New Religions and Our Civilisation

I have an interest in the 'new religions' - not as a practitioner but as a sympathetic observer.  These faiths are growing quite fast amongst teenagers and socially marginalised groups but also amongst solid stable ordinary folk  who find they say something important about how life might be lived.  Fear of ridicule and a certain paranoia about public reaction means that the extent of pagan belief in Western society is probably significantly underestimated because people are still reluctant to 'come out' about an often misunderstood set of views about the world.

One starting point for anyone who might share this interest is Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999).  It cannot be recommended enough.

A surprising result of the book - which made it clear that claims of an ancient origin to the new religions (with the exception of course of induction by consent into traditional shamanism) were just so much bunkum - is the degree to which Wiccans in particular have taken Hutton to their heart.  The 'newness' of these faiths, including the consciously reconstructed Heathenism of Asatruar, is fully accepted as a fact in terms of form and origin in order to preserve a 'timeless' content in terms of belief.   Wiccan and pagan forum members on the internet will often be highly critical of attempts to over-estimate the deaths in the 'burning times' (the European witch hunts), the unwarranted feminist claims of historians like Gimbutas and, above all, the ridiculous claims of continuity between modern reconstructions and the ancient religions from which they are being reconstructed.

This maturity - far from the caricature of outsiders - positions these religions as intimately linked to modernity.  They look less and less like reversions to the traditional as time and study progresses.  Even their interest in folk tradition centres on their being grounded in the contemporary community as local healers or earth magicians.  This flexibility of practice is in marked contrast to what happens when authority gets its grubby little paws on paganism to bend it to its own purpose.  The fate of Shinto under the Meiji restoration is an object lesson in cynical inauthenticity for the purpose of nation-building with tragic consequences.

These thoughts were occasioned by another contribution in the Hutton tradition of critical analysis of belief - Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic and Liberation in Modern Esotericism by Hugh Urban of Ohio State University (University of California Press, 2006).  I do not intend a book review.  Suffice it to say that Urban takes the key points in the history of 'sex magick' as separate and successive components of alternative cultural practice.  In my view, he demonstrates how what was highly transgressive at each stage of its existence, fully in defiance of conventional mores, eventually became pulled into the prurient and commercialised mainstream.  A culture of individual resistance to community culture came to shadow each stage of the development of consumer capitalism. With no intention to do so on either side, radical individual liberation and the market converged, becoming the Western society that we live in today.

This is, of course, my  over simplification - read the book.  But the seven case-types he introduces: the sexual magic of the mixed race American Paschley  Randolph in the Post-Bellum era; the discovery of Tantra; the influence of Crowley; the Nietzchean impulse of Julius Evola; the arrival of Wiccan ideas and its links to feminism; the Satanic 'christian heresy' of La Vey; Chaos Magic with its shattering of all points of reference: all these lead (in Urban's analysis) to the 'magical logic of late capitalism'.

But what next - with all barriers down and nowhere further to go.  Any belief, any practice seems to be permitted.  Authoritarian personalities are anxious. This is not good, they say.  The British military is worried, no kidding! 

'An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2053021,00.html

It is almost as if they are willing order to return and, fearing Mussolini and Stalin, want us all to accept their order in its place. Well, British intelligence has not had the best of records lately.  On this matter, its position on the future may be no different from its position on yellowcake from Niger or the presence of weapons of mass destruction in faraway countries.  Authority may be very worried about its loss of authority but there is no reason why we should be.  In fact, so long as authority does not intefere, observation of what is actually happening on the internet seems to indicate that a degree of self-correction within society is already taking place.

There is certainly now no turning back from the ideology of personal liberation that is dominant in the West, unless it be through the executive imposition of social conservatism.  Such a 'cure' would be far worse than the disease unless society were to break down altogether under pressure of war, disease or famine.  Indeed, some radical liberation activists (notably the gay and feminist elements) may even be becoming the New Right in the context of the alleged clash of cultures.  Many liberal Europeans are coming to define themselves as Western against (say) Islamism simply on the basis of a radicalised view of freedom that has no place at all for custom or tradition.  This is the mentality that underpins the world-view that I reviewed in the posting on 300 below.

No, the self correction is taking place from below and is based on two concerns - an awareness of predators in the system and of exploitation as intrinsic to the market system.  It is no accident that, while the founders of the alternative religions tended to be from the libertarian individualist right, their latter-day followers have tended to be liberal and to the left.  Once removed from being a rich man's hobby or from the pleasures of the Hellfire Club, alternative lifestyles and transgression are about resistance to, and the freedom of persons and communities from, oppressive authority.  Some tasks still need doing that good government does well but our current governments do not do very much of at all - such as protecting the public.  The infrastructure of religion in such times of instinctively authoritarian but limited government builds up community for protection.  The new religions are no exception. 

As time goes by, these new religions - which emphasise individualism, ritual and tolerance rather than dogma and organisation - are creating a social morality involving prison visits, mutual aid and assistance and self-policing against predatory persons that mimics early Christianity.  Just as Christianity was the religion of slaves and women - much to the later disgust of the Nietzcheans - some paganisms are the natural religion of many sex workers (the exploited of our time) and of those under greatest personal pressure from modernity.

Of course, these new religions may be growing fast but they are still small.  The religions of the book are also growing massively in the emerging world on the basis of their role as bulwarks that protect many from the full force of modernity.  But, in the West, traditional authority cannot be squared very easily with the facts of personal liberation.  These new religions, when you look into them more deeply, with their eclectism, tolerance and playfulness, are quietly combining the widespread acceptance of liberty as a precondition for being 'in and of the West' with a framework for making the world more comprehensible and for developing an ethical stance that actually works for its practitioners and for society.

One final thought.  Urban in his Preface refers to the prejudice and fear surounding his taking up (even in an academic and objective way) the subject of 'sex magick' as a topic for serious study.  He points out the odd combination in our culture of prurience and sniggering and a massive availability of sexual imagery in almost every context.  I would call Western culture adolescent if it was not an insult to teenagers.  If the new religions unravel attitudes more suitable to a peasant society before birth control and bring maturity to our civilisation, then this may be no bad thing.  It would not be the first time (we think of Jesus) that the margins of an empire have proved its salvation.

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For evidence of the construction of a social presence for paganism in a UK context, with specific reference to prison visits - http://www.paganfed.org/