As I've been writing and researching this piece, I've begun to laugh at myself for even proposing the topic. Not because I don't necessarily think that it's worth discussing, or even because I am concerned about the scope of such a topic in this format (though, I am, a bit), but because we are all going to necessarily come to this reading with a vastly different topic in our heads.

Perhaps this is a good place to start. Consider for yourself, before you read my take on this all: what are gods? What is God, if you have one rather than many? What role do or does they/it/he/she play in your life? How do you orient to your relationship with them?

My general awareness of neo-pagan or pagan reconstructionist spaces leads me to believe that there are many such ritualists who orient to deity worship as a kind of optional aspect to Practice. Some mention feeling called to venerate a given deity, some discuss their relationship with their deity as being casual and friendly, some have intense worship relationships with their deities and recognize a strict hierarchy of cosmic power, while others still clabber together an eclectic pantheon based on varying factors and have diverse relationships with different gods based on personal preference or current need.

These are only a few of the kinds of deity veneration I've seen or heard discussed in such spaces, and of course this list omits a very common type of deity veneration which is simply the absence of such an aspect to Practice.

But what are these beings that people are interacting with or purporting to interact with? How can there be so many? How can there be so many different ones? How can someone outside of lineage context just "pick" a god to worship? How does that god show up for them? Do they, actually? Are those who aren't working with deities "missing" something?

I don't know if I can answer all of these questions, and I really haven't come here to do so. However, I hope that some of their answers make themselves known or felt while you read, because what I am here to discuss is the underlying principle that I believe exists beneath all deity work. Now, this is a belief based on a significant amount of lineage, training, and exploration, but it is my own nonetheless. With that being said, I'm not here to tell anyone they're "doing it wrong". This is, ultimately, a personal publication and these are my personal thoughts. You will do with them what you will, and whether you agree or not I hope that there is some degree to which these thoughts are useful to ponder or use to layer your own approach to the gods, if you have one.

What are "gods"?

If you attempt to look up the dictionary definition of the term "gods", you'll get a different one from almost every online dictionary source, and the print dictionaries I can currently access vary in their phrasing as well. Some say that "gods" are supreme beings, others that they represent supreme reality. Some of the folks I asked about this say that gods are "spirits" that represent cosmic forces. But what are spirits? In a lot of disciplines, spirits are much lower, created disincarnate beings, where gods are uncreated, intrinsic, creative and extraordinarily powerful disembodied beings who are incarnate without physical form. In some religions gods can take physical form at will, and in others they're incomprehensible to those that reside within the World, or to "lower" beings, depending on the specific cosmology.

And so it seems there isn't necessarily an easy answer to this question, and this is why at the beginning I said that we're all probably coming to this discussion imagining a different topic entirely.

So whilst I cannot, perhaps, invent a definition of the gods that works for everyone, what I can do is offer my own personal interpretation based on my Practice and training.

Gods as representations of forces

Within some frameworks, the forces that make up the Universe[1] are given clear names, categories, and correlations with other things. The Kabbalistic system is one such framework, and applied Kabbalism has many documented tools for understanding such forces.

However, within the kind of animist framework that I am working within, there is not a clear and handy tool for naming the forces that we're discussing, and as such even less clarity on what the specific correlations to gods would be. Going even one step further back, though, let's discuss what we mean when we say "forces".

In Of Magick, I lay out a kind of poetic creation myth, and the reason that I wrote that piece the way that I did is that these concepts of what I'm calling force are really beyond language. For millennia and nearly universally, then, people from all kinds of different geographical and social contexts have utilized poetry, music, and other consciousness-altering media to convey these concepts – to cultivate the experience of the thing being described rather than attempting to describe these indescribable things purely analytically. If you find the following attempt at bringing those descriptions into analytical language confusing or unsatisfactory, then, I recommend going back and referencing that post and seeing if it feels any more intuitive.

With that introduction out of the way: a force is not an entity, nor even necessarily an exact parallel to what physicists may call a natural law such as gravity. However, it is highly likely that all of my readers understand the concept of gravity, and so let's use this as an example. Gravity is ultimately a kind of force that holds one body to another body based on one body possessing more mass than the other. In this way, gravity itself is a worldly reflection of a force that must exist prior to the existence of bodies – a kind of uncreated force which pulls or which enables the existence of mass, or which draws towards. Now, if you're the kind of person who can only really think in scientific terms, I apologize because I understand that this is very likely to feel like a frustrating explanation. You might be thinking things like "Wait a minute! You're leapfrogging science and philosophy in one go! Why would gravity be a representation of a force somewhere else, and not just the force? Why would it be uncreated and what does that even mean?"

And you'd be right to ask these questions! Please know, though, that I'm not sure I can truly answer them all right now just given the constraints of writing a newsletter and not a book, but I'll try, because I feel like this explanation matters as we go on and build on this concept. First of all, I say that gravity (remember, this is just an example) is a worldly representation of a force. By this I mean that gravity is the force, which exists outside of terrestrial bodies, acting on terrestrial bodies. Because we have asserted that gravity is a law based on our own socioplanetary[2] scientific determinations, and because we can both mathematically model and observe gravity working on bodies outside of our own Earth, it would make sense to also assert that gravity is something that exists as a function of the Universe and would have existed in some form prior to the existence of the bodies that we can observe beyond our own. Science does in fact assert this: in order for planets or stars or literally anything else to exist, there would have needed to be something underlying the collisions of particles and then atoms and then molecules that occurred which then created the cascading effects of planetary creation and eventually life in some places. This is one aspect of the "big bang" theory, that at some point the force that we now call "gravity" came to be. Because gravity needed to somehow pre-exist for the collision of infinitesimally small particles to coalesce into larger things with mass, there is a kind of running assumption (at least, last I checked, though perhaps there are theories I'm unaware of) that gravity came to be before particles began colliding and coalescing, or at least simultaneously.

So where did gravity, or the kind of prior iteration of gravity that existed before there were things with mass that enabled things with mass to be, come from? Well, we're in a conundrum here – we either dredge up the ol' "creation vs. spontaneous big bang" debate, which is really not a valid debate at all, because both perspectives posit answers that aren't mutually exclusive of one another, or we find another framework for understanding this. This is what I've done in Of Magick, and I'm working on something that develops this further, but it must be understood that neither are probably going to be capable of fully filling in this gap. However, we must move on somehow, so we will.

Gravity, then, is one example of force-made-manifest in physical reality. There is something underlying the motion of things and their collisions, and there are various other forces that underlie various other lower-level functions of life and existence: you could call some of these by their Western polarities like light and dark or masculine and feminine or severity and mercy, but even these labels are known to be reductive attempts at describing what it is that the physical mechanisms we witness are the result of "cosmically" speaking. So thus there is the assertion here being made that all of the mechanisms that make being possible are material iterations of mechanisms that make the potential for being possible[3].

Ultimately, my claim here with all of this is that the function of gods (be they "gods" or "God") is that of representation. Humans have witnessed and experienced in many states of being the forces that underlie all of the functions of life and existence, and also been in many instances at their mercy. What is hunger a function of? What is lightning? What is ecstasy, or bliss, or reproduction, or love? What are these things and what do they represent, where do they come from? And I don't believe that gods are simply the result of ignorant people desperate for answers, as some very dogmatically materialistic folk may purport them to be. Rather, I think that gods are an extremely brilliant way of contriving visualizable representations of natural forces – both those that are present and accessible through sense-experience-with-body, and those that are ultimately inexperienceable by people who are still incarnate in a physical vessel.

Going beyond the obvious

Now I'm worried that some of you at this point are going "Siin, seriously? You wrote all this to tell me that gods represent natural forces? Don't we all know that?"

Well, do we? I mean, yes, we can point to some cultures who have gods that represent obvious material corollaries: fertility, agriculture, the Sun, the Moon, sex, war, thunder, and so on – but is saying that gods hold sway over something within experience on Earth the same as recognizing that those somethings within experience on Earth are iterations of something outside of our capability to experience? Furthermore, do we feel like everyone really feels this way, or that religion hasn't generally taken an enormous step away from a kind of veneration that relies heavily on engaging in specific states of being that mimic or enter into surrender with the god-force being venerated? Do we even feel like all polytheistic cultures with gods named for natural actions truly believed that those actions were ripples of greater forces, or is it possible that some cultures really did name gods that they believed were beings who were literally causing those actions? It's possible that all polytheistic religions shared my interpretation, and it's equally likely that many don't!

And continuing with the assumption that they did but that perhaps the rise of monotheism has pushed us away from this awareness (for argument's sake), what of the Christian God? Clearly the Christian God within my interpretation would represent the ultimate force: the force that caused everything. Or, to be more correct, the force that conceived of everything and then also put that design into physical existence. So, then, if we truly find it obvious that gods and god-names are just representations of iterations of forces at work in the broader creation, why the conflict between monotheistic belief and polytheistic belief? And if we're saying: "no, no, obviously the religious leaders themselves don't understand (or pretend they don't understand) that gods are representations of the same things regardless of name or category, but we – as in, the neo-pagans, witches, pagan reconstructionists – we understand this better than they", then I think we can be honest with ourselves and understand what a wickedly arrogant statement that would be to make!

The Kabbalistic tradition, specifically that which is "applied" Kabbalah, or that which uses the metaphor of the Sephiroth as a kind of guideline to a spiritual yoga which leads an initiate into a state of being where they can potentially learn to access that which is beyond bodily experience[4], teaches that as an initiate ascends the spheres and accesses higher types of psychism or greater access to knowledge[5] they can learn to utilize deity worship to increase the power of their magick – and based on other readings I feel as though both the use of (even nonspecific, multitude, or cross-pantheon) deities as corollary representations of specific Kabbalistic forces and the use of "angels" are ultimately varying levels of the same ceremonial practice. In this discipline, a hierarchy of being is recognized wherein one would perhaps utilize a "lower" or "more accessible"[6] angel, archangel or god and "work their way up" to the power of, well, a more powerful being as their own capability to utilize or direct power increases. However, it is always recognized if one is being true to the writings of the Kabbala, that even God-with-a-capital-G at the top of the hierarchy is a representation of forces that Are – not necessarily specific Beings[7][8]. This is relevant because Kabbalism is probably the best Western-readable example of a system that very literally and legibly discusses the use of veneration or deity work as corollary to yogic practice that brings one into awareness of and even influence over the greater forces that underlie everything in Creation, and I think its example helps to make concrete this concept now that we've described what it is we mean when we say "forces" and "representations" in this context.

That's all really great, and the Kabbalah is a worthwhile system to learn or at least study if you're a Westernized person in a globalized, largely mono-theized world, because it fits well into our socialized view of things as being really easy to fit into neat, discrete categories and I think the meditations related to it are useful for opening up areas of the mind that are capable of experiencing things outside of that kind of discrete, categorical, heavily-language based mode of knowledge-access.

If gods – up to and including God-with-a-capital-G – are representations of forces, some which perhaps originated before everything that Is in the physical sense even Was; and if truly, lucidly understanding that in a deep and embodied way is a good way to unlock access to knowledge which is also a part of the forces outside of that which Is in the physical sense, then how can we orient to the gods outside of a system like Kabbalism – which is somewhat counter to an animist modality of magick and Practice?

Gods as representations of forces in animist witchcraft

Within my Practice, I, unlike those students of practical Kabbalism, wish not to view disincarnate beings or forces-made-manifest[9] as simply means to some magickal end, even if that end feels noble and aligned with Divine Will. I simply do not feel truth in seeing such things as simply objects or useful metaphors. Instead, I wish to consider the possibility of forces-made-manifest relationally. For if we are capable of seeing all things as having being, of having life, can we see forces as being imbued with animacy in their own way without hopelessly anthropomorphizing and risking a different kind of objectification? Can we give credence to such forces as bringing all to Being here, now?

How does gravity in its grander sense ripple through ecosystem – in the serendipitous forming of all relation, of the movement and shape of living water? Perhaps rather than invoke or use gods-as-metaphor or gods-in-disincarnate-being-form as things that serve us, we can name atmosphere and lightning as the ripples of themselves from Elsewhere, and love them. In knowing these names as dear friends perhaps we can learn something of the unknowable Creation, something of ourselves as we are but a silk thread in an ever-vibrating and ever-woven web.

Maybe dear Ira is right in this, that gods must have local names and be recognized as living spirits in-locality for us to truly honor them in ways that make sense. But maybe as well we recognize the universality of Isis or Sin for what they represented once, for their echoes through time and place, and maybe if we can place them within our own corner of Being we can truly build the relationships we must. Either way, it seems, to me at least, and humbly, that who or what the gods truly are is beyond comprehension and language. Simultaneously and not without paradox they are also the inhabitants of each and every Being, for they are the Movers – or perhaps more accurately, they are the potential for all Movement, all Being, all Life and therefore they are within and without, above and below, hierarchically located in a great un-hierarchy of cyclical potential and pendulous shifting much too large for us to even perceive it, and far outside of our single terrestrial space.

So with this I wish that we begin to feel the forces all around us as the great gods, be they smiling or smiting us, that we may better cultivate relation with all that Is within our momentary incarnate experiences, and perhaps persist beyond in whatever realms await us after.

Until next time ~

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Notes

1. Or Creation, the All, etc., feel free to pick your favorite term.
2. This is not a word, but it feels descriptive, so I'm going to make it up!
3. I don't mean to be pedantic or overly repetitive, I'm simply attempting in the last few paragraphs to describe something rather difficult to describe -- and I'm unsure if it's as difficult to understand in written form as it is to try to describe in written form, so please bear with me.
4. In the applied or practical Kabbalah, the goal is for one to continue to "ascend" after their bodily incarnation is over. In this way there is a kind of parallel with Tibetan Buddhism, wherein the goal is to remember the experience of all lives to maintain the living conscious Being through all incarnations and thus to eventually attain one's purpose in all phases of existence. So some Kabbalistic writings talk about "disincarnate Masters" which is basically a way of saying those who ascended to a point while living that a living body cannot ascend past, and who continue to walk the Path and even potentially teach others in Death, or as a disincarnate being.
5. The exact phrasing is dependent on the text and author, but I think generally they're trying to convey the same thing. Dion Fortune in particular has a specific (and maybe personal?) definition of "psychism" but I've seen other authors attempt to use this as a catchall word to describe "knowledge access" or "access to that which is outside of normal sensory, bodily perception or analytical knowledge".
6. What these things mean feels heavily dependent on the specific sect, order, or author you're learning from.
7. If you've read anything from Damien Echols or some of the more popular Western "how-to-do-magick" folk this gets perhaps a little muddled, because Echols and ilk do seem to legitimize the view of angels as specific Beings while the older writings by rabbis in the Kabbalistic tradition -- at least that I've read -- and even Fortune herself are pretty clear that gods and angels are useful representations-made-incarnate-in-the-moment only.
8. I'm using all of the Kabbalistic stuff as useful, concrete descriptions of a practice that specifically views gods in the way that I'm going to describe in a more freeform animist way in a moment -- bear with me if you're really not into all of this Western tradition stuff.
9. Whichever view you choose to take of the gods.