How Close the Gods? Transcendence, Immanence and Immediacy in Pagan Religion

How near the Gods actually stand in Pagan practice — transcendence, immanence, and immediacy compared.

Given at PantheaCon in 2007, this talk opens by noting how strange theology is as a Pagan activity. Sam points out that Pagans invented it — a discursive, philosophical way of moving from myth to explanation, argued out among the Pythagoreans, the Academy, the Peripatetics, the Stoics and the rest, with the state largely indifferent to the outcome. What changed the practice was Christianity's use of God-talk to fix doctrine as dogma and then enforce it with state power, making religion uniquely a matter of subscribing to propositions.

Against that, Sam invokes Iamblichus, who treated theology as useful mental training but only as a prelude to theurgy — working with the Gods rather than talking about them. Talk is worth something insofar as it clarifies experience and heads off misreadings, so the lecture narrows to one question: where are the Gods? Pagan answers vary endlessly, but they sort into three buckets. Transcendence holds that the Goddess made the tree and stands wholly outside it. Immanence holds that she is present in the tree without being it — the ghost in the machine. Immediacy holds that she is present as the tree, so that to touch it is to touch her, and there is finally nothing that is not her.

The second half is practical, written for anyone serving people in a priestly or ministerial role. Each position implies a different spiritual practice and a different kind of pastoral need: transcendence tends to produce a sense of pollution and unworthiness, answered by rites of release and purification; immanence produces alienation, answered by re-awakening the sense of presence; immediacy produces the subtler problem of a vision that is easy to lose in traffic or on the school run, answered by helping someone reclaim, hold and cultivate it. Sam sketches how ritual design shifts accordingly — awe and resistance for the transcendent, hide-and-seek revelation for the immanent, the ordinary flower or the transfigured lover for the immediate — and closes by declaring his own bias toward immediacy, on the grounds that it is simpler, provable in practice, and makes environmental ruin unthinkable.

Originally published at samwebstermage.com →