LOST DEITIES OF PAGANS:
(Con't)
By: Nicolaas Gillingham;
Ordained High Priest Kemetist (Egyptian Worshiper), Pagan Author and
Poet
The Eclectic Neopagan (#2)
"Chinese restaurant" approach (Pme from Pantheon A, one
from Pantheon B) must always be incapable of authenticity because it
will never constitute actual Polytheism. Too often it fuctions in
general as serial Monotheism: Brigid today, Ganesha next Tuesday, Ra
next time we feel like. Once we have learned to think
Polytheistically, as the old Pagans did, we will come to understand
that genuine Paganism must of necessity inhere in relationships.
To say "Pantheon"
implies lateral interaction within the pantheon itself, not merely
between the worshipper and whichever god she/he designs to "summon"
today. The eclecitic surrounded by his/her gods who don't speak with
one another together constitute a rimless wheel which is the hub and
spokes only, unable to move or withstand pressure: a wheel is
incomplete as to be no wheel at all. And in the last, Eclecticism
offers the insights and correctives of comparativism, but can take us
no further.
This brings me to
Reconstructionism (3). I personally would contend that all attempts
to resurrect the historic pantheons, any of them, are ultimately
doomed to inconsequence. The old pantheons are dead languages, which
we can study but no long speak. Even if through diligent study we do
learn to speak with them fluently, they will never be anything more
than idiosyncratic curios, lacking mof modern vocabulary and forever
incomprehensible to our comtemporaries. Necessarily ungrounded in our
own real world experience, they will always be a second language,
never an mother tongue.
While the ethnic Paganisms have
important things to teach us concerning the necessity of cultural
authenticity, at their worst they become purist ghettoes of
nostalgia-driven re-enactors. We must never forget our received
tradition or fail to learn from it; without it, we have no solid
basis by which to evaluate our own experiences. But ultimately the
ways of the ancestors cannot teach us what we most need to know: How
to be honestly Pagan for our own time and place.This can only be
understood from our own encounters with the very sources that
inspired these ethnic traditions in the first place. We must drink
from the original wellspring itself.
A thousand years ago the Younger
Gods fell in valiant battle, and a world fell with them. In a very
real sense, it was the end of tens of thousands of years of human
history. (refer to the rise of Christianity)
Who are these failed Gods, why
did they fail, and why are they not the Gods of our "Post
Ragnarok Era: requires? The Younger Gods are the imaginal powers,
nothing more and nothing less than the products of the human
imagination, their existence verifiable by subjective means only.
Most modern verisons of the Gods of the historic pantheons belong to
this category. These gods neither pre-existed humanity, nor will they
continue after us; they have no power apart from what we give them.
But because they are the makings of our own minds, we love them for
their human faces.
Our tendency to divinize our own
ideas is rooted in the nature of language. Because Love, Justice, and
War are nouncs, we tend to think of them as solids, as tangible
things or beings which occupy real space. But of course in reality
they have no active existence outside of the sphere of human thought
and action. We must always be wary of deifying ideas, a collective
hubris of the most destructive sort.
Abstractions, fictional
characters, and personifications of functions simply won't and can't
by definition, be Gods. The products of our own minds can never have
the power to save us from ourselves because they are, at the last,
nothing more than the human brain chattering to itself. Until we make
the courageous, radical leap out of our own internal dialogue and
into actual relationships with real, non-human others, we will
ultimately continue as we are now; imprisoned inside out own heads.
In the end, the Younger Gods
failed because they departed from what must always be the touchstone
for the best and truest human spirituality: the interaction of the
human mind with the natural world. Gods cannot be said to have real,
ontological existence except insofar as they correlate with the
natural world.
Within our modern era humanity
must reutrn to the primal source, the great archaic powers that
truely exist and always have: what we may call the Elder Gods. These
first beings existed long beofe homo became sapiens, and they will
continue long after we are gone. They are Gods ontologically real,
their existence objectively verifiable.
For conceptive reasons that
shoulbe be abundantly obivious to you the read, these Gods make their
appearance in culture after culture. (While the Younger Gods, by
their very nature, vary widely from pantheon to pantheon, the Elder
Gods are generally more or less the same.) Pleniscient, plenipresent,
and plenipotent, they constitute our oldest known pantheonl they are
also the most modern, no belief required. Though long eclipsed by
younger, more human Gods, in their enduring power, presence, and
majesty they have never ceased to speak to us. Neither allegories nor
symbols, they are real beings, with whom we, at every moment of our
lives, cannot help but engage. They are as near eternity as we may
hope to touch, ontologically permanent, oldest and most young.
It is due to them, that I
literally exist to write this and for you the reader to read it:
without which, not. This is Polytheism of the "hardest"
sort. They are Themselves, none identifiable with one other; to say,
after all, that Earth is Sun is Moon is a nonsense. Their
interactions are real relationships, both with one another and with
us.
Polytheism has never been a
matter of mere plurality, but rather of pantheon, of gods in
community. To rearticulate these relationships in the language of
myth is to begin the process of humaity's return to spiritual
intimacy with the non human world.
Some Pagans will wish to
distinguish, for example, Earth the Goddess from Earth the Planet. It
is my view, this is a distinction without a difference. I would
borrow the term from Hindu theology, they are "non different."
Goddess Earth is co extensive with Planet Earth.
We are, and cannot help but be,
citizens of our own century. We know irrevocably about physics,
evolution, and depth psychology. Try as we might (and afew I know
have tried mightily), we can never return to a pre scientific
worldview premised on "belief". In what sense, after all,
may one be said to "believe" in Earth or Sun? Belief, so
prominent in the Montheisms, recedes into deserved irrelevance when
we embrace instead what Anthony Scott has sited as "a glorious
sacred materialism.
Also, the resurgence of the
Elder Gods breaks down the way of separation between religion and
science that has partitioned Western thought since the Enlightenment.
The rise of science has taught us things about Earth, Sun, and STorm
that the ancients would have marveled to know. We are in the
enviable, irresistible position of being able to learn, through
science, about the very Gods themselves.
The Elder Gods have always been
the special province of the Pagan. Pace Wicca, witchery is not and
has never been a religion per se; it is, rather, a magical
technology. That being said, no magical technolog exists independent
of a cultrual matrix, and the first and truest matrices of the Craft
are the old polytheist world views of ancient Europe. When others
turned their faces towards Younger Gods, the Witch continued to treat
with the untamed elder powers in the making of her magic. This is one
reason why even in antiquity people held the witch and her powers in
fear and suspicion. This being so, how then did the Horned One and
Lady of the Moon come to be regarded as the modern witch's only Gods?
It is as if, high in the Greek
mountains, a village of goat herding magic workers had continued in
the old ways long after the advent of the new religion
(Christianity). In time, due to pressures both intenral and external,
all the other Gods, Younger and Elder alike --Zeus, Athena, even
Dionysos-- have come to be forgotten. The sole survivors of this
leveraged divine attrition as one might expect are the preeminent
Gods of herding and magic, Pan and Hekate.
This is contemporary and modern
Craft as we find it. The Lord and Lady are the witch gods par
excellence because in ages of ages it was they who first learned the
magic arts and taught them to their children, and so to this day we
their children honor them first among all other gods. And they're a
wonderful couple, really they are. but now it's time to meet the rest
of the family.
With the return of the Elder
Gods, exciting new panoramas of possiblity open before us. Wicca's
bitheism has stifled the emergence of new mythology precisely because
its divine population was too small to create compelling narrative.
But once we come to undersand that the Horned One is not the Sun, is
not Thunder, is not the Green God, the new myths begin spontaneously
to tell themselves.
If the horns and green are not
different faces of the same God, who then are they and what are they
to one another? To pose the question is to begin to answer it: They
are twin sons of Earth, born at one birth, lovers and rivals. The new
mythologies are waiting, poised on the threshold of articulation.
When we redefine "God"
in such a way as to encompass this old new understanding of the
world, the burning question becomes, not "Do the Gods exist?"
But rather "Do they know that we are here?" Are the Elder
Gods sentient, self aware beings who, for instance, act with
conscious intent and hear us when we speak to them?
The ancestors would certainly
seem, for the most part, to have thought so. If, indeed, they are
sentient, we should realistically expect to find among them a
sentience very different from our own. At the very least we may say
that, whether the old Gods are sentient or not, they are real, their
gifts to us are real, and their relationships with us are real.
We know for certain that self
awareness does exist in the world of nature; it is we outselves. In
humanity the universe achieves the ability to perceive and reflect
upon itself, and to reflect upon that process of reflection. This is
what makes us the "wise". This is the proper work of the
Witch; to be the eyes through which the world understands itself. Let
us not expect the Gods to do our work for us; they are busy enough
with their own work.
If the Sun and Storm do not hear
us when we praise them, or receieve the offerings that we make, why
then offer or praise at all? Our relationships with them are real
enough; so long as we acknowledge this, what does it matter whether
we ritualize those relationships or not?
It is my contendation that we do
so out of a sense of identity, of solidarity with our past and
future. This is what our pwople do and have alsway done. We concerse
with the Gods through symbols. Myth and ritual are the language by
which the mind articulates t itself realities that cannot be direcly
expressed in other ways; prayer and offering are metaphors that
express very real relationships. It is the spiritual technology of
the ancestors; how else shall we do it?
In modern days we as Pagans
continue to make offerings because at the heart of Pagan social ethic
stands the principle of Do ut des (a gift for a gift). Since
everything that we have has been given to us, it behooves us to give
in return. Only human infants heedlessly take without giving back.
Our social world view revolves around this principle given to us by
the Elder Gods, ultimately everything that we have and love comes
from them as does life itself. For this, the best of gifts, do we not
owe them, at the least with our thanks, respect and praise,
regardless of whether they hear us or not? Or do we, like an spoiled
child, continue to take and take without the least obligation of
gratitude and recognition?
In this old/new world of the
many, we should expect that the Gods will show us multiple faces; as
we know, they have always been shape shifters. Pan is wont to wear
the form --or at least the horns-- of whichever animal figures
largest in the local economy. In forest country he tends to be
antlered. On the Great Plains of North America he often sports, as
one might expect, bison horns. Among cattle herders, he is bull
horned; in the Mediterranean hills, his horns are often a goat's or
ram's. In Australia where there are no native horned animals, he
typically shows himself as the Kangaroo Man.
Another example; the Sun shoulb
be seen differenly by different people in different places should not
surprise any one. All the Sun Gods of humanity point to the same
underlying reality; for us all, there is only one Sun. Call him what
you will. That you in your valley know him/her by a different name
when I only adds to the interest. One story is never enough.
We must become once again the
people of the many, our goal nothing less than the replytheization of
the West. In polytheist society, it is understood that we benefit by
cultivating our relationship with the Gods, just as any intimate
relationship requires ongoing maintenance. Since there are ttoo many
Gods for anyone to properly befriend them all, it only stands to
benefit us when others honor different Gods than we do; in that way,
all the Gods receive their due, and everyone comes out ahead.
Above everything, new Pagans
must learn to honor the many as they manifest in our own time and
place. While the ways of the ancestors -- the Received Tradition --
must always inform our thought and action, we are truest to our
ancestors and heritage when we think and act as natives of here and
now. Our mandate is to be the Pagans of our own time, our own place,
our own post-modern, science driven Western culture. It is the only
kind of Pagans we can honestly be; anything else is pretense.
The Elder Gods were the Gods of
my ancestors and yours. Within our own day, it is for us individually
to enter once again into the tright relationship with them. As John
Michael Greer said, We live in a world full of Gods. The Earth upon
whom we live and die, the Sun rising in its splendor, worthy of
worship, as the Moon is at night. The Winds that grant us breath, the
Fire that burns at the heart of history. Him of the Horns who has
haunted humanity's dreams from the very beginning: these are our
lost-found pantheon, our once and future Gods.
So somewhere a God with a voice
of thunder, speaking the primal word, is even now moving in beauty
and terror towards us. My friends, let us arise and go and meet him.
Article By: Nicolaas Gillingham;
Ordained High Priest Kemetist (Egyptian Worshiper), Pagan Author and
Poet
Comments