I have always been a scientist. It’s not just what I do but who I am. It colors every aspect of my life, affects my worldview. Several years ago I decided I wanted to learn to paint in oils. A dear friend and talented artist took me on as a student. He taught me about color and light and contrast and texture. He gave me a limited pallet and made me mix my colors from very basic ones. This experience was a revelation. When I had looked at a tree as a scientist I had known its ancestry and evolution. I understood its structure, how the xylem and phloem carried its nourishment within it. I saw its leaf structure and knew about its stoma exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen and how the auxins directed its apical meristems to heaven or earth. I still knew all those things and saw them in the living thing before me. But now I had new eyes, artist’s eyes that understood the leaf was yellow and blue, knew that without red in the proper quantities I would never make the bark seem real. I saw texture and shadow and dancing highlights. The artist and the scientist both saw the tree, and both sets of eyes, each in their own way, saw a thing of beauty.

I was raised Baptist. I was active in my religious life, teaching, attending church, singing in the choir. Although I had had struggles of conscience for years, it was finally the scientist in me that rebelled after fifteen years of devout worship (a little altercation over evolution as you may recall from a previous Crone’s Corner).

My journey led to the Catholic church with which I had previously had some experience. I took instruction, was confirmed and worshipped devoutly. I found comfort in the concept of confession and pleasure was in attending mass daily during Lent and praying the rosary. But of course, there was the Pope. And the church’s attitude toward women. And the whole nagging problem of Christianity as it is practiced in this century and in this country.

I had always known I was religious. It was just a matter of finding the right religion. Mike Nichol’s witchcraft class was a revelation. The child I had been who had loved the ancient Gods of Greece and Rome and mourned that they were no longer worshipped (then looked around for the thunder bolt that would strike someone with such non-Christian thoughts) re-emerged. Mike gave me the foundation. Other teachers enriched my learning, gave me hands- on experience in Pagan ways, illuminated the path. I began to have a new mind, a new heart, a new spirit. And all the world began to look different. I had grown Pagan eyes.

For a while now I have been Pagan longer than I was Baptist, but I still live in a very Christian world. While monotheism is assumed to be the norm by vast numbers of people in the western world, for thousands of years and around the world, people were and are not monotheistic. It is a late invention and not as prevalent as monotheists believe. Christians are counted as one vast, homogenous group but beliefs of an LDS, a Roman Catholic and Primitive Methodist are wildly dissimilar. Non-monotheistic peoples are not usually considered as one group but rather as many small groups, though Hindus, Wiccans and tribal animists may hold very similar points of view about the nature of the divine. And all those non-monotheists see the world in a way that is very different from Christians, Jews and Moslems. Ancient peoples had a different worldview than the Western Christians who study and write about them and try to interpret them to a monotheistic audience. I believe that the mind, motivations and faith of a reverent Babylonian or ancient Greek is far more opaque to a modern Christian than to a modern Pagan.

There are people among us in the Midwest of the United States who have been Pagan all their lives, raised Pagan by Pagan parents in the Bible Belt. I wonder if they will revolutionize the fields of anthropology, archaeology, history. I wonder if they will slowly begin to change how our predominantly monotheistic society views and treats the Pagans of the earth, “lost and ignorant savages