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Sorry, that should have read "unverified personal gnosis" not unverifiable.
T the T:
I can understand the need to make distinctions between different orders of "truth-claims" (i.e. personal opinions being over-generalised) but the problem of setting the personal insight against academic research is tricky, to say the least, as what exactly contitutes "accepted" academic research apropos of any given approach to magic? There's also, it seems to me, a potential danger of dismissing an invididuals' insights into their own practice because they do not conform to some artificial "academic standard".
Also, this framing of "received lore" as that lore which is generally accepted as valid or worthy within the mainstream of a tradition also begs the question of according to who? And what constitutes the "mainstream" of a tradition anyway? Is "received lore" what academics say? One's immediate friends or fellow-travellers? Something that turns up frequently in books or on websites?
Those are some good points, Trouser, and you've actually touched on a subject which is dear to my heart. It arises continually within discussion around my particular tradition.
On the face of it, things in NT-ville should be pretty simple. On one hand you have the lore: that which can be gleaned from surviving texts, from contemporary reports, from archeological investigation, and so on. On the other, you have UPG: information derived from mystical practices, from sudden flashes of inspiration, etc. You then have a spectrum with the hard-line orthodox practitioners who focus mostly or wholly on the former at one end, and the "fluffier," neo-pagan-influenced UPG-bunny at the other.
The actuality is more complex. For one thing, the lore itself is not 100% reliable. What we have here is a primarily oral tradition which was written down by Christian monks. Much of what we have to go on was recorded after paganism had started to decline, in some cases many hundreds of years after Christianity had completely overthrown older religious beliefs and practices (officially at least). It is heavily influenced by the politics of the time, by the prevailing mores, by what kinds of stories people wanted to hear. The reconstruction of the pagan religion(s) of the time is likewise inevitably influenced by the prevailing culture and by the convictions of those doing the reconstructing.
There are great schisms occuring in modern heathenry along such fault-lines as the use of mystery practices, prayer and trance-possession (people who will invoke the Gods to full possession as part of their devotional work vs. people who refuse to pray at all ever because they don't "grovel on their knees like those Xtians"), the problem of Folkism (people who believe that only those of Germanic stock should ever worship Team Norse vs. people who aren't fucking turbodouches) , and issues around gender and sexuality (people who believe in the rigid enforcement of allegedly traditional gender roles, restriction of female sexual expression and prohibitions against homosexuality vs. people who aren't fucking turbodouches). One can certainly sketch the outlines of a general heathen mainstream, but within that there are huge areas of doubt and conflict. There's also the fact that the very vociferous groups who tout themselves as the mainstream often aren't, they're fringe outfits with loud voices but dwindling memberships.
Even when everyone at the table is deriving their interpretations from the same texts, you still get disagreements. These can range from minor points such as the correct translation of a word, to the meaning attributed to whole chunks of the surviving lore. There are a lot of core theological issues over which heathens are divided. Supposedly hardcore by-the-book lore-geeks will cheerfully dismiss inconvenient passages as Christian interpolation if they could threaten that person's veiw of how things ought to be. (Christian interpolation is a real problem and not to be underestimated, but the term is frequently deployed more along the lines of "I can't hear you, blee bloo blah.")
How much value one places on UPG in an NT context depends on a number of factors. One of these is how important the actual worship angle of being a heathen is. For some, it's reconstructing the cultural elements--the aesthetic, ethical and social principles, which is important--rather than the spiritual aspect per se. (That's perfectly fine, obviously, but there's a danger of slipping wholesale into SCA territory and just using the Gods and wights as window-dressing.) However, for those who are interested in the devotional aspect there's no getting away from the fact that 1000-odd years of downtime plus repression by the political groups who espoused the incoming religion has left us with a lot of gaps which cannot be filled from lore. Records simply do not exist of everything we would like to know, and it's up to us to discover or rediscover the knowledge we're missing. Mystical practices and techniques geared around the gathering of UPG can help us do that.
Personally, I place a tremendous value on information obtained through these means because my whole spiritual life is basically made of UPG. Quite apart from the fact that my best God is regarded as actively evil in some quarters, some of the Beings I have the closest of relationships with are down to a few lines in the Lore, if that. I'm also passionately devoted to Sigyn, and we know nothing about Her. She's down to three mentions in the lore and they all say basically the same thing: She's the wife of Loki, who stays by His side in the cave. We don't know if She's one of the Aesir, the Vanir, or some other tribe; no reference to any cult, no record of anyone back in the day who counted Sigyn as their particular friend amongst the Gods. But She's there all the same; if you reach out to Sigyn, you get a response. Some of my most profound, moving, cherished spiritual experiences have originated from my devotions to Her. I'm not alone in this either--other people say the same thing.
Raven Kaldera, a pagan shaman who deals with some of those forgotten or reviled Gods, came up with the useful concept of PCPG: peer-corroborated personal gnosis. This means basically UPG which has been experienced and reported by more than one person independantly. It's a useful tool (although obviously there's a risk of people working within groups influencing each other without meaning to). I like this because it gives us another way of evaluating and discussing UPG data.
It is easy to use the term UPG to dismiss someone's experiences as in the Ganesha anecdote above. The thing is, there's UPG and UPG; there's doing a faring-forth to find out more about Hyndla, recording your experiences and sharing them with your community; and then there's the person who defeated Loki in single combat and who He now deferrs to as an advisor. I kind of don't have a problem with dismissing that, even though I have no evidence to the contrary.
(Roy Medallion: I know, I need to quit, just can't seem to stop picking the scab.) |
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