Riddle and Meditation: Gods

by Ruby Sara

Greetings, best beloveds, from the gray and waning light of the pretty-wild-urban midwest.  I have not said much these past few weeks, having miles to go before I sleep and all that business…the business of bread and ritual and tables and friends.  But for the moment, there is a silence and a peace in the house.  I’ve a loaf of bread rising in the oven, my first six strand braid.  There is a flute playing somewhere, and the sky threatens rain, or snow, or both.  We slide into the dark, we slide into the dark.  It is only 5 o’clock, and already the night has been assured, through with teetering on the gunmetal brink of evening and dyed hard and fast to darkness.

This starry cloth that coats the sky is a god.  One of mine.  I call her Mother, which is more playful than anything, because she’s more of a crazy Aunt.  Or a dangerous stranger.  She’s a wild woman, and all things have known her, and she has seen all things with her million eyes.  I imagine her as a red-headed skeleton woman, dancing in dreams.  Sometimes she is Winter and sometimes Death, but she is always Night.  And she scares me, she scares me.  The world gets colder and she gets meaner, and her hard lessons are sometimes too much for me, and I wish instead for light.  But I am her daughter nonetheless, as we all are, and I have also seen her, sharp and glorious, smiling with all her terrible teeth, and have loved her fiercely.  As I do.

Yet, it is true that my thoughts about her are muddled.  When pressed I find my tongue reluctant to elaborate.

Come to think of it, this is the way I am on gods in general.  I avoid talking about gods here – their nature, their number, their beings.  And that’s mostly because I simply don’t think I know enough about them to say.  I know enough to know that I’ve only ever come close to describing them through poetry.  I know enough to have ideas, and I know enough to pray.

Also, I have to admit, sometimes I have trouble seeing a god as something that can be so easily pinned down, chatted to, or imagined.  Some folks talk about the gods as though they’re a bunch of invisible people, with the same foibles and strengths.  Some talk about them as though they’re simply archetypes born whole from our human minds.  And you know, hey, maybe they are these things.  Perhaps, perhaps.  As I said, I don’t know.  I have only ideas, and under a darkening sky, these ideas cluster around me like the Wild Hunt, shrieking and rocking me into the landscape where lives only my fierce dreams…and the sea.  The realm of the gods.

Powers.  Unimaginable.  Aether, wind, rock, night, death.  I believe that the gods are these things.  Literally.

I worship Dionysos.  A name for something feral and wild.  My God….madness, intoxication, fermentation, dancing, poetry, blood, freedom, the vine.  His name is as much a fabrication as the images of his face, as the coat he wears in my dreams of him, running through the deep wood, shouts and fire.  But he is real.  And how do I know that?  Because I have been drunk.  Because I have seen madness.  Because I have written poetry, and have danced, and have picked ripe grapes from dark vines.  Because I have blood.  And all those things are him – the rest is storytelling and music and poetry and human invention.  Yet these things too are meaningful, gorgeous, greater than we could imagine.  Because Dionysos is also the Mystery in those things, the wonderment, the vague unease, the terror.  So he is a Power greater than what we can understand, and blissful and awful, and so he is God.

What does this mean?  That I’m an animist in polytheist clothing?  Perhaps.  But then when Travelling, a woman with skin like sand and a voice like thunder tells me to follow a drift of bees west to the mountain, and I see in her the twist of old trees and the heartbeat of rock, and my throat is dry and my knees shake, what then?  Well, I can only laugh.  I laugh.  No theory is certain.  It’s a mystery – it may be the best and first one.  It may be the only answer there truly is.  Who are our gods – of what are they made – where is their being?  It’s a mystery.

Prayer opens, allowing for the possibility that everything is more amazing than it seems.  Allowing for miracles.  For voices in the great wash, and messages in that first breath outside after a snowstorm.  The cascade of dust that falls through sunlight and makes a poem out of the air.  When I pray, I speak to my gods, Force and Tornado though they may truly be, without names or faces, and this Works something inside me.

And all this, half-sense and dream, is why I hesitate to talk about them, these singing shadows, fiddle music, these hornets and summer mountains.  Prayer in the form of poetry, and a feeling like crickets in the evening as the light bleeds over rocks and turns them red as copper wire, or the sound of dead leaves near the frozen river….that rain of fire on the skin.

Something coherent next time, beloveds, I promise.  It takes time to reign in a spirit lost and dancing on a mesa, surrounded by stars.  Bread will help.  It sings from the oven a grounding song.  And thanks, and thanks.  Giving.

Grok thy gods, Pagani.  Pray without ceasing.