Invented Gods
By Katy Jennison
All Gods are invented, for
certain values of "invented".
They are human constructions: they may be archetypes, or projections, or
metaphors, or personifications. They may
even be reflections of real (for certain values of "real"),
independent, supernatural, transcendent beings, but if they are it's impossible
for us to get a firm handle on their properties, let alone their personalities
if they have any. So the best we can do
is to attribute human characteristics to the somethings with which we sometimes
feel we are communicating, or on to which we project what we think of as divine
properties.
The trap to avoid, and into
which various populous and influential religions have fallen, is to make your
invented God personify only your perceived best impulses, your ideal self. This lands you in the quagmire of dualism:
whether it's Johnny Mercer singing "Accentuate the Positive", or the
Christian Church believing in a God of Goodness, or a New-Agey Pagan thinking
in terms of universal love and white light, the negativity, evil or darkness
which is the inevitable by-product of your manufactured dualism has to go
somewhere too.
This means that if you
project only your ideal self on to the Gods you invent, you have also to invent
demons or anti-Gods on to which to project your Shadow, including everything
you dislike about or deny in yourself and which you project outwards on to
other people. The Problem of Evil is a
very tricky one, for the "God is Love" Christians and the fluffy-bunny
Pagans alike: if God or the Universe is love, why do thoroughly bad things keep
happening all the time, especially to apparently-good people? If you define your God as Good - and as Good
in purely human terms, at that: good for people - your God can't cope with
earthquakes, accidents, the death of children, cancer. Making demons responsible for
"evil", however, brings its own problems, particularly if you've
unwisely also attributed All-Powerfulness to your God. Some varieties of religion get round this by
calling the nasty things which happen "tests". They then have to explain why an all-loving,
good God would test you by killing your child, and why you should be expected
to worship him (it usually is him) afterwards.
Moral: invent your Gods in
the same way that hedgehogs make love: very carefully.
Pagans, on the whole, manage
to avoid these pitfalls, by inventing Gods who don't have "Good" as
their USP - indeed, usually by rejecting this artificial duality
altogether. If the Divine is manifest in
the natural world (which includes its human inhabitants), then a tsunami and
indeed a cancer is just as much a manifestation of the Divine as cherry-blossom
and moonlight. So Pagan Gods are not all
human-friendly sweetness and light, because the world they and we live in is
not all human-friendly sweetness and light.
If Gods are a human
invention, the likelihood is that they started out as personifications of
natural forces which then crystallised into specific named deities, characters
which, as writers of fiction will confirm frequently occurs, escaped from their
authors' imaginations and started behaving in independent and unexpected and
sometimes inconvenient ways. By this
stage of the game, there are enough deities out there for every Pagan to
choose, if they want to, the Gods which best fit their needs. Most of us select our Gods from the extensive
off-the-peg range rather than putting together a bespoke version of our very
own. Even if we did, our inventions would always include some of the attributes
of Gods or heroes or magical characters we'd come across at various points
during our lives, including the fictional ones from novels and films. But even when we take up with a deity who is
already well-recorded, well-defined, popular and recognisable - even then we
reinvent them and make them special to us, even if what we think we're doing is
making ourselves special to them.
There is a great deal to be
said for the practice of picking a different God every now and then, and
working with them over a period of time (months or years, rather than days or
weeks), and seeing what aspects of one's personality are expanded or
challenged. If I have a tendency towards
benign, peaceful and friendly deities, it can be salutary to see what lessons I
can learn from Gods of death or war or destruction. And in a spirit of experiment, it might be
valuable to deliberately set out to invent a God or Goddess, give them a name
and a realistic set of attributes, and work with them in this way.