Concepts of Deity, part 1

This will be the first in a series discussing aspects of my personal tradition; my goal here is mostly to share how I do things, but also to help me organize things in my head so that I can decide which ideas and practices become part of my teaching tradition, EarthDance, and which remain personal.

I had every intention of starting this series with a post about tools and altars, but it occurred to me that there was one subject that absolutely had to come first: Deity.

Warning: I’ve divided this into two posts, but it’s still hellishly long. If you plan to be a regular reader you’ll need to get used to that. Hope you’re in a comfy chair.

Let’s start with some quick and probably oversimplified definitions, just for the sake of this post:

Hard polytheism – belief that the gods are distinct and separate beings. The ancient Greeks were hard polytheists.

Soft polytheism – belief that the gods are manifestations or aspects of other, usually bigger, deities. This was pretty popular in ancient Egypt. Soft polytheism, I have observed, is a lot more popular in American Wicca than in British Traditional, which tends to be hard polytheist.

Panentheism – belief that God is immanent within the universe but also transcends it.

I keep seeing articles stating that more and more Wiccans are becoming more polytheistic, but I have yet to see any practical evidence of that; most of said articles come off sounding a bit patronizing, along the lines of "Finally people are realizing that our way is So Much Better, because obviously believing that all gods are aspects of something greater is just nonsense." It seems like wishful thinking on the part of the Keep Wicca Traditional crowd. (I don’t have any quarrel with the hardcore Traditionalists, except that they tend to think my way of doing things is stupid, which for some odd reason pisses me off.)

The above definitions should not be taken as evidence that I am any sort of theologian. For the most part I don’t feel it necessary to have vocabulary words for my beliefs, especially since they aren’t terribly consistent. It is my opinion that religion on the whole is kind of a silly idea, when you look at it through the lens of strict rationality; luckily the spirit is not rational, and the gods tend to speak to us in decidedly illogical ways. If you want a rigorous scholarly discussion of philosophy and theology, I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere. My beliefs are based on experience and may make no sense to you whatsoever. I’m fine with that. After all, I come from a worldview that casts spells and talks to stones.

But, as you no doubt have noticed, I digress.

I am not a hard polytheist. I am a panentheist and a soft polytheist. Sort of. My view of the universe goes a little something like this:

(Some of this will sound familiar, if you have read The Circle Within; however, my relationship with the Divine has evolved somewhat since I wrote it.)

Underneath and within everything that is and everything that isn’t, there is Deity—formless, genderless, and impossible to comprehend. It is the Great All of It, the Tao, the Glorious Whatever, the Magnificent Hot Damn! but I don’t really have a name I call it. The Froud Faery Oracle deck calls it, simply, Unity; that’s good enough for me.

Generally people don’t build altars to Unity, because it is impossible to comprehend, making it equally impossible to relate to; however, humans having a built-in sense of awe, we couldn’t very well just ignore the Vast Mystical Wow that is Deity, so we move in a level.

My favorite definition of God is "a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." (Attributed variously to Voltaire, St. Augustine, and others) If you think of our perception of the universe as a set of nested circles, we start with the biggest and move inward, from One to Two, from an undifferentiated force to twin complementary forces: masculine and feminine, Himself and Herself.

I consider the Two to be masculine and feminine because life is created through Their unity. Now, unlike many earlier Wiccans I don’t think of this as a means of revering heterosexual pairing as somehow more sacred or evolved than homosexual. The faces of Deity that I revere happen to be male and female, but here’s another place I differ from many of my coreligionists: my spirituality is not fixated on sex.

Masculine energy is that which is active, projective; feminine energy is receptive and passive. There is a stigma against the concept of femininity as "passive," in that it has been used to stereotype women as passive objects of male lust or possession, but again, I’m not talking about human bodies here, but about energy. The feminine is that which is: the substance of the universe, matter. The masculine is that which moves. It is the spark of life, the animating principle.

There is nothing inherently wrong with passivity when it is used in the proper context. But no one—no woman, no man—is wholly masculine or wholly feminine.  They can’t be, or they’d never get anything accomplished. There are times to be passive and times to be active; only through cultivating both sides of Nature within ourselves can we become balanced individuals.

(Continued in next post...)

Comments

[margaritaspirit]

When I first started taking classes in World Religions and when we (finally) got to Hinduism after spending most of the semester on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam I was surprised at how much of it paralleled with what I believe. The idea of 'Brahman' -- a transcendent, non-dual ultimate reality -- seems particularly applicable here. All the gods exist and are real, but they, like we, are like the sparks coming from a fire.