Someone asked if I'd share my views on Numenism. I reckon as I've been a Numenist celebrant for 54 years, I could say a few words about it.
I'm still going to write diaries mostly about Itzl and life with a hearing ear dog, but maybe I'll write a diary now and then about other things.
Numenism is a new religion. Or perhaps it should be called a new philosophy or a new lifestyle. It was formed out of a need to have a religion that was meaningful to people who'd survived World War II and the devastation of the atom bombs, of being the people who created and detonated those bombs.
It had already been around for a decade when I found it, and the first words I heard about it drew me in, and there I've stayed for 54 years, first as a celebrant, then as a priest, and lately as an elder.
What did I hear that was so compelling?
Proposed: There is a creative, generative force that is the universe and all within it, and we are each the individuated corporeal beings of that force, creative and generative ourselves and capable of far more than we can imagine.
Our goal is to test that hypothesis. Nothing is to be taken for granted and everything is subject to scrutiny.
I was hooked. A religion that begged you to test it and question it and examine it? How could I not love it from that moment on?
It was a decade old at that point, and had already developed some traditions and was building its own vocabulary for the things that just weren't possible in English. We used the languages of science and philosophy as well as foreign words. I heard people espouse the things I had heard when I was much younger and privileged to sit in on my grandparents' dinner parties where they invited professors from the University of Goettingen to dine and converse. I was never allowed to talk, but they felt it was a vital part of my education to listen, and listen I did!
When I returned to the States to be with my mother, I missed those dinners. Here at last were people who talked about important things like "What is our role in existence?", "What is art and why is it important?", "Is the way an idea is presented as important as the idea itself?", "Should we justify belief?" "Must causal evidence be related to the facts?", "Is there a way to prove or disprove Agrippa's Trilemma?", "Are zombies human?", "Is color inherent in the object or a product of the mind?", "Can we state something as a fact, the assert we don't believe it?", "Is a bale of straw still a bale if you remove one straw? How many straws can one remove before it is no longer a bale?", and so many more. Some were religious in scope, some spiritual, all contributed to the shape and form and burgeoning beliefs of what came to be Numenism.
I hung out with them, attending their meetings and dinners, but I was already seduced. I committed myself wholeheartedly to them and have never regretted it.
Even though it was a decade old, it was still so new it didn't have a name - and didn't get one until the early 1990's! When I first found the group, they were still "the study group". When Paganism, and the New Age, and Wicca emerged into the public eye in the late 60's and early 70's, the founders named the group the "Church of the Pagan Gospel", but we abandoned that name in the 80's when we realized we had strayed too far from the (mostly) Christian roots. For a while, we humorously named it the "Roman Shinto Shamanic Discordian Episcopagan Freudian Zen Druidic OTO Theosophists of the Great Goddess Caffeina and Her Consort Chocolatl and Their Children Pavementa, Bargaina, and Say Who?", but that offended a lot of people so we dropped that rather quickly.
It was late one night, during a chocolate-filled Moosemas that someone (probably Bacca, she had all the great ideas) suggested we just call it "Numenism" after the numena we now acknowledged were part of the way we recognized the Creative Force (which still had no name). And we agreed that was good. And so we became Numenists and our religion became formally the Way of Numenism. Or Numenism, for short.
I've been with them through many iterations and through the fluctuations of membership, which seemed to depend upon how charismatic we were rather more than what the religion actually offered. When someone popular embraced it, our membership would rise (don't laugh) to as many as 300 or so, and when they drifted away because it was hard (and it is hard), they took their followers with them. Our membership would plunge into a mere double digit. And then, the founders began to die - of accidents, of age, and shinier religions came along and pulled away even some of the faithful core.
We lost a lot of members to Wicca, and Hellenismos, and Asatru, and other such beliefs. Some came back, but most didn't. I admit I flirted with Wicca and Asatru and a few others, but I never really committed to them. Numenism had my heart and soul.
Let me start at the beginning.
What we call Numenism now was created in the living room of a WWII soldier with a group of his friends. Devastated and shaken by the atom bombs, by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and by being citizens of the country that unleashed such destruction, they couldn't find solace in Christianity so they got together to find some meaning in life after the War to End All Wars.
At first, they were just what we now call a support group, but they asked questions and they returned to college and got degrees searching for answers to those questions. It doesn't take long for a tradition to establish itself. By the time I met them, they had the bare bones of a ritual structure, a direction or vision for what they hoped to accomplish, and they were gaining the skills and tools to make that a reality.
The vision:
To create a religion that is meaningful to Americans.
Some people might consider that rather geographical, and to be honest, stated like that, it certainly seems that way. But consider this: America is a country that was once filled with sacred places and sacred thoughts by the many native tribes living here. It had a rich spiritual heritage when the Europeans arrived and proceeded to ignore and wipe out those practices. The immigrants brought their own religions here and transplanted them onto this land and the people living here, mixing and mingling it all in swirls like a Peter Maxx ad. (Oh please don't tell me I'm so old none of you remember Peter Maxx from the 70's? Swirly paisley sort of fat letters and such, rather psychedelic? He's still around, you know.) A lot of people lost their way - what's now called "disenfranchised", but we didn't have that term or concept back then, we just knew that a lot of Americans were groping for some sort of meaning in their lives, were feeling rootless and lost, and religion was a good way to guide them to finding meaning, and we needed it to speak to the heart and soul of Americans. So our founders set about trying to find a spiritual pathway that was relevant and meaningful to Americans because they were American and lost. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam were all created out of the austerity of the desert and they didn't have the answers our founders sought. They thought maybe other Americans wanted (or perhaps needed) a way to find their roots and to find meaning and maybe creating a totally new religion from the uttermost beginnings might be an answer.
Apparently it answered for a few people, but for the most part, Numenism hasn't really attracted too many people. Since one of our core tenets is that we don't proselytize and we don't have any charismatic members or ones good with marketing, we don't really get out in public too much. If someone asks us, we will answer - often lengthily because there are no shortcuts to understanding.
So, if anyone's interested and asks, from time to time, I'll post a diary about Numenism among the diaries about Itzl.