What is scientific paganism?

I am a spiritual person, but also someone that is ruled by the reason and the empirical. Along my life I started to walk to later have to return, different spiritual pathways. None of them was fruitful for me, because all of them demanded to have faith in things I couldn't percibe or offered me certainties and results that were doubtful or just non-existent. Also, their "free-interpretation" seemed rather convenient than truthful, which led me to be unable to believe in them.

However, a coulpe of years ago I lived the experience of living in another city, in another country and, perhaps even more important, in another hemisphere. I am a native and inhabitant of the South Hemisphere and therefore I had never associated so clearly the bond between nature and folkloric and religious celebrations and traditions. While living in another place, free from the society that had constantly surrounded me and experiencing a natural environment which I was not used to, I questioned at ease everything that I had learned. I let to stay all that seemed good for me and that wasn't harmful for everyone else, and I set myself free from what wasn't necessary for me and specially from what hurt me. 

This way, I started to experience nature which was more affordable than in my native city and to feel myself alive in it and part of it. I felt like celebrating, and as I didn't believe in anything in particular, I decided to celebrate whatever I wanted. So I feasted Halloween and Day of the Dead even thogh I do not belong to the anglosphere neither I am mexican, just because of it seemed interesting to think about these topics and to commemorate my closer dead ones. I then lived Christmas with all the fancyness that I wanted, living it for the first time in winter just as in the tales and movies of my childhood (but never in my reallity) to discover that I actually prefer it in summer. I enjoyed it and I didn't care if believed or not in Jesus or in Santa Claus. When making plans and symbolisms to each of these parties, I started to investigate its origin and I discovered that in most of my inculcated christian and folkloric celebrations the actual origin was a pagan one. Now, the term paganism is tremendously wide and the definition that I will use is surely insufifcient. With paganism I mean to the wide spectrum of pre-christian religions that were mainly politheist and which their deities were highly related with different nature phenomena or were the phenomena itself. 

 

While inquiring into this pagan origin and symbolism, I started to fill my life with videos and articles of people linked to the nordic and celtic paganism, the famouse wicca and a lot of other derivated ones that I don't think is necessary to specify. Consumig this content made me feel good with myself and the world in which I lived. Then, I got to know the Wheel of the Year. I began to celebrate some of its sabbats and when Ostara arrived, it was as if the world had truly decorated itself with these party motive. Ostara is the name of the Spring Equinox celebration, date in which these season starts (you can read more of it in this entry). On this party's eve, I saw daffodils to impetuously flourish everywhere. Then they started to appear little chicks of every kind of bird and they were followed by baby rabbits just in the day in which I had decided to celebrate "the pagan version of Easter", as I used to call it. Since then, I gradually began to celebrate the Wheel of the Year and to experience a life vision in function of it. 

Just as before, I actually couldn't start to suddenly believe in fairies, elfs or spells. I cannot believe in what you must firmly believe before experience it, mostly because along my life I made myself illusions by believing with strong faith in it, to then see it all result the opposite of what it should be. There's nothing more devastating to me than praying, make a spell or whatever is equivalent and implies faith, to then see it all results just the contrary of my prayers. The explanation that God or the universe have a better project seems too cheap for me. In fact, those answers made me a tremendous psicological damage and to live free from these precepts has been one of the best decisions I have made, even when this implies that I believe that I have to confront life and the world by myself, without anyone's help, or that when I die it will possibly be the end of everything (for me). 

So I started to design a belief or world vision that is guided by the pagan celebrations and spirituality, but that it adheres and feeds from scientific principles, reason why I call it scientific paganism. I placated my spirit by trusting that the sun comes to me everyday, and with it, the cortisol and serotonine that give me energy and awakening to confront the day. I observed the changing position of the sun and the following changes in the amount of light-hours and temperatures, as its changes in the ecosistem and my physiology. I let the beauty of all these phenomena to fill myself with wellbeing and joy and I learned to get the most of each season both for my personal development and for my spiritual one. I learned to see myself and everyone else as another element of an ecosystem in the biosphere, and this one as a piece of a celestial body of the great cosmos. I allowed the delightment that this vision made me feel to stabilize myself and give me strenght. And since then, I have found in this world and life vision refugee and comfort during hard times and amplification and extension of pleasure and happines during the good ones. 

Today, I throw the seed of this vision free from demands, just as this vision has taught me to be. During the last years I have contemplated life carefully, and I have seen that a lot of seeds fall from vegetal species, but only some of them germinate. From these, only some of them survive to first development stages. I have seen birds to lay eggs that didn't hatched and I have seen just-borned chicks to die. Notwithstanding, trees keep on throwing seeds and birds keep on incubating: so I learned to live this way. I release this blog to whomever that can make use of it, just as I have use the variety of written and audiovisual content that I have consumed during my life: may you make get use of it if you're reading this and interested in keep on learning about the scientific paganism.