Freedom, Religion and Anarchy

What follows is my contribution to a debate on freedom, religion and anarchy on a pagan website.

Ana Says

There is a lot in your preamble that I simply refuse to accept, particularly your comments on ‘the rise of fascism’ in the United States. I would urge you to be highly economical in the use of that term. It is often employed as a catch-all for the things one does not happen to like, which only serves to rob the word-and the practice-of all meaning. In this regard you might care to note an example from German history. In 1930 President Hindenburg dismissed the democratically elected government in the Reichstag and replaced it with a minority administration, using the special powers granted to him under the Weimar Constitution. Next day Die Rote Fhane, the newspaper of the Communist Party, appeared with the banner headline-Faschismus ist schon da! (Fascism is now here). Three years later they were to discover just how wrong they had been.

Also, I do not think the point of paganism is to ‘fight Christianity’, as you put it, or to fight anything else, for that matter; the point of paganism is to be free, or at least it is for me. I’m not altogether sure what the ‘principles embodied by the Christian church’ are; for there as so many churches and so many principles! Even if I look at this in simple national terms, I can assure you that the principles embodied in your churches in the United States are quite, quite different from those embodied by the churches in England. Here the Church of England, the official ‘state’ church, is literally dying on its feet, with an Archbishop suggesting in his unique and muddle-headed way that there might even be a place for Sharia Law in English society!

You also suggest that Christianity represents a ‘danger to all non-Christians’. Well, not that I can see. It may be uncomfortable for some people in your particular community self-identifying as pagans and living alongside some of the more repellent evangelists; but that is a highly specific case.

I have to say that I found your dissertation on the ‘organised structures’ both confusing and breathless. Many of the features of contemporary life, the adverse features that you identify, were also present in the past, when the state structure, and the official religion, was pagan. Jihad, incidentally, has nothing at all to do with ‘state structures’ or even an organised church; it is a practice, a dimension, if you will, that emerged from a particular form of militant religious thought. Most contemporary jihadists have neither the support of the state nor organised religion. In this sense one might even describe them as the ‘anarchists’ of the Muslim world.

I would not worry too much about Christian fundamentalists in your country, nor would I suggest that turning towards anarchism is a solution to this particular problem. Do not let them pin you down; do not let them identify you as an enemy and as a social threat. They need this; they need to feel threatened to give energy to their forward momentum. If you raise a flag, saying that the point of paganism is to fight Christianity, is to fight the danger of Christianity, they will swarm towards you like killer bees. Rather, let them break on the rock of your secular constitution. That is your greatest strength and your shield; not anarchy.

Christianity and the Mother Goddess

The more I look into Christianity the more complex the religion appears. In some sense it really is not a monotheistic religion at all, despite all the subtle apologetics over the exact nature of the Trinity. Indeed, if one looks beyond this core theological concept, there is a clear pantheistic quality to the faith, certainly in its Catholic clothing, with saints and intermediaries of all kinds in a sort of mutation of a late pagan tradition. But the key-figure, the mother-goddess, if you like, is the figure of the Virgin.

I read Mary and the Making of Europe by Mari Ruben in the March edition of History Today, part of the argument she presents in her book, The Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary, which I am also reading.

The cult of Mary served so many different purposes. For one thing its spread across Europe from the eleventh century onwards helped give a universal focus to a Church that had been fragmented in its devotion to local martyrs and saints. For another Mary was a more accessible figure, more human, if you like, than the Father, the Son or the Holy Ghost. More than that, she was believed to possess forms of leverage unique to herself. After all, she was a mother, was she not, and what son can refuse a plea from his mother? There is a twelfth century French prayer which sums up this mood perfectly;

Whatever you wish
Your only son will give you.
For whomever you seek
You will have the pardon and glory.

It was to her that even the monks turned when others might have been uncharitable or unforgiving;

O blessed and most saintly Mary, always Virgin, I am thus afflicted in the face of your goodness. I am greatly confused by the abominations of my sins which have made me deformed and horrible in the eyes of angels and all saints.


Mary also served as a focus of late Medieval anti-Judaism. As Mary was the vessel of the Incarnation-a blasphemous concept in Judaism-she was often deployed as proof of the perversity of the Jews and an instrument for converting unbelievers in the miracle stories of the period.

So Mary became a friend to the errant, a confidant of both monks and nuns, the Great Mother, in some ways more important than Christ himself in terms of popular devotion. All this is quite remarkable when one considers how little she figures in the Gospels.

Madness and Inspiration

This is a contribution I made to a discussion on the difference between madness and inspiration, which also touches on the subject of Joan of Arc.

Yes, this is an interesting topic; I’m surprised I missed it up to now!

I suppose it would be possible to argue that such evaluations are determined by time and context; that what in the past might largely have been taken as some form of ‘possession’, divine or malign, is now more likely to be considered delusional. However, the division is not perhaps all that clear cut, in that people in the past were as aware of the nature of mental incapacity as they are today, although they would obviously not have used terms like schizophrenia. I suppose the point hangs on how meaningful a particular ‘revealed experience’ is to others, and how the person who has such an experience is able to relate to the wider community. There is one example that immediately springs to mind, that of Joan of Arc.

Right, first of all, I should make clear just exactly how I understand schizophrenia, what I take it to be. It involves not just hearing voices but hearing voices that are most often malign, in that the sufferer is being pushed towards ends that they do not desire and actively try to resist. It involves, moreover, a fragmentation of the personality, whereby the world is, so to speak, turned upside down: that which is real appears abstract and that which is abstract appears real. In the end there is no form of external communication, merely an interior monologue.

So, look now at Joan of Arc. She heard voices, yes, according to her the voices of Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret and Saint Michael. But these voices inspired her, inspired her to save France from the English. She was also filled with a sense of mission, of such strength that she, a seventeen year old girl, was able to convince the French nobility, the King himself, that she was divinely inspired, a remarkable enough achievement for a peasant girl in a feudal society. Quite simply, Joan, a witch to the English, inspired the French, so much so that, under her direction, the course of the Hundred Year’s War began to turn in their favour.

Was this the action of a schizophrenic? I rather think not. In the end it really does not matter if one happens to believe in the validity, or the source, of Joan’s visions; what matters is that they had a real historical effect. So, you might ask, was the rest of the community simply taken in by Joan’s ‘madness’, failing to recognise it for what it was? Ah, but you see, the French did recognise madness and the political effects of madness. The previous king, Charles VI, had descended into the deepest forms of madness, which came close to destroying the kingdom. Having fallen under one mad leader they were not very likely to rise under another.

Yes, Joan was inspired; yes her visions had a practical effect, though I myself am not prepared to speculate on the precise source of her inspiration, other than to say that witches can show power beyond imagination. :))