Toward Ecosophy

Back in 1999 I wrote an essay titled "Myth, History, and Pagan Origins" and submitted it to The Pomegranate, a journal of Neopagan scholarship active back then.  I'd been encouraged to submit something to "the Pom," as it was usually called in the Neopagan scene, by Fritz Muntean, one of the prime movers at the journal, whom I'd met at a Neopagan event the year before. I admit I was surprised by the request, as my previous venture into Neopagan history had not exactly gone over well.  (It was an essay titled "The Red God," cowritten with Gordon Cooper, which was published in Gnosis in 1998.  It pointed out that much of what became Gardnerian Wicca was derived not from some notional medieval witch cult but from Woodcraft, a youth organization founded by Canadian-American writer Ernest Thompson Seton. I'm sure my readers can imagine what the response to that was like.)

Still, I wrote an essay, focusing on the historical claims made by Neopagan groups and discussing their parallels with other origin myths, and mailed it into the Pom.  It was duly published, in mildly mutilated form -- the editors deleted the bibliography and about half the footnotes that supported the argument -- and then someone didn't get around to mailing me the next issue, so I didn't have the chance to respond to the denunciations in the letters column. (I have no idea if this was deliberate, but it certainly worked out that way.) I shrugged and went on to other things. 

Fast forward to this month. In discussing socialism over on the main blog, I mentioned the article, for reasons that will be clear to anyone who reads it; someone asked if it was still available; regular reader and commenter Robert Mathiesen kindly chased down a copy and forwarded it to me, and I've posted it as a page on my blog site; you can read it here. (Read it now if you dislike spoilers.)

The basic argument of the essay is that the core historical narrative of the Neopagan movement was borrowed intact from that of Christianity. In place of Eden, insert ancient Pagan societies; in place of the Fall, insert the arrival of Christianity or patriarchy, depending on the specific flavor of Neopaganism we're discussing; proceed straight through the narrative, and point for point, it's all there -- the chosen people, the long age of persecution, the redeeming revelation, the rising spiral of conflict between good and evil that good is destined to win, the inevitable coming of the New Jerusalem, and the rest of it. 

This isn't just a matter of origins, though. Myths are the narratives we use to project ideas of meaning, purpose, and value onto the universe, and the myths we believe shape our behavior and largely determine the results we get. That's why Marxism, which has an identical historical narrative -- for Eden, insert primitive communism; for the Fall, insert the invention of private property, and so on -- has turned into a messianic faith prone to debates over doctrine that would have impressed medieval scholastics, and likewise prone to quite a few of the less pleasant habits of historic Christianity. 

So, too, the Neopagan movement.  In 1999 it had only taken a few tentative steps in the direction of imitating Christianity; since then, as I predicted, it's gone a lot further down the same road; and at this point, as the Neopagan movement slides further down the slope of its decline, large parts of the movement have gone full-on Calvinist, obsessing about original sin (that's spelled "white privilege" these days) and engaging in orgies of self-abasement and purity crusades in an attempt to convince themselves that they belong to the elect. To judge by what one of my readers who still follows the scene has passed on, the latest fad is denouncing Permaculture™ as racist because it wasn't invented by indigenous women of color. Since indigenous women of color make up a submicroscopic percentage of Neopagans -- it's overwhelmingly a movement of middle-class white folks -- I have started to wonder how soon they'll cancel themselves. 

Be that as it may, the lesson to take from this is that myths matter. The stories you tell yourself about who you are and how you got here aren't value-free; they determine your behavior and can turn into your destiny. Choose your myths wisely -- and don't try to pretend to yourself that the narratives you project onto the inkblot patterns of the cosmos are "just the way things are."