Live Where You Are

"The Ghost of a Flea" by Blake (1810s)

There is a fundamental difference between people today and our ancestors that has emerged, and sped up, over the last few decades. In the past we belonged to our communities and barely comprehended what was happening elsewhere in the world. When Rome’s Vestal flame was extinguished by Christian fanatics in the 390s CE people in India were unaware of this great tragedy and shed no tears. When Islamic invaders swept through India destroying Buddhist monasteries and wiping an ancient religion from its homeland in the 12th century CE the people of Europe knew almost nothing of it. When the last Viking settler died in Greenland in the 15th century only a few Icelanders could have guessed what had happened. 

By contrast today, here in Sydney, it seems nearly everyone I know is too interested in what is happening in far away places. For many, now that Game of Thrones has finished, there is a new Westeros (the USA) to think about. It is as if the Democrats are the Starks and the Republicans are Lannisters. It makes sense for Australians to be interested in US affairs up to a point, eg, Australians should want the US to have a strong military to match a strong alliance. But that is not the focus of so many Australians, because they are too invested in the stories which spit out of their televisions, their webpages and their social media. Their minds are not at home, and by living through stories happening in far away places they’ve launched mental and digital crusades in worlds that are basically illusory. 

Germanic Pagan Jewellery

The primary symbol of Germanic Paganism today is Thor's hammer, and there are a number of websites where you can buy really stunning Mjolnir pieces to wear, but they tend to be chunky and are clearly intended to be worn primarily by men. The hammer is a symbol of strength so it makes sense that men would want to wear a Mjolnir amulet, but I am no man and so here follows images of feminine jewellery that can be worn with contemporary dress while being evocative of Germanic deities. All of the pictures refer to the websites where you can buy them (as of September 2020). Click on the image to enlarge.

Pre-Christian Morality

"Lucretia" by Bassano (16th/17th century)

One sometimes encounters the notion that Christian values are foundational aspects of contemporary Western culture, but if this is so what happens when Westerners stop being Christians in large numbers? What might ethics in a post-Christian world look like? Looking to European notions of virtue before Christianity prevailed may give us an idea ...

Roman Virtue

Ancient Roman polytheism was primarily concerned with the proper conduct of ritual rather than personal morality, but meritorious conduct was not entirely divorced from the realm of the religious, as Cicero lets us know in On the Laws. In that work people living in an ideal society are described in the following way:

Polytheism for Beginners

"For Karin's Name Day" by Larsson (1899)

After over a decade of being consciously polytheistic I think perhaps it is possible that I may have some useful advice for people new to polytheism. All of the advice below comes from years of studying mostly Roman and Germanic sources, as well as some others (such as Celtic polytheism, Buddhism and Hinduism), as well as my lived experience.

There is no one and true way

The first and most important piece of advice I can give is to completely ignore anything that follows if it does not resonate for you. I am not a guru, and I suggest you be wary of anyone else who holds that they have discovered the one and true way to be a polytheist. Polytheism does not just imply a plethora of Gods but also a plethora of approaches to the divine.

Aesculapius – God of Medicine

"A sick child brought into the temple of Aesculapius" by Waterhouse (1877)

Mythological origins of Aesculapius

In the Roman tradition Aesculapius is the God of medicine. Myth proclaims him as the son of the God of healing (Apollo); the father of the Goddess of good health (Salus);* a favourite of the Goddess of skilfulness (Minerva, who gifted him the blood of Medusa, which could restore the dead to life), and as a child he was said to have been a student of Chiron – a centaur renowned for his wisdom and skill as a doctor. There are a number of stories associated with Aesculapius, most of them Greek in origin, like the God himself. In The Nature of the Gods Cicero (1st century BC) tells us:

Pax and the Roman Understanding of Peace

3rd century denarius depicting Pax 
(moneymuseum.com)

The worship of the Goddess Pax (Peace) in ancient Rome first comes to prominence during the reign of Augustus, when in 13 BCE the Senate commissioned the Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of the Augustan Peace) to mark the safe return of Augustus from Gaul and Spain. Significantly, it was dedicated on the Campus Martius (field of Mars), which until the 1st century BCE had been used primarily as a military exercise ground. This is a powerful hint as to how ancient Romans understood Pax, ie, that Pax and Mars have a relationship with each other. In the Roman mind, Mars (war) establishes the necessary conditions for Pax (peace) to flourish.

Our Degenerate Age – A Buddhist Prophecy

A man feeling spent after a night of debauchery
Detail from "Marriage a la Mode" by Hogarth (1743)

In many Indo-European religions there is a tradition which predicts the decline of humanity. The Romans spoke of an initial golden age of man, followed by a silver age, bronze age and finally iron age, with each age being less virtuous and less verdant than the last – it was predicted that our kind would finally be wiped out by floods and starvation (see Ovid’s Metamorphoses). In Germanic spirituality there is a tradition that speaks of mankind’s devolution: kinship bonds break down, lasciviousness and violence abound, the weather is harsh and sunbeams turn black (implying volcanic ash clouds?) – this is the age just before the destruction of our world by violence and fire, Ragnarök. It will be followed by the rebirth of a verdurous world when Gods and virtuous folk begin anew (see the Völuspá). In Hinduism it is taught that there are four epochs that characterise the cycle of existence. The first is the most blessed age, with each of the succeeding ages becoming more degenerate than the last, until the cycle begins anew (see the Mahabharata). 

Likewise, in Mahayana Buddhism, which originated in northern India but is now most common in NE Asia, there is a very old and widely accepted prophecy which speaks of the inevitable decline of Buddhism. It describes three ages. The first begins with the life of the Buddha of the Shakya clan, at some point between the 1th-5th century BCE (the exact century of the birth of Shakyamuni Buddha is unknown), and lasted between 500 to 1000 years. This was a golden age of Buddhism, when it was comparatively easy to follow the Buddha’s teachings and achieve enlightenment. The second period represents a time of the weakening of Buddhist spirituality, it also lasts between 500-1000 years. The third age is said to last for 10,000 years. According to Japanese tradition it began in the 11th century CE (which coincides with the Islamic conquest of south Asia; Muslims massacred Buddhist monks and destroyed their monasteries, universities and libraries, thus causing Buddhism to almost disappear from these regions where it had previously flourished: Reat at 76). During this latter age it is said that it will become increasingly difficult for people to follow the Buddha’s teachings, though there will be a period of flourishing before finally becoming obscured and lost. Following this there will be an extremely long period of spiritual darkness, after which a new golden age of Buddhism will eventually emerge, ushered in by the Maitreya Buddha.

The Greco-Roman Cosmos

Illustration from La Sphere du Monde by Oronce Fine (1549)
(the sublunary elements are fire, air, water and earth; above the moon is aether)

In most ancient Greek and Roman minds the distant stars were not thought to be suns capable of supporting a family of orbiting planets, and our own sun was not thought to be the central hearth-fire of our familial solar system. Their view of the cosmos was fundamentally different to our own.

“The Greeks, by about 500 BC, were trying to explain the movements of the planets by first assuming the earth to be the centre of the universe. ( … practically everyone before modern times assumed that it was.) A philosopher named Anaximenes about 550 BC suggested that the stars were fixed in a huge hollow sphere that enclosed the earth, the sun, the moon and the planets … This sphere might be motionless while the earth turned, or vice versa. Later Greeks argued both ways. 

The sun, moon and planets could not be fixed to this sphere of the stars, because they did not move along with the stars at the same speed. They must therefore exist in space between the sphere of the stars and the central earth … each must be fixed in a special sphere of its own [Asimov at 25-27].”

Beggar Spirituality

"A Beggar Girl" by Sargent (c. 1877)

When my husband died nearly two years ago it was as if in a thunderstruck moment I realised that the cosmos was not as I thought it to be – it was so much darker and more painful than I had imagined. I saw that the Gods had not kept me free from misfortune, and that my approach to worship had been absurd. I dismantled my beautiful shrine and even destroyed one of the statues in a state of bitterness and blank despair. But I did not stop believing in the Gods, nor did I hate them. Rather, I saw that on a very fundamental level *I* had got it wrong and that I needed a wiser and more realistic approach to the divine. Answers to difficult questions can never be finite – because the universe and the questions keep changing – but what I see now is that I was more of a spiritual beggar than a spiritual seeker.