The Old Gods and Goddesses<\/p>\n
One question that seems to be fundamental to Pagan belief is whether the Gods and Goddesses represent one idea or underlying form that has many names, or whether they represent many individual entities that, well, have many names.\u00a0 This must be an important issue because it almost always seems to get mentioned in any discussion of belief or working.\u00a0\u00a0 The way it usually goes is along the lines \u201cshe is the mystery that we call by many names.\u201d\u00a0 This seems to be subdivided between those who say there is some practical division (male\/female, dark\/light) in the mystery and those who feel that everything is unified at the deepest level.\u00a0 But however it goes we almost always work with various aspects or avatars of that underlying mystery.<\/p>\n
Well, you say, anyone can believe anything they want so the answer is \u201cyes, of course.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Or 42.\u00a0 \u00a0Yes, anyone can believe anything they want, that\u2019s why there are Christians.\u00a0 But the key question in my opinion is what effect does the various ways of thinking about the Gods and Goddesses have on belief, worship, and what we take away from out encounters with them.<\/p>\n
I am not talking about monotheism, as I\u2019ve discussed the past there is no historical incompatibility between Paganism and monotheism, nor is there necessarily a theological problem with it.\u00a0 Instead the question is how to think about whether the Gods and Goddesses are somehow layered, stacked one on top another in some sort of endless mystery spiral that ends in chaos, or they are \u201cflat\u201d and all somehow equal in their characteristics and priorities.<\/p>\n
The idea that there is one mystery at the heart of deity, and everything else stems from that mystery appears to be related to the theological problem of theodicy, the study of god\u2019s omnipotence and perfection.\u00a0 I would contend that idea of an underlying mystery arises directly from the ontological argument.\u00a0 As you will recall this argument essentially says that god exists because to not exist would be a lack of perfection (Descartes version) and, of course, the definition of god is perfection.\u00a0 Kant had some problems with this argument.\u00a0 Kant\u2019s problem can be boiled down to the observation that the argument kind of assumes the result as a starting point.<\/p>\n
From a modern Pagan perspective the idea of unity as a desirable trait, that one is better than many, seems like a logical assumption.\u00a0 If we have an underlying mystery then it can be seen as above and beyond all the various dualisms that give rise to conflict and imperfection, such as male\/female, good\/evil, etc.\u00a0 The various aspects of the sacred, from elementals to pantheons, come from this fertile pool of unified deity.\u00a0\u00a0 The underlying unity gives a depth and direction to our working, and makes explaining where the varieties of deities come from logical and consistent.\u00a0 If the underlying mystery is the consciousness of the universe, the Mother of all, then we have a unity between the mystery, the Gods and Goddesses, and our own consciousness.\u00a0 \u00a0We are all simply embers or sparks from the divine fire, a fire we can neither know nor explain.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately (for you) I do not like this line of argument, because I believe it is too easily transitioned into the New Age idea of union and blissful integration of all into one great mystery.\u00a0 It also sounds like a concession to the ontological argument, which, in turn, makes it seem like we are arguing with the Christians to justify our beliefs.\u00a0 I tend to think we need to stand on our own two feet.<\/p>\n
But the alternative view, that all Pantheons stand on their own and Paganism\u2019s defining characteristic of tolerance is the glue that keeps everything together, seems to lack the depth that an underlying, unified, mystery gives the theological idea of the Gods and Goddesses and their worship.\u00a0 It just isn\u2019t terribly satisfying if all there is are a bunch of Pantheons without some way to delve deeper into the mystery of what is behind it all.\u00a0 Without some underlying unity we could easily ask why we spend all this energy on one set of deities as opposed to another.\u00a0 Where are we going in our worship if not to the ultimate source of all?<\/p>\n
In this month\u2019s Cauldron<\/em> I was reading a very interesting article about the Pale Faced Goddess and it occurred to me that the Witches might have an interestingly profound way of thinking about the mysteries (surprise, surprise) [1].\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The standard Wiccan [2] way of thinking about the God and Goddess is that they are the manifestation of the deeper mystery, often an unnamed, or secretly named, underlying deity that is behind it all.\u00a0 Sometime this deity is sentient, and other times it is a force of nature.<\/p>\n This Wiccan mystery can be translated many different ways, and the most common way I have seen it translated is what I have characterized as the Wiccan ontological argument: Theologically we need something at the bottom, a turtle, so to speak, upon which the rest of the world can be constructed, and this mystery is what we have.<\/p>\n But this does not seem to be either the Gardnarian or other Traditional [3] form of the mystery.\u00a0\u00a0 There is a more historical aspect to the Traditional approach, one that recognizes just how ancient our faith is and how deeply mysterious.<\/p>\n Now I must have a bit of an aside here to say what I mean my historical.\u00a0 There are a couple of ways in which we can use the term.\u00a0 First is the linear sense of a series of events or dates that occur as we proceed backward in time.\u00a0 Or we can mean the study of the past and its characterization and analysis in the present time.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t want to mean any of those.\u00a0 Instead by \u201chistorical\u201d I mean that one thing is built on another over time like the layers in a sedimentary outcrop.\u00a0 We could call this the stratigraphy of deity, but that would need just as much explaining as calling it a historical approach does.\u00a0 The Gods and Goddesses had those who preceded them in time, and they grew and evolved themselves over time.\u00a0 The Gods and Goddesses have a history, both mythologically as well as archeologically.<\/p>\n So in thinking about the Gods and Goddesses we can envision a wheel or a genealogical chart.\u00a0 At the root is the great-unknown mystery of existence.\u00a0 It is the creation of all, what was there beyond the big bang [4], before existence itself came into existence.\u00a0 But from that beginning was borne the older Gods and Goddesses.\u00a0 Take the Irish pantheon as an example.\u00a0 Before Dagda and Morrigan came the Gods and Goddesses of those who moved in after the last glaciation and the following Neolithic megalith builders.\u00a0\u00a0 Crom Cruach [5] would be an example of one of these older Gods that survived relatively undisturbed (take that for what you will), while others of the Neolithic Gods and Goddesses became incorporated in subsequent generations of Gods and Goddesses.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Many of these older Gods and Goddesses became incorporated into subsequent Pagan Gods and Goddesses, such as Cernunnos and Herne, and eventually became Christianized as the devil.<\/p>\n While they may have been integrated into subsequent pantheons, these older Gods [6] still exist as unitary entities.\u00a0\u00a0 They are known by different names, Lilith, Holda, Norns, the White Goddess., or the various representations of the Fates.\u00a0 Sometimes \u00a0their names obscure their real intentions and abilities.\u00a0 Generally these ancient Gods and Goddesses are primal, and not always focused on the best intentions of those who call them.\u00a0 They are truly independent, independent of our intentions and ideas, and often independent of our concepts of good and evil.<\/p>\n Calling on these Gods and Goddesses is both powerful, and dangerous.\u00a0 Dangerous both in the traditional sense, and because when they manifest it can be overwhelming.\u00a0 They are capable of producing awe, and fear.\u00a0 We have all had moments in ritual when entities came, and things happened.\u00a0\u00a0 Often these interactions occur when the older Gods and Goddesses awaken and come.<\/p>\n These Gods and Goddesses are not always welcoming, but reflect the values and attributes of an earlier time when life was not lived by the same rules we live it by now.\u00a0 \u00a0They are independent of us and our values, lives, and wishes, but they can be a source of great inner power, support, and comfort in the same way that a good ship\u2019s captain can make you feel better simply because you know he is in the wheelhouse.<\/p>\n These Gods and Goddesses are elemental not in the sense that they are related to the elements, but they are elemental\u2019s of spirit.\u00a0 They are fundamental forces or natures that do not relate as easily to our conditions as the Gods and Goddesses that came later in the historical development of Pagan deity.<\/p>\n Later Gods and Goddesses, the ones we typically associate with the Pantheons, arose from these older, foundational, Gods and Goddesses.\u00a0 One generation of Gods and Goddesses gave birth to the next, and the next, and so on.<\/p>\n We see this form of understanding in the Theogony of Hesiod.\u00a0 Chaos [7] and Gaia gave birth to the first generation of\u00a0 Gods, the Titans [8]. \u00a0The Titans Cronus, Coeus, and Oceanus with their consorts (and with some help from Gaia and Uranus) in turn birthed the Gods and Goddesses who were more human-like in their actions: Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite and their relatives [9]. \u00a0\u00a0While this is all more complicated than it should be (Cronus overthrew Uranus in a particularly awkward way), what we have here is both a history, and a genealogy.\u00a0 One layer of Gods and Goddesses builds upon the other.<\/p>\n Whether this history is part of the history behind the Gods and Goddesses, as in the case of the Greek Pantheon, or occurred naturally through the passage of time and the evolution of a peoples, as in the case of the Irish, both ways produce a wide range of deity, not all of which are the focus of modern Paganism.\u00a0 In more recent times the focus of many Pagan rituals and workings has been on the most recent, \u201cyoungest\u201d Gods and Goddesses.\u00a0 The older Gods and Goddesses are not as popular, perhaps because of their more elemental, visceral, and distant nature.<\/p>\n But why Aphrodite or Hekate and not Coeus, Cronus, or Oceanus?\u00a0 What can the older Gods and Goddesses tell us about deity, and about ourselves?<\/p>\n First I believe we can dismiss the notion of a \u201chierarchy\u201d of Gods and Goddesses with the older being somehow \u201cbetter\u201d than the younger.\u00a0 That seems to me to be a similar fallacy to the one discussed by Stephen Gould in the Mismeasure of Man<\/em>: that we tend to like to see rankings and patterns in data where there really are none to see.\u00a0 Just because one thing precedes the other in chronological order does not mean that it is either better, or more primitive, than the thing that follows.\u00a0 Those concepts are human ways of thinking about the world, and don\u2019t necessarily apply to everything in nature.<\/p>\n So the old Gods and Goddesses are neither better nor worse than the more modern ones.\u00a0 But what they are is different.\u00a0 They are more distant, more removed from the human-like traits we see in the younger Gods and Goddesses. \u00a0They are not your best friends, they are not waiting to welcome you with sweet verse and soothing balms into their arms.\u00a0 They are demanding, they are tough, they are not what we would create if we were to make ourselves a deity.\u00a0 This can be tough when it comes time to work with them, something the Traditional Witches seem to understand.<\/p>\n The old Gods and Goddesses have a lot to teach us, and a lot of power that we can draw from.\u00a0 Their very distance is a form of healing from the world.\u00a0 They can give the perspective of something beyond the world, an entity that does not worry about the same kind of things that we do.\u00a0 Distance is sometimes as effective as engagement.<\/p>\n Their demands are demands that we should consider.\u00a0 They ask for sacrifice, duty, and hard work.\u00a0 They do not provide easy rewards.\u00a0 These are attributes that we can use to get us what we need, or what we want.\u00a0\u00a0 They are the demands of the hard stones, the fallow land, and the drought.\u00a0 Responding to their leadership leads us to survive and prosper.<\/p>\n They provide the power of self-confidence.\u00a0 They are the example that risk-taking needs.\u00a0 Who better to give us power, to lend us the ability to work toward our goals than an entity that has cracked the stones and ground the bones for millennia.\u00a0\u00a0 Their power comes from their age and their irreverence for the things that we value.\u00a0 Gaining their perspective means losing a little of the world that we hold onto, of letting go so that we can become more than we are.<\/p>\n As I write this a thunderstorm is overtaking the house.\u00a0 Lightening is flashing and thunder is booming.\u00a0 I take this as a caution.\u00a0 In advocating for attention to the Fates, to the old Gods and Goddesses, I am suggesting we engage and work with something elemental, fundamental, dangerous.\u00a0 At the same time the danger, to those of true intent and will, is the jumping off point for an amazing encounter with power, a power that changes and breaks and grows faster and more deeply than the powers we work with in our daily rituals.\u00a0 We should be careful, but we should also be curious.<\/p>\n [1] Theresa A. Lucas.\u00a0 \u201cThe Pales-Faced Goddess, The Witch Goddess as seen in some forms of Traditional Craft.\u201d\u00a0 Cauldron<\/em>.\u00a0 141, Aug. 2011. \u00a0\u00a0Though I\u2019ll note that none of the commentary I make in the text has much at all to do with the article.<\/p>\n [2] Just to be clear, I\u2019m using terminology precisely in this paper.\u00a0 \u201cWiccan\u201d refers to all the post-Gardnarian Pagans who identify with the general Wiccan set of practices.\u00a0 Gardnarian means, Gardnarian.\u00a0 Traditional means historical Witchcraft but not Gardnarian.\u00a0\u00a0 Gardnairans may or may not be Traditional; it depends on whether Old Dorothy was real.<\/p>\n [3] I\u2019m capitalizing the \u201cT\u201d in traditional to try and distinguish between those versions of Witchcraft that do not descend from Gardner, but do claim ancient descent, and those that descend from Gardner.<\/p>\n [4] I know that neither space nor time have any meaning beyond the singularity, but you have to say it somehow.<\/p>\n [5] A gentleman I would not engage without a good reason, and sincere intent.\u00a0 Respect.<\/p>\n [6] I\u2019m avoiding the use of \u201celder Gods\u201d for obvious reasons.<\/p>\n [7] Actually \u201cChaos\u201d is better translated as \u201cchasm\u201d which I think is much more interesting.\u00a0 Instead of Chaos getting busy with Gaia, the earth, we have Chasm or gap, or nothingness, coming together with matter, or Gaia, or somethingness to create the world.\u00a0 Existentially this suggests that in the beginning the nothingness of consciousness was infused into the material of the world, and from that sprang the original sentient Gods and Goddesses<\/p>\n