Variations on Death - 6. The Oddest Goddess

Imagine the physical appearance of a god. Does it take the form of a man, woman, dragon, moon, sun, or black hole? However appealing these forms may be, they pale in comparison to the ageless One, possessed of the secret and the power of Creation. Our human experience as mammals living for a brief time on a wet rock confines our imagination. Why should an immortal god require a form at all?

Forms are confining. A body is not a strength, but a weakness. All that is physical is transitory, destined for change, destruction, and renewal. We perceive this destructive change upon our own bodies as slow. It is fast. Our minds, our perception of time is slow.

Instead of inhabiting a single body, great or small, or existing in any one place, a god inhabits each of us instead, everything in the cosmos, and is recognized, even generated, nourished by our own thoughts.

To ask, "What is god?" begs the question, "What are we?" Is it right that clumps of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen should walk, think and talk? Sentient beings like ourselves are rare flowers of the cosmos comprising a tiny percentage of the total weight of matter. We are as much a mystery as god. To know ourselves better allows us to know god better.

My ideas upon the gods remain unclear to me. Much remains a mystery. My suspicion is that reality is not just as we perceive it, but rather different, not in the shocking way portrayed in the movie The Matrix, but different, at any rate. My favorite quote from the Bible is this: we see as through a glass darkly. There are things that we do not perceive, only because we cannot due to our limitations.

A god requires no gender, but from my own prejudices, I envision my own personal deity as a she, and when I refer to the divine, I refer to the goddess. She guides, when guidance is sought, so one might think of her as the super-ego, the better self, the intuition or parental faculty, and perhaps that is all gods are, after all, facets of ourselves. The scriptures of world religions depict a god with petty human vanity, jealousy, and wrath. What need has a god of these things? They are human frailties. We project upon the divine. We create the divine.

For my personal religion, prayers and votaries there are none, nor any specific rules or rituals, and her service would prove a most disappointing racket for a priest. She is the oddest goddess, without a name, although Isis, Demeter or Gaia come to mind, but they may only be relations. What need has a god of a name? We humans need names, because we use primitive spoken language, another frailty. The gods can do everything better than we can. That is why they are gods. They do not think or act as we do. When we bestow a name upon a god, this name is for our purposes only and has no meaning to the god.

Sometimes I have scribbled on stray paper or inserted into a text file a single word, TACITA, a word dear to my superstitious heart, reminding me of her blessing, because it is an acronym, Thou Art Cradled In The Arms (of the goddess). Am I? Well, I have been protected, but maybe it was my own doing rather than hers. Only much later, after performing an Internet search, did I suspect Tacita might be her actual ancient name. Is she the Goddess of Silence? To be sure, she's a shy one, because I've never seen or heard her.

I don't know much about this Tacita. I am like the frog sitting in a pond. He only needs to know what is in the water and the air above. He does not need to know what is far away in frog-distances, such as humans and their society. He does not care. I care about her, but do I need to know? Not really. Would I be any more capable of understanding her than a frog would be of understanding me?