Book Review - Gods Speaking
Gods-Speaking is a book of thoughts on polytheism and ritual by Judith O’Grady, put out by Gods & Radicals Press, a small publishing group that put out a lot of really interesting stuff in the 2010’s relating to the intersections of paganism and leftist politics. This was around the time I was delving deep into pagan philosophy and polytheism, and I bought more books than I read. Now I feel like the beneficiary of my prior scatterbrainedness, since newly-written books of this sort are hard to find, but here was one waiting for me on my shelf.
The book is small and slim, less than 200 pages, and written in a cozy conversational tone that really worked well for me. I got a good sense of the author, and I feel like we’d both agree and disagree on enough things to have a really fascinating conversation together. In a way, that’s what my notes on the book are: “I really resonated with this, not so sure about this,” and so on.
As the title suggests, the book is about the subject of communicating with deities (and spirits more broadly). It stands in distinction from the usual expectation of books on that topic by being largely unconcerned with the “how” of that topic, and more about the “why,” as well as simply the direct experience of what it’s like to be in such communication. It was refreshing (though not surprising, given the source) to read a book that wasn’t there to give me easy spell-type answers to do a thing, and instead was just there to explore someone else’s world and life.
As O’Grady observes (and I generally agree with), being a “God-Speaker” isn’t entirely fun or empowering, it can lead to stress, confusion, and if it’s not on some level effortful and unpleasant, it’s more likely you’re talking to something internal rather than to a god. This isn’t exactly a new thought, but the way she talks about it is enriched with examples and experiences that felt very personal and at times vulnerable. Some of these felt pretty different from my own experiences--my gods seem to be often interested in different things than hers--but the tone and shape of the experiences felt sometimes validating and other times aspirational.
O’Grady’s spirituality is very earth-centered and somewhat traditionalist. She’s from an earlier generation that most of the folks I read, and proudly proclaims the badge of being an ‘archaic thinker’ and can at times feel conservative in terms of her reference pool and personal experiences, though this is tempered a lot by a generosity of spirit and curiosity that still made me feel at ease most of the time. Still, this is where actual application of the thoughts here gave me the most trouble O’Grady’s relationship with and charge from her gods seems to be almost entirely focused on the natural world. In contrast, my spiritwork seems to be focussed around supporting a community that’s currently embodied in human shapes. Relationship with the natural world is part of that, but not my core focus. It was sometimes hard to know how O’Grady’s divine experiences affected her interaction with other human-shaped persons, which is for me one of the things I feel I need the most help with.
Despite that difference in focus, my favorite parts of the book was when O’Grady talked in detail about specific spiritual experiences, one being a ritual to invite a local river spirit into her spiritual community, and the other being how she worked physically and spiritually to protect seagulls in her local habitat from a person who was abusing them. While it’s common for a pagan writer to give descriptions of their magical activities and rituals, they’re usually done in a way that feels merely instructive (and all-too-often self-congratulatory as well). In contrast, O’Grady’s writing here was much more lush and personal. I was captivated by both those stories more than any other description of ritual I’ve read before, and would’ve happily read a book many times longer consisting of only those sorts of tellings.
The other part of the book I got the most out of was the theology, which mainly involved puzzling out O’Grady’s perspective on how gods “work” and comparing them with my own. One thing that helped me firm up my thoughts was the very definition of “God”. O’Grady seems to use that word where I’d more broadly talk about ‘spirits’. O’Grady suggests the possibility of gods who are happy on their own in what she calls “Gods-Land” and don’t interact with people here much at all, which at first made no sense to me, until I realized the problem is definitional: my understanding of “god” is specifically as a spirit who is interested in action and communication with folks such as us.
Another topic raised that is still giving me a lot to think about is posed by O’Grady as the almost glib question “Are Gods Socialist?” As leftist people, she points out, we necessarily want to assume our deities share those tendencies, but the shapes and constructs of Gods-Land seems to make that a complicated proposition. Our understanding of gods almost always implies a hierarchy: of purview and even of capability. What would socialism mean in that context? I’m not sure that I’m enough of a political theorist to have a full answer to that myself, but what it made me think about is that what I expect from my Gods is to have the same underlying values (things like empathy and mutual support) and that political labels are necessarily downstream of such values, affected by the conditions (material and otherwise) in which we (or the Gods) act.
Gods-Speaking was a delightfully idiosyncratic, rambling, and thought-provoking little book. It was both an easy read, in terms of sentence-to-sentence parsing, and a hard one, in terms of taking it on inside my head. It’s a whole different thing to read a book about spirituality that isn’t “telling you to do a thing” but more presenting a vibe and worldview. I wish there were more books out there like this, and I’d recommend this to anyone who wants to know more about the ways and means of one particular God-Speaker doing their thing.