The Pagan Experience - "Fire"

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WK 1 - May 4 – Fire –  What ignites your passionate fires? What fuels your spiritual fires? What rages in fire’s destructive wake within you? And, what has healed from the cauterizing flames? How do you honor fire? How will you embrace its transformative powers?

I panicked a little after I was ordained in 2009.  It wasn’t just my quarter-life crisis/pre-Saturn return.  I literally went through one existential crisis after another.  As soon as I “resolved” one issue, another would arise.  Even now I sometimes find myself looping back to former contradictions and concerns that I thought I had reconciled long, long ago. 

But as we venture further into the labyrinth of this existence, we find ourselves looping back and back again, an eternal ebb and flow.  But we’re always gazing upon the world with new realizations, insights, experiences, and knowledge.  At this rate, we might as well be looking at an entirely new world each and every time we open and close our eyes. 

One crisis I remember quite vividly was over my concern of “how to be a good minister.”  I remember phoning my Bishop (probably in tears), literally freaking out about how I had no idea what I was doing.  I took my ordination very, very seriously, and I had begun to put a lot of pressure on myself to be “the perfect minister” (hah, whatever that is!)  I still recall my Bishop’s voice – calm, patient, gentle, honest, trusting… I could tell he was smiling, even through the phone.  He assured me that he wouldn’t have ordained me if he didn’t KNOW I was going to be a good minister.  But that wasn’t enough for me, and he could tell I was distressed.  I wanted a check-list, a book or a resource for me to refer to:

How to Be a Good Minister

1. Get ordained

2. Study a lot

3. ????

Unfortunately, no such list exists.  Sure, a person can undergo ceremonies and initiations.  My actual ordination was actually quite lovely and incredibly moving to me.  I remember it vividly.  And even to this day, years later, I study and read all the time, trying to gain as much knowledge and technique as I can in regards to “being a good minister.”  But… these things don’t really make you a GOOD minister.  Not really.  There’s more, so much more, and my Bishop knew that’s what I meant when I asked him these questions.  It’s what I needed.

He took a breath and asked me “do you really want to know how to be a good minister?  Really, truly want to know?”

“YES!” I cried out.  “Yes, tell me!”  I was begging with him, pleading.

There was a pause.  I could hear him thinking.  He took a breath.  His voice was very soft and gentle.  He said: “The way for you to be a good minister is to let the light of the Divine shine through you.”

Now it was time for me to be silent.  I was still stuck on the “3. ????” stage of my “Good Minister” checklist.  He could sense my consternation, so he explained further.

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“Develop your relationship with the Divine,” he said.  “It will start as a little seed, as a little spark, but the more you nurture it, the more it will grow.  And the more it grows the more it will shine, until the fire of God overwhelms you and others have no choice but to be on fire, too.”

Though my Fellowship is no longer a Gnostic church, it started off that way, back in the day.  In one of the Gnostic myths, Sophia messes up and she creates the Demiurge, an imperfect being who is so removed from the Divine that the Demiurge things HE is God.  So the Demiurge, in his own acts of creation, forms humans, but treats them very terribly.  Sophia, compassionate and wise, takes pity on us, and saves us with a piece of herself, which is a piece of the True Divine.  And it is through this spark that we maintain our connection to the Source.

In Orphism, little baby Zagreus is torn apart and eaten by the Titans.  They are destroyed by Zeus’s lightning bolts and turned to ash.  It is out of this ash that humans are created – ash from the corpse of a Titan that ate a Divine child.  Again, we retain our connection to the fires of the Divine.

It is through these archetypal stories that we are reminded of our own Divinity.  These aren’t just myths – they more true than anything else in this world.  I am Goddess, and thou art God, and it is by recognizing this Truth that I am a good minister, that I can be the best minister I can be.  The spark of the Divine that lives within me ignites the spark of the Divine that lives within you, and together we burn bright.  Together we are fire. 

The Pagan Experience - Knowledge, Wisdom and Gnosis

WK 1- Mar. 2 - Knowledge,Wisdom and Gnosis - What do these words mean to you? How do express these principles in your spiritual work? Is any one more important than the other? Why?

Sometimes I tell people that Wicca is my religion but my spirituality is Gnosticism.  The problem with this, however, was that very few people know what I mean when I say I am a Gnostic.  Sometimes I don’t know what I mean, either.  What I do know, however, is the feeling I get when I read the Gospel of Thomas or Thunder, Perfect Mind.  I know that Gnosticism did more than just help me to reconcile any anxiety I had about my torrid Christian past.  It opened up a whole new trajectory for my future, in this life and beyond.

Identifying as a Gnostic doesn’t mean I can’t practice Wicca or be a witch or I had to change anything about my life.  If anything, it gives me more options.  I can pretty much enter into any religious ritual or ceremony and feel perfectly at home because it’s like God speaks to me anywhere and everywhere I go.  We’re surrounded by myths and stories and archetypes, and Gnosticism gave me the lexicon with which to understand what God was saying through these tools.

Here’s what Gnosticism is not – despite what you may have read in a billion Neo-Pagan books, we don’t believe that we are aliens from another planet who got stuck on earth because of the evil Demiurge.  For some reason every time I read a Neo-Pagan book that mentions Gnosticism, they always have these ridiculous concepts of what Gnosticism is and it really pisses me off.  Saying that Gnostics believed they were aliens is such an oversimplification, and furthermore, that’s literalist thinking.  If the Gnostics do anything, it’s reject literalist thinking. 

When the ancient Gnostics wrote about being from “some other place”, they were talking about pieces of themselves, what we’d call Aggregate Structures in the Esoteric Mysticism system.  So these pieces are part of greater, more complete and permanent pieces of the Cosmos, and we are made up of these aggregate structures.  But aggregate structures aren’t of this world; they’re of something more than this world and beyond this world.  Alien just means outsider, because we’re not of this world.  This world is an illusion.  So we nurture and foster these permanent structures because they will help us to return to the True Source, which is not of this world or this existence. 

So as a Gnostic I’m not recreating some science fiction story where I’m looking for my mothership to take me home beyond the stars.  I just recognize those greater pieces of me that are part of the Cosmos, and I can use those pieces to help me forge a greater bond to Deity, which is beyond this time and space.  By engaging in Gnosis, in knowing, I recognize that piece of me, and I know how it relates back to the Source.  I can begin to see past the illusions of this reality, and I KNOW.  Gnosis is a place beyond logic or thought or feeling.  It just is.  It’s certainty with every fiber of your being because Gnosis is every fiber of your being.

Sophia, or Wisdom, plays a great role in Gnostic teachings.  In some Gnostic myths (since there are so many of them because the Gnostics loved to write and re-write and re-write myths) Sophia is a piece of the Monad, the oneness that is the Cosmos and all things and no things.  But she messed up a little and creates the Demi-urge, the little maker.  The Demiurge doesn’t know it’s connected to the Oneness (like many of us do not know we are connected to the Oneness) so he creates this world, but it’s a shitty world.  So Sophia feels bad and she tries to help the Demiurge’s creations, who would be Adam and Eve.  She helps them by putting a piece of herself in them, a powerful and permanent aggregate structure that is a piece of Wisdom.  This piece that is within us all is closer to the Oneness than Sophia’s own flawed creation, the Demiurge, who is the creator in some myths (such as the Christian creation story.) 

So what is Wisdom?  Wisdom is Sophia realizing she made a mistake and having the grace to try to fix it the best she can.  Wisdom is thoughtful compassion which guides action. 

And knowledge is just the fact that I read all of this stuff in lots of books over the years, that I can regurgitate it to you in a blog post.  Knowledge of these mysteries prepared me for them, but it took a long time for me to have the Wisdom to understand, and even longer for the Gnosis to settle itself permanently into my being.  I’m not just some flawed creation.  I am a being of light and Wisdom, connected to the Cosmos.  I am a Gnostic. 

If you’re interested in reading more, I’ve written a lot about Gnosis and the Gnostics over the years.  You can find more about these topics at the following links:

The Gnostics

Review – Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions by Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney 

The Bible

Christo-what?