The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

And from a different perspective, I'd take issue with the suggestion that anarchism (gentle or otherwise) is that much of a trend in Paganism anyway.  

While it's arguably quite a broad term, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that a philosophical and/or political opposition to the concept of the state is necessary for someone to qualify.

 
I'm not sure she meant an articulated political position so much as "YOU NOT THE BOSS OF ME", which pagans have in spades, though.

This is where I must have gone wrong. It is clear that finding common ground amongst pagan religions in this forum appears futile. Since Celtic paganism is the direction I am heading then I will see if I can find someone with shared beliefs to discuss. Thank you for your suggestion.

 
I don't think it's necessarily "futile" to find common ground amongst at least some pagan religions. I like the n-dimensional ven diagram circle example. Some religions that fall under the pagan umbrella have things in common with each other, but some of them are very different from each other. Personally, I am happy to find a pagan forum where the variety of different beliefs are emphasized, rather than the standard "we are all nature-based and practice magick and worship goddesses, yea!" line that has prevented me from finding communty and a place to discuss my beliefs and the beliefs of others.

I think it's important to find someone with shared beliefs, particularly if you are new to your path as I am. However, it's equally important to be aware that your definition of pagan may not apply to all those who call themselves pagan. While that may not mentor you in your path, it does present the opportunity for very useful discussion. That is a good thing. You can get a good perspective on both your Celtic path (via the SIG and more general forums if you're specific that you're referring to something Celtic) and a well-rounded view on other viewpoints falling in the miscellaneous drawer of paganism.

Some Paga religions do have common ground -- quite a bit is some cases. It's when you try to find common ground between all Pagan religions that you have trouble. Of course, almost all Pagan religions do share some attributes -- the problem is those shared attributes are also shared with most non-Pagan religions, that is, they are not the things that make the religion "Pagan."

Too right.

Also, in my experience it almost never stops at finding shared beliefs because some people - and there is at least usually one - who  tries to shoe-horn religion A into really being just like religion B at its core. It goes from: That's neat that we both do this to we both do this, we're on the same path/have same goals/all gods are one, with a dash of the *climbing the mountain different path analogy* or alternately, blind men and elephants.

And that might tempt some to cynical laughter and disdain except for the fact that very often that is so exactly true. Many new-age pagan religions/belief systems are so philosophically loose, eclectic and unstructured that 'A' can fit so easily beside or inside 'B' so as to indistinguishable from each other.

So what? That doesn't mean that both religion A and B are the same at their core. I understand why people do this though, especially pagans. In my opinion pagans do it to find someone they/we can relate to. But I can relate to Jane Doe just fine without her, or me trying to shoe-horn each other into our separate religions.

And indeed, given that many people arrive at their preferred style of pagan expression from different routes that the mountain and elephant metaphor also apply rightly.

But those metaphors aren't about how we arrive to a preferred style of paganism; they are about how we are all striving for the same destination/have the same end goal.
We don't. The elephant parable doesn't apply either, in my opinion. It's a parable about six blind men touching an elephant, and then after touching different parts and each thinking it's something different - tail, leg, head etc etc end up arguing what it really is, and not understanding they're experiencing different parts of the same elephant - touching the same god but experiencing something different. In my opinion, this parable is a more elegant way of saying: all gods are one god, and all goddesses are one goddess. It can be an offensive assumption.

I don't actually feel offended when someone rolls out the mountain/elephant trope, I just tend to ignore their attempt at religious homogenisation.

Too right.

Also, in my experience it almost never stops at finding shared beliefs because some people - and there is at least usually one - who  tries to shoe-horn religion A into really being just like religion B at its core. It goes from: That's neat that we both do this to we both do this, we're on the same path/have same goals/all gods are one, with a dash of the *climbing the mountain different path analogy* or alternately, blind men and elephants.

So what? That doesn't mean that both religion A and B are the same at their core. I understand why people do this though, especially pagans. In my opinion pagans do it to find someone they/we can relate to. But I can relate to Jane Doe just fine without her, or me trying to shoe-horn each other into our separate religions.

But those metaphors aren't about how we arrive to a preferred style of paganism; they are about how we are all striving for the same destination/have the same end goal.
We don't. The elephant parable doesn't apply either, in my opinion. It's a parable about six blind men touching an elephant, and then after touching different parts and each thinking it's something different - tail, leg, head etc etc end up arguing what it really is, and not understanding they're experiencing different parts of the same elephant - touching the same god but experiencing something different. In my opinion, this parable is a more elegant way of saying: all gods are one god, and all goddesses are one goddess. It can be an offensive assumption.

I don't actually feel offended when someone rolls out the mountain/elephant trope, I just tend to ignore their attempt at religious homogenisation.

 
Universalism is a valid religious belief. Just because you don't subscribe to it doesn't make it offensive.

I understand why people do this though, especially pagans. In my opinion pagans do it to find someone they/we can relate to.

That's part of it, but it's unsatisfying to explain such a broad, ubiquitous tendency. The trend of theological/spiritual universalism in Modern Paganism is too commonplace for it to be up to just individual feeling. It goes much deeper than that, right to the intellectual roots of Modern Paganism. Which, as I've said before, is so strongly based in turn-of-the-20th century scholarship in history and the social sciences, and the Modernist movement in literature and philosophy. The Modernist reflex was to look for and draw connections, to see universalizing ties between societies throughout history, in order to apply that generation's paradigm--Darwinian evolution--to socio-cultural developments. And that carries over, even down to today, for a lot of people.

And I'm not bashing on those who do adhere to universalist principles in regards to modern Paganism. It's a big part of some of the larger and more effective traditions. But it's important to know where it came from, to identify its origins and the mentality that brought it forth.

...

Just hanging this off the last post in the thread--sorry, Yei.

I'm with Naomi, Darkhawk, Jennet, and multiple others on this thread: Paganism is best understood, I think, as a collection of religions that stem from particular strains of 18th-19th c Romanticism in the West. (Louisvillian, you keep saying Modernist: but the Modernists were 20th century, and also responding to/an outgrowth of Romanticism, so.)

Romanticism was a response to the Enlightenment: basically, the idea that the world/universe is basically rational and follows set laws, and it is our duty as human beings to discern those laws in a rational way. (The Enlightenment was itself a response to the religious wars and witch hysteria of the previous centuries.) Many of our modern ideas about the nation-state as a good way to organize governments, the codification of the scientific method, and the primacy of human Reason, etc etc etc stem from this. The ideal person--the ideal citizen, the ideal Christian--was an educated "civilized" adult who obeyed the dictates of Reason and Science. I mean, I'm oversimplifying A LOT here, but that was the basic idea. And then you ally this to the Industrial Revolution, and you've got the seeds of modern political and economic situations, etc etc etc. Also, a new interest in making societies conform to Laws of Reason, rather than Laws of God. (Of course, those Laws of Reason were just as much about facilitating the continued dominance of white Christian middle/upper-class men over everyone else: it was just a) a different rationale, and b) a different group of white Christian men being valorized--scientists, industrialists, etc. over churchmen.)

Basically, Romanticism looked at all this stuff and said, you know what, Reason and Science and Industry aren't all they're cracked up to be. Where's the emotion? Where's the passion? Where's the LIFE? We are not creatures of pure mathematical reason, we are creatures of feeling and emotion and desire and love and hate and all kinds of stuff that has nothing to do with Logic. And Nature may have Laws, but it's not the orderly perfectly explainable world we think it is.

Romanticism had many many strains, some of which involved rejection of the ordered world of civilization--proto-hippie back-to-the-land movements, valorization of the Noble Savage (an Enlightenment concept, but Romantics gave it more emotional oomph), etc. Others involved expansion and refinement of Enlightenment ideas: Romantic nationalism takes the Enlightenment concept of the nation-state, and applies to it the Romantic notion that the state garners its legitimacy from the unifying spirit of the people governed--the Volksgeist. This was a KEY element to revolutionary/independence movements--"we should be a separate nation because we are a Separate People." This was one of the stated goals of many early folklorists, like the Grimms: to document the Shared Beliefs and Spirit of a group of people, to find that Essence of Germanness (or whatever).

There had been all kinds of revivals of pre-Christian thought before--the Renaissance, the phil-Hellenes and classicists of the 18th century, and so forth. But with a) the Enlightenment loosening of strictures on non-normative religious expression and broader secularization of society, b) the Romantic emphasis on emotion, passion, and immediacy of experience, and c) the revolutionary movements that actively questioned and attempted to overturn the existing status quo, the stage was set for new religious movements. One of these was the birth of modern Christian fundamentalisms--dissatisfied with what they saw as the aridity of established churches, early fundamentalists were attempting to capture a much more intense experience with the direct Word of the Lord. Another was a more wholesale critique and even rejection of Christianity as a whole. It was this latter strain that spawned the occult revival, modern Paganisms, and the New Age.

For the occult revival, there were definitely very Christian forms of occultism (which got a new lease on life in this period, for the same reasons fundamentalism did); but a lot of the stuff that became influential to the birth of modern Paganisms tended to be more critical. This was the age of the revolutionary movements that said rebellion against established authority was not The Ultimate Sin, but a necessary process to create individual and societal freedom; of Blake, who argued that Satan was the real hero of Milton's Paradise Lost; and of Byron and Gothic novels, that made all that sexy. Modern Satanisms and religious witchcrafts come out of this, obviously, but all of this was an important philosophical/emotional underpinning to Paganisms in general. The very word "Pagan" conjured up, in the 18th-19th centuries (and still today), an image of sexy rebelliousness that was both scary and enticing. (IOW, don't blame present-day teenage Goth!Fluff Wiccans for this stuff: modern Paganisms wouldn't even be a thing we do without it.)  

The strand that birthed Paganism was also often very closely tied to Romantic nationalism--an attempt to discover the Soul of the People through examination of the beliefs of the past. The German and Italian unification movements; independence movements in Ireland, Greece, Finland, Norway; assertions of separate identity in Scotland, and Wales: all part of this. In its most extreme form, Christianity was rejected as a foreign imposition (in many places, this spilled into overt anti-Semitism). This was helped along by the fact that the Greek and Roman classics were a part of an upper-class gentleman's education, and had been for a while; Romanticism, as I said, gave an added emotional impetus for connection with these non-Christian myths, and a justification and framework for searching for comparable myths from other European places (especially one's own)--finding the "Norse Odyssey," and the like. (This had actually started a touch earlier--late 17th/early 18th c France had the Debate between the Ancients and the Moderns, with the Moderns actively hunting for folklore to "prove" that French culture was just as valid and worthy of the ancient Greeks/Romans; this was part of an Enlightenment nation-state building thing; Romanticism, a century later, took that and added serious passion and intensity to it.)   Modern Reconstructionisms really obviously have this, but Wicca does as well: Wicca is very specifically British, with the combo of Celticness, Anglo-Saxonism, and classicism that is particular to the British Isles.

(All of this is really oversimplified, of course--there's a million more words that can and have been written about this kind of stuff.)

So, you know, Paganism IS a social movement. As many of us have been saying, while you're not really going to find any unifying specifically-and-exclusively Religious Beliefs common to All Pagans, you WILL find a lot of overlap in a sociological, philosophical, historical sense, because modern western Paganisms grow out of specific stuff: we have a common historical and philosophical heritage, not a common religion.