What Wicca Is and Isn’t

Wicca is one of the religions officially recognized by the U.S. military. This soldier chose to have the Wiccan Pentagram as the religious symbol on his gravestone. Photograph by John C. Hamer, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0 Share and Share Alike.

It recently came to my attention that there are massive, widespread, and persistent misconceptions about Wicca in America.

The reasons for these misconceptions could be elaborated upon in books; but the bottom line is, what is important is what Wicca is.

It is not, as so many Americans seem to believe, devil worship. This misunderstanding probable comes from the old Christian habit of referring to any spirit or deity not explicitly described in Christian theology as a “demon.”

By this logic, virtually all native religions that weren’t Christianity were described as “demonism,” and some Christian pastors still describe all non-Christian practices that way today. Some have even speculated that the Medieval depiction of the Devil as being a horned, goat-like creature was actually based upon the appearance of the “horned god” who appeared in many pre-Christian European religions, in an attempt to convince followers of those religions that their deity was evil.

The fact that many Wiccans today do worship the horned god contributes to confusing Wicca with Satanism – even though the horned god is much older than Christianity and was traditionally a good figure, a bringer of wisdom and prosperity who represented the male horned animals of the European forests and the masculine characteristics of humans.

This cauldron created between 200BC and 300AD shows Cernunnos, one of several horned gods found in pre-Christian European mythology. This image is used as a source for many Wiccans who seek to return to pre-Christian ideas about masculinity and man’s relationship with nature. Photograph by Bloodofox, licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Share and Share Alike.

The formulations of Wicca are even more wide and varied than those of Christianity; just like some Christians believe in the Holy Trinity and others see that as a “pagan” corruption, some Wiccans believe in one God who expresses him/herself through many face seen in pantheons around the world; others believe in more than one absolute God or Goddess, but either way, the moral implications are the same.

Teaching that all Gods and Goddesses are expressions of the same divinity has one obvious implication; that any or all divinities can be properly worshipped as a means of worshipping the ultimate reality.

By that logic, I suppose it is possible that someone could be a Wiccan and worship Satan or another demon as your patron; but by the same token, there is also a large movement called Christian Wicca, which use Wiccan practices to interface with Christ.

So what is Wicca, and where does it come from?

As with most religions, that depends on who you ask. It was introduced to modern audiences in its modern form by Gerald Gardner in the early 20th century; he claimed that he had simply reconstructed the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe based on old documents and hands-on teachings from European traditionalists, but that is disputed.

However accurate Wicca is to pre-Christian European religious traditions, it certainly succeeds in being a nature-based religion which ties the practicioner to the cycles of nature which would have been important to pre-technological farmers and hunter-gatherers.

This Wiccan “wheel o the year” illustrates the major festivals as natural scenes, depicting what is happening at the natural world and what a Wiccan celebrant would do at those times. Photograph by Midnightblueowl, licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Share and Share Alike.

Wicca’s holidays follow the movements of the Moon and Sun, with each holiday’s traditions corresponding to what the natural environment would be doing at that time. Lughnasa, for example, a holiday which occurred just a few days ago, encourages Wiccans to make dishes using crops which would be ripening in early August, such as bilberries and blackberries.

The Wiccan theological framework also relies heavily on the natural world. Just as Taoism speaks of the “yin” and “yang,” which between them describe all the opposing forces in nature, such as masculine and feminine, light and dark, cold and hot, etc., Wicca uses the four elements of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire to encompass all traits of both humans and the natural world.

This is, in fact, the meaning of the five-pointed star called the pentagram; four points of the star represent Earth, Water, Air, and Fire, while the fifth represents the element of the human mind and spirit. The middle of the star, where all five points overlap, represents the world, which is ruled by both the physical elements and the mind/spirit.

Other popular Wiccan symbols include variants on the full and crescent moons, as the waxing and waning of the moon is a natural way of measuring time, and is seen to symbolize the waxing and waning phases of human life as well.

In Wiccan ritual magic, a practicioner symbolically communicates with and manipulates these elements in order to bring about changes in themselves and their environment.

One Wiccan’s altar for the celebration of Beltane. Traditional Wiccan altars include a chalice, which represents feminine energy, and a blade, which represents masculine energy. Note the representations of goddess and horned god, the wheel of the year, and the pentagrams. Photograph by xxGlenxx, licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Share and Share Alike.

So is it possible that a Wiccan may have felt that murder was an appropriate ingredient in one of their rituals? It’s certainly possible, in the same way that Jim Jones and and David Koresh felt that mass murder-suicide was a proper expression of Christianity. But such a Wiccan would be in a great deal of trouble with Wiccans who believe in the “three-fold law” which states that any harm or good you do to others will be revisited upon you, multiplied by three.

In addition to all of this, the most popular moral “rede” for Wiccans goes like this:

“An ye harm none, do what thou wilt.”

Not all Wiccans follow the rede, in the same way that not all Christians follow the Nicene creed. But clearly this religion, in its primal form, does not encourage murder!

My Top Five Lessons From Experience

I was asked recently by a Christian fellow what ideas my spiritual experiences have led me to. This is an interesting question, since one of my lessons has been “don’t try too hard to make things universal.” So with that opening, I will say…

Photograph of a Maasai woman by photography William Warby. Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0 Share and Share Alike. 

This photograph of Albert Einstein by Oren Jack Turner is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.

 

 

 

 

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1. Your morality should not be dependent on your religion.
   
   Religious differences are a frequent source of mistrust. “If they don’t believe the same things I do,” people say, “how can I trust them to be moral?”For some, this takes the form of “If they don’t believe in Heaven and Hell, why should I expect them to do the right thing?”

   For others, it’s “If they’re mistaking their own thoughts for the Word of God, how can I expect them to do the right thing?”

   There is an easy solution to this perennial question: Your morality should never be dependent on your religion!

   Think about it. There are some things that are obviously wrong because they hurt others. Don’t kill. Don’t steal. Don’t lie, except to protect someone from injustice.

   Do be kind. Do be compassionate. Do be empathetic. Do love your neighbor as yourself.

   These commandments are virtually universal, across religions and atheistic philosophies, because other people are people too.

   Across populations and belief groups, indifference to the welfare of others is advocated by only a tiny percentage of the population.For 99% of people, empathy seems to be in our genes; for those for whom its not, religious teachings never seem to have stopped them.

   So consider: is your moral compass based on the concepts of consent and empathy?

   Is it based on interfering in the lives of others only insofar as they want you do, and then only in favor of their well-being?

   Is your morality based on the general idea that “other people are just the same as me, so anything good or bad that happens to them is just like if it happened to me?”

   If not, reconsider why you do the things you do.

   If you cannot see yourself being moral without the promise of reward or threat of punishment, consider why that is.

   If something about “non-interference in the lives of others” rubs you the wrong way, consider why that is.

   Would you want others interfering in your life?

2. Don’t try too hard to make things universal.

   What often seems to happen with religion is that someone has one or more religious experiences, and tries to build a detailed, all-encompassing worldview around them.
   
   There are several problems with this, not the least of which is that a few experiences are not enough to base a detailed universal worldview on.

   I have known people who have had a drastic variety of religious experiences. All seem valid, beneficial, and insightful.

   I have not yet found any sort of theology that explains all of them.

   Even within my own life, I have had spiritual experiences that seemed to contradict each other.

   A positive, seemingly affirming experience of a God who explicitly states that no other gods exist.

   Positive, affirming experiences of gods and goddesses from different pantheons with contradictory creation myths.

   The human insistence on figuring everything out is the root of a great deal of religious strife.

   “If Christianity is good for me,” say the Christians, “then surely it is good for everyone. People just don’t realize what a favor we’re doing them by forcing them to convert.”

   “If atheism is good for me,” says the atheist, “then surely it is good for everyone. People just don’t realize what a favor I’m doing by tearing down their delusions.”

   How about we all use a morality based on consent, instead of one based on “I know what’s best for you, even if you don’t agree?”

   How about we not assume we know what other people have experienced?
   
   

3. Never assume you know what another person will experience. 

   This does not only apply to religion.I’ve heard the same attitude of “frustrated compassion” by any number of people who think they know what is best for another group.

   “Frustrated compassion” is the attitude of many Christians towards non-Christians who somehow fail or refuse to find a home in Christ.

   “Frustrated compassion” is the attitude of many cis-gendered people who, since they don’t want a sex change themselves, are certain that no one should undergo one.

   “Frustrated compassion” generally seems to apply to anyone who thinks they know what will make someone else happy, regardless of that the subjects themselves think.

   The fact is, people are not all the same. Put them in the same environment, they don’t all have the same experience.

4. There’s no accounting for taste. 

   What causes some people to find a home in Christianity, others in Islam, others in atheism, and others in paganism?I don’t know. There is no reliable way I know of of predicting that.

   But what’s important is that fighting over people landing in different places is f*cking stupid, and contradictory to what every religion claims to be.

   After all, every religion claims to be part of the solution. And fighting is part of the problem.

5. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. 

   Okay, so perhaps I stole this one. But it has been re-stated so many times because it is so true.Would you have another person try to “cure” you of your beliefs? If not, don’t do it to them!

Science and Spirituality: Things We Must Recognize

My recent posts have prompted a few comments about science vs. religion. Some have suggested that all spirituality is inherently un-scientific; others have suggested that spirituality is okay “because science isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

I don’t think human psychology supports either of those theses. Here’s why.

• The true purpose of the spiritual is not to violate scientific laws
  
  

  This photograph has been generously released into the public domain by its creator, Flávio Britto Calil.

  If the true purpose of the spiritual was to do something that’s impossible, people wouldn’t still be doing spiritual things.

  Many people have superstitions or spiritual practices that seem un-scientific. This includes many people who, by all rights, should be extremely scientific.

  For example, emergency room doctors – many of whom are also researchers thoroughly trained in scientific rigor and required to exercise it daily – admit to being among the most superstitious groups of people.

  “We don’t say the names of chronically ill patients unless we’re talking to them,” one of them told me. “Because if you mention the patient, they will get sick and they will show up at your door.”

  Just so, many people in otherwise scientific or intellectual professions engage in spiritual practices which seem to violate scientific findings, such as tarot reading. I personally have been shocked by the number of scientists and lawyers who had informed me that they read tarot or performed some other kind of divination – only after learning that I did it as well, which let them know I wouldn’t judge them.

  The perception that scientifically-minded people don’t engage in these sorts of activities seems to stem more from the efforts of many scientific and intellectual professionals to keep their activities on the down-low to avoid being branded irrational than from an actual lack of scientifically-minded people engaging in behavior whose classical theory suggests it should be irrational.

  Why should this be so? Why should highly rational individuals who care a great deal about empirical science as a source of truth seem to engage in un-scientific past-times?

  The discrepancy may come from a popular misunderstanding of what these practices, like tarot and prayer, are actually meant to accomplish. Just because such an activity has failed the scientific test of efficacy – of empirically altering or predicting the outcomes of real-world events, for example – does not mean that the act of practicing it is not psychologically beneficial.

  Tarot is an excellent example. The 78 cards, each of which can have multiple meanings depending on their placement, are popularly known as a way to “predict the future.”

  However, anyone who reads tarot will tell you that at least 80% of the cards in any given spread are not about the future at all; they are about calling the reader’s attention to different aspects of the past or present, and highlighting potential pitfalls and course-corrections.

  The most important function of tarot, indeed, in my experience, is helping an individual to ponder their present situation. By asking the reader to consider variables such as one’s emotional state, one’s formative influences and factors which may be preventing one from perceiving the situation more clearly, tarot helps the situation to have a better outcome – regardless of whether it functions through pure randomness or some sort of divine direction.

  By the same token, even some devout followers of organized religion will tell you that prayer isn’t meant to change God’s mind about something; it’s meant to open communication with God and bring the believer more in line with God’s will.

  In other words, many people who pray admit that prayer is not meant to change the actual outcome of events; it is meant to help the person who is praying to ponder and accept those events.

  While people certainly do exist who believe that divination practices can foretell the future flawlessly, or that prayer can cause miraculous outcomes that would otherwise not have occurred – not all people who engage in these practices feel this way.

  In fact, many people who engage in prayer, divination, spellcasting, etc., perceive that the action’s primary effect is on the mind of the person doing it.

  And that alone can make these actions very beneficial. Because…

• Humans have cognitive biases
  
  

  This JPG created from the TIF file by Arturo Balseiro, which is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Share and Share Alike.

  The human brain is not a machine for calculating statistics. It can’t afford to be.

  Outside of the scientific method – which is too cumbersome to be of use for on-the-spot problem-solving in survival situations – we don’t have ways to gather and analyze enough data to reach a truly accurate idea of what our best option is, or what the highest-probability outcome is.

  When you’re trying to figure out if eating something will kill you during a time of famine, you’re not likely to propose a controlled trial.

  So instead of being a scientific method machine, the human brain has many ways of deciding which data is most important, which knee-jerk reaction will be best, and what the environment is telling you about your probable outcomes.

  For example, some evidence suggests that depression is not a biological flaw; it is an evolutionary mechanism meant to promote conservation of resources and minimize risk-taking during times of famine or other distress.

  Unfortunately, the same kinds of neural cues that are produced during famine are often now produced in modern schools and workplaces; stress hormones released over long periods of time, it is reasoned, could trigger an old subroutine in the brain, triggering a mindset which is reluctant to spend energy on anything and generally expects the worst possible outcome to occur.

  You may wonder why I am talking about this. Well, an important function of religion and spirituality seems to be managing these evolved responses. Religious and spiritual practice is recognized by some neuropsychologists as one potentially beneficial component (ideally in combination with clinical approaches) to improve an individual’s sense of self-efficacy and quality of life.

  So how do practices like prayer or tarot help manage our cognitive biases to produce more favorable behavior?

  Well, put simply, we seem to be designed to operate differently when we have different expectations. When we think that times are tough and odds of success are low, our brains won’t give us much energy to invest in new ventures, and others who read the lack of confidence on us will similarly be hesitant to invest.

  That might not be a bad thing, if our brains were statistical calculating machines. But since so much of how our brain estimates the odds seems to have to do with local information like our stress levels and past experiences with unrelated matters, we can easily become paralyzed by irrational doubts.

  There is also the problem that our brains will calculate that it is only worth expending energy to improve a situation if the improvement has good odds of yielding our desired outcome. So if we don’t already believe that a better outcome is likely, we may become stuck in the “cycle” that characterizes so many social and psychological issues, whereby a destructive behavior continues because we already expect bad results.

  And humans are not motivated by rationality as strongly as we are motivated by emotion. We are not motivated by what facts our intellectual mind learns; we are motivated by the emotional gestalt our brain gets from a combination of evolved responses that were made for an environment where our biggest obstacles were “starvation” and “getting chased by lion.” These responses are no longer helpful in the modern world.

  These are one of the things that religious and spiritual practice help us to manage. If we believe the odds of success are higher – whether because we’ve been given a legitimately more objective viewpoint by considering different aspects of the situation, or a non-empirical boost in confidence to combat our non-empirical doubts – we will be more motivated to clearly assess the situation and take action.

  Optimizing one’s situation is, indeed, the motif of modern tarot reading. Every negative card is turned into a learning experience and an opportunity to realize your own power in the situation; every obstacle a challenge to overcome; every boon an opportunity to be seized and developed upon.

  Meditation is excellent for clearing away evolutionary chatter from the mind and yielding clear perception and emotional regulation; prayer is excellent for instilling confidence boosts and inviting contemplation of difficult problems.

  As much as some would advocate for becoming strictly rational creatures, that does not seem to be possible for the current human brain, still so close to its feast-or-famine, fight-or-flight, pre-literate roots.

  And given that our children may yet find themselves lost in the woods without access to science textbooks – perhaps retaining some of our responses evolved before science is not a bad thing.

• The spiritual holds unique power and experiences for many people
  
  

  Original photography by me.

  When we lay it out in the coldly analytical light of cognitive biases and essentially manipulating our own emotional behavior, spirituality can sound like a poor substitute for something preferable.

  Some readers will ask, wouldn’t it be preferable for us to become instinctively rational creatures? Wouldn’t it be preferable to perfect philosophy and meditation as purely neurological exercises, distilling pure logic and clearing the mind of unnecessary emotion?

  And the answer seems to be that those things do work wonderfully for some people. But for many, they take more work and, frankly, may not resonate as well as more classically spiritual pursuits do.

  Why is that?

  There are many hypotheses we could put forth to answer this question.

  Perhaps interfacing with gods and spirits allows us to use parts of our brain specifically made for the very important task of reading other humans’ minds in order to solve non-human problems and analyze non-human data.

  Perhaps these people we meet inside our minds are able to assist us in solving uniquely human psychological problems. One study found that children who interacted with imaginary friends originating in their own minds, rather than faring worse, were actually more well-adjusted than their peers.

  Perhaps we really do have genetic responses to certain aesthetics; it’s well-established that people with different psychological profiles respond differently to various therapy techniques, colors, and landscape imagery. Could the same hold true for scriptures and religious imagery?

  Perhaps magic works via the placebo effect; after all, clinical trials need to be double-blinded specifically because people who think they’re getting treated will often report improvement of their symptoms and sometimes better medical outcomes, even if there is no physical effect beyond that produced in their brain by the optimism of believing they are being treated. Double-blinded trials of drugs vs. placebos exist specifically to identify which drugs have benefits above and beyond the placebo effect.

  Or perhaps, just perhaps, there really are entities in the universe that we do not understand.

  In the end, which is the correct explanation matters little, except to guide us in wise behavior.

  Can spirituality go horribly wrong, yielding closed-minded dogmatists who are resistant to new facts, fanatics who believe they are only safe if everyone follows the same religious laws they do, and snake oil salesmen who make false promises? Yes.

  But can spirituality also empower the individual, assist in psychotherapy and self-actualization, improve one’s overall sense of well-being, and even lead to more compassionate, empathetic, and fearless behavior? Also yes.

  It is up to us to be wise with our spirituality. And on that note…

• Spirituality should never trump science
  

  This image by Miraceti licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Share and Share Alike. Yes, I’m aware that it’s based on the outdated standard model.

  The fact that I am spiritual does not mean that I condone rejecting science.I’ll say it again: I may be a pagan, a tarot reader, a spiritual leader to some.

  I will never reject science.

  Because science is good. When rigorous and peer-reviewed, it is a more reliable source of information than any divine revelation. It has led to more benefits than I can easily enumerate.

  And perhaps most of all, it allows new things, new possibilities for us to elucidate.

  If you know that you are getting a good thing out of spirituality, that is good. Hold fast to all good things.

  But consider what these benefits do and do not imply. Do they mean that your divination cannot be wrong about the future? It has never meant that for anybody before in all of history. Does it mean that you should do whatever your deity tells you, no matter how unscientific or morally questionable? We have seen such decisions end very badly many times.

  The good news is, there are very few people in today’s secure and enlightened era who need to be told this. As we become more secure in our material well-being and our own self-worth, rationality does, indeed, seem to be on the rise.

  But we must always be on our guard against the darkness, mustn’t we? That includes…

• Not everybody needs to be spiritual
  

  The “Happy Human” symbol of secular humanism, a movement independent of any spiritual grouping that seeks human advancement. Image by Tesseract2, licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Share and Share Alike.

  When you come across a good thing, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everyone should experience that good thing.But as with medication, spiritual prescriptions do not work the same way for everyone.

  If they’re going to be prescribed at all, it should probably be by a doctor – or, more preferably, a psychologist.

  You wouldn’t pressure your friend to take your medication without a prescription because it did good things for you; don’t pressure your friends to adopt your spirituality for the same reason.

  Anything that has power also has the potential to be dangerous.

  And our minds can be as different as our bodies.

  In summary…

• Just because someone is spiritual, doesn’t mean they aren’t also scientific.
  
  

  This photograph of a stained glass window at Yale University has been generously released into the public domain by photographer Sage Ross. It depicts personifications of science and religion paying homage to the same personification of Light-Love-Life.

  It is easy to see how we might think that the two are mutually exclusive. After all, the most popular religions in the world today are often dogmatic and overtly hostile to science.“If science contradicts my beliefs,” they say, “then it’s science that has to go.”

  But this is not always true. The Dalai Lama, not so long ago, made global headlines by declaring “If a scientific discovery contradicts my beliefs, then my beliefs will have to change.”

  This seems to be an attitude increasingly embraced by spiritual folks who realize that whatever benefit they get from spirituality must be balanced with recognition that their spiritual experience is not the only legitimate spiritual experience, and with openness to being corrected, not just by new spiritual data, but by science.

  The idea that spirituality and scientific rigor are mutually exclusive is a fallacy. It is based on an incomplete understanding of what spirituality is and what benefits it brings. Both the spiritual and the non-spiritual fall into this trap at times.

  Some spiritual people say “science can’t be true because it undermines my core beliefs,” without stopping to examine whether the beliefs under fire are actually essential to the benefit their spirituality conveys to them.

  Some scientific people say “spirituality is unscientific because it relies on belief in the divine, which is unproven.” Well, prayer may not cure cancer, and divination may not predict the future. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate reasons to practice these things.

  You just have to practice them for the right reasons.

My Spiritual Re-Awakening

In 2012, my spiritual re-awakening began.

Prior to that, I had been an atheist, forcibly cut off from spiritual experience. A bad falling out with a religion that taught that it was The Only Truth had left me with a disdain for all religion.

After all, if the one that said that it was The Only Truth, that nothing else was even remotely valid, that only one spiritual truth could exist was wrong – why believe in anything? It actually seemed blasphemous to my Christian sensibilities to do so.

So I cut myself off. Not only from the Church which had lost its ability to provide comfort and reassurance when I began to doubt the truth of its teachings years ago; but also from the sky which still sang to me after I had sworn of Yahweh, from the Earth which still seemed to wrap me in its protective embrace. I cut myself off from the sense of love, deafened my ears to it, reasoning that if Yahweh was not there, no one was.

Photograph of Monument for Jennie Roosevelt Pool, at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Colma, CA, by Seattleretro. Licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Share and Share Alike.

So I lived for several years; content with the mundane and the scientific, with what I could see and measure, with working for the good of the material world. I earned my degree in neuroscience because I wanted to know how it was that our brains could deceive us; I wanted to know the chemical workings, the hard physical laws, that underlay our emotions, our desires, our sense of the divine.

But a few things happened to break this spell. For I was still a writer, still a fantasist, and every now and then when I was deep in my mind looking for some character or some interesting new event, I would find something – or someone – I had never expected to find.

The first time, it was Death. But that is a story for another time, for he did not stick around.

The second time, it was Loki.

I was working with a fictional character – I don’t honestly remember anymore whether I meant for him to be an antagonist or an anti-hero. But I was absolutely fascinated with this mind that I had found within my own, this trickster who always seemed full of surprises for me. The sensation of communion with him was, at first, like what I had experienced with other fictional characters of my own creation.

But in time, it began to turn into something more.

The character’s facial features and his hair would change. They did not stick to the design I’d set for them. Sometimes I would come to find him effeminate, long, shining hair and alabaster skin; at other times his hair and eyes would blaze like fire, and he would seem barely human.

I have been long in the habit of dissecting these villain’s minds – he was a villain, a sociopath at least, that much was quite clear. I did it with Hannibal Lecter and Ledger’s Joker; I would seep into their minds and poke around in there, try to alter a small thing or find the mechanism behind a particular behavior I was observing.

I walked into this man’s mind –

And doors like those of a stone cathedral, stories high, closed behind me. I was locked in.

I’ll spare you the stories of how I reacted to this, how it felt, how we first fought and became friends.

I will skip to the part where I began to suspect that he was real.

My version of Loki had been feeling less like a character and more like a spirit for some time; he felt less like a fictional character, less like a mere mortal, and more like God or like the spirits of the trees I used to talk to or the goddess of a pond I visited often as a child. He felt more real and more like heroin, more like Death Himself had felt on his brief and mercifully rare visits. He felt like something outside of me.

And then things began to happen.

He told me one day, showed me the image with dancing glee, of each letter of the runic alphabet carved into small, round stones. One letter to a stone. Would this not be a lovely thing to have? he asked me, and there was such a sense of joy and beauty in the things in my mind’s eye that I had to agree.

Opalite runestones on wood.

I will make some when I get back, I promised him, for I was going on a trip – a trip to a convention where I never expected to find anything occult or divine.

I told no one of the sharing, but plotted to myself how I could make small round stone-like things out of polymer clay, could make them out of shining clay that would glitter like metal or jewels, darkened where I’d press the runic letters into them, which I knew as a phonetic alphabet from studying my grandmother’s books years ago.

I could foresee no practical use for such things, had no idea why I should want them, but I did.

So imagine me stopping dead in the convention dealer’s room, stock-still under fluorescent lights, staring at a box of the things I had been seeing in visions for the last two days.

“What in God’s name do you think those are?” I asked my roommate, a friend-of-a-friend who I had met only once before who’d ended up sharing a hotel room with me by sheer serendipity because another party member had canceled.

“They’re runestones,” she responded with an offhanded casualness as though she spoke of such things every day. “You use them for divination.”

“I must have them.”

She raised an eyebrow at me, surprised no doubt by my shell-shocked reaction, and agreed to teach me how to use them as she had apparently been doing for the better part of a decade.

I will spare you stories of how my stones served me, of how they accurately predicted prosperity and disaster in turn. I will spare you stories of how the use of runes eventually turned into the use of tarot cards through yet more un-planned serendipity, when I accidentally went to a panel on using tarot to predict the future instead of a panel while trying to find a panel given by a botanist I knew.

What I will tell you is this: Loki showed me, over a course of months, that I had been missing half of human experience.

My materialist existence was not miserable; it did not impart feelings of inadequacy or despair, as the Christians had promised me it would.

But living that existence, compared to living the one I now re-discovered, full of spirits and energy, friends and foes, power and what may be subconscious projections –

It was like living only half of life.

I never would – and never will – regain my lost faith in the unseen. I remain, mainly, an atheist.

But I’m an atheist now who talks to gods and spirits; who frolics with them in prarie and in wood, who defends those who are condemned and soothes those who are hurting, who calls to account those spirits who claim to be good and righteous.

I am an atheist who reads tarot cards and directs energy through crystals, who burns candles and works spells and reads The Tao Te Ching and The Witch’s Eight Paths of Power and The Varieties of Religious Experience each in turn.

I am a pagan with a degree in neuroscience, who reads The Fractured Mind and The Elegant Universe and questions every thing and every one.

All credit to the authors.

I think that talking about experience is important. It is, indeed, much more important than theology.

A physicist once told me she could prove just about anything with math; this is true with all strains of logic. A single flawed premise can render the world’s most internally consistent logic worse than useless. And we have only one way of knowing which premises are true.

These are our experiences. Our observations of the inside and outside worlds. Through these, we may know our true nature, and the nature of the world around us.

That is why I will share experience as frequently as I share theory. What is important is not whether my theory is absolutely right: it is that my experiences have happened.

What has happened to you?

 

A Theory of Gods

This photograph of a man worshipping at the Darbar Sahib, or “Golden Temple” in Punjab, India by Koshy Koshy. Licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Share and Share Alike.

Fairly regularly, I hear someone ask “why would someone with a normally functioning brain believe in a god?”

On the surface of it, I can see their logic. Gods are, by most definitions, invisible; they do not typically manifest in any way we can perceive with the senses we use to experience the outside world. People say they see the hand of God everywhere – but typically in things that require no “hand of God” to be explained.

Why, then, do so many people believe in gods or spirits?

I find that, to start at the beginning, many people’s ideas of how a “normal” brain functions are quite skewed. Human brains are not computers; they are animal  brains.  We are deeply instinctive creatures – and if we pay attention to our own minds, we perceive hte world quite differently from how a computer would.

I have observed in my time studying the subject that some people seem to have experiences of what they perceive as divinity from an early age, while others don’t, regardless of teaching.

It could very well be that the perception of divinity a brain function that varies within the population. I know that I have had spiritual-type perceptions from a very early age, including many that were blatantly incompatible with the theology my family attempted to instill in me. I know also that I’ve known people who wanted very badly to believe in God, to experience divinity, and were unable to do so.

One could speculate almost endlessly on why an animal brain would have evolved perceptions of divinity.

The conclusion I support most strongly is that interacting with “divinity” is actually a way of interacting with our own subconscious minds; the human brain perceives and processes a LOT of data and has to be extremely agile when responding to extremely complex social and physical circumstances, so talking to different “divinities” may help us to access and process data, and therefore respond more effectively to the complex system that is ourselves and our world.

There actually seems to be a lot of wiring in most human brains that would seem explicitly geared for this.

We are accustomed to hearing about this wiring going wrong, in instances like schizophrenia, where people believe they hear voices of higher powers – along with delusions, disordered thinking, and changes in sensory processing that are not typical of healthy people.

This connectivity scan of the brain of a patient with schizophrenia created by Kubicki, M. et al. Licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Share and Share Alike. Schizophrenic patients show disorganization of neurons in the hippocampus along with, for some reason, significant differences in the processing of visual information compared to people without schizophrenia.

I’ve heard it speculated many times that all spirituality originates with schizophrenics. But even a casual glance at the symptoms of schizophrenia vs. the behavior of spiritual teachers will lay this idea to rest. Schizophrenia is not the source of spirituality; but it is evidence that there are systems within our brains programmed to believe we are perceiving higher powers, which can become broken just like any body part can.

We also see evidence of an innate propensity for spirituality in near death experiences, and, occasionally, in dreams. As we become increasingly good at bringing people back from what was once considered “death,” studies show that well over 10% of cardiac arrest victims report near-death experiences – which often include life-changing spiritual experiences that experiencers find difficult to describe in words in the waking world.

These descriptions mirror brain states that occasionally seem to happen during REM sleep – which may account for many descriptions of gods coming to people in life-changing dreams in spiritual texts. Some scientists believe that the underlying neurological wiring for REM sleep is the same as that which kicks in in near-death experiences.

This image of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel by Gustave Doré is in the public domain because it’s copyright has expired.

But regardless of what the stimulus is, or what the underlying neurology is, the hardware for perceiving different attributes of the divine – such as other entities speaking to us inside our heads, profound feelings of being loved and connected to something larger than oneself, seem to be quite common.

One of the many mysteries surrounding this subject is that divinity seems to manifest in very different ways for different people. While some organized religions would have the devout restricted to worshipping one name and face of god; it is clear that different people flock to different divinities, of which there are, ultimately, millions recorded in human history.

Why that is is another subject for another time.

An Insult to the People and Democracy: On the Ethiopian General Election

Love is what’s needed.

Oromian Economist

An Insult to the People and Democracy

On the Ethiopian General Election

by GRAHAM PEEBLES,  Counterpunch

Every five years the Ethiopian people are invited by the ruling party to take part in a democratic pantomime called ‘General Elections’. Sunday 24th May saw the latest production take to the national stage.

With most opposition party leaders either in prison or abroad, the populace living under a suffocating blanket of fear, and the ruling party having total control over the media, the election result was a foregone conclusion. The European Union, which had observed the 2005 and 2010 elections, refused to send a delegation this time, maintaining their presence would legitimise the farce, and give credibility to the government.

With most ballots counted, the National Election Board of Ethiopia announced the incumbent party to have ‘won’ all “442 seats declared [from a total of 547], leaving the opposition empty-handed…the remaining 105…

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Love: What does it mean?

Love.

It’s what every religion claims to strive for, aid, and abet. It is almost universally recognized as the highest personal virtue, the ultimate goal. It’s what most religions cite as the reason for their actions.

Love.

For what we see as one word, the Greeks used four: “agape” to refer to perfect and complete love, “phileos” for affection and fondness, “eros” for romantic love, and “stergos” for parental love.

Love.

How quickly we deviate from it in our religions. How quickly it becomes un-important. How quickly “love” can become a matter of control – “I can’t let you do this because I love you,” “I can’t let you do this because I love them.”

The Torah sets down strict laws related to the punishment of unauthorized sexuality, stating that their purpose is ultimately loving – “thus shall you keep evil away from yourselves.”

C.S. Lewis once wrote that it is, in fact, a community’s duty to ensure that its members are in “good internal order,” because “a ship that goes astray can be dangerous to the whole fleet.”

The Qu’ran states that God is loving – but also that He has the right to do anything he wishes to the humans he made. This same mentality seems to be reflected in the Torah and the Bible, where the story of Job tells us that God is still considered virtuous after committing many murders in order to test one man’s faith.

Every culture, every religion, has its laws for a reason. In many cultures, religions were once tribal, and so religious differences were an extremely serious matter: if you followed a different tribe’s god, there was a real likelihood that you would be motivated to sabotage the well-being of your own tribe.

Even more recently, religions were used for political power. The entire reason for the persecution of Christianity in the Roman empire was that Christianity represented a threat to the divinity of the Roman emperor, which was an essential part of the glue holding that sprawling, mostly-religious empire together.

Time was, women and children were property; your tribe lived or died on the backs of your warriors, and women were how you made warriors.  You lived or died on the resources of your land, and inheritance and war were the two ways you acquired land. From this stems the gender heirarchy and obsession with sexual purity found in the Abrahamic faiths.

Similar trends can be found in cultures around the world; the Vikings’ intricate fealty system served their own purposes, and is reflected in their mythology; the Roman’s taboos (or lack thereof) reflect, among other things, their geographic surroundings and technological limitations.

So how are we to interpret what is “loving” in a world with thousands of conflicting prescriptions for what that means?

I would propose an evidence-based approach: can you demonstrate evidence of harm occurring in the modern world when your taboo is not followed?

But, of course, in practice, love comes down to an internal mental state; a personal practice.

But perhaps we should be clear on what can and cannot be justified by “love” from an empirical standpoint.

Perspective Check: On Non-Exclusivism in Religion

Good evening, everyone,

My roommate and I got into a conversation last night which raised an interesting point.

In the West, it is absolutely ingrained in our culture that you are one religion OR the another. The Abrahamic God proclaimed early on in his ministry that his followers were not to pay homage to any other gods or their customs; thus started the Abrahamic tradition of quite literally demonizing the divinities and traditions of other religions. “These things may exist,” opined the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, “but if so, they are evil. They are demons.”

Elaborate theologies of logic and philosophy were built by the Abrahamic scholars, explaining why their worldview was right and all others deeply flawed. Treatises were written on the evil and insufficiency of “untruth” and “demonism,” which were both terms frequently applied to the religions which were native to a region before the Abrahamic missionaries showed up.

And the Abrahamic faiths had no more tolerance for each other than for the pagan religions; Christian and Muslim scholars wrote long treatises on why the other was deeply flawed, and they invented nasty new words like “infidel” to call each other.

As a result, we in the West have an essential either/or view of religion. One cannot be, in our minds, Christian AND pagan, or Christian AND Muslim, or Christian AND Buddhist.

In the East, this never quite happened.

This conversation arose when we were discussing the activities of Buddhist and Taoist priests – both arguably non-theistic religions with monotheism-like trappings, teaching that a single nature is the explanation for the nature of the Universe, and that any spirits one may encounter are unimportant to the quest for truth.

But these religions seem never to have demonized the pagan/shamanistic/animistic religions that continued to dwell around them. Indeed, an essential role of certain classes of Buddhist and Taoist priests is to perform rituals to communicate with place spirits, minor deities, and other things.

What would it be like in the West, I wonder, if espousing trappings of more than one religion were not inherently taboo? How many former Christians would still call themselves Christians if they had not been told that they could not also be something else in addition to Christianity?

What would you be, if you could have two religions?

Honoring Fariba Kamalabadi: Day Two of the #7Bahais7years Campaign

Ms. Martha Urquhart

Topic:  Situation of Iranian Baha’is

NEW YORK—15 May 2015—

Today is the day the world will honor Fariba Kamalabadi, who has been wrongfully imprisoned since 2008 solely for her religion, as part of the global “Seven Days in Remembrance of Seven Years in Prison for the Seven Baha’i Leaders” campaign.

Ms. Kamalabadi, 52, was arrested on 14 May 2008 in an early morning raid on her home. Five other Baha’i leaders were arrested in home raids that day.

She is a developmental psychologist and mother of three who was denied the chance to study at university as a youth because of her Baha’i belief. Before her current incarceration, she had been arrested twice before, and was held for periods of one and two months respectively, all due to her volunteer work for the Baha’i community.

Since her arrest, and throughout her imprisonment, Ms. Kamalabadi has been held…

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Science vs. Experience

Following my latest post, I wanted to explain a bit more about religious diversity. It is something that we all struggle with – the idea that other people disagree with us. It is difficult to wrap our heads around why they should be allowed to do so when clearly one of us is right.

Logical attacks by one group against those who don’t think like them abound on the Internet. In the past week alone I’ve read logical exhortations of why all religion is irrational and therefore childish; why all religions other than Christianity are irrational; etc.. I’d probably be citing examples about Hinduism or Buddhism or Islam right now if I lived in a different country.

All of this seems to suggest that logic is of important, but not omnipotent utility when discussing matters of spirituality.

I think it’s fairly indisputable that logical deduction and the scientific method are the best ways to determine the best pragmatic course of action as a society. When you want to know whether to outlaw something, a society based on respecting the rights of individuals should ask: “Does this thing harm individuals? Does prohibiting this thing harm individuals?”

Those are questions which can be answered through scientific inquiry (which presents you with carefully measured facts) better than through personal experience (which vary widely from individual to individual and are so influenced by cognitive bias that the same people often espouse wildly differing opinions at different points in their lives).

However, it is also empirically, demonstrably true that human experience is neither determined nor ruled by empirical facts.

There’s good reason for this.

Our brains were not designed to be science machines. The fact that we are capable of scientific inquiry and rigorous logic is a great achievement, gained through tremendous effort. But to claim that these things do (or should) be our only basis for doing anything is like saying that we should act on vision alone, since it gives us the most detailed information about our surroundings, while ignoring the other four (well, technically five or six) sense.

Even if you say you’re going to act on vision alone, you’re lying. Your brain is still going to perceive what your ears hear and factor that into your thoughts, feelings, and actions, even if you insist that you are living a completely sound-free lifestyle.

This is not to suggest that “there’s no such things as atheists,” as some have proposed. But do you call someone irrational for insisting that sound is a phenomenon worthy of celebrating, even though you find it to be an inferior and unreliable sense? Do you condemn somebody who benefits from listening to music, since there’s no direct physical mechanism for music to improve one’s life?

I hope I haven’t lost you with my metaphor. My point is, some people do have spiritual experiences. I’ve lived with them and without them, and even though I consider myself an atheist, it makes my blood boil to hear other atheists suggest (as they often do) that all of religious experience is a scam/fabrication/just an attempt to explain a world they’re not educated enough to understand.

The question of what different individuals do “hear,” spiritually speaking, is a fascinating one to me. And perhaps that is what we should be talking about – what kind of spiritual experience do you “hear,” in the same way we talk about different Myers-Briggs personality types and different skin colors.

I have known people who were raised in deeply religious surroundings, who had every social encouragement to become religious, and yet who never had perceptions of God sufficient to make them believe in anything supernatural.

I have known people raised in strictly atheist homes who still had profound spiritual perceptions that led them to adopt religions for which they were severely socially punished.

I have known people who were raised in deeply religious homes and who felt powerfully drawn to the spiritual life – but whose spiritual perceptions contradicted what they were taught by their religious community from a very early age.

All of this seems to suggest to me that there is much more going on here than either logic or social incentive. Logicians disagree about the spiritual nature of the universe; people who are socially incentivized to believe the same things end up disagreeing. Something else is playing a powerful role in people’s lives.

And yet, whatever spiritual perceptions play such a powerful role in people’s lives are far from universal. Some tell stories of converting to Christianity, for example, as the result of an unexpected spiritual experience. Others tell stories of converting away from Christianity for the same reason.

So we seem to be able to establish that spiritual perception, whatever its source, does not manifest the same way for everyone. For some people it seems to manifest as the Abrahamic God; for others, as pagan gods or goddesses. For some it seems not to manifest at all, or to manifest as a non-sentient, non-anthropomorphic idea.

Let me tell you some stories:

Once there was a young man who desperately wanted to believe in God. He needed something to believe in, and had been raised to believe that God was the best and only thing to believe in; that believing in God was morally right and admirable, anyway.

But he couldn’t do it. Although he had been raised to believe that it was good and right, the teachings he heard from religious leaders growing up did not make intuitive sense to him. When he prayed, he perceived nothing.

That little boy grew up to be an angry atheist; an atheist who had been made to feel guilty and wicked and inadequate because he did not perceive God. An atheist who had felt restricted in many aspects of his life by the laws of a religion which seemed to him pointless.

He grew up to be an angry atheist who regularly railed against the ignorance and idiocy of all those religious folks who tried to force people to believe in something that clearly wasn’t there.

Another story; once there was a young woman who grew up in an atheist household. Her parents were both scholars who had no use for anything traditional or superstitious. Yet this girl began to have experiences with a certain divinity at an early age; and it was not even a popular divinity such as the Abrahamic God.

Her relationship with this divinity ultimately blossomed into a spiritual, magical, and religious practice that became an important part of her life. Even as she, too, pursued a PhD with the aim of scientifically investigating on aspects of the world that were important to her religious worldview.

Her scientific inquiry and vast body of scientific knowledge did nothing to detract from her continued relationship with a divinity that had no place in monotheism, no place, even, in a strict logician’s model of the universe.

Another; once there was a young man who was very angry at religion. Growing up in an abusive dysfunctional religious home, he was an angry atheist regularly regaling the stupidity of the religious who attempted to force their outdated laws and superstitions upon others. He lived wildly, embracing a lifestyle that was the antithesis of what he had been raised into.

Then one day, he had a vision of the Virgin Mary and somehow found himself in the office of a coordinator for a local Christian revival movement. Within a year he had joined an explicitly Christian commune; within three he had converted to Catholicism. He would remain a devout Catholic for the rest of his life.

This story would perhaps be less strange if that little boy hadn’t been raised in a Christian denomination that condemned the Catholic “idolatrous” practice of venerating images of saints, and their clearly “pagan” veneration of the Virgin Mary. Despite that, somehow, she found him – or he found her, as you prefer to think of it.

Last story: there once was a girl who was raised in a devout Irish Catholic family. As a child, she was the most voluntarily devout of her peers; as a teen, she was more devout than her parents, spending hours each week at church in worship.

But her spirituality had always had another side, which did not fit with the teachings of her church. From a very early age she had felt compelled to spend hours alone in the woods, engaging in thoughts, experiences, and activities that could best be described as pagan.

In time she realized that the primary reason for her devotion to Christianity was her love of what she felt in the forest; and the spirits that she talked to, who had no place in the theology of the religion of her birth. Because she had been taught from birth that the church was the place to worship the Creator of the natural world, she worshipped there; but certain church teachings had never made sense to her. She had been waiting for them to start making sense when she got older.

This little girl spent several years as an atheist, jaded by the failure of the religion of her birth, before having a re-awakening to pagan spirituality one day. “On that day,” she said, “I realized that as an atheist, I had been missing half of human experience. There was nothing logical about it; it was just a very powerful experience.”

We could speculate as to what all these stories have in common; all involve a rejection of the “default” worldview, the worldview which these children’s parents expected them to take up.

Indeed, the only universal generalization ventured by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience was that the profoundly affecting religion must always be a new understanding; nobody has profound religious experiences and thinks that their worldview is exactly like that of their parents. Even if the label is the same, they believe that they have come to some new understanding beyond what they were taught.

Yet I still think that there is something more than social individuation at play. How could a mere instinct to make an identity for oneself manifest as an ongoing relationship lasting years? Why would such a thing intrude upon apparently established identities, such as the two folks in our story who spent time as atheists after falling away from one religion and before falling into another.

There is much to speculate on here. All I can do is share my experiences, and the experiences of others I have collected.

What do you think?