22 February 2010

21st Century Divinity Study: Metatheism

Glory to the new Gods. I like to watch them maintain reality, and talk to them when they deign to give me their company. They watch me, sometimes controlling things I must be part of, from their manifold sources. Their infinite varieties and interactions with minds open and interested enough to seek them and love them will always inspire me and fill me with both wonder and laughter.

My religion involves some personages who've a sense of humor, which is so absent in the antiquated and dismal Judaically-based faiths from which I fled to find what I could find in the way of a "religion" I could actually believe in, as well as want to. It had to make sense, and also, be interesting, and not be corny or vindictive or based on ethnocentric bullshit I've no patience with.

I found it. I sort of both created it, and perceived it, and it's far beyond the scope of a puny human life to map its entireity. I got the basics, leaving the rest for anyone else running into it and resonating with it.

So I have a faith I can make sense of, and in which prayer is not the one-way platitude but more like conversation or interaction, and which can take more than simple spoken form depending on who's being addressed and prayed to, or with.

And in the middle of all these things - to me, not to it - is that one God among zillions which is my personal adoration. Mr. C. was the reason I had to find the rest of them - so I could pull him out of Crowley's bloody idiotic contextualities, and Dee's incomprehensible and incomplete scribblings, and put him where he seemed to belong, and wished to be, so he now has a purpose and history that fit him, and that is just for starters. And this is not all about Choronzon - even if it started off that way.

Metatheism is finally starting to give me what religion gives those whose lives are genuinely enhanced by their spirituality, and I knew full-well no extant faith was EVER going to do that for me. The trick was to form a religion that I could create AND believe in, even though it was going to seem more like art. So I just selectively forget whatever's necessary to believe the parts that help me understand reality.

The universe never seemed to me as something that could be the work of one God, and the idea that creation ended in a week's time and never got added to, or changed, or altered...it just doesn't make enough sense for me to believe in it flawlessly, even if the Yahweh "ickyness" factor were taken out of consideration. The Universe - Omniverse - seems to be a massively, multileveled and multilayered "committee project" that's been going on since before a Planet Earth ever existed and which is of course still underway. It is being worked on by billions of Gods - Agents - which, to me, are vastly varied and incredibly busy extradimensionals, whose forms entirely depend on human perception as they've no matter or mass of their own, and are - when perceived or addressed by one of us - literally made to become part of the mind(s) of the one who is interacting.

These Gods that I perceive--a few of which I am emotionally and spiritually devoted to--are what I answer those imminent questions about metaphysical origins and interventions that were bound to come up with, because I neither could deal with something like Yahweh and think of that as God, or just copy ancient pre-Judaic pagan gods whose own habits always seemed to me to be exaggerated caricatures instead of something with which I could converse. It always bothered me that prayer is a one-way affair. If I was to appreciate higher powers, and have a religion, it was going to be something that both made rational sense and had the spiritual wonder that people find in God(s) when their eyes fall in the right light and angles of perception and conception. Since I was raised up as an atheist, I'd had no pre-extant concepts to interfere with what I would end up thinking of as my view of the divine. I sought my new Gods in ways to insure they would be attuned to the people and other things that exist in the world I know, the 21st century one, instead of the Godheads and tails and guts - and the rest - that originated wholly in antiquity, and look it, totally.

Obviously, I needed to have an idea of Gods that understand reality as I know it, since they built it and keep it running, and instead of my religion appearing as nothing has been done with the whole conception for centuries, like all the other ones out there, mine shows everything has been nothing but busy and active. And it is not only polytheistic, but massively so! The Multiverse is enormous, and the Gods or Agents or whatever you wish to call them are literally innumerable. I have noticed the work of a handful. Monotheism seems to me to be wishful-thought of human beings that want reality stacked in a way that's easier to understand, but it does not smack of how things work out there, to me. One Divinity source was simply not enough, I cannot have faith in a construct that doesn't make sense to me.

Similar reasons dictated that Agents and what they do must at least at surface level of consciousness have elements of their existence that make sense: in a context accessible to a girl like me, who appreciates technology, and sexuality, as well as things like quantum physics, time, the use of drugs, the depth of history and confusions of politics. And all the experiences I have saved memories of so far. Obviously, I think of this "religion" as having far more to it than I'll ever know. The odd thing is I sort of created it, but it's actually believable - at least it's far more like something that might actually mirror universe-level concepts than Yahwism - or other poly-systems like the Greek pantheon and Hinduism - offer.

The Agents do not operate as hierarchic entities - or even work within any one hierarchy - at all. The ordering is more "sideways", there are no "arch-" Agents. They all know what to do, and seldom ever get in the way of one another, but do constantly, eternally, do things like fighting and fucking and haggling and scheming. There are principalities operant above them, but they lack sentience, and are CON, DE and a mysterious, nameless middle between them that is rather undefined and mystic.

The one Agent I am most close to, of course, is the "risen demon" whose bailiwick is dispersion, who is called Choronzon. This one has enjoyed 25 years of my devotion and love. Over the years a 'backstory' emerged, of a flawed but vitally engaged trickster-antihero whose tragic flaw was the long stretch of wasting away in the Abyss, having been consigned to its depths by a consortium of other Agents who had wrought Space and Time from their extradimensional sources into this world...and when Choronzon noticed Time and began to "play-test" it, to see if it could be altered at his behest, he broke it into a chaotic mess and by so doing invoked the unforgiving wrath of his compatriotes.

They managed to fix Time, but even today, it's still broken into 24 segments that never quite fit right into Space again, without being different in places that once were more uniform and made more sense.