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Tuesday, June 13, 2006
14:20 
Don't tell everyone or they'll all want one
 Recently I've been working triple overtime in the NC world (we don't have hatstands there - just lampstands). This has involved sticking my fat beak into other people's lives left, right, here, there and everywhere. And killing things. But the latter is par for the course. At least it's straightforward and doesn't involve doing the thing I hate the most: telling people things about themselves knowing that they will probably act on it when I have no basis for my assertions and pronouncements other than my fallible perceptions of the shapes in which I can feel myself swimming.
The subject has arisen, more than once, of blood. Specifically: "How can I possibly have a relationship with this entity when I am whiter than milk/blacker than coal/yellower than custard/not furry?"
Here's a secret. You have to promise not to tell anyone. It's just between you and me. Okay?
Are you ready?
The gods don't give a flying fuck whether you're white, black, yellow, orange, green, hairy, feathery or some form of mutant fucking slime mould!
The segregation of people by culture into disparate groups who may not/should not/will not talk to one another is a tribal "us and them" phenomenon familiar to many zoologists involved in the study of primates. We do it because we are just another great ape, marking our territories by pissing all over the boundary. When someone invades what we consider to be our territory we run up to the edge and start hooting and hollering, hoping to scare them off rather than have them mount an incursion.
Gorillas and chimps do it with branches. Lemurs do it by farting. We do it by insulting one another. It's all just primate territorial behaviour.
The gods don't give a crap about tribal boundaries on that scale. Human beings see each other by the way light reflects: the gods see us by the ripples we make in the Great Dance. Blood can make a difference, of course blood can make a difference. Blood can tie a thread from one part of the weave to another. Blood can alter the way the gods treat you. Blood can earn you perks, or mean that a god will pay attention to you sooner rather than later. Blood can also mean that a god will be less than gushing over you. But having or lacking blood does not mean a god will have nothing to do with you. Having or lacking blood does not mean that he will ignore you.
Gods care about what humans can do, about what they can offer. Gods care about the effects humans have on the pattern. Gods aren't in this to look after individual bloodlines. The idea of God as a protective, benevolent force, altruistically caring for his children, is peculiar to certain cultures and certain ideals. Gods are as much interested in gain as anything else.
The gods don't have time or patience for racism. Tribal groupings fluctuate so quickly — humans change their minds on who is good and who is bad all the time. What we think isn't the same as what they think.
Also, the gods aren't preserved in aspic. So there's really only so much you can get out of bookwork. That's one of the reasons I'm leery of reconstructionism. Sure, that's the way people did things for their gods then, but this is now. Even if I thought of them as 'my' gods rather than the other way around, they would be my gods now. To harken back to the past and insist things were better back then is to assume that the gods are incapable of adaptation, even though humans can do it. That's a bit arrogant.
Did the people on whose practices those books were based look to earlier books to find out how to do it? Are we actually saying that the gods aren't capable of getting up to speed in 2000 years or more?
UPG is just that: UPG. There is a place for bookwork. We can't rely on UPG as the be-all-and-end-all objective truth. That's just as arrogant. But this is our time now. It's up to us to form our own relationships with the gods, and if we don't bring racism to them they're not going to expect us to demonstrate it just because of some cultural bias about the amount of melanin in one's skin or whether or not we have epicanthic folds.
Culture is one thing. Stealing culture is bad because that's human territory. When territory is important we don't invade it, simply because it's asking for trouble. But gods have their own culture and, just as it's possible to learn a common language and talk to someone from another culture, it's possible for us to talk to gods if they choose to show themselves.
The Vikings didn't care whether you were blonde, red or black as long as you could work a boat. They cared about how good you were at making waves and using a sword. The gods are the same. Your skin doesn't matter. Your ability to interact with them does.
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