This Location is Genius!

To keep the concepts I’m talking about clear, I’m going to borrow a term from the Romans: genius. (plural: genii) The genius was considered to be a minor divinity that attached itself to someone or something for the duration of its existence. Every living being, place, and thing had its own genius, including groupings of people and things. There was a genius of the Roman emperor, of the Roman state, of the city of Rome; each separate and worthy of worship in the eyes of the Romans. These genii were made of the same divine essence as gods, but the gods were universal and powerful, as opposed to the more localized and weaker genii. Each genius was a protective spirit, which was called upon in prayer and sacrifice to act in some specific way pertaining to its domain. 

The question becomes, then, are the gods universal, or are they the genii of something local to us; e.g. the Earth, the Solar System, humanity itself? Let us assume, for a moment, that the gods are powerful genii, and are thus each attached to some entity. We would be presented with a model of cosmology which resembled a matryoshka doll; a hierarchy of gods with one for the planet, one for the galaxy, one for the universe, all nested within each other. In this hypothetical, we could claim that Tiw is the genius of collective humanity, due to his associations with the assemblies of the Germanic peoples. He would have come into existence with humanity, and would leave existence with it as well. He would be limited in his actions to those things pertaining to humanity. Each god would, in turn, be limited to acting on that thing to which their spirit was intrinsically linked. 

But the gods, as I and many others have experienced them, do not present as the genii would in the limits of their agency. It seems that all things contain a genius; some spark of divine connection; and perhaps some beings that we worship are the spirits of some thing or place. However, so many of our gods are multi-faceted and seemingly defy these limits. We can take as another example Thunor, whose name means “thunderer”. Polytheists who worship Thunor do so for many reasons and report varied experiences with the god. He is a god called on for protection, for hallowing, for rain, for help with our labors, for strength, and for friendship. He does not present as limited by function or domain, but rather motivated by interest and love towards those people and endeavors he cares about. He is not the spirit of the storm, or protection, or the working class. Thunor is the spirit of himself, not limited to one place or concept or people.

The problem we run into when trying to understand divine consciousness is that we cannot examine it in the way we can examine material beings or our own conscious experiences. Understanding it will require a rational departure from empirical observations. First, we should thoroughly examine material consciousness. Philosopher Thomas Nagel claimed that there must be non-physical properties of matter that explain mental states. [4] He called this view Panpsychism, and it was based on four premises: 

The mental states Nagel is referring to are the qualia of conscious experience. He was not arguing that thought is a non-physical process, since we can observe the ways that thoughts propagate in the brain through electro-chemical impulses between cells, but rather that we cannot intelligibly derive a unified, conscious experience from those chemical interactions. We don’t know how billions of neurons can create a single experience of self, but Nagel argues that there must be some non-physical component of matter that allows that experience of self to emerge. Consciousness must be at least as fundamental as matter, and since the reality of spacetime emerges from the causal interactions of matter, consciousness is also more fundamental than spacetime. 

Divine and material consciousnesses interact and therefore we cannot fully separate the divine from the material. While emergent systems can have abilities not present in their fundamental components, they also often acquire new limitations. These limitations, like the laws of causality, are not violations of the underlying principles; they are emergent constraints. Material consciousness, bound by material limitations, could therefore emerge from a more fundamental divine consciousness, acquiring those limitations in the process. The reverse is not possible. A system with more constraints cannot give rise to a system with fewer constraints without the latter already being implicit in its nature. If divine consciousness is less constrained,then it is more plausibly the fundamental source from which material consciousness emerges. This would explain why we find the gods wherever we go; if divine consciousness is fundamental, then all matter, energy, time and space emerge from its interactions.      

This is the most reasonable conclusion based on several key points. First, as shown above, divine consciousness does not emerge from material consciousness. Second, since both divine and material consciousness are related, either one emerged from the other, or they both emerged from the same fundamental thing. However, since spacetime emerges from the interactions of matter, if divine consciousness was a parallel system to matter, we would have no way to explain how the gods interact with us across space and time. This contradiction doesn’t exist if matter emerges from a fundamental divine consciousness, as both emergent systems would ultimately rely on it. 

Lastly, this would explain why material consciousness is more limited by natural laws than divine consciousness. Emergent systems are more complex than their fundamental parts and can have new and unexpected rules for their interactions, though these new rules do not violate the underlying laws of their parts. It is for these reasons that I have come to believe that the divine is fundamental to reality, and thus permeates all of it. 

To be very clear, I am not making a case, as Christian theologians would, for all-powerful deities. Though this is a claim of omnipresence, that is the only “omni” I believe applies to the gods. I see no evidence of omnipotence, nor do I think that omnipresence implies omniscience. Being present in all things does not mean that the gods have a perfect knowledge of all things. I am far from the first polytheist to make this claim, though this belief seems far less common among modern heathens. Neo-Platonist polytheists posit a similar, though more idealistic, structural model of the universe, wherein the physical universe is at the end of a chain of emanations that lead back to the gods and a unified divine One. [5] This idea has cropped up many times in various polytheist religions, and it merits some examination here.  

If the gods are indeed omnipresent, then why do we not perceive them constantly? An important variable to consider is the way that our brains function to facilitate experience. When we sense something; sounds, sights, smells; our brains do not present these experiences to us as they are received. All this information travels at different speeds, and so our brains unconsciously reorder stimuli, fill in missing information, and delete what they consider not relevant. Discordant streams of information are weaved together to form a single stream of experience. 

On the one hand, this makes our lives a great deal less confusing, but on the other, it means we are sharply limited in the amount of information we can process at any given time. The gods know us, and our limitations. It seems likely that we don’t experience the gods all the time because we can’t. These experiences are often meaningful to us, and this implies that our experiences with the divine are part of an action the gods take, not of our access to some passive state. When we cannot feel their presence, either the message wasn’t sent or it was sent, but not received. 

So, is the reason for someone’s loss of the feeling of connection to Frige during prayer that the goddess is angry with them? Maybe. Disappointing the gods is a real possibility, but the way that they experience us and our relationships to them must be vastly different to how we experience our relationships with other material beings. When we see the gods in our minds, or experience them visually, we see beings that resemble us or the other living things around us, but that is a projection of our human bias. There is no rational reason to think that the gods look like us, or act like us, or even think like us. It is difficult to imagine an existence more alien to us than a non-material one, and that is exactly how the gods exist. The truth is, we cannot answer the question of why a god has stopped interacting with us without answering a much more fundamental question first: Why do they interact with us at all? 

Since plunging headlong into this new question would require a whole new thesis, it seems prudent to conclude this article first. When taken together, the facts about our interactions with the divine and the laws of the material universe both point to gods who exist everywhere and always, from a human perspective. The omnipresence of conscious gods highlights some serious implications about the ways we have framed the gods and their existence so far. Questions that immediately arise include topics such as the gods’ relationship to time, determinism, and how existing everywhere would affect their relationships with each other. These are important questions, and I intend to dig into them more later. However, it is nonetheless comforting to me to know that I don’t need to search for the gods before reaching out to them. Wherever I am, there they are, and they know me for who I truly am. 

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Footnotes

1. A common counter to this framework from people who pay attention to physics is the possible causal paradox of quantum entanglement. Quanta are the particles that are smaller than atoms, like photons or quarks, and they act in ways that would make little sense on a macro level. Certain quantum particles can become entangled with each other, and the nature of entangled particles is such that if you were to measure the state of one, you would know the state of the other at that same moment. For example, if we had two particles which were entangled in such a way that they always had an opposite spin direction, when interacted with at the same moment and from the same relative angle, we would always find them spinning in opposite directions, even though it is the nature of individual particles to determine their state by probability. It seems like these particles are communicating with each other faster than light, however that is not the case. According to Dr. Thomas Vidick, a professor of Quantum Computing at Caltech, entangled quanta are so closely related that they “can be thought of as one object.” (https://magazine.caltech.edu/post/untangling-entanglement?utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=csequantum&utm_source=caltech-science-exchange&utm_content=&utm_term=) Information is not communicated between them, and they cannot be used to transmit information faster than the speed of light. This is the hard limit of all material communication. (https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.76.93) 

2. http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.html

3. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02184 

4. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#AntiEmerArgu

5. http://polytheist.com/noeseis/2015/12/21/the-nature-of-the-gods-i-the-problem-and-purpose-of-reduction/