Losing My Religion

[poliphilo]

When 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.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

What you're describing is essentially a friendship.

We're all in this together, I think.

[oakmouse]

Friendship, yes, and also a healthy family. One of my deities is the uncle who knows how to do everything, another is a sort of grandfather, another is the loving but stern aunt who makes you deal with things you may not want to deal with but who also has reams of good advice to give, and so forth. They're more my family than my biological relatives are.