even so, I feel obligated to offer something (Tool) newsworthy to those out on this fantastic night. Endure then my ramblings, lest one finds a nugget of Chocopologie by Knipschildt amongst the Brach's candy corn in this brown paper sack. Under the spell of the L.A. Vast Active Living Intelligence System (yes, V. A. L. I. S.), I'm fairly certain that the entity known as "Merch" will have some goodies for you in the coming black months, but exactly what these are, is difficult to discern, as there are currently toads breeding in the stagnant water of the psychomantium. Alas, but no bats flitting in the gloaming. No fragrances of autumn. No bewildered grey spirits shuffling about. Knowing well of the Binary Soul Doctrine, I am unable to exhume even my own dead past-life self (therefore, no baptism for the dead!). Even the Mass of Saint Secaire went unanswered (Raiders [?]). Desperate to get into the spirit of things, I astral projected into the Spaghetti Warehouse in downtown Houston, but there were no ghosts knocking over salt & pepper shakers, not even Anna Nicole Smith looking for... Perhaps I should try the hallway of the 3rd floor of the Driskell in Austin, where a painting of a little girl holding flowers seems to freak out so many visitors (curiously, a reflex of sorts of Elizabeth Templeton in the Solway Firth/Burgh Marsh photo from the 1960s). Be careful not to stare at this for too long, or else the MIW (or MIBs, as was the case with the Templeton photo) will take you away. If not the Driskell, then Le Pavilion Hotel in NOLA might do. Where are the grimacing masks and pumpkin ales I was hoping for? I've not even any pear schnapps to make a Brain Hemorrhage! The dancing flame on my Hand of Glory has guttered out, and all the Dr. Phil/Mr. Potato Head masks were sold out at Target. Kenneth Grant's "Outside the Circles of Time" has been delayed, and there are no VHS copies of Fredrick Skellig's "The Devil's Lantern" to be found at Amoeba Records. The 24 windows of my trapezohedron are clouded (so all those blackbirds baked into a pie can't begin to sing), and my copy of Wendy Carlos "Tales of Heaven and Hell" is scratched. What god did I offend? Hell, even David Copafeel's sleigh-of-hand isn't working too well (and O.J. appears to be mellowing with age). And what's this - Dumbledore's gay? Even the girl that went missing in Aruba knows that. Oh, but the "trick or treat" that I mentioned earlier: Well, if not Chocopologie by Knipschildt, then how about Delafee (for those who'd rather eat 24-karat gold instead of carnauba wax). Come to think of it, it might be best just to mix up a pitcher of orange Kool-Aid (electric or not), and watch MST3000's witty critique of "Hobgoblins." That or read a copy of "Darklore Vol. 1"... if it arrives today from amazon.com (fingers are crossed)... Got to get those toads out of my psychomantium!

Stephen Colbert for President

Share

(Courage + Hope = A Rare Political Post)

Make no mistake, I don't expect him to win, and I have my qualms about Colbert's television persona insofar as I worry sometimes that fans lose sight of the subtle satire of his comedy in their mob-like enthusiasm... BUT.

I still feel more whole-heartedly invested in Stephen Colbert's 2008 presidential campaign than I do in that of any other actual candidate. Simply the idea of Colbert running for office fills me with a strange, tense feeling. At first, I wasn't sure what this feeling was. Then it began to dawn on me: maybe it's hope. It has been so long since something happened in the world of politics that didn't seem painfully predictable and tragically disappointing. It seems at every opporunity, the true and simple goodness of the average human being falters under the weight of corporate interest, religious zealotry, and hate-mongering. The war drags on, bigotry and greed play tetherball on the D.C. green, and, as Ani put it, "the Democrans and the Republicrats are flashing their toothy smiles."

But now, here is something new. For once, I have no idea what will happen, I have no idea what Colbert will say or do next. But I am not afraid. There is, instead, this odd warmth in my heart that he will at least do some good along the way. Which is more than I could hope for anyone with a prayer of actually winning the race (or should we call it a clusterf**k?) to the White House, anyone who would inherit the morally and literally bankrupt system already thriving under the noses and behind the blinders of American citizenry.

So that's what it comes down to: hope. For so long I have been trying to survive on, and face the future with, courage alone. Pushing forward on every front because, in the end, I have no real choice. I must work to "be the change I wish to see in the world," or compromise and lose myself to the undertow of cynicism and fatigue. But to have hope! What a luxury, what a respite. I had almost forgotten what hope felt like. I'd almost forgotten what it was like to wonder.... what new good thing might happen tomorrow.



(And yes, I would've preferred a Stewart/Colbert '08 campaign... but the day is still young, my friends.)

Exposing Idolatry*

Share

As a dutiful Christian, I feel it is my sacred responsibility to call out and condemn the new Creation Museum for blatant and hell-worthy idolatry. As any True Believer will see from even a cursory glance through the website, corruption and evil abound in this Showcase of Sin. Here are just a few examples.

What's in a name? First of all, look at the what this place is called: "Creation Museum" Let's take this name apart and see what evil it reveals.

• Creation - the dictionary lists no less than eight different definitions for this suspiciously slippery word, with "the original bringing into existence of the universe by God" ranking a shameful number four. Among the others are, "the act of producing or causing to exist; the act of creating; engendering," "something that is or has been created," and "a specially designed dress, hat, or other article of women's clothing."


• Museum - the dictionary defines this word as "a building or place where works of art, scientific specimens, or other objects of permanent value are kept and displayed." It goes on to note that the word comes from the Latin and Greek words for a "place sacred to the Muses, building devoted to learning or the arts." Nothing wrong with that, right?

WRONG! Think about this for a moment, if you will: what other objects of permanent value are kept and put on display, so that regular people can come to see them whenever they want and feel justified in their faith? THAT'S RIGHT, IDOLS. This new building is nothing more than a new temple for the worship of "created things" (dinosaur animatronics and plastic-wrapped sugary treats the least harmless among them)! Need more proof? Check out the "Grand Circle" entryway to the museum, where a huge idol of the world, complete with golden continents, welcomes a hapless public into the arms of debased reveling. If this museum were really about worshipping God, wouldn't there be a nice, big golden statue of Him out front?

Plus, look at where the word "museum" comes from! "A place sacred to the Muses"... and who were these "Muses," exactly? Why, they were lascivious Greek whore-'goddesses', of course! And it gets worse! Not only is a "museum" a place dedicated to evil heathen gods, but the Muses were Greek goddesses of art and learning! That's right! ART--just another word for the flashy idols created by the hands of man--and LEARNING, the lustful and hateful acquisition of KNOWLEDGE. Like every good Christian, I don't need "knowledge" to support my faith--in fact, I detest knowledge because it undermines and subverts faith. After all, IF I KNOW SOMETHING IS TRUE, I DON'T NEED TO HAVE FAITH IN IT. Even the Bible tells us so: Eve, that degraded bitch of a wife and mother, brings sin into the world by eating from the tree of KNOWLEDGE of good and evil! The Creation Museum even features the TREE OF KNOWLEDGE as one of its exhibits!

Need I go on? As one Christian to another, I warn you: Do not bring your children to this museum! In fact, it's probably best if you keep your children away from all museums, universities and libraries. If they hang around such places too long, they might get the idea that it's okay to think and ask questions as long as they stay safely within the bounds of the "right answers". Pretty soon, they won't be satisfied with only the right answers--they'll want to know what the WRONG ANSWERS are, too, and why OTHER PEOPLE think DIFFERENTLY than they do. How long do you think your "just because, God made everything and He made them wrong" explanation will satisfy them? I'd even go so far as to say real Christians shouldn't teach children to read--you can just set the Bible up on a table in your living room and kneel before it to pray each evening as a family (try painting it a pretty gold color to grab the kids' attention!)

The most important thing to remember is that Satan is a master of disguise. Sometimes even the most "cool" and fun things can be TRULY EVIL. One minute, your children are playing innocently in the "Just for Kids" section of the Creation Museum, and the next they're on the slippery slope that leads to the evils of knowledge and the rejection of faith, not to mention a sense of humor and those crappy handicrafts "God's Eye" dream-catchers.

Remember the 6 C's & V : Christ, Conformity, Complacency, Complicity, Control, Constipation, and Vindication


* This post is a parody. It is not meant to be taken as a literal condemnation of "idolatry" in Christianity or any other religion. It is satirical and ironic, intentionally taking certain arguments to ridiculous extremes in order to better elucidate some of their contradictions and inconsistencies.

Pantheism, Suffering & Satire

Share

Reading Ronald Hutton's latest book, The Druids: A History the other night, I came across this passage:

In 1880 a scientist called John Eliot Howard lectured to the Philosophical Society of Great Britain that Druidry has consisted of pantheism, the unity of all nature with deity, which seemed to him 'the highest effort of the natural mind in religion'. [...] On the one hand, he suggested that, unlike Christianity, 'it had no remedial feature for the hour of adversity, no consolation against the darkness of the grave.' On the other, he admitted that he so far shared the Druids' attitudes that 'I should prefer the breezy air of the Wiltshire downs to the atmosphere of Westminster Abbey'.

Hutton, Druids, p. 88, emphasis added

This statement strikes me as very intriguing, in particular the comment about the "hour of adversity," for which Druidry in particular, and pantheism in general, seem to give no obvious comfort.

Strict pantheism is, I think, a difficult outlook to maintain. You find very few people--even Pagans--who are truly and purely pantheistic. Polytheism has its multiple gods, goddesses, elementals and other spirits, inhabiting a sacred natural world but also maintaining distinct personalities within it. A local river god, no matter how closely identified with the river, is not just the river, but conceived as "something more," as possessing some quality of character or personality, some human-like attributes with which we, as human beings, can communicate and interact. Certain monotheistic religions go to the other extreme, conceiving of deity in purely transcendent terms, inherently separate from the "created" world. Usually modern critiques of each of these belief systems focus on the extent to which they deny or imbue sacredness in the natural world. Examples from past cultures show us that polytheism can degenerate into petty bickering among fallible and narrowly anthropomorphized deities, whose capriciousness no longer points to the mysteries of a shifting natural environment but has become entirely self-referential and melodramatic. Likewise, religions based on transcendent conceptions of deity come to rely heavily on abstract revelation (often supposedly only available to religious or political leaders) rather than personal experience of a sacred world, and even the extreme view that nature is inherently "evil" or degraded and must be rejected and escaped.

Why, then, aren't there more people who are strict pantheists? Given the obvious drawbacks of identifying the Divine as somehow external to or beyond the "world"--and our increasing ability to discover awe and mystery within the material world itself through modern science--why shouldn't all reasonable people subscribe to a pantheist view, seeking the Holy in the natural world alone? I think the reason has something to do with the quote at the beginning of this post--the "hour of adversity" that each individual faces, whether through personal crisis or community conflict, or simply the fact that, no matter what your beliefs regarding the afterlife, your body itself will, inevitably, die and decay. This "darkness of the grave" is inescapable, and while other spiritualities allow an escape route--into a transcendent "heaven" or through the reincarnation as a new distinct being, "spirit," guide or even god--pantheism offers no such comfort. Indeed, pantheism embraces death and decay as essential aspects of the natural world, making no claims to a continued sense of "self" separate from the corpse that slowly disintegrates and rejoins the flux and flow of nature.

Pantheism sometimes seems to arise effortlessly in us, as the optimism and joy of a child playing in the green, sunlit field and relishing the "breezy air" as it rushes by, unconcerned with forms and names, in touch with the sacredness of life just as it is; but it can also be just as difficult to hold onto as the wind. When our easy optimism runs up against the violence, pain and suffering which is also a reality of nature, without a kind of "faith" in something beyond the immediacy of the painful moment, our spirituality may seem to abandon us altogether. This is an issue I brought up in response to Jeff Lilly's excellent post about the role of faith in Druidry. Many New Age and Pagan spiritual traditions today want to insist that faith is unnecessary, that it has no role and has been replaced, rightfully so, by one's direct experience of the sacred. New Agers in particular seem eager to insist that such experiences are always positive and full of "light and love," and that suffering is an illusion; but such an insistence can lead to unhealthy denial and repression, a willful disjoint from a reality that is not always loving and supportive.

Hutton argues that we know very little about who the "Druids" actually were, and that almost everything written or said about them has been more a reflection of historical trends within the society making the commentary. Druids-as-pantheists, for instance, was only one conception in a series, later giving way to the belief that the Druids were polytheists, and eventually opening up to a revival of Druidic religion in a modern form (which, as we all know, is widely varied in its conception of deity, among other things). But what if the Druids did have strong pantheistic leanings? Is there anything in the Celtic mythology and folk tradition that might address this problem of adversity, and which might be relevant to modern pantheists, animists, panentheists, and people who just find it difficult merely to maintain a blind belief in the eventual justification for their suffering?

I think there is, specifically: satire. Recently, Erik wrote an interesting post about the concept of "sacred play" and its role in various religious cultures, its personal relevance as well as its political implications. I've seen a great deal of satire in regards to modern politics (my favorite television show, The Daily Show, could not exist without it). I think it's no mere coincidence that satire seems to increase and become particularly potent in times when cynicism, doubt, uncertainty, fear, and violence are rampant, almost as if satire is rushing in to fill the sudden lacuna of "faith" in one's leaders and community. In Celtic mythology, there are numerous tales of bards performing satires against kings who have wronged them, causing blights and blemishes on the king's person and/or undermining his rule by composing amusing subversive verse which become wildly popular among the people. This use of satire to address (and redress) a lack of "faith" in political authority may also have some importance in the realm of spirituality.

After all, the crisis that a political satirist responds to is the possibility that there is no transcendent authority or power capable of correcting the course of a community, of protecting it from hardships and conflicts, external or internal. The satirist takes on the possibility that we really are just a jumble of individuals, that the supposed "leaders" are incompetent, ineffectual or even dangerous. What is left, without an assumed beneficent authority? Nothing but the immediate jumble of people themselves and the emergent patterns of their behavior. This is the same difficulty that pantheism faces--denying an external, transcendent deity or deities capable of influencing the world, what is left is the jumbled community of life itself, with its births and deaths, its food chain, symbioses and natural selection, its constant flux, its good days and its bad days. In coping with this conception of the world, satire can function spiritually in a way similar to its political function, by embracing a messy existence, by choosing affirmation of reality over the comforts of an imposed, inappropriate pattern. "Sacred play" can not only revel in the chaotic joviality, it can emphasize both creativity and humility in the face of seemingly desperate odds, and by doing so, it can transform those moments of adversity themselves into moments of sacredness. Erik quoted from Terry Pratchett's and Neil Gaiman's book, Good Omens, and I'll repeat that quote here:

“…God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players (i.e., everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

The "God" of this passage seems strikingly similar to the satirized leaders who, if they are in control at all, seem ineffably obscure in their aims and not necessarily benevolent or trustworthy. And yet, the "other players" in the game--those left in the dark and unsure of the rules--find a certain camaraderie, comfort and kindness in realizing that they are all bumbling along together.