29 April 2012
The recent abandonment by Peter Dybing of all titles and roles within the Pagan community to pursue ‘dirt worship’ and to focus more directly on his partner Rebekah possibly portends what I am increasingly fearing, namely, end times. The eco-system of our planet is dying. As Phoebe Wray puts it, our planet “will survive. We won’t.” If we honestly assess the planetary human community, we know that it is deeply and even dishonestly fractured. This rupturing situation extends to the Pagan community as well and to the point that our “backstabbing” appears to be much of the reason why Peter is quitting and seeking a “return to anonymity.” As he recognises, it is a disease that can infect us all.
On the wider level, half of humanity identifies with and/or practices an Abrahamic faith that is essentially a religion of division – an orientation that reduces the human event to an ‘us and them’ scenario. Whether Judaism, Christianity or Islam, the very nature of the religious conviction is schismatic so that each of these three world religions fight between themselves and even within themselves. They are also, potentially at least, at war with the other half of the human population. Two possible Abrahamic exceptions might be seen in Baha’i and Sikhism, but even with this last the Five K’s of its adherents concretely re-create an ‘us and them’ identity division.
Thanks to both desperation and greed, the divisiveness of Abrahamic exclusivism is to be found among the rest of us as well, whether secular, dharmic or pagan. Our human community has reached seven billion, and while within that figure there may be some coalescing into nests and concordant groups or communities, there is still an irreducibly huge number of self-ish desires, demands and uncompromising thought. And now with the sham of democracy, the imminent melt-down of our economic systems, governmental deceit, depletion of resources, global pollution and disregard of others on every level – from drunken mindlessness at 4 AM as inebriants vociferously blast through sleeping residential communities to collateral damage through drone bombings, armed aggression and suicide bombing – we have reached our end times; all of us.
Being upon the brink of catastrophe, it is no wonder that someone like Peter has chosen to focus more exclusively on his beloved and the ‘dirt’ immediacy of what is local and still left to appreciate and even, however doomed, to work with and for. As our earth if not the planet dies, we Pagans in particular die with it. She is our centre and comprises the core of our spirituality of engagement regardless of its individual forms. But it is to our shame that we fight among ourselves, drench ourselves in petty jealousies and reflect our worldwide human comrades more than the mother’s sanctity itself. We are disappointingly unimaginative as a communal voice despite some exemplary individuals among us.
Drowning as we are in a sea of mediocrity and banal ridiculousness, this last is not surprising. I would wish that I am wrong in this, but Peter’s decision is one that makes perfect sense in the face of hopelessness. In the dirt, some of us can still dream and envision perhaps the magic that we ourselves, as both a Pagan community and a human community, have failed. In the time we have left, perhaps the best we can do now is individually, locally and trans-politically seek to separate our dirt from the more ubiquitous filth of collective insanity. What exactly we have lost perhaps cannot be named, but our human terrestrial quest should be so obvious that it should be our silently spoken but absolutely insistent and universal demand. How sad for the earth, how sad for us and how sad for our children that it is not.
Second comment (7 May 2012):
Who is talking about Armaggedonism? The ‘end times’ that I am increasingly seeing on the horizon is not one brought about by a punishing ‘God’ or even a natural disaster but one in which the responsibility lies *fully* with us and us alone. And in my original post, I was speaking about the full human community and not just the pagan one which is and should be a part of all ‘earthlings’ and not something separate or apart. But we pagans like the rest of the human population can slip into a blind arrogance just as easily in defence of some erroneous facts such as EH’s blithe assertions that “we are far more abundant as a society” (which society?) and that we have “less hunger in the world.” This last I find astonishing. Perhaps there are more decently fed people in the world today than in the past, but with a world now moving beyond 7 billion, that means that there is also a much greater number of hungry people probably than ever before. In fact, according to the “The World Health Organization … one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed, one-third is starving - Since you've entered this site at least 200 people have died of starvation. Over 4 million will die this year” (http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/present/stats.htm).
Of course we pagans understand the ‘cyclicity’ of things and can envision a humanity that is not against nature, but when some of us maintain that “We are a people who believes in abundance, the abundance of Gaia and the unlimited resources of the Universe belongs to us all, all life, and we have been risen to the sentience to gain it, should be a core Pagan belief, and will be in generations to come,” this sounds frighteningly like the Old Testament injunction to subdue the earth and have dominion over her (Genesis 1.26-28) that renders the “abundance of Gaia” as an unlimited resource for us to plunder. Perhaps, and only perhaps, the “Pagan community is not in trouble,” but the human community is – whether we wish to acknowledge that fact and work to change it, or whether we wish to insist on a golden future that will simply “startle” those of us who have more to remember and is somehow to happen magically and without us owning up to the real – and, yes, often depressing – obstacles in the way.
Like Peter, I too love our community and respect anyone’s
effort for personal growth. I also have respect for more traditional pagan and/or indigenous communities who respect their elders and would never openly declare them as ‘personal failures’. As for pinning our hopes and faith position on an alleged current beginning of the Age of Aquarius, I would
recommend the work of Nicholas Campion who has assembled a huge range of dates that have been attributed as the start of the ‘New Age’. The Age of Pisces would correspond to the month of February-March and, with the precession of the equinoxes, we have a long, long way before we might emerge from the ‘winter’ and the next Age of Capricorn into a pre-winter Golden Age.
Peter’s relinquishing a claim to pagan leadership was only the catalyst for the expression of my opinion. His mention of backstabbing within our community as infectious is disappointing but merely underscores the work that lies before all of us if we are to forestall let alone eliminate any impending catastrophe. I too want a brighter future for my children and the rest of us, but we are not going to have one if we play ostrich and do not face the realities that we need to face. For me, Peter’s decision triggered the wish to express what I am seeing on the more global stage. Much of that is ugly and counter-productive to anything progressive and equable. But it behooves us to look at the warts and blemishes as much as we might our dreams and visions in order to square the one with the other. Fortunately, and as Nicole asserts, there are moderate allies ‘out there’ with whom we could and even should work, and hopefully the “apocalypse” is not as imminent as it sometimes seems to be. But every day lost makes the uphill climb even more difficult, and in that climb I believe that the pagan community has perhaps the pivotal role to play.
We may be at an adolescent stage, but in crisis situations such as we find today through much of our world, a premature maturity often becomes a necessity. I think through our gods and the pagan ethos, we pagans have what it will take not only to survive but to implement the kind of growing consciousness that could foster a collective shift before it is too late. But it is not going to be all sugar and light. We will often be called upon to swallow the bitter in the process and fathom the darknesses if we are to make “local, regional, and global impacts.” This also means that we cannot afford to sugar-coat realities.
Every religion merits respect and the opportunity to mature. But we do a disservice if we paint our histories dishonestly and pretend things to be differently than they were. Judaism, as the ‘parent’ of the Abrahamic traditions, was at best forced “to live in peace.” Before that we had the destruction of the Canaanite and Philistine groves, temples, idols and shrines.
Let’s be clear and honest with what things have been if we are to secure growth and positive change.
The Great Cycle of the Mayan calendar is supposed to end with the winter solstice of this year. An end is of course also a beginning. But we have before us at this point a metaphor that we could possibly harness to achieve something that has not previously existed. Let us work as hard as we can for the new to be something truly positive. Even if the world might end – and it will end for each and everyone of us at some point, it does not mean that we should not dance as if there were no tomorrow. But let that dance be for us a pagan dance that is both pragmatic and effectively magical.
Third comment (8 May 2012):
Perhaps my initial post sounds stronger than I would have wished. My intention was not to frighten anyone or cause uncertainty or depression. I employ terms primarily as metaphors, and ‘end times’ as well as the *supposed* conclusion of the current Mayan Great Cycle are precisely that, namely, metaphors – as are, in part, our inherited myths along with the gods and goddesses who inhabit them. The ‘end times’ metaphor is particularly appropriate, as are our deities, because it expresses a possible scenario that becomes all the more likely when we assess what we are doing to our seas through mercury contamination and plastics – all entering the food chain, what we are doing to our atmosphere with cholo-floro-carbon and ‘green house’ gases, and what we are doing to the very land itself with industrial pollutions and nuclear contamination. At the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, Gerald Barney, author of *The Global 2000 Report to the President* for Jimmy Carter on sustainable development planning in developing industrialised countries, pleaded that we had to start acting now-and-then if the world was not to have a catastrophe when, by 2020, he predicted that our expanding population would exceed the land space available to produce the food to feed us. When I saw him five years later in Cape Town, I asked if he thought any progress on that front had occurred since Chicago, and his answer was a frank “No!”
Any impending world disaster as I view it is not a product of any subscription on my part to an Abrahamic apocalypse belief. I too champion the advances of technology and scientific discovery but seriously wonder if even these will be sufficient to clean up the mess we are making. It is *not* simply a question of employing technology “to repair the damage.” On top of this are the counter-productive and squelching powers of an economic system that is largely controlled by a financial-corporate-military complex that tolerates little to no opposition and increasingly has the surveillance mechanisms, a police force and an abjectly compliant press to insure that and override any open and honest protest or accountability. On the macro-level as well as often on the local, those of us who are passionate ecologists and would-be defenders of our planet’s sacred equilibrium have our hands tied. All of us, pagans and non-pagans alike, remain in a political stalemate that has us descending into an amoral if not immoral vortex.
If my initial posting is alarmist, it is because I am genuinely alarmed. I engage in a perpetual conversation with my deities, and much of my writings are expressions of that exchange. Well into the autumn years of my own life, it pains me when I feel the pagan community despite all of its wonderful heterogeneity falls short of that of which I feel, hope and wish it is capable.
The backstabbing issue is largely incidental, but it has been a constant feature and complaint since at least the 1980s – rendering according to some a situation of more ‘bitchcraft than witchcraft’. This to my own vision is incommensurate with who we are, what we represent and where I feel we wish to
be going. Peter Dybing’s choice to melt into anonymity and to concentrate on the very *dirt* in all its sacredness – yes, dirt as something positive and holy – is understandable and perfectly acceptable as well as honourable. If we cannot applaud the freedom of self-determination, we are lost right from the start. But it was his statement that the contagion of backstabbing was such that he was becoming guilty of it himself that triggered my opening response, but my response is not directed to that but is an accumulative result of events and perceptions much more broadly in my own life and deity conversation. To harp continually on the backstabbing allegations and want names, etc. is completely to miss the point. It is merely a symptom and not the underlying issue.
It may strike some of you as ironic, but I more usually label myself a ‘militant optimist’, and I apologise that my earlier posting lacked any of the humour that I otherwise treasure. But when one lives as long as I have, the increasing inflictions to and losses of loved ones against a global background of deceptions, betrayals, marginalisation, abuses of power and even Orwell’s *1984* scenario can force one to cry out that for which the gods that I know are crying. My intent is not to bum anyone out, to be depressive or to cause strife. I have
myself been more than blessed in this life with freedoms, opportunities, adventures and the devoted love of my beloved. But it is because of all these blessings that I have perhaps been privileged to have had the persistent vision I have. It is ultimately this that I wish to share, and in the days I have left, it is with a community that is energised by the worship of the gods and the joy therein that I wish to share that vision.
Whether we be solitaries or in covens, groves or whatever, all of us as pagans are the core of our host planet in trouble. If we have allies beyond that core, so much the better, but it is because of our very centrality to the fulcrum point of our times that we are being called upon to honour and make *the* difference for the life of the future.