Ye Gods!

The problem with writing an opinions blog, as opposed to some sort of diary, is that you eventually run out of things to have strong opinions about. Or at least ones you feel qualified to rant about.
So, it seems that things have been quiet at Dionysian Towers. They haven't really - your humble host has been doing lots of stuff, just not much blogging. Anyway, my lovely friends at Clarian Faeries (Hello darlings!) decided to start a discussion on their Farcebook page which has got me thinking . . . and blogging.
The original question was "What does deity mean to you?" and my original answer was "An awful lot, actually". But then I realised that doesn't really tell you anything at all. So, I'm going to use this page for a personal consideration of what deity means to me.

Note: Please don't expect a sensible, coherent philosophy here. I'm making this up as I go along!

Oh God!

The first question, then is whether or not I believe in god or gods. The answer is a very definite yes. I don't believe in the modern Judaeo/Christian/Islamic concept that there is one (and only one) infinite, omnipresent, omnipotent and consciously active power. I'm sure there is some overall spiritual essence of which all things partake (the Tao), but to consider that deliberately active and conscious, especially in the form of an all-seeing father figure makes no sense to me. It's more environment than object, and to consider it conscious feels like the sea telling the fish what to do.

I do, on the other hand, believe in gods. Yep, plural! I don't like labels, but one that fits me very well is "polytheist" (I'm poly-lots of things, actually. Does that makes me a polypolyist?)
I believe in all the gods, every last one of 'em. Even poor old Yahweh/Allah/Hashem/G-d, who normally comes in for a lot of stick from me, is as real as any other. He's one god amongst many whose followers' rather warlike tendencies imposed a larger role upon him than he should have had, but he's there all the same.
There's another note. Believing in gods doesn't necessarily mean treating them with respect!

Okay, so I think they're real. In fact I think they're more real than most things. For example: Looking at it in terms of time, I have a limited reality. I have existed for 44 years and with luck and good judgement I hope to exist for at least another 44. Choosing a god at random, Zeus has existed for at least 4,000 years. Simple maths makes him a hundred times more real, and from his point of view I'm just a blip - hardly having time to exist at all.

But temporal existence is only one way to judge the reality of something. For some people things aren't real unless they can experience them for themselves, using their "normal" senses. That's fair enough. My coffee table is real, especially so when you walk into it and mangle your shin. The computer I'm typing at is real too, because I can see it and touch it and hear the click when I press keys.
That works pretty well until we get to more abstract things such as, for instance, a tune.

When you hear a tune it obviously exists. You can hear it, sing/play along, dance to it and so on. But does it exist when it's not being played? It may be written on paper, but that's a fairly recent idea (especially to a folk musician) and anyway, that's not the tune. It's only a "picture" of the tune. It could be captured in a recording, but again that's only been happening very recently and it isn't the tune itself - it's simply a very reliable way of repeating the tune.
Yet when the tune is being played it very definitely exists, so it must be real.
To me gods have an analogous form of reality. If a tune can be real, or a dream, an emotion, an idea - the gods also are real in a very similar way.

All this implies that reality depends upon someone experiencing it (When a tree falls in the forest, etc). It does, but only for us. Personally I believe that the gods have existed before humanity and will do long after we're gone, but what matters to us is entirely our experience of them. The only way we know anything is via our own experiences, so whether the gods exist without humanity is a bit of a pointless question. It's humanity which is experiencing them in the first place, and to some extent recreating them.

So, what are they?

My daughter, who is 8 years old and therefore a very clear thinker, recently asked me what gods are. The conversation went a bit like this:
Me: "You know how trees have spirits?"
She: "Oh yeah"
Me: "Well, the god of a forest would be like, a really big spirit made up of all the little spirits of the trees, plants, animals and so on"
She: "Oh. Right-oh!"

And that was that!

Okay, all that was a bit simplistic but notice that we don't just have random gods. We have gods of things, like love, war, mountains and so on. Now imagine a spirit of love. What would it look like?

All cultures across the globe have, or have had, deities of some form and, interestingly, their appearances seem to reflect the appearances and experiences of the people and cultures they come from. Very nature-based cultures, such as nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes and subsistence farming villages tend to have a lot of gods which look like animals and a few who look human. This can be related back to the tree-spirit conversation. What would a tree spirit look like? Well, it would certainly have an element of tree-ness. The same goes for say, Anansi, Coyote or the Rainbow serpent. The more abstract powers tend to look more human, such as the Navaho goddess of night and day, Estsanatlehi.

As people become more "civilised" their gods tend to lose their animal qualities and become more human. In ancient Egypt the gods often had animal heads, which suggests a culture which became extremely conservative in the middle of a transition period. In ancient Greece something even better happened, their gods are entirely human but they have animal companions. So do the Germanic and Norse gods, and many others.

To a certain extent, what this means is that we create the gods in our own images, but that doesn't mean we create them out of nothing. The power, quality, experience (etc) is already there but we need to experience it in a way we can understand, a way that we can relate to. We give the gods their shapes.

What about Chaos Magick?

Our society is going through a massive and extremely fast transition period. It's been happening with ever-increasing speed since the industrial revolution and doesn't look likely to slow down anytime soon. Religious experience, to be relevant, needs to keep up with those changes.
Personally I prefer my gods to have tried and tested forms which I can research and understand - my personal favourites being Dionysos (well, duh!), Shiva and Ishtar - but for some it's Cthulu, Shub-Niggurath, Bugs Bunny or Laurel and Hardy. The point is that the "power" is already there, but we need a way of relating to it in order to understand it better. Frankly, if it works who am I to say nay?

The last question remains, "What are the gods for?"
Some people worship their gods. They ask them favours, they give them gifts, they blame them when things go wrong. Fair enough, I suppose, if it works. And, for them, I'm sure it does.
Personally (which is what the question is about), I don't. I honour my gods by dedication of various activities (dancing, exercise, drinking, sex, etc) but in the end they are that which I am aiming to become. It's all very Dionysian because to me the gods are for ekstasis (to stand outside oneself) and entheos (to have a god within oneself). To become one with the nature of the gods is my personal aim.

So, I think I've come up with an answer to the question, "What does deity mean to you?"
To me it means potential, direction, ecstatic union, "An awful lot, actually!"

Love,
Seán