Another World, AUGUST 2021 Edition
Welcome to the eight edition of our supporters’ journal, Another World!
Thank you deeply for your support of our work!
Upcoming Courses
Our course schedule for the rest of 2021—including courses from Asa West, Emma Kathryn, Alley Valkyrie, and Rhyd Wildermuth—is published here.
The Next upcoming course, Becoming Wild with Emma Kathryn, begins at the end of August. To join this or any of these courses as part of your member benefit, please email us at distro@abeautifulresistance.com with your name and the course you would like to participate in.
In this month’s Another World
THE PAGAN MUSIC LIST 12
This edition features two bands: Blackmore’s Night and Eluveitie.
For the August edition of Another World, we have two long-read essays, both from Rhyd Wildermuth. The first is Being Body, an exploration of what the body means from a pagan perspective.
There are many other consequences to our modern alienation from body besides just the personal. For instance, because we do not see ourselves as bodies, we also do not see others as bodies either. Thus, often our interactions with other humans have a disembodied quality, a sense of distancing that can lead us to treat others as ideas, as symbols, as stereotypes, or mere background to our lives.
One place this is particularly evident is in our interactions with others through technological communication, such as “social” media. We interact with our perceptions of others, perceptions assembled from their words and profile images, and easily forget that beyond all those representations is another human body. So, we can find ourselves saying or thinking things about them—or to them—that we would never say in person.
W e do not communicate only with words and sounds, but also with body. The language of the body is something we learn as infants well before we learn the spoken language of our parents.
The writer and physician Gabor Maté, who is renowned for his work treating addiction, tells a story from his own childhood that shows this. When he was very young, too young to understand what was happening in the world, he constantly cried. This concerned his mother, who called a doctor to ask for help. The doctor replied that he would come check on the child when he could, but he was very busy because the children of all his other Jewish patients were also crying as well.
At that point, the Nazis were taking over Hungary, where he and his parents lived. Of course, Gabor could not have known this as he was still an infant. But what he and the other infants the doctor spoke of did understand was that their parents were nervous, scared, stressed, and worried. These emotions manifested through the bodies of the parents, which the children could then physically feel. And so they responded to their parents’ fear and anxiety by being anxious as well.
This ability to feel the emotions of others comes through the body. The body is constantly sensing, experiencing the physical world of which it is part. This is often called an “animal” sense, and we are taught to ignore such sensations and instead prioritize our thoughts.
Being Pagan: Of Oak and Wolf
The second essay from Rhyd Wildermuth this month is also from his series, Being Pagan (part of his manuscript-in-progress). This one is on our relationship to the animal and plant world.
Something that many anthropologists who have worked to understand animist views of the world have repeatedly noticed is that such peoples see all living non-human things as kin, as ancestors, and as inspirited beings. The deer that is hunted for food is not just an animal separate from humans, but rather a being related to them. The same is said for plants, who often are seen as “mothers” or “fathers,” beings with familial and parental roles in relationship to humans.
To kill and eat such a relative, then, is to kill and eat a part of your family, something that is otherwise forbidden and considered a profound crime when done to humans. So, for animist, pagan peoples, a sacred taboo needed constantly to be violated just to survive.
For such peoples, the response to this violation was not to pretend that animals and plants were somehow “less” than humans or were created to serve (as with the monotheist solution, in which a singular god declares he has made all the world for the use of humans), but rather to be in constant reciprocal relationship with those beings.
Rituals of gratitude and placation were performed for the animals that were killed: sometimes as simple as a prayer of thanks, sometimes much more elaborate. These rituals also manifested and maintained a commitment of obligation to these other beings, a declaration or acknowledgment of responsibility to the plants and animals that humans relied upon.
To take the life of a deer or a tree, then, was to enter into a relationship where the human became responsible for making sure other deer and other trees thrived. It also meant a responsibility to honor the life of the being killed, by using the body of a tree or a deer in a way that did not insult the being whose life was taken.
We can see immediately how much this worldview inherently stands against the overt destruction of nature. If the life of each tree in a forest that is felled needs to be honored—both in the act of killing and also in the uses of those trees—than cutting down an entire forest or over-hunting an animal so that it risks extinction is an impossible thing to justify.
EMPIRES CRUMBLE 26: Pandemic Thinking
In this episode, Alley Valkryie and Rhyd Wildermuth discuss the implications of the “covid passports” being introduced in Europe, as well as the increased authority governments are claiming over the health privacy and freedom of movement of the people they rule.
Other Notes
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