What is a God?
Just so we’re clear, in case the word pops up anywhere in the stories, god is not a person. God is not a name, and god is not a god, as we have been brainwashed to think of a god. It has no gender and it isn’t an it. It’s an us.
Just so you know, if I use the word god, I don’t mean a deity. Because I have no religion. I do not worship. We are belonging. In the way of present-continuous. God is the whole, being the sum of its parts, but not greater than them. God is the land you are and have been since before you were recognizably human, and that of your ancestors of every species, of every flora, of every river, each wave upon the sand of an atoll. Each susurration that laps the shingles of a Cornish beach. The macaw within the Brazilian canopy. The blue fungus that teaches the dreamer sight. What you know of it. That it knows you. The names of plants and the plants that are unknown and unnamed. That you are it, long after your body has ceased to be the you people think you are now. Or even that you think you are.
God is love and wildfires and volcanic eruptions. But there can be many gods. I think Neil Gaimon’s brilliant book American Gods came close. The premise of that story is that migrating people bring the old gods of the old lands with them, and very often, over generations, those people forget. These gods are then up to whatever tricks they choose, to remain significant. Even simply among themselves.
A god can be a certain rock, along the Birdsville Track in Australia, when there was no Birdsville Track. That rock is a wayshower. Its name is sung and danced and painted by indigenous people who know that to pass it by, and head north at a certain time of year, will lead them (and with the guidance of many other such gods) to the trading bay with the people who travel the sea routes (also gods) from elsewhere for that trade.
So now we have established what I intend, should I use the god word anywhere in this (or any other book). When a tall, dark-skinned man named Hunter, introduces himself as a forest god, he doesn’t necessarily say which forest. And he only appears to be a he. He is everything in the forest and, as such, could be any forest. At any time. Could also be the forest long since devastated for logging. Forgotten except as myth.
As you work your way through this lore, this gathering of teachings, this story-telling of ravens, please spare a thought for the effect any of us have on a god, or the gods, if we grade a road and remove that stone on the Birdsville Track, bulldoze a forest (a god) and cover the earth (a god) with concrete, build a dam where a free river (a god) once ran, construct a city, desecrate the bones of ancestral dead, of any species, terrorize the penned herds (gods) that are descended from what once were seasonally migrating aurochs. Spare a thought pertaining to our ignorance at treading roughshod over what has lived for a million years. That makes us, also gods, yes? What kind of gods are we? What kind of god communes with me?
Just for a moment, let us consider this because, in the time of the second era of mass extinctions those extinct are also gods. And their silence is deafening.
When I meet a wild god, it is as likely to be the bricks in the wall that were once the clays along the riverbed. The true magic of witch is to listen. To everything. To be the grains of sand that are the gods of future atolls, holding stories within their warmth for when the next Ice Age sets us free to remember.
Oh, and last thing? The actual word god has no roots in any naguage. It has no etymology. It has no meaning. All peoples of every indigene name that or who they honour. Through making up a word, the concept of place and the wisdom of humans who have lived and thrived without that word, have ahd–and continue to have– it forced onto us at gunpoint, at the hands a rapacious violence and capture of wildness and self-sufficiency. Be careful of what is happening to you, what you have done to our children by forcing ideology into their knowledge of life. You introduce fear when there is nothing frightening about life. You do not equip them with the skills to adapt unless you seek those skills yourself and remember.
(see Of Mice, Martial Arts and Vaginas — on FEAR)