Romantic Pastoral (Part One)
Rev. Paul Chase-MoonOak

PaleoPagans

When Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola was led by his young daughter into the caves at Altamira in 1879 and there were the beautiful late-Paleolithic wall paintings dancing in his torchlight, the discovery changed how many people viewed primordial (or “prehistoric”) humans.  Gone was the club-welding brute, and in his place, a people with a vibrant and creative culture, the very foundation of our own. 

When contemporary Pagans peer into the misty past, to the time when our ancestors were painting animals on cave walls, we see certain distinct truths.  The archeological evidence and anthropological explication of this time take vibrant shape in the Pagan imagination.  Whether these truths are historical fact is not as important as their theological and mytho-poetic interpretation in the present.  Altamira and other primal sites where we have glimpsed the lives of our forebears serve as beginnings for the story of the human sojourn on Earth.  Part of that story involves what Pagans believe is the innate ability, as developed and manifest in some humans, to delve deeper into reality, to sense and perceive complex levels of consciousness, to commune and communicate with spiritual and mystical realms of the world.  In every primal group, clan, or tribe, and in most subsequent settlements and later villages, there was at least one man or woman who possessed these abilities and used them to travel the Netherworlds in service to his or her people.  Often thought of as having special gifts of the gods, these few were the first Witches, the first servants called by God. 

To tell the story of the Romantic-Pastoral branch of NeoPaganism that will lead us to the Church of All Worlds, we must begin at the dawn of humankind, when our species was one of many children in the primordial garden. Scientific interpretation suggests that humans were originally foragers, gatherers, and scavengers, only later learning to hunt.  In this state of complete integration with nature, we may not have yet differentiated our selves from the Earth, just as an infant may not differentiate from her mother.  For most NeoPagans, Witchcraft begins with the proto-shamans of this period, the wise men and women who called the game animals, performed community rituals and rites, and traveled to the land of the spirits to heal the sick and wounded.  They were also familiar with herb-lore, medicinal and nutritious plants, and the unique nature of their environment.  The rhythms, cycles, and movements of their ecosystem, including migration routes and feeding habits of animals and growing seasons of edible fruits and vegetables, proved a critical gnosis for human survival in the harsh whiteness of the last Ice Age.  

            Many NeoPagans trace their cultural and religious heritage to these first holy persons and the skills they acquired, which they believe were passed on in a splintered but unbroken inheritance to Pagans today.  Again, whether this is historical fact is not the main concern; what matters is the perception that cultural and religious treasures can be re-discovered, revived, reclaimed, and re-manifested in the twenty-first century.  Of course, tribal people extant today unequivocally live in an unbroken line of ancestral knowledge, existing in inherited interrelationship with their bioregion.  While they should not be romanticized, we can and should acknowledge that they represent a lost state of being, faintly remembered in our oldest literature, wisest stories, most ancient spiritual traditions, and deepest collective unconscious. 

The Romantic-Pastoral branch of NeoPaganism begins with the tales, songs, dances, skills, knowledge, and mythic ecospirituality of the “Old Ones.”  For those NeoPagans who tend towards Edenic views of the past, humans once possessed great mental and spiritual power emerging from their connection to nature and the old gods and rooted in a sense of interconnectivity and deep communion with other people, non-humans, nature, earth, and deity.  Nevertheless, evolutionary processes and cultural development stand between those people and us, especially in the form of modernity, with its drastic changes and comparatively high-speed progress.  Humans have grown and matured, learning much in the intervening time, and our species moves through the eons just as infants grow into adults. 

We did not stay in caves, of course, but worked substances around us into forms and tools to aid our survival and prosperity—and flourish we did.  We taught each other to cultivate certain plants and animals, which provided a steadier food supply than foraging or hunting, and in time, we moved into the Neolithic period.  Farming and agriculture opened up an entirely new chapter in history, working on the consciousness in ways that allowed for innovative social organizations based primarily on human-to-human, rather than human-nature, interaction.  Cities evolved and grew in size and sophistication, and hierarchies formed—including the religious specialization of authoritative priesthoods.  This, according to author Daniel Quinn, describes the historically significant split between tribal culture and civilizational culture.  We will follow the spiritual traditions of tribal cultures as they developed, different from, parallel to, and interdependent with, the “march of civilization” that one learns in public school history books.   

During the Neolithic period, deities of grain and season joined older spirits of earth, sky, river, ocean, forest, and mountain.  These were immanent forces embodied in the fertile land, cyclical rhythms, and mysterious mists of Old Europe, where dwells the genetic memories of most NeoPagans.  From the start of farming to the widespread use of copper, early village cultures developed, and with them a settled, grounded life of seasonal celebrations, fertility rituals, rites of passage, and other community activities directed at the survival, unity, and prosperity of the whole.  Village life took on a steady pace, barring natural disaster, external disruption, or internal disorder, reflected in archeological sites such as Skara Brae in Scotland.  With settled life, attention was increasingly given to marking Earth’s seasonal journey in projects like Stonehenge.  There is also evidence for a lack of valuated social hierarchies, which developed later as the division between “pagan” and “civilizational” cultures increased, and a sense of egalitarianism may have prevailed where everyone contributed to the community and derived benefits from it in relatively equal measure.  When Romantic-Pastoral Pagans tend towards collective interdependence, they recapitulate this Neolithic memory.  

The myth of the balanced Neolithic village-community and its conscious attentiveness to cycles forms the basis for contemporary Paganism’s seasonal Sabbat celebrations, emphasis on life-long rites of passage, love of circular worship spaces aligned with the cardinal directions, and deeply-held, though admittedly modernity-inspired, sense of equality.

Faeries and Folk Spirituality

As the Celts began to spread across Europe in the late Bronze Age, the indigenous inhabitants, who were probably infantile in their interconnection with nature, came to be viewed by contemporary Pagans as possible candidates for the “little people.”  Pre-Celtic natives may well have been small in stature and dark in coloring, leading to tales and myths about “hill-dwellers” and “forest folk.”  Indeed, these small, dark-featured inhabitants, who almost certainly were pushed to the fringes of Europe—eventually Wales, Ireland, and northern Scotland— may have contributed to the extended mythological cycle of the wee ones or fey.  Even now, Brits who are small and dark-haired are considered to have faerie blood.  On the other hand, another explanation, particularly concerning the fey—faeries, sprites, leprechauns, pixies, and so on—is that at one time people, being more interconnected with nature, were able to see the rich complexity of life on all its many, otherwise invisible, levels of reality.  That is, there exists now, as in the past, different perceptual strata in the world, inhabited by ethereal beings not necessarily distinguished by modern humans.  If we have drifted away from deep gnosis of Earth, perhaps we have lost certain abilities of perception we once possessed.  While highly speculative, these ideas drive a certain need in Pagans to re-inhabit the planet holistically and reclaim lost faculties. 

The fey are not the grand pantheons of classical antiquity but the pastoral beings of hill and dale and immanent deities like Herne the Hunter and Green Man.  Rather than divine aristocracy dwelling in cloud-shrouded Olympus (or even further away in Heaven), the spiritual family of the country folk lived right next door, in deep woods, under grass-soft hills, and beneath crystalline springs.  They could take the form of animals, act mischievously, help or hinder crops, and were, in every way, creatures of the elements.  In NeoPaganism, they are represented and honored as elementals or devas, the spirits of growing and living things.  Whether there currently exist any of the many possible species of semi-corporeal beings that gave rise to fairy tales, I do not know.  It is possible they are extinct or greatly reduced in numbers by the dominance of humankind, or, perhaps, they are merely waiting in the shadows and morning mists until we are ready to know them again.     

In my own life, I cannot claim to have visually seen these realms of reality, but I feel them, sense their presence, and have experienced their efficacy.  At Findhorn in Scotland, the plant devas helped grow monstrous vegetables in beach sand, and at more than one Circle in which I have participated, others have seen visions or glimpsed the otherworld in ways I find compelling.  Even one of my sons used to stare up at the corner of the ceiling when he was a toddler, laughing and interacting with unseen companions, and to this day he seesauras.  I decline to accept that such events are self-generated phantoms of an isolated psyche.  Rather, I choose to believe in a complex world full of intelligent life, visible and invisible, with which we share the Earth.  To think otherwise is to reduce consciousness and the planetary milieu to the horizontal plane of physical-sensory perception, with humankind conveniently at the top, a doctrine shared by very few Pagans.  The search for holistic consciousness often includes the restoration of mystically esoteric qualities of the mind and spirit.  

       Folk Religion

In time, the nebulous traditions of relatively isolated groups coalesced into more formalized, and even loosely organized, religious systems.  Although there was a great deal of diversity, the early outlines of European folk religions began to unfold.  The common people—farmers, village-dwellers, shepherds, and the occasional wise woman or “cunning man”—were already weaving the tapestries of what would (re)emerge as the Old Religion.  Cyclical agricultural celebrations seemed to have formed the framework for what became the annual, seasonal Sabbats, punctuated by rituals on the full and new moons.  These celebrations offered regional inhabitants the chance to gather, swap stories, find mates, and generally enjoy themselves.  Very old traditions of blessing the crops through prayers to the Lord of the Harvest and erotic rendezvous in the fields between amorous couples are still a part of NeoPagan fertility festivals.  Images of John Barleycorn, Robin Goodfellow, Puck, Herne, Sheela Na Gig, and the Lady of the Wood resonate with richness and meaning, creating a mystical mindset and encouraging what is often called “twilight consciousness.”  In this state, magic can be perceived and worked, reconciling the modern dualities of mind/body, intellect/intuition, human/nature, and earth/spirit, spun into synthetic, energetic, and interdependent polarities and applied to the holistic spiritual life.            

Several important elements in folk religions stem from the practice of animism and pantheism.  Animism, in this instance, concerns the belief, and perhaps reality, that supposedly “inanimate” objects like rocks and rivers are actually alive and might even be living beings with their own, albeit radically different, consciousness.  The way certain First Nations refer to the “stone people” or “river people” just as they do “buffalo people” or “bird people,” as if each were a separate tribe, is an example.  Pantheism, of course, is the notion that deity is immanent in the physical world, expressed through sacred nature.  These two elements together allow for a relationship with deity or spirits through nature, one of the basic tenets of pagan folk religion.  When men and women danced across the fields, they were calling on the forces of nature, often embodied as spirit, sprite, or regional deity, to bless them with fertility and a good harvest.  They sang songs, performed rituals, and
celebrated together in order to draw forth the abundant earth through their clearly interconnected relationship with it.  This, in turn, developed into more complex systems of deities who cared for human needs and to whom appeals could be made, either in a parental mode of obedience or partnership mode of cooperation.  From these early acts of drawing greater powers into the project of human survival and continued prosperity developed later Pagan perspectives and praxis. Along with the outlines of folk religions that coalesced as Paganism, there was also distinct folk wisdom that presently informs NeoPagan traditions.  Story telling (including tales and myths), herbal medicine, midwifery, organic nutrition, Gaean interrelationships, divination, and ecospirituality are all products from the late Neolithic period.  Through the centuries, rural people amassed a compendium of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom that is, just as technological innovation and the scientific canon, the heritage of humankind.  Many of these skills are greatly admired and cultivated by NeoPagans today, and at most contemporary Pagan gatherings, you will find herbs and herbalists, healers, bards, and tarot readers in abundance.  Adding religion to the mix, two types of spirituality emerge:  the urban-civilizational type and the rural-tribal type, a difference which is at the conceptual heart of the two branches of NeoPaganism.  These two ways of expressing spirituality can be discussed with different terminologies, but their meaning is similar.

With the development of civilization, the two spiritual traditions appear to have divided, a separation that progressive NeoPaganism seeks to reconcile.  Civilization, marked by hierarchical social and religious structures, refinement of the power-over or dominance model, urban landscape and city-centered worldview, individualism, private property and ownership, and, unfortunately, almost constant warfare, gradually overwhelmed rural tribes, clans, and villages in many places.  The Romans burned the Druids’ sacred groves, city-states conquered the countryside, Christianity displaced, and often demonized, pagan traditions, and European folk religions were driven underground.