Original Participation = Paganism

Owen Barfield ended his book Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry saying that, when all is said in done, years into the future, "when the last balance comes to be struck between good and evil", the thing that humankind will remember as the greatest gift of the scientific revolution, which he argued was the greatest expression of idolatry, will be in fact that very idolatry.

"What will chiefly be remembered about the scientific revolution will be the way in which it scoured the appearances clean of the last traces of spirit, freeing us from original, and for final, participation...the other name for original participation, in all its long-hidden, in all its diluted forms, in science, in art and in religion, is, after all - paganism."

This puts me in a quandary - it knots up lots of threads that I have tried conscientiously to disentangle. For starters, my introduction to Barfield's work, and soon after to Rudolf Steiner's work, coincided with - and I think actually had to do with - my interest in New Age thought. One accusation made against New Age thinking - an accusation made by persons who think it to be an accusation, and a fatal objection morally and intellectually - is that it's simply another version of paganism.

Another way of saying this: As a result of reading and understanding Barfield's and Steiner's work, I've come to have an understanding of, and deep appreciation for, paganism. Yet Barfield says again and again - and Steiner too, in a different way - that he was not promoting a return to paganism, but pointing a way through idolatry, beyond paganism. He called it 'final participation', in opposition to 'original participation' - that human consciousness characterized by a very very dim, vague sense of self, and a much more immediate experience of immersion in the world, the environment - air, wind, sky, heaven, heart beat, anger, joy.

So I have this deep appreciation for the world of original participation (see my previous post about sitting on the mountainside). Further, I tend to more paganism-rooted spiritual practices in my life, life the Tarot, the I-Ching, astrology, and body-based meditation, even though I'm very intellectually oriented in most other things.

In fact, the work of both Barfield and Steiner is much more about phenomenology than it is about spiritual practices - though they both use the term 'spirit' in their writings. I think that is why, even with Steiner's immense written library of work, and his genius and vision, he - and his creation Anthroposophy - are not nearly as well known as, for instance, Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy. Barfield and Steiner are simply not very accessible, and their bias in favor of the intellect - a thoroughly considered, explicit and articulated bias, but a bias nonetheless - strengthens that sense of inaccessibility.