The Nature of Gods/Goddesses

[NightQueen]

I had a interesting thought when I reading a couple of the other threads about whether Jesus was real and the expansion of Christianity.

When I was Christian it seemed there was a very definite line between God and other spirits, such as angels or demons.  God was the creator and everything else was created, even if they were still supernatural.  However, I was wondering what, for you, separates gods/goddesses from other spirits?  I'm basically asking what makes gods, gods in your view?

In most mythological traditions I'm familiar with, the gods who are worshiped aren't generally the creators of the world so there's not that clear line.  What makes them different from just a water or air spirit?   Is it a connection with humanity or something else?

For the record I'm a little bit ambivalent about what I feel about gods/goddess, but I'm interested in hearing everyone's take.

[Faemon]

When I was Christian it seemed there was a very definite line between God and other spirits, such as angels or demons.  God was the creator and everything else was created, even if they were still supernatural.  However, I was wondering what, for you, separates gods/goddesses from other spirits?

 
Human politics.

Other than that, I think everybody's a god... a little bit. I mean, within the Christian paradigm that I was raised with, yeah, there was God and there were angels and fallen angels and saints that were dead and still doing stuff but were different than souls (or ghosts, dead and doing stuff maybe... but there seemed to be this, 'we're not using the gh-word!')

When I read mythology alongside the faith I was raised with, I sort of parsed it as... okay, a river nymph might have like entry-level powers whereas a water god has tenure? I mean, I read mythology and there was the g-word right there, and I wasn't taught to think like, "Oh, they're trying to get me to worship the bad demons!" or anything. I was an early reader, and that developed long before I could evaluate the information I was getting from books.

But mostly, what I'd gathered is that a thing is a god if people call it one.

And then back in the Christianity I was raised with, there was this idea that if God were omnipresent, that would include present within people. I don't know if that was some sort of cultural syncretism with Buddha nature, but I managed to inculcate that too without getting too confused with the previous categories because I didn't think quite so hard about it.

Roger Zelazny wrote something about being so aligned with your passions that you don't even need to explain what it is, that people will look at someone and say that they're (insert passion here) personified, not necessarily power or immortality.

So... leaning more towards the pop psychology, pop anthropology (is that a thing?) explanation, it's personification of a natural phenomenon.

That said, the word "god" even in lowercase has connotations of power and dominion (and domination?) to me, so even if the no-name, no-mythology people that I work with "are" small gods... or no-name, no-mythology gods... I call them familiars instead.

And I think just like anybody you'd be familiar with, sometimes they're your buddies and sometimes they're annoying and sometimes they do or say something so admirable that you get starry-eyed remembering that moment and are ever so glad that you're in each other's lives. When the last one happens, I feel like calling them gods.

[Altair]

However, I was wondering what, for you, separates gods/goddesses from other spirits?  I'm basically asking what makes gods, gods in your view?

In most mythological traditions I'm familiar with, the gods who are worshiped aren't generally the creators of the world so there's not that clear line.  What makes them different from just a water or air spirit?   Is it a connection with humanity or something else?

There are no hard lines in my belief (esp. since mine tends towards the metaphorical); the universe is a manifest goddess, and we as part of the universe are also the divine made manifest.

So what I tend to call gods are defined by scope and longevity, not any fundamental distinction. The goddess of death is a goddess because death comes to everyone and everything, and will for as long as time keeps going, giving her very broad scope and great longevity; the spirit that watches over my garden, on the other hand, is a spirit because its whole domain is about 500 square feet, and the garden didn't even exist a dozen years ago. You could just as easily call it a minor (very minor!) god.

[Sage]

For the record I'm a little bit ambivalent about what I feel about gods/goddess, but I'm interested in hearing everyone's take.

 
I had a linguist friend who shared this joke a lot. "What's the difference between a language and a dialect? A language has an army and a navy." With the idea that there wasn't so much difference in content/form but in social perception and politics that delineated the two.

I sometimes think of gods and "just" spirits in the same way. All gods are spirits but not all spirits are gods - but where exactly does that line fall, and why?

I don't think of my grandparents as deities because they're "just" Ancestors. And yet, I believe that Antinoos and Imhotep are certainly more than "just" Ancestors. (Antinoos being actually deified from His death in the Nile, Imhotep as a sort of national Akhu iirc my Kemetic Orthodoxy correctly.)

Is there a difference between a river nymph and a river goddess? And does that have to do with the size of the river or the number of adherents who worship Her? Is a spirit of [insert locality here] a goddess in Her own right - albeit with extremely small boundaries, but with powers just the same?

I'm not entirely sure about the answers. These are all just questions from the top of my head. I have been considering the nature of deity when looking at my relationship with Brighid and my relationship with the earth around me. I personally believe in a universal sort of Brighid who's reflected in the land, waters, and sky around me. And yet, am I worshiping "the" Brighid in Her guise as Brighid of the Blue Ridge Mountains, or am I worshiping a local goddess/spirit and calling Her Brighid? Does it ultimately matter, either to Her or to me?

I don't know, I just live here.

[Aiwelin]

I sometimes think of gods and "just" spirits in the same way. All gods are spirits but not all spirits are gods - but where exactly does that line fall, and why?

 
The lines are very blurry for me, in my practice.. I honor land spirits, but my deities are also mostly nature-based, and I call the local river a Goddess but usually end up addressing Her with the nature spirits.  Some things are easy; I can say my backyard oak tree is not a god.  Some things straddle the line, like the aforementioned river Goddess.

I like Sage's other question, "does it matter?"  I give the same level of offerings, perform largely the same sorts of rituals, give equal devotion-time to those I have a close relationship with, both deities and "just" spirits.  The only thing I have noticed as a difference is that land spirits are less universal.. I recently traveled up to Michigan and noticed that the land wights felt very different, and I couldn't reach out to the ones I was familiar with.  So perhaps breadth of presence is part of the difference?  Honestly, I don't know.   I just honor Them, and that seems to work for everyone involved.

[Voren]

I had a interesting thought when I reading a couple of the other threads about whether Jesus was real and the expansion of Christianity.

When I was Christian it seemed there was a very definite line between God and other spirits, such as angels or demons.  God was the creator and everything else was created, even if they were still supernatural.  However, I was wondering what, for you, separates gods/goddesses from other spirits?  I'm basically asking what makes gods, gods in your view?

In most mythological traditions I'm familiar with, the gods who are worshiped aren't generally the creators of the world so there's not that clear line.  What makes them different from just a water or air spirit?   Is it a connection with humanity or something else?

For the record I'm a little bit ambivalent about what I feel about gods/goddess, but I'm interested in hearing everyone's take.

 
Me; personally, I don't differentiate. every spirit/being is equal. I think in general it's...a case of being known? I don't know, I'm probably blithering nonsense here but I figured it's a thought.

[Sophia C]

I had a interesting thought when I reading a couple of the other threads about whether Jesus was real and the expansion of Christianity.

When I was Christian it seemed there was a very definite line between God and other spirits, such as angels or demons.  God was the creator and everything else was created, even if they were still supernatural.  However, I was wondering what, for you, separates gods/goddesses from other spirits?  I'm basically asking what makes gods, gods in your view?

In most mythological traditions I'm familiar with, the gods who are worshiped aren't generally the creators of the world so there's not that clear line.  What makes them different from just a water or air spirit?   Is it a connection with humanity or something else?

For the record I'm a little bit ambivalent about what I feel about gods/goddess, but I'm interested in hearing everyone's take.

 
Well, it all depends what perspective you're looking at it from.

Anthropologists of religion often argue that there's a linear progression in most cultures from 'magic' to 'religion', and that spirits are more associated with magic, whereas society turns those spirits into gods when we progress towards religion. (I think Frazer first proposed this in 'The Golden Bough', and while it has been questioned since then, it's still often an underlying assumption of sociology and anthropology of religion. See Lerro's 'From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods', for example.)

I find this an unfortunate (and ethnocentric*) description of religion, since it doesn't take into account the complexity of many indigenous religions, or the aspects of 'magic' that survive in religions - and it creates a hierarchy of 'primitive' vs 'cultured' beliefs that just isn't true of every religion. Lerro basically argues that polytheism was succeeded by monotheism because it was more sophisticated and connected to complex empires, but I don't think that's necessarily true. IMO, it's more about conditions being right for monotheism to survive, rather than it being somehow more politically sustainable than polytheism. A lot of scholars do agree that the 'magic' vs 'religion' division doesn't make a lot of sense, anyway.

However, there's certainly a case to be made that many cultures begin by appreciating the spirits all around them, then move on to turning some of them into gods. It does seem to be a common pattern. As we start developing recognizable religions, we seem to start thinking of some spirits as gods.

That's the anthropological approach, though. From the perspective of personal choice, e.g. within Pagan religions, we can examine the reasons why we each might consider some spirits 'gods' and others 'just spirits'. There's definitely an influence of culture here.

For example, many people wouldn't consider their personal spirit guides as gods, unless society had previously called them that. So if a spirit appears to you and says "I am Persephone" you might consider her a goddess - but if she appears and says "I am Julie" you might not. In that case, we're drawing on cultural understandings of what is a deity and what's not. That's social constructionism - where society calls something a thing (like a 'god'), and we work within that idea, that social construction.

On the other hand, we may choose to modify some of the ideas of society and go our own way a bit more. We may still keep the socially constructed idea of gods vs spirits, but decide for ourselves which we consider which. I decided that my deity (Cailleach Bhearra) was a goddess, even though many in Ireland would call her a spirit (or even just a folkloric figure or character in a story).

Another option is to decide that, if we believe that society decides what's a god and what's a spirit, we're going to ignore society entirely on that score. We may develop relationships with many spirits, considering none of them a god, and refusing to have any hierarchy between them.

And there are lots of other personal choices we could make about what's a god and what's a spirit, too.

For me, since I believe that society constructs the idea of a god vs a spirit, it's important for me to make my own choices about how I respond to that. Realistically, I think most gods are just spirits that got a lot of attention, which society then decided were gods. The reason WHY we chose those particular spirits to be gods... is more into the realm of theology than sociology, and not really my field as a result. But I'm interested in what people think about that.

*By 'ethnocentric', I mean 'assuming that your own cultural position is the norm'. It's a common issue with anthropologists and sociologists, who think that their culture is the 'advanced' and 'civilized' one, and turn other cultures into exotic or primitive Others.

[Juniperberry]

When I was Christian it seemed there was a very definite line between God and other spirits, such as angels or demons.  God was the creator and everything else was created, even if they were still supernatural.  However, I was wondering what, for you, separates gods/goddesses from other spirits?  I'm basically asking what makes gods, gods in your view?

In most mythological traditions I'm familiar with, the gods who are worshiped aren't generally the creators of the world so there's not that clear line.  What makes them different from just a water or air spirit?   Is it a connection with humanity or something else?

I touched on these questions for myself in another thread.  There does seem to be a defining factor on what makes a god and what makes spirit, and I'd agree that being a creator is part of that. But I also think maybe it has something to do with being worshiped by the masses.

God claims to have created the world and he also claims to be the ruler of all people. I don't know that how many pagan gods have claimed to be the rulers of all people, but I do think there is a mass worship of them regardless, and certain things about that make me personally uncomfortable in worshiping those deities.

So I've started to reject the idea of gods as they're generally defined. I don't believe in an Odin-god that flits between me and someone in Massachusetts and then over to Hawaii all in a day's work. In fact, it's all starting to seem a bit like Santa Claus, especially when you consider all the plates of offerings left out every day for consumption.

So I guess magic also defines gods, in the same way that it defines Santa.

But I do believe in personal spirits, and lots of them. My gods are just spirits that have come and gone, attached to me in some natural and intimate way, not gods of all moments  but gods of my moments. They didn't create anything, they aren't obligated to the masses, and there's no magic involved.

[Darkhawk]

I was wondering what, for you, separates gods/goddesses from other spirits?  I'm basically asking what makes gods, gods in your view?

 
A god is an entity possessing hu and sia.

Hu: the power of creative utterance.  The ability to bring into being, influence, command, control that which falls into the god's domain.

Sia: the power of mystical comprehension.  A full knowledge and understanding of everything that falls within the god's domain.

This is of course something that bumps back the question of "What is a god's domain?"  Where I consider the answer to be "Well, that depends on the god."  (The omnithree entity's domain is purported to be "everything".)

So there are three options for "spirit" vs. "god": the spirit does not have creative utterance, the spirit does not have mystical comprehension, or the spirit does not have a domain large enough that self-centered humans recognise it as a meaningful domain.  (If a dryad has total understanding of her tree, and total control over her tree, then she is a god, whose domain is that one specific tree.  Humans are unlikely to recognise this as significant divinity; most of them won't ever encounter that one tree, and the ones who do aren't likely to think of it as a meaningful domain.)

The big gods tend to have domains that contain some level of abstraction, such that they have knowledge and influence over components of a huge range of different things and broad presence.  These domains tend to be hard for humans to get a handle on, though it's possible to get koan-like representations of approximations of a human understanding thereof.  ("Bright fire on water", "connection and unbinding", "the waters of wisdom" - these are all shorthands for deities I've had at least some passing contact with, and extending the metaphor will find rather a lot of domain to be had there.  Much more than 'that tree, the one a little bit to the left of where you're pointing'.)