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22 August 2021 22:13![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
haptalaonIt's funny how my theology seems to be drawn to overlapping monotheisms. Paganism has a taxonomic quality, the use of correspondence systems leads us to box spirits into male/female, fire/water, and so forth. And now I have a correspondence system all of my own. But my perceiving seems to defy the purpose of sorting things into boxes.
There is the horned one in the woods but also in the sky; and rhe devil us in the sky and the moon and the woods; and the queen of the land is in the sky and the water and the woodlands; and the queen of fairy is also in the woods but also in the sky and in fhe hedgerows and fields; overlapping monotheisms. It seems obvious that there would be one god in the sky, another in the forest, and so forth. But this seems wrong for me. Nature's divinity is so expansive thst I cannot help but see the spirits I connect to in eveything. And maybe that's a fit for nature, which has never been monogamous, that THIS kind of sky would be for one power, and THAT kind for another, all kinds of sky for all kinds of being; if nature is infinity expressing itself, then it doesn't seem so strange. That the great powers of nature would not be confined to a single job title, but express Themselves through all the parts of the infinite. The devil oh a silver pool with white flowers, the devil in the coal under the mountainside; the changeling buried in the earth under the corn, the changeling laughing in the red wind; a great hunt of the wild in the woods, and another that rides in thin black streaks of night across the sky.
It's not that all gods are one god, more that within the Landweird one reality does not erase another. Echoes and layers like a cheap tape, with older memories bidden underneath. It isn't necessary to use a taxonomy to fix them into a pantheon with each in their place, so long as it can be used as a series of gates to take you to the right place. Why should there not be many gods of sky, in a land as old and strange as this? Why should there not be a jumble of spirits who reconcile within themselves generations of contradiction? This is why a map is important. It helps us orientate ourselves within the gods, which is to say - within the land - and see our way clearly to the fragment we seek.
There is the horned one in the woods but also in the sky; and rhe devil us in the sky and the moon and the woods; and the queen of the land is in the sky and the water and the woodlands; and the queen of fairy is also in the woods but also in the sky and in fhe hedgerows and fields; overlapping monotheisms. It seems obvious that there would be one god in the sky, another in the forest, and so forth. But this seems wrong for me. Nature's divinity is so expansive thst I cannot help but see the spirits I connect to in eveything. And maybe that's a fit for nature, which has never been monogamous, that THIS kind of sky would be for one power, and THAT kind for another, all kinds of sky for all kinds of being; if nature is infinity expressing itself, then it doesn't seem so strange. That the great powers of nature would not be confined to a single job title, but express Themselves through all the parts of the infinite. The devil oh a silver pool with white flowers, the devil in the coal under the mountainside; the changeling buried in the earth under the corn, the changeling laughing in the red wind; a great hunt of the wild in the woods, and another that rides in thin black streaks of night across the sky.
It's not that all gods are one god, more that within the Landweird one reality does not erase another. Echoes and layers like a cheap tape, with older memories bidden underneath. It isn't necessary to use a taxonomy to fix them into a pantheon with each in their place, so long as it can be used as a series of gates to take you to the right place. Why should there not be many gods of sky, in a land as old and strange as this? Why should there not be a jumble of spirits who reconcile within themselves generations of contradiction? This is why a map is important. It helps us orientate ourselves within the gods, which is to say - within the land - and see our way clearly to the fragment we seek.
