Not so Supernatural

by Daniel Bullard

September 18th, 2025

I’ve been asked by people unfamiliar with polytheist beliefs if I actually believe in the gods. I suppose, in a world containing archetypal soft polytheists and atheopagans, it’s not such a ridiculous question, but it can be frustrating to answer. Part of the problem is that so many of us in the English-speaking world grow up learning about Greek and Roman mythology, but very little about Greek and Roman religion. I like to refer to the misconception this fosters as the “Superman” theory of gods; perfectly beautiful humans who fly down from their mountain to rain blessings or destruction on humanity. Both then and now, there are very few people who believe in gods as superhumans.

In general, I think the prefix “super-” leads to some sloppy thinking when it comes to the nature of the divine. The gods are powerful; that’s not the issue. The gods aren’t supermen because they aren’t “men”. The gods aren’t “supernatural” because they are within nature, even if it is a nature we find hard to discern. “Supernatural” implies an extra nature layered on top of and outside of our nature. Thinking of the gods as supernatural confers on them an alien quality when they seem to be at home in our world and in ourselves.

I didn’t grow up Heathen; it was something I came to in my mid-20s. I grew up in the Episcopal Church, which is part of the Anglican Communion, and so my beliefs were a sort of middle ground between Catholic and early Protestant doctrines. I was never one to receive beliefs without questioning and I was lucky to have people around me in the church who were open-minded enough to explore those questions with m

When I started to explore the world around me, and especially when I was able to move through the world on my own as an adult, I found that my felt experiences didn’t reflect the beliefs of my childhood. The world felt alive in a way that surpassed mere biology. I experienced in the places and creatures around me a character that implied a more universal nature of the soul. This Animistic realization was the start of my journey into polytheism.

When I began to pray to the gods and my ancestors I felt their presence, and that experience created new beliefs and supported many beliefs I’d received from others. Without prophets or a holy text, this cycle of subjective experience creating and reinforcing beliefs is how a religion forms and matures. Even a priori arguments (arguments from pure reason) about these non-measurable phenomena require a foundation of prior experiential belief to argue over. Subjective experience is the foundation on which our religion is built, so we mustn’t shy away from examining it.

Humans have been pondering the nature of gods and the universe for as long as there have been ideas. Brahman, the ultimate reality in some Hindu theological traditions, is one such conception of existence. It is the creative principle behind all of reality for gods, humans, and everything else. Similarly, in Platonist theology, there exists The One, the source of reality from which the Mind, Soul, and Physical world emanate. Proclus, a Neo-Platonist philosopher, described the many gods of Hellenic religion as divine emanations (Henads) of The One, each expressing a unique aspect of its unity. Even the Epicureans, who thought of the gods as beyond human interaction, considered them to be made of the same material: atoms. All these philosophies, despite their vast and often contradictory differences, share a common thread: they describe a divine reality that is fundamentally interwoven with the nature of the universe itself, rather than existing as a separate supernatural realm.

I’ve written before about the role experience has in religion, but I’ve neglected so far to use its more philosophical name: consciousness. As defined by philosopher Thomas Nagel, consciousness is experience; the “what it is like” to be something. I like to think of consciousness as the movie that plays out in my mind of all the sensations, thoughts and memories that accompany my self. It isn’t physically seeing a tree, but rather the experience of having seen a tree. The building blocks of experience are called qualia; the irreducible experiences of something that get bundled together to form a whole experiential moment. The unified experience of 'seeing a tree' is composed of simpler qualia like “brown” or “rough.” There are also qualia for internal states of your mind, such as “fear” or “sadness”. Taken together, qualia and the consciousness they combine to form are the way we experience all parts of our physical, mental, and spiritual realities.

In order for us to experience something, there must be some part of it that intersects with the reality (or realities) in which we exist. We experience the gods, and so some part of the gods must exist in the same reality as some part of us. If we are wholly physical, as the Stoics or scientists would argue, then the gods too must have some physical reality. If our existence is a duality of spiritual and physical realms, then perhaps the gods are simply existing in spirit. In any metaphysical model, there must be some part of the gods existence which overlaps with our own, or else interaction would be impossible. If a spiritual realm, or a mental one, or a realm of pure consciousness exists, then our definition of “natural” as it applies to the physical world is too narrow. To be natural, something must exist in agreement with the makeup of the universe, and if that makeup includes non-physical reality, then the non-physical is as natural as the physical. If it is real, then it is natural.

There are two other important concepts that bear defining in this discussion: transcendence and immanence. Immanence is the idea that the divine encompasses or is manifested in the physical world, whereas transcendence is an aspect of divine existence that is wholly independent of the physical world. I tend to think of these concepts as a continuum: a wholly immanent god would be like the Stoic “God as nature itself,” while a wholly transcendent god might be like the Epicurean gods existing in the metakosmia, the space between cosmos. It seems to me, based on my experiences and the reported experiences of other polytheists, that the gods exist somewhere between these two extremes; perhaps not immanent in the physical sense, but certainly not transcendent to the point of non-interaction.

Our ability to interact with divinity helpfully supports the claim that the gods are both natural and not wholly transcendent. Any sort of communication between beings requires a shared medium for that communication. In the physical world, we communicate through the mediums of sound, light, and electro-chemical signals. In the moments I have perceived the presence of the gods, the medium has been pure experience: sights seen in the absence of anything physical, sounds heard with no source, feelings felt without logical cause. Consciousness is the shared medium which implies a shared natural cause. If we, as beings existing within the nature of the universe, can experience communication with the gods, then they too exist within the bounds of nature.

So, why does this matter? How do consciousness, immanence, and natural order relate to the everyday practices of a polytheist living in a scientific age?

This matters because it draws our religion back from the margins. We are serious about our beliefs and they deserve to be taken seriously. If we define the gods as “supernatural”, we are unintentionally placing them in the realm of the fantastical and the unreal. It severs the gods, and our experiences with them, from reality when our interactions with them are actually a deeper engagement with reality.

The framework I’ve described does the opposite. It asserts that when we interact with the divine, we interact with real, conscious beings that share a reality with us. The gods to whom we pray are situated firmly within the cosmic order. This does not serve to diminish their power as it would to an omnipotent god. The limit of their potency is possibility, and nature provides a vast and powerful array of possibilities. A god whose medium is consciousness is more powerful still, as consciousness is the very ground of being upon which all reality plays out.

I hope that for the modern Heathen, this and further conversations can form the basis of a coherent theology that can distance itself from the “super-”; a theology that is both intellectually robust and experientially true. We can then stand up and say that we believe in gods that are natural, conscious, and powerful beings who are as real as anything else we experience. We believe in the gods because we have felt them, and we have felt them because they are here with us. The world around us is more divine than it seems.