Danustouch
October 12th, 2001, 10:35 PM
Though I object to the title, personally :)
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New age faiths coming of age
JERI WESTERSON
For The Californian
Not everyone enters a church, synagogue or mosque to worship. Some literally worship the ground they walk on ---- the sky, the stars, the wind, and nature itself. Pagans, Wiccans, New-Agers ---- call them what you will, but those who practice these Earth religions say they are just as genuine as the faith of a Christian or a Jew.
Life partners Stephanie Zarrabi and Raven Grimassi own Raven's Loft in Escondido, a metaphysical book and gift store, characterizing themselves as "dealers in the quaint and curious." In the tiny store are displayed fairy figurines, sculptures of gods and goddesses, incense, candles, oils, crystals, pentagrams and books with such titles as "Earth Divination, Earth Magic: A Practical Guide to Geomancy" and "Astral Travel for Beginners." They consider themselves practitioners of old Earth religions, delving into Wiccan rituals, with a belief in a pantheistic approach to divinities. As Grimassi puts it, it is a "veneration of the natural order of things."
"The great spirit or the divinity is in all things," he said. "To honor nature is to honor the creator as well. I liken it to seeing a painting. You can discern the spirit of the artist who painted it through the art itself. So it is with nature."
Zarrabi said one can call on this conscious energy in the male and female personification of deities and use them as focal points, using Aphrodite when encountering a need for self-love, or Athena or Artemis if one is in need of strength or "warring energy."
"They are all parts of the whole," Grimassi said. "As an example, you may be many things; married and with kids. To a select group, you are 'Mom.' To a lover, you are 'Sweetheart.' Yet you are one person. But each person sees you in different aspects, different things to different people as they need you to be."
"We don't follow a central authority nor a central doctrine," Zarrabi said. "No specific tenets are advocated, though there is the Wheel of the Year, which follows the seasonal transformations. Much of our traditions are based on agriculture and fertility. It's all metaphorical. (Pagans) don't need to dance in the fields anymore, though we do."
It is honoring the changing of seasons, added Grimassi, which reflects the changes within an individual as well, contending that a person's natural highs and lows are all a part of the seasonal tides.
"We're not victims, but participants," he said. "What tests spirituality is how you deal with adversity and the gifts life brings you. People don't understand it, that it is a spiritual life. They just view it as weird cult behavior. But (pagans) have been around a long time."
Yet both Zarrabi and Grimassi admit that they keep a low profile, sometimes not telling friends and business associates that they practice unorthodox beliefs.
"It's the same thing as gays in the '60s," Grimassi said. "You had to hide it because society decided there was something wrong about it. It's all mixed up in that ignorance of stereotyping."
He said they are not devil worshippers and do no sacrificing of people or of animals and do not associate with those who call themselves Satanists.
He and Zarrabi said they went out of their way to introduce themselves to their business neighbors when they opened their shop two years ago. At first, the new shopkeepers felt accepted, but later, when the others saw that their business dealt with the occult, Grimassi said he could sense a difference.
Kristin Madden contends with the same bias because she, too, considers herself a pagan and has written numerous books about that lifestyle, her most recent being "Pagan Parenting." She says her style of paganism is a belief in the spirit world and its guides.
Madden said that neo-pagan traditions started as rejection of organized religions, particularly those that did not have a tradition of a female god or female priesthood. They also saw the mainstream faiths as proposing that one way is the only way.
"If you don't do certain things," she explained about the conventional faiths, "you'll go to hell. It's also in the missionary attitude, using fear tactics to convert." Though, she said, it was surprising how many neo-pagans look to Christian mystics for their own philosophy. "They don't have a problem with the sense of love and peace preached by Christianity, but it's the dogma and doctrines they object to."
Madden comes from parents who, in the 1960s, explored avenues opened up by the hippie movement. As a child, she said, even yoga and astrology ---- fairly mainstream now ---- were things her family practiced that she didn't talk about among her peers in Connecticut. Raising her own 5-year-old son now in New Mexico, Madden is still choosy.
"Some people have the same relationship with their gods as Jews and Christians with their one God," she said. "What it is, is to see how you can work to create a better reality, but we work with spirit guides. We honor the flow of energy, give thanks for blessings, respect and honor those energies by putting back into the energy that is the world. It's a continuing cycle."
Though there have been few protests or problems at Raven's Loft, Grimassi recounted one incident when a mother was angry that her son purchased a pentagram.
"I told her, 'Your son doesn't feel safe talking with you about this. He lives in fear of what you would do,'" he said. "Ironically, they had just come from the minister of their faith full of negative energy. As we talked, they teared up, hugged and walked off arm in arm. It's funny that they left their minister angry, but they left the pagans crying and loving one another."
Both Zarrabi and Grimassi said that people join their classes because they feel disenfranchised from the conventional religions.
Rebecca Moore, assistant professor in the department of religious studies at San Diego State University, said it is not only this dissatisfaction with mainstream religions that attract people to neo-paganism, but also control over nature and their own destiny.
"People turn to a variety of sources to control their environment and what happens in their lives," she said.
Moore said faith in crystals and astrology may be rooted in the inability to allow a greater power control over one's life, as is the foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Self-empowerment is very persuasive to individuals, she said.
Moore, a Methodist, said that pagans and neo-pagans are people on a religious or spiritual quest, looking more for an individualized form of spirituality.
"They use these sacred objects ---- crystals, tarot cards, tangible objects ---- to find a more intense relationship with the divine or transcendent world, or the world beyond the world we live in," Moore said.
These objects, she said, are used by people to access that world and to have control over things that may happen to them.
"I think it comes down to a dissatisfaction of traditional forms of religion," she said. "The practice of neo-paganism is individualized, with a blend of a number of elements of Hinduism, like karma or cause-and-effect. In polytheism, there is certainly an attempt to recognize a female divinity."
Moore doesn't go so far as to call paganism a faith as such, because she said "faith" implies a formal belief system. The term she prefers for neo-paganism is religion because it is a system of beliefs, practices and rituals.
"What is religion?" she asked. "Can religion exist without belief and faith? The answer is 'yes,' as long as you have rituals."
Depth of commitment, or the lack of it, she said, is as true in paganism as it is in the mainstream religions, but she said that research shows that those involving themselves in alternative religions have a shelf life of about two to three years.
"After that, their commitment is low key," Moore said. "I call some of them career 'seekers.' They move from one religion to another."
Moore has students who are professed Wiccans in her classes, one of which is about Satanism.
"I respect (Wiccans) because they are religious and genuinely concerned about the world around them, and this is their most meaningful path," she said. "I respect the pursuit for the divine in whatever form it takes. They're sincere in their desire to access the spirit world, attempting to live decent lives. Practitioners I've known are gentle people, concerned about the environment; concerned not just in this material world, but the world beyond."
"It's important to live your spirituality, not just when it's convenient," Grimassi said. "We don't believe in humans having a spiritual experience so much as a spiritual being having a human experience."
10/12/01
(Taken from the Oct 12th edition of the North Country Times, A California Newspaper).
****************************************
New age faiths coming of age
JERI WESTERSON
For The Californian
Not everyone enters a church, synagogue or mosque to worship. Some literally worship the ground they walk on ---- the sky, the stars, the wind, and nature itself. Pagans, Wiccans, New-Agers ---- call them what you will, but those who practice these Earth religions say they are just as genuine as the faith of a Christian or a Jew.
Life partners Stephanie Zarrabi and Raven Grimassi own Raven's Loft in Escondido, a metaphysical book and gift store, characterizing themselves as "dealers in the quaint and curious." In the tiny store are displayed fairy figurines, sculptures of gods and goddesses, incense, candles, oils, crystals, pentagrams and books with such titles as "Earth Divination, Earth Magic: A Practical Guide to Geomancy" and "Astral Travel for Beginners." They consider themselves practitioners of old Earth religions, delving into Wiccan rituals, with a belief in a pantheistic approach to divinities. As Grimassi puts it, it is a "veneration of the natural order of things."
"The great spirit or the divinity is in all things," he said. "To honor nature is to honor the creator as well. I liken it to seeing a painting. You can discern the spirit of the artist who painted it through the art itself. So it is with nature."
Zarrabi said one can call on this conscious energy in the male and female personification of deities and use them as focal points, using Aphrodite when encountering a need for self-love, or Athena or Artemis if one is in need of strength or "warring energy."
"They are all parts of the whole," Grimassi said. "As an example, you may be many things; married and with kids. To a select group, you are 'Mom.' To a lover, you are 'Sweetheart.' Yet you are one person. But each person sees you in different aspects, different things to different people as they need you to be."
"We don't follow a central authority nor a central doctrine," Zarrabi said. "No specific tenets are advocated, though there is the Wheel of the Year, which follows the seasonal transformations. Much of our traditions are based on agriculture and fertility. It's all metaphorical. (Pagans) don't need to dance in the fields anymore, though we do."
It is honoring the changing of seasons, added Grimassi, which reflects the changes within an individual as well, contending that a person's natural highs and lows are all a part of the seasonal tides.
"We're not victims, but participants," he said. "What tests spirituality is how you deal with adversity and the gifts life brings you. People don't understand it, that it is a spiritual life. They just view it as weird cult behavior. But (pagans) have been around a long time."
Yet both Zarrabi and Grimassi admit that they keep a low profile, sometimes not telling friends and business associates that they practice unorthodox beliefs.
"It's the same thing as gays in the '60s," Grimassi said. "You had to hide it because society decided there was something wrong about it. It's all mixed up in that ignorance of stereotyping."
He said they are not devil worshippers and do no sacrificing of people or of animals and do not associate with those who call themselves Satanists.
He and Zarrabi said they went out of their way to introduce themselves to their business neighbors when they opened their shop two years ago. At first, the new shopkeepers felt accepted, but later, when the others saw that their business dealt with the occult, Grimassi said he could sense a difference.
Kristin Madden contends with the same bias because she, too, considers herself a pagan and has written numerous books about that lifestyle, her most recent being "Pagan Parenting." She says her style of paganism is a belief in the spirit world and its guides.
Madden said that neo-pagan traditions started as rejection of organized religions, particularly those that did not have a tradition of a female god or female priesthood. They also saw the mainstream faiths as proposing that one way is the only way.
"If you don't do certain things," she explained about the conventional faiths, "you'll go to hell. It's also in the missionary attitude, using fear tactics to convert." Though, she said, it was surprising how many neo-pagans look to Christian mystics for their own philosophy. "They don't have a problem with the sense of love and peace preached by Christianity, but it's the dogma and doctrines they object to."
Madden comes from parents who, in the 1960s, explored avenues opened up by the hippie movement. As a child, she said, even yoga and astrology ---- fairly mainstream now ---- were things her family practiced that she didn't talk about among her peers in Connecticut. Raising her own 5-year-old son now in New Mexico, Madden is still choosy.
"Some people have the same relationship with their gods as Jews and Christians with their one God," she said. "What it is, is to see how you can work to create a better reality, but we work with spirit guides. We honor the flow of energy, give thanks for blessings, respect and honor those energies by putting back into the energy that is the world. It's a continuing cycle."
Though there have been few protests or problems at Raven's Loft, Grimassi recounted one incident when a mother was angry that her son purchased a pentagram.
"I told her, 'Your son doesn't feel safe talking with you about this. He lives in fear of what you would do,'" he said. "Ironically, they had just come from the minister of their faith full of negative energy. As we talked, they teared up, hugged and walked off arm in arm. It's funny that they left their minister angry, but they left the pagans crying and loving one another."
Both Zarrabi and Grimassi said that people join their classes because they feel disenfranchised from the conventional religions.
Rebecca Moore, assistant professor in the department of religious studies at San Diego State University, said it is not only this dissatisfaction with mainstream religions that attract people to neo-paganism, but also control over nature and their own destiny.
"People turn to a variety of sources to control their environment and what happens in their lives," she said.
Moore said faith in crystals and astrology may be rooted in the inability to allow a greater power control over one's life, as is the foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Self-empowerment is very persuasive to individuals, she said.
Moore, a Methodist, said that pagans and neo-pagans are people on a religious or spiritual quest, looking more for an individualized form of spirituality.
"They use these sacred objects ---- crystals, tarot cards, tangible objects ---- to find a more intense relationship with the divine or transcendent world, or the world beyond the world we live in," Moore said.
These objects, she said, are used by people to access that world and to have control over things that may happen to them.
"I think it comes down to a dissatisfaction of traditional forms of religion," she said. "The practice of neo-paganism is individualized, with a blend of a number of elements of Hinduism, like karma or cause-and-effect. In polytheism, there is certainly an attempt to recognize a female divinity."
Moore doesn't go so far as to call paganism a faith as such, because she said "faith" implies a formal belief system. The term she prefers for neo-paganism is religion because it is a system of beliefs, practices and rituals.
"What is religion?" she asked. "Can religion exist without belief and faith? The answer is 'yes,' as long as you have rituals."
Depth of commitment, or the lack of it, she said, is as true in paganism as it is in the mainstream religions, but she said that research shows that those involving themselves in alternative religions have a shelf life of about two to three years.
"After that, their commitment is low key," Moore said. "I call some of them career 'seekers.' They move from one religion to another."
Moore has students who are professed Wiccans in her classes, one of which is about Satanism.
"I respect (Wiccans) because they are religious and genuinely concerned about the world around them, and this is their most meaningful path," she said. "I respect the pursuit for the divine in whatever form it takes. They're sincere in their desire to access the spirit world, attempting to live decent lives. Practitioners I've known are gentle people, concerned about the environment; concerned not just in this material world, but the world beyond."
"It's important to live your spirituality, not just when it's convenient," Grimassi said. "We don't believe in humans having a spiritual experience so much as a spiritual being having a human experience."
10/12/01
(Taken from the Oct 12th edition of the North Country Times, A California Newspaper).