Greenspirit Books, 2001 Berry, Thomas Berry, Thomas Blindell, Grace Colebrook, Michael The New Universe Story, Greenspirit Books, 1998 Fox, Matthew The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, Harper and Row, 1988 Original Blessing, (many editions) Fox, Matthew Ho, Mae-Wan The Rainbow and the Worm, World Scientific, 1998 Midgley, Mary Gaia: the next big idea, Demos 2001 Deep Ecology in the 21st Century, Shambala 1995 The Universe Story, HarperSan Fransisco, 1992 Gaia 2: Emergence, Lindisfarne Press 1991 Greenspirit Journal, x 3 a year Sessions, George [ed.] Swimme, Brian & Berry Thomas Thompson, W.I. [ed.] These are all available from GreenSpirit Books, 14 Beckford Close, Warminster, Wilts, Telephone: 01985 215679, or via email to Alan Shephard, alan@gsbooks.org.uk, or order through the internet site at www.greenspirit.org.uk Western Nature Worshippers Frederic Lamond reflects on the difference between his pagan beliefs and Don Cupitt’s beliefs.
During the last century growing numbers of people have come to believe that life itself is sacred and divine: our physical and emotional life, as well as life of the world.
For some this was a slowly growing conviction through reflection, for others the result of a sudden overwhelming experience of unity with all that is, often triggered by a passionate union with a much loved partner.
Many were content to keep this personal conviction to themselves, while others felt a need for collective worship.
Several religious movements arose in the last half-century to cater for their needs.
The ecstatic Wicca mystery cult, oldest and largest of these, teaches techniques for achieving ego-transcendence at will, remote spiritual healing and other forms of spellcasting.
Others include some newer Druid orders like the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD) and the British Druid Order (BDO), the Northern Tradition, also called Asatru, and the ceremonial Fellowship of Isis. Since the 1970s these have been known under the umbrella concept Pagan. (However, not all Druid orders are Pagan or even religious.
The Ancient Order of Druids is a social organisation that collects money for good causes and bans all discussion of religion, while the Gorsedd defends Welsh culture and has many Baptist ministers among its chief druids.) make themselves available to help those who find it difficult to become conscious of their own divinity and to lead collective rituals to consecrate marriages, naming ceremonies and funerals.
Moral autonomy is a consequence of this immanence. Our freedom of action is limited only by the equal freedom of others. The Wiccan motto "If it harm none, do what you will!" is accepted by most Pagans. It is a more demanding rule than the Ten Commandments since the ‘none’ whom we must not harm includes not just our fellow human beings, but animals, plants and the whole ecosphere. This leads many Pagans into vegetarianism and even veganism. Others are content to live in harmony with Nature, which includes other animals as part of the food chain, but insist that animals and plants be aliowed to live as natural lives as possible up to their harvesting or slaughter: hence virulent opposition to intensive farming.
Sexual union is regarded as the supreme sacrament in Wicca, which can lead beyond the physical and spiritual union of the two partners into mystical union with the Universe.
Most Pagans believe in free consensual love between adults, which includes the freedom to say No, and the freedom to stay monogamously faithful to one’s partner if both have decided to do so.
All religions have festivals that reinforce their worshippers’ group identity and collective beliefs. Unlike the Abrahamic religions, which celebrate events in the lives of their founders, Pagans recognise that personifications of our gods and goddesses are mythical aids to human understanding, but feel that the divine names open us to real, all-pervasive energies on Earth A key pagan conviction is that of divine immanence, which has several implications. Since life, its forces and energies, are within us, as well as all other forms of life, individual Pagans communicate directly with what they conceive as "the divine". There are thus no revered founders, dogmas or sacred scriptures in Paganism. Our own experiences are the only criterion for spiritual truth. Those who are consecrated as ‘priests’ are not necessary intermediaries, but Pagan festivals celebrate the seasons of life in the climate in which we live. Druids celebrate the solar solstices and equinoxes, Wiccans the traditional festivals of the English agricultural cycle: the rebirth of the solar year at the beginning of February, springtime fertility at the beginning of May, the cereal harvest at the beginning of August, and the death of the vegetation year at the beginning of November. But there is Sof 56 November 2002 much cross-fertilisation between traditions, so that many Pagans celebrate all eight seasonal festivals Since every winter is followed by a fresh spring in which plants grow again, most Pagans believe in Reincarnation—that our death will be the prelude to a rebirth in a new body and with a new identity, shorn of the tired memories of our previous life. We have no proof of this since no one can remember all the events of a previous life, though a few claim to have recovered some glimpses. It is a conviction based on analogy with the life that surrounds us.
While there are neither dogmas nor any required beliefs in branches of Paganism, collective worship does require some agreement on the basic myths that will be ritually enacted.
Most Pagans like to personalise life’s energies so as to communicate with them more easily.
Since the divine life force is immanent in women as much as in men, it follows that in Pagan myths and rituals one or more male God(s) must be balanced by one or more Goddess(es). We therefore tend to reject the new gender-neutral monotheism in favour of Duotheism and Polytheism, since any form of monotheism perpetuates the totalitarian exclusiveness of the Jewish-Christian tradition and the Platonic dualism between Spirit and Flesh.
By analogy with past and present human society our Goddess(es) represent the emotional, sensual and nurturing sides of Being while the God(s) represent the active, dynamic and creative aspects of Doing. But ideally there is a balance between Being and Doing within each woman and man, which is the purpose of Pagan meditation and magical techniques. Wiccan worship and magic does, however, give prominence to the Earth Mother Goddess of Being as the power that can best bring peace on Earth and preserve its ecology: hence all Wiccan covens are headed by a High Priestess.
Some Pagans worship and invoke several gods and goddesses. They thereby recognise that life’s energies may manifest differently in various climates and cultures, and that there are many alternative ways of life for both women and men, all of which are sanctified by the fact that they have always been part of every-day reality.
Pagans recognise that personifications of our gods and goddesses are mythical aids to human understanding, but feel that the divine names open us to real, all-pervasive energies on Earth, which most of us have experienced directly at some time or other. Thus love goddesses like Aphrodite and fertility gods like Pan represent the erotic energy that drives the males and females of all species to seek sexual union in order to perpetuate their race, which is especially strong in the spring.
Our deities are very much part of our life on this Earth, not outside powers that intervene occasionally and that we only meet after death.
Similarly, our mostly successful spiritual healings and spells to get jobs or other benefits for our members and friends are not ‘miracles’ that suspend the "laws of Nature", but normal aspects of Nature with which all tribal peoples are familiar, but which the Christian church sought to suppress and of which materialist Humanists are ignorant.
If divine immanence is the most suitable postulate for the third millenium, as Pagans believe, we might expect it to surface in other religious families beside our own. To find out whether this was true of the most liberal and intelligent wing of Christianity, I joined the Sea of Faith in 1997 and have been reading Don Cupitt’s recent books After God, The Religion of Being and Reforming Christianity. In his rejection of eschatology and the Platonic dualism of Spirit and Flesh and affirmation of the immanence of the divine and his advocacy of "solar living" in this world and in present time, Don Cupitt echoes Pagan convictions of both the recent and the distant past. Though sof 56 November 2002 12 arriving at these beliefs by different paths - intuition or philosophical reflection - the common conclusion helps to validate them both.
Most Pagans, however, would take issue with two of Don Cupitt’s affirmations: "Everything is contingent”, and "When we die that’s it!" Contingent is equated with "haphazard" and "unpredictable", but the universe is eminently predictable. The Earth’s regular revolutions on its axis cause the regular alternation of night and daylight and its revolutions around the Sun produce the sequence of seasons. All plant and animal species reproduce their own kind, no other. It is only at the periphery of these eternal cycles that randomness occurs, like variations on a symphony’s dominant themes. We know that a spring and summer will follow winter, but we don’t know whether these will be hot and dry or mild and wet. We know when a child will be born, but not whether it will grow up to be physically beautiful or plain, intellectually gifted or artistically creative, nor whether it will be introspective or extroverted.
Also, if everything is haphazard, how does Don Cupitt know that Death is the end?
Wouldn’t a dose of agnosticism have been more appropriate? His advocacy of solar living in the present would have been even more persuasive if he had written: "We don’t know whether we shall have a life after this one. So let us live this life to the full as if it were our only one!" Of course, the notion of eternal bliss in Heaven amid angelic choirs, if we follow the Church’s line, or eternal torment in Hell, if we don’t, is and always was meretricious nonsense concocted as an instrument of power. But are these the only possible forms of life after death? How about reincarnation in a new body facing as many but different challenges from those of our past life, which the adherents of most religions except the Abrahamic have believed? Admittedly, few people claim to remember past lives, but absence of proof does not constitute proof of absence.
In spite of these differences, pagans and Don Cupitt don’t really differ greatly. He would not dispute that the Earth will continue to revolve around the Sun at the same rhythm for the foreseeable future, and Pagans would not dispute that our individual streams of conscious memories will end at or soon after the death of our physical bodies, and that our unique individual identities will then survive only in the memories of those who have known us and in the books we have written and the works of art we have created.
Perhaps the major difference is one of self-identification.
Don Cupitt identifies wholly with his time-bound and spacebound ego and stream-of-conscious memories, which will indeed end at his physical death. Pagans identify with the eternal and unending life stream of which we are a part, and from which new droplets will keep on being incarnated in fresh bodies. Since life is unending so is the essential part of ourselves. A Pagan chant expresses this well: “We all come from the Goddess and to Her we shall return, Like a drop of rain flowing to the ocean!” Both identifications may be acceptable, but which one is more conducive to a feeling of security and a responsible attitude to the Earth’s ecology for the sake of future generations? And which one has the greater potential to become an influential world religion?
Frederic Lamond has worshipped Nature all his life and was initiated into Wicca in February 1957. He has also been a member of the Fellowship of Isis since its inception in 1975 and is on the Council of the Pagan Federation.
His book Religion without Beliefs [Janus Publishing Company, 1997] describes Paganism and its relationship to other religions and world-views.