Definition by Metaphor

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boxes, deity, god, gods, metaphors, monotheism, panentheism, pantheism, polytheism, religion, theism opinions, views of deity

…Useful if you don’t take yourself too seriously.  If you take yourself too seriously, you might be offended.  Then again, if you’re the type of person that takes yourself too seriously and might be offended, I’m not sure why you read my blog in the first place!

Although, in all actual seriousness, this is how I first explained the differences in how people view deity to my kids (though I’ve added a few since then)–and it was something they understood easily.

 

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ruminations on authenticity and validity

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authenticity, gods, validity

Over the years, I’ve seen a number of explosions in the Pagan blogosphere (also Facebook, Tumblr, etc)…explosions that tend to be discussed in much quieter and compassionate ways in real life and on close-knit internet forums.  Debates which have turned ugly over things like worshiping superheroes, whether or not a literary figure can be worshiped (I know/know of a number of folks that have adopted the pantheon from the Kushiel series by Jacqueline Carey), the role and context of “invented” or modern deities, and which (possible) historical mythological figures really are gods (or just worth worship) or not.  Debates which, at the heart of them, seek  to establish whose worship is authentic or valid.

I was reminded of debates like this in a conversation that came up on Pagan Forum recently(some of you may know that I am an admin/moderator and co-owner over there, even longer than I’ve been blogging).  The subject itself wasn’t contentious (though I could see it perhaps going that way on other platforms), it was just a discussion asking for information about Cernunnos.  If you are familiar with Cernunnos, you are probably aware of the dearth of information that is available regarding him (if you aren’t, you can glean quite a bit from this post).  Cernunnos aside, I was reminded of a wider and recurring theme in Pagan debates, the problem of validity and authenticity.

About 10 years ago (when The Hubby still considered himself a Druid and I dabbled in that direction) I ran across an essay on the ADF website comparing OBOD and ADF which introduced me to this problem of validity vs. authenticity (in an admittedly ADF and OBOD context) that I’d been aware of, but not really known how to address:

In a study of the remarkable shamanic forgeries of Carlos Castaneda, anthropologist Richard de Mille has pointed out that there are at least two different kinds of truth at work in discussions of spiritual traditions. First is authenticity: does the tradition come from where the author or teacher says it comes from? Are the claims the author or teacher makes historically or anthropologically accurate? This is one obvious form of truth, yet as de Mille points out, it must not be mistaken for the whole. There is also validity: is the tradition effective? Does it accomplish what it says it can accomplish? Are the claims the author or teacher makes spiritually accurate?

A tradition can be authentic but not valid, and it can also be valid but not authentic. Much of the material in OBOD these days is valid but not authentic. There’s no good evidence that the ancient Druids had anything to do with Stonehenge, for example, but OBOD still does summer solstice rituals there. I can testify from personal experience that those rituals can be overwhelmingly powerful.

To OBOD members, the validity is justification enough for the practice, and some OBOD members make the mistake—a very common mistake in alternative spirituality, as it happens—of assuming that validity is evidence of authenticity, that the rituals must be historically accurate because they are spiritually powerful. Meanwhile people critical of OBOD—and this has included some ADF members—fall into the opposite mistake of assuming that inauthenticity is evidence of invalidity, that the rituals must be spiritually ineffective because they are historically inaccurate.

To some Pagans, validity is justification enough.  To others, authenticity is the only justification.  People on both sides forget that validity and authenticity are not two sides of the same coin, but completely and utterly different coins all together.  One could, of course argue that validity and authenticity together would be best…but what may be historically authentic isn’t necessarily universally valid.  And then there is the problem of determining authenticity in the first place…

I’ll admit my bias.  I like authenticity, but I don’t require something to be historically authentic for it to be valid.  I do require it to be honest though–lying about the authenticity of a practice or belief is just plain shitty.   How accurate information is about the historical context of a deity has absolutely and utterly nothing to do with the validity of the worship of that deity or the experiences that the practitioner has.  Or, put more bluntly, whether or not a god is “real” doesn’t impact how “real” the religious experience of that god is (unless you have a hang-up on the matter).

Lets be honest here….complete disclosure.  A good chunk of the “historical information” we have about ancient cultures (particularly those without a written record) is woefully incomplete, filled with conjecture, and riddled with giant gaps. I say that because I know it is true on a smaller scale about the fossil record, and biology gets *way* more funding than anthropology and archaeology–societies of people are tons more complicated and nuanced in terms of behavior and motivation and their internal monologue and motivation than dinosaurs and Precambrian whatnot.

Time only preserves a smattering of that which is preservable. Worship doesn’t keep. The gods don’t make good fossils. Ideas erode when the people that have them die, and when the people that came after them change their ideas.

Archaeology gives us insight into what ancient people may have done.  Mythology (when its been written down) can offer us a culture’s snapshot in time about the relationships between the gods and between men and gods.  Anthropology can teach us what cultures living in similar states and environments do and believe to make parallels between disparate peoples.

But at the end of the day, we don’t  know what ancient Pagans (whether they be Greek or Roman, from whom we have comparably tons of written accounts, to the Picts or the Celts, from whom we have relatively nothing) actually did, what they actually thought, how they actually worshiped, or what they actually believed.  We have ideas about these things–in some cases, great ideas that are well researched and supported by data (one might even call them theories, lol)… in other cases, we have unverified personal gnosis–opinions that have been developed by personal experiences.

And unverified personal gnosis (UPG) is something that often gets a lot of flack in the Pagan community.   Your personal experience of *enter god here* can’t possible be as valid as that of the person whose experience of *enter god here* because theirs matches the historically authentic references.  Poppycock!

Gnosis is not better simply because it is shared (sometimes called shared personal gnosis, or SPG) or because it has been confirmed or conforms with history.  Certainly one might look for and desire confirmation–either historical confirmation or peer corroboration.  Yes, take that UPG with a grain of salt!  Yes, compare it with other practitioners!   Yes, doubt and question your beliefs and experiences!  But don’t let historical authenticity be the defining context for your spiritual experiences (as opposed to informing and shaping them) because it will end up restricting them.

Religion is a language, a set of symbols (regardless of how “real” one feels they may be) that is culturally derived and interpreted.  Cultures are not static–they evolve because the conditions of a society (and how it interplays with other societies and its environment) evolve. Religion is a part of culture that also evolves, and the gods evolve (or at least our interpretation and understanding and interaction with them) evolves because we are evolving culturally and religiously (and at an exponentially speedier speed than we are biologically!).

The gods aren’t static, they aren’t still, they aren’t unchanging.  The gods exist because (whether we are talking about historically authentic ones or newly valid ones) people believe in them, they worship them, they experience them…whether they actually “exist” (in some sort of literal/physical form, on this planet or some other universe or dimension or whatever) or not.  If you want to know the gods, sure, you can start by looking to the people that do worship them (today or yesterday)…or better yet, go forth and worship.  Exprience it for yourself.  If the god cares, if you are “doing it wrong”, they are capable of letting you know (I’ve yet to have this crop up as an issue in worship).

I think that ultimately it doesn’t matter whether or not a particular deity was worshiped by the ancient whomever.  We don’t even know if the gods really exist–we have opinions on whether they exist or not (and for the past few years, its been my opinions that “real is irrelevant”).  Even if we work under the assumption that they do exist (because we’ve “experienced them”–goddess knows the human brain isn’t capable of fooling itself, lol), we certainly don’t know where they come from or how they arose or formed in the first place.  Heck, we can’t even agree if there are one, two, or two million of them.  Never mind trying to agree on things like the best way to interact with them or anything.

The human experience of deity is infinite….or at least as vast and varied of every single person that has ever walked upon this Earth (then again, I’ve been biased on this matter for a while).  Why choose any god to worship? I can’t see any reason that some guy 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years ago’s experience of the divine is any more accurate or valid for being old.   Appeal to antiquity (or appeal to tradition) is still a logical fallacy.   There must be something else to it, something besides plain old authenticity.

real is irrelevent

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deity, gods, real, theism opinions

There I was, working on tomorrow’s blog post, since I’ve been a bit off-schedule and getting quite behind on my (online) box full of drafts (not to mention my offline box full of stuff to make into drafts), when I decided to procrastinate a bit by checking on new blog posts…

And then I happened across this little gem–I had planned just to leave a comment, but the durn comment was so darn long, I figured I’d just turn it into a post on its own!

Someone in my UU discussion group shared this story today about a student who suffered from doubt over whether Kwan-Yin/Kannon/Tara actually exists. In frustration, he asked his teacher for help.  The lama closed his eyes for a few moments, then replied:

“She knows she’s not real.”

I wonder how this might apply to Pagan deities.

~John Halsted @ The Allergic Pagan

There are so many layers to a statement like that.  I could probably approach this on so many levels it would take me a month to go through them all!  But, I think I’ll limit it (today) to the idea of “real” as applied to gods, and whether or not it even matters (admittedly, a subject I’ve broached  a time or two or ten).

(from a UU campaign a couple years ago)

I’ve noticed that the idea of whether or not something is “real” isn’t even a big deal to a child. My daughter is 6, and the “reality” of the existence (or non-existence) of beings as varied as Tinkerbell, Santa Claus, Mama O’shen (her name for the Ocean-as-Deity), or Persephone is inconsequential and irrelevant in comparison to what we get from their story and what it tells us about our human experience and our interaction with the cosmos at large. My daughter can discuss and interact, for hours, all sorts of things with any of them, and it never even crosses her mind to wonder if they are there or not. And indeed, if you would ask her directly, she would tell you that they are not real, but that real does not matter, because it is their story that is important.

Perhaps we grown-ups spend too much time in our heads justifying our experiences and the time we spend having them, instead of just experiencing. Does it even matter that the gods are real or not? In the past 20 years, I’ve been a polytheist and a pantheist and an ambivalent agnostic…and its been my observation that either the gods don’t care, or I don’t, because my interactions with them haven’t varied based on the changes in those beliefs. They have, at times, changed–deepened, become more (or less) ecstatic, etc, over the years…but (if I am very honest and disgustingly introspective) these changes have been in relation to what I have needed, and what I have gone searching for, rather than as a result of my theological opinion in the existence and nature of deity.

To be honest, while I find such pondering to be intellectually interesting (though somewhat fruitless)…I really find them to be ultimately meaningless to my spiritual and religious beliefs and practices. Quite frankly, I don’t care that the gods exist or not. I have gotten to a point where my beliefs and experiences are not cheapened or enriched by either position. I do what I do, which includes prayer, offerings, reverence in worship, etc, not because I have faith in the literal existence in an eternal being (supernatural or otherwise), but because it works. It centers me, it enriches my experience of the world around me, it connects me to something bigger and greater than myself, and it allows me to bring those things home to my family, my home, and my community.

I don’t need for Sedna to be real to experience her, I don’t need to worship a literal Persephone to feel the relevance of her mythos, and the fact that Neptune might not actually be a eternally powerful divine dude that lives in the ocean doesn’t lessen my thankfulness to him for surviving another hurricane.   I don’t engage with the gods because of what they can do for me, or what I can do for them.  I engage with the gods because the act of doing so is my sacrifice, my symbol of my humility to those ideas and powers and forces that are greater than my tiny and cosmically insignificant self.  

It doesn’t matter if they are “real” or not, it matters that we find meaning in our interactions with them. It matters that those interactions better ourselves and our world.

deity from the middle…its messy and complicated

Tags

gods, pantheism, polytheism, views of deity

Many Pagans that I know of, particularly those who grew up in religiously restricted and even religiously hostile and/or spiritually abusive homes, choose to leave Christianity as much as a rejection of the Biblical vision of god as the new-found inspiration and rediscovered vision of the deities of ancient cultures.  I am one of the minority (or at least I assume I’m a minority based on my conversations with other Pagans) that came from both a quite liberal and even progressive Christian faith and from a quite religiously open-minded and open heart-ed family.  My change of faith came from a realization (at a rather young age) that, whether or not Jesus as Christ (literal or figurative) was “real” (mythically or historically), I didn’t consider “salvation” to be a worthy or even necessary goal of the human condition.  I have nothing to be saved from because there is nothing wrong with being human.  I also found that once salvation is taken out of the equation, the god of Abraham’s covenant isn’t any more compelling than a god of any other pantheon.  And really, I straight-up think some of those other gods are much, much cooler with far more compelling and powerful stories (I love me some Joseph Campbell).

Over the years, my theological opinion on the nature of god* has evolved from the Trinitarian monotheism of my childhood, into the duotheistic soft-polytheism common to eclectic Wicca of my formative Pagan youth, through a pantheon-specific polytheistic revivalism to its current incarnation of a hybrid pantheistic polytheism.  My beliefs about the existence and nature of god is a bit complicated, as I think it probably should be, for any reasonably logical individual that has none-the-less had profoundly spiritual religious experiences with deity.  I’m sure that my considerations on the nature of deity will continue to develop over time, but in the meantime, I thought it might be fun to ponder upon the current state of my belief in deity, and which twigs on the tree of Paganism that I hang my beliefs from…

When it comes to deity, I occupy a certain ambiguous middle ground in the Pagan continuum of belief (or just a Venn diagram of theological ideas).  In practice, I’m a polytheist (though I’m neither a hard or a soft polytheist since I don’t believe that multiple gods are either facets of one god or that they are literal and distinct beings), since I acknowledge and worship multiple deities.  In belief though, I’m more of a pantheist–but not entirely; and I’m not a naturalist, though I value that perspective, with my educational background in biology.   I’m also a fan of Jung and I don’t entirely buy into the idea that individual gods are literal, sentient and powerful entities capable of independent and direct action.  At the same time though, I really do think that there really is *something* else at work in the universe…I just don’t think we (humans of limited consciousness) are truly equipped to define it, though I tend to favor the idea that the *something* at work expresses “itself” in a myriad of ways.

So here’s the only thing I honestly know about divine beings, regardless of their nature (or indeed that *anyone* can know about divine beings):  There is no such thing as an objective event, fact or state(ment) that one can make about a completely abstract idea that is entirely subjective.   Because of that, there isn’t a single god that can be measured, weighed, observed, photographed, or otherwise independently verified.  Additionally, it seems that different cultures and individuals explain god in culturally relative and personally meaningful ways without any universal agreement or cohesion.  To me, this indicates that the ultimate nature of god is ultimately unknowable…except to the individual’s perception of and experience with god (and this includes the option that deities do not exist at all or that they all exist simultaneously).  Intellectually, I believe that god exists as infinite possibilities (well, infinite possibilities in the sense of global population over the history of humankind and any other organism that might be able to conceptualize an idea of god–which I find to be a totally interesting thought exercise).

*this is not meant to be a serious graphic*

With that being said, spiritually I believe in a Divine Universe.  I’m not saying that I think that the Universe is (merely) a deity, but rather that the Universe itself is the physical embodiment of what it means to be Divine and Sacred.  As such, I believe that the creation and on-going development of the Universe (via scientifically evidenced means) results in   individual forces which humans have since named and personified as deities in historical and culturally specific ways.  Just as elements of the Universe are constantly in a flux of creation/destruction/existence, so are the individual multiple forces of the Universe (and of humanity), which we often call gods and worship as such (this includes the Abrahamic god which evolved from a single, limited deity from a single, limited pantheon to an all-powerful single god).  Consequently, I think the collected stories of humanity about these forces and their interactions are incredibly important as a means of reflection and introspection about the human condition.  And yes, this means that I believe in the development of “new” gods and even that I think that perfectly valid and authentic spiritual and religious experiences and traditions can even originate from modern ideas and fictional writings (another popular discussion on Pagan Forum that crops up from time to time),

I have mostly chosen to pass on the question of whether or not gods are literal beings (does that make me an agnostic polytheist?) because I don’t find it to be spiritually significant.  I’ve had strong feelings on both sides of this issue at different points of my life, and I’ve found that there isn’t any difference in MY relationship with the gods whether I think they are really “real” or not (which of course, begs the question…what is “real” anyhow?)  If I am forced to take a stance, I don’t find it too difficult to allow for the possibility that these forces (which can be worked with) are active themselves and have modeled themselves for us as much as they have been molded by us into images/symbols/forces that are most appropriate to the time and place and people where they are worshiped.  But I draw the line at a believe in them as literal and distinct human-like entities that are independently acting and interested in human affairs for their own amusement or edification–that sort of polytheistic view seems no more realistic or relevant to me than the old white guy with the beard sitting on the throne in the clouds of so many Christian denominations.

Instead, it really doesn’t matter to me if gods are literally real or subconscious projections of anthropomorphic symbols or something in between…or if they don’t exist at all.  And it definitely doesn’t matter if someone else has come to a different conclusion on the nature of god.  One, many, few, none, all-encompassing, limited, etc…its no skin off my teeth, as long as someone isn’t an ass about it!  For me, god is a matter of pragmatism.  The only thing that matters is our actual experience with the them and what we do with our experience with them.  Hopefully, that we let our experience with god help us become a better person for one another.  Some people never experience god while some people experience god incredibly realistic and even tangible ways.  I fall somewhere in the middle, and I fully acknowledge that my experiences might just be a figment of my incredibly fertile imagination.  But its ultimately my experience of god (from myth to direct experience)–as a Universal Divinity and the myriad of ways in which it is expressed in the world we live in that informs my own humanity, for the better.

* I use god and gods fairly interchangeably to denote the idea of the many different views of deity in general, rather than as a statement of plurality (or the lack thereof).  When I use the word god or deity, I am saying that something is a spiritually and/or culturally referenced individual entity of power (which can be symbolic or literal).  A god then, in my book, can be anything from Thor or Athena, or the big G, little -od of the Bible, Torah and Koran…to a Divine Universe or a Universal Divine…to a nature spirit or ancestral spirit.   If I am referring to the Judeo-Christian/Islamic deity, I generally refer to him as the god of Abraham, rather than using “God” as a proper name (see here for why), and in semi-protest to the way the word ‘god’ has been  co-opted by the Abrahamic faiths to mean an all-powerful, all-knowing, etc single deity (a good book detailing this evolution is A History of God by Karen Armstrong).  Often I will use the term The Divine or Divinity as a means of differentiating the bigger-picture idea  of “god” (which is sometimes pantheistic/panentheistic) from individual, named deities (including the aforementioned “God”).

Follow God, Worship the Gods

Tags

Delphic Maxims, gods, polytheism, theopanism

Earlier today, I wrote a bit about the Delphic Maxim blogging going on, started by Star Foster, and I decided to wade into the pool a little bit.  I have a list of about 30 that I will probably follow along and blog with (though I’ve combined a number of them, so it will be less posts than that).

This is my post on two of the first three Delphic Maxims are (in translation) “Follow God” (Επου θεω) and “Worship the Gods” (Θεους σεβου).

Now, I don’t speak Greek, much-less read ancient Greek, but I do know that there was what is today known as “hard polytheism” was not universal then.  Sure, it was the predominant theological idea of the time, just as monotheist is the predominant theological idea today, but just as today, not everyone held bought into it.   I also know that neither Επου or θεω is the word for “God”, which (according to what I know of etymology) I would think should be θεός, the plural of which is Θεους (as we see in the second maxim).

So, my totally non-ancient Greek scholar self is idly thinking that there might be some nuances of translation going on here that don’t come out well in English.  I might add that Google translates the word Επου as “epic” in modern Greek, and the word θεω as “considering”–granted words change in meaning over time, but I find “epic considering” to be more interesting to contemplate.   And that works out really well for my theologically theopanist, functionally soft-polytheistic self.  Even if I’m wrong over what a bunch of dead guys meant, I like it.

In Thalassa’s world, not only is it always more fun if you refer to yourself in the third person, but “Follow God” and “Worship the Gods” are flip sides of the same coin. If  “god” really does mean something nuanced beyond “individual deity” in its use, then what does it mean?  For me, as a theopanist (its a term I’m trying on for size, I like the inclusiveness and non-specificity), it echoes the idea of a greater Divine of which the gods are as much a part of as we are.  Follow god, follow what is Divine, follow Sacredness…worship the gods.

Which takes us to another often loaded idea among Pagans, the w-word.  Worship.  Worship is often a contentious idea–I’ve been a member, a moderator, and an admin and one of the owners of Pagan Forum over the course of about 6 years now, where I’ve encountered all sorts of Pagans from all sorts of traditions–the members may come and go, but one recurring theme that has cropped up many a time in my tenure there, is that a number of people don’t like the idea of worshiping the gods.  Some choose to “revere” them, others to “respect” them, to “work with” them, to show “devotion” to them, etc.  For me, worship encompasses all of those ideas (and more).

As a theopanist*, you might wonder why I would bother worshiping gods, plural.  That would be where the functionally soft polytheistic bit comes into play.  If it comes down to thinking about it, I’m a bit skeptical as to the actual existence of multiple literal entities getting their eternal rocks off on hanging out with humanity.  But, I find the idea of gods, as a construct, an archetype, a symbol, a force, an anthropomorphic projection of cosmic and earthly phenomenon, to be both incredibly powerful and damned pragmatic.   Worship, whether it be of ideas representing eternal concepts and forces, or of actual entities, is another way to connect myself to the natural world and to the human experience  in an increasingly disconnected society.

And so, I worship the gods, and in doing so, I follow God–the epic Divine.

*a fancy way of saying I’m undecided as to whether or not I’m a pantheist or a panentheist or something yet to be determined that recognizes some sort of Universal Divinity, which I don’t care to try to define, being but a mere mortal (see Delphic Maxim #11, “Think like a mortal”)