Gods and Magicians

Last night I finished reading The Magician King, the second novel in The Magician Trilogy by Lev Grossman. (My daughter turned me on to the show The Magicians, and because I could never find the time to watch it, I decided to read the books instead.)

One of the big things that stood out for me was the subplot concerning the part magic plans in Julia’s history and development.

Unlike me, Julia was a freaking genius. However what she and I did share in common was her lack of certainty in any kind of god or gods. Julia needed evidence. She needed experiencial data.

I am like that too, in a way.

While I do believe in a Universal Creative Energy that some may call “God,” I have trouble believing deities — be They Zeus, Odin, Perkūnas, or even that nameless deity which many refer to as just plain “God” —  that have been fashioned by human beings. Theirs is an anthropomorphic construct — something that’s been fashioned to include human attributes, thereby applying certain limitations to something that cannot be contained in a tidy package. After all, we love our words.

But I guess that’s a human thing. Humans are not comfortable with ambiguity. And many are not comfortable with not being able to define things. Thus, something as vast and undefinable as the Universal Creative Energy — The Source of All Things — had to be squeezed into an easily graspable concept.

The thing is, concepts have limits. And somewhere along the way people either forgot that, or they never bothered to take it into consideration in the first place. Eventually, they also forgot that they, too, were part of this Universal Creative Energy.

And that’s how gods became entities separate from ourselves.

Anyhow, because my concept of “God” is a bit different from that of the popular mainstream, I have a hard time cultivating a the type of relationship with God that most people have. (Cultivating a relationship with Jesus is even tougher for reasons I don’t want to go into now.)

Maybe if God spoke to me like He did in the Old Testament, or even like He did to Donald Neale Walsch in his Conversations With God series, it would be a different story. I have trouble relying on faith alone. That is how Julia and I am alike. If no one answers when I ask questions, or gives me a concrete sign when I ask for one, it’s hard for me to accept that there is an all-powerful higher being who takes a special interest in me.

That is not to say that I am an atheist, or even an agnostic. It’s just that my understanding of “God” does not include an imaginary friend that talks back to me, or some irate bearded dude hurling lightning bolts from Mount Olympus.

The Source of All Things is beyond words and beyond comprehension, though we can tap into it.

As for deities, I think that Lev Grossman brought up an interesting premise in that deities are not so much higher supreme beings, but that they are magicians with an incredible and mind-boggling range of power.

And as for Julia, she did finally become a believer after she had an encounter with a goddess. In fact, not only did she become a devotee of this goddess — Our Lady Underground — she also became a demigod herself, which involved having to sacrifice the part of herself that made her human. 

(That in itself is another metaphor that can be explored at another time.)