Magick in Action Blog Challenge 1: Viewing the Divine

Today I decided I would try creating a blog challenge loosely based on a transgender blog challenge I did a few months ago.  You can find the ongoing list of questions on this page (or in the link in the sidebar), along with details on the project.  They're a nice mix of social issues and practical questions.

The question I'm choosing to answer is:

How do you view the Divine?  Do you acknowledge or worship any Deities?  If so, what do you feel is the most appropriate way to honor them?

I have gone through a laundry list of different ways to be Pagan since I first converted back in I think 1997.  Like most Pagans I started off heavily influenced by Wicca and was going by the duotheistic "All Gods are One God, All Goddesses are One Goddess" system.  This was before I transitioned female-to-male and began identifying as queer, so it made more sense then than it does now.

Right now I consider myself a mostly-hard polytheist.  What I mean is that I acknowledge all of the Deities worshiped by humanity as being distinct individuals with their own desires, preferences, and cultural contexts, but I simultaneously view them as being parts of one major entity that I just refer to as "The Universe."  The big difference between this and regular soft polytheism (in which all Deities are viewed as one conglomerate Deity) is that I see all things as being a part of that one major entity.

I was a raging hard polytheist for a long time when I was going through a rebellious reconstructionist period sometime in the mid 2000s.  What changed that was something similar to the Gaia theory--the idea that the Earth can be viewed as an organism--and a smaller-scale but similar understanding that humans and other Earth life are actually systems of many organisms working together to maintain one entity.  For instance, cell by cell a human is built of more bacteria than actual human cells.  With the recognition that humans could be to the Earth what beneficial bacteria are to humans, the conclusion was that Deities could be considered one singular organism along with other entities sharing their space.

However, this mentality typically only really rears its head when I'm either doing very deep meditation or thinking about spiritual environmentalism.  The Gaia theory is excellent for motivating oneself to care about the environment, for instance.  For the most part I work as a hard polytheist.

Do I worship any Deities?  Yes.  Every once in a while a Deity flicks in and out of my life, but for the most part I have developed close relationships with select few Gods and Goddesses.  My Patron God and Father is Set from the Ancient Egyptian pantheon, who has been with me for well over a decade and is tattooed on my right deltoid.  When I was a Kemetic Orthodox member, I was divined as being a son of Set as well as Wepwawet, who I still honor, although to less a degree.  Coming in third is Sekhmet.  I also have some dealings with Djehuty/Thoth, who I work with because he is considered a Patron of computers, which is the field I'm currently in.

How I worship my Gods varies a bit, with most of it falling under a roughly Kemetic formula but with a modern and queer twist to it.  I have been known to view Set and Heru/Horus as consorts in queer workings, but this is pretty rare nowadays.

I occasionally try working with some Northern Tradition Gods and Goddesses, notably the Rökkatru (the more chaotic, dark Deities who white supremacists tend to hate; bonus!).  Notable among these are Loki and Sigyn, with Sigyn being the more common of the two.  I do not formally worship them, although in the future I might.

I don't feel that people are necessarily obligated to worship Deities in a reconstructionist manner, although when asked my opinion on the subject I do believe people should start with that and see where the relationship evolves from there.  Trying to fit Deities you have no relationship with into a Wiccan-esque ritual and just expecting it to just work out is something I find somewhat annoying, although to be fair most people who do this believe in the All Gods Are One God thing I was talking about above.

The "True Christians" Fallacy and Exceptionalist Language

There's a video going around that I am not going to watch because it sounds deplorable and as a queer man with mostly queer friends I am already aware of what coming out can entail in a supremely unfriendly family.  If you want to watch it, though, there's an article about it on The Advocate.  I'm not going to be talking about coming out, or really anything explicitly clear at all.  Instead I'm going to talk about Christian exceptionalism and how it relates to the way this article's title has been formed:

'Christian' Family's Terrifying Response to Son Coming Out

What I want you to notice in the use of quotation marks around the word "Christian."  I often have heard these referred to as "scare quotes," but I prefer to think of them as "sarcastic quotes" or "sarcastiquotes" if you're in a portmanteau kind of mood.  They refer to the quotation marks people put around a word not to suggest an actual quote or to refer to the word rather than the concept, but to imply that the word is inappropriate in the context it's being used.

It's really quite common when used to refer to bigoted Christian behaviors.  The implication is that bigotry is not natural to Christian theology, and because of that anybody who acts that way isn't really a Christian.

And I want you to quit doing that.  Really.  I do.  And here's why.

People brought up in the West, especially in the United States, more often than not separate Christianity out from all of the other world's religions as being exceptionally special in some way.  Even those of us who were ostensibly raised to be tolerant of other faiths can easily get wound up in a trap where we assume that Christianity generally speaking results in good things, therefore people who do bad things are just pretending to be Christians.  Hence, we call them "Christians," using quotes to separate them from the "real" Christians.

This extends heavily to the way people talk about the Bible, with critiques of bigoted behavior often stemming from the assumption that the Bible is all about loving one another and being a good person.  What's lost in this is that--like it or not--the Bible is in fact loaded with sexism, racism, homophobia, and the endorsement of scores of oppressive behavior.

And the insulting part is that this isn't arguable.  Bibles are abundant.  You can get them at any bookstore, you can order them for free, and you can even read the whole damn thing on the Internet in various versions and translations if you feel like it, and I have yet to read any convincing evidence that Christian bigots are actually wrong about what the Bible says.  Instead, people assume that--because we raised to believe Christianity and the Bible are exceptional and special--it must automatically support our own beliefs in justice and right, and the fundamentalists must be wrong.

So we denounce as un-Christian beliefs that are obviously Christian, in order to avoid the messy business of ever having to be perceived as denouncing anything to do with Christianity.

And this is rampant.  I mean, not too long ago professional transphobe, biphobe, and terrible sex columnist Dan Savage helped found a group called "Not All Like That," which exists specifically to tell queer people that not all Christians hate them without acknowledging either the privilege involved in being Christian in a Christian exceptionalist society or the immense amount of harm Christians as a collective community, not as individuals have done to queer people, trans people, women, and people of other faiths.

In addition to forcing non-Christians to tiptoe around the way we talk about Christianity and Christians to avoid hurting their fragile exceptionalist feelings, we also remove accountability from the Christian community in favor of focusing on a few bad apples who "aren't really Christians anyway."

In the West, this is something very specific to Christianity.  When people talk about abuse and oppression within Islam, they don't typically put quotation marks around "Muslim" to make it clear they don't mean all Muslims.  And when they put quotes around "Pagan" or "Witch," more often than not their motivation is to demean the existence of Paganism and Witchcraft rather than to specify that some oppressive Pagan jerk doesn't really represent all Pagans.

And unfortunately, this is something that spreads all throughout our language as well.  In reference to Christianity, the word "God" is practically always capitalized, whether it's used as a title or not; this is a gesture of respect that is rarely used for polytheistic religions.  It's considered perfectly acceptable to use Christian holidays as generic indicators of season and sentiment, and people fight at great length to make sure nobody ever suggests that a Christian should show a little respect and not say "Merry Christmas" or "God Bless You" to somebody whose religion is unknown to them.  And any non-Christian of faith* can easily tell you that "nondenominational" and "multi-faith" in the context of a prayer before a town hall meeting or a meal at summer camp means "generically Jesus."

What we need to be doing--as Pagans, and perhaps as people who are not Pagans but may have stumbled on this blog for some other reason--is being mindful wherever possible of the ways our language releases the Christian community from accountability and the ways it systematically denies linguistic equity to non-Christian minority faiths.



* -- Many atheists would understand this, too, but I've found that a lot of atheists interpret Christian-specific terminology and practice as being "generally religious" rather than Christian exceptionalist.

The Telling Silence on Ferguson from White Pagans and ATR Practitioners

Last year I went to a Pagan Pride Day event where a friend of mine and a future friend were facilitating a discussion on social issues in the Pagan community.  One of the subjects that was dwelled on by the participants was the suggestion that white Pagans need to improve our record on race issues.  The discussion basically went downhill right from the start, with the majority-white audience consistently falling back on the idea that if we just stop acknowledging race it'll go away, so we need to "be the movement" as it were and stop talking about race.

At the same time, Pagans--especially Eclectic Pagans, but also Pagans practicing religions heavily inspired by the ancestral cultures of people of color--often have the mentality that all spiritual knowledge and art is necessarily fair game for us, with many Pagans identifying as being inspired at least in partly by Native American spiritualities.

I was thinking about this as the events in Ferguson unfolded, beginning with the murder of unarmed black teen Michael Brown, the unwillingness of any law enforcement body to arrest and charge Darren Wilson for his crime, and the extreme breaches of human rights associated with the police response to protests of the murder.  I was thinking about it because I noticed that literally none of the organizations and groups I at the time followed that were run by white people and focused on African spiritual or magickal wisdom said anything about Ferguson.

I looked.  I waited.  I saw post after post of white people talking about Vodoun and Hoodoo and Santería, and not one bothered to even mention the horrendous racist abuses taking place.

I want you to think about this whenever you scoff at peoples' accusations of cultural appropriation.  People practicing religious and magickal systems developed and maintained, either in Africa or by black people in the Americas, with traditions often steeped in an understanding of a history of slavery and intense racism, and they all went about their business, preferring instead to chatter on about what new kits they're selling to a predominantly white fanbase instead.

Because when people get angry about cultural appropriation, this is the sort of thing that really encapsulates the problem.

White people--including white Pagans--are great at saying things like "race doesn't matter, so we should be ignoring race entirely."  This provides a convenient excuse for white Pagans to take inspiration from Native religions, or from Hoodoo, or from Vodoun, or from Asian religions, all under the assumption that because race is a social construction race does not matter.

The simple fact of the matter, though, is that when we ignore race, it's more accurate to say we are ignoring racism.

Because it just doesn't matter whether or not you as an individual are tolerant of all ethnicities, whether or not you as an individual would shoot an unarmed black man or you as an individual would take a Native child away from their family to place in a white household.  These are things that continue to happen today.  You can't ignore this away.  You have to take action.

And if you aren't willing to take action, then you have absolutely no rightful business even beginning to demand access to those peoples' spiritual knowledge and belief, let alone profit from them.

Experiments in Entomophagy

Flax seed and field cricket broccoli.

Those of you who found your way here from my other blogs probably are already aware that one of my personal projects reducing my environmental impact on the planet is entomophagy... in other words, I eat bugs.

There's a reason that it's progressed to this, and I'd like to share it with you.  When I was a Sophomore studying to get my Bachelor's degree, I decided to go vegan.  This seemed to work well for a while before it became evident that this was not good for my tag-team compliment of gastrointestinal issues and food addiction.  My trigger foods--foods that resulted in me overeating to the point where I literally could not pack anything else into my stomach--were plentiful on a vegan diet, and many of those same foods made me buckle in pain when I went to go lay down at night.  After three years of this I added dairy and eggs back into my diet, and after four more I began eating meat again, in the context of a paleo diet.  Provided I don't relapse into my food addiction behaviors, these symptoms have mostly went away.

It presented a problem environmentally, though.  First I need to mention that it's the height of missing-the-point to believe that paleo eaters are responsible for a higher ecological footprint than other omnivores.  There are two main reasons for that:

1. We don't necessarily eat more meat than other omnivores.
2. We are culturally more inclined to pick more sustainable meat, like grassfed, pastured, and/or organic.

Still, a lot of us eat beef, which time and time again is showing to be one of (if not the) biggest environmental liabilities; releasing ample greenhouse gases, involving a huge amount of industrial monocrops like commercial maize if you're not going grassfed (lamb, I hear, is worse... but in the United States we rarely eat it).  Even switching from beef to pork is significantly more environmentally friendly than beef.  So although I still eat it occasionally, I'm striving to eat much less of it, both by eating less meat in general (I've been on paleo long enough that the novelty of eating meat-meat-and-more-meat is gone anyway) and by changing what meat I eat.

I've also been dealing with financial stress, so I decided to go a direction I'd been flirting with for a while, which is to... well, start eating bugs.  As an individual at least, this is significantly more sustainable because I live on a four-acre patch of only lightly developed property, loaded to the brim with ample edible "weeds" in addition to our personal orchard, and part of that is a serious abundance of insects.

To be honest?  I'm still getting used to them.  Although they are so plentiful you literally can't step without being within an inch of a cricket, it's difficult to catch them in large quantities.  I've basically been brushing them five or six at a time into a bucket, and from that bucket to a bag, until I get enough for it to not look utterly ridiculous in the freezer.  For some context, it took two days of collecting for about an hour each day to get enough crickets to make maybe three tablespoons of crunchy roasted crickets.  These crispy crickets actually taste really good.  They're kind of like potato chips with a grassy, shrimpy flavor that's very receptive to almost any seasoning.  But I have yet to seriously get over the fact that I am eating a cricket!

Regardless of the ick factor, provided you do not over-harvest* and especially if you're somewhere that's practically infested with them like I am, insects are a lot more sustainable than fish, mammal, or fowl, with very little extra impact.  So I'll be working on incorporating more insects into my diet with the intent to make it a noticeable and viable part of my diet.




* - In the future, if entomophagy really takes hold and sticks, maybe over-harvesting will be a problem.  I, personally, go by the method I learned in the Eat-a-Bug Cookbook by David Gordon:  Only harvest an insect if you're sure there are at least twenty more in that area for each one you take.

Illusions of Ecology in the Pagan Community

"Obviously I'm an environmentalist, I worship nature!"

This is the gist of the mentality I have typically associated with my Pagan friends.  It's not that they don't care, mind you.  It's that--and this is not unique to Pagans--it's very easy to get wrapped up in the mentality of eco-friendliness without really acting on or even understanding where we are impacting the planet the most and how to combat that.

Just for starter's, I'm going to list a bunch of traits that are commonly found or promoted among Pagans.  Stay with me, here:

• Nature worship.
• Worshiping outdoors.
• Love of being outside/camping.
• Worship of nature-oriented Deities.
• Honoring of the changing of the seasons.

These are all well and good, but here's the problem:  Not one of these actually makes a person environmentally-friendly.

I read an article recently that in a nutshell argued that Pagan environmentalism is going downhill because the consciousness we had decades ago is degrading in favor of consumerism and narcissistic use of technology, especially the tendency to have too much of our Pagan organizing be online rather than out in nature.  There's definitely something to be said about the consumerism in the Pagan community (and I guarantee I'll talk about that a lot here), but it's a huge mistake to assume that going outside more, worshiping Gaia, being naked outside, and camping a lot make somebody an environmentalist.  In fact, I'd argue that these actions make it very easy to be complacent about major environmental issues because we assume that we aren't part of the problem.

I went to Pagan Spirit Gathering last year, and in retrospect it was a very crushing reminder for me just how complacent I had gotten with the entire subject of the environment.  This gathering is over 175 miles away from me, and at the time my only vehicle was a beat up Dodge truck that got 15 miles a gallon on a good day, which I drove there alone for almost three hours each way.  The entire trip for me used well over 20 gallons of gasoline, and this sort of drive (and longer) was not an uncommon situation for festival-goers.  But hey, most of them did stay the whole week and did not come alone.

While there, I witnessed many people doing the communing-with-nature thing and doing some reasonably eco-friendly things.  There were a lot of vegetarians, many had brought organic snacks, there were people constantly reminding each other to use recycling bins, there was even a woman who collected rainwater for personal use.

And you know what?  It was a fucking mess.  Really, it was.  The constant reminders to recycle led to so many people confusedly mixing too much non-recyclable stuff in the recycle bins, there was trash everywhere, there was loads of food waste from people trying to take too much fresh food for the length of their stay, and the dumpsters at the end were filled to the brim with perfectly usable camping supplies that people just hadn't bothered to bring along: tents that were decided to be too difficult to fold, chairs with minor scuffs on them, and so forth.

This led to a meeting-of-shame on the last day, with a few people lecturing the participants, some of whom were tearing up in the audience because as Pagans we want to have a deep respect for the Earth.  The recognition that you are not being as environmentally friendly as you think you are is seriously painful.

The problem is that crying over already-completed environmental devastation does nothing in and of itself.  It reminds me of people who pray over already-purchased scratch-off tickets.  OK, it might galvanize some individuals, but keep in mind that this event took place in 2013, and from what I hear things haven't markedly improved since then.

And no, the Internet didn't do that.  In fact, it's probably always been that way.  It's ridiculously easy to completely ignore very obvious sources of environmental impact just by performing a few surface actions, maybe even ones that aren't that eco-friendly anyway (again, and I hate to have to drill it in so much, but just "being in nature" is not environmentally friendly).  So we might promote recycling or buy organic vegetables but then ignore things like how much and what kind of meat we eat, how much we drive, and how much energy we expend promoting environment-preserving legislation.

The point here isn't that Pagans are environmentally unfriendly pond scum, but that we have just as long to go as everyone else and have no business hiding behind Gaia and Green Man as if these are inoculations against environmental criticism.