Are They All The Same?

Witchy Wisdom
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Greetings to All :wave:t4:

I’ve thought about this subject a lot recently, well I’ve wondered since I was a child to be honest. I’ve seen a couple of hints to it in other threads but I don’t want to hijack them, so I thought I’d just throw it out there.

Are we honouring the same Deity, just with different names? Part of our human nature is all about what we believe, our individuality and perceptions. Throughout history, we have worshipped many beings, in just as many different ways. While it may sound frivolous, try to picture a bunch of Gods chilling in the clouds, Goddess A is like ‘dude, you got 2 prayers coming in, one from Egypt and one from Greece, get those hats on’, God B ‘I ain’t worn the Egypt hat in a while, better check on them’… do you see what I mean?

Many humans throughout history have worshipped Gods and Goddesses in every area we can think of, especially the common areas like Love, Magic, War, Death, etc., with usually 1 or 2 beings representing the ultimate deities if you like. So then, I asked myself, does it matter what pantheon I’m drawn to? Does it matter which name I choose to use to address this Deity? Do they care, or are they as protective of their names as we are? I mean, for starters, how do I know that the name I’ve chosen is the right one; I’m drawn to Egypt, but maybe they prefer an older, more “original” pantheon? But when I asked the cards, and pendulum, I used names from at least 3 different pantheons… so surely, if they didn’t like the name then they wouldn’t answer, right?

As it stands - if I’m correct - there are 7 Deities who wish to work with me. The names are from different pantheons… probably doesn’t matter… but it occurs to me that I could have 2 different names who are the same Deity? I’ve researched and cross-checked but who knows? But again, does it even matter?

I’m working with these energies (thanks @tracyS I like that idea) to figure out who’s who, and what’s where and it’s a one-moment-at-a-time kind of thing. But I’m wondering if anyone else has ever wondered the same thing?

I remember asking my Dad (Pastor of our Church at the time) if God and Allah were the same person; I distinctly remember him saying ‘no sweetheart, we believe in God, Muslims believe in Allah’, but the moment he said it he was thinking. It’s something that’s stuck with me, mainly because it represented my thoughts about religion as a whole at the time - are you just telling me what you’ve been told? And do you really believe it?

I was watching Dr Strange (as you do), and the moment when the monk tells him that the people who drew the various maps of the body were all right, just seeing a part rather than the whole…is that what we’ve done? I don’t know, like I said, I’m just wondering if anyone else wonders this too.

x Blessed Be x

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I’ve often felt it’s all one and the same, the difference is in the tradition you follow as in how you worship them. Let’s take Odin the Allfather, to me he’s Yahweh, Allah etc as he’s the Allfather. Looking at it energetically, you’re looking at the energy of Order Knowledge Wisdom, so I see them as the same, with odd exceptions.

The exceptions (and this is my view) is with the tricksters as they seem to be a group unto their own. I don’t feel Loki is Satan, but I also don’t feel Satan is evil but really just the opposite energy to God, so :thinking: like Ying Yang.

As far as pantheons it’s your choice, some traditions mix well others don’t because the philosophy that underpins that tradition can clash. An example is Christian v Norse.
Christian is we require a saviour for our inherited sin;
Norse, we are accountable for our own actions and we save ourselves and others. :person_shrugging:
Total opposite views, so can you work with angels and Norse gods? Well that depends if you want to work with them as energy/entities or follow the traditions that’s behind them. I work with Loki and Lucifer, without a problem but I don’t necessarily class myself as a Norse Pagan or a Demonolator. I’m a Norse Witch really, Trolldom, and Trolldom well it’s witchcraft so we work with whoever from wherever and I follow Loki and let him guide me wherever his chaotic ways want to take me. :crazy_face::rofl:

When I did a spirit course at the college of psychic studies, the tutor said the pantheons/religions/traditions were manmade, humans attempt to understand the spiritual world but spirit is spirit, the gods are the gods. So I think it all depends on your worldview.

Sort of answers the question but doesn’t at the same time. Very chaos :rofl:

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Yes? No? Maybe? The question made me think… and it hurt. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

My thought process on this went on for quite a while. I wrote out four long paragraphs explaining what could be exceptions but then came around to thinking I was on the wrong track and erased it all.

In the end, I thought… “Does it matter?” So… I stopped there. :rofl: :rofl:

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I have also considered the idea of all being the same. This led to research in deity names, specialties, and family connections. I thought I’d learn how the connections worked, and maybe a bit about individuals. Instead I got more info on culture and humans than on the deities! I’m still confused- or maybe more confused than I was at the start. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t regret my choice to study. It just didn’t lead where I’d hoped it would.

I’m taking some time off from such studies to allow some of it to sink in and be processed. Hoping for some understanding to bubble up from my internal primordial ooze.


Tenor

There really is a lot more to the question than I ever figured possible! One hill, lots of rabbit holes!


Watership Down

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If you’re curious I think Ksenia Menshikova discusses about pantheons in her book Oaths & Vows and about getting the balance right.

Here’s the discussion

You can see why many view Loki as Satan, but maybe he is, maybe he isn’t, maybe Satan is a trickster spirit. Is Baldr Christ? We go on and on with this one. It all seems to me anyway to point in the same direction, the Order V the Chaos in the universe keeping a perfect balance so life can exist. My brains melting, I need a coffee. :rofl::zany_face:

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Yesss, this is exactly what I mean! I’d never thought of this in an energetic way, but it does make the whole concept easier to process, at least for me.

That’s where I’m coming from, we became so focused on how we understand them, it became less about the gods and more about our understanding of them, which led to differences of opinions and therefore, religions and pantheons etc. Btw I’m not trying to diminish, dismiss or discount anyone’s beliefs, let’s not get it twisted!

Now that’s interesting… I also don’t feel that Loki is Satan, but I do believe Satan is evil. As I understand it, Wiccans don’t believe in Satan, but do acknowledge negativity; it’s the only part I don’t understand, because Wicca is all about balance. I can’t comprehend how one can believe in God but not Satan, but that’s me.

That’s the bottom line right there. Personally, I feel like I would rather know as much as I can in terms of traditions, because there are reasons for what has been done before, and there are important lessons to be learned from history. However, I intend to try and keep my focus on the energy and what they want, instead of what I think they want.

@dan3 thank you so much, I really needed that laugh! I am all too famailar with that headache so my sympathies, having completed that process several times lol… and always coming back to, “does it matter”? In our endeavour to understand as much as we can, maybe we overcomplicated things.

@georgia it’s so easy to get lost in rabbit holes! I found the same thing, an unendless source of information on us, our cultures, our processes, our beliefs… less so on the deities, and what does that say? Are we more wrapped up in ourselves and our ways, instead of the deities we worship…maybe. I hope you got a good rest!

My rabbit hole started here, in case anyone wants to have a gander - it seems to be a fairly comprehensive list of Deities arranged by country and culture. List of Deities | WikiPagan | Fandom

Make sure you’re laying down before you look at that list lol.

x Blessed Be x

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It’s interesting the whole evil concept, and that’s another rabbit hole. When looking at things energetically (as the course on spirit did), there’s no evil in energy, there is only energy. The evil is how we as humans work with the energy. Now he did say there were negative entities out there, but they aren’t ruled over by anyone, and there isn’t a great big plan of destruction to humanity. They are just there, and they are just negative, and they are rare (this is just course info, I’ll find the link if you’re interested). So it’s a tricky one that could blow ones mind. :crazy_face:

Found the link. Below is the notes on lesson 1, then if you enter the post and scroll I think I put notes on 7 lessons as I did the course. Session 4 (the second link) is all about some of what’s out there.

https://forum.spells8.com/t/learning-how-to-talk-to-spirits/47946/87?u=tracys

https://forum.spells8.com/t/learning-how-to-talk-to-spirits/47946/111?u=tracys

Omg just re-read these posts, trip down memory lane. Miss you @starborn :green_heart:

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Wow! 35 pages of just names and where they came from! You weren’t kidding! I have my work cut out for me- seeing which ones I have, which I’ve missed, and which I miscategorized. Thank you!

@tracyS Thank you for the course notes! I’m looking forward to more in depth study with them, too!

I miss @starborn’s philosophical deph, too.

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Just to add confusion and why I stopped trying to come to an opinion.:

My mind went a little South when I realized that there are LOTS of people who have no prime deity yet work with spirits. Perhaps the long list of deities (as linked by Nikki-Phoenix) leaves out just as many spirits as it includes. For instance, only one belief system was listed for North America. Last night, while my mind was buzzing with this, I ran into the following:

"North American Native religions encompass a diverse range of spiritual practices and beliefs among Indigenous peoples, often characterized by a deep connection to nature and the belief in a variety of deities and spirits. " (AI generated)

" Western tradition distinguishes religious thought and action as that whose ultimate authority is supernatural—which is to say, beyond, above, or outside both phenomenal nature and human reason. In most indigenous worldviews there is no such antithesis." (Britannica)

So… there are many more deities than on the list (it has one (Haitian but two deities)) for North America but there are probably hundreds or thousands hidden in the native lore of the hundreds of indigenous tribes)

Can there possibly be that many? In my quest for understanding belief systems, I would say yes and also that the surface hasn’t been scratched. The efforts by recent religions (last couple of thousand years) has been to wipe out and consolidate and much has been lost of older belief systems. In my mind, they are still valid beliefs and some may come back.

Frustratingly, that does not give us an answer to the initial question but does add a fairly big cloud of data. It might be easy to say “There can’t be that many” and boil it down… down to even one ‘spirit’. About here is where I stopped and came to my original, perhaps flippant, comment of “Does it matter?”.

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Here’s an interview with a Shaman. What stood out to me is he lived the different religions, and came right back to where he started. (Skip the occasional promotional message) :crazy_face:

It fits too with what chaos magicians do, they also live each religion to understand them, through deconditioning, a practice that we do in Nordic witchcraft too.

The list of deities was interesting, though I’m sure there’s more, what stood out to me is the similarity in energy in each pantheon of gods. :thinking: Kinda what the Shaman believes about spirit and the higher dimensions.

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What a great thread!
I frequently think this.
However I usually use specific dieites ro connect to for different reasons. My path has been mostly buddhist and with hindu gods. And now in the past three to 4 years I have been integrating Norse, Celtic and Greek. I enjoy seeing what each culture has come up with.

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@tracyS thanks for those links, makes for very interesting reading… especially the distinctions, fascinating! It does make it easier to understand that the concept of evil may be a human one, at least I can see how the argument makes sense now, so thank you.

@georgia there was fair warning haha! I also had the same thoughts as @dan3, as in surely this can’t be everyone? Like everything else, it was written by a human, but I was impressed at the range.

But then I began to wonder if, in fact, there are that many. As a race, I think we’ll pray to just about anyone, yet how do we (in the present) know these beings exist? As cool as I think it would be to have a deity of wine for example, is it only the mind of a human that could think of it? In the grand scheme of things, would a deity be assigned to wine…that said, it holds an extremely valuable place to us, whether we’re making it, drinking it or selling it… so then, why wouldn’t there be a deity of wine?

I also agree that history is full of atrocities carried out in the name of pretty much every religion, so which ones were deemed unworthy and erased from history? In other words, usually anything that went against whatever particular “norm” civilisation wanted to embody at that time…

Indeed - the similarities are too similar to ignore, right? Are they all just individual perspectives of the exact same thing? I will hopefully get to the video this evening, past couple of days have been kinda chaotic, princess still unwell bless her. Thanks for sharing @tracyS!

@celineelise I think my fascination with other cultures started when I was younger, and kind of turned into an obsession to figure out why people do what they do. Now the Craft has added another dimension I guess, because the history of magic is as much a part of each culture as it is ours, whether they like it or not.

x Blessed Be x

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Here’s a link to my research, if you are interested. Most of it is in cursive handwriting. The deities themselves are in Mythic Research.

https://forum.spells8.com/t/a-collection-of-georgias-works/45189

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Energy similarity may be one way to simplify things. Essentially, for the purpose of the question, we eliminate all the name categories. We still get a huge range of descriptions of what it takes to experience that energy and what the results are.

At the moment, I feel the answer is unknowable. I’m comfortable with that but others may be freaked out.

While noodling this, I kept coming back to the ‘faith’ answer that all religions claim in one way or another. Yes, that is non sequitur in a way but welcome to my mind.

Faith is a way of believing. I believe in belief. Which is why I am attracted to elements of Chaos theory. As Tracy has said a few times about Chaos, “Are you confused yet?” - Sure but I was totally confused when I started… now I am more comfortably confused. :rofl: :rofl:

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People have wondered things similar to this for years - you’re not alone! There’s even a word or two for it.

The first that comes to mind is “soft polytheism” and this encompasses the belief that all Gods are aspects of a single entity. So, in your example, all Gods are one God and all Goddesses are one Goddess. It’s an interesting perspective to have as one tries to wrestle the idea of multiple pantheons existing on their own around the world.

The second concept that comes to mind is Perennialism. This is the belief that all religions around the world share some aspect of core truth, even if they present it in different ways.

Some people believe that the Gods have shown up to different people around the world in ways that made sense to those people at the time. This is also a valid belief and is part of the soft polytheist belief system.

Another system of belief out there is that of egregores – the Gods being energy forms created by humanity by their acts of worship. For example, a lot of Irish deities are connected directly to the land or landforms. They would have been worshipped across the country in various ways depending on the people doing the worshipping and how they saw those divinities. If you worship or honor something long enough, there is always the possibility of it taking on a form of its own.

To speak to this briefly, the way I understand it is that Wicca believes in the balance of energies such as Masculine and Feminine, not necessarily good or evil. When you look at people, they aren’t all good or all evil. The concepts of good and evil are subjective, too, so it is harder to measure in terms of balance concerning religion. What one person thinks is evil another person may not have a problem with. The ideas of good and evil come from people and rules, not necessarily the Gods.

Ohh I’m bookmarking to come back to these in a bit!

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Ivy kinda co-opted that over on the Tech vs Cyber thread (Tracy’s post). Her motive was to make new spirits and gods that she needed. I think her move is a bit of a gray area but I like it.

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Yes and yes! If we eliminated all the names, we’re left with separate energies - the fact that there are so many similar energies across so many cultures, makes me think I’m in the Perennialism crew. I probably wasnt clear in my example, but I do think there’s more than 2 - I just think they’re different gods and goddesses to different people.

Now that is an interesting concept! I’ll be chewing on that for a few days lol!

x Blessed Be x

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What’s an egregore?

There’s the discussion for anyone interested. It’s also discussed in depth by Ksenia Menshikova in her book Oaths & Vows

The above link takes you to another interesting video. :partying_face:

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The way the woman in the video explained it was what I thought it was (after I looked it up :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:). I think Ivy made it a bit different but I could follow what she was saying… that is, she felt a need and filled it with her definition of an egregore. She seems to be getting use from it so cool.

The more elaborate definition (as in the video) is explaining why things happen. Taking that concept and creating a need heretofore unknown, is an expansion… I think…

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