I've been doing a lot of reading lately, and we all know where that leads . . . Oh yes, to a lot of thinking. I'm still, after all these years, trying to figure out where I fit in the greater scheme of things. Am I Witch, Druid, Shaman, Something Else? Am I a musician first or Neo-Pagan first, or does that even matter?
I recently re-read Margot Adler's famous and revolutionary tome, Drawing Down the Moon, and found myself plagued by many familiar issues. Even that far-reaching survey of the very oddest Pagan corners of our big round world didn't seem to have a Gayla-shaped space in it.
It's at times like this when I remember things my dad and I used to talk about. He was the first person I ever heard use the word "Druid" to describe himself. And he was quite right, it fit him perfectly. We used to walk out in the forest together, often in silence, but sometimes deep in conversation. And I remember one time talking about religion and relevance. The Universe changes constantly, and humans change constantly. The forces that we actualize and anthropomorphize and call gods in order to explain what is going on with the world change constantly, too. Once, everything was a god, because we understood so little. As we began to understand more about our world and the Universe it lives in, we needed fewer and fewer gods. But our need to connect with our planet, our community, our tribe, our home, is now just as deep and strong as it was when we lived in caves as hunter-gatherers.
In my own mind, I fully understood, even as a teenager, that the Universe is a single Divine Mind, much bigger, grander and weirder than we can ever know. And intuitively, I understood the human need to personify forces to be the Divine Mind trying to communicate with us, trying to explain that we have always been part of itself; our consciousness is not only connected to it, not only part of it, but is in fact the whole of it. We are all made up of the same stuff the stars are made of, so why shouldn't our consciousness come from the Divine Mind as well? And wouldn't that Divine Mind make every effort to talk to each person in a way that they would embrace and understand, simply in the interest of efficiency?
As we have come to understand so much more about the world we live on, we need Divine Mind to talk to us in a different way. We don't need the reassurance that the Sun will return after the winter Solstice, because we know that the whole reason for the Sun appearing to move in the sky is that the Earth is tilted in relation to its orbit around the Sun. But the need to celebrate that fact, to connect with that fact, is no less powerful than it was when we thought the Sun might not come back if we didn't pretty the place up a bit and maybe sacrifice a critter or two. Many gods have been invented over the centuries to both explain and fulfill this human longing for connection to something mysterious and incomprehensible.
But, as my dad pointed out to me, he and I didn't live in pre-Christian Ireland, or ancient Egypt, or pagan Rome, or in Babylon, and we certainly weren't lost in a desert unless it was a metaphorical one. We were, and are, humans alive in the twenty-first century on a continent that none of those cultures even knew about, in a country that didn't even exist until a couple hundred years ago. History and mythology should enlighten, enrich and inform us, but we need to build relationships with the gods in our backyards, and worship where we are now. Divine Mind is still talking to us, still reminding us that we're part of all of it. Instead of trying to filter everything through ancient mythologies that we cannot possibly hope to truly internalize, we need to be meeting the Divine here and now.
Gods, goddesses, avatars, elementals, guardians and other spirits from our deep spiritual past are our greatest teachers and mentors, and their ways and wisdom are well heeded. They can instruct us and show us the way, but we are responsible for walking it. The ancestors created their cosmology and their rituals based on the world they knew, which was a vastly different world than the one we know. We are responsible for creating new cosmology and ritual in harmony with this world, here and now. Our children and their children, if the human race survives what it is doing to itself, will be responsible for using our knowledge and wisdom to create cosmology and ritual that serves the world they will create. And that is a mystery well worth celebrating.
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