The First Wise Crack
One of the few people on the Internet with a name rather than a handle, Gail Finke, writes:
I’m not familiar with Satanists, but what you say is true for the so-called pagans I’ve know and whose works I’ve read. They are not actually pagans. They don’t actually believe in any of the spirits/goddesses/etc., they just think they are cool and a nice, “spiritual” way to look at the world. One can argue that the REAL pagans didn’t actually believe any of that stuff either, which I think is likely true. But their outlook on the world was completely different. The main things modern people who call themselves pagan do seem to believe are typical New Age stuff — you can attract good things by refusing to think of bad ones, etc. Very much a “me and the Universe, and I’m pretty in with the universe” type of thing. Very self-directed.
My comment:
I know a lot of witches — more than I know Christians — and their profile matches what you describe.
Indeed, in the long story of my conversion, the first incident, the first crack of wisdom in the invincible wall of my atheism, was the thought that Christians were not the most absurd imaginable religious folly.
That crack appeared when I was talking to my best friend and college chum Willy the Witch one day, and the topic turned to metaphysics. I asked him if he believed in life after death, and found out that he did not really have a strong opinion one way or the other. (He may have since pondered the question and come to a conclusion, but at the time, he had no answer.) I asked a few other questions about religious topics, as whether the gods punish sin, or how it is best to live. Again, his faith in the pagan gods was curiously blank.
I realized that he was not a pagan, but (as he claimed to be) a Wiccan, a witch, one of the wisecraft.
To him, the spiritual world was just another material world, occupied by forces and energies to be manipulated to serve the will of the wizard. He did not say prayers, he cast spells, that is, he did not supplicate the gods, but cajoled or commanded them. If he meditated, this was done as a discipline the way a martial artist might do it.
He explained (if I understood the explanation — perhaps I did not) that the gods were simply masks that the magician applied to the forces of the otherworld, and if addressed by those names, would act in the way the personalities associated with those names would act. Thor represented a different form of the archetype of the storm-god than Zeus, for example a warrior and troll-slayer rather than a king. Again, perhaps what he meant was more subtle than what my atheist brain could absorb, but it sounded like he did not believe his gods were real, but that as useful fictions, the god could be used to trigger real supernal powers into acting in the world, they way a lightning rod can call lighting.
But the idea of a pagan who did not really believe in the pagan gods was staggering to me.
Don’t get me wrong–my friend is deadly serious about his religion or his craft, or whatever you want to call it. He has devoted his life to it. Every wall and corner of his house contains some form of bric-a-brac or hanging mask or image or idol to one daimon or diva or another.He married a nice Witch woman and has born a fine Warlock son, who is obedient to his parents. They take their traditions and gods seriously.
But his opinion of the nature of the reality of his traditions and god, what a philosopher would call his ontology, is radically different, and, to my mind, radically inferior, to the ontology of a Christian.
To him, magic was a technology.
(I say “was” because, and I wish to emphasize, I am discussing a discussion I had with a college boy. William is in his middle age by now.)
The metaphysics of this technology did not concern him. His attitude was pragmatic: whatever rites and rituals worked, worked, and no overarching theory was needed to explain why.
I realized that my hated enemies the Christians, for all their faults and hypocrisies and absurdities and enormities, at least had a set of arguable theological, moral, and metaphysical beliefs. Even the most unlettered Christian would be able to answer if I asked him whether there was or was not a Last Judgment and a Ten Commandments, a moral order to the universe and an eschatology. At that time, I thought what the Christians thought was wrong, ludicrously wrong, deadly wrong; but at least they had a ready answer if someone asked them about life after death, or whether fornication was a sin.
One may see in Christians the paradox of Saint George, warrior saints following gentle Jesus; but one never sees the paradox of lesbians praying to chaste Diana, the virgin goddess, to bless their marriage rites. I would never treat Diana with such arrogant disrespect, and I, as a Christian, think Diana is a damned fallen angel, whose nature I do not get a vote on. Even as an atheist, I thought she was a real literary or mythic figure whose nature was one I did not get to change to suit myself, ignoring the votes of tradition.
To them, it is not disrespect. Diana is only as “real” as they want her to be. The virginal chastity that brutally slew Actaeon is an optional characteristic, in the same way that, to the modern mind, one’s sex is an optional characteristic.
Christians think God is not only real, but absolute, the necessary being, the source of reality, like a light that shines into the cosmos and creates it. The pagan thinks the universe is a chaotic mystery, whose origins are obscure and whose ultimate ends are unknown, if indeed it has an end and is not merely an endless return, a cycle of cycles, and within that chaos the gods are thrown together for a time by chance or fate, brighter and higher beings than mortal men, but creatures like him, younger than the world and not makers of it.
What I sensed dimly in my conversation with my friend, albeit I did not have the vocabulary to put it into words, and what repelled me, was not his ancient devotion to obscure and occult mysteries, it was his very modern, nay, his postmodern belief that reality was something he got to decide, that the gods themselves were merely masks he could command the powers of the universe to wear. What repelled me was his nihilism, the belief that there is no absolute truth, or that, if there is, we owe it no loyalty.
Now, dear reader, you may not think it much that I came to the opinion that the Christians were not the absolutely worst and most foolish and evil mass of self-deluded dupes and madmen in the universe, but, keep in mind, that for the truly zealous and devout atheist, the fundamentalist atheist, any admission that Christianity has any merit at all, takes it out of the category of being condemned, and puts it back on trial.
You see the difference? If someone is dead and damned, they are beyond hope or prayer. If someone is alive, however, they are not yet damned, and their good acts and bad must be judged. This small crack was enough that my philosopher’s sense of honor required of me to judge the Christians by the evidence. The Christian ideas ceased being dead and damned to me.
The next crack was not for many, many years after.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
