Devoured by Flame

If you can think of the Divine fulfilling a part of you that is already missing – akin to puzzle pieces – you can sort of see that there tends to be a missing part of humanity itself in which the Divine once naturally occupied and does no longer. The void, however, is never completely occupied though we try to fill it with something else like materialistic belongings, other people and things that tend to take up space but don’t ultimately get to the deeper more primal needs of our lives that tend to leave a gaping hole the Divine once filled.

We tend to think we need to fill it ourselves – after all, what is wrong with us that we can’t make ourselves whole and hale and why do we need anyone to fill anything beyond what we can control? We tend to take things into our own hands and make sure that whatever it looks like, we are doing this for ourselves and not other people and beings.

This leaves room for moralistic superiority to take place where people indoctrinate others to coerce or force them into thinking that the Divine is necessary and if we ignore that longing we are going to be sent to Hell or some other place wherein the displeasure of the Gods is more prominent. It becomes a black and white scenario where the pain of making the wrong decision in our lives shrouds the possibility of having a more holistic and devoted relationship with the Divine. When a relationship becomes a fear tactic, it ceases becoming a relationship and instead is survival instincts, panic and trauma.

So when we begin to wonder why we have so many issues creating space for the Divine in our lives, even when we aren’t Christian ourselves, we still have this looming over our heads and into our practices. Guilt and shame tend to take up more space than free will, choice and love. Blaming ourselves is a fault of not making the right choices to create space for the Gods and it then becomes exceptionally difficult to truly have an authentic and real relationship with Them.

There are some things, however, we can think about in order to avoid using shame and guilt to create spaces and context around our daily lives. Other things, I think, we can rethink and restructure to take out the meaning of being less than worthy of being with the Divine and instead empower them to be used to take on a new language of devotion and choice. 

Rethinking Shame

Shame is a troubling thing that causes people to remain in religions even when they don’t believe in them. Shame creates a gaping hole between us and the Divine and drives away our own inner belief systems in order to promote the more widely accepted one. 

A lot of pagan traditions use shame to keep people within their folds and belief systems. For example, heathens will use oath-keeping, wyrd maintaining and breaking, and luck to retain people within their beliefs. If someone does not uphold their doctrine, they will be cast out and made to feel ostracized and ridiculed for not being a proper “heathen.” This obviously has created enormous pressure within the community to ostracize people for thinking differently and maintaining practices that have no historical precedent because no historically documented practice actually holds any real meaning in the modern day world. 

Additionally, heathens tend to use the Aesir as models for the proper heathen “doctrine” as if the Aesir have anything to show for what is considered moralistically superior. The Aesir then are boiled down and belittled and other aspects of the pantheon are stripped of their nature and made to appear as an enemy. 

If shame and intolerance is what is holding a group together, how can we then assume they are “inclusive” and “forward thinking?”

The same concept applies for the three fold law in Wicca or miasma in Hellenism. All of our modern pagan structures have some aspect of shame hidden in the framework that keeps people from authentically being themselves and approaching the Gods. It is why cults are so prominent in paganism and narcissism runs rampant. People are looking for answers and people who have them. We have no sources available that can build an authentic religion when we are all so fragmented and concerned with what people on TikTok are doing or why they are hexing the moon. 

The fact of the matter is when creating a space for the Gods, shame cannot be a part of keeping us at their altar or maintaining our devotion. When shame gets involved, enemies are created and Gods then become an enemy. We then cannot even begin to approach the Gods without fear of being judged, smited, or ridiculed by them for being so small and petty. 

We hold ourselves to ideals that are not worth maintaining because they are yet another impossible religious standard that is an offshoot of Christianity and other Westernized beliefs. 

The fact of the matter is, shame does not belong in any religion ever. Shame is a black hole in which the freedom to choose and be chosen and have proper boundaries and meaning is sucked in like a vortex. It is disturbing how much shame is used in paganism and we have hardly even began to discover what it can really be like to have an authentic relationship with ourselves much less the Divine.

It is a wedge between us and the Divine and once it grows and festers, it becomes the wall that separates us from Them, therefore making us even less regarded as Divine in our own way. The veil does not thin or lessen, it is only the means from which we can realize that the Divine have always been there and our world has always had mystery and miracles. It is shame that gatekeeps us from the real opportunity to build these kinds of distinctions and mold it into a meaningful religion. 

Moral Superiority

Like shame, morals seem to promote ideals that are impossible standards to live by. It is not as though morals are wrong, per se, but rather when morals are implied in a shameful context and a shame-driven society, we bend and break the bones of healthy organized religion without even realizing it.
So what can we do with some sort of moral-based system like heathens or Wicca? We can acknowledge a few things need to go hand-in-hand with what we think we know about Pre-Christian religion and what we know that we know about Pre-Christian religion. 

What we think we know about it is that there are too many things that seem to blend in with Christian ideals like keeping a certain space between us and the Divine, not feeling as though the Divine have any time for us and allow us to work with Them by pure ostentatious pieces of our humanity, or that we make room for Them by making sure They are present in everywhere and everything we do whether we want Them there or not.

We know that such things as omnipresence and omnibenevolence was not quite a thing to maintain moral purity back in the pre-Christian era, so why must we also regulate the Divine between where They want to be and where They need to be and why it seems to matter to us so much? 

We know that Christians decided that sinning was bad in more recent history rather than what sin actually was which was pulling away from the Divine based on the material-driven desires so why must we set up our altars to be enormous displays of capitalism? Why do we have to show the Divine our worth by buying expensive offerings, developing performative ritual to maintain some unfathomable times of yore based on pure academic conjecture, or making sense of the philosophical workings and reading all of the myths as if they were the fully-functioning theology of our time? 

We barely know who the Gods are now and we do not know who They were back then, so what gave us the hubris to regulate each other on any of these things? 

These are the kinds of things that take up space in our day-to-day lives and this doesn’t even cover the entirety of it. These types of thinking slow down any progress we could make in developing any sort of modern polytheism and we have no signs of it ever stopping the more we are unaware of what we are doing and where we are going. Instead, we keep going down rabbit holes of gatekeeping the Divine, trying to place definitions on Beings we have no capability to knowing why They do what They do and we have not the proof to justify any claims that we are wrong or right. We just tell ourselves it’s “good enough” and keep going even when we have the technology on our hands to ask the Gods Themselves how They are to be reached out to. We keep asking humans about the Gods who know nothing about the Gods beyond knowing themselves and what they know they know. 

It sounds absurd when I simplify the issue being essentially about the blind leading the blind but that’s essentially what it is. We are tossing spaghetti on the wall, hoping it sticks, and then developing biases around why we think this needs to happen because a piece of spaghetti clung to the wall and we hammer it in as fact instead of biased fiction we tell ourselves to be comfortable. 

A lot of what I’ll be talking about on this blog is based on the assumption that what we know now about religion is mostly based on conjectured and fractured pieces of academia in history and the context and discovery therein is mostly gone from history. We don’t know how the Gods want to be celebrated, made space for, and kept in our homes. We have no idea of where we want Them to be and how to go about making Them a part of our lives, much less a normalized part of society. 

What we can do now, however, is go back to the ways our ancestors once had to in order to consider that the Gods are waiting for us to listen to Them. All humans have a piece of the Divine within them and all are capable of listening. We go back to the ways of creation of our ancestors who sought the Gods and made Them a functioning part of their history and kept them in their houses, shrines, and holy spaces. They touched the Gods in their hands, they formed religions alongside the Gods and worked with Them to make sense of the world and what is needed to improve and change the fabric of our own identity to better fit a piece of Them inside ourselves. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There is more of this later in my blog series but these are some thoughts about what we need to be more considerate about before asserting we have any authority over right and wrong practices, hubris, or some sort of function for the Gods to play in our lives.

The way it is now, most people burn out in polytheism after around 5 years. We have nowhere to go beyond making offerings, keeping a space for Them in our house, and then not knowing where to go from there. Most Lokeans I know have fallen off the wagon and have ignored Him the moment He started behaving in a way that we don’t ordinarily want to relate to Him as. I can probably say the same is true for a lot of the Gods – and in polytheism, all we can do is shrug and say “oh well” and move onto the next God who looks to be a part of our path instead of figuring out the root of why they’ve fallen out of touch with that particular part of the Divine and what part of themselves that needed to change that we avoided making. 

This is the solution I’m proposing to change the way we think about Deity work and recreate a structure from the ground up. Stay tuned for more of this series on drawing nearer to the Divine and what it can look like once we reach that turning point.