I often get asked about my beliefs, and how I became a pagan. Hence, this first pair of essays on spiritual topics.
First off, experience of gods and powers is very subjective. Untold millions of people throughout history have had experiences which were sufficient to convince them that the gods exist, while not being objective and testable enough to provide evidence sufficient to convince anyone else who hasn’t had that experience. Yet, the experience of deity, or at least a profound superstition which at the most basic level amounts to much the same thing, extends even to chimpanzees, who have been observed pounding rocks on or into special trees in a way which seems to be ritual rather than musical or territorial, and going to the foot of waterfalls to experience the crackle of static and then behaving as if awed by it.
For present purposes I’m going to ignore the issue of whether these experiences are real or hallucinatory (and whether that even matters), and work from the assumption that the gods exist. If you don’t like that, this essay is not aimed at you.
Many psychics and spiritualists believe in something called a Thought Form. The idea is that if somebody with psychic ability concentrates on imagining a spirit, that spirit will be able to appear to other people as if it were real, even though it’s a made thing. A lot of people think that the gods which people experience are merely Thought Forms, created from people’s belief in them. I believe – for a given value of “believe” – that this is true as far as it goes, but doesn’t make them any less real, because we’re all Thought Forms.
Please note: this represents my own personal best guess, the concept I’ve come up with which best fits my personal experiences. Even calling it a belief, as such, may be over-stating it, and I am aware that it may be the product of my own desire to impose a tidy pattern on a formless thing. That being said, what I think is happening is this.
In the beginning, souls shaped each other out of some kind of raw substrate, pulling and acting on each other in much the way planets form out of amorphous rubble, pulling themselves together and waltzing each other into orbit by their own mass. Spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it, exists mainly in what psychics call the “astral”, another level of being (and if you think that’s a clearly stupid idea, remember that cosmologists think there are multiple other dimensions that we just can’t see at present), but has a certain amount of contact with things in the physical realm and can attach itself to physical objects. But it is more fully expressed when it attaches to something like a complex animal mind. Think of the physical brain as something like a TV set – the signal going to all TVs is the same, but the higher the resolution of the TV, the clearer the picture will be, and at the other end of the scale you can sometimes pick up a TV signal through a biscuit tin, but you’ll get fuzzy sound and no picture. This belief, that spirit can at least potentially attach itself to almost anything in the physical world, is called “animism”.
Once those early spirits were complex enough to be fully conscious and to entertain concepts, they generated Thought Forms which personified those concepts, and which we call gods, but those Thought Forms are real, are people just as much as the rest of us, because we were all shaped in the first place by each other’s wills. They are generally much “bigger” than us, for want of a better term, but not completely unlike us.
Some of these deity forms are animus loci (there doesn’t seem to be a plural form) – souls of a physical place, a country, a ship, a school, generated by all the minds, human and otherwise, that are and have been alive in the body within its locus. They can represent something as small as a stone or a tree, or as large as a planet.
Some are what Terry Pratchett called “anthropomorphic personifications” of concepts such as harvest, war, kingship or healing. I believe that gods are created by the universe rather than creating it, and that the big Creator God which many people believe in is actually the god of the concept of Creation, and/or the animus loci of the universe. I believe that the Tarot works, to the extent that it does, because Tarot as a whole, and to a lesser extent each individual deck, has been used and believed in by so many people that it has its own Thought Form, which functions rather like an Artificial Intelligence. It answers like a computer, but also has (often grouchy) personality.
Because many different cultures have had slightly different approaches to the same concept, there are suites of gods who are partly individual and partly merged, who all respresent the same concept seen through different lenses. So Mars/Ares is like and unlike The Morrigan; Coyote is like and unlike Pan who is like and unlike Loki; and so on. You can choose to connect to e.g. Coyote or go further up and make a connection to the Trickster essence as a whole.
In terms of religions most people are more familiar with, you can think of the relationship of Coyote with the overarching Trickster concept as like the relationship of the sub-parts of the Trinity with the Christian god, or Hindu avatars with the god of which they are aspects. You can also see the many pagan gods as equivalent to archangels in the Judeo-Christian pantheon, or to the facets into which God is split in Kabbalah, each representing a different aspect of divinity.
They can also link to more than one larger concept. In some Native American mythologies Coyote is your basic Trickster, while to the Klamath people he’s a Prometheus figure who brought fire to mankind (but escaped being punished for doing so because, well, Trickster….). To the Aztecs with their rigidly controlled society and religion, Huehuecoyotl, Old Old Coyote, was an enemy because he was anarchic, and brought disorder.
One of the arguments against attributing any significance to people’s personal experiences of deity is the fact that they are inconsistent. If one person experiences that there is One God, and another experiences that there are thousands of gods, they can’t both be literally correct. But the Thought Form element comes in again. Because what you are seeing is appearing in your brain’s senses without being physically present in the external world, any psychic manifestation is an interplay between the thing doing the manifesting and the will, expectations and imagination of the person perceiving it. This is what JK Rowling was getting at in Deathly Hallows, at the end of the astral King’s Cross scene with Dumbledore’s spirit, when Harry asks, “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?” and Dumbledore replies “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” This means among other things that if you strongly expect there to be only one god, that’s what you’ll see.
There is also no reason to assume gods always tell the truth – far from it. Indeed, if they have our best interests at heart – as we can assume that the more benevolent ones do – they will certainly lie to us to make us behave in advantageous ways, as mothers sometimes lie to small children. And they aren’t necessarily all as benevolent as all that.
One of the consequences of believing that the gods are Thought Forms, real beings but shaped by the minds of all who believe in them or, in the case of an animus loci, all those who live or have lived within their locus, is that we should strive to be good not because “God wants us to”, and certainly not in hope of reward or fear of punishment, but because if our wills become corrupted and malign that will affect our gods and eventually make them malign too. In a very real sense, we make our gods in our own image.
Have you ever read any of Graham Hancock’s writings? Graham seems to be a little more rigid than your interpretation in that he believes in structures that are fairly organized compared to what you have described.
I enjoy Graham’s books and my take on the current religious climate stems from some of the ideas he presents in relation to practices and pharmaceuticals that can assist in alternate states of consciousness.
In my take on the current religions I see them as being hostile to competing philosophies in that they try to ban the use of consciousness altering substances. In my opinion, almost all current religions were started by a single person who either could experience an altered consciousness without aid or used some substance.
The revelations gained from the experience allowed the giving of information and advice that proved useful to the population that person was in. They became respected, revered, and later a following developed that became rigid and formalized.
I see Christianity, Islam, and to a lesser extent, Judaism being part of the rigid formalized following. For people like me, who, I guess, can get to an altered consciousness by just thinking about it, those religions seem irrelevant. They no longer provide useful information to the population that they are supposed to support. They do provide structure, but I am undecided if that structure is beneficial in the long term.
Thank you for sharing your personal take on our existence in this crazy whorl of experience, dreams, and desires.
Be well!
You must have found Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods a really interesting book. What did you think of his concepts?
I love your idea about his anthropomorphic personifications having a similar reality as gods. The idea that there might really be a DEATH as PTerry describes or Death as Gaiman describes in Sandman because people think of it and want it is lovely.
I follow you on Quora, saw there that you have this blog, and came to have a look. I’m thoroughly agnostic on the issue of deities, but this is a quite interesting and original take on the issue, and I find your lack of dogmatism refreshing.
Like you, I also have an interest in folktales; I am in fact in the process of writing a series of kids’ books with folktales as their subject. There is much power in ancient stories and wisdom.
As for the afterlife, I am agnostic on that too, but I imagine that if there is such a thing, it will be pretty much like this life, because presumably we’ll all still be us. I.e. your personality will not change into something else (if it does, then it won’t be you anymore, in which case there is little point to having an afterlife in the first place). So perhaps, if there is such a thing, we get the afterlife we make for ourselves, pretty much as in this life we get, to at least some extent, the life we make for ourselves.
Interesting explanation!
If I understand correctly, the gods you describe are purely mental beings who cannot directly affect the physical world at all, but can only affect the minds of others. Is this correctly understood?
Not entirely, in my opinion, but their effect on the physical world is not generally very strong. Minor tweaks rather than miracles.
“…we should strive to be good not because “God wants us to”, and certainly not in hope of reward or fear of punishment, but because if our wills become corrupted and malign that will affect our gods and eventually make them malign too.”
OMG. I never thought of that, but it explains a lot about fundamentalism especially, doesn’t it? And malign gods in turn — or at any rate, malign priesthoods — tend to create malign believers. Now I’m vaguely connecting this concept with Tolkien’s Orcs — I need to think about that more, though, before I can say anything more about it.
My own belief, insofar as I have any, is that there is something much bigger than we are that wants to connect with us, and to do so it uses the Thought Forms we have created. This is much like your belief (animism), though seen from a slightly different angle.
Also reincarnation, yes. One of my cats reincarnated — I suddenly saw my old cat in his kitten face. Of course that experience is entirely subjective.
In terms of cats I often think of house cats as having a communal spirit with eddies that form attachments to intensely loved human partners. They are all spirit of cat and survive but in some cases love is so strong that it shapes into something we might call an individual soul. Both my Wife and I have experienced “corner of the eye” sightings of past loved cats and in rare cases feel them brush past or purr.