The gods.
It is what our religion is actually about. The gods and the relationship we have with them as mortal beings. It is easy to read the myths and assign those attributes to the gods, but that is a mistake. Why? Because the myths are just a fraction of what the gods are and it is connected directly to how we interact with and think of them.
It is, perhaps, better to think of the gods as forces. As fundamental aspects of nature that are ever present and underlie everything around us so that even things like physics are essentially describing an aspect of them while the more physical manifestations of them, the ones we think of as the gods in all their mythic glory, are essentially emergent properties of their divinity. Emergences in nature, including human nature, that we can relate to as anthropomorphic or animistic.
This means that the gods are not localized or limited in their scope or reach by what we think, but are given form, their emergent forms, by the way we relate to them. That is to say that when people pray and seek guidance or blessings, it is those interactions they lay down into myth and fable. It is those interactions and their results that become the basis for the attributes we give the gods.
Athena is Wisdom, but it is her interactions with people who seek wisdom that give us the character we see in myth. People seek wisdom in a great many things from lighting a fire to waging war, and so she is perceived with a measure of all those things she is sought for. Demeter isn’t just the goddess of the harvest, she is the harvest. She is the natural order that allows for it, so the character we see in myth reflects the natural forces that make the harvest work.
This, in my opinion, is why we do not seek to belittle or insult the gods of others, a lesson I am trying to incorporate into my life and which I still sometimes fail to do. The gods this isn’t. The gods are. They are just not always the way you think they are, they can be what others need just as they can be what you need.
Be blessed and be kind!
#pagan #paganism #polytheism #gods
