Just another other than human person....
This is a subject that we have discussed a bit on the Pagan bioregional animist tribe, relating to deities from a bioregional animist perspective.
Graham Harvey calls deities other than human persons... and I don't think that can be argued... at least not well!
When bioregional animism was first coming to me I started to see how bioregions and places as well as cycles and forces of nature were what people traditionally knew as deities or gods... lots have been said on this on that tribe... I recommend checking it out... I remember telling people once who were setting up a sort of eclectic neo-pagan ceremony once, who were trying to help the land they were going to attempt to get to know their local deities... or Deity from the point of view of their particular bioregion...
as i pointed out before many Tibetan Buddhist deities were forces of nature as well as places in the animist pre-Buddhist Tibetan landscape.
From a bioregional animist perspective deity could be considered an other than human person who is just really big... a larger system of intelligence that is composed of smaller persons or smaller systems, all self emergent and at the same time interconnected and reliant upon each other.
A good example are the Apus in the Andes these are deities who are also mountains... this shows a really good example of animist polytheism as well as how deities are part of the landscape and universe as well as how humans relate to deity from a bioregional perspective.
This draws some question as to how we relate to deities formed from other bioregions and from peoples unique co-creative forms of relating to the other than human persons that compose their bioregion. Its not an entirely bad thing to have relationships with deities from other bioregional perspectives... there is a sort of universality to all deities regardless of where they are from or how they are partially shaped by the co-creative human person relationships formed around them... but seeing deity from a bioregional animist perspective gives us another angle to view deity from, as well as grants us the ability to form relationships with perhaps new deities.
Lately Ive been quite in love with Terry Pratchett's disc world novels... i love how describes how deities are born... it makes allot of practical sense in a humorous sort of way... for example the deity of toe stubbing... so many people have stubbed their toe and said god dammit to that which they stubbed their toe on or have said '' Ouch oh god! oh GOD my toe!" that a deity was born!
He goes on to say that theologians in the disc world stay very busy because new gods are being formed all the time, and old gods die once people stop believing in them... this is humorous and a bit insightful really!
Do you have relationships with Deity's as a bioregional animist if so tell us about it and them...
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My experiences with deities started with the Celtic-British pantheon. And this is where my foundations for Bio-Regional animism came from. What I discovered, is that the names for the deities in Welsh text where not proper names but titles. And in different times, and in different places, the positions where filled by different beings/intelligences according to the bio-region. It was the language that was unifying factor not the deities. I experienced this in the greater Yellowstone and Teton region of Idaho Montana and Wyoming. The Celtic gods I spoke with and communed with, where not from Great Britain – they were local spirits who spoke through me using the pantheon and mythos I was heavily studding at the time. When I looked into the linguistics of the middle welsh in which the first written records of these deities were preserved in the British mind – I discovered interesting things. One most neo-pagans have been using the wrong translation that have been muddled through modern welsh (example Arhonrod is not “Silver Wheel” but middle welsh Aronrot meaning “Round Mound” making her an earth deity – gwydyon was a son god not his son Llew (middle welsh Llue) who was a grain deitiety.) With my new perspective of the etymology, thanks to the help of a pen pall who was helping me work with these deities, I discovered the bio-regional and animism of Celtic-British traditions. As I discovered this, much in the way you were talking Reene, they lost their anthropomorphism in my mind and started showing me their true nature in context to the bio-region. This might be the vary phenomenon you are speaking of when you moved to the PNW, Reene?
I then shut down my experiences and got lost in the rational humanist perspective and reasoned away some of my experiences. But they started coming back, and now I have shed the pretences of foreign pantheons and started working with these beings in a strictly bio-regional context – I no longer see them as deities – not in anthropomorphic sense – but much in the way LLB talks about a system of intelligence comprising many parts of the whole. I am in a new Bio-Region, and starting this work all over again from the ground up – quite literally. Bio-Regional animism is not the path for those who seek predefinitions and structure – instead it challenges all of those to the core and when you’re done you are left with the very soil under your feet and sky above your head – and that is what you work with.
from Fish bowl on the bioregional animism tribe
http://tribes.tribe.net/bioregionalanimism/thread/4d3d31a5-bd15-45f8-8e2c-adbdccc17121
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