Magickal Theory in Practice - 3/The Other 96% - 4: Pantheism, the Path of the Perennialist and the Unification of the Gods

"Old Myths, old Gods, old Heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at he bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race." - Stanley Kunitz

I often get asked "so are you, like, religious then? Do you believe in God?", to which my stock response is "yes, many." As a Perennialist I find myself trapped between non-religious people trying to make sense of the fact I believe in any God, and religious people trying to make sense of me believing in many Gods, and Polytheistic people trying to make sense of me believing in gods from different pantheons; admittedly, my personal system of belief is a little cluttered, so I'll do my best to explain my understanding of what Perennialism, or Perennial Pantheism means. The word Pantheism literally means 'All Gods' or 'All as God', from a mixture of the English 'Pan', meaning 'all', and the Greek 'Theos', meaning 'God, or Gods', there is no distinction made between singular and plural. This denotes that everything is within God, the one, the Pythagorean Monad, the Unified or Source Field, or it can mean that all Gods are one, all facets of a single energy or consciousness. Both are correct in my estimation, and you will hopefully come to understand why. Perennial means 'lasting or existing for a long or apparently infinite time; enduring or continually recurring.', so Perennialism is the Spiritual Philosophy that all traditions hold pieces of a Universal Truth, that all Gods are different facets of the same consciousness which pervades all things, and that no matter how often the Truth is obscured or corrupted, it will always endure in some form and rise again, meaning that every cultural interpretation is valid to some degree.

First and foremost, in Perennial Theology there is no such thing as Polytheistic or Monotheistic; no seriously, hear me out. All religious traditions throughout history have a source of all being (including the pantheon of Gods), and all maintain that beyond the pantheon there is a single creating entity which either cannot be understood by virtue of its abstract nature, or has simply been forgotten, even by the Gods themselves. Even though the focus of any Old World tradition is on the many Gods and Goddesses and their stories of how they contributed to the creation of the known world, all traditions are, at their core, Monotheistic. This does not mean that any one Monotheistic tradition is superior or inferior to any Polytheistic one, it simply means that anyone who is confused by the idea of one God or many, shouldn't be. All things have their point of origin, even the Gods. As Bertrand Russel put it, "If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause then it may just be the world as God." This statement can be taken in many ways depending on one's outlook, but what I have found is that the atheistic perception of God being an allegory for the Universe is not far off the mark, so when Mr Russel refers to it as 'the world as God' he could also have phrased it as 'God as the world'. I have mentioned in previous articles that God may in actuality be an all unifying force field of subtle energy which binds all matter and denser energy together, the Unified Field or Source Field as David Wilcock has termed it, and I have briefly mentioned toroidal fields in one earlier post. I feel that it is important for me to explain this now before jumping into the Pantheonic ball pool.

A toroidal field is a term in geometry which describes the motion of energy out from a single source, spreading in all directions until the energy reconnects to itself and flows back into the point of origin at the centre of the force field. The most common example of this is found in magnets, particularly bar magnets; electromagnetic energy is produced and emanates outward from one end of the magnet (North, or positive +), spreading inn all directions around it and being drawn in to the other end (South, or negative -) resulting in a roughly circular field of magnetic force which gets weaker at the extremities and strongest when closer to the source at the centre, almost as though the projection of energy creates a vacuum behind it which draws the energy back in. Think of it like sitting in the middle of a bath tub; you stretch your arms behind you and scoop a load of water around so that it is in front of you. by doing this you create an empty space behind you, and as you push the water forward it displaces all of the water around it which will then flow away from the source of the force, dispersing in a arc until it finds the empty space you have created and flows into it back towards the source of the energetic projection, you. And I know some people might argue that this only happens because you're in a finite space in which the water has to move, but the same thing happens in a swimming pool or in the Ocean, it just happens so fluidly you don't notice, you are simply propelled forward by the very force which you create. If the Source Field is so evenly distributed through all things, then surely this same effect would take place. If the Universe with all of its galaxies, stars and planets exist within a toroidal field then this explains a lot of problems faced by theoretical physicists at this time, for if everything emanates outwards from a singularity, then all stars and galaxies will have the appearance of moving away from the source and away from each other at a consistent rate, gradually slowing down as they seem to lose energy. This is the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, or the Deep Freeze theory in which all matter stops and the universe ceases to exist. An opposing theory is that the Universe will stop expanding and then reverse itself, dragging all matter back into the singularity and crushing everything into a point of infinity density. Two seemingly opposing theories, but both can be reconciled with the application of the toroidal field, for everything will indeed expand uniformally and slow down uniformally to a point of energetic entropy, but then the vacuum will begin to draw in matter from around it and bring all of the matter and energy in the universe back towards the point of origin at the singularity, at which time the Universe will appear to speed up again and all stars and galaxies will move towards each other at a rate relative to everything else. The end of this cosmic dance, however, is not total destruction in the 'Big Crunch', for as everything expands and contracts as it moves further and closer to the source, such a change in density is virtually imperceptible, and would manifest to us merely as a perceived increase or decrease of velocity, time running faster or slower. There can, therefore be no singularity, for as matter and energy are pulled into the toroidal centre, an equal amount of matter and energy is projected away from the centre in equal measure resulting in the never ending flow of of cosmic energy and constant motion in the illusion of endless space.

The Torus, the motion of creation and the return to source, cosmic death and rebirth.

If the 'First Cause', as Aquinas termed it, is the conscious conceptual energetic principle of creation and unity which flows through everything, and if that principle moves like water in a toroidal field, then it could be said, at least as far as we can contemplate and theorise, that God created itself; the source of all existence is also the source of itself through the cyclical nature of its being. Of course there would have to have been a genesis point for this cycle of self creation, but it is my belief that this arose from the chaotic value of non-existence. I will discuss my understanding of Chaos and Order in another article. This adds credence to Aquinas' argument that God is eternal with no beginning and no end, for from our perspective of existing within the toroidal field of God there would be no beginning or end, only the continuous cycle which we would perceive as eternity. Out of this First Cause principle is created the duality, the dichotomy between that which is and that which is not, the consummation of the two generating the third principle of what could be as described in The Other 96% - 2: Millon Dollar Questions. I may be focusing too much on scientific theories here, but it will help understand the Gods soon enough. It is said by many that we are all the Universe experiencing itself from different points of view, and this also applies to the Gods as well, for they, as emanations from the First Cause are, in their very essence, the First Cause taking on different forms to understand itself.

When looking at the Neters in the Egyptian creation story, they each embody a combination of the primordial principles of directing or nurturing, projectile or receptive, linear or cyclical. These terms are translated into a condensed form of masculine and feminine, positive or negative. There is another aspect to the primordial creator Gods which is missing, and which I think is intrinsic to their composition... Elements. There is much debate as to whether the alchemical Elements are important when relating to the creating forces, but it is my view that the Elements existed as concepts before the Gods, and combined in varying degrees to create them, who in turn created lesser forms to represent their preceding generative principles, namely Air, Fire, Water and Earth. A God like Apollo would have a greater degree of the Fire principle which is primarily projectile and linear, but with the feminine nurturing aspect of Earth, thus condensed into a 'positive masculine' energy for Apollo projects life into being then cares for it afterwards like the sun. In contrast Hera would have the cyclical aspect of Water and the receptive aspect of Earth, but with the directive aspect of Fire, thus she would be regarded as a 'negative feminine' for she forms the world gradually through cycles but is impatient with her creations, directing them in accordance with her Will in a heavy handed manner. Naturally, I am humanising the deities for simplicity, but one can see how these fundamental principles combine to create the generative forces in the Universe.

Alchemical emanationism within the framework of the Pythagorean Tetractys.

Now here comes the interesting part; I'm going to skip the part where the Gods and Goddesses create emanations from themselves and combine the Elements in more ways to create the building blocks of matter which then combined and evolved in different ways to create out known Universe and innumerable others besides, and jump to the part where we, as humans and more importantly as Magicians, learn or remember the ways in which the creating forces work and how they can be directed in the physical realm. Since time immemorial, humans have sought to understand the formation of the Universe as a means of understanding the Gods that shaped it, and there are clues as to how these forces work hidden right before our eyes, clues which I will discuss in another article or we will never reach the end of this one. When one sees the patterns in nature on all levels of the cosmos, all the way down to the subatomic level, then one can truly get in touch with the Gods, no matter what pantheon they may be from. The names, personalities and everyday attributes of the Gods and Goddesses have been devised by mankind as a means of understanding the nature of the energetic emanation being focused on; so Aries, being a negative masculine energy having more Fire and Air than anything else within it, is shown as a hyper-masculine, highly aggressive, overtly sexual, competitive, arrogant, self confident, authoritarian warmonger, for that is what we associate with fire, pure, unbridled destruction if left unchecked. In reality, this cosmic energy is that of sacrifice for the purpose of new growth, dispensing with old things which no longer serve our greatest good and carving a new path through the thick brambles of adversity with the flaming sword of divine Will, conquering that which seems unassailable, leading others by the example of one's inner strength, mastering the self before mastering all that one surveys; this is what Ares represents as a cosmic creating force, the eternal battle to create something new in one's own image, to be as the Gods are. In this sense, the same can be applied to Thor in the Norse tradition, or Horus in the Egyptian tradition, or Shiva in Hindu tradition, and even in the Abrahamic tradition, Aries/Thor/Horus/Shiva, Mars can all be attributed to the angel Shamael, the Angel of Death, Lord of Fire, the Sword of God. What I have just done can be replicated with any and every God or Goddess from any pantheon resulting in a table of correspondence between all of them in one way or another. Sometimes the links are obvious, other times the links are seemingly loose, but this is because each culture will encounter these energies in a different context and draw a different understanding of each of them, sometimes encountering only a part of what that deity is and assign their own name to it as a separate entity. This limited perception and consequent lack of understanding results in their being multiple deities in one pantheon attributed to the same thing but with slight variations in temperament which is misunderstood as them being separate when they are in fact different sides or faces of the same deity. an example of this is the duality of Persephone and Hecate. Persephone is a young virginal Goddess of nature and beauty, associated with the fair seasons in which life blooms; she is abducted by Hades, Lord of the Underworld and he takes her as his bride. Demeter, Persephone's mother, enters the Underworld to negotiate her return with Hades, who agrees to allows Persephone to return to the surface world for 6 months of the year, but insists that she return to his side for the other six. Hacate on the other hand, enters the Underworld willingly, with her mother Astaria (who is often equated with Demeter) to find Persephone, but Hecate decides to remain in the Underworld to guide lost souls to their place of repose. In the same way, Persephone carries a lantern or torch as she leaves the Underworld, acting a a guide for souls to return to the surface world once they have served their sentence in the Underworld. Both Goddesses are Psychopomps, guiders of the dead, which creates another link to the Etruscan Goddess, Vanth, who lingers patiently near scenes of execution or battle to guide the souls of the dead into the afterlife. Since Vanth is seen as the chief of the Furies in Roman tradition, She, and the Furies serve as the prototype or contemporaries of the Norse Valkyries, winged warrior goddesses who guide the souls of fallen warriors to Valhalla. Returning to Persephone and Hecate, both represent nature and the divine feminine, though Persephone is in what many refer to as the 'Maiden' form while Hecate, as a patroness of childbirth, Magick and the wilderness, is in the 'Mother' or possibly 'Crone' form. This is a simple case of two characters being assigned to the same energy in different states, one positive, the other negative. A third deity could be linked in to the first two, the mother of both forms, Demeter. Demeter is still young and fertile, and births both Persephone and Hecate (who we can assume are one and the same). She is the one who traverses the boundary between life and death and thus helps to maintain cosmic balance. She is the one who effectively initiates Persephone into womanhood and therefore is synonymous with the 'Mother' archetype. This Maiden, Mother, Crone trinity is one seen throughout many pagan cultures, and a similar trinity can be applied to masculine deities also (though I like to use the Native American terms of Brave, Warrior and Chief in place of their feminine equivalents). This system can also apply to Artemis as the Maiden moon deity, Selene as the Mother moon deity who falls for a human, with Hecate again as the archetypal Crone figure as she too is associated with the moon. On the masculine side, one could say that Dionysus represents the Brave, the young man reveling in care-free youth, Aries is the Warrior form for obvious reasons, and Hades can represent the Chief form as the Dark half or 'negative twin' of Zeus, for we must all go through the journey of life, struggle and death, with which we become the ascended masters of our own being. by looking at each of the deities closely and finding those traits which allow them to fit into this archetypal triad, one can build a picture of which Deities are attributed to which cosmic energy and how they interact and link to one another. This practice has helped me understand my archetypes on a much deeper level and allowed me to become self empowered in all aspects of my life.

Confused? Good. It gets worse. Not only are the cosmic archetypes threefold in nature as demonstrated, but each has a masculine and feminine equivalent, though I prefer to think of them as other halves, forces of opposing nature to bring balance to each of the three aspects of the trinity. to explain this I will use the example of Aries and Aphrodite. If Dionysus is the 'Brave' to Aries' Warrior then Aphrodite's 'Maiden' form would be Athena who is chased and ostentatious, and therefore Aries' 'Chief' form as Hades would be mirrored in Persephone who is the Maiden of a different threefold system culminating in Hacate, the dark half of Persephone. If the 'Crone/Chief' aspects represent the ultimate masculine and feminine archetypes then this brings us back to the idea of Chaos as the primary source of all things, for both Hades and Hecate embody death and rebirth, returning to Chaos to rise again in another form. This is just one way of looking at one pantheon; the primary feminine trinity of the Norse tradition would be Freya as the Maiden, Frigga as the Mother and Hel as the crone to balance the masculine trinity of Thorr as the Brave, Tyr as the Warrior and Woden as the Chief. Freya is equivalent to Persephone, young, beautiful, a chased nature Goddess abducted into Jottunheim, Frigga is the Norse parallel to Demeter, a wife, a mother, a self determined Goddess ambiguously associated with the Earth, and Hel is synonymous with Hecate, a Goddess of life, death and rebirth. Thorr flaunts his masculine sexual energy and revels in youth as does Dionysus, Tyr is a warrior God embodying fire in same way as Aries, and Woden is a God of wisdom and death mirroring Hades. Woden is husband to Freya in the same way that Hades marries Persephone. The 'Chief' marries the 'Maiden' who then evolves and surpasses the Chief on her way to her ultimate Crone form. This, on a microcosmic level in human,s explains why females mature faster physically than males, as well as both mentally and emotionally, for the Maiden is equal to the Chief, and therefore the Crone is beyond the chief in her understanding of her own divinity.

Now I will add another layer to this Perennial Pantheist cake and link all of the above to the Abrahamic tradition. Through emanations, some angels in the heavenly hierarchy are lesser forms of one of the seven creating angels, or Elohim mentioned in Genesis and the Book of Enoch. I like to think of these seven creating angels or Gods as 'Oversouls' which envelope other angels which when combined, make up the overarching angel. Let us start with Archangel Michael. Michael is said to be the Hand of God, and slays the beast in Revelations using his sword, the Sword of God, which is a title given to the Seraphim, Shamael. Shamael is confused with the Devil for he is an angel of death who falls to Earth along with Shamyaza, but who later repents and is accepted back into the Heavenly Host. There is an intrinsic link between Michael and the Devil, which Christianity wrongly referred to as Lucifer or the Light Bearer, which has led many to believe that Michael and Lucifer were twin brothers. Another name attributed to the angel Lucifer is 'Lumiel', which from what little is written appears to be a female angel and could thus be seen as the female half of Lucifer. If Lucifer and Shamael are mixed up, and Lumiel is the female half of Lucifer, then she is thus the female half of Shamael, the Fire and the Light which are of the same essence. One interpretation of the early Judeo-Christian writings is that Lucifer is in fact not a single angel, but rather a title given to the union between Shamael and Lumiel, who are the masculine and feminine halves which make up Michael, which may explain the assumption that Michael and Lucifer were twins. Though this analysis, one begins to see how Michael is a threefold entity consisting of Shamael (Fire of the Lord), Lumiel (Light of the Lord) and Michael (beloved of the Lord). Because Judeo-Christian tradition was largely lost due to patriarchal focus on the doctrines and the conflicts which this created, there are not many female angels mentioned in the old scriptures, certainly not enough to build the same masculine to feminine mirror of trinities as seen in the Greek and Norse traditions, but it does tie in quite nicely when one considers that Michael was seen as the chief of the angels in the same way that Woden was the Allfather to the Norse, and Hades (as the dark half of Zeus) was the King of the Greek Gods. There are links everywhere, one simply needs to know where to look and what to look for. Use your intuition, it's the most powerful tool you have. If you are unsure about a particular deity and its associations, look at the Element it is linked with, the Planet that it rules, the Zodiac signs in which it dwells, the symbolism with which it is depicted, descriptions of its deeds, duties, temperament, or even look to its relationship to other Gods which you may have more information on to fill in the gaps. This is how I have built my panthoen, how I have chosen my masculine and feminine archetypes and guiding deities, and it's worked pretty well for me so far. Experiment, mix, expand your studies to all traditions and see what links you can find to your favourite Gods, Goddesses, Angels, or whatever you feel comfortable calling them. You may discover things about yourself which you never knew you could know! Good luck!

"You must understand that there is more than one path to the top of the mountain." - Miyamoto Musashi, Go Rin No Sho.

Namaste,

Enki Endymion. O(