Pagan Phenomenology I: What is a god?

The most important questions tend to be the most overlooked.

This is part 1 of a 3-part series on my view of a pagan religious system heavily influenced by the works of Collin Cleary, Husserl, Heidegger, and others. Part 1 will describe phenomenology and how it can apply to paganism. Part 2 will set up a hierarchy of being and transition into Heidegger's contributions to ontology. Part 3 will suggest practical advice to pagans for daily activities and the application of the worldview.

Introduction

What is a god? For any practicioner or entertainer of paganism this appears to be the most important and immediate question, but it turns out to be rather frequently overlooked. What is that thing or being which you make offerings or oaths to? What did your ancestors venerate since the dawn of conciousness? What is to be done about that understanding? Paganism is many things, but worship of a plenitude of gods is its foremost quality. Answering this, satisfactorily, is of the utmost importance.

It appears that the most common answer is the simplest and most direct - a god is some supernatural being which has power over natural forces. I have heard others describe them in even more esoteric fashions, such as “frequencies”, or “archetypes” of the Jungian fashion. Evidently there is not only disagreement here, but more worryingly, confusion. People don’t know what to do with “a frequency”, and a supernatural mirror-image of what is already perfectly explainable by a materialist framework is entirely redundant and pointless.

What I will present is, I argue, a tenable answer to this rather direct question. No doubt it could be expounded upon or refined, but I do believe it has enough intellectual bite to serve as a foundation for a pagan ontology. I will myself be expounding upon and refining a thought from Collin Cleary's Summoning the Gods, which is inspired heavily by the phenomenologists of the 19th & 20th centuries. What is to be described in this series will, hopefully, supply the reader with a worldview necessary to develop a healthy pagan religious attitude.

What is a god?

Phenomenology

First, let me briefly explain phenomenology and its utility to this question.

The dominant philosophical school in the West is empiricism and its ensuing scientism. It places objective knowledge of phenomena external to the mind as the sole desirable item of dialect. It seeks to wash away subjective notions and quantify/qualify only what is external to experience and universal. Phenomenology takes somewhat of the inverse approach: following its roots in idealism, it places subjective internal experience (consciousness) as primary - that the self is self-evident, that the knower is prior to the known - and seeks to create a systematic process in which the subjective experience can be objectively studied as a science. The phenomenological system starts with experience itself, reducing it down to “essences” universal to all experiences, and then working outward to the external world. It can be seen as philosophy's version of the scientific method, it espouses a specific process which is built to intake an inquiry and produce replicable, fundamental, truth.

Confused on phenomenology still?

Try this video if you have the time:

There’s a number of reasons why a scientific process of finding objectivity in subjective experience would be of use to pagan religion. For starters paganism is not learned through divine revelation, but is an experiential religion. Knowledge of myths, the gods, and divinity in general is obtained by man from the experience of “being in the world”. So, paganism itself is working from experience outwards and not from external (empirical) input inwards. Secondly, establishing an objective understanding of experience removes the modern pagan tendency towards relativistic modes of thought.

Regional Essences

The objective “things” which the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl sought to extract from subjective experience were “regional essences” - phenomena which are irreducible in experience and therefore universal to all experiences. Once the phenomenological method has sifted away all of the subjective baggage, a regional essence is what remains.

For example, perform the high IQ task of imagining an apple in empty space. Suspend all external phenomenon except for the object at hand - this suspension is known as epoché. Now, attempt to add or remove qualities from the apple to determine if the quality is “essential” to the apple's being, it’s apple-ness. This is known as “eidetic reduction”, from the Platonic “eidos”. Your apple is probably red, why not green? But not purple. It has a crunch and then pulpy-sweet bite, or maybe it’s gone rotten. But it wouldn’t taste of flesh, that’s no apple! We could do this endlessly, that’s one flaw of phenomenology, but the point of the example here is to orient ourselves with the essence of apple-ness. An apple can’t be an apple if it lacks the essence of being an apple, and so, we’d arrive at the fundamental and universal experience of an apple.

U leik?

The Gods as Regional Essences

Cleary's stroke of genius stems from his identification of these regional essences as the gods themselves. In easier to understand terms, he defines the gods as “regions of being”.

We can begin to see the utility of this angle immediately upon application with one particular god as an example.

Chronos is not an image or representation of time, he is not a personal being who simply controls time. Rather, Chronos IS time, further he is the purest and most irreducible form of time. When describing Chronos in myth, one is not appealing to time as it relates to a subjective experience, but the experience of the objective essence of time itself. The same can be said for any god, any region of being. A god is pure φαινόμενον (phainómenon), purely that-which-appears.

You may point out that there exists an infinite number of regional essences in the world, from major concepts like time to minor ones such as apples. You’d be correct - just as there is an infinite number of regions of being, there exists an infinite number of corresponding of gods. This is true to the nature of paganism described by various terms such as “animism”, “polytheism”, or “pantheism” - all of existence is divine, to experience at all is to experience the divine. To quote Alain de Benoist,

“It is not a question of believing in their existence, but of awakening to their presence.” (Thoughts on God, p. 65)

Momentary Gods

Corresponding to this notion that to experience an essence is to experience a god is the work of the philologist Hermann Usener, known for his development of the idea of a “momentary god”. For Usener, the very names of the gods are novel words coined by our ancestors to describe the sudden experience of a god, or regional essence. This sudden experience of divinity left the observer in awe, in a state of religious ecstasy. What was experienced lacked a name to early man, and so we gave it one.

For example, the proto-Germanic þunraz, aka þunor or Thor, quite literally means “thunder”, or “to thunder”. The first word made to describe thunder, as far as the PIE peoples are concerned, was the name of the god of thunder. Other possible examples may include the word for God, dewos or Dyeus, meaning “to illuminate”. Of course Dyeus was originally associated with the sun and sky, but imagery of God revealing himself as a blinding light remain today. One may also allude to a spiritual illumination when in the presence of God.

I must stress the importance of this connection. It reveals something special about the religion of our ancestors, about paganism in general - they did not invent the gods to explain nature, as some might claim. Rather, they experienced gods which were yet unnamed, and invented words to describe such a bizarre experience, the touch of a divine hand. It may even be that language itself is posterior to the experiencing of the gods, and that some of the first words were to communicate the experience of essences to one another.

“These beings do not personify any force of nature, nor do they represent some special aspect of human life; no recurrent trait or value is retained in them and transformed into a mythico-religious image; it is something purely instantaneous, a fleeting, emerging and vanishing mental content, whose objectification and outward discharge produces the image of the “momentary deity.” Every impression that man receives, every wish that stirs in him, every hope that lures him, every danger that threatens him can affect him thus religiously. Just let spontaneous feeling invest the object before him, or his own personal condition, or some display of power that surprises him, with an air of holiness, and the momentary god has been experienced and created.”

Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth

Worshipping a Regional Essence?

Some might contend that what’s proposed here is somehow demystifying the gods into profane concepts for the sake of apologetic intelligibility. After all, consecrating a grove to the All-Father makes more sense than doing so to “the regional essence of frenzy”.

Firstly, this is not trying to explain the gods as something else, especially not in the materialist or Baconian sense - “y is really just x”. What's being shown is exactly what is being experienced from the standpoint of a conscious observer. The task is not to explain away the gods, but to adopt a phenomenological attitude to the gods themselves and the way they disclose themselves to mankind.

Secondly, I believe that this is an element of Judeo-Christian religion still heavily engraved in our psyche which remains to be scrubbed clean. We have already established that our most remote ancestors saw the gods as momentary essences of being. What is being held onto, rather, is the Abrahamic conception of personal beings. The Abrahamic God is not the essence of love, he is a being who is all-loving. The archangel Michael is not a divine representation of war (though, pagan mentalities here persisted after the conversion of Europeans), he is simply a being who is assigned the heavenly duties of a warrior. Saints may be assigned regions of being, such as medicine or craftsmanship, but the gods are the regions “in of themselves”. It is the Abrahamic subversion of pagan values that must go here, not our working definition of a god.

To bring in the works of Iambichlus and Sallust, recall that the point of worship and ritual is to align oneself with the divine (theurgy). From this standpoint, practicing theurgy towards a regional essence doesn’t seem all that strange. By worshipping Odin, one would hope to become more like Odin, to enter a state of frenzy, or contemplate on the Runes. Giving yourself or sacrifice to Odin is giving yourself to the pure essence of frenzy and the experience thereof. Symbols, artifacts, myths, and idols relating to that essence are necessarily called upon as part of worship and ritual.

Closing Thoughts

A simple question of “What is a god, exactly?” may be brushed off with a simple and safe answer. But they do not really drive at the core of the experience of pagan religion, and likely would fall apart under slight criticism. What is given here is more robust. It synthesizes the worldview of the most remote ancients, as evidenced by the genesis of language of the divine, with the modern scientific philosophy of the phenomenologists. A cursory inquiry into neoplatonist thought confirms the same general trajectory.

In future articles, I will show what exactly can be done with this definition beyond philosophy and in regards to a practiced religion.