30 Jan The Spirituality of Self-Healing and Hatred
Traveling in neo-pagan circles years ago, I noticed several different “types” among my fellow travelers.
Some of them yearned only to worship deities: granted, multiple deities. But others wanted to be deities: at least, as performed in the practice known as “drawing down the moon,” inviting gods and goddesses to inhabit their bodies, use their voices and their limbs.
Whether or not one believed this was possible, the presumption and pomp and confidence were real. For these people, spirituality meant power, danger, transformation and adventure, of becoming bigger, stronger, wilder, greater than their usual workaday selves.
Not all those who preferred only to worship were alike. Some turned their devotion into display—composing complex rites ranging from operatic to alchemical; assembling lavish altars with exotic implements from distant lands and trendy shops; wearing the biggest, brightest and most pentagrams, crystals and crescent moons. Spirituality was a channel for their passion, creativity, and competitive edge, providing a sense of accomplishment.
Some worshipers were in it for the fellowship. Spirituality for them was shared experience, the mesmeric joy of voices in unison, rooms full of dancing feet. For them, shared glances—Do you feel it too?!—granted the grace of not-being-alone.
But other worshipers were visibly abashed, almost invisible among their gleaming, grapevine-stepping, bodhrán-beating, blurting-syllables-they-said-were-Sanskrit-and-Gaelic sisters and brothers. These silent types used dollar-store paring-knives as athames and burned birthday candles in flowerpots if they allowed themselves altars at all.
For them—OK, for us—spirituality was not a place for power, pleasure or proving ourselves. Rather it was a kind of otherworldly homeless shelter: crowded, certainly not ours and almost certainly impermanent, at whose door we queued humbly, half-expecting nobody to let us in. Allowed to join—by some mistake or miracle, we thought—rather than give ourselves fully to faith, we hovered always on the outskirts, waiting not for confirmation or community but for correction, criticism and exile.