International Pagan Values Blogging Month: My Pentacle of Pagan Values
I want to wrap up International Pagan Values Blogging Month with a consideration of my personal Pagan values. As I mentioned before, I struggled to differentiate my "Pagan values" from, say, my "Midwest values" or my "big gay values." But when I asked myself upon what values I base my practices and beliefs - what values of Paganism (real or perceived) drew me to this path keep me on it - a floodgate of possibilities opened. I sifted through them and find that they boil down to five essential values that form the core of my Paganism: my Pentacle of Pagan Values.
(Bear in mind that these values reflect my participation in an ecstatic, organic, consensus-based anarchofeminist tradition. Your mileage in other traditions may vary. Boy howdy, may it vary.)
Authority: In Reclaiming, as in many Pagan traditions, each practitioner is considered their own priestess. We require no intermediary to connect us to Mystery; no minister or rabbi or guru to instruct us how to worship and pray; no creeds to memorize that tell us what we believe. We are the authority on how we perceive the divine and how we connect to it.
Interdependence: Yet authority comes at a price, because when we make decisions, we bear ultimate responsibility for their consequences. We remember and honor always that we are part of an interconnected web of Being, and that our actions must be considered in light of that web, neither excluding nor limited to ourselves.
Immanence: The divine is not some disembodied being Out There. It is not separate from us. It is within us, and within every living thing, from the smallest microbe to the largest galaxy cluster. It is Cosmos itself, Earth itself. To be in right relationship with Mystery means to be in right relationship with Everything That Is, to treat all beings with compassion, respect, and joy.
Celebration: What better way to honor that immanent interdependence than through celebration of the cycles of life: the Wheel of the Year and the stages of the human journey? My rituals and most that I have experienced are joyous celebrations of Mystery, Earth, self, community - of life. No sins need absolving; no vengeful gods need placating. We celebrate the sheer joy of communion with that which we hold sacred, honoring its changes and its changelessness and our place within it.
Change: Let's face it. Most folks who're drawn to Paganism are intrigued by the idea of magic. And the most widely used definitions of magic all include the word "change." Be it of personal consciousness or of reality itself, the working of magic is the creation of change, or pathways to change, within and without. Pagan religions are religions of change-makers.
And so we return to where we started: change flows back to authority and is fed by it. Those who would make change must feel empowered to do so; those confident in their own authority feel freer to make change. And around we go again.