by J Kelsey
> What are your beliefs in relation to a singular God and Goddess?
J: For myself I deal see it a little like the yin-yang dichotomy. (But in it's traditional Chinese context that can be a constraining structure with a lot of cultural baggage.) The archetypal pairing of a god and goddess is a potent emblem of these energies, but I find that the energies are more fundamental than the god and goddess.
I tend to think of this energy as the more general creative energy of two separate things meeting. This might be the create result of predator/prey interactions in evolutionary time scales, or it might be the family, or the art that comes from an artist confronting the world, or almost any other meeting of two things.
The male energy is that which is directed into the longer term, the single goal, the hunt or the quest, it's fruit may be needed but it's not sustaining. Like our biology it deals with and responds to outside forces.
The female energy deals with the smaller cycles, the patterns that sustain rather than the problems that must be overcome. It is directed by it's internal prerogatives more than the outside world.
The god is like the larger turning of the year compared with the goddess in the turning moon. Life as a whole and individual lives are balanced whole when both are present; with each thing growing and learning and sustaining and dying, being made of smaller lives and being part of larger life, each thing has a place in nesting of order within order.
I think sometimes in the minds of many pagans these gods and goddesses are more symbolic, archetypal, than actual concrete, separately existing entities. In those cases I prefer to deal with abstracts as abstracts.
I don't know about gods, but there is a spirit that is sometimes present when I'm in a visionary state of mind. When I'm aware of his presence it's as if there is another landscape overlaid or coexisting with this mundane one. Where he is the wind is blowing as if off the sea, the light is soft as at dawn or dusk, he's standing or crouching -- balancing his weight on a staff, on a slope with think grass bending in the wind. He seems older than me but not particularly old, he appears to be in his forties, his hair is sandy brown trimmed short, he has a trim beard. He watches and I feel I have his guarded approval, I feel as if I've done something well. I don't think he's a god, I don't think he's a place spirit, I'd like to know more about him and how to interact more with him.
> how do you share your beliefs?
I'm involved in a regular public full moon ritual. Because we are visited by a curious public as well as regulars for whom it's an important rite, we're constantly questing for a something that can teach effectively, while being modest that we don't know much and much less about the paths of everyone we're sharing with.
Our solution is rather than to push our vision down other peoples throats, ask them to share: What do you bring with you? What do you hope to get from being here? The want to get to trickier questions: We've come and called on our deities, tell us about the character of the thing you called on?
> If you have a patron God, what can you write about them?
Wisdom, some people know her as Sophia, is a Goddess I have an affinity with, to guard the words and actions that I choose, so that I will make the choices that serve life.
There are other entities that I've encountered, more sensual, more concrete, none that I've ritually honoured but they get my time and focus.
> Is there anything else that you want to add?
Another challenge is to write about anything that you use regularly. I happily use the elements among other ideas. I think of them as a structure laid over a more fluid reality. But I'd trimmed them down to just a few key words, and could say less about them now than when I first started working with them.
I've got a notebook and a double page spread given to each of them and I'm working to fill each double page with keys and associations, it makes me think I'd encourage it as a form of meditation (on whatever matters to you: a pantheon, the tarot, the classic elements, some other set of elements, dream images, ritual tools, ogham, runes, sacred trees, animals, and so forth).
Cheers,
J Kelsey.