What does the Pagan value of hospitality mean in practice?

I know. I know. There is nothing—absolutely nothing, including respect for the earth—that we are allowed to say actually connects modern Pagans together in terms of a value or belief. BUT many European Pagan traditions do explicitly claim “hospitality” as a virtue, requirement or tenant.

Moreover, I have lived in traditional communities all over the world and have never encountered one where hospitality was not a lived value, a primary requirement of ethics and a point of honor.

In remote villages in Bangladesh, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Nepal, the Ukraine and Zimbabwe, I was told that their people live by “the law of hospitality” usually in so many words in their local languages.

Some of these communities, the villages where I lived for a time in Ecuador and Nepal, for instance, were proudly indigenous in their spiritual beliefs and they pointed to the law of hospitality as an important marker of that and something they believed distinguished them from people in non-traditional, industrial society. The other places had a thin Christian or Muslim venire with clear signs of pre-Abrahamic traditions showing through.

Creative Commons image by www napavalley com

We may not call these cultures “Pagan” today because that term is generally only applied to cultures that have asked for the label, primarily modern European Pagans who wish to practice either a reclaimed ancestral tradition or an earth-centered path. But even a rudimentary exploration of anthropology will show that these cultures and ancient European Pagan cultures have a lot in common.

In fact, one of the ways Europeans can successfully follow a pre-Christian ancestral path is to observe and learn from indigenous cultures. This doesn’t mean culturally appropriating their technologies, terms and rituals, but rather looking for the context and how indigenous communities relate spirituality to ethics and to daily life. These things don’t tend to change that much between a remote village in Ecuador and a remote village in Nepal, so it is likely that ancient Europeans were also pretty similar in these matters of ethics and practical spirituality.

That’s all to say that I’m going to make the statement here that hospitality is generally a Pagan value, whether the nitpickers like it or not.

Whew! Having established that I am even allowed to discuss hospitality as an ethical requirement, I am interested in what it means in practical terms, from interpersonal interactions to politics.

Stories tell us that among the ancient Scandinavians rules of hospitality were truly observed. A request for hospitality could not be lightly declined and it was considered a spiritual and moral failing if necessity or danger forced one to refuse. It was shameful if one didn’t have food and drink to offer and not offering what one had was unthinkable.

This was also my experience of being a visitor in indigenous communities. I was invariably given more and better food than my hosts, even in situations where they were clearly suffering nutritionally. I was always careful to be quiet and reserved until I learned the requirements for guest behavior, which are so often part of hospitality rules and can vary from place to place. I always brought gifts but rarely offered to directly pay my hosts unless I could be sure this wouldn’t give offense.

In one memorable encounter, I showed up in a small village at the end of a dirt road in Nepal with a letter from my Nepali friend asking his cousin to help me hike to the even more remote village where his wife and children lived. My friend was an immigrant in the West and we had met through a network of immigrants in a country where I was also a foreigner.

We’d been through some intense things together, including an incident when I had to bandage his serious wounds because his immigration status wouldn’t allow him to go to a hospital without ending up in deportation proceedings. We were tied by strong bonds and those bonds then extended to his cousin by the rules of hospitality.

I was dismayed to see a look of shock and even horror cross the face of the cousin when I finally reached him and handed him the letter from my friend. I could tell something was wrong, but he quickly recovered and greeted me with all due respect. At first, I worried that our friendship broke some rule about relationships between women and men in their culture or some such.

But later the cousin pulled me into a private corner and laid out the problem. which put two of his most important spiritual laws in conflict—hospitality and the rules of ritual.

His toddler was sick and this was connected in traditional belief to the fact that the family had neglected rituals to purify and ward their newly constructed house. A local elder and ritual leader had been called in from a distant village to conduct the necessary rituals. The elder was to leave the next day and the rituals could not be put off. Their tradition had a hard and fast rule that anyone who would sleep in the house that night must participate in the ritual.

From the perspective of my friend’s cousin, this presented a terrible dilemma. He had met only a few western foreigners and they were all Christian missionaries who viewed traditional rituals with disgust and disrespect. He felt pretty sure that I would be the same and this had caused him great discomfort because he had to decide whether or not to postpone the ritual or refuse hospitality to me.

Given that the health and safety of his family was at stake, he had finally decided to do the latter.

Thankfully, he addressed the issue with me openly and forthrightly, and so I was able to put his fears to rest and attend a traditional ritual that few foreigners would be privileged to join. It was one of the most intense and mind-opening events of my twenties, but I have written about the ritual itself elsewhere.

One of the most important concepts I gained from that experience wasn’t in the ritual at all though. It was the relationship of hospitality to ethical and spiritual rules in that culture. Clearly hospitality was a high virtue, but not the highest priority to which all others had to give way. My host was clearly distraught by the idea of refusing hospitality but also prepared to do so in order to obey the rules of the ritual leader and protect his family.

I have thought a lot about the laws of hospitality and how they should apply to my own conduct since then.

Eleven years ago, I was on my way an orphanage to meet my three-month-old daughter for the first time and a meth addict accosted me in a parking lot and begged for money. I was carrying the food to make lunches for my husband and me on the road. I could have stopped and handed her some of the food. We could have done with a little less and the law of hospitality tells me that I should have.

But the moment was among the most intense and emotionally fraught of my life and I instinctively recoiled from her face, so ravaged by the poisons of methamphetamines. And I fled. The woman was not threatening me, only begging. She would likely have used any money I gave her for drugs or alcohol rather than for food, so far gone was her addiction. But I had food—that most essential element of hospitality—right in my hands.

It is one of the most potent regrets of my life that I failed to give hospitality in that stressful moment. I have given it at many other times, but it is the time I didn’t that I remember.

Being a harried mother, I have also kept food for my children’s dinner hidden so that I wouldn’t have to make a whole new meal when guests showed up and I served only drinks and snacks. But these were not hungry guests, just people who didn’t have young kids or an understanding of mother’s work and exhaustion. I am not an extreme or perfect follower of the law of hospitality.

Still the law of hospitality extends far beyond this personal level. Countries where hospitality is expressed as a national value take in far more refugees than others. It is a common myth in North America and Western Europe that these wealthy nations take in more refugees than other countries, but it is far from true. Under the current definition, the top ten nations in terms of numbers of refugees accepted all happen to be countries with a majority Muslim population.

A refugee is defined as a person who has been forced to flee their home due to violence or persecution. Under current definitions utter lawlessness and systemic poverty left in the wake of colonial resource stripping doesn’t even count, though the closed attitude of wealthy nations would be even more apparent if it did.

Hospitality is an often cited tenant of Muslim culture and I have seen it in action in Kazakhstan and Bangladesh. As a young traveler without a clue, I showed up unannounced in out of the way places in both countries and was initially greeted with suspicion bordering on hostility.

But as soon as locals determined that I was a lost and nearly penniless kid rather than a threat, I was swept up in the culture of hospitality, treated as an honored guest, given a seat beside the head of household and provided with everything I might need.

It is apparently need that the law of hospitality responds to, not merely the state of being an outsider. The Muslim, refugee-accepting countries are not notoriously welcoming to everyone, just to those in dire straits.

I wonder how our Pagan ancestors might have seen modern politics and how they might view something like a refugee crisis. There is a strong current of isolationism among modern Pagans, even among those who claim to honor the law of hospitality. They tell me that hospitality means we should give food to a person who is right in front of us, that we shouldn’t fight with a guest and other things that are reminiscent of romanticized historical movies.

They say our ancestors never intended it to mean taking in hungry and desperate strangers. But that isn’t actually how the law of hospitality works in places where it is still a living tradition.

Looking at the evidence, I must say that hospitality should be a broad Pagan value. And hospitality means accepting and helping refugees and thus being Pagan should necessitate that we are in favor of policies that help refugees, whether they are fleeing violence, persecution or starvation.

Conversely, it does not mean that we have to be in favor of accepting every immigrant or that we are supposed to play doormat or not defend our homes, tribe or nation from a threat. While indigenous communities I visited seemed to be less suspicious than Muslim communities, this may well have to do with politics more than with the underlying cultures.

Certainly, it is not always easy to determine whether a person is a traveler minding their own business, a desperate refugee or someone bent on exploitation, distraction or even violence. Our Pagan ancestors had the same problem. This did not mean they didn’t consider hospitality to be a requirement of an honorable person. It just meant and still means that we have to use our intuition and consider it to bring dishonor if we guess wrong and refuse hospitality to a friend or to someone in need.