by Hypatia X
In Neo-Paganism I have found the only spiritual path that did not leave me wanting to make a running escape. Although I was never able to divorce myself from the deeply spiritual side of my nature, growing up lesbian in a fundamentalist Christian family made escape and running away primary thoughts where religion was concerned. It took many years of exploring various Christian religious paths before I could make peace with my Christian roots and accept that I had no place in any Christian tradition. Once I had freed myself from the mistaken belief that spiritual, religious, and Christian were synonymous, I began to explore other paths and gradually came to realize that I was and had always been a Pagan.
Neo-Paganism, for the most part, has been an experience of love, acceptance, and inclusion. Yet, there are times when I find myself feeling a little excluded by earth-based traditions whose rituals revolve around the procreative union of god and goddess. Some months ago, I left a ritual feeling vaguely dissatisfied and unsure of why I did not have more positive feelings toward the experience. Ritual is extremely important to me. The connections to others and the feeling of oneness with the divine that I experience in ritual make every place we gather a peaceful and magical place. As a mother, who is soon to be a grandmother, I have a deep respect for the procreative aspects of neo-Paganism. The union of male and female aspects of the divine are an important part of the creative process. However, nature has provided us with many examples of the creative process which are neither male nor female. We have also been provided with an astonishing history and range of homosexual behavior in nature as well as in our so-called ``civilized'' world. The conflict between nature and the way we choose to worship often leaves me torn between a feeling of belonging in the Neo-Pagan movement and believing that my faith has more to offer than what we have been able to give. Sometimes sorting out these conflicting feelings about my faith is complicated by the fact that examining the role of gays and lesbians in Paganism requires also sorting out the many conflicting perceptions others hold about what I am looking for.
When I first began exploring the role of gays and lesbians in paganism, I was surprised by how many different ideas people had of what questions I should be asking. Even my partner had a radically different idea of what I was searching for. Instead of looking at what it means to be a lesbigay in a Pagan universe, I keep searching for the ways in which queers are represented in the Pagan traditions. How much and in what ways do the pagan traditions belong to lesbigays? While some cultures accepted and even celebrated homosexual unions, others were violently opposed to same sex relationships. We cannot ignore the homophobia in our Pagan roots anymore than we can gloss over the homophobic teachings within the Christian tradition. Lesbigay scholarship must be true scholarship if it is to be taken seriously. The human tendency to romanticize the past, or the desire to accept as historical fact an educated guess that eases the pain of our own internalized homophobia, cannot be allowed to cloud our judgement as we search out the mythology of our Pagan ancestors.
It is not enough to attempt to recreate our religious paths from the fragments of past Pagan traditions. We must learn to understand the cultural roots of our belief systems and cut ourselves free from those beliefs that do not belong in our modern world. There is no place in a Pagan universe for a fundamentalist world view. Nature is a constant process of growth and change and those who worship the gods and goddesses of nature must learn to grow and change in our worship of the divine. The direction of change and growth should be as diverse as nature herself, but it must include more than male-female procreative change. How much and in what ways do the pagan traditions belong to lesbigays? How are we represented in modern Neo-paganism? Where do we belong in a Pagan universe? It is up to followers of the Pagan traditions to figure it out, day by day, in each path that we travel. I am still searching for the answers along my own path. If any of you have something to contribute to the quest, I would be most interested in hearing your thoughts.
Last updated: 11-22-95.