Yes, towns before temples. Now that I have your attention, let me assure you that I’m not advocating towns before devotion. Rather, I’m approaching a frequent question in polytheisms from a practical standpoint, to wit-

Why are there no temples near me?

This question comes up a lot, and there are many valid, concrete, and utterly unhelpful responses. In short, it’s easy to know why there are no temples of our faith near us- it’s a solution that is hard.

Galina Krassova recently shared a video called “Strictly Kosher“, which is a British documentary about the Jewish community in Manchester, England. While the associated post was specific to marriage and childrearing, I found the video inspiring in a much broader context.

It is also raised issues intimately related to landwork, at least the sort that this blog is concerned with. How so? Much of esoteric landwork is about the marriage of a place and the people who live there.

In most of “paganism”, let alone the more narrowly-focused label of “polytheism”, people tend to live where they live and then attempt to forge some kind of connection. Like most Westerners, we lack indigeny (or “indigeneity”). We move around, we don’t know our neighbors, we shop at the MegaMart, and we drive long distances to meet others of our faith.

I used to have something approaching indigeny. When I lived in Western Massachusetts, I lived two miles from the birthplace of my maternal grandmother. She and her husband are buried a few miles from where my mother grew up, which was in turn a few miles from where both of her parents grew up. My mother’s family has lived in that general area since sometime around 1638.

For about twenty years, I stayed there for that very reason- despite it hurting my job prospects (among other things). Since giving in and moving to Texas, I have become more acutely aware of the problems associated with this lack of indigeny- not to mention the Texas Problem.

While it’s painful, it has helped sharpen my awareness of this as a larger-scale problem affecting polytheists (and “pagans”) in general. Because so many of us either come from (or have been taught to identify with) the homogeneous white middle-class assumption of automatic indigeny wherever one dwells, we are perhaps blind to a simple truth-

It is okay to live near people like yourself.

Most of our ancestors lived in ethnic neighborhoods at some point. Those neighborhoods waxed and waned based on immigration patterns- but typically by the second or third generation, children began to leave these segregated neighborhoods.

The story is a bit different for African-American communities, in that legalized discrimination and segregation kept many Black neighborhoods together for more than a century. However, in parts of the country where such discrimination is illegal, we are seeing many of those communities aging out and facing gentrification, too.

However, I’ve recently noticed a movement in some traditionally ethnic neighborhoods to specifically recruit younger members of their culture to move into the area and start businesses. Whereas these were once places for young people to escape from– they are in some cases becoming places to aspire to.

From a practical standpoint as well, it’s much easier to start a successful business, become a “mover-and-shaker”, find a date, or even just a decent job if the people around you know you and have common cause with you. It’s also easier to build a temple.

The Jews of Manchester understand this.

Doing a bit of research after watching the video, I came to find out that constructing a “Mikveh” (ritual bath) often happens before the construction of a synagogue. Why? Because strictly speaking, nobody can stay spiritually clean enough to enter a synagogue unless they have access to a Mikveh.

In some cases, it is the first building erected in a new village- even before permanent housing!

In a more general sense, there is a certain amount of groundwork that must take place before humans are ready to build a temple. Roadside shrines? Okay. Home altars? Definitely.

But temples are, by their nature, buildings that require a community. A community to build them, to support them… Frankly, I worry that without a community we could build it, but They would not come.

This idea that we need to strengthen our communities before we can build temples has been said before- in many, many places.

I’m going to go one further:

We need to have neighborhoods before we can build temples.

What would we do in those temples? Do we even know?

We could build the largest, most opulent temple in history equidistant from all the adherents of Tradition X in America and no one would ever use it.

As we know from studying our polytheistic history, the worship of a particular deity varied widely from place to place. Unlike the folks in the video, we are not following a set of written rules dating back thousands of years- nor should we. We should be developing living traditions rooted in a time and place.

Our traditions are broken, our liturgies muddled at best- wholly absent in many cases! If we remain broken from each other physically as well, how will we repair or replace that which was lost?

It is not enough to simply raise children in our faiths if we are raising them to live alone.

Multigenerational traditions alone will not save us- I know a devotee of a familial Hellenistic tradition dating back several generations. She now faces the extinction of her tradition because her only child has converted to another religion.

We need to look beyond the blinders of our homogenizing over-culture and recognize that our generation carries the responsibility of creating more than academic treatises and solitary rituals. To do what is required of us requires that we recognize something unusual:

We are immigrants in our own homeland.

Like the Jews, the Irish, the Poles, the Italians, the Germans, the Belarusians, and many, many of our ancestors- we are a people set apart. In time, our polytheisms will hopefully grow and become widely accepted.

For now though, we need to recognize that we are barely treading water until we have places of our own. These need not be specific to a particular tradition or pantheon, either- only specific to a polytheistic worldview.

Back in Europe, Christians and Jews from a given country often lived in segregated communities. Here in the United States they often had more in common with each other than with the general populace- language, if nothing else. The Irish-American tradition of boiling corned beef (instead of bacon) derives from the formerly close contact between Irish immigrants and Jewish butchers in cities like New York and Boston.

We need to establish polytheist neighborhoods in several parts of the country.

We need to start moving close together. We need to start creating new traditions (in the informal sense) there. We need to start supporting each other there and helping others to move there.

Only then can we begin to staunch two thousand years of bleeding. Only then can we begin to move beyond healing into growth.

Maybe then, we can build a temple. Or two… or hundreds.

-In Deos Confidimus