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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in conversion

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 Robin's nest with a brown-headed cowbird egg - Bing Gallery

A Religion of Converts?

 

One might, on the face of it, think that most New Pagans are—in effect—converts.

Some seventy-five years into the Pagan Revival, I suspect that, still, the vast majority of us didn't grow up this way. I myself was, as they say in New Crete, “hatched in the wrong nest.”

And yet, if they asked you, “When did you become pagan?”, would the most honest answer really not be, “This is who I've always been”?

In my travels, I've met a spare handful who became pagan as the result of (if you'll pardon the comparison) a “road to Damascus” experience: the overwhelming, life-changing epiphany of a god or, more often, goddess.

But the fact remains that, for most of us, becoming pagan is not so much a matter of becoming something that we weren't before as it is of discovering a name for who and what we've always already been.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

high school Archives - JSTOR Daily

 

I lost a lot of high-school friends to the so-called Jesus Revolution.

We were all searching for Truth in those days. (It's a very high school kind of thing to do.) My identity as a pagan was already well-formed by then; I wanted nothing of their neo-con return to their parents' ways that they thought was so radical—there was nothing revolutionary about the Jesus revolution—or their embrace of feeling at the expense of thought.  Me, I wanted both.

(For the same reason, I'll never forgive Bob Dylan for his sometime embrace of Christian Fundamentalism. The attractions of Christianity I can well understand, but why choose the stupidest kind? Some betrayals are deeper than others.)

Those were my friend friends. My thinking friend I lost to yet another conversion. There's no Existentialist like a high-school Existentialist.

J__ was a self-taught intellectual. (It certainly had nothing to do with our high school curriculum.) He kept preaching at me (gods, I hate preaching) about the great German philosopher Nitchsky, and Frenchmen Ondry Giddy and Jean (rhymes with "bean")-Paul Sart (rhymes with "fart"). “Who put the 'stench' in Existentialism?” I kept teasing. J__ was not amused. Nor was he impressed with my observation—pagans being the People of the Long View—that fad philosophies come and go, “Existence precedes essence” being only the most recent, and certainly not the last, of that bandwagon parade. No, he thought that he'd found Truth.

(Eventually, the need for community won out over conviction, and J__ went crawling back to his natal Evangelicalism. So time makes cowards of us all.)

So in those days, I was a pagan alone. The lake, the woods, and the deer in the woods pulled me through, as they always have, but my post-high school life became a quest for my People.

Not Truth, then, for me, but the True.

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If you haven't read Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake yet, you should. (You can read my review of it here.)

Imagine that you've lost everything: your property, your possessions, your family, your culture itself, even your very gods. This is the tale that Kingsnorth tells in The Wake. The year is 1066.

In despair, the novel's protagonist, Buccmaster, calls to the Old Gods for succour.

And lo! one of the Old Gods hears: hears and and answers.

One of English literature's fresh new voices, Kingsnorth has been a lifelong eco-activist, though in recent years, despairing of the possibility of reversing the momentum of ecocide, he has come to refer to himself as a “recovering environmentalist”. (“Environmentalism is the catalytic convertor on the silver SUV of the global economy,” he wrote in a 2017 essay.)

He's also a pagan—or was. “Call me a heathen,” he writes in “In the Black Chamber,” his striking essay on the Palaeolithic art-cave at Niaux and the nature of the sacred, adding parenthetically, “I'd take it as a compliment.” His collection of Green Men watch him as he writes. For a while, he was active in Alexandrian Wicca. (English by birth, he now lives in Ireland where, as I gather, Alexandrians are thick on the ground.)

Hence my surprise (and disappointment) to learn that he was recently baptized into (of all things) the Romanian Orthodox Church.

(His baptism, aptly enough, took place in one of Ireland's sacred rivers, the River Shannon: a more “Nature”-adjacent initiation than anything that most pagan groups have on offer, I suspect.)

“In 2020, as the world was turned upside down, so was I. Unexpectedly, and initially against my will, I found myself being pulled determinedly towards Christianity,” he said. “I started the year as an eclectic neo-pagan with a long-held, unformed ache in my heart, and ended it a practicing Christian.”

There, he found, the “ache” was “gone and replaced by the thing that, all along, I turned out to have been looking for.”

My heart hurts to hear his words, but I understand them.

Organized religion has a lot to offer that (let's be frank here) the paganisms mostly don't: stability, depth, commitment to community, a sense of continuity.

But in Kingsnorth's case, I suspect that the roots run even more deeply.

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Pagan News Beagle: Watery Wednesday, September 28

A Pagan online journal looks for fundraising help. A solitary practitioner talks about his conversion experience. And we take a look at the side effects of "astral bleed-through." It's Watery Wednesday, our weekly segment on news about the Pagan community! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!

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Proselytizing and the Limits of Hospitality

 Q: What's the difference between a Jehovah's Witness and a Wiccan?

A: Three Watchtowers.

 

The Jehovah's Witness stood at the door, holding up a copy of The Watchtower. My mouth literally fell open when I saw the title.

 

Isis Is Still Being Worshiped.

In this very room, as a matter of fact, I thought.

“I don't have time to talk, and I can't give you any money,” I told her, “but I'll be happy to take a look at your literature if you leave it here.”

Turned out to be an anti-Catholic tirade. Boy, was I ever disappointed.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    I'm sorry to hear that door-to-door religion-peddling isn't just an urban problem. Personally, I try to be as polite and as brief
  • Jenn
    Jenn says #
    I was stalked by JWs in my area for several months. We live very rurally, but they get out to us somehow. I handled it similarly t
  • beth steptoe
    beth steptoe says #
    i live deep in the 'bible belt' and they stop by every 8 to 12 months to make sure i'm still here i guess. They are never invited
  • Michele
    Michele says #
    I actually find them kind of creepy. They walk around in pairs, two young men in white shirts and black pants, nametags, and a bla
  • Holli Emore
    Holli Emore says #
    I agree with you, Anne. I took Steven's reference to be about Pagans who like to get into long arguments with, e.g., evangelical C

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
"The Bishop Had 17 Children"

In the year 981, the German missionary bishop Friedrich arrived in Iceland along with native guide and translator Thorvald Konradsson, an Icelander who had been converted while on the Continent.

Their mission failed because a skald (a word thought by some to be kin to the English word scold) composed a scurrilous little poem about the two of them which made them the laughing stock of Iceland. They were forced to leave the island in 986 because no one would take them seriously. You can't preach to people that are too busy laughing to listen.

Iceland officially accepted Christianity in the year 1000, largely because the Norwegian king held the sons of numerous prominent Icelandic families hostage: conversion by blackmail. Being Icelanders, of course, they added the parenthetical proviso: But if you want to keep offering to the Old Gods in private, well, that's your business.

But two lines of poetry had bought the Icelanders 14 years of freedom, and more than 1000 years later, we still remember them.

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How I became a Pagan #4 - Pentecost and Solstice Fires

 

The fog is thick and cold and I can smell the fire before I see it. Flames are lapping up tendrils of wet air. Robed figures stand solemnly around the fire. Then the ritual begins. A procession of the cross, red ribbons, and drums starts down the hill.

...
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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • sarel
    sarel says #
    I am inspired by your it's exactly what i am going through. I don't believe anyone has the truth as they say. In a process of beco
  • Joyce ORourke
    Joyce ORourke says #
    Sarel It is not having a truth as much as knowing what resonates with you. That is your truth which may be different from others.
  • Joyce ORourke
    Joyce ORourke says #
    I truly enjoyed your experience and the fact that you speak and write about them is owning to your personal truth. It is through y
  • Ilyssa Silfen
    Ilyssa Silfen says #
    Beautiful, beautiful post! My family is what we lovingly and jokingly call "Diet Jewish," so I was lucky enough not to be raised i

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