Editorial: Are Pagans Just a Bunch of Bastards?

Merry bollocking Christmas. It’s that time of year again where we all get to hear just how wonderful and snowy and downright happy the Christmas season is – usually from the start of October through to the end of January when the infamous “They” start advertising Easter. We are bombarded with television and radio ads encouraging us to buy better and more expensive gifts for our friends and loved ones in order to show just how much we really love them (because if little Bobby doesn’t get that £500 super-bike from Santa he might just lose his childish innocence…) and we competitively try and create the best family-based Christmas with the biggest tree and the yummiest turkey and the loudest bloody carols… Everywhere you go, a commercialized, bastardized, and sickeningly overemphasized Christian holiday is blasted at you.

But you know what? I think that all of this at least hints at something pure, good, and… er… holy. (What?! Is that the sound of Kim forgetting to be cynical?! Quick, bring in Cyni-tron to purge her of this foul optimism!) Seriously folks, everything during the Christmas season comes down to something that I don’t think we Pagans have quite got the grasp of yet: charity. Compassion. COMMUNITY.

“The Christmas Spirit” is a much-used term around this festival, and it was so popular amongst the Victorians that Charles Dickens even anthropomorphized it into the Spirit of Christmas Present in his A Christmas Carol. Some might even say that Father Christmas is a similar anthropomorphic personification of the Christmas Spirit. This spirit speaks of love towards one’s fellow man, charity, community, service to others, opening one’s home to people, sharing our food, wine, laughter, and lives with them, being generous, withholding nothing. Okay, so it’s commercialized: but the Christmas Spirit is at the core of it all. And not just that: we are encouraged to keep the Christmas Spirit all year round not just at Christmas, as the hero of A Christmas Carol finally realizes in a sappy and romanticized vision of one of history’s most tackiest New Year’s Resolutions. It may be tacky, but I think it represents a core ideal of many religions: the ideal of charity, charitable love, generosity of spirit, compassion, and service.

The Pagan community doesn’t have many of those things, and if it does have some it doesn’t have them in abundance (or, more likely, the positive ideals it does stick to are overshadowed by the negative traits.) In fact, whereas so many of the world’s religions encourage service to the community and the Gods, compassion and charity towards one’s fellow man, the Pagan community encourages cynicism, spite, bitterness, a jaded attitude towards the world and relationships, greed, one-upmanship, and egoism.

When Christians are out doing the charity work their religion encourages, Pagans are in a pub getting pissed and arguing about definitions. When Santeros and Manbos in Haiti and Brazil are feeding their Gods and their community with food sacrifices and ensuring the spiritual and material wellbeing of their ‘congregation’, Pagans are doing spells in their bedrooms for a promotion at work or to gain a lover. While Buddhist monks pass their wisdom and years of meditation on to eager listeners and students, Pagans bitch about how they are oppressed.

Many religions speak about ‘serving’ their Gods. Most Pagans don’t. Many religions place as their highest concern the community they have created for themselves. The Pagan community on the other hand is something not held sacred at all but used as a means to bitch, complain, start rumours, make enemies, and more. (Just to be clear here, I do understand that there are also some positive ways the Pagan community is used, but they are not the subject of this editorial.) Paganism has lost its sense of community – if indeed it ever had one in the first place. Instead, our religion is for self-aggrandisement, selfish ends, a way to work through our psychological issues that is cheaper than hiring a shrink, a way to meet interesting people, rebel against society, find a new hobby… It is not a religion of helping others, considering others, or serving the Gods. In fact, most Pagans you meet approach the Gods with an attitude of use instead of service: they call on them when they need something, sometimes without even establishing a relationship with them first. To some Pagans, the Gods are just another correspondence alongside colour and moon phase to add a bit of ‘oomph’ to candle magic.

And what’s more – anybody in the Pagan community who does try and do some service for the Gods and the people in the community is often branded as an egotistical publicity whore or wannabe guru. These are the people who organize Pagan events, facilitate camps and rituals, give talks and workshops, perform healing and readings, stand up in front of the press and tell the truth about Paganism in newspapers and on radio shows. It is these actions that allow these individuals to make their entire life an offering and service to the Gods and the community. And that, maybe, is the Pagan equivalent of keeping the spirit of Christmas all year round.  

I’m not going to discuss why it is that the Pagan religion is like this. Perhaps it is because, quite simply, we’re all a bunch o’bastards. Or perhaps it’s because Paganism is such a disparate movement comprised of individuals who have been brought up in a me-me-me society who simply don’t know what community means. Either way, there’s something desperately melancholy about a bunch of individuals that on the one hand want to find like-minded people to share their beliefs with and on the other hand want to make their lives an act of self.

Or maybe – just maybe – after some hellish experiences and nightmares, the Pagan community will wake up on Christmas morning feeling as light as a feather and as giddy as a schoolboy, to discover that it hasn’t missed Christmas after all… and that Christmas can be kept all year round.

Bah humbug and merry Yuletide to you all, no matter how you want to celebrate. (Me? Mead for Odin, rum for Baron Samedi, and cake for Kim.)