Old gods, new gods.

I sometimes think about how theistic pagans must feel about me. Here is someone who builds altars to the gods, who celebrates the wheel of the year with elaborate rituals, and who makes an effort to learn about a particular pagan tradition of the past. And yet, I don’t believe the gods exist as fully autonomous, supernatural beings, nor do I readily accept various traditions that posit the independent reality of a spiritual realm filled with ghosts, spirits, and other mysterious forces. So, as far as they are concerned, I don’t believe at all.  

I imagine (and know, from some firsthand experience), that some of them feel deeply offended by this. Because what I’m doing, from their point of view, is partaking in all of the outward actions and rituals of their belief and yet, not really believing. It must seem upsetting or even deeply disturbing, that I could pretend, as it were, to be a part of the faith when I’m really not. I would expect to hear accusations of dishonesty or disrespect, and I could see where they would be coming from. 

 

All the more strange then that what seems all-important to them appears to me as a secondary consideration when it comes to the nature of my practice. Because in a way that I do take fully seriously and sincerely, I do believe in the gods, and the myths, and all the rest – and not merely as symbols or stories I can use to reference something “more concrete,” but as actual experiences I can interact with and not dismiss as merely products of my imagination. I’m going to take a crack at trying to explain what I mean.  

In an earlier post, I wrote about how John Halstead first articulated clearly for me the nature of the gods that I experience and, whether they had names or not, always have. The first step to understanding what I mean by this is to take a huge, giant step back from individualism as it has been handed down to us in Western thought and political culture. As we go about our daily lives, we operate with an awareness of an “I” behind the wheel; it’s us, in our heads, and only us. Our consciousness is something we think we have full sovereignty over. Most of us acknowledge some kind of subconscious, as well, but that seems to be regarded as the trash bin where we throw unpleasant feelings or memories, stashed away more or less on purpose by our conscious selves. And again, down there, it’s still the autonomous self that makes up all the content – all of your bad memories, your nightmares, your associations. 

 

But that’s just not how the human brain works, is it? We are born with brains not yet fully developed and devoid of the specific memories our particular lives will fill them with – but they are no blank slate. We already have the hardwiring for what most of us would recognize as the basics of being a sentient creature – the capacity for love, for fear, for pleasure and pain. We are also born curious; nothing illustrates the craziness of consciousness more than a baby scanning the room and everything around it trying to just figure out, “wtf is this, and what is going on?” Regardless of who we end up being, this human condition is the gift of millions of years of evolution, and its contents are not empty. 

 

And then comes culture. Some of us are born poor, some rich; some into an urban world, some into a rural one. Our caretakers raise us to be religious, or secular; to be reserved, or to be flamboyant; to believe in one god or many, to feel shame for this act but not another. As we absorb all of these values and tropes, it shapes that raw material we were born with into something more specific; fear becomes attached to certain experiences but not others, love comes to be communicated in particular modes. We learn to aspire to certain virtues and avoid certain vices; our culture creates aspirations and desires in ourselves whether we like it or not. And the deeper we take these structures of feeling, the more they take up residence in that place in our minds where we are clearly not in control; where we are encountering our heritage, both biological and historical, not constructing it.

 

Why one person’s gods take the shape they do while another’s can be totally different is a cluster of knots not really worth trying to untangle with any precision. In addition to the nearly universal qualities of being human, we are also born with personalities that shape our predilections and emotions from day one. So you have the basic condition of being alive, then your particular personality, and then the culture you are raised in and the experiences you have along the way, all thrown together in a messy canvas of modern art, where trying to determine where one color starts and then other ends is a fool’s errand. And in any case, in the end you end up becoming yourself. 

 

But that self you recognize as the “I” in your mind is only a part of what you’ve inherited. Still romping about in the back of your mind are the primordial aspects of existence you never needed to be taught, intermingling with the metaphors and myths you’ve been granted by your culture to try and wrestle with them. These are the gods, and they can take many forms. They are not simply “you,” because you cannot command them at will; indeed many of them might be demons you never wished to be there in the first place. We all know this at the most basic level: no one ever asks, or chooses, to be filled with rage; we do not think, I am going to feel blissful love right now, and switch that off just as easily. These ghosts, these gods, they come and go somewhat as they please. While you certainly can try to create an environment that encourages their emergence or control – this is really what ritual is – you can’t force it. 

 

What pagan practice does for me is it allows me to engage with my primordial spirits in a deliberate way – and by giving them names, and stories, and myths of their own, it has given that ill-defined mist of “emotion” some kind of shape and solidity that allows me to embrace it and invite it to the surface for an encounter. Even when the gods don’t really seem to come out to play, I’m still working on conceptualizing my relationship with something that I do not attach to my ego – it’s a part of me, but it is not me, exactly, because these gods do not belong to any single person: and, they are ancient – so very ancient. When I interact with my gods I am residing in the place where what is peculiar about me as an individual and what I inherit as part of my human and natural history intersect. 

The desire to use a structure of symbols and feelings that I did not come up with independently is why I chose to base my practice on a historical tradition. While Odin or Freyja or Fenrir will never mean to me exactly what they meant to Norse pagans (nor should they), I am drawn to them, nonetheless; there is something, something about these symbols and myths that calls to me, that tugs at my heart and compels me to look outward by looking inward. So this is the tradition I follow; I learn as much as I can about its historical character, and then I allow my own life and practice to transform it into a practice that speaks to the gods my 21^st century soul has happened to be granted. So I am both connected to the past – to the human and animal past that we all partake in through the collective unconscious – and fully present in the here and now, as fully human as my ancestors, reaching back towards them just as I reach forwards into the mysteries of my own being. 

 

So to come full circle, I, too, am capable of being offended by pagans who might be offended by me – some seem to think, it appears, that because I don’t conceive of the gods as literal autonomous beings that my gods are not real; that I do not have any relationship with Odin, or Freyja, or the older spirits of nature. I feel very much that I do; I just locate them differently, in the portions of my mind where the deepest of inheritances and connections rest; the places where we are reminded, where we are forced or enabled to realize, that we come from the earth, the soil, the water, the moon, and the sun: and into all of that we will one day be fully reabsorbed.