Tag: Starhawk

Starhawk: The Pagan Pat Robertson

Earlier this month, I mentioned my disdain for pagan activist Starhawk. But I did not appreciate just how nutty she is until my wife directed me to Starhawk’s A Pagan Response to Katrina.

The article is bizarre through-and-through, but the highlight is the Pat Robertson moment,

The forms and names we put on Goddesses, Gods, and Powers help translate those forces into terms our human minds can grasp. And so the Yoruba based traditions that originate in West Africa have given the name ‘Oya’ to the whirlwind, the hurricane, to those great powers of sudden change and destruction. Santeria, candomble, lucumi, voudoun, all include Oya in some form as a major orisha, a Great Power. Offerings are made to her, ceremonies done in her behalf, priestesses dance themselves into trance possession so that she can communicate with directly with the human community.

No city in the U.S. has more practitioners of these traditions than New Orleans. On the night the hurricane was due to hit, I made a ritual with a small group of friends to support the spiritual efforts that I knew were being made by priestesses of Oya all over the country. We were in Crawford, Texas, at Camp Casey, where Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Itaq, camped near Bush’s ranch to confront Bush with the painful reality of the deaths his policies have caused. Many of the supporters there were from New Orleans, worried about their homes, their friends and families. The overall culture of the camp was very Christian—we found no natural opening for public Pagan ritual, although a number of people did indicate to me quietly that they were ‘one of us.’ But our little group gathered by the roadside, cast a circle, chanted and prayed.

We prayed, speaking personally in the way humans do: “ Please, Mama, we know what a mess we’ve made, but if there is any way to mitigate the death and the destruction, to lessen it slightly, please do.” That same night Christians were praying and Orisha priestesses were ‘working’ Oya, and the hurricane did shift its course, slightly, and lessened its force, down to a Category Four.

And New Orleans survived. Not without loss, and death, but without the massive flooding and destruction that was feared. We all breathed a sigh of relief.

Robertson, of course, infamously claimed that through prayer he prevented Hurricane Gloria from striking Florida in 1985. In contrast, Starhawk’s accomplishments seem a bit underwhelming.

In both cases, however, it is interesting how indifferent both Robertson and Starhawk were to other people’s suffering during their purported spiritual efforts. After all, Hurricane Gloria went on to wreak havoc on the East coast, while Katrina avoided a direct hit on New Orleans but devastated other parts of Louisiana and Mississippi (Starhawk doesn’t mention the devastation in Mississippi, where hundreds of people were killed by Katrina, even once in her essay). Presumably Mississippians should have employed more voodoo adherents the next time a hurricane comes to town.

As I have said before, what fascinates me about new religious movements is how frequently they are simply that old time religion with a slightly different veneer on it. Although she imagines herself a leftist and a pagan, Starhawk’s views are surprisingly right wing fundamentalist.

Aside from the miracle of altering a storm’s course and strength, she’s got creationist nonsense,

Our human intelligence, our particular, sharp-pointed ability to analyze, think, draw conclusions and act, our esthetic/emotional capacity to thrill at a beautiful sunset, our deep bonds with those we love and our empathy and compassion for others, are all aspects of the Goddess Herself. Indeed, she evolved us complicated, contradictory big-brained creatures precisely to experience some of those aspects. Or to put it simply, she gave us brains and she expects us to use them.

She’s got apocalyptical prophecies inspired by man’s wickedness,

A few weeks ago, when we were preparing for the Free Activist Witch Camp that Reclaiming, our network of Witches, offered in Southern Oregon, I asked, “Is there any way to avert massive death and destruction.” The answer I got was an unequivocal ‘no’.

“The process has gone too far,” was the answer. The image that came to me was river rafting and shooting the rapids.. There was a point where we as a species could have chosen a different river, or a different boat, or a different channel. But now we’re in the chute. We can’t turn back. We can’t stop.

Not to mention people’s contemptuousness of her particular deity,

The Goddess does not punish us, but she also doesn’t shield us from the logical consequences of our actions. Katrina’s destructive power was a consequence of a human course that is contemptuous of nature. A Native American proverb says, “If we don’t change our direction, we’re going to wind up where we’re headed.” Katrina shows us a glimpse of that awful destination.

This last quote is the one I find the most bizarre. So people who die in natural disasters are the victims of their own contempt for nature? I’d love to see her explore the theological implications of the North Sea Flood of 1953.

Pagans See No Evil?

A few years ago I wrote about my disdain for the tendency of pagan/wiccans to adopt relativism. Peace activist and pagan Starhawk provides an excellent example of just how nutty this view is if it is taken seriously.

The title of her op-ed says it all, “Pagans reject the idea of evil — how do we respond to terrorism?” To Starhawk, the idea of evil is simply an artificial construct that pagans avoid using,

Evil is a construct Pagans try to avoid. Our theology, or rather, thealogy, (Goddess-knowing) teaches us that dark and light, life and death, creation and destruction exist in balance, and to cut off or condemn one aspect opens us to the imbalance that leads to cruelty and horror. We might say that the simplistic formulation, “They are evil; we are good” leads to its corollary, “We are justified in destroying them by any means whatsoever.” And that is the very ideology that motivates the bombers, as well, and which throughout human history has led to the worst atrocities.

But if we reject the concept of evil, how do we respond to horrific acts? Is there a specifically Pagan response to such violence? There is no central Pagan authority, no Pagan Pope to issue bulls, no Pagan rabbinical authority to say who does or does not have the right to interpret for us. We have no sacred scriptures to interpret, anyway. As Pagans, we are each our own spiritual authority, each with our own connection to the Goddess.

In one respect, this is a very conservative ideology. The view that the balance between life and death should not be interfered with is, after all, partially the motivating factor of ultra-conservative traditionalists who reject modern medical practices. In another respect, however, Starhawk’s rejection of the idea of evil is extremely radical.

In order to defend this view and simultaneously appear to reject things that the rest of us might call evil, she falls back on empty assertions and intuitions,

From that authority, I offer one PaganÂ’s response to the bombings. While we have no Bible, no set of commandments, we do have nature as our teacher, and a set of rough ethics that value life, balance, and interconnection. We feel an immediate, intuitive horror at the taking of life, and at the randomness of this death. To die because I chose to fight in the military, or to take a particular risk, or even because I incurred a particular enemy, at least has some sense of cause and meaning.

This is a sort of fluffy bunny view of nature. I take the other view that nature, if it were alive as Starhawk believes it is, is a mass murderer. The way each of us came to exist, after all, is at the tail end of an enormously long train of violence and destruction. Just ask people in New Orleans how they feel about nature carrying out its balancing act.

We rightfully reject and condemn those tactics. Death may be a part of life, but inflicting it on others breaks the fabric of interconnectedness and assaults the sacred embodied in each one of us.

How does violence break the interconnectedness of nature? After all, interconnected creatures are killing themselves all the time in Starhawk’s exalted nature.

Anyway, what exactly is wrong with breaking the interconnectedness? After all, doing so cannot be evil by her reckoning. So perhaps Starhawk merely finds this to be unpleasant, whereas other people feel differently.

She does try to address this at the end of her essay, but again just demonstrates the moral emptiness of this sort of ideology,

A Pagan response to violence might say thereÂ’s enough death, enough drama inherent in nature, in the course of life and the changes of the seasons and the cougarÂ’s pursuit of the deer. LetÂ’s not add to it. As human beings, weÂ’re put on this earth to develop those things the cougar does not have: compassion, gratitude, conscious appreciation and wonder at the beauty and mystery of life. LetÂ’s stop killing each other, and get on with it.

. . .

We are all interconnected. Perhaps that simple, Pagan truth could lead us to reject murder as a way of resolving our issues with each other, whether the killing is done by opposition groups or by the state itself or by a ruthless and unjust economic system. We are all part of the circle of life. That understanding must lead us to create a world in which the fabric of life is cherished, in the individual and the whole, and violence is transformed by love.

Presumably if Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Ill had just realized that they are interconnected with every living being, they woul have seen the errors of their way and gave in to love.

This is every bit a silly utopian ideology as the view shared by some Christians of an end times where Christ will return and rule over an enlightened Christian community.

Moreover, Starhawks solution for getting there is simply not to resist evil. In her world, Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Baathist Iraq — none of which was evil — would not have been resisted at all, except perhaps through trying to transform those societies with love and criticism of Western efforts to end those regimes.