The problem of creating my own path from the ground up is that I don't have the words of another that I can borrow to explain my thoughts. Finding the language of my path has almost been as hard as finding the deity of my path. Let me try to explain as best I can though.

As some of you may know, I have rebuilt my concept of deity having had some serious difficulties in reconciling why deity could allow so much suffering in the world. Not just that caused by humans either, but the suffering that is a fact of life for so many species on this planet.

If my gods are the gods of this cruel thing, bent on the hunger to survive that we call the natural world, then what kind of beings must they be? Why would such beings care about the welfare of me or my loved ones? Over time I realised the answer is quite simply that they don't. I am of absolutely zero concern to them and they couldn't care less if I perform daily devotionals and ensure the palm oil in my peanut butter is organic and from sustainable sources.

So for a long time I kept asking myself 'why should I worship these gods who care so little about suffering and who stand back and do nothing when their innocent children suffer through no fault of their own?'

The desire for an answer led me to what was probably a nervous breakdown. I had to reject everything I once believed in the process because nothing I'd previously learnt offered a satisfactory answer. Now, what I eventually arrived upon will most likely not gel with your own beliefs, and that is okay. This is simply the theology that works for me. It is the ONLY theology that works for me in fact. Having heard just about every explanation out there, most of which in a roundabout way comes back to the Christian answer of 'because god gave us free will', which has so many holes I wouldn't know where to begin.

There are two entries in my BOS that were the catalysts of this concept. The first was written in 2004 after I'd read a book by Vivianne Crowley in which she'd talked about 'elements of elements'. I'm not sure how much of my entry were my own thoughts and how much was a rewording of Vivianne's ideas, but I had written how I didn't like that some wiccan authors told you to invoke just a single element for certain spells, such as air for a study spell and so on. I had been taught that where the 4 elements met, a 5th 'element' was created (I never liked the word 'element' at the time because a mixture of 2 or more elements can't then be an element. In chemistry we'd call that a compound, and in my wicca, I called the 5th element an 'essence'). As I understood it at the time, it was this 5th essence that powered spells and as such, all 4 of the elements needed to be present in any spell.

The other entry was from 2 years later. I began BOS vol IV with a roundup of my current beliefs including my concept of deity. I had a layered system based on a few sources but very much influenced by Anderson Feri, in which Goddess and God become more human and more defined depending upon how far they were from what I was calling 'Unity' after the card in Jessa Macbeth's Faeries Oracle featuring the artwork of Brian Froud. Unity is gender-less pure energy. I had been training as a medium through a Spiritualist church at the time and so I also saw this as what they had been calling 'Spirit'.

In my concept, Unity was uncomplicated, all-knowing and yet without consciousness or self-awareness. Unity was what was there before Goddess looked into the void and felt alone and it was what is created again whenever Goddess and God come together in sexual union. It was the creative energy from which everything originates. I believed that only when Goddess and God had separated into individuals could we communicate with them. Unity was forever impermeable to human contact. Closest to unity they took the form of 'the Dark Goddess' and 'the Blue God', but they were so close, unstable and interchangeable in these forms that they constantly slipped in and out of Unity making it possible to communicate only fleetingly and on a very basic energetic level.

As they drifted further apart Goddess and God became more solid and adopted the guise of Earth Mother and Green Man. Able to appear in human form and yet existing within the plant kingdom they could be communicated with in words and yet it was the emotions behind those words that they'd understand and likewise it was with feelings that they reached back to me.

Finally they took their animal forms as the Horned God and Triple Goddess. In this form they spoke to me on an intellectual level. It was to these deities that I'd speak or sing my spells.

I began to ask myself if the energy that resulted from the elements combining and the energy that was Unity could actually be the same thing? Was it the Tao that contained both yin and yang? Was it the healing reiki? Was it the positive chi resulting from the 5 elements being in perfect balance in your home? If so, how could it be the combination of different parts depending on the tradition, that created this energy? How was it that it didn't matter which system you were working with, it always led to Unity? This idea incubated over several weeks until I hit on the answer. Unity isn't created from these various elements, they are created from Unity. When we have a belief system, we interact with Unity and it is that addition of human will that brings forth the spiritual experience. There is no such thing as the 'element of air' or 'yin energy' or 'humours' or whatever else you want to work with, until you work with them. These tangible parts simply make Unity easier to access and work with. They're just a tool.

From there, I began to understand that the gods and spirits we work with too, are created from Unity. I don't mean that we as pagans create the gods. They were always there, because everything that comes from unity has always been there. They are real, they have memories, they have thoughts and feelings. They just only appear in those moments that we are reaching out to them.

The gods don't do anything about our suffering because Unity is only aware of our suffering briefly while we're interacting with it. It IS powerful and all-knowing but it doesn't impart that knowledge or share that power without a human recipient and there is a limit to what can be achieved from that union. This is incidentally the basis of my magical system, but I'll leave that for another post.

On the forums I generally call this 'god energy' to avoid the long back story you just got, but in my rituals and meditations I call it Unity.

So.. who are my gods then? I knew if I chose to work with a pantheon those gods would be real. Not archetypes or facets of some greater Goddess or God, but at the point of contact completely real and whole within themselves. Without a pantheon I'd miss out on being able to work with individual entities that specialised in various areas. I had begun work on collecting together local Brythonic deities and getting to know them, but they were a bit samey and didn't come with the vast lists of correspondences that many if the more popular pantheons enjoy.

Something kept pulling me back to the original 3 layered concept of deity I'd had though. Then at around the same time I had started work in my second inner world in which all the guiding spirits took animal form. A few months into this work I started reading Neolithic Shamanism in which the authors speak of working with what they termed the ancestral spirits of plants and animals. This was very familiar to me not only because of my second inner world in which my guides all take animal form, but also because I'd been using plant and animal energies in my workings since my earliest days as a witch.

After a few months of working with this new path I suddenly realised the structure of the system I was working in. It was like being in a maze or labyrinth that viewed from above is the shape of a face, or star, or animal. From within the maze it's hard to recognise its overall shape. I felt like my vision had suddenly panned out and I could see the whole structure.

In my world-view there are 3 realms*. The first is an energetic realm ruled by the Dark Goddess and Blue God. The entities I work with from this realm are mainly egregores and I reach them via Rotokia, my original inner world. The second is the floral realm, ruled by Earth Goddess and Green Man, although if I'm working with them as the deities of my corner of the country I call them Brigantia and Bregans. The entities I work with here are the grandparent spirits of plants, although rocks and minerals belong to this realm too.

Finally there is the animal realm, ruled by the Triple Goddess and Horned God and of course the spirits I work with here are the ancestral spirits of animals.

So this is what I meant in my previous post when I said plants and animals form my pantheon. I view them as deities in their own right. However, I don't just pick a species to suit my needs. Every species I work with has contacted me first in one way or another, and so far most have been native to the British Isles. This structure isn't set in stone, but it gives me something tangible to work with and that is, after all, all one needs in order to access the infinite wisdom that is hidden within Unity.

I really hope I've been able to express this accurately. It is so clear in my heart but getting it into words is a struggle.

*This isn't strictly true, but I'll be returning to this in another post.