Day Three: Deities

3. Beliefs – Deities

Okay so I really don’t know what to write for this day’s theme, but Girlfriend is insisting I keep up with this post per day for the new year deal, and I’m too tired from work to think up another subject for day three and then sneakily go back and change in the master post so no one is the wiser.

So: Deities! Or my rambly musings on the nature of Deity in general.

One of the most useful things I have come across in my time identifying as Pagan is the God Map, a concept illustrated wonderfully by Joyce and River Higginbotham in their really quite good book entitled Paganism: An Introduction to Earth-Centered Religions. The God Map basically shows, in a nifty and easy to comprehend graph, how various religious throughout the world have different ideas of what Deity is, on a spectrum of abstract to concrete and permeating to transcendent. There’s a great rundown of it on another blog that I found during a frantic search effort while trying to explain my jumble of thoughts to Girlfriend one day. Read it here.

I don’t yet know where I stand on the God Map. Like, okay, some spiritual encounters I’ve had, like Lake Michigan, are very far removed from recognizable communication, and I would hesitate to ascribe anthropomorphized characteristics to spirits that are places. I’m very much in the animist region, in that respect. Permeating but concrete, but not so concrete as this is a guy in the sky who has a beard and wields lightning bolts, or any other sort of defined appearance other than the actual physical appearance of a very old lake that has claimed the lives of a lot of people over the years.

In other more recent Deity interactions, for example with the one I tentatively title Shining God (more about Him on day 12), I get a fairly concrete mental image of a golden, smiling, male solar deity during meditation, as well as UPG associations of sunlight reflecting on water or leaves. He is a solar-associated god but also not the actual Sun, which I do honor in a different way. The Sun itself, as far as I’m aware, doesn’t give a crap whether I worship it or not, it keeps on doing its thing regardless of any human activity. Shining God, however, seems to enjoy or at least look kindly on mindful offerings, and to further muddle things I will sometimes address Him and the Sun interchangeably in prayer.

So you see, it’s already a bit tangled. In addition to this, I’ve only recently begun trying to have good, productive, respectful relationships with more concrete deities and I’ve yet to research/experience enough to say definitively what I believe the nature of these gods are.