Post by Frater Veritas et Fortitudo on Sept 6, 2007 23:45:12 GMT -5
Ritual, Magick & How Pagans will Save the World
by Sam Webster, M.Div ©2004
We live in an unsustainable culture which values consumption and acquisition above all else. Yet, Pagans are a cultural force unpredicted and generally unnoticed that stands against the loss of our world. Wielders of Ritual and Magick, we have the means to change the human world and bring it back in harmony with the rest of the Cosmos. Will we rise to the challenge?"
Introduction
Thank you for inviting me to speak with you today, I am deeply honored that you would be interested in my idiosyncratic ramblings on the place of ritual and Pagans in contemporary society.
Hands up:
Pagans, Christians, Buddhists, etc.. . .
I have entitled my talk “Ritual, Magick & How Pagans will Save the World.”
As a ritualist, I admit my view may be myopic. It’s the hammer I’ve got so perhaps everything looks like a nail. But I don’t think the solutions and perspectives I will propose today have been tried in a long time so I think they are worth putting on the table.
Magick is a long discredited perspective too. But, in an era of dehumanized technology, the more integral approach used by the grandmother of science, namely Magick, may be a helpful corrective and one of the few bits of leverage we’ve got. Or it could just be the last hope of the desperate.
But then we have reason to be desperate, or at least deeply concerned. We live in an unsustainable culture which values consumption and acquisition above all else.
Yet, Pagans are a cultural force unpredicted and generally unnoticed that stands against the loss of our world. We are wielders of Ritual and Magick. As such I warrant that we have the means to change the human world and bring it back into harmony with the rest of the Cosmos.
The question is, will we rise to the challenge?
The Problem Situation
Let’s begin by looking at the problem we are in.
We, the inheritors of Western Civilization, are members of the only non-ritualizing culture in the world. (If you can find me another let me know, but I haven’t found one [China]).
Starting with Martin Luther’s Hammer blow on October 31st, 1517 (yes, Samhain, go figure), the West began a project of de-ritualizing itself. The Roman Catholic context in which it was operating was at best stale and at worst corrupt.
We all know the story of the sale of indulgences but we can also point to the alienation of the common folk from the rituals of the Church, being in Latin and, some might argue, being of a transcendentalist theology that had little relation to the lives of the people. Superstition, the performance of ritual activities without cognizance of their meaning, had set in.
[Hocus Pocus: Hoc est enim corpus meum/for this is my body.]
In this cultural revolution (and subsequent counter-revolution), we lost the baby with the bath water. Ritual, at first in part but later with more vigor was denounced as vain and ‘Papist’(we can’t have that) and systematically removed from worship. The altar was moved aside for the pulpit and was replaced with a highly attenuated form of ritual, the sermon.
The Word replaced the Deed. [Cf. Goethe’s Faust]
In Catholic countries ritual was degraded by the application of orthodoxy. The very soul of ritual was ripped out by defining the meaning of every act and reducing living symbols to dead signs.
Don’t get me wrong, the Catholic world is quite polyphones and so there was and is today a broad range of application. For instance the pageants, pilgrimages and festivals in Latin Countries in the Old and New Worlds and in some parts of Eastern Europe are fairly vibrant. But, on the whole, and particularly in the Northern and Anglo lands, we ended up with a rejection of ritual amongst the Protestants and an ossified ritual system among the Catholics. This did not bode well for the West but it would take some time for the damage become noticeable.
One core function of ritual is to embody and transmit the values of a culture. When examined systematically, the values promulgated from the pulpit are pretty good and summarizable in Jesus’ best word, ‘Love thy neighbor as thy self.’ Not bad. One problem: the medium is not up to the message. Nearly 500 years of Protestant preaching has had little positive effect on human behavior. It is a commonplace that we are told to ‘be good’ on Sunday, but we go right back to same old bad behaviors on Monday.
Preachers pull their hair out over this but my argument is that they are misapplying their effort. Word alone is not enough.
The Catholics have an additional problem. They can’t fill their seminaries. Soon there will not be enough priests to serve the otherwise slowly emptying churches. (With celibacy and a male-only priesthood it just doesn’t have the draw it did.) If they were filling the needs of the people they would not be having this problem. (I wonder if we could have their churches? Now wouldn’t that be an interesting turn around of history?)
Beside transmitting values, ritual has another core function: transformation. It helps us leave old out-moded states and enter the new ones into which we’ve grown. These are things like leaving the ‘single’ state and getting married, entering religious orders, return from combat back into society, leaving childhood and becoming an adult.
You all remember your adulthood rites, don’t you? When everyone in your community supported you as you left behind your childhood ways and you took your place as an adult with all of the rights and privileges thereof? No?
Of course not. This is what we lost when we lost ritual in our culture. Yes, we do still honor those getting married. Yes, we acknowledge those few who enter religious service. But the lack of reintegration rituals left many Vietnam veterans trapped in their trauma and discarded. And, there is many a young man who will die this summer attempting to drive their way out of childhood only to be stopped dead by a tree. (The situation is just more acute for the males, SOMETHING about the women).
The west also has the highest incidence of long term mental illness. Some have suggested that this is caused by the lack of transformative ritual. The only way our culture has to help a person work through a subjective or interpersonal maladaptation is through the psychotherapist’s couch. And here we are, back to talk again.
So where does this leave us? In a culture that can not transmit its best values to the next generation except by talking at them and without support to enable its members to negotiate the transformations required of us by life.
But it is not like ritual can be ignored. For tens of thousands of years humans conveyed value and meaning across time through ritual. Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese cultural histories are measured in the thousands of years. They had a stability and often a quality of life we can scarcely claim.
Nor is ritual a wholly human prerogative. Many birds and mammals, never mind the primates, engage in ‘non-productive’ activities as vital acts of communication that result in successful defense, status maintenance or change, or mating.
So, human's ritualize. It's in our blood, and if this was a didactic lesson, I would show you my theory that that capacity and root is ontological, but not today.
Since ritualizing can't be stopped, where did it go in our culture?
From the ritualizing impulse arose the secular arts, especially theater. Ritual is its direct ancestor via the rites of Dionysus. Music, dance and the performative arts, never mind the plastic arts, evolved independently of the sacred and ritual contexts in which they first came into being. In other cultures most art is related to the sacred and incorporated in worship and ritual. In Medieval European society things were much the same way, thus we have, for instance, Chauser decrying his ‘vulgar’ stories late in life.
But art for art’s sake developed with a particular vigor in the West due to this separation from the sacred and ritual. It is probably why we have the marvelous music and other arts we enjoy as entertainment today.
Sports are not dissimilar. Classically games had a sacred and ritualistic context, the most famous of course being the Olympics, but this shows up in many cultures.
But in the modern age all these became commodified. Music, dance and all of the performative arts are now products to be sold. TV and media like CDs, DVDs, etc., in general permit the packaging of performance and sport into hour-long segments or disks or whatnot which can be easily sold.
Art is for sale. Sport is for sale. It took a while but today in our culture the value of anything (and any one) is how much money is it worth...
This discussion leads into a vast array of ethical and political issues in and of itself. But our focus today is on ritual.
The problem with all of this is that the energy, the effort, the creativity, that would have gone into ritual goes into these commodities instead. That which should have be used to convey good values or transform society and its members is unavailable in the dominant culture on this planet.
Instead that creativity and energy is poured into the next sit-com, the next pop tune, the next advertising campaign and whatever values they espouse that is what is being inculcated into our lives and whatever transformation they happen to cause, they do. They do this without any thought to the direction of the transformation. Without any thought to the values the recipients will then live from and the consequences thereof.
Why should you care?
First off, because we are on board a train that is heading for a cliff and the bridge is out. Worse still, everybody, and I mean everybody, is on the train.
We live in an unsustainable culture. That means the time to remain in this condition is finite and ever decreasing. The good in this is that things will change, the bad is that if changes happens through catastrophe, it won’t be gentle on any of us. And since our culture is the dominant culture of this planet, when we go we will bring a lot of others down with us. Like the Police song puts it: “we can all sink or we all float, cause were all in the same big boat.”
And just to make sure you are paying attention, you must understand that this burden is principally yours. I’m likely to be dead before it gets too bad. You, however, will be around to deal with the consequences.
For instance at the current rate of consumption Oil will be gone by 2040, We use about 30% of the drinkable water on this world today. By 2025 we’ll be using 70% (it won’t be cheep),
If we keep paving farmland in the US like we have been by 2050 we’ll have lost another 15% or 55 million acres (of the 375 now available), even though the population will have grown by 40%. So you see, this is the problem or debt the parents of my generation have handed to us, and the bill will come due in your lifetime. Sorry.
We should note that the problem is not with production or technology. We have now the capability of providing food, clothing, shelter, fiber, medical care, and education for everyone living on this planet. And we have the ability to deliver the same to those who need it. Can you say Federal Express?
The fact that production is such that even now there is enough produced to cover everyone’s needs shows us that the problem is not with production. The fact that we can “absolutely, positively, get it there,” if we want to, shows the problem does not lie with the distribution system.
It shows that the problem resides in our philosophy of distribution and, by corollary, of our consumption. It is a matter of how we decide who gets the results of production and who gets to use the resources necessary to create that produce.
What determine these choices are values. The values that govern the distribution of production are a vast and controversial subject and suited to the discussion of better minds than mine. But the consumption part of this equation is a bit more immediate and just as painful and it makes an excellent illustrative example.
So, what are our culture’s values?
You all know the line from the Pink Floyd song, Money,
“Money, it's a gas.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I'll buy me a football team.”
I think that summarizes it. The values of our culture are consumption and acquisition. When everything is commodified and money the only real value, what else is there to do but to acquire and consume? When written on the large scale this is called Imperialism which we do mostly as corporate imperialism today rather than direct political empire building which is the use of military power to conquer foreign parts and colonize them. But given current events, clearly this is only a mostly, and it is hard to say which is worse. Just ask any client nation of the multinational corporations.
However, it is what we value that drives this process. What is worthwhile in life? If you are alienated from the world and your neighbor, if the only thing you can value is what you can measure, if the only pleasure you know is consumption and acquisition what else is there to do? Just look at advertising today. The basic message is simple: buy and be happy.
As Huxley put it in Brave New World, 64 thousand repetitions equals one truth. If we hear it enough times we’re going to believe it. It does not matter if satisfaction never comes, we keep believing the message: buy and be happy. We don’t even notice we’re starving, we keep thinking these empty acquisitions, these empty calories, will feed us.
We can see from the statistics previously quoted, this can’t go on forever. We live in an unsustainable culture. We are borrowing from the future to frivolously expend today, your future. Our forbears have done the spending and enjoying, my generation is feeling the pinch and so we’re scrambling to get ours before it’s all gone, and you will get to pay the bill. Sorry
We live in an unsustainable culture. Will we change before catastrophe is upon us or do we sail gracefully off the cliff in an elegant swan song of glittering consumption into a gottdamerung of global destruction? I believe theme music for this is: “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die!”
I take some comfort in this; as the Chinese note in their writing of the character for crisis is composed of Danger and Opportunity. I’ve outlined the danger. The Opportunity is us, the Pagani.
We are at a strange time in history but not a unique one. About 2000 years ago our world was at a similar crossroads. It was about to undergo a profound religious convulsion that would eventually bring down one of the greatest civilizations humans have ever produced, Rome. It was an era of Empire, of overwhelming cultural exchange, and profound disempowerment of the individual. In Alexandria these conditions lead to the development of many new strains of religious thought, some of which could coexist with others while some sought the destruction of the others.
We are in the same condition. We live in the most powerful empire humanity has yet produced. Communications, transport and supply-line systems have developed to the extent that every culture is touching every other culture now. And then there is the political situation.
I don’t know how this is being taught today but when I was in elementary and high school I was taught about our democratic government. Sadly, what I was taught is not what I see now. Instead, taking from what I learned in my undergraduate political science classes, we live in a plutocratic oligarchy or timnocracy. If you have enough money you can participate in politics, and participating in politics is about supporting the interests of the moneyed. In short, not democracy.
I’m particularly interested in seeing what happens as electronic voting becomes more widespread. You see, I’m a geek by profession and so I trust other geeks more than politicians and corporate spokespersons. The security inclined geeks I know tell me that the voting systems are so hackable as to be a mockery of security best practices. So much for democracy, so much for the power of the individual. In other words, a lot like Alexandria 2000 years ago...
by Sam Webster, M.Div ©2004
We live in an unsustainable culture which values consumption and acquisition above all else. Yet, Pagans are a cultural force unpredicted and generally unnoticed that stands against the loss of our world. Wielders of Ritual and Magick, we have the means to change the human world and bring it back in harmony with the rest of the Cosmos. Will we rise to the challenge?"
Introduction
Thank you for inviting me to speak with you today, I am deeply honored that you would be interested in my idiosyncratic ramblings on the place of ritual and Pagans in contemporary society.
Hands up:
Pagans, Christians, Buddhists, etc.. . .
I have entitled my talk “Ritual, Magick & How Pagans will Save the World.”
As a ritualist, I admit my view may be myopic. It’s the hammer I’ve got so perhaps everything looks like a nail. But I don’t think the solutions and perspectives I will propose today have been tried in a long time so I think they are worth putting on the table.
Magick is a long discredited perspective too. But, in an era of dehumanized technology, the more integral approach used by the grandmother of science, namely Magick, may be a helpful corrective and one of the few bits of leverage we’ve got. Or it could just be the last hope of the desperate.
But then we have reason to be desperate, or at least deeply concerned. We live in an unsustainable culture which values consumption and acquisition above all else.
Yet, Pagans are a cultural force unpredicted and generally unnoticed that stands against the loss of our world. We are wielders of Ritual and Magick. As such I warrant that we have the means to change the human world and bring it back into harmony with the rest of the Cosmos.
The question is, will we rise to the challenge?
The Problem Situation
Let’s begin by looking at the problem we are in.
We, the inheritors of Western Civilization, are members of the only non-ritualizing culture in the world. (If you can find me another let me know, but I haven’t found one [China]).
Starting with Martin Luther’s Hammer blow on October 31st, 1517 (yes, Samhain, go figure), the West began a project of de-ritualizing itself. The Roman Catholic context in which it was operating was at best stale and at worst corrupt.
We all know the story of the sale of indulgences but we can also point to the alienation of the common folk from the rituals of the Church, being in Latin and, some might argue, being of a transcendentalist theology that had little relation to the lives of the people. Superstition, the performance of ritual activities without cognizance of their meaning, had set in.
[Hocus Pocus: Hoc est enim corpus meum/for this is my body.]
In this cultural revolution (and subsequent counter-revolution), we lost the baby with the bath water. Ritual, at first in part but later with more vigor was denounced as vain and ‘Papist’(we can’t have that) and systematically removed from worship. The altar was moved aside for the pulpit and was replaced with a highly attenuated form of ritual, the sermon.
The Word replaced the Deed. [Cf. Goethe’s Faust]
In Catholic countries ritual was degraded by the application of orthodoxy. The very soul of ritual was ripped out by defining the meaning of every act and reducing living symbols to dead signs.
Don’t get me wrong, the Catholic world is quite polyphones and so there was and is today a broad range of application. For instance the pageants, pilgrimages and festivals in Latin Countries in the Old and New Worlds and in some parts of Eastern Europe are fairly vibrant. But, on the whole, and particularly in the Northern and Anglo lands, we ended up with a rejection of ritual amongst the Protestants and an ossified ritual system among the Catholics. This did not bode well for the West but it would take some time for the damage become noticeable.
One core function of ritual is to embody and transmit the values of a culture. When examined systematically, the values promulgated from the pulpit are pretty good and summarizable in Jesus’ best word, ‘Love thy neighbor as thy self.’ Not bad. One problem: the medium is not up to the message. Nearly 500 years of Protestant preaching has had little positive effect on human behavior. It is a commonplace that we are told to ‘be good’ on Sunday, but we go right back to same old bad behaviors on Monday.
Preachers pull their hair out over this but my argument is that they are misapplying their effort. Word alone is not enough.
The Catholics have an additional problem. They can’t fill their seminaries. Soon there will not be enough priests to serve the otherwise slowly emptying churches. (With celibacy and a male-only priesthood it just doesn’t have the draw it did.) If they were filling the needs of the people they would not be having this problem. (I wonder if we could have their churches? Now wouldn’t that be an interesting turn around of history?)
Beside transmitting values, ritual has another core function: transformation. It helps us leave old out-moded states and enter the new ones into which we’ve grown. These are things like leaving the ‘single’ state and getting married, entering religious orders, return from combat back into society, leaving childhood and becoming an adult.
You all remember your adulthood rites, don’t you? When everyone in your community supported you as you left behind your childhood ways and you took your place as an adult with all of the rights and privileges thereof? No?
Of course not. This is what we lost when we lost ritual in our culture. Yes, we do still honor those getting married. Yes, we acknowledge those few who enter religious service. But the lack of reintegration rituals left many Vietnam veterans trapped in their trauma and discarded. And, there is many a young man who will die this summer attempting to drive their way out of childhood only to be stopped dead by a tree. (The situation is just more acute for the males, SOMETHING about the women).
The west also has the highest incidence of long term mental illness. Some have suggested that this is caused by the lack of transformative ritual. The only way our culture has to help a person work through a subjective or interpersonal maladaptation is through the psychotherapist’s couch. And here we are, back to talk again.
So where does this leave us? In a culture that can not transmit its best values to the next generation except by talking at them and without support to enable its members to negotiate the transformations required of us by life.
But it is not like ritual can be ignored. For tens of thousands of years humans conveyed value and meaning across time through ritual. Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese cultural histories are measured in the thousands of years. They had a stability and often a quality of life we can scarcely claim.
Nor is ritual a wholly human prerogative. Many birds and mammals, never mind the primates, engage in ‘non-productive’ activities as vital acts of communication that result in successful defense, status maintenance or change, or mating.
So, human's ritualize. It's in our blood, and if this was a didactic lesson, I would show you my theory that that capacity and root is ontological, but not today.
Since ritualizing can't be stopped, where did it go in our culture?
From the ritualizing impulse arose the secular arts, especially theater. Ritual is its direct ancestor via the rites of Dionysus. Music, dance and the performative arts, never mind the plastic arts, evolved independently of the sacred and ritual contexts in which they first came into being. In other cultures most art is related to the sacred and incorporated in worship and ritual. In Medieval European society things were much the same way, thus we have, for instance, Chauser decrying his ‘vulgar’ stories late in life.
But art for art’s sake developed with a particular vigor in the West due to this separation from the sacred and ritual. It is probably why we have the marvelous music and other arts we enjoy as entertainment today.
Sports are not dissimilar. Classically games had a sacred and ritualistic context, the most famous of course being the Olympics, but this shows up in many cultures.
But in the modern age all these became commodified. Music, dance and all of the performative arts are now products to be sold. TV and media like CDs, DVDs, etc., in general permit the packaging of performance and sport into hour-long segments or disks or whatnot which can be easily sold.
Art is for sale. Sport is for sale. It took a while but today in our culture the value of anything (and any one) is how much money is it worth...
This discussion leads into a vast array of ethical and political issues in and of itself. But our focus today is on ritual.
The problem with all of this is that the energy, the effort, the creativity, that would have gone into ritual goes into these commodities instead. That which should have be used to convey good values or transform society and its members is unavailable in the dominant culture on this planet.
Instead that creativity and energy is poured into the next sit-com, the next pop tune, the next advertising campaign and whatever values they espouse that is what is being inculcated into our lives and whatever transformation they happen to cause, they do. They do this without any thought to the direction of the transformation. Without any thought to the values the recipients will then live from and the consequences thereof.
Why should you care?
First off, because we are on board a train that is heading for a cliff and the bridge is out. Worse still, everybody, and I mean everybody, is on the train.
We live in an unsustainable culture. That means the time to remain in this condition is finite and ever decreasing. The good in this is that things will change, the bad is that if changes happens through catastrophe, it won’t be gentle on any of us. And since our culture is the dominant culture of this planet, when we go we will bring a lot of others down with us. Like the Police song puts it: “we can all sink or we all float, cause were all in the same big boat.”
And just to make sure you are paying attention, you must understand that this burden is principally yours. I’m likely to be dead before it gets too bad. You, however, will be around to deal with the consequences.
For instance at the current rate of consumption Oil will be gone by 2040, We use about 30% of the drinkable water on this world today. By 2025 we’ll be using 70% (it won’t be cheep),
If we keep paving farmland in the US like we have been by 2050 we’ll have lost another 15% or 55 million acres (of the 375 now available), even though the population will have grown by 40%. So you see, this is the problem or debt the parents of my generation have handed to us, and the bill will come due in your lifetime. Sorry.
We should note that the problem is not with production or technology. We have now the capability of providing food, clothing, shelter, fiber, medical care, and education for everyone living on this planet. And we have the ability to deliver the same to those who need it. Can you say Federal Express?
The fact that production is such that even now there is enough produced to cover everyone’s needs shows us that the problem is not with production. The fact that we can “absolutely, positively, get it there,” if we want to, shows the problem does not lie with the distribution system.
It shows that the problem resides in our philosophy of distribution and, by corollary, of our consumption. It is a matter of how we decide who gets the results of production and who gets to use the resources necessary to create that produce.
What determine these choices are values. The values that govern the distribution of production are a vast and controversial subject and suited to the discussion of better minds than mine. But the consumption part of this equation is a bit more immediate and just as painful and it makes an excellent illustrative example.
So, what are our culture’s values?
You all know the line from the Pink Floyd song, Money,
“Money, it's a gas.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I'll buy me a football team.”
I think that summarizes it. The values of our culture are consumption and acquisition. When everything is commodified and money the only real value, what else is there to do but to acquire and consume? When written on the large scale this is called Imperialism which we do mostly as corporate imperialism today rather than direct political empire building which is the use of military power to conquer foreign parts and colonize them. But given current events, clearly this is only a mostly, and it is hard to say which is worse. Just ask any client nation of the multinational corporations.
However, it is what we value that drives this process. What is worthwhile in life? If you are alienated from the world and your neighbor, if the only thing you can value is what you can measure, if the only pleasure you know is consumption and acquisition what else is there to do? Just look at advertising today. The basic message is simple: buy and be happy.
As Huxley put it in Brave New World, 64 thousand repetitions equals one truth. If we hear it enough times we’re going to believe it. It does not matter if satisfaction never comes, we keep believing the message: buy and be happy. We don’t even notice we’re starving, we keep thinking these empty acquisitions, these empty calories, will feed us.
We can see from the statistics previously quoted, this can’t go on forever. We live in an unsustainable culture. We are borrowing from the future to frivolously expend today, your future. Our forbears have done the spending and enjoying, my generation is feeling the pinch and so we’re scrambling to get ours before it’s all gone, and you will get to pay the bill. Sorry
We live in an unsustainable culture. Will we change before catastrophe is upon us or do we sail gracefully off the cliff in an elegant swan song of glittering consumption into a gottdamerung of global destruction? I believe theme music for this is: “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die!”
I take some comfort in this; as the Chinese note in their writing of the character for crisis is composed of Danger and Opportunity. I’ve outlined the danger. The Opportunity is us, the Pagani.
We are at a strange time in history but not a unique one. About 2000 years ago our world was at a similar crossroads. It was about to undergo a profound religious convulsion that would eventually bring down one of the greatest civilizations humans have ever produced, Rome. It was an era of Empire, of overwhelming cultural exchange, and profound disempowerment of the individual. In Alexandria these conditions lead to the development of many new strains of religious thought, some of which could coexist with others while some sought the destruction of the others.
We are in the same condition. We live in the most powerful empire humanity has yet produced. Communications, transport and supply-line systems have developed to the extent that every culture is touching every other culture now. And then there is the political situation.
I don’t know how this is being taught today but when I was in elementary and high school I was taught about our democratic government. Sadly, what I was taught is not what I see now. Instead, taking from what I learned in my undergraduate political science classes, we live in a plutocratic oligarchy or timnocracy. If you have enough money you can participate in politics, and participating in politics is about supporting the interests of the moneyed. In short, not democracy.
I’m particularly interested in seeing what happens as electronic voting becomes more widespread. You see, I’m a geek by profession and so I trust other geeks more than politicians and corporate spokespersons. The security inclined geeks I know tell me that the voting systems are so hackable as to be a mockery of security best practices. So much for democracy, so much for the power of the individual. In other words, a lot like Alexandria 2000 years ago...