Non-Material Divine Beings

In his Pomegranate article (12.1:103-8), “Idolatry, Paganism, and Trust in Nature,” Bron Taylor mentions the perception of the spiritual intelligences that the world is filled with & with whom we can be in relationship. This perception he calls a “form of idolatry” (103). Bron refers to this as ‘animism’ and claims it to be “still infidelity” as a traditionally understood “central idolatrous violation” because it is “a valuing of one’s relationships with other beings above Abraham’s God” (104). When it comes to “the jealous and vengeful God,” Bron admirably declares, “if such a God exists, then resistance, not capitulation, would be the only moral response” (ibid.) On several occasions, Bron mentions “invisible spirits or gods … whether … malicious or beneficent” (104), “divine and invisible sources of existence,” (105), “non-material divine beings” (106), and “longstanding religions with their invisible divine forces and beings” (107). I do question, however, why the valuing of other beings is necessarily above Abraham’s God, but that is another matter, and I wish to address at this point the very notion of ‘non-material divine beings’.

Bron rightly acknowledges that the non-desire “for divine rescue from this earthly world … is typical of Paganism” (107), and his “spiritualities of belonging and connection to nature, which consider nature to be intrinsically valuable and sacred, and that advance kinship ethics with non-human organisms and express a deep sense of humility about the human place in the biosphere,” (106) are core to the contemporary expressions of paganisms as we are increasingly coming to know them. But in this light, Bron also refers to “perceptions of the mysterious forces of nature” (105) as well as Thoreau’s “subtle magnetism in Nature” (ibid.) While we pagans almost universally acknowledge “that nature is the wellspring of all life” (105), I wish to ask what do we mean by, or value in, what is variously referred to as the ‘supernatural’ or ‘preternatural’? Who or what are the gods as non-material and/or invisible divine beings or forces and need they necessarily be considered ‘sources of existence’?

To answer the last part of that last question first but briefly, I am guessing that attribution of invisible divinity as the source of existence is a hang-over from our Judaeo-Christian/Abrahamic conditioning. We may still have invisible spirits without having to accept them as sources of existence. In a full pagan understanding, the Greek poet Hesiod acknowledges Chaos as the primordial state but then wide-bosomed Gaia who becomes the ever-secure foundation of the gods of Olympus (Theogony 116-18). Hesiod’s choice of words is tricky, and CaoV geneto ‘Chaos came into being’ suggests that Chaos itself appears with the Earth – the last dividing Chaos into Uranus above and Tartarus below. But however we interpret Hellenic cosmogony, the underlying implication is that it is the physical earth that is the matrix not only of the divine gods but also the whole of creation. In more contemporary pagan terms, matter is the primordial mother.

According to Helen Berger in her paper “The Neopagans Next Door: Trespassing Boundaries” about the 1998 Beaumont, Texas incident concerning CUUPS and the Baptist Church,

For Neopagans the deities are multi-vocal symbols that can be envisioned in four distinct manners:

• as divine beings
• as metaphors
• as an aspect of each us
• as components of the one divine force or of the spirit that defines the universe

Different Neopagans may hold different views of the deities, although the same individuals may use two or more of these definitions at different times.

That is, of course, a nice academic way to describe it. I have known people, as I’m sure we all have, who have experienced the gods literally as divine beings and insist on them as such. And I think the assertion that we as pagans use the deities in different ways at different times holds true with the general flexibility and non-dogmatic dance that I understand paganism to be.

But it is as ‘symbols’ that Helen has presented the gods regardless of the four distinct manners of usage, and it is here as metaphors that I believe the ‘invisible forces/non-material divine beings’ are chiefly to be located. We know that invisible magnetic fields do indeed exist and can be measured, etc. by the sciences, but Thoreau’s ‘subtle magnetic’ forces are something different – as are those ‘mysterious forces of nature’ that Bron also mentions. But even here I think we can benefit from approaching the ‘magnetic’ and ‘mysterious’ as metaphoric as well.

In fact, our term ‘nature’ itself is a metaphor. Deriving from the Latin past participle natus of the verb nasci ‘to be born’, ‘nature’ refers literally to that which is born – mammals primarily and, perhaps by extension, to what is alternatively hatched. From this perspective, the vegetative world of plants and trees let alone the inanimate world of rocks, mountains, rivers, lakes and oceans are excluded as not being ‘born’. Nevertheless, we apply our terms natura and nature to the whole gamut of the natural world; ‘nature’ is, therefore, a metaphor for the organic that includes even the inorganic.

A careful look at indigenous and classical European religiosity – if not kindred pagan spiritualities elsewhere as well – frequently reveals a binary understanding of nature. Perhaps this became subsequently codified as the natura naturans and natura naturata in medieval times and was used eventually by Spinoza. Robert Corrington prefers the English translations of the terms, respectively, as ‘nature naturing’ and ‘nature natured’. In the Middle Ages, the first was in general ascribed to God or as God, whereas the nature natured was used to designate manifest nature , nature in physical form. I wish to suggest that a more contemporary understanding is to view natura naturata as ‘empirical nature’ – that which we can observe and measure. By contrast, natura naturans is ‘co-nature’ – something operative but non-empirical and beyond the remit of direct evidence and methodological observation. The co-natural has been more usually known as the ‘supernatural’ or the ‘preternatural’. I am not particularly happy with the term ‘supernatural’ because of the implication of vertical aboveness (e.g., God) to or over nature. The term preternatural – simply the ‘other natural’ – is preferable, but I have a partner who does not ‘like’ that word. The co-natural, consequently, works just as well and is additionally acceptable within my partnership. So for family peace, I am opting for that expression in particular.

But whatever term we wish to employ – and admittedly there are those, perhaps many, who would chose not to use designations for the non-empirical at all, we are referring to a ‘realm’ or ‘dimension’ that is somehow ‘beyond’ that of direct observation and approach, that is, to those more subtle magnetisms and mysterious ‘forces’ – whether understood as impersonal animistic energies or personal gods and goddesses. But for the very reason that the co-natural cannot be reduced to analytical data and we, for the most part, cannot see it or approach it through the senses, we can at best describe it through metaphor and symbol. And as such, the great pagan legacies that have survived to our day have bequeathed to us some wonderful mythological registers – corpora of myths concerning cosmogonies, theogonies, deities, kindred spirits and legendary heroes/heroines.

Consequently, if we can understand and approach the co-natural as or through metaphor, I will argue that the ‘divine mysterious spirits, forces and/or beings’ are to be known as – and live through – the metaphoric. The religious symbol is employed to represent and serve as a vehicle for the co-divine. It is something that we can consider, even ‘worship’ if so inclined, as part of our spiritual contemplations. What becomes even more interesting from a pagan perspective is that some of our oldest metaphors, our primordial metaphors, are such basic aspects of nature like the sun, moon, dawn, earth, luminous sky, lightning and fire. In other words, at the most aboriginal level of human reflection, the natural and co-natural virtually merge – and from there they continue to interplay and distinguish as part – perhaps the central part – of human interaction with the world or cosmos.

But my main point in all this is that not only is our natural world real and deserving of our fundamental honour, respect, concern and focus – especially as we have increasingly the power and potential is wreck and ‘de-equilibriate’ it, but also that the metaphoric or co-natural is real too or at least can be experienced as such though trance, intuition, telepathy, imagination, ritual and other religio-spiritual techniques. As Graham Harvey explains in his Animism: Respecting the Living World (2005), the perception of the animate in the inanimate is most usually an insight that one learns. In other words, one is trained for the most part to recognize and relate to the animistic. The same understanding is applicable to the appreciation and encounter of the invisible divine that we might know as ‘spiritual intelligences’ or deities. Through shamanic technique, we can increase the likelihood of fathoming and benefiting from our non-material divine spiritual being or beings – whether as the mantic, numinous, subtle magnetic, animistic, mana, manitu, magical, imaginal, elvin or gods, goddesses and pantheons. The metaphoric of religious perception is a spiritual resource. Some of us may choose to take advantage of it. Others may not. But as pagans, we have the option to do either or both. When and if we can fathom the dynamic behind the ‘vehicle’ in the various legacies of religion – whether as the revered idol, organic nature, the talismanic word of magic and power, and/or the celebrated metaphor, we can know the co-natural through those ‘divine beings’ who speak to the listener.

Finally, let me refer to the Rogue Priest article in which the gods are mentioned at one point as ‘patterns in the mind’:
http://roguepriest.net/2011/03/24/the-religious-atheists/