THE APPEAL OF PAGANISM (SPIRITISM)

Spiritism is about managing the rewards and punishments of the Spirit world. Spiritists enjoy the fact that the benefits of the spirits often come immediately. In The Secret Ways of the Lakota, Black Elk, a Sioux Shaman, had written:

·       You don’t have to wait for five years…The spirit comes and takes me somewhere…They’re all relations: Grandfather, Grandmother…We’ve drifted away for thousand years. Now we have to return to our Grandmother and Grandfather.

Since Spiritism is about the benefits, each group swears by their own ways of deriving the benefits. Besides, since they are not locked into one holy book or even a series of books, they are free to pursue the benefits wherever the spirits might lead them. Sometimes, this requires a blind leap of faith. In Mama Lola; A Voodou Priestess in Brooklyn, anthropologist and ethnologist, Karen McCarthy Brown, decided that she had to take such a leap to truly investigate voodouism:

·       I realized that if I brought less to this Vodou world, I would come away with less. If I persisted in studying Vodou objectively, the heart of the system, its ability to heal, would remain closed to me. The only way I could hope to understand the psychodrama of Vodou was to open my own life to the ministrations of Alourdes [the priestess]. (10)

However, leaps are not without their costs. It seems that her leap had blinded her judgment:

·       Although the Iwa [spirits] who possess Alourdes are often called sen-yo (saints), they are not saintly types in the traditional Christian sense. For example, in stories about the soldier spirit Ogou/Saint James, he not only liberates his people but also betrays them. Ezili Danto/Mater Salvatoris, the mother, cradles and cares for her children but also sometimes lashes out at them in rage. The Vodou spirits are not models of the well-lived life; rather, they mirror the full range of possibilities inherent in the particular slice of life over which they preside. Failure to understand this has led observers to portray the Voodou spirits as demonic or even to conclude that Vodou is a religion without morality—a serious misconception. (6)

Is this a misconception? To entrust ourselves into the hands of “saints” who “lash out…in rage” is to accept deficient moral standards. If our “saints” act in destructive ways, it is arrogance to try to outdo them! It might also be taken as an affront to our “saints.”

What then did Brown find in Voodou that had enabled her to tolerate such inconsistencies? She explained:

·       No Haitian—certainly not Alourdes—has ever asked me if I ‘believe’ in Vodou or if I have set aside the religious commitments and understandings that come from my childhood and culture. Alourdes’s approach is, instead, pragmatic: “You just got to try. See if it works for you.” The choice of relinquishing my worldview or adopting another in its entirety has therefore never been at issue.

Voodou did not require Brown to compromise her beliefs or lifestyle. Instead, Voodou is all about the pragmatic benefits and not at all about inspiring the follower to live according to a higher moral standard. Instead, “You just got to try. See if it works for you.” It leaves us the comforting belief that we remain in charge. However, this requires that we close our minds.

In Soul Retrieval, Sandra Ingerman, a shaman, reaffirms that Spiritism demands us to pack away our critical faculties in favor of experience:

·       As you read this book and wonder whether or not what I am talking about is real, I ask you not to enter into a battle between the right brain [reason] and left brain [intuition]. Simply read the material and experience it!...Does the information that comes from the shamanic journey work? Does the information make positive changes in a person’s life? If so, who cares if we are making it up? (3)

However, the costs might not be apparent until much later, after we have become committed to the spirits and are no longer amenable to contrary evidences.

In Bringing Down the Moon, the late spiritist, Margo Adler, was explicit about spiritism’s rejection of truth. She affirmatively quotes a priestess:

·       It seems like a contradiction to say that I have a certain subjective [personal]  truth; I have experienced the Goddess, and this is my total reality. And yet I do not believe that I have the one, true, right, and only way. Many people cannot understand how I find Her a part of my reality and accept the fact that your reality might be something else. But for me, this is in no way a contradiction, because I am aware that my reality and my conclusions are a result of my unique genetic structure, my life experience and my subjective feelings…This recognition that everyone has different experiences is a fundamental keystone to Paganism; it’s the fundamental premise that whatever is going on out there is infinitely more complex than I can ever understand. And that makes me feel very good.

Why does personal “truth,” rather than objective truth (like gravity which pertains to everyone) make her “feel very good?” If there is no objective truth, then there is nothing to judge the priestess or to tell her that she is wrong. Paganism represents the freedom to do whatever “feels good.” Adler explained:

·       They had become Pagans because they could be themselves and act as they chose, without what they felt were medieval notions of sin and guilt. Others wanted to participate in rituals rather than observe themselves.

But perhaps our feelings of sin and guilt are our internal eyes that enable us to see and avoid what will harm us. They are a defense against the pursuit of immediate gratification, like eating 30 chocolate bars or sleeping with our neighbor’s wife, and even self-alienation.

While living in harmony with nature has many benefits, it will not heal our alienation from our own moral nature. However, Adler wrote:

·       Most Neo-Pagans sense an aliveness and “presence” in nature. They are usually polytheists or animists or pantheists, or two or three of these things at once. They share the goal of living in harmony with nature and they tend to view humanity’s “advancement” and separation from nature as the prime source of alienation. They see ritual as a tool to end that alienation.

Adler revealingly explained why pagans hate Christianity:

·       Polytheism [Spiritism] is…characterized by plurality…and is eternally in unresolvable conflict with social monotheism, which in its worst form is fascism and in its less destructive forms is imperialism, capitalism, feudalism and monarchy.

Why did Adler characterize Christian monotheism as imperialistic? The Bible claims to possess the truths of God. The truth, however, imposes restrictions on our thoughts, goals, and behaviors. It limits our choices and imposes feelings of guilt and shame, which is unacceptable to modern paganism. To explain, Adler quoted Lynn White:

·       “Christianity in absolute contrast to ancient paganism…not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends…In antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own…guardian spirit…By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feeling of natural objects.”

While the Bible does teach that humanity is God’s crowning creation, it certainly does not teach the exploitation of nation but the care of nature. Even animals were to be granted a day of rest (Exodus 20:8-11). Besides, the narrative that pagans had a greater respect and care for nature has been shown to be a myth. In “Whence the “Noble Savage,” Patrick Frank had written:

·       Scholars previously maintained that “European influence…shattered a delicate social balance that had previously existed, resulting in widespread violence.”

·       However, analysis of ancient burial cites demonstrate that the death rates of British Columbian Native Americans (27-33%) far exceeded even the violent death rate of 20th century Europe and the US (1%). (Skeptic Mag. Vol 9, #1, 2001, 54-60)

·       The Southwest is dotted with finds of people killed en masse…These indications of war, violent deaths, mutilations and cannibalism are form tribal societies that experienced no European or modern contact, thus contradicting the idea that peoples who were free from European influence lived relatively peaceful lives.

Spiritism is near-sighted. It is willing to sign a contract with their own blood. Since it values the immediacy of feelings over the broad contours perceived by the eye of wisdom, it falls into the first ditch.