Stone Riley's Magic Mirror Tarot Set
About Paganism

Paganism (or Neo-Paganism) is an avant-garde bohemian shamanic religion in which religion is regarded as an art.  You craft spiritual experiences for yourself and friends in search of actual real reality.  Results seem encouraging so far. Politically, the movement is green and progressive with pacifist tendencies.  It is utterly unorganized by choice and has user-participation literature instead of holy writ.  It is growing quickly now, with maybe something like approximately half a million adherents in the USA, more or less.  Small religion; big art project.

If you want to do some web exploring on the subject, you can see the Some Links page to get a start.

But any reasonable person of good will nowadays could very well look around themselves at the vast damage being done by religion and absolutely refuse to call themselves a member of any religious movement.  There is so much carnage.  So many of the reasons given for it are simply lies.  So many of the religious leaders are so obviously corrupt.  They are obviously seeking what one philosopher (Starhawk) has called “power over” people instead of “power with”.  Another current thinker (Sam Harris) sees the basic problem as the ancient books with their ancient doctrines that utterly lack any evidence in the deeper knowledge of ourselves and the world that we have today.  Whatever the basic cause may be, it is a fact that religious enthusiasts now threaten our entire existence through nuclear war and global warming.

But can it be an adequate solution to abandon religion?  So many humans yearn for, and actually achieve, “spiritual” or “transcendent” or “mythic” states of consciousness that are benign and useful and demand an explanation if we wish to understand ourselves.  Sam Harris and Starhawk both point out that there has always been religion of a different kind consisting of free exploration of exactly that remarkable ability.  Harris finds his example in the science of mind developed by Buddhist meditators.  Starhawk finds her example in the deep politics of liberation in the modern world.  Both say that free exploration of our consciousness does discover good foundations for a truer realer thing than these perverse and murderous religions of which we are so sick today.

We might also reference Joseph Campbell, Marija Gimbutas, Piers Vitebsky and Aldous Huxley. Campbell finds exploration of mythic consciousness in the great stories all humans tell.  Huxley shows transcendence through expansion of perception.  Gimbutas, an ethnographic archaeologist, charts spiritual awareness in the symbol markings on the artifacts of neolithic Europe.  Vitebsky, an ethnographic anthropologist, traces it in lush detail through the practical work of shamans across the world.  All of them are eloquent writers and deep thinkers.  All of them say that something real is found if we search within ourselves beyond the easy lies of faith.

The Pagan movement, at least so far, is that kind of ad hoc effort.

- Stone Riley, July 2006