OCCULTISM

Appearances

SPIRITUALITY AND MYSTICISM

Essays on the nature and experience

of the divine.

Spiritual Awakening

Ah Kos, or some say Kosm… do you hear our prayers? As you once did for the vacuous Rom, Grant us eyes! Grant us eyes! ”Spiritual awakening” implies that I was ever spiritually asleep. I think many, perhaps even most people are; mundane life often occupies all of people’s thinking, even if they’re religious. But I don’t remember any one time in my life when I felt like my eyes were suddenly open. For all intents and purposes, I was born that way. I came into the world with an immediate interest in the cosmos and their functioning. Apparently I asked my mother whether the gas people put in their cars was the same as the gas on Saturn (not understanding the difference between gas, a state of matter, and gasoline, a liquid). I also apparently got frustrated when I was told no one knew what happened before the Big Bang. I can only interpret this as a desperation to learn as much as I could about the mechanisms of the universe I was born into. I proceeded to dabble in every field of science as a child, to get a basic understanding of how this world works before adding back all the weird stuff. I also was almost immediately interested in mythology, and I have somehow studied every major world mythology, beginning with children’s bibles in the back of my closet. Greek mythology had the most lasting effect on me, and it became an obsession for a few years in my childhood. Back then, I didn’t ask myself any complex theological questions about whether the gods were real or not, any more than I asked myself if my plush toys could really understand me. It didn’t matter whether gods were “real” or not, all that mattered was my current interaction with them. I had many interactions with them as a child that have gained a lot of spiritual significance in hindsight. With all of that, it’s hard to pinpoint any singular moment of spiritual awakening. I guess I could point to when I started seriously studying occultism at fourteen, and taking my religion into my own hands, because that’s when I started performing rituals and so forth. But the seeds of that were planted much earlier, so I think it’s more likely a natural evolution of experiences I was already having. My understanding of mystical experience is that it is a magic moment in which all the lights in your brain turn on. For a brief moment, you suddenly see as the gods do and understand everything in the universe. Sometimes it comes in the form of a cosmic “download” — information (usually in the form of images, emotions, or ideas) pours into your brain. Sometimes it’s a wave of love or other emotion. Sometimes, something just clicks. It’s almost always intense and overwhelming. The only thing I can compare it to is orgasm, in the sense of “fireworks going off in the brain.” “It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye, entire years for all I know.... I mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it's not at all. Time is something which defies spring and winter, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible. Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no "I," and yet it's not at all like those horrid comparisons one sometimes hears in Eastern religions, the self being a drop of water swallowed by the ocean of the universe. It's more as if the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self.” —Donna Tartt, The Secret History It is my belief — or at least, I would like to believe — that all mystical experiences come to roughly the same conclusions on similar topics. But while I’ve found that my own Unverified Personal Gnosis (UPG) often aligns with other people’s, the truth is that our human filters get in the way. Nothing that is ever written down comes directly from the gods. It first has to be translated from their language of insights into our human languages, and then is translated through multiple layers of religious and cultural context at minimum. Most people will have at least one mystical experience sometime in their life, but some of those people fit the new insights into an existing paradigm instead of learning to think beyond it. Others don’t know how to interpret the experience, and go insane. I’ve written other answers about how the line between inspiring mystical experiences and cosmic-horror-madness is so thin that Lovecraft himself addresses both, sometimes simultaneously. I want to try to explain mystical experience using a Lovecraft-inspired work, Bloodborne, which is a video game. It has a mechanic called Insight, which are points one accumulates from encountering bosses and consuming an item called Madman’s Knowledge. It’s pretty obvious that Insight is meant to represent the protagonist’s capacity to perceive and understand eldritch information. A higher Insight stat allows the player to perceive things that are otherwise invisible, like tentacled monsters hanging off the sides of buildings, and the sound of a baby crying in the background. Insight is not the same as mind-breaking madness (that’s a status effect called Frenzy), but it does make one more susceptible to madness (Frenzy builds up faster). Insight is inversely proportional to Beasthood, which measures how much humanity you’ve lost. Insight can be spent as currency for rare and useful items, and spending Insight increases Beasthood. Human capacity for “higher thought” requires a little bit of Insight (because you’re a Beast without it), but too much Insight and you start to think and perceive like a Great One — a god. Becoming a god also means leaving behind your humanity, and becoming a mollusk-like… thing. Most of Bloodborne’s evil factions are attempting to do exactly that, to manually ascend humanity to its next stage of existence (and causing a lot of devastation in the process). The description for an item called “Great One’s Wisdom,” which bestows multiple points of Insight, provides a quote from the head of one of these factions: “We are thinking on the basest of planes. What we need, are more eyes.” I love this line. We call the chakra of Insight the “Third Eye” for a reason! Obviously a game like Bloodborne is going to play it for horror by taking it very literally, but in a more figurative sense, I think that spiritual awakening could be described as having “more eyes.” You’re suddenly able to see in ways that other people can’t. You might be able to see beings that aren’t there, colors that aren’t on the normal light spectrum, contradictions that defy logical sense. Maybe this influx of new information and dissonant contradictions will drive you insane. Or maybe you’ll accept what you see at face value, as if in a dream. If you can do that, you’ll find that the mind-bending contradictions resolve into nuance, and everything will suddenly make sense. Then you’ll have a god’s-eye view of the world (no tentacles required). I think it’s safe to assume that I was born with higher Insight than most. Most people don’t necessarily gain or lose Insight as they age, but simply reallocate it — eyes open in different parts of the mind. But you may get a rush of Insight all at once, and find that multiple new eyes open, and that is a spiritual awakening.

Secret Knowledge

A lot of the “secret knowledge” of the universe seems really obvious to me once I learn it, so let me see if I can parse out what might be considered “secret knowledge” Death is not the end. The promise of eternal life was at one point the Great Mystery, hidden behind initiation in the Greek mystery cults, and made public by Christianity. But to an occultist, this is almost a given. Death is not an end point, but a transition point, a threshold. It’s like you are following a circular path, and a gate is somewhere on that path. The gate could be anywhere, theoretically, because a circle has infinite points. The gate does not change the fact that the circle has no beginning and no end. But if you are afraid of the gate, you can never move forward. Even if you turn around, you’ll eventually arrive at the gate. If you attempt to avoid the gate, you will never be able to progress. You will remain stagnant and stuck. This is why the tarot card XIII Death represents change, simultaneously the end of a cycle and the beginning of the next one. Death Reversed represents stagnation. To quote Sparrowhawk from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore, “To accept life is to accept death.” Securing one’s afterlife isn’t really a priority. That’s relatively cut and dried, and spending one’s entire life trying to get the best possible afterlife is a waste. Maybe it didn’t used to be, but we’re past that now, or just barely beginning to get past that. The point is not to go to Heaven, but to bring Heaven down to Earth, which is a lot harder and takes more time. Even if we assume there is no afterlife, and one’s life simply ends, still, the circle does not stop. The body will decompose and return to the earth, and act as sustenance for other things, furthering the progression of life. All things are connected in this way — all things from galaxies to atoms operate as part one gigantic cyclical flow. Everything is connected to and influences everything else. The Ouroboros is a symbolic representation of this — it generates and destroys itself; all things come from and return to their source. That which is above is like that which is below. The grand universal cycle operates on the scale of the cosmos and on the scale of atoms. It’s all one system, and changing things on one level will change things on all the other levels. Therefore, the same is presumably true on both the mundane and spiritual levels. The workings of the universe at large reflect the workings of human life and society, and vice-versa. Affect one, and you affect the other. Perform workings on the astral plane, and you can affect the physical plane in corresponding ways. Act upon physical objects, and you can manipulate corresponding ethereal or intangible forces. Predict the shifts of the universe, and you can predict the trajectories of your life. Manipulate things on the small scale, and you can shift the entire universe. Everything exists within the mind of God; everything is an emanation of the Absolute. Everything is within God, and the essence of God is within all things. God is All. All is God. Mankind is made in the image of God, and vice-versa. All humans carry within them the essence of divinity. We are all little gods, all wielding the creative power of the Absolute on a much smaller scale. As above, so below. If everything is thought, then we can use our own thoughts and our own words to manipulate reality in accordance with natural laws. We can emanate, as God does. Many ancient religions — Christianity, Buddhism, Orphic Mysteries — believe that we need to transcend our “base” fleshly nature by connecting with that inherent divinity, becoming more than we are and breaking the cycle of incarnation/reaching a better afterlife (i.e. becoming closer to God). I don’t believe that it’s bad to be incarnated, but that’s a separate matter. The divine is part of every human being, and realizing that can help you become more than you are. Pretty much all occultists operate under some version of this. You have a spark of divinity within you. Yes, you, reading this. The same is also true in reverse — because God is too great a thing to comprehend or explain, we put it in human terms. Deities look like humans and act like humans because it’s easiest for us to connect with something that looks and acts like us. It’s easier to understand a primal force if we put a human-shaped filter on it. Gods also change to reflect the people who perceive them. Therefore, God is made in the image of man, as well. As below, so above. In many mystery traditions there is a lot of emphasis placed upon that “reunification with the divine.” But the inverse is also important — having distance from God allows us to see the forest instead of the trees, so to speak. God cannot perceive itself without distance; it’s impossible to see yourself without looking in a mirror, and the mirror is on the wall across from you, so it is distanced from you. If humanity is distanced from God (as is often accepted), then humanity mirrors God. We can perceive God and understand God, and thereby reflect God back to itself. That means that in some way, the existence of humanity helps God to understand itself. And vice-versa. To create, God had to separate its creations from itself, and likewise, being creative as humans means expressing divinity in a smaller and more easily understandable way, distancing our ideas and our minds from ourselves. Being alive allows us to create things of substance. Completing the alchemical Great Work allows us to become alike to god and whilst still being alive on this earthly plane. You’ll have the power and knowledge of a god, whilst still being able to live on earth as a human, and therefore apply that power and knowledge in the real world. All religions are right… about something. The drastic differences between religions are mostly cosmetic, and don’t matter in the big scheme of things. Every interpretation is valid for any particular individual. The truth is somewhere between all religions. The Godhead or the Absolute is literally All That Is — it includes every conception of God that any humans have ever come up with, but no individual conception of God is the “correct” one. This knowledge is hidden in plain sight, but people tend to find it hard to swallow for some reason. We chose to be here. We chose to come to Earth. Our souls advance through the trials that we experience lifetime after lifetime. When we die, we will rest for a while in a nice place and then continue with our training. Why come to Earth? Because it provides us with unique opportunities for growth that we won’t get elsewhere. Exactly what those are depends upon the individual. Trying to understand the spiritual world is like trying to understand algebra while the most complex math you’ve ever done is counting with blocks. Algebra is simple once you get it, but you have to understand a lot of fundamentals of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and what variables are before you can simply be told “Find x.” Most adherents of most religions are counting with blocks. Initiates are people who have begun to understand mathematics at a complex enough level (within any framework) to be able to solve simple equations. The reason why initiation is necessary is to help you move away from the blocks, and begin thinking about math more abstractly. Humans have not existed on this planet very long. From the perspective of Those Upstairs, we’re just beginning to come out of infancy. We’ve been going through our growing pains for the last couple thousand years, and haven’t even started the real work yet. Of course we’re counting with blocks, we’re children! Those Upstairs are patiently waiting for us to grow up before they begin to teach us things like trigonometry and calculus. “Occult” might mean “hidden,” but something can be hidden without having been deliberately hidden. Something can also be hidden in plain sight. Occultists tend to pride themselves on knowing things that others don’t, having access to information or knowledge that the average person isn’t equipped to see. It’s not that the secret is hidden from everyone else, it’s that everyone else lacks the knowledge and experience in order to interpret it correctly. To return to the math metaphor, the secrets of the gods are like theoretical physics, in comparison to learning basic math in grade school. It’s not that your math teacher is “hiding secrets,” it’s that a child isn’t capable of understanding calculus. Before they even get there, they have to understand addition and subtraction, multiplication and division. If first-graders were to be taught calculus, their little brains simply would not be able to understand it. Your average mystic might have gotten as far as understanding algebra, maybe calculus, but would still be a long way away from understanding theoretical physics. It’s not that theoretical physics is a deliberately kept secret, it’s that only very few people have the knowledge and experience to understand it. The progression through different “grades” of the divine “school” takes many lifetimes, and each life is a part of that learning process. So, each individual is at a different “level” of mathematics, depending on what they covered in previous lifetimes. And if you try to explain calculus to someone who only knows how to add and subtract, well… they might think you’re insane. In that sense, the basic teachings of most religions are the divine equivalent of a lie-to-children. “If you’re a good person, you’ll go to heaven, but if you’re a bad person, you’ll go to hell” is a lie-to-children. It’s not technically true, but it gets the point across. “God is the King of Kings who is perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent” is a lie-to-children. God doesn’t have a human shape, it doesn’t think or act like humans, and it doesn’t “know everything” so much as have infinite awareness, which is similar but not the same thing. The spiritual world is extremely nuanced, but too often that nuance is watered down for the sake of being comprehensible. It’s a tradeoff. More complex spiritual concepts actually can be presented in ways that make sense to the average person, even to children. I know of not one, but three cartoons that address the great occult secret that all things are intrinsically connected, that the entire universe is one great organism. The first is Avatar: The Last Airbender: "Oh, the swamp is a mystical place alright! It’s sacred. I reached enlightenment right here under the banyan grove tree. I heard it calling me, just as you did. […] See this whole swamp is just one tree spread out over miles. Branches spread and sink and take root and then spread some more. One big living organism, just like the entire world. […] You think you’re any different from me, or your friends, or this tree? If you listen hard enough, you can hear every living thing breathing together. You can feel everything growing. We’re all living together, even if most folks don’t act like it. We all have the same roots, and we are all branches of the same tree. […] In the swamp, we see visions of people we’ve lost. People we loved. Folks we think are gone. But the swamp tells us they’re not. We’re still connected to ‘em. Time is an illusion, and so is death." —Season 2, Episode 4 The second is Fullmetal Alchemist (both adaptations, but the following quote is from Brotherhood): Alphonse: Hey Brother, have you figured out what Teacher meant by “one is all and all is one”? I’ve been thinkin’ about it this whole time, but I still have only a few vague ideas. Edward: I’m not really sure about this, but do you remember when I was weak from hunger and I ate those ants? Alphonse: You ate a lot of ‘em. Edward: I sure did, and boy did they taste nasty! But then, that got me thinking. If I hadn’t eaten them, I might have died. Then I would have been eaten by them. I’d go into the earth, and become grass. And the rabbits would eat that. Alphonse: You’re talking about the food chain, right? Edward: Yeah, but it’s not just that, either. A long time ago, this whole island was probably at the bottom of the sea. And tens of thousands of years from now, it could be the peak of a mountain for all we know. Alphonse: All things are connected. Is that what you’re saying? Edward: Everything we see, everyone we meet, is caught up in a great unseen flow. But it’s bigger than that. It’s the entire world. The entire universe, even! And compared to somethin’ as big as that, Al, you and I are tiny, not even the size of ants. Only one small part within the much greater flow. Nothing more than a fraction of the whole. But by putting all those ones together, you get one great all, just like Teacher said! The flow of this universe follows laws of such magnitude, that you and I can’t even imagine them. — Episode 12 The third is The Lion King: "It’s the Circle of Life And it moves us all. Through despair and hope Through faith and love 'Til we find our place On the path unwinding In the circle The Circle of Life" And there you have it, a great secret of the gods themselves, communicated through children’s cartoons! In my experience, the gods will tell you things if you ask them. Ask and ye shall receive, right? But you need to know how to ask, and and you also need to know how to receive. I find that whenever the gods give me a non-answer, it’s because the real answer is harder to parse out or to express in human terms. One time, I asked Apollo what fate was. I got a non-answer, and then a mental image of a vast network like a nervous system, with so many interconnecting pathways and “electrical signals” travelling along it that I literally could not comprehend the whole of it. I remember thinking, yeah, I’m glad it’s not my job to deal with that. And I find that I know more about fate than I ever have, because I have accepted that I cannot know everything about it. A lot of big questions are like that. You get the answers in pieces, pushing deeper and deeper each time, and when you finally get the ultimate answer you find that it was really obvious this whole time. It’s easy and obvious to say that everything is connected, but when it really sinks in, it hits you like a freight train.

Thinking Like a God

So I’ve been reading a lot of H.P. Lovecraft lately, and I’ve also been playing Bloodborne, which is a game inspired by his work. If you’re not familiar with Lovecraft, he’s best known for writing horror stories in which his characters come up against the incomprehensible. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu mythos,” a pantheon of gods and associated lore, codified what became known as the Cosmic Horror genre. Lovecraft’s gods are eldritch and deeply disturbing. They frequently have too many eyes and way too many tentacles, if they can be described at all. Just seeing them drives the hapless mortal who comes upon them to madness. They do not care about humanity. To them, we’re just amoebae. The terrifying prospect of there being things out there that are vastly more powerful than we are, that we could not even hope to understand (let alone control), and that could obliterate us at any moment is Cosmic Horror. But I realized there’s a lot more to Lovecraft than meets the eye. Many of his stories describe what seem to be genuine mystical experiences, some of which actually line up with my own in surprising ways. Lovecraft’s prose goes from relatively dull and very much a product of its time, to being stunning and seemingly ahead of its time at the drop of a hat. I’m inclined to believe that Lovecraft really did have some spiritual experiences like the ones he describes in his stories, because they feel so authentic. For example, in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” Randolph Carter experiences existential dread upon learning that there are innumerable versions of himself in all forms and in all moments in time. I think most occultists encounter that knowledge, too — I’ve definitely encountered the idea that we are all much grander entities who live millions of lives in millions of forms at once, and any individual life is one fragment of that nigh-incomprehensible whole. That an entity can be both you and not-you at the same time, that there isn’t really such thing as a “you” and yet, you exist; as Lovecraft vividly describes, that knowledge can be deeply disturbing. This is all to say that the line between mind-breaking cosmic horror and enlightening mystical experience is, in fact, very thin. The best metaphor I can come up with to describe it is, imagine trying to run a new piece of software on an old computer. If you try, the program likely won’t run, but if the computer tries to run it anyway, it might break or shut down. Your brain is like the computer, and the knowledge of incomprehensible Elder Gods (and so forth) is the program. If you try to comprehend the knowledge, you will either reject it and shut it out (it won’t run), or your mind will break with the strain of trying to process information that you lack the “hardware” to process. If an ant sees as a human does, it has just absorbed information that it literally lacks the biological “hardware” to process, and that would drive it mad. Likewise, if you were to comprehend God, in all its… allness, you would go mad, too. Unless, of course, you could process it in a more digestible form… use an emulator, as it were. That is why humans perceive gods as looking, thinking, and acting like humans. It’s not because gods actually are anything at all like humans, it’s that a human-shaped thing is the easiest for a human brain to understand. Gods and goddesses are human-shaped filters that we place over God in order to “translate” it into our language. At the core of Dionysus, for example, is the experience of transcendental ecstasy. But that’s too abstract a concept, so Dionysus is associated with wine, a human invention that allows one to experience an ecstatic trance state. The grand Mystery of his death and rebirth is reflected in the way wine is literally made, by tearing and crushing grapes (or by enzymes breaking down sugars during the fermentation process). Dionysus is a mask worn by a piece of God. The same goes for all other gods, which split up God into easily-digestible bite-sized pieces. And because there are multiple gods in polytheism, all of those little bite-sized pieces can add up to the whole. Monotheism runs into a bit of a problem here. The Abrahamic God is intended to be the ultimate form of God in all its Allness, but human beings literally cannot comprehend that on a regular basis. So the Abrahamic God is, inadvertently, as personified as any pagan deity — it is a kingly old man in the sky that is either jealous and punishing or loving and forgiving, depending on your interpretation. If this is taken at face-value, it causes dissonance, which leads to logical loops like “if God can do everything, why does he let children die of cancer? if he knows everything, why does he bother testing mortals if he already knows how they’ll behave? why does he punish us for failing a game that is rigged against us?” These questions make God seem like a dictatorial tyrant, and require even worse logic to explain away. Except God isn’t really anything like a tyrant at all, because it’s not human and doesn’t think like one. So the result is a deity that is unintentionally limiting in its scope — it only ever appears as light, masculine, celestial, and transcendent, and never as dark, feminine, chthonic, or sensual. Aspects of God that don’t fall into the “Sky Father” archetype just get ignored. Therefore, according to my beliefs of how this works, this understanding of God is inherently incomplete. Perceiving God as Sky Father isn’t wrong, but it’s not the full story either. It’s like if the only color you ever painted with was light blue. There’s a difference between painting with light blue because that’s your favorite color, and painting with light blue because you are incapable of perceiving any other ones. I tend to compare gods to a light spectrum. Any individual deity is a color on the spectrum. Each shade, tint, and tone is individually distinct from all the rest, but they are all pieces of a single whole, which is white light. But this is only the visible part of the spectrum — God is the whole spectrum. We as humans are trying to understand the whole of the light spectrum, while only being able to see one wavelength of light. Imagine if we could see all different light waves! That would definitely drive you mad. Mysticism is essentially training yourself to “see” other wavelengths of light, which you lack the biological “hardware” to see. But human brains are not computers; they can adapt, form new pathways, find new ways of understanding information. I must begrudgingly admit that this is why initiation is sometimes necessary — it helps the mind “upgrade” itself to fully understand divine knowledge, which then ends up being almost stupidly obvious. It’s possible for humans to gain a greater understanding of God if we know going in that we’re seeing it through a filter, that we’re using emulators, that whatever IT is needs to be “translated” into attributes and person. Based on my own experience, I could say that to comprehend God one must think like a god, and to do that is to see many more nuances than the human mind typically allows for. This is a lot harder than it sounds, because it is almost literally against our nature to think like gods. It’s human nature to categorize, to sort things into little boxes and give them helpful labels, to use logic and analysis to understand how things work and why. These abilities have served us well as a species, and I’m not knocking them. But that’s not really how gods work. Human logic does not exist to a god, because a god has wider perceptions than humans do. To a god, something can be simultaneously white and black at the same time. Not part white and part black, but literally both white and black at once. A god does not feel its identity fracture when it is interpreted in a myriad different ways by its many worshippers, or syncretized with another deity, or reinterpreted as something entirely different centuries later. It can be all those things concurrently. To a god, the past and the present and the future are all layered on top of each other. The real and the unreal, the living and the dead, the material and immaterial, all exist together and all at once. There’s no such thing as mutually exclusive. Thinking like a god means seeing in more dimensions. "Reflect on God in this way as having all within Himself as ideas: the cosmos, Himself, the whole. If you do not make yourself equal to God you cannot understand Him. Like is understood by like. Grow to immeasurable size. Be free from every body, transcend all time. Become eternity and thus you will understand God. Suppose nothing to be impossible for your-self. Consider yourself immortal and able to understand every-thing: all arts, sciences and the nature of every living creature. Become higher than all heights and lower than all depths. Sense as one within yourself the entire creation: fire, water, the dry and the moist. Conceive yourself to be in all places at the same time: in earth, in the sea, in heaven; that you are not yet born, that you are within the womb, that you are young, old, dead; that you are beyond death. Conceive all things at once: times, places, actions, qualities and quantities; then you can understand God." — The Corpus Hermeticum, Book 11 If you can turn off your conscience and just roll with the contradictory dream-logic of divinity, you’ll be able to better understand it. Deliberately choose to see the world like a madman, so that you don’t literally lose your mind in trying to process it.

Thinking Like a God

Gods, Time, and Fate

Have you ever seen Arrival? It’s about a linguist who is trying to decode an alien language. The aliens have no concept of linear time, which means that they can see the past, present, and future all at once. It’s all the same thing to them. Past and future, cause and effect, move in circles instead of in a straight line. The alien language is cyclical to reflect this. This is how gods perceive time. They don’t “see the future,” they perceive all points in time layered on top of each other. It would be like if you mixed red and blue to make purple, but could still see the red and blue at the same time as the third color. Gods also perceive an infinite web of cause and effect, pulsing through the universe like a nervous system. It never even occurs to a god to warn humans of potential dangers in the future. That’s a very human way of looking at things. Even before you factor in fate and free will, a god’s perception of time is so much more complicated than ours. To them, nothing is “potential.” Everything is happening now. There is no past and no future, only an infinite present. What do you do with that? Honestly, I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure that out. I usually don’t like thinking about time as a concept, and it’s only top-of-mind from having recently watched Arrival and Cloud Atlas. I think there’s a way for a skilled enough magician to change the future, or maybe even the past, with the help of gods. But that means learning to think as they do, which takes a lot of practice. It also requires shouldering god-level responsibility for the repercussions of your actions (but all magic requires that). It’s often better not to know the details of the future, for the sake of your sanity. For now, you can ask the gods to give you advice to make favorable decisions. Just don’t ask them their reasoning.

Appearances

Worship

I have an interesting relationship with the word “worship.” When I was a teen, I hated it. I had just left Christianity and I was going through my rebellious phase. I of course perceived worship as inherently submissive and degrading; at the time, I didn’t think there was anything worse than submitting to someone. I was proud of my defiance. I projected a tyrannical overlord (actually just Astor, i.e. part of myself) onto every authority figure in my life, making things much more difficult for myself. I had a martyr complex, and felt like I could put up with anything just to make a point. At that time, I refused to consider myself inferior to gods. I would not grovel before them. And if that was hubris, well, no way I was going to make the mistake of giving up my pride again. Submission of any kind was an admission of defeat, a surrendering of my very soul. So I approached gods as equals. They genuinely didn’t seem to care. Maybe that’s because they viewed me as a teenager who needed this right now, and didn’t take it personally (gods aren’t as easily offended as mythology would make you think). But despite this, I found myself lapsing back into passive prayer instead of active spellcasting, and my prayers were to a nameless and faceless goddess. It felt like Christianity with a second-wave-feminist filter slapped on it. Then something big happened. I got a patron deity! It turned out not to be Hecate like I thought, but Dionysus, who has had so much to teach me. The more research I did on him, the more he resonated for me. He looked and acted like the way I perceive myself in my mind; he’s a god that was me-shaped, and that always makes the divine easier to relate to. I came to deeply understand the spiritual concepts associated with him. And I realize now that I do genuinely worship him. Real worship is different. It still looks like submission, I think, but it’s motivated out of overwhelming love rather than fear or social pressure. It’s like the difference between being a submissive person and being sexually submissive — the latter is something you engage in because it’s enjoyable, and it can even be empowering. I automatically treat him with such reverence. Dionysus is extremely chill and laid back for a god; I can address him as “Lord Dionysus” or as “Dennis” and he won’t care either way. At no point have I felt pressured to worship him. But I find myself falling to my knees and crying at his feet. I find myself wanting to scream his name to the heavens and chant hymns. I feel the presence of Dionysus coursing through my veins when I dance, and that is worship. It is a true and stunning communion with the god, becoming part of its energy for a brief moment and being so overwhelmed that you praise it. Gods aren’t “superior” to you in a human, hierarchical sense, because that’s not the way they think, so they have no reason to maintain that “superiority.” Actual gods don’t address you as “mortal” or “foolish mortal” or “worm” or anything that immortals (demons, vampires, or just people with god complexes) say in media. They don’t need to. Being in their presence is awesome, in the truest sense of the word. They are sublime. They feel bigger than you, and being temporarily apart of that bigness is worship. At no point does it make you feel small, pathetic, or unworthy. You feel the exact opposite — to steal a line from Donna Tartt, it’s as though “the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self.”

My Thoughts on the Afterlife

My own perception of the afterlife was shaped by a film called Nosso Lar, known as Astral City: A Spiritual Journey in English. It is an account of the afterlife, channeled directly from a spirit to a medium, that was adapted into a film. The story follows a recently deceased soul, André Luiz, who finds himself in the closest thing to Hell that exists. It’s called Umbral in the film, but for reasons, I prefer to call it The Wandering Plane. It’s a place of suffering, weeping and gnashing of teeth, but it is still a far cry from eternal torture. André is in the Wandering Plane, not because he was a bad person in life, but because he made no sincere effort to connect with and love people while alive. (Think of Jacob Marley: “Mankind was my business!”) The other aggrieved spirits call him “Suicide” — he did not kill himself, but he spiritually committed “suicide” by being more focused on success than people, resulting in the cancer that killed him. Eventually, André hits rock bottom, and sends a sincere prayer to God to save him. A group of ascended souls, who shine like angels in the gloom of Umbral, come to rescue him. This is the first big difference between The Wandering Plane and traditional ideas of “Hell”: No one is stuck there. The only reason people are in Umbral is because their souls are burdened with negative emotions — fear, anger, spite, grief, etc. — that they refuse to let go of. If they didn’t work through their shit in life, they’re forced to in death. You can’t make any spiritual progress if you’re mired in your own suffering. The ascended souls take André to Nosso Lar, an astral city that’s basically a heavenly Crystal-Spires-and-Togas version of Rio de Janeiro. The spirits live in peaceful communities, which they call contribute to in different ways. Instead of money, they earn credits that go towards visiting their families and friends that are still on Earth. They have advanced technology that they hope souls will remember and recreate when they reincarnate on Earth (for example, the film is set around WWII, but the spirits are seen working on modern laptops). It’s made clear that Nosso Lar is not the only city of its type, and also not the only plane of existence that souls can ascend to — it is in fact the “lowest” of the heavenly spheres. André builds a new life (afterlife?) for himself in the astral city, and learns to actually heal people, which is quite different from being a doctor on Earth. I won’t go as far as to say that Nosso Lar is the definitive interpretation of the afterlife. It’s a film adaptation of a channeled book — that’s multiple layers of filtering right there. But, be it intuition or something else entirely, I know that Nosso Lar gets a lot right: The afterlife is tiered — it isn’t a simple as Heaven and Hell, rather, there are multiple heavenly realms depending on your level of spiritual advancement. There is no Hell of eternal torment for not being the right religion, only a place where spirits go when they are too anguished to go any higher, and they are not stuck there forever. Your journey does not end after you die — you will reincarnate, pass upward to higher planes, or otherwise advance somehow. Each life on Earth may as well be a day in the span of the “life” that you have in the spirit realm, which is your true existence. Going to your heavenly sphere is like coming home to bed after a long day at work. This understanding is not complete, and is still most likely put in painfully human terms, but it comes a lot closer than the carrot-and-stick model. I distinctly remember that after I watched Nosso Lar for the first time, I told myself, “When I reincarnate, I’m going to remember what the afterlife was like!” Then I realized that no one remembers what the afterlife was like when they reincarnate. And then, a smaller and subtler voice, that may have been mine or may not have been, said this: “How do you know you didn’t already make that promise to yourself?” I firmly believe that the afterlife you get has nothing to do with the religion you practice. Your religion might — might — shape what you want to get out of your afterlife (whether you want to reincarnate or want to ascend to a higher sphere, for example). But your religion has next-to-nothing to do with what afterlife you get, because religion is a human thing and the afterlife is a spirit thing. That said, I’ve been trying to contextualize my beliefs about the afterlife within my own religion. My religion, if I have one, comes closest to Hellenic paganism. The Ancient Greek afterlife seems very simplistic and dismal, but the more research I did on it, the more I learned that the Ancient Greek afterlife was actually far more complicated than it’s usually presented as. The typical model of the Greek afterlife is as follows: The majority of human souls go to the Fields of Asphodel, a gloomy place where souls whirl like dry leaves in an endless wind, with no memory of who they were before they died. A few souls (three, to be exact) are punished in Tartarus for having seriously offended the gods while alive. Heroes go to the Elysian Fields. That’s a very simplistic concept of the afterlife. But it gets more complicated as soon as you introduce the Mysteries. Mystery cults were the original secret societies. There were multiple Mystery cults in Ancient Greece, with two of the most famous being the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic Mysteries. I won’t go into intense detail about them here, but here’s the gist: Most ancient pagans were not concerned with the afterlife. The afterlife was bleak, so the most important thing was to leave your mark while you were alive. But the Mysteries were concerned with the afterlife. The Eleusinian Mysteries were focused on the goddesses Demeter and Persephone, and the Orphic Mysteries were focused on Dionysus. All these deities are associated with the afterlife. Initiates of the Mysteries seemed to believe that by practicing their secret rites, they could secure a better afterlife for themselves. They would be able to give a secret password in the Underworld that would allow them to drink from a spring of memory rather than from Lethe (the river of forgetfulness), and Persephone would grant them entry to Elysium. Some believed that if they managed to get to Elysium after three subsequent lives, then after the fourth they would get to live in the Isles of the Blessed with the heroes. Some of the Orphic lamellae texts even claim that the initiate is a god, or will become a god. In one of them, the initiate proclaims “I am a son of Earth and starry Heaven,” acknowledging his inherent divinity. In some others, the Underworld guardians proclaim, “You shall be a god instead of a mortal,” rewarding the initiate with apotheosis. I’m not a scholar of Mystery religions, but I am a mystic. Based on my own understanding as a mystic, this is my interpretation: It is fascinating to me that the way to get into Elysium is to be initiated, because that implies that the way to a better afterlife is advanced spiritual understanding. The Mysteries took religion beyond the normal motions of prayer and sacrifice and so forth, and made it direct and personal. An initiate would understand the spiritual world better than the average person. That person’s advanced understanding of the spiritual world would allow them to pass to a higher plane of existence. The fact that the initiate becomes a god is also extremely significant, because that is almost unheard-of in mainstream Greek religion (as opposed to mythology). Being an initiate allows one to become a god, or like a god, meaning that one can achieve immortality. The goal of many occultists is to achieve a state of divinity, whether that means reunifying with God on the highest of planes, or becoming a Philosophical King on Earth. We are the Initiates. It’s immensely validating to see some of my own beliefs about the afterlife reflected in Ancient Greek texts. It tells me that I’m on the right track. In Ancient Greece, the Mysteries were very secret and only a select few were initiates. Everything I’ve just explained would have been Forbidden Knowledge. But now, the idea of going to heaven upon death is widespread, in fact, some even consider it a default. What changed? Christianity happened. I’m mostly very skeptical of books like The Immortality Key that try to argue that Christianity is directly “copied” off of this or that Mystery cult (especially when it’s super obvious that the author went in with the intent to prove that conclusion, instead of using evidence to draw a conclusion like a scholar should). I don’t think that Christianity was “copied” off of any other religion. But, speaking as a mystic rather than a scholar, I do think that Christianity is a “mystery cult” of its own. Christianity is a “mystery” religion that decided to go public with the great Mystery, the one that all the other mystery cults taught in secret — that there is life after death, and that you can achieve it. I think that this is one of the reasons that Christianity is so popular. It is my personal theory that, in Antiquity, the majority of human souls went to the Wandering Plane after death. It was a different world then — constant war, slavery being a normal and accepted part of life, widespread oppression of women, etc. Not that the world is perfect now, but it is much better than it used to be, with a higher quality of life for many people in developed countries. I think that it was, and maybe still is, normal to go to the Wandering Plane before any of the celestial spheres after death. This is why so many pagan underworlds are bleak and gloomy places under the earth. The grand and shocking secret that Jesus taught the world was that you do not have to go there first — you can go straight up, just by going out of your way to connect with your fellow man. Christianity taught that we are all Initiates, all beloved children of God. But… the downside to bypassing initiation is “casting pearls before swine” — people will take that message and twist it to mean something different, even evil. In my opinion, it is evil to tell people that they’ll go to hell for thinking differently from you, or for being less than perfectly virtuous, for being human. Conditioning children with the fear of hell is even worse. Hell becomes a gimmick of control and a tool for the powerful and the hypocritical, and Heaven an exclusive club for the submissive. Hence, this question. Overtime, partly from the influence of Christianity but also because quality of life has improved and we’ve been on Earth for longer, it has become more normal to ascend to heavenly spheres after death. Hopefully, we as a species will arrive at a place where we are all Initiates. I believe that can happen. Perhaps it’ll take many lifetimes, but I’m willing to cut us some slack. We haven’t existed very long. If the entire history of the earth were compressed into one day, the entire history of mankind would be only the last two minutes before midnight. From the perspective of Those Upstairs, we’re still babies. We’ve got a lot of growing up to do before we can bring heaven down to Earth. You taught me the courage of the stars before you left, How light carries on endlessly even after death. With shortness of breath, you explained the Infinite. How rare and beautiful it is to even exist. — Sleeping at Last, “Saturn” At this point, the grand secret of life after death is old news. It’s obvious to most occultists. Not everything about the spirit world makes “logical sense” — in fact, most of it doesn’t — but part of what I do as an occultist is try to understand the spirit world as it is, with as few filters as possible. This is what we know that you don’t: We know that souls don’t stop existing when the body dies, that death is just a transition, and that the soul has options for what will happen to it after it dies. We know that a commonly-taken path is reincarnation. One life is not enough time to determine the trajectory of your afterlife, and the afterlife is not a system of reward and punishment. Souls rise up and fall back to Earth like water. Each life gives you a bit more experience and a different perspective, a bit more progress to whatever your ultimate goal is. Maybe we’re all in training to become baby gods. I don’t know for sure, but I do know that I’m ready to move past the dualistic model of Heaven and Hell.

Neoplatonism and Occultism

Most of the cosmological ideas that underlie Western esotericism have their roots in Neoplatonism and/or Hermeticism. One of the most common ideas among Western occultists is that one’s spiritual goal should be to attain henosis, the reunification of one’s soul with the great Divine. A lot of schools of Western occultism and mysticism attempt to accomplish this using different methods. Both Neoplatonism and the Jewish mystery tradition called Kabbalah are based on the idea that God expresses itself through a series of descending “spheres” that emanate from it, culminating in the physical world, which is the lowest and most impure of these spheres because it is the most distanced from God. With proper training, the mystic can ascend upward through these spheres like a ladder, to reconnect with God: "[The Neoplatonists] conceived of reality as spiritual activity or states of consciousness and regarded the human soul as a voyager, fallen and encumbered by bodily existence but perfectible by a path of ascent to its divine origins. […] Neoplatonic thought is characterized by the idea that there exists a plurality of spheres of being, arranged in a descending hierarchy of degrees of being. The last and lowest sphere of being comprises the universe existing in time and space perceptible to the human senses. Each sphere of being derives from its superior by a process of “emenation,” by which it reflects and expresses its previous degree. At the same time, these degrees of being are also degrees of unity, whereby each subsequent sphere generates more multiplicity, differentiation, and limitation, tending toward the minimal unity of our material world." —Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Tradition: A Historical Introduction If that sounds familiar, well… that’s because Neoplatonism also influenced early Kabbalistic philosophers. It’s no coincidence that both Neoplatonism and Kabbalah attempt to chart a “path” up through the emanations of the Divine to reach their Source. Most Western occultists believe some version of this — that we are subtle beings temporarily incarnated in physical bodies, and that we can somehow make our way back up to reunify with the Divine. Most occultists seek to overcome or bypass the limitations of the physical bodies into which we are incarnated. I don’t personally view my body as a prison or a punishment, but I am acutely aware of the difficulty of having a body. In my personal opinion, one of the things that distinguishes occultism from “normal” religion is that occultism puts you in an active position concerning your relationship with the spiritual and material worlds. I would go so far as to claim that the idea that one can deliberately “climb back up” the ladder of emanations to reach the Divine is an inherently occult idea. That’s not to say that all occultists adopt this system or versions of it, but that actively pursuing unification with the divine is an inherently mystical process, and mysticism falls under the occult umbrella. Why wait for God to come down to you, when you can go up to it? Hermeticism, a different but related system of Hellenistic philosophy, was already considered occult in Antiquity. It was attributed to the legendary magician Hermes Trismegistus, who is supposed to be a syncretic incarnation of the gods Hermes and Thoth. From Hermeticism, Western occultists get a lot of other core philosophies, including “as above, so below” (the idea that the spiritual and material world reflect and react to each other), that all human beings contain (or have the potential to contain) a piece of the Divine, that we can understand God by observing the material world, and that we can refine the “base” and “impure” material world into a “higher” and more spiritualized version of itself. These are some of the theoretical concepts behind alchemy (especially that last one). Western occultism as we know it was so heavily influenced by Ancient Greek philosophy that certain aspects of each become interchangeable. Then again, so much of religion as we know it in the West has been influenced by Neoplatonism that it may be redundant to emphasize its relationship to occultism specifically.

Emanation, Part 1: The Divine Stepladder

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.

Emanation, Part 2: Creation

I’m kind of fascinated by the emphasis on creation in Christianity. I was raised Christian, but either my denomination didn’t emphasize creation as much, or I just never internalized it. There were a lot of Christian ideas that I needed to work through and deconstruct when I became pagan, but this was not one of them. So, when I learned on Quora that a lot of Christians believe that the reason why God is worthy of worship is because he created everything, I was a bit nonplussed. Why? Why is creation so important, and why is it intertwined with divinity? Why can’t a non-creator be divine? Paganism mostly does not place a huge emphasis on creator gods. It’s far more common for the significant gods to be the children or grandchildren of the first gods to exist. There’s multiple Greek creation myths, but in the standard one, the first set of gods (the Protogenoi) passively emanate from a primordial void called Khaos. Khaos is often interpreted as a deity in her own right, but she is not actively responsible for creation. The Protogenoi also are mostly irrelevant to Ancient Greek religion. The most prominent one is Gaia, the Earth, who is also partly responsible for “creation” in that she is the mother of most kinds of life, as well as the first generation of gods (their father is Ouranos, the sky). The gods that actually matter are three or four generations down. The current Lord of the Universe, Zeus, is Gaia’s grandson, and Gaia herself is an antagonistic force under his rule. In Norse mythology, the brothers Odin, Vili, and Ve shaped the world out of the body of the giant Ymir, who arose from the primordial void, Ginnungagap; Odin is the chief god, but his importance is not tied to his role in creating the world, and his brothers completely lose relevance after that one myth (as far as we know). The Babylonian creation myth is similar; the first gods emerge from primordial water, and after a great battle, the god Marduk slays the primordial goddess Tiamat and makes the world from her body. Egypt also has a whole bunch of conflicting creation myths, but most involve the Sun or some other god arising from primordial waters or void. In one of the best-known Egyptian creation myths, the first really significant set of gods (apart from the Sun) are born from the Sky and the Earth. I don’t know what Hinduism’s exact theology is around creation, but I do know that the creator god, Brahma, is worshipped far less often than the other two aspects of the supreme being (Vishnu and Shiva) and considerably less often than many other “lesser” divinities in the pantheon. In most of these religions’ creation myths, there are a couple of recurring ideas: One, the idea of primordial water or void, from which everything else emanates. (The Abrahamic creation myth implicitly has this as well, since the Earth exists in a dark void when God creates it, but God already exists. There’s never any specification of where God came from, leading to an endless chain of ontological debates. But that’s unusual.) The first gods just sort of arise or coalesce out of the prima materia. Two, the gods immediately set about making more of themselves. They mate with whatever other beings happen to be there or, if there aren’t any, they… improvise. One of the Egyptian creator gods, Atum, masturbates to produce the first set of gods, Shu and Tefnut. And really, why not? That kind of makes sense when you think about it. Shu and Tefnut (both gods of air) have sex and produce Nut and Geb, the Sky and the Earth, who have sex and produce the first set of gods that’s actually important — Isis Osiris, Nephthys, and Set — who also immediately pair up and then it goes from there. It’s the same in other mythologies. Tiamat and Apsu, each representing primordial waters, have sex and produce two other sets of gods that represent fundamental male/female principles, who have sex and start spawning the gods that actually matter. In some versions of the Greek creation myth, the primordial gods Nyx and Erebos (Night and Darkness) spawn a whole brood of other gods that represent different fundamental aspects of existence — Day, Ether, Death, Sleep, Dreams, Discord, Fate, Friendship, Misery, Old Age, Vengeance, etc. In the Orphic creation myth, Kronos and Ananke are the parents of the cosmic egg, out of which hatches Phanes, the closest thing to a true creator deity that Greece has (excepting Platonism; we’ll get there). Phanes is a personification of progenation, the force of creation itself that drives things to come into being. “Phanes” means “to bring to light” or “to make appear,” but in Hesiod this being is called Eros — literally, a personification of the drive to have sex. Sex is an act of creation. That’s true in a literal sense. So gods create the world by spawning other gods that each make up a piece of the world as we know it. The Sky and the Earth are born, rather than made, because they are gods and they are alive. If they’re alive, then, like you, they had parents. If we’re going to interpret this from a mystical standpoint, then of course, sex is a metaphor. It’s how we make more of ourselves, so we speak of the gods as “having sex” to describe how they make more of themselves. And because gods all represent and/or rule over fundamental aspects of reality, they create more of reality by creating more of themselves. Certainly not all pagan creation myths follow this format, though. Another Egyptian creation myth, the one concerning Ptah, is a lot more like the Abrahamic one. Ptah creates the world by conceptualizing it with his thoughts and then speaking it into existence. Another big exception is the Platonic Demiurge, but again, we’ll get there. The third thing that these myths all have in common is that the later generation of gods is usually the more important one. Most of the primordial gods become irrelevant after the creation story is over. The later generation of gods is usually more anthropomorphic, more immediate, more relevant. Most of the myths are about them, and most cults are dedicated to them and not to the primordial gods. I don’t have a definitive or scholarly answer on precisely why this is, but I have a few guesses. Growing up with Christianity instills you with certain ideas about what religion is and how it works. You probably feel like the point of religion is to develop a personal relationship with God, and thus better understand God and perhaps earn your way into a better afterlife through your understanding of God. If that’s the way you feel, congratulations! You’re a mystic! I’m a mystic, too, and I still care very deeply about fostering a personal relationship with and understanding of the Divine. I don’t know if that’s because I was raised Christian or if it’s because I’m naturally inclined towards mysticism, or both, but regardless, that was not the main goal of ancient pagans. For ancient pagans, the main purpose of worshipping the gods was to get their help with solving immediate, mundane problems that fall within their little spheres of influence. The great Mystery of Creation therefore isn’t that relevant to the lives of most pagans. It’s not important. What is important is what the local rain god thinks of your sacrifice, because if it is satisfied, it will water your crops for you and bless you with abundance so that you can survive the coming winter. This god could be the lowest on the totem pole of gods, with the smallest sphere of influence, and no worshippers apart from you and your local community, but none of that matters if your survival is tied to its approval. You worship it anyway. When people’s religious needs are more immediate, then it’s more useful to have a god that is easily comprehensible, anthropomorphic, and present over one that is incomprehensible, transcendental, and abstract. Pagans also tend to believe that everything in nature is worthy of worship in its own right. The distinction between polytheism and animism is actually arbitrary; most forms of polytheism have just as many small gods, nature spirits, household spirits, fairies, daimones, genii, etc. as they do big-name gods. Sometimes the smaller gods are actually more important because — again — they’re more relevant to the average person’s life on a regular basis. Everything is alive, everything has a consciousness, everything can be called upon or petitioned. Everything deserves reverence. The idea that you shouldn’t worship any of these smaller spirits because they were created by something else is absurd. Why does it make a difference whether the spirit had parents or not? It’s simply advantageous to befriend as many spirits as possible, so you can have their allegiance or even affection when push comes to shove. These structures of venerating or petitioning smaller spirits still exist in a lot of traditions of Christianity, mostly through the worship of saints, although some have other folkloric concepts of nature spirits that deserve some kind of homage or tithe (like the aformentioned fey folk). Not Protestantism, though, or at least not the kinds that are prominent in America. Angels exist in almost all Christian traditions, but are generally assumed to be beyond the reach of the average person. Some Christians will interpret any attempt to call upon an angel as an act of hubris; God chooses when to send an angel to you, and you cannot request the aid of one for any reason. If you don’t believe in saints or nature spirits, and you can’t call upon angels, that leaves you completely bereft of options when you need something smaller and more accessible than the Great Trancendent I AM to help you solve a little mundane problem. The ultimate, transcendental version of God is frankly too big to take notice of you. And that leads me to another relevant concept that I’ve so far avoided bringing up — that of the Platonic chain of emanation. It’s a complicated concept, but here’s the short version: There is a Great Divine or ultimate Source of all existence, which is an absolute philosophical standard of perfection, truth, and goodness. From this entity emanates all of existence, descending through a sequence of “spheres” from the most abstract to the most material. This is a very common idea in mystical systems, including Abrahamic ones, such as Jewish Kabbalah. Mysticism involves “climbing back up” the ladder of emanation to reach the Divine. Interpreted in this context, the pattern of abstract vs. anthropomorphic gods takes on another layer of meaning. Metaphorically, the anthropomorphic gods could be taken as a more humanized variant of the same concept as the primordial gods. For example, Ouranos and Gaia are the most abstract version of the Sky and the Earth, followed by their children Kronos and Rhea who are a little more concrete, followed by their children Zeus and Demeter who are fully anthropomorphic. These are all just different ways of expressing the same concept. In Orphism, there’s a series of Lords of the Universe who proceed in a line of succession: Phanes, the aformentioned personification of generative force, then Nyx, then Ouranos, Kronos, Zeus (the current one), and finally Dionysus. Zeus, Phanes, and Dionysus are all frequently identified with each other in Orphic sources. One Orphic source even tells the story of how Zeus swallowed Phanes in order to subsume him and gain his powers as Demiurge: "Zeus when, from his father the prophecy having heard, strength in his hands he took, and the glorious daimon [Phanes], the reverend one, he swallowed, who first sprang forth into the Aither. […] And with him all the immortals became one, the blessed gods and goddesses and rivers and lovely springs and everything else that then existed: he became the only one." --Orphica, Theogonies Fragment (from the Derveni Papyrus). Translation from Theoi. This makes Zeus an evolution of Phanes. He’s the same Supreme Being, but less abstract. He’s more understandable — the King of the Gods, with plenty of colorful stories about a humanlike version of him to offset the more transcendental interpretations. But even at his most anthropomorphic, he’s still up there in the sky somewhere, at a distance. Dionysus is Zeus’s son (and, in Orphism, explicitly his heir), but even more immediate. In many of his myths, he lives on earth among humans, and he is directly accessible at any time — all you need to do is drink wine. Dionysus is the same Supreme Being at its most present, most carnal, and most human, therefore the easiest to reach out and touch. It’s not much of a stretch to consider the six Orphic Kings to all be the same being at different levels of emanation, from the most transcendental (Phanes), down to the most earthly (Dionysus). Plato’s creation myth, detailed in the Timaeus, describes a single deity, the Demiurge, who created the world and all of the other gods. He makes the younger gods eternal, and charges them with the creation of everything else: "When the Father who begat the world saw the image which he had made of the Eternal Gods moving and living, he rejoiced; and in his joy resolved, since the archetype was eternal, to make the creature eternal as far as this was possible. […] When all of them, both those who show themselves in the sky, and those who retire from view, had come into being, the Creator addressed them thus:—‘Gods, sons of gods, my works, if I will, are indissoluble. That which is bound may be dissolved, but only an evil being would dissolve that which is harmonious and happy. And although you are not immortal you shall not die, for I will hold you together. Hear me, then:—Three tribes of mortal beings have still to be created, but if created by me they would be like gods. Do ye therefore make them; I will implant in them the seed of immortality, and you shall weave together the mortal and immortal, and provide food for them, and receive them again in death.’ Thus he spake, and poured the remains of the elements into the cup in which he had mingled the soul of the universe. They were no longer pure as before, but diluted; and the mixture he distributed into souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each to a star—then having mounted them, as in a chariot, he showed them the nature of the universe, and told them of their future birth and human lot. They were to be sown in the planets, and out of them was to come forth the most religious of animals, which would hereafter be called man. […] Having given this law to his creatures, that he might be guiltless of their future evil, he sowed them, some in the earth, some in the moon, and some in the other planets; and he ordered the younger gods to frame human bodies for them and to make the necessary additions to them, and to avert from them all but self-inflicted evil." —Plato, Timaeus So, we’ve got a clear dividing line separating the transcendental God from the more “mundane” gods. The Demiurge is responsible for the spiritual plane, while the “mundane” gods are responsible for the material plane. But nowhere does Plato suggest that these other gods shouldn’t be worshipped just because they came later. They are still infused with divinity because the Demiurge made them in the form of perfect spheres, and gifted them with the ability to create and preside over lesser beings. "The Demiurgus therefore, as I began to say, by whom all things were produced, generated them [the gods] consubsistent with himself, and assimilated, and perfected, and converted them to himself; their order not being confounded by the at once collected evolution, as it were, of all things into light, but being in a much greater degree guarded and connected." — Proclus’ Commentary on Timaeus (Isn’t it great that both this weird philosophical text and a commentary breaking it down survived?). Translation: The gods are divine because they are made of the same sort of stuff and do the same sort of things as the Demiurge, but on a smaller scale. Now, you might have noticed that the Abrahamic God also creates humans in his own image and commands them to preside over lesser beings. Does that mean that humans are divine? And to that I say, yes. Humans are divine, but on an even smaller scale, and with more mundane “stuff” attached to us and weighing us down. Freeing yourself from the mundane world and climbing your way back up the ladder of emanation to reach God is the goal of a lot of mystical systems. So why does Christianity care about creation? Christianity is a mystery tradition. Creation is one of the big Mysteries, and part of the aim of Christianity is to interact with the Divine on that level. It skips over all of the more present/immediate/mundane versions of divinity — actively shuns them, even — and reaches straight for God at its most ultimate and transcendental. I’m of the opinion that this is admirable but not practical. One of the reasons I left Christianity is because it didn’t work for me, and worshipping Dionysus definitely did. And I also like being a polytheist. I like not being limited in who I can worship. I like making friends with all the gods, big ones and the little guys. I like the versatility. Despite being a mystic, I’m not that interested in creation. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer and I spend a lot of time creating my own worlds. I think I know a thing or two about the process of creation. Some of it is active choices on my part, but some of it is passive… it just sort of emanates from me, and then evolves on its own. I get to discover my own world as I build it. Maybe God’s relationship with its world is similar. I created all my characters — does that mean that they should worship me? (hint: yes)

Why Mystical Experiences Are Weird

I’m not a huge fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson, but there’s a quote of his that I like: “The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.” The deeper you go into science (specifically physics, but really any field of science), the less intuitive sense it makes. Real science is light-years more complicated than the “lies-to-children” that we were taught in grade school science class, and most of us will never get to the level where we can understand half of it. Unless you’re a scientist, then everything you know about physics or chemistry or biology is a watered-down, oversimplified, allegorical approximation of a concept. If you do end up doing research into any of these fields, you’ll quickly find out that reality does not work the way you think it does. There are more questions than answers, and many of the answers operate by rules that are so far outside the scope of reality as our brains understand it, that normal logic does not and cannot apply. The same is true on the religious side of things: the deeper you go into it, the less sense it makes. The gods are weird, eldritch things that don’t think or act like humans, but we perceive them as being humanlike because that’s easier for us. The spiritual world doesn’t operate according to the logic of the world we’re currently living in, so we filter it through ideas and symbols that we do understand; most religions have an entire system’s worth of stories, rituals, and theologies to explain this weirdness and complexity in ways that the average person can easily understand. For example, Heaven and Hell is a lie-to-children. It’s easily understandable, and very satisfying to our human minds, to believe that we’ll go to Heaven if we’re good and Hell if we’re bad. But that’s a heavily oversimplified idea that does more to scare and control people on Earth than it does to prepare them for the afterlife. A more accurate way of describing the afterlife might be an enormous port city with different kinds of transportation leading off in all different directions, and everyone has a different destination depending on a lot of personal factors (many of which aren’t even relevant while you’re on Earth). Some people might go up to higher planes, some might go down to lower ones, some might reincarnate, some might ascend to godhood, some might go places and do things that we don’t have any way of comprehending. And describing the afterlife like this is still an oversimplification, because calling it a “port city” is still using a familiar, human metaphor to describe something that is fundamentally unfamiliar and inhuman. If you see visions of the afterlife, chances are they’ll be filtered through the lens of whatever religion you practice, because that’s a lot easier to make sense of than whatever the real truth is. The answers are similar for almost every other big question. Here’s some of the answers that I’ve gotten to big questions: Is God one, or many? Yes. Here’s a metaphor about trees and leaves, or different parts of the body, or something, because that’s easier for you to understand than to try to explain how something can be both singular, infinite, and a multiplicity all at the same time. Are we bound by fate, or do we have free will? Well you see, there’s this web — actually, it’s not a web, it’s more like a nervous system, but it’s not that either, so we’re just going to call it a web — that has a infinite number of branching “pathways” that show the trajectory of every decision you or anyone else has ever made, and how those decisions affect everything else, and how other factors beyond your control affect everything else, and how the gods affect everything else, and how everything else affects everything else. All of those things interact in all of these complicated ways. We can see it all from our vantage point, so we know where it’s all going and why, but that doesn’t negate your ability to make your own choices. So once again, the answer is “Yes.” Why does God allow suffering? See above. We care about you, but we don’t even notice your little instances of suffering becuase they’re so brief and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. If you ask us to relieve it for you, we don’t really get why. …and so on. That’s why myths are useful; even if they’re not literally true, they use symbolism and allegory to help the audience understand the nuances of the concept that it’s trying to convey. Zeus does not literally make it storm (because thunder and lightning are a result of static discharge that builds up in clouds), but the storm is a symbol or expression of what Zeus is as a concept, or as an entity. If you can see through the story to what it’s really trying to convey, you get a little closer to the truth. In other words, the wackier it gets, the closer to the bullseye you are. And you still aren’t that close, just by virtue of being human. That’s all to say, embrace the weirdness! It’s a sign that you’re on the right track.

Judging the Validity of Mystical Experiences

If all mystical experiences come from the same divine source, then they should all say the same thing, right? Do they? Or are they a product of our own personal cultural and religious contexts? The answer is… kind of both. On the one hand, mystical experiences are intensely personal. They use a symbolic language that is familiar to the person having the experience, which is why they’re so often filtered through the specific cultural and religious context that the person is already familiar with. Essentially, mystical experiences convey information that is… well, not beyond the capacity of humans to understand (or no one would have these experiences at all), but difficult for any human to understand directly. It has to be filtered and translated into a familiar “language” in order to be understood at all. This means that the experience will usually be put into the terms of the person’s existing religious beliefs. The problem arises when the person receiving the message mistakes the language for the message, so that the experience ends up reinforcing the religious framework instead of pushing past it: “I saw a vision of Jesus, therefore he must be the One True God!” is not supposed to be the takeaway. Mystical experiences feel like some great and “objective” truth when you receive them, but they’re so heavily filtered through your personal framework that your bias is still present. No matter what framework you’re using, it can only approximate what the real truth is. If you want to see past your bais, one of the ways to do it is to compare your UPG (Unverified Personal Gnosis) to everyone else’s. If you look past each person’s individual framework, you’ll start to see a pattern. One of the first times I noticed this pattern is when I read Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love for one of my medieval classes in undergrad. Julian was an anchoress, and is notable for being the first (confirmed) woman with surviving works written in English. (Also, if anyone else here plays Fallen London, she’s the source of “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”) Revelations of Divine Love is an account of mystical experiences that she had while deathly ill. She witnessed Christ’s Passion, and received a message from God with an unusually positive character, especially for the Middle Ages: "And in this vision he [God] showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my mind’s eye it was round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, “What can this be?” And the answer came to me, “It is all that is made.” I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was, “It lasts and will last for ever because God loves it; and in this same way everything exists through the love of God.” In this little thing I saw three attributes: the first is that God made it, the second is that he loves it, the third is that god cares for it." — Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love This is just so beautiful! It’s an important message that God is ultimately motivated by love, and that his aim is to help humanity transcend sin rather than to punish them for it. It you know anything about Catholicism, they place a pretty heavy emphasis on sin and guilt and punishing oneself for them. The message that Julian got directly from God contradicts this notion. It’s the polar opposite of the revolting fearmongering of something like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and a very different attitude towards the idea of sin in general. The context of “all shall be well” is that God does not hate us for our sin, and that God also does not blame us for our sin (in the exact same way that we shouldn’t blame Frodo Baggins for falling prey to the Ring at the Crack of Doom — literally anyone else wouldn’t even have made it that far.) That’s a big deal in the context of medieval Catholicism! So I thought to myself, if a nun living in seclusion in the fourteenth century managed to get the same basic message about the nature of the Divine that I did, filtered through her familiar context of Christ’s Passion and so forth, then there’s got to be something there. Another surprising source of mystical resonance was H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft mostly wrote pulp horror based on his own paranoia and nightmares. His writing fluctuates between being beautifully descriptive and being dry, his big scares at the end aren’t always that affecting, and all his work is saturated with racism and xenophobia. But there’s a genuine mystical thread running through his work, especially his Dream Cycle stories, and every once in a while his work presents me with something that hits me like a truck. One such example was this section, plunked in the middle of an otherwise plodding story in which the protagonist expressed deep disdain for hillbillies: "The sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me. Chords, vibrations, and harmonic ecstasies echoed passionately on every hand; while on my ravished sight burst the stupendous spectacle of ultimate beauty. Walls, columns, and architraves of living fire blazed effulgently around the spot where I seemed to float in air; extending upward to an infinitely high vaulted dome of indescribable splendour. Blending with this display of palatial magnificence, or rather, supplanting it at times in kaleidoscopic rotation, were glimpses of wide plains and graceful valleys, high mountains and inviting grottoes; covered with every lovely attribute of scenery which my delighted eye could conceive of, yet formed wholly of some glowing, ethereal, plastic entity, which in consistency partook as much of spirit as of matter. As I gazed, I perceived that my own brain held the key to these enchanting metamorphoses; for each vista which appeared to me, was the one my changing mind most wished to behold. Amidst this elysian realm I dwelt not as a stranger, for each sight and sound was familiar to me; just as it had been for uncounted aeons of eternity before, and would be for like eternities to come. Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy with me, soul to soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour was one of approaching triumph, for was not my fellow-being escaping at last from a degrading periodic bondage; escaping forever, and preparing to follow the accursed oppressor even unto the uttermost fields of ether, that upon it might be wrought a flaming cosmic vengeance which would shake the spheres? We floated thus for a little time, when I perceived a slight blurring and fading of the objects around us, as though some force were recalling me to earth — where I least wished to go. The form near me seemed to feel a change also, for it gradually brought its discourse toward a conclusion, and itself prepared to quit the scene; fading from my sight at a rate somewhat less rapid than that of the other objects. A few more thoughts were exchanged, and I knew that the luminous one and I were being recalled to bondage, though for my brother of light it would be the last time. The sorry planet-shell being well-nigh spent, in less than an hour my fellow would be free to pursue the oppressor along the Milky Way and past the hither stars to the very confines of infinity. […] At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operating upon it. I closed my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly, and was rewarded by the positive knowledge that my long-sought mental message had come at last. Each transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind, and though no actual language was employed, my habitual association of conception and expression was so great that I seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary English. “Joe Slater is dead,” came the soul-petrifying voice or agency from beyond the wall of sleep. My opened eyes sought the couch of pain in curious horror, but the blue eyes were still calmly gazing, and the countenance was still intelligently animated. “He is better dead, for he was unfit to bear the active intellect of cosmic entity. His gross body could not undergo the needed adjustments between ethereal life and planet life. He was too much of an animal, too little a man; yet it is through his deficiency that you have come to discover me, for the cosmic and planet souls rightly should never meet. He has been my torment and diurnal prison for forty-two of your terrestrial years. I am an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep. I am your brother of light, and have floated with you in the effulgent valleys. It is not permitted me to tell your waking earth-self of your real self, but we are all roamers of vast spaces and travellers in many ages. Next year I may be dwelling in the dark Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan which is to come three thousand years hence. You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter. How little does the earth-self know of life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquillity!" — H.P. Lovecraft, “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.” Yes, we are meant to be shocked — shocked, I tell you! — that this mad, “degenerate” poor person had this effulgent higher-minded being living within him, because obviously his animalistic existence is unworthy of housing this being, yada yada… But, in and around Lovecraft’s bigotry is a real, profound insight: That we humans are actually subtle beings of light, that we come from “up there” somewhere and are only temporarily incarnated into these earthly bodies, and that our subtle bodies are not limited by space or time. That’s a very old mystical idea that shows up in many different contexts (though exactly what various groups of mystics decide to do with that information, varies). What really cinched it for me was the description of the spirit’s speech arriving fully-formed in the protagonist’s mind, and the protagonist understanding them immediately as if they were spoken in plain English, even though it’s just raw ideas that haven’t been put into words. That is exactly my experience whenever I talk to spirits! A description that is that specific suggests that Lovecraft must have experienced something similar, himself. The ultimate example of mystical resonance that I’ve encountered is Carl Jung, who, like Julian, had a series of mystical visions that he recorded in a personal journal that became The Red Book. It’s written in the style of a medieval manuscript, and illuminated with fantastic illustrations. I’ve been reading through it, and have found that while Jung’s dreams aren’t that much like mine, he comes to many of the exact same conclusions that I’ve come to throughout my own mystical journey. That could partly be a result of his influence on me, but there’s a lot of stuff in there that I learned entirely on my own, and seeing it validated in his work is astounding. So far, I’ve read through Liber Primus and the first half of Liber Secundus, so go check those posts out if you want the whole story. Since many different mystics from different walks of life end up having similar experiences and reaching similar conclusions, my belief is that there is something universal underneath it all. We may not be able to see it clearly, but it’s there, and we’re all interpreting it through our own unique set of internal lenses. If you find enough other people who have had the same mystical experiences as you have, your UPG becomes SPG, “Shared Personal Gnosis.” If you find ancient or historical accounts of such revelations that have been written down in primary sources, then it’s VPG, “Verified Personal Gnosis.” As a general rule, true divine revelations tend to impart the same messages. It’s always exciting and mind-blowing to find that you have the same revelations as someone else, even if they’re conveyed slightly differently. Of course, it’s not always going to match up. A while back, I wrote this post to try to parse out different people’s UPG. It was my inclination at the time to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and to assume that everyone’s mystical experiences come from God. I quickly ran into problems there. Not only are there boatloads of crazy people on the internet who will claim to literally be the incarnation of this or that deity, but after a certain point, it actually becomes dangerous to take everyone’s UPG at face-value. The most cutting example is that of Sannion, who claimed that Dionysus himself gave him license to use a Nazi symbol. That put me in an awful place. Either I had to find a good reason that Sannion’s divine endorsement of facism was illegitimate, or I have to accept that my god told someone to use a Nazi symbol. (Or he could just be lying, but how should I know?) There’s also the fact that mystical experiences can be hard to process, for a number of reasons. Some people have mystical experiences and then never come back to earth again, believing themselves to be God, which isn’t exactly wrong, but still isn’t a productive way to live one’s life while one is still incarnated in a body. Some can’t separate the meaning of the words from the language it’s written in, and will use the mystical experience as justification for the entire filter, believing that their own filter has been proven right while everyone else’s is wrong. Some just go crazy. What does one do, when confronted with UPG that’s just straight-up wrong? It’s tempting to use my own experience as a yardstick — the reason why Julian, Lovecraft, and Jung all had “real” mystical experiences is because, on some level, they match my own. That works to a point, because resonance really is a good sign that you’re on the same page, but you also have your own filter. My viewpoint isn’t any more “objective” than any of theirs, and my revelations aren’t any more true. If nothing else, they’re true for me. The important thing is to be aware of the filters, my own and everyone else’s. Some of those are cultural or religious, and many are psychological. Your own issues will get in the way if you don’t work through them! So much of The Red Book consists of Jung disentangling himself from his filters, first from what he calls the Zeitgeist (i.e. “the spirit of the times,” the cultural background of twentieth-century Germany) and then from Christianity. He slowly peels back the layers of filtering until he can reach the revelations at their core, and even then, he usually has very strong emotional reactions to them that range from confusion and rejection to shame and disgust. And also, Jung is a psychiatrist. It’s literally his job to work on himself and to teach others how to do so. It’s possible that the only reason he was even able to address, dissect, and interpret all those symbols and complex emotions is because he had the necessary skills. Most people don’t work on themselves. Most people actively avoid working on themselves, and mystical experiences will usually force them to in one way or another. So, that’s another obstacle to interpreting mystical experiences. With all that in mind, yes — there is something universal in mystical experiences, but they’re also deeply personal and rooted in the individual’s existing framework of religion, culture, associations, and symbols. In order to find the bits that are universal, one has to look past all the other stuff. But every attempt at making a “universal” religion has failed, becoming one interpretation out of many, because no interpretation is ever going to work for literally everyone. All the other stuff is also part of the condition of being human, and in many ways, it’s a feature and not a bug! One of the things I love the most about mysticism is that it personalizes religion. Mysticism allows God to approach you, directly, using your associations and your interpretation, translating itself into a symbolic language that is uniquely suited to you! The reason why someone else’s mystical experiences are different is because God has approached them in their way. We all see the same thing, because our different lenses allow us each to see it in the way that makes the most sense to us. "There are not many truths, there are only a few. Their meaning is too deep to grasp other than in symbols." — Carl Jung, The Red Book

About Sarah McLean

Hi, I'm Sarah McLean. I'm a writer with interests in mythology, religion, literature, and occultism. I spend a lot of my free time writing online articles about these topics, and I also write fantasy novels.