This week on public radio's conversation about
religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas:
Pagans
Ancient and Modern
Adrian Ivakhiv, an environmentalist at the
University of Vermont, was first drawn to Pagan
literature because of its strong emphasis on
ecology, the natural world, and a sense of place.
He's studied how ancient Pagan ideas are woven into
Western culture. And he believes that the modern
revival of Paganism is fueled by a hunger for sacred
landscapes what he calls "our global
condition of homesickness."
{This
is an encore presentation last broadcast in February
2007.}
Recovering the Layers of Original Depth and
Humanity
In its original sense, the word "Pagan"
simply referred to country dwellers or peasants.
Then, as early Christianity spread rapidly in the
urban areas of the Roman Empire, "Pagan"
became a negative term for those considered too
backward to embrace monotheistic faith.
Today, Paganism and Neopaganism are umbrella terms
for a vast array of loosely affiliated, new
religious movements that revive ancient polytheistic
ideas of Europe and the Middle East. There are an
estimated one to three million self-described Pagans
worldwide. But there is some overlap between these
traditions and New Age spirituality, a range of
practices that may touch as much as 20 percent of
the U.S. population.
For a long while, I did not know how to approach
this vast and loosely affiliated spectrum of
beliefs. Adrian Ivakhiv gave me a way in. He is a
young Ukrainian-Canadian scholar, an ecologist, and
an ethnographer of religion which means, he
explains, that he does not dismiss any religious
impulses without first understanding them. Where
Paganism is concerned, he also has a personal sense
of the pull of these ancient traditions, which have
appeared in new garb in contemporary lives.
At a young age, he was drawn to a defining impulse
of Pagan traditions their strong emphasis on the
natural world and a sense of place. Ivakhiv had
begun a love affair with nature that would lead to a
career in environmental studies. And he was filled
with curiosity about the sacred place of his
ancestry, Ukraine. But that part of the world was
closed to him until the Soviet era ended in 1989.
So Ivakhiv traveled instead to other parts of the
world revered as sacred imbibing the raw rugged
west coast of Ireland and Glastonbury in southern
England, where the legends of Camelot swirl amid
lush countryside and mysterious ruins. There, and
later in Eastern Europe, he became aware of how
Christian tradition was thinly overlaid upon ancient
ways of marking time and meaning with the cycles and
symbols of the natural world. He realized that
aspects of his parents' Eastern-rite, Catholic faith
with ritual, light, song, and symbol were in
part manifestations of this layering of history and
tradition. They were hints of how, from the
beginning, the fundamentals of monotheistic faith
mingled with Pagan insights and practices drawn from
everyday human life close to the land.
As it turns out, it is not difficult to find Pagan
impulses alive even in "old-time religion"
once you open your eyes and ears to them. There are
some wonderful "radio moments" in this
hour where sound works better than words. Adrian
Ivakhiv describes his time spent with gypsies and
wandering theatrical companies in rural Poland,
where troops of actors create song and story with
religious and Pagan overtones drawn from ordinary
life. And we play an old LP record of the late J.R.R.
Tolkien an eminent British Catholic writer
speaking Elvish, a language from his
Lord of the
Rings saga. The recently cinematized
Lord of
the Rings, like the Narnia Chronicles of C.S.
Lewis, creatively mingles Christian symbols of good
and evil with supernatural imagery straight from
Pagan mythology.
Indeed, as Ivakhiv points out, there is a fine line
between the mystery and awe that Western religious
traditions sanctify and the notion of magic that is
nurtured in Pagan and New Age spiritualities. He
speaks of how we commonly collect and cherish
objects as relics of the past or of those we have
loved: a lock of hair, a photo, memorabilia. We
experience in them a capacity to impart presence, to
evoke familiarity in unknown spaces, to summon
memories and emotions. Music has an effect on many
of us that one might call "magical,"
Ivakhiv points out; and isn't the brain itself
which we now know to be the alchemical center of the
memories and emotions that music can evoke a
magical organ?
There is a slippery slope to all of this, Ivakhiv
freely concedes. Once a person stops believing in
general sources of accepted wisdom, it can become
possible to believe in everything, without
discernment and wisdom. And Paganism is not immune
to the excess and distortion that can plague other
forms of religiosity. When Adrian Ivakhiv was
eventually able to travel to Eastern Europe, he
uncovered a dark side to the Pagan resurgence in
that part of the world a return to nature that
embraced a xenophobic, even racist, view of personal
and ethnic identity.
Adrian Ivakhiv suggests provocatively, nevertheless,
that the Pagan connection between identity and
ecology could open other, more generous
possibilities in modern lives. He wonders what would
happen if human beings cultivated a stronger sense
of shared reverence for the places in which we live
reverence for the land we inhabit, not simply
for our nation. Might that ground us in a shared
identity that could transcend the ethnic battle
lines that divide so many shared spaces in this
world?
I leave this program with the intriguing notion that
a 21st-century Pagan revival might, ironically, help
Christianity and Christian-influenced cultures
like the U.S. and Europe recover layers of
original depth and humanity. Thanks to all those who
suggested that this would be an interesting area to
explore. And we will do more.
I
Recommend Listening To:
Mortal
City
by Dar Williams
I love Dar Williams' song, "The Christians and
the Pagans," that warmly echoes some of the
themes in this program and brings them to life in
the sung story of a modern American family. A
section is heard in the show this week. Also, hear
and read the text of an eminently respectable
British hymn, "Jerusalem," that takes the
mingled Christian/Pagan lore of Glastonbury as a
backdrop. There is
a
slide show on the Web site this week, too, of
natural landscapes Glastonbury, Sedona, and
Slavic countries that Adrian Ivakhiv describes
as places of modern Pagan and Christian pilgrimage.
