Living the divine game

I solemnly swore I would not post about the Olympics. So here is my post about the Olympics.
Actually it was prompted by this picture that a friend sent me of the Olympian Bjorn Barrefors. Normally he wouldn't be my type, but he is really rather scrumptious, isn't he? In fact, when I got the picture I was so distracted by the beauty of his...eyes, I had to ask my friend what country he represents, completely failing to notice the acres of blue and yellow, and the word 'Sweden' in large letters across his chest. In fact his... eyes still draw me so much that I should probably apologise in advance in case this post is more incoherent than usual.
I called him an Olympian for a purpose. it has come to mean someone who completes in the modern Olympic games, but originally the Olympians were the main deities of the ancient Greek pantheon. In mythology they lived on Mount Olympus, hence the name. What I love about the divinities in polytheistic systems is that they are much more like us than the single deity of monotheism. It must be a very lonely life being a single God, with no-one to argue with, be married to, have children with! Perhaps this explains why monotheistic deities so often take it out on humans, since they don't have any other Gods to argue with.
Of course this also means that we are more like our Gods than monotheists are. I mean, you only have to look at Mr Barrefors to see that we can be gods, divine, and any other attribute you care to use. In fact one of the marvels of the pagan new religious movements of the twentieth century is that not only are our Gods more like us than those of the monotheists, but the line between divine and human is blurred slightly. One of Pindar's odes about Medea refers to her lips as divine, and this is one of the aspects of the traditional witch figure which is most happily drawn on in today's movement: the traditional witch figure continually crosses the boundary (the hedge?) between divine and human.
The implications of this for our daily life are quite astounding: if I can start off the day by looking in the mirror and seeing the divine looking back at me, that can only have a major impact on all my actions! It also influences my interactions with others: if I look around and see other people (and some would say things) as participating in the divine economy that must change how I look on other people. I would venture to give an opinion that this is why codes of ethics are more public relations exercises than actualy valid codes for witches. Witches don't - should not - need codes of ethics because they are attuned to the divine cycles of life. Yes, I know: this means that people are going to die and bad things are going to happen, but we don't have the difficulty explaining these things that you have in a system where there is only one all-good divinity (this is why they have to project bad stuff onto a figure of evil, because it doesn't make sense that bad things could happen): they just do. Shit happens. Of course this also has the potential to go extremely wrong where a witch things they are so part of natural cycles that they lose their balance, end up with too much credit, as it were, and end up being part of the cycle of destruction. I will certainly return to the discomfort monism gives me in future posts!

I also love the way the ancient Olympic games were actually part of the worship of the Gods, since doesn't our Goddess say, 'All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals'? I certainly would place the modern revival of the Olympic games in the same melting pot of things which led to the creation/revival of our modern pagan religions. The modern triad of mind, body and spirit is not quite as the ancients would have envisaged it. However our divine mature means that acts of pleasure (for ourselves and others) do genuinely pay homage to divinity. This is not quite the way the non-theistic Satanists would see it, since they see themselves as the only entity really, and then everything else is opposed in duality (how anyone can not see that this is not Christianity turned upside down escapes me, and Isaac Bonewits used to say, 'I get almost as much hate mail from Satanists as I do from the other fundamentalist Christians.'). Although I do like the idea of keeping your own birthday as a major feast day of your religion! Witchcraft and most other modern traditions in the same vein differ from this in that while we are not dualists, we are not totally immanent monists, since in that system you actually end up with no God, as God is indistinguishable from everything else. We are more panentheists, since while the divine is in everything, it/he/she/they can still be differentiated from everything else.