Here’s a thought that immediately gets sneered at by a great many people in a surprising number of religions: You are under no obligation to devote yourself to “ancient” gods or archetypes. You are free to take inspiration from your own world, here and now, and your spiritual practices can come from new sources and even…*gasp* pop culture.
The fact is a lot of “old” deities can come with a lot of baggage and not really make sense in today’s world. As with many things it’s a matter of perspective.
Let’s say you’re drawn to the Greek goddess Hera. Hera comes from a patriarchal culture that frequently portrays her as a bitter, vengeful, and jealous wife, the embodiment of a dozen icky stereotypes about married (and all) women. But when you meditate on her, or contact her in some other way, you feel her strength and power, her refusal to let her husband’s flagrant infidelity and general rapey-ness go unchallenged. You find in her a modern feminist goddess, not a shrieking shrew.
So which Hera is “right?” If you find something in a deity or archetype that was not part of their ancient cultural makeup, are you still revering that same deity, or something new you’ve made up?
Many, many women perceive Persephone as a Queen and a woman who undergoes the descent into Hades willingly, not a kidnapped little girl being traded between male gods. Many argue that the myth existed in a more powerful form before the Greeks took it and turned her into a passive victim, but at what point does a deity stop being Greek and start being modern? At what point are we projecting our modern values onto something born from a completely different time? Is a sovereign Persephone valid?
If you are not a mythological purist or a historian my answer for you is, “Sure, why not?”
It is my opinion and experience that sometimes Deity comes to you in an inconvenient or weird form. In a lot of ways you can’t control it. If the Goddess is reaching out to you and looks suspiciously like Scarlet Witch from the MCU, and you vibe with that, well, why not work with her in that guise? If the way you envision magical energy is as the Force, why deny it? If the warrior traditions and mythos of the DS-9 Klingons gets your bat’leth buzzing, who am I to say you’re just “making stuff up?”
Psst…we’re all making stuff up to one degree or another. That’s beside the point. The point is that the sacred will come to you in ways that make sense to both of you – even if it takes you a while to figure out why exactly, or what that particular vision means to you. It may be meant to combat a stereotype or help a particular part of yourself evolve.
Not every deity or teacher is going to stay with you for life. Some come to us to show us something particular, to help us through trauma or processing an event, and then fade out so Someone Else can come in. We’re not all dedicated to a single face of Deity or even to a single pantheon. You may end up with a Goddess for every day of the week, or you may adore one your whole religious career.
That said, if you find yourself drawn to the spirits or deities of an existing culture (especially a historically oppressed culture, like most Indigenous tribes the world over), PLEASE do your homework, and consider very strongly whether “borrowing” one of those concepts or beings is okay for you. If you are a white person and you decide you just can’t bond with any deity except White Buffalo Woman you need to be prepared for the fact that you will be challenged on it – and rightly so.
There are thousands of faces of divinity and rituals to celebrate that divinity. There is no need to take from oppressed and closed cultures. Even those that aren’t necessarily closed, like Hinduism, should require you to respect that culture, the history of the deity, and the way They are revered by actual living people. There is a difference between appreciation and appropriation, but that difference relies on respect and education, which is YOUR responsibility. Other cultures don’t owe you a pass because you “have a Native friend.”
The cool thing is we don’t have to do any of that! Really consider what it is you’re trying to accomplish and how you could get that same result using tools that aren’t the spiritual property of people who have been victims of genocide, those very traditions ground beneath a colonizer’s boot. I bet you can find a way. It doesn’t have to have come from another existing tradition to work. It doesn’t have to be ancient to be valid.
The benefit of our form of cheerful syncretism is that we have an opportunity to create all new practices, traditions, and even gods rather than clinging to the old. But even if you are working with ancient deities from well-documented cultures like Greece, research and study are still paramount.
You may have gotten the idea that I believe gods are just archetypes, but that’s definitely not true. They are archetypes to a degree, but archetypes with centuries of history, myth, worship, and power behind them. After all, you were inspired to connect with that deity – that inspiration came from somewhere, right?
My experience has been that Deity is reaching back to us through those archetypes, and in that sense they are very real and often behave differently than they would if we just made them up out of nothing. We’re tapping into something very old and often very opinionated. Even when working with adaptations of modern and popular culture keep in mind that there is energy behind them, and often they hook into ancient archetypes and energies because that’s what humans are spiritually drawn to.
The gods are not just faces and names and a list of correspondences. Deity as a universal force is alive; it changes and dances like any other living thing.
So when you reach out to the universe and she reaches back, whatever she looks or sounds like, take some time and find out everything you can about that aspect of Deity, then proceed with both mirth and reverence. And be sure and ask her name; it’s only polite.
