Pagan Blog Projects Weeks 1 and 2
I’m starting a little late on the Pagan Blog Project, I’m sorry to say. I missed last week’s post because I was in the hospital and wasn’t able to write or post something for the first week of the letter A. So this week I’m combining my two posts into one to catch up. Just a reminder that all opinions expressed are my own and usually supported by nothing more than UPG.
First off, some definitions supplied by Wikipedia and paraphrased here:
Apotheosis, also known as deification, is the act/process of someone or something becoming divine.
An avatar, the actual Hindu kind not the movie with the blue people, nor the master of all four elements (although that Avatar is cool too), is a deity incarnated as a human.
So you see how these two go together, one is mortal –> god, while the other is god –> mortal.
In a previous post I described how I believed gods came to be gods; how a non-divine spirit could become divine through the belief and worship of enough mortals. Since I first heard about apotheosis, and the people or whom it is part of their path, I’ve been wondering how it works. In my research some of the to be deified bloggers write about how their particular deity or deities is/are involved in the process, how they will ascend with the help of the god. While this makes sense to me, and I by no means doubt or question their path, I have had such trouble trying to fit this new possibility into my cosmology and my understanding of how the gods gained divinity. The only solution that I have been able to come up with so far has been that the deity or deities who are “sponsoring” the mortal’s ascension will give up some small part of their own divinity/divine power and share it with the mortal in question. My personal path mirrors that of apotheosis, more to do with reclaiming than achieving, so I haven’t managed to wrap my mind around how this would work. Probably it is different for every cases, as most of these things are.
On the opposite end of the spectrum we have avatars, or incarnation. This is something that I have had more personal contact with, those I haven’t yet come across anyone who identifies as an avatar. In my personal worldview it isn’t just gods who can become incarnate as humans, but all spirits who have a desire to. For the most part I have heard of this in the Otherworld and it seems to be on the same level as a spirit that was previously a human reincarnating as a human, there is no major shift, and the spirit now being incarnated as human does not undergo any major changes and the human life is not exceptionally remarkable, for instance just because the spirit was previously a lake spirit it doesn’t mean the human incarnation can breath underwater or has any more connection to that lake in particular or water in general than one may have from one human life to the next.
This is not so much what I am interested in. I’ve heard tell in the Otherworlds, from the spirits and gods I work with a serve that when a deity or a particular kind of spirit is forgotten, which is essentially killing them, they continue to exist in a fragmented form, and that it is possible for one or more of those fragments to become lodged in a human body. That fragment would then continue to live human life after human life, gathering information and strength until enough of the other fragments are assembled again and this fragment can rejoin it’s fellows and perhaps become some aspect of the original spirit again. Since I heard of this phenomenon I have been wondering how this relates to the idea of the avatar. Is this similar to a god in human form? Surely the god who is becoming human has a choice, does this spirit fragment?
These are just things that I’ve been wondering about for some time, and I thought, since they fit the theme I would share them. I’d love to hear people’s opinions on these.
I too have been mulling on this topic of late and find that my own interpretation is much less literal. I’d not considered your simplification of Apotheosis=Human->God and Avatar=God->Human, however I can see where you got it. However my personal understanding is that there is no difference. All Gods have know human experience and all humans are on the path to rediscovering their divinity. For some this ‘reclaiming, rediscovering, remembering’ is a very present and active part of their life, for most it is not. Instead they focus on experiencing other aspects of themselves through the medium of their life.
I also don’t feel that just because a deity is experiencing human life that they are completely limited to that form. The part of them experiencing that life may be blind to their greater spiritual self however there can be/is a greater part which is aware of both that life (and any other they’re simultaneously experiencing) and their own divine identity and nature.
This may be a poor example, but it’s the best we have within western culture. There is much confusion about the divinity and identity of Christ in relationship to the other aspects of the divine understood as Yahweh and the Holy Spirit. I struggled with the understanding of how Christ was both God and the son of God. Where they the same person? Did Yahweh incarnate as Christ knowing he was Yahweh, or was Christ a different person? I couldn’t understand how one could both be and not be something.
It wasn’t until long after left the faith that I understood how he could be both God and the Son of God. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only reorganized. So perhaps the energy (or consciousness as I refer to it) which understood itself as ‘Yahweh’ reorganized itself and came to understand itself as ‘Jesus’. Then upon the death of that form that energy reunited with its previous understanding and brought it’s experience with it. Perhaps this correlates with your understanding of the ‘breaking apart’ of spirits when their identity/understanding is no longer needed. Perhaps not, though it’s the explanation that makes most sense to me.
Mh, a lot of the information i collected during oracular work and my deity contact is in contraddiction with this version of what makes a deity divine. For what i was given to understand, worship is not what gives divinity but rather something that opens a door, giving open consent for they to interact with this plane of reality. Hencefore, being forgotten by humanity would diminish their ability of operating easily on this plane, but as they do exist and operate more freely on other planes, they would not stop existing. What it appears to make gods divine is the way they are connected to a sort of ‘universal matter/ source’ which makes them essentially larger and more far reaching than mortals. My information seemed to indicate that although a deity can incarnate as human for a number of reasons their soul still remains connected to that source in different ways than am human’.
My mileage (and I am new on this path) is that humans have divinity within us, yes, but we are not contained completely in this body, and that spirit is Divine, immortal, and the perception of ourselves as separate from the Gods is an illusion, albeit a powerful one. That’s not to suggest that we as humans need to claim divinity and be worshipped; it’s more like the Feri trad’s suggestion that yes, you’re a god, but you’re not the only god in the room, so mutual respect should be given to all. The other interesting factor on apotheosis vs avatar is that since time is not linear to Them, it seems that They can see you as a higher self, even while you’re still in human form. This is something that I have trouble groking sometimes; I’m an earth sign and to me, I’m human right now. Loki sees a bigger picture than that, and I trust that He knows what He’s talking about.
Regardless of whether or not you think all spirit is Divine or not, we’re here to have a human experience, and there is benefit in being embodied. I do agree with Seastruck that I don’t think worship confers Divinity. Worship gives them an opening into this world so that They can have greater influence and power.