In every corner of my soul, there is an altar to a different god.
- Fernando Pessoa
Immortals become mortals, mortals become immortals; they live in each other's death and die in each other's life.
- Heraclitus
The following is a rewritten version of a rather turgid talk which I delivered, probably at incomprehensible speed, at Druid Camp 2007.
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The emergence of contemporary polytheism
This article deals almost exclusively with Bobcat’s category of ‘ancestral’ gods, which I term ‘gods of culture’. The ideas expressed here do not apply to nature spirits or gods of nature. I write here in order to provoke debate, and to draw attention to the school of psychology termed ‘polytheistic’ or ‘Archetypal’ psychology. Patrick Kavanagh said: ‘God cannot catch us unless we stay in the unconscious room of our hearts’, and the members of this school would say the same in polytheistic terms. They have been writing and thinking for forty years about the relation of gods and the soul, and I believe contemporary Pagan religions can draw something from their insights. It will, at least, be food for thought, material to be weighed against personal experience.
Unfortunately, writing clearly about these subjects is difficult. A certain ungraspable, elusive quality seems to be characteristic of the gods and of the deeper levels of the soul alike. Accordingly, much of my language here is less concrete than I would normally like, but this is probably inevitable. Otherwise, I would start to drift into the realms of producing some kind of ‘dogmatic polytheology’ (perish the thought). What I write here are simply ideas and theories that I’ve been thinking about over the last year or so, and thus should be taken as suggestions, or ways of looking.
A final note, before I get started: I tell some stories in this article about people’s personal experiences. Those which are my own are unaltered. Those about others are heavily fictionalised, with all identifying details changed. If anyone feels that they recognise themselves or someone they know, I am confident that they will be mistaken.
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Ancestral gods and mythic narrative
The growth of Druidry and Heathenry over the last three decades has meant that a genuine polytheism has become hugely more widespread in the Pagan community than it was before. Wiccan duotheism, in which all deities ever worshipped by humanity are reductively, even imperialistically, lumped together into two great ‘meta-deities’, seems to be in retreat in public Pagan discourse. In its place, deities of many cultures proliferate in people’s devotions.
To me, it seems that these gods of culture (such as Rhiannon, or Oengus mac Óg, or Persephone) are beings that exist in narrative, just as fish exist in water. Their natures are embedded in narrative. Inanna’s being is revealed by the stories about her. The Dagda’s essence is not separate from the stories in which he appears. Their essences and the events which occur in their myths are not separable, any more than milk can be separated from its whiteness or a snake from its wriggling, to use two hoary old Hindu analogies. Ancestral gods are thus never still; they are always in motion.
But human time and divine time differ. A god can exist at all points of their myth – and at all points of all variants of their myth – at one and the same time. Dionysus is at once, dying, rising, dismembered, triumphant, a foetus sewn up in Zeus’ thigh, the leader of the Maenads, wine, vine, ecstasy, a panther, and all points in between. Such a deity exists at every point of their mythic sequence, all the time. As the Greek writer Sallust wrote in the 4th century CE of the immense mythic heritage of late antiquity: ‘These things never happened, but are, always.’
It seems generally accepted in the community that being especially ‘called by’ or devoted to a given god means that one often finds oneself, at least partially, living out their myth. (For example, in 1990 Caitlín Matthews discussed this with regard to her own life and the myth of the goddess Rhiannon, in Voices of the Goddess: A Chorus of Sibyls.) There is a kind of likeness between the human person and the god, but it is much more subtle than mere surface similarity. There is a hidden and mysterious congruence in the depths of the soul. All of us know people who are connected to what may seem a preposterously unlikely deity or deities; indeed, we may have such a connection ourselves. I’d suggest that this is because ancestral gods are not interested in the things on which the human ego habitually fixates, its totems of identity. The soul is not the personality.
In this, ancestral gods are like dreams. You can’t tell from listening to a report of a dream whether the dreamer is male or female, or how old they are, how well or badly off they are, or where they live. The dream has its own mysterious identity and message. It is deeply, utterly of that person and of no other, but it does not seem to care about, or even recognise, our conscious notions of identity. Dreams don’t even seem to be aware of death: very often a person’s dreams give no hint that they are going to drop dead the following week, and someone who has forty years to go can have the most vivid dreams of impending death. Like dreams, ancestral gods touch us in a place that is somehow deeper and more mysteriously plural than the personal ego.
Polytheistic psychology
This is one of the fundamental insights of the so-called post-Jungian or ‘polytheistic’ school of psychology, which has been richly elaborated by James Hillman. Drawing on C. G. Jung’s ideas, it goes beyond them, and I want to use polytheistic (sometimes termed ‘archetypal’) psychology now to think about the relationship between gods of culture and the soul.
Unfortunately, James Hillman often affects a deliberately opaque and elliptical writing style which makes him hard to read. (I say ‘affects’ because his wonderful The Soul’s Code is written perfectly plainly, so he can clearly do it when he tries.) Some of his fellow archytypal psychologists are better writers, especially Noel Cobb and Thomas Moore. But I will try here to sketch the broad outlines of Hillman’s ‘re-visioning’ of psychology.
Hillman puts soul, or psyche, at the centre of psychology. To him, soul is not a substance, nor a thing somehow inside a person: rather it is an attitude. He writes that soul ‘refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second the significance of soul, whether in love or religious concern, derives from its special relationship with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy -- that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.’
The depths of the soul in the unconscious are inherently multiple. To Hillman, each one of us is a churning mass of dreams and images and patterns within the soul. The psyche is intrinsically polycentred and polytheistic. In this, he breaks from Jung. Jung thought that the process of psychic growth was a kind of integration, a move towards ‘oneness’, towards a monistic, conscious Self that integrated the conflicting contents of the unconscious. Hillman knocks Jung’s Self off its perch, saying that it is but one fantasy of the soul among an infinite number, and should not be given a privileged position. Each of us has many altars within the Soul, many places where reverent attendance is due.
There is nothing that is human (fear, motherhood, agony, agriculture, drinking, mischief, selling, ennui…) that does not have its due quality of Soul, its archetypal dimension. Psyche, as the proper object of psychology, isn’t just what goes on in your mind; it envelops the entire universe, because every single aspect of our being, everything, is perceived through the medium of Soul. We cannot step out side of the psyche any more than we can step outside of the universe, or make ourselves two-dimensional by an act of will.
But ‘Archetypal’ does not mean ‘unreal’ or ‘just all in the mind’. I argue below for a deep relationship between these ‘gods of culture’ and the powerful tangles of psychic energy bobbing about on the borderlands of consciousness known as complexes. But I am not thereby implying that the gods are unreal.
Archetypes and complexes
Archetypes are (according to Jung, and after him, Hillman) the deep structures of human consciousness, and are of an undetermined, perhaps infinite, number. But what does that mean!? Archetypes are agonisingly difficult to define, and that seems to be part of their nature. We might say that they are ancient, inbuilt patterns of spontaneous imagination, which seem to be hardwired into human beings. They allow us to people the chaos of life with symbols, freighting it with meaning and story. In their ability to pattern life and to instil meaning, in their craving for expression, and in their ability to manifest on multiple levels at once, archetypes are like gods. Note: I am not saying they are gods, or that gods are archetypes. I shall leave it more mysterious than that.
Now onto complexes. Complexes are charged nubs or nodes of energy that exist within the depths of the psyche, and they can be more or less conscious and more or less powerful. (Again, we’re talking in terms of models or psychological theories here.) They also have an innate desire to come to the surface, as it were, to be made conscious. Some may remain totally unconscious, and never come to the surface in the course of a human lifetime. They have a life and will of their own, and act essentially independently of the conscious ego. Each complex has an archetypal core, which powers the complex and keeps it together.
I’ll give a personal example, but with some reservations, as one’s complexes are always very emotionally powerful and thus not always things you want to reveal. I have a complex that is to do with the feminine and the sacred, and which is strongly charged. When I was about eleven, the Anglicans began debating the ordination of women, and I had an overwhelmingly powerful (positive) reaction. It was this that led me in the direction first of Goddess-worship, Wicca, and then eventually Druidry, and has fuelled a fascination with feminist religious writing every since. The archetype that drives my complex is that of the ‘priestess’, which is a subtype of the greater archetype known as the ‘Anima’ in Jungian psychology. (I suspect a large number of Pagan men have this archetype humming away somewhere, not just me.) There is a divine core to it. One of my primary deities, Brighid, has an affinity with this archetype, in her austerity and maternal fire; but so do any number of other goddesses.
Individual people’s complexes also seem, weirdly, to be inborn. They are not a result of poor toilet-training or a punitive father. Rather you seem to find the perfect ‘hooks’ in outer life for your complexes to clamber to the surface on. Someone with a persecution complex will inevitably find himself persecuted. Someone with a complex about authority and the archetypal father will land up with the bullying boss, again and again. It is extremely strange how this happens, and not in the least fair; it just seems to be the way the world works, by some mysterious automatic law. The only way to diffuse them seems to be to make them conscious, to ‘own’ them. Complexes are always charged with great emotion, and can rise up and overwhelm the conscious mind for a period. Anytime you’ve ever found yourself slashing someone’s tyres at 3am or falling in love with the same kind of unsuitable person for the fifteenth time, you know you are in the grip of a complex.
So one way of defining complexes might be as archetypes in motion, the enaction of a myth within psyche, within the soul. As noted above, I am not necessarily arguing that gods are complexes, or even the archetypal cores of complexes. But they do have an integral relationship to them, and I believe that it is here that this mysterious link between a particular ancestral god and a particular individual occurs, in the realm of the complexes. Complexes are what the psyche uses to deepen itself, to become more conscious of its own depths and possibilities. And the gods are grander than an individual’s personal human feelings and qualities: they are everything that gives savour, and flair and grandness – any kind of depth – to Soul. They can never be exhausted, and they are always fresh, replete to overflowing. They are cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates.
Two examples
If a complex is the enaction of a myth within the soul, then because we are human beings, we must perforce live out that myth in time, sequentially. In this we are unlike the gods, who are present at all points of their myth at once. And many myths have a terrible finality.
I want to give two examples here of how this works. One is fictional, one heavily fictionalised. First, imagine a woman who always finds the men in her life abandoning her, though she is witty and intelligent. She and her husband have problems conceiving. After a miscarriage, her husband, whom she always considered rather less on the ball than herself, announces he wants a divorce. She has to change jobs, to something she finds more menial, and feels a sense of humiliation and grief. In this perfectly unremarkable and human story, we can see the outline of what we might term a ‘Rhiannon complex’. (Notice how you can’t use this terminology with the gods of nature: you can’t have a rain complex, or a winter complex, or a forest complex, because such gods of nature aren’t yet clothed in archetypes and patterned into narrative.)
But if the woman were to come across Paganism and begin exploring Druidry, she might well find that the goddess Rhiannon called to her strongly, with a deep sense of affinity. She might have a powerful spiritual experience at the White Horse of Uffington. She might remember that she used to love horse-riding at a teenager and be moved to take it up again. She might make an altar to Rhiannon, eventually coming to think of herself, and be recognised as, a priestess of that deity.
The second example is of an acquaintance of mine who was devoted to the Hebrew and Babylonian goddess (or demoness) Lilith. It is important because it shows that one can be possessed by a complex even in the midst of honouring its divine energy explicitly, or in other words, that you can honour the god and yet not be aware of your own complex which has, perhaps, something of the god at its core.
This friend was a powerful and charismatic Wiccan priestess, triggering my priestess-complex very nicely, thank you. We became firm friends, and I painted an icon of Lilith for her, at her request. I could sense the energy around her, and the painting became darker and darker, until I had produced a Blakean taloned, winged woman against a background of falling fire and golden stars. I found it indescribably sinister, personally. In time, we fell out, and she disappeared, just as Lilith flapped her wings and fled into the desert, having uttered the holy name of Yahweh.
I happened to know the person who subsequently became her landlord after her disappearance. It seemed that a terrible atmosphere of loneliness and decay settled around her. She had a miscarriage, echoing Lilith’s association with stillborn infants. She vanished again, leaving the house she had been renting, and when the landlord went in, the furnishings in the house had all begun to moulder, including the chair she had sat in, and the inside of the microwave. All the fish in the garden pond had died.
This is an important point: complexes and archetypes represent the totality of experience, and are thus not necessarily in good taste. Every single ancestral god has a mode of being destructive. Because, as I will argue, there is something divine at the heart of many complexes, it is possible to be unconscious of the complex whilst consciously honouring the god connected to it. The more unconscious you are, the more you are ‘fated’ to live the myth, and the less able you are to see the myth you’re in, it seems. My friend at no point seemed to realise that she was living out the darker part of Lilith’s story, despite talking about Lilith often.
There is also a matter of ethics and even to a degree politesse here. Being conscious of your mythic complexes means you have some ability to steer them. Many people in the community are dedicated to ‘dark’ deities, of war, violence, death, and decay. These are holy and divine powers, worthy of honour. But many of these people are not wholly conscious of the complexes that link them to the deity. And thus they can end up intermittently possessed by said complexes, just as my poor friend was unconsciously possessed by her Lilith complex, even as she honoured that goddess. As someone prone to fiery outbursts, I have learned the hard way that a connection to a goddess of blazing fire does not absolve me of responsibility for my actions. The same goes, I feel, for people dedicated to gods of chaos and disruption, decay and aggression. The motto might be: look to your complex, and don’t behave like your god at the expense of your ethics, for that is what the Greeks called hubris.
Gods of nature and the ‘roads’ of the gods of culture
An ancestral god, a ‘god of culture’, can have many dimensions. In this, they are unlike gods of nature, who have a kind of one-pointedness: such gods are powers like darkness, frost, sun, fear. But revering a pure god of nature is harder than you might think. Because we have nature inside us as well, and an endlessly intricate capacity to make metaphor, natural forces constantly shimmer in our minds with archetypal resonance.
Take winter. Many in the community might say that they find in winter a goddess. But there are two different things here. It’s one thing to see a divine power in winter when you’re actually up to your knees in snow. It’s another to try and conceive of and connect to winter as a deity on an August afternoon. Metaphor inevitably begins to slither in. People can be wintery. Someone can be ‘in the winter of their years.’ The lion in winter, Old Hiems, Jack Frost. As soon as we start imagining winter as old, personification is creeping in. Archetypal associations of endings, darkness, death, cluster round. A natural force is being swathed in archetypal imagery, and a god of nature shifts imperceptibly into being a god of culture, who can embody not just winter, but how we feel about winter. Think about it: people say ‘I honour winter as my goddess’, but don’t say ‘Oh well, at the moment, Margo, I’m actually honouring a particularly chilly snap in January 1983, as it happens.’ Keeping metaphor and personification out of our dealings with gods of nature is very hard.
Such use of metaphor and personification of the gods are also quite normal and human, as a glance at any of the world’s mythologies will show you. I personally don’t see that it is a problem. However, we contemporary polytheists have the chance to be more conscious about this process, more aware of our souls’ activities, than preceding generations. (The actual observation, however, is ancient: in the late 5th century BCE, Democritus famously said that ‘if oxen or lions had hands and could draw as men can, horses would make their gods in the shape of horses, and lions like lions…’) It seems to me that gods of nature shift in this fashion into being gods of culture, and then a given culture moves on and passes away, in the flow of time. The god fades, sometimes to be revived, sometimes to be forgotten. The divine energy in nature in its myriad forms, and the archetypes that structure our deep psyches, are eternal and always budding anew. So from the perspective of a brief human lifetime, the gods of culture are sublimely immortal. But the endless flow of shifting human lives and cultures bears individual gods off into oblivion. This, perhaps, is what Heraclitus meant in the mysterious fragment which heads this article.
This process of ‘archetypal swathing’ is why personality is sometimes a good metaphor for the way ancestral gods are perceived by human beings. They can be constantly contradictory, almost cacophonous. I’d like to introduce here the idea of gods having roads, or paths. (The idea is drawn from the syncretic Afro-Brazillian and Afro-Cuban religions of Candomblé and Santería.) According to this understanding, each god has many aspects, avatars, or roads. For example, the Afro-Cuban goddess Ochun, one of my patron deities, is normally visualised as a beautiful, sensual young woman clad in yellow and gold. But she also has a road in which she is poor and fed by vultures, and one in which she is deaf and lives in dirty water. In some roads, she is moralistic and represents faithful married love; in others, she is hedonistic and of easy virtue. But all of these roads are the one deity.
This concept works surprisingly well for a number of Celtic deities, Brighid in particular. She (to me) has a road of poetry and words, a road of healing, and a road of craft and blacksmithing. All of these have in common her constant connection with fire. This is why I dislike the idea of boiling her down, so to speak, to the idea of physical fire only. Because Brighid is metaphorical, archetypal fire as well, and every cultural product that comes to us via the agency of fire, in its purifying and refining and smelting and transmuting aspects. The idea of what was known in Alchemy as the ‘calcinatio’ seems to resonate with these deeper aspects of Brighid, which all her ‘roads’ share.
I would be unsurprised to find this idea gradually surfacing in contemporary polytheism. Many of the Celtic gods are known to us as little more than names; in our community we can see a small number of them ‘refilling’, reswathing themselves in archetypal, imaginal depth. Colours, places, elements are clustering about them. I can sit here as a Celtic academic and say that there’s no evidence of a link between the White Horse of Uffington and Epona or Rhiannon. But that doesn’t matter: it is generally accepted nowadays that there is such an archetypal resonance. By meshing again with archetypal material and with the complexes of individual devotees, these gods are taking on shapes again. It will be fascinating to see how gods who are currently very shadowy, such as Amaethon, come into focus. Even medieval literary characters whom the evidence shows were not originally deities are becoming divine, Blodeu(w)edd being a good example.
Complexes, archetypes and the gods
According to archetypal psychology, as indicated above, each one of us is a loose structure of many beings. We all have many altars within the soul, many shrines to many different gods, on whom we dance attendance. It’s time now to grasp the nettle, and stick my neck out and say what I currently think to be the relationship between gods of culture and complexes or archetypes. Baldly, are such gods really just the archetypes that power your complexes?
Think back to the story of the priestess of Rhiannon. That kind of story is the sort of thing I’ve heard many times from people in Druidry who honour a particular god or goddess as their primary relationship with the Divine. I’m sure many of you will have heard of the same phenomenon, or experienced it yourself. The fact is that people live out mythic patterns in their lives, because just by living, just by moving from A to B in time, we make stories, and the gods of culture have their being in soul and in story. This doesn’t mean they only exist in storybooks, but that they are made of story in much the same way that we are made of meat.
Our inborn complexes, archetypes in motion, so prone to shift into narrative, have a deep relationship to myth. A good Jungian would say that myths ‘reflect’ complexes and gods ‘reflect’ archetypes. (So the Garden of Eden is ‘about’ our primal sense of loss when we were expelled from the womb into separateness, and the myth of Prometheus stealing fire and being punished is ‘about’ our unconscious guilt for being conscious at all, and so on.)
But why should our complexes not reflect the activity of the gods in us, why should they not be formed in us by deity? Its easy to imagine that the unconscious psyche, the soul, is like clay, and that gods of culture might, as it were, press their fingers into that clay, leaving their characteristic fingerprints. Particular gods – perhaps very many, with a few predominating - might choose particular people before birth (they themselves not existing in time.) These imprints would be our complexes. And gradually, they rise to the surface during life, and we become conscious of them, like our hypothetical priestess of Rhiannon. These deep divine powers would then be something even more mysterious: cloaking themselves in archetypal material, rising to consciousness by means of our complexes, but not identified with either. I suggested above that complexes and archetypes are what let us perceive meaning in the world at all; they may also be the way in which these infinitely mysterious powers that we call gods may allow us to perceive them. The Greeks saw this well. As Ruth Padel writes:
Gods are in us as well as outside us. In Greek, there are two words for ‘god’. As a general rule, theos and daimon seem to suggest two different ways of regarding gods. Theos denotes something separate from human beings, something out there, in itself. It may watch you closely but anything it does is done from afar. Daimon … is divinity that moves in: the nonhuman in the human. It is divinity getting its hands dirty, wading into human lives. Close, active, involved. The same god, therefore, can be called theos and daimon at different times.
- Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness
Though gods may use our complexes to get us to grow and deepen, and to bring us to awareness of them in some form, they are not thereby ‘merely’ complexes and archetypes, which are also nevertheless real. The gods of culture are not necessarily concerned with our happiness. They are certainly not concerned with our fantasies of being saved from death, which barely exists for them, as time does not.
Padel’s image of wading is particularly apt. Instead of being a stream we can choose to step out of, it may be, mysteriously, that we are the stream that the gods step in.
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Further reading:
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, and Re-visioning Psychology
Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Ka
Noel Cobb, The Archetypal Imagination: Glimpses of the Gods in Life and Art
Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness
Caitlín Matthews, The Call of Rhiannon’, in Voices of the Goddess: A Chorus of Sibyls.
