Pop Culture Paganism

Pop Culture Paganism is something that has a strange reputation in the Pagan world.  As a community, we are still struggling for acceptance, and so many people try to distance themselves from anything that makes what we do seem silly or pushes the boundaries of make believe.

Pop Culture Paganism does exactly what many Pagan's are trying to convince people that we don't do:  treat fantasy elements as reality.  At it's base, Pop Culture Paganism takes things that exist in our modern popular culture and uses them as part of a religious or spiritual practice.  Pop Culture Paganism draws influence from tv shows, movies, cartoons, books and even real life people.  This may mean using energies that are from an Anime in a ritual, calling upon a character from a book as part of a spell, working with deities from a movie or using pictures of people on your altar.

While of course there are always people who make light of such practices, more interested in being a fan of a show than actually making a serious practice of it, there are others who really identify with and find a deep connection to the images and worlds that they have grown up with.

What I think is sort of fascinating is that if you think about it, the myths and legends that we associate with ancient cultures are in some ways the equivalent of their TV shows.  When children were growing up and hearing tales of the adventures of Hercules or Beowolf, then it only makes sense that when they need guidance or spiritual comfort those would be the figures to whom they would turn.  The stories they heard all their lives would be the ones they shaped their personal practices around.

Why then is it so strange that modern Pagans may do the same thing?  If you grew up watching Charmed, that world and it's magical rules and traditions would be not only familiar but comforting to you.  If you needed protection, you might call upon things from that world that make you feel safe.

In many ways, these Pop Culture universes are closer to us than the legends of ancient cultures.  Not only have times changed, and so the challenges and issues we face today are not the same ones faced by our ancestors, but we didn't grow up hearing those stories, so those worlds aren't as familiar to us.  If I am having trouble with bullies at school, finding advice and guidance in old myths will be much harder than thinking of episodes in a show I watched all the time growing up.  On the other side, reading a myth about the horror of a bad harvest doesn't instill the same level of dread as it did in days past, so many of the old stories are hard for modern practitioners to identify with.

I definitely understand how Pop Culture Paganism may be hard to explain to non-Pagans in a way that doesn't make us all seem like we are just caught up in a fantasy world, but there are many things we do that are hard to explain.  If we pushed away everyone who did something that wasn't easily explained, there would be no Paganism left.  I don't think the answer should be to turn on people who's practice is different from our own, but to try to understand it better, so that when we are faced with questions we can explain things more accurately in order to bring greater understanding to the world.

Personally, I have no problem with working with ideas, people or energies as they are explained in works of fiction.  I feel that the ideas are where the power is.  We empower things by focusing on them with the right intent. 

I know this gets tricking for a lot of people when it comes to deities.  I think that divinity is one of those things that we can't accurately comprehend or explain.  When it comes to the idea of worshiping or calling upon deities that originate from fictional sources, I take a bit of a multi-verse perspective.  There is a theory about reality that postulates that for every idea someone has ever had, there is a universe out there somewhere where that idea is a reality.  By this train of thought, there is a Buffy universe, where all the things we have watched on the show actually happened.  In that universe, it is all very real, and perhaps our universe is someone's creative writing project for a college English paper (how is that for something to wrap your head around!)

I also think that sometimes the beings we work with fall into the category of 'other':  they may not be deities in some definitions of the word, but they are capable of more than we are.  In this way, I take a very practical approach.  If I do a spell or ritual and call upon a character from my favorite book, perhaps wanting to draw upon some of their qualities in my own life, and it works, then I am not overly fussed about the categorization of the being I called upon. 

One theory I have heard to explain this also speaks to why older deities are seen by many as being less powerful now than they are in the stories.  This goes back to attention and energy.  During the height of their respective cultures, individual deities might have been worshiped and fed energy by so many people that they grew in power.  They were able to create more because more people believed in their power.  As the culture faded or was conquered by another, those same deities lost power because they were no longer the focus of the worship of the masses. 

By this train of thought, fictional beings could be drawn into power an existence as masses of fans obsess over them.  As more people start working with them, these beings become able to give more in return.

I think the ideas proposed by Pop Culture Paganism are much deeper than they appear on the surface.  When you start to think about how and why things work (and how and why they used to work), there is a lot to be pondered on and figured out.  Just because someone works with My Little Ponies, doesn't mean they don't have a full and viable practice. 

So the next time you hear about Pop Culture Paganism, consider listening to what the people who are doing it are saying.  Think about the implications of their practice, and make your own observations about how series they are about what they do.  There are as many ways to be a Pagan as there are Pagans, so embrace your fellows and learn about what other people are doing.  You may find yourself pleasantly surprised!