Sans Home and Hearth
The words 'pagan' and 'heathen' have become shorthand in the monotheistic community for 'other' and 'enemy' and 'not-us'. When you listen to Bryan Fischer (and more recently, Newt Gingrich, who never met a fad he didn't like) talking about the 'rise of paganism in America', this is what they mean - that slowly but surely America is drifting into the hands of people who are 'other' and 'enemy' and 'not-us'. They're not talking about religious pagans and heathens. Sometimes I'm not sure they're really aware that we exist. What they're talking about is an extremely reductive yet all-encompassing agoraphobia. It's like the fear blind, cave-dwelling things have for the sunlight. They are so busy screeching, "OTHER! ENEMY! NOT-US!" that they haven't really stopped to consider whether it hurts. Pagans and heathens are strangeness, we are alien geometries, we are outside their experience. What little experience they have (or pretend to have) with us becomes dramatized, fetishized, larger than truth. Ritual cult abuse, satanic killings, wild orgies, animal sacrifice... if there is any grain of truth in any of these, it becomes so bloated and distorted that its mere shadow drives those who don't know any better into fear-frenzy. We who know the truth come along with a small pin and puncture the balloon, but the fear of the shadow remains. This is how myths are made. This is why, when I tell people I'm a witch, they tell me with utter confidence that witches don't exist. They are thinking of a green-skinned, wart-nosed hag flying on a broomstick. They are thinking of the shadow. They haven't made the leap that I and others like me are the grain of truth, the shriveled piece of torn latex that was blown up to cast that shadow. The idea of witches exists because witches exist. As in most of life, you have to separate the propaganda from the facts.
The words 'pagan' and 'heathen' have undergone an etymological shift. Christians, Jews, and Muslims (mostly Christians, but I've seen it from the other two) have an idea of what 'heathen' means that has almost nothing to do with what 'heathen' really means. Many of us who are pagans and heathens use the words in a way we believe is true to their original etymology, and so things come full circle, but in the process we confuse the monotheists, who have been defining those words disparate from their roots for a couple thousand years.
What does 'pagan' mean? Pagan, from the latin paganus meaning 'country-dweller'. Heathen, meaning 'dweller on the heath'. What do these words have in common? They are defined by location. A 'pagan' is a person of a certain place. A 'heathen' is a person of a certain place. These people were named for the lands to which they were tied, and for modern Heathens and Pagans, that association still rings very true. We are 'people of place', spiritually as well as anthropologically. We are tied to the land. We feel the rhythms of the earth and we experience the divine in our surroundings. In this age of digital cell phone clocks coordinated by centralized nodes synchronized with atomic clocks that are accurate down to a thousandth of a millisecond, we bother to pay attention to phases of the moon. We create our own heat and light and coolness, but we celebrate the cycle of the seasons. I, personally, have never seen a ewe give birth but tomorrow marks the first day of Imbolc, the festival of Ewe's lactating dedicated to Saint Brigid of smithcraft and poetry.
I am neither a smith nor a poet. Trust me, I've tried to be a poet, or at least a songwriter, and I failed magnificently. I wrote one song, ever, that I thought was any good. I still remember the chorus but I've lost the rest of it and couldn't re-write it if I tried. When you're writing lyrics there's a line between 'ambitious' and 'unwieldy' that I could never seem to stay on the right side of. I was Christian Reformed, not Catholic, so I don't know Saint Brigid from before I became an apostate, and I have no real connection with her. My husband's the poet, not me. I'm a fire aspect, definitely, but for some reason, as Imbolc comes around again, I have no fire in my belly.
I'm a person without a place, and right now I'm feeling it.
I was sitting down this evening finishing Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods', and as I finished it there were two lines of thought tumbling over each other in my mind. The first is that I'm honestly not sure what I believe about the gods. I think if I searched it out and said it out loud, it would sound absurd and laughable, though certainly no more absurd and laughable than other things I've said over the years. I want to take the intellectual approach but I think what I believe philosophically and what I believe in my gut are deeply at odds. Maybe it's less what I believe to be true and more what I want to be true, and these are certainly different things, but when it comes to faith I think the line between them is thin and blurry.
Gaiman does this for me, though. Reading his work loosens the moorings in my brain to a point where things no longer have to make sense to be true, and there is a difference between truth and Truth, and his stories have the taste and smell of Truth because that's why we have stories in the first place. I know Christians in particular tend to hate it when I refer to their stories as mythology, as if that was some kind of criticism or insult, but when I see some of them (and I am well aware that not all of them do this) insisting that Creationism ought to be taught side-by-side with Evolution in schools I shake my head and I think, You've lost the whole point of myth. If it's True, then fine, it's True, but it is not fact, and you have lost the ability to comprehend the difference. Which is very sad, I think, because it means they have lost the soul for stories, which are the cultural repository of many of our greater Truths. If you can't perceive them as what they are, then they're really of no use to you. You've bled out all their power and resonance trying to beat them into being facts.
The second thing I have been thinking as I finished this book and tried to find any motivation at all to light a candle and mutter some kind of invocation to Brigid is that I am without place and this hurts me. Spiritually, it hurts me. The third day after I was born I was displaced into a new family, and after that displaced many times, bouncing around the country, moved along with my parents, new schools, towns, states. I am 27 years old and I have moved fifteen times. In Iowa I lived for five years and for five years at the Georgia/Tennessee border. Once you subtract ten years and two residences from your calculations the math becomes rather astonishing. I've been sitting here trying to think of a place where I feel 'at home' and coming up with nothing. I spit on the soil of Iowa, and not in a good way, no offense to anyone who lives there. I loved the south, I think. The small town just north of Cincinnati where I lived several times in my life and where my grandmother still lives has felt sort of like home as well. All my life I've longed for Great Britain. Scotland, I said, but when my parents went to visit Ireland my mother came back saying that's the place I'd really been describing. My husband is Irish, maybe one day we'll go. But I don't hold truck with any of their gods, except insomuch as Hekate is such a globe-trotter she's been caught in tartan once or twice.
So it's not so unusual that my patrons are psychopomps, wayfarers, lords of the in-between, liminal places. They're always moving and so am I. I'm comfortable in the car. I'm comfortable in planes, bus terminals, and airports. Places like that, which serve to aggravate and discomfit others, are places where I feel sublimely peaceful. It's that way at hospitals too, where people are always passing through, in and out, hoping not to stay any longer than they have to. I navigate those places easily. I navigate easily period. I'm a traveler. And if I may confess something, it's hurting me not to travel.
I've been overseas once and it was the best experience of my life. I'm dying to travel. There are places I have always wanted to go and see. I'm not afraid of foreign things or people. I pick up new languages easily and naturally when I'm immersed in them, and I forget them when I leave. I love to be moving. But right now I'm moving from apartment to apartment in a city I have no love for and feel no connection to. I don't even know where the great old trees are around here. I know a small handful of parks and a river. None of them hold any appeal to me. My ability to connect with my environment suffers. I have no community here, none at all. I don't know anybody. I'm not part of any church or group. I don't even have a book club. I could probably have these things, I should probably look into having them, at least then I might develop some tethers. I'm a grown-up now, I should go out and do grown-up things.
But tonight is really about Imbolc and how I feel like a failure not celebrating it. Because I don't know Brigid, not in any True sense of Knowing, and there is no fire in my belly right now. And it's fifty-seven degrees in February and while everyone else is praising the early spring, every wild swing of temperature and pressure sounds to me like Gaia screaming. I can't be happy about it. So ultimately, maybe I'm a little more plugged-in than I thought.