What does it mean to be pagan? What exactly do witches hope to find on their chosen spiritual path? Centuries of misinformation and a tradition of secrecy have fostered countless answers to those questions - and most are answers that pagans dread to hear. When you turn to our own community for explanations as to what we are and what we do, you hear the same explanations again and again. What images do the words, "...a peaceful, Earth-oriented religion that follows both a Goddess and a God..." bring to mind for the general public? For many, those images are of a bunch of lost souls playing make-believe and dancing naked in the moonlight.
If you asked a church-goer, "What does it mean to be Christian?" what would you think if they said, "Well, we follow the teachings of a carpenter who has been dead for two thousand years, who was born to a virgin and led a religious and political counter-movement in the middle east?" It begins to make dancing naked in the moonlight seem like a sane alternative. What you find in both examples is a misunderstanding inherent in trying to condense a way of life into a single sentence. Yet when we think of the best that Christian beliefs have to offer, we often don't think of the beliefs themselves, but the type of life that many Christians try to live.
For me, witchcraft has never been about spells or gods and goddesses. It's never been about pentacles and magick or searching for the chants and incantations to add to a rite. I could honestly care less about who or what I was in a past life or if I have a guardian angel or spirit watching over my shoulder.
For just a moment, stop thinking of the physical world as our point of reference. Regardless of our beliefs - whether we are Christian, pagan, Buddhist, or any one of an endless line of spiritual paths present in this world - we believe that this life is fleeting. Just as we were once born, we will one day die. Some believe we'll be reborn, to continue to focus on lessons that we have yet to learn. Others believe that this life is all we get and that, when it ends, we'll end up in paradise. Each one of us believes that this life is but the briefest of instants in the larger scope of eternity. For some, that eternity holds the promise of peace and love. For others, they see it as a opportunity to be reborn and start over - a second chance to face issues they struggle with and continue to grow. And still others see the end of this life as nothing more than a simple release, slipping into the peaceful emptiness of nothingness.
Many of us believe that this world was created from that source of the eternal. Whether creation was formed from the word of an almighty God, born from the womb of a Goddess, or continually recreated by each of us through the way we live our lives, then the world around us is an echo of the miraculous, it is a mirror of the divine. How many times in our lives have we stopped, awed by the majesty of nature. Was it a perfect sunset? A night sky filled with stars? The timeless wonder of an old growth forest or the power of a stormy sea? For each of us, in that instant, we felt something. A sense of wonder. A feeling of awe. A chill that ran down our spine as a smile slowly blossomed from ear to ear.
It is in those moments that the pagan path is born. We don't turn to books or scriptures to find the divine. We don't gather in churches to learn what our next step should be. We simply slow down our lives as we begin to reconnect to that wonder on a daily basis. Our source of the divine is constantly reflected in each sunrise, in each cycle of the moon, and in every moment we spend in nature. We don't look to these things as "God" or "Goddess;" we look to them as a mirror of the divine, as a reminder of the importance of life.
Our beliefs may seem out of touch with the flow of the modern world because we focus a great deal on concepts like nature, the hearth, and family. We aren't trying to return to an earlier time or recreate a world that has passed us by. What we are doing, successfully doing, is bringing a great deal of meaning to every moment of our lives. Rather than focusing on material objects to distract us from our lives, we choose to spend time embracing the life we have now. We don't turn our backs on the modern world. Instead, we see technology as a useful tool, not a standard by which we measure our joy. Spending time with our children is more important than watching television; filling our homes with the laughter of friends is more important to us than driving a new car. We measure our days, not by the listings in TV Guide, but by the rising and setting of the sun and the cycles of the moon.
Why? Why do we follow the seasons? Why do we do ritual? Why do we look to the simple pleasures of life? Many Christians look to God as the value in their world. They are here to simply worship Him and follow the teachings of Christ. In the end, when they die, they will return to what's important to them - they'll be in His presence, just as they hope to be. As pagans, we see that very same divine reflected in all of life. It's in the sunrise, in the laughter of a child, in the hope a crying friend finds when we console them in our arms. By following the path we hold dear, we're able to enter into "God's" presence every day. We simply welcome the divine into our daily lives.
Ritual confuses many of those outside of the pagan path. What is this magick? These spells? Aren't rituals evil? Don't you sacrifice animals and worship the devil? When you begin to think of pagans, not as minions of evil, but as people who hold a deep reverence for all life, who see the very essence of life as a reflection of the divine, it's a simple step to understand that our rituals, the moments when we specifically and consciously draw closer to the wonder of life, couldn't be evil, that they would never focus on harming another - whether that focus is another person, an animal, or the world around us.
In its most basic form, ritual is a series of symbols and correspondences which allow us to consciously change our perception of the world. It is often a time of letting go for us, of setting aside the problems that plague us, the things in our personal lives that hinder our growth and our joy, or simply putting away the stress of our daily lives. When we let go, when we no longer carry those burdens, we can see what life is like without them. And without those things, we can clearly see the path that leads us to that place of peace and completeness in our daily lives. Then it is simply a matter of working towards those goals, putting in the effort and determination on a daily basis that will bring us there.
Our rituals are also used to honor those who achieve a milestone in their lives. For many pagans, every step along life's path is a joyful event. The naming of a child; the celebration with a friend who has found the spiritual beliefs that are right for them; the honoring of a crone or elder who has reached that point in their lives or a child who has come of age; each of these things are miraculuous achievements, joyous events which we celebrate and embrace, making sure that the person honored and the gathered circle of friends and family are aware of their meaning.
If you're a Christian reading this and you think, "We believe a lot of the same things that you do," then you've discovered the point I'm trying to bring across. Those who don't understand pagans think that we are so very different, that we are an anachronistic group of people following ways that are absurd in a modern culture. But we're not. When you look across the entire scope of human history, you will find cultures that embraced the same things that we hold dear. Perhaps, you can even hear echoes of our ways within your own life. Does that mean you're pagan? No, it doesn't. It means what many pagans have known all along. All of us, regardless of what spiritual path we follow, all see the same source of the divine. There is only one God, one Goddess, one Buddha. They're all the same sacred source of wonder that each religion turns to. Different cultures, different families, and different individuals interpret the divine they see in their own special way. We simply follow different paths to reach the divine, paths that are as different and unique as each of us. Being pagan is ours. And we like to think that, as we all look to the same divine, we're not all that different from each other.