Let's talk about Gods and Goddesses

So I thought that now was a good time to talk about my personal ideas on Gods and Goddesses. Note, this is definitely not the only view there is. There are plenty of other pagans and witches that share my general view or something similar to it, but it's definitely not universal.

So first, I'll talk about this specific goddess right here, Persephone. We know that she's the daughter of the goddess Demeter, who is the goddess of the harvest. Persephone is in a way her opposite force, the goddess of spring- she makes things begin to grow, her mother makes sure it's ready for harvest at the end of it's growing season. From there, you find a split in opinions on the next part. Some sources say that Persephone was kidnapped and forced to marry Hades, the god of the underworld, and was tricked into eating three pomegranate seeds, which therefore correlate to how many months of the year she must spend living exclusively in the underworld with him, which is now winter, because her mother, Demeter, refuses to let anything grow in those months out of grief.

But in a second interpretation, Persephone went willingly into the underworld when she heard the voices of the dead crying out from a crack in the earth, descending via a cave in order to comfort them. She ended up rather liking it there, falling in love with Hades, and decided to stay on her own accord, which still infuriated her mother, but in this telling there is also more of a strained relationship between mother and daughter alluded to, with Persephone being less the sheltered, naive virgin daughter and more the adult daughter straining under an overbearing mother, desperate to form her own separate identity. In any case, Persephone becomes an interesting goddess, both ruling over the light new life of spring, and is queen of the dead in the underworld. And in case she looks a bit familiar to those who know me, yes, she's modeled from Lauren Hansen. Use your friends as models folks, it's fun and you'll rarely end up with a copyright infringement issue.

When I talk about a goddess like Persephone, what we know about her is entirely encased in the mythology and art of ancient Greece, and even then, the information can change in pretty significant details depending on what ancient source you're looking at. The same is true for any god and goddess of any pantheon of any culture- we're limited in our knowledge to their known mythology and material culture, and frankly, that's if we're lucky. There are plenty of cultures that had no written language, and we only know their gods and goddesses from things written by surrounding cultures, or stories passed down orally for centuries that were written down much later with who knows how much editing. Not all artwork or objects made by all cultures are easy to preserve- stone and metal were not easy to come by. There are suspected gods and goddesses that we know only from a single piece of archeology- a single statue or image with absolutely no context aside from a small amount of symbolic guesswork. And many of the things we 'know" can be extremely twisted in a modern context- there were quite a few well meaning but not particularly credible writers during the early 1900's through the 1930's who wrote extensively on ancient cultures in ways that that widely expanded the known narrative on many pre-christian ideas, but the did not expand them based off factual evidence. But that new narrative has found it's way into the "known lore" of these deities, weather it stands up to evidence or not.

The fact remains that the gods and goddesses can be considered 'cultural artifacts' in and of themselves. They were believed, sculpted, written and sang into life by the generations of people who worshipped them. Our ancestors saw the energy and spirit of places, things and events, and through our human minds, thought into life a being to "hold" all of those things for us. They are the embodiment of ideas, and a way to explain natural processes that we as humans didn't have a scientific handle on in antiquity. These ideas and natural forces are still with us today, and so too are the gods that watch over them- look up anything like 'modern gods' on Tumblr or Pinterest and you'll find hundreds of re-imaginings in art of ancient deities updated to a more modern aesthetic and job description.

There is a theory that, after so many generations of so many people, that belief in these deities has essentially willed them into life. That the thoughts and prayers of millions of souls eventually collected into a type of consciousness, a personality, an individual who embodies the things and ideas we place upon them. The gods, then, are in this way created for us, by us. They are not necessarily the all-powerful, 'in the beginning' gods of the Bible- they're a much more intimate type of spirit, one closely linked to the struggles of humanity because they were quite literally born out of them. We do not necessarily worship or venerate these gods out of fear (though it's a good idea to not actively piss them off,) but instead we work to form relationships and understandings with them as friends, teachers, helpers and guides.