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Where New Pagans and Modern Cultural Beliefs Collide
by George Dew
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An Amerind (American Indian or Native American) friend of mine, Tony Shearer, recently pointed out over coffee that the Spirit Worlds are "rushing toward us all the time right in front of us" regardless of our genetic heritage or spiritual path if we can merely relax and allow ourselves to open up without placing false visualization barriers and overly complex ritual procedures between ourselves and the Presences.
Less than a week before I wrote this, one of my beginning students came to class and reported the following experience. Leaving a crowded shopping mall, he did a simple "Sky above and Earth below, I greet you" ritual, not intending to communicate with the Earth Mother or any other deity, but merely to stabilize and ground himself. He was confronted by a person high Eagle form that gave him a warm friendly mental greeting and then vanished all in the middle of a shopping center parking lot at midday This can be a typical kind of experience if we, as Tony suggested, quit worrying about religiously doing this or that rite with its visualizations and motions, and just be with the Earth.
The student's experience partly answers the question why the interest in Earth Religion continues to grow. While mainstream religious systems promote at length the idea that "ordinary humans" may have contact with deity beings and the "higher levels" only through the efforts of a priest or by some "special dispensation" by God, the majority of Earth religions teach that virtually any person may have direct personal contact with deity(ies) at virtually any time without need of intercession or help by a priest or priestess; the only requirement is that the person is undertaking to be connected to the Earth.
In addition, most Earth religion paths train everybody to perform all the rites that might be needed in a practitioner's usual living so that the need for priestesses or priests only arises when there are group rites or teaching to be done or special and unusual individual circumstances to be dealt with, the individual's personal relationships with deity and the spirit realms thus being truly a personal matter between the individual and deity.
Unfortunately, I have encountered too many instances where a supposedly "higher level" practitioner priestess, priest, teacher, sweat leader, or whoever has not broken her or his mainstream conditioning and, as a result, has been unable to accept the fact that someone not yet "properly initiated" or "ritually prepared" may have had a real communication with The Mother or one of her agents.
As a case in point, less than a year ago a lady came to consult with me after the following experience. She had attended two or three Wiccan introductory meetings and then had been invited by a friend who was studying Amerind ways to visit a Yuwipi healing gathering conducted by a traditional Amerind practitioner.
This ceremony involves the gathering together of one or more persons in need of healing plus their relatives and friends in an enclosed area, either a sweat lodge or a relatively large and private room in a barn or a house. The area and the attendees are ritually cleansed, the area is darkened, and prayers and invocations to the Spirit Worlds are made. Then the healing operator is wrapped and bound in hides or blankets to conduct direct communications with the invoked Spirits relative to the desired healings for the designated persons for which the ceremony is being performed.
To return to the story, while she was sitting in the pitch dark of the crowded room, listening to the prayer chants of the other attendees, and noticing a lot of energy effects and mysterious noises, the lady was suddenly confronted visually by a large owl form that empathically gave her answers to some spiritual questions she had had for some time and then physically stroked her with its wings before disappearing into the darkness after telling her she could call on it for guidance in the future.
None of her previous Christian and social background nor her brief meeting with Wicca nor what her friend had told her about the Yuwipi having prepared her for such an experience, she was understandably shaken by the experience. After the Yuwipi was over, she approached the Amerind practitioner about what happened to her. Satisfied as to her experience's validity, he told her that she now had owl medicine if she wished to use it and gave her several contact procedures to use for later private communications with the owl spirit. What he could not grasp, as a traditional practitioner, was her Christian influenced reaction of "I'm not worthy!" and "But I didn't earn it!" nor was he unwilling to stop the other, mostly nonwhite participants from expressing their own disbelief at this "outsider's" experience.
When she sought further guidance from the Wiccan priestess who had given the introductory lessons, she was told that what happened could not possibly have happened to a noninitiate, much less a mere visitor to an Amerind rite. Even if she had been a Wiccan initiate, she would have had to be an initiate of at least second degree attainment.
Consequently, by the time she talked with me, her underlying belief that she was not spiritual enough to have earned" not only the attention of but a gift from deity had combined with these negative and unchallenged evaluations from both the other Yuwipi participants and the priestess. The combination created a situation that required almost six months of counseling plus some hands on magickal training until she could happily and effectively incorporate Earth religion practices smoothly and productively into her life and regain the "coming home" feeling she had had at the time that she attended her first Wicca classes.
Intellectually, people find the traditional Earth religion viewpoint that each individual is "all right" for being human and being on the planet regardless of his or her devoutness to be attractive. But it is emotionally difficult to internalize this viewpoint in the face of mainstream standards that subtly and pervasively communicate the idea that in order to be ''spiritual" or "worthy" of spiritual communication, we must somehow become something Other than what we are.
Thus, when we get ourselves in one or another situation where we are open and grounded be it an esbat, sabbat, sweat, vision seek, or merely some nonspecific grounding or centering procedure and have a "face to face" with the Mother or one or another of her agents, we have great emotional difficulty accepting that we did "deserve" the contact, regardless how much we may have hoped for it, and in spite of the fact that its happening is evidence of our "deserving" in the eyes of whatever beings were involved.
For traditional practitioners more or less uncontaminated by mainstream culture, the student who had the experience with the eagle spirit and the lady who had the owl experience did deserve what occurred, or it would not have happened, regardless of whether or not priests or anyone else including the recipients could see or explain exactly how it came to be deserved or earned.
As a summary of the discussion to this point, if you decide that Wicca or some other Earth religion feels right somehow for you, that feeling is probably accurate; however, that does not mean that at the point where you are beginning to truly connect with the Earth and the Mother, you will not have one or another experience that may be a real shock to the unrecognized, inculcated beliefs that you got by osmosis merely by existing in this place and time. This is true regardless of your genetic heritage white, red, yellow, black, or tan. If you were not raised in a more or less traditional tribal environment of some kind, truly "getting back to the earth" may well include some surprises, no matter how right it is as your personal path.
One of the more difficult things for a modem North American who gets involved with any form of Earth religion Wiccan, Druidic, Amerind, or any other is the difficulty of crediting the manifesting of spirit beings, call them divine or otherwise, as real and actual in the external environment, especially if they manifest without your having done some complex or age old ritual "by the book." In traditional teachings, if you experience some manifestation in your external environment, then that did happen as perceived without regard to whether or not some authority could explain "the whichness of the what" of it in terms of the known mechanisms of the material side of the Universe.
As an eight year old ranch kid in northwestern Wyoming in the mid 1940s, I had been impressed with the idea that sheer survival in the mountains depends on one's trusting the evidences of one's own senses. Therefore, I was sure that whatever "thing" larger than me that one evening leapt across a small campfire at me as I was looking across the valley in the dusk after a long day working as part of a haying crew was not merely a fantasy. My horse, tied to a tree some thirty yards away, was seriously upset and wanted to leave forthwith, clearly indicating he also had experienced that presence as reality, whether or not it had a physical body. It was almost four decades later that an Earth guardian spirit more or less humorously answered, "Woke you up so you could get Here, didn't it?" when I thought to inquire if that event had been for some purpose of the Mother's.
Because of most urban dwellers' cultural backgrounds, Wiccan groups (depending on the group, of course), may be easier on your systems than undertaking to jump into Amerind or other tribal practices, since many of the Wiccan groups, particularly those tracing their lineage to Alexandrian or Gardnerian approaches, have some pre-initiation procedures and contemplations that will help you identify and modify some of the aspects of your social conditioning that might otherwise get severely jolted by real experiences with the Mother and her agents.
Another concept that can be both fascinating and troubling for a modern person is the matter of learning and using "magic," or "magick," as many practitioners now spell it in order to differentiate it from stage magic. According to many tribal traditions, two sciences came into being at the time of Creation: religion, which is the study of humanity's relationships, collectively and individually, with those other spiritual beings who are part of the spiritual ecology of our environment; and magick, which is the study of spirit abilities and the applications of those to the handling of the energies of Air, Fire, Water, and Earth in both our daily affairs and our religious communications with deity, a science often referred to in older traditions as being necessary to the effective practice of any religion.
If we take the view that deities are spirit beings who have evolved to a higher and different level of existence than that of humans, then if human prayers and invocations and so on are to, in fact, reach the intended recipient, these messages must be sent in a directed manner with particular energies. just as if you were to undertake to telephone someone, you must set up certain energy frequencies in the telephone system that will cause the intended recipient's telephone to ring and establish an "energy bridge" with your telephone.
The ancients were also aware that in order for our level and the deity levels to interact without seriously disturbing the balances between the various existence levels, we need to make the energies of this level available to deity for use in communicating and acting in our levels in order that our level not become overcharged and the deity levels drained. In this connection, you might find it interesting that some esoteric Christian traditions view the "Lord's Prayer," given by Christ to the disciples, as an instruction in how to pray: what energies to take in, how that is to be done, how the energies are to be "programmed" so as to carry the message, and how the energies are to be released so they will go to the intended recipient. It is only superficially a suggestion as to what one is to pray for or about.
Traditions that discuss magick as the science necessary to effective religious practice also teach that it is proper to use magick in everyday life for self balance, self protection, healing, and providing of necessary food, clothing and shelter for oneself and for one's community, with this being done either by individual procedures or by group rites and rituals. depending on the need and the circumstances.
While tribal peoples learn to consciously recognize and handle the basic Air, Fire, Water, and Earth energies as just a normal part of life from the time of conception onward, our cultural system has a history of negating and invalidating not only existence of the energies themselves but also our human competence to handle them. It expends large amounts of energy suppressing the knowledge and practice of magick up to and including in some cases torturing and killing anyone who manifested abilities in magickal technology. All this leads to an almost inborn avoidance of the conscious developing of one's natural human magickal awareness and abilities.
Several years ago, I was struck by the response of a Central American shaman, interviewed in the magazine Shaman's Drum, that summed up the situation as I have experienced it. The interviewer asked what the shaman thought of the practice of magick in North America, and he replied that it terrified him because in North America, no one believed in magick, so no one understood it, and everyone was doing it.
Too many modern Wiccan priestesses and priests lack sufficient real magickal training to even enable them to perform effective religious rites, much less utilize magick effectively on a moment to moment, day to day basis. A few years ago, several of my more experienced students were invited to what was advertised as a traditional Wiccan Hallowmass, to be led by a supposedly well trained third degree priestess and priest, the ritual to be a "full cast challenge circle" open only to experienced Witches.
Such a procedure is usually only used when there are very important and high energy rites to be performed. Participants wait outside the ritual circle while it is first cleansed by the operators with the energies of Air, Fire, Water, and Earth; then the operators construct energy walls, one with each element, enclosing the circle, following this by drawing on the floor or ground with a knife (athame) or sword an electric blue energy line with an entry left temporarily unsealed at some point in the perimeter, usually at the northeast, the purpose being to wall off the circle from the external environment in both the material and the spiritual levels of the Universe.
The waiting participants then approach the entry from outside the circle, are stopped there by a knife pointed at the heart, and asked one or more questions that must be answered correctly in order for them to be allowed into the circle. The challenge generally used to ensure that no one who has issues with other participants or who has reservations about participating will be in the circle. Once all are within the circle, the "door" is closed by completion of the electricblue energy line across the gap.
If you are not familiar with the Wiccan ritual calendar, Hallowmass is not just a New Year's celebration usually involving the invoking of the presence of the Goddess into the body of the priestess. It is also supposed to be the last time for the participants to communicate with and bid farewell to the spirits of any departed family or friends who have "passed over" during the year. The spirits of the departed are supposed to appear outside the ritual circle. In the Wiccan view, the delicacies of both of these procedures require a fully cast ritual circle. The invocation of guardian presences (Watchtowers) is not only important religiously but also magickally mandatory for the safety of all concerned.
At the Hallowmass rite to which my students had been invited, it became obvious that although the motions of circle casting had been done, no real energies had been laid down by the operators, and that the Watchtowers were merely thought form projections (visualizations) of the operators instead of being actual invoked guardian presences. Thus, there was no protection of the ritual area and participants against unwanted negative energies and improper intrusion into the circle by ghosts and other non-divine spirits.
As the ceremony progressed, not only did the ghosts of two departed suddenly appear inside the circle trying to attach themselves to their living relatives, but the out of body spirit of a living ex-husband suddenly showed up in the circle and undertook to attack his ex-wife. These manifestations were perceived by at least four participants, in addition to the three participants actually attacked. To make matters worse, the high priestess and high priest were apparently completely unaware of the intrusions until other people who had some real magickal training banished the intruders with "Get out!" commands reinforced by energy bolts thrown from their hands.
If the circle had been cast with real elemental energies, it should have kept the various spirits outside where they properly belonged; and if not, real Watchtowers would not have permitted either the ghosts or the spirit of the estranged living ex-husband to enter the circle.
Reconstructing the experience with my students, I verified that the operators had made all the right motions and said all the right words and so on that were called for in casting the circle "by the book;" however, they clearly had not done so from a viewpoint wherein magick, the Watchtower presences and other spirits were real outside of their own visualizations and intentions (read hopes). While such a "form without content" disaster is regrettable, it is a logical byproduct of the intense cultural brainwashing against
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