Virtue Ethics

Abstract

Any application of ethics for a pagan or pagan lifestyle is not a given but an ongoing and eventually unending quest. I have been a pagan for more years than I like to admit, and as a sociologist, I have come to learn to study various forms of pagan spirituality that have emerged over the last 30 or so years. This possibility was not always the case, and for decades I merely sought to find others of like-pagan-mindedness with whom to celebrate ancient festivals and converse together over shared feelings and recovered ways of thinking. For many years I frequented ancient pagan sites – especially for the feriae and sabbats – in unsuccessful hopes that I might encounter those very souls that I knew somehow had to exist. I was always intuitively convinced that I was not alone. It is today a much different world than it was in my younger years, and the present work is the result of both my professional development and my personal encounters with many within the broad pagan community whom I have come to feel privileged in many, many cases to call friends. The present formulation of pagan ethics and their applications is, of course, my own – one which is based not only on my academic research but also and principally on my own persistent reflections. If what I am advocating can be termed an ‘idolatrous pagan ethics’, it is because I employ the idolatry trope as a useful and accurate label for the corpo-spirituality or telluric materialism that for me significantly distinguishes a pagan way of thinking and religiosity from the other and more traditional religious constructs in our world. Learning a love of numerology from my mother, I understand the number 7 to represent the magical. In what I have come to consider to be the proto-deific foci belonging to the seminal origins of the European tradition, what I refer to as a ‘heptatheon’ or a pantheon of seven figures, I have in a parallel fashion conceived of seven virtue-values underlying the essentials of human concerns and ethics. As the human and pagan are for me virtually exchangeable adjectives, these virtues may also be approached as pagan ethics. These are, of course, suppositional and are being presented as offerings for reflective consideration. In the present chapter, I wish to address three different but to some extent overlapping formulations of virtue ethics, namely, the Christian, the Cardinal and my heptatheonic. In the following two chapters, I shall address first what I discern as the core pagan and/or human concerns, namely, ‘the pagan quadrivium’ and next a subset (or trivium) of foci that are a part of what I term ‘worship’. Together, the quadrivium and trivium constitute an heptatheon of virtue-values.