My Pagan Life
“My paganism has passed through several stages: an early attempt to create my own mythology followed by many years of devotion to Celtic deities, a fascination with mysticism, and my ongoing involvement in pagan radicalism. It seems like a good time to take stock of where I’ve been, and of how I ended up where I am today.”
Photo by Salem Thompson
Discovering Paganism
I’ve been a pagan for 36 years now – three quarters of my life. In those 36 years, my paganism has passed through several stages: an early attempt to create my own mythology followed by many years of devotion to Celtic deities, a fascination with mysticism, and my ongoing involvement in pagan radicalism. It seems like a good time to take stock of where I’ve been, and of how I ended up where I am today.
I wasn’t raised as a Christian. My parents weren’t atheists, but they had no involvement with organized religion. I went to church now and then when grandparents were babysitting me. As a little boy, I was briefly kidnapped by a grandmother who wanted to raise me as a Christian and prevent my “godless” parents from dooming me to eternal hellfire.
Her efforts failed, as my interest in magic and the occult goes back to my earliest memories. As a small child, I often spoke to my parents about the spirits I interacted with – including an imaginary friend called Four Eyes, a god of the wind, who my mother eventually included as a character in her fantasy novel The Red Dance.
I felt myself to be haunted, often by a ghost dog. When I would get in trouble, I would claim it was the ghost dog who had done whatever I was being accused of doing. This worried my father, who believed in the existence of dangerous spirits. He frequently warned me to stay away from occult practices, worried that spirits would attach themselves to me if I got involved with their world.
When I was 12 years old, I read Bullfinch’s Mythology and I realized that I considered myself a pagan. At the time, I had no idea there were other pagans out there. I just felt drawn to the world of gods and spirits, though not to Bullfinch’s tales of Roman and Norse gods specifically. Instead, I created my own mythology, centered around a war god named Kora and various other deities.
What really interested me was a brief reference to Druids in Bullfinch’s work, but he didn’t provide enough information for me to work with. Believing that the Druids worshipped spirits of nature, I made a small wooden idol and asked my father if we could bury it in the vegetable garden of our homestead in the forest as an offering to the local spirits. He looked at me for a long few seconds, said, “You’re a weird kid”… and agreed to let me do it.
Witchcraft
By the time I was 14, I had discovered the Prophetic Books of William Blake, and begun my own imitations of them. I was also reading voraciously about all the topics that interested me, especially Celtic history and mythology. I read The White Goddess by Robert Graves, not realizing at first that it was not an accurate account of ancient Celtic lore. I read Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler around age 16 and was overjoyed to discover that I wasn’t the only pagan out there. Under the influence of Graves and Adler, I identified as a Wiccan for the next ten years or so and was involved with two different Wiccan covens.
The first of these was a Celtic-themed coven based in Massachusetts, which I joined with my first wife at age 22 or 23. Although this group identified as a Wiccan coven, it was also the first place where I heard the term “Celtic reconstructionist” – at that time in the mid-90s, there was no sense that you couldn’t be both a Wiccan and a Celtic reconstructionist at the same time.
The second coven I was involved with was called the Kin of the Old Gods, an eclectic group in which each member focused on a different pantheon of deities including Irish, Norse, and Hellenic gods and goddesses. The Kin of the Old Gods experimented frequently with ecstatic mystical practices, using techniques that induced extreme altered mental states. Speaking in tongues, resistance to fire and cold, and deity possession practices were all common in the Kin of the Old Gods, a coven largely made up of members of my own extended family.
At some point in the history of KOTOG, we decided that we were not a good fit for the Wiccan paradigm, so we publicly announced in our newsletter that we were no longer a Wiccan coven and that we considered ourselves an eclectic non-denominational pagan group.
Celtic Paganism
From that point on, I began identifying as a Celtic Reconstructionist rather than a Wiccan, although my personal involvement with mystical practices still continued through KOTOG.
There has always been a public and a private side to my pagan practice – Celtic in a public context, mystical in private. My mystical practices are not necessarily Celtic in origin, and often involve a complex personal mythology as chronicled in my work The Book of Onei.
While continuing ecstatic and mystical practices with KOTOG, I explored Celtic Reconstructionism through an organization known as Imbas. Around the turn of the century, Imbas was one of the leading Celtic Reconstructionist organizations out there. As a member of Imbas, I became involved with a faction known as Celtic Traditionalism, which advocated for closer involvement with the living Celtic-language cultures rather than an exclusive focus on the ancient Celtic iron age.
I was eventually elected Vice President of Imbas while promoting this concept of Celtic Traditionalism, so-named because of our emphasis on living folk traditions – not because of any connection to René Guénon or his Traditionalist movement, of which I was unaware at the time. Imbas eventually fell apart, but my devotion to Celtic deities continued.
I’ve been devoted to the goddess Brighid for many years, and she was always the main focus of my ecstatic worship practices in the Kin of the Old Gods. In 2012, I helped found an organization known as Clann Bhríde or the Children of Brighid, a small group of both pagan and Christian Brigidine devotees. Clann Bhríde has been the home for my Celtic religious practices ever since.
Polytheistic Monism
My devotion to Brighid and other deities such as Macha is interpreted through a mystical lens I think of as “polytheistic monism.”
Polytheistic monism is the idea that all of reality is a single divine Mind (the “God of philosophy” as some people call it) of which every specific thing is a unique aspect or manifestation – oneness and multiplicity at the same time. This naturally includes the individual gods, but no more so than any other unique thing in existence. In other words, it may be accurate to describe an individual god as an aspect or manifestation of an underlying divine reality you could refer to as God, but no more so than you or I or any random object in the universe could be described in the same terms. Polytheistic monism is a mystical reconciliation of the concepts of unity and multiplicity, acknowledging both as equally valid.
This theology of polytheistic monism was a common one in ancient paganism, but it turned out to be a highly controversial idea in the modern pagan world. When I wrote my article on polytheistic monism for the Patheos pagan channel, most pagans followed one of two theologies I frankly regard as oversimplifications – “hard” polytheism and “soft” polytheism. By identifying as a polytheist but rejecting both the hard and soft versions of polytheist theology I seem to have made some enemies.
Radical Paganism
As it happens, one person who liked the article even though he didn’t agree with it was Rhyd Wildermuth, one of the founders of Gods and Radicals. Knowing that my politics were far left, he invited me to write something for his new website. I agreed and have been writing for Gods and Radicals ever since.
Over the past few years, the link between my radical politics and my polytheist mysticism has grown clearer and clearer for me and I now see my identities as a pagan and an anarchist to be virtually inseparable. In the follow-up to this article, I’ll tell the story of my life as an anarchist.
Christopher Scott Thompson
Photo by Tam Hutchison.
is an anarchist, martial arts instructor, and devotee of Brighid and Macha.