In Defense of “Cosplaygans”

The other day, I was mentally rabbitholing the connections between Sherwood Forest Faire, EarthSpirit’s Rites of Spring, and Earth Spirit People of Texas while researching the Trolls movie franchise for work and started ruminating on my own aversion to “festival” paganism. To be fair, quite a bit of that is my own curmudgeonliness. If I’m being honest, there’s a bit of moral weakness in conflating my form of “being serious” with being right.

That way lies aristocratic nonsense.

A broader cultural expression of this lies in the term “cosplaygan” that I saw bouncing around the Internet awhile back. I’ve also seen “BS Pagans” (Beltaine-Samhain, plus allusions to the other BS). This is a callback to “C&E” Christians (Christmas & Easter).  “Ren Faire Polytheists” is another pejorative. Perhaps the most telling and important descriptor is “Lifestyle Pagans” or “Lifestyle Polytheists”.

The implication in all of these terms being that the persons involved are merely pretending- that they like the trappings of our faiths, but not the substance. To some degree, this is likely a valid criticism, both of these persons and the culture of many festivals. Many of them probably are just there for the mead, garb, dancing, sex, or whatever.

That doesn’t mean it’s okay for me (or anyone) to feel all smug and self-righteous about it.

We say “the Gods call whom They will for Their own reasons” all the time, but when faced with Lifestyle Polytheists, there’s a tendency to dismiss these people out of hand, minimizing their contributions to larger communities and the long-term plans of many Gods. Realizing my own culpability on this count, I felt it important to sit myself down and challenge these assumptions with an eye towards trying to understand what certain Gods might see in so-called cosplaygans?

I think it’s important here to draw a couple of distinctions here as well. By “Lifestyle”, I’m not referring to seekers- newcomers who might be fumbling around a bit or struggling to find a path, but who are sincerely interested in deeper connections with divinities, ancestors, and/or spirits. It’s not uncommon for seekers to find some attraction to festival culture, just as there are many longstanding, deeply religious polytheists who regularly attend such events.

I’m also not talking the sort of drunken asshat who blunders into the middle of a solemn rite to Athena wearing a plastic “viking” helmet and a speedo looking for the “bake n’ ale”. That guy’s most likely a sacrilegious dickhead and needs to be kicked out of the county. So too with evangelical atheists who infiltrate for the purposes of trying to convert us.* You don’t need that kind of negativity in your life.

The folks I am discussing are those whose interest in polytheism or paganism is pretty much skin deep. Perhaps they only attend a couple of public rituals or festivals a year and don’t really have much of a home cultus. Maybe they like to dress up in “witchy” garb and dance around a maypole, but don’t consider themselves religious. They could even really just be there for the partying or TikTok likes.

Why would the Gods call them? Have the Gods called them at all?

In the sense of a Divine Call to service, probably not. Still, there is something in our polytheisms or in “big tent” paganism that draws them. Some emptiness in their lives is better filled amongst our people than amongst other groups. After all, there are plenty of subcultures that hold similar events- sporting events are ritualistic, “burns” are quite similar to pagan festivals in many ways, there are groups holding dances and barbecues and concerts indoors and out all over the world almost any day of the year.

Why us in particular?

The only answer I can come up with is the numinous quality of religious faith, even for those who don’t consciously accept it. Even if they don’t believe in it, don’t want to commit to a regular practice, fear to acknowledge the existence of Someones far greater than themselves… Even then, there is wholeness in experiencing it on a bodily level, a preconscious level. There is health in that, a shift towards right relation in the face of a sick overculture.

I think that is the first reason lifestyle polytheists deserve acceptance and understanding- because I believe the Gods are calling these folks to Them, but by means adapted to the needs of those persons. Remember, even historically, very few people got the equivalent of a burning bush. The Gods have many ways to reach us and none is inherently more worthy than another.

As I continued to ponder this, I realized another parallel between our faiths and Fandom- it was not the hardcore fans who normalized being into “geeky” stuff. As much as there were deeply committed community servants who organized events and kept the core of fannish subcultures alive, these leaders were almost never the same folks who made it acceptible.

Instead, it was the married parents who only got to fly their geek flag a few times a year. It was lawyers, doctors, mechanics, politicians, actors, and countless other “boring” people who the “serious” fans often tried to gatekeep out of Fandom. Ultimately, it was “lifestyle” fans who moved the bar and made Star Trek or Lord of the Rings into things one could discuss in a sports bar or a high school hallway without getting beat up.

Many of our Gods are working strategies far longer than human lifespans. It makes a great deal of sense to me that at least some of Them are utilizing safety in numbers as part of those strategies.

That’s not to say They are prioritizing quantity over quality, either. To reiterate my first point, I think these Gods are calling people They want, but within the limitations of our overculture and the many ways people are damaged by it.

That brings me to another point.

If we replace “lifestyle” with “non-observant” and “Pagan” with “Jew”, very few of us would look at said person with the same self-righteous judgment. We recognize that someone who never goes to Temple but has a Passover Seder most years is still safeguarding a tradition. Sure, the rabbis and strictly observant Jews are doing a lot of the heavy lifting of preserving their culture and traditions; but, so the folks who only attend services for weddings, funerals, and bar/bat mitzvahs are contributing, too.

If we look back at historical polytheists, this was likely the case with many of them as well. Most ancient Greeks or Romans likely had little in the way of devotional relations with their Gods. Rather, they engaged in certain cultural practices without really thinking about them, attended the occasional sacrifice or festival (in part for the pageantry, food, and drink), and probably only tried to reach out to the Gods through a priest or folk magic when they needed something.

We see this pattern reflected in many ancient cultures and also in modern, unbroken traditions like Shinto or Hinduism. I remember reading an article some years back by a Shinto priest in which he mentioned that many Japanese people who consider themselves non-religious still tend a kamidana in their homes and call on priests for various life events, even things as seemingly mundane to us as buying a car.

His point was that Shinto was a cultural force. These aspects of their religion were nearly invisible to the people within that tradition because the activities were so normal and familiar. As with the rabbi, the Shinto shrine kannushi and miko are doing the heavy lifting, but it is the “lifestyle” Shinto practitioners who keep the traditions relevant and alive in the broader world.

“I am not going to talk about religious beliefs but about matters so obvious that it has gone out of style to mention them… Decency is not news. It is buried in the obituaries, but it is a force stronger than crime.” – Robert A. Heinlein, This I Believe

I read, time and again, complaints by various polytheist and pagan clergy about the lack of devotion in our communities. When such charges are levied against those who claim to be clergy or following some other Divine Calling, they should be taken seriously. So too in the case of “High Priestess Instagramma of the Fairy Fortress Witches” or “Lord Alastair MoonTumblr”.

Those in positions of religious or quasi-religious (magical) responsibility should definitely be doing their darnedest to practice what they preach.

But they were never the bulk of those who practiced and sustained historical polytheist traditions. I see no reason that would have suddenly changed, especially given the challenges of our simultaneously monotheistic and atheistic overculture.

Rather, and I promise I’m getting to the crux of my third point, I believe the Gods understand humanity better than we understand ourselves, especially as a collective species.

I think They know that things like temples, villages, large offerings, and mass public rituals are completely unsustainable by the relatively small body of clergy available to any faith. These things are only possible when large bodies of people do them, not just once or twice, but so regularly that not doing them becomes unthinkable.

“Cancel Christmas?! We can’t do that!”

Yet it is the C&E Christians and the lifestyle Christmas celebrators who make it so. There is no Natural law forcing us to celebrate it. If only the priests and the deeply devoted Christians kept that holiday, it would rapidly fade from popular consciousness.

This, I believe, is the third, and most powerful reason the Gods are calling lifestyle polytheists- without them, no tradition remains viable. It crumbles for lack of vitality.

While theologians, trained clergy, and other religious experts are still extremely important for maintaining the core integrity of any tradition, our communities and faiths need a certain popular tension to keep them relevant. It is literally the job of priests and the like to pull people toward the Gods. It is also the natural role of the least faithful in any tradition to pull back, citing mundane concerns and doubts.

On the surface, it might seem like lifestyle polytheists are necessarily moving further from the Gods, yet they do not act as a bloc. Many of them will remain within the Gods’ space. By this tension, the space between the core of the tradition and its loosest hangers-on stretches. If our clergy and most faithful remain steadfast in their devotion, they shift the Overton Window towards the Gods and a more viable tradition over time.

As this happens, many of those who were once barely devotional now find themselves closer to the faithful simply because their rote praxis is suddenly further from the outskirts. It is likely too that some of those whose devotion was only skin deep will feel the attraction of this deeper, broader pool and desire to come closer to the Gods.

In this process, I think it is important for us to bear in mind the possibility that some of our Gods expressly called these “cosplaygans” into polytheist and pagan communities for this (or some other) important purpose. By this, I mean that they, as with all of the faithful, are intended as co-creators of the new and reborn traditions the Gods want built.

Obviously, it is important that clergy and other polytheist leaders maintain the sanctity and integrity of their traditions and humanity’s relations with the Gods. At the same time, we (and especially I ) shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the folks who are just here for the food.

-In Deos Confidimus

* I added this note about evangelical atheist infiltrators after a discussion with Marcus Herminius early this morning. However, I feel a strong need to include the caveat that some people who present as atheists may actually be seekers whose heart led them to our traditions to heal, but whose head is still poisoned by the Overculture. Such cases make a powerful case for the need for communities that are spiritually deeper than public rituals but less intense than many initiatory paths- a “Sunday school” equivalent, if you will.