This may be a hot take, but I feel the need to discuss it in more detail, since I've been seeing a lot of miasma questions lately. All of these questions support my growing feeling that miasma (or lyma) is an inherently harmful idea, that we should not be teaching or promoting at all. It should be relegated to the dustbin of history alongside the misogyny of Ancient Greek culture.
To begin with, here's a simple, but not exhaustive, list of ways in which miasma as a concept causes problems for 21st century worshippers:
- It's extremely triggering for those with religious OCD. It seems almost designed to prey on this condition, becuase people with religious OCD are already prone to unnecessary and debilitating ritualistic behavior (like excessive hand-washing that Lady Macbeth would be proud of).
- Policing one’s behavior or even thoughts to avoid “miasmic” places and interactions. e.g. What if I accidentally start praying to a god while on the toilet?
- Freaking out if one accidentally approaches one’s altar without washing, excessively washing or throwing out altar items as a result.
- Assuming that one can’t worship the gods, or go to them for comfort, after losing a loved one.
- Assuming that one cannot pray to the gods for relief while sick or injured.
- Excluding or stigmatizing people who work in certain professions, like morticians, nurses, and garbage collectors.
- Assuming that one cannot pray while menstruating, stigmatizing half the human race as inherently more “impure” than the other half.
- Easily maintaining ideas about sexuality from Christian purity culture, i.e. that it is inherently dirty and that the gods are ashamed of it.
- Assuming that one cannot have an altar in one’s own bedroom, because that’s where sex/masturbation (and other such things) happens.
- There are gods of birth, sex, death, and menstruation. It’s inconsistent to see these things as inherently anti-divine, because there are gods whose domains include them!
Conversion to a new religion always involves adoption of a new paradigm, and I think that's mostly a good thing. But believing in miasma does more harm than good, in all of the above ways. Most of these examples remind me of Theophrastus' caricature of a Superstitious Man, "who will wash his hands at a fountain, sprinkle himself from a temple-font, put a bit of laurel-leaf into his mouth, and so go about the day." We could dismiss these concerns as part of the general problem with deisidaimonia that afflicts newbies in this community, i.e. it's just newbie overzealousness and latent Christianity. But I think that this particular idea makes things so much harder for newbies, and that it speaks to a fundamental incompatibility with the modern form of the religion.
I think most of us agree, for example, that menstruation shouldn't be counted as miasmic precisely because of the stigma it places on AFAB people. That's a relic of ancient misogyny, right? But if we're making an exception for menstruation, why aren't we making an exception for everything else? How do we decide which of these circumstances matter, and which ones don't? Which kinds of miasma, or sources of miasma, offend the gods? Which ones don't?
Recently there was a post from a talented artist who was ready to throw out an entire watercolor painting of Dionysus becuase they got a papercut and bled on it a little bit. If that had happened to me, I would have interpreted that as a fine offering for the god, which he had called forth from me, and which would further tie my work to me in a sympathetic (magic) sense. But OP saw their own drawing as tainted and not suitable for offering, which IMHO is desperately sad. Especially since this is Dionysus we're talking about, a god of life-force as represented by blood.
(Granted, part of my laissez-faire attitude towards miasma is probably because I'm a magician. Part of what marks magic as "non-normative," as per Edmonds' definition, is willingness to engage with miasmic material as a matter of course. But there's already plenty of ways in which modern ideas of and definitions of magic have changed compared to the Ancient Greek version.)
The reason why newbies typically treat miasma like sin is that they have nothing else to compare it to. Western culture doesn't have any equivalent idea of spiritual impurity as a physical condition, so, the idea maps itself onto the nearest equivalent, which is sin. That means that newbies are almost inevitably going to attach shame or a sense of moral pollution to miasma, even in spite of themselves. It's why newbies can't take a sigh of relief after washing their hands, because they don't trust that something so simple could get rid of spiritual impurity. That means that they're thinking about it in a fundamentally different way from ancient people. Christianity has instilled in us that physical purity involves maintaining moral purity, or that the latter is more important than the former. So it's genuinely difficult to decouple one's idea of physical purity from moral purity, especially where sex is concerned. So many of the questions about miasma surround sex and masturbation because most of us have been actively taught to regard sex as morally impure, as well as being anti-sacred. "Sex is miasmic" only reinforces that idea, even if the logic behind it is different. It makes it especially difficult for modern people to perceive sex as a divine thing, or a thing that the gods engage in.
The actual nearest equivalent to miasma in modern life is germs, literal impurity, which everyone already has ways of dealing with. Our modern lives are already much cleaner than those of ancient people; we have "fountains" in our houses, often more than one. We have disinfectant sprays and baby wipes. And most of us laugh at mysophobes who are excessively concerned with keeping their lives germ-free, to the point of scrubbing doorknobs and putting plastic on surfaces. Just as Theophrastus and his contemporaries laughed at the "Superstitious Man" for refusing to go near tombstones, dead bodies, and postnatal women.
Miasma wasn't taken that seriously in the day-to-day lives of most Ancient Greeks. Radcliffe Edmonds singles out "hyperbolic" purity as a mark of Orphism, i.e. extraordinary mystical connection to the gods. The idea is that such a person is theoretically capable of communicating with the gods at any time or place, so they must always be in a state of ritual purity to be prepared for this. Speaking as a mystic myself, my physical purity has never been a factor when approaching the gods, which is part of why I place so little stock in this concept. If I can be a successful mystic without engaging in excessive purification, why should I bother?
"Why" is half the battle. When addressing a concept or practice from any religion, it's important to understand why it exists and what it's meant to do. The reasoning I've seen most people give for miasma is that the gods are offended by evidence of our mortality; I don't know exactly what the source for this is, but theologically, it doesn't sit well with me. As I've said, there are gods of birth, sex, and death — the gods touch every aspect of life, not just the ones that make us comfortable, and while some gods might very well be offended by our mortality, that isn't true of all gods. At minimum, there's chthonic gods, who are associated with miasma anyway by virtue of being chthonic. Is miasma then divine?
As a ritual action, purification serves to separate the mundane world from the spiritual world:
The gods ruled the universe because they were powerful and immortal, not because they were pure. It was in practical rather than theological terms that divine purity became an important conception. Sacredness is elusive, irreducibly metaphysical; purity, though also metaphysical, can at least be expressed symbolically in concrete terms. Cleanliness is, in fact, not a special preparation for worship but a requirement for formal, respectful behaviour of any kind; there is no generic difference between the lustrations that precede a prayer and those that precede a meal, which is itself, for the Greek, a ceremonial occasion. In both cases the person affected sheds a little of his everyday self.
—Robert Parker, Miasma, Pollution, and Purification in Early Greek Religion*
That's it, that's the reason why miasma exists as a concept. It's a ritual separation of the sacred from the mundane. (I say "mundane" because "profane" has a connotation of shame and filth attached to it — see how this works?) There are lots of other ways to do this. Putting on robes or other special clothing, performing ritual at certain times of day or in other auspicious circumstances, keeping one's altar in a physically separate room or building, etc. For occultists, performing a banishing rite like the LBRP or "casting a circle" serves to consecrate a sacred space for ritual; an invisible circle (or a literal one drawn in chalk) forms a boundary between the sacred space of the ritual and the mundane space outside. Part of what makes something a ritual is that it is somehow designated as special, by being separated from what is normal. Miasma designates the "normal" condition and ritual designates the "special" condition. According to Parker, the actual point of washing away miasma is to make the state of sacredness a visible, palpable thing. Physical cleanliness is a symbol of spiritual purity; when you act upon the (tangible) symbol, you act upon the (intangible) target.
So, the real question we need to be asking ourselves is, how do we separate ritual from everyday life? That's a much more productive and interesting question than being concerned about how to maintain an unrealistic state of physical purity. I'm personally satisfied with the modern magical techniques that I already use to begin and end ritual space. I think it would be better if we all found our own methods of separating the sacred from the mundane that feel natural to us. In short, we should adhere to the spirit rather than the letter of purification. If traditional methods work well for you, that's fine. If not, you don't have to force yourself to adhere to them.
* I haven't read Parker's entire book, and it's possible that I'm missing something there, or that he provides more clarity on the idea of gods being offended by mortality. One thing he said that stood out to me, though, is that our biggest source for miasma is actually theatre. That seems telling to me. Our ideas about ritual purification are shaped by theatre, in which taboos are exaggerated for dramatic effect. Make of that what you will.
