What Gods?

Doing It, Religiously

All last week when I couldn't eat solid food I hated all the gods and cursed them. Now I can eat again I feel better about them and I'm ready to make up to them by putting in a small word or two of praise.

As I've said, gods are inferior beings, only fragments of consciousness and personhood, if that. Still, they have their uses. They enable us to see. Even those who don't believe in them see through them. It's the gods who do the believing, you just utter the belief out of "your" mouth. What belief you are uttering depends on which god has you by the nads at the moment.

Often, Cindy Holly has me by the nads. Cindy is not only my Muse but also a goddess. She's OK.

The ancient Hawaiians had a god and goddess named Laka. Laka, the god, was the god of canoe building and woodwork and carving. He was also sort of the Inigo Montoya of Hawaiian mythology ("Hello. My name is Laka. You killed my Father. Prepare to die.") He also was identified with the hula, and the composition of chants and prayers, and fertility. Laka, the goddess, nurtured the forest. Some people said the two were really the same, gods can be one sex one minute and another sex another.

When preparing to carve, my friend Lani would sing an invocation to Laka calling on him to supply the necessary mana through his nads. I find it easier to ask a goddess to supply mana through my nads than to ask that of a male god. Call me homotheophobic, I don't care. I call it an aesthetic choice. I also feel women are far prettier than men, on average. How sexist is that?

Anyway, I'm bringing this up because I'm big on the overlooked aesthetic component of religion, and plan to talk at length about it, eventually, and this is fair warning.

[Above right: Man Ray's portrait of Kiki as "Le Violon d'Ingres".]

Cindy Holly, Muse of Other

I was infused with some Hawaiian Kahiko and Huna (traditional Hawaiian religion and mysticism) before I knew anything at all about Christianity. Then I was bombarded with Christianity, of two kinds: Episcopalianism, overtly, and Southern Baptism, covertly. The result of this input and a whole lot of agonizing is what I am. I am religious. In some way. But I have no name for my religion. And, my religion is worlds away from any of the religions I see practiced around me.

One dictionary definition of "paganism" is any religion that's not a form of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, or a religion formed out of or in reaction to any of those religions. So, for example, a "Satanist" whose concept of Satan was based on the Biblical Satan could not be considered a pagan by that definition, because his religion would be a reaction to one of those three Abrahamic religions. But another person who called himself a Satanist, whose idea of Satan was based on a pre-Christian Celtic God, say, would be a pagan. Also, a traditional Hindu, or Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucianist, or combination thereof, would be pagan.

So in my 30s, when I finally realized that the Kahiko was more or less winning my soul, I tried calling myself pagan.

That didn't work out. Trouble was, other people who called themselves pagan read too much into it. Turns out, most self-described pagans aren't going by the above dictionary definition. They mostly have in mind European traditions, or (Continental) Native American. The dashed expectations became a big bother.

It wouldn't do to just retreat into calling myself Kahiko either. Kahiko really means Old Ways, and I was only educated in the Old Ways of Hawaii for less than a year as a two and three year old. I learned enough to keep Christianity from claiming me, but not enough for me to claim Kahiko as mine.

So the state of affairs I am reduced to is this: I have a religion that is unique in the world. It has no name. It is informed by an infusion of Kahiko, plus everything else I've absorbed since that was compatible with that infusion.

My religion isn't based on faith in any super-human person. It's based on poetry, drama, comedy, and art, respect of knowing and not knowing. I imagine a vast multitude of subjective realities, realized in human minds, many more than there are humans to house them, and by imagining them I make them as real as they need to be, for the purposes of my religion, a religion which I impose upon my reality, whether or not it likes it. My impositions are all powered by imagination, which is the real mana, the water of life. I know from personal experience that this mana can give rise to subjective realities independent of me, because I ho'omana: At first, mana goes where I dream it to go, then it goes wherever.

One of these independent impositions is very special to me. I have referred to her as Cindy Holly, not-her-real-name, Muse of Other, Muse of Few Words, Ageless, Timeless, Eternal, Beauty, currently brunette.

In fact, I say not-her-real-name, because her real name would be the name of THE Goddess, and I don't speak that.

But I can be a little more specific. She drives my feeble soul. She knows where the key to my existence is kept. I don't really mind when she visits me in my dreams and turns me into a horse. Her eyes never close. She gazes on life and death equally, and dances to the beat of both simultaneously.

Cindy Holly is her comic aspect. She is that powerful, that she has a comic aspect. Very few serious Gods or Goddesses can pull that off.

My Muse

I've always been a creative problem solver. This is a picture of me, at an age of roughly between 2 & 1/2 to 3, creatively solving the "How do I secure my next block?" problem.

I like creativity. I like seduction. I like the strange. I like the strange seduction of creativity, and the seductive creativity strangeness can induce. Speaking of seductive strangeness, my Muse Cindy Holly (not her eternal name) is the Muse of Other and the Muse of Few Words. When I first started my Real Change Column under the title Adventures in Poetry I was only allowed 350 words each. It was feared that my strange thoughts and modes of expression, if multiplied beyond that limit, might run amok and negatively impact unsuspecting innocent readers. Lawsuits could ensue.

Now, as Adventures in Irony, I manage to get away with 666 words per column. Still not much. So I am grateful to have Cindy peering over my shoulder all the time, suggesting words to cut. "Don't write words," she says. So I say, "What should I do then?" So she says, "Write." So I say, "Oh."