- Cosmology
This
is a bit of a tricky area for me. At heart, I think, I’m an
animist. (note that I added a glossary tab up top there to help allay
any confusion my fast and loose term-dropping may cause) I believe
that the universe came about through the normal
scientifically-accepted means, I just happen to also believe that the
natural world is full of spirits.
There
have been times in my life where I’ve been aware, with absolute
certainty, of presences or personalities in nature. This is one of
those tricky sometimes silly-sounding things called Unverified
Personal Gnosis (hereafter UPG), when one comes into a state of
knowing something, really fully knowing something that’s been
reavealed, but there is no way to prove this to anyone else. And in a
way, I think, it shouldn’t have
to be proven to anyone else, if the meaning you get out of the
experience is a personal connection with the divine.
Anyway,
during these instances of UPG I have felt in the presence of things
so much older than myself, larger and more powerful and completely
foreign from any human presence. These have been spirits of specific
places, and sometimes they make me feel welcome and sometimes they
simply make me feel like a foreigner who doesn’t belong. But either
way, they make me feel something,
and I’m grateful for the interaction and knowledge of their
presence.
More
recently, as I perused various online Pagan forums and read
(lurkingly, I am a master of lurking) about other people’s
encounters with specific deities, with names and images and
attributes and everything, I found myself wondering if I even believe
in gods at all, or if these spirits of place are all that’s out
there (or all that care about making themselves known to me, anyway).
Also, since so far these place-spirits show up when I’m traveling
or hiking or other occasional times when I’m not at home, I wanted
to try and expand my horizons a bit and put out a call, as it were,
for any deities who were interested in working with me in my efforts
to get a solid daily religious practice going. There have been a few
answers.
Right
now I can’t say for certain where I fall on the polytheism
spectrum; I don’t know if say, all spirits in the world are aspects
of one greater whole that permeates the entire universe or if
everyone is separate and distinct. Place spirits feel different from
Ancestor spirits, and those feel a bit different from more Deity-type
spirits, and there’s another low-key type of spirit-feeling I get
when I’m putting energy and work into something, like reading Tarot
or working on a painting that’s really coming together.
Something
that really fascinates and terrifies me is the thermodynamic concept
of entropy. I first was smacked in the face by how amazing it is
while reading Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia while sitting in the park
in Charleston with my wonderful girlfriend. It’s difficult for me
to conceptualize the idea that like, all the energy in the world has
basically come from the sun or residual radiation from the Big Bang,
and slowly it’s all being frittered away and at some point the
universal temperature is going to normalize. When I try to vizualise
this really, really full of math concept (note: math is not normally
my friend) I get a mental image of a great beast, permeating the
layers of reality, devouring everything indiscriminately. And because
I’m such a huge Borges fangirl I imagine that beast is a Tiger.
Generally
though I tend to keep my focus closer to home, so to speak. However:
if I ever become an intrepid spacefaring explorer I will probably be
making offerings to the great devouring coldness before I go, just to
be on the safe side.
:)
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