Another Way to Know the Gods
By C.S. Thompson
Mythorealism may seem, at first, to have a lot in common with Neopaganism, and indeed there is nothing to stop a Neopagan from being a Mythorealist. On the other hand, there is nothing to stop a Christian or an agnostic from being a Mythorealist either, because Mythorealism is a mystical and aesthetic philosophy and not a religion. However, it is certainly true that Mythorealism concerns itself with the realm of Myth, and thus with the gods and the heroes of the historical mythologies.
When I was a child we studied mythology in school, but strictly under the understanding that these were ridiculous fictions that no one believed in. This didn't make sense to me. Billions of people still believed in the Bible, and what was that but a collection of mythological stories? Now it may be objected that the stories of the Bible are true and the myths are false, and this is what a great many people would insist. Other people would insist that neither set of stories is true, that they are all "just myths," in the common sense of a fictional story which people mistakenly believe.
Dismissing the sacred stories by which so many believers understand the world seemed closed-minded and narrow to me. But it also seemed that there was no objective basis for declaring one set of myths to be ridiculous fictions, while holding up another equally fantastic set of myths as the literal truth.
The people of the ancient world believed in their gods, just as fervently and sincerely as the believers of the Christian world accept the stories of the Bible. There were skeptics and cynics back then, and there are skeptics and cynics now, but a glance at the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or the Discourses of Epictetus is enough to show that a sincere and pious ancient pagan was not very different from a sincere and pious modern Christian.
And there is something about those ancient stories, something amazing and moving that speaks to us after so many centuries. It isn't just entertainment or humor. It's the presence of the numinous, the hint of something vast and mysterious behind the bones of the saga itself.
In the words of the great Chinese poet Li Bai, "peach blossoms on flowing waters- mysteriously vanish. There is another Reality- not of the human realm."
It seems to me that this is exactly the feeling of reading a myth, if we read it with an open mind and a receptive spirit. Did King Arthur actually preside over the Round Table, sending out his knights errant on the quest of the Grail? Did Theseus really slay the Minotaur? Did Odin hang from the World Tree to learn the secrets of the runes?
Not in the sense in which Caesar was emperor of Rome, no. These things did not happen as factual events in historic time. But there is something there. And that something is no more of a ridiculous fiction than the birth of God's son from a virgin in Bethlehem, even if that particular event did literally happen- which, to me, is beside the point.
I don't know anything about the historic Jesus or the historic Buddha, and neither does anyone else, because we don't live in that time. But the Jesus and Buddha of mythology are still accessible to us, so it is the mythology that really matters. Not whether an ancient Jewish carpenter-turned-rabbi was exactly as he has been described to us, but what it means to conceive of God Himself in the form of a man, God incarnated and walking the world and then surrendering himself as a sacrifice.
I believe that the Gospel story is a great and true one, but I also believe that there are other stories that are great and true. They may not all be equally magnificent, but they all offer us something- that sense of numinous awe that marks the presence of myth.
Many people in the modern world share a love of mythology, an affinity for the ancient stories and the magic they evoke. Some people yearn so much for the magic that they want to see a revival of paganism, although all too often without any in-depth research into the nature of the old religions. Until one has read widely and deeply enough to distinguish good sources from bad ones and outdated theories from reliable information, all sources of knowledge are seen as equal.
One of the most popular expressions of Neopaganism is Wicca, which is often referred to as the Old Religion by its followers. The theology of Wicca derives from several sources, including The White Goddess by Robert Graves (a brilliant and mythopoetic work, but not a scholarly or historically accurate one), The Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Margaret Murray, and The Golden Bough of Sir James George Frazer. From these and other, related works, a complex of doctrines has been evolved.
These include the idea that there was an ancient European religion of the Great Goddess, variously manifested in all the female deities of mythology. This Mother Goddess is supposed to have a consort known as the god or the horned god, and in some versions the god is split into two forms, a god of fertility and a god of blight, whose struggles are mirrored in the changing seasons and festivals of the Wheel of the Year.
This ancient religion is supposed to have been driven underground by the coming of Christianity, surviving as the historical witch cult until the persecutions of the so-called Burning Times. After surviving for centuries in nearly absolute secrecy, this ancient religion finally resurfaced and became modern Wicca.
The only problem with this Wiccan history is that it isn't- no reputable modern scholar accepts any part of the above as historical fact. There is no evidence of a universal ancient religion based on a Mother Goddess, no evidence of a surviving pagan witch-cult in medieval Europe. Wicca is not the survival or revival of an ancient religion, but a completely new religion based around outdated and discredited scholarship. What happened is that a group of anthropologists in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century came up with some intriguing theories, which captured the imagination of occultists and dreamers. Wicca was founded by this group of occultists, who operated under the pretense that they were merely publicizing an ancient and underground religion. The feminist and New Age movements brought in many new members, and the religion became a popular expression of alternative spirituality, mutating into forms which would probably be unrecognizable to the movement's founders. Meanwhile the anthropological theories on which Wicca was based were largely discredited, a fact of which very few Wiccans seem to be aware. Those few who are aware are divided into two camps- those who know better than to take the Wiccan origin myths literally, and those who defend the literal truth of those myths with all the zeal of a fundamentalist.
The values and principles of ancient paganism seem to have little in common with those of Wicca, which tend to reflect the individualistic, hedonistic and even narcissistic values of our contemporary society rather than anything an ancient pagan would have recognized or understood. How can we reconcile the following, which is an actual quote from an ancient pagan: "one that cares not for thoughts about pleasure or sensual enjoyments at all... is like a priest and minister of the gods," with this quote from a Wiccan writer: "Ours is a nature religion, and we glory in sexual expression and honor the Goddess and the God with it... It means that if both of you are competent consenting adults, you are free to do whatever you both desire."
This is not to suggest that all ancient pagans were puritanical, or that sex did not have a sacred role in some ancient religions. But after reading the classics of the pagan era, it seems clear to me that the pagans of the ancient world and the Christians of the modern world would have a lot more in common with each other than either of them has with Neopaganism.
Wicca also tends to treat all ancient goddesses as aspects of a single Goddess, all gods as aspects of Her consort, to the extent of making them interchangeable. The gods of the ancient world had fluid identities- the Romans, for instance, combined local gods with their own gods in temples throughout Europe- but they were still seen as entities with their own essence and their own context.
For some in the Neopagan movement, context is the thing. The pagan religions were not world religions like Christianity or Islam, but the spiritual expressions of particular cultures- more comparable to Shinto or Hinduism. Outside of the context of the culture that worshipped him, no pagan god can truly be understood. It would be like trying to have a conversation with someone when you didn't speak his language, or know anything about his life or background. What could you really do except stare at each other in silence, or communicate the simplest concepts with basic gestures?
Because of these issues, some Neopagans have moved away from Wicca (or avoided it in the first place), becoming involved with smaller movements such as Reconstructionism. Reconstructionist Neopagans attempt to revive the religions of the ancient pagans in their cultural context. There are Celtic Reconstructionists, Greek Reconstructionists, and so on. For those who have studied the ancient religions in depth, this version of Neopaganism is often more satisfying. But contradictions remain.
For one thing, Reconstructionism is largely driven by academic concerns. It is widely accepted, for instance, that there was an ancient Irish goddess named Danu, and that the Irish gods, or Tuatha De Danaan, were Danu's children. More recent research, however, has revealed problems with these assumptions. There is not a single ancient Irish reference to a goddess named Danu, only to three "Children of Danaan" who are described as gods. The Tuatha de Danaan themselves are not a pantheon of gods, but a tribe of men with magical powers in the medieval Irish pseudo-history known as the Book of Invasions. Some of the kings and queens of this tribe have the names and characteristics of ancient Celtic deities, but others are probably fictional characters invented by the medieval monks or bards who wrote the book. The Book of Invasions is not a pagan scripture- it's a work of fiction disguised as history, freely mingling elements of the pre-Christian Irish religion with Biblical elements, and elements invented out of whole cloth. It was written by medieval Christians for a Christian audience. It has genuine elements of Celtic mythology in it, but those elements are very difficult to distinguish from the other elements, and any attempt to figure out the details of the ancient Irish religion is just educated guesswork. As for the supposed Irish goddess "Danu," early Celtic scholars such as Charles Squire assumed "Danaan" was in the genitive case, and that the nominative form of the word would probably be "Danu." So a goddess was born or invented, and there are Celtic Reconstructionists who pray to this goddess every day, even though there is no hard evidence that the ancient Irish had ever heard of her.
How can you follow a religion that might have to be revised with each new issue of the academic journals? And if you don't change your beliefs with the scholarship, then how can your religion be an accurate reconstruction of anything?
But these are not the most significant problems. The Celts, for instance, are not a dead culture from a forgotten era- there are still surviving Celtic languages, and communities which speak those languages and are struggling for survival. The Gaelic-speaking communities of Western Ireland and the Hebrides, the Breton-speakers of Brittany, the Welsh-speakers of Wales- these are the modern Celts, and they are certainly not pagan.
On the other hand, while they are not pagan, they are the guardians of the ancient culture, of a living tradition which has changed with the centuries but which goes back to the Celts of old. This tradition is expressed now in different forms, which would perhaps not even be recognizable to the men of the Iron Age. But it is Celtic nevertheless, and it has life and reality to it- it's not something people have to look up in books or reconstruct.
One might expect Celtic Reconstructionists to be among the most fervent partisans of the surviving Celtic cultures, serious students of their languages and participants in their traditions, even if they are also interested in reviving older aspects such as the worship of the Celtic gods. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Too many Reconstructionists have no interest in the modern Celts, or consider themselves to be the "real" Celts because they are pagan. They frequently show no interest in learning a Celtic language, and sometimes even express hostility toward the survival of Celtic language and culture, because it doesn't match their preconceptions of what that culture should look like.
I have a particular love and affinity for the sagas of the Celts, the exploits of the demigod Cuchullain and the warrior-poet Finn McCool, the horrific war-goddess Morrigan and the gentle Brigid. For a time I was involved with Neopaganism, because I loved these stories so much that I wanted to see a revival of the Celtic faith in the modern world. But the contradictions described above became increasingly problematic for me, and my solution was to go deeper into the living tradition, discarding any attachment to "paganism" in favor of the spirituality inherent in the culture.
With a few like-minded people I founded the Fellowship for Celtic Tradition, our goal being to express a Celtic spirituality within a genuinely Celtic cultural context, by participating as fully as possible in the living tradition. What did this mean exactly?
I studied Scottish Gaelic and learned a number of Gaelic songs, attended ceilidhs where songs were sung and stories were told (including the Celtic myths I had always loved). I learned a number of traditional Gaelic prayers by heart and recited them every day- when I woke up in the morning, when I first saw the sun, when I ate a meal or drank anything, and when I went to bed at night.
These prayers are very popular among Neopagans, but they usually say them in English and re-write them to remove all Christian elements, a process they call "re-paganizing," although they have no reason to think those particular prayers date back to pagan times. I recited the prayers exactly as I found them, a mixture of Christian and pre-Christian elements in organic harmony.
When I attended a ceilidh, I felt a spontaneous joy and spirit I had never found in any Neopagan ritual, a sense of real culture and living spirituality rather than dressing up and acting out a meticulous reconstruction. Children wandered around and played games and shouted while the adults sang, their voices swelling in the ancient choruses of the Gaelic song tradition. Some people told stories drawn from ancient legend, while others played the fiddle or the drum. This was real beauty and real spirit, and it couldn't have mattered less that it wasn't labeled as "pagan."
The Fellowship for Celtic Tradition, however, was doomed to failure. Our ideas were misunderstood or misrepresented within the pagan community, and as relations between Traditionalists and Reconstructionists became more and more strained, the debate took on all the characteristics of a tempest in a teapot- a pointless and self-destructive faction fight between two vanishingly small religious splinter groups. After a few years of relentless debate I was burnt out on the pagan community, on the whole concept of a revival of paganism, and on the notion of a Celtic religion.
For all my love of the culture, which endures to this day, there was no possibility of me ever belonging to it. The religion of the Iron Age Celts is long dead, and the culture of the modern Celts is simply not my own, although I will continue to sing Gaelic songs and say Gaelic prayers to my dying day, for the simple reason that they move me.
The attempt to revive dead religions is a peculiar kind of necromancy, too often resembling live-action role-playing more than serious spirituality. For every person who simply and sincerely worships Brigid or Odin, there are another ten who yearn to be perceived as Druids or Vikings, play-acting fictional characters in service of a self-constructed and cramped "identity."
These are harsh words, but the reality as I have experienced it is harsh. Religion and spirituality are meant to challenge us and make demands on us, the most important demands we will ever face- not merely to feed our egos. These problems are just as pervasive in other forms of Neopaganism, not only among Celtic Reconstructionists or Wiccans, leaving me convinced that this movement cannot answer the needs that called it into being.
And yet those needs remain. The incredible popularity and influence of the Sandman series and Neil Gaiman's other fiction, the success of movies like Pan's Labyrinth and novels like Clive Barker's Imajica, and of great epics like the Lord of the Rings- these things show that a hunger for myth and magic are pervasive in the modern world.
Mythology still evokes the awe of the numinous, the sense that there is "another Reality- not of the human realm," as Li Bai put it. The mysterious and essential truth is still there beneath all the accretions, even in stories like the Book of Invasions that were never pagan scriptures in the first place. Paganism is not the fundamental point- Myth is.
In the years since I drifted away from Neopaganism, I have come to see the gods as vehicles for communication with the Absolute- God, if you will, or the Way. I see no contradiction, therefore, between polytheism and monotheism, and I have learned to respect the magical core at the heart of all authentic religions.
The world we live in is the world of magic- a world where the divine lurks behind every shadow, peers out from between the lines of the ancient stories, reveals itself in random comments and the seemingly mundane, and always retains its mystery because Mystery is what It is.
"The gods are here, forever present between somewhere and nowhere!" I have quoted this line before, by the T'ang Dynasty poet Li Ho. To the extent that I am still a pagan, this is how. But I have another way of knowing the gods. Not by trying to revive an ancient religion, although I have nothing against anyone else doing so if they can resolve the difficulties and contradictions that implies.
And not by trying to start a new religion either. I am perfectly satisfied that God and the gods endure, and that the Mystery is just as accessible now as it was to the ancients- and equally so to Christians or Buddhists or pagans or anyone else, no matter what the fundamentalists say. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.
But my perspective on these issues is a little unusual, because I am just as likely to see the Mystery behind an ancient myth as I am when praying to God, or when sitting alone in a quiet place in contemplative silence.
Between somewhere and nowhere, the magic still lives. If you can see that, if you can feel that, then you are a Mythorealist, regardless of whether you are a pagan or a Christian or anything else.