b2ap3_thumbnail_720822bb8ea169c408fc55f2ab8dbf92.jpg

This is the third in a series of posts in which I discuss four terms that polytheists use to distinguish gods from archetypes: "real", "literal", "separate", and "agents". In this post, I want to address the position the the polytheistic gods are separate from us in a way that archetypes are not.

Pagans often talk about the re-enchantment of the world as a return of belief in polytheistic gods and spirits.  Over Patheos, John Beckett has recently gone so far as to argue that it is not possible "to re-enchant the world while remaining staunchly non-theistic."  I would agree that it is not possible to reenchant the world while being "staunchly" atheistic -- by which I means an atheism which insists that the category of divinity has no human value.  But I would also argue that it's not possible to reenchant the world while being "staunchly" polytheistic either -- by which I mean a polytheism which insists that the gods must be "separate, distinct, individuals".

In my opinion, atomistic theology which insists that the gods must be "separate, distinct, individuals" too closely resembles the alienating discourse of objectifying science that led to the disenchantment of the world in the first place. Morris Berman explains, "The scientific mode of thinking can best be described as disenchantment, nonparticipation, for it insists on a rigid distinction between observer and observed. Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness; … The logical endpoint of this worldview is a feeling of total reification: everything is an object, alien, not-me." Hard polytheists make the same mistake when they insist on a rigid distinction between the gods and us.

Pagan theology, as I understand it, takes the interconnectedness of all life as axiomatic. It recognizes that we are a part of something much vaster and more inscrutable than ourselves, that our own lives are continuous with the life of the rivers and forests, that our intelligence is entangled with the wild intelligence of wolves and wetlands, and that our breathing bodies are a part of the exuberant flesh of the Earth (paraphrasing David Abram, "Depth Ecology"). Carl Jung wrote about feeling at times that he was "spread out over the landscape and inside things" and "living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons."  From this perspective, the lines that we draw between ourselves and nature are artificial and unreal.

And if the gods are part of nature, as many polytheists claim, then the same must be true of our relationship to them as well.  As "natural polytheist" Alison Leigh Lilly has written in her essay "Naming the Water: Human and Deity Identity from an Earth-Centered Perspective":

"If human identity is complex, both personal and social, physical and psychological, spiritual and ecological — why should we expect deity identity to be any simpler? If our sense of self-identity is fluid and changeable, interconnected, responsive to the teeming, dancing life that permeates and surrounds us — why should we expect the gods to be objective, discrete and separate beings? The experience of spiritual practice and the biology of physical life teach us otherwise — showing us both the astounding unity and the sacred, interconnected multiplicity of being." (emphasis added)

I sympathize with those polytheists who are eager to prove that their gods are "real". But by emphasizing the "separateness" of the gods, they are playing by the rules of a positivistic paradigm and, so, they have already lost the game. Rather than insisting that the gods are real because they are separate from us, we should instead argue that what is real is not the radically separate, but the radically interconnected -- and that applies to us, the earth, and the gods.

I was recently challenged on this point by Jes Minah.  She argued that I was ignoring the fact that the vast majority of polytheist writing, thought, and practice is about relationship -- love, honor, obligation, reciprocity, generosity, devotion -- which it might be argued is the opposite of objectification. You cannot objectify a being that you are in respectful relationship with, said Jes:

"When the world is peopled with gods, and spirits of all kinds, a river is not a river. It is the home of a river spirit, a being you are in relationship with. That means it has desires and needs and wants that are ultimately separate from your desire or need to have a place to put toxic chemicals. When we are in relationship, we must consider the other."

I see Jes' point.  I do think recognizing the "otherness" of the world and its inhabitants is a necessary step toward its re-enchantment.  Our primary experience of the world and of other people is often of our own projections.  You may have had the experience of talking to someone and, suddenly, for the first time you really see them, see them as a unique individual.  Or you may have noticed something about the place that you live that you never saw before, and suddenly the world seems alien. That experience can be both fascinating and disturbing.  We Pagan often do this when we project our images of gods onto nature before we truly encounter it.  We have a tendency to see the dryads and Ents and loose sight of the trees.

Drawing on the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Patheos blogger, James Faulkner explains how the encounter with the "other" opens us up to the world as it is:

“when I experience the other person as a person, she breaks through the sphere of my otherwise solitary, ego-centered, conceptual world. Most of the time I live in a world of my conceptualizations and representations. There everything is encountered as if my will and I were the center of the world: the merely ordinary world. Exposure to another person in herself disengages me from that world. As a person, the other person overflows my understanding of her as an object, as something I conceive of—and by overflowing my understanding she interrupts my consciousness. She reveals its limits. ..."

In this way, you have to get to know someone in order to experience their difference, otherwise they remain an object for you, a mere projection. 

But we shouldn't stop there.  As we continue to get to know a person better, we can begin to feel the ways in which we are connected, in spite of their "otherness".  On one level the other person always remains an "other", but on a deeper level, we recognize how we are the same, how we are connected.  I think in order to truly re-enchant the world, we can't remain stuck at the point where all we see is the "otherness" of the world and its inhabitants; we need to discover that deeper sense of interconnectedness.

Let's take Jes' example of the river which is the home of the river spirit.  Jes says that, because the river has needs and wants that are distinct from our own, we are forced to consider its well-being.  But there are limitations to this way of thinking.  What happens if the spirit leaves the river (which happens in some belief systems that include spirits)?  Is the river then no longer worthy of care?  And even if the spirit is always present, who determines whose needs take precedence when (inevitably) there is a conflict between the needs of the river spirit and the needs of human beings? 

Human beings have consistently demonstrated a collective unwillingness to place the needs of our other-than-human neighbors before our own.  The only way to truly protect the river is for humans to identify with the river and to see its needs as their own.  Rather than finding the source of the river's value in it being the home of another individual like me, I value the river because it is me ... and I am it -- or rather, we are both part of something else that transcends both of us.

I don't believe we can re-enchant the world by (re-)populating it with individual gods and spirits in nature.  I think the disenchantment of the world was caused, not when we stopped seeing gods and spirits in nature, but when we stopped seeing our essential connection to nature, when we lost what Morris Berman calls our "participating consciousness". And so I don't think extending "individual rights" to rivers and trees is going to re-enchant the world. Rather, we need to realize our essential oneness, the manifold ways in which we are connected to the rivers and the trees -- whether or not we find gods in them.