Sometimes I get questions like 'How can you honor both Loki and Odin? Osiris and Set? Shiva and Brahma? How can such opposites both be aspects of the same Deity?' This leads into the whole concept of balance, which is almost as important in Wicca as it is in some of the Eastern philosophies - I'm thinking particularly of Taoism.
Think back to the second half of the Charge of the Goddess. "Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you." Part of what Wiccans draw power from is the duality of opposites, and a great deal of the Wiccan paradigm comes from realizing that those seeming opposites are actually two points on a continuum, or two halves of a wheel - the light and dark parts of a Yin/Yang symbol, supporting and containing each other.
Now that I've phrased that in sufficiently philosophical babblings let me try to put it more concretely. My personal belief (and I don't have to put the disclaimer at the beginning by now, do I? :)) is that there is no such thing as 'evil' in pure form - all wrongs are simply something that is good in proper balance. Look at that 'honor/humility' dichotomy from the charge for a moment. What's honor taken to it's farthest extreme? Pride, self-righteousness, supremacism. Hitler is a good example of someone who took honor too far - his pride in the Aryan race became the tool with which he almost conquered Europe. But is honor in and of itself wrong? No, because in balance it is simply a healthy sense of self-confidence and self-worth, of taking joy in being who you are and doing what you do well. To right the wrong of someone like Hitler you need humility. And since that's what rights the wrong then it must be a right thing, correct? But you can make the same argument with humility - at the other extreme you have an abused wife who lets the man beat her because that's all she feels she deserves. What she needs is a more healthy sense of honor, of pride. So neither of these are either good or bad in and of themselves - they become so when taken to extremes. And sometimes you need more of one and sometimes more of another, depending on the situation and where the balance stands.
So going back to the example of Deities who seem in 'conflict', like creative and destructive Deity pairings often seem - think of when you have plant overgrowth in a forest and the ecology becomes unbalanced - often something like a forest fire is required to give new plants room for growth. In the proper place and time, destruction is just as important as creation, because it gives room to create again. That's what the Wheel of the Year is all about; that's why we have to have the barren rest of Winter before we can have the new growth of Spring. And that's why one day you can call upon one Aspect of Deity and another day something that seems the opposite - because depending on the balance, sometimes you need one aspect and sometimes another. Beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence. Each necessary in its own place and time, each a wrongness without the other. It's a matter of getting rid of the concept of 'either/or' and learning that the best answer is often 'both'.
- Cecylyna
And remember Thalia's favorite line...
Life is too important to be taken seriously!
© 1996 cecylyna@oocities.com
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