What do the gods want for us?
Hint: not bad stuff
Pagans don’t have a book, so our experience of deity continues to be far more interpretable than the monotheistic religions.
It’s probably the subject of another post to discuss the pros and cons of monotheism versus polytheism, although I’ve done a little bit of that here. It’s not that having a book means that the ideas are not debatable. Certainly Jewish tradition includes many possible interpretations. Both early Christians and - for a short period - Muslims engaged with multiple interpretations of texts until such thought was captured by the state. In both cases, that happened 3-4 hundred years after the start of the religion. For Christians, the Council of Nicea in 430 and for Islam in the 10th century .
So how do we see the gods? Why engage with them? I don’t use the word worship. Not because we don’t, but because many of us also see them in far more personal relationship than one that is purely aspirational. For example, I’ve worked with Lilith for decades. Who exactly Lilith was in the ancient world is subject to much debate. [I started looking at academic papers and got very sidetracked. Post to come later.] I didn’t go looking for her. She came to me and this isn’t about her history, but how I interacted with her.
I’m an only child raised by a single mother far from any extended family. In hindsight, that isolation was profound and has reverberated through my life in multiple ways. Humans are meant to interact and I spent hours and hours alone as a child deep inside my own head, or watching TV. That’s not healthy either. My step-daughter spent her early formative years with video games as a babysitter. She didn’t survive the experience with her sanity intact. I at least had a human woman to care for me [not my mother] and her teenage children helped socialize me.
But without a healthy male figure to act as family protector, I always felt vulnerable. My mother wasn’t a strong woman. She was deeply agreeable and even as a child I could talk her into things. To this day, she maintains that I ‘made’ her buy that expensive Rainbow vacuum. I was eight.
Maybe because of this lack of solidity, or because of early trauma, I’ve always had beings around me. Some of them didn’t feel good and scared me. But some felt protective. The winged woman was the latter. I didn’t have a name for her until much later. But she was protective and comforting in my isolation. For the record, she never told me to do anything bad. None of the gods I worship or the inhabitants of the unseen world I work with pull me in negative directions.
What would be the point? Why give devotion to something that would send someone down a bad moral path? Such things exist, but they aren’t gods. I’ve sometimes encountered ancestors with unresolved issues. I don’t give them attention. Galina Krasskova says that It’s not necessary to revere ancestors who retain the toxic traits they had in life. And again, why would we want to do that?
Jordon Peterson in his most recent book, We Who Wrestle with God, cites the importance of monotheism because it unites people and is aspirational. I don’t disagree with his premise. We need something to unite us. However, he doesn’t explain how polytheists built the Parthenon, the Ishtar Gate, the Pyramids, Stone Henge, Mohenjo Daro, Daryn Kuyu, or any of the myriad other great structures of the ancient world. Slave labor? No doubt some was involved, but it couldn’t all have been.
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Polytheism certainly united the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. Some of the most important ideas of Western culture came from polytheistic Greek Culture: Freedom of speech before the assembly and the idea that we benefit from setting emotion aside to debate ideas, ie philosophy. [Which is what got Socrates in trouble with civil authorities.]
Neoplatonic religious practice is distinctly aspirational. Philosophy is a practice used to purify the mind and clarify thought before one seeks to be closer to and more like the gods. We cannot BE gods, but we can try to be like them. Even Christians strive to be like Christ using him as a role model.
I do the same with my gods. Lilith helped me to survive my aloneness and gave me the strength to not just survive but start reaching out. Aspiration is subjective. Sometimes people are so broken that a unified, transpersonal concept of god is utterly out of reach. Lilith was my protector, my companion. Once married, I looked at different areas of my life that needed improvement and asked for gods to help me with that. In the ancient world, wealth was equated with bulls and that’s who showed up. I asked what I needed to know and was led to read on economics. Later, when my stepdaughter developed serious problems, I was guided specifically into actions that led to our financial stability.
This is how I see the gods. They are there to help us and guide us, but we have to ask and we have to be respectful and honor them. Why would they help us if we take them for granted, or are rude? Humility is necessary in any relationship. They want the best for us, both as individuals and as a group. Building things take a group effort: the Parthenon, a road, or a re-usable rocket is not the work of a single person. For those things to happen, we have to be able to set our sights on a much larger goal and communicate with other humans in a way that conveys ideas rather than accusations and hostility.
I don’t argue that both Christian and Jewish religious culture have set us up for that. But Pagans are part of that culture. We too aspire to what is better, and that’s good. Not just the gods, but the land spirits, ancestors, guides, and angels and daimons are there to help us move upward, to be better humans.
We just have to ask.
If you’re curious about Paganism/Heathenism/Wicca/Druidry, please feel free to message me and I’ll be happy to answer questions.
Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been Pagan since she was 14 [which was a long time ago] and been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. She has direct communication with her gods and they’ve always given her answers when she asks. [One does have to ask.] Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. Be warned.
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