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22 June 2007
Solstice encounters 2007
Lithuanians roll in the morning dew at sunrise on the summer solstice. Other peoples took baths at this moment. These aquatic associations with midsummer's survived with the identification of this time as the feast of John the Baptist. When Caesar reformed the calendar, the summer solstice coincided with the 24th of June. Because of minor errors that culminated with the adoption of the Gregorian calendar that we all use today, the solstice itself occurs a few days earlier than it did with the inauguration of the Julian calendar. For us in London, the bathing rites occur at 04:45. Not until approximately twenty minutes later are we able to see from the Albert Bridge the sun rising over the rooftops of Pimlico.
And so began our day. Finding our jumbo cappucini took several hours more before cafes would open. Originally we thought to spend part of the day at the National Galleries at Trafalgar Square, but all the predicted rain for the day never materialized, and we used the outdoor gift of clement weather to visit the ancient shrines, groves and luci we know in the City. These days, I find the frequency of off-season weather forces one into attempting to discern new patterns than those we have previously been able to read. These will be doubtlessly destructive in some sense, as change inevitably is. I'm thinking of the buggy-whip makers and what became of them. As there is no limit to pagan profusion, perhaps there is no structure to be found in the analysis of our world. Do we then opt for the fixed, closed, safe and, vis-à-vis the human potential, hexed? Or do we simply surrender to the wonder of it all? Without question, there is risk and perpetual doubt with freedom, but for us as a species, what other choice is there? The structure might only be the verbal forms we use to describe the unstructured.
These solstitial reflections arose when I began to ponder on astrology as the study of Earth through her halo and, especially, on the divide between the 'planets' when interpreted, respectively, by Western and Vedic astrological perspectives. For the West, Jupiter and Venus are benefics; Mars and Saturn, malefics. Perhaps that feeds into our Western cultural fears of Martians as potential enemies. Frequently, Venusians are pictured as more benign. Vedic astrology, however, views both Saturn and Venus as malefics, and those from the East might be predisposed toward being more suspicious in any Venusian encounter. Differences such as these lead me to conclude that for any success of cultural paganism there must be a transcending of regional and ethnic differentiations. Ultimately, this means everyone comes to the conference table.
As the solstices are pagan festivals, naturally my musings yesterday turned frequently to an appraisal of paganism itself. When we talk about religion, we are primarily dealing with the realm of fantasy-fiction. Each religion is a particular fantasy-fiction option. Some are more commensurate with human aspiration than others. Personally I find Christianity and its Abrahamic cousins as forms of cultural neuroses. Our linguistic ancestors understood the 'asurian' to be something that is antithetical to human existence. Reifying it as a god or God, the Christian offshoot of this line of thought holds that this entity claims to have married humanity in that unique form of Christ. The pagans' task, therefore, is to rescue Christ from his Herculean burden, that is, to take him off that eternal cross.
OK, how did I get to this way of thinking? My story, in answer, involves dedicating myself to the maintenance of a 1960s countercultural state of awareness. I do this generally in line with observance of the Roman festival calendar upon which I happened fortuitously to stumble once upon a time. I have since that day found the calendar to provide a pattern that allows an attunement with the wonder while also maintaining a foot on the joys and trials of practical incarnation. This is paganism. It is a challenge to the way society currently and perhaps traditionally has viewed things – viewed and valued. While Nietzsche's inversion of values may be too extreme, we might instead allow the individually identified components of value simply to flourish organically – letting them come together naturally. Rather than an autocratic monarch, we might think of god as a farmer. We as a species who embody values, let god and his children nurture us as the farmer grows a favourite crop. The physical growth process itself is our responsibility alone. The gods might assist us as the farmer cultivates what she or he wishes to grow, but the expansion dynamic is our being itself.
Admittedly, this metaphor suggests that the irrational will in some sense eliminate some growth as if it is weed. Is this not the risk of life itself? My wish is for a re-writing of history on a different value basis – perhaps one that has practical incarnation as its foundation. True enough, the leaping off into any eternal abyss is a terrifyingly fatiguing process. In that leap, it is not the void that we trust but the flow that intersects with it. Not all pagans are atheists, but pagan atheism is not believing in the gods but still orienting toward them as benign, positive, encouraging farmer-nurturer possibilities rather than as demonstrable, empirical realities sui generis.
Rome upheld her earliest foundations as an ideal. In many respects, this is little different from the ideal of the Founding Fathers America. In both cases, these may be propaganda creations of the imperial impulse of any ascending society. Or, is there even so a more local, even rural remnant that is still to be found in small town America – one that yet upholds those earliest of values upon which the nation was founded?
In accepting what might be termed the 'spiritual anarchy of paganism', there is certainly the acceptance of instances of human creative passion along with organic flow. I believe it all comes down to a conflict between the strictly provincial and the cosmopolitan. The problem occurs when provincial figures go off to being war-lords and emperors – otherwise known as bullies. Worst, of course, is when the state itself becomes the bully.
In the course of our day and its stream of enjoyable encounters with people we came across in the process, I was able to re-realise once again what an absolute luxury it is to wash with soap and warm running water. How often do we simply take something like this for granted? It may be when this is not available that we come to appreciate it as the great gift it is. It was the Gauls who developed soap. Before they learned it from the Celts, the Romans did not have soap. I like to think that Celtic spirituality is aligned, as is Shinto, with cleanliness and purity.
But in any event, initiation is the heart of ritual: wishing, health, wonder, initiation. For the pagan, the transcendent experience is always part of an initiatory ritual. My own trust is with the impulse of the multiple in place of God or Goddess. And the numerous invisible is what lurks beneath so much of civic society today, that is, as an old intuitive sentiment – whether consciously or not – that still celebrates the ancient holy days. Along the Strand and Fleet Street run two ley lines which may be considered as gratuitous flows of energy – gratuitous as opposed to one acquired through the outlay of physical labour. The ley line is an imaginary invisible connection that flows through churches, megaliths, holy wells and/or various sacred points, that is, those encouraging venues for transcendental experience. Associated with saints and deities which are themselves vehicles for sacred archetypes, ley lines, shrines, etc. delineate patterns within which change might occur. The calendar likewise concerns the potential repeatable. The interstices of the festival calendar embrace vertical/synchronic vision. It is in this way that a sacred calendar becomes a tool for the acquisition of insight and transcendental vision.
We ended our external gavotte in St. James Piccadilly for an Isis Ensemble that included music of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Glazunov, Pärt and Shostakovich. Wandering around this magnificent edifice, I was reminded of the genius of Christopher Wren (there must be some Wren misses, but this is not one of them) and that this was the church in which William Blake was baptized. Detectable here and there is the inchoate searching of much contemporary liberal Christianity. In its own way, it is trying.
Lovely phone conversations once home with John, Monica, Robert and Stefanie. And these days, almost at every turn, one is re-confronted with la sophistication française. Despite the embarrassing shenanigans of Sarkozy and Royal, the French know and simply accept the keeping of the private life out of the public/political arena. How refreshing this is!
We have had the luminescent culmination. May what Richard likes to call 'the eternal summer' follow now in due course.
Pace amoreque deorum,
Michael