Meic asked:

I'm a practising Pagan and am interested in the Classical Pagan Philosophers.

Problem : When trying to discuss Paganism with people I'm somewhat at a loss to give a definitive
statement of Paganism. I've tried formulating a Philosophical position to make this easier. I call it
Mono-Pluralism and present it as a form of (Pythagorean/Platonic) Dualism.

There is one ultimate reality which manifests itself in a diversity/ plurality of forms and may be
approached through a diversity of paths. (Many paths, one goal.) Goal and path (Deity and Devotee)
being the Duality. I hold to both the identity and distinction of the one and many as a form of dualism.

Am I thinking clearly, or has my proximity to the subject compromised my objectivity?

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I hope you will be happy if I divide my answers into three parts. First, if I understand correctly, you are
asking how to define yourself as a Pagan. Secondly, you are interested to know about modern and
ancient paganisms, and thirdly, you'd like to know how your philosophical approach stands up and
how you might develop it.

To begin, defining oneself is difficult for everyone, defining yourself as a Pagan is going to be
especially difficult. Let me explain...

It is difficult to define who you are, if only because we each know such a huge amount about
ourselves that trying to condense it into an adroit set of axioms is going to a monumental task. A task
made all the more difficult because your final definition of who you are will then become an extra part
of what you are, which will in turn mean that your definition of who you are will need changing to
accommodate it. And then the new definition will need... and so on, in what is called a 'set-of-sets'
problem.

A more seductive route is to try to define yourself by who you are not.This is much easier, probably
because, knowing little about the people who aren't you, you can the more readily categorize them.
This is very plausibly why those who identify themselves with, say, political parties, will be much more
ready to do down the beliefs of the otherparty than to explain their own. Likewise, religious people
are often more ready to denounce other beliefs than to proclaim their own. The extreme example of
such anti-definition is, perhaps, found in those who hold allegiance to sports clubs. Their devotion can
be powerful indeed, yet it consists of little other than a certainty that weare not
whoever-our-rival-clubs are. Anti-definition is very easy, very strong, and history shows it to be very
dangerous. I'm sure I need not remind you of the horrors which ensue when a whole people start
defining themselves, not as who they are, but as the fact that they are not'Yids', 'Niggers', 'Gippos'
etc.

The term 'Pagan' (which comes, incidentally, from the Latin 'Paganus', meaning 'someone who lives
outside the town') was originally used to mean 'anyone who doesn't follow the true (i.e. 'our') religion,
in just the same 'anti' way as the deliberately offensive racial terms I've mentioned above. At least
until the sixteenth century in England, it included Jews, Moslems and Buddhists. 'Pagan' meant 'the
religion we are not'; it meant 'them (bad) people' as opposed to 'us (good) people'. It was not the title
of a particular religion, so a whole range of spiritualities have come to be lumped together in the
Western mind as 'Pagan'.

Now, to the association between modern and ancient paganism. You write in excellent English, and
refer to yourself as a 'practicing Pagan', so I assume (forgive me if I am wrong) that you belong to the
Gallic tradition of the Druids, the English Wiccaor the Italian Strega.This is rather different from the
spiritual tradition of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Druid tradition is closely connected with
personifications of aspects of the earth and picks its festivals to match the cycles of the planet, while
the Greeks and Romans tended to personify aspects of human ability and had rather a variable set of
festivals. The Druid deans were both philosophers and spiritual leaders while in Greece and Rome
the two positions were quite separate and often in conflict (as Socrates discovered, to his cost).

There is very little written material about the Gallic tradition which can be relied on. There are some
references in the Irish sagas Tuatha De Danannand Cuchulain,and do have a look at Caesar's
Gallic Wars(Book VI ). But, unfortunately most of the more recent works weave mere specks of fact
around a lot of shoddy guesswork, I have no hesitation in accusing James Frazer, among others, of
downright charlatanism. There is the same problem with Pythagoreanism. You'll find more-or-less all
there is of any merit on Pythagoras at http://history.hanover.edu/texts/presoc/pythagor.htm, and I
would especially warn against giving any credence to either The Golden Versesor The
Commentaries of Hierocleswhich are certainly later inventions.

As to Plato's spiritual views, his Phaedrusand Phaedoare both available on-line at
http://promo.net/pg/index.html. There used to be an excellent overview of modern interpretations of
ancient spiritual paths in John Lash's The Seeker's Handbook: The Complete Guide to Spiritual
Pathfinding, but the sensational seems to have ousted the reasoned, and it is no longer in print, but
very well worth seeking out a copy.

Now, to your philosophical position. As a spiritually-minded person, it is probably necessary to hold
that there is One Ultimate Reality, and as a Pagan it is appropriate to think that this reality is
accessible to humans, and the routes by which it can be comprehended are many and varied. I
suspect that your difficulty arises in trying to frame a stance which determines which parts of your
thesis are to be monist, dualist and pluralist, for plainly, they can't all be. I suggest, and it is only a
suggestion, that you consider doing three things:

(1) Decide how to split up your fields of knowledge. You may decide, for instance, that there is, first,
the realm of the inner mind, then there is the perceptible realm of ordinary things, there is the realm of
the classes of things (for which, as a Pagan, you would have particular personifications), and that,
ultimately, there is the realm of the absolute or Ultimate Reality.

(2) Decide which of these realms is monist, dualist or pluralist. There are several possibilities. Here
you might possibly consider saying that the inner mind is dualist in that it is capable only of
determining the two states of 'match' and 'not-match' and that the Ultimate Reality is monist in that it
is the one, single and only thing on which all the others rely. Alternatively you might take the view that
the inner mind is just one thing and that its aim is to reach the all-embracing multiplicity of the
Ultimate Reality. There are several other possibilities.

(3) As you see your goal as being to have access to the One Ultimate Reality, try to give some
clearer substance to what this is. You have chosen to take a mystical approach, so you should not be
too concerned whether your description of it is logically sound but instead be quite willing to use
allegory, poetry and allusion in an attempt to give an impression of that Reality with a view to inspiring
others to the joy of the search for it. One way you might do this is to give Ultimate Reality a name.
The later Greeks and the Romans sometimes adapted the name Cronus(the Lord of time-itself),
while Christians have used the word Logos.

I will leave you with this majestic task: go and find what 'Logos' means, and then use it. May the
Great Goddess inspire your journey.

Glyn Hughes