A pet peeve: pagans who appear to be afraid of the word "worship".
It's really a thing. "Oh, I don't worship gods. I work with them!" "I honor them!" "I am devoted to...."
But never worship.
All of those acts of religious devotion directed towards a deity? Not worship. Somehow.
Showing reverence and adoration? Nope, not worship either.
It's a weird thing to me. All of this activity that is on a literal level worship is defensively declared to not actually be recognition of the worthiness of the gods to be honored. And I know it's a connotational thing for some people, the whole history of experience in religion that was big on self-abasement and all, but self-abasement is still a different thing than worship.
I think sometimes it's something more insidious, though, kind of a Buddy Christ phenomenon. Working with gods, being a kind of professional colleague, it feels like being more important than worship, which recognises and differentiates between categories in a kind of rank-acknowledging way. And that rank thing, it's touchy, isn't it?
And sometimes there actually is stuff about meeting the gods as a comparative equal, individual to individual, but I do tend to think that that needs to come with respecting the existence of differences. A god is still out there manifesting on a much more cosmic level than I manifest, so if the standard of equality is "two manifesting beings", well, we've got that, but it remains a difference of kind. And if worship requires a difference of kind, well, it's there.
I light my candles, I burn my incense, and you know - if you're out there lighting candles and burning incense to me you're a bit confused, and probably have a bit of category error going on. Different categories, different types of attention paid.
It's a thing.
20 December, 2012
W is for Worship
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"Dw3t-Hthr" (Duat-Hether) is a title of various female temple officials in ancient Egypt. It means "Worshipper of Hathor" or "Adorer of Hathor".
2 comments:
I'm gonna go ahead and disagree about the category error part because there are traditions in which the difference can be made, not born; many of the figures worshipped in Chinese traditional religion are historical figures who were deified due to their acts, or by attaining enlightenment (sometimes after death). I keep a shrine to Guan Gong. He was a person. He is also a bodhisattva, and a mountain, and an advisor to many throughout history. He was a history student too.
I do think that 'worship' is mostly a connotational issue, or at least, a matter of defining healthier relationships with gods than many of us were taught were expected to occur when the word 'worship' was invoked. I would also put it down to that blindsiding element of being godbothered as a pagan; 'worship' sounds almost too deliberate for the situation some of us found ourselves in, but there's the rub of your previous post; at what point DOES one acknowledge worship as a deliberate process?
Ngl, I often use 'follow' or 'revere' myself partly due to not feeling diligent enough for my activities to constitute 'worship'.
Well, yes, various forms of ancestor worship and the process of apotheosis exist, but the right-nowness is a bit sketchy to me. I am not an ancestor, nor am I an ascended power, and in the unlikely case I am recognised as a boddhisatva later that is not the case now, and thus my sense of etiquette suggests that doing such things now is inappropriate.
(Likewise, any system in which there is a specific living person receiving worship-type veneration I have a certain wariness of, though there is an edge case in which the person is not the true target of the worship but rather the principle or entity that they represent.)
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