But why should we fear to meet the sidhe? Because they will steal us from earth, and as beautiful as fairyland is, there is a shadow upon it. However much one eats of fairy food, one is never full; however much one drinks of fairy mead, one is never drunk. Something – some foyson, some essential vitality – is missing in that perfect shadowless world. Our world of growth and death, death and growth, interlaced and intertwined, holds something that fairies need, something so compelling they resort to death and kidnapping to taste it. – Patricia Monaghan, The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog.
These days, I am reading Caitlín Matthews’ Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom, Bride of God. I’m not exactly sure how to define the book; it’s an explanation and personal spiritual vision about the survival of the Divine Feminine in the West, hidden in monotheistic religions otherwise intent on Her erasure. And, of course, I have some thoughts about the division of male and female, spirit and flesh – and hierarchical dualism.
It’s tempting to think that gnostic thought – which I am here defining as a philosophy of extreme hierarchical dualism – originates with the Abrahamic faiths. This is not actually the case; the earliest manifestation of this comes via Zoroastrianism, which likely dates to the 6th century BCE in eastern Iran.
The core ideas of Zoroastrianism are familiar today: the eternal battle between light and darkness, good and evil, spirit and matter in the form of a solitary God and an Adversary, and an Armageddon in which good ultimately defeats evil. What’s not so well-known: Zoroaster (or Zarathrustra) not only created the two poles of sacralized hierarchical dualism, but he swapped the very identities of Divine beings. Powers that were seen as maleficent to humankind were now seen as beneficent, and vice versa.
Let me explain. The Proto-Indo-European word for the Divine was *dyeu, or to shine, preserved in many languages and forms, such as the Indian devi (goddess) and deva (god), the Gaeilge dia, the Greek Zeus, the Roman Jove and Diana, the Germanic Tiw. Zoroaster’s reforms literally flipped the poles, which is how the original PIE word for the Divine ended up as today’s devil. Similarly, Ahura Mazda – the one God – has linguistic connections with the Indian asura, or negative divine powers similar to the Irish Fomhoire or Norse Jotun.
So, not to put too fine a point on it … this form of religion is literally worshiping powers that want to eliminate life, because “life” is seen as fallen and impure. More on that in a minute.
The ideas within Zoroastrianism went on to influence all three Abrahamic religions, Greek philosophers such as Plato, and Manichaeism, which has its origins in Mesopotamia. These are, for the most part, religions of the desert – a harsh, dry environment marginal to life.
Christianity, sadly, got a full firehose of sacralized hierarchical dualism, even though it went hog-wild persecuting actual Gnostics and Manichaeans. You can blame St. Augustine, another son of the desert who spent ten years as a Manichaean before he converted to Christianity. Or, if histories are true, reconverted; his mother Monica was a dedicated Christian herself and his father converted on his deathbed.
One could argue that Augustine never truly left Manichaeism behind, even as he authored apologetics against the philosophy; the trademark disdain for the body and sexuality runs through his philosophy like a stain. Augustine is also the author of such concepts as original sin, in which human beings are literally born in a state of eternal damnation because moms and dads in the generations before them ended up doing boogie-woogie all the way back to the Fall.
Ascetic, dualistic faiths of the gnostic type are obsessed with purity and transcendence; the goal, in essence, is to shatter the Supreme Ultimate (the union of elements in constant motion) to achieve a pure yang existence of light, spirit, intellect.
A purely male existence, completely divested of nature. In gnostic philosophy, all of the Green World – plants, animals, our physical bodies – is tainted and irredeemably fallen, a twisted mockery of the real spiritual reality that lies outside the current multiverse. In such systems, women are especially sin-soaked, since they give birth to future generations – after tempting purer male figures into sex. Because of this, some gnostic sects apparently believed that women needed to become spiritually “male” to enter heaven.
It’s not a coincidence that monotheism defaults to a male imago dei, even if the official philosophy is that God is beyond gender. The Virgin Mary, although theotokos, is emphatically not God, and the Holy Spirit was deliberately stripped of any remnants of Goddess-hood.
Yes, Christian Gnostic sects and mystic Christianity in general chat about Sophia. The word means “wisdom” and Sophia is, by definition, the wisdom of the unitary God, just as Christ is the word. Gnostic writings in the Christian era tend to give agency to otherwise abstract concepts, but I think it’s a stretch to say that “wisdom” was a goddess or even the feminine side of the unitary God.
Wisdom is ultimately an abstraction and figures embodying wisdom are an allegory. If you strip out the psychedelic Gnostic wordplay, wisdom (Sophia) and reason/mind (logos) are part of the nature of God.
Think of it this way: Say your name is Vinnie. You may call your rational mind Steve and the part of you that meditates in yoga class Jessica. You may call your tendency to scarf chocolate cookies between meals Freddie, and your ability to balance a checkbook Ursula. But that doesn’t mean you are four different people named Steve, Jessica, Freddie and Ursula: You’re still Vinnie, you know?
Which is one of the reasons that Gnosticism was kind of bullshit.
The theology of hierarchical dualism
The world of the sidhe is called the “land of youth” not only because fairies do not age physically, but also because they never bear responsibility for their deeds or their consequences. – Patricia Monaghan
Gnosticism is based on special knowledge, and this knowledge is of a particular type – the helium type that combines with nothing and no one and just floats around in space. And damn it (because everything that exists is damned), they like it that way.
In the theology of hierarchical dualism, it’s preferable not to have been born. After all, remember the Proto-Indo-European root of the word “sin”: being. The fact of our existence is a crime against God – the real God, 100% light, and not the knock-off Demiurge who created the material world according to Gnostic mythologies.
Our goal – whether in the pure Gnostic systems of yore or their modern-day Abrahamic cousins – is therefore to deny the body, with its pleasures, wants and needs. It’s better to marry than to burn, but it’s better not to engage carnally at all – i.e., remain celibate and childless. It’s better to starve than to feast, to rub your body with ash and rags, to turn away from everything that makes you smile or laugh or brings you joy. It’s better to die and achieve spiritual bliss, rather than stay in this fallen world of shit and rot.
In other words, hierarchical dualism is a death cult: a philosophy that literally worships non-existence as the highest goal.
I’ve often wondered how death cults came about because they seem so antithetical to the business of living. In contrast, I consider my own faith-path to be that of generosity (*gen, to give birth): the gift that life gives to life, to sustain life.
A-musing myself, I’ve come up with two basic theories. The first is based on the trifunctional societal division proposed by comparative mythologist Georges Dumézil. According to his theory, Indo-European societies divided themselves and their concept of the sacred into three: priests, warriors and commoners.
Death cults arise from warrior castes naturally: After all, you’re trying to convince human beings that sacrificing their lives on behalf of a ruler is the height of virtuous behavior. (Reminder: virtue comes from vir, the Latin word for an adult male; ergo, we are discussing manliness.) At the same time, you need to convince human beings that killing fellow human beings is also virtuous – which doesn’t come naturally to the 97% of humanity who aren’t diagnosable sociopaths.
According to warrior virtue, real men are killers. Real men are also willing to be killed for a righteous cause.
And who determines the “right cause”? Enter function one: the priests who, like the warriors, serve the ruler.
The first and second functions are, respectively, the apologists and enforcers of the authoritarian order. This order is patrilineal, which is why men compose the vast majority of first- and second-function positions. (Exceptions exist, of course.) And while Dumézil focused his studies on ancient societies that spoke Indo-European languages, you can make the argument that these social divisions exist in virtually every dominator society. It’s the stuff domination is made of, after all.
The first and second functions, in Dumézil’s interpretation of IE mythologies, join together in a holy war to oppress the third function: farmers and herders and makers, and pretty much anyone who isn’t the top dog, the top dog’s pet clergy member or the top dog’s security force. Ergo: the third function is impure, aligned with nature and the Earth.
While Dumézil divides male gods into the three functions, he holds that many, if not most, female divinities are transfunctional. Somehow, not being reduceable to a single function made goddesses lesser for a reason that remains somewhat unclear. Perhaps it relates to the position of women in hierarchical systems of this sort: the perpetual Other, not quite human no matter what social class they happen to occupy.
My argument – on the side of generous religion, the spirituality of wetland and marsh – is that we need to eliminate the functions and all become transfunctional. That said, the emphasis should be grounded in the third function’s Earth and nurture.
We don’t need warrior religion, or priest religion, king religion or ivory tower intellectual apologist religion. We need farmer religion. Gardener religion. Childcare and eldercare and teacher religion. Earth religion, in short. Sure, sometimes we need to step up and protect those we love, but war and conflict should never become the core of our identity.
Whimsical side note: One of the reasons I love Irish is that the word for person – duine – essentially means “earthling.” And that’s what I am really talking about here: The Dumezilian third function is composed of earthlings, while the first and second functions are composed of people playing silly little conceptual games to convince themselves that they are not earthlings – and that it’s a-Okay to kill people.
Which leads me to theory 2 about death cults.
The bus is coming regardless. You may as well enjoy the ride.
But ours is not the world of the sidhe. When we pretend that it is – when we push away awareness of death and decay, when we bury the refuse of our overly complicated lives like strange sacrifices in bogs – we lose more than we gain. Only by embracing our mortality, by honoring the cycle of life and death, can we live our lives fully. Only by honoring the earth’s rhythms can we survive as a species. There is no bog huge enough to bury a discarded earth. Those who seek to avoid death, to live forever in a fairy shadowland, are doomed to get exactly what they fear. – Patricia Monaghan
In one of my critical moments, I groused about how a religion that believes in eternal life seems awfully obsessed with death and pain. I have also pointed out that we become what we flee or fight.
Death cults, then, are ultimately based on fear of death. Driven by this primal fear, we create weird little bargains: If I refuse to really live, then I can’t really die, right? If I turn my daily life into low-grade suffering, then really super-bad suffering will never happen to me, right? RIGHT?
In my mind, the condemnation of the body and this-world existence betrays a deep, paralyzing insecurity. Death is the ultimate loss of control, the ultimate lack of gnosis or knowledge: We don’t know when that bus is going to show up, or where it’s going to take us. We have theories and visions and experiences. And yes, some people who were on the threshold have returned – but they didn’t board the bus for the full trip.
We may play little games, but we’re all getting on the bus. It’s one of the basic conditions of mortal life, friends.
You get on that bus if you’ve lived a life of celibacy, clad only in thorns. You get on that bus if you’ve married the love of your life, or never found that special someone, or found a lot of special someones. Whether you had kids or cats or both. Whether you ignored the existential questions, or fell down into some Gnostic rabbit-hole with the Manichaeans and hard-core Calvinists.
And when you get on the bus, you find out where we’re going. Not until then, even though the spirits might send you postcards and love-notes with coy hints.
While we’re on this Earth-trip, our three-part souls aren’t separate from our bodies. Our minds aren’t separate from our emotions. We’re all one ecosystem, with each element interpenetrating the others for a whole that changes from moment to moment – just as the Otherworld, in Pagan cosmology, interpenetrates this one. There is no “apart,” just different iterations of one-water.
Life isn’t just some vale of tears, worthless and corrupt because it can’t be eternal. Love and beauty infuse even the most banal moments, the most painful trials. In fact, a large measure of that beauty and meaning is its impermanence – which is why fairies kidnap mortal lovers and children, according to folklore. There is something missing in this eternal fairyland of disembodied spirit: Life. Generosity. *Gen.
In this blog, I’ve written about Asherah a number of times, which may seem an odd choice for a Celtic Pagan. The reason is that this Goddess is a lovely representation of Divine generosity, the very spirit of *Gen. In the original mythology of ancient Canaan, she was considered the wife of Yahweh, the Queen of Heaven referenced throughout the Bible. Asherah poles were erected outside Yahweh’s tent-shrines.
Her name means “She walks on the sea,” but she was depicted as a tree – the Tree of Life. Yep, the same one that ended up in the Garden, which may also be the Otherworldly Tree that joins all the realms.
Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever…
The immortality Asherah grants, however, isn’t the disembodied shadowland of the Gnostics but life, in all its forms, its flux and flow. And when her people stop making offerings to her, their lives literally go to shit.
But since we left off to burn incense to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine.
(So, burn that incense and pour the drink, folks! Asherah misses us.)
I’ve come close to Gen in the strangest moments – such as when I am on the side of the road, projectile-vomiting. One time, this happened on a college trip to an organic farm run by nuns and I didn’t make it out of my professor’s car in time; I ended up covered in my own filth, lying in the grass. And the grass, the light, the blue of the sky pierced me through with an incredible beauty.
Or a couple years ago, late at night in the Carolinas – the hum of the highway behind me, the dark blanketing heavens speckled with stars. I cherished the cool grass against my cheek, my hair caught up in trash and vomit. Emptied out, I felt the prick of every star in the sky. It was so utterly beautiful: that moment, this life.
White Cat Grove 
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