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Do you believe?

  
 
Gypsy Lantern
09:22 / 09.05.08
In order to avoid rotting the "what drew you to magic?" thread, I thought I'd splinter this conversation off.

Neon Snake said:

I've done very little outside of divination, sigilization, and some stuff with making charms from runes. I've not ventured into any of the stuff some of you guys do with gods and the like; that scares me a bit too much, and also I'm not sure I'm ready to believe in that yet.

I said:

"Going off topic slightly, but I'm interested in the "I don't believe in Gods/Spirits/whatever" thing when it comes from people who otherwise are interested or involved in other things that get classed as "magic". I often think its almost a semantic difficulty, because for me the reality of the Powers I work with is self-evident in nature and there's not really much suspension of disbelief involved or required. I think there's often a misunderstanding that the Gods exist as these sort of Marvel comics-type beings in another dimension, which I could understand someone having a hard time believing in the literal existence of. Whilst the Gods and Spirits I work with do have definite personalities, these personalities are generally illustrative of the force of nature they represent and how it is expressed in human terms in an "as above, so below", microcosmic/macrocosmic sort of way.

So for instance, Shango, associated with fire, thunder and lightning, has a fiery and passionate personality. His devotees will tend to have similar natures, and there is a complex of emotions, ideas and experiences that are said to be of the nature of Shango - all of which come back to an observation of fire, thunder and lightning in nature. He is power, virility, masculinity, passion, dancing, excitement, drumming. From these ideas, his personality emerges, and his service is a way of recognising and honouring our own fiery natures, our own passion. How we can be like a tempestuous thunder storm, how we can be like a flash of lightning, how we can be like a blazing fire. Shango IS all of these things, in nature and in us, and when you interact with him as an Orisha, you are not really being asked to "believe in" something so much as giving a name to a certain aspect of nature that is reflected in human experience and honouring it under the name of Shango. We need to anthropomorphise abstract principles in order to better feel an emotional connection to them, and the business of interacting with Gods and Spirits through devotional practice is like a language for opening a more direct dialogue with very real facets of our existence and principles of nature that we actually deal with all the time.

I've just come back from the river. I went down to the banks of the Thames in my lunchbreak and made offerings for Oshun. She is the Orisha of love, joy, pleasure, sex, luxury and all of the good things that make life worth living. She is the Queen of the River, and owner of the "sweet waters" that we can drink. You can easily see how her other attributes are directly derived from an observation of the river, the beauty of the river, its replenishing, life giving properties, its winding course, its hidden currents. By studying the nature of the river, you learn something of the nature of Oshun and her mysteries. One of her titles is "owner of the fan", and standing up on waterloo bridge on a beautiful summer's day and feeling refreshed and cooled by the gentle breeze coming off the river, is the heart of this mystery.

I think what I'm trying to say is that the Gods are perhaps better thought of not as these abstract fictional characters that we must invest belief in the literal existence of, but as very real facets of our experience both within nature and within our own being (which is a part of nature) that the language of deity assists us in describing, understanding and honouring in our lives. This doesn't make them "less real", and it's not really a clinical reductionism that demotes Deity to subroutines of our subconscious mind either. It's more a way of recognising the inherent magic and mysteries of nature, and how these mysteries are directly reflected in our own nature and the experiences available to us as human animals. Does that make sense?"

Neon Snake said:

You seem to be saying that, given that I have expressed an interest and am involved in magic, why is such a stretch to believe in gods? Do I have that right?

That's not quite what I was trying to put across. I totally understand why it is often a stretch to take the step of investing belief in Gods, as I've been there myself. But having taken the leap to experiment with this stuff, and lived on the other side of that for almost a decade, I don't really see spirit work as irrational or that hard to swallow anymore. I actually see it as a really down-to-earth pragmatic language for interacting with nature and our own being. A tool kit for processing a certain rather fundamental aspect of our human experience, which we as a species - certainly in the west - have largely forgotten how to use. It's a process for opening a dialogue with very real facets of our experience, but generally gets misunderstood as this far-fetched and fanciful D&D-type thing that is difficult for anyone with a healthy scepticism to go anywhere near.

Ramsey Dukes/Lionel Snell has some really interesting material on how the human brain just finds it easier to comprehend things in anthropomorphic terms, which can be illustrated by the way people give names to their cars or to the office photocopier, etc. So I think that the language of describing these various swathes of our human experience as Gods, can have a quite rational reading as just that: a language or medium for interacting with something that is otherwise a bit elusive and difficult to fully apprehend. The business of making offerings and devotions, and the whole paraphernalia of altars, candles, incense, offerings of food and drink, prayer, drumming, symbolism, etc... Could be thought of as the medium through which this sort of dialogue takes place - like an artists materials, these attributes are the paint and canvas that you use to communicate your message and elicit a response from whichever area of self or nature you are reaching towards.

I think its perfectly possible to construct a fairly rational reading of these practices, but you actually get the best results if you keep this sort of intellectualising around the subject out of it - at least while you're in the heat of the magic. There can be time for that afterwards, but if you are working with this sort of material it is better to approach it in fairly literal terms. I really think that it's the instinctive animal part of the brain that is the magician, not the conscious rationalising brain, and the former seems to respond best when these things are framed and approached quite literally - rather than with a sort of knowing post-modern distance. I find that its most constructive to not really get into this whole deconstruction of what the Gods and Spirits may or may not be. I refer to these elements of my experience as "The Mysteries" as they are exactly that. We can never really know *for sure* what these Gods and Spirits actually are, but to paraphrase Crowley: if you perform certain actions, certain results will follow. I think it's important to maintain a healthy scepticism towards one's practice, whereby you exist in that liminal space where you are quite happy to entertain either the purely rational lens on your practice or the full-blown witchdoctor shaking a bone rattle in the cemetery at midnight animist shaman hat - depending on the utility of the belief in a given set of circumstances.

I hope some of this is making sense. It's really difficult to express the qualitative core of the experiences that spirit work tends to produce, but I guess that's my daily struggle as a writer!

I'm not ruling anything out; however, I have a 'magic' rule in my head that I have to experience something myself (or be presented with reasonable proof) before I buy into it.

I think maintaining that perspective throughout your experiments with magic is totally invaluable. I'd even push it further and say that it's important to keep your options open - even in the face of seemingly mad break-the-laws-of-physics evidence for magic - that you might in some way be unconsciously complicit in a magical interpretation of events that could also be framed through a more rational lens. You have to keep that inner sceptic somewhere in the background, or else you leave yourself wide-open to uncritically taking on board all manner of unhealthy delusions and problematic beliefs. Ultimately, the real test of any aspect of one's magical practice is: regardless of what may or may not be happening "behind the scenes" and regardless of the narrative you may have constructed to describe your empirical experience, is this stuff benefiting you in some way? Is it healthy? Is it, in some sense, improving the quality of your life or your understanding of what it means to be a human being breathing air on the planet? Is it making you happy? Is it promoting positive transformative change? And if for some reason it isn't, what can then be done to tweak your working models and preferred narratives so that they function more healthily.
 
 
Eek! A Freek!
12:29 / 09.05.08
Around 15-20 years ago (When I knew *everything*) I decided to embrace atheist ideas. I refused the Idea of a creator.
At the same time, I decided to retain my "belief" in magic(k), ghosts, and demons. (Curiously not angels, however.)
I tried to wipe out any type of Judeo/Christian influence over my thoughts.
Obviously, this made a mess of inconsistencies in my mind which is one of the things I'm still sorting out.
Currently I view the idea of a Creator/God as being both impersonal and all-embracing. I'll use the analogy of a bacteria within my own body: I'm vaguely aware that it's there, I vaguely hope that it will do good things within me, but that's about it. If it acts up, there are a series of pre-written programs to take care of it, but not on a conscious level, for the most part.
I also still "believe" in spirits, elemental forces, and that there are conscious life forms somewhere else in the universe and other dimensions. I also suspect that the things we see under the influence of psychedelics or fever are always there, but we just don't perceive them.
I'm always hesitant to put a name on these things, though: Saying that bravery or the warrior-spirit is embodied by Ogun for example, feels a bit weird, but then again, I've never been formally introduced...
Suspending your disbelief is necessary at first I suppose, until you are shown enough to begin believing. I've seen ghosts, I've talked with other intelligences, I've glimpsed other dimensions. Ergo, I believe.
Magic(k) is not much different than computer programming: Ask a hard-core techno geek about the power and language of computers and they'll spin your head with tales beyond your comprehension. They may see a tree in terms of binary coding, one great big if/then computation.
So... Do you need to suspend your disbelief for them? It's pretty far-fetched and fanciful to me, but I still manage to accept the reality of computers. Are magickians so different? Are they so hard to believe?
 
 
Tomb Zero
16:15 / 09.05.08
I think that the gods/spirits are a paradox. On the one hand, it’s easy to argue that they are our inner, poetic representation/personification of the forces of nature (be those forces external, in the world around us, or internal, in the psyche). But on the other hand, those natural forces are an objective reality—the river, the thunder, the forest, and so forth (or love, anger, thought, intuition and so forth) exist independently of our perception of them (to paraphrase Gypsy: they were here a long time before any of us were born, and will be here after all of us are long dead). The gods are the mysterious children of the union of subject and object, and live in the liminal space where subject and object meet.

Thankyou, Gypsy—your post, here, has articulated something that I’ve been trying to articulate, in a long-running debate I’ve been having with a (rationalist, sceptical—I mean those terms to be non-derogatory) friend of mine. I’d outlined exactly the argument you’ve set out, here (although I used, as examples of our tendency to find the human form in the world around us, Orion and our tendency to see faces in clouds and gnarly tree-bark, rather than the names we give to cars and photocopiers, excellent as those examples are), and argued that the gods are symbols that help us to understand the world around us. But that’s wrong, I think—or clumsily put. The words I’ve been stumbling to find, for so long now, are that the gods are symbols that allow us to form emotional connections with the world around us—not just an aid to understanding. So thanks for that.

My long-running debate, with my friend, has convinced me of one thing, mind you—that although there are many ways to rationalise the gods, to “explain them away” using reason, there is an element of faith/unreason involved in any relationship with them. My friend has argued, time and time again, that he feels no need to give human form to the world, in this way, and I must admit that he is very much connected (emotionally/spiritually, that is) to the world and to nature—every bit as much as I am, I feel, with my pantheon of gods/spirits. I also agree with what Gypsy says about the gods being at their most potent when we do not try to “explain them away” at all, but rather accept their mysterious nature, take them at face value, and treat them as beings, rather than symbols.

It seems to me that much of the conflict and strife between people of various religious persuasions, throughout the ages, has been caused by misunderstanding the nature of the gods. People become over-attached to the symbol, and forget about the thing symbolised—idolatry, if you ask me, in the truest sense of the word.
 
 
Neon Snake
18:40 / 09.05.08
Gypsy Lantern - thanks for the time and energy you've put into this thread; freektemple and Tomb Zero too. This has, I think, helped me understand a bit more about what you mean when you say 'gods' or 'spirits'.

Gypsy Lantern, you're quite right, I think I was imagining gods (to some extent at least) as powerful and lofty individual entities inhabiting another dimension and looking in on us through the walls of reality, occasioanlly deigning to help out a mortal follower.

Also, I think I'm struggling because I have no real frame of reference.

I'm currently operating under the belief that there is a 'something' beyond/below/above/around us, which I call Tao. I believe that this drives the world. I'm unsure whether I believe it to have intelligence/sentience in any recognisable form.

I think that there is something which sits between us, which both sides can 'touch'. I think that this is where all the 'energies' sit, and is the conduit. This is what I think I'm accessing when performing magick.

The closest thing I use that might be a useful frame of reference to me are the elements - for instance, Water is the name we give to the type of energy that is communication, persuasiveness, steadfastness, calmness; if I wish to tap into that type of energy, I would wear something black.

Not that I'm saying that the elements have any kind of personality; but the abstraction - I'm tapping not into Water, but into what it represents.

Does that make sense?
 
 
ghadis
22:44 / 09.05.08
I've been thinking a lot about the concept of deity recently due to a thread on an Egyptology forum i'm on. The thread starter was querying the meaning of the most common hieroglyph for nTr (God or Deity) which is this...



This was originally thought to be an axe but then was re-identified, post Budge, about 100yrs ago, to be a flag. The thread-starter felt that this re-classification may be wrong and had a rew arguments for this. One of the points he felt was that a flagpole wasn't very godlike. He felt it was too PASSIVE, it just flapped around in the wind, whereas an axe was ACTIVE, made an impact on the world.

Now i feel he's missing the point of deity and to me a flag in the wind is the most perfect depiction of God. The animation of everything through spirit. The wind through the trees, a pen on paper, the blood through my body, etc and so on. No-one knows for sure what the Egyptians originally meant by this depiction, of course, it's shrouded in pre-history, but for me it sums up my feelings and thoughts well.

It's also thought that originally the flag was more like strips of cloth wrapped around the pole, mirroring mumification, which were then unwrapped and given to the wind. This brings up loads more wonderful connotations of course!!

So, no massive suspension of disbelief needed for me. I'm more than happy to live my life as an animist/pantheist with every part of the world that i inhabit being alive with aspects of deity.

Saying that though, i can understand the uneasiness that comes from the anthropomorphism that types of ritual and perception can give. Especially when it comes to devotional worship or bhakti. It can come across negativly as submission or giving up free will. Theres some great threads on barbelith covering this i seem to remember. It's something i love deeply although i tend to go through phases of doing it regularly or not. I liked what GL said about it being part of a language to use to engage with process.
 
 
ghadis
22:57 / 09.05.08
Oh, and...

NeonSnake - 'Does that make sense?'

Yes it does. I think using the elements as a way of engaging in a magical way with yourself and the world is a great way to go about it. Just be sure to get out and get your hands dirty so to speak. There's not a huge amount to gain sitting in a dark room with a 'Sounds of the Worlds Waterfalls' CD on headphones whilst draping yourself is strips of blue paper and glitter when its raining outside and theres a canal down the end of the street.

I'm not saying you would mind, but there are some very stupid occultists out there!!
 
 
ghadis
23:14 / 09.05.08
I should point out that i'm not the only one to think about the flag in the wind being moved by invisible forces as being a metaphor for deity of course! It's been written about a lot in books on Egyptian religion in the past. It does resonate with me though.
 
 
darth daddy
00:40 / 10.05.08
There's not a huge amount to gain sitting in a dark room with a 'Sounds of the Worlds Waterfalls' CD on headphones whilst draping yourself is strips of blue paper and glitter when its raining outside and theres a canal down the end of the street.

Have you been serveilling me? You missed my special pyramid hat I bought from Crowley.com.
 
 
ghadis
01:01 / 10.05.08
Barbelith IS Crowley.com you sucker!
 
 
EmberLeo
01:22 / 10.05.08
I think there really is a difference between believing and wanting to believe, and it's not just about changing your mind, you know? Willing suspension of disbelief can get you through a specific event, but not through your entire life, can it? For me, willing suspension of disbelief got me through a few specific occasions of not wanting to simply discard what I was seeing without waiting to see how it panned out... But mostly I didn't want to be rude to my friends, who seemed to believe (and in retrospect were absolutely serious) what was going on before me.

But I admit that, had I not also wanted personal proof, I might not have accepted what I saw as such. Specific events can dramatically change your perception whether you choose to allow it or not - but it's certainly more likely if you do choose to allow it.

So I started my morning as I had been - not believing in gods or fairies, but thinking the world would be such a beautiful place if they did exist - and I went home that night wondering if I'd just been missing it all this time. But I slept on it, and woke up the next day and there it was. So now, yes I believe in fairies from that day forward. And later on, when a similar encounter with Odin put Him squarely in front of my face and I suppose I had the option of telling myself He wasn't really there, but I would have had to lie to myself to do so, and that goes so hard against everything else I'm working for any given day.

I do agree that the gods are - amongst other things - personifications of very real forces that surround us every day and those forces can be seen by even the most pedantic skeptic without hesitation. I know noone who denies the existence of Thunder, Tornadoes, Earthquakes, or the Sun.

But I also think that there's more to believing in the gods than simply choosing to redefine your perception of forces of nature, you know?

--Ember--
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
12:48 / 10.05.08
Part of learning to deal with the spirit-contact in a meaningful way for me was learning to embrace a more liminal belief state. Although the initial experience that got me going was very dramatic, and my experiences since then have been even moreso, it would theoretically be possible to keep doing mental backflips until I landed back in the "all a delusion" square. I spent a lot of time initially trying to find a way to cram it into either the "all a delusion" or the "all true!" box. In the end I discovered that to keep from driving myself nuts I really needed a third box, one marked "meh" or "????"

I can parse the available information in a number of different ways. One narrative would be that there's this external entity called Loki who is 100% independant of me who decided that I might be useful/fun/entertaining to work with/needed His help, and made Himself known. Another would be that it's all been an epic-scale midlife crisis/neurological cock-up. Somewhere in between you have the fact that the Mysteries Loki represents were not well-understood or integrated by me, and therefore the possibility my own subconscious mind threw up an anthropomorphic personification of those elements to better aid me in coming to grips with them. I've found that the "Loki is a God and is talking to me" narrative has been the sanest, healthiest, least-mental-backflip-intensive fit for what I see and experience. Nothing else I've been able to come up with makes quite as much sense. Initially, there was a leap of faith involved, but once I made that leap, confirmation began to accrue. I still need to make it again from time to time, but now it's more of a hop of faith than a leap.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
08:39 / 12.05.08
This was originally thought to be an axe but then was re-identified, post Budge, about 100yrs ago, to be a flag. The thread-starter felt that this re-classification may be wrong and had a rew arguments for this. One of the points he felt was that a flagpole wasn't very godlike. He felt it was too PASSIVE, it just flapped around in the wind, whereas an axe was ACTIVE, made an impact on the world.

This is interesting. I think that beyond looking at the action of a flag blowing in the wind, you could also think about how we use flags and what they mean to us. For instance, a flag that has been used to demarcate a new territory in the name of an army following a war, is not exactly a "passive" symbol. Neither are the flags waved by football supporters. We tend to use flags to show our allegiance to things, or to demarcate territory in the name of that allegiance. Flags are pretty big in Vodou, and are used as a way of "bigging up" the Lwa of your House - literally flying their flag, displaying their colours, showing your love for them. It's a way of saying this house honours this mystery, we really value this aspect of existence, and we fly a flag for it to show everyone how great and important it is to us. It's really used in exactly the same way as flags at football matches, but with the flags representing fundamental principles of the universe rather than your local team. So I think its pretty fascinating if the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for deity actually does mean flag.
 
 
EmberLeo
09:21 / 12.05.08
And then Mordant came along and described how I feel much more clearly.

Only swap "Odin, Freya, and Ghede" in where "Loki" goes...

--Ember--
 
 
Tomb Zero
22:58 / 12.05.08
"I do agree that the gods are - amongst other things - personifications of very real forces that surround us every day"

EmberLeo, I'm curious about what you mean by "other things", and would be grateful if you could elaborate (please)...
 
 
EmberLeo
08:30 / 13.05.08
Oy. Well, let's see... Is this where I display my get out of paradox free card?

I believe the gods are separate individual beings in Their own rights, at least enough to have pretty solid opinions, wants, and needs.

I believe They represent/touch upon aspects of Self echoed in every human being and in every group of human beings such that They are worth learning about and from even if only on a purely metaphorical or allegorical level.

I believe They are extensions of - or perhaps intersections within - the Divine Whole which may or may not be individuated in much the same way we are, but without bodies. Of course, we are contained within the Divine Whole, as everything is, so on that level the question becomes "How connected to the Divine Whole are They, really, and if They aren't any more connected than I am, do I care?" For the most part, the answer is "Not really - They're still much older and wiser and more knowledgeable than I am, and I am in the habit of gathering advice from, and making friends with, experts in fields that interest me." At that point, I'm back at individuals in Their own rights, and that's just fine, really. That's about the level on which I perceive non-Divine spirits anyway. Incidentally, this definition of "god" is why I consider Jesus, Orixa, and Angels to be gods within Their own pantheons, but acknowledge that the word "god" means different things within the contexts They come from. I dance around the differences in definition as respectfully as I am able.

Of course, we've reached the level where what I believe (or perhaps what I think about a lot and conclude repeatedly is my working model) is a bit hard to describe and sounds kind of... well, silly.

See, I picture the Universe as a sort of gigantic inverted koosh ball with rather knotted strands, and little floating bits inside/intersecting with other floating bits. It's not so much complicated is it is hard to explain. There's two kinds of stuff - there's existingness stuff that may be either physical or energetic or both, and there's Identity, which doesn't float around by itself, but which contains existingness stuff in some but not all cases (the other cases being where existingness stuff is free-flowing, and has no independent Identity of its own, simply being part of the greater Divine Whole). The Universe as a whole is the biggest example, inside of which all existingness stuff is contained, and that Whole is God in the pantheistic sense. That's the inverted koosh ball, and when you're looking at one end of a strand - or one intersection of the web, perhaps - you are interacting with that bit because looking at the whole is really difficult. And if you're talking to one of the floating bubbles that may or may not be contained within or intersecting with another floating bubble, you've got a fellow traveler like yourself whose sense of Self is sufficiently isolated from the Whole that, though inevitably sacred, is not Divine.

--Ember--
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
10:17 / 13.05.08
I've got something I kind of wanted to raise here about difficult interactions with spirits and deities, and how to parse and process those. This is coming up a lot atm in the kinds of questions I get asked by other people, either in the context of "how could you worship a God/dess who does XYZ?" or "Help, my God/dess keeps doing XYZ, what should I do?", but generally it's kind of the perennial struggle of my spirit-work career.

I've often found that a more literal reading of the situation (you did something wrong, or ommitted to do something, and now the spirits are pissed and that's why they're poking you) isn't really that helpful. Crime/punishment narratives are easy to reach for and can be emotionally satisfying for the narrator, but whilst it's certainly possible to piss off a spirit and get a solid clip round the ear those models don't necessarily offer all the answers.

Sometimes the best or most productive approach to understanding what's actually going on is not to take out the laundry list and see where one might have erred, but to look instead at the particular mysteries embodied by that God and see how you relate to them in your own life, how they are integrated in your personality. Like I said upthread, Loki's mysteries were not initially well-understood or integrated by me, and that has repeatedly led to a lot of strife and uncomfortable interactions. As I've slowly begun to address the issue via an ongoing teacher-student interaction with that set of mysteries as expressed in Loki's personality, things have got better. Every breakthrough makes the whole situation easier, more rewarding.

(Interestingly, I don't actually think that the progress I've made in understanding those relatively abstract concepts and relating them to my own way of being could possibly have been accomplished without Loki in my life. It's all just too big, too mad, too distant. You've got too many barriers in the way. I've directly experienced those times when the Gods give the laws of physics twenty quid and send them down the cinema, but this kind of personal development is far more miraculous and amazing to me, especially when I then see how my having that stuff on board begins to benefit the people around me and lets me make small but real and positive changes in the world.)
 
 
EvskiG
13:52 / 13.05.08
See, I picture the Universe as a sort of gigantic inverted koosh ball . . . when you're looking at one end of a strand - or one intersection of the web, perhaps - you are interacting with that bit because looking at the whole is really difficult.

You might want to take a look at David Bohm's idea of the implicate and explicate order. Seems to mesh with your perspective pretty well.
 
 
EmberLeo
22:27 / 13.05.08
Thanks Ev - that looks really interesting. I should note that my description is intended philosophically, and metaphorically. I don't expect it to mesh with physics, because it's not really intended to address physics directly at all.

Mordant, lemme see if I understand you. It's often less useful to look concretely for a simple answer of what's wrong when dealing with a power so much as to figure out what They are trying to teach you in the greater scheme of things?

--Ember--
 
 
Tomb Zero
09:09 / 14.05.08
Thanks for that, EmberLeo. I'd never seen a Koosh ball, before - but I have now! What you were describing, there, sounds strangely familiar to me. I'd use the world tree as a metaphor, though, personally - with its network of twigs & branches as the "strands" and its leaves (or maybe flowers) as the "floating bubbles". Very interesting to look at these things by means of a different metaphor, though, thankyou.

I wonder if anyone here can give me any insight into another paradox that's puzzling me... There seems to be broad agreement that the gods are, on one level, personifications of the forces of nature. But what puzzles me is this: do those natural forces have a kind of dual nature, with one side of that duality manifesting in the wind, the flow of the river, and so on, that we see all around us in the world, and the other side of that duality being a 'spiritual' version of that force, which is the side of the force used in magic. When a mage invokes, say, the power of the element of water, for instance, it seems to me that they're rarely attempting to actually make it rain, but rather to set the 'spiritual' side of water working for them. Apologies if I've not put that very clearly, I hope you all can catch the gist of what I'm trying to say.
 
 
ghadis
09:33 / 14.05.08
There's a Ramesside text from around 1200BCE that i feel clarifies some of my thoughts and approach to Deity.

All Gods are three:
Amun, Re and Ptah who have no equal.
He who hides his names as Amun,
he is Re in appearance,
his body is Ptah

You can think of the hidden 'Name' as the unknowable essence of the God. The Mystery with a capital M. The cosmic aspect.

The 'Appearance' can be seen as the mythic position. How we percieve the Deity through approachable forms, images, stories. The relationship we have, which is a two way communication of course.

The 'Body' is the wind, the sea, the laugh, the argument, the flower, etc etc.
 
 
EmberLeo
09:40 / 14.05.08
I wonder if anyone here can give me any insight into another paradox that's puzzling me...

I don't find the two natures you're describing to be in contradiction so I'm not sure why they're a paradox. But otherwise your observation seems sound.

The World Tree (from a Norse context, anyway) represents something rather specific to me, and while I'm willing to accept that it does correlate somehow to my Inverted Koosh Ball Universe, they are in very different parts of my own brain, and I don't even try to correlate them.

--Ember--
 
 
Tomb Zero
10:05 / 14.05.08
"I'm not sure why they're a paradox"

You're right, they're not - what I was (clumsily) trying to express is that although everyone can accept the reality of wind, rain, and so on, many people consider a belief in the 'spiritual' side of these forces to be "a far-fetched or fanciful notion requiring a major suspension of disbelief". I was (as I say, clumsily!) trying to point to an area of what we're discussing which seems to require a 'leap of faith'.
 
 
Eek! A Freek!
12:11 / 14.05.08
That's why I've always had trouble identifying with different "aspects of nature" Gods: I've never really been "chosen" by a God(dess)(Nuit - The Night Sky, maybe? We're pretty tight...) and I always found it hard to choose a God(dess) based on their aspects. I would tend to want to choose something "Cool", like thunder, or mountains, or rivers. It's easy to fall into the trap of choosing what you want, not what you need. My wife has just been diagnosed with MS (mild, fortunately), and we want to have a child: Should I try contact a "healer" or Medicine God(dess) or a fertility Goddess? or both?
I can see the appeal of an all-in-one god sometimes... Actually, on the other hand, I think that that's also my attraction to voodoo: That you can approach different Gods for different things that you need in your life (Provided that you approach that God(dess) with proper humility, honour and respect, of course - I don't view these things as a "blessings buffet".)
When someone is approached, or "tapped" by a God(dess), is it considered a lifetime commitment, or is it because the person needs that particular God(dess) at that particular time in their life?
 
 
EmberLeo
18:21 / 14.05.08
Some of each. I've been tapped by gods for specific individual projects and I've got some long-term commitments. Sometimes I don't know when the project starts which way the relationship will then go.

Some traditions have more concrete ways of telling these things, I suppose...

--Ember--
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
18:52 / 14.05.08
I would tend to want to choose something "Cool", like thunder, or mountains, or rivers. It's easy to fall into the trap of choosing what you want, not what you need.

I think that as long as the approach you take is flexible and adaptable, it doesn't matter that you started out by approaching the "cool" God/dess because you'll be prepared to move on if They send you elsewhere. Why does this God look cooler than that one? Because on some level, the mysteries They embody resonate for you. They speak to something fundamental in you, some deep level of your being.

Like I've said on a number of occasions before, you don't actually need Gods or spirits to be a good magician. However, if you wanted to start experimenting with deity work there is absolutely nothing wrong with approaching that cool God or Goddess and asking for further guidance. I know some people who were chosen by the Gods they ended up working with, some who started with Pantheon A and ended up with Pantheon B, and one or two people who tugged on the God's sleeve until He or She turned round and said "What!?" (In fact, in some cases it might even be better to begin the relationship at the "Cool!" stage, in case there's a lamped-over-the-noggin stage waiting somewhere down the road.)

Based purely on personal experience, my advice for anyone interested in deity-related work these days would be to start with your Ancestors. They'll have a vested interest in your well-being and will be placed to put you in touch with the right people to help you in your journey. Just don't forget them if the Big Kids do show up.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
12:18 / 16.05.08
I would tend to want to choose something "Cool", like thunder, or mountains, or rivers. It's easy to fall into the trap of choosing what you want, not what you need.

Don't be afraid to experiment with something and see what happens. Go with your gut instinct. It's OK to make mistakes, because that's the best way to learn. If you don't do anything for fear of getting something wrong, you're never going to learn very much. Humans make mistakes. Magicians make mistakes. The trick is to try and learn from your mistakes and hence make progress with whatever you're doing.

Also, all of the Gods are "cool". If you are thinking of stepping into deity work or spirit work, don't think around the subject too much. Just go with your gut instinct. Who speaks to you the most right now? Who do you think you can learn something important from at this stage of your development as a human being and as a magician? You don't really make the decision over which deity is going to be your "patron", at least not at a conscious level. So you don't have to worry about "making the wrong decision" too much. You can also quite happily have really good working relationships with deities other than your eventual patron, so again, no worries about somehow getting something wrong by speaking to deity A ahead of deity B. If you are going to end up with a primary patron deity - which is pretty common among people who work with deities a lot - they will make their presence known of their own accord in their own time. Especially if you are already beginning to work with deities.
 
 
Eek! A Freek!
13:03 / 16.05.08
Thanks for the advice, I really appreciate the pointers: My tendency to over-rationalize and second-guess hampers me a lot... Maybe I fear to choose and would prefer to be "chosen". Kinda takes the onus off of me; makes me less responsible and that's wrong, unhealthy. Sometimes I feel I'm looking for someone to say, "Go on, it's OK...". Sometimes the want of approval and acceptance is so powerful, hard to overcome...

I think I know who I most want to contact, but I may ask my dead Grandmother (Gan-gan) to make an introduction... (I was named after her: my first name was taken from her maiden name so she's a powerfully close ancestor...)

O/T:
(Funny how hard that's been for me: I grew up being called my second name which was my parent's preference. Around the time I was 18, I decided to switch to my first, as I felt it fit me better, felt more like who I was and wanted to be. Some people went with the flow and made the switch. Others, like my older brother and parents, refuse to and try force their realities on me and call me by the name they're more comfortable with. It's a constant struggle of will and quite draining, sometimes... Names eh? I swear, it's been like my own private sex-change... I could only theorize how incredibly difficult that would be...)
B/T/T
 
 
EmberLeo
02:39 / 18.05.08
(My friends mostly call me Ember, but my family calls me Angie or Angela. Because I feel I own both names it doesn't throw me, but I thought you might like to know that your situation isn't that unusual in my experience.)

--Ember--
 
 
SBN-1
15:14 / 17.07.08
Good post, you folks are really good at expressing things that make good reading.
When it comes to gods and the like, I don't care whether they "exist" or if they're parts of my own subconcious or whatever. Shit happens and if I want to I can have some great forces working in my life and (to me) that's more fun than being left alone in disbelief. I mentioned elsewhere that falcons have been following me around for years and that eventually led me to the Ra-Hoor-Khuit stuff. I haven't done any rituals or invoked or anything to attract this attention, but Horus keeps coming back with stronger intensity all the time. Lately I've had scrying visions where I actually was Horus "attacking" people, and a few days ago he physically entered/manifested in me before my friend's astonished eyes. Now I don't attribute any objective reality to this, nor do I expect anybody to care - but to me it's great fun.
 
 
Ganagati
17:33 / 17.07.08
[...]a few days ago he physically entered/manifested in me before my friend's astonished eyes.

That's an interesting thing to watch, by the way. My husband is occasionally taken by Hermes. When this happens, his face and demeanor suddenly turn into this weird flip-book where every 4th page isn't him, more like the stone Hermes representations from Greece (only a touch older, more rugged).

Are they real entities? or manifestation of the psyche? I just couldn't say for certain. I'm not sure I care to know, what I do know is that my life would be quite empty without them.
 
  
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