A Grove of Ashes and Aspens

Now Playing: Draugen’s Maelstrom by Elvenking

The title may seem like a stupid question, but I promise it makes sense.

When having specific experiences within Heathenry (and paganism in general), it can be hard to distinguish if an experience is from a god or a local nature spirit or house spirit or even the spirit of an ancestor. It can be very clear, where someone knows who reached out and what they want, but sometimes, we can get a certain feeling, but it’s just a general sense with no clear idea of who is sending that sense. And with the Abrahamic god being postulated as an all knowing and all powerful god who loves everyone and lives in the sky, this can leave some asking exactly what kind of entity the gods are and where they are.

If you were to ask ten different pagans the question of what separates a spirit from a god, you’d get ten different answers. This is a topic like many others within paganism, where the lack of first hand information makes it much harder to know exactly what beliefs were held in this regard. As a result, many people just form their own opinions and beliefs about this, making it that much more unclear and diverse. The most common consensus, and one that I tend to agree with, is that the gods are a type of spirit, or at least a type of spiritual being.

Some also view the gods more as metaphors and manifestations of certain concepts, rather than actual beings. Personally, I don’t agree with this interpretation, but I can see how this makes sense, especially with how the gods are each associated with specific physical phenomena, metaphorical ideas, themes or concepts.

Where the line exists also gets muddy when local spirits in specific areas are taken into consideration. Local spirits, in my experience, act in ways similar to gods, with having a specific domain and similar things. The distinction comes up in the scale of the domain. Local spirits will have their domain be a specific lake or a specific building or something along those lines, where the domain of a god will be something like love or storms or death.

All this to say, it’s really not clear exactly what anything related to the spiritual is. There isn’t a way to quantify it yet to my knowledge, so we can’t really get any definitive answers on what these entities are with any certainty for the moment. However, that does make the religion overall very interesting and one that many kinds of people could learn from.