When I started this project I wondered to myself whether there were active polytheistic monstics out there in the wider world– monasticism’s nature, being a vocation that generally takes a person out of the world, can make it quite hard to find monastics online. But this year Janet Muninn released a collection of essays she edited, Polytheistic Monasticism, wherein monastics discuss their experiences. What luck!
Some of these essays appear to have been taken from unedited extant blogs– hopefully with the authors’ permission– others, I’ve been entirely unable to find online which leads me to believe they were written especially for this little book.
One of the themes consistently emerging in these essays is the fact that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with polytheists shamelessly cherrypicking tenets and practices used by Catholic monastics when striking out to rebuild our own. After all, 2,000 years ago they had absolutely no problem stealing the concepts of asceticism and monasticism from polytheists in the first place. The idea that a person can retreat from society to seek deeper connection with the Mysteries of the Divine does not belong to one religion– and if one group has successfully hit upon strategies and frameworks to make such a life sustainable, then it is good to distribute and adapt that information widely. This is especially apparent in Julie Bond’s chapter, “Building a Druid Monastic Practice”, where she goes into detail about what her experiences as a novice in the Order of the Sacred Nemeton have been. She’s done a great deal of research into keeping hours and prayer cycles– how assorted monotheistic orders do it, how they can be adapted for pagan purposes.
(The ways in which Christianities can prove incredibly useful in building polytheistic religious structures and communities makes me think of a satirical fake news article with the headline, “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point”.)
I’ll be returning to Bond’s next chapter, too, called “Druid/Pagan Lectio” as here she discusses how a pagan might apply the process of lectio divina to our own texts. This is a process that interests me personally. (I’m a sucker for the scholarly study of faith, even if faith can’t be built on books alone.) Bond suggests that this process can and should be applied to Nature, the physical world around us, in place of a holy book– after all, pagans have little need for holy books as such.
Which brings me to another throughline that crops up in many authors’ works in this book: we are part of this world. It is a very easy thing to say but like any proverb it has a great many layers of implication and meaning. To me, from this connectedness to the world, it follows that a monastic must seek to inhabit it as fully as possible… but there is a distinction here between the world that is holy and the rest of life. There is great depth sought in polytheistic monasticism, rather than some kind of transcendence. Rebecca Korvo’s essay, “On the Custody of the Eyes” unpacks what she feels the principle of custodia oculorum means in a pagan context, to reclaim this idea– which has been reduced in many ways to a mere struggle against lust– to instead mean a mindful and intentional choice about what we spend our days looking at. Whether we’re talking about reducing intake of violent films, mindless matching mobile games, social media dashboards, or that person in the office whose dress sense you irrationally hate– for a monastic it’s important to look at things that serve you and help you connect to the gods more so than… anything else. The basic idea is, spend less time looking at garbage and you might feel better.
And to think I was thinking about that very thing just this last week…
All things said and done, I think that this is a valuable little book to have on hand for academic and historical purposes, even if a person isn’t interested in becoming a monastic of any sort.
You can buy Polytheistic Monasticism: Voices from Pagan Cloisters here.
If you’re interested to learn more about specific monastic orders, those included in this book are:
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