Why be a pagan? What's the point?

The best way for me to answer this question is to tell a brief story about how I came to be a pagan. I tend to use the terms "pagan" and "Wiccan" a little bit interchangably - don't let that throw you.

I was raised by parents who chose, from the beginning, to allow me and my siblings to find our own spiritual paths. Given that we are talking about the early 60's, this is remarkable in and of itself, and I still don't know how they got away with it. They exposed us to a number of churches, spoke freely and openly about their own belief systems, and even sent us to a Lutheran private school at one point. I will forever honor them for approaching this as a personal decision as opposed to family dogma.

This is not to say that I was raised by hippies or wolves or anything. Dad is a USMarine, and my mom stands somewhere to the right of Ronald Reagan. To this day, she quotes Rush Limbaugh to me and doesn't understand why I'm offended. In the end, I ended up being pagan, my sister is Roman Catholic, and who knows where my little brother is at this point.

For myself, the journey really began about 5 years ago.

Holidays have always been a little weird for me. In America, with it's puritanical background, all of the public holidays revolve around the Christian calendar. As a non-Christian (I knew that much, even before I discovered Wicca), it seemed somehow wrong for me to celebrate the life story of a religion I didn't subscribe to - particularly one with the checkered past that Christianity has accumulated. On the other hand, it DID seem appropriate somehow to celebrate the passage of time in some fashion. That just made sense to me.

This led me to researching the roots of the Christian cycle of public holidays. Turns out, all of them - literally all of them - were inventions of the Catholic church as a means of co-opting the existing pagan holidays when the church started expanding into pagan Europe. Although most Christians don't know it, Christ was neither born in December (research indicates February) nor crucified in March. Both Christmas and Easter were the Catholic church's inventions to supercede the existing Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox festivals that most agrarian societies acknowledge.

In fact, if you look at most of the major holidays; Easter, Christmas, Halloween, etc., you will find underneath them a pagan celebration with roots going back further than anyone can document. It seems that we humans have celebrated the changing of the seasons as a nearly universal, pan-cultural practice.

I suddenly realized that this was what I had been looking for. I had felt the need for some sort of acknowledgement of the passage of time - I just had never figured out where that feeling was coming from. The problem, however, was that the popular image of the modern pagan was of some Dungeons-and-Dragons-obsessed freak prancing around the forest in the middle of the night in a bad production of "Midsummer Night's Dream". As a theatre person, I saw that for what it was - in a word, theatre. For that matter, most organized religion has a healthy dose of theatre. Just talk to the Roman Catholics - they practically invented the drag show. What I needed was something more basic, more simple, and more honest.

The first place I went for information was the Internet. I'm a geek, and that is - after all - the first impulse of most geeks when they have a question. The Internet pointed me to an absolutely amazing book called "Wicca for the Solitary Practicioner" by Scott Cunningham. In that book, I discovered the beginning point I needed to start finding my own way. And I also found my first question.

What's the point?

Luckily, Scott didn't answer the question, per se. He had the wisdom to tell his reader that the only answer to that question comes through your own personal journey, your own personal construction - your own personal faith. He told me to use the symbols that made sense to me, make the rituals that had meaning for me, and find the answers that spoke truth to me. I felt like I had been given a driver's licence to the magickal highway.

And so, on a late summer evening, I gathered together the elements of my first altar, cast my first circle, called the corners, placed a pentacle around my neck and called myself a witch for the very first time. The details of the ceremony I constructed were simple. I won't give you the specifics - every solitary should make up their own, and if you are joining a coven, they will have a ritual already in place. What I will say is that my altar contained - and still contains to this day - a clay goblet of Water, a clay pot to represent Earth, a lit candle for Fire, and a chime to represent Air. In my circle, I am Spirit. If you've done any research, you will notice that this isn't the inventory you would find on most altars. No problem - this is my altar, and these are my symbols. Choose those that speak to you.

I also gave myself my "craft name" of Adam - more about that in later postings, but it's kind of like a stage name for your soul. Or rather, it's your real name, and your birth name is the stage name. You could look at it either way, I suppose. "Adam" isn't all of my craft name - like most Wiccans, that's on the private side. I'm comfortable, however, sharing with you my first name.

So what is the point? The point is to find a way of looking at the world that resonates in your Spirit. Whatever that perspective ends up being is right for you - Christian, Jew, Buddist, Moslem, Wiccan, whatever. To my mind, they are all reflections of the same thing: the human spirit's desire to acknowledge something outside the bounds of the mundane and find the stage upon which the play called "Reality" is performed.