Nor is this entirely a bad thing. During my tenure at newWitch I was proud to present an excerpt from Christopher Knowles' Our Gods Wear Spandex. Knowles makes a strong argument that comics are the mythology of our day and superheroes our demigods and culture heroes. In Vodou and other African Traditional Religions imagery from religion and pop culture is frequently folded, blended, and reinterpreted to suit the practitioner's needs. If a Haitian Houngan can see Baron Samedi in Darth Vader, why can a Lokean not see Breaker of Worlds in the Joker's desire to watch the world burn?
I'm not calling on the devout to unplug their TVs and burn their silver-age Spiderman collection. I recognize that people have been inspired to fruitful spiritual activity by The Matrix series, the Star Wars saga and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If the Gods are present in all things, they must be present in the modern as well as the ancient. If we are going to honor Them in our space and apply Their lessons to our time, we must incorporate contemporary imagery and ideas into our veneration. If we are going to follow a living tradition, we must both honor old tales and create new ones. Yet while I accept the mass media as a valid spiritual source, I also have concerns about the way it treats religious expression.
Galina Krasskova often rails against hubris among Heathens. I agree that many Pagans and Heathens have serious entitlement, privilege and arrogance issues. But I also think there's something deeper and more disturbing going on here. These people treat the Gods and ancestors disrespectfully because they have no idea what constitutes respect; they are irreverent because they have never been shown what reverence is. If they know precious little about sacrifice for the community or the greater good, they know nothing at all about sacrifice for the Divine. And I believe our contemporary mythology and our ways of presenting it have a great deal to do with that shallowness.
Mass media characters may be loved and revered, but they're not worshipped. You may admire Superman or seek to emulate Spock's logical grace under pressure: you don't kneel in their presence and acknowledge them as holy. Whatever joy or knowledge you gain from a summer blockbuster or a graphic novel is earned from the safe distance of "just a movie" or "only a book." You can root for the rebels without landing in an imperial dungeon: you can cheer for Aslan without fear of becoming a foot soldier in some Narnian war. There is no emphasis on engagement or commitment. The religion that comes out of this worldview is often a Spectacle (in the Debordian sense of the word) where awe-inspiring is demoted to "totally awesome!" and the holy is replaced by "holy shit!"
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In this theology the good gods protect Earth with no thought of recompense and only the maddest and most evil of villains demand respect. In this theology personal relationships with your superfriends are the norm: who needs a deity when you can have a drinking buddy? With the advent of fanfic and role playing, it's perfectly acceptable to throw yourself smack into the middle of long-running interdimensional conflicts. And should things get too challenging you can declare yourself "over" the series and go on to a new fictional universe. You can discard Kali and take up Kwan Yin the way you might (and should) discard Twilight in favor of Bram Stoker. Given all this, can we be surprised that newcomers have a hard time distinguishing between revelation and fan fiction and between mystical experiences and Mary Sue stories?
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1 comment:
I'm probably going to bounce all over the place when it comes to this subject but I will start with my belief that the modern pagan movement has really created a subculture of religious narcissists. I've been to more than one pagan meetup where the gods are treated as cosmic cash machines, there to grant wishes like trans-dimensional genies, because they exist to console, coddle, and care for mankind.
The solitary paganism movement in the 90's did little to change this; so paganism isn't about a group of "religions" anymore but glorified self-help and self-help means complete autonomy even when dealing with entities that are gods deserving of worship. As our society becomes secular the idea of "worship" has attained sinister overtones, perhaps due to the me-centricity of modern Western culture, but possibly because so much of Protestantism is based on the idea that all you have to do is ask for forgiveness (and most of the time this doesn't include actual worship or even real repentance ) and everything is all right.
Would it be fair to say that many pagans bring this mentality into a religious umbrella they already think "has no rules?" And when most mainstream books treat gods like underwear, while referring to the legitimate orthopraxy of Judaism or Christianity as stifling, oppressive, or totalitarian; you don't have a religious umbrella; you have a refuge for a bunch of petulant teenagers who don't want to be 'told what to do' even by their gods.
Perhaps the first thing to do is get the idea across that Paganism is not "Christianity Lite." It's not a place you go to cling to Christian morals while spouting some nonsense about how all gods are one and they all exist to help you achieve cheap and easy enlightenment over a weekend. Perhaps we need to start stressing that 'religion' has the same meaning "over here" that it did "over there" and instead of allowing willful ignorance in the name of "free expression" set a standard of in what is, and is not, considered paganism.
That's a dangerous proposition in and of itself.
But if you look at history, gods were sacrificed to, worshiped, revered, and with festivals held in their honor; you can swap out Kali for Kwan Yin because they've been reduced to interchangeable archetypes based on the users needs. And yes, I did say user.
Considering that we are the ones worshiping, researching, and building home altars to these entities, I expect a lot better of us then what we do and what we are as a whole.
-Pythia Theocritos
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