Heathenism and New Thought : Not Compatible

Heathenism by its very nature must be strongly against the mainline of the New Thought movement, which suggests that reality is what we think, as if there were no real world, independent and sovereign, as Dave Foreman so aptly puts it, into which we must adjust ourselves. If the world is thought, it is not our thought. It is the thought of millions of spirits who dream it together. Heathenism always acknowledged those millions of spirits, those others with whom we share the world. So see this as dream or firm reality, it is the thought of all of us together in tandem. While New Thought erases those spirits and reduces things down to a two which is really a one : there is you, and there is God or the Universe, really in the form of a giant teat there to supply all of your infantile needs. To this, heathenism says : grow up. Grow up and acknowledge that the world exists outside of you and your thoughts. Grow up and realize that negative thoughts may affect your own morale and the morale of those around but do not in and of themselves change the reality of forests and deserts and mountains.

Yes, there was an acknowledgement of magic in the old tradition, but significantly, it was always envisioned as a singing with the spirits, a joining the chorus, as it were, and not a solo act before which the world bows down in applause. No, the world is real, even be it a co-dreaming. It is real and solid and soulful. In its hardness and opaqueness and sometimes impenetrability, its roughness and its sharpness, its variable coefficient of adversity, as Sartre puts it, are parts of its soul. We may be drawn by spirits along currents of wyrd that are the way the world works, and in that gushing flow of might, we may be drawn to that which we most need, and be blessed by its magic, but it is the magic of the world, and our nimble, skillful, humble return to the chorus.