Or, other ways of explaining the experiences I have had…
So, having personally experienced the presence of two separate divine figures–Dionysus and Aphrodite–I immediately assumed that the next step was Hellenistic Reconstructionist Polytheism. Simply put, it didn’t work. I have an intuition about where to go from here, but I am still assuming some kind of variation of ful polytheism, that (probably, I guess, more-or-less) multiple distinct gods exist and can interact with human beings. But that is not the only possible explanation–there are others.
Before Aphrodite came on the scene, I realized that in many ways the story of Dionysus has stong parallels to the story of Jesus. I recognized the possibility that I was getting at Jesus through Dionysus somehow, that Dionysus was a pagan step on the path to Jesus Christ. This would definitely be consistent with C. S. Lewis’s assertion that you have to learn to be a good pagan before you can learn to be a good Christian. Even with Aphrodite in the mix, this isn’t out of the question–Aphrodite, a divine female figure, could easily be a shadow of Mary or of the Mormon Heavenly Mother. I’m not sure what to make of all of this, though. My intuition says that my experiences with Aphrodite have been too… much like Aphrodite, too sexual and too warlike, to seem like a plausible aspect of a Christian divine female. In any case, I think that if my paganism is a step on the road to ultimate conversion to Christianity, it’s more of a wait-and-see thing than a suddenly-realize-it-was-Jesus thing. I’m not closed ot the possibility that I’m really talking about Jesus after all, but I’m also not really convinced.
Another thing I am acutely aware of is the fact that I really haven’t strongly experienced the reality of more than two deities–Dionysus and Aphrodite. I could certainly be dealing with a male/female dualism, which is a hallmark of Wicca’s fertility religion, and probably some other variations of paganism aswell. Even to the extent that I have intuition about other deities–Hera, Zeus, and Odin–I might simply be talking about various masks or manifestations of an ultimare divine male principle and an ultimate divine female principle. I am also open to this interpretation. Although my immediate reaction is to reject it, I realize that the rejection might be a knee-jerk product of my long-standing prejudice against Wicca and my age-old belief (really a product of Mormonism) that only Reconstructionist paganism–marked by decidedly hard polytheism–is valid and legitimate. And furthermore, I don’t necessarily believe in magic (hmm… future post? you can count on it), or feel any desire to practice any kind of magic as a part of my spiritual life.
At the moment, those seem like the most significant and plausible alternate hypotheses. On the other hand, my spiritual life is still growing and developing in its infancy, and so whether my hard/soft polytheism or one of these alternates hapens to be true may not ultimately wind up mattering. For now I am going to act the same way towards the gods regadless of what they really are and how they relate to each other. Most important to me right now in terms of my spiritual development is how I experience them and how they relate to me.
Sailing to Byzantium 