I think, examined in the grand scheme of things (especially in Europe and India), Paganism and Polytheism were the religions of the world. For each aspect of life and nature there was a deity, or a collection of deities. Often these deities lorded over facets of nature. In some religions, nature itself was worshipped, pantheistic as in Shinto in Japan, ancestor worship, and shamanistic practices, animism, and even forms of monotheism as in pre-colonial America. God (Yahweh, as I discussed in my last post) was a product of merging from a polytheistic to a monotheistic system. One might say He beat out the competition.
What determines which belief is right and which is wrong? Is it how you were raised? The severity of your conviction? A feeling in your bones? Is it that my God is stronger than yours, so I must be right, look at how many billions we’ve converted?
There’s a part of me that thinks none of these belief systems are inherently wrong. In fact, they’re natural. One might say, if they were to rationalize this to the Christian mind, that God could have shown himself to different cultures in different ways to allow them each to understand Him in the way they’d best understand. Thus, believing this, to worship any god is to worship God.
My first argument is thus: be it by nature of Christian evangelism into polytheistic lands and so attempting to assimilate pagan cultures more easily, or be it because Christianity inherently possessed such qualities to begin with, one can see polytheism at play in modern Christian angelology. Look, for example, at the Archangels. Each is representative of some facet of nature, be it human or worldly.
- Michael, the Warrior
- Uriel, Thunder and Earthquakes, the Fire of God
- Raphael, the Angel of the Spirit of Men
- Gabriel, the Messenger
Moreover, in Catholic doctrine, Saints, though not worshipped, are believed to carry greater weight in their prayers, and thus praying to them is seen as not only acceptable, but encouraged, for their prayers may better reach the ears of God. Ignoring the doctrine regarding how talking to the dead is forbidden, this alone, along with the system of Patron Saints, bespeaks pagan origin.
What I’m getting after is that religion is not black and white, it’s history is muddy and doctrine loose with time. If we extrapolate from a pantheistic idea rooted in the Christian God: that God is a theological, verbal, one might say mental representation of the universe, and vise versa, that the universe is God, and if one recognizes that God being God and not a Goddess is purely a subjection of a patriarchal society’s preference on a being that requires no gender or sex organs to begin with, then we can arrive at a place where many interpretations of this deity, that being the Universe or Nature, can exist.
I wish to take, very briefly for I have rambled on long enough, a quick glimpse into a religion of peculiar interest to me: Wicca. I won’t get into its history for now, but suffice to say it’s very modern, “new-age,” and has unjustly been labeled as witchcraft and devil-worship. From a purely theological perspective, watering down my understanding (which is very limited) of Wicca, there are two godheads: the Horned God and the Triple Goddess.
The Horned God is masculine; he is associated with the natural world, wilderness, and the life cycle. His depiction with antlers reflects his connection to nature and he is thus referred to by two names, the Oak King and Holly King (a duality representing light and dark, the warm months and the cold). The Horned God is also represented by the Sun.
The Triple Goddess is the feminine divine, represented by the Maiden (youth, new beginnings), the Mother (fertility, abundance), and the Crone (wisdom, knowledge). These three aspects of the divine symbolize the phases of the moon, which is her sigil. The Goddess is worshipped as the life-giver and figure of feminine strength.
In Christianity, we see a similar splitting-of-aspects. Catholics believe in the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all representing a different part of the same deity. Interestingly, if you ignore the Latin (masculine) and Greek (neuter) and look directly at the Hebrew, the Holy Spirit is referred to in the grammatically feminine gender, a fact ignored by later translations (especially Latin and the vernaculars). That aside, since the idea of a multi-faceted god is not foreign to Christians, let us conclude with this:
The dual figureheads of Wicca, a God and Goddess, are together a part of what Wiccans call the Divine (nature, the energy of the universe), the “deity” which they worship. Thus, I should like to wonder: is it too far a stretch of the imagination to say that Wiccans, by the very act of worshipping a Divine, nature, their prayer “spells” and their sacraments “rituals,” thus be said to worship God?
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