First things first: I’m sorry, Taylor. I unreservedly apologise for my condescending tone and disrespect for you and your practise.
To put my remarks into context… I’m sure that my passion and anger on this subject are unmistakeable. I’ve come to this thread – and indeed my understanding of you as a person – with a history of having read and heard occultist’s accounts of divinity, accounts that I’ve more often than not found either dismissive, glib, purely theoretical or received unquestioned from modern occultist thinking. To have offloaded that onto you was wrong of me. I damaged my own case in the process, and I hope to re-establish my voice in this thread with considerably more goodwill and less knee-jerking on my part.
I have a huge issue with the way in which many people use the term “God.” I’d describe my objection as an objection to appropriation. To describe the process by which a God is formed as a work of cumulative fiction that a society of individuals charges with significance instantly strips that God of its Godhood and domesticates it in the mind of the practitioner, in the sense of adapting it to an environment in which it can be more or less understood to be a product of humans and be of use to humans (regardless of whether that process has the end result of forming what Gypsy might term an artificial intelligence). It is divorced from its context of being worshipped and in doing so becomes something other-than-Godlike. In an earlier post I used the dictionary definition of God to illustrate this.
The parameters in which one perceives it existing instantly become redefined. No matter how rich and complex one’s beliefs about how a God becomes a God (and there have been some brilliantly rich and complex beliefs on this thread), hypothesising and building a theology about its origins in the minds and actions of humanity instantly takes away a God’s position of being Godlike to the practitioner, therefore becoming a less powerful being to be in a relationship with. I believe that’s losing too much into the bargain. The concept of the term “God” as it stands is part familiar, part alien, and totally wild, ragged, raw and staggeringly potent to the unconscious. It bypasses a conscious intellect that would prefer it left comfortably tagged, or at least described and defined in the abstract, and is all the more powerful for it. It is bigger than humanity, and as such affects our sense of ecology, the context into which we fit.
One of my concerns that I’ve already alluded to is that to come at one’s practise from this kind of belief loads the dice in terms of results. The experimenter sets the terms for the experiment, the observer actively interacts with what they’re observing. In the realm of our subjective experience as soon as you define what you believe a God to be then you potentially limit it in what it is capable of doing. I repeat from an earlier post that I refuse to come to a conclusion about what constitutes a “God.” The most I’ll say is what I’ve already said: that the term should not be used lightly and without a clear knowledge of what it means and how you’ve necessarily changed that meaning.
I’m not of the belief that people should worship every God they encounter. However, an encounter with a God should to me by definition make the practitioner stand back in awe thinking, “Fuck me. I can see how thousands/millions of people worship you!” The worship reflex is triggered while potentially not being fully acted upon. The flipside of this is that one can trace the effects of the belief that the Gods have their origins in man in the accounts of the practitioner: they’re lacking in the sense of scale, magnitude and hard-sought depth that you’d find in accounts from the religions that actively worship that God. In this case it’s not about the amount of significance you invest that effects the results, but the type of beliefs you have about what you’re getting involved with.
I guess my standpoint is that if you’re going to work with a God, let them be just that: a God. Reversing the lens for a second, it’d be fascinating to hear the opinions of people within mainstream religion concerning how occultists have come to relate to their Gods…
Now that its been clarified that we’re not necessarily creating a quick-fix pantheon of TV and Comics characters, but seeing how those characters may relate to and depict classic types from character and myth, I’d agree with Taylor that Ben Sisko from DS9 bears all the traits of a mythic hero. He’s part divine, part human, inextricably bound to fates beyond his understanding and seen as a messianic figure by a religion he’d prefer to distance himself from. He’s an aspect of the archetypal God-Man, a Christ, a mediator, arguing on behalf of the Gods to Man and on behalf of Man to the Gods. Added to this he’s a destroyer and warrior figure, contrasted with being a nurturing Father and community builder. He’s also the mask that the writers of the show wear in order to allude to their own involvement, again making him a Christ figure: the created enters the creation. As a lens through which to see existing forms he adds a fascinating new spin on things. I’ve worked with Sisko a lot in the past, and I probably feel more comfortable with him because he’s deliberately constructed to be a magico-religious figure, coupled with the identification I have with him as being similar to myself and my Dad. He has a cache to me that other fictional characters do not, because he is already a deity in the internal logic of the telly prog to which he belongs.
However, it’s worth reiterating that: everything in my experience is already deeply in my unconscious long before I consciously choose to invest additional significance into it. I tend to only pay attention to those cultural artefacts that seem to have already sprung into a seemingly autonomous life within me. Further choices to invest in them are organic and don’t feel a great deal like real choices to me. I rarely have to choose to work with characters, story types, themes and ideas from the culture around me. They seem to crop up as and when they need to. I didn’t go looking for Sisko in any conscious sense, and don’t intend to form a belief system or pantheon around him. Any ideas I have concerning Sisko’s existence outside DS9 as an entity to whom I can relate are likely a product of my identification with the character, my respect and admiration for Avery Brooks, and that constantly surprising manner in which a well-drawn character will appear to have a life all its own inside our own world-models. None of which is necessarily synonymous with the term “God” to me. |
), since they seem to occupy a position somewhere between human-created/dependent "pop" spirits and essentially divine "traditional" spirits or Gods. They are also very current and active, so there is little question of an unrecoverable "ancient past" or dubious revival religion to deal with. 