What are your guilty pleasures? Mine at present are singing loudly to the Indigo Girls. Badly, and out of tune. Gobbling easter chocolate indelicately and sprawling across the living room sofa. I do all of these things only when I am alone in the house, so why do they all entail a modicum of guilt?
Beltane is traditionally the time of year when pleasure rules. The spring sap has risen, and, priapic, Pan roams the forest and the Green Man lurks in the dark woods. In the past, at this time of year young couples would go a-maying, which was more or less a euphemism for running off into the woods to shag behind a tree. These May Weddings were accepted within the community, and children from these unions were exempt from the bastardy tax.
"Ben Jonson writes “Out of my doors, you sons of noise and tumult, begot on an ill May-day.” The children of May marriages were often called Jackson, Hodson or Robinson since they were the children of the Jack in the Green, Hod (a woodland sprite) or Robin Goodfellow (or Robin Hood, another form of the Green Man)." (excerpt from a good essay on May Day)
So why, in a religion that embraces pleasure, do we still have such an ambivalent relationship with it? I think that in part this stems from a lack of group consensus. In our modern era we are unlikely to find ourselves living in a village which sanctions anonymous sex in the woods one night of the year. Even if we do find ourselves within an open-minded community, it is unlikely that this is the only community of which we are a part. We must still go to work, see our non-magical friends, eat dinner with non-magical flatmates, put on a veneer of "respectability".
There's that word. Respectability. I wonder if that isn't why we don't speak of our guilty pleasures more often. Would you take me seriously as a doctor if you knew that I liked to watch cartoons and eat children's breakfast cereal on my days off? (for example). Or would you respect my opinion as much if you knew that I owned and prized the various works of David Icke? (I don't).
You see, even writing about David Icke has made me feel like less of a person. The thought that you might misinterpret me and think that I have any interest whatsoever in David Icke makes me reluctant to write about him. Even now I'm wondering which unsavoury character might stumble across my blog directly as a consequence of me writing about David Icke.
So you see, dreams are fragile things. Our perception of ourselves is built on a tissue of dreams and hopes and fears and for most people relies on acceptance and respectability. Our pleasures are directly linked to our self-perception, so if you judge us based on our pleasures, you judge our dreams.
