The (a)Morality of the Gods

The gods are no more moral than a storm, a wolf, or an oak.

This is not an insult. Nor is it a compliment. It’s a description of how things are.

Many pagans want to see the cosmos as intrinsically good and beautiful and project their longings onto the world. The belief that Lugh is out there looking out for everyone and ensuring that justice is served is comforting and appealing, but I don’t see any evidence for it.

The Gods Are Not Fundamentally Good

The argument of the fundamental goodness of the gods runs into the same theological snags that Christianity does. If Lugh is purely good, he must always help those suffering, for neglecting their pain would be irresponsible and unjust, yet look around you. There’s a lot of suffering. However you feel about the Israel-Palestine war, Hamas militants brutally raped and tortured women before executing them. In retaliation, Israel is leveling Gaza and killing tens of thousands of civilians. This is not good, and a just, powerful god certainly could design a work-around that didn't lead to such misery.

The current Israel-Palestine conflict is just one tiny example that demonstrates the inconceivable levels of suffering that are endemic to life on earth. Another is much more close to home. My cat. Lala is a master hunter of geckos, and every day, she consumes around four of these four-legged pests. When she’s starving, she’ll gobble it up first thing, but when my huntress isn’t in a rush, she luxuriates in her meal, like a connoisseur at a fine-dining restaurant. She paws at her victims, ripping off skin, breaking limbs, gouging eyes. She throws them in the air, pounces on them, or waits for them to scramble away before rushing after them. Only after whetting her appetite does she eat them. The gecko squeals with the first bite, and then it's crunchy, squishy sounds until the prey slides into her stomach. On the slopes of Carrauntoohil or the plains of Meath, this violence occurs millions of times each day.

Why doesn’t Lugh intervene?

The Gods Are Not Omnipotent

One argument is that Lugh is just one god. He can’t help everyone, so he must use his powers judiciously. This defense strikes me as plausible and in line with early Aryan myths. It’s difficult to say much about the specifics of the Celtic gods due to the fragmented and corrupt nature of their myths.

Of what does remain, there are hints that the gods are not omnipotent. In The Book of Invasions, for instance, Lugh’s power is limited. To start with, the upstart king must wage war the Fomorians and slay Balor. Where he an all-powerful god, he could snap his fingers and wipe them out of existence. There's also another big problem. Lugh dies, falling prey to Dagda’s vengeful sons. This last fact, though, is probably more a product of euhemerization rather than authentic Celtic theology.

Given the highly corrupted nature of The Book of Invasions, it is not a reliable guide to the mythic world of the Celts. At best, we can glean qualities, characters, and vestiges of stories, but the details are lost. For a more well-preserved pagan tradition, let’s look to the Greeks for guidance.

In early Hellenic paganism, there was no omnipotent god as found in Christianity and later Hinduism. Zeus certainly is mighty. He is, after all, the king of the gods, but he’s not all-powerful. First, he must defeat his father and imprison the other Titans in Tartarus before he can begin his reign. Second, he is not an undisputed king. The thunderer rules over the sky, while Hades rules the earth and Neptune the seas. Third, other gods challenge and outsmart him, notably Prometheus, who bests the Olympian twice. Our fire thief pays for his ruse, but he also demonstrates the imperfections of the king of the Olympians.

Zeus, as an omnipotent lord, does appear in a protean form in early Greek religion. A few verses in The Iliad state as much, but this is contradicted by the dramatics in the epic itself and the mythical tales it alludes to. The Stoics developed the idea of Zeus as an all-powerful creator and orderer of the universe only centuries later. The earlier god of the ancient myths was but one of many competing powers shaping the fate of the cosmos.

The Gods Are Not Purely Good: The Mythic Argument

But there’s another challenge as to why Lugh doesn’t help out the geckos or the women brutally raped by Hamas - Lugh is not purely good. Among the paltry myths available about Lugh, its difficult argue mythologically that the Celts believed he was a fallible deity. The only strike against him is his murder of Bres, a Formorian whom Lugh spared in exchange for knowledge of local agricultural practices. The Many Skilled God forces the former enemy to consume a poison. Not exactly conduct becoming of a paragon of virtue. He also murdered his wife’s paramour, but it is unclear whether that would have been regarded as immoral among the Irish of the time. I suspect not.

Again, we must turn to extant Aryan myths to answer this. Surveying the Olympian gods, the answer is clear: the gods are no goody-two-shoes. Zeus is noble, mighty, and just, but he’s also hot-headed and lustful. I return to an example mentioned earlier: Prometheus. The Titan tricked Zeus, stole fire, and restored it to man. Zeus punished him by chaining him to a rock and ordering an eagle to eternally feast upon his liver. The affair is dramatized in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, revealsing that even the Greeks felt the Titan's treatment was cruel and that they did not hold their own gods as morally infallible.

The great thunderer also sparked many-a-drama with his affairs. In one story, he falls in love with Alcmene, a mortal woman whose beauty rivaled Aphrodite’s. Since Alcmene was a good wife, he knew she would not betray her lover, even if it was with the Lord of the Sky himself. The mortal's chastity was no excuse. Zeus wanted her, and he'd have her. Rather than rape her, as he did with Callisto, he politely disguised himself as her husband and slept with her. The result of their union was mixed. Literally and metaphorically. On the one hand, Alcmene became the mother of Hercules, but on the other, she incurred the wrath of Hera. Hera sent a troop of witches to harass the expectant mother and narrowly escaped death at their hands. Once Hercules was born, Hera sent a pair of serpents to murder the young boy. The queen failed again, but it is clear that drama and suffering followed in the wake of Zeus’ trysts, along with some pretty spectacular children. These are not the actions of a perfectly virtuous god.

The Gods Are Not Purely Good: The Natural Argument

The previous arguments suffer from one fatal flaw: they rely on the testimony of others. Ancient myths are not infallible windows into the cosmos. They are some of the most illuminating guides humans have produced, akin to diamonds formed by pressure over thousands of years in the depths of the collective unconscious. At the end of this process, these veins of truth emerge spontaneously from the crusts of the culture. Despite my admiration for these tales, they alone are an insufficient basis for theology.

To understand the nature of the gods, we must return to their source: nature herself. The gods are symbols of natural forces and, oppositely, nature is the material expression of these psychic powers. As symbols, they are not mere human constructs that render comprehensible the chaos of the cosmos. They are objective agents in the world and are as causally significant as matter. I will cover why in later essays, but for now I shall let these statements stand on their intuitive force.

As symbols of natural forces, we can observe the world around us to determine whether or not the gods are benevolent since creation is a reflection of their will. This task circles us back to the original observation that started this inquiry: widespread suffering and loss. Nature is unpleasant, terrifying, and ruthless.

These descriptors might surprise some, but that surprise is because urbanization has corrupted our vision of nature. To a 21st-century city-dweller who only occasionally visits the woods for a hike or weekend adventure, the outdoors can appear as a pristine utopia. Overhead, the canopy of oaks, the sun, and the sky. Underfoot, a line of ants marches along familiar lanes and bluebells tremble in the breeze. Around, crisp air, a few squirrels play amid the branches, a spotted woodpecker drums against a trunk.

The world they see around them is real, but it is only a sliver of nature. The wild places that remain are no longer wild. Before industrialization, the wild was terrifying. In the woods, wolves waited to kidnap and devour Little Red Riding Hoods. Ghosts, fairies, and demons abounded. The elements could maim or murder the unprepared or luckless. Many of these threats are now gone. The predators that once mauled and devoured our ancestors have been hunted to extinction or thoroughly decimated. The supernatural are dismissed as outdated superstitions. Teams of park rangers, highly curated trails, and the ubiquitous presence of motorways and towns renders all but the most daring excursions safe. What's left is the illusion of a gorgeous nature - defanged, castrated, and sedated.

Tourists will also never appreciate the outdoor's brutality because they are not around long enough. I don't say this to snub my nose at urbanites, but it's a fact. Unless you have lived in the wild for years and come to see the snails, drongos, and millipedes as your friends and neighbors, witnessing them day after day, delighting with them in the warmth of the rising sun after a frigid night, singing as they sing to its ascent over the hills, knowing them as individuals with names and characters, it's difficult to fathom the tragedy of the natural world.

In Thailand, when the hot season arrives, 90% (or 100% in some cases) of the creatures die. The devastation is palpable. Dessicated corpses of worms and millipedes are scattered across the forest floor. The colonies of black ants that once marched acrossed my path vanish without explanation. The sounds of the cuckoos and swifts fade away as their numbers progressively drop. Misery, loss, and death breath down my neck. As a visitor, it's next to impossible to feel this deeply until they've thrown themself into nature and truly called it home - not a weekend getaway. Otherwise, it hits like an obituary read about a stranger in the newspaper.

Death in nature is a quiet affair. As in the case above, animals wither up in the heat, perishing as they exert their will and body to the absolute limit, or they find a place to lay and die, or they are prey - savaged and gone in a few minutes. These events are difficult to spot because, as in human society, violence and death are hidden away. A snake that raids a rat nest doesn’t pompously display its catch for other creatures to see. It strangles and devours it, then slithers off to its den for a long slumber. A kite that snatches a dove in its claws consumes it on the spot, then returns to its nest for a rest. The only remnants are a few feathers scattered on the ground. Regularly witnessing these encounters or picking on their faint clues requires patience and months of wilderness living, eluding the eyes of casual visitors.

Nature is serene, but it is also terrifying, painful, and brutal. These qualities rule out the gods' benevolence unless a pagan argues for a Manichean world where the cosmos is embroiled in a perpetual state of war between good gods and bad gods. This total-war good-bad view of the world is not attested to in any Aryan myths (Zoroastranism excepted) and can be dismissed readily through observation. Wolves don’t run down deer in the forest because wolves are evil and deer are good. Every creature survives through destruction. Wolves eat deer, but deer eat plants and, if the opportunity presents itself, birds and bunnies. Each creature has competing interests, and nature necessitates that one win and another lose. Here, we find the first hint of the moral nature of the gods, but there’s another element missing from this picture.

If we step back and view nature from a distance, we observe a pattern: the cycles of the seasons, replicated in everything from the life of stars to liver cells. Since gods are symbols of natural forces, they too must follow these patterns.

This pattern doesn’t suggest that gods come and go, like butterflies in winter. Rather, they cycle through periods of dominance and submission, akin to the yin-yang of Taoism. They are imperfect and in perpetual motion, rising and falling as waves in the ocean or the passage of the seasons through a forest. During some periods, Taranis' fiery energy is ascendant. In other periods, Brigid's warmth prevails. At other times, the Morrigan's frenzied destruction is prominent. To cling to any state as absolutely good and hold it in perpetuity is deluded and impossible.

Amoral, Moral, and Immoral

Like natural processes and creatures, the gods are amoral, moral, and immoral.

They are amoral because they are processes that follow the laws of change and balance. Is spring better than winter? If you’re living in Scotland and going insane with the long, cold nights, yes. Spring is better for you, but spring can never be perpetual. Spring requires winter, and winter, spring. They exist interdependently, and due to the nature of change, they constantly oscillate between these two states.

The same applies to other opposites like heat and cold or dark and light. To heat one area, we must draw energy from another. To cool one area, we must displace heat to another. We witness this dance in weather patterns, movements dictated by fluctuating temperature and pressure. There is constant movement, yet also harmony. In the midst of this, the net result is zero. Since the cosmos and its lesser forces are not moving towards an ultimately moral or better state, it is amoral. It's only mandate is the maintenance of equilibrium.

Within this ultimate state of equilibrium, the gods are moral agents. This might seem to contradict what I said a moment before, but allow me to explain. First, we must begin with one of the main tenets of Celtic paganism: that everything in the universe is alive, awake, and willful. A cloud drifting through the sky or a yew spreading its branches over the forest floor is not merely a physical process driven by material conditions. It’s a choice willed by each living element of the world. We are not solitary souls trapped in flesh wandering through a mostly dead world. We are a soul swimming through a universe of souls. Spirit and matter are one.

Since everything is alive, everything possesses its own will, and that will is moralistic. A deer believes it’s wrong, however he conceives of it, that a pack of wolves chases him down and tears him to shreds. His flight is sufficient proof. The wolves, however, believe it’s right for them to do so, and the thrill that seizes them as they run their prey down evinces this.

When it comes to vitality of inanimate objects, we enter into territory alien to the modern mind but familiar to the ancient one. A stone is alive and willing itself to be as it is, resisting the degradations of wind, rain, and creepers. A storm wills itself to explode through Tralee and the hills of Kerry, zapping trees and joggers in its path. Precisely how it conceives and performs this is a mystery, but mystical realization will confirm this as a fact. The world is alive, and its competing wills sometimes clash and brawl; sometimes they are indifferent to each other's presence; and other times they join hands in common cause.

The gods are the same. Lugh longs for justice and order, but Morrigan frustrates him and sew strife and chaos. Both feel justified and pursue, in their inscrutable ways, their ends. The changing of the seasons or the life cycles of man are testaments to these various powers competing within the world. In youth and spring, we have the exuberance of Aenghus unleashing himself upon the world. During summer, the height of man’s powers, Lugh, the lord of might and justice, stands haughtily over the world. As man descends into age and autumn arrives, the sagely Dagda, wisened in years, apportions the harvest. The final years of old age are accompanied by winter and overseen by the chthonic deity Donn, god of death and the underworld. In the world, as in the human body and seasons, these various forces vie for power and experience periods of lordship, subservience, or irrelevance.

This might sound strange, but it coincides with observable nature and Aryan myths, particularly the earlier strata. In one sense, the myths can be read as the dramatization of these forces vying to impose their will upon the world.

The gods are also immoral. Their immorality stems from their imperfection. Modern man has this perverse impulse to project perfection onto the natural world, driven by his alienation from it and a juvenile wish to believe in some ultimate salvation. In his imagination, an oak tree is a perfect specimen of life, and that man alone suffers from immorality or moral failings. Wrong. Nature is fundamentally no different than ourselves. Oak trees are imperfect. They can develop cancer-like diseases. They can suffer from genetic defects or, by dint of their environment and biological limitations, be crippled in growing and swallowing up as much space, soil, and sun as they can. These material imperfections are coded into their will as well. They act against their own interests, much like ourselves, other natural phenomena, and the gods.

We can observe this readily in nature, where internal contradictions define the biological life of every creature. But this fact is also attested to in the myths. Due to the paltry extant sources and their highly sanitized nature, forgive me for passing over the Irish myths again. In the better-preserved Hellenic myths, the moral failings of the gods are patently clear. I’ve already listed Zeus’ own hot-headedness and lust, but Hera, his wife, was also no faultless queen of virtue. She could be cruel and vindictive. For sleeping with Zeus, she nearly killed the innocent Alcmene while she was in labor. It was only because her maid tricked the goddess of childbirth that Alcmene escaped her fate. In another story, Tiresias, a mortal who had been transformed into a woman and then back into a man, was asked by Hera and Zeus to settle a dispute about who experienced more pleasure during sex. Tiresias sided with Zeus, stating that a man enjoyed one-tenth the pleasure and women nine-tenths. For not agreeing with the queen, Hera struck him blind. Not exactly just.

Imperfect Agents of Good and Unwitting Preservers of Harmony

The gods are not pure agents of good. They are partially good, but we must keep in mind how they are good. The deities are agents of the complex qualities they represent. For Lugh, goodness is justice and order, and he actively creates and preserves these qualities. He only cares about human affairs to the degree that it accomplishes his goals. However, he also knows that he needs allies in his task and that the law of reciprocity requires him to respect honors shown to him.

There are two caveats here. First, Lugh is not omnipotent, as discussed earlier. Nature cannot allow him to be, as that would disrupt balance. With too much power, the entire world would be wholly ordered and predictable. He must eternally contend with injustice and chaos. The result is not a perfect stasis but a dynamic cycling between opposites. Some of these cycles might take one year. Others might take 100,000 years or some other incalculably long period, but they are playing out despite the modesty of human perception.

Second, Lugh is not just justice and order. Like an eagle or a mountain, you cannot reduce a god to a set of abstract qualities. To call an eagle just a symbol of freedom and violence would dismiss his complexity and how he behaves in the world. In fact, it would tell you little about the creature. Lugh, like the eagle, is a constellation of desires and values that express themselves in surprising and unpredictable ways. The reduction to a set of abstractions also fails to include his imperfections. The complexity of life, be it an eagle's, a forest's, or a god's, cannot be condensed to a few predictable and inviolable ideas. This is the impoverished view of the mathematician that sees life as a series of equations. Lugh is not a neat series of equations. He is a host of desires and emotions. He is fallible. And he is wild.

I end with one of the great lines from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that captures the grand, elusive, and elemental nature of the gods:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

The gods are vast. They contain multitudes. They lie beyond the narrow categories of good and bad and yet are driven by them. They marshal every resource to achieve their ends, yet they uphold unity amidst their largesse. Such is the mystery of spring and winter, of birth and death, of our own bodies and souls, and of the gods.