To keep the ball of inspiration going…
I was reading lovely Nellie’s latest post when I stumbled across an idea I hadn’t thought about sharing until just then- the connections we have to our various gods and how we got them. She finds herself connecting through the birds- a new idea to me, I suppose that’s because I don’t know much about birds and I never seemed to connect to them, but she got me thinking seriously about paying a little more attention to our avian allies.
Anywho, I was thinking about how people become connected to their different deities. Some become connected through reading and research, some get random feelings and go on a hunt, some just feel the presence and choose to give it no name or give it a personal name. Some people connected to their deities through fantasy books, television, movies- all sorts of places. Some people were raised polytheists and are carrying on family worship.
Me? I am one of those people who feels something and chooses to give it no name until I’ve come across the name or divine it on my own and in my own time. Some spirits or entities are still nameless for me, and I’m not on a steady hunt- for all I know these Old beings have no name that can be read in a book or found on the net, and it works for me to just refer to them by what they feel like.
Not every entity is some recycled standard, some are simply… what they are. The Old gods, the ones that were the first to emerge from the existence of this world, the ones who were older than life as we know it and were there in the before time, before religion or man or land animal who may be the great progenitors of primordial existence and thus our ancestors- I believe they’re still around.
I am not the type of pagan who believes that gods exist regardless of us- I think the divine energies and “gods” are what they are today because of beliefe and prayer and memory. What they represent; their energies and values and spirits may have almost always existed- love, death, war, poverty, joy, kindness- these feelings are old energies and when you believe in an energy strong enough and long enough, they take on their own power and are sustained by those beliefs.
It’s complicated to explain exactly how I believe what I believe but I think the gist of it is that I don’t believe that everything that exists simply dreamed itself into being. I believe that belief itself is what gave way to the gods of man, and that the gods or entities that existed before us (which was a good 4.5 billion years of Earth’s existence) probably were the older forms of the “God’s of Man”. Some gods we worship were probably human ancestors who became legend and became divinity, some were spirits of nature so powerful and universal that they extend to every culture, and some are animal gods- and since our species owes everything to other animals, I’m not surprised we’d turn them into deities. Whatever the beginning, I have a very deep faith that the primordial gods, the ones who are as old as the first life of the primordial seas are probably the first of this planet and the progenitors of all that followed in some way and that even though they’ve all but faded away from human belief and knowledge, they are far too old and too powerful and too connected to everything to need be sustained by human belief or prayer.
How many gods existed since the dawn of human spirituality are forgotten and nameless and lost to all human knowledge? And what becomes of them? Do they loose all influence in this world or are they worshiped in new incarnations? Who really knows, everyone feels differently about this. In Dilis Glas, we have the concept of the Oneness, the Opposites and the Many: the Universal Unconsciousness which is the existence of all that is, has been and will be, the opposing forces whose friction makes and unmakes material and energy (some call this feminine and masculine because of the passive/active relationship), and the many- which are the lifeforms, spirits, energies, entities, whatever that coexist in the universe and fill it with all the invisible and visible life.
The Oneness is NOT god. It is not a god, it is not concious, does not care or feel because it is everything- life and death and all inbetween- not a god. It feels no compassion or anything at all, it simply is existance and nonexistance as it truly is, not as we understand it- it is everything. The opposites are energy and matter, they are the complex relationship that creates and destroys, often symbolized by the phallus and the womb- the active energy and the passive energy that ALL life as we understand it is based on. And the many- well, it is the energy that exists from those actions- the spirits who were here at the beginning of our universe 14 billion years ago who were never human and are unaware of time as we know it, our planet’s creatures, the creatures of all the universe, the gods- all that is a product. In simple terms: everything is connected, there is no separation between us and anything else, and there is no single right path in this universe.
Getting back to the point: How we discover these beings, which some of us call gods (though admittedly, that word means something different to all of us) or how they discover us varies from person to person. I don’t disbelieve in any god, but I don’t worship them all. It just so happens that the deities I’ve become most connected to or called to were Gaelic/Brythonic/Gallic in origin and I can’t really answer to why exactly. Maybe those spirits/energies just speak to me, maybe what they represent by those names makes sense to me, or maybe they just like me a lot lol. The truth is I don’t know and I find it hard to believe anyone really knows the WHY when they’re sincere in their faith. I try not to obsess over the Why and focus more on the moment and how I feel.
I liked reading about her connection to the gods through the birds, because I too connect through nature- being that I worship nature and gods who were probably originally nature spirits. I find myself most connecting through the weather, through the changes of the seasons and the change of nature based on the weather. I speak my most powerful prayers on the wind, light my charms by the sun, bless my tools by the tide or the torrential rain. I’m a weathery kind of witch- it’s the change of it all that makes me feel most connected to the divine by all their many names.
How did you find your divine connections, how did they find you and where did it come from?
