American Paganism?

TLDR: I'm going to use the hashtag #AmericanPaganism to indicate my personal gnosis as a white American who's trying to define my path as a pagan in a way that takes our culture and history as a whole and in modern terms (which necessitates being accountable for the atrocities committed by our colonizer culture and working to alleviate the effects of that history) because I think it's an accurate descriptor. This is subject to change as I learn more.

-----

I've been thinking a lot about pagans in America. Especially European-descendent pagans in America. 

I've been learning about the intersections of our racial histories and our spiritualities. 

I've been looking into the perennially awkward feelings I've always gotten from Wicca and Neo-Paganism and their tenuous grasp on historical connections. 

Years ago, I joined a coven. They were fairly structured, with a set course of instruction and a reading list for new members to 'grow in their practice,' and they were decidedly Wiccan. I wasn't Wiccan, necessarily, but I was relatively unlearned in paganism and I joined them with the intention of learning more and finding community. 

To be clear - I had been Wiccan at one point. Wicca was my gateway religion into paganism when I first began seeking spiritual knowledge outside of Christianity. I was 12, and a constant reader. I had decided to leave Christianity because it didn't make sense to me. The contradictions were too obvious and too morally concerning. I spent a couple of years as an agnostic, deliberately giving myself some space from religions in general. I remember the day I walked into the high school library and found books on each of what I knew then as the 'major' religions. That was my starting point. Paganism made the most sense to me, and the books available then (the mid-90s) were Wiccan. So that's where I started. As I learned more, I felt a growing unease with the structures and dogma of Wicca. I was especially conflicted about the claims of ancient practices in a religion that was created in the 1950s and couldn't produce a clearly verifiable source for those ancient practices. But the pagan worldview still made sense to me, so I left Wicca and wandered vaguely pagan-ward. By that time, I was old enough to be distracted by the things young adults are distracted by, and my spiritual education continued, but slowly and without much ambition. I didn't return to intentional, focused study until I was an adult and a mother. That's when I sought out community.

A year and a day after joining the coven, I was initiated and they began my education in earnest. This was the beginning of the end. 

The High Priestess gave me a binder that contained her dissertation. She never mentioned the name of the school she'd attended, or what her field was, or even what her degree was beyond "doctorate". She just called it her dissertation, and the coven took that as a sign of her academic bona fides. This was what I was supposed to study. It was her gospel, though she would have been mortally offended to hear me compare her book to a bible.

The binder contained a 'history of goddess worship' that was, according to her, thoroughly researched and completely accurate. The references included Scott Cunningham. In that moment, I emotionally disengaged from that coven. 

Yes, I had an inkling prior to that, that this coven had a shaky spiritual foundation that didn't really align with my personal values. However, they were the only coven in town that I'd been able to access, and having community was more important to me than having a complete alignment of values. They were close enough for my purposes... until they provided me with unavoidable, documented foolishness. Even then, I stayed with them a bit longer, because they were, by then, friends, and I felt that obligation of maintaining the friendship. So I continued to overlook their delusions. The relationship ended when, after a significant bout of clinical depression during which I barely made it to work, nevermind making it to coven gatherings, they kicked me out for my lack of attendance. I was annoyed by the unfairness: their rules allowed for poor attendance as long as communication was maintained, which by some miracle I had done despite my depression, but I was also relieved by the disconnection. I was admittedly bad at ending bad relationships on my own (full disclosure: I still am). 

Prior to that experience with the coven, I had not fully drawn a line between my practice and Wicca. I knew that I was pagan but not Wiccan, but I also knew that "Wicca" was a word most non-pagans understood as a pretty benign form of paganism and that allowing them to call me that was the easiest way to avoid having to explain my actual path, which I didn't really have a specific term for beyond 'pagan.' And most of all, I was uninterested in unnecessary conversations, especially about myself. So when I said I was pagan and they replied "oh like Wicca? I've heard of that!" I would just smile and say "yes, like that," and I would shift the topic elsewhere. I was also bad at conversing with people I don't know well (again: I still am). 

After the coven, I began to tell people, no, not Wiccan, just pagan. It helped that the term 'pagan' had become more common then. 

I also began actively seeking out a path of my own. I tried on Celtic-based paths for size because I knew my heritage was western European. It's a route many white Americans take, but it felt itchy. I couldn't quite settle within it. And as I researched Celts, I learned that they were not one people, but many, with many differing traditions and gods and values - so there could not be a unified 'Celtic' path, not really. The best we could hope for was a cherry-picking of those cultures that would force them together in ways that were not true to their roots. I tried on heathenry and Asatru for size, because many of their stated values match mine: hospitality, acceptance of all people, seeking wisdom for wisdom's sake. I also know that I have some Scandinavian ancestry, so it seemed appropriate. I was appalled to learn of the connection between heathenry and white supremacy, and I distanced myself from heathenry for some time because I didn't know how to address that, or even spot it in its subtler forms, and I didn't want to be associated with it, even accidentally. 

I've wandered through paganism for most of my life now, never really finding my spiritual home. Yet I never really liked the label 'eclectic' either, although it was arguably appropriate more often than not. I didn't like using 'eclectic' because it carried a connotation of a pagan who cherry-picks from cultures, taking what they liked and leaving the rest as though a culture could be served a la carte without losing any of its essential truths. I felt then - as I believe now - that you can no more take the culture from its context than you can separate a personality from their upbringing; too much is lost in the translation and the final product is just a hollow doll. 

This idea was really driven home to me when I moved from the forested, temperate eastern part of the US, which at least had similar seasons to my ancestors' homes, to the Sonoran Desert, which has a decidedly different annual cycle. 'Winter' means something different in the desert than it means in western New York. The common pagan calendar is based on the harvest cycles of western Europe and made little to no sense in the desert. Paganism, to me, is primarily about seeking and maintaining a spiritual and practical relationship with our habitat. I'm not celebrating that relationship by ignoring the climate I live in. I do not harvest wheat in August, I do not have to wait until March to see the new growth of spring. I also do not believe that the veil between the physical and spiritual realities waits to thin, so that it only thins on a particular day on an artificial calendar. I need my spirituality to reflect my physical-world reality, otherwise, my spirituality is just another hollow doll. 

What it comes down to is this: I am American. My ancestors may have been indigenous to western Europe, but I am not. Their cultures were indigenous to their time and place, and do not apply to me. However, as a descendent of Europeans, the cultures indigenous to America are also not mine. I'm also an animist, and maybe I'm an overthinker, but all of this has led me to the beginning of this path I find myself stepping onto now, which is seeking a spirituality that acknowledges not only my ancient ancestry, but also my current reality, and the entire journey in between. 

That might sound pretty, but in order to honor my natal culture, I have to acknowledge and incorporate that culture's history. As a white American, that means I have to account for the effects of colonization on and by my ancestors. If I ignore things like slavery and genocide then my spirituality is, in fact, hollow. I'm not looking for a pretty statue to offer flowers and incense. I'm looking for a fully accountable union of my spiritual and material realities. As a white person, that means I have a lot of learning and unlearning to do, and I don't believe that any modern American form of paganism can be honorable without that accountability. 

All this to say that when I looked up the hashtag "American Pagan," to see if anyone was using it and hoping to find like-minded souls while expecting to find hyper-patriotic/white nationalist pagans who would at best be disappointing... I found not much at all. There were a few, to be sure, but not many and those weren't explicitly white supremacists. So all in all, I'm still hopeful at this point that I can call myself an American Pagan without immediately calling myself something repulsive.