As a "new" pagan I have to justify me and my believe
again and again. Why ? People tell me , I try to escape rationality, science
and the world of technology. I would try to escape into a selfcreated religion
that works on the Patchwork principle and my own needs. And even if this
would be true, what would be so wrong about it. (which it is not)
I hold many religions for sacred and do believe
that every religion is trying to give answers to the questions that move
mankind: What is it all about ? Will we live on ? Why ? The old religions
-it doesn't matter if you think of Mesoamerican religions or old European
religions at this point - had a different way to look at things, at creation,
at the earth itself. They felt the different powers of nature, the gentle
ones and the destructive ones and gave them names and manifeststations as
gods and goddesses. They had a deep feeling of the truth, that we are not
masters of nature but part of it.
In my opinion today spirituality and faith have
been pressed to the edge in our society. They are almost at the edge of the
absurdity, because something you can't touch, can't count and cannot be proved
by science simply doesn't exist at all.
There are certainly few pagans who would like
to go back at the "good" old times. Who wants to be without car, telephone
or computer and spend most of his or her thoughts on how to make a living
? But nonetheless I want back in some other way.
We should question whether our point of view of
the world and our life attitude,our attitude to nature or creation is the
right The conception of the superiority of the man over nature, which we
rule by rationality and the power of technology.
I for myself don't know any separation of rational
and irrational or actual and mystical. For me worshipping some old goddesses
or even talking to them (and getting answers !) is as rational and as real
as my computer, my car and my phone. For I - as all beings - am moved by
the same inside powers that moved the people in the past. In accepting that
I am not the crown of creation but a part of it, I realize what my duties
are: Taking care of mother earth, its creation and handling all things (living
and so called dead things) with the respect they deserve.
In this inner search for a new way the study of
old religions or even converting to some degree to them can be very helpful.
At least it was for me. The striving for the whole which fulfills all religions,
is for me, trying to be one with mother earth and her creation. It is the
deeply felt perception that we don't stand outside nature and her laws. The
ways of our ancestors ( I hold all past cultures as ancestors to today) are
buried in the past before Christianity came into being. Don't mistake me,
Christianity has -as every religion- good parts and there are many paths
on the way.
Of course I don't live or practice an old religion
as it was practiced in the forgotten past. What would a religion be that
does not change with the people, their feelings and their lifecircumstances
or the movement of time. It would be dead. My spirituality permits to let
others come to word, to listen to others and to study together. Because I
don't think that there is only one golden truth, only one answer and not
only one way to believe at all.
I try my best to integrate the old ways in my
modern life. To regain some of the views people in the past had, to feel
some of the connections with mother earth again, which we lost in our only
believing in technology and modernization. I search the realization of my
own relativity. An abolition of contrasts, a harmony with the flow of things,
a harmony with the laws of mother nature.
I close with a sentence of an "modern" Aztec:
Nature has made nothing square, everything is round in nature. Nature knows
no end and no beginning, everything is a circulation in nature.
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