Category Archives: Psychology

Bioregion, Cosmology, Ecopsychology, Environmentalism, Health and Healing, Meaning, Naturalist Paganism, Nature, Nature Spirituality, Nature Writing, Paganism, Psychology, Science

Ecopsychology and Neopagan Relevance

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Note: This post was originally posted on No Unsacred Place in 2011, and then later Paths Through the Forests. I am moving it over here so I can have more of my writings in one place.

Ecopsychology: the psychology of how we relate to the natural environment, and the therapeutic application of the restorative qualities of nature.

When I enrolled in a counseling psychology Master’s degree program in 2008, the single biggest magnet for me was the series of three ecopsychology courses that were offered. I had read Bill Plotkin’s Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World, which explained human psychological development in part through one’s relationship with nature.

Through three straight semesters, I learned the basics of ecopsychology and who some of the key figures were; I also explored how to incorporate a client’s relationship to nature in their therapy, along with family history, spirituality, and other important parts of the client’s experience. I even spent four days out in the woods with other students learning hands-on wilderness therapy techniques. (I also gave a presentation on how Alan Moore’s run of the Swamp Thing comic book could be used in ecotherapy, but that’s a story for another time.)

Not surprisingly, I discovered much that enhanced my neopaganism. Furthermore, I saw a wealth of material that could be relevant to neopaganism in general, as well as elements of neopaganism and related paths that could enhance the development and practice of ecopsychology. I wasn’t the first person to make the connection of course; on the contrary, some of the very foundational concept of ecopsychology are quite relevant to nature-based paganisms.

Here are just a few of the salient points:

–Ecopsychology helps to explore and understand the development and maintenance of a nature-friendly mindset.

Why do we enjoy being out in the wilderness? What is it that makes us respond better to a tree than a live plasma-screen movie of the same tree?(1) What are the effects of disconnection of nature, both on an individual and systemic basis? Ecopsychologists seek to not only find answers to these questions, but to utilize the information in helping clients achieve better states of mental health. Many pagans are already familiar with the relaxation that can result from a weekend spent camping, or the difference between an indoor and outdoor ritual; ecopsychology provides additional insight as to why we may feel that way.–Ecopsychology sets the individual firmly within the context of the ecosystem they are a part of, human and otherwise.

One of the criticisms that ecopsychologists have of much of modern therapy is that while the average therapy intake form asks clients about their family members, significant others, home life past and present, and other human relationships, it doesn’t ask about the client’s relationship to nature. As psychology, particularly applied in counseling, takes an increasingly systemic view of people and their mental health, research and anecdotal evidence alike deny the (particularly American) ideal of the “rugged individualist”. Rather than an island, each person is part of an interconnected greater system, and the natural world is a part of that. Ecopsychology gently reminds us that our very minds and perceptions are inextricably linked to our environment, something that many neopagans have been living consciously for years.

–Ecopsychology meshes well with nature-based religion.

From its inception in the late 20th century, ecopsychology has always been closely entwined with spirituality, especially (though not exclusively) nature-based spiritual and religious paths. Even the anthology Ecopsychology, which came out in 1995 and is considered one of the foundational texts of the subject, included an essay by Leslie Gray entitled “Shamanic Counseling and Ecopsychology”. Whether theistic or not, spirituality is an intrinsic part of the right-brained tendencies of ecopsychology, and paths ranging from neopaganism to Catholicism(2) have been explored within ecopsychological writings.

–Ecopsychology lends itself well to ritual practices.

Joanna Macy and John Seed’s Council of All Beings rite, and Mary Gomes’ Altars of Extinction(3), are just two of many examples of how ecopsychology has delved into ritual as a way of healing and processing the profound level of grief many feel at the destruction of the environment. Ecopsychologists recognize ritual as a structured way for clients to process and work through life experiences past and present; additionally, as many neopagan rituals tend to be focused on the bright, celebratory side, an exploration of the processing of grief may be valuable to our spiritual communities.

As you can see, just in these few examples there are plenty of areas of overlap between ecopsychology and neopagan interests and practices. Our relationship to the world, to include that expressed in spirituality, depends heavily on our perceptions and cognitions; we cannot experience and interpret what is around us without the filters of our senses and our thoughts. Ecopsychology is a formal, though often quite organic, exploration of that relationship between personal microcosm and universal macrocosm.

1. There’s a great study done a few years ago that demonstrated just that; you can read the paper that resulted at http://faculty.washington.edu/pkahn/articles/520_kahn.pdf

2. During my first ecopsych course, one of the co-authors of the excellent text, Care for Creation: A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth, spoke at one of the classes. Those readers with a particular interest in interfaith dialogue may be interested in the book, though it’s an enlightening read in general.

3. The Altars of Extinction project was featured in issue #96 of Reclaiming Quarterly: http://www.reclaimingquarterly.org/96/96-altarextinct.html

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Anthropocentrism, Bioregion, Cosmology, Death, Environmentalism, Ethics, Gratitude, Health and Healing, Meaning, Naturalist Paganism, Nature, Nature Spirituality, Nature Writing, Paganism, Psychology, Rites of Passage, Rituals, Science, Wonder and Awe

The Invitation of Wild Geese

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I feel like not enough people knew of Mary Oliver, who passed away on Friday at the age of 83.

I myself, not being a huge fan of poetry, never heard of her work until just a few years ago. Somehow in my enjoyment of nature writing I had overlooked her work. While the poet herself is gone, her legacy is immortalized in an incredible body of work spanning several decades.

Like so many people, my introduction to Oliver’s work was her poem Wild Geese. I was working on my ecopsychology certificate in graduate school, and encountered her words in a reading. Initially my attraction to it centered on the imagery of nature, the painting in my head of the movement of pebbles and sun and geese over the land. For years I came back to it just for this picture as a source of solace and joy.

But over time it gained a deeper meaning for me. Having been raised Catholic, I was soaked from an early age in the idea of original sin and the idea that humanity is inherently flawed. This, of course, also bred in me a deep sense of guilt and inadequacy, as well as contributing to the anxiety disorder I still deal with today. When I shot forth from these confines as a teenager and landed in the lap of neopaganism, I thought the main thing I wanted was a religion that was centered on nature, rather than seeing it as a set of materials to be exploited.

I got that, of course, but what I also got was a lot of fellow pagans carrying a lot of Christian baggage. (1) The need for a higher power to have control of things and to be petitioned for aid; a tendency to divide things into dichotomies like “light” and “dark” or “white magic” and “black magic”; a desire for some authority (often scriptural) to offer clear lines of What To Do and What Not To Do. And with the crossover of paganism with environmentalism, I often ran into sentiments dripping with the idea of sin, guilt, and flawed humanity, like “humans are just cancer on the earth”, and “Gaea is going to make us all pay for what we’ve done to Her”.

I carried much of my Catholic baggage with me. I especially yearned for structure and ritual and orthopraxy and definitive methods of pleasing the powers that be, or at least that’s what I told myself I needed in order to be a Really Good Pagan. The crescendo of that particular adventure was the few years I tried putting together a formalized path using various bits and pieces of things I had learned and developed over the years. The harder I tried to make that work, though, the more I found myself rebelling all over again.

I went back and re-read Wild Geese. I read the opening lines:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

In that, I broke open. Catholic tirades about how we are all tainted with original sin even from birth, pagan moralizing over how the Threefold Law is gonna get ya or preaching Gaea’s ecological smackdown–these all came flowing out as though from a deep wound lanced. “Love what it loves” wasn’t a call to crass, reactionary hedonism or indifferent amorality, but instead trusting our instincts and deeply-ingrained social bonds that our ancestors evolved over millions of years to thrive together.(2)

And that was the key: the idea that humans are not inherently flawed, that we are just another species of animal in a highly complex world full of many ecosystems. Our actions have evolutionary roots, even if we’ve taken them in some beautiful, strange, or even terrible directions. Our large-scale destruction of the planet has largely coincided with increasing beliefs that we are separate from nature; after all, it’s easier to destroy something you don’t see any responsibility toward. Yet here was a call to return to our place in the natural order of things, where we are one among many.

From that point, the rest of the poem is a joyful invitation to return home. And I suppose that there is a bit of that shared concept of forgiveness in the idea that no matter how badly we’ve screwed up our lives and the planet–if we stop and do our best to turn things around, nature will still be waiting for us.(3) But it’s not a forgiveness gained through penance and punishment, nor is it dangled over our heads as the one and only alternative to an eternity in hellfire and brimstone. There’s no mention of any specific religion one must adhere to in order to be saved, no threat of damnation. We aren’t required to do rituals A, B and C in order to avoid angering the gods.

All it says is that the rest of nature has been there all along, waiting patiently for us to come back into the rhythm of the dance of raindrops and rivers. It will continue on in some form with or without us, but wouldn’t it be glorious if it were with us? There’s a grand, amazing world out there full of wonder and awe. Nature does not dole out sinfulness and punishment, but only natural consequences to actions, which are inherently neutral and not steeped in human ideas about morality.

Since that time, my paganism has evolved into something more naturalistic, and anything but structured and formalized. Instead it pervades every element of my life organically and without pretension. I feel constantly connected to something bigger than myself–the entire Universe–which is a key goal of spirituality anyway. Rituals feel redundant, unless you think of my daily farm chores and my meals and my sleep as rituals, all of which celebrate the world I live in in various ways. And I don’t see myself as being part of some cosmic hierarchy; I am not inherently better or worse than any other being here.

I am still working on returning to the rest of nature, but it is only because I am unpracticed, not because I feel unworthy. I can be concerned about the environmental destruction I am contributing to by my very existence and lifestyle without letting that concern translate into a guilt that continues to keep me separate as something dirty, foul, not deserving of nature’s touch. And the more I feel close to nature, the more responsibility I feel toward it, and vice versa. Nature may not be an entity that can love me; it’s pretty indifferent as a whole. But I can make up for that with the utter joy and astonishment I experience every moment I am aware of my place in nature and what amazement surrounds me.

It’s a cliche to say that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. I never told Ms. Oliver how much her work meant to me, and of course now I will never have that opportunity. But I don’t think I realized myself the importance of Wild Geese in particular until the evening after she passed, when I began writing this post. And I sent out my gratitude in these words–too little, too late–but hopefully enough to share that meaning with those who remain.

What is remembered, lives.

  1. 1. Obviously, yes, #NotAllPagans. But after over two decades in this community, I’ve seen these and other leftover Christian patterns frequently. These phenomena do also occur in other religions, and arguably in some pre-Christian paganisms. But it was clear in the instances I saw that the patterns were most closely replicating those many of us were raised with in Christianity, with a thin pagan veneer pulled over them.
  2. 2. I recognize this is a pretty romanticized view of “instincts”, and that hunting and other violent things are also instinctual to a degree. That’s not what this is about, though. Leave those aside for the moment.
  3. 3. Of course, with climate change being what it is, it may not be able to wait for us much longer, at least not in a form that allows us to survive as a species. But leave the doomsaying for some other time and place. All it does is make people less likely to try to improve things, and more likely to just give up, and that is antithetical to what this entire post is about.
Activism, Environmentalism, Ethics, Health and Healing, Naturalist Paganism, Nature, Paganism, Psychology, Rituals, Skepticism

A Clarification On My Last Post

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Regarding my last post where I speak of my grief, anger, and frustration over the fires in the Columbia River Gorge, first of all I want to thank everyone who read, shared and commented on the post, helping to get that information out there. As of right now the fires are still burning over 30,000 acres and have spread over to the Washington side of the Columbia, but no one has died and the firefighters have done a remarkable job in spite of ongoing heat, wind and lack of rain.

Most people have been able to understand my frustration with all the calls for prayers and rites at a time when these things feel like a band-aid on a bullet wound. I know I took a big risk in writing from a place of deep pain, grief and anger and that doubtless there would be people who, instead of paying attention to the bigger takeaway–do something concrete about the fires and the events leading up to them–got tangled up in my harsh words on prayers and rites.

What I should have clarified was that I am specifically frustrated with those who pray for rain, but then do nothing else helpful to follow it up. I’ve been pagan for twenty-one years. I have seen countless pagans who do “send energy to X” rituals and spells, and then do nothing else to follow it up. We tell people that if you’re going to do a job spell, you can’t then not send out resumes or apply for jobs. In the same way, all the “stop the fire” spells seem to fall flat when what we need even more urgently is everything from funding for firefighting and fire prevention to boots on the ground when the fire stops and the damage is assessed. Even if all you can do is pass on crucial information about evacuations and how to stop this happening in the future, you’re helping.

I know that even though I no longer practice magic of any sort, that it is a big part of paganism for a lot of people. And I know a lot of the people who do workings are also following them up with concrete physical actions. And I really, really appreciate all of those efforts. Even if the rituals only ended up having a purely psychological effect, bringing people together and boosting moods to keep going, that’s valuable.

I wrote my post when I was at an incredibly low point, physically alone and re-traumatized and in deep despair and just about ready to give up. I channeled that into drawing together resources to show people how they could help, both immediately and long-term, and that was part of what started helping me out of that dark place.

So I hope you’ll understand if my post wasn’t the nicest, sweetest, most diplomatic thing I’ve ever written. Yes, I could have been clearer about who, exactly, my frustration was with. But I have no apology for being angry with the hypocrisy of those who do a spell and then do nothing to follow it up when it comes to something this big, destructive, and deeply rooted in long-term human error.

Activism, Animals, Anthropocentrism, Bioregion, Book Reviews, Cosmology, Environmentalism, Fungi, Naturalist Paganism, Nature, Nature Spirituality, Nature Writing, Paganism, Plants, Psychology, Rituals, Science, Skepticism, Sustainability, Wonder and Awe

Lupa’s Essential Books For Pagans

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Hi, folks! Sorry for the radio silence; my head hasn’t been in pagan space much lately so I’ve been dealing with a bit of writer’s block in that direction. I’m starting to come out of it a bit, though, and I have a few ideas, this being the first one.

Most essential reading lists for pagans tend to be pagan-specific books, or books that deal with related topics like the history of pre-Christian religions or herbalism. My list is perhaps a little more removed from blatant paganism than that, and might be better termed “Lupa’s Essential Books For Nature-Based Pagans”. Moreover, it’s a list that will likely change over time. But they’re texts I think all pagans would benefit from reading for one reason or another.

The Nature Principle by Richard Louv

Many people, not just pagans, are attracted to nature. But why? In his follow-up to his award-winning Last Child in the Woods, Louv looks at not only why nature is good for us, but concrete ways in which we can reconnect with the natural world, even in urban areas, as a way to combat nature-deficit disorder. (See also Florence Williams’ The Nature Fix as a more up-to-date collection of nature-is-good-for-us research for laypeople.)

A Beginner’s Guide to the Scientific Method by Stephen S. Carey

Paganism often flirts heavily with pseudoscience, sometimes to dangerous degrees. Everyone should have a solid understanding of the scientific method, to include how a good experiment is put together (as well as how not to conduct research), and how to avoid pitfalls like confirmation bias. Not only will this help you to cut through some of the crap that gets presented as fact within paganism, but it will help you have a more critical eye toward sensational news headlines claiming new cures for cancer or demonizing vaccinations. If you can pick apart a study based on things like sample size and the validity of the results, you’re already way ahead of most of the population.

The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins

Okay, put the fact that it’s Dawkins aside; this is one of those texts where he’s focusing on communicating science instead of tearing religion apart, and he’s frankly at his best here. Now, evolution is up there with gravity and a round earth as far as things we know to be true, and hopefully you already have a basic understanding of how it works: It is not survival of the fittest so much as survival of those who fit into the ecosystem most effectively. What this book does is cleverly place us, Homo sapiens, in the context of the grand dance of evolution by tracing on possible path we may have taken all the way back to the last universal ancestor that all living beings on the planet share. Along the way we get to see the origins of everything from our big brains to our opposable thumbs and upright bipedal walking, showing us that we are not the most amazing and superior being that the gods ever created, but rather one among many incredible and diverse life forms that evolution has produced through natural selection and mutation. It is, in fact, the ultimate journey on this planet.

Also, the Walking With Dinosaurs/Beasts/Monsters/Cavemen BBC documentaries are fun, if a bit flawed and dated, ways to look at how evolution has shaped animals over millions of years.

Roadside Geology series by various authors

If you’re in the United States, there’s a Roadside Geology book for your state! You may not think much about the ground beneath your feet other than as a nice, solid base, but the various stones and formations, as well as hydrological phenomena like rivers and lakes, are all crucial to the sort of life that can thrive in a given place. The Roadside Geology books are a fun way to go look at your local geology in person and learn a little about the land you live on. You can then follow up by picking up some more in-depth reading material for the geology of your area.

Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan

We often assume that plants are relatively sedentary beings with few motivations. Yet they are vibrant and active parts of their ecosystems in ways even we animals can’t touch. This book looks at the world of plants through the relationships four of them have with humans, how we have changed them–and how they have changed us. I also strongly recommend following this up with two documentaries: How to Grow a Planet by Iain Stewart (which also happens to be on Netflix as of this writing) and David Attenborough’s The Private Life of Plants (which is also in book form.)

Trees, Truffles and Beasts: How Forests Function by Chris Maser, Andrew Claridge and James Trappe

In paganism we tend to look at animals, plants and other beings individually, as stand-alone guides—yet if we want inspiration for just how interconnected we are, there’s no better model than an ecosystem. This book explores how just a few of the animal, plant and fungus inhabitants of forests are inextricably bound together. Extrapolate that out to the entire ecosystem, and you begin to see how deeply entwined all beings are in a very real, even visceral sense. If you’ve only been working with animal or plant spirits, this book may just inspire you to reach out further.

The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms by Amy Stewart

Again in paganism people tend to be fairly short-sighted when it comes to animals. We often look at the most impressive mammals and birds, and then only at the most surface qualities, gleaning what we can for ourselves and our spiritual needs. In order to step out of this self-centered approach to nature spirituality, we need to really appreciate beings for themselves in all their complexity, and what better starting point than the amazing and completely indispensable earthworm? This is a really fun read, but you’ll learn a lot along the way, too–and maybe start treating the soil in your yard a little better, too!

There are lots of other books that explore individual species in depth, like Bernd Heinrich’s The Mind of the Raven and Of Wolves and Men by Barry Holstun Lopez, but I really recommend you start with the often-overlooked earthworms before moving on to stereotypically charismatic critters like ravens and wolves.

Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown Young

One of the disadvantages of pagans reading only books by pagans about paganism is that we miss out on other awesome and relevant works by people who aren’t expressly pagan. Joanna Macy is one of those authors that more pagans really need to know about, especially those who construct group rituals. This is an entire book full of rites for reconnecting to nature and to each other, as well as grieving for global losses and fostering gratitude and hope for a better future. If that doesn’t sound like something more pagans could get behind, I don’t know what does. Just because it doesn’t mention any deities doesn’t mean that it’s useless.

Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World by Bill Plotkin

This is another one of those “pagan but not” books. I’ve explored this book in more detail in the past, but my opinion still stands: it is a much better alternative to Maiden, Mother, Crone and Youth, Warrior, Sage. It’s based in a developmental approach to ecopsychology (or an ecopsychological approach to developmental psychology?) Growth is not based on your physical age or whether you’re capable of popping out babies; rather, Plotkin’s eight-stage Wheel looks at your journey as a person and your continuing relationship with your community and ecosystem to determine where you are developmentally. You can even be in more than one stage at once! It’s a much more well-rounded way to apply a label to yourself, if you must, and I recommend it for anyone who is sick of the gender-limiting stereotypes of MMC/YWS.

(Honorable mention to Lasara Firefox’s Jailbreaking the Goddess as another alternative to MMC for women.)

Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by Paul Hawken

If you love nature and honor it and you really want to do something to make up for the damage we’ve done to the planet, there’s nothing much more effective than working to reverse climate change. I mean, really, it’s a much better offering to nature spirits than pouting food and drink on the ground, or sending a vague ball of energy to wrap around the planet to do….what? What’s even more noteworthy about this book is that it’s an excellent antidote to the hopelessness and fear that a lot of people feel about climate change. In it you’re going to read about people who are already boots on the ground making a difference, to include in the very industries that are causing the most problems. And it ranks the top 100 causes of climate change (you can see this on their website, too.) Pick one of these causes to start working on, with whatever time and other resources you reasonably have available, and not only are you giving something back to nature, but you’re also counteracting the paralysis that pessimism breeds.

So there you have it: my current essential reading list for pagans. Sorry I’m not handing you yet another rehash of the Wiccan Sabbats or a bunch of spells. Over the past few years my paganism has become much more firmly rooted in the physical, and my reading list reflects that. After all, what good is a nature-based path if you don’t know diddly about nature itself?

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

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

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[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

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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.

Activism, Cosmology, Ethics, Health and Healing, Paganism, Psychology, Rituals

Self-Care as a Pagan Virtue

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The past few weeks have been a rough ride for a lot of people between the election and the start of the holiday season. Tensions are running high, and with all the busy-ness of the season it can be difficult to find time to recuperate.

One of the things I’ve been trying to remind people is that self-care is a thing, and it’s even more crucial to practice it now. Self-care looks different for different people. For some, it’s spending time with friends or other group activities. For others it’s having some alone time, or being with that one person you can sit next to while you both read books in perfect silence. Going outdoors is a popular choice, whether you’re sitting in a quiet park or base jumping off a mountainside. Eating good food, making love, dancing like there’s no tomorrow, playing video games, even turning the thermostat up another degree or two in winter to be a little more cozy–all these and more are valid forms of self-care meant to help decrease stress and restore one’s psychological and physical resiliency.

Yet self-care is one of the most neglected parts of many people’s lives. We get so many messages, at least in the U.S., about “toughing it out”, and “don’t be selfish”. And the underlying streak of quasi-Puritanical asceticism further urges people to feel guilty about indulging the self in any way. I mean, we live in a society where it’s considered a luxury to have more than a week’s worth of paid time off and three sick days in a year. Is it any wonder that the pressure’s on us to avoid anything that could potentially be considered laziness?

And then when we do let loose and unwind, it’s often done to excess. Binge drinking, overeating, buying really expensive things you can’t actually afford–all these end up being more destructive than restorative. We aren’t allowed to have regular outlets in our daily lives. No wonder, then, that so many people end up blowing all their free time on overdoing fun things rather than spreading them out in more manageable quantities. Instead of being able to take some time to chat at the water cooler at work, our need to be social and not be working EVERYSINGLEMINUTE ends up exploding in getting drunk on Friday night. There needs to be some acceptable middle ground between nose-to-grindstone, and weekend bender (complete with hangover.)

Something I really appreciate about the pagan community is that we tend to not only be more skeptical of the Protestant work ethic that pervades American society, but we also know more about how to care for ourselves (even if we aren’t all perfect at it.) Take meditation, for example, one of the basic practices that you find in a lot of pagan paths. Sure, it’s a way to enhance one’s ability to focus on rituals and the like. But it’s also really good for you on a variety of levels. Moreover, it’s an investment in yourself and your well-being. A lot of pagans came to paganism as a way of improving their lives, and putting time toward your spiritual path can increase your happiness and make life feel like it has more meaning.

Sometimes when we engage in self care it feels like we’re stealing time from things that are considered more important like work or school or social obligations, and so we feel guilty for having a little “me time.” A lot of us have spent years deprogramming the tendency toward guilt that many Americans have. Guilt is a nasty thing in the wrong hands; it makes you feel like a bad person for wanting things that are perfectly normal to want–good food, good sex, and–dare I say it?–FUN. No matter what you do to care for yourself, there’s always some killjoy there to tell you there’s something wrong with you because of it. You’re eating an extra cookie? Don’t let anyone see you, because they might judge you for your lack of self control! You’re an adult having mutually consensual sex that doesn’t exactly match “for purposes of procreation within a monogamous, heterosexual marriage”? You’re tearing apart the moral fabric of America! You took three minutes to check Facebook in the middle of the work day? You must be costing the company several cents per year in productivity losses! And so it goes on and on, with any indulgence being immediately suspect and open for criticism. There’s no gray area, either–dare to indulge a little, and you’re met with horror stories of people who ate themselves into an early grave, who were sex addicts who cheated on their significant others, or who were such lazy layabouts at work that they got themselves fired.

Look at all of this guilt that is thrust upon us just for trying to make our lives a little nicer! But when you shake off that guilt, it means that you can be more open in your self-care–and the reasons you need it. Pagans are pretty open and honest, as a general rule, about mental health issues and other chronic issues that can contribute to stress and increase the need for self-care. While our community certainly isn’t immune to discrimination against people with mental illnesses or various disabilities, I’ve found a lot of pockets of pagans in the past twenty years who are more willing to talk about these realities than I’ve found in the population at large. And as a community we’re getting better at addressing areas where we need to improve.

One of the ways we can facilitate this growth as a community is by making self-care a more prominent part of our dialogue. There are a number of ways we can do that, and I’d like to share a few suggestions:

–Be mindful of your own self-care. I know it can be tough to make time for yourself when you’re super-busy, when you’re tired, when you may be wiped out by a chronic illness or other limitations. A lot of self-care suggestions involve spending money, which may not always be possible. Start, instead, by thinking of the little things in life that make you smile and lift your heart a bit. While yes, I love going hiking and spending time hiding in the woods, I also enjoy looking at cute animal videos on YouTube and re-reading favorite books that I’ve had for years. It’s important to put yourself first in this regard; it’s a lot harder to help others if you are not in decent condition. Once you’re feeling more on an even keel, then you can…

–Help others be mindful of their self-care. Post something on Facebook or other social media asking others to do something nice for themselves today–or, for that matter, doing something nice for someone else. Share your own self-care activities with others; we are social apes, and we like to imitate each other, so set a good example. If you’re able, invite others along–yoga in the park, for example, or a weekly potluck. If you know someone who seems like they’re struggling or overburdened and you feel comfortable doing so, check in on them, see if they’ve been able to take time out for themselves at all, and ask if they would like a little help, even if it’s just time to chat about what’s eating them. (Don’t press the issue if they’d rather not speak with you about it, and don’t offer up more assistance than you’re reasonably able to give.)

–Look for the self-care practices that are already woven into various pagan paths and emphasize how they’re good for those practicing them. Rituals (solo and group), meditation, connection with nature or deities or some other Something Bigger Than the Self, “all acts of love and pleasure are mine”, gaining a sense of control through magical workings, creating routine and structure through daily spiritual practices–all these and more can be powerful forms of self-care. If you come out of it feeling better than you did going in, chances are it’s self-care!

–Help dispel the guilt surrounding self-care. If you feel yourself feeling bad about taking a little time to attend to yourself, tell that little voice in your head to go jump in a lake, or fly a kite, or something less polite. If someone else expresses guilt over being kind to themselves, reassure them they’ve done nothing wrong. If someone tries to discourage self-care by bringing up the worst example of excess, remind them that life is not black and white and that most people are capable of moderating their activities.

–Keep questioning the structures that tell us that we need to work harder, deny ourselves more, avoid anything that could even remotely be considered “selfish”. Remember that scale and proportion are important factors, that there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing–but also too little of a good thing, too. Find your balance, and encourage others to do the same.

–Encourage a culture that is accepting not only of self-care, but of being “imperfect.” Support a pagan community in which it’s okay to have a mental illness or other chronic illness that needs to be cared for, and where it’s okay to talk about your experiences (including, and especially, the negative ones) without judgement. Make it okay to talk about being super-stressed even if you’re otherwise in good health, and where there’s no shame in admitting you’ve hit your limit on what you can tolerate physically, psychologically and otherwise. Encourage compassion and active listening rather than judgement and denial. Support the choice to ask for help and to be vulnerable; it should not be shameful to admit that you can’t handle something yourself.

–Share resources when you have the opportunity and when it’s appropriate, even if they’re not resources you personally need. If you know of a pagan-friendly therapist, for example, keep their information on hand in case someone asks for help of that sort. Let people know that you don’t think any less of them for needing these resources, and that you offer the resources up with the hope that they will help them feel better.

–Be honest about your boundaries. You may not be capable of helping someone who’s experiencing acute mental distress, or who needs a great deal of caregiving for a chronic illness. It’s better to say no than to promise support you aren’t capable of giving. It’s not just about not having the training, either. If you’re super-stressed, or having mental health issues yourself, you may not feel able to even be around someone else going through similarly serious experiences. Likewise, if you have a chronic illness that reduces your mobility or energy levels, don’t feel bad for not being able to care for someone who needs constant attention.

–Above all, dispel the myth that self-care is overly indulgent, or that being kind to yourself (or others) is too “white light.” Just because you might follow a deity who is inhumanly strong, it doesn’t mean you have to be inhumanly strong yourself. The world will not fall apart if you take a half an hour to yourself each day to breathe, to read, to draw, to daydream, to eat a tasty snack that you’ve been looking forward to all day, or to do whatever other self-care you choose. You are not a horrible person if you aren’t focused on the Bad, Serious Problems of the World 24/7. It doesn’t make you awful if you take some time to improve your situation instead of always trying to make things better for someone else, especially if it’s at the expense of your own happiness. Again–you’ll be more effective in helping others if you yourself are in a better condition. A strong, well-rested and well-fed person can pull more people out of a pit with a rope than a person who is exhausted and starving and about to fall into that pit themselves.

May I make one more request? Think of one thing you can do each day for self care. It doesn’t have to be the same thing each day. And if you don’t get around to doing it every single day, it’s not the end of the world. Just start with thinking about self-care every day, and if you can follow up with action, so much the better. When you make self-care a part of your awareness, you’re more likely to remember it when you find yourself with an unexpected windfall of time (or just a few minutes to yourself.) Keep a list of self-care activities, too, so if you have the opportunity to engage in self-care but you just can’t think of what to do, you already have some ideas ready to go.

And just remember: You don’t need an excuse to be kind.

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

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

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“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.

Divination, Meaning, Psychology

On Divination and Projection

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I’ve been practicing divination for about two decades now. I started with Elder Futhark runes, and then tried tarot for a while before falling deeply in love with the Ted Andrews Animal-Wise deck, which I use as a totem card deck. I’ve tried a few other systems, and I’ve pretty consistently found that if I understand how the system works and what each component means, I can use it pretty successfully.

Some of this is because I have really good pattern recognition. It’s not surprising–I’m an artist, and I have a fair amount of visual-spatial intelligence. So once I know the lay of the land, as it were, I can pick up the patterns within it. I also possess a decent amount of empathy–not the sort where people claim to be able to sense others’ emotions even with no real contact with them, but the sort every emotionally healthy human has, the empathy that we evolved as part of being exceptionally social, communicative creatures and which we exercise through both verbal and non-verbal communication. You might be amazed how much active listening plays a part in good divination.

But what I want to write about now is the issue of projection. In its original psychological context it involves someone denying a quality in themselves while accusing others of displaying the very same quality. But the meaning of the word has drifted a bit over the decades, and can also mean when we imagine that the other person is experiencing or thinking the same thing we are, to include when we’re aware of it. I’m going to use that latter, less strict definition for the purposes of this post.

It is impossible to give someone a 100% unbiased divination. This is just the truth when it comes to filtering any information through the mind of a human being: we are invariably going to add our bias to it, no matter how slight. Sometimes it’s as small as what words get the most emphasis in your relaying of the information–or even what words you choose to use. Other times, a reader may make their bias very clear, even making suggestions as to what the querent should do.

Neither of these are necessarily bad in and of themselves. I’ve had readings where I needed to be very careful of what I was saying and how I was saying it because I needed to be sure the querent got as neutral a reading as possible. And I’ve had some where the best tactic was to be more directive, particularly when the message seemed urgent. As with anything, it depends on the situation.

But it’s important to be mindful of projecting your biases when you read. Let’s say you’re reading tarot with the Rider-Waite-Smith deck or one based on its imagery. The cards have some historical meanings, as well as others that have been built up over the years. The images in the cards also have certain cultural meanings associated with them. We know the Fool is the Fool because he is carefree, not really paying attention where he’s going, and looking like he might be about to walk off a cliff while his little dog tries to warn him in vain. He is not opening the mouth of a lion like Strength, or tumbling through the air from the Tower.

But we, in the end, add our own spin to these cards. Some people see the Fool as a shiny new beginning, a reason to step forth onto an untrodden path. Others view him as being too naive, and one should be cautious before blazing a new trail. He’s also been seen as someone wasting their time on frivolous things. It all depends on the reader and what biases we place on the Fool.

This is where projection comes in. A reader who sees Fool-ish people as lazy and directionless may urge a querent to move beyond the Fool’s part of the journey. Someone who appreciates the enthusiasm of youth, on the other hand, may tell the querent that the Fool is a great sign of energy and a return to innocence. All of these are potentially right, and it’s okay if your biases affect how you personally interpret a card and what meanings seem to fit it best. A moderate amount of projection is necessary in order to make use of any divination system; it’s part of what makes it your reading instead of a reading given by that other person at the next table at the psychic fair.

Where projection can become problematic is where our biases are too influential on what we tell the querent. It’s one thing to interpret a card; it’s another entirely to tell the querent whether this is good or bad. The reader who sees the Fool as too foolish may say “This card represents someone who hasn’t yet settled down and found their path in life; does that sound familiar to you?” rather than “The Fool is the card of immature people who can’t even figure out what they want to do with their lives, and maybe you need to get more serious about things.” Occasionally there will be a time when that latter, more hard-hitting message is appropriate to convey, but for the most part it’s better to at least open your discussion of that card with the more neutral statement and see how the querent responds before going on.

What we really don’t want to do is judge the querent themselves. Sometimes we get people coming in with really hairy problems. Sometimes, yes, they’ve made some bad choices, and they may not even be fully aware of how their actions have brought about consequences. While there’s that occasional querent who may benefit from a metaphorical two-by-four to the back of the head, it’s generally a good idea to err on the side of compassion and non-judgement. As a reader, it is not your job to fix the person or tell them what an utter screw-up they are. Instead, you’re conveying information, helping them understand it, and being a sounding board as they start to figure out what to do with it. (If you find yourself resembling Judge Judy or Gordon Ramsay, you’re doing it wrong.)

So how do you keep your projection in check while making the most of its usefulness? Primarily be being aware of it. First, look at why you assign a particular meaning to each card or other component of your divination set, and if there are certain interpretations and patterns that keep coming up whenever it arrives in a reading. This is especially important with divination systems where each component can have multiple interpretations. If you keep records of your readings, check for those same patterns where you keep assigning the same or similar meaning to the same card/symbol/etc.

The other part of awareness is to consciously pay attention to your biases as you’re reading. The next time you give a reading to someone else, pay attention to how much of what you say is your bias or judgement being laid out on the table versus straight information about the card/etc. in relation to the querent’s question or situation. How many times are you interpreting the card for them versus letting them decide what it means for them?

And finally think of whether that querent wants you to tell them the answers, or whether they just want information that they can then chew on a while. A good way to gauge this is to convey the meaning of the first card as neutrally as possible, and then ask them what they think. Some may have a lot to say about it, but there are also those querents who say “Well, I don’t know…” With time you’ll be able to gauge not only how active a querent wants to be in their reading but also be able to adjust your amount of projection as the reading proceeds.

Did you enjoy this post? Consider having me give you a totem card reading!

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

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

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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.