Witches and Nothing
I have often repeated the story of my conversion to anyone who cares to hear, but I have never mentioned that first snowflake with started the avalanche.
Back in the happy blindness of my atheist days, one of my innocent pleasures was to sit around with like-minded friends and blaspheme, mocking the foolish Christians and their endlessly foolish God. No jest was too coarse for this pastime. Those of you who cannot comprehend the pleasure involved, it was the pleasure an iconoclast gets from smashing idols. It did not matter whether any real Christians were in earshot or not, because we were not especially mocking them, we were mocking an ever-present idea that was equally open to mockery when we were alone. (It also did not matter because no Christian was so rude as to voice a defense against our slanders and jibes, or even to request common courtesy from us.)
After graduation, one of my blaspheming friends became a neopagan, or, to call things by their right names, a witch. Yes, a sky-clad, tree-hugging athame-wielding warlock, complete with muttering and peeping and a big purple cloak. When we sat blaspheming, he did not seem to realize that, in my arch-rationalist atheist eyes, his devotion to his make-believe little gods and hocus-pocus make-believe powers was no more worthy of respect than the very beliefs he joined me in mocking.
Once upon a time I asked him, whether, in his religion, he believed in an afterlife or reincarnation. The question caught him by surprise, and he had no answer for it. During the same conversation, I asked him whether he had a metaphysical explanation for ethics, that is, whether his moral code had objective existence due to the divinity of his gods. The conversation was soon tangled in insurmountable confusion. He had never thought about it.
You see, I did not grasp at that time that, for him, the gods he worshipped did not have objective existence, they were merely a convenience, a mask,if you will, to explain (or to visualize) an amorphous mystical energy or ‘force’ that the magician can tame by attributing to it the names and personalities of ancient gods.
My friend was not a sincere pagan. He was a magician. The gods to him were tools in his toolbox, and his rituals and observances were crafts meant to influence the world, to change his luck, to help him achieve spiritual enlightenment, or, perhaps supernal powers.
His religion had no Ten Commandments, no theology, no history, no literature, no liturgy, no practices, no eschatology, no creation myth, no fixed pantheon, no community, no intellectual life or accomplishments at all. It was a smorgasbord, where the celebrant picked what gods and what observances he liked—on Tuesday, we adore Sechmet, on Midwinter’s Eve, we cut Mistletoe— and simply dismissed the others. From what I could see, it was all feast days and no fasting, always Easter and never Lent.
For my neopagan friend in his coven, there was no paradox in worshipping the Virgin Moon-goddess but approving of fornication (even though real Vestal Virgins caught fornicating were buried alive). There was no paradox in worshipping the Great Mother, a fertility goddess, but approving of lesbianism and aborticide. Apparently fertility goddesses do not make any demands that the celebrant actually, you know, be loyal to the idea of fertility.
I admit I was thunderstruck. I am not a pagan and I have little sympathy for pagans, but even I, an atheist from skin to marrow, would not have insulted the memory of the pagans of antiquity in the thorough and contemptuous fashion as my friend, who allegedly worshipped their gods.
How you worship something without respecting it, revering it, obeying it, taking it seriously, that I cannot tell you.
The pagans of old believed in their gods. They trembled before them and placated them with sacrifices. The pagans of old held it an honor to serve the gods, to remain virgins for Vesta and her sacred fire, to avoid the boasting and pride which provokes divine ire.
The pagans of old were patriots, respectful of their ancestors, for the gods of the city were the genius of the city. My friend did not even respect his own parents, much less the flag. He thought the gods were here to serve him. It was a fundamentally dishonest approach to the cultus of old: Odin and Hecate would be shocked.
My neopagan friend and his coven did not actually support the pagan virtues: fortitude, justice, temperance, and moderation. They did not read the pagan philosophers or the pagan poets.
I tried to imagine my friend, or any of his coven, having the gumption of Antigone, who is ready, willing and able to suffer a horrible death, merely to see to it that her brother was buried with the proper funerary rites. The attempt made me laugh. The neopagans were a particularly lighthearted group when it came to familial piety. None of them, as far as I could see, had any loyalty to their brothers; certainly not the kind of loyalty that commands death without flinching.
Their religion did not stand for anything. It made no demands on them, it explained nothing, it offered no comfort.
That was the first hint of doubt in my pristine and pure atheist world.
I asked myself why my friend, if he was going to demean himself with religion, why he would select a religion he knew to be false, and which he had no intention of practicing honestly or taking seriously?
The answer to that question came several years later, when I saw my pagan friend marry his pagan wife in what I thought was a rather moving ceremony. They vowed not only eternal fidelity to each other, but swore a oath poetical, nay, breathtaking in its arrogance that they would meet again in other lives and in other worlds, woo again and wed once more, and be true toeach other for all of time, beyond the shores of death itself. Talk about making promises you cannot keep.
This puzzled me, because I knew enough history to know that Romans could divorce their wives at their pleasure. Why were my pagan friends binding themselves with an oath even more strict than the strictest Roman Catholic, who vow merely to be faithful unto death?
Because they wanted to keep the Christian moral code.
Why not be Christian, then? As far as I could see from my atheist eyes, there was no reason to prefer one false theory to another.
Because they did not want to disapprove of homosex.
Why not be a Buddhist or Shinto or some other living religion, then?
They did not want to live up to a moral code of any kind. All living religions make a demand, either that the ego be quenched, or that the Eightfold Path be followed, or that the Thousand Gods of Japan be served by a life of purity.
All living religions stand for something. They did not want to stand for anything.
It was not until I read Hart’s essay on Christ and Nothing that I understood what the neopagans stood for. They stood for Nothing. They stood for the proposition that you can by magic create reality around you, and even assign the gods their names, epithets, and attributes, and so by your own will project your soul into the surrounding Nothingness and have it, for you, for so long as you willed it, become Something, and take what shape you put upon it.
Fans of Ayn Rand will recognize this philosophy: The neopagans are the Wesley Mouch of the spirit realm, the looters and moochers, guilty of the metaphysical equivalent of context-dropping.
Fans of David Lindsay will recognize this philosophy: ultimately, it is Gnosticism, the idea that secret knowledge will dash all the falsehoods of the surrounding cosmos, and reveal that you, in your glorious you-ness, are the source and summit of the glorious goodness that is the Surtur fire, the inner divinity.
Fans of Bob Heinlein will recognize this philosophy: Thou Art God.
I did not have any soul back then, and so I knew nothing of spiritual longings, and so I did not understand what drove my poor witch friends to feast on shadows and don the fancy fabrics of the Emperor’s new clothes. The coffin of the natural universe seemed large enough to me back that, and I did not think there was anything outside it, or any other place to which to escape, and the lid was sealed by the laws of entropy, so there was no point in regretting our being buried alive.
I was, in other words, a Stoic. While I did not believe in the ecpyrosis, the universal conflagration, that inevitably destroyed each cycle of creation, I did believe in the heat death of the universe. While I did not believe in Pronia, a divine reason that orders all nature, I did believe and do believe, in Natural Reason, that is, in the existence of objective and self-evident moral principles that command, by merely being, our assent.
Knowing nothing of spiritual longings, I could not understand why anyone would reject a rather subtle and powerful falsehood, like Christianity, and yet embrace a simplistic and empty falsehood, like astrology.
The first snowflake of disbelief in my pristine atheism was this: I realized that there were systems of belief even less coherent and less dignified than Christianity. That may not seem like much of a concession, but it was enough to get me wondering.
The second snowflake, for those of you that are interested, was a Protestant telling me that the Catholics were pagans. I was curious enough to look into it, and I found out to my pleasant surprise that the parts of paganism, the good parts, that my so-called neopagans had left behind, were still alive and well in that citadel of abhorrent superstition known as Catholicism. Aristotle was alive and well, living in the cell of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Vestal Virgins in all sobriety were alive and well, disguised as Nuns and helping the poor in Calcutta. Mighty Odin pinned to the world-tree Yggrdrassil by his magic spear Gungnir, was alive and well in the shape of Christ, pinned to the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil by the magic spear of Destiny, the lance of Joseph of Arimethea.
The parts that were left behind in paganism, sodomy and infant sacrifice and hierarchy and slavery, were, of course, the only parts the neopagans, whether they knew it or not, were really bent on reviving: homosex, aborticide, elitism, and socialism.
I found myself forced to admire my hated foes, the Catholics, against my will, the same way, I suppose, fans of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK secretly admire Darth Vader and his theme music. At least I could argue theology with a Catholic if I wanted to prove atheism correct: there was nothing to fight and no one to argue with and nothing to proof among the neopagans, because they have no theology and no faith in reasoning and no standards of proof. How does one argue with "I believe it because I feel like it"?
The third snowflake I have mentioned before in other writings. When my wife asked to raise my children in her religion, despite the fact that I regarded it as a revolting superstition akin to a mental disorder, I consented: I wanted my children to be afraid to tell lies. I wanted them to fear to break the Ninth Commandment. If they had to believe in ghosts and mumbo-jumbo to have that iron rule soaked into the bones, so be it. In this, I was tacitly admitting what all atheists take such vehement care to deny: whether or not there is a natural reason, absent religion, to fear and obey a moral code, it is perfectly clear that even a child can understand the religious reason. There was no corresponding moral fiber to neopaganism, at least among those I knew. They might say that Odin punishes oathbreakers or that the Moon-goddess protects virgins, or that evil returns on the evildoer tenfold, and so on, but if you only worship Odin on Wednesday and Artemis on Monday, where does that leave you? If you know you are inventing your own gods to suit yourself you know their enforcement of cosmic law is nothing but your own willpower enforcing your own will: the Ten Commandments you wrote yourself in chalk on slate.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
