What does magic mean in the context of connectivity and a general lack of hierarchies and selves? What is religion for a whole Earth? What is paganism, the path of the land? I have been chewing on these and similar questions for decades. So far I have not found any answers in print. Mostly I find my philosophy growing in the garden.
This leads to a specificity in my thinking and a plurality in the world. My ethics are rooted in the beings that live with and around me, and my praxis mostly consists of nurturing abundance and radically curtailing harm here in this place. My ways of being would not be the same elsewhere among other beings. So elsewhere has its own paths and guidelines. This being true of all Elsewheres, I can’t imagine there is a universal religion. There is no one way.
This is borne out in history. Though universal deity — the one-size-is-forced-on-all (and fits none) approach — is found in all large faith systems, the tendency to have spirits of place is actually the more common, the normal mode of interpreting mystery, both for humans and possibly for more-than-humans. Few, maybe only one group of humans, have ever declared themselves the one true and right way of being, their gods the only gods, their values the only good. This sort of philosophy requires being dissevered from all other being. You can only be the best if you are alone. You can only follow a singular right and true path if all others, including all the world outside humanity, is wrong. Being tied to place is the antithesis to universal. But being tied to place is the only real way of being.
So universals never work. Ever. A system of thinking that is not rooted in reality, that is not place-based, that is disconnected and artificial, can not be made to work in a connected, relational, embedded and embodied and interdependent system of living beings. And every being is such an amalgam of organisms at many scales. Earth is not merely a planet. She is all of us living individual lives together. A human life is not just human. Our bodies are composed of multitudes and require all these others around us merely to survive. Thriving is when we recognize that. Any system of thought that ignores that, that claims humanity to be special and superior and independent of context, will fail. It will not allow any beings to live well, not even those who believe.
The wrongness is not in searching for a right way of being, nor even looking to ideals. It is making these determinations disconnected from place, from other beings, from living. And it is dictating how to be in places where that manifestly does not work. In the case of the Christian tradition (and to a lesser extent Christianity’s Greco-Roman roots) which are predicated on being strangers to this entire universe, actual living denizens of someplace else where that ethical system may or may not be rooted, there is no place on Earth where that system is functional, practicable and wholesome. Clearly, this is not real. Nor helpful. But this mode of thinking has infected all others, quite literally wiping out ways of being that are Earth-centered.
Modern paganism has more in common with Christian and Judaic mysticism than with any land-based paths that have proven to be sustainable and sustaining throughout the world. Pagans may mouth indigenous practices, but as a group they follow books and leaders and do not look to their own rooted feet. Because they do not have roots. They do not cultivate relationship with place, with beings other than themselves. They have a god and a goddess, not understanding that there is no singular power, nor that power is ever clothed in human skin.
I am not sure that I believe in powers at all, but if they do exist, I can’t see any reason to place them in humanoid bodies, however perfected (by which is generally meant sexually attractive to humans). Humans are small and not terribly powerful. Nor interesting. How can anyone look to the stars and believe that he is the center of the universe? How can anyone see all the teeming life just on this Earth and yet believe that there is an omnipotent god in his image? How can anyone believe that there is some special eternity for only his kind? How can you not know that you are just like all other beings around you and very much less important than most…
No, I don’t believe in humanoid powers, nor anything centrally and universally in control. I don’t believe much in control, and I don’t believe in centrality at all. Distributed and relative cooperation and community work so much better at sustaining being. But if there are powers, I can’t see any reason to want to attract their attention — if that is even possible. I have no doubt that nothing humans can do would alter powers one jot… How does that even make sense? Super human power under the weak thumb of a human, that is by definition less powerful? No wonder our stories of invoking gods and summoning demons never work out well. Even our fantasies admit the logical fallacy.
But that is where paganism has landed, because anthropocentrism and hierarchy are our modern milieu. Paganism in this context becomes little more than a goofy pose, involving candles and anachronistic robes and quite a lot of universalizing math trying to figure out how “as above and so below” things are. But what if there is no above? What if there is no one correct way? What if all things are just all things flowing together in all directions? What if every body living well is the right path?
You can’t write books about that. And in fact nobody has. Because books necessarily impose one way and that way is human. Books are linguistic, which is pretty much a human thing. They only describe human things and that mostly the things of humans at the top of the human-created hierarchies. Human words, particularly the languages used most frequently in book printing, are of their nature anthropocentric and universalizing, context free because, as symbols, they have no physical context. It is very difficult to disentangle words from the arrogance and blindness of humanity, to talk about the nonexistence of superiority and purity, to discuss the real world of interconnected beings and happenings, none of which have a meaning in which humans are central.
Paganism, and especially the ceremonial magic-with-a-k portion, is all about hierarchy. It’s lords and ladies and priestesses and sages. The small hedge witch is pushed to the margins if she is allowed to live at all. Because she messes up the image, drawing attention to the local and embedded world, showing her roots, cackling madly at purity and greatness. She knows these are code words. They are the rules of exclusion, excuses, justification for why some may benefit from life and most may not, most particularly those who do not honor the rankings and divisions. She also knows that it is no happenstance that those who make the rules and define the codes are the only ones who benefit, cutting out the entire world from the enjoyment of life.
Have you noticed how universal rules are utterly joyless? The world hates our rules. But it’s not even what humans want, though philosophy never tires of trying to convince us that we agreed to this nonsense. This is much like saying the woman wanted to be raped. No, humans don’t want to be ruled. We want to be free of rule-makers, free to make our own ways of being that don’t require rules, because those rule-maker-free ways of being are the only ways to be content in community. Humans hate being led and we find endlessly clever ways of getting out from under the imposed hierarchies. Though there are always more rules forced upon us, we wriggle and writhe until we are free — until the next ruler comes along. But this basic human unwillingness to be ruled means that it is very expensive to maintain hierarchy… and ruling is generally doomed to failure.
But rules imposed from above rather than guidelines grown in place are also just dumb. Rules rely on maintaining that pretense of universality and the superior correctness of the few. Rules don’t work because there is no universality. Rules increase suffering because forcing a body to follow them makes it impossible to live well. This is just stupid. Anything that grows suffering is stupid.
There is much written of suffering, though we seem to be confused on the concept. For starters, it is not a human condition. Other beings absolutely do suffer. Because we are depriving them, we are keeping them from living well. No, we do not have a unique capacity for suffering, though we have a unique method of coping. We talk about it. We word it. We name it and believe it is unique to us for this accident of communication method that we call language. But anyone who has ever separated a calf from her mother knows that animals suffer. Anyone who has ever watched a plant wilt from neglect knows that plants suffer. Anyone can see that this whole planet is suffering, feeling pain, perhaps even helplessness. We are making a world of suffering un-living. Suffering does not come from the stars. It is our fault.
Wisdom traditions notwithstanding, suffering also has little to do with death, nor even with loss. All beings experience these temporal and temporary griefs. All beings have ways to mitigate loss. We see these practices in every community of organisms that we have ever encountered. Grief is not suffering, or not necessarily so. Suffering is isolation and purposeless and despair. It is the inability to live well because some human has taken that ability away by force. Suffering is the inability to be responsive and responsible, to live in community, which is the only way to live because we have needs that our bodies can not meet in isolation. Suffering is what happens when we try to be isolated in this world of interdependence, when we force other bodies to meet our needs without any sense of reciprocity or accommodation or care. Suffering is hierarchy in action.
Suffering is directly related to the question of needs and the work necessary to meet them. Paganism, like most faith systems, is rather silent on this. Praxis is talked about, but then magic is inserted between the need and its relief, obliterating the necessary work. Magic and powers, when all you need to do is plant the garden, bake the bread, sweep up the mess.
Have you ever noticed how few itinerant sages are women? This is not because women are not wise, nor even because women prefer the order and comfort of home. (Though we do…) It is not because we are materially depraved, greedy and grasping of our possessions, unwilling to live free of the cares and burdens of stuff. It is because we know that living “free of care” is really a code phrase for living free of the burden of a living-eating-breathing-shitting body. Denying the body’s needs just means that you are not doing the work to meet those needs. It doesn’t make those needs go away. Someone else has to pick up your slack – otherwise you would soon die. Women know that there is no body that is free of that labor, and any that slough it off are really just adding to the burdens of others… mostly women. Women do not have the luxury to force others to do their necessary work. Women do not even have the temperament. It is not a luxury to us. It is embarrassing ignorance and carelessness. It is not right. It is not good. It is not a path to wholeness and wellness. It is creating suffering.
Buddha may have found the enlightenment of the dissolution of the self and its merging into interbeing. Most of his followers — including all the new age-y pagans who sample from all the world without much thought for how it relates to their place — do not seem to have understood that enlightenment is a living biological relationship with all around you in this material world. Not someplace else. Not some mind space or spiritual eternity. Relief of suffering comes from ending the physical body’s isolation and despair, which is a living process, not some hazily promised future of disembodied being that can’t, by definition, be experienced or lived. Enlightenment – the relief of suffering – is recognizing not only that we are not selves, but that we are communities, organisms, interbeings, all interconnected, at all levels and varieties alive with sense and agency.
Relief of suffering is the ability to act to meet the living body’s needs, not to develop the self by becoming uniquely pure, nor even to deny the self. (You have to believe in a self to be able to deny it, you know…) But to recognize that there is selfhood everywhere, all the time, and it is all working together to be happy. Centralizing rules universally interfere with that project of good living.
Relief of suffering is not sitting on your ass, contemplating your navel. It is not calling on powers to do your heavy lifting. It is not giving away the tools your body uses to keep your body healthy and whole (while notably retaining a good deal of useless space for sitting…). Finding a good path is embracing the truth that you are a body with needs and that the entire world around you is working with you to meet those needs in communion. It is both shouldering your own responsibility and doing the work of communal responsiveness. It is sinking into equity and balance. It is releasing ideas of greatness, specialness, hierarchies of worth. It is being alive to reality, within reality, not ideas. It is knowing your physical and temporal place and accepting your smallness within it.
In interbeing, there are no lords, no priests, no masters, no superiority, nor inferiority. All is equally necessary. All is equally valuable. Embodied existence does not allow for hierarchy. That is nonsense. Oh yes, there is learning in all directions, always. But there is no correct center telling the rest how to live while forcing the rest to make up for their sitting in the center, doing nothing but prescribing. That is the path of nonsense. How am I more important, more worthy of having my needs met than the beings I depend upon or that depend upon me? (Though for humans… that is a much smaller problem… we are hardly critically necessary in any ecosystem.) This is all so much nonsense. The world is a communion of sensible and sense-making bodies working together to be sensibly alive, each in their own sensed place. No hierarchy is possible in a world that makes sense.
This is the Earth path. Morality is not how to make the most of a human individual. It is the guide to living embedded with others. Morality is indeed relative, though not in a self-serving, anthropocentric — and usually lazy — post-modern fashion. All the world is moral together. All the world is an organism that has needs and ways of being that allow all to live well. And that life is embodied, meaning based in a physically embodied place. Morals are how to live well, and life is relative to where you are and who you live with.
Neopagans seem to miss this. They have shed the moralizing, but they also threw out the moral living. They, like their Christian forefathers, think they have the one truth and it comes from the tip of a wand. Which is not a thing… It certainly doesn’t do any work or share any responsibility. It does not even create lasting pleasure. Because a good life is not pleasure for the self, it is not an endorphin joy-ride for one body, it is not imposing the will. It is calm. It is order. It is community. It is knowing place and purpose and peace. Which cannot be except that it be shared.
What wisdom traditions always seem to overlook is that we are here not purely by chance. Nor does it take a humanoid power to bring us into being. We are here because we are the best organisms to be here now with all other organisms here now. We are how life is choosing to express itself. We, along with everything around us, are embodied life, without distinction.
Knowing that, living that truth every day in every embodied act, that is the Earth path. And that is what place-based, land-based, hedge-walking paganism truly is.
That is the philosophy I find in the garden and the woods and the kitchen. I might light candles and look to my human ancestry for emotional counsel. But I live in this body, in this place, and that is the only right way for me to be.
And it is not at all the only right way to be… All the gardens have their own paths… It is for each of us to find those right ways of being through being in right relationship with the embodied path that each of us treads.
This is not magic… and yet… it so very much is!
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 