Invoking Gods

(Every Witch Should Know How To Phone Home)

There are very few times in ritual where you do not invoke Gods. You will usually invoke at least one God or Goddess. Ritual is after all, how we worship our Deities.

Throughout your life you are likely to call on many Gods and Goddesses based on what ritual you are performing, and what needs you have. Before you can invoke a Deity, you must first know just what it is that you are invoking.

There are thousands of God forms. Entire books have been written about individual Gods and Goddesses. Describing each in detail is an in depth discussion and requires far too much detail for a website. What I am talking about here is Divinity as a whole. Just what is Divinity, and why are there so many Gods?

This is of course and by necessity, how I see Divinity, you may see things differently, but perhaps it will help you find how you perceive the Divine.

People have always had Gods. When the first person saw lightning strike a tree and start a fire, that person needed a way to make sense of what they had just witnessed.

Since they had no concept of electricity, positive and negative charge, or static, they needed to explain to themselves and others, what had happened, in terms they could understand. A God was born.

We still use Gods and Goddesses today for that very same purpose. Gods help us to explain and understand in our limited way, things such as birth, life, and death.

While we have a slight scientific understanding of these events, belief in a God or Gods help us to deal with the unknown aspects of things such as where the spark of life comes from in birth, and where it goes in death.

Man (and it usually has been men in the last couple of thousand years) has been obsessed with Divinity, down to the most insignificant detail for a very long time.

In centuries past, great thought and large quantities of time have been spent on the most trivial of questions, such as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Some treat the discussion of what Deity is, as being just as trivial, but I believe that in order to worship a thing, you must have some idea what that thing is.

This is the one aspect of Witchcraft that really requires belief without any sort of real evidence. We literally have no way to know what it is we worship.

Most Pagans believe in some form of reincarnation. Usually the reason given for reincarnating life after life is to learn, but what are we learning, and why are we learning it? Just what is the meaning of life?

What I have come up with, after many years of thought and discussion with peers, is certainly not the only answer, but it is something that works for me.

Deity is huge. A single cell has no awareness of its surroundings, but when you combine billions of cells, all working in concert, you get a person, who does have intelligence, and is self aware.

Most Witches think of the Earth as a living entity. She is alive and aware. Certainly we have come to realize that Her bio system is at least as complex as any other living entity.

Even so, the Earth is not Deity. The Earth is like that single cell. When you take all the planets, and all the solar systems, the universe as a whole, you begin to reach toward Deity.

Deity is so immense and complex that we can never hope to understand it. We see an insignificantly small part of Deity, and put a label on it. We call it Thor, or Herne, or Isis, or Aphrodite, or Jehovah, or Yahweh.

That insignificantly small part of Deity is as much as we can try to understand, in our limited human capacity. Fortunately, we do not need to understand exactly what Deity is, only that it is much more than we can hope to understand.

As we glimpse a small part of the Divine, we need some way to recognize and try to understand what we see in terms that make some sense to us.

Just like that first person to see lightning start a tree on fire, we do not understand the whole, so we take the small part that seems to make sense, and label it.

The ancients may not have understood what it was they were doing by creating entire pantheons of Gods, but if you take any pantheon, the Gods and Goddesses of that pantheon will encompass all the supernatural elements that were important to that culture.

This view point also allows us to realize how there can be more than one God. Christians would have us believe that they understand Deity, and therefore they have a lock on what Deity wants and requires.

In truth, they are only looking at another part of Deity that is no more significant than any other. Each person who looks upon Deity, sees something different.

This is why we understand that all Gods are one. Each of us is simply looking at a different part of Deity. Different parts of the same whole.

Deity is self aware. Deity understands that it exists, and what it is. Deity is everything and all. Deity is forever. What Deity does not understand, is mortality. It does not understand linear time, as we know it.

Deity will always exist, and therefore does not understand what it is like to have a limited lifespan. In order to understand something, it must be experienced.

Deity experiences mortality by allowing parts of itself to experience life and death. If the whole of the Universe is Deity, we are the parts of Deity that experience mortal existence so that Deity can learn what it is to not be limitless.

Cosmologist Carl Sagan, use to say that we are all Star Stuff. The individual atomic and subatomic particles we are made of were created inside stars. Anything more complex than hydrogen was created either in a star, or from the death of a star.

Those elements then coalesce into planets, which create other elements. The process is never ending. Parts of my physical body have been at some time in the past, parts of stars, planets, and interstellar dust clouds that no longer exist.

Just as with the physical part of me, that part of me that makes me who I am, that spark of life has also gone through the same process.

Not as stars or planets, but as other beings. Living things hatch, germinate, and are born. They live and then they die, yet the life force remains. Nothing is ever destroyed, not matter, not energy, it is simply transformed.

Parts of my life force, that which makes me Ken, and no one else, have been plants and animals, and other people. After each cycle of life, that which was, returns to Deity, and shall return after this life, and Deity will absorb the life force and learn what it is like to be that individual entity.

In this way, Deity learns what it is like to be something it is not. Deity learns about mortality in all its infinite combinations.

By looking at life in this way, we see that we really are connected in the most fundamental way to everything else. We are all part of everything that was, is, or ever will be.

We live our lives, and experience life. We die and return to Deity, and Deity learns what it was like to be us, then parts of who we were, return with parts of other entities to become a new being and experience it all over again in a different form.

What the Christians call the soul, is not a single thing. It is a collection that was put together from Deity, when a person is created.

That collection functions as an individual for the duration of the life cycle, then is absorbed back into Deity at death. The creation of an individual soul is a random process.

When the person who is Ken, was created, Deity scooped a part of itself out to become me. When I die, my life force, or soul will return to Deity, and Deity will learn what it was like to have been Ken.

Because I was created from Deity, when my soul returns it will cease to be Ken, it will again be Deity. The parts that have become me are diluted with those who have also returned, like mixing random colors of paint.

Deity will form other entities as desired, but the collection of Deity that was me will never again be formed into a single person, exactly as I am now.

Parts of who Ken was will go into many other entities, perhaps even living at the same time. That may be why we sometimes connect with another person so quickly and completely.

We recognize in that other, a part that was once us. It gives new meaning to the term Soul Mate.

Each soul that returns from life has taken on the color of that lifetime, and is again mixed in with the rest, only to be combined with other soul parts, to create a new person.

I cannot say that who I am was once Napoleon, or Caesar, or any other individual, but parts of who I am may have once been a part of any or all of those people, as well as parts of a tree growing in a desert, or a bird, or a fish, or an amoeba.

For all I know parts of who I am, may have experienced life on other planets. I am not arrogant enough to believe that this is the only planet that contains life, and if not, those other life forms are just as Divine as I.

The spark of life starts out a bland color. The color of a newly formed soul is an even mixture of the various souls that make up the whole. It’s the life that was lived, that tints the soul with a particular color.

What I can say without hesitation is that I am God. I am also Goddess. As is everything I can see, feel, hear, smell, taste, or think of.

When you invoke a God and Goddess, you are invoking part of yourself. You are communicating with that part of you that is Divine. Christians separate the Divine from the mundane, we do not.

Witches do not require a Priest to talk to the Gods, because we are all Gods.

When you realize that you are Divine, you also begin to realize that everything else is Divine too. Christians have this hang up about Original Sin, and that they don’t deserve to be Divine.

Their mythos even says that when the Divine walked among them, they killed Him. Because Christians separate the Divine from themselves, most believe that their spiritual goal is to return to Divinity.

The spiritual goal of the Witch is to experience life. For most Christians, the goal is the destination, even though Christ taught differently. For Witches, the goal is and always will be the journey.

As a Witch, when you invoke the Gods you are invoking a part of yourself. You are recognizing the conduit that connects you to the rest of Deity.

The question now is how do you do this? The answer is to open yourself to the Divine. Relax, calm your mind. Let go of all the troubles of the day.

Everything happens for a reason, no matter how bad life seems at the moment, realizing that you are part of a much greater whole will allow you to understand that nothing is permanent. Everything changes.

To invoke the Gods, close your eyes and still your mind. Sometimes it may help to picture a small crystal clear pond, not a ripple on its surface.

When your mind is open and completely still, you will feel a warmth, or a sense of connectedness to everything. When you recognize the connection you have with Deity, you will feel it.

I say recognize the connection, not create it because the connection is always there, you are just unaware of it most of the time. Day to day issues and concerns distract you from feeling the connection.

It may take time for you to recognize your connection, the first several times you attempt it. You may not even be able to feel the connection at all for some time.

We spend our lives worrying about the job, bills, family, and every other detail of our lives. It takes time to lose the hold that our mundane lives have over us, but everyone has the ability.

Take your time, and don’t worry if nothing seems to happen. It just takes practice. Don’t give up, you can do this. Have faith in yourself. If you don’t, who will?

Once you get to the point where you recognize the connection to Deity, your mind is perfectly still and open to the Divine, call out to the God or Goddess you wish to invoke. You will feel a shift in the connection when the God or Goddess answers.

I can’t tell you what your connection will feel like, or what this shift will feel like. Everyone feels something different because everyone senses things differently. I can tell you that when you feel it, you will know.

You must have confidence in your ability to touch the Divine, or your doubt will keep you from succeeding. In the words of Yoda, “There is only do, or do not. There is no try.” It may sound corny, but it is true.

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