I was showering the other day and, among several other random things, I thought about belief.
It’s not really a choice, is it? I mean, could you decide at this moment to believe in Santa Claus and simply make it so? It seems to me that you either believe in something or you don’t. That’s that. However, amid the shampoo bubbles and the spray of hot water, I pursued the thought further.
Let’s take the churches I grew up in. Almost everyone there professed a belief in Jesus and the Bible. Who knows how many harbored occasional doubts, but that wasn’t the sort of thing discussed over pot-luck lunches. The sheer volume of people who seemed to have no doubt was, in itself, a factor that influenced my own belief. I remember the words of the Bible—at times profound and eloquent—and the pastors, passionate and emotional, delivering them from an elevated pulpit Sunday after Sunday. I remember the songs, from the hymns I heard before I was old enough to understand them to the modern compositions that used every trick of musical emotion to move the room. I remember being filled with feeling, sometimes even brought to tears.
Was that God? No. It was just the biological response humans have to a great speech or a stunning piece of music. I get the same thing from Patsy Cline and Martin Luther King, Jr.
But, all that said, if you immerse yourself in that particular culture, you might find yourself believing.
When I began investigating neopaganism about two decades ago, I didn’t approach it with emotion, but with an intellectual interest in culture and history. I wasn’t prone to believing in literal pagan gods any more than I believed in the literal Christian god. Interestingly, though, I encountered a new concept: orthopraxy.
Unlike orthodoxy—which is about “correct belief”—orthopraxy is about “correct practice.” It is the idea that the focus of a religion should be on correct conduct, ethical behavior, and the performance of rituals. My studies suggested that in many pagan traditions, belief wasn’t the core requirement; the requirement was simply that you carried out the rituals at the correct times.
But why would anyone honor a god—say, Óðinn—if they didn’t actually believe he existed?
The human brain is tremendously complex and, whether we wish to admit it or not, deeply flawed. Our brains evolved over millions of years for a single purpose: survival. Evolution cares about nothing else. While we’ve developed capabilities beyond mere survival, those are ancillary. Your brain will lie to you—and does so regularly—to ensure you stay alive. It’s why we do stupid things out of anger and even stupider things for love. Pardon my French, but your brain is going to tell you whatever it needs to, facts be damned, to keep fight, flight, and fuck front and center.
If we accept that our brains are products of an evolutionary process motivated solely by preserving the species, we can begin to understand the utility of gods who don’t have a “real” physical form.
The psychiatrist Carl Jung described the concept of archetypes: universal, inherited patterns of thought or images present in the collective unconscious of all human beings. These archetypes are innate patterns that strive for realization, helping an individual develop their unique identity—or, in more modern terms, “finding yourself.”
If gods are archetypes, then they are helpers in our own heads. They are psychological shortcuts that circumvent the brain’s desperate need to act like an ape, tricking it into playing along. After all, gods are big and strong, and maybe even watching you right now… you’d better be on your best behavior!
Voilà! You’ve just played your primate brain. You’ve given it a trigger (something bigger/more powerful) and a response (do as the gods say). Humans have used this for centuries to manipulate the masses, but you can also use it as a tool to make yourself stronger. In this sense, the god is not your master, but more like the Obi-Wan to your Luke Skywalker: a symbol of what is best, and of what you could become.
I believe that honoring the gods as the pagans once did—through repetition rather than belief—is much like the act of going to church. People gather, repeat a process, and strive to emulate the archetype at the center of the practice. Actual belief is unimportant; the act itself carves new ripples in the brain and guides the practitioner toward the objectives that the archetype represents.
So… are the gods “real?”
They are as real as music, as words, and as thoughts.
