Are the Gods in Us?

Are the Gods in us or outside us?  So much depends on what we mean by "us."  I became Wiccan after I encountered the Goddess, and She was most definitely outside me, a separate personality.  I was a guest at my first Sabbat, not in a particularly open frame of mind (I was compulsively punctual and this was an example of Pagan Standard Time at its worst) and was standing far from the center of the action.  Her arrival came immediately after She was invoked.  Like flicking a light switch.

I encountered the Goddess that time when She was being drawn down into the priestess.  The experience had every dimension of encountering Someone quite different from myself: wiser, more loving, more powerful, more beautiful - and all to many orders of magnitude.  We had enough in common that I could recognize those qualities as perfections of what I carried as seeds or small shoots.

Much later the same being, or so She seems to me, made a shorter but more personal contact when She was drawn down into a high priestess in a Esbat.  There was one other time of strong contact and a few others not so strong, almost entirely unexpected and sometimes separate from ritual of any sort.  In none of them was She 'in' me in the way She would be in a Priestess drawing down the moon.

When the God was drawn down on me, my experience was of a being very different from me - imagine masculinity minus any fears, insecurities, desires to control, etc., etc - that I was changed by the encounter.  My teacher in these matters describes these experiences as a "tuning" where our vibrations, so to speak, are drawn into greater harmony with the Gods - a bit by bit process to be sure, but one that fits my experience.

Again, speaking from my experience, the gods do not come equally strongly to everyone or to any one all the time.  They appear to have their own agendas.  They can appear unexpectedly and fail to appear when expected.  But almost always they appear in ritual space.

Last February I was on a panel at Pantheacon. http://www.pantheacon.com/  We were asked to discuss the nature of the Gods.  One thing that a great many of us agreed about - and no one challenged - was that an encounter with deity was an encounter with something that seemed more real than we were or this world was.  Thos was not a denigration on our part of either the world or ourselves but rather an acknowledgement of the extraordinary qualities of deities.

This can only plausibly be a "Thou art Goddess Thou art God" kind of experience from a monistic perspective - we contact what lies at our deepest core - and while I happen to be a monist, using the same reasoning, you are me and I am you.  I think there is a sense where that is true, importantly true - but there is an important sense where it misses the point.  To live in this world I need to differentiate between you and me, and similarly, I need to differentiate between myself and a God.

Other Traditions

My view is strengthened by the long existence of other Pagan traditions centered on incorporating deities and spirits into humans during ritual time.

I will never forget the first time I was a guest at a Brazilian Umbanda drumming ceremony.  I sat in the back because I was unsure what was going on, and wanted simply to watch.  As the drumming got stronger I found my body was twitching.  "Energy releases" I thought, and tried to sit still.  They got stronger, until the man in charge, who was in trance with a Caboclo, a kind of Indian spirit, suddenly stopped the drumming, and wordlessly motioned for me to come forward.

I got up and walked up to where he was, completely convinced that I was considered disruptive and would be asked to leave. Instead, he touched my forehead and the nape of my neck, and motioned for the drummers to begin again.  When they did, my feet started dancing - but I was not involved.  I had the impression that with great will I could probably stop, but was too amazed and fascinated to do that.  I went along with it, dancing alone in front of a crowd who I scarcely knew.  This was about as out of character as it could be.  I was an still am far too shy (as well as being a mediocre dancer) for that kinds thing.

The guy in charge knew what was likely to happen, I had absolutely no idea.  At that point no one else had entered into possessory trance.  No words were exchanged between us.  I ended up working closely with him for 6 years, but that's another story.

In the Brazilian traditions, and African Diasporic traditions generally, different spirits are associated with all manner of things.  The same is true for traditions in Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere.  Some are Gods and Goddesses, some were human, some are powers of nature, some seems mixes of these qualities.  But while some of their behavior seems clearly tailored for the tradition of which they are a part, the basic phenomena encountered in trance do not seem to be simply parts of our inner psyches.

I do not want to carry this discussion into too much depth and sublety because we are discussing concepts which themselves have no settled meaning.  What is our inner psyche, our inner self, consciousness, and so on.  But I experience these beings as quite independent of myself, and see little experiential evidence that they are part of me, unless I assume my psyche/self/spirit has firm boundaries, and that awareness cannot exist outside of what we consider a physical body.  I think both of these assumptions are mistaken.