Pantheism

Pantheism

Summer Moon Ceremony June 2017

What is Pantheism?

The first definition is a doctrine that identifies God with the universe or regards the universe as a manifestation of God.  Our pre-Christian Beguine mothers were Pantheists.  They saw God in each other.  They saw God in their Sisters.  They saw God in their children.  They saw God in their tribe and in the Earth they occupied.

The second definition of pantheism is a more rarely used form of the word, and that is “worship that admits or tolerates all gods”.  Our ancient Beguine mothers also were pantheists by that definition.

Emily Hursh writes, in Beguineing to a look a lot like Medieval:

The Beguines had the misfortune of being associated through geography, and gender, with the Brethren of the Free Spirit. The Brethren of the Free Spirit was a lay (not ordained) Christian movement with some radical beliefs for Christianity: pantheism, and the idea that once the soul had reached a certain level of closeness with God, it was best to let the body indulge all of its base urges in an effort to keep it sort of satisfied and out of the way.  You can imagine how well free love went over in medieval Christendom.  Followers of the Brethren of the Free Spirit were condemned to heresy, and the Beguines, though they didn’t subscribe to these beliefs, were swept up in the zeal to bring the heretics to justice.