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July 28, 2004
27th July, 2004
RAISING A CHILD WITH THE GODDESS, PAGANISM 101...
I know there are very few pagan’s out there reading my diary, but I want to take this opportunity to talk a little about my spirituality - to give anyone interested a little more knowledge about what it means to be a pagan, and how I am setting about raising my daughters with this very different spirituality. I honestly think it might be interesting for some (perhaps not many!) of you to read on, to gain a deeper understanding of this alternative spirituality that has been so badly misunderstood throughout the centuries. I believe there is always room to be MORE tolerant of the differences within our world. How dull would the world be if we were all the same? Differences are natural and inevitable, we do not all raise our children the same way, we do not all live the same lifestyle, we do not all hold the same political beliefs, nor do we hold the same spiritual beliefs and practices. This is okay, this is good. We are all different and we should celebrate this. If we could only learn to respect and honor each other’s differences then the world might actually find lasting peace.
If you are committed to the principles of understanding and tolerance, please do me the honor of reading this entry. Spirituality might not interest you, and perhaps it is not the perfect forum for this, but I am not trying to convert anyone, nor do I wish to ‘outrage’ or challenge anyone (if you find yourself feeling that way, simply put down the mouse, and back away!). I do not wish to spark a religious debate on my board. I am simply trying to open the channels of understanding and respect. You are free to ignore this entire entry if you so wish, I will not pretend that it will interest many of you. And heaven knows I don’t want to bore anyone. But a few interesting religious ‘questions’ have come up on my message board of late, so I was hoping to present a clearer picture of what my spiritual views involve. IF you do read on, I hope that you might have a slightly clearer understanding of the alternative religion that is the fastest growing religion in America (according to your last census!). And to anyone who might still be a little ‘afraid’ of the pagan religion (thanks to a pretty thorough smear campaign over the centuries), I hope this will show you that it is a perfectly wholesome and beautiful religion to raise children with.
If there is one thing I have always hoped, it is that my very public diary keeping might inform or inspire even just one person...to think a little differently, act a little differently, or at least accept or understand those of us who DO live a little differently from mainstream culture. So here is my little contribution to helping maybe someone out there to understand paganism a little better. In my usual fashion, I shall blunder straight ahead where angels might very well fear to tread!
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If you ask a lot of people when they have felt the most connected to ‘God’, they will often tell you it is when they are out in nature: looking at a beautiful sunset, feeling a summer storm roll in, walking in a grand and awe-inspiring forest. Nature inspires a religious feeling in our souls. For pagans, this feeling is AMPLIFIED. We feel a ‘divine’ presence in nature, and our entire religion is built around that basic experience.
What is a pagan?
In the simplest possible terms a pagan is someone who reveres nature. Paganism is an umbrella term that embraces all of the ‘earth religions’…that is, religions that believe ‘divinity’ exists within the earth and the natural world. (One of the most beautiful earth religions, and one you might be most familiar with, is that of the Native Americans.) One of the spiritual principles that sets paganism apart from other religions, is the notion of IMMANENT DIVINITY. This simply means that a pagan believes the ‘divine’ is everywhere present in the world. To the pagan, everything that exists in the natural world – you, me, plants, animals, earth, sky, moon, stars – is an embodiment of divine energy.
Pagans believe there is a terrible ‘wound’ at the centre of our civilization that stems from the idea that the Divine is forever outside of us and our world. Pagans feel that this idea – coupled with the ideas of scientific rationalism that have strongly influenced our culture - has played no small part in the tremendous environmental tragedy that we are caught up in. The fundamental idea that the world is inanimate and devoid of ‘divinity’ has resulted in people having no compunction about killing off entire species, wiping out old growth forests, polluting the water, and destroying the ozone layer. In such a climate we have failed to see the divine and sacred value of the Earth (as our mother) and her creatures (as our ‘brothers’). You will find pagans everywhere lead very environmentally responsible lives.
Because pagans believe that divinity exists within the entire natural world, we look to the natural world to gain insights and understanding into spiritual mysteries. We believe in reincarnation because everywhere in the natural world we see this principle reflected. All life appears to be cyclic… plant a tomato seed, it will sprout, grow, blossom, fruit, and then the fruit will fall, seeds will spill, the plant will die, only to be reborn the following spring. The sun follows the same pattern throughout the year, it wanes in strength throughout autumn, to die and be reborn at the midwinter solstice, before growing stronger throughout spring, reaching it’s peak during the summer solstice (the longest day), and then growing old throughout autumn, as it wanes toward it’s winter death again. All things appear to travel in a circle, and pagans believe that our souls follow the same path.
Because pagans find spiritual ‘meaning’ in the cycles of the natural world, our ‘religious festivals’ revolve around the changing of the seasons. We celebrate eight festivals throughout the year and many of them are familiar in our culture. In spring we celebrate Imbolc and the Spring Equinox, in summer we celebrate Beltaine and the Summer Solstice, in autumn we celebrate Lughnasad and the Autumn Equinox, in winter we celebrate Samhain (Halloween) and Yule, the Winter Solstice. The festivals represent the “Great Wheel of Life”, from rebirth and new growth in spring, to fruition in summer, to the harvest and decline in autumn, onto decay, death and repose in winter. That is the pattern of life that pagans honor, believing that it mirrors the path of our souls.
The celebration of the festivals is a major part of our family life. We’re about to celebrate Imbolc here in Oz. Imbolc literally means ‘in the belly’ and represents the first ‘stirrings’ of spring deep within the earth. We can feel a different quality in the air around now, a humming deep in the earth as all of life reawakens after it’s winter hibernation. We decorate our altar with a white velvet cloth (white to symbolize the purity of the season and the last of the snows), lots of candles (to symbolize the light and the warmth that is now being reborn with the first stirrings of spring), and sprigs of blossom (to show the bursting forth of new life). We celebrate with an appropriate seasonal feast (to honor the seasonal foods of the time), and we do a house-cleansing ritual and begin our ‘spring’ clearing (getting rid of the old and the stale and making room for the new).
We have a lovely Imbolc ritual, where we all write down on scraps of paper the ideas, plans, projects we hope to bring to fruition throughout the growing season. We crumple these ‘wishes’ into little pellets and plant them in a glass dish full of dirt from our garden. We then place birthday candles over each of these ‘seeds’ and light the candles and feel the energy of the light blessing our ‘wishes’.
And so each of the seasonal festivals follows a similar pattern: we decorate our altar with appropriate seasonal symbols, we undertake some ritual activities suitable to the theme of the season, we have a feast with seasonal produce, we share some suitable prayers and blessings, read stories appropriate to the season, and do some seasonal craft. At Yule we have a Yule tree and a bonfire, at Oestara we dye eggs and have an egg hunt, at Beltaine we dance around a maypole and make a faery garden, at Lughnasad we have a Mexican fiesta to celebrate the summer, at Samhain we carve pumpkins and dress like ‘crones’.
We choose to honor the cycle of the year in this way, because we know that without the miracle of the natural world we would not be alive. We are an intricate part of the natural world, all interconnected and interdependent, and we believe we need to honor and respect that through ritual observation and gratitude.
Pagans don’t believe in ‘evil’ and we have no ‘devil’ in our mythology. Where humans perform acts of terrible cruelty, we believe it stems from a separation from the divine. These people have lost their belief in the inherent goodness and beauty of life. Perhaps they were ill treated or abused as children. To a pagan, those who harm others, particularly in the name of religion, reveal that they have no connection to the Divine. If they did, they would treat all of life with reverence and the utmost care and respect. And the pentagram, one of the pagan religious symbols that has been labeled ‘evil’, is a five-pointed star with each point representing the ‘elements’ that we depend upon for life: earth, air, fire, water; with the top point of the star representing that which makes us human: our spirit. It is that simple, and there is nothing ‘evil’ about it whatsoever.
I talk a lot about the Goddess, and I feel that it is of vital importance that my daughters grow up with the basic pagan principle that there is a Goddess AND a God. Pagans have noted that the natural world seems fraught with duality: day-night, sun-moon, winter-summer, male-female. We believe that this basic principle of duality needs to be respected within the natural world, for without male-and-female, sun-and-moon, winter-and-summer, life on this planet could not thrive. Duality exists for an important reason, everything needs it’s polar opposite to create life, and we need to respect and revere both energies. And this is why pagans revere Mother and Father, Goddess and God, the female energy and the male energy. We don’t envision our Goddess and God so much as separate ‘beings’ but more as ‘energies’ we can see functioning throughout the natural world. These energies create life, and need to be kept in respectful balance within the natural world. In our household we spend most of our time talking and thinking about the Goddess, because I believe that in this cultural climate where patriarchal religions have dominated for so long, to bring the energies back into balance we need to focus more on reclaiming the energy of the feminine, the energy of the Goddess. The Goddess is both the womb and the tomb, the giver of life (the creative energy), and the repose of death. She is the nurturer, the sustainer, the Great Energy of Mothering, and in my life as a humble mother of two daughters, I call on her energy all the time to inspire and sustain me.
I shall end with Pixie’s favorite bedtime prayer:
“Help me to feel that you are near, Great Goddess.
Open my ears that I may hear your voice,
Open my eyes, that I may see your beauty which is everywhere around me,
Open my heart so I may know your love.
All shall be well,
And all shall be well,
And all manner of things shall be well.
For I am a beloved child of the Goddess,
And the Goddess loving takes care of me,
Now and forever more.
All is well in my world.
Blessed be.”
Blessings to you all,
Eloise.
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