The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

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?

 
This seems like a somewhat leading question. I'm not really sure I feel comfortable engaging with the topic of lore vs. UPG when it's being presented it a manner that seems to be clearly saying "there is only ONE way to interpret academic sources." I can read the same articles as you or anyone else. I don't have to come to the same conclusions to be right.

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.

 
So you're talking about the Morrigan, here? What scholarly sources have you read? Have you read the primary literature yourself? Because from that, she actually doesn't come across as the bloodthirsty harpy that pop-mythology texts paint her to be. She was a goddess of sovereignty. You had to RESPECT HER. Cu Cuchulain disrespected her. BIG TIME. That's why she went after him. You don't treat a goddess of sovereignty like he did and expect to get away with it. Hell...you shouldn't expect to treat a PERSON like that and come away without consequences.

So I think here, the balance between subjective experience and objective truth is...what are those sources? There's plenty of bad "academic" stuff out there, even translations of classic texts can garble things. While I certainly expect to check UPG against lore, I also want to check lore against itself.

Or, you know, the actual lore.


 
Someone whose experience is of a bloodthirsty sexpot is having an experience that contradicts the known mythology of the Morrigan, yes, and other people will say "Wrong number."

Every time.

 
I didn't intend to open such a can of worms with my comment on the other thread that it spills over into another thread!

So I'll repeat and clarify my apology from the other thread:

Morag was right. I was wrong.

Dead wrong. I slandered the Morrigan and insulted Morags goddess and faith based on half-assed pop culture notions and half-remembered readings of Celtic mythology.

I acknowledge my errors.

I apologize, and will continue to do so as needed.

 
I have to say, the attitude here towards people with deity communication seems to be pretty awful.  As though anyone with any concept that isn't 100% lore accurate is .. deviant?  Misguided?

There's lore.  Which is often contradictory to begin with.  There's actual recorded practice, which doesn't necessarily match the mythology.  F'ex, Greek mythology has Zeus and Hera routinely at odds because Zeus is seducing everything.  Actual practice has them worshiped /as a couple/ and as guardians of /marriage/ among other things.

So even in a religion that has a ton of stuff written down that came to us, there are discrepancies.  There's variation.  Make that a zillion times more so when dealing with less-known deities, or religions where stuff wasn't written down.

There's a reason we fill in the gaps with experience.  There's not enough to go on without it.

As a librarian, I like academic sources, but I think it's really important not to put them on a pedestal.

Firstly it is because I am a student and my natural instinct on checking any claim is to go back to the sources.

Which is great - but here's the thing. Academics are people, and often their work has substantial flaws, for all sorts of reasons. (We discussed some of these on a recent thread but there are lots of other reasons, like the actual data being flawed.)

Secondly, sources from lore are often problematic. For some things, there just isn't a right answer and a wrong answer (life has a lot of things like that.) We have some versions for some cultures of some stories, but very little complete work. Different people who wrote down the myths and stories cared about different pieces (and may well have changed bits for their own reasons). And that's *before* we get into issues like translations, how languages change over time, how sometimes people read an idiomatic phrase in one language and don't understand what it implies.

(One example of this in New Testament Greek is the idea in some denominations that only 144,000 people can be saved. In fact, the phrase that comes out to 'twelve thousand by twelve thousand' is just the way you say 'really big non-specific number' in Greek, like we'd say 'zillions' or something like that. Language is full of this kind of thing, is what I'm saying.)

Secondly it is because such sources are usually more widely accessible than someones personal gnosis. Basically anyone can read them (though some might be hard to find at times). This is important for establishing the provenance (sp?) of an idea.

Lots of people refer to information badly on the web, but really, I have a hard time arguing that academic sources automatically better here. First, *not* everyone can get access to those academic sources, especially if you're talking about the origins of an idea - many journals are still being digitised, others are just not very available, and people may not have reliable access to academic libraries or the ability to read the languages that a given article is in.

(The former access is more available than many people realise, but that doesn't mean it's universal. Plus, lots of people don't know *how* to read academic texts, and that can mess things up even more.)

In contrast, it's trivial to create a method of sourcing information on a modern webpage, by posting either the information on the source (if it's print or not-online), or by creating a linked reference. This is also imperfect, of course (sites go dark, people change pages) but with things like archive.org, I think it's hard to argue it's *worse* than academic access is for the kinds of material we might be talking about.

Thirdly, this acts as insurance against fraud. Maybe this idea is more relevant to me because Indigenous religions are often targeted by frauds but it could be a serious issue for any religious group. Misuse of such religious ideas can and has lead to injury and even death in the past.

Again, academic articles just aren't better here. They're still written by humans. With agendas. And many of those humans are not actually experts in the relevant religion. In many cases, they're outsiders to religion (again, see the linked thread above), and even if they're not, they're - well, professional academics, generally, not full-time priests or priestesses.

Lastly, lets us be honest. We are armatures in many of these religions. Those who recorded those myths and spread them were probably professionals who dedicated their whole lives to understanding the divine, built on top of sometimes thousands of years of social interaction with the gods. To think that one can know better just from a brief fleeting contact, just seems arrogant to me. Maybe one day things will be different, but not today.

I am a trained professional researcher. My training as a priestess was in many ways (and I can tell this because I did them during the same span of time) *more* rigorous than my training as a professional librarian in a well-designed program. Both taught me a lot of specific things that I continue to use (7 years after I completed both my 3rd degree and my MLIS), and in a more varied way than a Ph.D (which is of necessity extremely tightly focused) would allow.

(I have not had a lifetime to perfect it: I turn 39 tomorrow. But I'm working on that part.)

But I also know that many of the people who passed down lore either were more complicated in background than you're implying, or were, well, also human. Euripides was a playwright, and how he went about questions of Gods and human kind are very informative, but he wasn't a full-time professional priest. Neither was Homer, most likely. Neither were the people who were leaving behind small familial homes and their related archaeological evidence in cities in Egypt or putting items into sacred pools in England or painting caves in France or making burial tombs in Tuscany. And yet, all of those people had personal and meaningful experiences of the divine, and left some of them for us to understand.

(And it's precisely those things that are the basis for most academic study. The study of 'text written by professional priests being the thing you focus on' is, well, Christian history and later, really. Even there it's not actually true - we also have lots of material from people who did other things as their jobs - but it's at least *more* true.)

And they're still all human. Why are we trying to deny human experience and learn from *all* of it, when it's about gods and life and what matters? Academics are not better people. They just happen to be academics.

Which is great - but here's the thing. Academics are people, and often their work has substantial flaws, for all sorts of reasons. (We discussed some of these on a recent thread but there are lots of other reasons, like the actual data being flawed.)

Secondly, sources from lore are often problematic. For some things, there just isn't a right answer and a wrong answer (life has a lot of things like that.) We have some versions for some cultures of some stories, but very little complete work. Different people who wrote down the myths and stories cared about different pieces (and may well have changed bits for their own reasons). And that's *before* we get into issues like translations, how languages change over time, how sometimes people read an idiomatic phrase in one language and don't understand what it implies.

(One example of this in New Testament Greek is the idea in some denominations that only 144,000 people can be saved. In fact, the phrase that comes out to 'twelve thousand by twelve thousand' is just the way you say 'really big non-specific number' in Greek, like we'd say 'zillions' or something like that. Language is full of this kind of thing, is what I'm saying.)

So? The point is you can do this. You can go back and check. If you suspect a problem with the source material, you can question them yourself. Academic texts, at least good ones, will give sources which any reader can check. You can go and read their sources and then make up your own mind. Nor are historians ignorant of biases and misrepresentation. They frequently question each other, and history is being constantly revised, and any reader can be a part of that process. You can compare different interpretations or compare different myths and draw a conclusion from that.

Lots of people refer to information badly on the web, but really, I have a hard time arguing that academic sources automatically better here. First, *not* everyone can get access to those academic sources, especially if you're talking about the origins of an idea - many journals are still being digitised, others are just not very available, and people may not have reliable access to academic libraries or the ability to read the languages that a given article is in.

(The former access is more available than many people realise, but that doesn't mean it's universal. Plus, lots of people don't know *how* to read academic texts, and that can mess things up even more.)

In contrast, it's trivial to create a method of sourcing information on a modern webpage, by posting either the information on the source (if it's print or not-online), or by creating a linked reference. This is also imperfect, of course (sites go dark, people change pages) but with things like archive.org, I think it's hard to argue it's *worse* than academic access is for the kinds of material we might be talking about.

Academic and serious texts are not that hard to get. Libraries can special order texts, texts are easily and cheaply available through online stores or simply online. They are becoming cheaper and more widely available all the time. Academic information can also be brought to people through the internet. Compare this to someone's, let's say, dream, which you will never be able to experience yourself and will have to go back to sources in order to make sense of anyway.

Again, academic articles just aren't better here. They're still written by humans. With agendas. And many of those humans are not actually experts in the relevant religion. In many cases, they're outsiders to religion (again, see the linked thread above), and even if they're not, they're - well, professional academics, generally, not full-time priests or priestesses.

The important point is not the academics per se, its the ability to check their claims, and that such texts can and are, contextualised and challenged when they are updated. Besides, being outside of a religion and/or culture can be a benefit, since they can take a more 'neutral' or dispassionate perspective, or simply make the experience more understandable for an outsider.

I am a trained professional researcher. My training as a priestess was in many ways (and I can tell this because I did them during the same span of time) *more* rigorous than my training as a professional librarian in a well-designed program. Both taught me a lot of specific things that I continue to use (7 years after I completed both my 3rd degree and my MLIS), and in a more varied way than a Ph.D (which is of necessity extremely tightly focused) would allow.

(I have not had a lifetime to perfect it: I turn 39 tomorrow. But I'm working on that part.)

Good for you. I'm glad to hear that.

But I also know that many of the people who passed down lore either were more complicated in background than you're implying, or were, well, also human. Euripides was a playwright, and how he went about questions of Gods and human kind are very informative, but he wasn't a full-time professional priest. Neither was Homer, most likely. Neither were the people who were leaving behind small familial homes and their related archaeological evidence in cities in Egypt or putting items into sacred pools in England or painting caves in France or making burial tombs in Tuscany. And yet, all of those people had personal and meaningful experiences of the divine, and left some of them for us to understand.

But that's the point. You can check up on that stuff. Academics will note and record that information. They can read about Euripides, tell the reader about his life, and offer an interpretation and give sources. Most importantly of all, you can check up on them. You have the option of agreeing with them or not.

And they're still all human. Why are we trying to deny human experience and learn from *all* of it, when it's about gods and life and what matters? Academics are not better people. They just happen to be academics.

It is not about the academics being better people or not, it is about understanding where ideas come from and the context where those ideas developed. I know that academics are not perfect. I know that they can be biased, prejudice, even idiotic. But so can other people. All these problems will apply to any form of knowledge that I can think of. At least an academic text, the good ones anyway, will tell you what their interpretation is based on.

In addition academic sources IS learning from the human experience. Numerous sources (at least in my area) come from written and oral sources created by the members of the religion/culture in question. History brings their voices to life so they can be heard, and gives them context (and translations) so they can be understood. Much of this personal experience would have been lost, or be untranslated, or simply intelligible if academics had not worked on it. And at the end of the day, modern gnosis, in order to be understood, still needs to be contextualised by examining sources anyway. So if anything academic sources provide a means of empowering gnosis by helping it to be interpreted through a community.

In the end I suspect the difference between us is that most people don't get their information about your religion from Apocalypto (at best).

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?

 
This is a really interesting topic, Carillion, especially for someone new, like me. Trying to figure out where to get my information and what weight to give upg is quite a challenge.

Cool. I'm hoping to learn something.