One and All

My last two blog posts spoke of the Horned God and the Great Goddess, but there is a third concept of deity in Wicca, known as Dryghten, the One, or the All.  This monistic impersonal ultimate pantheistic divinity is acknowledged but not worshiped, and is not to be confused with the monotheistic idea of a single supreme personal deity.  Unlike religions that place a divine creator outside of Nature, Wicca is pantheistic, seeing Nature as divine in itself. I first came across the term pantheism when I was in my early teens. The word was constructed from the Greek pan "all" and theos "god" by the English mathematician Joseph Raphson, in his work De spatio reali, published in 1697. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers a contemporary definition:

Pantheism is a metaphysical and religious position. Broadly defined it is the view that (1) “God is everything and everything is God … the world is either identical with God or in some way a self-expression of his nature”. Similarly, it is the view that (2) everything that exists constitutes a “unity” and this all-inclusive unity is in some sense divine. A slightly more specific definition is given by Owen who says (3) “‘Pantheism’ … signifies the belief that every existing entity is, only one Being; and that all other forms of reality are either modes (or appearances) of it or identical with it.” -Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Belief in pantheism is often founded on a mystical experience of oneness with nature. The influential Norwegian philosopher, Arne Naess, once spoke of a compelling emotional experience many people have in nature of being connected to something greater than themselves. Aldous Huxley called mystical oneness with nature "the perennial philosophy". Christianity's greatest mystic, Meister Eckhart, spoke of the sublime moment when "all blades of grass, wood, and stone, all things are One." It is this sublime experience of unity with the infinite All that pantheists call God.  

"There are sacred moments in life when we experience in rational and very direct ways that separation, the boundary between ourselves and other people and between ourselves and Nature, is illusion.  Oneness is reality." -Charlene Spretnak.

This worship of Nature is something I felt had always been part of my philosophy. As a child I would always treat trees and forests and places of natural beauty as my cathedrals and churches. There was something very holy about these quiet tranquil places. I have a very clear memory of being an 8 or 9 year old child and deciding to myself that I would create my own religion. I found a circle of birch trees and decided this would be my church. I drew a star in the dirt and decided this would be my symbol. I looked up to the big blue sky and decided "All" would be my God, encompassing the entire universe.

"When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one's body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it.  In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism." -Dag Hammarskjold.

It was not until a few years later that I discovered the word paganism and thought this must be the word for my religion, I had been pagan all along. It took me a long time to figure out exactly what paganism, witchcraft, and Wicca were. I knew I wanted to be a witch but I didn't really understand what or who the gods were. When I came across the word pantheism, I knew it made sense to me and I started to call myself a pantheistic witch.

"I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole.  (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.)  The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars; none of them seems to me important it itself, but only the whole.  The whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine.  It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions - the world of the spirits." -Robinson Jeffers.

I learned that Wicca was pantheistic, and that this One and All was described as Dryghten by Patricia Crowther, or the Prime Mover by Gerald Gardner. Unlike the Lord and Lady of Wicca, Dryghten is not personified, and cannot be visually represented. Some describe Dryghten as the "life force" of Nature. Gerald Gardner described the Lord and Lady as representitives through which we may worship the One and All.

Janet and Stewart Farrar explained that Wiccans "regard the whole cosmos as alive, both as a whole and in all of its parts", but "such an organic view of the cosmos cannot be fully expressed, and lived, without the concept of the God and Goddess. There is no manifestation without polarization; so at the highest creative level, that of Divinity, the polarization must be the clearest and most powerful of all, reflecting and spreading itself through all the microcosmic levels as well" -The Witches' Goddess: The Feminine Principle of Divinity, Page 2-3. It is through the Lord and Lady that Dryghten is known. They are made manifest in personal form, through dreams, visions, or mediumship. Gerald Gardner explained:

"The Gods are real, not as persons, but as vehicles of power. Briefly, it may be explained that the personification of a particular type of cosmic power in the form of a God or Goddess, carried out by believers and worshippers over many centuries, builds that God-form or Magical Image into a potent reality on the Inner Planes, and makes it a means by which that type of cosmic power may be contacted." -The Meaning of Witchcraft, p. 260.