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Pagan Theology & Ethics 
In construction
Is it possibly to derive ethical views from pagan values?Assuming we can use the term 'pagan' to capture a specific set of religious practitioners - it's unlikely they would be able to come up with an agreed list of values. Its the nature of paganism to be vague about these things. Even so here are aresome possibilities.
pagan values
1. Cause no unneccessary harm
I've a feeling that might be a self-evident truth.You have to be pretty bloody minded to think the opposite.Can you think of a counter example?
2. The necessity of polytheism
Some would say monotheism is the only necessity.But true monotheism is rare.For example, Christianity is a good example of polytheism masquerading asmonotheism. The complexity of nature implies a natural polytheism
3. The plurality of ultimate truth
A great deal of effort has been devoted to the discovery of one 'ultimate truth' or one'Theory of Everything.' But theories such as Godel's Theorem of incompletenesssurely imply this issue will always be unresolved. In which case ultimate reality isalways plural - which is expressed in certain pagan mythology such as that the worldcomes into being from the interaction of a god
and 
a goddess.
4. Tolerance5. Principle of Honour 6. Compassion
Issues:
AbortionConflict
 Death and Burial 
I take it Caliban's long comment is intended for the issue of 'Death & Burial'. Heseems to be saying that the intellectual paganism of the classical period (Greeks andRomans) is responsible for a loss of the richer attitudes to death and the otherworld,traces of which are still discoverable in older cultures. It's an interesting idea and onethat is evidenced in the literature. It maybe goes hand in hand with the idea thatmagicians of the period were such trouble makers that they provoked their owndemise. Certainly it can't all be blamed on the Christians - bad as they were - the firstlaws against magick were enacted by Augustus way before the Christian hegemony.
 
The high culture of Egyptian had three classes of sentient being-the ankhw, the akhw and the neterw -the living, the spirits and the gods.All that talk of 'spiritualism' is really about the Akhw - the spirits of departed whohave some continued existence - sometimes in a way helpful to us sometimes not so.Death customs may be for the benefit of the deceased or serve some other aim - perhaps display or redistribution of wealth. Nothing so far implies an afterlife in someotherworld. The Akhw live amongst us not somewhere else, if they did maybe theywould be less troublesome? Some death customs clearly do implie an otherworld - asfor instance when someone is buried with a sword presumably to do some fighting onthe other side. The death customs I like seek to return the body to the biosphere inrespectful but also quick and efficient manner. The departed spirit is reborn or otherwise reintegrated into the living world of those that come after. That to me seemsa more pagan way.DivorceDrugs - use & abuseEcologyEuthanasiaGamblingMedicine & its limitsPoliticsSexualitySexual politicsA dialogue - please leave your feedback Posted by Mogg Morgan at8:17 AM 
3 comments:
calibansaid...As a spiritualist, I am never certain whether I am a pagan or not. After all, itseems rather strange to deny Christ his position as one of the world’s greatreligious teachers, even though I admit my personal Christology needs further clarification. On top of this, etymologies of the word “Pagan” tell us it means“countryman”, “rustic” or “bumpkin”, and although I hail from Hampshire-with a suspicion that poetry is written for country folk by country folk- I havelived over half my life in London. Therefore, as I stand before you in my usualluminal position.5. The UnderworldA few weeks before he died, Franz Kafka wrote in one of his Blue Octavo Notebooks, “There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the worldof the senses is the evil in the spiritual world, and what we call evil is only a
 
moment in our eternal evolution”. Well, autumn is the season of the dead. Thetraditional time when we remember our ancestors (both literary andotherwise), and recall their trials as well as their tribulations before we reach beyond the eco-politics and Romantic philosophy of modern western paganism into the numinous promise of renewed light. Perhaps this is why Ihave come to understand Spiritualism as more than a series of “Pagantechniques”, but rather as a sophisticated religious ideology in its own right.For me, it is the esoteric thread between theology and the visionary arts, thevery key to unlock the sigils and seals of sacred texts. As I wrote in a recent blog, “Spiritualism is part of my being, like air and laughter”. This implies, of course, that spiritualisms practice and perfection is primarily found in thecontext of worship. Indeed, without the necessary checks and balances offered by a Coven, Hearth or Church family, the work of even a gifted Medium or talented healer may fall into mere entertainment or prurient paranoia. In anunfortunate sense, their monadic and psychic gifts are reduced to yet another form of therapy on an already overly extended medicinal agenda. Onlyworship prevents this religious diminution by opening the world around us tothe realities beneath its surface.Having said that, to what extent the earliest accounts describing the conditionsof the deceased in Indian, Greek or British pagan literature reflect much older conceptual schemes is open to debate, even though I would contend that theimmensely rich mystical systems of India are probably the mostrepresentative. From the outset, the Sanskrit hymns sing about the various bodies used by the Atman as well as the social ambiguities surrounding the physical remains of the dead person. Clearly, age-old customs concerning thecadaver ranged from barbaric cremation ceremonies to the subtlties of Vedicritual. They explained that the physical body would disperse into sky, earthand water, while the eyes, breath and limbs go back into their cosmicequivalents; sun, wind and plants. Moreover, bodily liquids were likened tothe air, or in other words, the middle realm between sky and earth. As one of the death hymns states:” For Yama press the soma; to Yama offer the oblation;to Yama goes the well-prepared sacrifice, with Agni as its messenger”.Therefore the founders of our civilisation understood the physically dead as permeating the environment with their wisdom and compassion, while theirreducible self learned to transcend both time and space.By contrast, the hedonistic pleasures of early Greek pagans led to increasinglyreductionist views of the after-life. Sadly the poets became obsessed with loss.Consequently, the fate of the psyche or shadow-image was seen as simply the perpetuation of an enfeebled double beneath Erebus. At death, it was said, thisdouble descended into a twilight realm where (still mindful of its former estate), this radically depleted left-over bemoaned its passing. In an often cited passage from book 11 of the Odyssey, the hero Achilles is briefly re-animated by the blood of a sacrificed goat to say, “Nay, speak not comfortably to me of death, oh Great Odysseus. Rather would I live upon the earth as a hireling of another, with a landless man who had no great livelihood, than bear swayamong all the dead that be departed”. Among the Greeks any idea of anelevated immortality came through the timely intervention of the mysterycults- first the Eleusian and shortly afterwards the Dionysian and Orphicschools. These faiths and formulas managed to both focus and deepen a
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