Do you know your Odins from your Wodens? Do you know St.George from St.Michael? Does it really matter? The more research I do, and the more thought I give it, the more it all leads me further back along a reducing scale until I reach The One Other. The further you stretch towards the divine, the fewer in number the form of the concept becomes.
I have been trying to understand people’s fascinations with the concept of a pantheon of gods, a hierarchy of spirit. It makes sense to me as a network of ever-more powerful forces. I can deal with it as a range of energetic entities that have qualities of size, form, sense and intelligence. An intelligence that has a range of influence, and therefore engendered within it a sense of power, of strength. That is how I have come to picture the energies that I have dowsed and dealt with, in the sense that I have traded energy and thoughts with Nature’s own. When I work with Nature it has not been necessary for me to do anything other than make a connection. No need to specify to whom, or to what, or to implore the help or attentions of anyone of anything in particular. Simply to extend the wish to connect to something real and alive – some natural element such as fire, sun, moon, air, water, earth. Other sentient beings such as trees, or animals.
It is not necessary to invoke a huge and intricate pantheon of gods in order to work with energy and perform acts of Natural Magick. The pantheon is only a guide to the various possibilities of working with energy. In a way they personify the aspects of life that can be affected by energy, and we relate to them more readily in the form of a character from an old story, a film or a book. The range of the divine goes all the way from one to as many as we can feasibly hold in our heads or in our culture.
Whether you work with a single concept of natural power, or with a very specific aspect of Nature in the form of a small god, a faerie or a ghost – you are still working with the same intelligent entity. It simply conjures up images of itself in whatever form we imagine, however we are capable of understanding it at that time. Is there value in working with a specific aspect of Nature? In the same way that communicating with a single person can enlighten you, then the answer is ‘Yes’. The question, however, would need to be very specific, or your request to work with it would need to be sure that this one entity had the power to help you.
Simply tuning your request to find a sympathetic connection is a more efficient way of working, though. The response will be felt intuitively, and can be easily discerned. As the Internet does, scanning for connections from the totality of possibility with a well-formed query allows the entire pool of creative connectivity to be browsed.
Some people spend what must be a great deal of time gorging themselves on the myths of ancient and modern times. It is all too easy to get pulled into the stories of the Little People, Arthurian Legend, the Gods of Greece and Rome, and to have those myths offered to us in mesmerising media that require little thought to digest. A feast for the eyes and the mind, but your own stories need to be told. “Time waits for no man” to pull himself out of his stupour and cleanse his third eye of the grime that has accumulated.
I don’t dismiss the value of a story that interweaves a tradition that symbolises a living wisdom – rites of all types are our means of communicating between ourselves about the Mysteries. Of course they should be upheld, encouraged, re-discovered, enjoyed again and again for their worth. But there is another side to the myths. They have embedded within them tales of the possibilities that can be explored. And it is to this that we must draw our attentions.
A narrowing of focus. An opening up to the wealth of possibility. A keen eye and a goal. A Hedge Druid’s meditation.
