On God and the Gods
Who is God in Romanism?
“…You will see one according law and assertion in all the earth, that there is one God, the King and Father of all things, and many gods, sons of God, ruling together with him.”
Maximus Tyrius, Dissertation 1
God
God is the supreme ultimate reality. God also transcends the physical universe, the realms of thought and spirit. Thus, God is beyond any classification and without name, gender, form, or any limitation. Any definition we apply to God ultimately falls short of God’s true reality. The ancient sages referred to God as the One and the Good. God is the One because he is the first cause and founding principle of all existence. God is the Good because he is the Good of all goods and the ultimate goal of every being.
“The One is all things and not a single one of them… It is because there is nothing in it that all things come from it: in order that being may exist, the One is not being, but the generator of being.” - Plotinus V-2-1
God is the source of all that is. God exists necessarily and requires nothing else for its existence. God simply IS. God is the First Cause of all things. This doesn’t mean the first in a series of causes but rather the first cause in a foundational sense. God needs to exist for there to be anything else within the cosmos. This means God keeps the universe in existence at every moment. Without God, nothing could exist.
God is not a person. God is the ultimate reality behind all things and all personalities. As humans living within the creation of God, we cannot fully understand God. We are too close to see it clearly. In our ignorance, this One reality of God appears in a multitude of forms, names, and changing conditions. Like a prism, the white light of God displays every color imaginable.
Because of God’s ineffable nature, we can only understand God through one of his limited forms. This is why religions around the world have seen God in a variety of different ways. Every culture develops a way to direct its devotion toward the ultimate supreme being.
Christians will see God in Jesus. Hindus worship the Trinity of Brahman, Vishnu, and Shiva. Zoroastrians worship Ahura Mazda as supreme, and Sikhs worship Waheguru.
Our Romanist ancestors had a unique way of viewing God not found in other cultures. They understood that there is an aspect of God we cannot know called the One, and a multitude of Gods who reveal this One God as unique and limited manifestations of the One Divine Reality. In this way, God is both unmanifest and transcends all things, and is simultaneously immanent in every aspect of creation.
Why can’t we just worship the One directly?
Our minds simply cannot grasp the reality of the One. If we imagine the One to be the universe, a supreme intelligence, or a spirit that pervades the universe, we are placing a limitation on the One which diminishes its reality. It is best to think of the One as the simple divine unity behind all things and not as a personal God with whom we have a personal relationship. The One is beyond any personality. The only way we can give any worship to it is in silent meditation where we clear our mind of all objects and any distinction. Only then can some sense of the One be intuitively realized. This union with the Ultimate is called Henosis.
This however, is an advanced spiritual practice we must work towards and some may not be prepared for it within this lifetime. Instead we focus ourselves on union with the Holy Gods. The Gods are divine personalities that we can come to love, worship, pray to and seek union within. They hear our prayers, send us divine gifts and grace our lives with order and blessings according to their powers. As we bring ourselves into closer union with them, we raise our souls up to their divine perfection.
Unlike other religions that focus on salvation from without, we Romanists work toward our own liberation. It is by our work and effort that we become closer to the Gods by purifying our souls and engaging in regular worship, devotion and contemplation. This is why spiritual practice is the foundation of Romanism rather than belief in a particular dogma. Ultimately, what we believe about the Gods is a personal matter. What is essential is that we begin worshiping them and developing a spiritual relationship with them. We are ultimately a community of devotees and seekers, not dogmatic believers.
The 5 Primary Gods
There are hundreds of Gods within Romanism, and the worship of any of them is permitted. However, this leads to an array of deities that confuses more than informs people of the nature of the Gods. Since we ultimately know that God is One and permeates all divinity, we focus our devotion and worship on five primary Gods.
The five Gods are Jupiter, the king of the Gods, Father, and Maker of the universe and humans; The Great Mother, Magna Mater in Latin, who is the Mother of the Gods and source of all life and things that grow; Bacchus, the son of Jupiter, the liberator of all souls and breaker of all limitations; Mercury, the guide of souls and mankind, who uses his clever wit to help all humans in success and leads us toward the Divine; and Apollo, the God of Light, music, poetry, divination and harmony.
Each individual God is a way in which one can come to understand the Divine. Each Romanist chooses a personal God to direct their worship towards. That choice does not limit them; it is often one of the five primary Gods, but any Roman God is permitted as one’s personal Deity. They can change their chosen Deity as they themselves change. The Gods will take no offense. The Gods are all United, and everything is full of Gods. By changing your chosen personal Deity, you are merely looking at the Divine in a new set of clothes, with a new face.
You may wonder, why so many Gods? If God is one, shouldn’t there be One God we all worship? It isn’t that we have too many Gods; the reality is that there is no limit to how the Divine manifests itself. Humans differ significantly in each individual, culture, nation, and ethnicity. As we develop spiritually, we develop different understandings of the Gods and God. This is why there are so many different religions in the world. Each sees the Divine in a particular light. However, it is a great mistake to think that the one vision of God you may prefer in this life or area of the world is the only one that exists. The Gods have no such limitation.
Romanists understand that God can be understood in many ways, and our religion allows devotees to explore that relationship with the Divine through his many manifestations rather than forcing all to worship one of God’s many forms. For this reason, we are tolerant of other religions so long as they do not wish to impose their understanding of God on us through proselytizing, missionary work or outright violence.
Why Roman Gods?
We worship the Roman Gods exclusively because while God is manifest in an infinite amount of forms, each religion provides a closed system that helps us understand the whole. Some people have tried eclectic spirituality, where Gods from various cultures and religions are mixed together, but this often ends in confusion and incoherence. Polytheistic systems have an internal logic that is disrupted when we start mixing in various foreign elements that don’t fit into the whole system. For example, if a Romanist were to worship the Norse God Thor, that would disrupt the Gods in our pantheon, like Hercules and Jupiter, who fulfill the same functions for us and map to our own mythical language.
The Greek and Roman Gods have merged into one system, but that happened slowly over hundreds of years. Religions like Romanism can change, and I suspect it will look different a thousand years from now, but those changes should happen through natural organic change and not be done haphazardly.
Secondly, we worship the Roman Gods because they are the Gods of our European ancestors. Romanism is as much a culture as it is a religion. It is the vessel of our ancestral heritage, and we should honor and respect the Gods that our ancestors have recognized for thousands of years.
Lastly, worshiping an endless array of Gods from any culture destroys one of the most important aspects of religion: community. You can’t have a community of religious devotees when each person creates their pantheons based on personal preference. This important aspect of religion is often overlooked by our modern society, which is overfocused on individualism.
For the Peace of the Gods
“Before the things that really are, even the first principles of all things, is One Divine Being, prior even to the first God and King, abiding immovable in the aloneness of his own absolute unity. For neither is Intelligence nor any principle else intermingled with him, but he is established an exemplar of the God self-begotten, self-produced and only-begotten, the One truly Good. For he is the something Absolutely Great and Supreme, the Source of all things, and root of the first ideals subsisting in the Supreme Mind. Then from this One, the God sufficient in himself caused himself to shine forth and hence he is self-engendered and self-sufficient. For he is the Beginning and God of Gods, a unity proceeding from the One, subsisting before essence, and the principle of essence. For from him are being and essence; and he is called accordingly Noëtarch, Chief of the realm of thought.”
Iamblichus, On the mysteries
"The fountain and origin of all beings is the Good. For what everything strives for, and what everything stretches up towards, is the origin and goal of all things. The Good produces everything from itself, both the first things, and the intermediate things, and the lowest things. But it produces the first things contiguous to it and like itself. One Goodness produces many goodnesses, one Simplicity produces many simplicities, one Henad above all henads produces many henads, and one Origin produces many origins. For the same thing is One, and Origin, and Good, and God, since God is the first thing, and the cause of everything. But it is necessary that what is first must also be most simple, because what is composite in any way and has plurality is secondary to the one, from which the composite things and plurality come. ... It is also necessary that it should have the highest power, and all power. Superabundance of power means that in producing everything from itself it produces the things that are like it before the things that are unlike it. ... For all of the beings, which are differentiated from one another and are pluralised by their own proper differentia, are referred back each to their own single origin. (For instance, all beautiful things, whether in intellects, souls or bodies, are referred back to one fountain of beauty. ...)."
Simplicius, Commentary on Epictetus' Handbook 5.2-28