Merry Meet

THE GUARDIAN'S PAGAN PAGE

May the Circle be open, but unbroken ...

NOTE: This page is much more serious than most of my other pages. If you came here looking for caustic humor and graphic nudity, hit "back" now.

When I first went to college, I was looking for something to do with my life. More specifically, I was looking for a religion. I'd tried the Christian way of doing things, and found that it just didn't work for me. The constant guilt and begging of mercy from a wrathful God who might decide to smite me at any given moment made me feel worse off spiritually than if I'd never became a Christian. I felt horribly divided; my faith was weak enough for me to question why I was a Christian, but too strong for me to walk away without some amount of dread. Nor did my Christian neighbors take very kindly to my choice. Simply becoming an agnostic met with great resistance among those who thought I was turning away from the light of heaven to a path towards darkness. Such it is with all great journeys.

I considered a number of other spiritual paths. Buddhism I found particularly interesting, but ultimately that wasn't for me, either. That was when the Goddess showed me the way, when I ran into a number of Pagans who had banded together to whether the storms that the primarily Christian populance threw at them. I was skeptical at first, I admit. Their talk of the ancient pantheons of mythology and magic made me scoff in derision. But I was curious enough to attend one of the rituals, and when I felt the raw magical energy coursing through me I could no longer doubt what I knew to be true.

Thus began my journey as a Pagan.

Spiritually, I'm far more alive than I ever have been before. The trees, the stars, even this computer has a part of the divine Essence. One just needs to know how to harness it. This recent Samhain (the Pagan equivilent of Halloween and the beginning of our new year), each of the members of my group called upon the aspects of a diety to guide us throughout the New Year. I called upon Thor and felt the raw power of the Thunder God surging through me, something that I never even came close to during my dry, passionless Baptist upbringing. I willingly became a member of one of the most misunderstood and hated groups in America for this, and I would never trade it for anything. Once you've tasted the magic of the Old Ways, you're never quite the same. Now and forever after, I am a Witch.

My intention here is not to bad-mouth Christianity. In my opinion, the worth of a religion can be seen in how it helps its practitioners to become closer to the Source of All Things. If Christianity inspires you to live a good life and brings you closer to others and to the Divine, then that is a good choice for you. If you use Christianity as a justification for hatred and bigotry, then you defile that which you claim to worship. Christianity simply didn't work for me; that doesn't mean it doesn't work for you, or for anyone.

MY BELIEFS

NOTE: These are my beliefs only, hence the title. I do not claim to speak for all Pagans everywhere.

Contrary to popular belief, Witches do not worship Satan, sacrifice children or animals, or engage in massive orgies (well, maybe the last one). Suggesting we worship Satan is like suggesting we worship the Easter Bunny; how can we worship that in which we do not believe? Nor do we have three nipples.

I do practice magic, the idea of which makes some people very nervous. After all, if my powers don't come from the Christian God, then they come from the Christian Devil; henceforth, us Witches must be very dangerous indeed. And indeed we could be, were we not bound by the Law of Three. Essentially, whatever we do in life, be it through magic or mundane action, returns to us threefold. Also, many Pagans follow the Wiccan Rede, myself included;

Bide the Wiccan Rede ye must,
In perfect love, in perfect trust.
Eight words the Wiccan Law fulfill:
AN HARM YE NONE, DO AS YE WILL.
And ever mind the Rule of Three;
What ye send out comes back to thee.
Follow this with mind and heart
And merry ye meet, and merry ye part.

Hardly sounds like the kind of witch with green skin and pointed hats that like to boil Bugs Bunny alive, neh? The words "An harm ye none" bind us from hurting others with our spells; for this reason, magic is used mainly for healing, divination, and bringing fortune. In this way, magic is much like prayer. Christians ask God to intercede for them; when we use magic, we channel the energies of the Divine through us to achieve our ends.

The main difference between my beliefs and Christianity have to do with man and his relationship to the Divine, and the nature of the Divine Itself. Christianity, in all its cheerfulness, declares men are evil and corrupt of spirit, the only redeemind quality of which being that they are loved by God. It seems to me to be a philosophy that doesn't much care for self-esteem. Also, in the Christian philosophy, men are to be subject to God and break their wills to him, therby throwing away free thought. Furthermore, we aren't suppposed to even THINK of a thought of our own, but use God as a security blanket. Admittedly, it is my personal belief that these had nothing to do with what Jesus actually said and were mainly added so that the Church could guilt-trip people into giving them lots and lots of money, but there are still many who believe thus. Trust me, I was raised Baptist, I know.

WHAT IS GOD?

As long as man has been around, they have constantly sought to find a cause for their existance, a higher power that is greater than themselves. This is because we are all made from the God and Goddess, who are themselves children of the Source. The Source is everything in the universe; from the mighty oak to the tiniest paramecia, from the Empire State Building to your own hair follicles. The Source does not judge us, for we are It; if It judges us, It judges Itself. It is perfect, but only in the sense that nothing is more perfect than it; instead of being stagnant, it grows and changed, becoming more perfect, more powerful and more wise. Unfortuantely, such a being of infinite scope is beyond our ability to comprehend; therfore, the Divine appears to us as different aspects, the God and the Goddess, the male and the female. After these aspects of divinity mankind was made, not from mere dust, but from the very substance of the stars. Despite being made of starstuff and a portion of the Divine Soul, being incarnated into material form brings about need; the need for food, water, shelter, love. It has also limited our scope, so much that even the God and the Goddess are nearly too much for us to comprehend. Therefore, they reveal aspects of themselves to us that we might better understand their parts. The Divine is infinitely diverse. Thus were born Odin, Hera, Ra, and even the Christian God, Yahweh. Each were a portion of the God or Goddess (or in some cases, such as the androgenous gods of the Hindu tradition, both), and thus are part of the original Source.

LIFE AFTER DEATH

Obviously, I don't believe in a magical Pagan heaven where I and my fellow Witches can romp and play naked in glorious green fields while those wrong-minded Christians sit in a burning lake of fire while being forced to watch Rosie O'Donnell. Other than the fact that such a thing is unbelievably arrogant, it also denies everything that appears in nature. Nature moves in circles, not straight lines. The seasons go winter, spring, summer, fall, and then begin again at winter. They don't suddenly stop or turn into something else. When a tree dies, it falls to the ground and decomposes. In the extreme short-term, that is a straight line; but when it decomposes, it makes the ground richer in nutrients. Grass springs up, and perhaps another tree grows where that one once grew. Thus is the cycle of life; so too, I believe, is the cycle of the afterlife.

Remember that we are all created from the Source, that our own experiences might improve upon that from which we came. However, in order to do so we must see the world from hundreds, perhaps thousands of different lives. Gay, straight, bi, male, female, Christian, Pagan, black, white, red, yellow. It matters not what you are now, because you either have been or will be all of these. I truly believe that Jesus' true message was one of love for all people, because before the Source we truly are one body. I think that Jesus knew that because he was nearing the end of his cycle, when he would be re-absorbed into the universe and thereby make the Source that much more perfect. In that way, Jesus was a prophet. Was he the Son of God? No more than you or I am. The fact that his words were diluted as they were are a result of the five hundred years between Jesus' death and the writing of the Gospels.