Spiritual Beings, Part I: God & The Gods
The upper limits of The Hierarchy of Being
I. Introduction.
This world is a graveyard of gods. It is strewn with the ruins of temples dedicated to deities long forgotten. Every culture’s nightmares are haunted by a whole bestiary’s worth of malevolent supernatural beings which we in The West would call Demons. The testimonies of all the tribes of Man down through the ages agree on this startling point: We are being watched by a crowd of spiritual beings who scrutinize our every deed. Some of these beings desire our ruination, and others cheer us on in our quest for virtue and wisdom. Surely the consensus of so many Men across time and space cannot be wrong. These beings are real. They know you are reading this.
Whether you realize it or not, every second of our life in this world is an epic spiritual war. Every single aspect of your reality is raw material being used by a faction in this war, and if you are not aware of that then you are under the power of the side that hates you. This world is but a stage wherein the latest scenes of an epic cosmic war that began in eternity past is being played out, and we are but the characters in that drama. You were enlisted in this fight before you were even born and you are always participating in it whether you like it or not. This war is waged all over the earth, across different dimensions and planets. This war is waged most fiercely of all within each human heart. The clashing line within our innermost core between good and evil is the frontline where God and His Enemies fight for supremacy.
A willful change in our lives that brings us more in accord with The Eternal Aryan Dharma earns their collective attention. In that moment our ancestors cheer us on as we bring glory to our bloodline. The gods take notice of us and wonder if we will soon join their ranks. The demons become affrighted by us, and seek to drag us back down to their level. God Himself, who knows all things before they come to pass, personally registers every sincere effort to seek Him.
The one who is seasoned in prayer, silent meditation and asceticism soon becomes directly aware of the presence of both benevolent and malevolent spiritual beings. It is not a matter of belief, at that point, it is a part of your day to day life, as it is for me.
The normative framework for thinking about this question in The West is Christian. When Theodosius made his fateful choice to make Christianity the state religion of The Roman Empire in 380 CE it set humanity on a decidedly Abrahamic course. Mankind has been steadily shifting from worshipping a plurality of gods to worshipping a singular Deity ever since. We feel the tremors of the spiritual earthquake of that forced conversion to this very day. But the nature of this decisive change in how much of humanity has been approaching the divine is misunderstood. It is foolish to think that Man yearned to contact The Divine Realm, and only did this successfully 1700 years ago. Not even the ancient Christians believed that. When ancient Christians asserted that theirs is the one true God they did not mean that all of the other gods were just the imaginary creations of Man. No, they believed that those gods were very real indeed, but they believed they were demons. The truth is more complicated. The elite among Rome’s wise men knew that Divinity could be contacted in terms of approaching it as a plurality emanating from a mysterious oneness as the Pagans of yore understood (especially the Platonists and Hermeticists), or in terms of approaching it as a singular Entity reaching Man through historical events like the crucifixion as in Christianity. They saw the rise of Christianity due to complex social and economic factors resulting from the decline of Empire and saw in that the hand of providence. Such a momentous decision as the one to change Rome’s religious make-up could only come From Above, not from the minds of men, not even the most elite or the most powerful. They knew that Ineffable Providence had wrought paganism in antiquity and had wrought also the conversion of Rome to Christianity as it would also create some other religion in some other epoch that was distant to them but near to us. Religions come and go, but the mysterious spiritual realities they point to remain the same.
The downtrodden classes of Rome did not see the conversion to Christianity in that manner, of course. They saw the conversion of Rome as a dramatic turnaround in a spiritual war that had been going on long before the creation of this world. The gods were demons who had deceived Mankind and the true God was now taking back this world. Rome’s history was subsumed into Israel’s by this conversion, making Rome’s history and indeed the history of all the pagan antiquity of the Greco-Roman world just as providentially guided as Israel’s, as Rome had become the instrument of conversions and missionary work for Israel’s God, as was the providential plan the whole time, in their eyes. This war between God and the gods was not to stop at Rome but would continue. The 2000+ year ascent of Abrahamism since the death of Christ has seen all of the pagan religions be heavily damaged to the point of near-extinction with the notable exception of India, Japan, and a number of very remote places such as the interior jungles of Papua New Guinea. But the rapid decline of Abrahamism, especially the Christian species of Abrahamism, shows that a new phase of this spiritual war is emerging. The masses have gone from worshipping many gods to worshipping One to worshipping zero.
The only way to understand the rise and fall of Paganism, the rise and fall of Abrahamism, and the rise of Secular Liberalism and Communism is to understand that spiritual beings are absolutely literally real, more real even than you and I and anything you can perceive with your physical senses. They are not “archetypes” or “metaphors.” They are not dependent on us for our attention just to survive as some Neo-Pagans think - rather it is we who are dependent upon them. Us mortals see the mere appearances of things invisible, we see the ripples of tremors happening in the higher worlds from whence the realities we perceive flow down. All that we call religion and politics and history is only the tip of a vast iceberg and what lies concealed beneath the dark metaphysical ocean that surrounds this iceberg is beyond the comprehension of lowly beings like us. But we can still piece together the nature of our puzzling situation, from some of the clues we have been given, and this will help us to understand what we cannot ever know fully in this life. We will find even just the slightest glimpse of that greater reality to be awe-inspiring.
In this new four part series of articles on the ScythianBro Newsletter, we will be exploring this grand subject of God, gods, demons, angels, and how these mysterious beings relate to each other and to us. We will discuss their role, and ours, in this this epic spiritual war we find ourselves in every day. Many assumptions about those beings, yourself, and this world will be challenged regardless of whether you approach this question from either a Pagan or a Christian perspective. But it is our endeavor to go boldly to wherever the truth leads us.
As I was writing this article, my laptop crashed multiple times and it was extremely buggy the entire time I was writing and editing. I know that this is because the dark powers were interfering with me and trying to prevent this knowledge from getting out.
Before we begin this intellectual journey in earnest, we must first make it clear how God and The Gods exist in the same universe, occupying exalted but distinct places on The Hierarchy of Being.
II. The Hierarchy of Being
We have alluded to The Hierarchy of Being numerous times in our newsletter, and it is time that we discuss it at length. The Hierarchy of Being is absolutely critical for you to imbibe as a concept when you are a spiritual seeker, because the dark powers who control all of our institutions have inculcated into you a flat view of the cosmos where all human life is of equal value and it all happens within a strictly materialistic cosmos. They want you to seriously think a sub-80 IQ Somalian’s life matters as much as a 140+ IQ Swede’s, or a tiger’s as much as a mosquito’s. This is madness, of course. The universe is radically hierarchical at every level, and God designed it that way because Hierarchy is good, and true, and (especially!) beautiful. It ensures variety and distinctions which God loves.
One needn’t believe in spiritual things to come to the conclusion that this universe is not designed in an egalitarian manner. In fact, since all traditional institutions established for teaching spiritual truths have been hijacked nearly everywhere in the world, a spiritual belief might be an obstacle to recognizing this truth because the institutions teach the utterly lethal lie that God made an egalitarian universe and populated it with egalitarian creatures to promote egalitarianism! To see that Hierarchy is everywhere we need only look at Nature: Some men are faster than others, some are slower, some are wise, some are retarded. Tigers are mightier than sloths. We can see plainly see that a Tiger is a more magnificent creature than a worm. In a contest between two animals over sexual partners or food, it is the stronger who wins. Nature does not care about fairness and neither does Nature’s God.
Among humans too we see a variety of types, with lowly peasants who care only for their material safety which they maintain through their labour, merchants with greater appetites that demand to be met through generating wealth that employs peasants, warriors willing to risk their lives out of a burning desire for everlasting fame who can extract wealth from merchants and labour from peasants as they see fit, and finally sages who realize transformative eternal truths in the depths of their consciousness and then teach these truths for the benefit of all mankind. There is dispute among the great perennial traditionalists, like Guenon and Evola, over whether the priestly or the warrior caste is superior. In any case, some men are greater than others.
Men are meant to have a superiority over animals, though in modern conditions Men have sunk to a level of shame that makes them unfit for this great dignity. Man has triumphed over all other lifeforms on this planet, to the point of stripping The Earth bare and driving most other forms of life to extinction, because Man is superior to the animals in power. He did this through his superior reason. Man was made to be a steward of The Earth with dominion over the animals, and instead he is a polluter of The Earth and a genocider of animals. He abuses his power over animals unjustly, and a day of reckoning is coming for that, but the qualitative superiority of Man over animals will remain, even if Man must fight desperately to return to the position that God had ordained for him.
Creatures higher on the hierarchy of Nature like a Tiger or an Artist are more complex, with more faculties, and greater demands for energy, and more time-consuming means of reproduction. Thus they have a noble bearing because they know their great desires demand to be met as a matter of justice. They are keen to treat what others lesser than them would see as excess luxury as a natural right that is necessary to develop their inborn powers.
Everything in the universe boldly flouts the liberal’s insane belief in Egalitarianism. This is so because God loves Justice. Justice can only flourish where there is inequality - wherever there is harmony between different beings, with the superior benevolently leading the lower who humbly submits, each recognizing their proper station and the duties that naturally flow from that, there is JUSTICE. For anything to be just means for it to occupy its proper place in the universe, and to practice Justice means nothing else than to put things in their proper place.
The delusional liberal’s promotion of equality is nothing other than a diabolical scheme to promote injustice and tyranny. One who clings to that belief can never understand themselves, the universe, God, history, or Nature. Let us practice Justice, then, by mocking the belief in Equality wherever we see it.
God, of course, occupies the topmost position on The Hierarchy of Being. If there even is a Hierarchy of Being, there must be a summit, and only one entity could occupy that summit or else they wouldn’t really be Supreme, and if they didn’t occupy that summit eternally then they wouldn’t really be The Supreme Being. This is who Men call God. But between us and God there is another rank of being, and this is what we expect because otherwise there would be an unnecessarily large gap between God and Man which is unfit for an infinitely creative being like God.
If underneath Men on The Hierarchy of Being there are quite intelligent but not to the point of being able to overcome animal instinct creatures like the great apes, then less intelligent creatures like worms, it would make sense that directly above Man on The Hierarchy of Being there were creatures quite a bit more intelligent than us but still ranking underneath God: These are the spiritual beings we will discuss throughout this series of articles.
Understanding The Hierarchy of Being is essential. Even just to understand it is itself a wonderful triumph over The Demons. In order to ascend The Hierarchy of Being, which is precisely the same thing as advancing spiritually, we must realize our full potential and fulfill the responsibilities that our present position within the Hierarchy entails. We must assist our inferiors and venerate our superiors. We can’t venerate our superiors, the gods and God, unless we ourselves know our place in The Hierarchy of Being and theirs relative to each other and to us. Internalizing the secular egalitarian materialist worldview is to be robbed of all the attitudes necessary for spiritual advancement, and the only beings interested in doing that to us are The Dark Lords of The Hell-Realms. Putting The Hierarchy of Being into practice by properly venerating the spiritual beings above us, and showing the noble benevolence proper to the beings beneath us, as well as striving to fulfilling the duties that our position entails is how we win the spiritual war on the side of The Gods of Righteousness and their Master, The Supreme Being.
But what is the difference between God and the gods? We will now proceed to discuss this at length.
III. God and The Gods
Consider the painting you see above, made by Gustave Dore. I am sure you have seen it before, it is ubiquitous on X dot com’s Trad Christian sphere for example. They post this painting but do not really understand it. You see Christ brandishing the weapon of His Conquest, The Cross, and legions of Aryan-looking Angels (note their blond hair and fair skin!) casting out the beings below them who are the numerous pagan gods whose cults were displaced by the new cult of Christianity. Trad Christians think the pagan gods were just demons, which is not true at all. Artists, of course, can intuitively access the higher worlds and as such can depict scenes that are happening there even if they’re not aware that this is what they are doing. When cultures clashed in the ancient world, the combatants knew that their respective deities were involved and fighting each other’s gods. A war has always been a favorite spectacle for a spiritual being to watch. You couldn’t win a war unless your own gods were on your side, and the Romans would even try to propitiate the gods of their enemies to get them on their side and ensure the defeat of their enemies. But the gods can make backroom deals with each other just like humans can, they have plans and goals that are millenia in the making, so the mere result of a war can’t necessarily be how we discern what has transpired in the spiritual world. The Romans knew that well. Us foolish modern mortals make the classic mistake of thinking our immediate circumstances must represent the will of the gods or their feelings towards us. “I prosper so God has blessed me, I am cursed so God has abandoned me” - How do you not know that you enjoy prosperity in this world only because God has abandoned you to your sins, and in His Wrath you are being prepared to receive a greater degree of punishment by letting you remain in ignorance and sins resulting from decadent worldliness? How do you not know your trials are just so God can make you tougher and wiser because He loves you? So it is also with events on a bigger scale, like war, or the displacement of one religion by another. It could be that the triumph of one nation over another means that the winning nation’s gods are stronger, and that one religion displacing another means that the conquering religion has a stronger Deity. But things are not always what they seem, and the beings in The Divine Realm operate on a much greater time-scale than we humans do.
Yes, the scene depicted above is something that literally happened, not “just metaphorically” - Gustave Dore saw it with his spiritual eyes. The scene transpiring in the invisible realm depicted in that painting above is the necessary precondition to Christianity displacing Greco-Roman Paganism. We see in that painting that Christ does not confront the gods directly but gets the angels to fight them on His behalf. But how is it that an Angel can defeat a god? The truth is, an angel and a god are the same type of entity. They are, qualitatively, the same species, but engaged in different roles. It is the role that makes the difference. An Angel is a god that has freely chosen to serve The Supreme Being to the uttermost of their capacity and to live a mostly spiritual existence. Their whole orientation is to serve and adore God. A god is an entity that also pays great homage to The Supreme Being but they love to relish sensual pleasures and the pursuit of glory and the feeling of power. A god is an angel with an ego, and an angel is a god with a stricter spiritual regiment. The gods sometimes stray, in varying degrees, from the worship of The Supreme Being, getting lead away by their passions, as almost all beings who have passions and free will and intelligence do. There is nothing so common in this world as people straying from the straight and narrow path. But a god is not a “demon” which is a different type of role for a spirit. The gods are opposed to demons, and if they are not they will not remain gods for long. We will discuss the role of demon in a different part of this series. In this part, we will examine what is meant by the term God, gods, and angels.
It would be an absurdity to dismiss all of the gods of the pagans as “demons.” How can these beings who guided people who reached such heights of glory as the Greeks and Romans be all dismissed as “demons?” How can one read such written works as those by Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles only to come to the conclusion that they were inspired by “demons?” - that is madness. That same poetical tradition formed the backdrop of the world the divine Plato grew up in, and he invoked those same beings, and his philosophy became a critical contribution for Christian thought. Books by pagans like Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius inspire even secular people to virtue, so how can such people be worshippers of demons? Do demons inspire people to virtue? For a Christian to assert that the Greeks are all uniformly demonically inspired means a quite significant chunk of the foundation of their own intellectual heritage is “demonically inspired.” No, the reality is far more complex. I could never believe and have never believed that all of the pagan gods without exception are “demonic!” and for Christians to think this is patently absurd, but they are caged in by their own monolithic framework.
But it is important to understand the vast gulf between God and the gods. The difference between them was never essentially quantitative - it’s qualitative. A god is a being somewhat similar in psychological make-up to yourself but with immortality, vast supernatural powers, and a direct perception of realities which to us are unseen but to them plainly visible. It is a frightful thing to be on the wrong side of such an entity, as we see with Odysseus, whose impious slight of Poseidon cost him the lives of his Men and 20 years of his life. The gods of Greece were noble and inspired their followers to live nobly. When we venerate an entity we establish a spiritual bond with that entity. What we call “veneration” is not just an emotion or an attitude but a spiritual power of the heart that cuts through time and space and puts us in direct contact with that which we venerate. We can break into and access the unseen realm through great concentration of thought and will concentrated with emotion, and that is what veneration is in the highest degree. The Greeks, and every other Pagan people too of course but we will continue to use The Greeks and Romans as our foremost example, were spiritually linked to their gods by the power of veneration. We know that the gods they worshipped were noble and wise beings, because they became a noble and wise people. But we also know that sometimes the gods can be capricious, cruel, and petty. Zeus had many love affairs and could thus be just as much a slave to passion as Man. But they have an infinitely greater capacity to satisfy and enjoy their passions than mere mortals like us.
The gods have physical bodies, like us, but as they live in the higher planes of reality their bodies are made of a finer material matter than ours and as such they can phase in and out of the higher worlds and this one at will. They can separate their metaphysical bodies from their physical bodies at ease if they find it necessary, whereas mortals like us can only do that with effort built up through spiritual exercises. I have separated my soul from my body numerous times and it is hard to stay in that state for very long. But the gods can do it for as long as they like and initiate that state with ease.
You probably think that the spirit world is all immaterial in contradiction to the material world, but that is not quite true. In fact, the gods perceive the fullness of the physical world but they perceive it better than you, and then in addition to that they also see the spiritual realities that are wholly or mostly invisible to you. The existence of a higher being like a god is “the spiritual world plus the physical world” and never “the spiritual world sans the physical world” - a gnostic existence is not fit for a god! In fact your physical senses cannot at present handle the sensual pleasures enjoyed by the gods like Poseidon or Zeus. Their food, Ambrosia, is so good that all earthly food, even the very best, would seem like ashes in comparison. The food they eat is physical and spiritual just like themselves: it is deeply nourishing and spiritually energizing. The nectar they drink makes the purest water on this planet seem like sewage waste. Your physical senses would be overloaded to experience what they perceive, and they would find our entire sensual experience impoverished. Oh, and how can we neglect to speak of the vigour and beauty of their bodies. The pure vitality radiating from the flesh of the gods makes our healthiest athletes look like crippled geriatrics, and in addition they are immortal and can shapeshift into animals they have an affinity for if they like. The bodies of vital and healthy and young people “glow” in a sense, as do indeed the bodies of the gods but even moreso, and then in addition to that the bodies of the gods shine with a spiritual light too. The spiritual light sought after by the mystics radiates directly from the flesh of the gods in addition to the “glow” of their physical healthy vitality: everything with the gods is “both-and” - both spiritual and material to a maximal degree, not either one or the other. Their physical and spiritual qualities are both extremely developed and at full blast, at all times. It is a great mercy from God that most do not see the bodies of the gods, because the slightest glance of them would spoil the sight of Man forever. All of this and God has given them power over whichever of the elements that they have an affinity for in accordance with their individual personalities like fire, water, earth, love, war, wisdom etc. Yes, from the perspective of spiritual beings seeming “abstractions” like “war” and “love” are as much elemental forces as water and fire. They occupy an exalted status on The Hierarchy of Being, so they are dangerously divine and very much like God though still not at all exactly the same as Him. Consider the story of the woman who asked to see Zeus’ true form without a human disguise, and then was burned into ashes at the mere sight of it!
There is some discussion amongst Pagans whether the gods that seem to exhibit similar qualities are really just the same god known by different names in different cultures: Whether the Norwegian Thor is really the same being as the Slavic Perun. Some of the Romans had thoughts like this, they thought Odin was just the Germanic version of the Greek god Hermes. But I strongly suspect such conclusions are not true, though I am not completely sure, the truth of this question has not been revealed to me. I think, rather, some humans from among the tribes of Man incarnate as gods and the gods one can incarnate as across cultures are similar enough to each other that they can be categorized similarly but yet they are separate beings. I do not believe Thor and Perun are the same, and even less do I think Hermes and Odin are the same. The Dharmic framework is best here: “Indra” (a kingly and militaristic thunder god in the Vedic tradition) is a role that any exceptionally virtuous Man could incarnate as. The various gods in the Vedic Tradition are just roles that spirits can play, archetypes they can fulfill, but they are absolutely really existent beings that are just as alive and personal as you and I. This is a useful model, I believe, for understanding all of the pagan gods of all the world’s pantheons. So there have been “many Indras” as it were, and also many sea gods, many love goddesses, etcetera - in this age and myriad other ages, on this planet and myriad other planets.
Do you crave an existence such as the gods have? That’s only natural. It could be yours. It has long been understood by the ancients that the end result of living a heroically virtuous life is that you evolve into a being precisely like this, reborn as a god. Indeed, the life of a Man properly lived is just a school for godhood. The Sanatana Dharma Tradition of India preserved this idea exceptionally well, for the most part, in their schema of a spirit that reincarnates as a God in accordance with its righteousness. In The Hellenic Tradition there are more than a few echoes of this idea in pagan gods transforming those whom they love and honour into trees, stars, or inviting them to live with them on Mount Olympus like they did with Hercules who became a god. The Platonists knew this secret as well as the Dharmis of India.
Some gods may wish to keep the reality of humans being able to becoming exalted as gods a secret to maintain the power of their position! But such greedy gods will not remain gods for long, as this is an ignoble abuse of their power. Do not think that mere do goodery or a normal life is sufficient to attain this exalted status of being. It takes real extraordinary Virtue to reincarnate to that level: Ordinary duty-keeping in a human life still only ensures reincarnation as a human again and that is hard enough. To become a pagan style god one must have died on the battlefield after heroically sacrificing one’s life in a noble cause or have been a just king or a wise man or a great artist. It takes a wealth of extraordinarily good deeds to merit an extraordinary birth such as the one enjoyed by The Gods.
Yes, the gods are glorious and worthy of honour. It is awe-inspiring for us to even see what from their perspective is just mere casual play. But they are nothing like The God, from whence their title, gods, is derived. The key to understanding the difference between the gods and The God is understanding the difference between the words Immortal and Eternal. We tend to lazily conflate these terms and use them interchangeably even though they do not at all mean the same thing, which is a huge problem in the Christian theologies of today I have noticed. To be immortal means to have a definite beginning but no definite end. All the world’s “mythologies” attest to the reality that the gods were born but that having been born they cannot really die except under very exceptional circumstances. This is immortality: to have a definite beginning but no definite end. This is different from mortality, the condition you and I both have, where we have both a definite beginning and a definite end (Memento mori, my dear reader!) God, however, is Eternal: having neither a beginning nor an end. What an immortal being and an eternal being both have in common is an endless future. But there are two differences: Firstly, an immortal being has only a potentially endless future, only barring exceptional circumstances, whereas an Eternal being has a definitively and unquestionably endless future. Secondly, an immortal being was born at a definite time, but an Eternal being has always existed, will always exist, and could never not exist. An eternal being has an endless past in addition to an endless future. In the normatively Christian west I think we are used to thinking about having a never-ending future, but we are not as much accustomed to thinking of possessing that in addition to a never-ending past as The Supreme Being.
The gods are immortal but God is eternal. Both exist, and it is necessary to distinguish between them to understand either of them fully. God is singularly unique (“one”), and possesses every single positive quality imaginable to the infinitely maximal extent: Goodness, Truth, Beauty. All good qualities in this universe and all good qualities participated in by sentient beings are derivative directly from Him, but He is never outmatched by anything that comes from Him. He has no rival or equal. He is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, and Holy. He created the whole universe and is the author of all the history that transpires within it. He is the source of all other beings, including the gods and man, whom He actively creates, preserves, governs. He judges their deeds according to His perfect and unchanging moral standards. He is self-existent, the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover. He is present everywhere and within everything but without being impacted by any of those things, and so He is simultaneously fully transcendent and fully imminent, which is what we mean by Panentheism. All that He made is good, and what we call “evil” is just a corruption of a good resulting from an abuse of free will from some other being. As The Sovereign of the Universe, nothing transpires that He does not ultimately either will or permit. He doesn’t directly will the abuse of the good gift of free will that intelligent beings are endowed with that results in evil, but He permits it because no evil is beyond His power to bring forth more goodness out of it that will more than make up for it in the end.
As we have discussed before in other articles, the gods are ultimately servants of The Supreme Being and serve Him, as His deputies in the creation, as it were, having power over certain aspects of the universe He made in accordance with His Will. The Zoroastrian Tradition, another Indo-Aryan Tradition like Sanatana Dharma, preserved this primordial truth to a wonderful extent with The Yazatas, supernatural beings who serve Ahura Mazda, the name for The Supreme Being in their tradition. We find the reality of gods reperesenting aspects of God’s creation to lower beings also in The Silmarillion where we find Eru Illuvatar (The Supreme Being-analogue) whose servants are The Valar. I find Silmarillion to be filled with rich spiritual truths, which makes me suspect Tolkien was unconsciously drawing on primeval sources when constructing his mythos.
Brahma, Allah, Ahura Mazda, Vishnu, The Christian God, and “The One” revered by Neo-Platonists and Hermeticists are all imperfect conceptualizations of The Supreme Being who has revealed Himself in various ways befitting the peoples and times in which He revealed Himself in accordance with His Plans, though all of these conceptualizations have been corrupted over time and thus they are not perfect. But we can still approach The Supreme Being by using those conceptions as stepping-stones.
An important insight that has been well-preserved to a great extent in the Vedic Dharmic traditions is that our spirits are co-eternal with God, that they are derivative effects of God’s eternal self-existence. Our spirits have varying degrees of consciousness in accordance with their virtue and wisdom, and incarnate in increasingly complex forms as they ascend The Hierarchy of Being. You and I have already passed through numerous mortal incarnations, my dear reader. What The Eternal God desires for each of us is for our co-eternal spirits to incarnate into an immortal incarnation, to become gods, spiritually awakened co-eternal spirits dwelling inside gloriously immortal bodies born at a destined moment: that is what the gods of all pantheons are. What people call “Reincarnation” or “The Transmigration of the Soul” is just a process whereby we are prepared, over the course of many mortal incarnations, to have an immortal incarnation: to have an incarnation that begins but does not end as our present one will. To be both physically born as immortal gods and spiritually awakened to our eternal connection with The Eternal God is our destiny if we follow The Eternal Aryan Dharma. We could say that all sentient beings (animals, humans, gods) are just “the same species” (eternal spirits) at varying degrees of development. But there is a qualitative difference between eternal spirits like us and The Supreme Being. One cannot “become God” as in The God as one can become an Indra, a Zeus, a Poseidon. All of the gods in Gustave Dore’s painting above were humans once, as were all of the angels.
Many among the Wise Men of The East understood that a birth as a god is dangerous, and that to enjoy the pleasures of the gods is not the ultimate telos of life which is to be spiritually enlightened and confirmed in one’s union with God. But those Wise Men made the mistake of thinking that our telos is to be “dissolved into God” - which begs the question, why would God even make creatures at all if they are just to dissolve themselves back into Him? No, our eternal spirits are to to incarnate as immortal gods who serve The Eternal God, but still, they were right about the dangers of seeking godhood. While they live for an extremely long time by mortal standards, the gods themselves can still perish. Even a blissful lifetime of millions of years is just a blink of an eye from the perspective of the wise. But while mortals like you and I die because of necessity, gods die for much stranger reasons. The gods have free will, and sensual desires, and egotistical inclinations, just like humans do, and as a result of abusing their free will the good karma they accumulated that enabled them to become gods to begin with can run out. The gods can even do such wicked crimes in spite of their high station that they can even incarnate in The Hell-Realms as a punishment! Yes, many a naughty god has had to endure terrible sufferings as a consequence of their deeds as humans do, just like us, and some crimes are so serious that only Death is sufficient as a punishment. Because gods are more powerful than us their capacity for crime is much greater and the negative consequences of their crimes more serious, having the potential to negatively shape entire planetary epochs. Thus the punishments that must be dealt to such serious crimes must be more serious. In addition to this, as anyone who has even briefly studied the world’s corpus of Mythologies could tell you, gods can also perish in fights with each other. Only a god is strong enough to kill a god. Thus, we say that the gods can never die of ordinary causes but they can be extraordinarily killed. When an eternal spirit that had incarnated as a god dies, it typically sinks into a lower level unless they died for unjust reasons. They can possibly even incarnate all the way down into the lowest level if they have committed a serious crime, and must then work their way up The Hierarchy of Being all over again. This is the worst possible outcome for an eternal spirit like us. Oh, to have had so many lifetimes of storing up karma and learning lessons wasted for fleeting pleasures and unjust tyrannical power! The foolishness that our passions can lead us to!
The beautiful and mighty gods of the Greco-Romans lead The Greeks and The Romans into becoming the singularly pre-eminent peoples of the Ancient Western World. But they became decadent over time, and their cults became corrupted. They were no longer leading Mankind to spiritual enlightenment to the extent that they should have. Because of this, God in His Providence saw fit to mostly displace their cults with Christianity. As befitting their bellicose nature, The Greco-Roman Gods fought back against this displacement but eventually accepted their punishment. They and all of the pagan gods of Europe have nonetheless been subtly present in European History ever since the rise of Christendom. They have been serving The Supreme God behind the scenes instead of explicitly as they would like as a part of their punishment, and they will soon make their grand return. They will soon be revealing to their pagan worshippers how to worship them in a way that honours them authentically. All of the spiritually sensitive artists and wise men of European Christendom have noticed that the very same muses of Apollo that inspired the great artists of Pagan times were actively inspiring the great artistic movements in the Renaissance and in all of Europe’s history. The Immortal Pagan Gods were neither destroyed nor killed, but relegated to serving God and the Europeans they had an affinity with in less explicit ways than they would have liked until The Supreme Being sees fit to bring them back into the spotlight. Those who seek them earnestly now through prayer and sacrifices are likely already more in touch with them than most would suspect.
IV. God’s Divine Play
While their capacity for enjoyment is vastly superior to that of a human, many Wise Men particularly in The East say that even the lifestyle of a god is to be renounced because even the pleasures experienced by a deity are ultimately unsatisfying as all transient experiences are. Only The Infinite God can satisfy the infinite longings of our hearts, and this is as true for humans as it is for gods. If we had all the power of the gods but no unity with God, we would still ultimately be miserable and ignorant and egotistical creatures.
Thus, the eastern wise men did not seek to incarnate as pagan gods, though they certainly believed such an existence is indeed attainable, but rather they sought to cease reincarnating all together and extinguish all desire for pleasures as a fully enlightened Buddha or Yogi. In the Dharmic Tales we see that even the gods bow before a Buddha, A Yogi, A Saint, who has attained the ultimate spiritual enlightenment. Indeed, to realize spiritual enlightenment directly in our own consciousness and not as a mere matter of intellectual abstraction, to directly perceive God’s Transcendental self-existent luminosity is the ultimate bliss for all created beings, a bliss far beyond all sense pleasure or imagination or rational consideration. Those who have not truly had this experience have not even had the slightest inkling of what it is like enter into their hearts, and those who have had that experience know it to be the summit of existence, the telos of all intelligent sentient beings. Holy and wise men get small glimpses of this even in their earthly lifetimes, and the gods enjoy this perpetually in varying degrees. But those who are not confirmed in their surrender to God and still cling to sensual passions and ego, such as the pagan gods of most of the world’s mythologies, can still commit very serious sins that may even warrant their destruction.
We ascend the hierarchy of being, consciousness and bliss through our conformity to He who is being, consciousness, and bliss itself, and the higher we are in that hierarchy the more we can influence reality itself at our will and the more serious is the karmic effect whether for good or for ill when we make an impactful decision. It is much better to keep ascending the hierarchy of being than it is to burn through our wealth of good karma by being a megalomaniacal deity. So the Wise Men were right in a sense to renounce even the existence of a god. But they were wrong that the alternative is to be “one with God” in an existence wiping away all traces of individual self, which is not what God wants. In addition to that, many small-souled and mendacious people have abused this teaching of the East to stop Men from embodying nobility and other god-like qualities out of fear of being “egotistical.”
When The Eastern Mystics say we are “one with God” or even “one with Everything” they are right in a sense, but they err when they say that this negates our individual personality or that it ought too. We are, of course, “one with God’ and realizing this directly is all that spiritual enlightenment is: We directly perceive that God is and always has been the Heart of our heart, the Self of our self, the Being of our being, the Consciousness of our consciousness. But to no extent whatsoever does this dissolve our distinct personality and those among the orientals who think it does have just fallen under the most pernicious ego-delusion of all.: the egotism that seeks to deny egotism.To clarify, I do not think the greatest among the eastern mystics originally taught that the individual self should be completely dissolved or that this happens in spiritual awakenings, only that this is a distortion of their original teaching that has since displaced the original teaching over time. The gods bow before enlightened Yogis and Buddhas to honour them, yes, but such folks become gods in the end. They bow before the humans who have attained divine enlightenment in spite of the challenges of a human birth, and then those humans join their ranks.
There is no perfect metaphor to describe the mystery of our essential unity with God. All metaphors are imperfect, because language cannot accurately communicate Transcendental truths. One metaphor that I like to use is the ocean and the wave. The ocean can say to the wave “I am the wave!” but the wave cannot say to the ocean “I am the ocean!” because despite their qualitative similarities there are also vast qualitative differences between the ocean and the wave, and the wave is only a necessary effect of the ocean. Similarly, God could say “I am you, the self of your self” but you cannot say “I am God!” without being in complete error. This is not a perfect metaphor, though, because the ocean is ultimately composed out of all the little individual drops of water, whereas God is perfectly complete in and of Himself and is not “composed” out of the sum total of the beings in the universe, and moreover though spirits like you and me exist as an effect of God’s self-existent ocean of light, we do not exist “necessarily” as an effect of that Light, because there are no necessities with a perfectly free being like God, rather He is actively willing all of the beings that exist as a freely made choice. Moreover, one wave is not really different from another wave, but all of the spirits like you and me and the pagan gods and the angels and the demons are all uniquely different from each other by God’s creative design, imbued with distinct personalities that God wants them to be in touch with and to exhibit. God loves variety. He loves His creations, each of us, our distinct personalities, and does not want us to merely dissolve ourselves into Him, but rather to be as near to Him as possible while still being ourselves and united to Him.
Don’t worry if you are confused. This is a great and profound mystery that is beyond all power of language to describe. I do not fully understand it myself, lowly adept that I am, and anyone who says that they fully understand it and that they have the perfect descriptive terms for these transcendental things is a liar or a fool whom I urge you to flee from. Oh, the audacity to think that something as lowly as language could ever contain the ineffable mysteries of God, or that transcendental truths could ever be reduced to mere words! I wonder how many eternal spirits ceaselessly wander from one incarnation to the next because of their puffed-up pride in their fancy words, and I wonder how much God hates these false idols of language that Men have vaingloriously constructed because of how much they serve as obstructions to the direct perception of Him. The subtle idolatry of theological constructs being mistaken for God as He is in Himself is part of the reason why Abrahamic religions are going to be destroyed by The Supreme Being.
Yes, God is Other to us. But for two different reasons. One dimension of Him is Other because He is more like us than we are like ourselves, an eternal personality, and thus we do not understand Him because we do not understand ourselves. Other dimensions of Him are unknown to mere mortals like us: Infinitude, for example, and other qualities so far beyond our comprehension that we cannot even name them. These knowable and unknowable aspects of God are not different "parts" but rather make up one unified whole of this wondrous being Man has always called God.
This whole creation from the lowest Hell to the Highest Heaven is just God’s Divine Play. It does not exist because of necessities, and from His divine vantage point it all makes perfect sense and it is all perfectly enjoyable. Realizing your oneness with Him and sharing His perspective, directly perceiving Him, is perhaps the most dramatic scene in this story, but it’s not the end of the play. The play is eternal. But certainly insofar as they are under the illusion of separation and enslaved to so many sinful habits and ignorant modes of thinking, spirits like you and me can make the creation quite terrible, so this world we live in is not at all what God had originally intended for it to be, though it’s hardly beyond His power to fix, and He permits it all for reasons known to Him.
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