What the Hel Does That Have to Do With Paganism?

Yesterday’s rabbit came with letters and numbers.

ISFP 6w5 so/sp.

I went looking at personality types and found one that seems to describe me rather better than I expected. That exploration belongs mostly over on Standing on the Ledge, because ultimately it is a discussion about me: how I think, why trust matters so much, why I research things into the ground, why I want people around me while still being extremely selective about whom I trust.

But there was another rabbit hiding underneath that one.

Because once I began looking at the description, I found myself asking the inevitable question:

What the hell does any of this have to do with Paganism?

Quite a bit, apparently.

The Paganism I Practice Has to Mean Something

The ISFP part begins with something called Introverted Feeling, or Fi. Strip away the psychological terminology and what remains is a strong internal value system.

I can learn traditions.

I can read books.

I can listen to elders, scholars, priests, teachers, community leaders, reconstructionists, historians, witches, Heathens, Druids, and the person sitting across the fire who has been doing this for forty years.

But eventually something still has to pass through my own internal filter.

Does this actually mean something to me?

That may explain a great deal about my Pagan journey.

I have never been particularly interested in belief merely because somebody tells me I am supposed to believe it.

A ritual performed only because the instructions say to perform it leaves me rather cold.

A tradition means considerably more when I understand why people did it, what it represented, how it connected them to their gods, their ancestors, their land, or one another.

I need some living meaning underneath the form.

That does not mean throwing tradition away.

If anything, it makes me want to understand tradition more deeply.

My Paganism Begins With Things I Can Touch

The sensing side of ISFP also makes an interesting amount of sense here.

My Paganism is not entirely philosophical.

It is fire.

Land.

Cold air.

Rain.

Gardens.

Animals.

Food.

Wood smoke.

Changing seasons.

A place that has been walked repeatedly until memories have accumulated upon it.

People gathered around something physical and sharing an experience together.

Then comes the intuitive part.

What does this mean?

What is underneath it?

Why did this particular experience affect me?

Why does this place feel different?

Why did our ancestors attach meaning to this season, this animal, this tree, this fire, this story?

That process is probably one reason so many of the rabbits on Unplugged Pagan begin with something very ordinary and end somewhere philosophical.

I notice something.

Then I want to understand what lives underneath it.

Then Type Six Asks Whether the Community Is Real

This is where things get considerably more uncomfortable.

The central questions associated with Enneagram Six concern trust, loyalty, security, reliability, and belonging.

Put that into a Pagan context and suddenly a lot of my writing makes sense.

Who are my people?

What does it mean when we call ourselves a community?

What obligations do we have toward one another?

What is loyalty?

What is frith?

What happens when trust is broken?

When somebody says that a place belongs to the community, what exactly does that mean?

When somebody speaks for a tradition, where does their authority come from?

What happens when community language and individual behaviour stop matching?

Those are not merely organizational questions for me.

Apparently they strike directly at one of the ways I understand belonging.

I Want Pagan Community

This needs saying clearly because introversion is so often mistaken for wanting isolation.

I do not want Paganism to be something I practice entirely alone.

I can practice alone.

That is different.

I would much rather have the fires, gatherings, conversations, shared meals, rituals, arguments, laughter, storytelling, music, work parties, and all the strange little interactions that happen when people build history together.

I want community.

I want people around me who understand at least some of the same language.

I want people who can sit around a fire until some ridiculous hour discussing gods, history, philosophy, mundane life, and complete nonsense without any clear boundary between them.

What I apparently do not want is the appearance of community without the obligations of community.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

If we call ourselves a community, then surely the word should imply something.

Maybe not agreement.

Probably not uniformity.

Certainly not obedience.

But perhaps some combination of reciprocity, memory, responsibility, hospitality, respect, and recognition that none of us exists entirely independently of everyone else.

The Five Wing Wants the Footnotes

Then there is the 5 wing.

This may be responsible for an unreasonable percentage of the material appearing on this blog lately.

Six asks whether something can be trusted.

Five responds by looking it up.

Where did this tradition come from?

Who actually said this?

When did this practice appear?

Was this ancient, or did somebody invent it in 1973?

How did Wicca affect modern Paganism?

Who influenced Canadian Pagan communities?

What did the scholars record?

What did the people who were actually there remember?

What happened to the gatherings that disappeared?

Who kept records?

Who did not?

And suddenly there goes another rabbit.

This is one of the reasons I have become increasingly interested in separating history from mythology about our history.

Both can have value.

They are not necessarily the same thing.

If we are going to understand where modern Paganism came from, then somebody has to ask inconvenient questions about what we actually know.

The Social Instinct Changes Everything

The part of the personality description that really caught my attention was so/sp.

The so means Social instinct comes first.

Again, that does not mean being a social butterfly.

It means that questions involving belonging, groups, roles, responsibility, continuity, and shared identity tend to carry considerable weight.

And suddenly the rabbits I have been chasing recently look remarkably consistent.

Second-generation Pagans.

Third-generation Pagans.

Who keeps our history?

What happens when founders die?

How does a gathering change when the people who created it are no longer there?

What happens to traditions when nobody remembers why they existed?

Can a Pagan community become old enough to have institutional memory?

Can we transmit something to another generation without turning it into dogma?

These are not simply historical questions.

They are social questions.

They ask whether Paganism is merely something individuals happen to practice at the same time, or whether we are capable of creating communities that persist beyond the people who originally built them.

And Self-Preservation Asks Whether It Can Survive

Then comes the secondary Self-Preservation instinct.

This is the part that looks at all those lovely ideals and asks a rather mundane question:

How are we actually going to keep this going?

Someone needs to maintain the land.

Someone needs to build the fire.

Someone needs to organize the gathering.

Someone needs to clean the toilets.

Someone needs to preserve the records.

Someone needs to teach the newcomer how something works.

Someone needs to make sure the bills are paid.

Someone needs to remember what happened twenty years ago.

Ritual may create sacred space.

But eventually someone also has to stack the chairs.

That is not separate from community.

I increasingly think it is one of the ways community reveals whether it actually exists.

Maybe That Is Why Legacy Keeps Appearing

Over the last little while I have repeatedly found myself coming back to legacy.

Not legacy in the sense of wanting my name carved onto something.

I mean continuity.

What remains?

What survives?

What gets passed forward?

What disappears because nobody thought it was worth writing down?

What happens when Paganism becomes old enough that people entering it have no living memory of its formative years?

What happens when second-generation Pagans become parents and third-generation Pagan children begin appearing?

At some point we stop being merely participants in a young religious movement and become ancestors of whatever comes next.

That is a strange thought.

But perhaps it is an important one.

The Fire Keeper

There is an image in all of this that I keep coming back to.

The fire keeper.

The fire keeper does not necessarily own the fire.

They do not control everyone sitting around it.

They do not decide what everyone must believe.

They simply understand that if nobody feeds the fire, eventually it goes out.

Someone watches it.

Someone adds wood.

Someone notices when it is dying down.

Someone remembers how it was started.

Someone teaches the next person how to tend it.

Perhaps that is part of what I have been searching for when I talk about Pagan community.

Not authority.

Not ownership.

Stewardship.

People willing to keep something alive long enough to hand it to somebody else.

There Is a Danger Here Too

The same personality traits that make someone interested in history and community can also lead them badly astray.

If trust matters deeply, suspicion can become too easy.

If patterns matter, unrelated events can begin looking connected.

If research provides security, it can become difficult to stop researching.

If community matters, changes within that community can feel more personal than perhaps they actually are.

That means I have to remember something whenever I chase these rabbits:

The purpose of research is not to prove that I am right.

It is to find out what is true.

Sometimes those are the same thing.

Sometimes the rabbit should lead directly to evidence that forces me to change my mind.

That is not a failed rabbit hunt.

That is exactly what the hunt is supposed to do.

So What Does ISFP 6w5 so/sp Have to Do With Paganism?

Maybe nothing.

Maybe everything.

I do not think personality determines religion. I certainly do not believe all Pagans of a particular personality type will practice anything like I do.

But personality probably affects the questions we bring with us.

And apparently I bring questions about authenticity, trust, community, history, responsibility, and continuity.

I want Paganism to mean something personally.

I want to understand where it came from.

I want community, but I want that word to have substance.

I want us to remember the people and places that brought us here.

I want us to build things capable of surviving us.

And I want to know that when the people around today’s fires are gone, somebody will still remember how to light the next one.

Perhaps that is why I keep chasing these particular rabbits.

Maybe I am not merely trying to understand Paganism.

Maybe somewhere underneath all these questions I have been asking something else:

What are we building together that will still exist when we are gone?

That rabbit may keep me occupied for a while.