They are fertility. They are the source of all life and the ones who greet us upon our departure from this world. And the best words we can possibly come up with to describe them are God and Goddess. These words are equally adequate and inadequate as they are so far beyond the boundaries of what our minds can conceive that we could never hope to pay them enough homage by labeling them.
I would even go one step further in my description of this divine two-some. They are neither male nor female, as we would like to think. I believe that the reason we give them genders is because that is what we know. We understand that to create life you need an egg and a sperm and a Barry White CD.
However, I think that those ideas fall away when you get to the level of God and Goddess. The creation of life is the most primal of all forces, and it is this last hump we must get over to truly understand the nature of the divine. What I believe, instead, is that they are a representation of balance. When one is life, the other is death. When one is the sun, the other is the moon. So, when one is male, the other must be female.
However, these roles can change and morph and mutate depending on the given situation. The earliest peoples knew this. The Greeks knew that just because Zeus was a male God it didn't mean he couldn't get down with his male cupbearer Ganymede. Heck, if you follow Native American concepts of the divine, you'll see a whole menagerie of animals that are not clearly defined as male or female, but they are just as potent, just as important, and just as God-like as the African Anansi or the Hindu Ganesh (who are, ironically, depicted as a spider and a multiple-handed human with an elephant head, respectively).
It is strange to us to see Gods with goat's hooves or monkey faces, because they don't look like us, and someone decided a long time ago that God made us in His image. So, that must mean God looks like us. Except, we must understand that we didn't always used to look like us, and we don't all look alike either.
So, is God a 6' 6" blonde with blue eyes and a really big nose? If so, then I'm in luck. Otherwise, I need to get around the idea that God/Goddess/the Divine is anything that my mind could conceive of.
However, we are human, and we do really want an image to picture when we're talking to our God and Goddess. And, I think it's okay to do this. Because that is exactly who God is at the time. The Goddess is Frigg when you need her to be. She is also Aphrodite when your love life is down the drain, and, when you're feeling not so mellow, she is Parvati the Goddess of peace.
However, I tend not to call on the Gods or Goddesses by specific names. Instead, I'll ask the God of the soil or the Goddess of rain to assist when the garden isn't doing so well. Or, contrarily, I might ask the Goddess of the garden and the God of storms to do the same thing.
The nature of the God and Goddess is just that: nature. They are the personification of the forces that keep the world spinning and bopping along as it does. The process by which we give them these genders and personalities is called anthropomorphism. This word simply means giving human characteristics to an inhuman force.
Gods are not humans, so they do not operate on the same laws that humans do. They are not bound by the same constraints we are, and that's a good thing. I don't think that it would be as awe-inspiring or humbling to worship a deity that was ill-equipped to do the job of ruling the universe because she was having her monthly mood swings or he was too self-absorbed to ask for directions.
This article was first posted at Witchvox and is reprinted with permission.
Fire Lyte lives in Illinois and works in the court services system. He contributes frequently to Witchvox and blogs at Inciting a Riot.
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