I recently attended a Winter Solstice celebration here in Northern California. Held at a local community center, it was well attended by an enthusiastic crowd. A first glance indicated a growing and healthy NeoPagan community.

A second glance was not as reassuring.

Every new spiritual movement faces the challenge of enabling people unfamiliar with it to partake of its message, its approach to celebrating and connecting with the sacred. What is important is what is new, and what is off-putting and most easily misunderstood to others is also what is new. The more familiar the practice the more accessible the tradition – but at the same time in promoting greater accessibility the tradition might lose what it truly once had to offer. This dilemma is unavoidable when a tradition grows.

How a religion handles this task is vital to its future. History is replete with people seeking to institutionalize their spiritual tradition to make it “more relevant” to ever more people, and in the process losing track of its initial message. This case could easily be made for both Christianity and Islam in general, but is hardly unique to them. I have heard Buddhist friends make similar complaints about institutionalized Buddhism. Worse yet, as popularity grows some might seek to use the new tradition to further nonspiritual objectives of their own, as Constantine most definitely did with respect to Christianity and Japanese rulers did with Shinto. Such efforts can come both from those wielding power and from those who oppose them.

During this Solstice Sabbat I saw this danger raise its head for the NeoPagan community. This was certainly not the organizers’ intent, and my point is not to criticize anyone by name. For this reason I avoid naming anyone although because I describe a real event, some will try and figure out to whom I refer. But doing this misses my point. I have great respect for the people whose actions I will criticize, and I hope my readers’ attention will be on the common danger that challenges us all rather than on the personalities through which this danger manifests.

I want to emphasize the danger Pagans face as our spirituality moves from the edgy fringe towards the modestly respectable. It is at this transition towards greater respectability that the danger I describe is at its greatest. The problem is not bad people misbehaving but good people not fully appreciating the challenges that now confront us as Pagans.

The Solstice ritual started off wonderfully, and the energy raised was a delight. But in retrospect it seemed the invocations were subordinated to the organizers’ aesthetic desires rather than having the aesthetics shaped by the task of invoking directions and Deities. Still, this might be a relatively minor quibble. The crowd was large and many were inexperienced, and the opening came off very well. The standards of a small and experienced group should not be blindly applied to a large public gathering. Even so, I felt the directions and deities were slighted, though this could just be the grumping of a BTW. However, it fit in with what happened next.

And my reaction to what came next is not a minor quibble.

Of Sermon and Ritual
After the Gods were invoked the ritual’s course shifted drastically. The Sabbat’s major organizer strode forward and gave a “short sermon.” This was the speaker’s own description, not my interpretation of them.

Sermons are a central aspect of Christian practice. They imply a specific kind of relationship between deity, the sermonizer, and those hearing the message. Deity is distant. The sermonizer is an expert at theological interpretation, at least compared to the audience, who are essentially passive receptacles. In the Christian tradition they often are referred to as a flock, as those who come as children, and in similar disempowering terms. They are “ministered” to. If open to the sermon’s message, they will be uplifted and fulfilled by the preacher’s words.

Like any viable spiritual practice, sermons have their strengths and weaknesses, but their strengths are not in keeping with Pagan approaches to relating with the Divine, and their weaknesses undermine the vitality of Pagan spirituality.

As soon as the sermon began, the room’s wonderful energy plummeted. The reason is obvious to anyone used to ritual work. At least in the white Protestant form in which this one was delivered, a sermon immediately shifts us from ritual awareness to intellectual cognition: Do I understand the message? Do I agree with the reasoning? And so on. Intellect pushes aside experience.

Christian services with such intellectual sermons do not try and bring their audience into a personal experience of the sacred. They seek to impart a deeper understanding of the meaning of scripture. (Other styles of sermon do seek to elicit a spiritual encounter – and while I believe they are also not appropriate to a Pagan ritual, the issues they raise are different.)

Anyone who reads my blog knows I have no problem with intellectual reasoning in its proper context. But Pagan ritual is an improper context. We do not gather to hear someone expound on the Gods or on anything else. We gather to honor the Gods, and if possible, to personally encounter and experience Them. This process generally works best when we are fully immersed in the ceremony, and not relating to it as observers (though the Gods can intervene with anyone).

Pagan rituals seek to bring a person into greater harmony with the Gods at many levels, to offer honor to them, to encourage their actual presence among us, to seek their teaching, and in some cases to do magickal workings. These goals are difficult if not impossible to accomplish within a critical rational state of mind. Rituals work with and through our poetic and mythic consciousness not with our rational analytic consciousness.

There is a time for intellectual reasoning regarding Pagan ritual, and that time is afterwards. That is why so many of our traditions urge that no ritual be discussed for 24 hours after its occurrence. Then we will have some perspective as to what occurred there.

Of course we could remain immersed within a completely open attitude during the sermon. Perhaps some of those present did so. But this is even worse.

The Solstice sermon focused more on the political crisis confronting us today than on spirituality. For example, the sermonizer made claims about non-spiritual subjects, such as public housing being a good and important thing. I happen to agree for some approaches to public housing and disagree regarding other approaches. And this ambivalence on my part points to the deeper problem.

If I start thinking about the intricacies of housing policy my awareness is instantly divorced from ritual space. It becomes mundane. But if instead I remain as open as possible in a non-critical sense to what is being said, I am encouraged to adopt a mundane position without critical appraisal, and end up being emotionally committed to it.

Recent experiments involving brain imaging of very strong political partisans encountering discordant views indicate the rational part of the mind is virtually switched off when strongly held views are challenged by contradictory information. The attitude of mind most appropriate for participation in ritual is not appropriate for considering complexly nuanced political issues. They are best addressed within two different contexts of awarenss, and while an integrated human being should be capable of both, that does not mean that both are equally appropriate in all contexts.

I do not mean to argue that political or other mundane issues can never be legitimately addressed within a ritual context. They can. The famous case of Gerald Gardner’s New Forest Coven and other Witches working to prevent a Nazi invasion of Great Britain is a clear example (famous among British Traditional Pagans anyway). You can read about it in Philip Heselton’s Wiccan Roots.

The Journey to Where?
At some point the sermon drifted into a “trance journey.” But it was unlike any trance journey I ever experienced. Perhaps it could be called a guided meditation. But it dealt neither with the symbolism of the Solstice nor with the Gods. It consisted of hearing a recital of the origins of life on early Mother Earth that, save only for the gendering of the planet, Richard Dawkins would have enjoyed. (For a post of mine on Dawkins see here.)

Perhaps I witnessed an attempt to demonstrate that Pagans are smarter about science than many Christians, given so many of the latter’s ignorant attacks on evolution, geology, and science in general. And I do agree Christians have a more difficult time dealing with science than we do. But there was nothing Pagan about this “meditation” – and worse, mixing spirituality and science in this way invites trouble.

Spirituality deals with the superhuman and ultimate contexts, science with phenomena that human beings can hope to predict, understand, and often control. At its root science is always a work in progress with inevitable errors being weeded out through rational analysis of empirical data. We never know when new research will require modifying, or even a large scale rebuilding, of parts of science’s imposing edifice of knowledge. So linking any specific scientific proposition with a spiritual proposition addressing ultimate contexts is always very risky.

The speaker described how life arose from molecules in water. That is the most probable likelihood at the present time. But clay has also been suggested by competent scientists as another context where life may first have arisen. I have no idea, and whether life on earth originated from water, clay, came down by panspermia, or arose in some other way, is irrelevant regarding my Pagan practice. Mixing the two realms is a mistake because doing so associates spiritual claims about ultimate contexts with empirically based rational arguments that may later be understood as errors.

If science discovers a more adequate explanation that renders an older view obsolete, does that also render the spiritual perspective claiming kinship with that older view not only obsolete, but also mean it was in error? Science and spirituality address different kinds of knowledge. Science addresses questions of “how.” Measurement, experiment, and prediction can answer scientific questions, but do not address issues of meaning. Spirituality addresses questions of intrinsic meaning. Pagans could be good Pagans whether they believed that the myth of Tiamat and Marduk adequately accounted for our world, or whether the scientific proposition that the Big Bang and evolution does a better job. More complexly still, we can find valuable truth in the Tiamat and Marduk myth as well as accept the scientific evidence for the Big bang and evolution because the former addresses issues of meaning, the latter issues of how.

We can reasonably discuss whether a particular scientific view is compatible with our form of spirituality, and if not, how to deal with it. This is very important, but is hardly the stuff of guided visualizations.

Further, no time existed for people to journey into personal contact with the numinous. Instead they were continually guided, often in detail, through a part of the story about life’s evolution on earth. Perhaps as a result they later gained a better appreciation for Deep Time. But they were very unlikely to have experienced deities or other entities in this kind of thing. In fact, I would argue, as Mainers are wont to say, that you can’t get there from here. Visualizing “how” does not take us to “why.”

Now again, given that the crowd was quite large, many people likely naïve, and with the presence of many children, I believe a genuine trance journey would have been inappropriate. But what took its place seems more to have been an effort to demonstrate Pagans can harmonize their views with modern science rather than any celebration of the Winter Solstice. It would have made us more “respectable” to the secular world, but less Pagan.

If the sermon tried to bring our practice into closer harmony with Christian traditions, the “journey” did the same with respect to secular modernity. Whether either effort succeeded or not, the loss was of anything approximating specifically Pagan spirituality. What was most specifically “Pagan” disappeared from this Solstice celebration. People sat passively and listened, or, like me, they sat unhappily and wondered what the hell was going on.

Conclusion
I remained troubled by what I had experienced long after the event was over. If it had simply been a bad ritual, I would not be writing this post. Anyone with much experience in our path has encountered their share of bad rituals.

But what I had experienced was a ritual grounded suddenly by a sermon, followed by a guided visualization that replicated standard geology and biology about life’s rise on earth. I think the leader was trying to make Paganism politically relevant by shaping it to serving a laudable political goal and employing techniques from elsewhere to do so. In the process the spirit of Paganism as I have encountered it for well over 20 years of practice was eliminated.

Changes like these when repeated and institutionalized are how a religion with a new focus is gradually tamed, and brought into harmony with the status quo. If sermons become a component of Pagan ceremonies, participants will increasingly be called upon to become passive vessels filled by whatever words the preaching Priest or Priestess feels called upon to say. If the altered awareness of trance and ecstasy is replaced with hypnotic introductions to scientific orthodoxy, we end up being more dependent on the competence of those giving the sermons and less on the Gods.

As a spiritual community we need to be very careful. Popular interest in our practice is greater now than ever before. We are becoming respectable. But those newly interested in us interpret what we do from within their own framework, and it is natural and appropriate for us to seek points of common understanding within their framework to explain our ways. Yet if we go too far along this path we lose sight of where we began.

I think the danger is particularly strong because our recent growth has vastly increased the proportion of us who are solitaries rather than coven members. There will always be solitaries. I am one due to the frequent moves I have had to make over the past seven years. But solitaries are necessarily attracted to large public gatherings when seeking spiritual community, yet it is within our covens, groves, and other small groups that we experience what is most uniquely our own.

After my long list of warnings I want to end on a positive note. I have been both a covener and a solitary, and there is no question but that the coven and equivalents groups are far the more satisfying form for practice when we can find compatible partners. Being small and easy to leave, power structures are weak and members’ opportunities to learn and grow are great. The intensity of work is on balance far stronger. Opportunities to encounter the Gods come with every Esbat and Sabbat, rather than in the occasional mass public Sabbat. Genuine community can build as a coven settles into trusted relationships. It is as if the Gods want us to form close communities.

As a larger community, I believe we should seek in every reasonable way to grow and strengthen that proportion of us that works within covens, groves and similar groups. Truly it is within the small working group that the magick and wonder of our way most easily and frequently manifests, and where we can stay in closest touch with the essence of our path.