How is it possible for gods to be both anthropomorphic and transcendent at the same time? When it comes to gods, almost anything is compatible with anything else. In my experience, gods are inherently contradictory creatures, and that’s a feature, not a bug. If you expect gods (especially pagan gods) to conform to any kind of consistent theology, you’re going to to get very frustrated very quickly. Gods can exist on both a transcendent level and a personal level at the same time because they aren’t limited by space, time, form, or identity. That means that it’s possible for gods to be both transcendent and ineffable and humanlike. They are transcendent and ineffable up on their level, but are still limited and humanlike down on our level.
This is an idea that appears both in Neoplatonism and Kabbalah, and it’s super common in the Western occult sphere: the idea of emanation. There’s a chain of emanation, beginning with the Great Divine or Absolute at the top, and continuing down through various manifestations or aspects of this entity until it finally arrives at the material world. If you think of gods in these terms, it’s like each god is a column that is abstract and ineffable at the top, and steadily gets more and more anthropomorphized as it goes down.
I believe that gods are transcendent and ineffable up there in the Astral world, or whatever incomprehensible divine realm they inhabit. I think I’ve got a good conceptual grasp of what gods are like at this level, so they’re not quite beyond my comprehension, but it’s hard to put into terms that make sense. On this level, the gods are “perfect,” meaning they simply are what they are, and they exist in a state of completeness. They permeate out into the universe like chords. Maybe they’re all pieces of this grand, ultimate cosmic consciousness or supreme energy, which I took to calling the Absolute (until BG3 ruined that for me), or perhaps “The Good” in the manner of Plato. Or maybe not. Whatever they are, they’re this great, fundamental force of being with infinite awareness (which is kind of like omniscence or omnipotence, but not exactly the same — think of it as being more like a cell tower that’s continuously receiving signals from everything, everywhere, all at once). It’s very difficult to connect to gods directly on this level. It’s not impossible, but it requires some serious mystical training at minimum, and attempts to relate to gods only on this level don’t really work in my opinion. It’s much easier to relate to gods when they have some kind of humanlike characteristics that we can latch onto, something we can understand.
On the next level down, gods remain sort of abstract, but have settled into “archetypes,” familiar patterns that somehow embody or express a fundamental aspect of existence: power, love, creativity, illumination, ecstasy, war, agriculture, chaos, sex, death, etc. If you take any god from mythology and line up all of its domains, whatever all of those domains have in common is the essence of the god. At this level, gods are distinct individuals, just like people, but simultaneously, their identities are malleable. They don’t lose track of their sense of self even when they’ve been syncretized, divided up, reinterpreted, or otherwise remixed. That sense of being from the first level never leaves them. At this level, gods are a little more comprehensible, but they’re still eldritch and weird and not really human.
On the next level down, gods are anthropomorphized. We humans look at these gigantic, sublime beings and condense them down into humanlike shapes with humanlike personalities, behaviors, and appearances. This is gods as they appear in mythology, gods as characters. Gods at this level are a lot safer to relate to on a regular basis, because they fit themselves nicely into our general levels of perception, and don’t put our sanity at risk. The anthropomorphized version of a god is like a filter, or a mask that it wears to make itself more relatable to humans, and therefore easier to understand and interact with. It also clearly defines a god’s relevance to human life; it’s sphere of influence consists of whatever people associate with it, and the people pray to it for help with those things. I still don’t really know if gods’ anthropomorphized forms are something that humans create for them or something that they choose. I think it’s a mixture of both; humans will see gods as looking like themselves, and will associate the god with some things and not with other things, but gods do seem to present themselves to people in particular ways. (For example, Hermes is usually associated with the color orange, for no discernable reason. Dionysus looks almost the same in much of the modern artwork I’ve found that depicts him, with slight variations in hair and eye color, and other Dionysians’ descriptions of him are also uncannily similar.) It’s possible to have personal relationships with gods at this level, because they’ll “speak our language” and relate to us the way humans do.
All these different “levels” of gods exist concurrently. They don’t live up at the highest level and descend to the lowest level, they exist on all levels and in all of these different forms perpetually and at the same time. We mostly interact with them on the lowest level because that’s easiest for us, but they’re still these sublime and eldritch beings at the higher levels. The humanlike form is just a mask, behind which is this grand thing, and if you have a personal relationship with a god, then you will occasionally catch glimpses of who and what the god really is. Those moments are the ones that are to die for, the ones that mystics spend their entire lives chasing. When you’re able to have a personal relationship with a deity and perceive it on its higher levels, without losing your mind, it is life-changing.
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