I am reading Gods-Speaking by Judith O’Grady, a slim but thorough treatise — or perhaps rather long essay — on the phenomena of talking to beings that are not human and may not be completely of this world. It has set me investigating all sorts of rabbit holes, not least of which are the multitude of ideas packed into that two-word title.
You see, I don’t altogether agree that there are necessarily gods out there, but I am quite sure that Out There is plenty large and sufficiently undetermined — undeterminable, probably — to encompass all sorts of ways of being. Where I get hung up is understanding why and how those Out There beings would take any interest in a piddling backwater like Earth, a tiny ball of rock orbiting an utterly nondescript star among billions tooling along on the fringe of a rather boring middle class ex-urban galaxy like the Milky Way in an unremarkable universe among the infinity of possibilities. I mean, how would Out There even find this place! Never mind become invested in talking to a self-absorbed, infantile, and extremely ephemeral species like humans. We’re undetectable in the universe that we occupy. For all that we’ve recently triggered something like a local immune response, we don’t even qualify as a statistically significant part of this tiny planet’s existence.
(We talk of the scale of the universe and beyond as mind-blowing… it’s really not… except to a creature that can not understand that it is not the center of the universe. It is not mind-blowing… It is ego-blowing.)
Consider this: Light, and therefore any sort of electromagnetic radiation that might be used for communication, would take over twenty-five hundred human lifetimes, that is 200,000 years, merely to traverse our home galaxy — and humans have only existed for about 300,000 years. Do you see the unlikelihood of ever attracting the attention of Outsiders of any variety?
(For the record, while light can travel at that speed, it would take current human technology about half that time, 81,000 years, just to reach the nearest star to the sun. Again, a couple thousand generations of humans just to get to the next star system… Never mind the logistics of air and food and water and waste and fuel and viable breeding populations and entropy and space hazards and so on, would it even be possible to remember where the ship was headed after four or five generations?)
Now scale it the other way. Surely, we are relevant to microbes, atoms, quarks, strings.
Well…
If you tallied up the cells in your body — and even exclude the issue of mitochondria being mitochondria and not part of any other being state than mitochondria, though they live in nearly every known eukaryotic cell — human cells, that which you think of as “your body”, comprise only about 43% of the total. The organism that is you is more than half not you, though you do at least feature strongly in the story of the composite being. You are not irrelevant. You’re just not as in charge or as central as you might think. In fact, you can’t digest food, recover from injury, protect yourself from illness, grow or think or feel — you can’t live without substantial input from the not you majority. So who is you? And who would Outsiders be addressing in all this messy pastiche of being?
And that’s at scales that are tiny and brief but yet intelligible to human beings. If you shoot off into the cosmically tiny, you very quickly lose any relevance at all. Worse, there is nothing that we know about that is relevant. The core of all being is, to a first approximation and to the very best of our knowledge, an empty void. Probably a lotta room for Otherness in there, but probably not entities that are going to care much about humanity, if they can be said to care about anything. Further, the mechanics of interacting with anything at that scale is so unwieldy, claiming communication with that realm stretches disbelief a little too thin. You have to be able to understand everything all at once to even trap an electron into a known and fixed existence for the endless stretch of subatomic time that it takes you to say “Hi”. And electrons are similarly vast compared to strings and other possible Ground of All Being states.
So Deity Out There is problematic. Not because They can’t communicate with us if they chose — though I, for one, can’t imagine how that would happen — but it’s very hard to understand why they would, why They would even know that we exist.
But what of the local gods? What of entities that have their place and being here on Earth and at scales that would recognize us as fellow beings in their world?
There are plenty of beings that are older and wiser and more skilled than humans, that could be considered gods from a human perspective. Even a maple tree has more relevance to a local community and a greater capacity for influencing and shaping lives than humans. A maple tree can feed itself and everything around it. Humans can’t even breathe without the maple. So who has more profound relationship within the world? Who is more likely to be in communication with the world? Who is already known for talking to other beings? Yet, do we recognize that this interaction is talking? We define speech as what we do with all these mind symbols and mouth sounds — even though that is a very small part of the conversation we have even with other humans. And so far, we’ve not been able to see past our own ideas, the muck of our minds… So far we think we are the only ones who think, so we logically conclude — with our own logical thinking — that we have to be the only ones to speak.
Do maples talk? Undoubtedly. Do we understand? Not at all… yet…
I don’t know that I truly believe in consciousness or will or mind — because who and what in any given organism “has” that consciousness? — but if there is consciousness at all, then all beings must have it. Because that’s the only way for it to exist in a complex and interpenetrating web of beings. And if everything has the ability to know I from Thou and That and Whatever, if everything has the ability to consider I and Thou, then it’s very likely that everything can communicate in one way or another and maybe even wants to communicate — as long as we listen. So does the maple talk to us? Almost certainly… in so far as a tree encounters the few of our kind who are listening. Maple has every reason to be well and truly pissed off at humanity, but Maple still seems to want to interact with humans as much as every other being around her.
Is Maple a god? I suppose that depends on your mind muck idea of god-scale. It all comes down to terminology.
Which is the rabbit hole I’ve been wandering since picking up this tiny book. (Why is it always the little books! They’re like philosophical black holes…)
Even the idea of terminology itself is, perhaps, baseless. The word implies boundaries, definitions, lines and demarcations, none of which truly exist. Nouns are unreal like that. But in the real world there is very little division between This and That, I and Thou. Reality is all flow of being. So terminology is problematic, but within this word that unmakes and breaks apart the world, there are some doozies, words that completely invert reality, turning Maple into tree, and human into Center of the Universe. And that is what I wanted to talk about briefly here… (All this other mind muck is prologue… because that’s how I roll in the rabbit hole world…)
So let’s look at a short list of inversion layer terms. Starting with:
Race/Species/Etc
We all know there is no such thing as race, just cultural variations, different ways of being human based on the web of relationships in a specific place. Similarly, there is little evidence that species is a real thing. There are some beings that can’t mate and have babies that are viable combinations of their parents. However, that there are multi-cellular organisms at all is a refutation of the idea of delineation between kind. Or even definition of kind. (Consider the mitochondria…) What is a human when the majority of the cellular blueprints in human bodies are not coding human bodies? What is the boundary of this organism? And then how do we determine when it is reproducing properly? (Or property…)
Less archly, a human body can not exist without such a plenitude of other bodies. Same for all bodies. So what is the terminus between bodies that divides one from another when there is no viable division? There is more of the Other in you than your Self. So what species are you?
What species are your gods?
(Now, note that race does not even add a footnote to this question.)
Are these viable questions? Or are they just mind muck?
Somewhat like the next term:
Invasive Species
Other beings do not wander all over the planet. Humans do. And we have moved all these others to places where they have no checks on their numbers. It is not the rabbit’s fault that Australia generally needs rabbit-proof fencing these days. It is not the rabbit’s fault that there is nothing that keeps rabbits under control in Australia. It is not the rabbit’s fault that nowhere in Australia evolved into an ecological organism that includes rabbits, with rabbit eaters and rabbit foods and strategies for avoiding being rabbit food. Rabbits are not a part of Australia. And rabbits, on their own, would not be in Australia. Were it not for humans intentionally carting rabbits halfway around the globe from a rabbit-adapted world to one that simply can’t tolerate rabbits, there would be no rabbits in Australia. Rabbits are not invasive.
Similarly, while humans did not move white-tailed deer to the North American continent, a certain subclass of humans moved in and removed everything that keeps deer in balance with their world. Some we’ve actively eradicated (wolf, bear, big cats). Some we’ve pushed to the margins (buffalo, beaver, Native humans, though not for lack of trying to fit them into the eradicated bin). And by now the only check on deer population is starvation, which, deer being a ruminant able to digest a wide range of plant materials, is not much of a check. As long as there are plants, there are deer. So of course they’re invading your lavishly planted gardens and eating your suburban (and increasingly urban) shrubs and flowers. But who caused this invasion?
Homo sapiens is the invasive species. And really, it’s only a small cultural variant that is prone to invading. Most of our kind are quite happy to live within their small portions of the planet, thoroughly intermingled with all the other beings around us. As is, in fact, true of all beings, no matter our aspirations for individuality and distinction. There are no other invasive species. All the others are just trying to make their way in a place they don’t understand. If they get things wrong or make messes, it’s not on them. It’s on us.
We need to stop labeling them with one of our worst character traits.
We also need to trust that the local gods and masters will eventually sort out the messes. And we probably don’t figure in that balanced equation. Something that eats white-tailed deer will come along, is coming already as long as we don’t kill it in the name of “protecting” our domesticated ruminants (so we can kill and eat those we’re protecting…). Something that makes gnawing rabbits violently sick will grow in Australia, very likely already is growing as long as we don’t yank it out of the margins of our gardens. There might even be something that eats kudzu… maybe… But it’s not kudzu that is invasive. We stupidly moved kudzu to where kudzu can grow and nothing eats kudzu. Kudzu did not take to the seas and mount an invasion on an undefended land…
That was us…
Relatedly…
Apex Predator
As we use this term — and apply it to ourselves with a sort of faux chagrin that does not hide our hubristic smiles — the only being that might qualify is a virus. Or perhaps the soil, though we don’t typically consider decomposition the equal of predation. Predators are powerful and bright and shiny and great. Decomposers are just dirty. However, a virus is a predator, and its prey is everything. It is powerful. In fact, a large percentage of the DNA in the human genome was put there by viruses. Viral DNA has remade us. Now that’s power and authority! Dare I say, godly power and authority?
We respect beings that take life to eat, that kill their food. We respect predators, not producers, because we can’t produce and must kill. We are not altogether comfortable with this feature of our bodies. We have created whole bodies of myth to ‘splain our dependence on eating other beings and the harm we cause others because we have to eat them to live. We turn that harm into a badge of honor and name the killers the masters — even as the logical progression is obviously that all killers will eventually be masters of none… a predator without prey is dead.
You see, there is no relative value in producing or breaking down. Life requires both. In the real world, there is no master, whether predator or producer. There is no top dog. Not even a top virus. There is no top to living. Everything lives in humble balance with everything else. Thus there is no sustained being for a hierarchical system of any kind. Everything with a precariously perched top will eventually topple.
This is why our culture is so miserably terminal.
Here is another term that makes the world into an image of us at our worst:
Queen Bee / Worker Bee
There is no bee that doesn’t work. All bees work. What we call the “queen” works hardest of all, or at least in ways that are most taxing to her tiny body. It is more true to say that the colony has a mother that they all nourish and tend, while she, in turn, gives birth to every single sister among them. But the queen is no leader. (There are no leaders…) She is doing essential work, just like every one of her daughters. She is ruled by the needs of her community. As is every being…
But because we devalue work and worship leadership (and invasions and predators and such), we impose hierarchies and leisure where they do not exist. And we simply do not see the work done by female bodies. We despise the feeding and the tending, writing them out of existence in all our stories of the world. We’re annoyed and embarrassed by reproduction and actively avert our gaze from it. So we simply don’t understand what we see in a hive where every body is doing the work of maintaining the body. In fact, every bee is doing the work of maintaining the body of the hive, exactly as our cells, and all those that are not us — especially those mitochondria! — are doing the work of maintaining our hive bodies.
We think we see a leader in our bodies. We think the queen is the brain, up there above all the mundane body-being, directing all the work and engaging with very little labor of its own, certainly no manual labor with all its dirt and grime (and decomposition…). We think this of ourself and so we see it in the hive. But the mind, if it exists, is not the brain, nor even within the brain. Moreover, the brain does quite a lot of directing work, but it is no more a leader than the heart or the hands, and much less than the gut and the endocrine system. But mostly the brain is working on sorting and recalling sensed information. It is not in charge of anything but its own work, like the “queen bee” who is really the Hive Mother.
We imagine there are hierarchies because some of us want to be that leader that is free from doing the work of maintaining the body. And for a while, with sufficiently large inputs from enslaved others, we have created a culture with a few parasitic queens… though it is more accurate to call them kings…
But this is a fragile order. It is artificial and deeply wrong in a world of inter-being. And like the predators that will eventually reduce the plague of deer and the plants that will poison the rabbits, the world is imposing reality on our ideas. We’re starting to understand that there are no kings and queens and that every body takes care of itself and the hive that it inhabits.
There’s another hive idea that upends the world, tries to make it like what we think we are:
Default Male Pronouns (especially silly as applied to insects)
For all that we call most things Mister, you will likely never in your lifetime see a male bee, nor a male ant, nor a male termite. It is unlikely that you will see a purely male arachnid, though gender gets squishy in most of these beings — as it is in the entire universe. There is exactly one cultural being state of one tiny [apparent] species that ascribes rank and title to gender. And even in that tiny group, the ranking variant is the minority state. (It is also the less biophysically essential — which is precisely why it has all these delusions of grandeur…)
You will never be correct in addressing a spider resting in a web as Mister. Male spiders don’t build webs. They can make silk, but it is used solely for courtship — the brief and defining act of the male spider. The last thing most of them do… Similarly, unless you pay very close attention to ants, you will never see a Mr Ant. Same for Mr Bee. Same for many, many Mr Beings.
Mister is certainly not the default.
Yet look at our images. Listen to the stories we tell. Mr Ant is far more common than Miss Ant in our narrated versions of the world. Because Mr Human is fundamentally in charge of the narration.
To generalize further…
Gender, More Generally (but particularly as it might apply to gods)
Most of the universe does not have gender. This is not a common characteristic, much less an essential one. Few being states use combinatory genetics to reproduce and invigorate their kind, and of those few that do, only a tiny fraction have dimorphic being states that are necessary to breed new beings. Even in that tiny subset of the known world (let’s ignore that we only know 5% of what probably exists just in this universe), male and female parts are often combined in one organism. And some don’t need the male parts to reproduce. Most don’t need the male parts for anything more than fertilization. Gender is certainly not the ground state of being in the world. So why would there be a God and a Goddess?
Why not Ground State? Or just Ground…
Does Maple have a gender? No… But She is not a depersonalized it. So we have this terminology conundrum and it colors all we know of the world.
Can we even imagine deity without the divisions and hierarchies we impose on the world? So how do we communicate with these beings? They are not like we think we are… though neither are we…
Finally, here is a personal pet-peeve of a word:
Creature
… implies creation, implies creator, implies Something, probably Some One, in charge of all this messy interwoven being. (Probably has a Ring of Power…) But of course, this is not a thing.
Certainly there is nothing alive that comes from human or human-like hands. We don’t make creatures. Our gods, (as opposed to The Gods), those ideas we’ve invented to explain the fact that the entire universe has the same agency that we do (as we occasionally get smacked in the face with this truth) also do not make creatures. Nothing is a creator, so there is no creature, only living beings wrought by none and formed by all.
And this is the essential message within Gods-Speaking… The living world is the source of all living being. The interaction between beings is the source of all creation and all its seemingly infinite variation. There is no master, no leader, no queen, not even a guiding hand, only a billion, billion, billion hand-ish beings being together in balance — except when we move the rabbits and kudzu around the playing board.
So back to the beginning. Can we talk to The Gods? Are They even Out There? Does it matter?
What matters is what is part of you, what is around you, what is living with and through you. There are local deities, beings that are good mentors and wise stewards in your place. Maple is certainly one such. Forests and rivers and mountains and even some human places all have composite personhood. Many of these people are godly by human standards. There may even be discarnate beings that have no obvious representation to our senses. A spirit of place is certainly a real entity, some more benevolent toward humans than others.
But it comes down to the Ground: here, where you are, is your god. And you are already in active conversation with that place. All you have to be is a listener.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 
Brain food! This post is wonderful brain food … thank you!
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