My new article on Pagan+Politics, inspired by the American Family Association’s demand to stone a killer whale and SeaWorld Orlando’s curator, deals with the issue of projecting ancient law codes into the present. You can find it here.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to come to grips with my mortality. We all live; we all die. We just don’t think about it much when we’re younger. It seems so far away. Think about how we experience time: It always takes forever for Yule or your birthday to come when you’re a kid; summers seem to last forever – as does the school year. But where once it took forever, now it’s here before you know it – before you want it. What, another birthday, already?

The time just seems to start flying by, and pretty soon ten years have gone past, or twenty, and you wonder where they went. Hours become minutes, days become hours, and years…well, some days you wake up feeling like Rip Van Winkle. Is it really more than 30 years now since that rainy afternoon when I first saw Star Wars?

Now too I’ve been told that I am having heart problems. I have known of my mitral valve prolapse for many years – it kept me out of the Army when I tried to enlist back in the 70s (I was going to Berlin as part of the Third Brigade – an artillery spotter). But it’s never really been problematic until recently, when shortness of breath and fluttering led me to the cardiologist, who, after some tests, informed me that my heart was too big, too weak, and that the valve leaked too much.

Surgery was always inevitable, he told me. It was just a matter of when. Well, when was suddenly upon me. “It isn’t the news we wanted, I know,” he told me, “But it is what it is.” That may be a tired old expression, but it has the virtue of always being true.

Two tests later (heart catheterization and transesophageal echocardiogram, or TEE), I have been told that my heart is less weak than previously thought (which is good news), and that because I am fit and healthy in all other respects – no diabetes, etc, I am in good shape for surgery.

The heart surgeon came into my room after the catheterization. He told me that he loves doing mitral valve repairs. He had a childlike gleam in his eyes as he told me he has been doing this for 15 years and that he is successful 90% of the time. If he cannot repair it, he said, he will replace it. I told him I chose the synthetic valve over a pig or bovine valve – not because I don’t dig on swine or cows but because both those would wear out over time and require, as he put it, a second, even more dangerous surgery.

He gave me all the percentages, which is only fair. It turns out I have only a 2% chance of dying. Not bad really. Think about it: climate scientists say with 90% certitude that we are experiencing anthropogenic global warming (AGW). As James Hoggan says in his Climate Cover-Up (2009), if somebody told you that there was a 90% chance the plain you were on was going to crash, you would seriously consider making other plans.

Well, it works both ways. 90% is pretty close to 100% – and you can’t have 100% certainty in science or in most other aspects of life. If there is a 90% certainty that he can repair the valve, I’m going in pretty confident. The 2% seems trivial by comparison – except that if the repairs can last decades, running afoul of that 2% lasts – forever.

I’ve had a lot of time – and many opportunities – to think about death. My brother was killed when I was 10. My grandparents died in the 80s, and I was holding my grandma’s hand as she died.  My ex-father-in-law died in the 90s and I was very close to him. Both my parents died a few years ago. One of my ex-sisters-in-law suddenly died last year. She should have outlived me. As you get older, you start losing people. It’s simple math. I don’t think anyone should become accustomed to the idea of people dying, but perhaps exposure to it makes you a little less afraid of it.

I’m 53. By any generous estimate I’m at the half-way point. When your gas gauge dips below half, you start thinking about a fresh tank. There aren’t any fresh tanks in life, so we should start thinking about our legacy instead, if we haven’t already.

It’s probably no surprise then that I’ve thought about my own death as I’ve grown older – the legacy I want to leave behind, the awareness that time to do the things I want to do is not infinite. Particularly now, with the heart problems.

I’m not afraid of dying. Even before I became a polytheist I liked what Socrates had to say about it. He provided an example for us all in his Phaedo, when he told his friends that there was nothing to fear:

[E]ither death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. . . . Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is a journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?

My Heathen ancestors had a great many conceptions of death, and to what road it led: to the halls of our ancestors, to Hel (nothing like Christian hell but just a place you go when you die), to Valhöll if Odin chooses you. Skjöldunga Saga speaks of “going to King Odin” and “the underworld,” and there is some sense of going “into the mountains” to join your ancestors. There is also a limited appeal to reincarnation, as Ellis-Davidson puts it,  “belief in the birth of the souls of dead ancestors into the living world again, in the persons of their descendants.”[1] And of course, there are the dísir, who are female ancestors who have stayed behind to help the household.

Who knows? It is difficult to know what to make of all the various ideas surrounding death. Islamic traveler Ibn Fahdlan, when watching a Varangian funeral,  spoke of “paradise” which was the best he could interpret the Norse word as he was made to understand it. But anything that smacks of paradise cannot be bad.

Outside of the claim to Valhöll (a claim no mortal can make) the poem heard by Ibn Fahdlan at the chieftain’s funeral, and re-rendered by Michael Crichton in the 13th Warrior, captures the essence of Heathen ideas of death:

Lo, there do I see my father.
Lo, there do I see my mother.
And my sisters and my brothers
Lo, there do I see the line of my people
Back to the beginning.
Lo, they do call to me.
They bid me take my place among them
In the halls of Valhalla
Where the brave may live forever.

My ancestors did not live their lives towards an afterlife, or for a hope in some afterlife, though ideas of joining their ancestors shows that they expected them to be there already, waiting for them. They lived their lives as part of a continuum, inheritors but also progenitors, descendants and ancestors to be. And they lived their lives for life, for what mark they made on this world, what they did for their families and communities – and for their gods. And for what name they left behind them. As I quote in every email I send out:

Cattle die,
kinsmen die,
oneself dies likewise,
but good renown
will never die
for him who earns it.

- Hávamál, 76

I think this is true. And who does not want to be well thought of when they are gone? Who would choose ill-renown over good? We all want to have had a good impact on those whom we love and care for. We want that “son of” or “daughter of” to mean something.

So how have I done? Too soon to tell. As another Norse proverb tells us, “Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it has been drunk.”

And I think that is as it should be. We should not be judged on our accomplishments until we are done with the opportunity to affect change – that is, when we are dead. I hope that when the day comes that I have shaped my final fate that I will have done some praiseworthy deeds. That is what we should all hope for.

Followers of the White Christ hope for some form of eternal salvation, a nebulous form of afterlife in which they will enjoy the fruits of their devotion to their god. I find there is a disconnect between “up there” and “down here.” But our gods, like us, are of this world; there is a connection that is very real between we mortals and the Otherworld.

It is only fitting that as I have lived “down here” that I be judged “down here” and by the people I have lived among, whose lives I have in some way impacted and whose lives have impacted me. I hope that my deeds will have been found worthy of my ancestors, that the good will have outweighed the bad, wisdom foolishness, and piety impiety. I would very much – like Theoden King in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – to go before my ancestors unashamed, just as I have hoped to live my life unashamed.

We all make mistakes. We all make decisions we are not proud of; say and do things we regret later, or fail to say or do things we feel we should have said or done. We don’t have to apologize to our gods for those oversights. Instead, we redeem ourselves here. It is redemption – not salvation – that is meaningful.

But in the end, as each of us shapes our own fate, we have nothing to complain about. Our decisions, our actions, have brought us to where we are now. If sometimes (as in my case) genetics jumps in with a “surprise!” then there is still no reason for complaint, no reason to rail against gods or fate.

So in the end, my concern is where it should be, not with some nebulous and unknowable afterlife or paradise but with the world I leave behind, the world I belonged to, and whether or not I’ve done enough to have made it a better place.

The gods will know, but they will not judge. That will be left to my fellow mortals here on the little island in space we call Midguard.

(I have my surgery on March 8. I will be missing from the Internet for a few days. I am told a couple of days in ICU, completely cut off, and 5-10 days in the hospital after that, during which time I will probably write but may or may not be able to get on the Internet. There will be some limits on my activities afterward, but none that should keep me offline or from writing – 3 weeks without driving, six weeks until I can perform ordinary household tasks on my own, 12 weeks before returning to work, and several months before full recovery. At the end of it all, I am promised I will feel better than I have in a while, which is something to look forward, and something, I should add, more tangible than beliefs in an afterlife. I will continue to post up until March 7 and I will look forward to seeing you all again after that – Hrafnkell)

Notes:

[1] H.R. Ellis-Davidson, The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (1968), 145.

INTRODUCTION

The gay/lesbian rights movement has been called the civil rights issue of the new millennium. Conservative Christian groups oppose granting the gay-lesbian community the rights guaranteed them by the Constitution and they do so on the basis of a black and white moralistic dichotomy. Some Pagan groups do as well. I will argue here that opposition to gay and lesbian rights on a historical basis is misguided and – where not influenced by Judeo-Christian understanding of morality – is based on modern ideas of gender roles and categories. Homosexuality has not been universally seen as immoral; it has not even always been seen as homosexuality. As often happens, the truth is much more complex than the simple black and white model offered modern Western audiences.

We claim to live in an enlightened age yet we are trapped by our own understanding of gender roles and categories. We are brought up to believe that there are boys and there are girls. Boys have penises and girls have vaginas. And there is nothing in between and it is obvious how the pieces are supposed to go together. And no surprise: we are brought up to see the world in this way.

But it is not the only way; other cultures and other ages have different ideas and understandings. In the industrialized West we determine gender categories based on plumbing. We don’t base these categories on gender roles; instead, gender roles have for a long time been determined by gender categories: men fight and hunt; women engage in domestic duties.

Likewise, if a boy makes love to a boy, it is homosexuality. You thus have a category called “homosexual” – those who engage in same-sex sexual relations. Both participants are labeled as homosexuals.

But homosexuality, few people realize, is a modern concept. The pathology of the 19^th century created the category from the male/female conceptualized as abnormal.[1] Ancient ideas about sex and sexuality are far more ambiguous.[2]

To claim therefore that modern distinctions and prejudices are simply continuances of ancient Pagan feeling on the subject is to misstate the case. As Marilyn Katz puts it, “the nineteenth-century notion of sexual pathology was unknown to antiquity.” As she goes on to say, “[T]here is a radical discontinuity between the ancient and modern discourses on sexuality.”[3]

This is a point upon which modern Pagans would do well to ponder. Will we appeal to the past, or to the present, or will we find our own way? And if we appeal to the past we must have a care that we do not impose our own prejudices on our interpretation of history. As Beate Wagner-Hasel observed in 1989, the debate over the status of women in ancient Greece “is not only an attempt to reconstruct a bygone way of life, it is also a discourse over woman’s place in modern bourgeois society which had its beginnings in the Enlightenment and has continued up until the present time.”[4]

Archaeologist Joan Breton-Connelly speaks of “presentist” assumptions – arguments based on or colored by “late twentieth -century political sensibilities.”[5] With regard to genders as “fixed” categories Breton-Connelly appeals to Judith Butler’s questioning of “woman” as a fixed category in her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) in which she “exposes the ways in which traditional feminist constructs decontextualize individuals from their historical, political, and cultural settings and identities.”[6] The same can be said of homosexuals as a fixed category.

OTHER PARADIGMS

But what if gender was based on gender roles instead of plumbing?

Take for example my own Norse ancestors. While a boy might be born with male sex organs, that simple fact did not in itself make him a man. Gender categories were not fixed and manhood was something that had to be earned – and maintained – through the activities normally associated with that gender category. This meant that while a boy and his penis could aspire to manhood, so could a woman. By laying aside one set of gender roles and embracing another, a woman could become a man. Conversely, a man could become a woman.

Critics – many of them Christian – and Western – say “you confuse gender roles with gender categories.” The answer to this claim is that such a viewpoint is ethnocentric and of little help in understanding the complex nature of gender issues both temporally and spatially.

“This is a world in which ‘masculinity’ always has a plus value, even (or perhaps especially) when it is enacted by a woman,” writes one scholar.[7] It was “a society in which being born male precisely did not confer automatic superiority, a society in which distinction had to be acquired, and constantly reacquired, by wresting it away from others.” Because women had no theoretical ceiling and men no theoretical floor, gender categories were flexible and movable.[8]

Like the Norse, the Romans and Greeks lacked a modern understanding of “homosexual” and “heterosexual.” Once again, it was not what a Roman “was” but what a Roman “did” that determined things. A Roman male was supposed to be a penetrator, the “active” partner in sexual activity. It was manly to penetrate; it was feminine to be penetrated.

The poet Horace put it thusly:

When your organ is stiff, and a servant girl

Or a young boy from the household is near at hand and you know

You can make an immediate assault, would you sooner burst with tension?

Not me. I like sex to be there and easy to get.

As one author puts it, for a free male citizen of Rome “to be sodomized was shameful, a betrayal of his masculinity. Anyone who was known to enjoy being buggered was scorned.”[9]

The Norse understood things in the same terms. “Anal penetration constructed the man who experienced it as whore, bride, mare, bitch, and the like – in whatever guise a female creature.”[10]

To put it bluntly: A hole was a hole was a hole, and quite literally, since the Roman word “vagina” (which means sword-sheath) applied equally to vagina and anus and certain Norse words served the same dual purpose.[11]

The evidence suggests that for the Norseman’s “character was not either male or female, but lay on a spectrum ranging from strong to week, aggressive to passive, powerful to powerless, winner to loser.”[12]

To be called a man was the highest compliment a man could pay a “woman,” as we see in Laxdaela Saga when Snorri of Helgafell says of Gudrun the Fair, “Now you can see what a man Gudrun is, when she gets the better of both of us.”

To be a man was to be hvatur – bold, active, and vigorous – and this was to be admired, whatever sort of plumbing you had. Likewise, to be blauður – soft and weak – was to be despised, whatever sort of plumbing you had.[13]

CONCLUSIONS

In our world of assumed certainty, things are far less certain than we like to pretend. As it turns out, gender roles and categories are nebulous, shifting things. In the end, they are what we say they are from age to age and culture to culture. We decide man = x and woman = y but x and y are neither fixed nor universal.

The moralizers in some ancient pre-Christian societies decided that men were penetrators and women were penetrated. The old ditty about Caesar demonstrates this, that he was “every woman’s man, and every man’s woman.” In contrast to today’s paradigm, by sodomizing another man Caesar would not be seen as effeminate; but being sodomized was another matter altogether.

Christian moralizers, following Jewish Law, presented the Western world with a new paradigm: Not only did men “insert” and women “receive,” but men could only be insertive with regards to women and women could only be recipients of men. Any toying with this equation was an abomination that had unhappy results for all concerned. And the derision of your fellows (in Pagan cultures) and a relatively quick death (in Judaism) was replaced in Christianity by an eternity of hellfire.[14]

And so it remains today.[15]

Except that these distinctions are all artificial. In mathematics numbers added to or subtracted from other numbers have certain, unchangeable results. But nature – and life – don’t work that way. There is homosexuality in the natural world outside of the human species – or at least we label it as such (we can’t possibly know how the animals involved would think of it).[16]

It is the human-imposed synthetic categories of “moral” and “immoral,” “normal” and “abnormal” that is unnatural. They are not universal; they are not constant and unchanging. They are what we say they are. And if we want, we can say they are something else. The irony is, for the West, that it is a religion that distances itself from nature that has decided for us what is and is not natural.

Some Pagan moralizers sound like conservative Christians; they like to say that homosexuality is immoral but they have forgotten to change their moral filters. For a reconstructionist religion making this determination isn’t reconstructing the past; its imposing modern prejudices on their model of the past (which had an entirely different set of prejudices).

On reconstructionist grounds alone, there is no basis for 21^st century ideas about gender roles and categories; you cannot reconstruct what did not exist. It seems the pathology of the 19^th century can capture those who escape the clutches of Judeo-Christian moralizing.

The monolithic and universal category of male/female is a myth, the determinants differing for every culture and/or religion. For one group to say “our way is the True way” is not only arrogant but wrong-minded. Just as every ethnic group or culture has a religion that is true for it (true because it works) so every culture has gender roles that work for it. We may not approve of them, but then, who are we to say that we are right and they are wrong? Put the shoe on the other foot and see how you feel about it.

Once we start imposing our particular views, once we start categorizing our local views as universal, we open ourselves up to a world where might makes right, where the dominant culture (which in recent centuries has been Western and Christian) determines in a blatantly ethnocentric manner what is right for everyone: this is what a woman is, this is what a man is. These are the rules permissible for men and women; conform or die.

But ancient Church Councils aside, universal truths are not attainable by popular vote. One book, developing out of one culture and society (and religion) no matter how popular, cannot dictate for everyone what determines gender roles and categories. Such an understanding is only one out of many thousands of possibilities.

If we are going to come to a new understanding of these matters, we have to set aside our arrogance and our ethnocentrism; we need a new paradigm…and a new discussion.

---

[1] Marilyn Katz, “Ideology and ‘The Status of Women’ in Ancient Greece,” History and Theory 31 (1992), 92. With regard to “homosexual” or “gay/lesbian,” and the effect of using one term over another see Steve Williams, “Gay and Lesbian or Homosexual? What’s in a Word?” http://www.care2.com/causes/civil-rights/blog/gay-and-lesbian-or-homosexual-does-it-matter/

[2] See Ray Laurence, Roman Passions: A History of Pleasure in Imperial Rome (Continuum, 2009), 84-86 for a discussion of views of “homosexuality”in the Roman world.

[3] Katz (1992), 92.

[4] Beate Wagner-Hasel, “Frauenleben in orientalischer Abgeschlossenheit? Zur Geschichte und Nutzanwendung eines Topos,” Der Altsprachliche Unterricht 2 (1989), 19.

[5] Joan Breton-Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece (Princeton University Press, 2007), 19-20.

[6] Breton-Connelly (2007), 22.

[7] Carol Clover, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Speculum 68 (1993), 372.

[8] Clover (1993), 380.

[9] Anthony Everitt, Augustus (Random House, 2006), 149.

[10] Clover (1993), 375.

[11] Clover (1993), 378.

[12] Nancy Marie Brown, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (Harcourt, 2007), 74.

[13] Brown (2007), 74.

[14] And in Uganda, with the support of extremist American Evangelicals, we are seeing the return of the death penalty for homosexuality. See “Human Rights Impact Assessment of Uganda’s Anti-homosexuality Bill,” The Zeleza Post, January 17, 2010 http://www.moveon.org/r?r=86439&id=18903-6770804-EYlalox&t=5

[15] See the discussion at ReligiousTolerance.org: http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_legis.htm

[16] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/5550488/Homosexual-behaviour-widespread-in-animals-according-to-new-study.html

Paganism, in the Roman Empire, died hard. For centuries, laws and edicts punished the devout. People continued to believe, to celebrate their gods. They loved their religion; they did not want to give it up.

From the fourth century to the ninth, you can see the measures taken to crush the beliefs of the people.

The same was true in Northern Europe. “Barbarian” Christian successor states rose up from the ruins of the Christianized empire and began to impose Christianity not only on their own people, but on peoples beyond their borders. The Frisians, the Saxons, and Slavic peoples, all resisted. None of them wanted the new religion.

Further north, in Scandinavia, Heathen practices persisted for centuries. In Iceland, which was forced under threat of war to convert to Christianity in 1000, Heathenism simply went underground.

Much of the myth of Christianity centers around the idea that people flocked to become Christians, that it was a liberating experience. It was not. Christianity succeeded because it was imposed by force, including torture and death. It was maintained by the same forces throughout the centuries. In the later Roman Empire, every time Roman Christian authority waned, Paganism sprang up and the people cast off the unwanted religion. This happened in Britain, it happened in Spain, and it happened elsewhere.

Another sign of Paganism’s enduring nature comes from central Mexico – from the descendants of the Maya. This video is brief but it’s message is powerful and compelling: people love the gods, they love their religion: The Secrets of the Maya

It’s refreshing to see something like this, with no hint of disapproval in the narrator’s voice, no sign of missionaries engaged in cultural genocide (though we all know they’re out there somewhere). Leave people alone; let them worship as they wish. If it’s a syncretic form of Christianity that pays homage to the past and to ancient religion, fine. You may think of them as heretics, but let them be. If it’s something else, something closer to the beliefs of their ancestors, even better. Either way, it’s their choice.

We need to get over our strange belief that we know best, and I’m speaking of Western cultures in particular, given the age we live in and the influence of Christianity on these cultures. Never before in history has the idea been prevalent that a culture has to export its religion, and not only export it, impose it and enforce it. Bring the missionaries home. Let the people be. If you think your god wants everyone converted, he will do it in his own good time

There is a reason you don’t hear much about Prosper of Aquitaine. Why? Because he agreed with the position I stated above, that it was “for divine grace alone”to bring about conversion. Prosper wrote in 440 CE a book called “De Vocatione Omnium Gentium (On the Calling of All Nations). It has been called “the first work in Christian literature to be concerned with the salvation of infidels” (A. Hamman in the Encyclopedia of the Early Church Oxford:1992) but what sets it apart is that Prosper spoke of salvation, not evangelization.

It was an enlightened position for fifth century Christian culture; it would be an enlightened position today, in the twenty-first century, sixteen hundred years after those thoughts were put to parchment.

(Now that Jól is past I have had time to reflect on what the holiday means to me. I have also had time to reflect on various environmental issues. There is a symmetry that exists for Pagan peoples where religion and environment are concerned that is perhaps missing for some, and this article is meant to address one particular aspect of that symmetry. My goal here is to offer food for thought, rather than solutions – Hrafnkell)

People like fireplaces and wood burning stoves – not to mention a good bonfire. Not only for the warmth they provide, but for aesthetic reasons, particular on a cold winter’s day. Few will disagree that the sight and sound of flames licking at wood is a recipe for contentment.

But for Heathens, a wood fire can have religious connotations that might be lacking for those who follow other religious paths (the idea of the Yule log is not unique to Germanic Paganism).

No doubt there are few who have not heard of the Yule log. Fewer are probably aware of its Pagan antecedents.  For a Heathen, the Twelve Days are unimaginable without a decorated tree (the decorations were originally gifts to the tree) and a burning log in the fireplace.

We cannot always get oak, but we can get wood – actual wood rather than Duraflame’s napalm-like qualities, or the logs made out of coffee grounds. But wood, after many millennia, is becoming a politically incorrect and environmentally inexpedient commodity.

People have become aware of the polluting qualities of burning wood. We live in environmentally conscious times, and we are daily bombarded with studies revealing the origins and causes of various forms of pollution.

I first encountered the idea of particulate pollution when I moved (briefly) to Florida. Florida, I learned at the time has (or had) a problem with particulate matter floating around in the air and this was a cause of concern, given my allergies. I knew that stuff wasn’t good for you.

The U.S. Department of Energy has identified some of the problems related to wood-burning fireplaces – they emit various nasty substances, including the above-mentioned particulate matter, but also nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and organic gases. That a wood-fire can therefore be harmful to a person’s health scarcely needs saying. It is particularly bad for people who already suffer from various health problems or whose health is precarious because of age or pregnancy.

There is the added issue of fireplaces serving as a means of escape for heat – thus leading to increased energy consumption to keep your home warm. For this please see the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Savers Blog.

Clean Air Revival informs us about the dangers of particulate pollution:

Burning solid fuel yields particulate pollution – solid particles smaller than a red blood cell which have been implicated in 30,000 deaths in the US and 2.1 million deaths world wide per year. .  “Particulate pollution is the most important contaminant in our air. …we know that when particle levels go up, people die¹. ” Indeed, wood smoke is chemically active in the body 40 times longer than tobacco².

1. Joel Schwartz, Ph.D., Harvard School of Public Health, E Magazine, Sept./Oct. 2002

2. Wm. A Pryor, Persistent Free Radicals in Woodsmoke: An ESR Spin Trapping Study, Free Radical Biology and Medicine 1989, 7(1): 17-21

Perhaps unsurprisingly, wood smoke can contribute to the risk of cancer: A  July 11, 2005 study published in Chest informs us that exposure to wood smoke may increase the risk of lung cancer via a mechanism similar to that of tobacco: “… our findings demonstrate that wood smoke could produce similar effects on p53, phospho-p53, and MDM2 protein expression as tobacco.… It is important to consider wood smoke exposure as a possible risk factor for the development of lung cancer in nonsmoker subjects.”

Not a pretty picture by any means. I learned long ago that grandma made me sick by using wood cutting boards and preparing raw meat and veggies on the same surface; now I learn than her fireplace was giving me cancer!(For more on the dangers of wood smoke see Clean Air Revival and Wisconsin Department of Health Services.)

The situation is so serious (or at least, perceived to be – there are critics of the measures) that some parts of the country are placing limits on burning wood. Planetizen.com reports that “Five years ago, the Central Valley became the first area of California to ban indoor wood burning when an ‘alert’ was called by the air district; other air districts followed in 2008.” On October 17, 2008, “Regulators in the Bay Area Air Quality Management District are clamping down on wood burning between November and February as a way to meet a new federal law limiting the amount of breathable, fine particles.” On March 9, 2009, the Connecticut Legislature considers HB6616 An Act Establishing Wood Smoke to be a Public Nuisance (!) On December 29, 2009, it was reported that Bay Area inspectors in California caught 47 fireplace violators on Jól day.

Ouch. Happy Jól, folks.

In many cases you can only have a fire if you have the proper type of wood stove. In others, no fires at all.

What’s a conscientious but devout Heathen to do?

Will the day come when across the fifty states we are barred from burning a Yule log? And should a religious waver be possible?  A spokesman for the Bay Area Air Quality Management District does not offer an encouraging answer: “We know a lot of people like to burn on this holiday, but it’s our duty to protect public health,” said Ralph Borrmann, the spokesman.

While the dangers of wood smoke cannot be denied, it seems hypocritical that those who cause the worst levels of pollution – big corporations – proceed with doing untold harm to our environment with hardly a comment directed at them. You can watch their chimneys belch smoke into the sky but you can’t burn a Yule log for your gods?

Still, legal and regulatory hypocrisies aside, it’s a bit of an ethical conundrum. If Paganism is nature-based religion, how does one reconcile concern for the environment with concern for showing proper devotion to one’s gods?

I would argue for one obvious (and partial) solution: that even where bans do not exist, one solution might be to burn less frequently. Obviously, a person could choose to burn wood only for religious reasons and on religious occasions. Most of us do not require the use of a wood fireplace to heat our homes (not that the heat we obtain via the power company comes pollution free!). For most of us, aesthetics are at the heart of a fire.

A simulated fire is obviously inadequate. This would amount to pretending to toss a pinch of incense on a flame or pretending to pray. It is the cultic act that has significance. Faux piety is no piety at all.

Wood pellets are offered as an environmentally safe option when burning wood. They produce less soot and ash (and no creosote – the stuff that causes chimney fires)  and they are made from wood that would otherwise go into a landfill. See Treehugger.com. But while wood pellets produce far less pollution, burning wood pellets does not have the same effect as a log. While aesthetic considerations might be set aside in the normal course of events, religious reasons render this a far less attractive solution.

For those who are interested in both the ethics and the environmental issues involved, please see Burnwise, a partnership program of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).