Guest Post: Reimagining Our Relationships With Divine Entities
“Doozy” is a pantheistic hedgewitch on the east coast. She enjoys connecting with magical energies through every day actions, radical activism, and intuitive engagement.
I’m very excited to share this guest post with you. The below essay centers Doozy’s lived experience with an autoimmune disorder and how it informs her relationship to her own body as a way of critically examining relationship-building and power dynamics within establish cosmologies. It dives into the reciprocal relationship between deity and devotee and asks us to deconstruct the idea of “worship” in a way that acknowledges the way both ends of the relationship interact with and depend on one another.
Being in a time of upheaval, everything is up for revisioning. We have been reckoning with our common cultural ideas about health, power, resource distribution, and so much more. While we’re at it, why take our spiritual relationships for granted?
The mainstream way of relating to gods and like entities includes treating them as authorities, or as upper class beings to revere or worship, or seeing them as akin to monarchs to win the favor of. We are told to send our prayers to them and hope they bestow what we need. Or it is supposed that we should make offerings to them in exchange for their benevolence. In so many ways, our culture acts as though they are powerful and comparatively we have much less power.
But when we step back and remove the idea that it is inevitable, do we really consider that dynamic to be acceptable? In what other realm would we see it as reasonable to have such an overlord without so much as having a vote on who it is and what they can do? (Yes I know that level of power differential is present in our world, and still few of us who can see and acknowledge it approve of it.)
For context, I come at this question from the lens of a pantheist and animist. When I personally say that, I mean that I view all things as macrocosms and microcosms of interconnected and overlapping systems, such that I am to divine beings as my cells are to me.
Witches often say “as above, so below”, and why would it not be true as well that “as below, so above”. Having an autoimmune disorder, I am keenly aware of how just a few small cells can bring my entire being to my knees. I have one kind of sacred power, which allows me to move my body, change my breathing pattern, think purposeful thoughts, and control what goes into my body. That does not make me the all-powerful being over my cells, who have a different and also very sacred power. No matter how hard I try or what I will to happen or how much neurofeedback training I do, I will never ever have the power to move a specific sodium ion through a cell membrane, or precisely decide the neurotransmitter release at a specific synapse. Only my cells have that sacred power. Now zooming back out, the entities we regard as divine have sacred powers to move energies and influence patterns, but they will never be able to pick a flower for my neighbor or write my congresscritter. Only I have that sacred power. Must we act as though that is not sacred magic as well?
So what would it look like if we viewed our powers not as different quantities, but as different forms sacred to different micro and macrocosms? What would it look like if our “inter-cosm” relations did not embody classist dynamics? How would we move differently if we saw ourselves as equal partners with other cosms, micro and macro? What would change if we approached other macro and microcosms as co-conspirators? How would we be challenged to be a better member of this group project of continuously creating the universe than we have been? In which ways can we envision and embody justice and liberation in these relationships? I suppose the answers to all of that is for us to build together!
