Conveyed by Brahn th Blessed
I coined the term ‘cosmytheology’ some years ago to combine three studies that contribute to our understanding of who, what, and where we are: cosmology is the branch of astronomical science that focuses on the origins of the universe, mythology is the branch of literature that describes our relationship to the divine, often in metaphor and fable, and theology is the study of the divine from a philosophical perspective. Science, philosophy, and literature are three paths by which humankind seeks to understand our existence as beings in the boundless universe. Do you question your existence?
Many people do not. They begin their lives overwhelmed by the struggle merely to survive and have no interest to spare for idle wonder. Many others find such wondering beyond their grasp or beyond their interest and find it much easier and more interesting to focus on social activities, careers, and the acquisition of possessions (assets). If these people have any concept of the divine, it was given to them by their parents or religious leaders, and they have given little attention to it. Church pews are filled with such people; not only churches, but tabernacles and mosques as well, houses of God where religion is often practiced by rote and tithing. It is why many Pagans abandoned the Abrahamic religions of our families.
But even some number of Pagans have little interest in questioning their existence. We are content to accept what we are taught by Pagan leaders, enjoying the celebration of life & nature in rites and circles that remind us that we are part of the whole of nature in all its many beautiful wonders. Those of us Pagans who seek no more than friendship and fun (without the religious baggage)—which after all are central needs for all humans who can afford them—those Pagans may well find nothing of value in the Essynian Mysteries. That, after all, is why they remain mysteries; not because they are hidden or secret but because humankind largely has little interest in pondering such notions, in seeking a difficult understanding of our existence. For many of us, to be frank, knowing how to operate our smart phones to our maximum benefit is of much greater concern, and much easier to grasp than understanding the fundamentals of our existence. It is for you, reader, to decide your stand on such issues.
Every decision you make, every action you take, is one more step on your life path, isn’t it? Our choices, once we are able to make our own in consequential ways, chart our course through life, from the moment we first choose to obey or disobey a parental instruction. That is how we become ourselves, instead of the property of someone, like our family; our will becomes active, our volition, and we begin to make and act upon our own choices and finding our own pathway through life. I remind the reader of a simple fact; from the beginning of our existence, the World makes us before ever we are able to make our World. We become what our worlds make of us before we can become who we truly and deeply are. Finding and becoming our true selves is what life is about, and allowing that innermost identity, the I-inside, to make the world better (or worse) by the marks of our actions.
Not every decision we make or action we take is ours. We do somethings because we are forced to do them by our society, our family or friends, our bodies. Do you obey laws sometimes, not because you think they are right but because there are legal, even criminal, consequences for breaking those laws. Many of us drive above the speed limit or park in places we shouldn’t at times only because our needs of the moment outweigh our concerns about traffic violations. Sometimes family and friends will pressure us into taking actions we would not otherwise take; but we don’t want to offend or do harm, or perhaps to allow others to do them harm. When people join the military, they do not so to die; they do it for needs of employment, direction, escape from their world, or often to serve in the defense of those they love. But soldiers die, and soldiers kill and destroy on command. It is a choice they make because it seems the lesser of two evils, or because they have become people who seek the power of command and the power of the gun.
Our bodies influence our choices by the chemical influence of hormones and the abnormalities or deformities of birth. Some mental illnesses are caused by traumas in our lives, but others are genetic; our bodies are seldom perfect, although they may appear so in the baby. Many of us suffer chemical depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder. Some of us Pagans are strongly empathic, and this (acursed!?) gift can cause such disorders if our DNA is genetically subject to such influences. I know people whose personalities are entirely different when they suffer bouts of chemical depression, and it certainly is not a choice they make; I also know many Pagans and some others who suffer affective anxiety because their empathic abilities cause them to feel the ambient emotional stresses of people in crowds.
These are just a few more obvious ways in which we either do not choose our actions or choose actions that we are pressured or forced to make. Understanding better the elements that create your person and your environment allow you to better understand the many motivations of your behaviours. Understanding. In many cases, you cannot understand what-is without first understanding the many things before it that make it possible, and you cannot understand the whole without understanding its parts and how they contribute to the whole. It is possible to live a perfectly normal life without understanding much of the world around you or even ‘knowing thyself’. Mine is not a perfectly normal life and I am very much a seeker of understanding. If you are a seeker, read on.
Starting life in an unsettled and broken family, I had no religion imposed upon me although I was introduced by bits to the church and its Holy Bible. This absence of family religious fervour fortunately gave me a personal freedom to examine my culture’s religions and question their value. I began to seek a better understanding of my religion and all those religions that weren’t mine. I soon understood that the Bible was only another book of mythology composed by various writers. Like the Mabinogion, the Eddas, and the Mahabharata, it is full of tales and fables the truth of which is not as essential as the lessons they convey, excellent literature but an image of the divine that was more like the kings and emperors who commissioned it than like a divine creator of the universe. There was madness and brutality in the old testament God (Yahweh, El), and the new testament God seemed neurotic and compassionate by comparison. Was this the same image of the divine? No. Different writers in different times had found different images of the divine.
It seemed to me that the God of Genesis had been infuriated by man’s unwillingness to obey him. Adam had been placed in a garden with a tree of life to reward his submission and a tree of knowledge to punish his rebellion, and he chose rebellion, as all children must rebel to become themselves. In his anger and disappointment—or perhaps it was joy and pride—God cast Adam out of the garden, having failed—or passed (?)—his test. Apparently, Adam had been born with immortality, for the consequence of his rebellion was death, an end to his eternal life. But the soul, it seems, could not be eradicated, only removed from its manifest life. Most mythologies agree on this point, that the soul endures the end of life. Whatever a soul is, once it has been brought into existence, it cannot be made to not exist. In their new incarnation, Adam and Eve seem to exist in a world from which the garden world is inaccessible—perhaps the garden was only created for testing these souls to see if they were capable of choosing for themselves and prove that they were not automatons of their creator, capable only of acting as instructed or programmed. (Perhaps we shall some day test our AI computers to see if they have become true ‘ghosts in the machine’ {Spiritus in Machina} and not mere products of clever software composition.) The Genesis tale is often given an entirely Earthly (this planet) interpretation, but it is possible that Eden is elsewhere and the world into which the first humans were cast (our world) is a purgatory for disobedient souls, a place for rebellious souls who can’t be destroyed. In this regard, there are two things we especially must learn more about, must better understand: God & Souls. One thing leads to another.
God is not a person in whose physical image man was created; he does not reside in a summer palace concealed in the Himalayan Mountains. Material/physical reality is ruled by mortality and corruption; our physical bodies die, all physical bodies die. God cannot be physical AND immortal. In fact, the only God whose existence we can prove is that conceptual being, the Idea that exists only in the minds and hearts of those who believe. God as an idea is nonetheless immensely powerful, even without a physical embodiment, as I have discussed in other articles. Is God perhaps a soul? Is that the sense in which we are made in his image, because we too are physical bodies with souls? But then, we must ask… What is a soul?
All of this suggests that there is some manner of reality other than material (physical) reality. If there is a non-physical reality, what and where is it? It is perfectly possible that it is nowhere. Perhaps location is a quality only of the material realm, and the spiritual realm has no such quality of itself or of its inhabitant beings. Science recognizes such a possibility in its cosmological concept of a multiverse of universes that have no relational connection, e.g., no location relative to each other, but science also declares this concept untestable and therefore unscientific. It must be considered a metaphysical concept accessible only to the philosopher and the theologian.
If you are so much a materialist that you doubt any other manner of existence, you should stop reading here, because you will reject whatever you may read when it challenges your materialist assumptions. Don’t waste your time pretending to be open-minded when your not.
Once there was no space, no time, no energy, no universe, and yet there was existence. Existence is primordial, the initial condition from which all else must necessarily derive; it cannot be otherwise. Existence is the fundamental principle of all reality. In the beginning, existence is only an unmanifest potential. Those who say that our universe comes from nothing are almost right. Primordial existence is necessarily nothing insofar as it cannot be seen or felt or heard, it cannot even be imagined. All of these are experiences after all, and experience requires something that experiences and something that is experienced. How can either of these exist prior to existence? Existence must precede experience, and yet, in the absence of existence, were there truly nothing, truly non-existence, it would be impossible for existence to begin, because beginning is a form of change, an expression of time that requires one condition to become another (a change). If ever in all our cosmic history there was a condition in which true nothingness was all there was, then existence could not, cannot, be born from it or explained by it. For nothing to become something is a change, the potential for which must exist within that nothing. But you see, if nothing is imbued with potential, with the ability to become what it is not, then that nothing is not truly nothing; it is something that is only cloaked in nothingness. Read this paragraph until you grasp it.
Existence can have no beginning or end; it must be present for anything to exist, so it must precede even time, and if it precedes time and change, then it cannot begin or end. Existence does not begin or end; rather it simply is. It is immortal and immutable because it is Boolean, true or false, yes or no, the basis of all else or not. Being one, it can never become the other. If there were no existence, it could not begin to be, and if there is existence, it can never cease to be. The fact that I write these words and you read them is positive prove of existence, because there can be no such experience unless there exists eyes and minds to read and words to be read. Existence is immortal and primordial, and it is also changeless (immutable). It exists beyond space and before time; while it needs neither space nor time, both of these require existence. Existence is the primal ground in which the seed of everything that exists lies dormant in potentia. But how is this boundless potential that is the essence of existence ever realized if existence is immutable, and if this potential can never be realized (made manifest), then how can it truly be real potential? This paradox is the existential conundrum that brings about the first change and the birth of time. The resolution of this conundrum will be the next discussion of The Essynian Mysteries.
The writer was born with moonlight in his heart and is dedicated to her service. He is a pantheistic neoPagan mystic, the coordinator of Crows Nest, the Global CAW Cybernest, and an editor of Green Egg Magazine–by which magazine he was first introduced into the neoPagan community in 1972. He is also an Elder of the Essynian Witchcraft Tradition that he founded in 2021, and he is also the Most High Swami-Pajami at the Nashville Temple of Eris Discordiana & Towing Service…If You Need a Tow, Come Rain or Come Snow, We’re on the Go, And We Won’t be Slow!