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Beliefs of a Pagan Polytheist...To His Rabbinical Student Friend...
Although the Source of Being underlies all that is, it is essentially
unmanifest and without qualities in the usual sense,and per se cannot
be the object of religion. However, in answer to human spiritual need,
it manifests in form as human deities. These are AS IF objective and
independent gods and goddesses. I acknowledge that the component of
the human mind is part of the process, but the fact that these deities
may spring in part from the collective unconscious or Jung's
archetypes does not obscure their status as deific entities which
serve as the focus for the individual's spiritual life, and which do
so as effectively AS IF they were what they seem to be....I do not
find profit or point in debating what anything "IS" beyond what I can
experience it to be...I find comfort in a Source generous and loving
enough to appear in the guise which serves best to help me in my quest
to love Goddess or God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength, and
my neigbor as non-different from me in esseence.
It would take a really dense polytheist to insist that there is
only One Right Way....that's authoritarian monotheism in thin
disguise...but it would take an insane polytheist to believe that
there is more than one "ground of all being"--- contradictory by
definition..HOWEVER (CRITICAL POINT AHEAD!): pagan polytheism is more
than "many masks of the One God"...These deities we experience really
are indistinguishable in practice from MANY, and so we treat them as
such.....The spiritual experience involved "doesn't happen" otherwise.
Note, though: the Wiccans who believe in a Mother Goddess and a
Nature God realize that the highest mystical experiences lies in the
two becoming one...But this does not deny the separateness in a
reductionist way. As perceived and experienced within a rich and real
spiritual life, the Two are two.....But just as the material Earth and
its growing life are non-separate, so every year we experience in the
cycle of the seasons the manifestation of the polar principles uniting
to become the one manifest world of life and nature. It is precisely
because we perceive the Two functioning as separate entities that the
vision of unity is so mysterious (in the good technical sense) and
ineffable, and moves us so. For some people, me for example, it is
only through a real and ineffable union of Two that are really
separate that the Oneness becomes a numinous and mystical fact instead
of a numerical datum.
There is a theology, or for a Goddess-worshipper, "thealogy", that
can articulate all this in better and more formal language, but I hope
something got across...Of COURSE the unmanifest Source is not-two (NOT
the same as ONE!), but what is absolutely unmanifest is too close to
being really "NOT" for humans. So the Ground Of Deity (note the
acronym!) is quite happy to manifest as Real Gods to meet human
spiritual needs, with a bit of co-operation from the human psyche, and
would in theory gladly emerge as, ACTUALLY, Klukk the great Chicken-
God if that's what it took to integrate worshippers into loving unity
with one another and the world and the divine.
Just be sure you realize that, just as a Krishna worshipper REALLY
does encounter Krishna and a Christian REALLY has an experience of the
Christos, a pagan can actually experience deity within as a loving,
beautiful feminine Presence of unmistakeable reality and cosmic scale-
--indistinguishable from ANYONE ELSE'S mystical experience only in
form. Since operationally and experientially the goddesses and gods
are in no way distinguishable from what one would experience in the
instance of "they really exist", we pragmatically say that they really
do...Any other assumption abolishes the numinous mystical
experience.....And since my root assumption is that this experience is
the ultimate point and goal of any non-trivial religion, I am a
polytheist. Being one gives me a simple explanation for the fact, and
it is a fact, that Jews and Christians and Muslims and Hindus, and ad
infinitum, ALL report mystical unions/apotheoses/epiphanies of a real
meeting with a real deity....Their interpretation of this universal
fact leads them, usually, to the conclusion that they finally have
personal proof that they are right and all the others are deluded. My
pagan polytheist view is that they are all non-deluded: that, out of
the Unmanifest or (pardon the plagiarism/blasphemy) Ain Soph arise
Real Deities who, from all appearances, have an independent existence
apart from the observer/worshipper. Out of an unseen and featureless
Void, pregnant with Being, Love and Consciousness unexpressed, all of
us get what we need.
To voice this paradoxical fact that there are Many at the same time
that there is Unity requires one to tread as carefully as a student of
Kabalah dealing with Emanations as not effecing the Oneness...I can't
do it on that high a level, but I hope I communicated something.
There are the "play Pagans" and the "shock their parents" pagans,
but most of us, for all our glaring faults, have found in our faith an
approach to that ineffable experience behind all religions that works
for us as no other has....and which integrates it into our lives, and
our lives into our world in loving and compassionate manner as no
other way has....
Shalom, Blessed Be, and may the great Gee Whiz take a likin' to ya...
Raven Dragonrune