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 How might our Paganism influence our politics? A post I wrote before the election, was recently rebuked because I supposedly had no respect for nearly half the American people. Supposedly my views were alien to the Wiccan rede. I disagree as will be obvious, but my basic issue is not with the author, who I assume was sincere, but with a style of thought and the confusions it breeds.  While this post begins with a political question to answer it I will take a journey through some theology and some philosophy.

How big a tent?

My previous post on connecting with Pagan Gods and Goddesses involved seeking to establish relationships with them by becoming involved in ritual Pagan practices where such events happen, and sometimes are even expected to happen. Having such experiences means our spiritual reality roots are directly into our own experience of the more-than-human as not only sacred but also willing to enter into explicit relationship with us. Such encounters are both wonderful and deeply transformative. They also upset our life plans in many cases, although in my experience leaving us ultimately better off than had such things not happened.

But are there easier ways to at least get a sense of this greater reality? Ways where we can be more active in our search?

One of the most interesting discoveries I made about modern Paganism is the large number of people attracted to us because they feel at home here. They like the way we celebrate seeing ourselves as a part of a larger world of intrinsic value and beauty. Our society gives little opportunity for people with these feelings to come together in a community. We do, especially in our public Sabbat celebrations.  But they say they have never had a powerful spiritual experience, in whatever way they might define the term.  Some even describe themselves as Pagan atheists.

Their motive for identifying with the rest of us seems to me an excellent reason to consider oneself a Pagan. On the other hand, I am surprised at the numbers of us who have never had a personal experience with this enchanted world. This blog entry is dedicated to those who haven’t and wonder how they might

In the two months since the election my broader outlook has become less defensive.   I have begun turning from battling the nihilistic right to the vastly more rewarding challenge of helping build a attractive alternative to modernity’s collapsed moral foundations. That collapse facilitated the right wing’s attempt to impose traditional authoritarianism in both secular and religious guise. Now, instead of constantly uprooting the right’s intellectual and moral weeds I hope to help prepare the ground for new growth and beauty. We sure need it.

My reading has shifted from politics to exploring recent studies exploring how our world is truly conscious “all the way down.” So long as materialist reductionism dominate the intellectual conversation, with irrational monotheism as the alternative, we will be regarded as exotic outsiders, and not taken seriously.  This conversation desperately needs widening. More and more people are becoming aware of the inner bankruptcy of the Enlightenment project and its monotheistic alternatives, and so are open to views such as that of many Pagans if they are skillfully presented.

November 6^th the right wing attempt to take over the country shattered against the sea wall of our constitution and a damaged but still viable electoral system. I think their defeat will be ranked by future historians as their high water mark. They can still do great damage to our country, but their chances to rule us have collapsed. And they know it.

This development frees us from having to play defense all the time, allowing us to ask what positive values would we like to see better achieved in modern America? 

I have put a more complete argument for why I think Pagans should vote 100% democratic up on my personal blog.  Here at Witches and Pagans I compress it only to the issue of women and the feminine.  In reality that should be enough.  My basic point is not that the Democrats are awesomely good. In almost every case they are not.  It is that their opponents are awesomely bad, in every case.

                         The War on Women and the Feminine

  Pagan spirituality in almost all its forms praises feminine values, usually in through a Goddess.  The Republican Party has demonstrated over and over again that even during times of high unemployment, attacking anything that empowers women takes precedence over all other issues with the possible exception of increasing the wealth of the 1%.  Most of my readers will know of the recent comments by Todd Akin that women when raped cannot get pregnant along with Richard Mourdock’s ‘insight’ that when they do get pregnant from rape, it’s God’s gift. (Theological coherence is not a right wing trait.)

The Republican and right wing attack on a woman’s right to choose whether to be a mother when she finds herself pregnant is of long standing.  But this past year it has broadened enormously and ominously to assault anything that empowers women except as obedient servants to right wing values.

Two fascinating insights deepen our understanding of death and Samhain, which honors its sacred dimension.  In one of his essays on nature poet Gary Snyder made a point I have never forgotten. 

An ecosystem is a kind of mandala in which there are multiple relations that are all-powerful and instructive.  Each figure in the mandala – a little mouse or bird (or little god or demon figure) – has an important position and a role to play.  Though ecosystems can be described as hierarchical in terms of energy flow, from the standpoint of the whole all of its members are equal.

   . . . We are all guests at the feast, and we are also the meal!  All of biological nature can be seen as an enormous puja, a ceremony of offering and sharing.

As I was finishing a chapter in my forthcoming book, Faultlines, I encountered a compatible observation by Carl von Essen regarding what he called the “hunter’s trance.”  Von Essen wrote