When this was first written back in 2016, it started out with the statement, …”as I’ve mentioned in other posts and in the About section of this website, I’ve chosen not to align formally with any groups when it comes to new-age or neo-pagan traditions. The decision is purely a personal one and stems from an internal desire to avoid limiting myself intellectually and spiritually in my own journey. The decisions made early in my life have never been about remaining separate from any group; for, in many of their teachings, beliefs, and practices exist an abundance of rich tradition and wisdom in which to pull from. I include many elements of several systems in my own practice.”

The sentiment still resonates to some degree as I know it will with many of you. The idea to start a temple was less about giving up that original position, and more about taking action in a world desperate for real people to make small changes for the greater good. It was in the climate of recent events and the context of greater distance between people that I chose to embrace a way to bring people back to togetherness and inclusiveness. In seeking that path to being a small light for a few who will, in turn, become their own beacons in the world, I finally decided to go back to some of the origins of spirituality and mysticism in the world. My heart and mind are still as open as they’ve always been to many paths, but I feel by choosing one path to walk together we can at least all head in the right direction as our individual paths branch off like the tree of life.

Unfortunately, one of the greatest barriers for those newly interested in a spiritual path outside that of mainstream religion, is getting past the stereotypes, stigmas, and intense emotional baggage that such labels as Pagan, Witch, Shaman, Mystic, or even just New-Age bring with them. In this article, I hope to clarify some of the terms, provide a brief context of some of the groups, and hopefully show that, once past such labels, there is a wealth of knowledge and spiritual wisdom to enrich your own daily life.

First of all it’s helpful to understand that the lines between individual systems is rarely well delineated. A modern witch will most likely be a pagan (although it’s not a given…they may be ceremonial magicians, etc.), but many pagans might not be adherents of the Wiccan religion. Also, just because someone chooses to pursue a path outside mainstream religion, not all should be labeled as New-Age practitioners. Although many people today use different names for their personal religious or spiritual beliefs, many in historic times would never have even known to call themselves one thing over another. They just lived in close connection with the earth and/or the subtle energies of their own minds and bodies. The biggest thing to realize is that keeping an open mind is paramount to true understanding and the majority of labels will only serve to cloud the waters.

So with that in mind, let’s start with the term, Pagan. The term comes from the Latin word paganus. Originally referring to those who lived in the countryside or lived a “rustic” existence, the term evolved within the context of the Christian church as a derogatory label of those holding onto their polytheistic heritage or those in direct opposition to the church. Initially there would have been no religious connotation with the word at all.

It’s important to remember that even things like healing with herbs or claiming to alter consciousness, would have been opposed to church doctrine even though these things would ultimately be found to have great scientific significance in generations to come. Those who lived in the cities of ancient times would have been more influenced by the money, political power, and doctrine of the growing church, but those who lived lives outside larger communities were still able to keep their traditions and live in communion with nature and not the decrees of the growing Christian faith in Rome.

For many pagans, life was inextricably linked to nature and the world around them. Although some today celebrate the times of the changing seasons as religious holidays or festivals, those people of ancient times would have just understood them to be a natural cycle of life; a cycle of birth, growth, mating, death, and rebirth. It would have been seen in the heavenly objects they didn’t have names for, but tracked nonetheless, as well as in the crops and animals that sustained them. When Lee and I owned our farm, we became very attuned to the markers of the seasons; the first buds of spring, or the last leaves to fall as winter approached. To us it meant certain things that we needed to take care of with the land or with our animals. We, however, were considered hobby farmers. In the days of old, the same changes, and need to understand them, would have had the weight of life and death to those who were wholly sustained by what they could grow or raise.

Over generations those closest to the earth would have also experimented with what the land gave them and naturally would have found use for the medicinal or spiritual properties of those gifts. They also would have worshipped the different “Gods” that they saw and felt. This probably didn’t even have the same context as the structured systems and well defined deities of Greek or Roman pantheons of distant mythology, but was likely more related to just understanding that every living thing had an innate nature; a soul if you will. For those who spend time outdoors, it’s not hard to feel that a certain familiar tree, mountain, or body of water has a “personality”. For those of you who align with animals, you can’t help but look into their eyes and see something far beyond that of an inferior being. To look on the moon as a protector in the darkness; a mother, is natural, as the pure energy of the celestial form embodies the more worldly relationships we feel with those we are connected to. For those who embrace such energies, they KNOW these Gods and Goddesses to be true for what they are in the world; a connection to the innate being of each and every thing.

As time went on, church leadership as well as the “intellectuals” of the larger population centers began persecuting those living on the fringes with their strange beliefs in things that the gentry couldn’t understand. Ignorance, fear and hate fueled everything from the promotion of negative images about groups or practices to the outright torture and murder of many. Such Gods as the Horned God of the hunt and the forest, became equated to the Christian concept of evil as embodied in an anti-Christ. Such a distinction would never have been made among these people for they had no concept of a devil (and still don’t).

Even after the centuries of supposed enlightenment, the images of the past continued with more than a little help from organized religion. Of course in modern times, such images have been even further distorted by the likes of the entertainment industry and their need for the next best villain. There have even been misguided individuals on their own fringes who’ve perpetuated the idea that paganism and Satan are somehow intertwined. Their beliefs are fueled in no way by the connection to nature-based faith, but out of the same hate that they condemn in the establishment.

A sort of revival took place in the 20th century; however, as scholars, historians, and archeologists started learning more about ancient cultures like those of ancient Greece and Rome as well as the Celts and Vikings. Although the historical record is far from complete, we have gained many insights into those cultures who were so deeply connected to the land, the seas, and the heavens. The somewhat less biased work of the scholarly and scientific communities allowed us to peer back in time without the overlays of ignorance and fear, and start to get a glimpse of not only the peoples, but the very reasons that they believed and worshiped as they did.

In today’s world, where we are often oblivious to these very same things, it is apparent that our lack of connection has started to impact us in not only the physical world, but in that of the mind and spirit. We can devastate our Earth because we do not recognize a “spirit” within it, much less understand the language in which she speaks to us. We can be evil to our neighbors because we feel that they are separate from us and not also a daughter or son of the same Mother. The church took the Creator and put Him behind robes and the hierarchical power structures of very human, and fallible, men. They removed the Creator from the created and in doing so removed us from the very source of our energy. Many in the neo-pagan movements of our modern day seek to once again connect in the way that our ancestors did.

I want to take the entirety of Part 2 and devote it to the term, and beliefs of the witch. The turbulent past surrounding witches and witchcraft as well as their practices in modern times serve as a foundation for many in far reaching disciplines today. Before leaving Part 1, however, I want to take a short time to look at a group that is a little bit of an enigma within the new age circles today.

As with all titles and labels, I’m sure that the words shaman, medicine man or woman, or even witchdoctor evoke different images for different people. That said, however, many of those images aren’t nearly as charged as other stereotypes of the neo-pagan and new age movements. Many people will automatically associate the terms with Native American cultures, but actually the true meaning extends far beyond our continent. Many cultures on almost all the continents have a form of shamanistic practice within their own divisions. Although many of these practices and cultures have been racially marginalized and stereotyped erroneously, going so far as to even promote the early view of a “noble-savage”, much of the associations with evil or the Christian concept of Satan have not lingered within modern culture as they have for the witchcraft and neo-pagan communities.

The practice of shamanism has more to do with altered states of consciousness and the belief that one could meet, talk with, and ultimately use (or heal) the energies of spirits on the different planes of consciousness. They believe in malicious spirits who can cause harm, but can be neutralized through shamanistic wisdom. They believe in traveling between the spirit world and that of our own existence. Such journeying was made possible by things like vision quests or ecstatic states brought on by extremes of endurance or hyper vibrational energies like chanting and drumming.

Once again, it’s important to remember that the actual term shaman is a label. It has been promoted more as a scholarly and anthropologic means of designating a group rather than a true title to any number of peoples or cultures. The men and women who would have practiced such traditions would have been called by appropriate titles within their own languages to designate their understanding of the place of such wisdom holders within their societies.

Over time I hope to write considerably more about shamanic beliefs and practices both in historic terms as well as the way those practices have become a part of our modern world. For now though, I think it’s interesting to note the differences in the way such practices are perceived in our world as compared to other belief systems such as witchcraft, and the reasons for this contradiction.

Regardless of the variations in actual practices and beliefs, the overwhelming majority of those cultures who would, today, be considered shamanic traditions, lived at the extreme far reaches of powerful organizations like the Holy Roman Empire within Europe and Asia, and completely outside of its power in places like the Americas and Southern Africa. Such peoples never knew the same persecution of those deemed heretics, although they surely would have fallen victim to the same oppression. These practices were allowed to grow and evolve organically within the communities for centuries longer than those of the pagans who resided within the boundaries of the church. Once these practices started coming to light through more distant exploration and anthropologic research, we had gotten past some of the darkest times in human history. Today much of the bias we see against the accounts of these peoples lies along the same lines that we see it with any other group; race, economics, and power. Nevertheless, much of the ingrained “evilness”, promoted by an organization looking to completely squelch an oppositional voice, hasn’t been permanently attached to shamanism.

Although I think geography played a large role in keeping some of these practices relatively less maligned, I believe there was a more important reason that such beliefs have managed to come down through the generations with their relevant message for our own times. The greater factor was that we actually had the voice of those who practiced. By the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, historians, anthropologists, and researchers in many other fields were actually interested in true documentation instead of repression. Of course that’s not to say they always got it right or that they didn’t have their own biases, but for the most part, we can get a truer sense of the unfiltered traditions from the people who actually practiced them. Unlike pagans of Europe, whose voices had been silenced hundreds of years before and whose accounts had been “cleansed” from the acceptable body of wisdom, modern people could get a sense of what the practices of those in tune with nature and the universal levels of consciousness actually believed and practiced in their daily lives.

Just like in the archetypal figures and natural laws that seem to transcend geographic boundaries and times, we can hear our distant past calling to us from the relatively more recent voices of our elders. Shamanism gives us an interesting and relevant link to cultures who didn’t survive. Shamanism was often about healing, and maybe the wisdom of those cultures has endured millennia to help us heal our deepest cultural and spiritual wounds.

CLICK HERE to read PAGANS, WITCHES AND SHAMANS, OH MY!  – PART 2

 

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