Losing My Religion
Jul. 17th, 2007 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloWhen I left the Church in 1986 I wasn't yet ready to give up on religion, so I read lots of books and flirted with lots of spiritualities and wound up as a pagan.
It was the Goddess who drew me in. After all those years spent worshipping a masculine Deity some sort of balancing was needed.
For a while I was a pagan evangelist.
Then Ailz and I became witches and ran a coven. That was brilliant fun.
But somehow- and I can't say exactly how- the need went away.
If I say I grew out of it, it sounds patronising. But maybe we shouldn't be afraid to patronise religion.
The dangerous question is "Why?" Why am I wandering round this room naked with a sword in my hand? Why am I addressing the empty air in mock-Elizabethan English? Why am I wearing these papier-mache horns on my head and pretending to be Pan?
It's not that I became a materialist. I still think the universe is full of gods and spirits and ghosts. I'm one of them- and so are you and you and you; we're all working our passage. But I don't require sweet savours and people bobbing up and down in front of me- and I question the sanity and ethics of any spook that does.
I devised a Wiccan third degree initiation which ended with the candidate facing an unshaded window with her back to the temple. That was effectively the end of it for me. Look, I was saying to the candidate (but mainly acknowledging to myself) you don't need all that jiggery-pokery any more.
It was the Goddess who drew me in. After all those years spent worshipping a masculine Deity some sort of balancing was needed.
For a while I was a pagan evangelist.
Then Ailz and I became witches and ran a coven. That was brilliant fun.
But somehow- and I can't say exactly how- the need went away.
If I say I grew out of it, it sounds patronising. But maybe we shouldn't be afraid to patronise religion.
The dangerous question is "Why?" Why am I wandering round this room naked with a sword in my hand? Why am I addressing the empty air in mock-Elizabethan English? Why am I wearing these papier-mache horns on my head and pretending to be Pan?
It's not that I became a materialist. I still think the universe is full of gods and spirits and ghosts. I'm one of them- and so are you and you and you; we're all working our passage. But I don't require sweet savours and people bobbing up and down in front of me- and I question the sanity and ethics of any spook that does.
I devised a Wiccan third degree initiation which ended with the candidate facing an unshaded window with her back to the temple. That was effectively the end of it for me. Look, I was saying to the candidate (but mainly acknowledging to myself) you don't need all that jiggery-pokery any more.
