Category Archives: Anthropocentrism

Activism, Anthropocentrism, Cosmology, Environmentalism, Gratitude, Nature, Nature Spirituality, Paganism, Rituals, Sustainability

Offerings For a Nature-Based Path

2 Comments

Note: This post was originally published at my old Patheos blog. It is unfortunately still there despite my resignation and request that they delete all my content. I had a request from another writer to link to this post, though they didn’t want to use the Patheos link (thank you!) So I am republishing the content here, and will likely do that with a selection of my other Patheos posts. Enjoy!

*******************************

When someone gives something to us, it’s natural for us to want to return the favor. Reciprocity is part of being a complex social creature and part of the underpinnings of successful civilization. It’s no different in our spiritual paths. When the spirits, gods, nature gift us with knowledge, empowerment or even a good meal, we want to be able to say thank you in a formal manner.

This balance more important now than ever. For centuries we have done a lot of taking from nature and relatively little giving back. Of course, some things are hard to replace. We can’t exactly put oil back in the ground or easily remove the pollutants caused by its processing and burning. But it’s only been recently that we’ve made conscious efforts to replace at least some of what we take. In Oregon, for example, it’s been a law since 1972 that any landowner who cuts down trees for timber must plant more to replace them.

Still, the balance is far from equal. We still take far more than we give back, and what we do give is often tainted. Take food offerings, for example. It may seem pretty innocuous to make an extra plate of food after a ritual and leave it out “for the wildlife”. Some of what we eat is very bad for other species, though, and it doesn’t have to be the hyper-processed snack foods we favor. Onions are toxic for dogs and cats, and so any wandering domestic or feral animal would get sick if the dish you prepared contains even cooked onion. (Coyotes might also not fare so well.) Moreover, leaving food out teaches wild mammals to stop fearing humans and to become more aggressive in trying to get food from us. Predictably this leads to more animals having to be killed as nuisances or dangerous.

The source of the offering may also be suspect. Let’s say you want to leave a small quartz crystal next to a plant that you harvested leaves from for medicine. Where did the crystal come from, and how was it mined? What quality of life did the miner have and how much did they make for it? How many thousands of miles was the crystal shipped using fossil fuels? What offering did you make to the land the crystal was torn out of to say “thanks for the shiny rock”? And, finally, how exactly is the plant supposed to use a piece of quartz crystal when what it really needs is water and healthy soil?

We need to rethink the concept of offerings, and what we’re actually giving versus receiving. Are we giving back anything of actual value, or just contributing to more problems at home and abroad?

I’d like to offer some potential alternatives for those of us on a nature-based path. These are offerings that are more conscious of environmental impact and have a real, measurable effect on the land. (In my experience they also make the spirits of the land happier!)

–Take the time to really get to know the land you live on: How much do you know about your bioregion? What’s the geology that forms its foundation, and how does it affect the climate and weather? What animals, plants, fungi and other living beings share space with you there? What did it look like before large numbers of humans arrived? What did it look like 10,000 years ago? 100,000? 100 million?

Knowing these things helps you understand the intricacies of your bioregion and what it needs in order to be healthy. You may think that your area has a diversity of wildlife because you know a few species of bird in the area, but it may lack the necessary habitat to support more elusive animals. What happened to drive these other species away?

You may not be able to do anything about these bigger situations, but just being aware of and sensitive to them can be a great offering in and of itself. It shows you respect the land and the beings you share it with, and it helps push you out of the heavily anthropocentric mindset most humans have been running around with for too long.

–Offer your time: If you have the time and physical ability to do so, spend some time trying to improve the land around you. If there are local environmental or conservation groups working to remove invasive species and replace them with native ones, or monitor water and air quality, or other efforts toward habitat restoration and preservation, see what sorts of volunteer opportunities they have. Check the Citizen Science Alliance website to see if there are any nearby nature research projects you can help with. You can even do some self-directed projects, like keeping a particular park or stretch of stream litter-free.

Even if you don’t have the ability to do that sort of intensive outdoor work, consider contacting your elected officials about environmental issues in your area. The more you educate yourself about these issues, the more effective you can make your letters. You can even extend this communication to local business owners, encouraging them to implement sustainability efforts or transparency about pollutants in manufacturing activities.

Some of you may even have the opportunity to make your career more centered on nature. Degree programs in biology and other natural sciences offer the ability to do field research (though there can be competition for jobs and research opportunities!) Should you happen to be interested in law school, environmental law is a great way to utilize the legal system to hold polluters and other problematic entities accountable.

–Offer your money: You don’t have to tithe 10% of your income to your spiritual path, but even if you have just a few dollars extra, consider donating the funds to an environmental nonprofit that you trust. Local organizations are always looking for ways to pay for their projects, and this may be the best option if you’re trying to help your immediate bioregion. On the other hand, bigger organizations do a lot of valuable work ranging from buying up and protecting fragile ecosystems, to lobbying elected officials and convincing them to vote in favor of the environment.

Some utility companies are beginning to offer clean energy buy-in options to their customers, albeit at a little higher monthly rate. Instead of getting your electricity from coal, for example, you might be able to switch some or all of your electricity to wind or hydroelectric power. While these are not without their own problems, they’re an attempt to try to cut down on the reliance on fossil fuels. And the more people who demand cleaner energy, the more incentive there will be for companies to work out the flaws with wind, hydro, and other energy alternatives.

–Teach others: Social media has become a pretty significant powerhouse for activists of all sorts. You don’t have to be organizing marches against pollution, but you can use your social media network to share links about environmental issues. Don’t worry about making your contributions all news all the time, either. Even just passing on a few links in the middle of your usual roster of cat pictures, gripes about work, or “What I did this weekend” posts can make a big difference.

Looking back at the volunteering option for a moment, you might see if local organizations or national/state parks have opportunities for volunteer interpreters. These help visitors to parks and other wild places to learn more about the flora, fauna and other features of the land, and it’s a great way to inspire others to fall in love with your bioregion!

–Live more lightly on the planet: Look at your everyday life and see if there are ways you can live a greener life. This might involve spending a little more money to buy a couple of extra organic or pasture-raised food items, or toilet paper and paper towels made from recycled paper. Or it may mean switching over to public transit for your commute (which, by the way, makes for great reading time!) When you take a shower, catch the “warm-up” water in a bucket, and then use that to refill the toilet tank next time you flush. Use a 50-50 vinegar-water solution and some Bon Ami for house cleaning instead of harmful chemicals like bleach. Really, it all depends on what your financial and schedule situations are like, what resources are available to you, and what you can afford to change. Even if you just make one change a month, over time that all adds up.

And these offering ideas are just a few potential options. What else might you do to make effective offerings in a nature-based path?

Did you enjoy this post? Consider buying a copy of my book, Nature Spirituality From the Ground Up, which has more ideas and practices for getting closer to nature through your spiritual path!

Anthropocentrism, Cosmology, Magic, Meaning, Nature Spirituality, Paganism, Psychology, Science, Skepticism

Dear Pagans: Can We Be As Picky About Science As We Are About History?

27 Comments

[I know this is a long one, and potentially controversial. Do me a favor, please and read all the way to the end, and pay especial attention to the italicized bits? Thank you!]

Celtic Wicca. Samhain, the God of the Dead. Witches’ covens that extend back in an unbroken line thousands of years. These are just a few examples of the really bad history that’s been passed around the pagan community, and which has rightfully been skewered by those who have done better research. I came to paganism in the mid-1990s when Wicca was all the rage, and everything was plastered with Celtic knotwork. The Craft, Charmed and other media helped bolster support for aesthetic paganism that was more about looks than substance. A glut of books hit the market, many of which were full of historical inaccuracies from the mildly off to the blatantly awful.

Pagans with a decent background in history began to tear apart the inaccurate material, some of which had been floating around for decades (I’m looking at you, Margaret Murray!) We encouraged each other to go beyond strictly pagan books and explore historical texts, both those written for laypeople and more academic texts. We cited our sources more. And so now, twenty years later, while paganism still has its share of bad history, we have a lot more accurate information to apply to our paths, whether we’re hardcore reconstructionists or not. And we have space for things that aren’t necessarily historically accurate, but which we find personally relevant, like Unverified Personal Gnosis, or UPG (which you can read more about here.)

All this came out of a lot of discussions, along with debates and arguments. Post bad history in a busy pagan listserve circa 2000, and you were bound to get dozens of responses correcting you and offering good research material. And today wrong historical information is still swiftly corrected. What boggles my mind is that a lot of the same people who will throw down over historical inaccuracies won’t bat an eye when someone horribly misuses science. Woe be unto anyone who tries to say that Artemis and Freya are just different faces of the same Great Goddess, but sure, we can say that quantum entanglement proves magick is real without a doubt. Whatevs, it’s your belief, right?

In Defense of Facts

Ah, Gérôme’s “Truth Coming Out of Her Well”. How appropriate for this section.

Wrong. Just as history deals in facts, so does science. Yes, there’s room for errors (accidental and deliberate) and updated research, but that doesn’t negate the general tendency of both of these fields of study and practice to deal in the most accurate information we have available to us. We’ve gotten good at pointing out where pagans are over-reaching historically through speculation and UPG. We suck at doing so for those speculating beyond what science has demonstrated to be true or impossible. It’s the same error at play: when history or science don’t have a clear answer–or the answer that you want–you don’t get to just make up whatever you want and say that it’s equally real.

Lots of anecdotes do not equal “anecdata”. No matter how much you really, really, really want to believe that you can make streetlights turn off just by walking under them, the evidence we do have is pointing toward it just being an occasionally blinking streetlight and good timing. It’s also confirmation bias in that you’re seeing what you want to see and that affects your “results”. No one has yet created a substantial, well-crafted study that even remotely suggests a person can affect the electrical flow to a light bulb (other than by physically tampering with the wires, unscrewing the bulb or turning off the power.) A group of people walking back and forth under a streetlight does not a solid experiment make.

Yet paganism is full to the brim with people claiming they can do similarly supernatural things. Look at the proliferation of spells that claim to be able to aid in healing, take away curses, or even affect political outcomes. That’s saying that “If I burn this candle or bury this herbal sachet or say these words over here, that thing or person or situation wayyyy over there will be directly affected in the way I want it to.” Sure, your process was more elaborate than just walking in proximity of your target, but you have no more evidence of causation than that other guy. And look at how many pagans claim that a simple spell is every bit as effective as a complicated one. Doesn’t it follow, then, that the simplest spell–walking under the light with the intent of making it blink off–has every bit the chance of working as something more complex?

Why We Treat Science Differently

But that’s getting away from the point. I think we don’t want to be sticklers for science in the same way that we’re sticklers for history because we don’t want our sacred cows slaughtered. Our beliefs can still hold up when we question historical inaccuracies because many modern pagan beliefs are based in history, and better history means better justification for our beliefs because “our ancestors believed it!”

But many of our beliefs are also based in pseudoscience, as well as bad interpretations of good science (like the misapplication of quantum anything to trying to prove magick is objectively real). When we start picking apart the scientific inaccuracies in our paths, it feels threatening and uncomfortable. If you feel a sense of control because you literally believe that a spell you cast will change a situation you’re anxious about, then you don’t want to question the efficacy of that act because you feel you’ve lost control again. If your connection to nature is primarily through thinking the local animals show up in your yard because you have special animal-attracting energy, the fact that they’re more likely just looking for food, shelter, and other normal animal things makes you feel less inherently connected. So instead of focusing on aligning our paths more closely with scientific research as well as historical research, we instead cling tightly to justifications.

The Rewards of Accuracy

Plus we pagan bibliophiles have more excuses to spend time with beautiful old books!

I think that pressing for more historical accuracy has made paganism stronger as a whole, both as individuals and as a community. We’ve spent decades working to be taken more seriously as a religious group, sometimes to gain big steps forward like equal recognition for our deceased military pagans, other times to just be able to mention our religion without being laughed at. Those who want to emphasize to non-pagans that our paths have historical precedent and long-time relevance have more resources to do so. There are other benefits: Those who want to emulate the ways of pre-Christian religions have more material to work with. And history offers more depth to explore; your interest in a particular ancient spiritual path can extend out into knowing more about the culture, people and landscape that that path developed in. If you’re creating a new path for the 21st century, you have more inspiration to work with when you see what’s worked for pagan religions in both the distant and recent past.

Science has a lot to offer us as well. As a naturalist pagan–and a pagan naturalist–my path is deepened, and I find greater meaning, the more I learn about and experience the non-human natural world. I don’t need to believe the blacktail deer outside my studio are there because they have some special message for me. It’s enough that I can observe them quietly from the window as they go about their lives, our paths intersecting by proximity. I do not need to drink water from their hoofprints to attempt to gain shapeshifting powers; I can imagine a bit of what it is to be them when I follow their trails through the pines and see the places that are important to them. And that makes me even more invested in protecting their fragile ecosystem; my path urges me to give back to nature.

When pagans step out of the narrow confines of symbolism, and act as though nature is sacred because we know how threatened it is through the science of ecology, not only do we deepen our connections to nature, but we also show the rest of the world that we walk our talk. It’s just one way in which we demonstrate that, as with our historical accuracy, we’re also interested in scientific accuracy, rather than denying or ignoring facts in favor of our own spiritual self-satisfaction. And rather than getting entangled in self-centered interpretations of nature that elevate us as the special beings deserving of nature’s messages, a more scientific approach to paganism humbles us and reminds us that we are just one tiny part of a vast, beautiful, unimaginably complex world full of natural wonders that science can help us better explore and understand.

Conclusion

As always, I’m not saying don’t have beliefs. Beliefs have plenty of good effects, from strengthening social bonds to bringing us comfort when things go haywire to helping us make some subjective sense of the world through storytelling and mythos. UPG can be a really valuable tool in giving us a place to put the things we believe that don’t fit into known historical research, and I think we need to extend it to hold beliefs that go outside known scientific evidence, too. So keep working your spells and your rituals, and keep working with the deities and spirits that you hold dear. If you derive personal meaning by feeling that the crows are nearby because of some spiritually significant reason and it improves your life, don’t let go of that, so long as you also accept that the crows are just crows doing crow things.

Examining your beliefs in fine detail doesn’t even require a microscope!

But we also need to be able to make use of critical thinking skills and suss out areas where we’re factually wrong, no matter how we may personally feel about the matter. That way, as with history, we’re able to clearly say “This is the portion of my belief system that matches up with known facts, and this part over here is more personal.” We’ve learned to be skeptical of the claims of people who say that historians are wrong and they have the REAL history; we should be able to do the same for those who claim to know better than thousands of scientists.

What I am also asking you to do is really question your beliefs, their foundations, and where they intersect with and diverge from science (and history, while we’re at it.) If you have a belief that runs directly counter to known facts and you feel it has to be every bit as real as science or history, ask yourself why. What would happen if you allowed that belief to be UPG, or personal mythology? What would happen if you let it go entirely? What would you have left, and what value does it have?

I can’t say where this process of questioning will take you, whether you’ll let go of your beliefs, or recategorize their place in your life, or just cling to them more tightly. Every person’s path winds in its own direction. But just as we have questioned our historical inaccuracies and come out the better for it, I think that as individuals and as a community we can benefit from really questioning scientific inaccuracies in the same way. Won’t you join me in this effort?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider picking up a copy of one of my books, which blend a naturalist’s approach to the world with pagan meaning and mythology–Nature Spirituality From the Ground Up is especially relevant!

Anthropocentrism, Cosmology, Geekery, Nature, Nature Spirituality, Paganism, Psychology, Science, Skepticism

No, You Cannot Change Lightning Waves With Your Brain

9 Comments

If all I did with my blog was tear apart pseudoscience masquerading as real science and promoted by pagans as being “proof our spirituality is real!!!” I would never write about anything else. Plus I would quickly despair for the future of our community instead of mostly focusing on the positives. But this particular piece of pseudoscience slithered across my Facebook feed over the weekend from a few different people. The short version is that it claims that a change in the frequency of Schumann resonances signals that human “vibrational frequencies” are rising, which somehow makes us better people and will soon usher in a better world where in we’re all nice to each other and nothing bad ever happens.

Ugh. Like I said, there were multiple folks who reposted this, but I’m going to keep my rant to my own space instead of arguing on someone else’s turf. This is yet another example of a fundamental misunderstanding of actual scientific principles on a couple of different levels.

For one thing, Schumann resonances are not some sort of super-special waves that measure how good humans have been (Santa Claus, is that you?) Here, you can read NASA’s writeup about them. It’s just a particular sort of wave caused by lightning in which waves of a certain frequency, which bounce along in between the Earth and its ionosphere, combine with themselves rather than dissipating normally. It’s kind of like when a bunch of people hold hands and skip across a field together, gaining more and more momentum with each skip, only it’s one person replicating themselves each time they hit the ground. The reason this happens is because these waves are so incredibly long they wrap around the earth two or three times, making it possible for a wave to overlap itself in just the right way.

I’ve seen people on FB claim that our brains are affected by Schumann resonances. But the fact is that they so much bigger than us–about 38,000 kilometers long for a 7.83 hertz wave (https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4352)–that we are simply incapable of detecting or interacting with them. And even if that were somehow different, animal brains wouldn’t be able to afford to be significantly affected by such forces. If our brains shifted significantly every time there was a lightning storm, or a solar flare, or any of the other waves that we normally don’t even notice, we wouldn’t be able to remain mentally stable enough to carry on our everyday activities and would die out. There are rare exceptions, but they’re when we’re literally out of our element–the only time our human bodies have to worry about solar flares, for example, is when astronauts, not protected by the Earth’s atmosphere (you know, the thing that shielded us from solar flares for billions of years so life could evolve to where it is now) have to be given artificial protection from radiation. Schumann resonances, by contrast, are not something that we would ever really have to worry about.

Moreover, the idea that we are able to “think hard” enough to change Schumann resonances is ridiculous. It is literally impossible for our thoughts and behaviors to have any effect on the frequency at which lightning emits electromagnetic waves. I mean, just comparing the relative electrical charge of a human brain and that of lightning shows there’s no way this can happen. The average working charge of the human brain is about .085 watts, roughly equal to that of a triple A battery. That’s because you can’t have ENTIRE brain firing off at once, without being used to do other things like, oh, making sure you keep breathing. (http://gizmodo.com/could-you-charge-an-iphone-with-the-electricity-in-your-1722569935) Compare that to a single lightning bolt which has about 10 billion watts  of energy (which, as http://www.windpowerengineering.com/featured/business-news-projects/how-much-power-in-a-bolt-of-lightning/ mentions, is about enough to power a 60 watt bulb for six months and then some.) The waves produced by such a massive outburst of energy are much too powerful for us to affect–the only things that affect them are massive, global/atmospheric conditions like seasons, solar activity and the Earth’s magnetic field (and no, we can’t change that ourselves, either.)

And considering our brains are pretty well insulated in layers of cerebrospinal fluid, bone and skin, it’s not like the electricity can easily leave our heads anyway. That means there is literally no way for our puny little electromagnetic waves to have an effect on lightning or the waves it produces. Even if you could somehow get every person thinking the same thing at the same time with all their brain (and somehow not suffocating because all involuntary functions have ceased, like breathing), there’s no way to focus it on a particular lightning bolt or its resulting wave, because it can’t get out of your skull, other than the meager waves that an electroencephalogram reads. So saying that our brains can affect Schumann resonances is like saying that throwing a handful of sand is going to move a mountain ten feet north. Yeah, sure, you can keep throwing that sand your whole lifetime, but the most you may do is wear a divot in the ground.

I love the pagan community, but I hate that so many pagans will swallow pseudoscience without question  and completely ignore the basics of how science works. It’s one thing to have beliefs about “how thoughts change reality” or somesuch. It’s another to take perfectly well-researched natural phenomena and bastardize the facts behind them so badly and then present them as “proof our religion is real!” I’ve already written about why trying to legitimize ourselves with really awful science is a bad idea and how collective experiences are often muddied up with confirmation bias. It’s just frustrating to sometimes feel like the proverbial voice crying in the wilderness (which, ironically, was a voice about accepting something on blind faith.)

Moreover, this sort of pseudoscientific bullshit takes the focus away from the real efforts people are putting in to improve the world. We haven’t made all the positive changes we have in the past few decades–civil rights, environmental awareness, etc.–because somehow our “frequencies” changed. We achieved those changes because millions of people protested, and marched, and fought–and bled, and died. It is a slap in the face of all those who made huge sacrifices to say “Oh, well, people are just thinking nicer things and magically becoming more aware and vibrating differently.” A lot of those people wouldn’t have even encountered better ways to think or be without the efforts of those making real social and environmental changes with blood, sweat and tears.

By the way, that whole “changes in the global consciousness” thing? Simple explanation: we are apes, and apes are social animals. We have these things in our brains called mirror neurons, which cause us to want to imitate others–monkey see, monkey do. (Or ape see, ape do.) So when we model better ways of being to others, others are more likely to adopt what we do, even if it takes time and the aforementioned sacrifices. Socially, these ways of being become more acceptable and in the norm. None of this is magic, just the way our ape brains function–without having to pretend our little AAA battery electrical charges somehow can influence the waves created by lightning bolts.

And please don’t pull that whole “But science just hasn’t discovered it yet!” crap. What we undeniably know about both our brains and Schumann waves is more than enough to make this crackpot idea so highly unlikely that it is essentially impossible. Again: sand and mountain. No one is going to test the hypothesis for the same reasons no one is going to test whether jumping off a building and flapping your arms while visualizing yourself becoming a bird will actually result in you flying: we know enough about how physics and related sciences work to know that such an experiment would be a wasted effort.

Finally, this whole idea that we can affect massive electromagnetic waves with our brains is utterly arrogant and anthropocentric. We are not as important as we like think we are. We are not the Earth’s special children, blessed with amazing talents that allow us to have influence over forces that much greater than ourselves, especially without some form of technology. We are just mammals with big brains, opposable thumbs and upright, bipedal walking styles, and we have much more serious things to worry about than how we’re so great we change massive electromagnetic waves with our neurons.

I know I have other things on my mind, so I’m going to get back to preparing for the Tarot of Bones to arrive here later this month, and finishing up art for my Patrons on Patreon, and other stuff I really ought to be doing now that I’ve done my part to hopefully chase a little more pseudoscientific fluff out of my community.

Enjoy this post? Consider picking up a copy of my book Nature Spirituality From the Ground Up which, although it does some archetypal mythologizing of nature, is deeply rooted in natural history.

Anthropocentrism, Cosmology, Environmentalism, Meaning, Nature, Nature Spirituality, Paganism, Totems

Multi-Layered Stone Totems

2 Comments

In Nature Spirituality From the Ground Up I talk about the concept of Land Totems. Most people associate totems with biological beings like animals, plant and fungi. However, in my own (nonindigenous) path, a totem is an archetypal embodiment of a particular force of nature, of which a species is just one example. So I not only work with Gray Wolf, Sword Fern and Fly Agaric, but also Gravity, Hail, and Tide, among others.

My aversion to stereotyped meanings carries over, too. Just as I don’t believe in saying “Well, Deer means this, and Bear means that, and if you see a starling this is what it means”, I also don’t think other beings of nature can be easily boiled down to one-dimensional keywords and supposedly universal messages. To me, that sort of thing is a severe shortcut in spiritual work. Instead of taking the time to get to know a given totem, which can take years, you’re basically doing the equivalent of reading a Wikipedia page and thinking you’re an expert.

Do I think there’s value in trading notes? Sure. Sometimes it’s fun to see what another person has learned from the same totem as you. But just as teachers teach students different things, or different emphases on the same material, so totems aren’t going to just blab out the same rote messages to everyone. Keep in mind that a totem is born from the natural history of the species or other force it embodies, and a lot of what non-indigenous practitioners rely on is their own personal relationship with that being and its physical representation. You’re putting a lot of yourself and your biases into that relationship and the interpretation thereof, which is why it’s short-sighted to characterize it as a universal meaning.

So. Back to land totems, specifically stones. There are scads of books that talk about the spiritual properties of crystals and other mineral specimens. I’m not entirely sure where all the information comes from, for example why amethyst is often associated with healing, while citrine, which is just a different color of quartz from amethyst, is associated with prosperity. Maybe it’s just color? But then purple fluorite is often associated with psychic powers. As far as I’ve seen, it’s just books passing down information from slightly older books, and I’m not sure where the original source is.

In my experience, what I’ve learned from biological totems has a lot to do with the physical beings’ behavior and natural history. This carries over into land totems as well. Consider a finger-sized piece of basalt in the Columbia River Gorge. On first sight it’s not doing a whole hell of a lot but sitting there on a trail. But that single stone connects me to a wealth of totems:

–First, there’s Basalt itself, the totem that watches over all basalt, from great formations to tiny pebbles.
–There’s also the totems of various minerals basalt is made of, like Feldspar and Pyroxene.
–Basalt is made of cooled lava flows, which adds in Volcano and Lava (some people may wish to work with the totems of specific sorts of lava.)
–The Columbia River Gorge was first shaped by glaciers, though the Gorge itself was carved out by massive glacial floods originated near what is today Missoula, Montana. So this piece of basalt also connects me to Glacier and Flood.
–And finally, this little stone is being steadily worn away by rain, so I can also speak with the totem Erosion through it.

This is a lot more complicated than “basalt is good for grounding”. And that’s not even getting into all the stuff you might learn from all the totems associated with that little bit of stone.

This is why nature-based paganism and bioregional totemism can be a lifelong pursuit. It doesn’t stop at using natural resources as spell components. Instead, it invites you to really get to know nature in depth, and find meaning in that connection. I’ve been at it for twenty years, and I only in the past couple of years feel like I’ve hit something resembling an advanced level of experience.

So I invite you to start exploring the depths of your own path. If you like working with a particular sort of stone, start tracing its natural history. See what totems are associated with the stone, its mineral content, and how it came to be in the first place. Think of totems as being in their own spiritual ecosystem, as vibrant and complex as the ecosystems in physical reality.

Most of all, be willing to take your time, and don’t just focus on the “witchy” aspects of what you’re doing. Just as pagans often draw on history, anthropology and other “mundane” studies to bolster their path, so I encourage you to explore geology, ecology and other natural sciences as an extension of your path.

And you can start with one single stone.

Did you enjoy this blog post? Consider picking up a copy of my book, Nature Spirituality From the Ground Up, where I get into a lot more of this sort of bioregional totemism!

Activism, Anthropocentrism, Cosmology, Environmentalism, Ethics, Nature, Nature Spirituality, Science, Sustainability

A Call to Action

Leave a comment

I tend to not get overtly political on this platform very often, but current events necessitate it.

The Environmental Protection Agency is already under attack on multiple fronts. So is the National Park Service. Less than a week in, and the new administration is already trampling over the environmental work of the past several decades like a bunch of drunk tourists deliberately stomping all over ecologically sensitive off-trail areas–or, you know, toppling precariously balanced rock formations because they think it’s funny.

I have been an environmentalist for much of my life. I worked as a field and phone canvasser in Pittsburgh for Clean Water Action. I have done many hours of volunteer time doing everything from water pollutant testing to invasive species removal. I have a Masters-level certification in ecopsychology to go along with my MA in counseling psych, and my graduate work included rigorous training on research methods, statistics, and how to interpret scientific studies. I just started coursework for the Oregon Master Naturalist certification. I read voraciously about ecology and ecosystems and how they work–and how they break if we apply too much pressure to them. I arguably know more than the majority of Americans about nature and related topics, because I make it my business to do so.

Part of how I am able to do this is through the transparency of scientific research, particularly that funded by my tax dollars. Even if it’s filtered through popular media and put in layperson’s terms, it’s still a vector for knowledge by the people and for the people. A lot of it also comes from outreach on the part of scientists, national park employees, and other experts sharing what they know with the public. We need to have that communication between specialists, and those of us who are affected by what they are working on.

In the past four days, we have seen nothing short of an assault on this communication. This isn’t just a matter of “Waaaaahhh, we don’t get to use our nifty park service Twitter accounts any more!” This is a breach of the First Amendment, specifically the freedom of speech. EPA employees are now prohibited from talking about anything related to their research–research that is not classified, and which is paid for by the public–even on their personal social media accounts.

This sets a dangerous precedent. This administration came in already screaming about how they want to dismantle the various environmental safeguards that have been built up since the 1970s–the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, the EPA–and how they want to push through the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone Access Pipeline. If they gag anyone who tries to speak out about the massive negative effects of these actions, then they win. They get their money, they line the pockets of fossil fuel executives and investors, and the long-term goal of creating a more sustainable future is sold off for short-term greed.

And we lose. I have spent the past twenty years with my finger on the pulse of conservation and environmental issues. I have read research reports and statistics. I have done field work as a citizen scientist. I am paying more attention to these things than most people give to anything. To allow President Skroob’s* administration to wipe away the hard work of the past five decades is to doom future generations.

Because this is what we had before the EPA, before the CWA and the CAA. It never ceases to amaze me how people, even otherwise intelligent people, can so easily forget the recent past. The laws and regulations that are in place are there for very good reasons–there was a definite problem, and because the people responsible refused to take responsibility, the government had to step in. It worked, and it helped the problem, and now we no longer have the Cuyahoga River on fire.

I look to the past, and I learn from it. I don’t stomp my feet and say “BUT I WANT MORE MONEY AND THE EPA IS IN THE WAY OF ME GETTING MORE MONEY!” I look at the condition the environment was in when the EPA was formed, when the CWA and CAA and other important environmental laws were enacted. I look at the reasons for those things.

I look to the present, and I examine it. I look at all the work that STILL has to be done to repair the damage we’ve done. I read research that came about in part because of the water testing I did on the Columbia River for the better part of a year. I pull Scotch broom and other invasive plants out of the soil on the land in Washington that I am helping to rehabilitate. I consider how the laws in place can help further improve and stabilize these and other damaged places.

I look to the future, and I hope for it. I am only here for a few more decades, if I’m lucky. But there will be humans on this planet likely for many centuries to come, and I want them to have a good life. Part of that includes healthy air to breathe and clean water to drink, and the biodiversity that is necessary to maintain both and more. And that’s not going to happen if Skroob and his ilk have their way.

So I offer you a few quick things you can to do help:

–Contact your elected officials. Phone is best, but email works too. Tell them your concerns, Give them specifics. Contact them any time an issue comes up that you want them to work toward fixing. Even if they’re against your view–especially if they are–give ’em hell anyway. Here’s an easy way to find who your elected officials are.

–If you have Twitter, follow the Alternative US National Park Service account, where national park employees are anonymously sharing important information. Oh, and a healthy dash of snark, too. Same goes for the BadIands (note the I instead of L) NPS account.

–Read about the Scientists’ March on Washington, and consider volunteering toward that effort. Scientific illiteracy is becoming more prevalent, especially as our public education system continues to degrade due to lack of funding, and as the culture of deliberate ignorance rises.

–If you have a few dollars to spare, consider donating to the National Parks Service. I’m guessing that by the time Skroob is out of office the NPS’s already inadequate federal funding will be even more thin on the ground.

–Most importantly, keep educating yourself on environmental issues. Listen to the people actually doing the work, not the talking heads trying to squeeze more cash out of the system at the expense of everyone else. Read books and magazines. Watch documentaries on Netflix. If you can, take science classes at your local community college–you don’t have to actually work toward a degree. Go to seminars, meetups, group hikes led by naturalists, anything that gives you a chance to learn. Learning shouldn’t stop once you’re done with school. Let your curiosity guide you!

These are dangerous times, and it’s going to be hard to not feel despair. (I recommend the writings of Joanna Macy as a good antidote.) Engage in self-care when and as you need to, and keep building your resilience. If you feel all alone, remember that at least I’m here with you in this fight, and I have a pretty good bunch of people at my side, too.

We’re in this together.

*I refuse to refer to our current president by his name. Instead, I shall compare him to the commander-in-chief in Spaceballs, and apologize to Mel Brooks for any insult.

Anthropocentrism, Cosmology, Magic, Meaning, Paganism, Psychology, Science, Skepticism

“Is Anyone Else Getting Weird Vibes?”: On Confirmation Bias and Emotional States

5 Comments

“Has anyone else been feeling weird vibes lately?”

“Am I the only one feeling the energy shifting here?”

“Three other people I know have gotten bad news in the past week. It must be a sign!”

“The full moon must be making everyone crazy.”

“Flat tire? Opossum attack? Breakup? Collapsed souffle? Must be Mercury retrograde again.”

“Man, I’ve just been feeling so worn out lately. Anyone else feel like the energy is being sucked out of you?”

“I don’t know, I just got a bad feeling and have been sad ever since, it must be because the energy is really weird!”

It’s time to pick up the thread I started earlier this year with my post Dear Pagans: Please Stop Abusing Science. In it I skewered a few patterns I’ve seen in paganism (and the New Age, etc.) like trying to prove magic exists with shoddily-designed experiments. One of the tools I use to critically think about my spirituality is the concept of confirmation bias, which is when people look for evidence that supports their claim while ignoring anything that doesn’t, even if they aren’t conscious of the fact they’re doing it.

Confirmation bias is at the heart of a phenomenon I’ve seen a LOT in my twenty years of paganism. What typically happens is one person will say something that boils down to “Hey, has anyone else been getting weird/negative/etc. vibes in the energy lately?” And then a bunch of other people chime in and say “Yeah, the energy has been really off the past few days/weeks/month.” Sometimes there’ll be an excuse given like Mercury retrograde or the full moon, or something more nebulous like veils thinning or energy shifting.

My response is generally: Well, yes–of course if you ask a big group of people if they’ve been feeling particularly sad, or angry, or happy lately, you’re going to get a bunch of them saying yes. There are 7.5 billion people on the planet. There will always be millions upon millions of people who are experiencing basically the same thing you are right this moment. Even in your own city/town/county you can likely find hundreds if not thousands of people who just happen to be in a similar emotional state as you. And this is true all of the time.

Moreover, I’m willing to bet you dollars to doughnuts that there are as many miscommunications and other unfortunate events going on when Mercury is direct as when it’s retrograde. We just expect Mercury retrograde to bring problems, and so we actively seek them out (if not consciously) because of our old friend confirmation bias. As to that old idea about the full moon having negative effects on behavior? There is absolutely no solid evidence that there’s any truth to it (remember, anecdotes don’t count because they’re rife with conformation bias, even if they come from emergency room workers and the like.) (For what it’s worth, there’s no solid evidence linking menstruation to lunar cycles, either, even in people who live away from artificial light.)

“But–but–lots of pagans I asked are feeling weird stuff right now!” Okay, so did you also ask how many weren’t feeling anything weird? How many didn’t say anything because they felt they didn’t have anything to add? Did you ask people who aren’t pagans? A bunch of anecdotes do not add up to anecdata, your sample size is too small and self-selected, you lack a control group, and I guarantee that if you repeat your “experiment” over and over again, you’re always going to get about the same number of people saying “yeah, I also feel sad/happy/angry” at the same time, no matter the circumstances or what you think the energy is up to, because there are always people in your vicinity/social circle/etc. who feel the same way you do at any given time.

Look, yes, zeitgeist is a thing; it’s a natural occurrence when you have thousands or millions of humans in contact with each other all trading social memes and other communications. Certain patterns of behavior and belief and other markers of culture are bound to come up again and again. And yes, I know that the primary source on synchronicity, Jung, was a highly respected individual in the field of psychology, which supposedly lends his theory of acausal connections some weight.

But neither of these is a reason to skip the search for a more mundane causality for what you yourself are feeling on a more personal, immediate scale, especially if it’s something like feeling good one minute and then all of a sudden feeling down. Why not respond to unexpected emotional changes by considering much more likely mundane explanations? “Hmmm, I feel kind of blah. When’s the last time I ate? Did I get enough sleep? Has someone I live with been kind of pissy lately and stressed the entire household out? Maybe I just have some kind of weird temporary hormonal shift that’s affecting my mood?” (By the way, people of all sexes and genders have hormonal cycles that can and do affect emotions.)

It’s okay to want to not feel alone in your thoughts and feelings. But remember that we humans share a lot of common experiences. We share joy, and sorrow, and anger, and fatigue. We share weird blips in our neurochemistry that can bring on what feel like unexpected mood swings. When we are hit by a daily barrage of negative news media and other exhausting input, then yes–it’s normal for our systems to get overloaded, even if we aren’t conscious of it happening at the time. And it’s natural for us to feel empathy for others in the same situation we’re in: welcome to being a social species of ape. We evolved this connection to each other over millions of years, and we share it with lots of other species, too.

If you want to adhere to a principle created by a famous white guy from Europe, set aside Jung’s synchronicity and take a look at Occam’s Razor: the simplest explanation for a situation or phenomenon is the most likely. The more direct evidence you have and the fewer assumptions and leaps of faith you have to make, the better. And when you find the actual source of the problem you can then do something about it. Talking to a bunch of people online about how you all feel sad today can help you feel better in that you don’t feel so alone and you get a chance to talk about what you feel, but it won’t necessarily get rid of the original cause of your sadness. If you still feel off, you might be a little depressed or tired, your hormones might be a bit wonky–or you might just need a sandwich and some water. Either way, know that no matter what you’re going through, there are other people facing the same challenges right this moment, and that what you’re going through is likely normal and okay.

Anthropocentrism, Bioregion, Body Modifications, Cosmology, Death, Environmentalism, Ethics, Health and Healing, Nature, Nature Spirituality, Paganism, Rites of Passage, Sustainability, Way of the Scavenger

A Pagan Argument For Organ Donation

2 Comments

I am an organ donor. Or at least a potential one, in the event of my death. I’ve been signed up for over a decade through my various state driver’s licenses. I’m also on the bone marrow donor registry at Be the Match. I haven’t yet been a match for anyone, but I’m there for the call if they need me. (For what it’s worth, they really need people of color to increase potential donors for non-white patients, since white people like me are less likely to be a match for non-white donors thanks to tissue typing. But I encourage anyone who can join to do so, regardless of your race.)

I consider it an important part of my spiritual path to be a potential donor. I’m not especially invested in any particular idea about the afterlife, if there even is one. All I have guaranteed is the here and now, and what I have here and now is a body that I borrowed from the Earth. Every atom in my body came from food I consumed, water I drank, air I breathed. And when I die, I’m going to have to give it all back; I’m a huge proponent of green burial, by the way, and I’d like a spot at Herland Forest.

But not all of me may end up in that ground. If, when I die, my organs are still in good enough condition, I’d like them to go to people who need them. After all, I’m certainly not going to need them. I’ll be dead, and the worms and bacteria and other little critters won’t care that there’s no liver, or I’m missing an eyeball or two. I could selfishly say that since I am against embalming I refuse to allow any part of my body to be embalmed, and therefore refuse to be a donor on the grounds that it’s likely when the recipients die they’ll end up full of embalming fluids–to include my old spare parts. But as I said, that’s selfish, and I’ll sacrifice a few pieces if it means someone else gets to enjoy this world a little longer.

I’m not at all worried about not making it into some possible afterlife because my body wasn’t complete. Do soldiers who lose body parts in combat not get to go to the next life? What about tradespeople who end up losing a finger to machinery, or someone who had their original teeth knocked out in an auto accident? Hell, what about pagans who donate blood and plasma? I mean, really, we’re shedding hair and skin cells all the damned time, and we aren’t able to vacuum them up again, store them in bags and then take them with us to the grave. (Ewww. No, really, ewwww.)

Loss is normal. Other animals run around in the wilderness all the time with missing toes, shortened tails, cropped ears from fights, accidents, frostbite. Our medical technology just allows us to save more damaged bits and parts. The idea that only someone with a “whole” body gets to go to the afterlife just seems antithetical to reality. I mean, I had a large lipoma removed from my hip when I was seventeen. I’m sure it got sent to an incinerator (if it wasn’t plopped into a jar of preservative as a study specimen for students). It left a pretty big scar (which, quite honestly, I think looks really damned cool.) I also had my wisdom teeth removed a few years later. Am I automatically denied an afterlife, if such a thing even exists? Better to bank on what I know I have for sure–this life, and this world–than gamble valuable resources on the idea that there’s something after death and that somehow the integrity of my borrowed, physical body matters there.

I’ve heard arguments that organ donation is against environmental ethics. I am keenly aware of the fact that we have 7 billion humans and counting on this planet; it’s one of the biggest reasons I chose not to have children. Some of the population rise is because people are living longer overall. Organ donation helps facilitate that, though it’s hardly the biggest factor. I don’t think helping organ recipients live a few years longer (or even decades, as we improve post-transplant medicine) is that big an impact compared to how poorly people use natural resources. We could be a lot wiser with our consumption, make birth control and information on how to use it universally available to lower the birth rate, and make room for a few successful organ recipients while we’re at it.

I’ve also seen it said that organ donors are “cheating death”. Well, so what? I cheated death several years ago. I had a nasty case of diverticulitis that turned into peritonitis that put me on 48 hours of IV antibiotics, and I likely would have died had I not gotten that medical attention. Should I have just let nature take its course and died at the age of 31? Taken a chance on some herbs maybe working quickly enough to kill the fast-moving infection in time? Would you prefer I wasn’t here? And would you like to tell organ recipients that they should have died instead? Because that is what I hear people say when they say organ recipients cheat death.

Finally, I feel a responsibility toward other humans to make what resources I am no longer using available to them. It’s a little more complicated than dropping unwanted clothing off at a shelter or taking excess art supplies to SCRAP, but the concept is the same to me. Some people refuse to donate because they think their organs will be wasted on those who in their mind don’t “deserve” them, or who won’t survive long post-transplant. Sure, my heart may go to someone who end up dying six months later because it just didn’t “take”. But it might also go to someone who gets to live another decade, in which they may finish that book they were writing, plant trees for future generations to enjoy, or simply bask in a few more glorious sunsets. My corneas may end up with someone who dies in an auto accident three years later–but then given that over 90% of cornea transplants are successful, they got three years of sight they wouldn’t have had otherwise. No one knows for sure who will get my spare parts, and as I’d be dead I’d have no control over it. But isn’t death the ultimate act of losing control anyway?

As a naturalist pagan, my primary loyalty is to this world and the beings I share it with. And it’s because I feel so deeply for all of this that I want to make the best use of what I have to offer, down to my very mortal remains. You may have very valid reasons for not being a donor, and I respect your reasons, and if applicable your disagreement. But for me, organ donation is just one more part of my spiritual path, one that will continue my journey beyond death itself–even if I’m not around to see it happen.

Go here for information about being an organ and tissue donor in the U.S.

Go here for information on being a bone marrow donor in the U.S.

Did you enjoy this blog post? Want to encourage me to keep writing about various pagan-related topics? Consider buying one of my books, or become my Patron on Patreon for as little as $1/month!

Animals, Anthropocentrism, Cosmology, Environmentalism, Ethics, Meaning, Nature, Nature Spirituality, Paganism, Science, Skepticism, Wonder and Awe

On Paganism and Sin

16 Comments

I’ve been pagan for twenty years now. I was raised Roman Catholic, went to Catholic school for eight years, and I was even an acolyte well into high school. I discovered paganism in my latter teens; I was instantly intrigued by the notion that nature could be the source of the sacred, rather than just being a lower level of reality to be used and abused til Kingdom Come.

For the first few years after my conversion I would sometimes have this fear that really, the Catholics were right and anyone who wasn’t in the right religion would be condemned to an eternity of torture and flames. I think a lot of that worry, ironically, came because I was trying to plug pagan deities and practices into a fundamentally Catholic structure. I was supposed to be devoted and pious to my gods, and follow a schedule of rituals and observances throughout the year, and I wasn’t allowing myself to simply explore my path without worry I was “doing it wrong”. I was essentially swapping one dogma for another, fear of mistakes and all.

In Catholicism, fear of mistakes manifests itself as the fear of sin. To sin is to go against divine laws, however those are defined. The whole point of Christianity in general is this idea that humanity is by its very nature sinful and we need to be saved by God, through Jesus, or else we’ll suffer in hell forever, alongside murderers, and babies who died before they could be baptized.

And I realized that at this point in my life I simply don’t agree with that basic concept–that humans are inherently flawed. In my world, humans are just another sort of animal. We’re pretty amazing–we evolved these big, complex brains and opposable thumbs, upright walking and refined vocal apparatus, all as responses to the same challenges all animals face. But we’re not above other animals. We’re no more evolved than any other species that’s here with us today. We all got our same start 4.5 billion years ago, and each species of animal, plant, fungus, protist, etc. has a lineage that was equally successful in bringing it up to this very moment in time.

What we think makes us better than other animals is actually just our awareness of our choices and our ability to assign meaning to things. Sure, we’re really good at using these big brains. We have the ability to imagine what our actions are doing to another being. When a tiger attacks a deer it’s not thinking about how much its claws are hurting the prey, or how much fear the prey feels as it dies. But we can do that, with other humans and other beings. And because we have empathy, we create conceptions of “good” and “evil” that roughly correlate with “don’t hurt people” and “hurt people”.

The fact that we are capable of harming others doesn’t make us inherently evil or sinful, though. Every baby comes into this world a blank slate; each develops into an adult through a combination of genetic signals, and learned behaviors and social structures. We ALL have the ability to make decisions. There are mitigating factors–certain personality disorders and mental illnesses can have serious impacts on decision-making capabilities and risk awareness, for example. But even the best of us make some mistakes sometimes. We all lie, we cheat, we feel jealousy and envy, we hurt others either intentionally or accidentally. We also all feel love and care, we do kind things, we experience joy, we bring healing to others.

The concept of sin only looks at the errors, and if there’s even one tiny flaw you just aren’t good enough. I’m reminded of a Catholic school book I had that said sin was like contaminants in pure, white bottles of milk. A sinless person was pure and spotless, someone who had committed venial sin had some black splotches all throughout, and someone who had committed mortal sin was black all the way through. That image stuck with me for many years, and I hated myself for not being pure and spotless.

It took me a very, very long time to undo that unhealthy idea that if I made any sort of a mistake it made me a terrible person. I spent entirely too much of my life racked with guilt that I wasn’t perfect, and it made me hypersensitive to any sort of criticism. And yes, it made me miserable–I wasted a LOT of time being unhappy over my flaws. The other thing that this whole idea of sin did to me was it robbed me of opportunities to learn from my mistakes. When you’re trying really, really hard to avoid messing anything up because mistakes reflect on your character, you don’t allow yourself to dwell on your screw-ups any longer than is necessary, and so you don’t take the time to learn from them.

And that ability to learn from mistakes is part of what makes us human! In my martial arts class I learn more from my mistakes than from my successes, just like I’ve had to train myself to be okay with making mistakes in other areas of my life. Other animals learn from their mistakes, too. Young blue jays that eat monarch butterflies learn very quickly that bright orange and black butterflies will make them sick, and so they avoid them. Baby elephants that are still drinking their mother’s milk will still watch what plants she eats so when they, too, eat solid food they know what’s safe. Juvenile cheetahs have to chase many antelope before they catch one–and they have to catch several before they actually figure out how to kill one.

This concept of sin erases our animal heritage, where we learn from our experiences, good and bad. We’re not allowed to be dirty and aggressive and full of mistakes. We have to feel guilty about enjoying sex and must speak of it in hushed tones. We aren’t allowed to have conflicts which are just normal parts of any social species’ existence, and we aren’t allowed to learn from resolving those conflicts because they aren’t supposed to happen in the first place. We aren’t allowed to be of this world.

Look, I know that this world can be really harsh and difficult and full of pain. That’s just the way it’s been ever since life began in hot, lava-tinged oceans billions of years ago. And with more complexity in life comes more complexity in suffering. So yeah, it’s really tempting to daydream about a “perfect” other world where nothing ever goes wrong and everything is safe and comfortable. It’s tempting to want to push people toward your idea of “goodness” by threatening them with sin and hellfire.

But I have no evidence that any religion’s afterlife is actually going to come to pass–I’m waiting til I die before I form any opinions either way. I have a limited time here, and for all I know this may be all I get. I’m not going to waste this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity being miserable because I make mistakes, or worrying that I’m not doing what someone else in my religious community says I should be doing, or trying to make people believe the same things I do because I think they’re wrong and I’m right. I accept this world and every being I share it with as they are, neither inherently good nor evil, neither perfect nor flawed. There is no sin tying us down the moment we’re born, putting us at a disadvantage before we’ve even opened our eyes for the first time. There’s only a lifetime apiece: a lifetime of experiences, mistakes, and choices. Each moment is an opportunity to appreciate and absorb this world in all its parts, and if we so choose, to try to ease others’ suffering and to bring about joy.

Isn’t that a wonderful thing?

If, like me, you find your path in nature’s beauty, consider picking up a copy of my newest book, Nature Spirituality From the Ground Up!

Anthropocentrism, Cosmology, Magic, Meaning, Nature Spirituality, Paganism, Psychology, Rites of Passage, Rituals

Maiden/Mother/Crone, Youth/Warrior/Sage, and Strict/Gender/Roles

38 Comments

I got to go to my very first Pagan Spirit Gathering earlier this year; between it and my second-ever Heartland Pagan Festival, I was strongly reminded of why I love Midwestern festivals. Both events had an appreciable roster of rituals throughout their time, but I was particularly impressed by the number of rites of passage at PSG. This isn’t surprising; after 36 years, the Circle Sanctuary organizers have had plenty of time to create a crucible for people to step from one stage of life to the next. There were rites for young people just entering their teens, and others for elders. Most of the rites of passage weregendered towards women or men (based on identity, not genes), though the Wild Hunt was an ordeal open to people of all ages and sexes (by necessity participants were chosen from a hat full of names since there wasn’t enough room for everyone who’d want to participate.)

While I was pretty busy with guest of honor activities, I did look into what would have been available to me if I’d had the time. I’m a woman in my mid-thirties, and my choices were:

–Motherhood Blessingway: a blessing for all women who were pregnant or had become mothers (to include through marriage or adoption) in the past two years. Nope, no kids here and no intention to have them, so that doesn’t fit.

397px-thumbnail–Daughters of the Dark Moon: “a group of women past the Motherhood stage of life but who do not yet identify with the Crone stage of life”. Well, that’s only open to members of a particular online group that have been putting a lot of preparation into this ritual for the past year. No gate-crashing this time!

–A Circle for She Who is More than a Maiden but Not Yet a Mother: for women who have “left childhood far behind, but don’t yet have the responsibility of motherhood (literal or metaphoric)”, with some non-reproductive alternatives to Mother offered up for consideration. I really, really wanted to see what this one was all about, because I spoke briefly with people involved in it and it actually sounded awesome, but I had a workshop I had to teach at the same time.

MMCYWS as Limiting Factor

I am in no way faulting PSG for making some use of MMC imagery. Again, their attempt to have something for just about everyone was really impressive, and I know a lot of people who participated in the rites got a lot out of them. In fact, I think they should be a good model to other groups and events wanting to offer similar rites of passage.

But a LOT of pagans are still using what I consider to be a very limited and outdated model of human development: Maiden/Mother/Crone and Youth/Warrior/Sage* (which I will from here on out abbreviate as MMCYWS.) MMCYWS started out in Wicca as a way of viewing the Wiccan Goddess and her Consort in their various phases, but worked its way into the greater pagan community as a way to answer the lack of rites of passage for human beings in the United States and elsewhere. We celebrate things like getting your driver’s license or reaching legal drinking age, but it’s not usually a big community affair where you’re formally brought into a new stage of life by others who have already been there, done that, and who explain the responsibility not just as an individual but as part of the community. (Usually the meaning of these two rites is limited to “Wheee, now you can give your car-less friends rides!” and “CHUG CHUG CHUG!!!!!”)

The problem is that people are a lot more complicated than three phases and their rites of passage can account for. As you can tell from my personal experience, it’s not always easy to pigeonhole someone into one particular archetype. And we all have major shifts in our lives that have nothing to do with our age–for example, the ordination of new Circle Sanctuary ministers that is held at PSG each year. But MMCYWS is convenient for a general audience, isn’t it?

MELLIN(1850)_p1.156_ODENWell, convenient, yes, but accurate? Not necessarily. Maiden/Mother/Crone is the older of the two triads; Youth/Warrior/Sage was added on later to have an analogue for men. These go back to the idea of the Goddess as the keeper of the Earth and plants and being receptively feminine, while the God is the lord of wild animals and hunting and virile masculinity. And MMC is dreadfully uterus-based, not surprising when you consider Wicca is a fertility religion, but still unacceptable when dealing with diverse, flesh and blood women who may not even have uteruses. Moreover, look at Youth/Warrior/Sage: those aren’t based on whether the guy had sex and made babies or not. They’re about roles within the community. MMC, on the other hand, is all about reproductive powers. “Maiden” either refers to a woman who has not has sex yet, or one who is unmarried. “Mother”, of course, is a woman who has children. A “Crone” is a woman who can no longer bear children because she’s hit menopause.

My development as a person has had only tangential relationship to my physical body, particularly after my late teens/early twenties when my brain and body finished growing and developing. I remember my menarche, and I honestly felt it had less to do with my development as a person at the time than my confirmation as a Catholic a couple of years later. Everyone in eighth grade at my Catholic school was confirmed and brought more fully into the community of the church. It wasn’t about whether I could make babies or not, but how much I’d learned about the faith I was raised in. Sure, you could argue that because no one made a big deal out of my menarche of course I wasn’t going to see it as a rite of passage. But even back then when I was told “Well, now you can get pregnant”, I didn’t particularly care because motherhood just wasn’t something I ever wanted. And menarche celebrations are still just ways to say “You’re an adult now because of your reproductive powers.” They’re specifically tied to that one change in the physical body, no matter how else you dress it up.

And that’s my biggest gripe with MMC in particular: it still follows the dominant societal script for women of “You grow up, you get married, you have babies.” We’re surrounded by that message from a young age. I never had role models in my life who deliberately chose not to have children (but still had relationships), and there were no female characters in stories and shows who didn’t have children because that was what they wanted. (But there were plenty of male characters running around who didn’t have the “burden” of a wife and kids, and a few who had off-stage families who didn’t interfere in their adventures.) Most female characters were mothers or grandmothers, or were too young but were some guy’s love interest, or in a few cases were heartless shrews that no one would want to reproduce with in the first place. The few times childlessness was ever addressed it was through infertility, not choice.

And so as a childfree woman who has no intentions of changing that lifestyle, the Mother part of MMC is particularly frustrating, as even my spiritual community isn’t free of the ideal of women-as-baby-makers. I know that most women do end up having children, and I have no problem with them having blessingways and other rites–being a parent is a BIG change in one’s life, and it should be treated as a big deal. But why should the men have their middle phase be “Warrior” instead of “Father”, while women are universally stuck with “Mother”?

Possible Solutions?

There have been attempts to try to shoehorn every woman into the MMC model, particularly that persnickety Mother stage. “Oh, Motherhood isn’t just giving physical birth! It can mean nurturing other people’s children! Or nurturing creative projects, or careers!” Nurture, nurture, nurture! That’s what women do! But men aren’t said to be “nurturing” anything–they’re warriors. The message is clear: women nurture, men protect, even if they’re working on the same damned things. And that’s the issue: you’re still trying to work with a model that is based on outdated gender dichotomies that place women in gentle, passive, nurturing roles, and men in active, assertive, protective roles. That’s not to say that there haven’t been attempts to make rites of passage for women that include our more active, protective qualities, or rites for men that remind them that they, too, can be nurturing and gentle. But as long as we keep trying to uphold MMCYWS as the gold standard for pagan rites of passage, we’re going to keep running into the stark limitations that this model has.

That means I also don’t support the idea of turning the men’s triad into Youth/Father/Sage. Making BOTH triads dependent on one’s parenthood status doesn’t fix the problem. Instead, I want to see more community-based rites of passage that do away with MMCYWS entirely. I don’t mean get rid of gender-specific rites entirely (though they need to be open to everyone who identifies as that particular gender, not just women’s rituals for women with fully functioning uteruses as one example.) There’s something to be said for being able to explore how you feel as a person of your sex/gender and where your place is in the greater community, especially because we are gaining more freedom from the strict gender dichotomies of the dominant culture. But we need to stop trying to shove women into Maiden/Mother/Crone. And we need to stop trying to create a similar limiting analogue for men.

Marble_statuette_of_Hecate_depicted_as_a_triple_goddess_surrounded_by_dancers,_from_the_Mithraeum_at_Sidon_(Colonia_Aurelia_Pia,_Syria),_Louvre_Museum_(9362315337)So what do we do instead? Well, you can have rites of passage based on gender and/or age, but don’t limit them to MMCYWS. In fact, drop the archetypes entirely, and let the participants themselves inform what they feel they are growing into. Why does everything have to be shoved into labels anyway? I’ve seen people try to come up with alternative roles for the middle stage of MMC–Queen or Warrioress instead of Mother–but there’s still the uterus-based movement of Maiden into Middle Stage, and then Middle Stage into Crone.

And question what you feel you can teach boys and men that you can’t teach girls and women, especially for the boys and girls. Puberty is really when the different treatment of girls and boys gets into full swing, and girls often get the short stick when it comes to things like practical skills. My Girl Scout troop honestly sucked pondwater, because our meetings were mostly sitting in a basement singing songs and making woven potholders, while Boy Scouts my age were getting to go camping and learning how to build fires. (I even had a subscription to Boy’s Life magazine for a number of years because I just wasn’t getting to learn enough in my scouting “adventures”.) And while I’ve met a few women whose Girl Scout experiences were more active and adventurous, a lot of women had experiences similar to mine, because girls were supposed to do domestic things and not get dirty or do anything dangerous.

If your rites for boys and girls are different–WHY? What can you possibly teach boys that you can’t teach girls, other than how to approach the societal expectations that our dominant culture tries to shove on each group? And if your rites for grown men and women are different–WHY? If the men get to go off into the woods to have solitary vision quests, but the women are expected to stay in a circle and talk, why? Is it just a matter of different organizers with different ideas for rites in general, or is there gender-based bias going on? Even crones and sages–are the crones just talking about how much hot flashes suck, or is there a reason that all these elders aren’t celebrating their coming into elderhood together? I’m not saying don’t have gender division in these rites–but I AM saying to question the reasons why. Furthermore, question whether they’re necessary, and whether you’re bringing assumptions about the supposed differences between men and women into play. Having a group of crones-to-be talking about how society views older women and how to change that is one thing; treating the crones as geriatrics who might break a hip while letting the sages have one more adventure before settling down is another.

Beyond that, consider rites of passage that have nothing to do with one’s gender or sex. A few years ago I wrote about Bill Plotkin’s Wheel of Life as an ecopsychological alternative to MMCYWS. You’ll need to read his book Nature and the Human Soul to get the whole effect, but the short version is that it’s a gender-neutral eight-stage cycle of growth that is based less on physical changes, and more on psychological growth, and one’s relationship to both community and environment. There’s a lot of potential fodder for rite of passage inspiration.

And for pity’s sake, there are LOTS of pagan ritualists out there who have created some really amazing celebrations and transformations. Surely that wellspring of creativity can come up with something that doesn’t use MMCYWS. We’ve created incredible handfasting/wedding rites, funerary rites, baptisms, and other celebrations. I bet we can come up with other ways to mark important thresholds that don’t involve trying to pigeonhole human beings into limited gender roles.

To that end, I’d love to hear any experiences people have had with working beyond MMCYWS in rites of passage, particularly gender-based ones. I know you all are out there–I invite you to share in the comments!

* To be clear, PSG didn’t use the Youth and Warrior terms for the men’s rite of passage, nor the Maiden term for the young women’s rite. But Youth/Warrior/Sage still has a pretty strong influence on the pagan community, with Warrior/Father/Sage being a less common interpretation.

Animal Totems, Animals, Anthropocentrism, Environmentalism, Ethics, Nature, Nature Spirituality, Science, Skin Spirits, Totems, Way of the Scavenger

Why We Need the Migratory Bird Treaty Act

5 Comments

It’s festival season again, which means it’s time for one of my favorite pastimes: counting the number of illegal bird feathers I see on people’s hats, jewelry, and rear-view mirrors. Well, okay, to be fair there are plenty of other things I’d rather be doing, but being a naturalist my eye is automatically drawn to the ephemera of the wild. The feathers people tend to pick up most often are pretty easy to identify–usually the wing or tail feathers of assorted raptors and corvids, or more colorful songbird plumage. (I very rarely see the more drab garb of your average Little Brown Job.)

If the owner of said hat/jewelry/vehicle is nearby, I’ll usually follow up my observation  by surreptitiously mentioning to them that technically they’re not supposed to have that feather. Responses are usually along the lines of “Wow, I had NO IDEA! Let me take care of that!” with the occasional variant “Well, too bad–I found it and it’s mine, and no one can take it away from me because of religious reasons/finders keepers/etc.”

There’s not a lot I can do about the latter group of folks, but I always hope I’ve made a difference to the former. On the grand scale of wildlife violations, a molted blue jay feather is pretty far down anyone’s list of priorities, and it’s not highly likely that fish and wildlife officials are just going to be bumming around your average pagan or hippie festival. But there’s always that chance that someone is in the wrong place and wrong time with the wrong feather, and not knowing the law isn’t a good defense if an official decides to make an issue of it.

You Don’t Know What It’s Like, Breaking the Law

Law? Yes, that happens to be the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 (MBTA). The text of the law prohibits, within the United States, the “pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill, attempt to take, capture or kill, possess, offer for sale, sell, offer to purchase, purchase, deliver for shipment, ship, cause to be shipped, deliver for transportation, transport, cause to be transported, carry, or cause to be carried by any means whatever, receive for shipment, transportation or carriage, or export, at any time, or in any manner, any migratory bird, included in the terms of this Convention . . . for the protection of migratory birds . . . or any part, nest, or egg of any such bird.”

What’s a migratory bird? It includes almost every wild bird in the United States, from raptors and corvids to songbirds and waterfowl. About the only birds not protected are non-native species like pigeons (rock doves) and European starlings. There are hunting seasons on a few species, such as certain ducks and geese, and American crows. However, their remains are still strictly regulated; only the hunter who killed the birds (legally!), or someone that they give them directly to, may possess them, and they can’t be bought or sold.

What this all boils down to is that unless you have a scientific permit, you cannot legally possess the remains of any migratory bird, even naturally molted feathers. A common misconception is that Native Americans (federally enrolled or not) are exempt, but this isn’t the case. The only exception there is to a different law, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act of 1940, and even then enrolled tribal members must be on a waiting list to get feathers and other remains from the National Eagle Repository.

The Birth of the MBTA

If you were to walk down the street in any American city in the late 1800s to early 1900s you would likely see an abundance of birds, dozens of species within just a few hundred yards of each other. The catch? They’d all be dead, resting on fancy women’s hats as individual feathers, wings, or even entire bird skins. From common songbirds like robins and cardinals to more remote species like sage grouse and goshawks, all would be on display for the sake of fashion.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with feathers as adornments. But at the time there was no regulation of how many feathers (or birds) could be taken in a season, which meant commercial hunters could kill millions of birds a year with no limits. This is the time period in which we lost the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet, among other now-extinct species. And we almost lost many others along the way.

Probably the best example of the excesses of the time was the great egret. Egrets develop a particular sort of fine plume during breeding season, and maintain them while still nesting. (You can see a particularly lovely example on the cover of Faith No More’s album, Angel Dust.) By the time the birds naturally molt these feathers they’ve gotten ragged and dirty from months of nesting and other wear and tear, so they weren’t sufficient for the hat trade. Plume hunters therefore would go into the wetlands and kill one or both adult egrets, often while they were still incubating eggs or caring for young. For the sake of a few feathers, both parents and up to four young could die. Egret numbers plummeted.

Enter the MBTA

The early 1900s saw the passage of the first laws to protect wildlife and trade in their remains. The Lacey Act of 1900 made it a federal offense to transport illegally acquired or possessed species over state or national lines, but it was sometimes difficult to enforce. The Weeks-McLean Act of 1913 set hunting seasons for birds, to include prohibiting hunting in the spring during nesting season, but it was found to be unconstitutional.

The MBTA improved on what the Weeks-McLean Act was trying to accomplish. It laid out firmer and more widespread restrictions on the killing and possession of migratory bird species. The Act was based on treaties the U.S. made first with Great Britain (representing Canada), and then later Mexico, Japan and the then-Soviet Union. Its goal was to protect all species of wild native bird that migrated between the U.S. and any of those countries.

The feathered hat trade had slowed down significantly with the rise of World War I; the fancy excesses of the Victorian and Edwardian eras were replaced by more sober practicality as participating countries had to tighten their belts to pay for the materials of war. The millinery industry, market hunters and others dependent on the feather trade were already hurting financially, and the MBTA was a final nail in the coffin.

But the trade-off was worth it for the birds. The great egret and many other species rebounded to healthier population levels. Today songbirds are a common sight even in urban areas, and raptors glide over the landscape (helped along by the ban on DDT in the 1970s). Waterfowl are recovered enough to allow hunting seasons, though these are carefully regulated.

Sadly, the MBTA came too late for some species. The ivory-billed woodpecker may have lasted longer than the Carolina parakeet, but low numbers coupled with continuing habitat destruction led to the almost-certain demise of this bird. The story is the same for Bachman’s warbler, the heath hen, the New Mexico sharp-tailed grouse and the dusky seaside sparrow, as well as many Hawaiian native birds whose MBTA protection came only with Hawaii’s statehood in 1959.

Migratory Birds and the MBTA Today

Despite the successes of the MBTA, there are still good reasons for it to remains on the books in the 21st century. One third of North America’s migratory bird species are at serious risk of extinction. Habitat destruction, climate change and pollution events like oil spills have devastated both bird populations and their nesting and wintering sites. Predation by domestic and feral cats accounts for the deaths of  hundreds of millions of wild birds every year. Our birds aren’t out of the woods yet.

Still, some people question the strictness of the law, particularly in cases of building infrastructure for alternative energy and other human endeavors. Some of the questions I’ve heard everyone from taxidermists to festival attendees as are: Why should someone face fines and possible incarceration for picking up a crow feather? Why can’t there be some limited season on non-game birds, especially those that are common like gulls? And why on earth are Canada geese, which are considered pests in many areas, still protected?

I know it’s frustrating. There are plenty of times when I’ve had to pass by beautiful molted feathers on the ground, no matter how lovely they might be in my art or personal collection. (And those human-acclimated Canada geese can be MEAN!)

But ultimately, I’m on the side of the MBTA and the scientists who are in support of it. For one thing, it’s next to impossible to tell the difference between a naturally molted feather and one that was stripped from a poached carcass, so lifting the ban on found feathers would almost certainly have devastating consequences. Remember, too, that 1918 was just under 100 years ago, a blip in ecological time. Forests felled that year are still recovering, so why should we expect the forests’ inhabitants to be completely in the clear?

Most of all, I support the MBTA because it’s still having positive effects. Do we need to discuss situations like making exemptions for wind farms and the like? Of course. But wind farms are much more necessary than taxidermy mounts or feathered hats, and I feel that those of us who create non-essential (but pretty!) things out of feathers, hides and bones should leave the exemptions to the necessities. We have plenty of alternatives–just look at the beautiful variety of feathers available on heritage chicken breeds, for example!

And if your concerns are of a spiritual nature, I have found over many years of experience that the totems and spirits of endangered species appreciate the substitution of more common feathers and remains in lieu of their own. Really, what better offering can you give an endangered animal totem than protection of its physical counterparts? You don’t actually have to have a raven feather to connect with Common Raven; a dyed goose feather will do just as well (though be sure to thank Domestic Goose as well!)

You can find out more about the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and other relevant laws at my Animal Parts Laws Pages.

Did you enjoy this post? Consider picking up a copy of my book, Skin Spirits: The Spiritual and Magical Use of Animal Parts, which includes discussions of legalities and ethics along with rites and practices for treating hides and bones with respect on a pagan path.