On the Heathen Ego | Home | Clergy Program | Contact | Join | Links | Member Services | Organization | Our Faith | Resources | On the Heathen Ego William Bainbridge In religions, there is always some good news, and some bad news. That is, religions tend to tell people some things that they want to hear, and some things they don't. In the former category lie observations that life and humankind are intrinsically good, and more problematically, promises of eternal bliss if one merely believes the correct formulations of orthodoxy, or that one's people has been chosen by God/the gods, and is therefore entitled to beat the tar out of everyone else in the general area. In the latter category, alongside the threats of eternal torment for believing the incorrect formulations of heterodoxy, and the various moral strictures and asceticisms that have seemed to become divine commandments, lies the knotty problem of the ego. Certainly, if religions taught simply that we are, mean and become exactly what we naturally feel and believe ourselves to be, mean and become, then one would be justified in asking why we needed religions at all. In fact, however, the more reflective among us have always had the feeling that things, and more to the point, we, are vastly more complex and ambiguous than our more mundane perceptions tell us. Thus, for some, anyway, religion entails a duty to venture beyond the security of a natural and unreflective sense of self, in search of a mode of being and understanding that is more fundamentally in accord and harmony with how things really are, and with what we can intuit about how the divine is engaged in transforming things. How is this bad news? In some ways, I suppose it's not--indeed, it may be the best news of all. But for most of us, it is in some way very unwelcome news, because abandoning the natural, intimate and comforting sense of who and what we are with which we have lived these many years, in order to struggle to attain the more inclusive, but far less intimate and solid, sense of self toward which religions, in common with critical thinking, tend to direct us, is both extraordinarily difficult and productive of great insecurity. Hence, the need for religions, because only great inspiration can set our feet on that path with the necessary assurance that it really is a path, and only the perception of great and divine power at the heart of things can enable us to sustain the journey. And so it is that a religion that wants to be taken seriously by those drawn to this kind of transformative approach to spirituality must tell those of its adherents with a mind to listen that they are not entirely who and what they imagined themselves to be, and must also have some helpful and practical advice for those who take this lesson to heart. Yes, the same religions will generally have ready-made answers to such questions of identity and relationship with the divine for those less inclined toward perilous personal quests of the spirit, but such answers often were themselves once the hard-won insights of spiritual adventurers for whom the answers of their own day were not good enough, and their truth lies not so much in their final formulation as in the process through which they were attained; because life itself is much more a process than an object with a definable set of properties, so that an expression, and particularly a spiritual expression, of life that rises to the level of religious truth will not just describe something, but will point us in a direction whereby we can actually experience, or even become, that thing. In modern Heathenry, the question of the nature and significance of the individual self has most often been approached in one of two ways: collective identification, or deconstruction into constituent elements, as in the "Teutonic soul" diagrams. In collective identification, the individual person is defined, described and explained in terms of some larger group of people; examples include a clan, a tribe, a "Folk," whatever one means by that, a culture, a "community of the faithful," or all humanity, though one sees rather little of the last of these in Heathenry. Collective identifications are present to some degree in just about every religion with more than one adherent, and they clearly played a very important role in the old Heathen societies of Northern Europe. Nonetheless, as means of understanding individuality in any ultimate sense, they are necessarily little more than tautologies; an individual is defined as a representative member of some collectivity, which is defined as a collection of individuals having clearly or not-so-clearly defined characteristics or relationships, which is to say, the definition of "individual" has "individual" as one of it's parts. With such a circular definition, one can tell who is or isnłt in a particular grouping of individuals, but does not understand much more deeply than before what an individual really is in him- or herself. Obviously, the desire to avoid the religion's "bad news" by avoiding the hard questions is a much more serious concern than understanding the phenomenon of the self in any rigorous way for those for whom a collective identification seems to be a sufficient and satisfactory description of that phenomenon. The "Teutonic soul" diagrams, on the other hand, seem to represent both a serious effort to understand the inner nature and workings of the self, and thorough scholarship, being largely based on the use of various words in the Old Norse sources that refer to specific psychological (or "parapsychological") phenomena. And while it would appear very likely that the ancient skalds who created those sources did not conceive of the self in the systematic, highly organized manner implied by the diagrams, we would not, after all, be the first religion in which later generations systematized and hyper-organized concepts suggested by earlier generations. There are, however, at least a couple of other reasons why we should hesitate to adopt the diagrams as Heathenry's conclusive understanding of the self. Several of what are presented as the constituent elements of the self do not seem terribly consistent with the "elements of the self" lore in other cultures or religious traditions, even those relatively close to the Germanic in other respects. This leads to a couple of observations. For one thing, if we accept a view of the "composite self" radically different from practically everyone else's, then we either have to assume that our tradition uniquely possesses the true knowledge, or that Germanic selves are somehow constructed of different elements than everyone else's. Neither assumption appears very attractive intellectually. And for another thing, setting the voluminous literature that some other ancient cultures produced on the nature of the self against the relatively sparse offerings in Old Norse and in other Germanic Heathen cultures, one has to wonder whether the issue did not simply receive relatively less attention in ancient Heathenry when it came to creating the body of religious lore. That is, it would seem that this was not an issue that captured the imagination and intellect of the ancient Teutons as it did the ancient Egyptians or Indians. Another reason for seeking beyond the diagrammed Teutonic self is that it seems to reflect a view of the self that is rather static, and that does not really attempt to do justice to the interconnectedness between the self and everything else, which is to say, it allows one to occupy oneself with its intricacies without forcing one to acknowledge and experience the fullness of the self's relativity and integration into the rest of the web of being. One of the fundamental adjustments that religion should help us make is coming to grips with the fact that we are not as solid and permanent as we wish we were, nor are we really just the principal characters in our own little stories. Viewing the self as a sort of mechanism constructed by attaching different components together fails to show us the extent to which the components are only on loan from many different sources, constantly change in response to their environment and to one another, and eventually wander off entirely to rearrange themselves in different ways that might be convenient for them, but can seem dreadfully inconvenient for us. Nor does this view give us any real guidance in constructing a more reasonable relationship between ourselves and the rest of existence, which is very much a task of religion. Rather, the self diagrams seem to teach the desirability of fixing the elements in place as strongly as possible, in order to perpetuate the particular arrangement out of which we have constructed our identity for as long as possible. While this is certainly a viewpoint that has received much attention and many supporters throughout history, I do not see that it is necessarily a viewpoint widely adopted in indigenous religion or by our own Heathen forebears, nor is it one I personally would consider representative of the higher kind of spirituality, which by its very nature recognizes the relativity of self, and the need for the spiritual quest to transcend the merely personal self. It seems to me that one of the hallmarks of indigenous religion, shared by our own ancient Heathenry, is a basic practicality and realism of outlook. Its concepts tend to arise out of the real experiences of people, rather than people's philosophical and metaphysical speculations, and the practices it emphasizes tend to be those that benefit people in perceptible ways. Thus, the ancient Heathens did not adhere to beliefs, such as the "immortal soul," developed out of theological necessity or derived from the words of somebody else as recorded in a "holy book," but instead, their view of the self would have been based on their perceptions of their own and others' lives, and buttressed by the revered stories comprising their religious lore, which were themselves distillations of the perceptions and experience of many preceding generations. And to the extent these perceptions can be extracted from the lore to form the basis for our own coherent Heathen view of the self, we might profitably look for them, not in a few psychological terms taken out of context, but rather within an understanding of Wyrd as it applies to the individual, which underlies the view of self expressed throughout the eddas and sagas. Of all the ways of expressing and comprehending the phenomenon of self of which I have become aware in an admittedly selective and incomplete study of religion, Wyrd seems to me the most naturally consonant with my own experience of reality, as well as with modern psychological and scientific knowledge, to which we tend, correctly in my view, to accord great respect. The essence of Wyrd, which in many ways is independent of any belief in deities or metaphysics, would appear to be that everything is the result of several, usually many, definite causes and conditions, that the roots of those causes and conditions are virtually always extremely extensive and complex, that our own words, deeds and thoughts themselves become causes with far-reaching consequences, and that ultimately, one thing can only be understood in its relationship to everything else, to the wholeness of being. Because each effect itself becomes the cause of new effects, nothing in Wyrd is ever really static, and thus, nothing can ever be grasped or held constant for long. In the same way, while the general direction of things may be significantly determined by the massive inertia of past causes, the precise way in which things work out can always be influenced by the addition, skillful or otherwise, of new factors. It is clear, particularly from the sagas, that our predecessors saw the individual personality as a complex phenomenon that could only be understood when the many factors that influenced and shaped it were considered. The skalds never developed an overarching "theory of personality," in which a few factors were assigned a similar relative importance for everyone; how we came to be who we are was as much a mystery, in the more religious sense of the word, to them as Wyrd herself. Moreover, the shaping process continued throughout a person's life. Both external circumstances and internal choices were always capable of transforming the character and significance of a person's life in ways that were not entirely conditioned by the person's past, or by some divine or predestined fiat, but every such transformation occurred for real and identifiable reasons. Neither the characters nor the things that happened to them were either arbitrary or preordained in precise detail. The factors that predominately influenced a character's behavior changed over time, as the character changed by virtue of accumulating and assimilating a lifetime's experience. Thus, a protagonist at the end of a saga was not the same person as the protagonist at the beginning; rather, a person became his/her own successor, over and over again, as new causes were laid into the Well of individuality. Approaching this view of human life from a Heathen religious standpoint, I find it both very difficult and unrewarding to fit this complex understanding of the individual into some fixed theory, diagram, moral lesson or comprehensive program of self-improvement. Life simply is too complicated to be meaningfully explained by such things, and in any event, does not work precisely the same way for each of us, since the balance of significant causes is probably different for each of us. What is the same for all of us is the process of working out old causes and adding new ones, and also the web of causation that ties us all together in many and profound ways, some of which we can understand and some of which remain mysteries approached only through myth and metaphor. Each of us was created by a multitude of causes, each will ultimately be destroyed and dissipated by a multitude of causes, and in the space in-between, each will be constantly transformed by a multitude of causes. While it is tempting to identify with one or a few of them, and cling to them as to a seemingly sturdy raft caught in turbulent waters, to do so is fundamentally inconsistent with the way things--the way we--really are. The raft, after all, will break up in the end, and the only resolution that promises any stability is for us to understand once and for all that we and the waters are, at bottom, not separate things. It might appear at this point as if the view of Wyrd presented here differs from a scientific/psychological viewpoint only in its acceptance of non-physical, "spiritual" causes, rather than remaining constrained with the need for tangible, measurable causes. But that alone is, I think, insufficient to make Wyrd an essentially religious belief. It is a pet notion of mine that two fundamental perceptions lie at the heart of religion as a human phenomenon. They can be neither proved nor disproved logically, but then, no one ever said that faith does not play a part in religion, and as things go, I am satisfied in placing my faith in them. The first is that, despite all of the things that appear to us to be messed up in one way or another, the way life is working itself out in the universe is the way it is supposed to be working itself out; that is, life, being, consciousness are supremely and unquestionably good. And the second is that the appropriate human response to the first perception is gratitude. The most primary expression of religion is to give thanks for the innate rightness of life. Understanding ourselves in light of Wyrd, as patterns within the universal web of life and destiny, removes barriers that too often stand in the way of our arriving at the gratitude that impels us to give thanks. To get there, we must give up what we will inevitably lose anyway, and reach beyond ourselves to grasp what is, in fact, the true essence of ourselves. This is admittedly an intellectualized, and some would doubtless add, tortured, expression of something that remains implicit, natural and mysterious in the lore. But I do not think it entirely different from the realization that led so many of the figures in lore, when faced with impossible situations, to express, not merely fatalistic acceptance, but outright joy at the prospect, not of survival, but rather of expressing in their own destruction an affirmation of life, and of all they had lived for. Where it does differ, however, is in the fact that, because it is an intellectual formulation, it insists upon logically working out its own consequences: it is not enough to give thanks for the innate rightness of life; one should go farther, and participate in that rightness, strive to carry it forward. How that further obligation seems to me to work itself out in religious practice and personal conduct, though, is not much expressed either in the lore or in modern Heathen thought, and although I believe I have arrived at my conclusions through following a relatively traditional understanding of Wyrd out to its logical consequences, I also believe I have gone out on this particular limb about as far as I intend to for now, at least in public. Be that as it may, I would close with the suggestion that Wyrd, not gods or ethics, might actually be the central mystery of Heathen religion; but one does not drink from her well for free, and having drunk, cannot become again the person one was beforehand. | Home | Clergy Program | Contact | Join | Links | Member Services | Organization | Our Faith | Resources | This page was last modified on Thursday, 20 March, 2003 at 23:07:37 This site, and all documents copyright © 1995-2005 The Troth, except where otherwise stated. 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