All Our Relations: Pagans and the more-than-human world.

For aware Pagans the Sacred encompasses us all, rivers and mountains, oceans and deserts, grasses and trees, fish and fungi, birds and animals. Understanding the implications of what this means, and how to experience it first hand, involves our growing individually and as a community well beyond the limits of this world-pathic civilization. All Our Relations exists to help fertilize this transition.

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Gus diZerega

Gus diZerega

Gus diZerega DiZerega combines a formal academic training in Political Science with decades of work in Wicca and shamanic healing. He is a Third Degree Elder in Gardnerian Wicca, studied closely with Timothy White who later founded Shaman’s Drum magazine, and also studied Brazilian Umbanda  for six years under Antonio Costa e Silva.

DiZerega holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from UC Berkeley, has taught and lectured in the US and internationally, and has organized international academic meetings.

His newest book is "Faultlines: the Sixties, the Culture Wars, and the Return of the Divine Feminine (Quest, 2013) received a 'silver' award by the Association of Independent Publishers for 2014. It puts both modern Pagan religion and the current cultural and political crisis in the US into historical context, and shows how they are connected.

His first book on Pagan subjects, "Pagans and Christians: The Personal Spiritual Experience," won the Best Nonfiction of 2001 award from  The Coalition of Visionary Resources. 

His second,"Beyond the Burning Times: A Pagan and a Christian in Dialogue" is what it sounds like. He coauthored it with Philip Johnson. DiZerega particularly like his discussion of polytheism in Burning Times, which in his view is an advance over the discussion in Pagans and Christians.

His third volume, "Faultlines: The Sixties, the Culture War, and the Return of the Divine Feminine," was published in 2013 and won a Silver award from the Association of Independent Publishers in 2014. The subject is obvious, and places it, and the rise of goddess oriented spiritual movements and our "cold civil war" in historical context.

His pen and ink artwork supported his academic research in graduate school and frequently appeared in Shaman’s Drum, and the ecological journals Wild Earth, and The Trumpeter. It now occasionally appears in this blog.

I was just in a rather dispiriting discussion of sexual predation in the Pagan community, sparked by an interesting piece in the Wild Hunt. The article was good. which is more than I can say for some of the discussion that followed. 

    The piece was about the decline of nudity at Pagan events and the reasons for it.  But much of the discussion shifted to the related but different issue of why many women felt uneasy or defensive when sky clad at such events.  Despite all the energy and more than a little venom that accompanied that discussion, one important issue remained unaddressed.

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  • Gus diZerega
    Gus diZerega says #
    Not at all sure what you mean here.
  • Gus diZerega
    Gus diZerega says #
    Greybeard- I have not known any women such as you describe. None. As to the latter, I agree with you. The festivals you descr
  • Greybeard
    Greybeard says #
    "I have not known any women such as you describe. None," Gus "What is abstractly wrong, and which we would condemn if done by so
  • Aryós Héngwis
    Aryós Héngwis says #
    Greybeard, I'd urge you to avoid derailing the topic. Gus diZerega's post about how Pagan festivals can better promote a culture o
  • Constance Tippett Chandler
    Constance Tippett Chandler says #
    We are not living in post patriarchy society, and we are not better than every one else's religion because we are Pagan. We have
A review essay on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s "Braiding Sweetgrass"

The lost world

Our EuroPagan traditions were last practiced centuries ago. Traditions that had developed in an unbroken sequence since the Pleistocene are gone. Some folklore, myths and sagas have come down to us. Some writings have survived, especially from Greece and Rome. These bits and pieces remain, but like fossils, they are far removed from their ecosystems and relationships. 

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  • Jamie
    Jamie says #
    Mr. diZerega, Thank you for sharing an insightful review of what looks to be a great book. I will definitely add it to my wish li

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Religion as Sacred performance art

 

My first essays tried to establish two important points about Pagan religion, and to some degree religion in general.  My third ties them together. 

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  • Gus diZerega
    Gus diZerega says #
    Yeah, when academia gets involved there are costs as well as benefits, and expanding religious and spiritual terms to encompass th
  • Luan Makes Marks
    Luan Makes Marks says #
    Thanks for your thoughtful response. I have observed the negative feedback on ritual only occasionally, but it exists in the dial
  • Gus diZerega
    Gus diZerega says #
    Thanks Luan- I agree completely. When I first became a Pagan I worried about the 'messiness' of our beliefs. It was when I first
  • Luan Makes Marks
    Luan Makes Marks says #
    Gus, there were so many ways I was moved to respond to this, thanks for that. I used to say that my studies were positioned at the
  • Gus diZerega
    Gus diZerega says #
    I agree with you about the importance of having a teacher and the skills required. (When I was in grad school I felt every depart

My religious practice is mostly Wiccan.  Were I practicing a Heathen, Celtic Reconstructionist, or some other NeoPagan tradition, my examples would differ but I think my point would remain the same. 

Wiccans have a primary pantheon of two major deities, the Lord and Lady. We also have a number of mythologies describing these deities’ relationships. Taken literally they are not consistent with one another.  In some but not all Wiccan traditions She is viewed as having three guises: Mother, Maid, and Crone.  Sometimes She will have three dimensions but not as mother, maid, and crone, as with Hekate.  Sometimes She is treated as a single goddess.  The Horned Lord is sometimes seen as the Oak King and the Holly King.  At the solstices they engage in ritual combat, dying to be reborn.  In other Wiccan contexts and traditions He is treated as a single deity, and sometimes as an aspect of a more inclusive deity. 

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It used to be simple. Wiccans and NeoPagans in general were polytheists in contrast to Christians and other mostly monotheistic religions.  NeoPagan polytheists usually spent little time on theology and considerably more creating and practicing rituals.  Most of us became Pagans by virtue of personal attraction enriched by our involvement with a teacher or a coven or similar group.

Today many NeoPagans first learn about our traditions from books or the internet.  The net in particular has expanded easily available information about our religion but at a cost.  That cost is to be severed from NeoPagan history and practice except as available through pixels or the printed word.  Instead of starting with learning and practice with others and then studying written sources, many NeoPagans now go from the study of texts to practice. They hope to interpret experiences they anticipate having through the texts they have read rather than judging whether the text illuminates or contradicts the experiences they have had.

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  • Gus diZerega
    Gus diZerega says #
    Hi Rebecca- I agree with you. I tried to make it clear that there are not enough qualified teachers and that hopefully the growth
  • Rebecca Kinney
    Rebecca Kinney says #
    Just to point out, as a fairly new Pagan(in my thirties, not a teen), finding those who are willing to communicate in person is to
  • Greybeard
    Greybeard says #
    As a resident of the Eastern Washington scablands I can relate. I have often complained about the bias of "educated" men who dis
  • Heather Freysdottir
    Heather Freysdottir says #
    *applauds* I agree, and I look forward to your next post.
  • Kristina Galbraith
    Kristina Galbraith says #
    Thank you for writing this. There are so many times I have been told I am not a "real" Druid because I havent been approved by som

         This is part III of what will be a three or four part series on the social implications of Pagan religion. 

         Some Pagans probably found my previous essay on alternative forms of economic organization,    such as the Mondragon workers cooperatives, far removed from a strictly Pagan site’s expected interests.  At first glance it does seem far removed.  Here is why I think it is not and in fact goes directly to who we are.

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  • Jamie
    Jamie says #
    Mr. diZerega, Thanks for another great post! Two things: You've reminded me of why I cancelled my subscription to The Economist,
  • Jamie
    Jamie says #
    I'm also a big fan of silent film generally, and Fritz Lang's German stuff in particular. I'll remember your post the next time I
Business as if human beings mattered more than profit

Capitalism seems invulnerable today not because anyone likes it, informed decent people do not, but because it is hard to imagine a realistic alternative. State socialism failed, and failed in a horrible way.  Going back to the land is impossible for more than a relative few of us.  Markets work better than explicit controls and markets seem inevitably to generate capitalism.  We seem trapped. 

But markets are not as predictable as economists claim and most economists confuse their theoretical categories with the real world of men and women. Consider the Mondragon cooperatives   in the Basque country of northern Spain. In September, 2012, I had the opportunity to visit these cooperatives in September of 2012 as part of an annual study group organized by the Praxis Peace Institute.  Given all that I had heard, I felt that while I could not easily afford to go financially, I could not afford not to go intellectually. 

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  • Stifyn Emrys
    Stifyn Emrys says #
    Intriguing analysis. It seems to me you've put your finger on a weakness of corporate capitalism as practiced in the United States

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