Pillars and gods and the Fool

To my knowledge there has never been a monastic movement in ancient paganism. The closest, which has sometimes been suggested as a source for the early Christian monastics who lived on top of pillars, is the once a year occasion when men would climb up inside 'pillars' to commune with the Goddess. This is not the actual inspiration, since the actual text of Lucan's De Dea Syria makes it plain they were climbing up inside great big penises (Source chapters 27ff).

That of course is the kind of old time religion we can all be enthusiastic about. Of course they didn't inspire these pillar saints, called stylites, since they were way too fleshly. St Simeon Stylites, who illustrates this post, has always been a favourite of mine, and in true pagan style, I have always wondered how they urinated and defecated, and can't decide whether they would have done it off the edge, or used a pot which would have been collected when their food was hauled up on a pulley.

I think there are however hints of a monastic tradition in modern paganism. I read recently on another blog about a woman who aimed to practice minimalism and was expecting it to give her a great sense of freedom (I won't link this because I really am playing very fast with this source). Unfortunately when she got down to the number of possessions she was aiming for all she felt was a sense of loss and emptiness. She rather got slapped by some minimalism guru who told her she obviously wasn't ready to do it. The person whose blog I was reading criticised the guru in turn and reflected that major changes require adjustment. She felt that the freedom given by minimalism means that a person is very difficult to categorise using the standards of consumer society so would feel a freedom from pressure.

Now I don't believe in minimalism because only the incredibly rich can afford to do it. But the freedom from labels and pressures did strike a chord and I think this is the connection with modern paganism. The fool in the taroT is identified with what there is before something even manifests as intention in the magician. Of course we know the oldest neo-Pagan tradition is stealing anything which isn't nailed down and we stole this from 18th century cartomancers, who stole it from the Jewish Kabbalah. As we  know much of the point of magic is the connection between all things and this includes the no-thing before some-thing.

However there is a connection with ancient paganism and it is to the genuinely ancient belief of holey stones representing divinity. Yes there are also situations where a whole stone represents divinity but in the ditsituat where the hole is the essential thing, it is the nothing which represents the god/dess.

Even without extraordinary feats like living on a pillar I think a pursuit of the no-thing which precedes things reflects the Christian and other pursuit of aloneness but with a genuinely pagan feel.