Finding your Goddess and God

Quest for Deity

One fascinating element of Wicca is selection of your own personal deities. Over at Witchvox, there is a great essay by Nicole Gilbert called Quest for Deity. Nicole outlines a process to help you find your Goddess and God. The first is a somewhat academic approach:

...A good place to start is to ask yourself some questions. Are you drawn to any particular time periods or cultures? Ancient Egypt, perhaps, Classical Greece, or maybe pre-Roman Britain? How about Ireland? Most people seem to feel some affinity with an older culture or two and that is a good place to start. Studying the mythologies of the times and places you feel drawn to is an excellent idea...

That academic approach works for some. On the other hand, for other Wiccans, it's the other way around--it's you gets selected! Nicole draws on her own process:

...I have had the experience of being chosen by a goddess... I was feeling overwhelmed and trying to narrow it down between Egyptian or Celtic pantheons but also being strangely drawn to the Greek underworld goddess, Hecate...I was napping when I had a very vivid dream. I was standing on a hill, looking up into the sky at a tiny speck way up high, spiraling down, closer and closer. All my attention was focused on the speck, though I did notice a bit of a chilly breeze. Down and down the speck spiraled, growing larger the closer it got. Finally it got close enough for me to see that it was a large white owl...

What a refreshing illustration of how differently the spirituality of Wiccans and Pagans is from mainstream monotheistic religion. It begs the question Joseph Campbell, Jung, Alan Watts, Diane Osbon and others have asked, "Could God exist if nobody else did?" Of course not. That's why Gods and Goddesses need us to believe in them. I like entomologist Alan Watts' answer for this, "If you believe in God, I don't. If you don't , I do". As Osbon states, "There are as many Gods as people thinking about God". For many ancient cultures, all we have left of what they knew and felt about the Cosmos are their conceptions of Deities. The Deities our history has created are really the mirror images of ourselves. Deity is actually the work of human kind, projected in beings we call Goddess or God.

Considering how rotten we have been to the Earth lately, it's really nice of Goddess and God to still believe in us.