Reality of Gods and Goddesses |
The first rule of any magical work is to know that the gods and goddesses are real. They exist independently from the individual psyche, and anyone saying different is either using materialist pyschology as an excuse or as apologetics, or has never worked magic. Or both. Debate is fruitless in comparison to experience and participation.
However, we do have two aspects of consciousness/energy in any one lifetime, that mirror and enable our interaction with the deities. One is the holism or phase of the psyche that is "like unto" any specific deity: the goddess, the god, the mother, the warrior, and so forth. These have become the playground of psychology, but with severe materialistic limitations.
The other is the raw inner power: creation, destruction, harmony and so forth. The raw inner power also resonates to the deities that embody it on a larger scale.
Gods and goddesses come out of the interaction of a land with the humans of that land, collectively. That is why a Chinese goddess will be similar to a Norwegian one, but have many significant differences in her power, actions, and personality. But the deities also embody cosmic forces....those same Powers that we have in miniature within us. The cosmic forces are not shaped by the interaction of land and people, and they transcend the cultural matrices of the deities.
Anyone following this pattern of interaction, described above, will be able to work powerful magic, but not be bound in service to any one god or goddess.
There is also a deeper magic, whereby we work through the deities to become independent of them. This is often twisted into the infantile "ye shall be as gods" nonsense beloved of 19th century occultism. They seem to have missed the fact that to do so you have to lose your humanity, rather than have it inflated with false powers.
Wordwide Copyright (c) R J Stewart, 2002.
