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T rue to E the arth P P T agan olitical heology kadmus True to the Earth: Pagan Political Theology Some Rights Reserved This entire work is licensed under a creative commons license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Kadmus ISBN 978-1-7325523-1-9 First Printed by Gods&Radicals Press Cover Design by Li Pallas Li.pallas.loves.you.com Layout by Casandra Johns Houseofhands.com Editing Team Rhyd Wildermuth Casandra Johns Gods&Radicals Press PO Box 11850 Olympia, Washington 98508 Solidarity, bulk discount, and wholesale copies available Contact the editors or author at [email protected] Or for distro contact us at [email protected] Gods&Radicals Press is a not-for-profit anti-capitalist Pagan publisher. View our works and online journal at: Abeautifulresistance.org ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people made this book possible but I would like to give special thanks to Dr. Al Cummins, Mallorie Vaudoise, Peter Leykam, and Jesse Hathaway for numerous rich and helpful conversations and other opportunities to learn from them. Rhyd Wildermuth has provided extraordinary help and unflagging support. Finally, I would like to thank my husband and all my friends who en- courage and inspire my work. “I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes! They are mixers of poisons whether they know it or not… Now to desecrate the earth is the most terrible thing, and to esteem the bowels of the unfathomable higher than the meaning of the earth!” Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: Why This Book? 9 Pagan Metaphysics 12 Pagan Political Theology? 14 High Paganism, Late Paganism, and Monotheism 16 What Is Meant by Pagan? 18 How This Book Is Organized 19 Chapter One: Preliminaries to a Pagan Metaphysics 21 Cosmos, Order, and Chaos 22 Plurality in the Pagan Cosmos 25 Many Truths, Many Meanings, Many Values 29 First Interlude: Truth and Lies in a Pagan Sense 33 Chapter Two: Cultures of the Story: On Orality and Literality 41 What is Seen and What is Heard 42 Prioritized Speech Within Oral and Written Languages 44 The Worldview of Oral Cultures 45 The Temporal and The Many 47 The Conflict Between Oral and Written Thought 48 Second Interlude: The Wisdom of Multiple Meanings 53 Chapter Three: All Things Living, A Pagan Animism 63 Pagan Concepts of Nature and Spirit 63 Heraclitus & Transformation 65 Bodies and Gods 70 The Primacy of Bodies in Pagan Metaphysics 72 Bodies and Psyche 73 From Consciousness to Action 76 Third Interlude: The Greek Magical Papyri 79 Chapter Four: Divine Subjects and Substance: On Event Ontology 91 The Unmoved Mover 91 Pagan Event Ontology 93 Change and Interpenetration 96 Bodies Within Bodies 98 Fourth Interlude: Taliesin and the Permeability of Being 101 Chapter Five: The Honesty of Impurity: Remainders, Monsters, and Incompleteness 109 The Politics of Purity 110 Gender and the Foreign 112 Temporary Orders and the Fragility of Divine Politics 115 Empty Perfection and the Monstrous 116 The Pragmatic and Faith 119 Fifth Interlude: The Eleusinian Rebellion 123 Chapter Six: Nature’s Rights 129 The Political and Natural 130 A History of Rights 131 1. Reason as Natural Law 132 2. God 133 3. Nature 134 4. Pain and Pleasure: Utilitarianism 134 5. No Natural Rights 135 Restoring the “Nature” in Natural Rights 136 A Pagan Theory of Rights 139 Art and the Natural Right of Expression 140 Property 141 Chapter Seven: The Music of the Spheres: Of Values, Paganism, and Capitalism 143 Value and the Gods 144 Spheres of Being and Council 145 Dominance and Monopoly 148 Capitalism, Monotheism, and Nihilism 151 Capitalism versus Character 155 Conclusion 159 Bibliography 163 Index 167 About the Author 177 INTRODUCTION Why This Book? W e can little conceive how different life now appears to us than it did to our ancestors. While much of value has been gained, some of humanity’s most vital and precious treasures have been lost. What we could call a pagan worldview or a polytheist perspective once allowed us to see and think things which have now become invisible to us, or available only with great and circuitous effort. The pages that follow is an attempt to reclaim and return to this lost perspective. It is a perspective now so distant from our experiences that we fail to even feel the wound of what has gone. There are great obstacles here. Our modern culture, philosophy, science, politics, and of course common religion are so thoroughly integrated with a monotheistic foundation that we often cannot recognize this integration and its source. But there is another obstacle even greater than this: our literate societies. Pagan cultures were originally oral societies without writing, and contem- porary pagan cultures were largely oral until the introduction of writing via vi- olent colonialism and monotheist missionary campaigns. The surviving written documents from ancient pagan cultures are also frequently the last documents of cultures crushed through monotheist invasion. When this isn’t the case, as in Ancient Greece, the development of writing brings its own challenges, partic- ularly conceptual and cognitive changes which obscure the previous insights that formed the heart of pagan culture. Whether we are dealing with documentary evidence of a pagan culture (whether first-hand documentation of a surviving culture or written records from a lost culture capturing a fading way of life,) we inevitably find layers