On creating Pagan ethics
By Maewyn | April 21, 2010
In response to a couple of particularly heinous news stories about self-proclaimed Pagans, Jason at The Wild Hunt has put out a call to create a statement of Pagan ethics. (The actual hammering-out of the statement will be hosted by Brendan Myers on his forum.)
The adjective “self-proclaimed” has featured pretty regularly in news articles about Pagans, usually implying to a mainstream readership “can you believe this person thinks she’s a real witch/Druid/etc.?!” and thus a cause for some grinding of teeth about not being taken seriously. In these recent cases, though, that hedge-word has allowed local Pagan communities to confirm that the person in question was not known to them and that no Pagan groups advocate the activities that person claimed to be practicing (such as murder and sexual abuse of a child) when arrested. (In one case, an abuser held clergy status with the Correllians. His clergy status has been suspended pending the outcome of the trial, and if he is found guilty, the Correllians say, it will be revoked outright.)
I can believe that many people could feel the need for such a statement of ethics; given the situations under discussion, I absolutely support the local Pagan communities’ ability to emphasize that they neither practice or condone such things. And I think that the people who create a joint ethical statement might end up with a halfway decent document at best. At worst, however, a finished document would be a replay of the Council of American Witches’ “13 Principles of Wiccan Belief.” (Recap: Published in 1974, and as I understand it, American witches ever since have had to explain that these beliefs are not universally accepted and that neither the Council nor the list of principles has any kind of authority among witches. Some of them aren’t even beliefs.) But an ethical statement that would be accepted by many practitioners across many Pagan religions — which we can’t even define without controversy — and would somehow also include solitaries?
To paraphrase Anne Hill on the topic, I wish them well.
These situations are happening because the only gatekeeper on Pagan religion is your willingness to look it up on the internet and then claim that you’re a Pagan. If you’re really dedicated, you might buy some books on the subject. You don’t have to join a single group or show up at any community festival. You can even decide to leave any group you’ve ever joined. You can go and collect tools and other shinies, you can participate on lists and forums and blogs, you can buy lots of books or borrow them from the library — you can get all kinds of information on Paganism and practice as a solitary, doing whatever makes your heart sing, and hardly anyone will say you nay. This is normally something that Pagans like about their religion. Where it’s mostly harmless for your average treehugging soft-polytheist who works with dragons and unicorns and Sephiroth from FF7, however, it doesn’t get more harmful than [trigger warning for descriptions of abuse at this link] sexually abusing a child for years and telling her it’s part of your religion.
Anne Hill advises keeping “ethics and standards on the front burner in our various subcultures.” To which I add: If we do that in all the various websites and YouTube channels and forums and books that any solitary (or group member) may pick up, it will reach the widest possible group of Pagans. We don’t necessarily have to agree at this stage (which I think is far more likely than the creation of one statement of ethics), we just have to keep talking about it, in places we can point to when cases like this come up. It would also be good to call people out on their ethical breaches — which we do, in these cases as well as loose campaigns like “Traditional Wicca Does Not Cost Money” — in ways that also keep the discussion going. Not all Pagans share exactly the same ethics, and where a single document may not be widely accepted for one reason or another, broad consensus may be more effective.
Or so I think. I doubt how effective a group Statement of Pagan Ethics might be; I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t think a definitive set of answers is even possible. But I’m certainly in favor of keeping the discussion going.
Recently I read a couple of books on (specifically) Wiccan ethics: When, Why … If and Before You Cast a Spell. I’m working on essays on both of them, plus looking for other books on ethics and witchcraft, which will eventually end up at my own ethics project as a contribution to the discussion.
