I see a lot of headlines like "How to harness nature's healing power", "How forests heal people", and "How to use nature to improve your health". Their version of nature is lush, green, and peaceful. There's no red in tooth and claw; there's no predator, prey, and parasite. Theirs is a tamed nature that exists as a tool for our benefit.
To me, respect for nature means understanding that it isn't here to serve us. It can be the soothing green shade with bird song, but it can also be the disease carrying deer tick picked up in that same idyllic place. It exists for itself alone. We are lucky that walking through the natural cathedral of old trees or observing a wild flower conveys spiritual, mental, and physical benefits, but framing nature in terms of how we can use it maintains the same paradigm that led to animal extinctions, rain forest clear cutting, and vortexes of plastic waste in our oceans.
Get out into the green when and how you can, for the personal benefits or as an act of worship, but don't mistake your reasons for nature's purpose. And wear insect repellent as needed.
I need an alley of graffiti art to passionately pace through, à la Rick Mercer. Picture that as you read, if you would.
I'm generally an "if it harm none, do whatever you want" person. If you want to invoke fairies and unicorns - more rainbow power to you. If you like to decorate with skulls and black candles - embrace your darkness. Tarot, crystals, herbs, fancy tools or a stick you picked off the sidewalk - have at them! Tree hugging, dancing naked around a fire, praying, fasting, meditating, elaborate ceremonial magic or a bit of kitchen witchery - go for it! Though I have a philosophical problem with the idea of weather magic, I don't actually believe that it is possible, so, you know, as you will...
Mediumship, though, is a crystal of a different cut. People who claim to speak to the beloved dead and pass on their words or let their voice come through them are performing a fraud we should not tolerate.
The memories of our loved ones - what they actually said and did, and who they were when they lived and loved - are precious. But if someone claims to speak to them, they feed us new memories and put new words in the mouths of those who aren't here. And that's not right.
If your beloved dead visit you, that may create new memories of them for you; I respect that. But no one else should be allowed to tread on the legacy of other people, especially not for fame or profit. What is remembered, lives - don't let anyone mess with your memories.
Every year, I go to a big local literary festival. I typically buy tickets for six or more events over the course of a week and come home with a pile of new books. I've mentioned before that this particular festival includes a territory acknowledgement before each event. This is something that started a year or two ago, and it's really the most basic of acknowledgements; the moderator reminds people to turn off their cell phones, that the event takes place on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and to please Tweet after the event using the hashtag... It's better than nothing.
I had the same moderator at two different events. At one, she did the same type of acknowledgement as everyone else had been doing. At the other, she asked everyone to take a moment of thoughtful silence after doing the acknowledgement. One was an event with Joy Kogawa, a Canadian author and poet of Japanese descent, and the other was an event that included two First Nations authors - Katherena Vermette and Joan Crate - and was about books that include Indigenous characters.
This festival includes simultaneous events at several different theatres. At one theatre for an evening event, the bathrooms had been relabeled as "gender neutral". The next day, there for another event, I found the conventional signs were back. One event was for transgender author Ivan Coyote's "Tomboy's Survival Guide" and the other was for a panel of thriller and suspense authors.
We weren't more on unceded territory one of those day and less on the other, and that fact was not more worthy of thoughtful consideration because there were First Nations people on the stage. Though "Tomboy's" attracted more transgender and non-binary audience members than the average event, everyone needs a safe place to pee every day, not just when they are represented on the stage. In fact, the reverse is true: if someone at "Tomboy's" had to use a gendered washroom that was not an obvious match to their gender presentation, there probably would have been no fuss or issue; the same could not necessarily be said of the same person in the same washroom during the thriller author event.
Social justice isn't something to nod to when forced to by the visible presence of a minority group. We need to do the right things to make our communities safe and comfortable for more people. If we make our public events and rituals inclusive and welcoming of people who aren't there, maybe one day they will be.
We need to practice social justice over and over until it becomes good, conscious, purposeful habit - until we are inclusive as a default. Good habits take time and effort to develop. The "3 R's" approach looks good...
... every time we first pick up the broom to cleanse the space, we acknowledge that we are on unceded First Nations territory, and we take a moment to sit with that knowledge.
... every time we light the central candle on the altar, we agree that we consent to being a part of the ritual and speak of our right to withdraw that consent any time we want, and we enjoy the mutual respect and self-care that creates.
... every time we hold a ritual that includes social justice components, we remember that we want to make the world more fair, more just, more safe, more comfortable.
Three or four times a year, people find reason to blame the normal problems of modern life on Mercury going backwards in the sky - the dreaded so-called "Mercury retrograde". People who are normally quite rational seem to buy into this superstition.
It is silly enough to believe that the movement of a planet some 77 million kilometers away has an impact on our emails and travel plans, but to believe that an illusion of movement of a planet affects our lives is ridiculous. See, Mercury doesn't actually move backwards; it just appears to do so from the earth's perspective. If we were the centre of the solar system, Mercury would be moving in loops, but we're not the centre of anything. We circle around an average star in a mediocre neighbourhood, universally-speaking.
Humans, as a species, are arrogant. In mainstream Western culture, nature is about our needs. The God of the Bible created everything to feed and clothe and serve us, and we are the ultimate creation - the reason for all the rest. Some Pagans may say that we worship nature, but sometimes we fall victim to delusions of human importance too, and we end up worshiping nature only in relation to its utility to us, where autumn is all about our harvest and spring is all about our planting, and never mind that that's the human wheel of the year, not nature's.
That same thinking feeds "Mercury retrograde" fears. At it's core, that superstition assumes that the earth is the centre around which all things revolve and that we're so cosmically important that the fact that we see a planet going backwards from our limited viewpoint is enough to create communication and travel chaos.
I have recently read several articles that explain why Mercury retrograde is nonsense and then go on to say that the author believes in it anyway because they've experienced it. One author lists a whole bunch of reasons why they personally might be experiencing communication difficulties, including some long term stress, and somehow concludes that those reasons are not sufficient to explain some recent problems they've had and that the difference must be Mercury. Humans are awful at evaluating this kind of stuff. We have huge perception biases, we are terrible at calculating risk, and we often have little understanding of how certain factors actually do affect us.
I am proud of the accomplishments of members of my community, I believe in the ideas of Paganism to make us better people and to bring us spiritual satisfaction, and I am glad to claim "Pagan" as one of my identities, but I am not proud to be Pagan. Claiming a religious affiliation isn't something to be proud of; it is neither an inborn trait nor an earned title2.
I wish it could be "Pagan Awareness Day" or "Pagan Community Day", but we probably can't change that. Regardless of the name, we can make our local events great through volunteering, participating, and offering our time, energy, and money to showing our community to its best. Happy Pagan Pride Day to all those whose celebrations are still coming up; let's make our events something to be proud of!
I write this post on unceded Coast Salish territory, the ancestral and traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. As an uninvited guest on this land, I benefit from this land, its resources, and colonialism. Though acknowledgement is not sufficient to redress those wrongs, it is important for me, as a descendant of settlers and colonialists, to remember where I am situated physically and historically.
Ten years ago, those kinds of acknowledgements were the marker of a radical event - far left environmental protests, the memorial walk for missing and murdered women - but they have become extremely common, to the point where the local literary festival includes one. The City of Vancouver itself made an official acknowledgement a couple of years ago. Sometimes these words are said with solemnity and sometimes in a very perfunctory manner, and some acknowledgements are better than others, but at least there's a moment taken to remind everyone that the land we stand on has a history and that where we put our bodies is political.
My Paganism is an embodied religion grounded in the time and space where my body is located. I aim for rituals that use our bodies, our senses, and our movements to honour and celebrate what's happening in the natural world around us. I can't separate my spirituality from the body I was born with nor from the natural, political, economic, and cultural systems I was born into. I am a white, English-speaking, able-bodied, cis-woman born and raised into a middle-class family in Canada. I have huge amounts of unearned privilege because of the body, place, and time where I was born. Some of that privilege touches upon the earth itself, as it is why I can claim to own a small piece of land.
I don't think I'm alone in seeing my Paganism as being about the actual land I'm on. And most Vancouver residents will have heard these acknowledgements before - as I mentioned, they've become very common - so it seems very weird to me that I have yet to hear anything like this at a Pagan event.
This topic came up at Silver Spiral's Pagan Symposium and I've been contemplating the question of why Pagans don't (in my experience) acknowledge ever since. A Silver Spiral member raised an important theological point: For her, casting a Circle takes us out of the physical world to a literal in-between - a place that is not a place and a time that is not a time - so she would find it jarring to have a physical, political reality invoked in that Circle. However, setting aside the question of the politics of taking a piece of unceded land and taking it out of time and space, we were agreed that before we move into sacred space and after we cut the Circle, the physical space is relevant. We came to an easy agreement that both political and theological needs could be satisfied by making acknowledgements before casting the Circle.
So if the problem is not theology, than something else must be going on. My first thought is that I might be overestimating the political involvement of my fellow Pagans. Perhaps they don't go to the kind of progressive events, conferences, and workshops that make a point of territory acknowledgement. Perhaps these speeches are less common at suburban events, where many Pagans live. Perhaps a lot of Pagans attend mostly Pagan-run events and end up in a bit of a cultural echo-chamber. And perhaps when they do hear it, they don't really know what it means and they don't think about how it might apply to Pagan use of the land.
There may be something else at play here too: the mostly-white Canadian Pagan's complicated relationship to First Nations' culture. There are still some Pagans who elevate any drop of First Nations blood they can claim, who like to accessorize their faith with Native tools and art, and who often seem to engage in the "Noble Savage" mythology. Most Pagans - or, at least, most Pagans I know - seem to look down on these practices, realizing that cultural appropriation in Paganism is a real concern and that as a community, we need to build and maintain our own identities and not steal other people's, especially when those people are still around and have suffered very real hardships in order to keep their traditions in the face of attempted cultural genocide by some of our ancestors. I wonder, though, if in our justifiable concern about stepping on cultural toes, we've gone so far that we're at risk of erasing First Nations' existence from our concerns.
Finally, and most cringe-worthy, I think our community has a bit of a prosecution complex. Though we have for the most part laid to rest the myths of the so-called "Burning Times", I think we still want to embrace our minority status. Not to say that being "out" as Pagan doesn't sometimes have negative consequences, but we are not a group that faces daily discrimination like that caused by racism. I confess that I do wonder if some parts of our community have subconsciously avoided the standard "unceded territory" speech because that would be acknowledging that we are privileged.
My question to the Vancouver Pagan community is simple: Why don't you currently acknowledge traditional territories? What do you think would happen if we did?
Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. - Mark Twain
Every day is a chance to be better, but there's something about a fresh year to inspire a desire to become your best self. On December 31st, there's an energy in the secular world a witch can only yearn for from a full moon, as people everywhere simultaneously vow to drop their bad habits and their extra pounds. As midnight nears, everyone promises themselves that the next year is going to be the one where they stop smoking and eating sugar, get to the gym and out of debt, give up alcohol and caffeine, and start volunteering. They yell "happy new year!" with great intention and energy. "So mote it be" should have so much power.
The typical new year's spell has tons of energy and the best magical timing and often has physical spell components (nicotine gum, stevia, FitBit, nicotine gum, or herbal tea), but fails anyway. We wake up on January 1st and we're the same people and we rediscover that good intentions aren't enough. Magic alone is insufficient; change needs real, physical, daily actions. Instead of yearly resolutions, try daily choices. If a promise on a calendar flip or a burning candle on the full moon helps you get started, use it, but don't make the mistake of thinking that desire is enough. If it was, the world would get healthier, wealthier, and happier on every January 1st.
A recent article on the dystopian film trend starts: "Before your film can dominate the global box office, it needs ideally to have been a word-of-mouth bookshelf smash. And unless your name is John Green or JK Rowling, your best option is to write a piece of bestselling YA dystopian fiction or fantasy."
There's no shortage of dystopian fiction right now, and theories about why we can't seem to get enough of reading and watching it. I think I know why there's so much of it being written: it is easy.
Writing a great book is probably never easy, but it is easy for most of us to think of ways the world could go wrong – the news is full of examples every night – and creating suspense and tension through the simple means of putting freedom, lives, and basic rights at risk is a bit of a shortcut. Wallowing in this kind of dark fantasy is easy for us, like imagining what people would say at your funeral in the "they'll regret this when I'm gone" way of a dramatic teenager1.
I'm seeing some things pop up in the wider online Paganism that remind me of this. People talking a lot about bones and poisons, about using desecrated items from other religions, and about demons and curses. People reclaiming our connections to the occult and to Satanism. People talking about the dark and awful sides of our gods.
They aren't wrong. We shouldn't shy away from our history or from knowing about the ugliest, bloodiest, hardest parts of ourselves and of nature. To only talk about the bounty and beauty is false, but so much of what I see that is standing against the "white light"/"fluffy bunny" approach feels like just a dark fantasy version of the same thing.
Of course, if you genuinely believe that the world is dark and that nature is red is tooth and claw, your religious practices will and should reflect that. And if you genuinely believe that the universe is love and the gods are divine parents, your practices will and should look very different. But my concern is that in disparaging the latter as being childish and naive, we have made the former into the intelligent and realistic option (we do love our binaries), and I have seen as many Pagans burn out from the "darker-than-thou" competition as from getting tired of the pressure to throw positive thoughts at all problems.
My Paganism is a faith that tries to participate in and reflect reality, and edginess is not the same as realism. If others prefer their religion mixed with fantasy, that's really nothing to me, but I don't think it's fair to look down on bright fantasy while elevating dark. Escapism is the same whether cloaked in flowers and white light or in bones and shadows.
Paganism is silly. All religion is. That's OK; sex is silly too, and most of us need that. Sex can be physically, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally fulfilling. So can religion. The process of getting to either orgasm or spiritual ecstasy is messy and weird, and few people look good in the the midst of either, so both are mostly private matters, best done in private (and wash your hands after).
So I think this goofy article about taking Paganism seriously is a waste of pixels. Paganism is inherently silly and should only be taken seriously for the same reason that we give respect to other religions: because they bring meaning and fulfillment to people and are no one else's business. We don't need to justify ourselves any more than any other religion has to.
Religion and sex are both private, but that doesn't make them secret or shameful. As Cory Doctorow has said in another context: "Every one of us does something private and not secret when we go to the bathroom. Every one of us has parents who did at least one private thing that's not a secret, otherwise we wouldn't be here."
Being human means doing silly, messy, weird, and embarrassing things. Being a good human means respectfully letting others get on with their own silly, messy, weird, and embarrassing things in their own way.
Three or four times a year, people find reason to blame the normal problems of modern life on Mercury going backwards in the sky - the dreaded so-called "Mercury retrograde". People who are normally quite rational seem to buy into this superstition.
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