One thing I learned the hard way is that the path that I’ve taken this far is not only a lonely one but it is a far-reaching one that spans over the course of millennia. That being said, it’s humbling and important knowing that I’ve been given the opportunity to know things that others may not have the chance at knowing and these things are to be shared explicitly by the Divine and not be humans.
The ethical considerations of this are also important. I believe the Gods talk to humans and not only are they capable of giving similar answers about Themselves to Their followers, but They also come down and educate Their people on who They are, as well. These things are mysteries that are given to us as a privilege and an opportunity to create rather than destroy the very fabric of our knowing by making it a TikTok or blog post.
It’s a thin line as far as I’m concerned. We live in an age where sharing the details of our lives is a common occurrence. We want to find those who know us and those who recognize each other through the internet. There’s days where I want to tell people all that I’ve learned and all that I’ve found the past couple of months and years. Unfortunately, though, that is not my place and I don’t think it’s any human’s place, either, to share the mysteries of the Gods. That’s how Christians started to destroy their religion and where a lot of people tend to get it wrong.
When humans take Divinity into their own hands, problems start to be created in regards to ethics. Talking to the Gods is something everyone should learn how to do in a proper manner, but not everyone is capable of keeping their experiences to themselves because they have trouble validating it on their own. People assert that they know the Gods because the people on Tiktok and Tumblr have a checklist for each category of Deities and the standards they need to make in order to be classified as Divinity and Divine interactions. The problem here is, we’ve completely removed the autonomy of the Gods by doing this and destroyed the trust that They have in humans by exposing Their own secrets.
It isn’t for us to determine who the Gods go to, it is for Them to determine who needs to know what at what time.
This is why discernment and understanding why things work the way they do is tantamount to forming a better alliance with the Divine as humans. Right now, we are more often than not left alone because we can’t seem to keep our mouths shut when it comes to thinking we know what the Gods want from each of us. We pretend we know the answer when really we just have what we need to know from the Deity we are interacting with and not what each other needs to know about Them.
The answer to this is that channeling, mediumship, and possessory work is an art that is lost to time especially in Western society because we are so hellbent at controlling each other as well as the Divine to allow it to be important and healthy. It is undoubtedly a fault of our morals at this modern age that we consider the Gods to not be powerful enough to speak for themselves all the while not allowing humans to have control over their own boundaries with their own responsibilities in how we talk to Them.
It’s immoral in its own right to deny autonomy to the Divine as well as other humans. Autonomy gets destroyed when we propagate things like doctrine and rule books and destroy the very foundational practices that the ancestors who worked closely with the Divine knew about but have not managed to recreate in modern day due to the misunderstanding that the Divine cannot speak for Themselves through humans. Humans and the Gods have had a longstanding partnership with each other. Priests and priestesses were used as a delivery system for the Gods but not without sacrifice and vows to keep silent when asked.
The ethics of being a morally sound partner with the Divine get a bit shaky when we think we know who we are talking to but really have no idea that it’s our own mind talking back. The Divine keep quiet more often than we probably know They do and that’s more often than not the cause of why so many people tend to burn out after only five years. You can only do the same things so many times with a God until it gets to be a problem and you don’t go anywhere. People either move on or move away from polytheism and steer the ship into the ground because they don’t know any better.
The problem being, of course, we live in an age where sharing everything is seemingly important. Everyone needs to see what we are doing with each other and if someone is hiding something from others we claim them to be gatekeepers when they are actually preserving the integrity of the religion from being swayed by others who speak louder than them. The difference between being a partner and working with the Divine and gatekeeping is simple: those who are in alignment with the Gods and working on making things better for Them don’t actually speak about their practices to anyone who shouldn’t know about Them and gatekeepers scream that others shouldn’t even go into this sort of work because it’s unethical – when really, they are the ones making it that way.
We don’t really know what this could look like at the end of the day because we have no precedent for this work. There is no rule book and no laws depicting how we are supposed to navigate the modern worship of the Gods and we think we know what it should be when we are only ever just barely scratching the surface of what it could be.
We have no real evidence that we know how the Norse Gods especially were worshipped because the majority of any context we could have had was taken away millennia ago. The time sensitive depictions of holidays, practices, myths, ordeals, rituals, etc. are all gone in the wake of modern politics destroying what the Norse Gods even stood for. I cannot speak for the Hellenic pantheon because they at least had philosophers and mystics who wrote down the things that they knew. The Norse had nothing. Modern Scandinavian culture is the only thing worthwhile that we can look into and even that is the bare bones knowing of what values they could have had before Christian missionaries.
People also try to solve this problem by labeling experiences as UPG and tossing them out the door because there is no precedent. When, in fact, we don’t really know ourselves what the precedent experiences of the Norse Gods entailed let alone how we can go about using our own knowledge to depict how we can go about employing our own kinds of worship and devotion. Mystics tend to be shunned by heathens and even when mystics try to function within the framework of heathenry, they short circuit because they cannot follow the rule book of what to do when things don’t go according to their already established doctrine.
I know I’m extremely critical of heathenry but I’m also just extremely critical of the westernized framework for polytheism itself. We went about it the wrong way here, folks, and to no fault of our own. We are only the product of our ancestors who shunned the Gods and followed one single entity who is questionably not even in existence at this point because we took even His words so extremely out of context and assumed we knew more than He did by making it called a fucking Bible. Like, come on, guys. Let’s not follow the Christian example.
What I’m proposing is simple: we don’t need to gatekeep the Gods in this fashion. We simply don’t need the Gods being talked about for each other as the Gods Themselves are fully capable of doing so. However, our way of believing that no human could ever work for the Gods in the way that mediums, seers, priests, and other people who have dedicated themselves to this work could ever be this important to the continuation of the religion, that no human is capable of doing it because we’re too flawed is reductive and frankly, stupid.
It’s obvious that people have abused the authority of the Gods over and over again but what does that abuse actually look like and what can it actually be if we are doing it in a way that is controlling? Assuming we know what others are called to do and shit all over their inner knowing, their inner calling is a good start at dominating their own opinion on what things could look like. We are scared to admit to each other that we know something that should be kept secret and that it’s important that others aren’t aware unless they hear it themselves.
The Gods choose to tell Their followers things when They feel that they are ready to hear them. Other followers don’t get to decide that for Them. And other people don’t get to decide how they can go about talking for Them.
If we were truly capable of being able to discern everything for ourselves that we know to actually be the case, we wouldn’t feel it necessary to talk about it on Tiktok. If you feel insecurity, you’re going to seek validation with other humans rather than trusting the Gods to validate for you. But other humans can also validate for the Gods, as well. They just aren’t going to be doing it by charging you for readings or channeled messages online to make money. You probably won’t even know where they are in the end, and you probably won’t be ready to hear whatever it is you’re waiting to hear if you feel that it’s necessary to share everything with other people.
“Mysteries” is the word I am finding to be important in this work. Mysteries that can be found through experiential listening and learning through those who were already initiated into the mystery itself. Time keeps proving over and over again that secrets are best left to the people who are capable of keeping them. And those who truly want to know the faces of the Gods will find that when they find the Gods, they will not think it important to share with everyone else unless they are told to do so. And even then, it’s difficult to even recognize why you’re talking to the person you’re talking to and why you are even here in the first place.
The truth is, when we allow the Gods to operate for Themselves, things become much more obvious. When we allow Them to take authority over their own followers and talking to them how They wish to talk to them, we can start to really understand how this could have happened back in the pre-Christian era. It’s mysteries and secrets that kept the Gods from becoming too powerful of an authority and kept humans from making themselves too powerful of an authority. Indoctrination is not an ancient philosophy. It is implicated as a purely human phenomenon, not a Divine one.
We cannot assume we know more than we do and we can arguably only be sure that the Gods are relating the information if we realize what that authentic information feels and looks like. We have extremely little context for this kind of information sharing. Those that think they do are often already misinformed or being contrary to Christian beliefs which is also a form of indoctrinating others. We cannot possibly learn to keep quiet if we don’t even know what is being shared in the first place and we also can’t know the differences either if we are intent on assuming everyone else knows the answers and we can’t have them.
If we can’t trust each other to know when to keep ourselves quiet out of respect for the Divine, and if we can’t trust ourselves to know when the right time to act is, then how are we supposed to really know Them? How are we supposed to have a healthy level of autonomy as followers to the Divine? And how are the Divine supposed to have autonomy with Themselves?
It’s these things that I feel important to discuss as I begin to really start to pick away at what different roles could look like and how they play into being in relationship with the Divine. This can also play a part in knowing for ourselves the difference between what we want to think is true and what They actually want us to believe about Them.
For right now, though, next time you come into a revelation or epiphany about the Gods you work with, consider keeping it to yourself unless you are told to share it with others. More often than not, it is meant to be kept quiet unless the Gods Themselves come down and say so. You’ll find you’ll have more authentic experiences the more you don’t need to validate them with the internet or with other people. You’ll also find issues that once were a problem with discernment more often than not are because of other people telling you things they think they know about the Gods.
Consider that it’s important to keep things to yourself unless you’re explicitly being shown to do the work in which you are to share it but even then, allow the Gods to show you the context for it, not the internet fandom of the Gods.
Devoured by Flame 