The Modern Spirit of Paganism

When I embarked on this journey a couple months ago, I wasn’t sure where it’d take me. I sought a spiritual connection with nature in my quest for self-discovery and personal well-being. Studying traditional Buddhism, meditation, Zen, and dipping my toes into the world of witchcraft on a whim, I discovered paganism and a spark that has kindled since a young age. I happened upon a new world, though in truth, one much older than what I had known even in Christianity.

Be it Wicca or heathenry, hellenism or kemetism, or any other flavor of the pagan movement, they all provide at their core a means to tether our life to something more ancient and untamed, something two thousand years of spiritual domination by Christianity has squashed in the West: individual freedom and a sense of oneness with the world around us.

The words that pagan and heathen come from are rooted in the same idea: outsiders, country-folk, the people who lived outside the cities and towns, or simply civilians as opposed to soldiers in ancient Rome.

Then, as Christianity supplanted the old gods and Rome actively persecuted their worship, the cities became the centers of Christian faith. The last holdouts for the old religion were the farmsteads and frontiers of civilization, where the people had not forgotten their place as a part of the land, and where nature still reigned unbridled.

Just as then the old ways inhabit today a world where humans and nature are not two distinct, conflicting paradigms, but rather one harmonious entity. Do not fool yourself, nature may be cruel. The hungry wolves will not back from the calf for innocence’s sake. But it is balanced, it gives and it takes. It embodies the perfect imperfect. The gods are this for men. They are forces of nature we turn to for guidance, wisdom, and aid. But just as nature may be fickle, spontaneous, unruly, chaotic, cruel, or nurturing, so too may the gods. They are nature manifest, such that we may encounter and interact with and begin to understand them, and like us, they are imperfect.

Thus, when we reach for that connection as modern pagans, we seek the same connection our ancestors understood. What was once respected and feared as a force of life and death, now mastered and maimed, we yearn for as a place of respite and belonging. Humanity may have forgotten the world, but the world has not forgotten humanity. She seeks us, she whispers in the gentle breeze with the amber fall and pleads in howling winds with the thundering storm. We simply must listen.

Thus, I urge you as you step foot outside your doors to remember, the world is alive.