So during my journey into fake witchcraft I'd thought a little about the idea of choosing a deity or deities to be a pretend devotee of; but there weren't any particular "traditional" ones that really resonated with me I guess. But eventually I did come up with this trinity of deity concepts, each personifying a different ideal/worldview, all of which kind of contradict each other but each of which holds some attraction for me... I call them Virtue, Beauty and Truth. I'm not sure if they're really good for that original purpose but they're symbols that mean something to me and I feel like describing them here.
So the first archetype-figure is one I'm calling the god of Virtue (for lack of a better name). This is the god of the selfless universal love of all sentient beings -- both a kind of utilitarian idea of morality where all that ultimately matters is relieving suffering and promoting happiness, and the willingness to make any personal sacrifice necessary to bring about the universal good. Ey represents the utter refusal to participate in any system of exploitation or to live happily at the expense of others. Ey is the one who walks away from Omelas -- who actually obeys Jesus' command to sell everything you have and give to the poor. Ey stands for a pure andĀ perfect ideal of morality that no one can realistically live up to, yet which is difficult to logically refute as the only really correct and moral way to live.
Contrasting with that is the god of Beauty, who pretty much represents all the other stuff human beings care about -- everything that can't easily be fitted into a rigid utilitarian idea of morality, like art and culture and personal love and so on. Not that any of these things are strictly anti-utilitarian: of course anything that makes humans happier has some value to the god of Virtue; but Beauty values them all for their own sake, irrespective of any utilitarian calculus.
Like -- the god of Beauty wholeheartedly admires the magnificence of ancient monuments like the Pyramids and shit, while the god of Virtue asks if that magnificence was really worth all the slave labor and exploitation that went into building them. The god of Beauty loves St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel and is glad they exist, while the god of Virtue can only think of all the poor the church could have fed and clothed with that money instead.
I also associate this deity with the beauty of Nature in all of its savagery. Ey's the part of you that admires the graceful strength of the wolf as it leaps upon its prey -- while Virtue can only weep for the deer as it's viciously torn apart. This is Mother Nature -- a cruel mother who slaughters her own children by the billions for the sake of perfecting her art.
Ey's the part of you that thinks life might just be too boring without a little bit of violence and suffering.
Ey's also the part that values the special loyalty and care you show toward those you love -- while to Virtue all people have equal value and it's selfish to privilege some over others for reasons like personal affection or blood relationship. Perfect virtue requires prioritizing the universal good over the personal good of your own tribe or family.
Finally there's the third figure, the god of Truth -- the most frightening of the three, representing all the unpleasant truths that people don't like to acknowledge. Like the fact that we're all going to die, that life has no real meaning or purpose, and that when it comes down to it neither the ideals of Virtue nor Beauty actually hold any objective value or truth but are just meaningless byproducts of the evolutionary forces that happened to shape the human mind. Our sense of beauty evolved to help us identify things useful to our survival; and our supposed "virtuous" or altruistic acts are all unconsciously motivated by our own self-interest in one way or another. And even if our striving for goodness were real, the amount of suffering in the world is such that realistically we'll never be able to make a meaningful dent in it no matter how hard we try.
This god sees the world as it truly is -- governed by the cold and ruthless logic of physical law and natural selection, a rigid mathematical construct without the faintest gleam of life or color. Here there is no beauty, no feeling, no hope. I call this entity the god of Truth because intellectually I think its bleak outlook is the closest to objective reality of the three -- but you can't fully buy into it without wanting to kill yourself. Hence the necessity of the other two worldview-archetypes.
In terms of anthropomorphic visualization I tend to imagine Virtue as a pure white angelic figure, Beauty as a brightly-colored fairy queen (as the Fair Folk are often used to represent communion with nature as well as a sort of wild, amoral and dangerous beauty), and Truth as a stern lord robed in black or grey.
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