Feast of the Gods

 Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your Law, "I have said you are gods"? 
~John 10:34

Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things. ~Herman Melville, 'Moby Dick'

Beneath the fastidious doctrines of theology, the glib abstractions of non-dualism, and the blissful metaphysics of the New Age, under all our platitudes about the One, run ancient veins of myth and ritual, hidden caverns within us, where gods and goddesses still sport and contend, sacrifice and sing, die and rise as pulses of our inspiration, muses of our poetry, passions of our dance.

The irony is, when we read them literally as historical personalities, the gods are dead. But when we embrace them in the bio-physics of our spinal fluid, they breathe. They dwell on the threshold between matter and consciousness, feeding us with nectar, ripening us until we are juicy. Without the flushed faces of the gods, God would be pale.

If we acknowledge the gods inside us, we cannot claim to be exactly One. And if we claim to be exactly One, the gods will drive us mad. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus warns, "Bring forth what is within you, and what you bring forth will save you. Do not bring forth what is within you, and what you do not bring forth will destroy you." He was talking about them. It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living gods. Or a wonderful thing.

Any woman has less to fear from a conscious Kali than from an unconscious Jezebel. The liberated man is a gentleman who has awakened the warrior within, not the passive-aggressive "liberal" unwittingly possessed by a wrathful deity.

To appease unconscious gods, our ancestors burned food and animal offerings on an alter. We appease our presiding deities by inviting the unconscious to dine with our awareness, on the alter of the senses. When we welcome our gods, we release their message and their energy; they become useful forces in our lives. Our conscious embrace of long repressed gods immediately transforms demons into angels, integrating their gleaming bodies of dark energy into our personality. This work is alchemical, priestly, and wise.

The fathers of the Catholic Church knew all about this inner work of integrating old gods into the new Christ-Consciousness. To tap the muses of Christian imagination, they built their great cathedrals on sites of pagan worship, embracing ancient gods as saints, with all their myths and sagas. This brilliant ruse turned the feast of Mithras into Christmas, the feast of Aphrodite into St. Valentine's day, the feast of Samhain into All Soul's. Almost every Christian symbol originates in pagan cults: cross and Christmas tree, font and grail.

The gods are embedded in the very first verse of the Bible. Earth is created from "tohu wa bohu" (formless and void), and the creator is named "Elohim." This term is used for God throughout the Hebrew Bible. But in Hebrew it is plural, actually meaning "Gods." The literal translation of the Bible's opening verse is: "In the beginning, when GODS were creating the heavens and the earth..." No Bible scholar will deny this. They just won't talk about it. The "formless void" of Genesis 1 also contains the buried names of ancient Sumerian deities. "Tohu" derives from Tiamet, the Goddess of the Deep. "Bohu" derives from Behemeth, her dragon of terrible power.

Yes, the gods are the builders of the earth. As they dwell in our souls, so they dwell in the heart of matter. Hold a rock in your hand and look into it deeply. Through the depths of stone, gods and goddesses are dancing. Electrons shimmer in the vast sub-nuclear void, whirled by the devas, those shining intelligences named in the ancient Vedas, who order both constellations and sub-nuclear particles through inter-stellar space, which is also the space inside the atom. The gods self-organize their glittering temple architecture from waves of pure mathematical probability. They build matter's mirage out of no-thing, from algebraic equations spinning toward symmetry to solve themselves.

Quantum physics confirms that this stone is but radiant intelligence, a theater of luminous contending logoi, the play of the gods. Even the proton, a so-called "stable" particle forged in stars, is made of mesons, baryons, gluons, that are nothing but vibrating fields of abstract intelligence. A field has no location. Therefore the most solid material particle is, in its warp and woof, the pointless all-pervading dance of a pantheon, gods who sport in the heart of a dust mote.

Modern humans flee into the safety of reason, the dogmas of monotheism, and the mechanics of old Newton, because reality is much too magical, and much too Pagan for us.


Painting: Rottenhammer's Feast of the Gods