Naked in the World

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"I reckon we're doing this 'cos we are goin' to die, d'yer see? And 'cos some bloke got to the edge of the world somewhere and saw all them other worlds out there and burst into tears 'cos there was only one lifetime. So much universe, and so little time. And that's not right..."

- Cohen the Barbarian, from The Last Hero, by Terry Pratchett

There is a difference between a hero, and a bully. We all know this, we know it in our bones, in the marrow that makes our blood and the heart that moves it. There is a difference between a warrior, and a grunt-for-hire. Between an act of courage, and an act of arrogance, ignorance or cruelty. And that difference does not lie in nobility, or honor, or wisdom, or even mercy.



Last night, Jeff and I finished reading Terry Pratchett's The Last Hero: A Discworld Fable. With illustrations by the marvelous Paul Kidby, the book is more an homage to the fans of the Discworld novels than anything else. Though my favorite character in all the Disc — Captain Samuel Vimes of the City Watch — sadly did not make an appearance, cameos by Vetinari, Mr. Slant, Ponder Stibbons, the Librarian, Leonard de Quirm, Rincewind, Offler the Crocodile God, a few sad-eyed swamp dragons, and Great A'tuin herself, a giant turtle swimming through the black, starry sea of space carrying the discworld on her back, kept us in giggles for the past several nights. Still, I had been looking forward to some piercing satire and cultural commentary, and for most of the book had to rest satisfied with friendly, conspiratorial winks towards Pratchett fandom instead.

But not last night. In the final pages of the book, Pratchett's genius for story-telling flexed its muscles once again, pulling all the threads of humor, character and destiny tight, weaving a climactic show-down with the gods themselves (and a face-off with the many-eyed Blind Io is not something to sneeze at!). The blurb on the book's dust-jacket sets the mythic tone of the book, introducing the ancient and increasingly decrepit Cohen the Barbarian, who has watched most of his friends die soft and senile of old age, and who is angry, very angry, at the gods. So "the last hero in the world is going to return what the first hero stole" — Cohen intends to bring fire back to the peak of Cori Celesti, right into the halls of Dunmanifestin. And he plans to bring it back with a bang.

The Madeleine Syndrome: A Guest Post

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Today I'm pleased to feature a guest post by Marian Van Eyk McCain, editor of the new anthology GreenSpirit: Path to New Consciousness from O Books. Her post speaks eloquently to the theme of interconnection and interdependence, and celebrates the sensual embodiment that characterizes our relationship to the natural world. Enjoy!

The Madeleine Syndrome
by Marian Van Eyk McCain

The wild honeysuckle flowers are out now in the hedges all around where I live. My garden has a rosebush and it, too, is flowering, its scent so exquisite that every time I pass it I get stuck there for a while, sniffing each one of its flowers in turn and thanking it, my whole being awash with sensory pleasure.

Why We Need Love and Gratitude Despite Chaos and War

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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

Dinnertime Dualism: You & Me & the Tree Makes Three

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"Imagine yourself hanging by your teeth from a tree over a cliff. Your hands can grab no branch, your feet can touch no limb. A man from below you asks a question your life depends on answering. You cannot remain silent, yet if you open your mouth, you fall to your death. What do you do?"

- Philip Toshio Sudo, zen guitar

The kids had been shouting "I fink, derefore I am.... I fink." Over and over all through dinner, a joke they didn't understand from a satirical children's book, Where's My Cow?. "What do you think that means?" I asked them. When they said they didn't know, I told them, "Guess. What might a person mean if they said they exist, because they think. Just take a guess..."

"That you know you're you because you're doing the thinking?" one of them hazarded.

"And do you think that thinking is the only way you know you exist?"

"No, you know because you can feel yourself."

"That's right — but there was a man, named Descartes, who decided he was going to question everything he absolutely could, to see what was real. So he might look at that tree outside and say, 'I think there's a tree outside because I can see it and hear the leaves rustling — but maybe my senses are wrong.' Haven't you ever seen or heard something in a dream that wasn't real? What if he was just dreaming the tree?"

"That tree?" the littlest one asked, pointing. "But there is a tree, I can see it!"

"That's right — so Descartes thought, 'Well, even if my senses are wrong, other people see the tree, too. But what if I'm also imagining the people?' You've had dreams with people in them who aren't real people, right? 'In fact,' he thought, 'what if I don't even have a body at all and I'm dreaming this whole thing, the world, my body, other people, the tree? How do I know anything at all actually exists?!' And on and on he went, questioning everything — until he got to the very end and he said, just like you did, 'Well, one thing I'm sure of: I know I exist, at least, because I'm thinking. If there's thinking going on, somebody must be doing it, and that's me!'" The kids sat and seemed to consider this, slurping their tomato soup. "Do you think he's right?"

"No," said one, "because... because I can feel I'm real, and I can go up and feel the tree."

"Do you think he's right?" Jeff asked me, one eyebrow raised.

"No," I said, turning my attention from the kids for a moment, "Because Descartes adopted a policy of radical doubt — doubting everything, even those things which he had no reason to doubt — and such absolute, unconditional doubt in everything is a form of insanity. It led him to a fundamentally dualistic view of the world, in which the mind is trapped inside itself and the world, if it exists at all, is stuck outside it with no way in."

"But the Buddhists would say differently. They'd say there is no self, only the thought," Jeff said.

"Well, yes. It's the phenomenologist's view that the senses can be trusted, that the phenomenal, perceptual world of 'intentions' and experiences is the place from which we must start, because trying to start anywhere else misses the point. The phenomenologist says Descartes went too far. The Buddhist view is that he didn't go far enough. The Buddhist would say, why stop at the self? Question the self, too, try to find the self that's doing the thinking." The kids were growing restless again, the littlest twisting in her chair to make faces at the other two. "And when you look for the self doing the thinking, you're like a dog chasing its own tail — right, guys? Going round and round and round, chasing after nothing at all..."

The kids laughed. "Until you give up! That's what most dogs do."

"Now we're talking about animals, and not about people" the littlest one piped up, "that's what I like."

Later, clearing the dishes from the table while the kids went up to brush their teeth and change into pajamas, I talked to Jeff about the differences between the Western approach to mysticism and the Eastern approach.

"Well, now," said Jeff, "I'm not a Zen Buddhist, and this is why.... 'The mouse has cut the wire. Goodbye!'"

I laughed in surprise, catching the bizarre reference to another children's book, this one by Dr. Seuss, about two people in the same room talking on the phone about how they cannot hear each other.

"I'm kidding. But that's very Zen, by accident, isn't it? They're always saying things like that..."

"It reminds me of something I just read in that book, zen guitar," and I told him the story about hanging off a cliff by the skin of your teeth, when someone asks you a life-or-death question you absolutely must answer, so that either way, you die. "I don't remember what point Sudo was trying to make — mostly because I didn't get the story, I didn't know the answer. But I know what I'd do if I was hanging desperately off a cliff and some jackass asked me a question..."

I mimed dangling by my teeth, glaring irately down at the imaginary questioner then slowly, emphatically, lifting my middle finger.

"I've been thinking.." Jeff said as he came in from reading the kids their nightly bedtime story. I continued to practice my guitar, and he closed the bedroom door quietly behind him. "Your response to the Zen riddle about hanging off the cliff — that's exactly right."

"How so?" I asked, fumbling on the strings, taking a breath and starting again.

"Well, it's creating an alternative. Your answer rejects the very assumption that there are only two options. You make your own."

"Yeah... though I was really just being snarky. But I see what you mean. And that's what Druidry teaches, too. That when faced with dualism — whether the mind-body duality of Descartes, or the phenomenologist-Buddhist duality of trusting the senses versus questioning the self — that the Druid way is to find the third, to complete the triad that pushes us to the next level where opposites are not only compromised, they're reconciled."

"And," Jeff said, "If there seems to be no third, then you create one. Just as the poet creates new meanings through metaphor and juxtaposition, by throwing together and connecting things that don't seem to be connected."

We both sat for a moment, musing, and smiling.

Setting my guitar aside for the night, I looked up at him. "Jeff... I really like being a Druid."

Relationship & Story: Exploring Ethics from a Pagan Perspective

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The beginning of June marks the beginning of the first-ever International Pagan Values Blogging Month, and I couldn't be more excited! I also couldn't be busier, as I juggle schedules, arrange for my summer vacation, plan for my up-coming birthday and help my boyfriend move into his new apartment. So, I hope you will forgive me if I kick off this month's posts with a review of two excellent books on "Pagan values" already out there in circulation and well worth reading: Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics by Emma Restall Orr, and The Other Side of Virtue, by Brendan Myers. Within the next few days, I'll also be guest posting over at Druid Journal on ecology, environmentalism and practical pacifism, as an introduction to a four(ish)-part series on the role of pacifism, violence and warriorhood in Paganism. I'll be updating here again to let you know when that post is up, so be sure to hop on over to check it out! Until then, enjoy the following review, first published in Sky, Earth, Sea: A Journal of Practical Spirituality (Spring 2009).

"The greatest achievement of spirit: the ability to transform nearly anything--even our suffering and tragedy--into art."

- Myers, The Other Side of Virtue

As the Pagan community continues to change and grow, establishing itself as a thriving contemporary spiritual tradition (or more accurately, traditions!), the needs of this diverse and somewhat chaotic community also continue to develop beyond those of first-generation neophytes looking for initiatory experiences and basic how-to guides. One aspect of this evolving need for a deeper, more complex engagement with the Pagan spiritual path--so familiar to those who demand "advanced" Pagan texts that move beyond the typical "Druidry 101," for instance--can be seen in the community's desire to establish its own unique sense of ethics and virtue apart from the divinely mandated good-and-evil dualism of a monotheistic mainstream. From the earliest modern practitioners of Wicca and Druidry, we find examples of moral formulations: the Wiccan Rede, the Law of Threefold Return, and the collection of Druidic triads, to name only a few. And yet many of us can see that these simple codes often leave much to be desired, faltering under pressure or deteriorating into self-justifying rhetoric. Two new texts published recently by O Books, however, rise to the challenge and take on the complex, wild and vital questions of ethical action and virtuous living, seeking new ways of approaching such ancient problems: Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics, by Emma Restall Orr, and Brenden Myers's text, The Other Side of Virtue: Where our virtues come from, what they really mean, and where they might be taking us.

Both texts center on the idea of relationship, more specifically that between the self and the world (and those in it), as the defining aspect of what we should consider an ethical or virtuous life. Emma Restall Orr sets out in her book, Living With Honour, to provide a clear basis for making practical (or "applied") ethical choices apart from the moral doctrines laid out by monotheistic religions and secular culture, which have tended in recent times to be dualistic and hierarchical. The result is a uniquely Pagan conception of ethics based on the primacy of "honorable relationship," an on-going, active engagement with the world and those living in it, guided by courage, generosity and loyalty. While Restall Orr focuses primarily on how this relationship with the world shapes our everyday choices and behavior in order to form a healthy interconnection with other beings, in Brenden Myers's work The Other Side of Virtue, the author trains his attention on the engaged individual, exploring how a self-aware relationship with Immensities helps each of us to discover, as well as to create, "who we are." For Myers, self-knowledge presents a philosophical "problem," and the work of resolving it cultivates a person's virtue in the form of human excellence. Both authors, however, recognize a core ambivalence about assuming such relationship with the world will always be safely benign, challenging the easy dichotomy between good and evil so common to monotheistic religions. In searching for an alternative ethical foundation, both Myers and Restall Orr evoke Pagan and Druidic notions of creative story-telling as the means by which we might shape our lives with a sense of meaning, beauty and truth.

Emma Restall Orr's text might be considered, for many readers, to be the more practical and down-to-earth of the two. She devotes the first half of this clear-sighted and articulate book to deconstructing common (and commonly misunderstood) terms such as "Pagan," "morality," and "honor", as well as developing a broad understanding of the many schools of thought that have contributed to the study of ethics over the centuries. Leaping over whole philosophical systems in a single bound, she is likely to leave some readers a little giddy with vertigo, but her treatment is invariably sharp and fair, seeking the central tenants and common threads that will be most illuminating without risking oversimplification. Her careful exploration of the multifarious foundations and processes that go into making everyday choices--from emotion and instinct, to reason and the rule of law--prepares the reader for the "applied ethics" of later chapters. Further, her brief description of various Pagan traditions and their unique moral formulations provides a place for the contemplative Pagan reader to find an initial foothold of familiar subject matter, while also clarifying (for Pagan and non-Pagan readers alike) how one can establish and maintain a functional ethical model outside of the doctrines of monotheistic religions and secular humanism. Scattered throughout these sections of analysis and dissection are Restall Orr's characteristic flashes of narrative--dancing in the rain, savoring an apple, reading quietly in the park--which give flavor and moving insight into the potential of engaged ethical living.

These more poetic moments become less common in the second half of Living with Honour, as Restall Orr buckles down to the nitty-gritty and addresses many contemporary social and political issues of our time. Exploring everything from suicide and euthanasia to animal rights and vegetarianism, parenting and romance to ecology and materialism, she applies her ethic of "honorable relationship" with intensity and consistency. Her approach puts the individual's ability to choose freely, no matter how difficult or convoluted the circumstances, at the heart of an ethical life, and eschews any reliance on socially-imposed "morality" or external rule of law. This text does not aim to rewrite the shared assumptions of a Judeo-Christian mainstream, but instead celebrates the anarchistic, pluralistic tendencies of the modern Pagan community as essential to developing a sense of individual responsibility ("response-ability") that relates more directly and receptively to a world that is always complex and in flux. Because of her intensity, however, some of her conclusions may make readers cringe (especially those passages which call for strict veganism or which challenge the usual notions of death); her thorough deconstruction of our potential for careless exploitation is pitiless, daunting, even at times overwhelming. One might wonder how it is ever possible to have enough knowledge or power to be capable of making truly effective ethical choices in the face of a huge and infinitely complicated world.

However, her unfaltering emphasis on personal, responsive relationship softens her own tendency towards moralizing, saving the text from becoming just another example of imposing doctrine. Instead, Restall Orr works tirelessly to remind readers that ethical living must be guided, above all, by an open and ever-changing experience of the world itself, here and now. In the third and final section of her book, she addresses the feelings of fear, impotence, inertia and confusion that often keep us from acting according to our own sense of ethics. As an antidote to such feelings, she suggests a kind of stubborn, loving integrity that seeks for a meaningful, empowering sense of self immersed in an infinitely beautiful world. In these final pages, she tells a story of scared awe and gratitude, in which the choice to act ethically is rarely ever a choice at all, but only the natural response that empathy and integrity evoke in a receptive individual willing to place honorable relationship above pure self-interest or familiar fears.

In some ways, this poetic conclusion to Restall Orr's work leads naturally to the first chapters of Brenden Myers's The Other Side of Virtue, which opens with a warm circle of storytellers gathered around a crackling fire, inviting the reader to join. While Restall Orr finds powerful, ecstatic inspiration above all in the wildness of the natural world, Myers is clearly moved and motivated strongly by the shared life and work of community and locates the beginning of his discussion of virtue in this setting. The first "movement" of the text (which is structured like a song or musical score) plays informally with images and metaphors to be developed more fully later on, asserting aphorisms and even making jokes. Reading along, it is almost impossible not to begin to engage the text directly, chuckling aloud or scribbling notes in the margin, developing a dialogue, a conversation of ideas and possibilities. While Restall Orr prepares the reader to enter into the thick of ethical analysis by first covering the familiar ground of Pagan tradition, Myers uses a different approach to his task of defining virtue: establishing a sense of community that will run through the rest of the book and give landscape and texture to the path it will trace.

In the following three movements, Myers proceeds to examine the historical development of the concept of "virtue," beginning with the tribal culture of Heroic societies, through the developing emphasis on reason in ancient Classical philosophy, following the various permutations over the centuries as they produced humanism, romanticism and contemporary examples, real and fictional, of honorable heroes and great men. Throughout this discussion, Myers includes useful details about the changes in society and politics, as well as myriad quotations from ancient texts, to give context and perspective to the evolving definition of human virtue. His examination of particular thinkers and writers, such as Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Nietzsche, provide stepping stones through history for the reader; however, at times they give the text almost too specific a focus, as though standing in for whole schools of thought without giving the reader enough perspective to see how these trends weave together in a broader theory. Meanwhile, the influence of Judeo-Christian morality and its redefinition of virtue as that of passivity and obedience, so intriguingly mentioned in the book's overture, is left almost entirely unmentioned. Here is one place where Restall Orr's sweeping but sometimes overly broad discussion of philosophical concepts can compliment Myers's more specialized focus and remind the reader of the "bigger picture" that might otherwise be lost in the historical milieu.

If the discussion of virtue's historical development, although very well-researched and highly informative, feels a bit dense or cobbled together at times, the fifth movement of The Other Side is where Myers really hits his stride. In it, he attempts to lay bare the "logical structure" of virtue itself, as he understands it, and the slowly-unfolding weaving together of seemingly disparate ideas from previous sections is by turns masterful, musical and mind-blowing. Here we are confronted in a kind of pure contemplation with some of the "Immensities" (Myers's term) that Restall Orr addresses more directly and practically in the later chapters of her own work: the Earth, Death (or Time), and Other People; as well as some of the responses their presence in our lives can evoke: wonder, integrity, and humanity. For Myers, the issue of relationship--the place of the individual within a community and landscape--comes to the forefront in "threshold" experiences whereby a person's sense of identity and self-knowledge is challenged, shaken to its core and thus transformed by an engagement with something both infinitely knowable and intimately overwhelming.

Unlike Restall Orr, who believes that an open engagement with the world usually renders the "ethical" course of action obvious and natural, Myers suggests that we develop our sense of virtue, or human excellence, precisely in those situations when an Immensity calls our most fundamental assumptions about the self and the world into question--that is, precisely when we are least certain of what we once believed to be obvious. His discussion of how these experiences shape us, however, is remarkably similar to Restall Orr's. He too emphasizes our inherent ability to choose as both a revelatory and creative act, at once revealing ourselves to our own self-awareness and helping to create those very selves. The choices we make are shaped by our sense of story (what sociologists might call, on a larger scale, our mythology, what Druids might call our "song") and the role we see ourselves playing as that story unfolds. There is no guarantee that Fortune will be kind or an Immensity benign--in fact, the potentially transformative nature of threshold experiences might be considered inescapably destructive, even traumatic to some extent. But with a strong sense of story, rather than a reliance on traditional definitions of right and wrong, we both discover and create meaning and beauty in our lives through the choices we pursue at such times.

Of course, the study of ethics and the exploration of virtue are not precisely one and the same. On the one hand, virtue is only one way among many to approach the question of ethics (including relativism, utilitarianism, deontology, etc.); on the other hand, there are certain amoral or nonmoral aspects to our understanding virtue itself (such as beauty, physical skills and even good fortune), so that it is difficult to see one as fitting snugly as a subcategory into the other. It may be a gross simplification to say that virtue concerns the effects of a relationship with an Immense world on the nature and knowledge of the self, while ethics is the study of how this relationship is expressed in our behavior and practical choices in everyday life. Yet it seems these two approaches are essentially the ways in which two remarkable contemporary Druid authors have chosen to explore a subject of vast complexity and vital relevance for every human being today. These two books, published so fortuitously within a few months of each other, should most definitely be read together, and read more than once. The questions they raise and problems they wrestle have continuing importance fundamental to our perception of ourselves and the world we live in with one another. And as our own stories change and evolve over the course of our lives, these texts will continuing to offer fresh new insight and possibilities for meaning, beauty, knowledge and truth.

• Brenden Myers, The Other Side of Virtue: Where our virtues come from, what they really mean, and where they might be taking us, O Books, 2008.


• Emma Restall Orr, Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics, O Books, 2007.

Book Learnin': A Helpful List of Books on Druidry

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I have been attempting to develop a kind of flow of interconnected ideas and concerns, from one post to the next, in this blog lately... but every once in a while, I find myself struck by a sudden rant that just needs expression. Now. This is one of those rants. Enjoy (or be annoyed), and I hope you'll come back when I return to writing more directly about the problem of spiritual growth.

See, this is why AODA annoys me sometimes. In general, members are very kind, supportive and helpful, but every once in a while, they go in for this "sabotaging the newbie" nonsense. It might not even be intentional. Perhaps they do not even realize that, collectively, they're coming off as very intimidating and discouraging, at times even obnoxious. The latest example that set me off (and has happened at least twice in the past month) concerns what I will flippantly refer to as book learnin'. Someone sent a post to the online forum asking for recommendations on good, reliable (and accurate) books on Druidry. Now, this is a perfectly understandable request, especially if you're just starting to explore the Druid path, because there is a ton of misinformation out there on the Druids ancient and modern, some of it more or less intentional and misleading. Asking for advice on where to begin looking for a foundation of scholarly information as well as insight into modern practices is not only a good idea, but perhaps an essential early step for a neophyte (especially one not lucky enough to have other practicing Druids around to offer in-person guidance and discussion).

But what do the members of this AODA forum do? They respond with things like, "O well, it really depends on what kind of Druidry you mean, because there are so many, such as [insert long list of all the variations and "denominations" of Druidy here, many with names that sound like paleontology prefixes and which you've probably never heard of unless you've been studying two or three years already].... Which one did you mean?" Not one helpful recommendation of a good, solid text that covers a wide variety of information to provide a beginner with a bit of foundation. (Such general introductory texts do exist, I assure you, and I would bet money that every person who responded to this inquiry with nitpicking has probably read several such books.)

O, and my favorite: "Druidry isn't something you can learn from books. You have to do it and experience it for yourself. How can someone possibly understand [insert name of exotic sounding ritual involving fire and possibly pain or blood sacrifice] and even attempt to write about all its important lessons when such things are beyond words?"

How is this helpful? It's not. It's a way of avoiding giving anything away or giving up any of the aura of authority you get by knowing more and having more experiences under your belt than a neophyte. If I were new to Druidry, I would be immensely discouraged, not to mention as annoyed as I am now, by such replies. Luckily, I adore books and you couldn't stop me from reading them if you tried, no matter what kind of sanctimonious the-reality-is-beyond-words nonsense you bombarded me with.

Perhaps it's because I came to Druidry through my poetry (which I've been writing since about the age I could first hold a crayon) and I continue to adore Druidry because of its bardic traditions, which embrace and celebrate music, song and the power of words... but I have never understood the kind of response that rejects book learnin' as somehow less important or more dangerous than direct experience. To me, reading and exploring ideas in books has always inspired and sewn in me the seeds of desire: desire to move ideas into the real world and bring their beauty into participatory being, and desire to meet the challenge of articulating my own experiences in meaningful ways that can sew those seeds in others. If it hadn't been for a few incredibly well-written books on Druidry, I wouldn't have ever bothered to begin the real life practice that has given me so much and opened me to so many experiences (I wouldn't even know what a [insert exotic sounding ritual here] was or why it might matter to other people, let alone what it might someday mean to me).

Somehow I doubt people who post requests for book recommendations are looking to replace the actual activity of walking a spiritual path in real life. I don't see why it should be a problem to provide suggestions about a few well-researched and insightful books about Druidry, which is after all not only a personal path but a community spiritual tradition (and a diverse and diffuse community at that, which has developed its own customs of discussion and often communicates its shared interests and values through text, in books as well as in online forums and blogs like this one). If this were still an oral culture and non-textual sources of information were more readily available, perhaps an avoidance of books might be more justified. But the truth is, this is a literate culture we live in today, and if a new student of Druidry is to find her way into the tradition, it is not enough to set her loose in the forest without a teacher or a mythology to guide her, and say, "Well, go to it, go do 'Druidry'."



On that note, these are a few of my favorite books on Druidry and modern Druidic practice:

• Way of the Druid: Renaissance of a Celtic Religion and its Relevance, by Graeme Talboys With a bit of historical background, this book explores the "Celtic metaphysic" and how it relates to modern practice. It's the first book I would lend to a non-Druid friend or family member interested in understanding the spiritual tradition I follow.


• Spirits of the Sacred Grove: The World of a Druid Priestess, by Emma Restall Orr A wonderful memoir that follows the cycle of the seasons, this book expresses in beautiful, powerful writing the kinds of personal experiences at the root of practical Druidry and gives you that itch to go out and spend long hours in the local woods listening to the breathing of things. A very nice counterbalance to Talboys' more theoretical focus, though it may come across as "too weird" for non-Druids... I wouldn't recommend it to my mother, anyway!


• The Mysteries of Druidry: Celtic Mysticism, Theory, & Practice, by Brendan Myers This text focuses a bit more on various common themes and symbols that echo throughout Celtic mythology and lay a foundation for creative, engaged work with the Druidic tradition.


• The Rebirth of Druidry: Ancient Earth Wisdom for Today, edited by Philip Carr-Gomm A collection of essays, this is the very first book that shook me awake and inspired me to seek out Druidry in my own life; all sorts of topics are covered, from the personal to the traditional, from theory on seasonal calendars to explorations of self- and social-identity, and more.


• The Druidry Handbook: Spiritual Practice Rooted in the Living Earth, by John Michael Greer A very good how-to kind of handbook that talks a bit about some of the concepts central to Revival Druidry in particular, and lays out the First Degree curriculum for AODA in depth.

All of the above focus on contemporary Druidic practice from various perspectives. As far as scholarly historical works, Ronald Hutton wrote a fascinating introductory text entitled, Druids: A History, that traces the development of the idea of Druidry and Druidism throughout the past several hundred years. He has a more extensive book due to be published in June, 2009, called Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain that will expand on this topic, and which is bound to be great. Beyond this, I'd recommend any of Miranda Green's work (I just got her Symbol & Image in Celtic Religious Art, which I can't wait to tear into!), as well as most of the books written by John and Caitlin Matthews, which usually explore mythological themes and have a bit of an historical/academic bent, if not much at times.

Amusing Anecdotal Interlude (Or: Aai!)

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"Things are going well, " I said, breathless with the cold as I walked home from my dentist appointment and a late lunch at the vegan restaurant down the street.

"Anything new?" my father asked on the other end of the phone. I could hear him shuffling papers as he sat in his cozy office in the county courthouse on the other side of Pennsylvania.

"Well, I've been writing a lot, keeping my New Year's Resolution to write something other than journaling every day. I'm working on a series in my blog right now that I'm thinking of maybe trying to expand into a book. A lot of people seem really interested in the topic, and it seems like I have a lot to say about it..."

There was a pause on the other end of the line. As I turned the corner into the wind, my scarf slapped gently against my shoulder and a piece of hair escaped from under my knit hat and found its way down between my eye and the lens of my glasses. I hate when that happens. I fumbled at the tiny cell phone with my clumsy gloved hands.

"Is that that Druid stuff?"

"Yeah, one of the blog's readers is the author of that book I lent you a while back, remember? The 'one with the funny name.' And he says he might be able to help me find a publisher for a manuscript if I put one together. I'm actually kind of excited about it."

"Yeah, well, that sounds nice." My father's tone reminded me of Dane Cook's dad being interviewed about his son's success. ("Yeah, well, I guess he makes a living, anyway, for just fooling around," was Mr. Cook's deadpan response. Not that I'm as wildly awesome as Dane Cook, of course.)

"I could have a book published. That's kind of a big deal, Dad," I said into the phone. "Sound more excited." My parents--my mother especially--are hugely proud of my younger brother, who recently landed a position with a small but major marketing research company. For them, it's all about who you know and what they're willing to pay you, not really what it is you actually do.... They're still not entirely sure what my brother does. On the other hand, they grasp the concept of "waiting tables" and "spouting off on some webpage that anybody could just read" fairly well.

"O, no, of course that's nice, yeah," my father said in an entirely unconvincing, but still endearing voice. "So," he said, "what is this, like, just basically taking environmental and nature stuff and having it be your religion?"

I rolled my eyes and huffed a cloud of warm breath out into the wind. I don't ask him things like, "So, this Christianity stuff, it's like human cannibalism and magic virgins and all that?" Of course I know better, I was raised to know better. Over my Christmas vacation when I visited home, we even had an extended conversation about Druidry and why I'd decided to officially leave the Catholic Church and stop taking communion at Mass (it'd be a violation of the community's trust in the whole 'one body in Christ' thing, I'd explained). I teased him about how I only get frustrated with politics and money-grubbing because I take Jesus more seriously than he does (and that if Jesus were living today, he'd probably be a Druid, too).

"Did you read the book I lent you, Dad?"

"Which one, the one about the oak tree, or the one about crows?"

Of all the books I've lent him over the years, he remembers these two: the latter, a semi-scientific naturalist book on corvids he borrowed almost two years ago; the former, a kind of sociological "history of the oak tree and human civilization" I lent him a year and a half earlier. So let's hear it for Pagany stereotypes!

"No, Dad, the one about Druidry. All the 'Celtic metaphysic' stuff and how it relates to modern Druidic spirituality and philosophy..."

"I never really got around to it."

"Well, anyway, the point is, I could get something actually published. So... not wasting my life over here. Good, right?" This was just me fishing for compliments. Usually it provoked an all-your-mother-and-I-want-is-for-you-to-be-happy-and-healthy response.

"Good, that's good," my dad said. For a moment, the wind on my end died down and I could hear in the background the general-office-noise murmuring on his end of the line. I remember visiting the courthouse when I was little, the huge echoing marble halls, that led into unexpectedly small, modest, dare I say even cheap-looking offices of cubicles and bulletin boards and messy desks. The realm of the twenty-five-years-loyal-service county juvenile probation officer. "So, what is this stuff about then?"

"See, if you'd read the book, you'd know, wouldn't you?" That got a laugh and he knew I was teasing him again. "But really, what I'm getting into right now," I went on, "what I want to focus on, is this whole relationship between aesthetics and spirituality, and what role art can play in religion. It's basically the kind of stuff I did for my honors thesis in college. Remember? The ritual theory and creative writing interdisciplinary distinguished honors stuff. Remember that? Nathan said, at the time, that if I wanted to work at expanding my paper, he thought I could turn it into a publishable article, a scholarly one, to submit to an academic journal in religious studies, I mean, which is pretty good for an undergraduate paper. I didn't pursue it because by then I'd moved out here... But I've always wanted to get back to those ideas. Maybe not in an academic sense, but in a more direct, personal way. So I've been writing about that a lot recently, and I think I might have some good material."

"Uh-huh.... So how was the dentist?"

I grinned. The brittle air shuddered against my freshly cleaned teeth (and the Sensodyne my dentist had recommended bumped against my thigh, nestled along with the free toothbrush in the bottom of my shoulder bag). Classic change in subject. I love my dad. Last week he sent me an email with the subject "Brrrr!" that was only two sentences long: "Boy is it cold outside today! Make sure you wear a scarf."

"O, you know how the dentist always is. Metal Versus Enamel, and all that scraping and prodding... But it was good, it was good. I'm healthy and happy, just like you want."

"Good," my father replied, "Good. Well, make sure you call your mother."

The Death of Civilization.

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The following is a review of The Road, a novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 2006. Its film adaptation is set to be released in November, 2008.


If future anthropologists are one day sorting through ancient literature trying to find some insight into today's modern Western culture, they would do well to read this book. Not because it's all that good, but because to understand a culture it's often very useful to look at its worst fears. In this sense, The Road is a perfect artifact, a precise and unself-conscious portrayal of consumer culture's unique nightmare: the end of consumer culture.

As a novel, The Road is rather dull, repetitive and sometimes annoyingly confusing in its basic grammar (for instance, with two main characters, both male and neither named, the masculine third-person pronoun runs rampant, often to the detriment of clarity). There is no real character development per se, and the ending is predictable and sentimental, so that the entire plot feels like what it describes: a slow march towards an inescapable but pointless end. Luckily, unlike the characters in the book, the reader does have a choice, and could easily just put the book down and walk away, to go do something better with her time, maybe work in her garden or learn how to knit.

If, instead, the reader decides to stick with it, what she will find unfolding before her is not the development of interesting characters or intriguing plot, but the characterization of a worldview. Modern consumer culture's worldview, to be precise. In this worldview, nature, ecology, even time itself are irrelevant; the only thing that matters is man's modern conception of civilization. If there is one sentence that could encapsulate the basic mythology at the heart of The Road, it's this: civilization is God. Without civilization, man has no moral center, no sense of self, and is reduced to pure savagery. Because our culture defines man's role as that of a consumer of readily-available products (rather than as cultivator or creator), the apocalypse is the story of man reduced to a scavenger, picking off the remains of civilization's rotting, rusting corpse, moving inanely from one place to another looking for those last few items still left to consume.

Community is beyond the scope of imagination (consumer culture's anxiety-driven individualism deteriorates into simple xenophobia and paranoia), and family bonds are poor shadows of their former ideals, composed of necessity and mere sentimentality. The novel's protagonist lives for his son, not for the son's sake, but because of what the son represents. He refers to his son as a god and as "the son of God"--but what does this mean, other than that he is the son of civilization. The "fire" that the "good guys" carry is merely the vain hope that somehow civilization itself can be rekindled and rebuilt, that the rules of civilized people can be reinstated, that the world can be rendered safe and familiar again. But in the end, basic biology and common sense overtake good guys and bad guys alike. In the end--an end consumer culture has always struggled to reject, avoid and deny--in the end, everybody dies.

All of this, if conceived intentionally by the author, might have made for a fascinating and insightful look into the mythology of our modern culture, an exploration of obsessive consumption and the conclusion to which its basic premises inevitably lead. Unfortunately, it seems quite clear that McCarthy is steeped in this worldview up to his eyeballs, with neither the awareness nor the perspective with which to criticize it. The ubiquitous, unexplained ash that pervades the book and kills off everything except, remarkably, man himself might as well be a symbol for the author's ignorance about ecology and the cycles of the natural world. Because civilization is God, and man is assumed to be the only vehicle of progress and change, when civilization is destroyed, the world itself ceases to turn. Time becomes irrelevant--seasons change, but somehow this entails only a change in temperature, not its consequences; rain falls and winds blow, but these natural processes fail to cause any erosion, even after a decade.

Instead, everything is eerily preserved, an open-air museum of concrete and plastic and mummified corpses, the remnants of the dead civilization morbidly displayed in their uselessness. The Road is the nightmarish landscape of man's presumed untouchability. Even with the end of civilization, the anthropocentrism of consumer culture persists, and its products are portrayed as effectively eternal and largely beyond the influence of the natural world. Indeed, the natural world extends only so far as domesticated dogs and cattle, which (of course, the protagonist tells us) perished without man's intervention and stewardship. No crows, rats or cockroaches--not even microorganisms--speed the decomposition of the dead, no weeds or weather can break up the roads' unflinching macadam.

The world of McCarthy's novel is an unreal one, and therefore an unmoving and even irrelevant one. It is a world built upon the fears of our particular culture, one that cannot see beyond itself or imagine a world that survives its own destruction. It plays by the imaginary rules of a culture unable to recognize man as a part of nature, one that instead sees him as exempt from nature even unto his own demise. A wholly ridiculous notion, and a nightmare that can be laughed at once the sleeper has awakened. The world will not end with humanity, and humanity itself is not trapped in the suicidal and pointless obsession of consumption. When there is nothing left to consume, no products or plastics, man's addiction to consumption will wane, he will learn how to tell a new story about himself and about the world, and maybe he will even remember himself, his self-creating, his ability to become. But the reader who sympathizes too strongly or thrills too easily at the ghost story of The Road is likely to busy herself with the frantic preservation of this current self-deluded way of life, rather than risk what today's culture insists is the only nightmarish alternative.

Influenza & a Book Meme.

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Cat, over at Quaker Pagan Reflections, tagged me to participate in this book meme that's been going around. Speaking of what's going around, I'm currently knocked flat by a rather icky case of the flu. Yesterday was defined by splitting headaches, inflamed throat, feverish... er, fevers, and frequent vomiting (for those of you who really wanted or needed to know).

Now it seems the worst is over, though I'm still left feeling a bit faint and fragile. So here's that easy book meme to keep you entertained until I'm up to writing something substantive again:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Technically, the nearest book to me is Ross Nichols' The Book of Druidry, which gives us:

Generally, the use of stones, although impressive, limits the mobility of Gorseddau or circle meetings; the modern stones idea was started by Iolo Morganwg and, whilst good to emphasize continuity between past and present and the true nature of that for which stone circles were made, it may now be rather backward-looking when we realize a circle as a structure mentally realized for the operation of psychic faculties.

Playing through the three chiefs on the eastern side are the triple forces of light, which in some stone circles have been marked by pointer stones outside. The centre stone to the due East represents the rays from the equinoxes, the times of balance; the stone to the North-east is the high force of light at the midsummer solstice, that to the South-east is the place of rebirth of the sun in midwinter.

But I haven't actually started reading that one yet (it's in my to-be-read pile currently), so how about the next-closest, Ronald Hutton's Witches, Druids and King Arthur, which I'm about half-way through:

This in itself, to Iamblichus, justified the heavy investment in ritual, material trappings and sacrifice characteristic of traditional paganism, and which acted as part of a process of correspondence and reunion. The cannier pagan was distinguished by knowledge of the precise nature of the material substances, numbers and incantations which should be used to contact and work with particular deities.

Even among canny pagans, however, to Iamblichus theurgists were definitely superior.

I'm not lucid enough to tag anyone, and besides I think almost everyone I read has already participated. See, this is why the kids don't ask me to play tag--I'm very bad with the concept of passing it on.

A Quandary of Cats

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As I promised one reader in the comments of the previous post on John Michael Greer's book, A World Full of Gods, I'm going to take some time to explore and elaborate on what I think is the main flaw in his reasoned argument against monotheism and in favor of polytheism. After tonight's post, though, I'm hoping to return to a more poetic-creative form of writing for a little while, not only because I sorely need to keep those writerly muscles in shape, but because I find myself growing increasingly cantankerous with all this political and religious polemic in the air. February in Pittsburgh tends to be a dreary month--the sun slants slightly higher and longer than before, but more sleet, rain and snow blow in from the west and cake the streets and buildings in treacherous gray sludge. Even on the occasional warmer days, the sludge and mud persist, and you get to thinking that those obnoxiously bright morning birds must be wrong. So, after this, enough with the nitpicking for a little while. I need to ready myself to receive spring as she deserves.

I agree with Nettle's statement on the previous post, that "one god" versus "many gods" is not just a disagreement about number, but indicates a fundamentally different way of defining "deity." I suspect this distinction is why I found Greer's book so very frustrating--he treated it as exactly that: merely a disagreement about number, and nothing more.

The most telling example is Greer's "Many Cats" analogy for deity. In this inventive tale, several neighbors all endeavor to cultivate relationships with a mysterious being they call Cat. The "monofelists" believe there is only one Cat, and because they disagree about its appearance (sometimes black, sometimes tabby, for instance) and its food preferences (one neighbor leaves out milk, another kibble, yet another canned food), each accuses the others of merely imagining things, feeding rats by mistake, or simply having a less than perfect understanding of how Cat truly looks and behaves. The "afelist" of the neighborhood doesn't think there's any such thing as a Cat at all, while the "polyfelist," who is portrayed as clearly the most reasonable and knowledgeable of the group, laughs and says there are actually several cats in the neighborhood, each with its own territory, food preferences and personality.

Now, this allegory is, indeed, very helpful in illustrating Greer's personal conception of what deity is (or, in this case, what deities are), but rather than exploring the difference between monotheism and polytheism, it takes for granted a polytheistic worldview. What Greer fails to address is the possibility that, as he himself has pointed out earlier in the book, people actually experience deity in vastly different ways; in other words, the "monofelists" are assumed to be experiencing a limited or singular example of something that is inherently multiple and, furthermore, could easily be known as such with minimal effort. There is no way of illustrating from within his imaginary world, for instance, what an experience of deistic unity or transcendence might be like, and so the reader is left to assume (most likely without even realizing the bias) that such things cannot be aspects of deity, but are instead something else.

Greer's Many Cats analogy immediately strikes me as a very different version of the Blind Men & the Elephant metaphor, and perhaps a fairer comparison between monotheism and polytheism might be found in comparing these two different stories and how they conceive of the nature of deity as fundamentally different. In both situations, the foolishness of supposing that one person knows everything is apparent, but the nature of what is unknown and/or not personally experienced is vastly different. In the Cats story, there is nothing all that mysterious about the Cats themselves, and each person's ignorance lies in their unwillingness to listen to others. Greer seems to suggest that if "monofelists" simply treated others' experiences as being as valuable as their own, they would naturally reach the "polyfelist" conclusion. In the Blind Men story, however, our very ability to experience the Divine in its Fullness is what is limited. Our own limitations--not just those imagined of others, but those we ourselves experience and recognize--gives rise to our ignorance, so that even when we do listen to each other and give one another as much credence as we give ourselves, we can still only guess at what it is we think we know. Even if the Blind Men worked together to run their hands over the entire elephant, in other words, they would still be missing a certain kind of experience: in this case, the visual experience of seeing the elephant as a whole.

The difference between the two stories is in the supposed limitations, or lack of limitations, of human experience of Spirit. In the Many Cats example, the "polyfelist" is just as sure of her definitive knowledge of what Cats really are as Greer accuses "monofelists" as being. But it is still rather easy to imagine such a "polyfelist" having a moment of heightened experience in which she catches the briefest glimpse of the unity and interconnection of all beings--including Cats-- that transcends her previous understanding of each Cat as a separate being (and in fact, both Greer and Jordan Paper, author of The Deities Are Many, say that polytheists can and do have such "mystic" experiences). What if, upon mentioning such an experience to her "inclusive monofelist" neighbor, the "polyfelist" discovers that this kind of transcendence is precisely what the "monofelist" has been referring to all along?

So what kind of experience is this unity and transcendence, then, and what is being experienced? Does it not point to a kind of relationship to Spirit that belies the certainty of both the "monofelists" and the "polyfelist" as Greer portrays them? Is it not possible that unity and transcendence are just as likely to be attributes of deity as any other attribute of power, personality or presence? Greer describes the "retreat to a ground-of-being definition of God" as the result of monotheists backing themselves into a corner, but in my personal, direct experiences of this kind, it is precisely the opposite: it is a moment in which a new kind of experience transcends and unites the multifaceted and varied nature of previous experiences of deity, without denying or replacing them.

(Another, specifically Christian example of such a phenomenon is the experience that "everyone is Christ." This does not mean that people do not have unique personalities, individual and autonomous wills, or conflicts of interest, and that we should instead paste the "Face of Jesus" on top of everyone's true face and ignore all differences. Instead, it means just the opposite: recognizing the sacred uniqueness of every being, including ourselves, and as a corollary, respecting that uniqueness and individuality as itself a manifestation of a common, deeply-rooted Spirit. This might seem, again, to be mere dissembling or, even worse, to be downright illogical. Yet I have had personal, direct experiences of "seeing Christ" in other people.)

If Greer claims to respect such experiences as essential, even foundational, to one's religious life, then I do not see how he can so easily dismiss them as mere doctrinal semantics. He may, of course, have polytheistic explanations for these experiences--or even go so far as to claim that these experiences are themselves essentially polytheistic--but to me, this is as underhanded a strategy under the guise of "open dialogue" as that of monotheists who claim there's no such thing as a true polytheist.

I find it amusing when Greer, towards the end of his book, accuses monotheists of digging their own graves, setting up the potential for disbelief in other gods so thoroughly that it was only a matter of time before their own deity came under fire as well. I have already written in this blog about my understanding of atheism as part of the process of the spiritual life, and I hold to my assertion that to challenge simplistic, overly-anthropomorphic views of Spirit is entirely healthy, even if one must tread dangerously close to utter nihilism or reductionist materialism. I am also reminded of several scholars of Christianity's early development, who note that, for polytheists of that time as well, monotheism was effectively a form of atheism, denying the existence of the gods and goddesses so poignantly loved and worshipped in polytheistic traditions. But then, according to most monotheists today, polytheism itself is a form of atheism in rejecting the underlying unity and coherence of the animating Spirit in favor of "disjointed" and fragmentary forms. Funny, that after millennia, we are all still wrestling around in Square One.

It seems clear to me that neither monotheists nor polytheists are atheists. especially now that, thanks to philosophical systems like materialism and humanism, we have such clear, self-proclaimed examples of what atheism and non-theism look like. Rather, monotheists and polytheists simply disagree about the definition of deity itself, what it should include and how it can be experienced by human beings. Any exploration of either view, in particular an exploration which seeks to compare one against the other, must recognize this most basic difference. Only then can we begin to approach these religious worldviews on their own terms, rather than in the terms of those imposed upon them from the outside.


And now, for your viewing pleasure
(because you stuck with me this far, dear reader),
I give you:

The Disillusioned Apprentice

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One reason I have been largely silent in this blog over the course of this month is I have been, admittedly, undergoing a kind of disillusionment regarding the Archdruid of AODA, John Michael Greer. Of course, any time you feel that pull, that telling tug, to join a particular community, you want to believe the leaders and respected elders of that community are kindred spirits, reasonable and accepting, patient with new members and yet knowledgeable enough to engage those who want to continue their development and growth.

When I first joined AODA over a year ago and began its self-guided home study course for the First Degree, I was thrilled to find a community that seemed so in touch with all those things I had valued in my own spiritual life up until that point, while at the same time providing both the wise instruction and varied experience of its older members to help me pursue both familiar and new work even further. The clincher, though, was its accepting embrace of monotheistic and pan(en)theistic, as well as polytheistic, approaches to the concept of Spirit. Unlike the impression of strict, almost angry insistence on polytheism that I sensed from ADF and the Celtic Reconstructionists, AODA--and in particular, its Archdruid--seemed to take a truly tolerant attitude towards practitioners who found meaning and value in Christian ideas and beliefs. More than this, I found several members of the AODA who actively and effectively worked to blend their Catholic heritage with their Druidic work. The thought of kindred souls who had delved as deeply into the Christian Mysteries as I hoped to and had found a path, through Christianity, that joined so wonderfully with the Druidic emphasis on nature, sacred experience and creative work was quite encouraging!

Recently, however, I read Greer's book, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism, and much to my dismay and continued frustration, found it to be full of the very same misconceptions about Christianity and monotheism that I had turned me off to other Pagan communities. This book proved to be not so much an inquiry into polytheism and its role in the spiritual life, as an opportunity for yet another disillusioned polytheist to present his argument for why monotheism was a monolithic, homogeneous religious movement that, throughout its entire history, had supposedly embodied the worst of Medieval ignorance, fear and superstition, compounded by Victorian-Era sexual prudery and repressive social etiquette. This view of monotheism was presented without regard to the complex, multifaceted and often spiritually fruitful reality of the actual living faith of both historical and modern believers. When Greer does discuss polytheism directly, it is only to point out how its most important aspects (personal experiences of the sacred, the use of mythology as meaning-making, the role of giving and mutual love between mankind and deity, etc.) apparently are nowhere to be found in monotheism.

Ever since reading this book, I have been reeling between indignation and the overwhelming urge to go page by page and correct his vast number of misunderstandings and misrepresentations. The latter, of course, is always my response when someone makes sweeping claims about a tradition or social group that I myself have experienced firsthand and know personally to be more subtle and complicated than they suppose. It helps to mitigate this urge when I remind myself that much of his "enlightened" polytheistic theology I had come to understand on my own, long before discovering modern Druidry, through the contemplation and struggle to incorporate specifically Christian myths and doctrines into my own spiritual life. It also helps to remember that I have already addressed some of these misunderstandings in my series, Modern Myths about Christianity, the title of which is not meant to be ironic, but to point out how the "evils of monotheism" tale is as much a particular mythical construct (with, as usual, occasional seeds of truth) as the myth of Progress or the fundamentalist obsession with the mythology of monotheistic hegemony.

My indignation, meanwhile, is really just a self-defense response to the painful shock that someone so obviously well-studied in certain aspects of Paganism and magic, someone I had come to trust as fair and sincere in his purported tolerance for all approaches to Divinity, could so blatantly fail to give as much unbiased study to traditions he does not agree with as he gives to those with which he does. What in polytheism he calls paradox and mystery, within monotheism suddenly become illogical impositions of dogma. While the modern Pagan movement is, he rightly claims, a response to certain dissatisfying aspects of modern Judeo-Christian culture, the historical development of monotheism itself is portrayed as an insidious plot by the powerful to repress a spiritual tradition that had, until then, left no spiritual need unfulfilled. There is no chance, according to Greer, that the Christian habit of theological contemplation was a genuine response to a real need for more unifying, if more challenging, approaches to the numinous in its varied manifestations; there is no chance that the mythology of Judeo-Christian culture can be as satisfying, inspiring or metaphorical as the mythology of ancient paganism; and it would be absolutely ridiculous, apparently, to claim that Christians, Jews and Muslims have honest-to-goodness real experiences of a meaningfully personal, "ground of being" God, however paradoxical or "illogical" such an experience might seem, and furthermore that these experiences, not merely coldly reasoned doctrine, have led monotheists to an understanding of deity that is, in its essence, markedly different from the polytheist's definition.

Throughout his discussion of monotheism, Greer conveniently ignores two vitally important aspects of monotheism (at least the monotheism in which I was raised): mystery, and humility. He returns again and again to the objection that monotheists are inevitably caught in the trap of self-exception through claims that they know definitively "what God really is" while all other religious traditions, including other monotheist traditions, are wrong. All self-excepting monotheists can't be right, he points out, and so none of them are. He ignores the possibility that some monotheists, myself included, are equally unsure about their own idea of God and are quite willing to admit the possibility that they haven't got a clue, which is one reason they are so eager to seek out and listen to other viewpoints from other traditions--not out of some misguided political correctness, but because of an honest curiosity to explore the mystery of the spiritual life with sincere humility. When faced with the possibility of liberal, tolerant monotheists willing to give polytheistic and atheistic spiritual traditions, as well as other monotheistic traditions, an equal place at the discussion table, he dismisses them with accusations of "creative" pussyfooting and backpedalling.

Such reasoning frustrates me, not only because similarly tolerant, liberal views within the Pagan community are treated as natural, serious and laudable, but because dismissing tolerant monotheists marginalizes such individuals and ensures that monotheistic traditions will be increasingly defined solely by literal-minded, intolerant fundamentalists--not only hanging Pagans out to dry, but depriving less-than-extremist Jews, Christians and Muslims of any sanctuary or recourse within their own traditions. I have always tried to be a living example of how Christianity, in particular, can live up to its values of love, self-giving, and moral integrity for the sake of the well-being and growth of others and a commitment to the Divine. To see myself and my views dismissed as merely "creative" dissembling, as if I were a struggling child receiving a patronizing pat on the head--as if, furthermore, the impetus to creativity and new ideas in response to complicated and often contradictory moral obligations is a sign of a wishy-washy intellect unwilling to default to the easy and "obvious" solutions of polytheism, rather than an indication of meaningful growth to overcome very real conflicts that polytheism seems, at best, only to reframe in deified terms--well.... as I said, quite frankly, it hurts. It hurts to see oneself marginalized not only by Christians in the name of literal-minded dogma, but by Pagans in the name of the very tolerance they aren't deigning, in this case, to demonstrate.

It also leaves me wondering just how much I can trust the Archdruid and other elders of my Order to provide the kind of welcome and guidance I had until now always utterly believed of them. I have recently completed and "passed" my First Degree examination and have been accepted and initiated as a Druid Apprentice in the AODA. It is, perhaps, both ironic and appropriate that I now find myself honestly wondering about the kind of leadership within the Order itself, and how I might step into that role in the future, for better or worse. I have not, of course, completely given up on nor rejected Greer as a invaluable teacher with much wisdom, insight and experience to share (I have just started his newest book, The Druid Magic Handbook: Ritual Magic Rooted in the Living Earth, which has already proved to be interesting and encouraging, even if it is in no way uniquely polytheistic!). Instead, I find that I have discovered an area--the possibility of a fruitful and tolerant monotheism--into which his expertise, experience and, therefore, authority simply do not reach. In some ways, indeed, I am extremely grateful for the realization that I may yet have something new and unique to offer to the Druid community. I only worry (though, happily, not very much) that I may not be given a fair hearing when that time comes...

The Blackout

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This past Thursday, the city of Pittsburgh experienced what the papers are now apparently calling a triple-hit of violent storms (which included dangerous "microbursts" and tornados), stripping trees of branches, flooding basements, shutting down businesses (including the restaurant where I work) and stranding up to 120,000 people without power for several hours (as of Friday morning, 20,000 to 34,000 were still without power, and as of my writing this, one friend of mine is still whistling--or in her case, going quickly through her store of beer and cigarettes--in the dark).

This wasn't as exciting as it probably sounds. A coworker of mine informed me yesterday at work that the local electric company was actually referring to it as a "natural disaster" situation, but for those of us who experienced the storm and subsequent black-out, it seemed mostly like more of the same (i.e. more f#&king rain!) and a gradual realization that the fridges and television sets wouldn't be kicking back on to rescue us anytime soon. The power in my apartment was out for approximately eight hours, from around 3 PM until 11 PM (11:04 PM, to be precise). When the second of the three storm-fronts hit, I had actually just left my house to walk to work and pick up my schedule for the week. I waited out the brief black-out (before our restaurant's limited back-up generators kicked on) and the rest of the storm in the dining room, sipping on a soda and watching my fellow servers explain to customers that there was a foot of water in the basement, so they had to turn the pilot light out and the kitchen was closed--but please, help yourself to our delicious salad bar of fresh, local produce! Then I walked home in the light rain that followed, surprised by the number of felled trees within only a few blocks.

Once home, I buckled down and finally started reading Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal Dreams that I'd been meaning to get to. As each hour passed (on my battery-powered IKEA wall clock), I turned to my trusty sky-blue pocket-sized notebook to jot a few thoughts down. Strangely, some of them ended up being rather interesting, and so I thought I'd share them with all of you.

The power's still out. It's almost 6 PM--it's been out at least since 4 PM, when I got home. Maybe the bookstore is open now and its power back on. In another half hour or so I'll walk down to see.

[The bookstore, incidentally, was still closed at 6:30 PM, and would remain closed until about 11 AM the next morning, when power was finally restored. And gosh darnit, I'd really been looking forward to getting that book on crop circles that I'd had my eye on!]

If I feel any more--if my capacity to really feel gets any greater--I think something bad might happen. I can't possibly meditate or practice opening--I have no safeguards in place for the subsequent disaster. But I think I'd make an excellent lover, the way Venus is an excellent lover--too close, unbearable and burning, but bright and liquid all the way through.

7 PM, still no power. No fans, no air conditioning, no light. The dusk is coming, and more rain.

8 PM, reading Animal Dreams by candlelight (though it's a bit of a strain--and it's only just twilight out still). Got myself a caffeine-free Pepsi and an applesauce from the fridge, though neither are all that cold. Worrisome. I'll have to empty the fridge this weekend when I have time. I wonder what's taking so long to get the power back. I can't remember the last time an outage lasted this long. Once it gets truly dark, everyone will start in on the sex. I wish I could call Ray [my best friend, out of town this week] and tell him I'm lonely, but my cell phone is down to one bar and I need it as an alarm for tomorrow if I still don't have power.

9 PM, it's honest-to-god dark out now. Needless to say, still no power. I'm beginning to think television and the computer were rubbing me raw. Somehow, this dark is soothing, like a balm. So easy. I can feel, but it doesn't hurt so much. Maybe I'll make an effort to leave the computer off most of the time for the next week or so. At least until Ray returns. I feel kind of pathetic that I'd almost rather be a pet, a family pet who gets to sit and watch my lovely people move around and who nobody minds too much. I don't need to be anyone's girlfriend, not for now. For now, let me be a pet, is all.

10 PM, still no power. A little while ago, someone in the darkness on the street yelled something about light, and I found my heart pounding, feeling exposed and vulnerable with all my candles lit--as if they could see my one window barely flickering in the whole dark facade of my apartment building. As if I had stolen something, as if I had done something wrong. I am so much more afraid of human beings than I am of coyotes, of light more than darkness. Still, it couldn't have been more than twenty minutes ago, and already I feel safe and invulnerable again. And outside all is quiet. No rain. No people quietly talking. Not even the noise of sex. [The sex remarks are references to the fact that I have very... enthusiastic neighbors, even on nights with power, and they'd been at it earlier in the evening, around 5-ish, already.]

Almost 11 PM, still dark. I'm not so tired anymore and would like to keep reading, fairly sure there's no point in going to bed when I don't have to be up that early tomorrow. I know that if I had regular light, I wouldn't have to sit up straight and carefully hold the candle over my book--I'd drift off in ten minutes with the lights on. My body wants to lay down, but my mind doesn't. Reading Animal Dreams, I'm jealous of Codi--with a shit hometown to go to, people to watch come and go, a confused family history, a man who wants her to love him. I can't go home or stay put. Once you know the twists and turns of your family's history, there's not much more to do with it, is there? My mother will always be the mother she had, always hard-done-by and cold. She doesn't want to be filmed. She hides behind a camera because no one takes a picture of people taking pictures. Except me. I don't hide behind the camera, I want to be in two places at once. The best conversations are never caught. It hurts to look into a single candle flame, but I could stare into a campfire all night. I have so many thoughts in my head every hour, I sometimes wonder what would happen if I just got them all out, if I wrote and wrote until there was nothing left. How much uselessness could I generate? Reading a story slows my thoughts enough that they don't feel so overwhelming. A few a second, maybe, or vague intuitions and emotions only half developed. Reading someone else's story quiets me down, turns down the volume of my own living--which sometimes feels all tangled up in the living of every thing, so that it's just too big--and for a little while, I can feel human. A quiet, small thing conversing with other quiet, small things. Instead of a rushing vortex of noisy everything.

Everything just came on. It's 11:03 PM.

[The feeling, just as I finished writing the last sentence, was eerie and put me out of my skin with goosebumps for a split second. It's hard to explain the strange presence of everything familiar suddenly rushing back into awareness.]

11:04 PM, after I'd blown out all the candles and reset the clock, the power died again then struggled to come back on. I'm leaving one candle lit this time, so I don't stumble on anything... just in case.

Harry Potter & The Seriousness of Childhood

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I'm not a parent. I'm not really... around children all that much (serving hog dogs and french fries to the obese little buggers in a family restaurant while the adults at the table demand more soda pop and extra mayonnaise--doesn't count). That said, I do know a thing or two about being a child--having been one within the last decade or so--and about living around young adults who persist in acting like children. I live cheek to cheek with this phenomenon that Ron Charles calls "cultural infantilism" in his critical article about the Harry Potter books.

When it comes to the Harry Potter phenomenon, there is one important fact to keep in mind: they are children's books. They are not "serious" adult novels, they do not grapple with the complexities of foreign political policy, the devastation of war, the moral ambiguity of conflicting desires for "the good", the insecurities of a materialist, isolationist culture, the obstacles to healthy partnerships between the sexes... They're just cutely-illustrated books about a bunch of child-wizards waving wands around and playing at puzzle-solving within the imaginary world of Hogwarts. Right?

Let me say it again: these are children's books. Any self-respecting adult might be embarrassed to admit enjoying a series of books meant for children, especially when there are plenty of "adult" novels that address serious subjects like war, sex, morality, politics, religion, and so on. The question the Harry Potter phenomenon begs is not whether they are good books for children--they must be at least as good as the latest "Barbie Goes to the Mall" picture book, after all--but why so many adults are reading them (and why this bothers certain people so much).

One easy answer is that the first Harry Potter book was published ten years ago. Ten years ago, I was fourteen, and my little brother was twelve, more interested in climbing trees and playing soccer than in reading books (but, happily, not at all interested in video games or the internet, let alone cell phones or iPods). Today, I'm a young woman whose college experience was defined by 9/11, religious and political fear-mongering, and the waging of an unjust, unnecessary war despite worldwide protest; my little brother is now a young man, about to graduate with a B.S. degree in marketing, who finds himself uncomfortable with the way aesthetics and psychology are warped and number-crunched into base methods of manipulating consumers into buying unnecessary products beyond their means. What does that have to do with Harry Potter? On the surface, nothing at all. But look again, and you discover that we are both--as grown, mature and intelligent adults--wading knee-deep in a culture of insecurities, over-reactions, emotional turmoils, immediate gratifications and damn-the-consequences agendas... We're adults stuck in an adolescent world.

Neil Postman has some interesting things to say about the "disappearance of childhood" in our modern Western culture which, because of the dominance of television and other multi-media, has destabilized the socialization of children into adulthood. Contemporary ritual theorists bemoan the lack of clearly defined social moments of initiation into adult life, replaced instead by relatively individualized benchmarks like first car, first sexual experience, first cigarette, first beer, first full-time job, etc. As childhood slowly shrinks, the in-between "adolescent" stage seems to grow ever more expansive, reaching back to include children of ten and younger, and forward to embrace adults in their early (and sometimes even late) 20s who are still living out the irresponsibility and frivolity of their college days. When our ubiquitous multi-media culture isn't busying shrinking childhood, it occupies itself with idealizing and romanticizing it. We've suddenly come to believe that children "shouldn't have to confront" difficult issues like war, violence, sex, diversity and free will. Parents lobby school districts to ban books they feel are "too adult" for their children to read. Even widely admired classics (not to mention books that address censorship and ignorance) aren't safe from our romanticization of a childhood free from struggle, risk and, in the end, growth.

Enter J.K. Rowling, and a charmingly normal, bit-too-skinny, ten-year-old boy named Harry Potter who suddenly discovers he has power and potential none of the adults around him want to admit, and furthermore, he has the chance to develop and utilize these powers either creatively, or destructively. Now, gee, why would anyone living in the modern world, struggling to emerge mature and whole from the mire of unending adolescence, be even remotely interested in such a silly story? After all, what are the Harry Potter books, class? They are children's books.

You can guess by now where this critique of Charles's review is going. Charles sees the Harry Potter sensation as a cause of or contributor to infantilism. What other reason could there be for adults reading books meant for kids? he demands. But I disagree. I see it as a symptom of, and a legitimate response to, the increasing dismissal of childhood as a "serious" stage of life, and the need to recapture--and perhaps relive--the transition into adulthood in a socially-shared way.

The remarkable aspect of the Harry Potter books is that the characters do grow up. The angst-ridden, isolated Harry of book five (The Order of the Pheonix) is not the same innocent, wide-eyed, puzzle-solving youth who fought a troll in the girl's bathroom in book one. By the end of book six, Harry has already confronted a large number of complex "adult" issues, including:

• the importance of friendship, and the appreciation of diversity and difference as necessary for a thriving, challenging community;
• the struggle for truth, and the ambiguity of "good" and "evil" in complex social and political institutions;
• the reality of death, and the existence of unmitigated injustice to which different people respond with different emotional needs;
• the potential for any human being to choose creativity and growth, or destruction and death, and the need to make such choices deliberately, conscious of their consequences;
• the role that hope (rather than despair), love (rather than fear) and sacrifice (rather than self-preservation) play in the inevitable initiation into adulthood.

Charles describes "the unique pleasures of reading a novel" as "that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private." Far be it for me to disagree, when I've only just written an ode of my own to solitude, stillness, contemplation and engagement. However, what Charles fails to consider is that, in a world that is increasingly "out of sync" with itself, the "thrilling unity" of the Harry Potter phenomenon may in fact serve a social function that has been increasingly neglected. After all, Harry Potter fans don't just watch the movies, buy the action figures and attend the midnight costume parties... they also read the books. What they respond to is not simply the hype of a mass-media experience, but the sense that others are also engaged, on a large scale, with the complexities and ambiguities these books address: that childhood is not frivolous, that it is not inaccessible to a jaded adult population, and that it can be an on-going source of growth and community even as it is transcended.

Harry Potter - Bad for America

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I recently announced on Twitter that I will not be tolerating any spoilers regarding the latest and last Harry Potter book (indeed, as of Friday afternoon, I will be going officially and completely "offline" for several days in order to revel in my reading without interruption or distraction). In response, a friend of mine announced (I hope playfully!), "Harry Potter is bad for America" and sent me a link to an article by Ron Charles published a few days ago in the Washington Post. Now, personally, any time someone says something is Bad for America, I tend to giggle a little bit and maybe wink conspiratorially in the direction of the responsible party. But being a thoughtful person with my fair share of crusades against ignorance and infantilism, I like to give even the most curmudgeony protester a chance to make their case.

So what exactly were Mr. Ron Charles's objections to the Harry Potter books? For most of the article, he dwells almost exclusively on the mass-marketing of the books (with their subsequent movies and merchandise) to seemingly intelligent, mature adults. He laments this "bad case of cultural infantilism," with its "Cap'n Crunch in a Gucci bag" adult editions of Rowling's books and the ever-increasing synchronization of the public's "fits of enthusiasm" on each book's worldwide release date. Of course, the same stunt was tried with the final two films of the Matrix Trilogy, which fell disastrously flat--so perhaps childish, synchronized enthusiasm for mass-marketed media is not the sole explanation for the Harry Potter books now decade-long success, after all.

Charles has, it seems, stepped beyond the job description of "book critic" and become an analyst of cultural trends. Since I'm not professionally qualified to be either, and yet here I am pretending to be both, I suppose I'm not one to complain. Furthermore, I don't entirely disagree with him regarding his general misgivings about the decline of serious readership, and the glorification, even among those who deem themselves "professional writers", of the "pop novel" which strives to be a book-version of what might as well be the latest Thursday-night television drama. I've ranted on about these very topics.

On the other hand, I am a fan of the Harry Potter books. I am also, I'd like to think, an intelligent, mature adult (no, I don't just play one on the internet). My tiny apartment is crammed with bookshelves, all creaking under the weight of myriad "serious" works of classical and contemporary fiction, as well as poetry, creative nonfiction, philosophy, mythology, and the like. Does this make me a hypocrite? No. Does it make me an exception to the "cultural infantilism" that so disturbs Charles? Perhaps. But I think, most importantly, it suggest that the Harry Potter craze is not a cause or contributor to the "death of reading" in America, but a symptom of much larger cultural trends. In a modern world where "seriousness" is often a synonym for cynicism, pessimism, irony and apathy, Rowling has written a set of books addressing "serious" subjects such as death, truth, morality, power, corruption, choice and hope--books that are not only accessible to children (whom we have, perhaps, learned to dismiss as potentially "serious" readers), but which actually trace the complicated process of growing into adulthood.

At this point, we might throw our hands up into the air as the debate over Harry Potter devolves into a passionate (and equally biased) he-said-she-said scuffle. Charles's only direct criticism of the books are regarding "the repetitive plots, the static characters, the pedestrian prose, the wit-free tone, the derivative themes," but he fails to cite any specific examples from the books themselves. Indeed, at the beginning of the article, he seems to imply that he has only ever read three and a half of what will be seven total books (the first three being by far the shortest, simplest and most "childish," as any Harry Potter fan will tell you). Is it possible that he is that notorious kind of critic, most annoying and belligerent of all--the kind who hasn't even read the books he's criticizing? Horror of horrors. Of course, we will forgive him for this possibility--we understand that his career demands that most of his time be spent reading "serious" novels written for "adults" and that he would have no reason to read children's books that his daughter had grown bored with. (We will also forgive him for assuming that, when a sleepy ten-year-old grows bored of listening to her father read a book in a disengaged monotone, it must mean the book is boring and the story is bad. After all, Mr. Charles is a book critic, not an expert on the various techniques of the artistic craft of oral story-telling.)

What is left for us, then? In my next post, I will look at some of the things that, as an actual reader of the Harry Potter books, I have most enjoyed and appreciated about the series. I'll discuss how I think the books' central themes address some of the underlying symptoms of "cultural infantilism" that concerns both Charles & me (and, I would guess, probably bothers Rowling as well). So, until then...