Above is my religious symbol; an Egyptian ankh, symbol of eternal life, and an Armenian symbol of eternity within it. Totally going to get a tattoo of this one day.
Prepare to read a crazed religious manifesto. I call my belief system Armeno-Kemetic Neopagan Pantheism (referred to from here on out as AKNP), as it mainly incorporates deities from the ancient Armenian and Egyptian pantheons (Kemet is what the ancient Egyptians called their country). It is “soft” polytheism, meaning that I see the Gods as personifications of natural forces or concepts, or psychological archetypes that reside deep in the collective subconscious of humanity, rather than literal beings that physically exist somewhere. But that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to them, or seek solace from them. I have been teetering between polytheism and pantheism for quite some time now. They don’t necessarily contradict one another, but I’ve still leaned closer to one than the other at various points of my life.
Panpsychism, Gods and Science
If I had been asked late last year what my thoughts were on God, I would say that endless eternal oblivion is the ultimate God that will consume the entire universe one day and erase any evidence that anything ever existed, at the Heat Death of the Universe, trillions of years from now. I call it the Abyss, as described by Nietzsche, and it is higher and stronger than any God. The Abyss, as far as us mortals are concerned who aren’t going to be around for the end of the universe, is our deaths. It’s the end. While undeniably true from a certain point of view that everything in the universe is going to be undone eventually, I have other points of view too. That’s not the only God, nor does it need to be the only God to focus on. Life exists too. There’s more to a story than just how it ends. I’ve managed to put the Abyss on the back burner for now, not to ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist but to compartmentalize it; just like death itself, it’s always going to be there looming in the background, but I can’t do anything about it. I live with it. It is important to acknowledge it, but dwelling on it is unproductive.
I also believe the stars are the closest thing to Gods that physically exist (and there are other ways to exist than just physically), and have a consciousness of their own which we are all part of. This is called panpsychism, or stellar consciousness. Our souls come from the Sun, or occasionally other stars, ancient stars that went supernova billions of years ago for example. After death, our souls either reincarnate after a period of rest, or return to the Sun, the Source. Something like nirvana in Buddhism. Our lives are almost like simulations that our souls undergo, for the purpose of growth and learning. It is how the universe knows itself. We are basically the Universe observing itself. We learn hard lessons, and suffer terribly, in an unjust and indifferent world. I sometimes wonder why my soul wants to be on this planet. Surely there are easier planets to live on somewhere in the universe. There have been times when, in a deep meditation, I almost felt like I had the answer, like my soul was almost awakening from the simulation, but something didn’t want me to unlock the truth and I was pushed back into this dream. I still feel like I’m more hyper-aware of reality than I’m supposed to be. Certainly more than I used to be.
There’s one thing I want, and that’s the truth, no matter how unpleasant it might be. Many people who turn to religion are actually fleeing the truth. No one wants to think they’ll cease to exist after they die and everything they ever did was meaningless. So, many people believe any outlandish fairy tale they’re told, and if a lot of other people say they believe it too, that’s enough comfort for them. They’ll become so afraid of thinking deep thoughts about existence and so desperate for their fairy tale to be true that they will even kill anyone who says differently. I will never be one of those. I’m a pantheist, so I believe that God is in all things, it is the consciousness of the universe, and that our souls are indestructible energy and we reincarnate. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. I will go into nonexistence peacefully. Because I don’t take my pagan religion literally like Abrahamic monotheists do. They’re fables to draw lessons from, symbolic interpretations of reality, not literal history.
Anyway, I consider pantheism/panpsychism compatible with current understandings of astronomy, quantum physics and the like. I agree with atheists like 99% of the time. I just don’t agree with materialistic thought. I think that the concept of dark matter is science desperately trying to keep materialism from being disproved. Panpsychism holds that the universe and everything in it has some kind of consciousness. In science, it can also explain why stars oribit their galaxies at a faster rate than should be possible with gravity alone; which was what prompted scientists to come up with dark matter to explain it. I think that the stars are moving of their own volition because they are alive, and yes there are some scientists who take it seriously as a hypothesis, although an untestable one. I think that might be true at least with living things, planets, moons, stars and galaxies. Anything that is born, grows, ages and dies, which all of these things do. Perhaps mountains count as well, and crystals. I know what I felt when I gazed upon Mt. Ararat. That mountain is like a God watching over the landscape. Anyway, I view panpsychism as a feature of pantheism.
By the way, I believe in evolution and all that. No problem with monkeys in my ancestry, I accept it. But I believe in the mystifying aspects of evolution. There’s a kind of inherent intelligence to it when you look at the animal kingdom and see how specialized each species is, almost as if it’s being guided by some higher being. It’s a kind of magic. Heka, to the Egyptians. Our species gaining higher consciousness and self-awareness may have been some kind of cosmic fluke. Only happens every few million years somewhere in the galaxy. But it is supposed to happen, that’s the end goal of life. Sometimes it takes a few billion years to finally get there, it has to be in a very stable environment, and then you’re lucky if the species doesn’t nuke itself, like humanity is probably going to soon.
So, what exactly are Gods, in my practice? Let’s go back to the Sun, for example. As far as we’re concerned here on Earth, the Sun is God, even if it is a mediocre star compared to others. The rest of the universe could disappear and as long as the Sun still existed we would probably be fine (until it goes Red Giant. Then we would be in trouble.) Anyway, the Sun was seen by the ancient Egyptians as Ra, the falcon-headed deity who created all of the other Gods asexually. Every polytheistic religion has a Sun God. The Armenians and the Peruvians both called themselves Children of the Sun, despite being separated by oceans, continents and centuries. Deep down we all know it’s true. The Christian God is really just a Sun God in disguise. But Ra was Egypt’s interpretation of the Sun. Gods are a bit like mascots, in a sense. Mickey Mouse doesn’t physically exist, but Disney is a real entity.
The truth is like a mountain. What you see as the shape of the mountain depends on what direction you view it from. Take a mountain with twin peaks, one higher than the other, like Mt. Ararat, or Mt. Diablo, in California where I grew up. One might view it from one direction, and say the smaller peak is on the left side. Someone from the opposite direction sees the smaller peak on the right side. Someone from yet another direction might see the larger peak from the side and be unaware of a smaller peak hidden behind it. They’re all correct from their standpoint. But you can be correct and still not see the whole picture. This is my view on polytheism. Each culture had their own interpretations of the world, of the truth. I latch onto these symbols sometimes, those of Gods. There are more ways to exist than just physically, as I mentioned. Gods represent things and concepts that are real: the Sun, death, love, motherhood, etc. They are personifications and interpretations of those things. Personifications that make for good back and forth conversations in your brain.
My Religious History
I grew up Christian, but my immediate family was never super devout. Plenty of religious extremists in my extended family, but luckily I wasn’t indoctrinated like that. I was christened under the Armenian Apostolic Church as an infant, obviously without being given much say in it. Then I was talked into getting baptized at a Baptist church when I was about 11 years old. Also too young to truly consent to it. As a teen I started wishing my enemies would burn in Hell, and the religion didn’t do anything positive for me, it just fed into my hatred and spite, like it does for a lot of people. I fell in with a circle of friends who were Wiccan, more or less, and while they made no effort to convert me I started to see how different religions worked. How they can be positive. Not to mention the more I started to learn about Christianity, the less I liked it. A history of colonialism and cultural genocide around the world. In Egypt, they burned down the Library of Alexandria and destroyed many ancient temples. Armenia in particular has been trapped in an abusive relationship with Christianity since 301 AD. They destroyed all the ancient records, burned and ransacked the pagan temples, and made it so much easier for the Azeris to say we aren’t ancient centuries later. Armenia could have had monuments and ancient wisdom as great as Greece and Egypt, but they are lost. And Jesus didn’t lift a finger to help Armenia in 1915, during the most infamous stage of the Armenian genocide (which is an ongoing process that began around 1000 AD and continues to the present, but that’s another topic). The world simply does not work the way Christianity says it does, and yet people still blindly follow it out of fear. Islam is just as bad if not worse.
I loved Egypt as a kid, I always felt connected to it somehow. Particularly the God Anpu/Anubis. I’m pretty sure I’ve had some past lives in ancient Egypt. Egypt came back to me a second time in my early 20s, which was when I converted away from Christianity and started to instead follow the Egyptian Gods and Wicca. Wicca can be eclectic, meaning you can incorporate any deity from any religion and have them as stand-ins for the Horned God and the Moon Goddess. But I do feel like it still has a naïve idea of how karma works. People get away with horrific, gruesome acts all the time. I don’t want to wait until they reincarnate for them to get their comeuppance! The way I see it, there is no inherent justice in the universe. Justice is a man-made concept, just like good and evil. No higher being or force is just going to carry out justice for you. Overall though, Wicca gives a good starting point, it can even provide the backbone to your own unique pagan practices. Just take what you feel is true and leave the rest. Later I started learning more about the Armenian Gods, of which very little is written sadly, and I gravitated more towards them so that I could follow the religion of my ancestors, leaving both Egypt and Wicca behind. But I did learn a lot with the Armenian Gods, and I got that direct ancestral attachment I couldn’t get with the Egyptian pantheon.
Then in my 30s, I went through that existential nihilism period, and while I maintained a passing interest in it, I dropped out of paganism for a number of years, and no longer felt very spiritual. A lot of this coincided with the 2020 Artsakh War and its disastrous results, and just 2020 in general, which was a depressing year for everyone. But it was also the call center jobs I had in the preceding two years that sucked the life out of me and killed my optimism. I might just be finally starting to move on from this, if this renewed interest sticks around. I strangely don’t feel like I control how long I stay interested in things. But I will try. We’ll see how my Seasonal Affective Disorder goes this year.
Thanks to my webcomic, which involves Egyptian Gods, a couple months ago something rekindled in me after years of dormancy. A renewed interest in the ancient Egyptian pantheon. In particular, the God Set, Sutekh in ancient Egyptian, and Thoth, Djehuty in ancient Egyptian, called to me. I feel happier when I’m learning new things and being a nerd, and I’ve been learning all sorts about the Egyptian pantheon that I never knew before. It’s a welcome escape.
Maybe once you fully accept existential nihilism as the truth there’s not much further you can go with it, unless you become an absurdist, and just say “screw it, nothing makes sense or has any meaning, the universe is absurd, we’ll never fully understand it, I’m just going to do what I want and live life in spite of its meaninglessness”. Maybe this is what me becoming an absurdist looks like. Returning to paganism. No one can really say what’s real, we only have the minimum senses it takes to survive in the world. There are other layers of reality which we are unaware of and unable to interact with, quantum science proves this. Then again, maybe paganism is all a comforting delusion. Maybe the “Gods” are just voices in my head. Imaginary friends. But if there really is no inherent meaning of life, why not? It’s not hurting anyone. I’m not out to convert people. I’m not going back to the dogmatic bigotry of Christianity either. That’s not what AKNP is about. I’m not going to shove my head in the sand that deeply. Or at all, hopefully.
I am going to wrap this blog entry up, I have a LOT more to talk about, but this blog is going to be a mile long if I don’t stop somewhere. Join me next time when I discuss the pantheons and Gods I follow and why I’m drawn to them, and what holidays I observe in my practice.
