Pagans, Peasants, and the Regeneration of All Things

It is easy to become despondent when surveying the current political and social landscape. For me, this despondency becomes all the greater when witnessing the theological complicity in these frauds and their manifold iterations—whether from the Blue Meanies writing for traditionalist Catholic blogs, from their lotos-eater counterparts at the other extreme, or even from much of what passes for more high-brow speculation on that one outlet that publishes the occasional interesting but for the most part just okay conference papers (most are high in the theoretical or abstruse but generally lacking in practical application.) Things are no better among the other Christian institutions, which manifest theme and variation on the same motif. But I’m with Mae West. I’m not ready for an institution. Turning to allegedly esoteric or otherwise alternative sources serves just as futile, enthralled as so many of them are to the totalizing demands of the political. So much fodder for malaise. So much.

One disturbing trend among Christian discourse these days is to speak disparagingly of “pagans.” I’m not sure what they mean by the term, other than that it functions as a convenient catch-all meaning “them.” This trend is as meaningless as it is tiresome, yet still motivated by the same political polarization as what we find in the vast field of current public discourse—and certainly underwritten by the primarily unconscious but nonetheless powerful Calvinist notion of being “the elect.” What begins as tragedy ends as farce. No one is more accurate than Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

I’m not sure what “pagan” means to the majority of those using the term as a pejorative. I don’t think they mean “neo-pagan.” It seems they intend something more along the lines of “nasty secularists” or something like that. Etymologically, the word comes from the Latin for “peasant” or “rustic.” As I’ve written many times before in this blog, I have no problem self-identifying as a Christian Pagan. In fact, I don’t see how someone can be a Christian without being a pagan.

To be a pagan, in my understanding, is to live in awareness and awe of both the created world and the spiritual world that stands behind and informs it. In biblical parlance, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you…. Consider the lilies of the field.” The audience Jesus spoke to was not comprised of elites or intellectuals, but to peasants, people in deep relation to the environment (shepherds, fishermen, vinters, farmers) and to craft (carpenters, weavers, potters). These peasants were pagans.

I think much of our current malaise and anxiety is not due to this or another person being elected to public office, but to our own estrangement from the cosmos, inner as well as outer. This estrangement did not occur with the last election. Rather, it occurred over time (from at least the 16th century with the first enclosure laws in Europe) but really gained momentum with the destructive winds blown by the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions which multiplied exponentially with the Information Revolution. And nowhere is this more evident than in farming.

February is kind of an exciting month at Stella Matutina Farm (where I live) as we start to order seeds and plan our gardens for the approaching growing cycle for our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), and I have had farming as well as poetry on my mind as of late. I’ve been teaching a course on Romanticism, and the insights of Goethe, Novalis, Blake, Wordsworth, John Clare, and their compatriots—all from the late 18th and early 19th centuries—speak to me (and us) of our estrangement from God and Nature and of the pathological conditions thrust upon us in the name of “progress.” For Blake, government and institutional religion were co-conspirators in this madness, as he writes in an incendiary proverb from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Prisons are built with the stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.” This is a hard saying.

The sympathies of the Romantics lay with the peasantry, thrown off the land by rapacious parliaments and undefended for the most part by their churches. Yet, even in the first half of the 20th century, there were those who could still see that is was possible to heal our disruption from the land, when many of ancestors were sold into slavery in the Egypt of wage-earning and never-ending debt, and who recognized the hidden and potentially irreparable costs of such “progress.”

One such figure was Rudolf Steiner. In his seminal lecture cycle on agriculture (given in June 1924, nine months before he died), Steiner spoke affectionately of what he called “the peasant wisdom”:

“When I was a young man I had the idea to write a kind of ‘peasant’s philosophy,’ setting down the conceptual life of the peasants in all things that touch their lives. It might have been very beautiful. The statement of the Count [Keyserlingk, on whose estate Steiner delivered the lectures], that peasants are stupid, would have been refuted. A subtle wisdom would have emerged—a philosophy dilating upon the intimacies of Nature’s life—a philosophy contained in the very formulation of the words. One marvels to see how much the peasant knows of what is going on in Nature.

“Today, however, it would no longer be possible to write a peasant’s philosophy. These things have been almost entirely lost. It is no longer as it was fifty or forty years ago. Yet it was wonderfully significant; you could learn far more from the peasants than in the University. That was an altogether different time. You lived with the peasants in the country, and when those people came along with their broad-brimmed hats, introducing the Socialist Movement of today, they were only the eccentricities of life. Today the whole world is changed. The younger ladies and gentlemen here present have no idea how the world has changed in the last thirty or forty years. How much has been lost of the true peasants’ philosophy, of the real beauty of the folk-dialects! It was a kind of cultural philosophy.

“Even the peasants’ calendars contained what they no longer contain today. Moreover, they looked quite different—there was something homely about them. I, in my time, knew peasants’ calendars printed on very poor paper, it is true; inside, however, the planetary signs were painted in colors, while on the cover, as the first thing to meet the eye, there was a tint sweet which you might lick whenever you use the book. In this way too it was made tasty; and of course the people used it one after another.”1

In the lectures, Steiner doesn’t call for a return to the past. Instead, he introduces a reimagined peasant wisdom intended to rehabilitate not only the land, adding tilth to depleted soils as well as health and fecundity to plants and animals, but also to human flourishing. In an amazingly prescient moment, he also predicted the pathologies currently afflicting the honey bee. Commenting on the then-revolutionary methods of artificial queening and artificial feeding, he had this to say:

“But there we come to the whole question of artificial beekeeping. You must not think that I am unable to see—even from an non-anthroposophical point of view—that modern beekeeping methods seem at first very attractive, for certainly, it makes many things much easier. But the strong holding together—I should like to say—of onebee-generation, of one bee-family, will be impaired in the long run.

“Speaking generally today, one cannot but praise modern beekeeping; so long as we see all such precautions observed of which Herr Müller has told us, we must admire them in a certain sense. But we must wait and see how things are in fifty to eighty years time, for by then certain forces which have hitherto been organicin the hive will be mechanized, will become mechanical.”

Called it.

Another one who called it was the British writer H.J. Massingham (1888–1952). Massingham saw all too clearly the pathologies and evils attendant to the removal of the peasantry from the land, and he saw the restoration of an authentic relationship to Creation as not only socially imperative but as the very heart of Christianity. Writing in 1942, Massingham, very much saw the hand writing on the wall:

“An alliance between forces of agricultural technology and big business with bureaucracy as their willing promoter has appeared whose professed object in its own words is ‘to overcome tradition’ and be rid of ‘out-of-date customs which delay progress.’ The abolition of private ownership in land; the destruction of ‘nuisance’ features in our countryside such as hedgerow timber, copses, hedges, lanes and the like; the abandonment of balanced farming for specialization in crop-production; the unlimited use of machinery and artificials; total nationalization accompanied by the profit-making as the sole stimulus to initiative in agriculture—these proposals are put forward, not by irresponsible paper-ideologues but by men of weigfht and authority in national affairs…. Their advocacy of ‘larger economic units’ represents the last stage, the final act, of the 18thand 19thcentury Enclosures.”2

And, in his upholding of a true Christian culture, he recognizes its symbiotic relationship to what is too often disparaged as “pagan”:

“Christianity would not have supplanted Paganism if its nature-worship had been true to the nature and adequate needs of Western man, while only history can show the dividing line when Christendom began to depart from Christianity, and to what extent the embryonic causes of that division have developed into the anarchic consequences of the 20thcentury. Nor can the Christian Faith (seeing there is no alternative to it) itself be rejuvenated unless it be equally shown that its own division from nature has pauperized it as an all-sufficient gospel for modern, grownup, Western man, wrecked in the bitter sea of his delusion of self-will. The pagan story of the Tree Iggdrasil, the Tree of Life, whose roots were in earth and topmost branches in heaven, prefigures that gospel.”3

I, for one, am proud to be thought of as a pagan. And, though I have a doctorate, I consider myself deeply ensconced in the peasantry. If one is neither a pagan nor a peasant, can one even dream of being a Christian?

So, please say a pray for my wife and me as we begin again our farming cycle, as we wait for the weather to break for the first planting, for our goats to start kidding, and the return of the bees. Then, do yourselves a favor: find a local organic or biodynamic CSA—and join it. May the Lord bless you and keep you.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1. Rudolf Steiner, Agriculture, trans. George Adams (Biodynamic Agricultural Association, 1958), 84–85; Beekeeping, trans. Marna Pease and Carl Alexander Mier (Steinerbooks, 1964), 15.

2. H.J. Massingham, The English Countryman: A Study of the English Tradition (London, 1942), 131.

3. H.J. Massingham, The Tree of Life (London, 1943), 16–17.

Anglo-Catholic Pagan: St. Robert Herrick

Corn Doll by John Benjamin Stone, 19th c.

As far as I'm concerned, Robert Herrick is a saint. He may not be known for his piety or his sanctity, but, God love him, he may be the most human poet ever. If ever I could, I would gladly live in 17th century Devonshire as a member of his parish. So, in the spirit of All Saints Day, here is an excerpt from my chapter on Herrick and the community at Little Gidding that appears in my book The Incarnation of the Poetic Word: Theological Essays on Poetry and Philosophy/Philosophical Essays on Poetry and Theology.

The critical history of Herrick’s folk religion embodies all of the problems of the religious nature of his verse. Is it Roman pagan? Nostalgically Catholic? Laudian Anglican? Does Herrick celebrate folk customs in his verse that he observed in his Devonshire parish? Or is he celebrating the Caroline court’s dilettantish and performative appropriation of all things pastoral? The real problem, I think, is in trying to pin Herrick down to a particular faction. His vision of Christianity is bigger than that—but it doesn’t include everyone. In particular, Herrick’s evocation of a communitarian spirit in his verse challenges the Puritan sourpusses who not only disliked feasting and frolic but wanted to—and eventually did— create laws that did their best to eradicate any and all delights connected to the Christian year. As Shakespeare’s Sir Toby Belch tells the pompous Puritan Malvolio in Twelfth Night: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”1 Many precisians, indeed, attempted to curtail the enjoyment of cakes and ale connected with merrymaking. Upon coming into power they erased as much merriment from the English year as possible—including the removal of Christmas as a Christian feast and holy day, which ruined in its wake the merry season between Christmas and Twelfth Night and also brought down maypoles and church ales in a ghastly resurgence of the same ethos inherent to the Visitation of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century.2 Ultimately, “upon 10 June 1647 Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, and all other Church feasts ceased to exist in England by both secular law and ecclesiastical ruling.”3 (It was in 1647, of course, that Herrick was ejected from his living at Dean Prior.) Puritans not only disliked these things because of their own anxieties about merriment: they especially hated them because they believed these observances to be “popish” and full of superstition.

Connecting merriment to Catholicism—and thereby to the worst sort of paganism—had become a pretty standard Puritan trope by the mid-seventeenth century. The Puritan controversialist Thomas Hall (1610–1665) plays on this theme in Funebria Floræ (published in three editions, 1660–1661). His zealous vitriol is patent:

“So that I would debauch a people, and draw them from God and his worship to superstition and Idolatry, I would take this course: I would open this gap to them, they should have Floralia and Saturnalia, they should have feast upon feast (as ’tis in Popery) they should have Wakes to prophane the Lords-day, they should have May-Games, and Christmas-revels, with dancing, drinking, whoring, potting, piping, gaming, till they were made dissolute, and fit to receive any superstition, and easily drawn to bee of any, or of no Religion: And this was the practice of the late Prelates, when they were bringing in Popery by the head and shoulders (as is made apparent to the world out of their own writings) they first caused the book of sports to bee read in all Churches for the prophaning of the Sabbath (a lesson that people can learn too fast without a book) that so they might fit the people the better for the swallowing of those superstitious innovations, which shortly after followed.”4

One can imagine the prelate Robert Herrick responding—enthusiastically— with “A toast!” This is precisely the function of his poetry.

Herrick’s poetry, of course, is widely acknowledged as celebrating the carnival aspects of folk and religious life, even to the point where some question his religious sincerity, as if Christianity were all about melancholy and self-abnegation and antithetical to fun and procreative activity.5 It may be for some, but not for everyone. Certainly not for Herrick. Indeed, many a critic exemplifies the early modern Puritan enthusiasm for a joy-killing Christianity even when that critic happens to be an agnostic or atheist.

But the central feature of Herrick’s festal tone rests in his reliance on ritual and its role in binding communities together. It is with this in mind that the ordered disorder of Hesperides needs to be considered. As the Tudor wholesale extermination of Catholicism had in the sixteenth century, during and after the Civil War the Puritan zeal for reforming the reform and abolishing even the least traces of what might be consider “popish” following Archbishop Laud’s partial retrieval of tradition was, in essence, a project dedicated to the disruption of community, a program devoted to the “divide and conquer and demoralize” methodology which modern states have ever since utilized as a template for “best practices.”

Many critics, of course, have already addressed Herrick’s interest in community, and none so comprehensively as Achsah Guibbory. Certainly, some have called her assessment into question—all interpretation is, after all, contingent—but her argument bears up remarkably well after almost twenty years. And while I don’t have much to add to Guibbory’s masterful contextualization of Herrick’s preoccupation with community, I do think it necessary to add a few thoughts in consideration of Herrick’s worldview in the light of communitarianism.

The term “communitarianism” is, admittedly, more than a trifle anachronistic when applied to Herrick’s historical moment. But, nonetheless, I think it an apt one. The social pressures applied by a mixture of a creeping nascent capitalism—which had concerned Thomas More in Utopia6 during the reign of Henry VIII—and what could be called a kind of “soft totalitarianism” (exemplified by both the Tudor reforms and the reforms imposed by Parliament during and after the Civil War) awakened in Herrick the desire to (re)affirm the sacredness—sublime at times, ridiculous at others—of what was being lost. In this, Herrick’s poetry has much to say to postmodern communitarianism.

Communitarianism asserts a strong critique of modernity, a modernity in its infancy when Herrick lived. And the poet was amazingly prescient in seeing where it would lead and what was in danger of being lost:

“Lost to moderns are the manifest answers to existential questions provided by embeddedness with kin, culture, and place. Lost are pre-modern certainties of everyday rituals and known obligations. Lost is the intrinsic value of work, the sacredness of object and place, the natural rhythms of day and season. Lost also are the intimacy and trust generated from repeated face-to-face interactions in a society in which relationships are dense and multi-stranded.”7

These are the things Herrick simultaneously celebrates and mourns in his verse, as he does in the melancholy strains that complete the otherwise celebratory “Corinna’s going a Maying” (H-178):

And as a vapour, or a drop of raine

Once lost, can ne’er be found againe:

So when or you or I are made

A fable, song, or fleeting shade;

All love, all liking, all delight

Lies drown’d with us in endlesse night.

Then while time serves, and we are but decaying;

Come, my Corinna, come, let’s goe a Maying. (lines 63–70)

Herrick’s uses of carpe diem, then, are not only warnings about a lost moment, but of a lost age.

Charles Taylor, for one, has emphasized the importance of communitas as an element of human flourishing seriously compromised by the various reform movements, by the Enlightenment, and by all that goes by the name of “modernity.” Communitas is found in the sacred (liturgy, preaching, communal prayer, pilgrimage), in the profane (carnival in all of its manifestations) and where both meet and coalesce in the life of the parish: in religious festivals, the “good magic” of blessings and sacramentals, and in the myriad ways in which the Church year intersects with the progression of the seasons and the agricultural cycle. Communitas, furthermore,

“is the intuition we all share that, beyond the way we relate to each other through our diversified coded roles, we also are a community of many-sided human beings, fundamentally equal, who are associated together. It is this underlying community which breaks out in moments of reversal or transgression, and which gives legitimacy to the power of the weak.” 8

Communitas, then, seeing that it encapsulates not only the variety of human affiliations in the living of life as well as in the liturgical and agricultural cycles, is a thoroughly cosmological reality. Though certainly not the intent, the Protestant Reformation effectively destroyed any integral communitas:

“Reform comes to be seen as a serious business, brooking no alternatives. There is no more separate sphere of the ‘spiritual’ where one may go to pursue a life of prayer outside the saeculum; and nor is there the other alternative, between order and anti-order, which Carnival represented. There is just this one relentless order of right thought and action, which must occupy all social and personal space.”9

This is exactly what transpired during the Civil War and the zeal of such reform no doubt contributed significantly to Herrick’s ejection from Dean Prior. He was not alone in being harmed by a rage for reformation. As Michael Walzer has observed, “Calvinist saintliness, after all, has scarred us all.”10

Communitas is, more than obviously, central to Herrick’s religion as well as his poetry. This is why his collection is such a mélange composed of acerbic epigrams, poems celebrating love and fertility, religious verse, poems of self-parody, epithalamion, eulogy, prayer. His collection is a body of work that, by his own admission, represents a “mixt Religion…. Part Pagan, part Papisticall,”11 comprised of Laudian Anglicanism, pre-Reformation English Catholicism, folk and fairy traditions, and pagan Rome: these are things that characterize communitas, what Taylor has called a “multi-speed religion” characteristic of pre-Reformation Catholicism. Communitas is not univocal, but multifarious, messy, teaming with life and variety. This is what Herrick represents and why his verse, both Hesperides and Noble Numbers, stands as such an achievement. This is also why his collection’s disordered order could be arranged in no other way, and why he prefaces it with

The Argument of his Book

I Sing of Brooks, of Blossomes, Birds, and Bowers,

Of April, May, of June, and July-Flowers.

I sing of May-poles, Hock-carts, Wassails, Wakes,

Of Bride-grooms, Brides, and of their Bridall-cakes.

I write of Youth, of Love, and have Accesse

By these, to sing of cleanly-Wantonnesse.

I sing of Dewes, of Raines, and piece by piece

Of Balme, of Oyle, of Spice, and Amber-gris.

I sing of Time’s trans-shifting; and I write

How Roses first came Red, and Lillies White.

I write of Groves, of Twilights, and I sing

The court of Mab, and of the Fairie-King.

I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)

Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all. (H-1)

Michael's latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1 From The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 2.3.115–16.

2 Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 205–12.

3 Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, 212.

4 Thomas Hall, Funebria Floræ, the Downfall of May-Games… 3rd edition, corrected (London, 1661), 13–14.

5 This is the case with much earlier criticism, as with Swardson, for example, who writes of the poet that “we are dealing with a Christian poet who felt the sense of opposition between his poetry and his religion, as so many poets of Herrick’s century did” (Swardson, Poetry and the Fountain of Light, 42). Such an assessment would probably have moved the poet to respond with an acerbic epigram. Creaser is in general agreement with Swardson. See his “Jocund his Muse was,” 45ff.

6 “…even some abbots though otherwise holy men, are not content with the old rents that the land yielded to their predecessors. Living in idleness and luxury, without doing any good to society, no longer satisfies them; they have to do positive evil. For they leave no land free for the plow: they enclose every acre for pasture; they destroy houses and abolish towns, keeping only the churches, and those for sheep barns…. So your island, which seemed especially fortunate in this matter, will be ruined by the crass avarice of a few.” Thomas More, Utopia, trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams, revised, 2nd ed. Norton Critical Editions in the History of Ideas (New York: W.W. Norton & Company1992), 12–13.

7 Charles Heying, “Autonomy vs. Solidarity: Liberal, Totalitarian and Communitarian Traditions,” Administrative Theory & Praxis 21, no. 1 (March 1999): 39–50, at 40.

8 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard/Belknap Press, 2007), 49.

9 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 266.

10 Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), vii.

11 “The Fairie Temple: or, Oberons Chappell. Dedicated to Master John Merifield, Counsellor at Law” (H-223), lines 23 and 25.

Christian Neopaganism for Dummies

The Feast of Saint John, by Jules Breton (1875)

for Tyler

Happy Solstice.

It was on this day in the Year of Our Lord One-Thousand and Ninety-Two that my very pregnant wife (she was four months along, but looked ten) and I attended a “Summer Greeting Rite” at the invitation of a friend, a millionaire composer and esotericist (I almost wrote “esoterrorist”) and his wife, a professor of psychology. The Rite, I was told, was brought to Canada by British expatriates who still practiced “the Old Religion” (meaning some sort of pre-Christian folk religion) and who wanted to preserve the Rite by releasing it to outsiders. It was kind of a Mummers Play thing, and I was chosen to play a character along the lines of Jack o’ Green or the Fool (no laughing!), more or less the emcee and director of festivities. I don’t recall all of the characters in the play/rite, but I do recall the Lord and Lady of Summer (our hosts). The Rite was followed by feasting, music, drinking, and finally by a game of hide-and-seek wherein the men were to try and catch the Lady and the women the Lord. Whoever caught their targets first were then to reign as Lord and Lady the following year. As it turned out, I caught the Lady and my wife—who was not really participating due to the enormity of her size—almost “accidentally” caught the Lord. As it also turned out, I subsequently had a falling out with my friend and my wife and I were not invited back the following year. So I guess, according to the august and venerable regula of the Rite, we must still be Lord and Lady. Huzzah!

The Rite had a very PG-13 Wicker Man vibe to it (without the human sacrifice, of course) and, while I have my doubts about whether it was some ancient relic of English folk religion or wonder if it was instead a modern imaginative reconstruction of what one might have looked like (there are boatloads of historical research from which to draw, Sir James Frazer’s exhaustive The Golden Bough, though certainly superseded in the interim, effectively provided a vocabulary for the genre), it certainly was a great deal of fun.

Of course, such elements of folk religion need not be understood as antedating the arrival of Christianity in Western Europe (or anywhere else, for that matter). In fact, they were to a profound degree intertwined (Ronald Hutton’s The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400 – 1700 is a classic text on the subject). Indeed, the English poet and Anglican priest Robert Herrick’s Hesperides & Noble Numbers (1648) fairly serves as an instruction manual for mixing Christian (particularly Catholic) along with pagan (as in Roman) and folk religious modes. It’s a chaotic mix, but, like life itself, what a glorious chaos it is. (I write about Herrick in the chapter entitled “Robert Herrick, Little Gidding, and Spectres of an Old Religion” in my book The Incarnation of the Poetic Word). Herrick, who was kicked out from his living as a pastor in Devon when the killjoy Puritans came to power, well knew the value of what we would now call the neopagan elements of rural English Christianity in the seventeenth century, as he writes in his famous poem, “Corinna’s Going a-Maying”:

Rise; and put on your Foliage, and be seene

To come forth, like the Spring-time, fresh and greene;

And sweet as Flora. Take no care

For Jewels for your Gowne, or Haire:

Feare not; the leaves will strew

Gemms in abundance upon you.

Every year at our farm (Stella Matutina), my wife and I host a May Festival (as well as a Michaelmas Festival in September) and for a couple of sessions prior to the event I teach the children who will be in attendance a brace of Maypole dances. At one practice, a couple of the girls, sisters who were usually very enthusiastic, became standoffish. I later discovered that when they told someone at their parish what they would be doing that afternoon (they attend a traditionalist church) they were upbraided by Saint Holyroller for participating in paganism and devil worship. The warmth. Of course, this was exactly the charge laid on Catholics maintaining folk religious customs in early modern England by the Puritan religious police. Alas for reincarnated partypoopers, even if they wear mantillas.

I’ve known many neopagans over the years. Perhaps my favorite was a woman (and her long deceased husband) who hired me as her gardener right about the time my wife became pregnant with our first. Seeing all the tricks I had for helping plants thrive (nettle teas, a deft hand at encouraging recurrent bloom in roses, a gift for pruning trees that borders on mysticism, etc.)—even though she knew I was a practicing Byzantine Catholic, one day she told me, “Michael, you’re more pagan than anyone I’ve ever met.” I hold it as a great compliment.

So, let’s just say I get highly annoyed when any of my religious confreres talk smack about “pagans” or use “pagan” as a pejorative. Neopagans, as far as I’m concerned, are trying to recapture what Christianity, to its shame, has lost: a connection not only to a community and to divinity, but a connection to the cosmos. And by “cosmos” I don’t only mean the stars and the planets, I also mean clouds and soil, birds and animals, rivers and meadows. As I write in The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics, “Tragically, Wiccans and Neopagans, sensing the loss of something sacred in a cultural milieu surreptitiously poisoned by Enlightenment values, have appropriated for themselves a host of (previously) Christian customs, stripping them of their Christian elements in the process. One can hardly blame them.”1

One of the central insights of Sophiology is that the spiritual and created orders are not so distant as we may have been led to believe. Folk customs, like those mentioned here, tend to acknowledge their coinciding. Christianity, alas, has become more an intellectual or political position-taking or identity than a lived experience. We have replaced life with explanations (... “if you don’t believe in Purgatory yet, just wait until you’ve run through ten weeks of RCIA.”)

It does not need to be this way. I find comfort in the ancient story in Plutarch that, at the moment of the Crucifixion of Christ, a sailor named Thamus heard a voice coming across the sea, crying “Great Pan is dead!”2 Some, like Eusebius, interpreted this as referring to Satan and his power being broken (look around—do you buy this?) but others interpreted it as an evocation of Christ, the God of All (“pan” meaning “all” in Greek).

So, if I’ve learned one thing from Sophiology, it may be that it is nearly impossible to be a good Christian without also being a good pagan, that is, a person connected to the cosmos as well as to community and divinity. Anything else, it seems to me, is simply pathology.

But at my house, we don’t celebrate the Solstice. Our celebration takes place on St John’s Day, the moment the strength of the sun begins to wane; or, in the language of the gospel, when “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).

I hope that your joy will be complete.

Blessings.

Everyone's favorite neopagan folk-rock band.

Michael's latest book is Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses, including courses on Sophiology and Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot.

1 Page 171.

2 De Oraculorum Defectu, 419b-d