Mash It Up.

If modern, Western polytheism seems dominated by laundry lists of Gods whom polytheists claim to have met it is also wrapped around by grocery lists of “sacred texts”.

Recently one polytheist of my acquaintance asked a number of her colleagues - people who mistake vocabulary for scholarliness - to briefly itemise the “sacred texts” which they possessed, with particular emphasis upon those of other religions. The reasons for this poll are irrelevant here but it should be noted that the term “sacred” has not been defined and that subsequent responses included writings which were sacred to the responders and more, the majority of each list, which are sacred to other religions which included some presumed to be sacred to extinct cultures. Several objects which were never intended to be sacred nor which it is fair to consider sacred were also listed.

Let’s have a definition of sacred. We can see that grimoire, tarot cards and DVDs, some of the more bizarre responses given, don’t qualify. The question of definition is important here because there is so much of relativism in modern paganism that we shouldn’t be surprised to notice some pagans walking down the street with their right shoe on their left foot and vice versa declaring, between stumbles and grunts of pain, that the chirality which they assign to their feet is a matter of spiritual preference and that this is a key part of their reconstruction of a great Gnostic-Egyptian-Hellene-Brythonic-Pictish tradition which has been lost to history due to the Christian misinterpretation and misrepresentation of extant sacred texts - including the Bible, the Beano and the instructions which came with their flat-pack chest of drawers - and the rediscovery of previously lost writings beneath the kennel of their fairy great-great-great grandmother’s albino wolf-scotty crossbreed, Lassie.

Now, what relevance do the books of religions dead and gone as well as those here and decidedly not Pagan by current context have to modern, Western pagans? What, say, has Religio Romana to do with the religious beliefs of the Sioux people? Of what relevance is the Egyptian Book of the Dead to hedge-witching? Why would a Heathen retain a Greek New Testament when ditching the rest of her library? Where does Celtic reconstructionism meet with the Bhagavad Gita? Yes, of course a person may retain these in their libraries freely and their reasons for ownership will be diverse, yet why should pagans seems to share an interest in other religions not their own? I would expect, from my own experience, that a straw poll of Christians or Jews or Hindus or Muslims or Buddhists would not produce results even in the neighbourhood of similar to those under discussion here. Why, then, are pagans special in this? Why do they own such a range of books considered sacred by other religions?

It’s simple, really. Modern, literate Western pagans enjoy reading about other religious beliefs because in so doing they feel that they become part of a great tradition of non-Christianity, and to feel justified in abandoning their Christian beliefs and practices, cultural or religious, by reference to great swathes of time in which there were other ways of believing and being. This is not to deny that there are many pagans who accept the epistemological status of their beliefs and who recognise, as I, that a set of beliefs and practices of a handful of years, well-found in thought and consistent, coherent study, and sincerely observed is a tradition as good for the soul - to use a metaphor - and their community as that of any church, synagogue, mosque or temple. Where this is not the case, however, is when study - which sometimes amounts to nothing more than e-books of grimoire and Latin translation downloaded from free sites and the use of heavy, second-hand paperbacks to prevent bookshelves from floating off into space - is not coherently themed, not consistently engaged in and not implemented in the everyday. I assume this is the case because so much of the pagan discourse I encounter, in person and over the internet, seems to consist in no small part of syncretic mash-ups of ideas, names and references from any given religious, philosophical, magical or mystical tradition you may care to mention. I would be surprised if many of these pagans had even read a sacred page of any of the sacred texts they claim to own - whether they own them is another question - yet they see neither nonsense nor disrespect in blithely diluting the sacred beliefs of other peoples in their vain, shallow ignorantly post modern, relativist discourse.

If any of the above describes you then I would ask you to remember that in religion, as in everything else, the value of what you get out is in direct proportion to that which you put in yet you will not, however hard you try, obtain a vital, enduring and useful religion by dumping umpteen “sacred texts” into your simmering cauldron of don’t-want-to-be-Christian soup.