Bull Moon Hearth

I follow fewer magic/occult-specific blogs than I used to, as the amount of magic-proper that I do at this point in my life hovers just above zero, and neoplatonism gives me a rash. However, I'll always keep Rune Soup on my list, because it's just full-on a trip, in every possible sense of the world. Gordon is eccentric and funny and his writing style is this odd whirl of ideas, most of which he just tosses out there and slides on past; I seriously understand about one-third of what every post says. By the time I do my research, I'm usually up to two-thirds. I'm not usually a subscriber to Secret History of the Universe type stuff, but holy shit, sometimes reading Rune Soup convinces me that world is crazier and more of it than we think.

He's got a good recent post on Tolkien, which you should absolutely read.

Let me first say that the point on which I'm still not convinced is that there's anything particularly pagan about Tolkien's moral universe -- or rather, if there is, it's mainly based on the aforementioned neoplatonism, which was so thoroughly absorbed into Christian philosophical thought so early on that it's silly to imagine that paganism retains any ownership of it, lo these many centuries later. That whole process of history moving from the purity of its great cosmological forces into denser, more complex, and more flawed "modernity" -- sure, that predates Christianity, but it's a late entry into pagan thought and sealed into the very early foundations of Christianity, which from my perspective makes it more fundamental to Christian thought.

As best I can unwind the argument, it's that the fatalism of Middle Earth is the authentically pagan element -- that it lacks the triumphalist vision of Christianity: Middle Earth is a world without the Kingdom of God, where all heroes are only victors until their defeat, where evil is a fundamental presence that can be somewhat corralled, but never eradicated. Of course, did you see what I did there? That's two completely different statements that I put next to each other as though they were restating the same thing. In Tolkien's work, they basically are: if all the battles and the heroism are fights against evil, then to say that heroes always fall in the end is pretty much the same thing as to say that evil always gets the last word.

The thing is, heroic morality is *like this,* but *different.* Pagan stories about heroism do, generally speaking, end with the hero's gruesome death, with the hero meeting some foe who (through trickery or strength or luck) simply can't be defeated. And that's important. That's so important, I think, and for the same reason that Gordon seems to be thinking of when he says, "This is the cornerstone of Middle Earth’s morality. One acts as best one can in a much larger context than is ever possible to grasp. The decision to choose a moral road happens on a moment-by-moment basis, not because one is moving toward a preferred outcome that is fully visible from the outset." The morality of heroism is that you fight on, *knowing that every fight may be your last.* There are no assurances that you'll win, or even that you've chosen the right battle. You don't ask for assurances. You don't take refuge in apocalyptic thinking, in the idea that your virtue will be rewarded, or any other type of "preferred outcome," other than perhaps harboring the hope that someone remembers your story. It does feel a bit gruesome from the perspective of modern Western thought, where everything should contribute to PROGRESS and the BETTERMENT of the world, as well as Western occultism, which also emphasizes coming closer to perfection, through "rising on the spheres" or whatnot. As far as we can tell, most indigenous European paganism just didn't have that concept that the choice of right action was about pragmatism, about getting to the best possible goal. The thinking was that pragmatism was the *default* -- that pretty much everyone tried to improve their station. But morality happened in those moments of not knowing, of choosing virtue with no particular reason to believe you'd be rewarded for it.

More and more, I find myself coming back to this vision of morality, which I agree Tolkien does capture much more powerfully than any other modern writer. The world is so complex and so unknowable that I think a lot of us are well and truly paralyzed by trying to figure out which actions will lead to our preferred outcome. Maybe this is a cop-out, but a lot of times lately, I find myself saying, in essence, fk it. Cattle die, kinsmen die. The dragon got Beowulf and will get you, and all the empires, and all the works of humans. Even the heroic vision of immortality through fame is close enough to a lie as makes no difference; if you're lucky enough to be remembered, it won't last all that long -- go far enough back into the 100,000 years of human history and there are no more immortal names. So I find myself being sort of released from the burden of Saving the World. The question I end up asking myself isn't what will the ramifications of this action be down the road, but will I be proud of myself or ashamed of myself if I do this? Like, ten minutes from now. Will I feel like I'm a slightly better person, ten minutes from now, or a slightly worse person? Of course, for this to work, you have to have a sense of what a "better person" might look like. Otherwise you have no way to answer the question. And that's what wisdom is largely about, and the reason I've often argued that wisdom is the one and only virtue that you can't have too much of. In Tolkien's terms, it's why the characters he presents as most virtuous -- Gandalf, Galadriel, Faramir -- flatly refuse to handle the ring. Because they know who they are and what the best version of themselves looks like, and they're able to see that the ring is going to make them not-so-slightly worse people. The fact that Frodo does handle the ring, and essentially sacrifices himself to it, shows not that Frodo was more or less virtuous, but that the Best Possible Frodo is a different person from, say, the Best Possible Gandalf. Frodo's particular road was about his love of home and family and his passion to preserve that; self-sacrifice made sense for him in a way it didn't for any of the other characters. It was the particular Fate laid on him and specifically relevant to his -- well, I'd use the word da/n, his soul or gift or destiny. Even though Frodo's life was pretty well shattered by his experiences with the ring, he went out pretty old-school pagan heroic: the best Frodo he could ever have been.

It sounds like an easy morality at first glance -- don't think about the future! Screw the consequences of your actions! But the longer you think about it, the more you realize it's really, really, really not easy at all. Being the best possible You that you can be, *literally in every moment and with every little choice* (because you never can see which choices count most), is relentlessly difficult. I fail at it 99.44% of the time, and the excuse I use to rationalize my failures is usually, "Well, it won't really matter, there won't be any major consequences." Except that I'm obviously lying when I tell myself that, because the major consequence is that I'm just slightly *more* not-my-best than I used to be. And that's everything. (Shoulder to the wheel, Dollhouse fans!)

Wow, I was going to talk about Middle Earth vs. Arthuriana, but maybe this is more than enough for one day. Anyway -- Be a Better You -- read more Rune Soup!

Seasonal and relevant! Irish folklore on Crom Dubh and bulls

We've made an effort not to put Our Bull, the Durham one, into too much of a mental box. Is he a land spirit? Is he a spirit generated by the life of the city itself? Is he an emanation of some primordial Great Bull? Is he a localized expression of some particular god? (We got a fairly visible omen at our Neptunalia one year just as A. was invoking a bull-related aspect of Neptune, which was interesting.) Who knows? Every year, I think I become -- not less curious as a theologian, but curious in a healthier way, less needy about answers. I don't know who he is, but I've made many an offering at his feet, and I've become more sensitive over the years to the specific quality of his attention and presence. He feels watchful and protective to me in a somewhat dry, world-weary way, as though he's seen enough human foolishness to expect it by now, but dumb as we are, we're his responsibility. There's affection there, but its dominant note is unbending strength rather than warmth. On any given tv show, he'd be the grouchy but ethical Chief of Police who claims to want to retire but would never really do it voluntarily.

We do a lot of small ritual in the Plaza, often just hello-we-see-you offerings, sometimes slightly larger rituals aimed at the health of our city. Public ritual -- genuinely public ritual, in front of random passers-by -- is an interesting experience. We performed one recently, midmorning on a Saturday after the farmer's market. I held the space in the center of the Plaza with our little travel/camping candle, while A. crossed the street to offer to the Outsiders. She did what she always does on the way, stopping to put her hand on the Bull's nose and say a brief prayer.

I was the one in a position to see that after she did this and then crossed the street, a very ordinary-looking black man in his mid-20s came along just behind her, and then paused to do the very same thing. He put his hand in the same position on the Bull's nose and held it there a moment, looking up into its eyes, and then walked on about his business. It was a beautiful example of how places and objects of power draw people in toward themselves, how we don't always need to know why we're doing what we do in order to experience a connection to something numinous. Whoever that man was, whatever thought process motivated him to pause during his day just to touch and to look at a giant brass bull statue, I think he experienced what Hindus call darshan, the experience of reciprocally seeing and being seen by the divine. I wonder how it might change him, without him ever knowing it.

Taurus Civitate, macte esto.

In general I neither know nor care all that much about the Olympics, but we happened to be at a friend's house (a friend who donated her copious kitchen space to Peachapalooza 2012, out of the kindness of her heart and for the small bribe of some ginger-peach jam and peach chutney) and the opening ceremonies were on her DVR.

Wow, I'm glad I saw those, or I would never have appreciated the extent to which Boyle celebrated London by depicting it as a horrifying blight on the earth. At first I thought I was just projecting my crunchy-granola aesthetic onto what the color commentators kept reassuring me was "a celebration of progress and industry," but by the time the *giant smokestacks* came up and they *forged an actual ring,* I was pretty sure they just had to cut the Uruk-Hai for time.

It was actually a genuinely moving piece with fantastic music -- once the Olympics' copyright goblins get bored and go away, you should try looking for it on YouTube if you didn't see it the first time through. One of the things I like about Britain is its general lack of jingoism -- I'm sure this is an oversimplification, but they seem much more able than Americans generally are to accept that it's reasonable to have discomfort and grief and frustration about your country and still love it in many ways. That just seems like a very adult way of loving anything: not blindly, because does anyone really want to be loved blindly more than they want to be loved by someone who really sees them?

Surely it isn't possible to have a genuinely mature and loving relationship with the land if we can't include both our deep loyalty to it and our ambivalence, grief, and anger over the enormity of our impact on it.

Because a certain type of Christian is sort of famous for insisting on doctrinal issues of faith that are objectively not at all how the real world works, I thought I'd be incredibly fair today and talk about one of those places where I also struggle between things my religion teaches me to believe and, well, actual-facts reality.

There's this idea that exists throughout the Indo-European world, embedded deeply into the ancient language and literature, of something called "undying fame," which is believed to take precedence over any other kind of undyingness. Pagans had various views on the afterlife, depending on time and place, and while I think there's a lot of good evidence that the belief in a peaceful underworld existence where the dead rejoin their families is an ancient, indigenous IE belief, the historical record clearly shows that the Greek and Roman worlds, at least, had a pretty grim view of the afterlife. They saw it as populated (for the most part) by sad, hungry shades who longed eternally for the living world they would never see again, a world which had all but forgotten them.

On the other hand, there was this "undying fame," which provided a sense of continuity. If you were mighty and successful in whatever way, congratulations! The poets would sing about you forever. You, unlike the other sad, dead bastards, would continue to be remembered, and to matter to the world. This was a huge component of the heroic ethos and these cultures' sense of what a good life meant. Essentially, it meant a *great big* life, one that was impossible to forget. That was the goal of it all: not to fade away. That's why the great heroes of the poetic tradition inevitably make a speech that boils down to "I don't care when or how I die, as long as I take enough enemies with me that they'll sing my Undying Fame til the end of time."

That's a pretty neat trick if you're trying to recruit warm bodies for generations of systemic, endless fighting over cattle and gold and wives: turn it into a great quest for glory and honor instead. We still pretty much do that. It's a winning strategy, for the warlords who field these armies of eager-beaver hero wannabes.

But the thing is, the end of time is a long way away. Human memory just is not "undying," even under the very best of circumstances. In the last post I mentioned that human history is tens of thousands of years long. The great ancient heroes we've heard of (assuming for the moment that these were ever real people; some of them may have been, or maybe not), your Gilgameshes and Beowulfs and Achilleses (Achillei?), are preserved in memory over the course of maybe three or four thousand years...and that's because of the accidents of history that provided for some (very far from all) of the IE world's traditional oral epics to be written down once the cultures began to change so irrevocably that their institutional memories were failing.

That always happens, is the thing. Cultures fail. Civilizations fall. Memory exhausts itself. We don't know the names or the stories of the people who built Stonehenge, although that's a fairly epic achievement. We don't know the names of any of those original great warriors who rode down out of the Caucasus to seek their fortunes and eventually spread throughout Europe. Forget their personal names, we barely even know what they called themselves as a whole (they might have called themselves something like "Aryans," but it's more likely that was a conceptual category that united a number of completely disparate tribes and helped enable them to cooperate with each other). The effects of their deeds are impossible to overstate: they invented the western world as we know it. We don't know one name. Not one of them achieved the Undying Fame they believed would be their reward.

Heck, the thing about an afterlife in another realm is that it's not exactly disprovable. Undying Fame *is* disprovable. It's disproven. And it's a pretty sketch concept anyway, given that it's supposed to apply primarily to the heroes of action-packed epic wars and not to the people who, you know, invented axles and agriculture and other things that have a lot more world-shaping significance than the siege of Troy or the Cattle Raid of Cuilgne ever could have -- let alone to the people who just lived decent lives and raised -- improbably, *amazingly* -- one more generation of human beings, launching their children out into the future freighted down with all their hopes and fears. Those are the people who made us who we are. Those are the people whose deeds invented our world. And most of us can't name them four generations back.

So here I am, trying to practice the religion of my ancestors, but unable to accept one of the really pretty significant belief systems that animated and drove them. Death for me can't mean what it did to them. Life to me doesn't mean what it did to them. The idea of fame will never have the same weight to me; I'm the child of many centuries of revolution in thought about the concepts of elite and common, of significant and insignificant, and I'm just not driven in the same way by the dream of heroism. I'm driven by the other dream: of honoring my obligations to my family, and of the joy of being at home among them eternally. I like to tell myself -- with some good evidence, I think! -- that that's a vision at least as old, at least as well-integrated into the tradition. But the thing is that even if it isn't, I'd choose that over the other.

I think there's something to be said for the honesty factor when it comes to tradition. No matter how deeply we honor where we came from, I think all of us run into those things where we just can't believe the same things about our world that our ancestors did. I'm not saying that's always comfortable, but I don't know of any tradition that doesn't pretty clearly place a higher value on truthfulness than falsehood.