Ten years ago, I self-published an ethnography about the emergence of contemporary Western polytheism. I defined the practice as the reification and veneration of multiple levels of divine beings. As a devotional polytheist with time on my hands and no tenure-track position even remotely on the horizon, I had the time. It seemed like it would be a worthwhile thing to do. So, I did it. My main motivation was that at the time, there was a lot of discussion amongst the hard polytheist subset of pagans about the “correct” way to view the Gods (capital G), the correct way to worship Them, and how to establish devotional relationships with Them.
My mentor at the time, who I’ll call Tracy, had extremely hardcore, authoritarian, and exacting ideas about these things. She also expected those of us in her circle to follow suit- to a T. If we didn’t, There. Were. Consequences. As time went on, I began to realize that I didn’t really agree with her about any part of her practice and wanted to know what others were doing. I imagined a lot of devotional polytheists were in the same boat. So, I spent two years interviewing and writing Walking With the Gods and learned what else was going on. I wanted to help people like myself who were struggling to define their relationship to the Divine and build a practice that would nurture and foster those relationships.
Like the overwhelming majority of people I interviewed, I eschewed the points of mythology that painted my Deities in bad light, or were open to unkind interpretations. Sometimes, I just “felt” that a particular myth couldn’t be a true depiction of Them, because that wasn’t my experience with them. Until it was. Eventually. Looking back, I am floored by the immense optimism, enthusiasm, good faith, and devastating naïveté of my devotion to various Gods. The harsh reality I eventually faced was that not all of Them reciprocated my good faith or emphasis on clear communication. My experiences with a few of Them were deeply suboptimal, and to be honest, there were instances where my guardians and Ancestors had to intervene because I was flat-out being abused. Unfortunately, some of the Deities to whom I was devoted did not deserve the devotion I gave, and they took me for granted.
To be fair, a good part of my struggle was because I had refused to heed the myths of these Gods. Not because they are literal truth, but because they give a clear window into a Deity’s character, values, and personality. It is important to heed the insight of the cultures who actually first worshiped these Gods, because they had context and experience that modern people simply have no way to access. Several myths make it abundantly clear that there are some Gods you shouldn’t engage naively, if at all.
After a few years of struggling with my contradictory and conflicting experiences, I gained the inner strength and self-respect to walk away. The goodly Gods understood my journey and blessed my departure. The nasty ones were hardly nice about it. Nonetheless, I developed the alliance-building, ritual cleansing, and spiritual negotiation skills to make the separation stick. It was only much later after I had freed myself that I realized that some of the Gods I had venerated were in actuality incredibly evil and nasty beings impersonating Gods. They relied on my inexperience and sincere desire for Divine connection to run me into the ground until I was a total wreck. If it weren’t for my innate conviction that Gods shouldn’t treat people like that, and that it was wrong for Them to do so just because they were GODS–along with the intervention of key spiritual allies–I’d have been sunk.
In the years since I began that project, I have run into at least a dozen people who ended up in exactly the same situation as I. Thankfully, My nightmare gave me the skills and the resources to help them get out from under their onerous and ill-advised relationships with various Gods and various God-impersonators. Two things really began to stand out in these situations. First, you need to have a strong sense of self and a strong personal moral compass. If your desire to commune with a Deity outweighs your knowledge of self, you will often find yourself pushed out of your moral comfort zone and doing things you’d rather not, because you’ve been led to do it in the name of devotional practice. Fortunately, I’m the type to kick like a mule when this happens. Freedom and decency are worth fighting for. Second, you need discernment, cleansing protocols, and a solid ritual engagement practice in order to recognize when you are dealing with an evil trickster (or an evil God, because there are SEVERAL) and rid yourself of it.
Prior to my harrowing experiences with Gods, I had equally harrowing experiences with Jehovah. Christianity is not often kind to female-bodied people or queer people, and I’m both of those things. Yet, I still had that yearning desire to connect with the Divine and my utter conviction that somewhere, there had to be a Deity who deserved the sort of devotion Jehovah demanded and was worthy of mine. Fortunately, I’ve finally forged the connections I’ve been seeking: with the land, my Ancestors, the spirits of nature, guardians, guides, and Creator –or Cosmos, or Mother God, as I variously conceive of Her.
I still reify and venerate multiple levels of divinity, but I’m no longer a devotional polytheist. Gods are largely absent from my current practice. Guides, guardians, nature spirits, my Ancestors, Mother Earth, and Creator are my focus now. I learned a lot during that project. I’ve learned even more in the decade since. The biggest thing I’ve learned is how incredibly foolish it is to engage ancient Gods who haven’t been steadily worshiped in millennia with the expectation that they are somehow going to conform to your understanding of what Deity is and not have very specific expectations of those who choose to engage them.
At this point in my life, I will NEVER worship a male-gendered God as any sort of supreme being. Gender is inherently limiting. The body you are born into heavily determines your social status, role expectations, and reproductive prerogatives. To my mind, a proper Supreme Being is limitless, and it just doesn’t seem logical or reasonable to assume that any sort of Supreme Being would be limited by gender. That said, I innately respond more positively to the divine feminine. When I do engage in any way with a Supreme Being, I see her as Mother God, with the recognition that in all likelihood They are beyond gender and are not at all obligated to conform to my gendered expectations.
So imagine my surprise when all these years later, I find myself once more turning to investigate the Abrahamic religion of my youth. The state of the world has left most of us in the West revisiting those Abrahamic eschatological narratives. There is a feeling of apocalyptic doom hanging over us. I can’t help but think that the Abrahamic monotheist assumptions that underpin the majority of Western culture have predisposed us to make these sorts of “end times” connections. I decided that I wanted to better understand what is happening, so I gave myself a refresher on the Abrahamic scriptures. Yet, this time, my reading of these scriptures is very different than it was when I was a child.
Itamar Ben-Gvir’s march on the Temple Mount was a deep motivation to do this reading. On the one hand, it is patently absurd that Jewish people praying at the Temple Mount is an illegal activity. On the other hand, given the sanctity of the site, it’s patently absurd for Ben-Gvir to have marched on the Temple Mount with over 2,000 of acolytes, knowing full well the consequences set down by Hashem (“The Name,” meaning God, whose name is too holy to be uttered aloud) for approaching (and possibly stomping all over) His altar in an unclean state, for the purpose of provoking further bloodshed between nations that both have nuclear weapons. Ben-Gvir offered nothing by hubris and arrogance on the altar of Hashem, during his visit. And if there is one thing I remember well from childhood, it’s how Hashem deals with that sort of hubris.
Still, something deeply moving has slowly been revealed in my studies of the Pentateuch: the spiritual journey of Abraham, When I read about Abraham, what I see is a man whose passionate and all-consuming desire to connect with the Divine led him to forcefully reject the Gods of his people and his ancestors. It drove him to focus his entire being on devotion to El, or as Abraham would come to call Him, YHWH Elohim. At that moment, I viscerally connected with Abraham in a way that never could have imagined I would. Reading those verses nearly brought me to tears. Abraham’s deep, insatiable yearning to connect with the Divine, and with Divine purpose–I RECOGNIZE that. Viscerally. I understand that. I’ve been negotiating exactly the same compulsion for years.
From that moment on, I stopped seeing Abraham as a ready-made monotheist who was an all-knowing expert in all that he did. I started seeing him as someone who had to invent, from scratch, the devotional practices and ritual engagement methods for connecting with Hashem. Abraham was someone who had nothing but sincere intentions and ironclad faith that Hashem was guiding him, and nothing but faith to assure him that the voice he heard was always that of Hashem.
Abraham’s journey is the exact inverse of mine. Abraham rejected the gods of his ancestors and devoted himself to Hashem. I rejected his God and went looking at the Gods of my ancestors, and a goddess or two of his ancestors. Yet the exact same gut-wrenching yearning for connection to the Divine drove both of us. Which is also why I believe that his inexperience and lack of established protocols for spiritual cleansing and ritual engagement caused problems for him. These problems had to have been very similar to the problems I had in trying to build my own devotional practices.
It has been my experience that trying to build (or reinvent, depending on the Deity) the protocols necessary to not only cleanly connect with a Deity in a way that They recognize and enjoy, is difficult and painful.l I’ve had only my own personal gnosis and doggedly determined devotion and faith that I was connecting with Them to guide me. At the time I wrote my book, others were only beginning to come forward and publish about their own devotional practices, and I very quickly learned that even if you wish to engage the same Deity as another person, what that Deity wants from you might be very, very different from what that Deity wanted from them. The fact that on several occasions I succeeded only in connecting with some monstrously evil spirit masquerading as the Deity I sought is proof that this process is riddled with dangers and disappointments. Though my situation has greatly evolved over the past ten years, there are challenges. Even now, I’m still perfecting my practice, building my spiritual protections, refining my spiritual cleansing protocols, and strengthening my discernment. It’s a long process and there is more than a little bit of trial and error.
Thus, it was for Abraham. He had the experience of worshiping the various Canaanite Gods, with the different types of offerings, ritual practices, and devotional proscription attendant to each. Yet it is very, very clear to me as I read through the Pentateuch that Hashem absolutely did not want Abraham to do any of those things. In all honesty, it seems that Hashem wanted to get Abraham as far away from those practices as possible. It was the only way to build the system of devotional practice and ritual engagement Hashem saw fit. Hashem wanted specific things both for and from the people He would eventually choose. Discovering those things was the most important and essential task Abraham could possibly undertake.
It is worth considering what, exactly, Hashem was guiding Abraham away from. The Canaanites of Abraham’s time had inherited their pantheon from the Ugaritic culture. While the chief god of the Canaanite/Ugaritic pantheon was El, the most popularly worshiped God in the pantheon was the storm god Ba'al–whose name, roughly translated, means “Lord” or “Master”. Ba'al was the rain-bringer. The Levant doesn’t have many rivers or freshwater lakes. Rain was the sole water source for agriculture. Given this, it isn’t surprising that Ba'al was so heavily emphasized in the Canaanite religion. Because of this, the relationship between Ba'al and El could best be described as that of co-regents; Ba'al’s influence was such that El was forced to consider Ba'al’s preferences and desires when making decisions that affected the pantheon. It is Ba'al, not El, who serves as the protagonist of the most prominent Ugaritic myth cycle. His worship was far and away one of the most dominant aspects of Canaanite religious life.
And yet, what did this worship entail? The Pentateuch outlines any number of hideous perversions, which modern scholars have taken great pains to contextualize as hyperbole. The worship of Ba'al involved drunkenness, sexual licentiousness, bloody animal sacrifice, and gluttonous feasting–and very possibly bestiality as an homage to Ba'al’s escapades in the Ugaritic myth cycle. Yet, it has been well-established that the ancient Carthaginians– the descendants of Phoenicians who worshiped Ba'al–practiced brutal child sacrifice. The passing of children through the fire as an offering during the ritual worship of Ba'al is well-established. These practices were all common in the Levant during the Bronze age. At best, worshiping Ba'al was a filthy, bloody, mindless act. At worst, it was a depraved abomination.
I have no desire to demonize sexualized fertility rites, feasting, or any other of the ancient rituals done to honor the ancient Gods. Yet it’s important to point out the peculiarly depraved character of Ba'al worship. Everything about those rites concerns connecting with the animalistic nature of humanity and the animalistic, tempestuous nature of the God in question. The rites of Ba'al are absolutely devoid of spirituality, mindfulness, and engagement with what is highest and best in the human soul. THIS is what Hashem was leading Abraham away from.
My experience with Ba'al is that he is exactly as violent, jealous, bloodthirsty, abominable, and overwhelming as advertised. I don’t think it sat well with him that YHWH Elohim had chosen to break off from the other Canaanite Deities to nurture a new nation that would be focused on the growth and elevation of the human spirit, and focusing on what was best about humanity. This nation would be rooted in all the things Ba'al was not and would value none of the things Ba'al offered. It is not hard to reckon that Ba'al was very displeased that YHWH Elohim was cutting Him out of getting what He felt was His. Likely, He was motivated IN THE EXTREME to destroy every part of it that He could. Historically, we know he had success in this effort. For centuries after founding the nation of Israel, the worship of Ba'al was often in direct competition with the worship of YHWH; in Judah, the worship of YHWH was often undertaken with Ba'alist rites in direct contravention of what had been established in the Torah.
Into this fraught situation, Hashem led brave Abraham to found a new nation devoted to the uplifting and spiritual evolution of the people of Israel. Only people oriented toward the good and the holy were worthy to worship Hashem and carry out Hashem’s Divine plans. But the building of a solid devotional practice and clean ritual engagement is a lifelong endeavor. Because Abraham was the first person in the Levant to do something like this, he occasionally made mistakes. Hashem countered this. Rather than leave Abraham to rely on his personal gnosis, Hashem brought him the prophetess and seer Sarah to be his wife. Abraham was instructed to do no great undertaking without first consulting Sarah on the matter. But, he was human and he made mistakes.
Nowhere in Abraham’s story is this more clear to me than in the story of the binding and near-sacrifice of Isaac. I’m not the first person to suggest that centenarian Abraham was misled by an evil spirit whom he mistook for Hashem. And I’m not the first to point out that Abraham committed to this undertaking without first consulting Sarah on the matter. If he had, she would doubtless have seen right through it. And I’m not the first person to recognize that Hashem likely commended Abraham on his devotion rather than berate him for his error because Abraham had always flawlessly followed Hashem’s commands. But to my knowledge, I am the first person to suggest that the evil spirit masquerading as Hashem was none other than Ba'al.
Ba'al saw a 105-year-old man who had grown accustomed to trusting that his discussions with Hashem were exactly as he took them to be: conversations with Hashem. It would have been incredibly easy to fool Abraham into committing child sacrifice, so long as he did not consult Sarah on the matter first. But it is the nature of the sacrifice commanded by “Hashem” that convinces me Ba'al was involved. Abraham was told to sacrifice his miracle son. Ba'al is well-known for demanding child sacrifice, and what better sacrifice could there be than the one who was destined to carry forth the founding of the nation of Israel? Especially if, as I suspect, Ba'al was consumed with both jealousy and hatred for Hashem and His Divine plans to redeem the Israelites from the baseness and depravity Ba'al demanded from them.
Another reason to consider the potential role of Ba'al in the binding of Isaac is that it does away with the need to reconcile a cruel God with a loving one. What if Hashem wasn’t proposing a particularly cruel test of Abraham’s faith? What if an evil and depraved Ba'al misled Abraham to nearly commit this atrocity? And if this is possible, then where else in the Pentateuch or the rest of the Old Testament, might that be the case? What if the cruel and jealous God commanding heartbreaking acts of faith is actually Ba'al impersonating Hashem, and the people in question had no idea, so the story got recorded as if it was truly Hashem? There is ample evidence that Levantine peoples routinely conflated Ba'al and YHWH. Judah was rife with exactly this problem, and it wasn’t eradicated until the Babylonian exile. The possibility that otherwise devout people have been egregiously misled by Ba'al masquerading as Hashem bears consideration.
And if this is the case, there’s no reason to assume that Ba'al hasn’t intermittently recurred throughout history to cause incredible strife for the Jewish people? Doesn’t Nathan of Gaza’s insistence in 1666 that the heretical Sabbatai Levi was the Messiah make more sense if he was heeding Ba'al unawares? And Levi’s later shenanigans certainly make more sense if we accept the possibility that he, too, was misled by Ba'al. Levi’s rejection of traditional devotional practices, dietary restraint, and ritual purification would have left him open to the influence of evil. His belief–courtesy of Nathan– that he was the Messiah would have left him certain that the voice he heard was Hashem’s, and the ideas he had were divinely inspired. The door was open for evil to enter, and there's no reason to doubt that that evil might well have been Ba'al.
On the other hand, I have previously discussed the likelihood that the deaths of Nadab and Abhiu were the result of their introduction of elements of Ba'al worship into Hashem’s Tabernacle. I contend that their deaths were not the result of mere disobedience or a giddy passion for serving Hashem. Rather, their entering the Tabernacle unbidden and attempting to force Hashem to accept an unfit incense offering IN HIS OWN HOUSE was an act of contempt and hubris. Their fiery deaths were necessary to purge Hashem’s altar of their abominable actions. It also sent a message to any Ba'al worshipers who had avoided detection till that point: don’t try that here. Perhaps Hashem was a jealous God precisely because Ba'al was actively trying to sabotage and destroy His Divine plan AND his chosen people, and Hashem refused to give quarter to Ba'al’s influence, period.
Many of the incomprehensibly cruel actions attributed to Hashem might very likely have been those of Ba'al. Some of the overwhelmingly harsh punishments for disobedience might have been a response to the intrusion of Ba'alism into Hashem’s holy spaces. With this in mind, it is easier to reconcile these seeming contradictions. Perhaps they ultimately arose from Hashem’s struggle to preserve his people from Ba'al’s influence. Maybe Hashem is a loving God, who is harsh when necessary, but mistakes were made in attributing to Him the cruelties of Ba'al.
