Religion is my fandom

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been interested in religion, my own and other people’s. One of my earliest memories involving books is of a volume of Greek myths for children; something about the illustrations disturbed me, and I wound up lying awake in bed, convinced that a vulture was going to come out of the closet and eat my liver. (Perhaps the worst part was that I was not at all sure where my liver actually was.)

I cut my teeth, so to speak, on Greek mythology, on Norse mythology as illustrated by the D’Aulaires and by Willy Pogany, and on Egyptian mythology filtered through books on archaeology and ancient Egyptian culture. I pored over color plates of Tutankhamen’s treasures and learned the story of the cursed ring, the original one, from the Volsungasaga rather than the Nibelungenlied: Sigurd and Brynhild, Andvari and Gudrun.

But I also got interested very early in religion as well as mythology–people’s beliefs and practices, as well as their stories. Perhaps the thing that got me hooked was that big red Time-Life volume on Religions of the World. It had text, and I read the words, but while I was a good reader at a young age, what I remember now–as with the D’Aulaires’ book and Padraic Colum’s The Children of Odin–is the pictures: The D’Aulaires’ Thor glaring through his bridal veil; Pogany’s slender Loki and his up-curling hair, nibbling daintily on Gullveig’s burnt black heart; the two-page color painting of all those Hindu gods and goddesses, with Vishnu and Lakshmi on one page, Shiva and Parvati on the other, Brahma and Sarasvati split by the spine, and all sorts of gandharvas, apsarases, nagas, and lesser deities around them; the golden vestments of a Greek Orthodox priest, offering communion to a small child on a silver spoon; the intensely saffron robes of Buddhist monks.

By the time I was ten, I think, I had graduated to books with more words than pictures. I recall a book with some black-and-white photos that I think was called The Five Great Religions; Amazon lists a book by that title with a publication date of 1974, which sounds about right. This book had chapters on Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and one other–what was it? Hinduism? Sikhism, possibly? I’m not sure. But books like the Time-Life volume, and The Five Great Religions, and Religions of the World, which must have been a college-level textbook with chapters on everything from Mesopotamian polytheism to Shinto, all taught me one important lesson. They taught me to think of Christianity not as Religion, but as one religion among others–a great and important religion, a world religion (unlike limited and local polytheisms), but still just one of many, and by no means the most colorful or interesting one. The pictures in the chapters on Christianity had nothing on that sensual and colorful spread of the deities of Hinduism.

Another thing that strikes me now is how very dull those books made Buddhism look. I realize now that they concentrated on the Theravada traditions of Burma, Thailand, and Ceylon, which focus on self-liberation through the monastic life. In those cultures, people who can’t go off and live lives of monastic renunciation basically can’t do anything meritorious except support the monastics and hope for a favorable rebirth in which such a life will be possible. I’d have gotten interested in Buddhism much sooner if they’d offered me descriptions of Vajrayana ceremonies and pictures of thangkas or dancing lamas. (That’s “lama” with one “L”.)

Discovering Imbolc

I have a confession to make.  It’s a terrible, embarrassing confession for anyone who’s a Druid or any kind of Celtic Pagan.  Please don’t judge me, I can’t help myself.  Here it is: I don’t celebrate the goddess Brigid at Imbolc.

Ever since I first became interested in Druidry and Celtic Neopaganism, I have tried to cultivate a relationship with Brigid, the great threefold goddess of Ireland.  She is the daughter of the great god Dagda, the goddess of poetry, healing, and smithcraft, the protectress of hearth and household, the giver of milk and butter.  She was so widely worshipped that She refused to go away but simply converted to Christianity along with the people, and Her sacred fire at Kildare (which is Cill Dara, the shrine of the oak) was tended by nuns in place of priestesses, but it was kept alive until the Reformation.

The flame at Kildare was re-kindled in the 1990s by an Irish Catholic nun, and it has been tended ever since.  All around the world, devotees of Brigid as saint and as goddess take their turn tending Her flame, lighting it on personal shrines and altars, praying to the creative, nurturing, healing Lady of the flame.  As She was widely honored before the coming of Christianity into Ireland, so She is widely honored now, by Druids, Wiccans, Christians, Pagans of all sorts.  But not by me.

I’ve tried.  I’ve been a member of at least two flame-keeping orders.  I’ve written Her poems.  I’ve prayed to Her.  I’ve hung Her woven wicker cross around the house and at my workspace.  And despite all my efforts, I’ve never felt a response from Her, nor have I felt more than a mild affection for Her.  Once I had made contact with deities who were actually interested in me, it became apparent how tenuous and one-dimensional my relationship with Brigid had always been.

So every year at this time, when the feast of Imbolc rolls around, I’ve felt vaguely grumpy, vaguely guilty, and more than a little confused, because everyone around me is celebrating Brigid–even the Church–and I am not.

This year, however, I think I’ve finally figured out what Imbolc means for me.

Reconstructionist pagans like to point out that “the Wheel of the Year” is a 20th-century invention and that no pagan culture of the past celebrated all eight of its festivals with equal emphasis on each.  Even in Celtic cultures, Imbolc, Beltaine, Lughnasad, and Samhain were not all equally important in all regions at all times.  However, the Wheel of the Year works for us Neopagans, and I think it does so for three reasons: One, each of its festivals *has* been celebrated in European culture; two, each festival corresponds to regular climatic changes, though not the same changes in every environment; and three, each festival corresponds to an astronomical/astrological event.  The old Celtic festivals, also called the “cross-quarter days”, correspond to the Sun’s arrival at fifteen degrees of what are called the Fixed Signs of the Zodiac: Imbolc in Aquarius, Beltaine in Taurus, Lughnasad in Leo, and Samhain in Scorpio.

Sometime in the past year, I began to make an effort to look around, pay attention, and sense what is really happening at those eight points of the year, in my environment, in my neighborhood, in my relationships, in myself.  I determined to base my celebrations of the seasons not on traditional explanations, not on what other people were doing, not on what The Book said (no matter how helpful and reliable That Book seemed to be), but simply on What Was Happening.  While I was slogging through the mild depression that often comes for me this time of year, I somehow noticed a number of important things.

The first is that February is often the coldest month of the year in my state.  November and December can be very mild; we may not see snow till January.  But in February, just as the days are getting longer and brighter, when you start to feel better because you’re not leaving for work *and* returning home both in the dark, the temperatures drop, the wind picks up, and snow, sleet, and ice arrive to coat the ground.  Fire and ice, extremes of creation.

Despite the chill, the first flowers typically come up.  I saw some hardy dandelions first, and by the end of last week, the crocuses in the neighborhood park had returned, purple and yellow.  I greeted them like old friends back from vacation.

There’s an old legend that birds choose their mates on Valentine’s Day.  As with so many old legends, there’s truth behind this notion: At least some species of birds in my neighborhood begin showing courting behaviors as early as Imbolc.  Actual nesting may not take place till after the vernal equinox, or later, but a bird’s fancy may turn to thoughts of love while the days are still cold and fairly short.  (Chaucer, who mentions birds mating on the feast of St. Valentine, was also right about birds sleeping “with open eyen”.  I wonder how he knew.)

In the past couple of weeks, I realized for the first time that I always, annually, reliably have a creative surge around Imbolc.  New creative projects suggest themselves which I may spend the rest of the year pursuing.  This year I returned to writing practice, as taught by Judy Reeves and Natalie Goldberg, pulled out and read over stories I wrote in my late teens, found the germ of a new idea there, and began re-writing an early work.  In addition, I’ve been playing the harp we were gifted at Christmas, and, as you can see, I’m starting to blog more frequently.

The creative surge rising up in me is the same surge that pushes the crocuses out of the ground and urges the birds to pair off–”the force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age,” as Dylan Thomas so memorably put it.  There is something in the ground, driving upward; my Grand ArchDruid calls it “the telluric current”, R.J. Stewart calls it “the Rising Light Below”, other traditions have other names.  It is a force of creation and creativity, and I said to myself, quietly, that the chief meaning of Imbolc, for me, is creativity, creative idea, energy, and action.

But there was more.  I found myself looking up at the stars, spotting Orion and the Big Dipper, watching the orange twinkle of Mars creep from east to west overhead.  I found myself thinking about the current running through the ground, rising up in creation and procreation, and the currents of the stars.  And every Monday I lit incense in honor of a goddess who told me to call her Dana.

Others, I think, have called her Danu and Don.  She is the goddess of the night sky, of space, and of the stars.  The Milky Way belongs to her, that river of white light overhead which is how we see the galaxy of which we are a part.  She is also the goddess of rivers; the Danube notably bears her name.  I associate her with the river that runs through my state, through my city, that caused European settlers to build here; much diminished, much polluted, it is still swift, still numinous.  The tracks of the light rail line run along its banks to the north of the city, and on a recent trip, I heard a man my age who sounded suspiciously Pagan talk about how he used to fish there and even ate what he caught, and how that wasn’t possible any more.

The same current that runs through the earth also runs through the sky, and vice versa.  Druidry, whether ancient or Revived, knows this, as does the Hermetic tradition, which epitomized it in the famous dictum, “As above, so below.”  The Milky Way in the sky, and the milk of lambing ewes on earth; the rushing of the rivers, and the rushing of the stars; the creative urge to write and make music in me, and the presence of Dana in the night, creating goddess, mother of stars and waters.

It all came together in a marvellous piece by the Irish choral group Anuna called “Shining Water” :

Shining water, silent daughter, face turn from the sun
Guiding light through silver night, your songs blend into one
Crystal morning dew is forming, falling through the trees
Deep inside your simple guidance whispers on the breeze

Danú, danú, danú, danú Dé
Danú, danú, danú, danú Dé

Danu, Don, Dana, the giver–however you pronounce her name, under her guidance, I have finally discovered Imbolc.

Spring after winter

It’s been a whole season in pagan time since I last updated: Alban Arthuan, the celebration of the Winter Solstice, has given way to Imbolc, the first wakening of the earth, commemorated by the Church and popular culture as Candlemas, the feast of St. Brigid of Kildare, and Groundhog Day. While my part of North America has had unseasonably warm and even humid weather during this time, I’ve been undergoing an appropriate hibernation, a cold and dark winter of the spirit that I think is just beginning to lighten.

I dislike using the words “dark night of the soul”. St. John of the Cross, who coined that term, meant something specific by it, specific to his type of Christian mysticism. While I don’t claim to understand what he meant, I do feel sure that a good many people who use the phrase are not having the experience Fray Juan had out of which he coined that description, especially if they are using it to mean a depressed and sleepless night in a comfortable bed. So I won’t say I had “a dark night of the soul”. “A winter of the spirit” seems to work, however. If the external weather was more like late fall than deep winter, if even January was warmer than it’s wont to be, my internal weather has been pretty bleak. Magical work has ground to a halt. The gods who seemed so present, so communicative, for most of last year, fell silent and seemed to disappear, as if they’d gone south with the birds. There were days I did not know how much longer I could bear getting up before the sunrise, waking my companion birds in order to feed and water them, working in a windowless office, then coming home after dark. The one bit of leaven in this heavy loaf was that I began writing in a notebook again, keeping a journal on paper, doing Morning Pages a la The Artist’s Way, and generating lots of raw creative material in daily writing practice.

I spent a lot of time thrashing around, internally, flailing helplessly, starting things and not finishing them, and asking the gods Why? and Where are you? and What have I done? I didn’t make any progress flailing and thrashing, and I haven’t gotten any answers to my questions. But as so often after these periods of trying to save myself from drowning by an agonized dog-paddle that has me going round in circles, I find myself back where I started, ready to get my feet under me. I always come back to quoting “Little Gidding”, from Eliot’s Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

After all my exploring, in the dark, I arrive again at Druidry and know it as for the first time, know that no other name better fits my spirituality, no other spiritual tradition best fits my need. My Anglican background is deeply important to me, and I watch the fighting in the Anglican Communion from a safe distance and with dismay, fearful lest all that is good in that tradition be lost to literalism or progressivism. I learnt the practice of magic from the New Hermetics, and I’m excited as I’m about to undertake teaching my first student in that tradition. There is room in Druidry for those Anglican influences, there is room for the magic of the New Hermetics, there is room for the creative writing that has obsessed me at least since first grade, there is room for sacred housekeeping and sacred sexuality and a center for all these in nature spirituality, in a luminous world.

The world was luminous this morning as I walked to work under clearing skies. Sunrise is getting earlier, sunset later, and the sun’s daily track higher across the sky. I felt more alive than I did yesterday. May your world be luminous also.

Light in darkness, Word made flesh: A Druid’s Christmas

Family obligations have loomed large over the past week, as I suspect is true for many of my readers. Whether you call it Christmas, Yule, or Alban Arthuan, the celebration of the Winter Solstice is a kind of cosmic vortex in our culture; it even sucks in basically unrelated holy days like Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. And gathering with family remains an important part of the celebration, even in the face of economic oracles trying to prognosticate the next year’s events from a few weeks’ commercial activity.

On Christmas Eve, due to those family obligations, I was at Midnight Mass in a very high Episcopal church–not merely High, but Anglo-Catholic. The choir, accompanied by strings and woodwinds, sang a lovely Schubert Mass while the people around the altar carried on a ceremonial which Pope Benedict XVI would have recognized and approved, despite its being delivered in sixteenth-century English. During the rather rambling sermon, the homilist touched all too briefly on something which has always seemed to me to be the core of Christian doctrine and set me musing about it.

He referenced a prayer attributed to St. Leo the Great, Bishop of Rome and one of those theologians the Roman Church honors with the title of “Doctor”. In the Roman liturgy it is used when water and wine are mixed in the chalice in preparation for the consecration of the Eucharist; in the 1979 Prayerbook of the Episcopal Church in the USA, it is the Collect for the Second Sunday after Christmas:

O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

That bit about “sharing the divine life” caught my attention probably when I was a teenager. I discovered that while nobody talked about it very much, the Church taught, and had for a long time, that God became human so that human beings could become divine. In the Eastern Church, this teaching is called “theosis”, and it has never faded from attention. What happens after sin is forgiven, the soul is justified by the work of Christ, and the rest of life stretches out ahead of you? Well, you experience theosis; you get divinized. Methodist teaching about sanctification is not dissimilar; theosis and sanctification are both about What the Holy Spirit Does Besides Look Pretty in Paintings.

If I had been preaching that Christmas Eve sermon, I would not have gone on to talk about how baby Jesus grew up to die and how the manger and the cross were both made of wood. I would have talked more about the Creator of All becoming a finite human being so that other human beings could experience the infinite. I would have talked about the transformation of human life, human experience, and all of the material world through divine grace. I would have talked about what I call the “Plan A” theory of the Incarnation: That the Word becoming flesh was not merely a fix for sin, a reaction to the fall of Adam and Eve (several thousand years delayed), but the reason for the Creation, that is, the Divine Plan A for the universe, not a hasty Plan B. I came up with this theory on my own as a thoughtful young person and then discovered I hadn’t invented it; John Duns Scotus formulated it first, and there are resonances of it in the Revelations of Julian of Norwich, a medieval text which shaped my Christian spirituality for decades.

As I sat there on Christmas Eve amidst the poinsettias and the candles, the robed choir and the string players and the ministers vested in shining red and gold, I thought about my own extremely simple Winter Solstice ritual and about the Plan A theory of the Incarnation, and I had one of those “I am eternally Anglican” moments. I still, after almost three years now in Druidry, don’t see any other reason for anything to exist than to become divine. You, me, that rock on the sidewalk, the homeless person crouched in a doorway, that tree with broken, that reckless driver who almost hit you, your grandmother, everyone, everything–potentially a god or goddess. Potentially divine. Possessed of Buddha nature, as the Mahayana tradition teaches. All of us Word made flesh, light in darkness, able to shine.

Resolutions, fulfillments, and endings

Druid Blog 12/20/2007

In the personal Druid calendar which I follow, this is the month of Ruis, pronounced “rweesh”, the month of the elder tree. In the Ogham-based lunar calendar which I and many other Druids follow, it is the last month of the year, and the cycle begins again with the moon that waxes after the Winter Solstice. (Obligatory disclaimer: the Ogham lunar calendar is not an Ancient Druid Tradition, but a useful modern innovation mostly inspired by the poetic musings of Robert Graves in The White
Goddess.)

John Michael Greer, the Grand ArchDruid of my Order, calls Ruis “a few of resolutions, fulfillments, and endings”. My daily meditations on the attribute of this few, its traditional word oghams, its associated color, bird, animal, and so forth, have led me to see that this year, the secular year which is also about to end, has been a year of endings for me.

The most significant ending I experienced was the death of my father-in-law, after a year and a half of his slow decline from pancreatic cancer. His sudden passing after falling in the night and injuring his head was a relief to all of us, but of course I still miss him terribly. I sang with the choir at his elaborately formal Anglo-Catholic funeral and knew that what we did was a magical act; by our ritual, by the music we sang, we opened the gates to the Other World for him, ushered him through, and saw them close behind him. His ashes are interred at the church where he was such an important member, and frankly, I wonder how the parish will get along without him. He was an educator, an administrator, a performer, a prankster, a dear parent to me.

The other significant ending that dominates my thoughts in these last days before the solstice is not unrelated to my father-in-law’s death. This year, 2007, will stand out for me as the year that I finally left the Church. I have been trying to leave the Church since I was thirteen, when I read the newly published The Spiral Dance, and realized that some people did still worship the old gods I had read so many stories about, and not just in India or other “backward” countries. Like a woman in a bad marriage, with a husband by turns solicitous and abusive, I have left the Church and the Christian religion over and over again, only to come back when I needed something–structure, community, reassurance–that Neopaganism could not give.

This year, I finally realized that the Church was not actually giving me anything. It was no longer a question of there being some missing element in my Pagan spiritual practice that only the Church could provide. It was a question of feeling my Christian spiritual practice actually sucking the life out of me. I also realized that the Church as I knew it, the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. and its Anglican cousins around the world, had changed drastically, in ways that left me feeling irrevocably an outsider. On the one hand were conservatives who clung to the heritage of music and Prayerbook liturgy that I loved, but rejected the personhood of women, homosexuals, and anyone not inclined to agree with their highly literal, highly un-Anglican interpretations of the Bible. On the other was the American Church, boldly ordaining women, gays, and lesbians to the priesthood and the episcopate, speaking out for justice, yet ready to throw out the baby with the bathwater and jettison the old prayers, the old hymns, the old customs without critical examination. I reached a point where I looked at the traditions of my Druid Order, at the history of the Druid Revival, at the respect for music, poetry, creativity, and nature, and realized that the Druids were more Anglican than the Anglicans.

I became a Druid, in other words, so I could keep on being an Anglican. However, I also became a Druid, and ceased to be a Christian, because I discovered polytheism. Thanks to Greer’s book A World Full of Gods, I saw that polytheism could make good intellectual sense as a description of the world; in fact, it often provided a better description of how things work than monotheism does. And thanks to certain spiritual experiences, I saw that it was possible to have a real, functional relationship with a being who can only be contacted through meditation and imagination, a thing which decades of Christian prayer and meditation had not demonstrated. In the space of a few months, I have developed more vital and more intimate relationships with a particular set of deities than I ever had with Jesus. Gods and goddesses whose existence is known to us principally by monuments with Gaulish inscriptions and remains of Roman-influenced temples and statues became more real to me, and more helpful to me, than the exalted figure who is the subject of four canonical sacred biographies, at least that many non-canonical ones, and countless numbers of books from the first century of the Common Era right up to the twenty-first.

Leaving the Church, leaving Christianity, leaving Jesus has been very much like getting a divorce. Even though I have new deities, a new tradition, and a new community in my life, in the form of my pantheon, Revival Druidry, and AODA, I’ve gone through grief and mourning, anger and bitterness for what I left behind. I can keep the anger to a minimum by avoiding news of the shameful and heartbreaking controversies in the Anglican Communion, but the grief and the sense of loss remain.

My comfort at this time of endings is in one of the chief things that Druidry teaches, in company with other Neopagan traditions: No ending is final. The days are getting shorter, but they will not contract forever until we live in an endless night. We know when the cycle begins anew and the days begin to lengthen once more. The moon that rises ever later as it shrinks will eventually catch up with the sun and begin to wax again. In some ways the old year ended at Samhain, and the six weeks from then till now have been a time of waiting in-between–much like the Christian Advent season with which I grew up. Now the solar year and the lunar year as well as the secular, Gregorian year are about to begin again. As I wait for the solstice, which we Druids call Alban Arthuan, I am also waiting to see what will begin anew in my own life.

Your druidic quote for the day

Our understanding of the roles of the ancient Druid prompts us to follow them in an involvement in the academic, artistic and social justice arenas, as well as in purely spiritual and religious matters.

Acorn

Druid Order of WhiteOak

Flame from a distant altar

 I’ve come to a conclusion about something:  If there’s any religion that can substantiate a claim to be The One True Religion in the World, it’s Buddhism.

I know that’s a pretty strange thing for me to say, an Episcopalian turned Druid who never quite accepted Christianity’s claims to be the One True Way.  (I always found other people’s religions too interesting.)  I’ve come to this conclusion, and to the point of daring to voice it aloud, after more than a year of reading about Buddhism, particularly Tibetan Buddhism, of experimenting with sitting meditation, of looking at Tibetan Buddhist sacred art and listening to Tibetan Buddhist ritual music.

My conclusion is that Buddhism is not so much a religion as a philosophy and a set of disciplines or a toolkit that can merge successfully with any existing religion and transform it.  Even a cursory glance at Buddhism and its history–and, to be truthful, that’s about all that a year’s study amounts to–shows that it melded with pre-existing religions in India, its birthplace, in China, Japan, Tibet, and the rest of southeast Asia.  Each of the great traditions of Buddhism has its own flavor, imparted by the teachers who carried it but also by the cultures that received it. The twist is that by “religion” I mean exactly the opposite of what most Western thinkers have meant by it for over 1500 years: I mean what is now called polytheism, animism, pantheism, ancestor worship, in other words, everything that “religion” meant before the monotheisms of Christianity and Islam began to dominate world culture.

The more I learn about Tibetan Buddhism, the more I find it essentially sane.  Underneath its exotic, colorful surface, underneath its intellectual complexity, it is essentially sane and simple.  It is about love, defined as wishing others to be happy; compassion, wishing others to be free from suffering; joy, sharing others’ pleasure in their own happiness; and equanimity, having love, compassion, and joy toward all beings impartially.  It’s about dedicating one’s own quest for freedom, wisdom, empowerment to being able to help others get free.  It emphasizes the basic goodness of all beings, the basic joy and freedom of existence, the nobility of bodhichitta.  Bodhichitta is hard to translate into English, because the Sanskrit word “chitta” means both “heart” and “mind”.  Bodhichitta is the wise heart and mind that seeks to liberate all beings from delusion so that they can be their best selves; it is the motivation to succeed in order to help others.

In addition to its essential sanity, the other quality which Tibetan Buddhism impresses on me is its completeness.  Again, I’m going to have to talk about that by first using words from Buddhist tradition, then backing up and seeing how those definitions might apply outside Buddhism.

Buddhism has described itself for centuries in terms of three “vehicles” or yanas.  The Hinayana or “Little Vehicle” is the way of the seeker concerned with his or her own condition: achieving enlightened awareness and getting out of the trap of rebirth, desire, frustration, death, rebirth, which in Sanskrit is samsara. It’s about cleaning up your own act, pure and simple.  The Mahayana or “Great Vehicle” introduces the notion of bodhichitta, which is practiced by the bodhisattva.  The bodhisattva is someone who has vowed to achieve enlightenment, not merely for their own sake, but for the sake of all sentient beings, as the traditional phrase has it.  Some bodhisattvas have vowed not to leave the world of rebirth and enter nirvana until all other beings have done so–to be the last one out of the burning building, as it were.  The six paramitas or perfect virtues are the watchwords of the bodhisattva: generosity, ethical behavior, patience and forbearance, enthusiasm and effort, meditation, and wisdom.

The Hinayana tradition is sometimes identified with the Theravada tradition practiced in Sri Lanka and other countries south of India, but that is often seen as unfairly limiting.  Tibetan Buddhist teachers do not make that identification; rather, they seem to say that the Hinayana is where an individual needs to start; you need to get your act together (Hinayana) before you can take it on the road (Mahayana).  The Mahayana traditions include  Tibetan Buddhism, Ch’an Buddhism in China, and its better-known descendant Zen in Japan, Korea, and Viet Nam.

Tibetan Buddhism includes both Hinayana and Mahayana teachings, but its most distinctive characteristics belong to the third vehicle, the Vajrayana or “Diamond Vehicle”.  The Vajrayana consists of teachings intended to allow the practitioner to achieve enlightenment in a single lifetime; they are a shortcut to Get You There
Now.  Much of these teachings consist of visualization practices that include secret mantras, complex mandalas, and identifying oneself with the visualized deity.  Traditionally, they can only be practiced if one is “empowered” to do so, that is, initiated by a teacher who has also been empowered.

If the Hinayana emphasis on taking care of oneself (and its often devotional manifestation, for laypeople, in Theravadin Buddhist cultures centered on the ordained monastic community) can be compared to Protestant Christianity, and the compassionate, self-giving bodhichitta of Mahayana, with its many saint-like bodhisattvas, can be compared to Roman Catholic Christianity, the only thing the Vajrayana can be compared to is magic.  In Western culture, in Christianity, those high-speed, short-cut techniques of transformation have been cut off from religion proper and relegated to the realms of magic, the occult, the forbidden and transgressive.  The banishment of our Western Vajrayana has been so complete and effective that most people do not even think of magic as a form of union with the Divine, a way of becoming one’s best self; they know it only as a means of controlling reality or other people, of attracting love, money, or power that one cannot gain legitimately, by normal means.

Ceremonial magical traditions teach that magic may have two purposes: thaumaturgy and theurgy.  Thaumaturgy, literally “wonder-working”, is magic for purposes such as healing, attracting wealth, gaining knowledge, or any basically practical purpose.  Theurgy, “god-working”, is magic meant to elevate the human being to godhood; to attain union with the gods or God and manifest the greatest potentials of the self.  Mainstream Christian theology, centered on the fourth-century doctrine of original sin, developed to a point where either of those goals was (and is) considered unacceptable, an attempt to usurp Divine prerogatives.  (Of course quite a lot of Christian ceremonial magicians would disagree.)

What fascinates me in Tibetan Buddhism is that all these different aspects of religion–devotion and ritual, self-improvement, service to others, and magical transformation–have remained united, and have been practiced equally (if not always to the same extent) by monastics and laypeople.  You don’t have to be an ordained monastic to meditate, study with a teacher, or take Vajrayana empowerments; on the other hand, you don’t have to be Tibetan to get ordained, either–there are some notable American-born Tibetan Buddhist teachers, such as <a href=http://www.dzogchen.org/surya/index.htm>Lama Surya Das</a> and <a href=http://www.gampoabbey.org/ane_pema/index.html>Pema Chodron</a>.

I think what I’m looking for as I study Tibetan Buddhism is a way to put those pieces back together, to reunite magic, devotion, theurgy, thaumaturgy, service, and philosophy in a Western cultural context, as a Druid.  I’m looking Eastward to see what light the Buddhist traditions shed on the West, and that light is considerable.  It’s not that I don’t think the West has worthwhile traditions of its own, but the fire has been damped down on our altars.  A little borrowed flame from the East could help re-kindle it.
 

A year in the forest of druidry

It’s been almost a year since I received my First Degree in the Ancient Order of Druids in America, at Alban Elued, the autumnal equinox. It’s been about six months since I began to think of myself as working on my Second Degree requirements, so this seems like a good time to review what those requirements are and how I’m doing at them.

The first requirement, the Earth Path, recapitulates the requirements of the Candidate year leading to the First Degree: nature awareness, seasonal celebration, and meditation. My home in a very green urban neighborhood and my regular walk to work continue to provide me with lots of opportunities to be aware of nature, to observe it, and to learn about it. I still don’t read enough about natural history or science, but I flatter myself that direct experience counts for a lot in my tradition. I observe the sun and moon, wind and weather patterns, plant and tree growth, and the habits of birds, first-hand.

I also continue to search for ways to diminish any negative impact of my lifestyle on the Earth. One good thing I began to do was to save bottled drinks I consume at my desk at work and take them to the recycling bin in the lunchroom. I’m trying to drink less bottled stuff, period, and more water, but I do enjoy my Diet Pepsi so.

I’ve observed a full cycle of Druid holy days at least once, more like one and a half times, but I’m still tweaking my ritual forms. I’m essentially confined to my home for ritual space; in order to hold an outdoor rite, I’d have to pack up all the necessities and carry them on public transportation, and then hope I could walk far enough to find a private spot. I can do very simple, very basic offerings outdoors near my home, or I can satisfy my urge for pomp and splendor with a more elaborate indoor rite, but I can’t have it both ways. Still, I’m lucky to have a handsome tree right outside my front door.

I’ve been meditating on the Ogham for nearly a year now. The Ogham is often referred to as the “tree calendar” or “tree alphabet”, but while it can be used in those ways, it’s better seen as a Druidic equivalent to the Tree of Life in Kabbalah: a magical filing system which connects everything and to which everything can be connected. While each individual few or letter of the Ogham has a corresponding plant (some are trees, some not), it also has a bird, an animal, a color, a tool, an art, a castle or fortress, and other equivalents, according to the varying sources. Meditating on the Ogham is a way of organizing what I already know about Celtic lore, the Druid Revival, magic, deities, and wisdom stories of all kinds into a coherent whole.
“The element of Water represents the emotions, and in the Druid tradition it also relates to growth and the development of wisdom.” The Water Path is about learning to mentor, learning to help others find a viable spiritual path. I haven’t done much toward these requirements, but I’m about to take a workshop that I think will go a long way toward them. Back in 2005-2006 I studied the New Hermetics system of magical training with its creator, author Jason Augustus Newcomb, as my mentor. This training was one of my qualifications for my AODA First Degree; it also qualifies me to take the Advanced workshop that is being offered this month, at the fall equinox. An amazing coalescence of circumstances, motivated by the generosity of several persons, has made it possible for me to attend this workshop; once I have, I will be certified to train new students myself, under Jason’s supervision, and that should cover my Water Path requirement.

The Fire Path requires me to study and master the standard form of Opening and Closing a Grove and the Initiation of a Candidate. I’m nearly there with the former, but the latter falls under the “still to be done” heading. I’m also required to design my own set of seasonal rituals, and I have a feeling that may be happening soon.

The Air Path requirements are for various kinds of study, backed up by short academic papers, as are the requirements of the Spirit Path. All of those requirements are still in the future, but the Second Degree must take a minimum of two years, and it can always run longer.

Finally, there is the Spiral requirements. The Spirals are seven arts or disciplines traditionally associated with Druidry since the Revival: music, poetry, divination, healing, magic, sacred geometry, and earth mysteries. I covered magic in my First Degree by taking the New Hermetics course; I’ve finally settled on music and divination for my Second Degree. I’ve been doing a daily reading of the Ogham for several months now, and this fall I’m returning to the church choir where I used to sing. I expect the fairly heavy demands of that position will spur me to do some reading about music and thus fulfill all the requirements for that Spiral.

The secret of the AODA curriculum for the degrees is not to look at the requirements and puzzle out how to fulfill them, but to look at your spiritual life and practice and see how it meets the requirements. That’s what makes this curriculum so great. Now that I’ve done what I just recommended, I feel much better about my life and my druidry.

Return of the Mommybird, or, Eight Random Facts

Over a month ago, Nettle tagged me with this meme:

• Post eight random facts about yourself.
• Tag eight other bloggers (hopefully those who haven’t been tagged before).
• Post these rules.

I’m not going to tag anyone else, since I assume anyone who really wanted to do this meme has done it in the time since I was originally tagged, but here I offer these random facts as my re-entry into blogging.

1. Despite spending most of my life involved with the Episcopal Church, I was actually baptized as a Methodist. My mother had, shall we say, issues with the Methodists which were not a factor with the Episcopalians; she sang in an Episcopal church choir for eleven years but never converted, and she had no qualms about letting me be instructed and confirmed an Episcopalian.
2. Despite my intense love for my companion birds, and for birds generally, I never kept birds until fifteen years ago. My husband and I acquired a pair of finches in July of 1992, and since then we have become thoroughly pwned.
3. My first email handle was the scientific genus name of those finches.
4. Ben & Jerry’s Karamel Sutra is currently my favorite flavor of ice cream. (Now *that’s* random.)
5. Hill Street Blues was the first television show which I liked for adult reasons–its large cast of diverse characters and their complex interrelationships, its humor, its gritty realism. I still like it for all those reasons; despite being about 25 years old, it looks remarkably contemporary because it pioneered so many techniques of storytelling which are standard fare in television drama today.
6. I rarely read any fiction that isn’t science fiction or fantasy. This has been true since I was a child, and I don’t anticipate my tastes are going to change.
7. I’ve spent more than two-thirds of my life vacillating between Christian and Pagan paths. I finally found a Pagan path that appealed to me as much as Anglican spirituality.
8. A friend in college once told me that my eyes were the same color as my hair: auburn. Since she was a painter and was peering closely into my face at the time, I believed her and still do.

 

Kindred Spirits #1

A series of occasional posts of contemporary poetry with a Druidic spirit (in my humble druid opinion).

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
published by Atlantic Monthly Press
© Mary Oliver