P.R.I.M.E. Revisted

People who've heard my description of Wiccan theology as PRIME (polytheistic, realistic, individual, multiple, ecstatic) may or may not like my new version of PRIME.

Here it is, from a rough draft of Wicca uncluttered:

[Please note some formatting is missing below.]

Although not an established UEW teaching, I likewise divide the theology of Wicca into five main points, which I call PRIME:

The gods are:
· Personal
· Real
· Individual
· Multiple
· Experiential

I chose the word prime because the gods are the most important part of Wicca. Wicca without the gods is like a person without a brain, or a car without an engine, or a city without people: Useless, pointless and rather sad. It is possible to be an atheistic Wiccan and believe the gods are not gods, but the thought-forms of a collective human consciousness, but you still need to believe those thought-forms, whatever their source, exist, before Wicca will make sense.

So what does a “personal” god mean? This means that individuals make the connection with the gods at their own behest, not because a perceived religious leader tells them that this is what is appropriate. Your understanding of the gods should be based upon your interactions with them, and it is not anyone’s business what those interactions are. It is about you and your gods.

This personal nature works two ways. On the one hand, no one has the right (or, indeed, the ability) to dictate what one experiences with the gods, which means that it is possible to have experiences that fall outside the shared gnosis of a community about that community’s deities. On the other hand, when such personal gnosis is not verified outside of the individual (what we’ve discussed elsewhere as UPG) that knowledge is limited in its scope to affecting the personal.

To give an example, imagine that we have a Pagan named Elsie, who believes that she has had an interaction with Zeus. Elsie’s interaction shows Zeus to be a pacifistic deity who puts women first. She believes this interaction to be true, despite the fact that this goes against the body of literature about Zeus and is not the knowledge shared by other worshippers of Zeus.

Elsie has many options about what to do with this unverified information, which roughly fall into two categories: She can discard the gnosis as being something other than an interaction with Zeus (considering it, for example, a manifestation of her own beliefs, or an experience with a different deity), something that is going to depend on the type of interaction she’s experienced. She can also accept the information as unverified and personal and base her personal practices upon it. As long as she’s not trying to dictate this is the way for other people to follow Zeus, her view is between her and Zeus and he can sort it out if he so chooses.

Imaginary Elsie’s fictional experiences of the god Zeus are not the way most people report these things. The more common experience is generally that a person has an experience of the divine that transcends their own knowledge of the god or gods in question and, when investigated against the body of literature about that deity and compared with others who’ve had that experience, ends up being similar if not exactly the same.

The reason we, as Wiccans, give for this similarity, is that we believe the gods are real. That is that they exist, and are individuals with their own personalities, likes and dislikes, wants and needs. Things get a bit sticky in theology at this point because the exact nature of these real gods is a matter of debate. A debate that can never be settled.

Part of the reason the debate can never be settled is that the personal nature of our relationships with the divine mean that it’s not our business to go around sharing our ‘testimony’ of the gods. In fact, since the relationship with the gods is personal, it is no one’s business what that relationship entails, and it should be shared only in a way which honors that relationship, and that can (and should) mean that some experiences should be held close to your heart and not shared with those who’d only use your words for scorn and criticism. Comparing experiences between two followers of the same god makes sense, but using one’s experiences to sway believers in other gods or those who don’t believe in any gods is pointless.
Remember, we believe the gods exist and can and do interact with mankind. This means that if someone is not a follower of a given god it is probably because that god has no interest in having that person follow him/her. Put simply, if any given god wanted any given person to follow him/her, that god has the ability to provide that person with the necessary experiences required for that person to become his/her follower. If a person does not follow a god, that is between the god and that person, and it’s not our business or obligation to change this. At the risk of sounding like I’m bashing a particular religion, let me make this clear: Gods that actually exist do not need people to sell them to other people. Gods that need people to sell them to other people either do not exist (and therefore can’t interact with people) or exist but are not interested in having worshipers (and therefore don’t interact with people).
A third possibility, that such gods exist but are not very nice, is possible, but there is no need to discuss gods that aren’t worth worshiping in a book about Wicca.

Moving on…

If we assume that the gods are real and that they interact with people, it becomes obvious that people don’t all have the same experiences. There are a few different ways to understand this, and one sort of cheap way is to assume that the reason interactions with the gods differ is because they are all created at the human level. This does not explain the very real fact that people on different continents, with different backgrounds, will describe the exact same interactions with the same deity, but it does work for those trapped in a monotheistic mindset that says all gods are one.

It is easier to assume the gods are multiple in number and themselves individuals, just as we are. The Hermetic Axiom ‘As Above, So Below,’ appears in Wicca frequently for a reason. We believe that the universe manifests in repeating patterns: Subatomic particles behave in ways that can be understood by observing planets in a solar system, and the gods behave in ways that can be understood by observing mankind. We are discrete individuals, a part of a mass of humanity with distinct minds and separate goals, organized into groups but capable of acting alone…and so are the gods.

I’ve discussed how the belief that all gods are one big god doesn’t really fit into Wicca properly (and the Abrahamic source material behind this belief) in other places, so I will leave it at that, because I think everyone can arrive at an understanding of the problems with that view based on nothing more than the idea that the gods are personal and proselytization is pointless. You’re all adult enough to work that out for yourself, and you can read it ad nauseum in Wicca 333 if you’re still concerned about it.

The last part of PRIME, like the Ethic of Attunement, explains why we do ritual: The gods are experiential. We do rituals and make attempts at attunement because we can experience communion with the divine. We can interact with the gods, via Mystery and other ritual, and doing so has benefits for us. It is no one else’s business when we do, and no one can force it upon us, but we can have those experiences.