When I first attempted to do graduate school with Cherry Hill Seminary, I observed from the outside something that should have been a lesson to me. In one of my classes, a hard polytheist and a pantheist kind of managed to butt heads. The pantheist was insistent that anyone educated could only see the gods as metaphors, and couldn't understand that Pagans outside their bubble didn't. The polytheist seemed to be offended that anyone could call themselves Pagan without believing in the gods in some more direct way. I attempted to explain to them why they were each offending the other, and help them see each other's point of view. I think in many ways it was a lesson that goes beyond mere academic work.
And there's the catch - "mere academic work." I lose myself in thought so often, and in researching and studying things. I want to categorize, to chart out, to dissect the issues and problems. As deep as my emotions can be, I often focus on learning about things, rather than simply letting myself experience without analyzing. The soul work class I took gave me some important tools that have since helped me seek other viewpoints, and has given me gifts that just can’t be put into words.
One example was establishing the practice of "Artist Dates," based on the book The Artist's Way. I found myself using that time learning to watch media I had judged other people for enjoying. Not to hate watch, but to genuinely try to understand what they saw in it. For example, the very first one I did was watching Maleficent - a movie I had associated with curse-happy Tumblr witches who posted “spells” that included a coded recipe for a pipe bomb. I not only didn't hate the movie, I enjoyed it.
Indeed, one of those Tumblr witches wound up being a good friend. At first we blocked one another, but when we actually met in person at a larger Pagan event, we wound up becoming quite good friends. Time and again, I would find my shadow in the things I judged others for. I had long forgotten (until reminded by a journal) judging someone for being a "bisexual Wiccan" when I was 16, and back then even said it in the same breath as mentioning the person was a former heroin addict. I wound up being a Wiccan for a few years there, and now realize I was bisexual all along- not a person who had "beaten the gay temptation" and seen it was a "choice," as fundis would have me believe.
One of the books covered in the soul work class, “Five Thousand Ways to Listen” by Mark Nepo, discussed the concept of "dropping one's argument with the world." These lessons were my first inkling of peace with those I had argued with the most. There are certainly places one has to draw the line. I've met people who will verbally attack religious sisters while seeking help at Catholic Charities, plus one can't forget the "tumblr bone witch" incident that made the news. Someone felt entitled to gather and even possibly sell the skulls they "found" in a flooded graveyard full of the remains of impoverished persons. Some also think the reason the college Pagan group kicked me wasn't a good one either - it isn't "too Christian" to be creeped out by someone trying to go around death cursing people for their relationship drama.
But I had, indeed, had it with the drama, and it was the final straw in my building doubt. I wanted to avoid both the Pagan and Christian communities, to be honest. It had started with neurology classes and people attempting to debunk Near Death Experiences, and had escalated to my own concerns that people may, indeed, just be "meat computers." When the brain dies that's it - no soul, no spirit, nothing. Yet this doubt in the afterlife didn't cause me to doubt the existence of any sort of deity - at first. Then when that set in, it didn't make me disbelieve in all spirits - weirdly I found demons easier to believe existed than gods. The last thing I gave up - or didn't quite - were fairies, and I basically in the end saw them as at least a metaphor for the fact that other living things - trees, plants, animals - are in fact other living things. It was with this that I managed to cling to Something. That, meditation, herbs, and other things I could see and touch and smell became the core of what was left.
If I wanted to believe in ridiculous unscientific things, I could just as easily have stayed a 6,000 year old Young Earth Creationist like my mother. While the things Evangelical Christians do that crash into this reality check are well documented, there are some fair criticisms that don’t involve “magical realism” so much as hard reality and internal hypocrisy that come up in the Pagan community as well.
A moment ago I mentioned herbalism, and what I mean by that are things that can be confirmed by science. Willow bark is the root of aspirin, after all. Dandelion root can help hangovers, and elderberry and red onions are often the main ingredients in homemade cough syrup. Homeopathy, which my mother uses, however... is bullcrap. To cure itching for example, they water down poison oak until poison oak is no longer in it, and then claim the water "remembers" the plant. The “like cures like” principle however, at its foundation, shows why you wouldn’t want any of the original substance in there anyway - who thinks exposure to more poison oak will cure poison oak? Do they think the water, that “survived” less than a molecule of the plant, works like a vaccine? Then why are a large number of the people who claim this stuff antivaxxers? There’s also wild covidiocy in the Christian, New Age and Pagan parts of the homeopathy community alike. The moment someone says they trust homeopathy as their main source of medicine, I admit I take that as a bright orange, if not red flag... but of course, I'm also aware that many people don't know the difference between "homeopathic" and "herbal." Poisons can be "natural" too - and so can placebos. Or worse.
I am, admittedly, alarmed at my mother's particular brand of ignorance on COVID. She believes each individual shot of the vaccine is made from an individual aborted fetus, and while it took her awhile to fall into more mainstream nonsense, she eventually stocked up on horse dewormer and malaria treatments as well.
(Additional homeopathy links: https://computationalcalculator.tumblr.com/post/686019830270361600
https://www.exberliner.com/politics/germany-homeopathy-vaccination-rate-covid/
While exBerliner's article goes at it from an atheist angle of seeing magical thinking as the root of the problem... It's one thing if you wanna use Reiki to supplement healing spells, you do you, but lines of "logic" encouraging things like denial of COVID, medical treatment, or even basic medical principles? 😬)
I had moved into what I called "doubtspace."
I did wind up hanging out with mostly-secular Buddhists during this time.
Essentially, I had slipped and become what is known as a physicalist, someone who thinks the only real world is the physically provable world. I definitely saw through a lot of “spiritual” materialism during this time. For me, being more of a physicalist didn’t preclude the idea of altered states of consciousness. There are atheists who have argued that one can, to use a parlance some tranceworkers will understand, “horse Batman as an archetype.” Those who tried substances to achieve altered states instead, such as mushrooms, often metaphorically considered it the “spirit of the mushroom” speaking to them. To me, this fits well with fae and animism, honestly. While that was used by some as a way to dismiss trance work, it allowed me to still consider its validity even in my own doubt. My grandmother’s death also had an impact. She was the one who talked me into "getting saved," but when she died... I wondered if we would wind up in purgatory together, but I didn't dismiss the notion that nothing might happen instead.
One of the better arguments atheists and agnostics have against Protestantism that Catholicism and Orthodoxy have on their side is the idea of punishment based justice versus restorative justice. Purgatory shifts the majority of cases from the former to the latter. While I was not, per say, a universalist, what separated me from heretics like Origen when I was Catholic was that by and large I found the idea of pardoning the devil and his angels, whom hell was created for, absurd. Still, I didn't think, even then, that it was only as simple as Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory.
I hated what the change in my beliefs around the time of my traumatic brain injury implied as well. Was I just one Phineas Gage moment away from having more belief or less? At the very least, in hindsight, when I was in the ER for it, a friend of mine who by then was a priest fresh out of seminary was called, and I received Anointing of the Sick. Fitting enough, because while I tried to keep going to Mass for another two and a half years, that TBI was the beginning of the death of my Catholicism.
If what I was trusting was what I could see and prove and touch, then what would I do when the proofs of my life didn’t add up to that, beyond what I could reasonably call coincidence? The smallest actions really do cause large ripples sometimes. From my journal in Fall 2021, more or less:
~*~*~*~*~
I watched a movie. A cheesy one, badly written and paced, but it made me think of a friendship and later a relationship I’d had nearly twenty years ago. We’d been in and out of touch since but… not often. Maybe two hours across ten years. I searched the internet for the first time in a long time. And here were my thoughts:
“…. Damn you 2020. He’d caved and gotten Facebook thanks to you. And… he’s… he’s an Odin worshiper? Gods. Please don’t be racist …. Please don’t be racist…. Oh. Oh shit. He’s not one of the racist jackasses. Well. I have got to get this story. How the hell did he… I mean what are the odds?! He worships Odin now?!”
So I friend him, and the next day, as I go to get groceries, I discover a message. “This cannot be who I think it is!”
That started an off Facebook conversation lasting fifteen hours straight, and at least five hours a day for an entire two week vacation he had already taken before I sent the first message. Every step and change went parallel. Everything we thought was something to not like in ourselves that we felt we had to warn the other about was in fact an added bonus.
We are trying to be cautious. We have both been hurt. There aren’t any I love you’s... But everything fits. I even managed to get a huge amount of time off at a job that never offers any.
…Of all the damn people the gods could have sent to get my attention when I wasn’t even sure if they existed, they sent a best friend and former love interest I’ve known for half my life, who stepped back in like it was yesterday that we were young with the whole world ahead of us.
…Maybe it still is.
~*~*~*~*~
Over the years, I had done love spells, but usually open ended, not attracting anyone specific, due to ethical reasons. Still, after my marriage to “Andy,” I did what could be considered a Christian equivalent, and one that was a bit pointed… but the fates had a sense of humor about it.
As it turns out, there are a bunch of Christians who make very desperate attempts to try to save their relationships. “The Love Dare” attempted to capitalize on this, but given that one of the characters in the movie divorced, they are less strict than some of these people online. There are a ton of marriage ministries devoted to praying for the return of “prodigal spouses.” Now… I’m not batcrap crazy. I do make more efforts to stay with someone than average, but most of my splits wound up pretty amicable. Andy was a bit unique, and I genuinely don’t think we gave it a fair shot. My spirituality had been brought into it more than average as well, which grew into something I later became wary to share in relationships. But during the separation and divorce itself, and even into the end of the process where an amendment had to be filed to the divorce, I did take it hard, to make the understatement of a lifetime.
However, I may have messed up by indulging the methods of those Christian ministries and the Catholics with their St Monica and Our Lady of Perpetual Help and St Jude novenas. A lot of that stuff was aimed at the first person one says marriage vows to… but my ex husband and I were handfasted, and never said Christian marriage vows. As it turns out, Andy wound up Heathen, and an Odin worshiper. And then… I found out Eric had too. I couldn’t ask my ex husband what was with all my exs finding Odin, but I could ask Eric, because when that one came up… one ex was a coincidence, but Odin starting to collect them was becoming A Pattern.
So I asked. It wasn’t even until we were back in communication and I got nostalgic that I found something in my past journals… Eric and I had said Christian vows to one another, unofficially, without actually getting legally married, long before I had a Pagan, but legal, ceremony. Our souls had also followed similar paths ever since. It wasn’t until the time he took time off, right after casting a spell and making an offering and plea to Freyja, that he now claimed his spell had worked, and magic we had both done as Christians and as Pagans linked up. Everything even fit the wording of some of our most open ended spellwork, including some I had done as a witch about relationships in general. I shared with him the wording of my spells- something I did with no one. And he had my ring, the first ritual item I had ever had on an altar... on his altar. I also was reminded by my journal of a dream I had had, in my first baby steps with witchcraft. I had woken up within the dream to find that he had died in his sleep beside me, while we were both old. To find him again after that? Maybe that was from Hela and the gods.
That was hard to ignore, but I tried to for about a month. I found that there was nothing he seemed to want for me that didn’t line up exactly with my own goals for myself that I had never felt supported in. Our paths had been parallel, but it seemed like I would have someone to walk with, together. I had also been reconnecting with my old Pagan group from a decade beforehand over Zoom due to the pandemic, and with new doors opening in so many areas of my life, and with everything taken together, I started to feel the tug of the gods.
Truly, the most monumental “coincidence” I couldn’t ignore was how things worked out with my mother. Eric and I didn’t really want to legally remarry, which I knew would upset my mother. She had thrown a fit when I actually did lose my virginity as a teen and almost threw me out. When she finally found out I was bi she had mostly ignored it, because I was in the middle of a divorce from a man and was at a low enough point. By the time Eric and I had reconnected, someone else I had dated after Andy was still a current roommate. Mom wasn’t condemning me for that because she knew we had separate bedrooms and weren’t together in that way. Would she yell at me this time? Tell me I was going to hell?
A long… long talk was had, and I came out of it crying. After my father’s death, my grandmother long ago had condemned her for being with my step-father before she was remarried to him. She didn’t want me to ever feel like she did with my grandmother. (I also don’t think she knew the extent of my infertility issues before this.) If not marrying Eric but instead moving in, maybe having a handfasting, and still being stepmom to his kids was the way for me to not be alone and have a family… well, she shared my sense that a lifetime is a long time to be alone, too long.
Things were changing, not just with Eric, but in me. In opening my heart to so many possibilities I had buried - romantic love, having a family, maybe even finishing my graduate education, and more - I also opened my heart back up to other more community based misunderstandings.
I began to deepen further in "dropping my argument with the world." Considering I've been in several religions, and my politics had changed many times over the years, I'm not unpersuadable. I admit, I like to "steelman" and crash test ideas into walls first. I do this with religious ideas as well, something I picked up off the Episcopal theologian and psychologist Morton Kelsey, along with the idea that anyone who has been clinically depressed can tell you what a spiritual Hell would feel like without having to die. I've had a lot of love for his work, regardless of what faith I've been at the time, if for no other reason than it's hard not to be impressed by a priest who was willing to devote the first 50 pages of a book about the Afterlife to genuinely asking "what if the atheists are right and there's nothing?" The fact that he draws a lot of the evidence he considers from other faiths and even the occult community of his time is undeniably unique for a Christian theologian. In much the same way, crash testing ideas, I was slowly moving into a deeper acceptance of myself and my community, even if from the outside it looked like resistance. I wanted to ask my questions before, essentially, changing my fate.
I communicated badly, and took too long, but I didn't know it yet. All I knew was love and change. One night, I found myself really looking at the moon, contemplating Mani, the Norse god of the moon, as well as the old "man in the moon" folklore concept from Children's poetry, and the Wiccan Goddess of the moon... and something in my heart shifted. I remembered watching a lunar eclipse through pine trees during my first year and a day as a witch, and the family of deer that had approached the rose bushes just outside our glassed-in porch the first time I tried making moon water. I remembered talking to the tree dryads as a child… and it only later occurred to me just how animistic that particular fairy belief was.
I thought about it, and realized something else. Perhaps something akin to Dante’s “Valley of Apostates” might be where my grandmother wound up, but did I really want to share an afterlife with my mother and grandmother? I looked back, for a moment, at all the Heathens I knew. They included best friends, former loved ones, and a few people I didn’t like so much but wouldn’t mind sword fighting for closure, Odin willing, even if we wound up in Helheim and not a mead hall somewhere.
While she was still alive, my grandmother had a near death experience during one of her hospitalizations. Long story short, she had a bit of a scary experience, despite being a lifelong conservative Christian, involving weird things like nuns made of wood like Pinocchio that terrified her. However, she also weirdly declared that my father, who had died when I was a toddler (my mother remarried to my step father when I was six), was "no longer in hell." I took this to mean, essentially, he was no longer in purgatory.
She wasn't the only fundamentalist I knew to have a negative NDE. It's my understanding and impression that a certain famous preacher also had one. It was known around the campus mom taught at that he had a major health scare around a year before he actually died, and while most of his stances were unchanged, the rumor was that he had tried to make up with a relative of his who was dying of AIDS. Even if he was still against gay marriage, the story goes, he suddenly felt bad for his lack of compassion during the HIV crisis of the 80's, and also for trying to lose people their jobs over their sexual orientation. I'm not sure if that's true, it's just rumor mill hearsay from "back in the day," but if it was... it shows that even those who (unlike their kids) actually seem to believe what they preach, may not know "God's Will" as much as they claim, and whatever divinity is actually out there is more compassionate than they are. As Dostoyevsky put it, "What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."
When the Crusade for Christ kids at college yelled at my friends from Pride "John 3:16" like it was some kind of club to clobber people with, I would often yell back "1 John 4:7-8!" The verse, as that same preacher's Sunday School teachers had me memorize it, reads as follows: "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and everyone who loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God for God is love." (emphasis mine) I eventually found it important to ask myself, though, that if the Biblical God exists, does that God love the devil? Some would claim that it is God's love that sustains all that exists in existence, so for the devil to exist, wouldn’t God have to love him too? (I have a source for an interesting Christian discussion of this, with the caveat that there is a content warning on the ads there for more liberal friends: https://relevantradio.com/2019/10/does-god-love-satan/ )
When I leaned more agnostic but was hanging out with Buddhists, this is what I packed with "suitcase Jesus," so to speak, and considered the baby not to throw out with the bath water:
That even those who claim the most certainty in their fundamentalist evangelical faith may be surprised by what awaits them;
That movement between spiritual realms may well be possible;
That various spiritual states (including positive ones) may not be something one needs to die to experience;
That the most important things are love of Divine and neighbor;
That those who aren't loving and are full of wrath and hate don't know anything about Divinity;
And that love capable of echoing throughout the universe may not have the limits on it that we tiny humans might think.
At the time though, I figured that what awaited was a complete loss of ego-self and a dissolution back into that from which I had come. Being itself, and being recycled into new life, in the very literal sense of having a tree use the carbon that was my body and brain (and thus mind) to grow.
For all I know now? That Valley of Apostates Dante described is technically outside purgatory and was where people who left Christianity (or possibly just Catholicism) for non malicious reasons wouldn’t actually be punished. They would, however, have to wait for some multiple of their lifetimes before moving on. I sometimes joke that based on his description that the“valley” could just be in a very confused corner of Helheim no one else ever goes to. After all, many Heathens consider Hela's realm a beautiful place of eternal autumn, and it also fits Dante's idea that they are neither perfectly blissful nor suffering, a state otherwise unheard of in Christian afterlife descriptions. Maybe they just think of her as some young angel of death or lady grim reaper, as I did.
“Yeah, that’s where we keep the people with too much latent Christianity. If you hear Latin singing you got too close. They’ll work through it eventually.”
(Ha! This is meant, at least mostly, as a joke.)
For me, when I finally did turn towards religion again, it wasn’t a choice of Christianity versus returning to Heathenry. Only Heathenry offered some things that made me embrace it even when I have doubts, because admittedly, it gives me a certain emotional closure on some things from my past. The people I’m closest to, the people who hurt me most, and others I’m entwined with all seem to be Heathen now. My family drives me nuts, so I’d rather be with friends… and settle a few beefs I have while I’m at it, if possible. My Christian friends should note, the alternative at this point if one tries convincing me Heathenry is stupid may even be full blown atheism. Being Unitarian-Universalist-friendly-ish and open hearted is the closest I can get to where you’re at. Chalk it up as “better than atheism” if you must, or write it off as a mental health issue. Whatever floats your goat.
Afterlife aside, one thing I will note - speaking of being open hearted - that what was worth taking with me was some interesting writings on thoughts surrounding original sin. It was not the Pelagian or Matthew Fox approach many future Pagans get drawn to, however.
I'll let past Sigyn explain, again -
~*~*~*~*~
One of the biggest gaps in the understanding of Christian doctrine surrounds original sin and what, exactly, changed in The Fall.
Christians would mistakenly blurt out Pride, and most Pagans and Atheists would assume that it was the seeking of knowledge. “Oh yeah, they were just punished for wanting to actually know things!” Both groups are reading it too shallowly when they give these answers. Original sin, (based on Christian doctrines and traditions that refined and amended St. Augustine's position after his death) was humanity setting themselves up in the place of God, and in a specific area: as judges of the good or evil of other humans. NOT in the shallow way our society looks at “Oh, you're being judgmental, you're being intolerant” - that would be to create an entirely new error if that became the new understanding, so I'll clarify that now.
Think about it. When you steal, you assume something means less to another than it would to you. When a murder is committed, you render a judgment that another human being is unworthy of life - and unless you're also suicidal, you believe they are less worthy of life than you yourself. When you cheat on a partner, you assume your emotions are more important than theirs. If you rape someone, or treat them as a mere object or sex toy, you ignore their desires, wants, and independent agency in decisions and even their very sapience and personhood.
Original sin comes into effect whenever you make an assumption that treats another human being as less human than yourself.
It's literally the opposite of loving your neighbor as yourself.
Indeed, it's my theory that this means that Original Sin as a theology is intrinsically linked to the psychological idea of "othering," and in-group, out-group communication.
When someone is "in the group," we think, "Oh yes, the people of my group are so diverse. We have someone with this skill and someone with that one, someone with this opinion and someone with that one, someone with this understanding and someone with that one, but in the end we are all united by some variation of This Other Thing ..."
"... Which distinguishes us from That and Them." The out group is assumed to be all the same. All Germans are Nazis. All Muslims are Terrorists. All Christians are representable by Westboro Baptist. All Americans are Rude. All Heathens are Racist. All Eclectic Wiccans are Fluffy. All Republicans and All Democrats in America 100% agree with the most extremist views in their party.
Does that sound familiar yet?
We get most in trouble when we assume that all there is of a person is the way they are categorized by society, or even by themselves. No two Pagans think alike, no two Christians think alike, no two Buddhists, or Democrats, or Republicans, or ciswomen, or cismen, or transgender people or genderqueer people will ever think exactly alike. No one person will ever conform completely to the stereotype of them you have in your head.
Humans are never comfortable once they can see "Them" as people. We like having a "Them" to attack, because it makes defining "Us" simpler - we aren't "Them."
This was where Jesus was kinda trying to bop us on the head and say "no."
~*~*~*~*~
This is, unedited word for unedited word, how I described my theology on Original Sin nearly ten years ago, in 2012. It is now the only published part of what was once a very long book. A poem I’ve shared before, “On Jesus and Folkish Heathens” covered some of the same themes, and is honestly what I’d want to be remembered by if I died at this point in my life.
But life has pointed out to me how difficult this philosophy often is to live by.
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