Atheology
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Mythology: The Guardian Trees
This is another in my series of mythological stories about Sonoma County (see “Storytelling and the Mythic Landscape”.) What if this happened, long ago? Now, everyone knows that the Sacred Earth gives birth to all of us, and takes us back into itself and makes new creatures when we die. This is the way of Life: those whose time has come are eaten to sustain the living, and when our time comes, we get eaten, too. But what some people don’t know is that the Earth does the same thing with the very lands themselves, like our Sonoma. When their time is done, they, too, go back into the ocean, the source…
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Is Atheopaganism Political?
People’s relationships with the world of public policy, elections and world affairs vary widely. For some, they are background noise, irrelevant distractions to the matters of their own lives, beliefs and practices. There are many Pagans like this. While they may espouse political opinions or share memes on Facebook, they’re not doing much to change the world through political or activism channels. Some of them don’t even vote, expressing the bizarre idea that by refusing to take a stand in an election, they are somehow taking a more important stand in a larger context. (Personally, I don’t get it. I don’t see how one can believe that doing nothing is…
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Audio: Storytelling and the Mythic Landscape
Another in my series of Sonoma Stories: mythology for a sacred landscape of meaning. Text version here.
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Storytelling and the Mythic Landscape
Throughout human history, religions have communicated their values and moral codes through storytelling. Both oral traditions and literate societies passed their metaphorical teaching stories from generation to generation. These stories illustrated the values of their cultures, gave explanations for how they had come to exist as distinct groups, and often populated the home landscapes of these cultures with mythological beings and histories. As a whole, such myths had the effect not only of passing along the beliefs of their peoples, but of enchanting their landscapes. Major features of the lands where these people lived—rivers, mountains, geological features— became associated with stories of heroism, discovery, innovation, and lessons learned. Where I live—North America—the vast…
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Accountability: a Pagan Missing Piece?
There’s been some discussion of the concept of “sin” in the Pagan blogosphere lately: here, and here, and my own contribution some time ago, here. Now, I should say: that’s a freighted word for many people, but not so much for me. I was never a Christian, nor a Jew nor Muslim. So I don’t feel the oppressive weight of the concept of sin that those religions transmit. Please bear this in mind as you read the following. I’ve been involved with the Northern California Pagan community for a long time–30 years next year. And in that time, I have seen a deep imbalance between the community’s orientation to pleasure-seeking…
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The Sacred Body
We are unique manifestations of the Universe. Each of us is a roll of a billion dice, a singular event in the history of the Cosmos that has never been before, nor will be again. And what we comprise—all that we are, insofar as the available information would indicate—is of our bodies. We are our bodies. It is our bodies which perceive, which act, which experience. Our bodies which think, which feel, which create. Our bodies are, in fact, the Universe perceiving itself. The Cosmos crafted each of us, according to physical laws played out in near-miraculous, painstaking detail. Each of us is a magnificent expression of the Universe…one that…
