Rites of Passage
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Meeting the Meat: An Animal Initiation
We are reasoning Pagans. We revere the Earth and Cosmos without gilding the lily with the supernatural. We are poets and singers, dancers and artists. We paint the sky with our pigments, our tones, our voices, the products of our loving hands. And under all that, all that lovely amazing late-evolution neocortical creativity and executive function, there is The Animal. The Animal that, frankly, kind of scares us. It’s sweating and eating and breathing and excreting and lusting, and none of that is under our control. It’s as if our consciousness is surfing a powerful, turbulent wave of capricious, hungry, insistent flesh…except that the consciousness is the wave, too, not…
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Approaching Sixty
A month from today, I will reach 60 years of age. I can’t believe it, honestly. I still feel 35. Where has all that time gone? Now, I’m aware that I can’t look at this dispassionately. A combination of the American cult of youth and the very real fact of impending mortality makes this a milestone I can’t ignore. And it is true: my body does not have the capacities it once did. I am no longer the man who scampered into the Sierra Nevada high country for solo backpacking trips every summer in his late 20s. Or even the one who paddled the Grand Canyon in his 30s. Aging…
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So, um…Wanna Get Ordained?
Today, I learned something amazing: In the U.S., if your religious organization’s income is ordinarily expected to be $5,000 per year or less, YOU DON’T HAVE TO FILE FOR TAX EXEMPT STATUS! What this means is that The Atheopagan Society is ALREADY a tax-exempt nonprofit. We have some steps we have to take, like formally convening the Society Council and filing some documents with the state, but we don’t have to mess with convincing IRS that we are a “real” religion until we have much higher income than is projected to be needed for the first year or two, at least. And so–like any religious nonprofit, anywhere–we can ordain people.…
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This Is a Way of Life. You Can Ritually Commit to It.
Atheopaganism is a Pagan path without “degrees”, levels of initiation, clergy statuses, etc. We’re all of equal value on this planet and in this practice, and so we say that any Atheopagan with the skills and inclination may, say, officiate at a wedding or a funeral, or perform pastoral counseling. What is important is not the “status” of the individual, but their abilities. This is why we emphasize learning ritual skills as a part of developing as an Atheopagan, because Atheopaganism isn’t just about what you believe; it’s about what you do. All that said, while neither I nor anyone else can “initiate” you as an Atheopagan, you can certainly dedicate…
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Effective Atheopagan Leadership: a Curriculum
As I’ve written before, my conceptualization of Atheopaganism as a path and a tradition does not incorporate concepts of degrees of advancement, or “clergy” as an elevated status within the religion. I just find such hierarchies to be fraught with too many pitfalls, ranging from “higher-level” persons gatekeeping access to knowledge and training from lower-level ones, to those with “status” potentially being able to leverage that status in unhealthy ways ranging from minor pomposity all the way to harassment and abuse. The whole idea of “initiations into secrets” is a holdover from secretive organizations like the Masons, with their roots in the Romantic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries. There…
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Rites of Passage #5: Memorials
Some time ago, I wrote a piece about Atheopagan Rites of Passage. In it, I described life milestones that might be celebrated by an Atheopagan, and which we as Atheopagan “clergy” (we’re all clergy, since we have none) might be asked to officiate over. On reflection, it occured to me that just talking about these rites of passage probably isn’t helpful enough: that having some guidelines for each such rite would be helpful to the community. So here is the final installment in the series: Rites of Passage. Note that the structure outlined below isn’t a formula; it’s a set of guidelines. Feel free to change any or all of its elements to…
