Personal Reflection
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The Ecstasy of the Mosh Pit
I love punk rock. I was in high school at exactly the period that disco became a popular genre (which means that it was already dying in the gay bars and minority clubs where it had been born; by the time straight white people took it—because there was money to be made—it was pretty well wrung out). Those years–1975-79–saw some of the most godawful popular music that had been seen to date: lush, overproduced orchestral rock anthems with pretentious lyrics, whiny love ballads, the Eagles (enough said) and ubiquitous disco enjoinders to dance and screw, the soundtrack of the Seventies Bacchanal that set the table for the AIDS epidemic. There were exceptions, of…
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A No-Bullshit Religion
A week or so ago, when I published “Is Atheopaganism Political?“, I expected some pushback. I suspected that there might be some who have embraced—even subconsciously—the dualistic idea that religion/spirituality lives in a separate realm of human experience from that of pragmatic matters such as public policy. So I thought there might be some commentary along the lines of “well, that’s okay for you, but I don’t concern myself with such things.” Or some such. I doubted you, friends, and I should not have. There was no such response. Feedback was nothing but positive. And this tells me that the Atheopagan group and the readers of the blog get it: that our pursuit of…
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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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Crickets, Time, and Paying Attention
This time of year, the chorus of crickets is a nightly affair. It’s evocative. It speaks of every summer evening there ever was. As it turns out, there is more to cricket’s song than the equivalent of “Hey, baby!” in High Cricket. Think about the speed at which a cricket lives: at room temperature, its heart beats many times faster than that of a human being. It lives only about 90 days. So slow it down. Slow it down until the sound is at the relative speed of a human life. And what it becomes is angelic. The cricket’s song reminds me to slow down and pay attention. Life is fleeting. There are…
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My Favorite Ritual Tool
Ritual tools are personal things. They are objects that we find evocative, meaningful, symbolic. They whisper stories to us, and those stories are folded into the meaning of the rituals which we perform with them. Atheopagans vary widely in the kinds of ritual tools they use, including those who don’t use tools at all. The use of tools in rituals—typically, ritual knives (“athames”), wands, patens or pentacles, chalices and incense burners and so forth—is one of the threads of Western occultism that was woven into the fabric of Neopaganism as it arose in the mid-20th century, and it persists today in most of the Wicca-style Pagan traditions. I use tools…
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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…
