The reality is that polyamoury only seldom works. Whether it’s due to hardwiring or just circumstances, more often than not, multiple relationships just don’t work. When even Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, who’s very often cited amongst the BiPolyPaganGeek crowd, even admits that “serial monogamy … may just be the human default”, in addition to pointing out that loving someone and making the relationship work, any relationship, is going to require a lot of hard work, that means something. That’s important. Most people just don’t want to do the work, and frankly, while there are a lot of people who agree with polyamoury ideologically, or for convenience, it just very seldom works out.

I still hold on to the notion that, at one point, maybe a very short point, she genuinely wanted to do right by the community, mainly because I am optimistic by nature and genuinely believe that even the most corrupt, selfish, and wicked people start out with a belief that they’re acting in the best interests of everyone –that doesn’t excuse corruption or wicked deeds, but it illustrates that we’re all social, clan/tribe-oriented bald apes, deep down. The fact that some people who I still respect maintain some fondness for her doesn’t hurt this optimism, either, because there’s always the possibility that they’ve seen something in her that I haven’t.

Regardless of my optimism, I can’t help but wonder if her burnt bridges in the community were the real underlying reason in her self-removal from a pagan identity a couple months ago. There’s really no less drama amongst “polytheists”, and I know a lot of the ridiculous drama llama parade behind the legacy in Hellenion, which seems to be what she attached herself to after whatever falling-out with her Alexandrian coven that initiated her happened in the comments on Patheos and then even the post itself magically disappeared. She left a long legacy of doing stupid, clearly divisive actions during her run as the Patheos Pagan Portal Editor in chief, and there’s a point where you gotta realise that the primary common denominator in these episodes is her. I guess some people still want to make excuses for that, but long before her “Foster care” pleas prompted me to make this post, I just couldn’t see justification in her behaviour anymore –just cos the main person she’s *ultimately* hurting is herself, she’s burnt out a lot of people on the pagan community, in the process.

I don’t know if she ever wanted to do right. Whether she did or not, I think it’s easy for good intentions to be misinterpreted as assholerly just as much as it is bad intentions to be misinterpreted as passion and spunk. She did seem to burn a lot of bridges by the time you wrote your blog though

The only explanations I can think of for why I got a lesser reaction is cos I’m not as popular, and maybe a dash of people finally getting wise to Foster’s shit.

And at any rate, you seem to be setting up a few straw men, because what I’m saying and what you are arguing against are two different things. You seem to be working on some premise that I’m coming from an Epicurean stance, which I’m not. I don’t aim for future pleasure, I don’t aim for present pleasures. Pleasures and pains are only themselves to me and not much else. If you want to boil my system of ethics down to anything, you are going to just have to call it Conorism. Calling or approaching it as anything else than that isn’t going to allow much give.

The Hedonist is able to find pleasure in a diversity of surroundings, from the grandest of palaces to the lowliest of hovels. An appreciation of fine things within one’s means includes any means by which one is living, which is always subject to change. Always.

Sometimes, a largely unpleasant situation is unavoidable. That does not mean there is no joy to be found within it. The life of Aristippus alone can teach that. It’s not wise to seek those situations, if they can be avoided, but in the moments one must endure them, why is it unwise to focus on the pleasures to be found within those moments in favour of the future joys that don’t exist? The Hedonist posits that it is, indeed, far wiser to grab those “little” pleasures within even the worst situations, because it’s what exists now.

And easy living (which has a high amount of pleasure) will make you very soft and weak. For example, my ability to withstand hot temperatures changed dramatically when I started working construction as a teenager and doing roofing. The discomfort and pain associated with the hard work made me physically stronger and able to withstand the temperatures well enough. The same goes for psychological pain, when you have not gone through a particular situation such as the loss of a loved one or the loss of a relationship or friendship, and have not experienced the pain and agony associated with it, you have little insight into the situation or how truly awful it can be. By experiencing these things, we better open up ourselves to be useful and supportive to others because we have gained new insights. Likewise, you cannot talk about how wonderful sex is or truly understand why a friend spends all his time with his new girlfriend if you’ve never been infatuated with someone or have felt the emotion of love. Pleasures too lead us to insights, just as pain does.

And just because the human body produces a counter-measure to it does not mean that the experience is ‘wrong’ or ‘right’. Our bodies have developed to withstand a lot of pain for a variety of reasons, and it is an indication that being able to tolerate pain and misery was vital to our evolutionary survival and not much more than that.

Thank you for your reply. And really, just for the article in general; it was very well put.

*Why* were these things considered to be spiritual pollutants? I mean, I get it, it makes us ‘stinky’. I’ve heard that part already. But what I want to know is, in these rules that were laid down for us, does it explain *why* the rules exist?
Does Zeus say “I find childbirth offensive because XYZ!”, or is it just “Ick, you have baby smell. Get that shit away from me!”?

I just can’t (completely) wrap my head around “because They said so” or “They’re gods, we don’t have to understand Them.” That’s on me, and I know that. It’s not a judgement on those who can, but an honest assessment of myself. And this is trying to appease the logical part of me, not the spiritual, because even if it doesn’t make me understand why I do something (and as I said in a few posts after the instigating one…I do use khernips, smoke cleansing, and flagellation before any big ritual, so I do perform acts of ritual cleansing, even if I don’t understand miasma rules and my methods aren’t entirely traditional), I’d like to know why I am expected to, and be able to make peace with any discrepancies I can’t assimilate.

Thanks for anything you’re willing to throw my way.

This isn’t really something I can just shrug and go “oh well, agree to disagree” on, cos the menstruation anomaly isn’t the only one that exists within the history of religious miasma. The “first hygenic, later spiritual” hypothesis seems to just stink of this atheistic ideal within modern Western Classical Studies that aims to paint pre-Christian Hellenic religion as this sort of proto-Jungian borderline atheism. In some taboos, the “first hygenic…” hypothesis seems to make sense, but from early on, there were a lot of anomalous quirks to miasma. Furthermore, for the most part, miasma simply didn’t extend to household worship –or it was at least treated far less rigorously by the ancients (unless you were Hesiod —but Hesiod’s got subscriptions ). I know the ancient Hellenes liked to preen and loved their baths, but with kids getting sniffles left and right, one’s own parents and grandparents dying, often in the house, and one and one’s Missus fucking like rabbits sufficiently far from the hearth, in order to maintain a steady population of Hellenlings, it’d be a wonder that people could leave the house at all, much less sit to eat a meal, if they were religiously bound to washing themselves before every meal, or passing the shrine to the household gods. Hell, it’s a wonder even Hesiod didn’t die by scrubbing himself raw, if miasma was a widespread major household taboo. If it was “first hygenic”, then why was household practise so lax? Surely people noticed that they got sick from their family members more often than others, even in Hesiod’s day. If it was “first hygenic”, then why a complete absence of menstrual taboos? If it was “first hygenic”, then why parade dead people through the streets, potentially infecting the whole neighbourhood?

The reality is that spiritual miasma actually far predates “miasma” as an all-purpose word for “poison air disease theory”, when the word was repurposed in the 19th Century for the “poison air” hypothesis of how diseases spread. The link with the word “miasma” and physical pollution, as best as I can tell, is far newer than miasma as spiritual pollutant.

My own stance is one on a more emotional level, an inability to connect with the Gods due to self-imposed restrictions. The reason why, mainly, is because I found myself VERY uncomfortable with the thought that the Gods would be so inclined to disregard the prayers of an unwashed person (for whatever reason that they are unwashed) simply on account of that. I’m very abstract with my interpretation I suppose, though I take purification very seriously. I don’t think you can go ‘WHELP, I’M SUPER HAPPY, TIME TO GO PRAY’. Hell, I make my boyfriend wash his hands and face if he plans to get close to the shrines, and he doesn’t share my faith or pray at them or things of that nature. My interpretation may be modern, but my approach, practice, and treatment of miasma isn’t.

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What a lot of pagans miss is that the primary activity associated with Easter is just going to church.

Having grown up in a reasonably devout Catholic household, I’m inclined to agree, but I’m also inclined to give the benefit of the doubt, as I’ve since met people who state that their parents only took them to church on Christmas –the tradition of pastel Easter dress was, to them, “just something else you do on Easter”, even though the only place they wore this finery was Grandma’s house.

The “paganisation” of Easter happened gradually —I imagine the eggs were adopted first, as they were part of local feasts for various festivals, and the first noted inclusion of rabbits or hares in “Easter symbolism” dates to mediaeval England, where, again, it’s likely that the animal were a holdover from pre-Christian Romano-Celtic feasts. It’s interesting how Catholicism became so widespread, and the takeover was simple: Remove the paganism from practises while keeping them relatively recognisable to pagans –local customs were OK, as long as it became part of church tradition and stopped being about pagan deities, even veneration of local deities was still OK as long as the church was willing to repurpose those deities as saints.

The fact that the average pagan may be more familiar with non-liturgical Evangelical Protestants for whom this is not necessarily the case are doesn’t change this.

And I know very little about that culture. Like, do they not go to church on Easter? Is it just less common for them to? That seems so odd to me that I just take for granted the fact that Easter is one of the most church-going days of the year, most of the time.