Open-Minded or is Your Brain Falling Out?

This is a true rant, perhaps the most uncensored rant I’ve posted yet on this site. I could’ve chose a more tactful title, but why bother? If my recent forays into new places of Pagandom have shown me anything, it’s that tact doesn’t matter. Nor, apparently, do the time honored qualities of intelligence and logic. Let me share with you a recent experience I had.

I was invited to join a certain Pagan e-list recently. I suspect that it was a blanket invitation; perhaps the person simply went through the member’s lists of certain other groups and sent invitations to all. In any case, I was a bit surprised because it wasn’t the kind of Pagan list I’d normally frequent, but I figured I’d check it out. I was, after all, associating with other Pagans- why not try a more general Pagan list?

I joined along with a few other people I knew who had also been invited. One of the first things I received were a few files sent to new members of the list. Most of them were relatively typical things; an introductory questionnaire, list rules, etc. One of the files, however, was a list of “Goddess Candle Colors.” I don’t do that sort of thing, but I did look at it out of simple curiosity. What it was, as the name suggested, was a list of goddesses and what candle colors supposedly should be used to represent them. I glanced through the list, and found two Aztec deities listed. I was mildly surprised as Aztec deities don’t usually get much attention from mainstream Pagans, but naturally I did more than skim over the two deities mentioned to see what was said about them.

I say deities rather than goddesses, because only one of the Aztec deities mentioned, Tlazolteotl, was actually a goddess. The other mentioned deity was Centeotl, a male corn god. There is also a female corn deity, Xilonen, in the Aztec pantheon, but Centeotl is distinctly the male corn deity. Centeotl wasn’t merely misplaced in the “Goddess Candle Colors” list, he was misrepresented: the text itself discussing Centeotl referred to him as a goddess. Needless to say, I found such a glaring mistake offensive.

While the author of the list got the gender of Tlazolteotl correct, the author did something which never fails to frustrate me, and yet has become rampant in the Pagan community: assume that a goddess must *obviously* fit one of the three Wiccanesque female stereotypes: maiden, mother, or crone. Tlazolteotl was called an earth mother goddess, and the short description was as one dimensional as any other goddess a Pagan has decided to misrepresent with this stereotype. In actuality, the “earth mother goddess” of the Aztecs is Coatlicue; Tlazolteotl is the goddess of sin and redemption, the eater of filth.

After reading this, I figured the most logical thing to do would be to correct the misinformation so that the files could be changed and the correct information would be spread instead of falsehoods. So, I made a post to the list pointing out the errors and correcting them. I recommended Xilonen if people were looking for a female corn deity rather than a male one. I made the post polite and directed it at no one in particular.

I certainly was not expecting the responses that I received. I figured that people would be glad to know of the error and correct it. Instead, what I received shocked me.

“Do I sense Pagan bashing?” someone asked. To my dismay and disgust, this response was not alone in its content. Several people accused me of bashing the Pagan community, being mean, disrespecting the beliefs of others, and simply being wrong for no reason but that I challenged the truth contained in the candle colors document. I could not possibly be a real Pagan, because I hadn’t adhered to a standard of “everything is acceptable, no matter what it is.” I had clearly come to the list intent on bashing their innocent Pagan practices. Perhaps most shocking to me was that they did not take the biggest issue with the statement that Tlazolteotl was not simply another mother goddess- they most contested that I would state that Centeotl is male.

I provided them with proof of my claims, resources they could check out themselves to see that Centeotl was indeed a male god. To my further shock, not only was that not what they wanted, they simply didn’t care. I had seen Pagans reject scholarship before, but never to such a degree that they simply did not care what gender a deity historically was.

I was told that I had no right to request the document to be changed, because perhaps the author had “experienced” Centeotl as a goddess instead of a god. Even if they hadn’t, I was told, who was I to object? Everyone has masculine and feminine qualities, so why not the gods? And if they had both qualities as well, why should it matter whether or not Centeotl is a goddess or a god? Who cares, and even more so, how dare I care? I was utterly shocked.

The worst part of this is that no matter what I said, how I handled it, or how I tried to educate and reason with them, I was accused of being mean and intolerant for daring to correct them instead of simply patting them on the back and saying, “If that’s how you want to rape the Aztec pantheon, that’s okay.” I say it that way now because I’m sick of being polite about something that is, quite frankly, bullshit. I struggled in every way I could to present things as politely as possible until I reached my last straw, because I knew anger would only shut them off from my message further. And my first message was nothing if not polite.

I’m not going to dull this down for the light hearted among you that can’t handle constructive criticism anymore- this is my rant, my straight up opinion without the addition of flowers and sparklies for the soft of mind. This “everything is okay” attitude in Paganism is unforgivably idiotic when it comes to something like a historical pantheon. If I insisted that Isis was a male war god, even if that was my personal “experience,” would you honestly think it was acceptable for me to go about telling the world matter-of-factly that that’s who Isis really was? And deep down, if you’ve truly had an experience with Isis, would you honestly believe my male war god "Isis" was the Egyptian Isis most people are referring to?

If you actually answered yes to those questions, I doubt you’re being honest with yourself. More likely you are simply succumbing to the kind of “super politically correct” thinking that plagues the Pagan community, and will as surely as small pox killed millions; kill any intellectual integrity the Pagan community has.

Are these words of intolerance, that sin so feared by earnest Pagans? It’s as simple as this: Be open-minded, but don’t be so open-minded that your brain falls out. If you can’t figure out what that means or simply want to brand it as intolerance, I suggest you think about it until you recover your lost brain cells. Imagine you’re a Christian for a minute- yes, that’s right, I asked you to compare yourself to the C word. You’re a Christian, and a man comes up to you telling you he’s Jesus and if you join him and his followers, he’ll make sure you get into heaven. Are you just going to believe him and resign yourself to advocating the next cult? If you think like a Pagan, you will. “That’s his personal reality, who am I to challenge it?” you’ll tell yourself. Maybe even, “Sure, I should go with him, because if I don’t I might be invalidating his truth of being Jesus.”

Perhaps the worst thing about this is that I do not in the least believe that the author of this document honestly had any kind of experience with Centeotl, let alone "experienced" him as a goddess rather than a god. The list was simply that; a list of many deities from which others could draw upon. I would challenge anyone to say that they have had a genuine personal experience with 30 or more deities. Even if so, that wasn't the point of the document, the point was simply to give people some knowledge to draw on. Though I'd never seen Centeotl referred to as a goddess before, the misinformation wasn't really shocking to me. I can see how that mistake could be made, as there is a female corn deity, and many people make mistakes with the Aztec pantheon because it's not one of the more familiar ones. In addition to my own observations, a few others spoke up amidst the cacaphony to confess that they as well had seen inaccuracies towards their own pantheons in the "goddess" list, but had not voiced them because they were afraid of getting the kind of reaction I had. I would bet my life and my soul that the author of this document had never had a personal "experience" with Centeotl that lead him to believe that Centeotl was really a goddess. And yet, Pagans have become so mentally castrated by their paranoia of appearing to be "intolerant like Christians" that they not only have ceased to care about inaccuracies in their scholarship and teachings, but have come to defend such mistakes righteously.

Can you really say that it's anything other than fear mutated in an attempt to disguise itself as tolerance? Being tolerant of other paths and keeping your minds open to things outside of the norm is not bad at all. But it becomes sheer stupidity when you are so terrified of rejecting anything that you will accept everything, regardless of what it is. Perhaps more than anything else, this is the way that Pagans make themselves look like fools to the rest society. If I truly wasn't a Pagan (as I was accused of not being, since I didn't follow the usual "everything is equally true" dogma), I would not have seen that group's arguments as a noble effort to champion religious tolerance by defending another's right to call a god a goddess. I would have seen that group as a bunch of nitwits with cotton candy for brains that would rather live in a fantasy world where everyone's dreams came true than face up to even the simplest realities of history.