Worship

by Anja Heij

 
Worshipping a god or goddess in fact is paying homage to the great shining light at the core of your being.
You acknowledge that there is more than everyday reality and honor it.

The various godheads are different ‘gestalts’, energy beings, or facets of the whole you in a pure and exalted form. The gods are your transcendent friends, helping you to develop latent characteristics and qualities in yourself. Through meeting and worshipping the gods you absorb and work with their specific type of energy.

 
Thus you bring this form of energy/reality into your consciousness and make it part of your being.
This is the base of astro-drama, being a combination of astrology and drama, in which you tune into the energies of the planet-spirits and behave like them. And feeling the Saturn inside, or acting like bold Mars for a woman, can be quite a revelation.

 
Wearing a mask is another form of experiencing a different personality within you and taking on its special powers.
A god or goddess can never be defined by one specific form; the form is a symbolical representation and a personal perception of the greater reality behind it. Eventually the collective unconsciousness creates an image we all have somehow agreed on. And so we know Venus as a beautiful young woman with round forms, Cernunnos as a real guy with the large horns of a deer, and Holy Mary as innocent devotion surrounded by an aura of white light and standing on a crescent moon. But do they really look like this?

 
“Every man and every woman is a star”, Aleister Crowley said. The gods and goddesses are rays of light of the one star that is All: the great God/Goddess, the Life Force itself, often personified by Nature, Heaven and Earth, or Sun and Moon. But also these big representations can be no more than shallow depictions of the truth behind it.

 
Some years ago I really astounded my rational self by intuitively buying religious objects, and purchasing flowers and gemstones as offerings for my new buddha statue. Until then I’d believed that religion was something internally, and that occupation with pictures of deities was superfluous nonsense. And here I found myself, burning candles on an altar in devotion! I sincerely questioned my mental sanity. Then suddenly I realized that I did not worship some outer god, but through paying loving attention to a deity, I was honoring the god and goddess within.

 
Therefore I know that it can be very useful to create a small altar in your sacred space, to promote the communication between your self and your Self, or the conversation with your Holy Guardian Angel as magicians would say.

 
Article by Anja Heij