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When examining polytheistic ideas about divinity
and the nature of worship (and vice versa), we must first take
down some barriers to clear thinking of which many people are
unaware. Discussing spiritual matters with modern Westerners,
even the religiously inclined, is often like discussing rainbows
or sunsets with someone who has worn dark sunglasses for his
or her entire life. First you must persuade them to remove the
sunglasses, at least temporarily, in order to show them what
you are talking about. This is especially difficult if the person
is unaware that the sunglasses exist, or that they can be removed.
Unless you have carefully prepared them for the experience, the
odds are high that their reaction to an unfiltered rainbow or
sunset will be to scream in horror, replace their sunglasses
as quickly as possible, and attack you violently.
Christian fundamentalists confronting the
evidence for evolution, Roman Catholic leaders refusing to ordain
peni-less priests, or Islamic fundamentalists burning the works
of Salman Rushdie, all demonstrate this common Western reaction
to ideas coming from outside of their established worldviews.
What may not be so obvious is that third-rate stage magicians
and mediocre scientists “debunking” evidence for psychic
phenomena, intellectual members of liberal religions ignoring
the magical aspects of liturgy, or ordinary people rejecting
ideas about multiple deities and other spirits, are behaving
in exactly the same fashion — prisoners of the conceptual
sunglasses they don’t even realize they are wearing.
A couple of centuries of modern science have
devastated so many old interpretations of the monotheistic traditions
that many intelligent, educated Westerners have, consciously
or not, decided that all monotheistic beliefs are equally
“unscientific.” Yet a person who has rejected every
other monotheistic dogma will often continue to accept the one
that says Judaism/Christianity/Islam (choose one, and then a
denomination within it) is the only “real” religion,
and all others are foolish, weak, or demonic. This, of course,
is based on the conservative monotheistic belief that there’s
only One God, only One Reality, and therefore only One True Religion.
Once you have decided that the only “real”
religion (usually your childhood one) is “unscientific,”
and therefore “unworthy of belief” by a modern intellectual
(who has been taught that science is the only way to judge proposed
reality constructs), it’s a short step to declaring all
those other “inferior” religions, magical systems,
and psychic technologies to be even more unscientific and absurd.
The philosophical term for this type of logic is “throwing
out the baby with the bathwater.” The usual result is a
conversion to atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, or some other non-theistic
(but still dualistic) faith.
One of the most popular choices is Scientism
(also known as “Scientolatry” and “Secular Humanism”),
which is the worship of the previous generation’s scientific
worldview, and the acceptance of any statement made by an elderly
man wearing a white labcoat. People who are devout followers
of Scientism share a number of quaint dogmas, the most important
of which is the one that they don’t have any. These
people will always declare themselves to be open-minded and willing
to be convinced of the error of their ways — and then set
up the logical rules of their game to exclude all non-Scientistic
reasoning or evidence as fallacious. That’s because there’s
only one reality, and only one way to understand it — does
this sound familiar?
Scientism is dualistic, just like the conservative
monotheistic philosophies from which it is descended (see my
Evolution of Dualism Chart for a graphic
explanation). All statements are Absolutely True or Absolutely
False (except in the area of subatomic physics, where Scientistic
types will usually (if reluctantly) admit the necessity of the
“Uncertainty Principle”). Because of their basic fear
of ambiguity (which many feminist philosophers believe is rooted
in fear of the feminine) and their frustration with a universe
that does not actually fit into nice neat little pigeonholes,
Scientistic people are terrified of parapsychology and the occult.
They react to claims of paranormal activity, not with the lofty
intellectual neutrality they brag about, but with the same anger,
hatred, and fear that fundamentalists of other religions express
when confronted with “counterfeit miracles” (those
done by members of competing faiths), and for the same psychological
and theological reasons. To the followers of Scientism, all
miracles are counterfeit, and always will be, world without end,
amen.
Scientism should not be confused with genuine
science. Science is a collection of intellectual tools, organized
into various systems known as “scientific methods”
(there are many), each of which is designed to discover and organize
certain types of knowledge (physics, chemistry, biology, sociology,
anthropology, and so on). The methods of the so-called “hard”
or “physical” sciences are not very useful for understanding
music, poetry, love, religion, ecstacy, or other important aspects
of human experience (that’s what the “soft” or
“social” sciences are supposedly for). Of course, superior
scientists seldom claim that the methods of any one system of
science are universally applicable. It’s primarily the mediocre
scientists, who are more frightened than inspired by the unknown,
who try to insist that (their particular) “Science is the
Answer” to every single question that a human can ask.
Unfortunately, most people in our dualistic
culture are unable to tell the difference between science and
Scientism, or between healthy skepticism and unhealthy cynicism
for that matter, and this includes many with strong interests
in spiritual matters both inside and outside of the Neopagan
community.
The irony is that, although it’s true
that the hard sciences don’t really support conservative
monotheistic doctrines anymore, ever since Einstein all the sciences
have tended more and more towards multi-model, pluralistic theories
that fit very well indeed with polytheism and traditional
concepts of non-monotheistic occultism. This makes it sad that
even people who have consciously rejected conservative monotheism
are reluctant to let go of certain Scientistic prejudices, especially
those concerning materialism and the nature of reality.
I’ve often thought that the overwhelming
reason why most modern magic(k) falls so short of its potential
is that most modern magicians, whether monotheists or Neopagans,
really don’t believe in magic. So they have to keep
inventing new definitions for it. After all, magic as psychotherapy
can be made to sound scientific, magic as art or poetry is immune
from scientific criticism, and magic as a method of spiritual
growth is “above” science. But magic as magic,
as a way of causing measurable and observable changes in the
physical universe, collides head-on with Scientistic dogmas about
the nature of reality. Most people simply don’t have the
intellectual courage to deal with multiple levels of reality,
with nested paradox, or with complex ambiguity. They like things
kept as simple as possible, so they wind up closing their eyes
to the complex, yet potentially liberating, aspects of their
environment. This may be the single most important reason why
successful magicians are rare in any culture, and almost unheard
of in the West.
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