To borrow a question my parents thought I might have the capacity to answer by age 5: What is God?
If we are to imagine an incomprehensible life force, let us suppose there are two essential types: institutional, from the top down; and endemic, from the ground up. For the sake of convenience, here I will reduce the entire spectrum, from saintly to supernatural, to "gods."
The institutional gods reign over particular regions by supernatural might and by their dynastic virility; following groups like the Dorians and Ionians to settle/dominate someone else's world, as the situation presents. These deities, having slash-and-burned their way across the Untamed Wild, then set about reproducing their own reality on top of the ashes.
The endemic gods are, by their nature, less easily defined. When the Romans brought interpretatio romano to Britannia, they left behind scores of altars to various genii loci, local gods. Many represented natural phenomena -- Coventina, clean water springing from the soil; Grannos and Sulis, the hot springs -- but the most common veneration was to the spirit of the crossroads, to language and its oaths. Every local Mercury was not not-warlike, but had the capacity to start with an olive branch* before resorting to the club.
I must pause here to trouble my easy distinction between what is institutional and endemic. It is easy to suppose that Jupiter, son of the Phrygian Kronos, ruled the Aegean and Tyrrhenian by thunder and bolt; meanwhile, that Camulus Mars embiggened the spirit of Caradoc and his other freedom fighters against Caesar, the avatar of Jupiter. But whose god was Camulus? and whom did he depose? We'll never know the complexities of indigenous realpolitik, in part because the presence of our written sources** destroyed the source material.***
Ideally, the practice of interpretatio**** builds upon extant power structures and, by contextualizing the status quo within a symbiotic hegemony, offers to incorporate "the smallfolk" into the fold of Imperial Civilization. In the name of lasting peace, the people were allowed to retain their local divinities, so long as they also venerated their numismatic deity ROMA.
While the deity's name and form have shifted from the Eve of Latium to the Sun-Fish of Nazareth, the numismatic structure reappears. Western society stands upon the shoulders of paranoid Christianized societies, driven by fear to out anyone who might be incurring God's wrath. These days, after surviving the Satanic Panics, Red Scares, and literal witch-hunts, it is easy to find nonbelievers at church, simply trying to pass in their community. Theoretically, anyone can get along by saying "God bless" and "Amen," so as to comfort the faithful/fearful.
As Nietzsche taught in The Birth of Tragedy, the Apollonian social order stands for that which is visual, perfected, and permanent; while the Dionysian stands for the unbound freedom of the Promethean spirit. In America, the Apollonian Puritans worked tirelessly to venerate the Pure and Ineffable by eradicating any devilish Dionysian aspects they might perceive.***** While secular Deist factions balanced these impulses in the 18th century, and 19th-century Romanticists revived Pan and Artemis for their pseudo-Christian mystery rites, the divinity of the paganos persists in the image of The Lamb; or Sol Invictus; or Buddy Jesus; the avatar of YHWH, the storm-deity of the Levant.
In the face of all of this, I cannot say that I believe in any of these deities; but neither can I allow myself the easy out of repudiating them. For those who believe, they exist as the pinnacle of culture: the divinity, for what can be changed; the deity, for that which can only be accepted.
But even while we accept The Deity and His Power -- render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's -- may we yet retain our divinity under duress.
*or a cup of mead; to each their own.
**Julius Caesar & friends
***the Druids of Mona, traditionally regarded by the Gauls as the center of oral knowledge in the West
****not new to the Romans, or to the empires they borrowed from; see: Sobek/Re
*****one imagines for their War on The Devil the satirical TSA signs from 30 Rock: "See anything, say anything"
