Skip to content

Each of us is a piece of the cosmos experiencing itself. We have always used our senses to do this, and our imaginations at least back to cave paintings, but in our world now, we have enhanced abilities so the piece of the cosmos we each represent can see more and experience more than our ancestors could dream of.

Zoom in and see the composition of nature.

A single fan-shaped ginkgo leak and three images of it from a microscope.
A dried ginkgo leaf under a microscope.

Zoom out and see our earth from an impossible perspective.

Photos of Earth from Space: Blue Marble Eastern hemisphere, Blue Marble western hemisphere, and Black Marble: the Earth at night.
The Blue Marble East and West from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and The Black Marble from NASA Earth Observatory

Pan around the world and witness stories where you will never be.

A curved wall of books.
"Reading in the Round" by Let Ideas Compete; CC BY-NC 2.0

Feed your inner divine cosmos with information and with imagination and with beauty at all scales.

A close-up of a sundial surrounded by low greenery, showing a time of about 12:30.
"Garden sundial MN 2007" by SEWilco is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5

I've never been too fussed about always going clockwise in Circle, and the Silver Spiral tradition doesn't have it as a requirement. We sometimes forget to tell guests and start off watching them awkwardly spin three-quarters clockwise instead of one quarter counter-clockwise until they realize that we don't bother. Up to them, though; if deosil is their preference, they can have at it.

It's all a matter of view and perspective: Rise to the sun and the moon, and gaze down with Them on our rites, we seem to move clockwise. Sink down in to the earth below our feet and look up with Her, and we seem to move counter-clockwise. Every deosil contains widdershins, and each widdershins contains deosil.

Pull back away from our sun, and see the planets spiral through space. If they left trails, they'd be like be like the double helix of DNA. Our little sacred Circles on the earth spiral through space with Her.

A computer generated image of a double helix DNA strand: dark blue on a lighter blue background.
"DNA Double Helix" by cookiepx2016 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Clockwise or counter-clockwise, circles or spirals; it's all a matter of perspective.

1

A dark sky with a band of orange sunlight at the horizon and a number of people gathered, looking into the sky.
The horizon during the moment of the full solar eclipse of August 21st, 2017.

You are made of elements created in the depths of a dying star. You are made of the universe. You are the universe embodied and breathing, and the universe experiences itself through your senses.

That swept through my mind as I watched the moment of totality during the August 21st's solar eclipse. I didn't know what to expect from that moment, so the tears that welled up in my eyes took me by surprise. The experience was literally indescribable1.

In the days leading up to the eclipse, there was a letter by an optometrist going around social media urging people to stay home and watch the eclipse on TV. I understand the importance of making sure people take the risks seriously2, but it was shameful to tell people to miss the miraculous experience of being there in person if they could be. No matter how good your TV is, it cannot give you the experience of the sudden coolness, the sudden darkness - the awe-inspiring sight in person.

Some beauty comes with risks and sacrifices, as when you go into faerie land to come back mad or a poet. Or as when you fall in love. You owe it to the sacred universe that you embody to experience as much love and beauty as you can in the short time that you are on this earth.

Penny: "Okay - I'm a Sagittarius, which probably tells you way more than you need to know." Sheldon: "Yes - it tells us that you participate in the mass cultural delusion that the sun's apparent position relative to arbitrarily defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality." Three or four times a year, people find reason to blame the normal problems of modern life on Mercury going backwards in the sky - the dreaded so-called "Mercury retrograde". People who are normally quite rational seem to buy into this superstition.

It is silly enough to believe that the movement of a planet some 77 million kilometers away has an impact on our emails and travel plans, but to believe that an illusion of movement of a planet affects our lives is ridiculous. See, Mercury doesn't actually move backwards; it just appears to do so from the earth's perspective. If we were the centre of the solar system, Mercury would be moving in loops, but we're not the centre of anything. We circle around an average star in a mediocre neighbourhood, universally-speaking.

Humans, as a species, are arrogant. In mainstream Western culture, nature is about our needs. The God of the Bible created everything to feed and clothe and serve us, and we are the ultimate creation - the reason for all the rest. Some Pagans may say that we worship nature, but sometimes we fall victim to delusions of human importance too, and we end up worshiping nature only in relation to its utility to us, where autumn is all about our harvest and spring is all about our planting, and never mind that that's the human wheel of the year, not nature's.

That same thinking feeds "Mercury retrograde" fears. At it's core, that superstition assumes that the earth is the centre around which all things revolve and that we're so cosmically important that the fact that we see a planet going backwards from our limited viewpoint is enough to create communication and travel chaos.

I have recently read several articles that explain why Mercury retrograde is nonsense and then go on to say that the author believes in it anyway because they've experienced it. One author lists a whole bunch of reasons why they personally might be experiencing communication difficulties, including some long term stress, and somehow concludes that those reasons are not sufficient to explain some recent problems they've had and that the difference must be Mercury. Humans are awful at evaluating this kind of stuff. We have huge perception biases, we are terrible at calculating risk, and we often have little understanding of how certain factors actually do affect us.

I really like this: "... if there’s any life lessons to learn from Mercury retrograde, it’s that we may be vulnerable to illusions when we think that everything revolves around us."

Pagans, we are better than "Mercury retrograde".

ETA: Looks like I'm not the only Pagan finding the "Mercury retrograde" thing particularly obnoxious right now. Read Lupa / The Green Wolf's take on it: "Is Anyone Else Getting Weird Vibes?": On Confirmation Bias and Emotional States.

Long-exposure of stars from Death Valley National Park
Photo: Joe Dsilva / Flickr / Creative Commons License

I am humble, for I am made of earth.
I am but a single, tiny grain of sand on a nearly infinite beach.

And yet, I am the universe seeing itself.
I am the universe learning itself.
I am the universe knowing itself.

So I am noble, for I am made of ancient stardust.

Everyone I meet is another piece of the universe on its own journey.
We are all small and we are all great.
We are all humble and we are all noble.

And I am grateful.
So mote it be.

1

Orangutan Woodcut
Public domain

Ever since this past Samhain season, I've kept tripping over information about ancestor worship, working with ancestors, ancestor shrines... These things have never been a part of my personal practice and I still don't feel called to them now, or, at least, not in the ways I've seen them done. There's nothing wrong with those ways; just not my thing. But I do see the power of acknowledging where we come from.

I have two urges: To go very far back and to go very far forward.

I want to go back to the ancestors of modern homo sapiens - Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Adam - and honour our deepest origins and our beautiful shared humanity.

And I want to go forward and explore what it means to be the ancestors of the future, worthy of being honoured.

1

The planet Earth as viewed from space.
Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

We are stardust breathing and dreaming and thinking and creating. Our very bodies are made of elements born in centres of long-gone stars.

Eyes evolved and we saw the stars. We are stardust star watching. We are the cosmos seeing itself.

Critical thinking evolved and we thought about the stars. We are stardust contemplating the heavens. We are the cosmos exploring itself.

Imagination evolved and we dreamed ourselves among the stars. We are stardust inventing the future of the stars. We are the cosmos creating itself.

But we are not unique. Our world is made of stardust. Every life on this earth owes its being to the death of stars.

Our eyes are not the only ones seeing.

Some of the beings with whom we share this beautiful world see things we cannot and perceive things we are not equipped to observe. The mushroom, the crow, and the oak tree are all stardust seeing the stars in their unique ways. The mountain, the wind, and the ocean are all cosmos perceiving the cosmos with their different understandings.

We are not special, but we are part of something immense. Though we are the cosmos, it is also beyond our understanding, because to understand it requires the simultaneous views of the mushroom, the tree, the ocean, and the human. But we can pray and meditate and do ritual and get a little closer to our source. We are made of stardust and to the stars we will return.

3

The Cat
Source: Hubblesite.org

We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring. - Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980.

A big point of this website is to explore the intersection of religion, especially Paganism, and science. My first exposure to the idea that we are made of star stuff wasn't through Paganism, though I'd been Pagan for six years or so, but in a second year university geology class. My professor taped Christmas lights to the blackboard and turned out all the lights and told us about how carbon and almost all the other elements that our world is made out of were formed in the heart of long-dead stars. He ended with the Carl Sagan quote above and I got goosebumps. I was so inspired that years later, I wrote my biggest ritual to date based on this idea: the Stardust Ritual.

Episode 123 of The Wigglian Way podcast included a review of the tv show Cosmos1. As part of the discussion, the two hosts, Mojo and Sparrow, mentioned the show's occassional anti-religion jabs and a star stuff quote:

[Stars] get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together deep within them to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. All was cooked in the fiery hearts of long vanished stars. ... The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. - Neil Degrasse Tyson, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, episode 2, 2014.

Mojo: "... [Neil Degrasse Tyson] also mentioned that there's a good possibility that everything on the earth - everything alive - came from the stars; that we are in fact made of star stuff... does that sound familiar to anybody? That we are made of star stuff? So not only is Cosmos not disproving my religion, it's only proving it more. We've always said we're made of star stuff."

Sparrow: "Exactly. ... Science is coming closer and closer to what we believe all the time."

The idea that we're made out of stars predates Carl Sagan. Quote Investigator found uses as old as 1913 and 1918, both from science. The only non-scientific origin seems to be a "Serbian proverb": "Be humble for you are made of dung. Be noble for you are made of stars." Serbia has been Christian for a very long time, so I don't know if we can count that as Pagan origins. And that's assuming it truly is a Serbian proverb; the earliest source seems to be Guy Murchie in his 1978 book The Seven Mysteries of Life and he did not provide any documentation. It is an interesting idea that Pagans, ancient or modern, may have always believed that we're made of star stuff, but I couldn't find any proof of this. Mojo hasn't gotten back to me with his source.

Until a Pagan source can be found - and I am keeping an open mind about that - I will remain a bit disturbed by this possible re-writing of history. I know modern Pagans are not, as a community, all that good at history (you don't have to dig very deep to find people who still believe that nine million women were killed in the "The Burning Times" and in Gimbutas' ancient gynocentric civilizations), but that's all the more reason to guard against the tendency to add more unprovable or false stories to our collective history.

We can be the religion that embraces and welcomes science; the progressive, flexible, growing religion that isn't threatened by new facts or by change. I don't want science to prove my spiritual beliefs to be right; I want to take on new knowledge and incorporated it into my beliefs and rituals. And maybe that's something Carl Sagan, scientist and self-proclaimed agnostic, could get behind:

Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. ... Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries. ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

1

Two eagles on a cross on a steeple. There are two bald eagles perched majestically on the cross at the top of a beautiful steeple. They are posed picturesquely against the blue sky, seen only by those, like me, who stare at clouds.

Wandering through the side streets on a certain evening, I come across an awesome sight: hundreds of crows in the trees, on the streets, and on the lawns. The sky fills with black wings as the nearest take brief flight at my appearance, and the cacophony is almost frightening as they call to each other over my head.

Walking to work one morning, a crow swoops suddenly at my head, screaming. She doesn't hit me, but flies so close I feel her passing, then wheels in the air above me and comes back towards me in another ferocious dive. I run to a nearby building and hug the wall, while she dives repeatedly down the edge as much as she can, unable to get me because of the steepness of the wall. I creep along the wall, crow screaming above me and cyclists and other pedestrians watching, until she gives up and flies away.

If I relate any of these stories to people of a certain mystical bent, they will tell me what eagles and crows symbolize and what these encounters mean about me. They may tell me that when "an eagle appears, you are on notice to be courageous and stretch your limits. Do not accept the status quo, but rather reach higher and become more than you believe you are capable of ". Since the eagles were on a cross, surely my goals must be spiritual in nature. They may tell me that crows are all about "prescience and precognition", and that a big group of them might indicate an important magical happening coming up and that the attack is about me fighting my intuition or instincts. I worked in a new age store for several years; I heard these kinds of interpretations all the time (plus the woman who was sure that her deceased ex-boyfriend was haunting/stalking her in the form of pigeons, memorable only because she began sobbing about it on the store counter).

I know the truth, though. The eagles are a mating pair that nests in a nearby park. They like the steeple for its tall 360 degree view of the area, to better spot potential prey. The massive crowd of crows occurs nightly, the exact time shifting with the season, as the huge flock of crows that spend their days in Stanley Park cross the city diagonally to their evening nesting area in a park in Burnaby. And the crow who attacked me: I probably walked too close to a nest, and it is quite possible that I was wearing a hat similar to someone who is scared of birds and sometimes throws rocks at them. All very explainable; if I were to believe otherwise, I would need to get over myself. It isn't all about me.

In my opinion, much of modern Paganism has an anthropocentrism problem. Basically, this is the belief that human beings are the most important species and that reality can only be understood in terms of our senses, values, and experiences. There are thousands of rituals based on this: spring is about growth, so what, metaphorically, are you planting and growing this spring? I've created a fair number of those rituals myself, as they are easy to write and are readily understood by a group. However, I have felt myself starting to balk a little at the idea that all our Pagan rituals – all our nature-worshiping, earth-honouring ceremonies – end up being about us. We step back from nature when we present Her stories only as symbols to be applied to our lives.

What it all reminds me of is when someone is telling me a story that reminds me of something that happened to me and I want to chime in and tell them about that. Even though I refrain from actually interrupting, my attention is not on what they are actually saying anymore, but on what I'm going to say. Their words are only important for how good or poor a lead-in they are for my story. I try to stay focused, but I don't want to forget my response, so I am rehearsing my words and watching for an opening. I can hear them, but I am not listening.

If we see every story in nature, every bird and plant and season, in terms of what they symbolically mean to us, we are not listening to nature. And if our deities are to be found there, we are not listening to them either. We are taking their words and using them as excuses to talk about ourselves.

Now, I will concede that if you believe in deities as literal beings, they may employ animals and other natural phenomenon to send messages to you. I personally believe that such messages would be rare – why would a god interfere with a real animal to tell you something that could be conveyed in a dream, vision, or meditation – and that they would be marked by a provable departure from ordinary behaviour for that animal. I believe no one is getting true divine messages from the crow migration because it happens every evening; that I should only stumble upon it once in a while does not change the fact that it has nothing to do with me.

If we are to respect the autonomy and individuality of the other beings with whom we share this earth, we cannot simultaneously cast them as props in our lives. The crow cannot have both freely chosen your tree to call from and be there as a symbol for you to interpret, and if asked to choose, I will always assume the crow's free will. Just as someone with a disability is not here to be your inspiration, the crow is not here to give you meaning. They have their own lives and loves and needs, and it is isn't all about us, as individuals or as a society.

I know I am asking a lot of myself and my fellow Pagans here. The culture that surrounds us, at least in North America, is anthropocentric to the core. Where we try to give animals voices, we tend to anthropomorphize them, thus silencing them further. In fact, as a society we still engage in extensive othering of other humans, so it seems an impossible task to stop the othering of animals, plants, and bacteria. But I believe in Paganism's ability to create new culture based on new values; that's the kind of magic I believe in.

I said earlier that I would have to get over myself were I to believe the eagles and crows were there for me, but I'll take that a step further. I think Pagans should make an effort to get under and beside themselves; to fundamentally get outside of themselves to try to meet non-humans where and how they actually are. We may not always succeed – in fact, we may never succeed – but the effort itself is worth while.

Further reading:

Paganism's Messiah Complex by Traci at "A Sense of Place".

Defining Anthropocentrism by Alison Leigh Lilly at "Holy Wild".

Anthropocentrism and Magic by Taylor Ellwood at "Magic Experiments".

2

Screenshot of the title shot for "The Middle" TV show.

Here in the middle, we mostly don't want to have to choose between faith and reason. See, on one side, there are hard core atheist scientists telling us that there is no meaning and that the universe is just physical forces and genetic replication with blind, pitiless indifference. On the other side, there are fundamentalist religious fanatics telling us that we have to believe in a certain God in a certain way or we will be condemned for eternity. And while they yell at each other, most of us just want to get on with it.

Pie chart of American's beliefs about evolution and creationism
Gallup Poll, May 2012

I watched the opening remarks of the Nye-Ham Debate: Evolution versus Creationism but decided that my blood pressure couldn't handle the whole thing. I do find ignorance about science and how it works to be galling. When I find out that 46% of Americans believe that God created people in their current form within the last 10,000 years, that 42% of Canadians believe that people and dinosaurs co-existed, and that 66% of those polled say that literal creationism is 'definitely true' or 'probably true', versus 53% for evolution, I despair of the state of the North American educational system. However...

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. - Richard Dawkins

Secularism, with its moral relativism, is in direct opposition to Christianity and its absolute morality. The battle is between these two worldviews--one that stands on God's Word and one that accepts man's opinions. - Ken Ham

The anti-religious atheists and the fundamentalists have, together, set up a rigid dichotomy between faith and science. It is probably the only thing the two extremes agree on: that they cannot co-exist. And they are right; I believe the extremists on both sides cannot find peace with each other.

Here in the middle, we can have knowledge of science and still pray. We're capable of understanding fossils and the big bang and how chimps and humans are related, while still going to church, or temple, or mosque, or Circle. Some of us decide that divinity guides evolution. Some of us just figure that there's divinity and there's evolution, and we will do our best to understand both. And we get on with a life that is neither intellectually impaired (as some hard atheists would say of the religious) nor spiritually lacking (as some fundamentalists would say of secularists).

The fundamentalists on both sides think they are warring for the minds and hearts of the public. They have set up an "us versus them" situation and declared that one side must be right and the other wrong and there is no middle ground. A lot of people, confronted with having to make a choice, will choose the faith they learned first instead of the science they learned later, or will choose the comforting choice that says that there's a loving God looking out for them instead of an empty heaven, or will choose the story they understand instead of the complex and incomplete reality. Despite advances in scientific knowledge and all the information we now have at our fingertips, the percentage of adult Americans who hold Creationist views (45%) hasn't changed significantly in 30 years.

Here in the middle, standing on that middle ground that isn't supposed to exist, we don't want to be scolded and we don't need to be educated. We don't want to be threatened with hell and we don't need to take every religious story literally in order to take our faith seriously. We find ways to understand what has been explained, to explore the mystery of what hasn't been explained, and keep our minds and our hearts open. And maybe we don't feel so righteous, and maybe we're not always so sure of ourselves, but we can live with that.

***

End note: I really enjoyed this post on the Nye-Ham debates from the Science on Religion blog and this post on questions we should be asking ourselves after the debate from Under the Ancient Oaks.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...
Social Network Widget by Acurax Small Business Website Designers
Follow

Get every new post on this blog delivered to your Inbox.

Join other followers: