The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

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I was thinking of this while reading another thread wherein one person felt obligated to apologise for misconstruing the true character of a goddess based on what appeared to be that other person's subjective *experience* of that goddess.

Thing is, from my reading about this goddess , she was alloted certain characteristics by botht the mythology in which she appears and by numerous
 academics that have researched her which one of the posters apologised for mentioning. To be fair, not all academics agree so there is room to manuver in regard to interpretation. But certainly some aspects of her are agreed upon.

Which got me to wondering. I have to first own to not having a deity phone so I have to rely on academic sources for information. It is from this that I form my ideas on certain deities, their characters and place in mythological narratives.

So how much should someone who is limited to reading about a deity throw overboard when corrected by someone who has a subjective experience of this deity which disagrees with the literature?

I am not just referring to the thread I referenced. I studied Hecate for a couple of years and nothing I read seemed to indicate this chthonic goddess was at all warm and fuzzy yet other people who claimed to be in her thrall or at least in cominication with her assured me that she was the victim of bad press and she first and foremost a loving, nurturing mother-type. I did hope this didn't mean the posters had sacrificed puppies to their real life moms if this was their 'model' :eek:

The problem with this is without those early stories, we would not even know about ancient deities.

The best answer is to both read and investigate one's experiences. But I know from past history that many on pagan forums will metaphorically beat the crap out of someone who only has access to research which contradicts their ideas and it can be very confusing for a seeker. A lot of people will simply turn away from the mythology and go by the popular consensus .

So do you think that if your experience contradicts the known mythology, you can safely disregard it and should you encourage others to do so as well?

You're right. But they do not necessarily teach us things about the role of polytheistic gods in modern society. (Or rather, we cannot assume that they will.) Because the world changes, and the ways people think about things and connect things changes, and things like a modern ability to travel and communicate quickly across large distances changes things.

As I said, I believe strongly that the Gods are beings who continue to change and grow and learn, so what was said about a God 2000 years ago is, in some ways, like talking to someone who knew me in high school about what I'm like now. Some things will be consistent (I am still smart, I read a lot, etc.) but other things have changed a lot (my politics, my religion, the things I make a particular priority for time in my life.)

And these things *also* go on in the modern Pagan communities. They happen in less formal methods than article and response in an academic journal (or an article being submitted for peer review), but *because* they are less formal, and take less time to work through the research/writing/peer review/publication/distribution process, they're actually more useful for evaluation at times. (and more people can be involved, comments, raise issues, etc.)

And there are serious possibilities for harm and risk in my larger religious path (initiatory religious witchcraft). Also fraud, and misappropriation of traditions without bringing along the safety and precautions. (Initiatory work can be amazing, but there are people out there who borrow the outside/external 'what happens', without the internal work.) Your concerns are very valid here, but they're common to a lot of paths.

And I have *said* that. So please stop misrepresenting that I haven't. I believe in evaluating *all* the information I take in. I do it routinely. I'm trying to figure out where you get the idea that I don't.

But when you are talking about someone's direct experience, you do have some ways to learn more about where they got their info, and this is, in my reasonably extensive experience, about as feasible for people in describing practice as it is for academic research (which is to say, there are times it's easy and there are times it's hard, but I don't experience it as being notably easier or harder for one kind of source than another: for me, it varies much more by topic or field.)

You seem to be assuming that a) the primary-source mythology and folklore as we know it is coherent and unified; b) "academic consensus" is coherent and unified; and c) that personal experience and "academic consensus" are, if they appear to "contradict" each other, inherently oppositional. Also, the idea that personal experiences should be irrelevant to the ~mythology as we know it~, and that cannot be incorporated into understandings of that deity/mythology/whatever. But the truth is that from the perspective of a folklorist, a mythologist, a literary scholar, a cultural historian--you know, those academic fields that deal with myth/legend and belief and practice both contemporary and historical--you'd be wrong. You seem to think there's some kind of black-and-white truth that is easily discernible from the myth/folklore, and anything that doesn't fit with that is automatically Wrong. From the academic perspective of both historical scholarship and of the study of contemporary beliefs, that is an incredibly reductive, simplistic, and seriously problematic viewpoint.

First, historical materials, and the interpretation thereof: There is no such thing as "neutral" or "objective." There really, really isn't. We're talking about culture, and human beings are ALWAYS creatures of their culture. That doesn't mean they're automatons mindlessly repeating the existing Big Truths of their time/place; but it does mean that context matters--and often in ways that aren't immediately obvious, both of the person writing the original document AND of the person interpreting that document from a historical/geographical/cultural distance.  And when you're dealing with documents with a long tradition of scholarly analysis, you're going to have all those layers to go through. And, of course, your own assumptions and expectations: what's important? what questions are you going to ask in your analysis? what have we learned from arachaeology, or analysis of economic texts from the period, or a new theory of how discourses of sexuality work in culture, or documentation of violent colonization and raids, or what later folklore tells us about it?

None of this adds up to easy, simplistic answers about something as complicated as the ~nature of the gods.~ Myth, belief, narrative: the general rule is that written material is only going to give you a fragmentary picture of "who the gods are." Even a seemingly coherent text from a single author is--as any scholar who does textual analysis will tell you--is full of lacunae and instabilities and ambiguities and fuzzy areas and water margins. And the author/compiler of a text is ALWAYS going to be informed by his/her context, beliefs, assumptions, etc. As will the people interpreting it. That disclaimer is always there, even if you don't see it: it's, like, a basic tenet of humanities and social sciences academia.

Here's an example. Fairy tales are axiomatic as fairly simple, pure-plot narratives with not so much characters as TYPES. There is Good and there is Evil, and that is obvious, discernible, and will be rewarded and punished accordingly. But even within these seemingly-simple narratives, there is an epic SHIT-TON of stuff going on. WHY is X good, and Y evil? How do we KNOW? This stuff shakes out in wildly complex ways once you actually start poking at the texts. For example: there's a persistent pattern in the Grimms' collection of absolving male characters--particularly neglectful/abusive fathers--of any wrongdoing, and foisting all blame and punishment off onto female figures. (Think of the fathers in "Hansel and Gretel," "The Maiden Without Hands," "Aschenputtel," or "All-Fur.") "Hansel and Gretel," is it a tale of child abuse? or of parents forced into an impossible position due to starvation? Is it a warning against consumption, or overconsumption, or wasting food? Also what about that witch? Is she ALSO the stepmother? What relevance does she have to anxieties about witchcraft? Or of famine? And what about the whole cannibalism thing? Is she pure evil? An initiator? What about that forest? What are some of the class issues happening? Why does the father who abandoned his children get to live happily ever after? And why did the Grimms pick THIS version, instead of the others they had collected? And how does this relate to other folktales about starvation, witches, forests, gingerbread, murderous children, etc. etc. etc. etc.?  

If we can poke critically at the characterization of the proverbially evil fairy tale witch (and proverbially good poor father figure), why on EARTH should we sit on our hands when it comes to beings as complex as GODS? So, like, that academic viewpoint that you seem to think is so coherent, really isn't--not the way you're presenting it. There are too many scholars questioning too many aspects of too many documents.

(It's especially weird that you picked the Morrigan as the hill to die on, considering that scholars have been pointing out things like "patriarchal Christian monkish smear campaign" for YEARS, and even if the texts were written by the most biased monk in the world, the Morrigan STILL comes across as seriously ambiguous and complex. Morag's "UPG" is actually a hell of a lot more academically defensible than the "bloodthirsty sexpot"--which Cuthwin acknowledged!)

When we get into modern UPG, you're on even less firm ground for trumpeting academic readings as inherently superior. I'm a folklorist, and I can assure you that dismissing people's lived experiences out of hand is both academically unsound and ethically dodgy. Like, if RainbowUnicornFarts69 claims to have had an experience with a warm fluffy cotton-candy Morrigan, I might ask some questions about why she thinks it's the Morrigan (given what I know of the lore), but ultimately, it's HER experience, not mine. I'm not obligated to accept her explanation of her experience--any more than I'm required to believe a fundie Christian who claims that his bagels keep burning because Satan possesses his toaster--but it's not my place to assert that there is NO WAY tM (or Satan) would EVER do that and therefore they're WRONG. They're gods, they contain multitudes, and Satan can conceivably burn people's bagels if he wants to--and I sure as shit am not going to tell him different. I can choose to add "burns bagels" to my mental checklist of "stuff Satan does," or not. But the bagel is still burnt.  

If I'm writing academically about beliefs about Satan, this is especially important: I can contextualize the rise of fundie Christian theologies of Satan's influence in everyday life, how it ties into larger philosophical constructs of sin and evil and (lack of) personal responsibility, and all kinds of other stuff. But it's REALLY not my place to assert "the bagel wasn't burnt. Or if it WAS burnt, it totally wasn't Satan because that's stupid." I don't know, man. I'm not here to prove or disprove the existence of Satan (burner of bagels or not). But the fact that this person thinks he burnt their bagel DOES matter, folklorically--those beliefs don't spring from a vacuum.

Academics in the relevant fields don't trumpet their scholarship as, like, the definitive statements on XYZ gods/legends/beliefs--they KNOW BETTER. And if you're dealing with living beliefs and experiences--as people are talking about with UPG--it's especially relevant and important not to dismiss present-day worshippers' experiences. Present experiences might not line up with ~The Lore~, but THE LORE doesn't line up with the Lore, and the academic readings are dealing with a gazillion things that could possibly be affecting The Lore and trying out new ways of reading The Lore and questioning the assumptions of The Lore and all the other readings of The Lore. So academic readings are going to challenge and negotiate fuck with and analyze and pull apart that Lore.

Yei's point that academic material is preferable when you're dealing with religions of people that are dealing with extensive colonialist misrepresentation and racism and appropriation--as with indigenous spiritualities in the modern West--is not at all wrong: academics, as pointed out, at least have a system of peer review and accountability, which understandably makes their work easier to identify as useful among the widespread mass of plastic shamanism popular-press nonsense. (Academia is certainly not free of colonialist white-supremacist bullshit, but again, at least there's a mechanism for calling that out in a way that will affect later work.)  But the work of academics simply cannot, and should not, be the be-all end-all ultimate authority for any spirituality that hopes to live and thrive in the present day among living people.

To sum up: you don't get to use the academic disciplines of folklore/history/religious studies/etc. as a club to beat people with non-standard UPGs.  If you have any respect for academic integrity, it's just not going to work, not the way you seem to want it to.

You're continually setting up a false dichotomy that's been addressed by multiple posters as being a false dichotomy. Why do you keep insisting on it being an 'either/or' situation when it's actually a 'this AND that' situation?

You ARE setting up dichotomies--the very questions you're asking ASSUME "yes/no" and "either/or." That is NOT how it works. Which is what everyone here has been trying to tell you. You keep invoking academic sources--didn't you say somewhere you were a scientist? There are completely different methodologies and questions and assumptions and expectations within humanities scholarship.  So no, you aren't actually familiar with how academic research works *in these fields*.

This is NOT a question of "the literature isn't useless": no one has said anything even remotely like that. You really seem to WANT there to be someone claiming that the academic sources are useless so you can, as far as I can tell, complain about how people having experiences that don't precisely conform to what you think you already know are just too hard to understaaaaand. Everyone here is telling you that academic sources are NOT useless, they are just LIMITED--which academics in the relevant fields, like me, have been saying the whole damn time. We're talking about living worshippers of living gods--in a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT cultural context from that of ~the Lore~. It would be absolutely absurd to expect people to have EXACTLY THE SAME kinds of experiences when there's such a gigantic difference in context, as any folklorist could have told you.

From a practical pagan perspective, of course it makes sense to use existing texts/scholarship as identification/reality testing/source of inspiration/idea generator/whatever. But that stuff is plainly and obviously only in and of itself going to be able to give you a limited and fragmentary picture of what that god was considered to be like (by some writer in some time/place with some agenda) Back Then. It isn't going to do much for you NOW without some work on your part--which of necessity includes sorting through your own thoughts/feelings/experiences AND ALSO other people's reported thoughts/feelings/experiences to figure out what makes sense to you.

I'm not sure why it's so hard for you to accept that other people have ideas and thoughts and experiences with deities that are not 100% compliant with the comparatively little we know about any pagan religious culture, and that a lot of the people here don't just dismiss those experiences out of hand. Even in info-heavy cultures like Greece and Rome, all the reams of primary sources and interpretations of said sources are just a tiny drop in the bucket compared to what the actual experience of being a worshipper of the gods back in the day was like.

Given all that, the real question you should be asking is why it's so important to you to make "academic vs. UPG" an either/or proposition that requires you to "choose" one or the other.

I'm not sure why it's so hard for you to accept that other people have ideas and thoughts and experiences with deities that are not 100% compliant with the comparatively little we know about any pagan religious culture, and that a lot of the people here don't just dismiss those experiences out of hand.

I would say that someone who comes out with something totally uncompliant with the surviving lore generally gets considered to be something of a crackpot at best.  (I mean, I did make reference to W*cc*n W*d* in another thread, and I hope that's enough obscurity to stop him egosurfing in if he still does that.)  They'll generally, from what I've seen, be nudged towards "That's probably a wrong number" as an interpretation, at least in discussions in places that I would consider worthwhile.

But, of course, that was explicitly not the case in the supposed provoking example, where misconceptions about the content of the lore were corrected with direct references to mythology, and misconceptions about modern practice were corrected with personal experience.