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I am becoming increasingly convinced that one of the critical things I think people need is some serious work on dealing with their transgressive elements.
I return to the quote from this weekend, which I didn't get attributed, and google around and still don't get an attribution but a nice phrasing nonetheless: "The perfect law--is the law of liberty--liberty is the freedom to do what is right/righteous--not to be confused with license which is lawlessness."
I can't speak to how mainstream cultures handle this stuff (though my guess is 'not well') because I don't know enough normal people, but this strikes me as a big deal among pagans, and something that probably needs to be worked through long term. Part of the issue, I think, derives from the fact that neopagan standards of behaviour are assembled differently than is the default in many of its members' cultures of origin, and the transition space can be difficult to navigate. Part is that many people came to paganism looking for a place that was more accepting of some part of their nature than their religion of origin. Part is the underlying theologies and structures of the religions themselves; part is the gods Themselves.
Seriously, on the gods thing. I'm a devotee of Set, which means that the behaviours of Setian folks are things that I'm aware of as potentially reflecting on me. A god of necessary disruption, of overcoming challenges, of storm and chaos and darkness and perversion, is somehow turned by many folks into a patron of fuckwits and assholes and people who take His presence in the cosmos as an excuse to behave badly.
A couple of odd tidbits about dealing with people explicitly as a Set devotee: I mentioned Him once to someone and got a response of "He's not so bad", delivered in tones of, "The gods I hang with are bigger and badder and nastier than yours". As if there's a competition out there to see who's in service to the biggest wanker, or something, I don't know. Confounded the hell out of me.
The other one was a discussion with another Kemetic, one who followed Set and Yinepu. He said that someone had asked him how he dealt with the contrast between them, since Yinepu is fairly gentle and easygoing and Set is such a strict taskmaster. And after thinking about it a great deal, I believe, yes, that the god of chaos and confusion is a strict taskmaster: He has no patience for followers who turn away from the challenges that will make them strong, and He expects them to persist. This leads to a great deal of disruption, but it is not random, unfocused, haphazard; we return to necessary disruption, necessary challenge. While random disruptive action can be turned to the development of strength with effort, that is not where it starts.
I'm prone to saying "The failure state of Discordianism is really annoying." This goes back to the sense of necessary disruption -- breaking people's minds open requires knowing how to apply the leverage. I've also been prone to saying "Humor is guerilla thought" -- it sneaks in behind the lines and sabotages things with varying levels of effectiveness -- but again, this requires some level of thoughtfulness and strategy in order to be effective.
But back to transgression. I tend to think that most everyone has one or two traits that are transgressive by someone's standards, sometimes in multiple ways, sometimes in contradictory ways depending on the way the subcultural boundaries get drawn. Expressions of gender, reactions to experiences, religious beliefs and practices, sexual orientation and practices, whatever -- there's something in there that's going to violate someone's norm. (I wrote a while back about my processing of kink -- transgressive -- which appears to be weird and alien to the BDSM community as I've encountered it -- also transgressive.)
Many neopagan ethical systems are rooted in personal conceptions of right behaviour; problems arise when those personal conceptions come at the expense of others. Wicca's "An it harm none, do as ye Will" gets truncated either into the impossibly restrictive "Harm none" or the generically permissive "do whatever you want"; Thelema's "Do as thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law" is even worse off for odd interpretations.
Both of those phrases are rooted in a concept of Will that encompasses more than "what I want"; both suffer from sound bites. These are concepts that have a certain amount of background in what it means to have a Will, what that includes, and how to implement that in responsible ways. Without the background of responsibility and understanding and the enfolding of consequences into choices, the concepts break. Because they are not enforcing external standards of behaviour, they break down when people without internal codes sufficient to govern themselves get involved.
Again, cycling back to transgression: there are people who come into pagan religions with transgressive aspects to themselves that are suddenly not forbidden by external code. Some of them wind up not merely looking for space to be themselves, but finding themselves believing that because a thing is not forbidden explicitly in the internal structures of the religion, then it can be engaged in without consequence: "I'm going to be a jerk and you can't stop me because it's a part of my religion, neener neener." License to act up, really.
Others are looking for permission to embrace their transgressions from something outside, and seeking a system that will grant it. Here's where I wind up dipping into Setian thoughts and Feri ones: this is a Power problem and a Self problem. It's hard to develop confidence and security in oneself in general, I think; when there's no system that reflects positively on aspects of that -- because they are transgressive -- then that part gets processed differently. This is coming at a vulnerable area from a position of weakness and un-integration; it's tremendously fragile and insecure in general, and from what I can see drives people to extremes of excess and/or repression, sometimes cycling between them. I hope that most of the people who are looking for this sort of reflection develop the internal strength to be able to be what they are without depending on outside sources for the capacity, because outside sources are fickle and with one's center of gravity that far outside one tips over pretty readily.
One of the effects I've seen of being out of one's center of power about transgressive stuff is the use of the transgressive thing as a sort of leverage -- because it has the capacity to make people uncomfortable, that's a form of power that can be generated, providing a shell of security of sorts. (And I wonder if this wasn't the background to the "Aw, I hang with much meaner gods than that" conversation.) This is the "freaking the mundanes" game, which appears to be much more satisfying to some if there's some way that their behaviour can be played as sacrosanct, something that cannot be challenged.
I think the ideal that I strive for is to treat my oddnesses, my transgressive elements, as just part of myself as a complete person. I do not go to great lengths to conceal them, nor do I go to great lengths to expose them. I try to be centered in my power about this, neither depending on others to declare my stuff okay nor highly invested in their responses to it. And if I am to subvert the dominant paradigm, I wish to undermine it with skill and directed effort rather than setting off cherry bombs at random and hoping I hit a fragile point.
I find myself reminded of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
elfwreck's comment that the Black Heart lies on the line between self and power. And, for that matter, between knowledge and liberty.
I return to the quote from this weekend, which I didn't get attributed, and google around and still don't get an attribution but a nice phrasing nonetheless: "The perfect law--is the law of liberty--liberty is the freedom to do what is right/righteous--not to be confused with license which is lawlessness."
I can't speak to how mainstream cultures handle this stuff (though my guess is 'not well') because I don't know enough normal people, but this strikes me as a big deal among pagans, and something that probably needs to be worked through long term. Part of the issue, I think, derives from the fact that neopagan standards of behaviour are assembled differently than is the default in many of its members' cultures of origin, and the transition space can be difficult to navigate. Part is that many people came to paganism looking for a place that was more accepting of some part of their nature than their religion of origin. Part is the underlying theologies and structures of the religions themselves; part is the gods Themselves.
Seriously, on the gods thing. I'm a devotee of Set, which means that the behaviours of Setian folks are things that I'm aware of as potentially reflecting on me. A god of necessary disruption, of overcoming challenges, of storm and chaos and darkness and perversion, is somehow turned by many folks into a patron of fuckwits and assholes and people who take His presence in the cosmos as an excuse to behave badly.
A couple of odd tidbits about dealing with people explicitly as a Set devotee: I mentioned Him once to someone and got a response of "He's not so bad", delivered in tones of, "The gods I hang with are bigger and badder and nastier than yours". As if there's a competition out there to see who's in service to the biggest wanker, or something, I don't know. Confounded the hell out of me.
The other one was a discussion with another Kemetic, one who followed Set and Yinepu. He said that someone had asked him how he dealt with the contrast between them, since Yinepu is fairly gentle and easygoing and Set is such a strict taskmaster. And after thinking about it a great deal, I believe, yes, that the god of chaos and confusion is a strict taskmaster: He has no patience for followers who turn away from the challenges that will make them strong, and He expects them to persist. This leads to a great deal of disruption, but it is not random, unfocused, haphazard; we return to necessary disruption, necessary challenge. While random disruptive action can be turned to the development of strength with effort, that is not where it starts.
I'm prone to saying "The failure state of Discordianism is really annoying." This goes back to the sense of necessary disruption -- breaking people's minds open requires knowing how to apply the leverage. I've also been prone to saying "Humor is guerilla thought" -- it sneaks in behind the lines and sabotages things with varying levels of effectiveness -- but again, this requires some level of thoughtfulness and strategy in order to be effective.
But back to transgression. I tend to think that most everyone has one or two traits that are transgressive by someone's standards, sometimes in multiple ways, sometimes in contradictory ways depending on the way the subcultural boundaries get drawn. Expressions of gender, reactions to experiences, religious beliefs and practices, sexual orientation and practices, whatever -- there's something in there that's going to violate someone's norm. (I wrote a while back about my processing of kink -- transgressive -- which appears to be weird and alien to the BDSM community as I've encountered it -- also transgressive.)
Many neopagan ethical systems are rooted in personal conceptions of right behaviour; problems arise when those personal conceptions come at the expense of others. Wicca's "An it harm none, do as ye Will" gets truncated either into the impossibly restrictive "Harm none" or the generically permissive "do whatever you want"; Thelema's "Do as thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law" is even worse off for odd interpretations.
Both of those phrases are rooted in a concept of Will that encompasses more than "what I want"; both suffer from sound bites. These are concepts that have a certain amount of background in what it means to have a Will, what that includes, and how to implement that in responsible ways. Without the background of responsibility and understanding and the enfolding of consequences into choices, the concepts break. Because they are not enforcing external standards of behaviour, they break down when people without internal codes sufficient to govern themselves get involved.
Again, cycling back to transgression: there are people who come into pagan religions with transgressive aspects to themselves that are suddenly not forbidden by external code. Some of them wind up not merely looking for space to be themselves, but finding themselves believing that because a thing is not forbidden explicitly in the internal structures of the religion, then it can be engaged in without consequence: "I'm going to be a jerk and you can't stop me because it's a part of my religion, neener neener." License to act up, really.
Others are looking for permission to embrace their transgressions from something outside, and seeking a system that will grant it. Here's where I wind up dipping into Setian thoughts and Feri ones: this is a Power problem and a Self problem. It's hard to develop confidence and security in oneself in general, I think; when there's no system that reflects positively on aspects of that -- because they are transgressive -- then that part gets processed differently. This is coming at a vulnerable area from a position of weakness and un-integration; it's tremendously fragile and insecure in general, and from what I can see drives people to extremes of excess and/or repression, sometimes cycling between them. I hope that most of the people who are looking for this sort of reflection develop the internal strength to be able to be what they are without depending on outside sources for the capacity, because outside sources are fickle and with one's center of gravity that far outside one tips over pretty readily.
One of the effects I've seen of being out of one's center of power about transgressive stuff is the use of the transgressive thing as a sort of leverage -- because it has the capacity to make people uncomfortable, that's a form of power that can be generated, providing a shell of security of sorts. (And I wonder if this wasn't the background to the "Aw, I hang with much meaner gods than that" conversation.) This is the "freaking the mundanes" game, which appears to be much more satisfying to some if there's some way that their behaviour can be played as sacrosanct, something that cannot be challenged.
I think the ideal that I strive for is to treat my oddnesses, my transgressive elements, as just part of myself as a complete person. I do not go to great lengths to conceal them, nor do I go to great lengths to expose them. I try to be centered in my power about this, neither depending on others to declare my stuff okay nor highly invested in their responses to it. And if I am to subvert the dominant paradigm, I wish to undermine it with skill and directed effort rather than setting off cherry bombs at random and hoping I hit a fragile point.
I find myself reminded of
elfwreck's comment that the Black Heart lies on the line between self and power. And, for that matter, between knowledge and liberty.
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It occurs to me that this relates to your annoyances with the "the personal is political" claim, too. If the personal is political, then everything transgressive that one does is involved in subverting the paradigm, and thus one either must live one's personal life in a way that puts lots of effort into doing that subversion effectively (which is at best terribly wearying), or else live one's personal life in a way that involves lots of loud flashbangs accomplishing little but annoyance.
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Good point.
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Other bits are that "political" is public action, and I want my personal life to be able to remain private, so that I can choose what of it is rendered public.
I think the 'to the extent personal is by definition political, there is a problem' depends on that.
Also, my personal stuff is not performance art.
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As a nonreligious person, may I ask what exactly is it that is being transgressed? If it's someone's personal standard of behavior, then is that person not transgressing too by presuming to impose it on others? If it is a community standard, then perhaps the community needs to define it more clearly (words like "fuckwit" or "asshole" do not suffice, I think).
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You reading a.p. at the moment? There was a brief subthread about whether or not the point of kink was to be abnormal that was part of why I wound up writing this.
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Can any meaningful discussion of transgression take place without considering what is being transgressed? I think not. Does a person born different in an intolerant community, for instance, transgress by merely existing? If so, I would deem the law unjust and its followers the true transgressors.
So whose law are we talking about transgressing?
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I do find it meaningful to look at how people deal with the aspects of themselves that other people find abnormal and threatening, and unless I'm dealing with specific transgressiveness the context for that is not relevant. There are both good and bad responses to an unjust law; I can prefer associating with those people who deal with whatever deviances they have healthily to those who do not regardless of that context.
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Or is it a triumvirate? Before one can break things at the correct spot or put the right things together, one needs to see what one is.
Therefore, illuminative behavior.
I'm not a pagan, or if I am, I'm an agnostic pagan just as I identify as an agnostic Christian.
I don't believe in anything I don't know and the only thing I know for sure is I don't know much compared to how much there is to know.
I liked your exploration of transgression because it was so illuminating. :)
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