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