Repeat episode: Interview with Michael of the Atheopagan Society Council

We aren't able to record a new episode this week, so here is a great interview we did with Michael H. of the Atheopagan Society Council. See you next week!

S3E41 TRANSCRIPT:

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Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm Mark, one of your hosts.

Yucca: and I'm Yucca.

Mark: and today we have a really exciting episode. We have an interview with a member of the Atheopagan Society Council, Michael, who is joining us today, and is gonna tell us about his journey and what this community means to him and his vision for the future and all kinds of cool stuff.

So welcome.

Michael: Well, thank you very much for having me.

Mark: I'm delighted to have you here,

Yucca: Thanks for coming on.

Michael: Yeah, no, I'm excited.

Yucca: Yeah. So why don't we start with so who are you? Right? What's, what's your journey been to get here?

Michael: Gosh. Well, I kind of have to start at the very beginning. So my name's Michael and you know, I've, I start, sometimes I go by Mícheál, which is my Irish, the Irish version of my name. And that's something I've been using more as I've been involved in the Pagan community. My parents are both Irish and.

They moved to the United States in their early eighties cuz my dad got a green card working over there

Mark: Hmm.

Michael: and I was born in America. And then they decided they want to move back to Ireland then in 1991. So already I had this kind of dissected identity. Was I American or was I Irish? I never really lost my American accent.

When I, when I moved to Ireland my sister who was born in Ireland, she actually has a slight American accent just from living with me. So she never people always ask her, are you, are you American? And she's like, I've never lived there. So it's funny that it's kind of stuck with her, but I moved to Ireland and I suddenly was kind of got this culture shock at the age of five and moving to this new country.

And my mother has a very large family, so she has like, two, two brothers and seven sisters, and then I've got like 30 cousins. So , it was a big, a big change from AmeriCorps. It was just the three of us. Moving back to Ireland and. It was a very, you know, Ireland, you know, is, would've been considered a very Catholic country, and it's been kind of secularizing since the nineties up until now.

But back then it was still quite Catholic. Like homosexuality was only decriminalized in 1992 and divorce was only made legal in 1995. So, I guess the first kind of sense of, of what I meant to be Irish back then was, You know, you learned Irish in school, you learned to speak Irish in school, and this was very it wasn't taught very well, I would say, and I think most Irish people would agree with that.

It's kind of taught like almost like Latin or something as a dead language rather than as a living language. So you're spending time learning all this grammar. And you don't kind of develop that love of it that I think you should. I did go to like Irish summer camp in the Gaeltacht . The Gaeltacht is the Irish speaking area of Ireland, and I kind of became aware of my Irishness, you know, just through being part of all this and also. I would've introduced myself as American when I was little but people didn't really like that. It was kind of a, like a weird thing to do. So my mom eventually told me, maybe you should just stop paying that. And so throughout my I, you know, as I mentioned, it was a very Catholic country.

And when I was in the Gaeltacht in Irish summer camp one of the kids said they were atheist. And I was like, what does that mean? I'm like, I don't believe in God. And I was, and in my head I was like, I didn't know you could do that, I didn't know that was an option. . So I kind of thought about it for a while.

I became, we started studying the Reformation in school when I was about 14. And then I learned that Catholics believed in transubstantiation and nobody had really mentioned that before. They didn't really teach the catechism very well, I guess. I'd done my communion and my confirmation, but nobody ever mentioned that.

We literally believed that the, the body and blood, you know, was that the bread and water? Oh, sorry. The bread and wine actually became literally, And the body. And I thought that was a very strange thing, that that was a literal thing. It wasn't just symbolic. And then we also studied Calvinism and all that stuff. And I was like, then I started to read the Bible and I was like, then it fun, it finally just dawned on me that I didn't believe any of this, and it was kind of liberating.

But it was kind of a way of being d. In a very homogenous society too. You could be a bit of a rebel. So I think I was one of those annoying teenagers who was always questioning everybody and having, trying to have debates with everybody about religion and they didn't enjoy that . And so I went through school and I just remember hating studying the Irish language until eventually when I left school.

On the last day, I actually took all my. My Irish textbooks and burnt them and I feel I . Yeah. I mean I feel so much guilt and regret about that and I think about that how important it's to me now and that, that was a real shame that, but I didn't, partially I didn't put the work in, but also I just think the structure.

Was not there. I mean so many Irish people come out of outta school not really know, knowing how to speak the language, you know, and I think it is an effective col colonization as well, where, you know, you consider English is a useful language and learning French or Spanish, that's a useful thing, but there's no use for Irish in people's minds, which is a, and I find that a real shame and I. could go back and change that. In university I studied anthropology and history because I was very interested in religion. All throughout my teenage years, I was obsessed with learning about world religions, you know, there was a world religion class in, in secondary school. I didn't get into it, but I begged the teacher to allow me to.

Into it because I was so interested in the topic. And he was like, fine, fine. And he kind of thought he'd humor me in one class one day and he was like, well, Michael, maybe you could talk about satanism. That's the topic for today. And I was like, well, let's start with Al Crowley. And he was like, okay, maybe he actually knows what he is talking about So, I went, I. I went to the university sorry, national University of Ireland, Minuth Campus. And it's funny because that used to be known as so it's actually, it's two campuses. They're St. Patrick's college, which is like a, a seminary for priests. And there's the I, which is like the secular version, and they're both, but they both share the same compass. So it's funny, it used to be the, the biggest seminary in Europe. They call it the priest factory cuz they pumped out so many priests that sent, sent them all over the world. And it's when you go out and you walk down the corridors, you see all the graduating classes. So you go back to 1950 and you see a graduating class of like a hundred priests.

And every year as you're going down the corridor, it gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Until I think the year I graduated, there was like two people graduating as priests. Yeah. So that was, that was a, I decided to study history and anthropology at n Y Minuth and one of the books that I read. Was kind of a gateway into thinking about land and language, which are two things that are really important to me in my, when I think about Paganism.

It's a book called wisdom Sits in Places by Keith Bato, bass by Keith Bassell, and. I'm just gonna read a little bit here from the book because he was an anthropologist working with the Apache, the Western Apache, to try and remap the land using the Native Apache words rather than the, the English words. So trying to make a native map and working with Apache people to find all the true, the true names of …