Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
You Can't Argue with a Good Metaphor
Learning to Think Pantheonically
Och, I still cringe to think of it.
Back when I still knew everything, I made the mistake of arguing theology with a Hellene elder.
I was talking gods.
He was talking pantheons.
“Oh, pantheons,” I opined, as if I had even the slightest idea of what I was talking about. “I just put together my own.”
(In defense of my callowness, I can only say that this was the prevailing attitude of the day.)
“If you take a head from one statue,” he said, “and a torso from another, and an arm from yet another, and a leg from somewhere else, and you put them all together: the result may be a sculpture, but it isn't a statue.”
For the ancestors, tribal people all, the concept of a “personal pantheon” would have been unthinkable, a contradiction in terms, even a betrayal.
Polytheism ≠ serial monotheism.
In the end, pagan thought is ecosystemic, relational, both vertically and horizontally.
In the end, there's no real viable long-term alternative to thinking pantheonically.
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