Most Traditions, or "Trads," of the Wiccan religion
are duo-theistic, worshipping both the Great Goddess of Wicca and Her male
consort and counterpart, the Horned God. Some are polytheistic, acknowledging
many goddesses and gods, but most often the "many" in these traditions,
even while they are being worshipped or invoked individually or in familial
pantheons, are recognized to be goddess and god forms reflecting specific
aspects of the larger Great Goddess and God of Wicca referred to more
affectionately as the Lord and Lady. These duo-theistic traditions
almost universally declare, as a core point of doctrine, the absolute equality
of the Goddess and the God, their perfect balance in Nature, and their
complete mutuality and inter-dependence in the generation of all life.12
But when you study the literature rising out of
these traditions in greater detail, it becomes readily apparent that this
acknowledgment of the God's role in Nature and in Wiccan practice usually
amounts to little more than canonical lip-service. The God and his
equality are central theses of standard Wiccan theology, but in practice,
the Goddess clearly rules with lavish inequality in the hearts and lives
of most individual Wiccans. Wiccan books (this one included) almost
ubiquitously devote vastly disproportionate page-counts to loving explor-ation
of the Great Goddess of Wicca, to Her Nature and history, Her mythologies
and magicks, to methods of approaching Her and of entering upon Her moonlit
path. These same books, if they mention the Horned God at all, usually
do so in a few summary paragraphs or pages, heavily quoting one another,
instead of doing original research or pursuing fresh thealog-ical directions,
and revealing in the process very little about concepts of male deity in
Wicca beyond the obvious hesitance of the book's author and, presumably,
of it's readers, as well to address the topic at all.
Roughly half of all living creatures on the Earth
are male. We have already acknowledged in this work the existence
and power of male-gendered super-conscious planetary beings (Mercury, Mars,
Jupiter etc.). All of the major sabbats of the Wiccan religion are
solar in nature, marking significant events in the seasonal course of the
Earth's relationship with the masculine sun. The Horned God really
is central to any complete understanding and practice of the Wiccan religion
so why the hesitancy, the difficulty knowing Him, in adequately thinking
through and describing the nature of His existence, and most importantly,
in building one-on-one relationships of intimacy equal to those Wiccans
routinely and ecstatically experience with the Goddess? The answer
to this question has at least three distinct facets.
Part of the problem, as some Wiccans have honestly
appraised it, and as our critics routinely charge, lies in a certain psychological
discomfort many Wiccans personally feel toward all things masculine, a
likely result of Wicca's dispropor-tionate appeal to those very people
women, children, gays and lesbians, pacifists, poets, Leftists,
Feminists of either gender, etc. who have historically been most disenfranchised
from, disempowered under, and victimized by the last several thousand years
of Western rule by patriarchal Middle Eastern religions and the political
structures they inspire. It should not surprise us to find that those who
embrace Wicca as a gentle, natural antidote to the brutality and power-mongering
of patriarchal religions and governments have difficulty sorting out masculine
concepts of divinity in their own terms. While it is not thealogically
correct within most Wiccan traditions to do so, it has certainly proved
easier for many to bask in their personal loving relationship with the
Goddess, while simply avoiding the question of male deity altogether.
A second contributing factor is cultural (as opposed
to the personal response to cultural influences described above).
European culture has been dominated by Christianity, and its rigid concepts
of male deity, for more than a thousand years. America was founded
by, and has never fully escaped the spiritual shackles of, Europe's most
puritanical and narrow-minded Christian elements. Since Wicca was
born in England in the 1950's, and has since gathered the majority of its
followers from the European and North American continents, it is something
of a fact of happenstance that most contemporary practition-ers of the
Wiccan religion were either raised in Christian homes, or were at least
heavily exposed to Christian concepts of deity through other cultural influences
like books, music, TV, movies, schools, etc.
For the last thousand years, in Europe and then
America, the Christian concept of an all-male triune god has so dominated
theological thinking that even those not raised in a Christian church or
family usually have great difficulty conceiving of masculine-gendered deity
in any non-Christian form especially in a form as wholly foreign to the
Middle Eastern concept of a punishing, wrathful god as is the playful,
loving, wildly sexual Horned God of Wicca.
One result of this fact, played out over the first
fifty years of Wicca's evolution as a modern public religion, has been
the almost forceful redirection of Wicca's attention toward study of the
Goddess exclusively, and away from any attempt to equally fathom the Horned
God. In our work to define our religion to ourselves and to the public
at large, we have been free to define our Goddess in any terms we wish,
to research Her mythology, script Her rituals, explore Her reality and
experience Her direct presence without any significant argument against
or contradiction of our beliefs by the larger culture because the larger
Western culture simply has no concept of female deity to compete with ours.
This fact has allowed the Great Goddess of Wicca opportunity to offer a
pure revelation of Herself to modern Wiccans. Christians have attacked
and persecuted Wiccan individuals and groups, for sure, but in our internal
thealogical conversation concerning the Nature of the Great Goddess, Christianity
has had nothing substantive to offer, and has had little or no influence
in shaping our understanding of Her Nature.
Wiccan efforts to define our God, on the other
hand, have met with massive cultural resistance. Christians have
long believed themselves justified in identifying our Horned God with their
own god of evil, Satan 13 a false identification they have used to powerful
effect in leading the uneducated to unfairly despise and fear us, and to
actively resist education efforts on our part. Even those who are
not effected by such mindless propaganda, and who treat our religion and
individual Wiccans with sympathy and respect, often have difficulty understanding
the our God is not "G-O-D," the Judeo-Christian Jehovah or Yahweh, Jesus,
or even the Islamic Allah, as these are the only personifications of male
deity or deity of any kind to which they have ever been exposed.
A useful tool for helping us to understand this
dilemma is the Hindu belief that there are many paths to enlightenment,
some direct, with others designed to reach the same goal by longer, more
circuitous routes. One long route to enlighten-ment, though one said
to lead as surely to it as any of the others, is the path of "Neti, Neti,"
or, literally, "Not this, not this." By this path, enlightenment
is reached by the systematic elimination of all that is not enlightenment.
"Is this it?" the practitioner asks him or herself. "No, not this,
not this..." By a lifelong process of such elimination, it is believed
that, eventually, only enlightenment will remain, and by this path, be
achieved.
The larger Western culture's lack of any real Goddess
concept has freed us to explore and define Her Nature as we see fit, without
significant interference or "cultural noise" to obscure Her emergent revelation.
Not so, the Horned God. Our struggle to define and incorporate male
deity into Wicca has from the start been, and continues to be, burdened
by this circuitous process of "Neti, Neti." Rather than being free
to define our God as He is, we are most often left, in the fury of defending
our beliefs and ourselves against Christian (and Islamic, and to a lesser
extent, Jewish) attack, to merely insist upon what He is not the Wiccan
God is not Jehovah, is not Satan, is not Rambo or the Marlborough Man or
any of a zillion other two-dimensional, macho Western male stereo-types.
He does not hate or oppress women, or demand that they belong to Him as
possessions or submit to His power. He is not cruel, or evil, or
a perverted eater of babies. He is not this, not this...
The third contributing factor in the lack of knowledge
and understanding of the Horned God among Wiccans arises from certain concrete
facts of His own Nature. The God is, by nature, hard to know because,
here on Earth, our view of Him is necessarily obscured by the reality of
our existence as cells within the body of a female-gendered super-conscious
planetary being. If the Earth were male, our situation might well
be reversed we might experience the God directly and intimately, but
have difficulty conceiving the Goddess. It only becomes possible
to understand why this should be so when we view the Wiccan religion from
a cosmic perspective, and the Earth as a unique individual being within
the physical cosmos, with Her own path of spiritual evolution to work out
that is separate from our own.
Jungian psychology teaches that every human being,
whether male or female, is born containing in their psyches all of the
archetypes pertinent to both genders, and that through biological and cultural
influences, the female archetypes in women become fully developed, and
the masculine archetypes likewise in individual men (in healthy, self-aware
adults, anyway). In both genders, the contrasexual archetypes remain
largely undeveloped or underdeveloped. They do not disappear or cease
to exist, but rather, they remain buried in the unconscious, existing in
a timeless, changeless, two-dimensional state, there "constellating" together
into an inner opposite-gendered "personality" referred to in men as the
anima, and in women as the animus. The Jungian path to balanced,
healthy human development, or "individuation," consists at least in part
in the conscious development of the contrasexual archetypes, in a man's
"getting in touch with his feminine side" and in a woman's embrace of her
masculine self.
Following the Hermetic injunction "As Above, So
Below," we must then consider that, if this scenario is true for human
beings, it likely represents a universal pattern within Nature, and is
therefore true as well for the Earth, and for all beings living within
and making up the body of the Great Cosmic Goddess of Wicca. The
Goddess is immediate and clear and compelling to us, while the God is unclear
and distant and difficult for us to understand or know well in any practical
way, because the female-gendered Earth in which we live and move and have
our being contains within Her super-conscious planetary psyche a set of
fully-developed, mature feminine archetypes, while Her masculine archetypes
lie dormant, undeveloped and dangerously two-dimensional within Her unconscious.
The vast majority of male deity concepts to be
found in all human religions and not just the Middle Eastern brands,
but in pagan religions as well, i.e. the Greco-Roman or Norse pantheons,
etc. are far less re-flections of the Great God of Wicca in His fullness
than they are expressions of the Earth's animus14, of the constellated,
under-developed "masculine side" of this one tiny planet residing "...on
the insignificant edge of a minor galaxy nowhere near the center of anything."
To make matters worse, it would appear that the Earth may well, for some
thousands of years, have been, animus possessed.
According to Jungian analysts, when a woman fails
to develop her buried masculine qualities, her personality is apt to be
periodically taken over or "possessed" by the immature "boy tyrant" residing
invisibly within her psyche, so that she appears opinionated, argumentative
or domineer-ing to others, though she will seldom think of herself that
way.
Taking the cosmic viewpoint of the Earth as a living
being working out Her own spiritual evol-ution toward union with the Great
Cosmic Goddess of Wicca, we gain tremendous insight if we consider the
(in geologic time, anyway) rather brief and recent patriarchal period in
human religion and culture, as expressed in the wide and rapid spread of
opinionated, argumentative and domineering Middle Eastern religions15 and
the social systems that have arisen based on their beliefs and principles,
as a possible (even likely) bout, on the Earth's part, with animus possession
just as the 20th Century "rebirth of the goddess" via the spread of Wicca
and other feminine religious and cultural expressions can be benefic-ially
viewed as the fruit of Her contemporary struggle to regain balance.
In this view, to the extent that our human concepts of male deity may be
tainted by the Earth's brief struggle with animus-possession, it's easy
to see that, for all the painful oppression and persecution of women and
the sad denigration of the Divine Feminine perpetrated by male-deity-dominated
religions in the past three millennia, we may well have been experiencing
a mere "local phenomena," a temporary imbalance taking place in the psyche
of the Earth that tells us almost nothing about the Great Cosmic God of
Wicca in His fullness. Sexless, violent, misogynistic, judgmental
gods do not in any way accurately reflect His true Nature rather, they
are more likely to mirror an imbalance in the Earth's development of, and
relationship with, Her own contrasexual mascul-ine self.
This is a critical distinction to make, and it
is worth saying again for clarity: The gods of patriarchal religion
Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, Jesus etc.16 reveal NOTHING to us about the
true nature of cosmic masculine deity. They are embodiments of dangerously
undeveloped or underdeveloped masculine archetypes residing in the unconscious
psyche of the living Earth, and as such, the maint-enance of their worship,
and thus of their egregores, in their current forms represents a major
roadblock, not only to the spiritual evolution of the Earth, but to that
of the Human species as a whole, and of every individual, as well.
For all of these reasons, from the personal to
the planetary, it is, in reality, simply far more difficult for human beings
to gain an undistorted view of masculine deity at this particular time
in history than it is to interact with the Great Goddess through Her accurate
reflection in the developed feminine psyche of the living Earth, and the
goddess-forms that communicate that reflection to Humanity.
One of the truly unique strengths of Wicca in this
regard, even over and above other pagan religions, has turned out to have
been exactly the hesitancy described at the beginning of this section to
pin the God down in Earthly, human terms, to lay claim to a concrete knowledge
of His Nature in its fullness that no one really has or can expect to acquire
under present conditions. Whether it has been a result of thealogical
wisdom on our part, of blind, dumb luck, or of a courage-deficit in addressing
personally uncom-fortable issues, our process of spiritual "Neti, neti..."
regarding the God has served us well.
It has revealed that even our own most cherished
images of the God (Pan, Cernnunos, Thor, Amen-Ra, etc.) may well be woefully
tainted by the Earth's unbalanced psychic condition, and by that condition's
effect on the ancestral cultures that have passed these god-forms down
to us. It has revealed to us that, while the pagan god-forms we have
inherited from our ancestors surely contain clues to knowing Him especially
those that herald back to ages prior to the patriarchal animus-possession
of the Earth the unadulterated truth of the Horned God's Nature remains,
for the moment, beyond our earthbound conception, lying in its fullness
only in His more developed manifest-ations in the cosmos beyond planet
Earth.
And finally, it has revealed to us that, here on
Earth, male deity is very much a work in progress, one whose completion
will not be won by simple decisions to settle for this image of the God,
or that belief about Him, but rather through the real work to be done by
every individual human being, male and female alike, in their role as a
cell within the body of the Earth, to assist in the development of the
masculine archetypes buried within Her planetary psyche. When we
do the psychological and magickal work neces-sary to cast off the immature,
negative masculine stereotypes within ourselves, and to bring all the archetypes
of our personal psyches to full maturity, wisdom and power, we contribute
sig-nificantly to the Earth's accomplishment of this same task, and through
Her rebalance and spiritual evolution, to the transformation of the world.