Land, Sky and Sea

From my earliest memories, I have felt both connected to and overwhelmed by the world around me. The roaring wind. The vast sea. The limitless reaches of the sky. This sense of connection is one of the things that first drew me to Druidry. I do not claim to be an avid outdoorsman, because I'm not (although sometimes I want to be), but I do attest to a feeling of continuity with nature.

I am not quite finished reading Emma Restall Orr's The Wakeful World, but I can say that her argument for animism makes sense to me, and puts a context around this feeling of connectedness. As she presents it, animism is the idea that all of nature is minded. Everything, even the things we don't perceive as animate, has some sort of perception and a place in the vast grandeur of nature.

I will have more thoughts on this soon, but I want to finish the book before I say too much. For now, I can say that it provides an elegant philosophical basis for pagan religion, and can enrich one's practice.

Playing in the Mud

I’ve had a lot of signs about mud lately.

I’ve been reading about animism, and am currently about 2/3 of the way through the marvelously dense The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind and the Self in Nature, by Emma Restall Orr. It’s giving rise to a new appreciation for nature and a desire to spend more time out in it. Then, last Saturday, a seer at the Grove suggested the same to me, without knowing anything of that recent reading and thinking.

While listening to an old episode of Druidcast, I encountered the song “Spirit and Soul and Handful of Mud,” by James J. Turner, which speaks powerfully to that same impulse.

Also, for the past few months I’ve felt some interest in Cernunnos, a deity whose wildness appeals although I have had no prior relationship with him. 

Today, I plan to make offering to him during ritual and try to open that door a bit. My practice has been centered on the intellectual and practical for a while. Now, the time feels right for earthiness.

The Love of Destiny

I just finished reading a deceptively short book – deceptive because despite its length (well under 100 pages), its ideas are an important contribution to polytheistic religion.

"The Love of Destiny" by Dan McCoy draws on the mythology of the Icelandic sagas to illustrate animism – the view of the world as infused with sacredness, contrasted with the monotheistic concept of the world as profane, separated from the divine. While the book is not specifically about animism, this pervasiveness of the sacred in the natural realm reflects that philosophy.

In McCoy's definition, "monotheism" and "polytheism" are less about the number of gods, more about the perception of the physical universe. In a few pages he ably sets up these definitions, describes the dominant monotheistic groups (including modern science) and contrasts them to polytheism and, more importantly, the understanding of the divine that undergirds polytheism. As McCoy sees it, monotheism, envisioning the divine as something apart from the material universe, lends itself to binary division: sacred/profane, good/evil.

Polytheism, envisioning the divine as infused throughout the material universe, is not prone to such divisions. Morality is polyvalent. As an example, he retells the Icelandic myth of the Nordic god Tyr, normally as upright and honorable as they come, swearing a false oath for the purpose of binding the wolf Fenrir. While the oathbreaking was a dishonorable act by Germanic ethical standards, binding Fenrir was the greater good. This is an example of the "plurality of norms" that McCoy contrasts to the monotheist's "objective moral standard." In a polytheistic universe, indeed, one god's moral standards may differ from another's, yet this is not a contradiction.

The challenge for modern polytheists is to try to shake 2,000 years of monotheistic dominance and return to this earlier perspective. A "mere multiplication of the number of deities," as McCoy puts it, is only part of the difference.

McCoy is hardly the first contemporary writer to embrace and seek to describe animism. Emma Restall Orr's work is well-known, and McCoy's bibliography lists several other authors and works on the topic. What he adds uniquely is his tie-in to a specific cultural mythos to connect the dots. In the Germanic understanding of existence, time is cyclical. The story begins with the emergence of the universe from Ginnungagap, aided by Odin, Vili and Ve and the death of the giant Ymir. It ends with Ragnarok, and then begins again.

The final section of the book expands on this concept, suggesting a correspondence between the web of wyrd (destiny) and the web of nature, interdependence and interconnectedness integral to each.

Click the Amazon link above to support this site through your purchase, or buy it direct from the author (PDF format) here.