What does the Pagan value of hospitality mean in practice?

I know. I know. There is nothing—absolutely nothing, including respect for the earth—that we are allowed to say actually connects modern Pagans together in terms of a value or belief. BUT many European Pagan traditions do explicitly claim “hospitality” as a virtue, requirement or tenant.

Moreover, I have lived in traditional communities all over the world and have never encountered one where hospitality was not a lived value, a primary requirement of ethics and a point of honor.

In remote villages in Bangladesh, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Nepal, the Ukraine and Zimbabwe, I was told that their people live by “the law of hospitality” usually in so many words in their local languages.

Some of these communities, the villages where I lived for a time in Ecuador and Nepal, for instance, were proudly indigenous in their spiritual beliefs and they pointed to the law of hospitality as an important marker of that and something they believed distinguished them from people in non-traditional, industrial society. The other places had a thin Christian or Muslim venire with clear signs of pre-Abrahamic traditions showing through.

Creative Commons image by www napavalley com

We may not call these cultures “Pagan” today because that term is generally only applied to cultures that have asked for the label, primarily modern European Pagans who wish to practice either a reclaimed ancestral tradition or an earth-centered path. But even a rudimentary exploration of anthropology will show that these cultures and ancient European Pagan cultures have a lot in common.

In fact, one of the ways Europeans can successfully follow a pre-Christian ancestral path is to observe and learn from indigenous cultures. This doesn’t mean culturally appropriating their technologies, terms and rituals, but rather looking for the context and how indigenous communities relate spirituality to ethics and to daily life. These things don’t tend to change that much between a remote village in Ecuador and a remote village in Nepal, so it is likely that ancient Europeans were also pretty similar in these matters of ethics and practical spirituality.

That’s all to say that I’m going to make the statement here that hospitality is generally a Pagan value, whether the nitpickers like it or not.

Whew! Having established that I am even allowed to discuss hospitality as an ethical requirement, I am interested in what it means in practical terms, from interpersonal interactions to politics.

Stories tell us that among the ancient Scandinavians rules of hospitality were truly observed. A request for hospitality could not be lightly declined and it was considered a spiritual and moral failing if necessity or danger forced one to refuse. It was shameful if one didn’t have food and drink to offer and not offering what one had was unthinkable.

This was also my experience of being a visitor in indigenous communities. I was invariably given more and better food than my hosts, even in situations where they were clearly suffering nutritionally. I was always careful to be quiet and reserved until I learned the requirements for guest behavior, which are so often part of hospitality rules and can vary from place to place. I always brought gifts but rarely offered to directly pay my hosts unless I could be sure this wouldn’t give offense.

In one memorable encounter, I showed up in a small village at the end of a dirt road in Nepal with a letter from my Nepali friend asking his cousin to help me hike to the even more remote village where his wife and children lived. My friend was an immigrant in the West and we had met through a network of immigrants in a country where I was also a foreigner.

We’d been through some intense things together, including an incident when I had to bandage his serious wounds because his immigration status wouldn’t allow him to go to a hospital without ending up in deportation proceedings. We were tied by strong bonds and those bonds then extended to his cousin by the rules of hospitality.

I was dismayed to see a look of shock and even horror cross the face of the cousin when I finally reached him and handed him the letter from my friend. I could tell something was wrong, but he quickly recovered and greeted me with all due respect. At first, I worried that our friendship broke some rule about relationships between women and men in their culture or some such.

But later the cousin pulled me into a private corner and laid out the problem. which put two of his most important spiritual laws in conflict—hospitality and the rules of ritual.

His toddler was sick and this was connected in traditional belief to the fact that the family had neglected rituals to purify and ward their newly constructed house. A local elder and ritual leader had been called in from a distant village to conduct the necessary rituals. The elder was to leave the next day and the rituals could not be put off. Their tradition had a hard and fast rule that anyone who would sleep in the house that night must participate in the ritual.

From the perspective of my friend’s cousin, this presented a terrible dilemma. He had met only a few western foreigners and they were all Christian missionaries who viewed traditional rituals with disgust and disrespect. He felt pretty sure that I would be the same and this had caused him great discomfort because he had to decide whether or not to postpone the ritual or refuse hospitality to me.

Given that the health and safety of his family was at stake, he had finally decided to do the latter.

Thankfully, he addressed the issue with me openly and forthrightly, and so I was able to put his fears to rest and attend a traditional ritual that few foreigners would be privileged to join. It was one of the most intense and mind-opening events of my twenties, but I have written about the ritual itself elsewhere.

One of the most important concepts I gained from that experience wasn’t in the ritual at all though. It was the relationship of hospitality to ethical and spiritual rules in that culture. Clearly hospitality was a high virtue, but not the highest priority to which all others had to give way. My host was clearly distraught by the idea of refusing hospitality but also prepared to do so in order to obey the rules of the ritual leader and protect his family.

I have thought a lot about the laws of hospitality and how they should apply to my own conduct since then.

Eleven years ago, I was on my way an orphanage to meet my three-month-old daughter for the first time and a meth addict accosted me in a parking lot and begged for money. I was carrying the food to make lunches for my husband and me on the road. I could have stopped and handed her some of the food. We could have done with a little less and the law of hospitality tells me that I should have.

But the moment was among the most intense and emotionally fraught of my life and I instinctively recoiled from her face, so ravaged by the poisons of methamphetamines. And I fled. The woman was not threatening me, only begging. She would likely have used any money I gave her for drugs or alcohol rather than for food, so far gone was her addiction. But I had food—that most essential element of hospitality—right in my hands.

It is one of the most potent regrets of my life that I failed to give hospitality in that stressful moment. I have given it at many other times, but it is the time I didn’t that I remember.

Being a harried mother, I have also kept food for my children’s dinner hidden so that I wouldn’t have to make a whole new meal when guests showed up and I served only drinks and snacks. But these were not hungry guests, just people who didn’t have young kids or an understanding of mother’s work and exhaustion. I am not an extreme or perfect follower of the law of hospitality.

Still the law of hospitality extends far beyond this personal level. Countries where hospitality is expressed as a national value take in far more refugees than others. It is a common myth in North America and Western Europe that these wealthy nations take in more refugees than other countries, but it is far from true. Under the current definition, the top ten nations in terms of numbers of refugees accepted all happen to be countries with a majority Muslim population.

A refugee is defined as a person who has been forced to flee their home due to violence or persecution. Under current definitions utter lawlessness and systemic poverty left in the wake of colonial resource stripping doesn’t even count, though the closed attitude of wealthy nations would be even more apparent if it did.

Hospitality is an often cited tenant of Muslim culture and I have seen it in action in Kazakhstan and Bangladesh. As a young traveler without a clue, I showed up unannounced in out of the way places in both countries and was initially greeted with suspicion bordering on hostility.

But as soon as locals determined that I was a lost and nearly penniless kid rather than a threat, I was swept up in the culture of hospitality, treated as an honored guest, given a seat beside the head of household and provided with everything I might need.

It is apparently need that the law of hospitality responds to, not merely the state of being an outsider. The Muslim, refugee-accepting countries are not notoriously welcoming to everyone, just to those in dire straits.

I wonder how our Pagan ancestors might have seen modern politics and how they might view something like a refugee crisis. There is a strong current of isolationism among modern Pagans, even among those who claim to honor the law of hospitality. They tell me that hospitality means we should give food to a person who is right in front of us, that we shouldn’t fight with a guest and other things that are reminiscent of romanticized historical movies.

They say our ancestors never intended it to mean taking in hungry and desperate strangers. But that isn’t actually how the law of hospitality works in places where it is still a living tradition.

Looking at the evidence, I must say that hospitality should be a broad Pagan value. And hospitality means accepting and helping refugees and thus being Pagan should necessitate that we are in favor of policies that help refugees, whether they are fleeing violence, persecution or starvation.

Conversely, it does not mean that we have to be in favor of accepting every immigrant or that we are supposed to play doormat or not defend our homes, tribe or nation from a threat. While indigenous communities I visited seemed to be less suspicious than Muslim communities, this may well have to do with politics more than with the underlying cultures.

Certainly, it is not always easy to determine whether a person is a traveler minding their own business, a desperate refugee or someone bent on exploitation, distraction or even violence. Our Pagan ancestors had the same problem. This did not mean they didn’t consider hospitality to be a requirement of an honorable person. It just meant and still means that we have to use our intuition and consider it to bring dishonor if we guess wrong and refuse hospitality to a friend or to someone in need.

The modern-day hearth IS the kitchen table

When my husband and I realized the dream of owning our own home 15 years ago, the first thing I did was get a kitchen table.

And this wasn’t just any old table. It had to be THE table. I felt that in my bones.

I grew up in two houses. The first one was little more than a shack. The kitchen table was in the living room and it was makeshift, a piece of plywood on round logs stood up on end. But everything happened at that table. It was the only writing surface in the cabin. It was the place we made things, ate, celebrated holidays, had important talks…

When my father finally finished building “the big house” after ten years, we had a real table in a nook between three big windows next to the kitchen. The table itself was made from the heart of an ancient pie-cherry tree, loving known as “Grandmother cherry tree” to the local children. It is solid enough to dance on and continues to be the beating heart of the Farnam clan, the point to which everyone returns from distant travels and other homes, and the place friends come back to. When you sit at the old cherry-wood table, you know you’re home.

So, I knew the table had to be special. Fortunately, I had the perfect solution. An Egyptian carpenter in Prague was a friend. I commissioned him to build a table to my specifications—eight feet long and four feet wide, and yes, strong enough to dance on if the occasion should ever demand it.

Creative Commons image by Peter Miller

My carpenter friend fell sick and struggled to finish the table and the cabinets I had commissioned before leaving the country for a long convalescence. The result was that the table legs don’t exactly match the floor tiles underneath and the table rocks. So, for fifteen years, I’ve put folded up newspapers under one corner to keep it steady.

But otherwise it is one excellent table. I do actually stand on it regularly—to hang bundles of herbs from the ceiling. And it feels as steady as the floor, thanks to those newspapers and its massive wooden slab.

In that time my table has become a bit battered. I loved it when it glowed with a fine even finish. But since then it has been chopped by knives, hammered on by nutcrackers, drawn on and carved by children, burned by ritual candles reaching the ends of their wicks and scorched by many a hot pan. There are marks I can run my fingers over and bring back a family dinner or incident as clear as day. It has become the heart of my home as well, maybe not as heavy a draw as the great cherry-wood table far away in Oregon, but still worthy.

When we built our house, I was also adamant that we must have a wood stove of some kind, even if we planned to heat mostly through environmentally friendly electrical systems. I thought that the wood stove was the heart of a home, after all. Both of my childhood homes had stoves and in the case of the “big house” even a real stone hearth with broad lava rocks and a curved wooden mantle.

I absorbed from the culture, stories and lore the idea of the hearth as the place of greatest importance in the home, even though experience didn’t bear it out. In my first childhood home, the wood stove was an ugly brown monstrosity that lurked near the door. We never sat around it and the only time it was of primary importance was the few times that a major winter storm knocked out the power and we couldn’t pump water out of the well. We then had to cut chunks of ice and heat them in a metal laundry tub on the wood stove, because the kitchen propane stove was too small.

Even the massive and beautiful hearth in the big house of my childhood is not the heart of the family. It is technically in the center of the house and it takes up an inordinate amount of room. It is where various things are displayed and on some winter evenings people do sit in front of it. But most of the year it just gathers dust.

I see many Pagan blogs and books encouraging modern Pagans to treat their electric or propane kitchen stoves or their radiators like a hearth. We are encouraged to make a small altar near them to the hearth goddess, house spirits or ancestors and to approach work at the stove with reverence. While I don’t see any harm in that I find the comparison to the ancient symbol of the hearth to be a mismatch.

The radiators that carry central heating to the rooms of a house today are so far from the concept of a hearth that trying to treat them as such is often depressing. I’ve done so in hotel rooms and while there was nothing better to do, the concept just wasn’t there. They heat the room. For part of the year, they have a purpose. The rest of the year, they are inert. In warmer areas there is no heating system at all and more likely to be an air-conditioner.

The kitchen stove is a closer concept. At least we cook there. That is where we prepare the food to nurture our families. For many people who are the primary cook in a household, the kitchen stove can take on great importance. But the fact is that it is primarily that person who feels it. It is not actually the center of the home or family. It is part of how we process food. It isn’t meaningless, but it doesn’t have the central importance that the hearth once had.

The ancient hearth was the source of warmth. It was also the place where food was prepared. But its key importance was as the magnet that drew the family or clan together. Certainly it drew them because of the warmth and the food. But it’s most important function was as that beating heart of the basic social unit.

The Pagan concept of hospitality grows out of that. When we talk about giving weary travelers or those in need a place by the hearth, we don’t mean just that we should give them food and shelter. In so far as that practice is crucial to many cultures, it is more about taking someone into the family or community, offering them not just the physical but the social, emotional and spiritual sanctuary of the group.

To be banished from the hearth is to be truly outcast. There is an element of physical loss of sustenance and warmth but it is much more the feeling of rejection and social ostracism that make that such a terrible concept.

And that is why I say that today, the kitchen table is much more the equivalent of the hearth. That is where most people gather. It is a place connected to food and family, home and unity. In some homes the television may play a close second, if the family mostly gathers there. Still with a television, the focus is never on the family. There is never a circle around it by definition. And so, I argue that the table is the best modern equivalent we have.

The sad truth is that far too many homes don’t even have a kitchen table or any other gathering and eating place anymore. Far too many people, particularly those who find themselves trapped in poverty, lack the basic equipment and spaces to cook or eat food at home. They are forced to eat ultra-processed food and this brings with it a whole host of negative health effects. It also generally means that these same people have no place that is the equivalent of the ancient hearth, a symbol shared by every human community on earth with crucial ancestral importance.

That fact may have deep psychological and cultural results, as we not only grow further from nature but also further from the deepest roots of our sense of community and hospitality. For that reason, the hearth as a symbol gains even greater importance. Those of us who do have a kitchen table or another equivalent gathering place do well to honor that place and recognize the great privilege and fortune that having it reflects.

The next time you give thanks for a meal and thank the cooks, the farmers, the animals, the plants, the land and the ancestors, spare a thought for the table itself, the tree it is made of and the hearth it has become.

Of Lughnasadh and solidarity

Over a plastic table at the university grill I laid out my case to two prominent members of the student government counsel about why we should show solidarity with low-income students as drastic cuts in federal financial aid were proposed. 

"That's exactly the problem!" one of the young men glaring at me across the table snapped. "That word."

What word? I combed back through my carefully prepared argument, trying to figure out what faux pas I might have committed in word choice. 

The other young man must have believed my expression of blank confusion. "Solidarity," he said. "That word makes you sound like a communist."

That was more than twenty years ago and it was the first time I heard that "solidarity" is considered a bad word. Unfortunately, that has not changed over the decades. 
 
Even today as progressives are making the word “socialism” halfway respectable, I still don’t hear this more personal term.
 
Solidarity isn’t charity and it isn’t socialism. It is much closer to the Pagan concept of hospitality. It means aid and comfort offered to the cold, the hungry, the wounded, the outcast and those whose harvest was poor last year or for many years, not out of pity but out of a deep understanding of our interconnection.
 
We are always saying that earth-centered spirituality is a big tent and we have very little if any common ground to base any solidarity on. And yet we all recognize "Paganism" when we see it, so there must be something that binds us.
 
Is it our acknowledgement of multiple gods of many different names and conceived of in as many different ways but still with suspiciously similar attributes across the world? Is it our yearning for something authentic, ancestral and rooted? Is it our understanding that the earth, not some man on a cloud, is the true giver of our daily bread?
 
Many of us with European roots wish to be acknowledged as a tradition en par with Native American, African or Hindu traditions that share these bits of common ground with us. But at the same time so many Pagans insist that politics and with it all social justice concerns have no place in our faith.
 
How so? What of that hospitality you speak so highly of? What of gratitude for your metaphorical harvest? What of your desire for native peoples around the world to acknowledge you as honorably seeking out your own ancestral connection?
 
What could the values of Lammas and Lughnasadh, the gratitude and the hospitality toward others possibly mean in today’s world that has been divorced from the land and agriculture, if not solidarity with those who have had hard luck, whether that meant being born in a war-torn and impoverished country or having less opportunity to obtain a secure living in our own country? What could it mean if not sharing what we have to ensure that the earth survives for another cycle of time?
 
You can claim with truth that we Pagans all believe different things. We do. We are vastly different. The words, the traditions and even our core beliefs diverge.

But if you hold some tradition of Lughnasadh or Lammas or even one comparable under some other name, then it is time to match your deeds to  your prayers and libations. Paganism is either real beyond your ritual circle or it is merely the teenage game some have accused us of.

I offer a poem for Lughnasadh and Lammas on the subject of solidarity:

Not to bow to sloth and greed
Nor to build walls of hate
Did Lugh ensure the seed
Or the Norns weave our fate.
You who claim the gods of old,
Who were silenced by crime,
Can least afford to turn cold
To those outcast in our time.
Honor you call for the great,
The ancestors of your blood,
And yet will you rise too late
To stand for right and good?
Odin wandered as it's told
In the guise of hard luck.
And Brigid of flame and gold
Always for justice struck.
Maybe tales are just that,
No more firm than mist.
Old warriors grow fat
And children are mere grist.
But if you call them sacred
And mean your oaths sworn,
It is time to battle hatred
And face the coming storm.
Hospitality for those in need.
Solidarity for those who fight.
The call of the heart’s creed
Is ringing in the night.