Why does this keep happening?

Seeing this story on the Wild Hunt about the closure of yet another pagan community center I was reminded of this oratorical exercise I wrote a while back, Against those who fetishize the building of temples.

I often imagine what it must have been like to hear Demosthenes or Cicero addressing the law-court or better yet Diogenes or Hipparchia mounting their podium and letting loose on a crowd at the market. Sometimes I imagine myself doing the same thing today. And so, dear readers, here is my attempt at a proper Classical διατρίβω. For a more sober reflection on the topic, with carefully constructed arguments and ample source material to back it up, I direct you to my previous essay Greco-Egyptian Domestic Worship. Also, many of the Dionysian allusions of this piece can be found in Eternal Bacchus.

“Build the temple! Build the temple!” So goes the periodic cry of the pagans. “We need buildings and land of our own and all the proper infrastructure if we’re ever going to be taken seriously as a religion. Bylaws and tax exemption, priests to counsel us in times of need and large congregations of lay people who attend services regularly or maybe just on certain special occasions like holidays and marriages and funerals. We want them to think we’re just like them, after all, so it’s best not to come off as too religious. Once we’ve got the respectability conferred by government recognition then, maybe, they won’t hate us anymore.”

Maybe. But that won’t make them hate us any less. We aren’t them and we shouldn’t want to be them. Deep down they don’t want to be them either — at least the sensible ones among them don’t. When Christianity allied itself with temporal power it had to forsake everything that made it unique and valuable in the process, except on the margins where it lingered on as a superstitious remnant. Institutional Christianity today is a relic of bleached bones, an empty system of pat morality and stifling regulations that offers only a sanitized and impotent vision of what it is to be human.

And you want to emulate that?

Thanks, but I’ll be having none myself. I know my place and it’s out on the margins with the witches, the faggots, the cross-dressers, the mystics, the drunkards and the artists. Out where you can be yourself and hear the voices of the spirits more clearly, where you can devote yourself completely to your art, whatever that happens to be. Give me fire and feasting and dancing; give me masks and frenzy and the magic of a world where trees and rocks and rivers are alive and join in our celebration. Yes, give me that! It is more than sufficient for my needs.

Now, I have nothing against temples. There’s a Hindu saying that the man who builds a temple for his god eradicates the karma of a thousand lifetimes with that single act. And I believe it.

But all things must happen in their proper time, in the proper order. When you have to struggle to find more than five people to worship with, that is not the time to be thinking about building a house for your god.

The work that needs to be done now is growing a community. When every festival begins with a massive procession down the streets — then it is time to consider such things. Until then keep alive the memory of the gods through your words and through your rites, however humble they may be. Tend to the gods of your home and honor the spirits of the place where you live. Mark the passage of the seasons, celebrate the anniversaries of important events and spend as much time as you can outdoors, exploring the world around you. Know who you are and act accordingly. Support those in your community. Nurture the next generation who will replace you. Treat all suppliants graciously. Let every aspect of your life speak well of what you love. Do this and you will have a true religion, temple or no. Without all of this in place what good is a temple anyway?

Will the god just sit alone in his house, with no one to adore him?

And if you should succeed in building a temple — what then? You’ve got a single temple but there are hundreds of gods. Thousands, even. Much work remains.

For instance, the work of keeping the temple holy and alive, a fitting habitation for the divine. Do you have the men and women who are properly trained to carry out this work? Those who know how to draw the divine pneuma down with their songs into the image carefully crafted by artists’ hands to the specifications laid out by the seers? Those who know how to dress and feed and care for all of the needs of the enlivened image every single day, many times a day? Those who know how to pacify its mighty heart when something goes wrong? Do you have those skilled in cutting the throats of beasts, those who can read the signs manifest in the bloody organs, those who live with the mythology and customs of their people etched in their minds? Do you have even the humble neokoros to sweep the floors and collect the flowers and candles and other votives after the throng of pilgrims have left?

You don’t? Then why on earth are you trying to do this? Do you want the gods to become wroth when their ceremonies are misperformed, their abode defiled through negligence and ignorance? And if you answer, “My gods don’t care about such things, they wouldn’t get mad over such a trivial slight.” Then why are you even bothering to dream of building a temple? Is it for the gods or for you?

And let me tell you something else, the real reason why I do not support the building of new temples in this present age: there are records of scattered Dionysian groups as late as the ninth century.

Not reconstructions like Westlake’s Woodcraft Chivalry or the bacchanals of the Hellfire Club, nor mere appropriations of Dionysiac imagery as when the Byzantine emperor staged a triumph with revelers costumed like satyrs and nymphs attending him as he rode through the great basilica on the back of a donkey to shame the greedy patriarch and his scheming, overbearing mother.

No, these were genuine survivals from antiquity as late as the ninth century!

Nine hundred years after the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, six hundred years after Constantine saw the sign to conquer, four hundred years after Justinian and Theodosios proclaimed the closing of the temples and the death of paganism — and there were still Dionysians.

How?

They learned the lessons of history, they left the temples behind to run wild in the woods, howling their drunken prayers to the god under the dark night sky.

Oh, there were still Dionysian temples, don’t get me wrong. When the monks came in from the desert fired by holy zeal to wage war on stone blocks and beautiful statues, killed the priests and carried the tokens of the Bacchic mysteries out into the streets to be mocked and corrupted by uninitiate eyes, all Alexandria was consumed in a maelstrom of madness and violence. Many a martyr was made that day in divine retribution. But the temples had long since ceased to be the primary outlet for Dionysian worship. Even in the days when the wife of Athens’ king married the god in the ox-shed, private cultic associations flourished. Thiasoi, orgeones, phratries, collegia, technitai or simply bakchoi or dionusiake, those who belong to him — they went by many names and worshiped the god with diverse rites, unofficial, unaffiliated, unattached to the state and its structures. This is how they survived. You cannot kill what you cannot find. Instead of gathering in one place, at a single temple, they scattered to the wind, blending in with the scenery but keeping love for Lusios strong in their hearts.

Long before Saint Stephen got stoned the pagan authorities tried to crack down on the excesses of the Bacchic cult. Ptolemy Philopator, for instance, attempted to reform the various groups under his dominion in Egypt. His grand vision was to bring them all together, united under his own spiritual hegemony so that each cell operated from the same hieros logos and conducted their ceremonies in the same fashion that he did. He failed. And so did the Roman senate a little more than a generation later when they sought to root out the superstition of the vine planted in Italian soil by a wandering Greek poet-magician. Philopator used persuasion and the awe of his crown to compel the radical Bacchants into conformity but the Romans, a more practical people, used their swords and crosses and lawsuits to crush them. Though hundreds lost their lives to gain a seat at the bridal feast of Ariadne, the rest grew canny as the serpents they carried in worship and sought solace underground. In the dark they thrived and outlasted their enemies and even the enemies of their enemies.

The Christians were wise to target the temples. The temples were the life of their community and when they fell the people were left with little choice but to fill the void with Christianity. The gods of the state were fed by the state so when the funds stopped flowing in the gods grew hungry and their homes fell into disrepair. Eventually even private individuals who had kept the temples going in the aftermath of the empire’s conversion to atheism were barred from carrying out sacrifices and sponsoring the sacred feasts and pageants. Torture and death awaited all who defied the unjust law. Eventually the Christians strangled their opponents into submission and baptized all who remained.

Except the Dionysians out in the wilderness.

You may cut back the vine over and over again, but it always comes back. Lykourgos learned this the hard way and so did the prelates of the Church.

Hysterically they may shout, Forbidden are the Brumalia, the Bota, and the diabolical festivities on the Kalends of January when shameless men dress as women and the young dance the Stag and the Goat. No longer will you put on the mask of the Satyr as you tread the grapes in the vat. Let the name of Bacchus never more be upon your lips at harvest time! Only Christ shall you praise with a loud and fervent voice! But it did no good. Convene as many councils as you like, pass a thousand laws and send out your gestapo to enforce them — you will succeed in quieting the ardent ones for a short time only. Others, elsewhere, at another time, will rise up to join their voices to the dithyrambic chorus. So it was and so it will always be.

We Dionysians are headless and free.

We know how to become invisible.

We know how not to make ourselves a target, how to keep running and dancing and hunting without ever getting caught.

Find a tree and hang a mask from it. Light candles and incense and pour out the good wine. Offer meat still bloody to the god with your hands. Play the pipe, bang the drum and sing as loudly as you can. Go mad and be lifted out of yourself. This is how we worship, and it leaves little trace for others to find. His temple is any land that has been sanctified by our dancing feet. Which is as it should be. Because that ensures that there will always be Dionysians to worship him.