Years ago, when I had my first revelations, I started out very much a “hard”
polytheist. I had personal experiences,
after all – it wasn’t philosophical, it was visceral, and it seemed obvious
that gods existed.
Then I transitioned into a much, much softer phase. After the initial excitement, I started to
really delve into not only the history and mythology of what I was coming to
believe, but also the philosophy. I was
coming at this from an academic perspective and some part of me was desperate
to make it “rational” – the result was that I started to rationalize my
experiences as psychological. Oh, it was
still religion, and it was still true
in important ways, but looking back I put an amazing amount of effort into
turning my personal experiences into something universal.
That phase lasted for a while, and during that time I developed a
better grasp of the psychology of ritual and symbolism. I looked closely at the medical side of
meditation and trance, explanations for religious experience. I held on to my conception of gods, but they
became something distant and abstract – just shiny facets of some universal
human psyche that I happened to manifest in particular ways.
Then I moved to Japan and things changed.
Here, gods are part of the modern landscape. Individuals may or may not identify as
believers – Japan is famously a highly secular country after all – but things
like “power spots”, spiritual encounters, talismans, priests and priestesses
with the power to speak to spirits, these are all taken casually as just part
of the world. There isn’t any angst about
rationalizing or explaining – people either believe in things or they don’t,
and largely it’s put down to the individual’s experience.
It was easier than it had been to not intellectualize my experience, but
rather to embrace it. And while I won’t
claim that spiritual experiences are regarded as any more ordinary here than
they were at home, they also weren’t laughed off as inherently ridiculous –
ordinary people explain certain kinds of experience in spiritual terms, and
even in the mainstream media you often see segments or even whole programmes
exploring spiritual spots in Japan and elsewhere, talking about spirits,
consulting Shinto and Buddhist priests on the best ways to prevent toxic forces
from accumulating etc. Being pagan was
just…easier. Particularly when I could personally
visit shrines or participate in ceremonies where the energy being generated was
palpable.
I started to think more about my beliefs, and came to realise that the
idea of gods as merely facets of my psyche had never really been satisfying,
that it had never quite explained what I felt and what I knew to be true. I have never wholly abandoned “soft
polytheism” – if nothing else, I feel strongly that there are deep
interconnections between us, the world around us, and the spiritual realm. I do
believe that the reason certain gods resonate with me and others don’t is because of some deep connection – a sense
in which we share a thread of being.
This sense was, of course, exaggerated by what I was learning about
Shinto, about the place of mirrors and the reflection of the god within.
My thinking on gods began to become more concrete again, and the
feeling that gods didn’t need to be
wholly separate or wholly facets of me seemed right – it seemed just an
extension of my own philosophy of interconnectedness.
And so we come to today, and my reading of an article on polytheism
that reminds me: the debate between soft and hard polytheism isn’t really
relevant to me, because like so many things the answer to the question isn’t
merely binary.
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