The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

So, a term came up in a topic of conversation very recently that made me turn my head and go, "Bu'WHA?"  I'd never heard it before. I have only the vaguest idea of what it means.  I tried looking it up online, and really didn't come across anything...

What's a god spouse? What does it mean to be one? What does it entail? Can people literally be a god spouse?  How do you know you are chosen? And a million other questions I can't even begin to think of.

Does Exactly What It Says On The Tin.

It is a particular mystical practice of extensive personal, emotional, social, and practical devotion to a particular deity, which often comes with a fair amount of heavy lifting in terms of doing that deity's work in the world, strictures on behaviour and practice, or other obligations.

Beyond that, a lot of people are assholes about it.  Both ways.

 
How are people assholes about it?

If one is chosen, are there rites for it?

What kind of obligations do you mean (I know it varies from god to god, but...)

Are there any websites out there that explain it?

Well, with any sort of relationship or position you'll have people lording it over others, on the one side.

On the other hand, you get people who insist that That Doesn't Happen, that Your UPG Is Stupid, that Nobody Is Special To The Gods, that Erotic Relationships With Entities Are Bunk, that ... I'm sure you can fill in some more ideas here.



I'm sure a lot of people like to ritualise their marriages, and many do in some way or another.



Varies from god to god, relationship to relationship.  I think the most common thing is that that person is usually present as a corporeal contact for that god, which has effects that can range from "my eyes in this ritual" to "I want you to have that for lunch so I can taste it vicariously through you".  Some have taboos related to their god, like some kinds of priest might do; some are expected to be monogamous/chaste aside from mystical sexual practices.

Aside from that, it's a very personal form of mystical experience.  I'm sure St. Theresa of Avila experienced it differently from a modern neopagan.


 
I'm not sure there's anything to explain.  But here's a thing: even for people who talk about their relationships, those are their private relationships, not a public service.  You may find individuals who want to talk about the nuts and bolts of how their relationship with a given entity works (regardless of whether or not that entity is corporeal), but those would be both uncommon and, well, not representative.

(Perhaps it's my prejudices speaking, but I would tend to figure that most people conduct their marriages kind of like I conduct mine:  I'm happy to refer to the people I'm married to and have it publically known that that matters to me, but I'm not interested in providing people intimate details of relationships that they are not a party to.  Someone who wants to figure out what it's like to marry one of my husbands is going to have to do their own work, including getting the relevant consents.)

 
I really appreciate all of your insight.

Here are a couple of more questions, if you're up for it:

How does being a godspouse differ from being a priest/priestess? Is it the sexual aspect?

What or how... if it's not too squishy of a question... does the sexual/erotic bit come into play?

And I suppose that if there are any taboos, you find that out on your own by listening to the god in question?

You'll have to start out by defining what you mean by "priest" in order to start n that question.  I'm soooo not gonna assume that we share a definition there.



... I wonder if I can find that blog post.  Hrrrm.

(Holy shit.  Googling "sex with gods wordpress" actually pulled it up. o.O )

http://sexgodsrockstars.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/god-sex/


 
I would suspect so, yes.  I would also suspect that they would be consistent with the god in question's expectations on the world, realms of interest, and so on.

 
I found that link earlier, and it was very informative, thank you.

As for priest/ess... well.  I don't know what I mean by that, either, so that's something else I'm trying to figure out.

Taking the broadest and least useful sense of "priest", though, I would suspect that the most useful comment I could make is that a priest is someone acting in a community context in some way, whether it's "performing rites for this god on behalf of the community" (as was common in ancient times) or something else.

A marriage may be witnessed by a community, it may lead to various actions or roles within a community in some cases, but it is not commonly done as a community thing.  Completely different context.

 
That is actually a very good, very helpful definition for both of those. Thank you. I appreciate it.

How are people assholes about it?

In pretty much the same ways they're assholes about the general phenomemon of direct interaction with deity/ies, only squared or even cubed.

My pettest peeve about this is the implicit (or worse yet though rarer, explicit) claim that one person's experience of it constitutes The Way It's Done.  I think most of those who do this don't actually intend it to erase or invalidate others' differing experiences, they're just failing to adequately note the variability of mileage.

My own mileage varies quite a lot from other cases I've read/heard about, enough that I've spent a fair bit of time wondering my case was even in the same category as what others meant by "godspouse" (I eventually decided that "godspouse" had to mean all instances of "human-type person in marital-type relationship with deity-type person", not just a subset of those instances).

The question of, "just what is a god, anyway?" comes up here; the ways in which that varies from one cultural pantheon to another is one of the factors in how godspousery varies.

If one is chosen, are there rites for it?

Varies all over the map, depending on what the deity and devotee want/need, whether it's in context of a path that has specific marriage traditions, etc.

In my case, Coyote made me a wedding blanket - not a physical World of Form one, though it has a representation in this physical world, a microfibre fleece throw that I bought (with His Doggedness' input) for that purpose.  I did a bit of dedicatory stuff with the physical representation, to create the necessary linkage between the two, but that's adjunctive, not a wedding rite; the "wedding rite", such as it was, was simply him making the (astral?  etheric?  otherworldly? whatever) blanket and offering it to me, and me accepting.

What kind of obligations do you mean (I know it varies from god to god, but...)

Again, my case only:  I'm not sure if it being a sexual relationship counts here; the progression was from nonsexual/nonmarital patron-deity relationship of several years' standing, to having a sexual component to it, to being marital.  (Or, marriage is the between-humans relationship that's the closest metaphor for this.)  Also, the Chaotic Canine is not the only deity with whom I've had sexual interactions; deity-sex does not, in itself, a godspouse make.

Otherwise, the only thing - and I think this is a function of closeness of patronage-relationship, not of godspousery per se, though of course the two are intertwined - is that I have much more of an obligation to be an exemplar/resource of his teachings.

Are there any websites out there that explain it?

 
I'd have given the same link DH did, if they hadn't beaten me to it.

There are a fair few individual godspouses out there blogging about it, but mostly they're talking about their individual experiences, not about godspousery in general.

Sunflower

What's a god spouse? What does it mean to be one? What does it entail? Can people literally be a god spouse?  How do you know you are chosen? And a million other questions I can't even begin to think of.

 If memory serves Galina Krasskova does a lot of writing on this subject. I'm really quite busy ATM so I can't go find the links, but try looking some of her stuff up. Personally I'm not to sure on the issue as it falls completely out of the realm of Roman religion and my own sphere of comprehension, but so far I think that it's just a really heightened state of ritual devotion more than a actual relationship per se, but that's just me.

The Chaotic Canine and I sometimes joke that those increased obligations I mentioned mean I'm "a priestess of Coyote", but it's a joke.  A complicated, multilayered joke with a bunch of truths inside it

And here I'm thinking of the ancient Egyptian term Hemet-Netjer which was used for "priestess who had ritual obligations in the Holy of Holies" can mean "wife", "servant" or "slave", iirc.