(Note: This post contains discussion of a particular "pagan" religion and its relation to ethics, especially ecological and animal-rights ethics. I recognize this is not everyone's shot of tequila. By all means, feel free to skip this one. I don't pretend this represents any kind of absolute moral system, and I don't want to get weird email about it.)
I don't usually talk about my religious practice; I'm often assumed to be an atheist, and I'm fine with that, but I believe deeply in Greco-Roman polytheism ("paganism.") I've been thinking a lot lately about how my faith applies specifically to ecological and animal issues.
A recurring theme in the myths associated with my faith is theoxenia - the motif of the gods, disguised in human form, rewarding mortals for showing them hospitality (xenia) and kindness - or punishing mortals for treating them with cruelty or violence. Demeter, goddess of the harvest, is traditionally believed to have visited many homes while wandering the earth mourning her daughter, Persephone. Where she was warmly received, she left gifts and knowledge of agriculture, such as a gift of the first fig tree to Phytalos. The same theme applies to Dionysus in Nonnus's epic "Dionysiaca"; being given hospitality by a shepherd (with a meal notably not including meat) he departs after having taught the shepherd knowledge of wine-making.
Do I believe in these traditions as literal history? No; my gods are immaterial, and do not walk the earth themselves. I believe the myths have instructional value, however. Kindness and warmth toward guests is clearly pleasing to the pantheon, as it is one of the most common recurring elements in the Hellenic religious canon. What should I take away from this? If someone I don't know comes to my door, that I should give them a meal?
Yes, probably, but that's not all.
The Neoplatonic philosophy arose in the final centuries of classical antiquity, and offered a highly internally consistent interpretation of the Hellenic religion on top of a monistic idealist cosmology influenced by the Pythagoreans. While the philosophy is complex and had varying interpretations, most notably from Plotinus and Proclus, the central element is this[1]: everything that exists is a procession from unity to multiplicity. The One, self-sufficient and perfect, emanates from itself a chain of steadily less universal entities including the classical pantheon and, finally, the material world of humans and animals. Everything is a less perfect image of what is ontologically prior to it. This means, among other things, that people (and probably animals, though there was some disagreement on this point) possess literal fragments of divine souls.[2]
This has implications.
One that I can't avoid is that animals and people are, in a real sense, gods, albeit in a highly diminished form and mixed up with matter. This does not mean that we are immortal or omnipotent, but does mean that every one of us - humans, earthworms, those unsettling fish-tongue-parasite things, dogs, but possibly not plants[3] - has a glowing ember linking us to a god whose soul is ontologically prior to our own. In this sense, the gods really *do* walk among us seeking compassion and warmth.
Iamblichus and Proclus, if they were here, would be shouting at me right now. After all, they have argued that animals possess souls - but only irrational souls, not the rational souls that allow humans to participate in intellect. This seems to me to be both special pleading and irrelevant; if the soul is a part of a divine series, it is holy regardless of whether it contains the capacity for rationality, and there is not a consensus among philosophers in antiquity that it does not. For instance, Porphyry - the student of Plotinus and mentor of Iamblichus - states in the third book of his treatise on vegetarianism: "Every soul which participates of sense and memory is rational." He concludes that harming animals is both impious and unjust.
The association of causing harm to animals with impiety is not only noted by Porphyry. Plutarch, the prominent Middle Platonist, asks us this in his Moralia: "Why impiously offend law-giving Demeter and bring shame upon Dionysus, lord of the cultivated vine, the gracious one, as if you did not receive enough from their hands? Are you not ashamed to mingle domestic crops with blood and gore?" Interestingly, the two deities he cites as being specifically dishonored by meat-eating are arguably the two that are most heavily associated with the theoxenia motif.
Realistically, any critique of meat-eating also has to apply to ecological destruction.[4] The result is the same; animal lives are destroyed in the interest of human needs, whether for food or for goods or for infrastructure or even for entertainment. Nature is holy not only because of abstract notions of aesthetic beauty, but because it is home to living persons with their own desires, experiences, and relationships - and their own particular divine spark, shared in common with everything else but also particular to the being carrying it. Nature is an emanation with parts independently participating in Providence, not raw material for humans to use up as part of our march toward self-destruction.
There are a few potential avenues of criticism here. The first and most obvious is the prevalence of animal sacrifice in the ancient world. Certainly it was widespread, but it was not without its critics even at the time; Pythagoras and Porphyry both took exception to the practice. Porphyry in particular associates animal sacrifice with "a swarm of evils," notes the universally-acknowledged ritual impurity of corpses[5], and compares the practice unfavorably with the practice of human sacrifice, long abolished in his time. Clearly, animal sacrifice is not an effective "gotcha" against the impiety of animal use - it was already looked on with disdain in antiquity.
None of this is intended to diminish conventional animal-rights arguments; instead, I feel it's complimentary to them. I made those arguments myself in my recent "Animals" post. I do, however, believe that animals have dignity that is relevant to my faith, and I see the reflections of that dignity, that fundamental link to the divine, in the mythological and philosophical tradition. I can't escape the conclusion that if I do not do right by the other living things that share in the nature of the gods, I am failing to honor my own faith - and any offering I make to the gods is made with ichor-stained hands.[6]
[1] This is a grotesque oversimplification, but this post is not entitled "Introduction to Neoplatonism: An Analysis of Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus."
[2] Orphic cosmology regarding souls is probably similar enough to apply here too - though to my understanding, all souls in the Orphic system derive from Dionysus's divine soul rather than from one or more henads.
[3] What beings have particular souls in the Neoplatonic system is a source of discussion both in antiquity and today. I'm comfortable seating the pneumatikon okhema - the soul's physical vehicle - in the brain, and concluding that if a creature has a brain, it has a particular soul, and therefore possesses experience. The material world as a whole has its own undifferentiated soul, which presumably would include rocks, dirt, and possibly plants.
[4] Setting aside the specifics of, for instance, factory farming - which creates animals in order to kill them.
[5] Abstinentia, book 2 -
But if in the sacred rites which are here, those that are priests and diviners order both themselves and others to abstain from sepulchres, from impious men, from menstrual purgations, and from venereal congress, and likewise from base and mournful spectacles, and from those auditions which excite the passions, (because frequently, through those that are present being impure, something appears which disturbs the diviner; on which account it is said, that to sacrifice inopportunely, is attended with greater detriment than gain); if this, therefore, is the case, will he, who is the priest of the father of all things, suffer himself to become the sepulchre of dead bodies?
[6] This brings to mind Cassandra's words in "Agamemnon" by Aeschylus:
CHORUS: What mind-nausea's this, that makes you spit and hack?
CASSANDRA: The palace stinks. It stinks of dripping blood.
CHORUS: It's just the scent of our offerings to the gods.
CASSANDRA: It sweeps over me like the bad breath from a tomb.