Being Pagan: A story of enchantment
In each of the previous chapters, I’ve attempted to describe the pagan framework through a largely objective narrative. That is, rather than stating too explicitly my own beliefs or describing many of my own practices, I’ve written more broadly and avoided anything that might seem too “woo.” (1)
However, we’re now at the point where I cannot write about being pagan without writing about my own experience of being pagan and what that has looked like, regardless of how “crazy” that may sound.
So, I’ll start with a statement: “Odinn told me to join a gym.”
Perhaps that sounds absurd, so I can rewrite that sentence in a way that sounds a bit less “crazy,” such as: “it was because of Odinn that I joined a gym.”
Unfortunately, though, that rewritten statement isn’t actually true. It was actually because of me that I joined a gym. That was my choice, my decision. Odinn didn’t make me get a gym membership, and I didn’t get a gym membership because I was trying to make Odinn happy, and as far as I know, it wasn’t even Odinn’s idea, but rather mine.
So, the only way to say this is, “Odinn told me to join a gym.”
To tell you this, though, is to obscure an entire story for which that statement is mere shorthand. So, I will start again, without concern for how “crazy” or “woo” it might all sound.
“If They Were Actually Real…”
This story actually starts a little over nine years ago with a really haphazard and irresponsible action I don’t recommend anyone take. I remember the day well, and precisely where I was standing and what I had been doing before. It was late afternoon, and I was walking home from work and talking aloud to myself.
I’ve always done that. I think to be a writer you must do this, no matter how embarrassing it can be if someone overhears you. I speak ideas aloud, form sentences before I have written them, and often say “oh” or “hmm” or even “ah! I get it now…” when thinking about some idea or another.
That day, though, standing on a particular part of the sidewalk, about to turn down an alley down which my house was found, I said something quite strange.
“You know, it’s too bad gods aren’t actually real. Because if they were actually real, it would be a lot of fun to do things for them.”
Anyone reading this with experience of gods is no doubt cringing at what I’d done. I cringe sometimes too, and also laugh a bit, and sometimes shake my head whenever I think on that.
What happened next was probably inevitable. I say “next,” but what I really mean is “starting from that point on through the next nine years up until now and probably for the rest of my life.”
Of course, nothing happened immediately. It isn’t as if some bolt of lightning crashed directly in front of me, or a god appeared, or anything like that. It was all a bit gradual, really, and subtle, and also quite sneaky of them.
I started having dreams. Strange ones, with imagery quite jumbled but otherwise more vivid than those to which I’d been earlier accustomed. Sometimes what happened in them—which really never made much sense immediately—lingered in mind all day in the way that an after-image of a bright light stays on your retina even after you close your eyes.
They started slow, quite subtly. I would wake with a sense I had been somewhere else all night, like I had not really been in my bed. Sometimes I felt deeply tired after such dreams; other times, oddly rested.
I told no one, and tried to ignore them. However, the more I tried to ignore them, the more persistent they tended to be. And that’s when the dreams stopped waiting for me to be asleep to start.
I remember the first time that happened. I had just gotten into bed with my partner already asleep next to me. The moment I closed my eyes, well before I’d actually fallen asleep, I saw a woman’s face staring at me.
So I opened my eyes. I’d seen that face before in my dreams, and though it was a friendly face, the dreams with that woman were always really exhausting and I didn’t want to dream about her that night. I wanted just to sleep, so I kept my eyes open a little longer, staring into the darkness of the bedroom, and then finally closed them again.
She was there again, so I opened my eyes. I remember saying something to her, maybe aloud but probably just silently. “Hey, can you wait please? I just want to sleep.”
I heard no response, but she also wasn’t there the next time I closed my eyes. I felt relieved, and then fell into sleep and into another dream with her there.
“...and what’s in-between the rain”
I have a name for her, by the way. I’m pretty sure it is her name: Brighid. I’m sure it’s her name, actually, because a man in a different dream told me that was her name. “It’s Brighid,” he said. “You can tell by the way the rain falls, and what’s in-between the rain.”
She was usually laughing about something in those dreams, and throwing wood on a fire. She never spoke to me, or not directly. Sometimes in the dream I didn’t feel like she even actually noticed I was there, but that’s not precisely correct. It was more that my being there didn’t matter much, in the same way that we might notice a spider in the corner of a room but feel much need to say hello to it.
I eventually made peace with these dreams, stopped fighting them and just let them happen. They got easier once I did this, though no less intense.
Also, when I stopped trying to keep them away, I began to have other kinds of dreams, or dreams with other kinds of images and people. A few of the other people had names, too, and turned out to be gods. Many of them remained unnamed in my dreams, and sometimes I dreamed of gods but there was nobody resembling a person at all.
In fact, this latter sort of dream became the most common. I suspect that’s because faces aren’t really something the gods have, or not like what we think of as faces. I don’t know precisely what they have, just that they sometimes have faces in dreams.
Or maybe they have faces when we need them to. The Greeks and Romans thought of them as having faces, enough to give them faces on statues they made of them. However, the faces on those statues are never the same face, and it’s not really the faces that distinguish them.
Similar to the way the Catholic church depicts saints, what is most important in the Greek and Roman statues—as well as Hindu images of gods—is something they are holding, riding, or wearing. Just as you know it’s Saint Catherine because the statue is holding a wheel, you know it is Minerva because there is an owl on her shoulder, Ganesha because he is riding a mouse, or Neptune because he’s holding a trident.
The gods in my dreams didn’t have such easy keys, though when Brighid was around in one of them there was either a soft, barely perceptible rain or a hearth fire nearby. In dreams, there was a tower or stars when it was Arianrhod, and always a cauldron or a skull when it was Ceridwen.
Being Somewhere Else
The problem is that they didn’t just stay in my dreams. I say “problem,” and that sounds kind of rude perhaps, but it’s the correct word to use, because when you are standing in a bar or at a bus stop or in the middle of having sex and you feel the same weird feelings that you feel when they’re there in your dreams, it can be a bit disruptive.
Most of that, by the way, was Dionysus. That’s the name I have for him, though he never specifically told me it was him. This name I figured out because I met someone else, a human, who told me his experiences of Dionysus were similar to what I was experiencing in those moments.
Dionysus became a kind of initiator for all this, or better said a guide. When I had really intense experiences, visions, and dreams that made no sense to me, it was usually Dionysus who was around to help them make sense.
What did that look like? Oh, this is not easy to describe. First, the experiences themselves were quite bizarre, including having flashes of knowledge about something that was just about to happen, or something that had just happened to someone else. Sometimes I would hear a conversation between between people I didn’t recognise, “hear” as if with my ears though no one else around me seemed to have heard it (though I didn’t ask—I didn’t want anyone to think I was crazy).
Some of these experiences were quite physical. I’d feel someone touch me but there was no one apparently there. Quite often I would feel someone breathing on my neck (that’s Brân, I now know). Sometimes it was just the way the wind fell on my skin, but there was no wind.
Other times, these experiences fit into what moderns might call “the supernatural,” but which a pagan framework still insists are fully natural, just unusual. One time I was walking to work and suddenly wasn’t “there.” Instead, I was on a shoreline that I recognised, a stretch of beach near a village of Bretagne I’d visited a decade before. I looked around, felt the salt wind on my lips and in my nose, heard the sand under my feet. I looked again, and I was on the sidewalk again, still walking to work.
Understandably, it was a bit difficult to focus on work that day, and many other days while all those experiences were happening. I could still perform all my duties, but both my desire to do so and my sense of purpose for it all (I was a social worker at a homeless shelter) had deeply diminished.
Around that time, I met a man who became a close friend. Our meeting had been quite by chance: it was at a bar, and I heard someone tell me to go talk to him. There was “no one” there, of course, or not a human, anyway. It was the same voice I heard some other times, and I learned quickly that taking the suggestions it offered always led to profound, life-changing events.
That voice was Dionysus, I’m pretty sure. And the friendship that arose from that “chance meeting” became deeply transformative, leading me later to other experiences and understandings which eventually brought me to where I am now, writing this text.
“Mere Co-incidence”
To try to apply a modern, rational analysis to all these events is certainly possible. One might suggest I had a schizophrenic break perhaps, or some process of trauma which my mind healed from by conjuring useful fantasies. And for other events which I’m about to narrate, the response would be “mere co-incidence,” which is our modern answer for anything we cannot easily explain.
During the same time as all these other events occurred, I’d briefly met a person to whom I’d recounted some of these events. While he considered himself an atheist, he had shrugged and said it all sounded reasonable regardless. We exchanged contact information, though he was moving to Ireland for work a few weeks later.
We didn’t actually keep in contact, though, which is how such things go. I’d heard nothing from him at all for almost a year, when I received an odd email from him. He’d told me he’d “seen” me in Dublin multiple times one day, turning a corner or walking into a store. He’d thought it strange and a bit amusing, and the next day, while visiting the Bru Na Boinne neolithic site (better known as Newgrange) he’d done something he confessed he thought was silly.
“I put your name in for their solstice lottery. I don’t think you should get excited, they get 40,000 or so entries every year so the chances are nil. Still, I thought you should know.”
The purpose of this lottery is to select 50 people to have a chance to witness a rare and profound event. During the midwinter solstice, just at sunrise, assuming the morning is clear, a shaft of light shines into the 6000 year old passage tomb for a few short minutes. The tomb is very small: only a small number of people can be safely inside, and there is never any guarantee it will be clear those winter mornings.
Still, when I read his email, I had a feeling of panic. “That will happen,” I said aloud, as if I’d already saw it.
Three months later, I received this email:
Dear Rhyd,
I am writing to you from Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre to let you know that your application form to attend the Winter Solstice at Newgrange, Co Meath, Ireland was one of those picked out by local school children on September 26th 2014. There were 30,532 applications altogether. Many congratulations!
They selected 50 out of that total number, putting the probability of not being selected at 99.84%. My chances of being selected, then, were 16 out of 10,000. Of course, that isn’t a zero percent chance, and the chances of being selected for that are much better than winning most financial lotteries.
That being said, I don’t know how to calculate the chances of a person you only ever met once and had no real communication with after that thinking he saw you multiple times in a foreign city and then deciding to put your name in to a cultural lottery, rather than his own.
The Newgrange passage tomb, in Irish lore, is said to be the home of The Dagda, a god who said to be the father of Brighid. That is of course also possible to put down to “mere co-incidence,” but regardless it meant something to me. Other “chance” meetings happened there, and during the rest of my trip. I traveled to Wales while there, hiked around to the site where two dragons were said to be buried under a hill.
Beyond some really intense dreams full of people telling me things I “needed to know” during that part of my trip, I had an experience there I cannot really describe, though I have tried many times to do so. Standing on the hill in a midwinter range, I saw something through a rain drop dripping from a tree that made everything else in my life make sense.
I don’t know what to call what I saw, but I sometimes call it “dragon fire.” It wasn’t fire, and there was no dragon, but it was something “dragon fire” nevertheless accurately describes. It was something from the earth, from within the earth, but something also within myself.
Another word for it might be “will.” It was something older than machines, as old as forests, maybe even older. Something both within and without, something connecting me—by body, my history, and everything I was—to everything around me.
It was that moment I understood something I had tried to understand for a long time. I didn’t need to believe the right things, or believe in gods, or believe in magic. I just needed to be, to let those things be, and be with all of that without trying to make sense of anything anymore.
By being, I became. By being, what happened around me and what I did acted in concert, like it was all some orchestrated symphony or dance which everyone—human and non-human—had known from even before their births.
Was Willst Du?
That event led to many others in my life, eventually leading me to encountering more gods and land spirits, including a certain figure I’ve encountered twice “in person.”
The first time I met him, he was just a strange guy giving me a bizarre look from one eye as he walked past me on a path near an old druidic site in Bretagne. Later that night, I saw him again in dream, and he made me an offer I politely inclined.
The next time, however, we actually spoke in person. It was my last day on a long pilgrimage through Europe, which I had ended by staying with a friend in Berlin. On that final day, just before catching a train to the airport from which I would then return to the United States, I decided to buy an ice cream cone and sit on a park bench one last time.
I had an hour before I needed to leave, and I just wanted some time alone to think, to enjoy the fleeting minutes of my experience in Europe. I was profoundly sad: I didn’t want to leave, and I felt like my entire life made more sense when I was there than it ever did in America.
I was interrupted. A man had walked by, dressed in torn clothing, with long grey scraggly hair, and then decided to sit directly next to me on that bench, rather than on either of the two adjacent and empty benches.
I’ll admit to being frustrated. He was sitting uncomfortably close. I worked professionally with homeless people for 6 years, and he looked homeless, and this all reminded me of the job I didn’t want to return to in the country in which I no longer wanted to live.
I looked up and asked him if he wanted money or a cigarette.
“No,” he answered.
“Then what do you want?” I asked, probably quite rudely.
“Nein,” he said in German. “Was willst du?” (2)
That’s when I noticed his glass eye.
I shrugged. “I want to live in Europe.”
He nodded. “Okay,” he replied, then said some other things I still don’t fully understand. Then, he stood up and left.
I heard him again a few years later, though in a backwards way, the way you hear with your body instead of just your ears. I was living in Europe, as I said I had wanted to. And I was not in a good situation, and was feeling quite a bit of despair. I felt disconnected from myself, from the world around me, and frozen in place.
He told me I should join a gym, because I obviously wanted to and so I should do what I truly desired. So I did, and found that this was what I had been missing, a direct way to be body again rather than becoming stuck “in my head.”
That’s what I mean when I said, “Odinn told me to join a gym,” a statement which makes no sense without the rest of that context.
Context is also why I’ve saved all this for the very end. Life is an enchanted thing, the body is capable of understanding things we rarely allow ourselves to experience, nature has a rhythm and song of its own, our ancestors understood things we desperately need to remember, the land speaks, and gods and spirits dwell everywhere. All this that I have written about I have learned because of these experiences, from letting myself be body and giving attention to the time of the moon, the seasons, and the stars rather than the logic of machines.
This is what it has looked like for me. For you, it may look different. I don’t suggest the specific stumbling and clumsy path I took to get here, nor do I recommend loudly stating that you think it would be fun to do things for gods “if they really existed.”
You can live a deeply enchanted life without doing all that, and likely a more stable life than I’ve necessarily had. Since that very first experience, I’ve lived in quite a few cities in quite a few countries, lived in no shortage of bizarre situations and experienced no small amount of weird visions, dreams, and other moments that still don’t make much sense to me.
It is enough to go for a walk and to stare at the moon. It is enough to think fondly on your ancestors, to light an occasional candle in their memory, to leave an offering to a house spirit once in a while. It is also enough just to let yourself feel the sun on your skin, to enjoy the feel of water or the touch of grass under your bare feet.
It is enough just to be, without worrying about believing the right things or seeking experiences outside of what we have come to expect as usual. Being pagan is itself enough, because it is most of all being yourself, recollecting the lost parts of you and remembering them in a way that feels more human and less machine.
All this is an act of joy, of life, and of nature itself, which is what being pagan really is.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd is a druid, a writer, a theorist, and the director of publishing of Gods&Radicals Press. He lives in the Ardennes.
Notes
I don’t know the etymology of woo, sorry. I’m certain it isn’t from latin. A synonym for it is “weird” or “far out;” basically, anything without an immediate materialist explanation.
“No, what do you want?”