Once again, a ferocious debate is raging in pagan blogosphere and I find myself caught in the middle. I’d like to be a partisan in one of these someday. It looks like fun – all that righteous anger and willingness to take offense at the slightest contradiction must be really cathartic.
Respect.
Maybe next time. On the whole “worshiping Batman” controversy, while many bloggers I have a lot of respect for rage on, I’m firmly in the middle: I see the absurdity of both sides.
This all started, as far as I can tell, with a person saying “I do this thing. It’s basically the same as what you do, just more modern.”
A bunch of other people responded with “It’s really not the same at all and here’s why.”
This quickly degenerated to “You’re an intolerant meanie!” versus “Yeah, well you’re shallow and vacuous!”
Then some other people, whose practice is somewhat related to the first person’s but really not what anyone was talking about, jumped in with “How dare you call me shallow and vacuous!”
And it all went down hill from there. Me, I made popcorn and settled in for a fun read.
But it preyed on my mind and in the middle of the night, I decided to write this after all. *shrug* I hadn’t done a blog post in awhile and this topic interests me.
Then there’s this guy.
On one had, I am a fangirl, pure and simple. It’s in my nature to become obsessive about various pop culture phenomenon. It took me a long time to learn not to be ashamed of that. I will delightedly spend hours arguing with you about who was the best Doctor (Tom Baker, thank-you-very-much) or the relative excellence of Jimi Hendrix verses Jimmy Page (why bother though? They’re both freakishly talented.) I include Hendrix – as well as Jim Morrison, Marc Bolan and many others – among my revered dead.
I have found spiritual inspiration from Neil Gaiman‘s Endless. When I visualize Ares, he wears the face of Kevin Smith. When I was younger, before I found paganism, I considered the Force as a religious paradigm.
I have even written Harry Potter fan fic. (Eep! Didn’t intend to admit to that one…)
However, I work very, very hard not to be a fangirl about my Gods. It would be blasphemous to reduce any deity to the level of Lucius Malfoy or John Constantine, even in my own mind. (As a result, though, I tend to second guess the passion I feel for the Gods. Something I really need to work on if my relationship with Them is to develop much farther.)
On the other hand, I have no problem believing that ideas and characters from fiction, if given enough energy over time from enough people, or perhaps really intense energy from someone who knows what she’s doing, can develop a life of their own. They can be magically useful, so why not religiously? Besides, if Alan Moore believes it, it has to be credible! (Blatant example of fangirlishness provided for your benefit.)
On yet another hand (I have lots of hands) I am a relatively hard polytheist. Gods are Gods, heroes are heroes, thought forms are thought forms. They’re not the same thing. (Well, except Hercules – the hero who became a God. And Dionysos – who has a grave and could be considered hero as well as Deity. And… not making my point really well here, am I?)
The thing is though, while no one believes that Batman or Lucius Malfoy were ever real, living humans, the heroes of ancient Greece were never thought of as fictional. They are our glorious ancestors. Even with a modern’s skepticism – (Is that really the grave of Achilles? Or just the grave of some guy someone decided to call by that name?) – and nervousness about taking mythology too literally, I see that as a major difference.
But in the end, if you’re not practicing my religion, what do I care? Because it will make “us” look silly in the eyes of those who lump us all together and who will probably never take any of us seriously anyway?
*shrug* I’m a fangirl. I’m used to looking silly.
But if you say you are practicing my religion and what you’re talking about is extremely different – even to the point of being directly opposed or, at the very least, disrespectful – to what I do or believe, don’t I have the right to say “maybe not so much?”
Does it really all come down to words and titles yet again? Who gets to decide what a Wiccan is? Or a Hellenic Polytheist? Or a Christian? It’s really easy to say the members of those faiths get to define the term, but that’s begging the question.
Related articles
- Notes Toward a Pagan Theology of Fiction – Sermons from the Mound
- Making Light: Hero Worship – Sunweaver
- Modern Heroes – Dalliances with Deities
- Strange Pastures – vonfaustus.blogspot.com
- Pop Culture Paganism – Adventures in Vanaheim
- We Bleed Ink – The House of Vines
Introspective Maenad 