Being Pagan: The Other
Beyond the belief in gods and spirits, another core aspect of the pagan, animist, and indigenous framework throughout the world and throughout history is the belief in some form of magic.
For modern people, whose worldview is dominated by the concept of reason and the mistaken belief that we have “progressed” to a more advanced (and therefore “superior” or “true”) way of seeing the world, this can be an incredibly difficult thing to comprehend. We believe ourselves to live in an age defined by scientific knowledge, of rational thinking, to have transcended the superstitious and “primitive” beliefs of earlier people. Therefore, the very notion that magic might exist is quickly dismissed.
Yet despite this, interest in magic and the occult has always permeated this “secular” modern order. Horoscopes can be found in almost every newspaper, and journals such as The Atlantic and The New York Times have published many articles in the last few years remarking on a dramatic increase in interest for witchcraft and new age healing practices. (1)
Interest in the occult and magic isn’t just recent. For instance, the two best selling non-religious texts—in any language—in all of human history both prominently feature magic: The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien (140.6 million copies) and Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling (120 million copies). (2)
Books are not the only place where the persistence of occult and magical interest can be seen. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, esoteric movements sprung up throughout Europe, blending occult themes and pagan ideas together into new forms. Spiritualism (and its related movement, Spiritism) were both formed in the middle of the 1800’s around the idea that certain humans could contact angels, demons, and the dead. A little later in England, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn arose as a secret society dedicated to the pursuit of ritual magic and occult knowledge. At almost the same time, the Theosophical Society was founded in the United States by a Russian esotericist, Helena Blavatsky.
Those two movements greatly influenced the thinking of three famous occultists who have shaped the way many people now look at magic and the occult: Gerald Gardner, Doreen Valiente, and Aleister Crowley. Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente co-created a new religious movement called Wicca, which has now become wrongly seen as synonymous with witchcraft and paganism both, while Aleister Crowley founded the occult tradition Thelema.
We can go further back than all this, into the “Enlightenment” itself, to see that interest in the occult permeated the thoughts and writing even of the founders of rationalism. Isaac Newton, for instance, wrote extensively on alchemy and angels, while Francis Bacon, the founder of the “scientific method,” was actively involved as a jurist against accused witches in England. Jean Bodin, whose Six Books On the Commonwealth are the political foundation for the modern, secular nation-state, also wrote a study of demons and the occult. And of course, just a little earlier, there were the famous Renaissance magicians, whose works form the foundation of many alchemical, astrological, and goetic practices today.
The Nature of Magic
Though there has absolutely been a persistent fascination with magic and the occult throughout the last half a millennium, and though many of the architects of our modern secular framework were themselves studied in such subjects, our current conception of magic is quite warped and bears little resemblance to theirs, let alone the more ancient and widespread pagan conception.
While writing about magic and the occult thus far, I have been particularly careful to avoid a certain word whose absence you may have noticed: “supernatural.” The reason for this is because, in a pagan framework, there is no such thing.
That doesn’t mean that pagan, animist, and indigenous peoples have no concept of magic. On the contrary, magic forms a core part of their understanding of the world. Similar to their understanding of gods and spirits, magic is not a supernatural process or act for them, but rather a fully natural one. That is, just as gods and spirits are part of the natural world, so too is magic.
Believing magic to be part of the natural world is very similar to believing the body to be inseparable from a human. Just as our modern alienation from the body often leads us to see our minds as outside the body or the body as something external to us, our modern misunderstanding of nature leads us to assume that magic, spirits, and the gods must be external to it.
Our alienation from body is an important obstacle to our understanding of magic, so we need to explore this problem again. Here, Silvia Federici’s previously cited essay, “In Praise of the Dancing Body,” is yet even more useful:
What we have not always seen is what the separation from the land and nature has meant for our body, which has been pauperized and stripped of the powers that pre-capitalist populations attributed to it.
Nature has been inorganic body and there was a time when we could read the winds, the clouds, and the changes in the currents of rivers and seas. In pre-capitalist societies people thought they had the power to fly, to have out-of body experiences, to communicate, to speak with animals and take on their powers and even shape-shift. They also thought that they could be in more places than one and, for example, they could come back from the grave to take revenge of their enemies.
Not all these powers were imaginary. Daily contact with nature was the source of a great amount of knowledge reflected in the food revolution that took place especially in the Americas prior to colonization or in the revolution in sailing techniques. We know now, for instance, that the Polynesian populations used to travel the high seas at night with only their body as their compass, as they could tell from the vibrations of the waves the different ways to direct their boats to the shore.
Here, Silvia Federici offers a tantalising look at something that very few other writers have explored. The ability to feel by the vibrations of waves how far your boat is from land sounds like a “supernatural” power, yet it is something quite natural and something that the body is capable of doing.
Here we can remember what I wrote about when we spoke of the moon, that I can know without looking or consulting any external chart where it will rise and in what phase it will be. This, to someone who has never thought on such things or who has not made a habit of looking at the moon, could easily seem “supernatural,” but it’s actually a fully natural thing to be able to do.
There are countless other such acts and perceptions which are seen by some as supernatural but are instead abilities of the body we have “forgotten” in our modern world. That is, they are all quite natural abilities, but our modern definition of what is natural has become too small and limited.
A peculiar phenomenon known as “blindsight” illustrates this quite well. In blindsight, people whose visual cortex (the part of the brain responsible for translating light stimuli into images) have been irreversibly damaged and are therefore completely blind still are able to judge distances, point out the direction of bright lights or objects, and even correctly notice when someone is looking directly at them. (3)
A blind person shouldn’t be able to do those tasks, of course, since such things are thought to be only possible with sight. However, they can, and this has led “rational” researchers to come to a conclusion that is remarkably similar to the supposedly irrational animist one: our consciousness is not our only source of knowledge. Instead, there are unconscious processes and sensations to which our bodies are constantly reacting which we rarely ever notice.
The Unconscious and the Conscious
Consider that feeling you have when someone else is in the room with you that you didn’t expect, and then suddenly you notice they are really there. Before you were consciously aware of their presence, you were unconsciously aware of them. That is, there was a bodily awareness before there was a mental awareness.
When we speak of unconscious, then, what we really mean is everything that the body knows and senses. What is conscious, therefore, is only the part of the knowledge and sensation that has our immediate attention.
There’s a rather funny “trick” I like to show my friends and my partner which often will both amaze and terrify them. When I am cooking and in the process of chopping vegetables with a very sharp knife, I will talk directly to them while looking completely away from the knife and what I am cutting. Once they notice that I am not actually paying attention to what I am doing, their response is usually one of panic: “you’ll cut yourself!” they’ll warn.
I don’t actually cut myself though, because I have learned to slice things very accurately by only touch. This is what some call “body memory,” the same kind of process by which you can find your way through a dark room that you know very well or type without looking at a keyboard or even the screen.
“Body memory” is a kind of unconscious knowledge, just as blindsight is. In blindsight, the body of a blind person still senses distance and directed attention because such knowledge is coming through the body itself, regardless of whether or not the body “informs” their conscious perception.
Consider all the daily activities you perform without ever focusing on them, and you will begin to get a sense of how truly vast the body’s capabilities really are. Walking, for example: you move throughout the world with legs accurately stepping flatly on the earth without ever once losing your balance and toppling over. This is an unconscious skill, an act of the body that rarely requires your direct attention. You daily chew and digest food and drink water without choking or drowning yourself, and never once need to direct the act of swallowing. You probably dress without actually thinking about putting on each article of clothing, perhaps only ever giving attention to which clothes you will wear that day. If like me you ride a bike, you are engaging in a completely unconscious and quite astounding act of keeping yourself upright on two wheels, only directing your conscious thoughts to where you’re riding and to avoid obstacles or cars.
Very few of these things which the body does ever have our attention or focus, and that is probably for the best. In fact, often consciousness will get in the way of many of the things we need to do. If you think too hard about riding a bike and try to control the movements of balance, you are likely to fall. When you dance, focusing too much on the steps will make you miss them. Likewise, if you try to go to sleep you are quite likely instead to find yourself wide awake, just as trying to direct the slicing of vegetables with conscious effort is likely to result in cutting yourself. (4)
The body knows things we don’t ever think about or even realize we know. Since we are our bodies, what I really mean here is that we know things we don’t realize we know.
Magic and the Body
Here we can look again at the question of magic. One of the definitions of magic, put forward by Aleister Crowley, is that it is the “science and art of causing change to occur in conformity to will.” A more pagan definition, however, would be “aligning consciousness to the body in order to enact change.”
That is to say, we moderns have it all wrong: the body is not the servant of the mind, but rather consciousness is the servant of the body. Consciousness, or “the mind,” are not the “real us,” but rather just one part of us. Consciousness is the directed gaze of the body, where the body looks and what the body chooses to give attention to. That gaze is not possible without the body, in the same way eyes cannot see when they are removed from the body.
Aligning our consciousness to the knowledge of the body means, at the very basic level, giving attention to what the body is telling us. As mentioned in the chapter on the body, often times experiences of anxiety, depression, panic, or despair are actually our consciousness misinterpreting bodily sensations. Are we really depressed, or are we actually tired? Are we really anxious, or are we actually hungry? Is there really a reason to despair, or have we just not taken a deep breath for awhile or had a drink of water?
Learning to tell the difference here is crucial not just for our own health and sanity, but also for performing any sort of magic. Consider: if your consciousness is constantly misinterpreting core bodily sensations such as hunger, thirst, and fatigue, how much more would it misinterpret more complex and much more rare sensations, such as the presence of a god or spirit?
That is, to align consciousness with the body in order to enact change, we must first understand what the body is already saying. Many religious and esoteric traditions recommend meditation for this kind of work, which can be useful but is hardly the only or even necessarily best way to do this. In most forms of meditation, a person “stills” their thoughts in order to have better control over the consciousness and the ways it is directed. In forms of mediation that I have found much more useful, the focus is not so much on quieting thoughts but rather being aware of how those thoughts relate to sensations of the body.
In these other forms, when a thought arises, you direct your consciousness towards where that thought might be located in the body. The goal here is to approach these thoughts and their relationship to bodily sensations with a sense of curiosity, rather than judgment. For example, the thought ‘I’m bored’ might correspond to stress in your lower back or legs, perhaps a subtle pain or exhaustion of those muscles. In such a case, the body desires to shift or move to release that tension, and boredom (which is really just wanting to do something else) is how this desire is consciously translated. (5)
Practicing these latter forms of meditation are one way of aligning your consciousness to body, but there are many more active ways of doing this as well. For instance, weight training, hard exercise, and martial arts all lead to such an alignment, because in all such training our conscious attention is pulled into a sense of immediacy through the intensity of bodily sensations. When I do leg presses at the gym for instance, an exercise that requires pushing several hundred pounds of weight with just the muscles of the legs, my consciousness can only focus on what the body is doing and what the physical sensations are. Here, the mind must listen precisely to what those sensations are, determining when the levels of pain are healthy and useful (all weight training damages muscle tissue, which is how muscles grow) and when the pain indicates a joint or tendon might snap. In many martial arts, conscious awareness is trained to “follow” the body, rather than direct the body, since it is the body rather than our conscious attention that senses where an opponent is about to strike and what movement is required to counter or avoid that strike.
Martial arts are also useful in developing a wider field of sensation than what our conscious attention normally acknowledges. An esoteric way of describing this is “extending the subtle body,” with the subtle body meaning the field of sensation that extends beyond the apparent physical body itself.
One need not train in martial arts (though it is profoundly useful) to develop this, however. Here, other physical activities like dancing are helpful. Some recommend consuming entheogenic substances (6), and this can be a useful path for some. I would be remiss if I did not admit I myself used quite a few such aids several decades ago, but I also do not think they are necessary. The same altered states they create are all possible to attain without their use.
Intuition, Insight, Inspiration, and Charisma
All of these practices to align your consciousness with your body ultimately lead to a deeper connection to what is often called intuition. Intuition, like so many other words we have looked at, comes from Latin and has a specifically pagan root sense. The core root of intuition is also the root word of the word tutor: tueri, which meant “to watch over” or “to guard.” Thus, intuition is a kind of inner tutor or guardian, something (or someone) watching over you from within.
This idea of intuition being an inner guardian is a deeply pagan idea, found especially in Greek and Roman pagan beliefs. The Greeks recognised a being called eudaemon, a kind of benevolent spirit that would protect and watch over particular humans. Plato, for instance, recounts how Socrates claimed to have such an eudaemon since childhood, who often whispered warnings to him. Roman pagans spoke of and even often made shrines to the genii, (7) personal attendant spirits that are with people from the moment of their births to the moment of their deaths (8) and are to some degree a part of the person themselves.
Both the eudaemon and the genius (9) were spirits independent from a person, yet were also seen as somewhat inseparable from the person themselves. Rather than being a paradox, though, this points to something profound about the pagan view of spirits, intelligence, and the nature of thought itself.
This can be seen in another latin-derived English word that we often use when describing a kind of inner and rare knowledge: inspiration, which comes from the same root as the words respiration and spirit. To be inspired was to have breathed something in, or to have a spirit inside you.
This link between spirits and breath is not just a Latin one: our word ghost comes from the Germanic-derived old English word gast, which could equally refer to a spirit, an angel, a demon, a breath, or a man. (10) And in Greek, the word for spirit is the same word for breath and breathing, pneuma. (11)
This link between breathing and spirits answers the apparent paradox of the eudaemon and the genius being both independent but also inseparable from a person, because of the principle of interpenetration. As Kadmus notes in True to the Earth:
There is another aspect of the gods we haven’t talked about yet, namely the way they can inspire, be channeled by, or even possess humans. In pagan cultures when a person embodies a particularly striking characteristic that falls within the domain of a given god, they were frequently understood to have become that god. Sometimes, this is described as the god appearing as the person. Sometimes, the god is described as inspiring or dictating the actions of the person (for example, Athena talking to Odysseus to guide his wisdom while no one else sees or hears her). Sometimes, the god is said to directly enter and possess the person. All of these are attested to in Ancient Greek literature, but nowhere is there a more highly developed expertise on the varieties of relations like these than in African traditional and diasporic religions.
This aspect of the embodied gods makes clear that gods and the rest of the entities that make up the cosmos (especially humanity) are really inter-bodied. We flow in and out of each other, as interweaving ongoing events which mutually define us. Understanding bodies as matrices of relational actions and events helps us to understand how the bodies of the gods can go through the many changes that they do, as well as being able to interpenetrate our own.
Consider the act of breathing. When we inhale, we pull in oxygen which circulates through our blood. When we exhale, we release carbon dioxide that the body creates through all its life activities. So then, is the air we breathe actually an internal or external part of the body? The answer of course is that it is both.
This is the key to the pagan understanding of spirits and also that of consciousness, insight, and inspiration. The genius and the eudaemon are both internal and external to us because they flow in and out of us the way air flows in and out. Sometimes we have particular flashes of “genius” and are said to be “inspired,” and sometimes we escape particular harm through apparent chance or the “gut feeling” of intuition that to others—and also to ourselves—may look like someone or something was watching over us.
In our modern framework the conclusion when such things occur is that a person is merely “fortunate” or is particularly “gifted.” Both of these ways of looking at the world actually contain one half of the pagan conception. Consider: to be “gifted” implies that there was someone which gave the gift. Luck and fortune both derive from pagan concepts implying the same relationship: they were things given to someone by the gods, rather than just random acts of chance. (12)
One last concept, this time from the Greek, can help further explain the pagan way of understanding intuition and inspiration, as well as the relationship between our conscious attention and the body of knowledge we call the unconscious. As Kadmus noted in the section I cited above, when someone appeared to do something strikingly powerful, or to be particularly beautiful, or to possess some unique and renowned trait that others were drawn to, pagan peoples saw the presence or the influence of a god in that person. The Greek word for this was kharisma, meaning “divine favor or gift.”
A person with kharisma (or charisma, as we now spell it) was seen as having been touched or gifted by a god who favored them. A god of beauty, for example, might have gifted a person with particularly stunning beauty, just as a god of wisdom might have given a gift of divine insight to another. Crucial to this was that everyone around the person immediately recognised the presence of such a gift and connected the gift to a divine giver.
Charisma is a concept which remains in modern secular society still, though we usually see it as a dangerous trait. A charismatic person seems to have an uncanny power of drawing people to them through charm (13), or their beauty, or just a “magnetic personality,” and many times such people are seen as potentially destructive (for instance, a charismatic cult leader or politician). Even in this negative view, however, we can detect a continuation of the pagan idea that behind such unique and alluring traits was a powerful influence that could not easily be reckoned with.
Here we can see how our concept of “genius” now also still continues some degree of this pagan framework. A person who is a genius is thought to be profoundly intelligent or to possess a very rare and powerful degree of insight or intuition about a situation. For the pagans, such people were not geniuses themselves, but had particularly helpful genii to whom they listened.
Listening to the Other
This is the key to this pagan framework of magic, of aligning consciousness to the unconscious in order to affect change. A person could be surrounded by all the helpful spirits in the world, but if they did not listen to them then their life would be one misfortune after another. Similarly, a person could have a particularly insightful genius constantly alerting them to danger or offering them insight into the world around them, but if that person did not listen then none of it amounts to anything.
What we call the unconscious is the body and all that the information the body constantly attempts to convey. Whether that information is simply hunger and thirst or intuitive glimpses and strokes of genius and inspiration, it is all worthless if we insist that our conscious attention—our minds, or what Freud called the “ego,”--is the true seat of knowledge.
Once we recognise the unconscious for what it is, we can then learn to understand what is being said through the body by the rest of the world, and the place that is easiest for many to start with is dreaming.
Our modern understanding is that dreaming is an unconscious process; if this is true, and if the unconscious is also the body, dreaming is therefore a bodily process. One way of looking at what is happening with dreaming is that it is the body attempting to translate experiences into consciousness, rather than consciousness translating experiences of the body.
Of course not everything in dream has profound importance, but often times our dreams do hold mysteries which deal with the world to which we do not normally direct our attention. For instance, we may dream of a tooth falling out, which many see as the body conveying the need for something to leave our life that is no longer necessary. Or we may dream of being in a vehicle which we cannot stop, which often is interpreted as a bodily sense of loss of control.
Here we might ask, “where are such messages actually coming from?” The answer to this is complicated, but on the most basic level, they are coming from the body itself. However, since the body is always in relation to the world around it, whether we sleep or are awake, no message can be truly said to be “only” from the body. Instead, every such message is the body’s response, just as pain is a response to something.
Consider: when we touch a tree, we experience the tree through the body. We only “feel” the tree because there is a tree there that we are touching. Without the body touching the tree, there is no message of a tree being touched.
So when we dream, our body is conveying a message just as pain is a message. And just as pain can be a message relayed by the body from an external or internal cause, dreams can likewise be from internal or external causes, with the body being the messenger.
Recall again the matter of sleep and the dead which Kadmus mentioned in his book, True to the Earth:
This idea of sleep touching death is also well attested to in the ancient world, and it is not original to Heraclitus. It was (and still is in many cultures) a common truth that the dead speak to us in our sleep. More potently, there is a longstanding tradition in both Greek and Roman culture that dreams come through two gates, a gate of truth and one of falsehood, and both gates are found in the Underworld land of the dead. In fact, sleep and dream are often identified with the gates to the Underworld.
We are “unconscious” during sleep, meaning that we are fully experiencing the world only through the body, without the focused attention of conscious mind. Thus, we are more open to hearing outside ourselves, though of course we do not always know how to translate what we hear.
One dream I had recently was of my grandfather telling me I was dying. When I woke, I learned that there had been a fire in the house while I slept that could have killed me. Dreams of dead relatives are rare for me, and so when I wake I try to give what they said particular attention.
Other such dreams that have had profound meaning for me have been dreams of certain animals, or people I did not know telling me strange things which made no sense to me immediately but later unfolded into deep wisdom.
Starting from such dream experiences, I then learned to let unconscious body communicate things to me during waking, as well. It was in this way I began to understand that the feelings I had in certain physical places were not just random, but rather bodily responses to something in the place itself. Near specific trees, for instance, or specific streams, certain feelings came over me that I learned indicated a presence in the place.
Again, though, this sort of knowledge of spirits is only possible once you’ve learned to discern what the body is communicating. You may feel really good in a place because you just drank some coffee or are with friends, or really sad in a place because you are tired. Or, on the other hand, those feelings may be the body experiencing an Other.
You can only know the difference when you first know the body.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd is a druid, a theorist, and a writer, as well as the director of publishing for Gods&Radicals Press // Ritona asbl. He lives in the Ardennes.
Notes
For instance, “When Did Everyone Become a Witch” in the New York Times (2019), “Why Is Witchcraft On the Rise” in The Atlantic (2020)
In fact, half of the top 20 selling books of all time feature magic. Seven of these are by the same author, J.K. Rowling.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150925-blindsight-the-strangest-form-of-consciousness
This goes for many, many other things. For instance, stuttering is often cured by helping the person stop giving attention to the act of speaking, and sexual dysfunction is usually cured in people by training them to stop thinking about the sex act.
This is a deeply crucial insight for anyone who wishes to practice magic. The body experiences things our consciousness constantly attempts to translate, and often times the translation is wrong. However, through practice, you can begin to correct those translations in your conscious thought so that you understand better what is being experienced and can discern what is coming from “normal” sensations and what is coming from an external influence.
Substances that temporarily alter perception or consciousness, such as hallucinogenic mushrooms, or the wide array of plants used ritually by indigenous people.
Though this word looks remarkably similar to the Arabic word for spirits, djen (or djinni) which was translated as “genie” in English, etymologists believe they are completely unrelated.
These two pagan concepts were later borrowed by Saint Augustine and became folded into the Christian concept of the “eternal soul,” though this is absolutely not their original meaning. The folk Christian belief in guardian angels, however, is a much closer approximation (and technically a pagan continuation) of the original ideas.
The singular of the plural genii, which is also the source of our modern english usage of the word “genius,” meaning someone with a particularly rare kind of insight.
The word “wight,” which usually only refers now to a kind of undead, also originally could refer to a man, a thing, or a demon.
This is the root of the word “pneumatic” and “pneumonia,” and also the French word for tires, “pneu,” referencing the fact they are filled with air.
Chance comes from latin as well, cadentia, which meant “what fell out,” referring to how dice fell out of hands or a cup when thrown.
Again from latin, charm originally referred to a specific kind of song used in religious rites, an incantation. Enchant has the same root.