In the early to mid 2010s, my mom visited me in my then-apartment every few months. She always visits me bearing fruit out of the conviction that my five-a-day can’t only come from vegetables. One time some years ago, she was greeted by (the usual) meticulously-stacked glass Tupperware. I think that, that day, the fridge was particularly intensely Tupperwared because I was subscribed to a CSA at that time, and I used Saturday mornings as my vegetable processing time — everything was cut and ready to be used as ingredients for whatever I was eating. She thought it was too organized, and she asked me if I was OK.
My mother’s refrigerator, by contrast, once actually made me cry and shut down. When I was in college and grad school, one of the first things I usually did when visiting home was to clean her refrigerator. That specific time — I think in late grad school — I opened one of the produce drawers and was greeted by a three-inch-deep rotten slimy watery layer from the vegetables at the bottom. It was too much.
That was the last time I cleaned my mother’s refrigerator. Every time I have visited since, she boasts about having done that in advance. I know how it got that way and don’t judge her for it, though. In professional, white-collar desk jobs like the profession we share, there are all of these aspirations around what we have mental energy to do. My mom is in a director position in her workplace, and while she may aim to eat the peppers or zucchini or salads, she often preps something quick, like brie, bread, and fruit. The way I deal with similar fatigue is to focus on modular meals that are easy to put together from prepped ingredients. Sometimes I actually just use a cheese grater to shred zucchini into food as it’s cooking so I can get my five-a-day without chopping vegetables.
My refrigerator no longer looks precisely like it did then. I now have plastic trays filled with sauces and other condiments for food. I usually make a protein in the oven or on the stove that I add to food during the week. While the CSA was good at the time I had it, I now know which vegetables I go for and that my stomach gets upset when I eat more than a few tomatoes or peppers per week, so I’m more of a salad-zucchini-and-herbs person. The things that tend to go bad in my refrigerator before I use all of them are lemons because I buy them in the bag.
Half-jokingly, I call myself a Tupperware person. I like systems, and I like it when things are organized and fit together nicely. Marie Kondo’s Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up — both the book and the organizer’s spinoff series — are things I enjoy watching. I organize cabinets when I’m stressed. Having a dust mite allergy means that all of this is actually really good for me because I am literally allergic to clutter. The only reason I have open bookshelves is because my main bookshelf is an heirloom piece that may have been made or purchased by my great-grandfather, and my supplemental bookshelf is one that I purchased because I had overflow books, and it was less expensive than a closed bookcase for solving a pressing problem. Its days are numbered. My shrine doesn’t really count in the same way, but the style of openness I went with is one that will make my pre-Noumenia cleaning go smoothly. I like it when time is organized, too.
There are some Gods who give me anxiety because I know that they are the exact opposite of my personality and lifestyle preferences. There are other Gods whom I vibe with on the level of specific epithets and areas of resonance. For example, I pray to Hermes because he is the patron of information science, and I ask him for his blessings in the realm of serendipity, communication, and alacrity/thinking on my feet. Hermes has a rowdy and mischievous side that I almost never engage with, and I never did engage with it even when he was my primary God in my mid-/late 20s during my “getting used to adulting” phase. I am terrified of what I know about the Norse God Loki because I have a feeling he’s not very into Tupperware or organizing and I fear for what would happen to my cabinets and refrigerator. I had a similar anxiety about Dionysos until I read the Platonists and started engaging with Dionysos in a Platonic framework. All I had seen from his major devotees was stuff about breaking and remaking people, and all I wanted after my screwed-up childhood was wholeness, the exact opposite of that. I also don’t drink alcohol and only make an exception for the Anthesteria. I sometimes have similar hesitations about Oðinn based on the way his devotees talk about him, although I do honor him a bit when I’m honoring Frigg. For me, Apollon is already very intense and all-encompassing, tightening his devotees like a lyre-player tightens strings until the devotee makes the notes the God providentially desires them to make. I like the familiar-intense of that and would not want to disrupt a devotion that is essentially the center of my spiritual solar (soular?) system by unmindfully expanding cultus to another God known for high intensity. I suspect the “in” with him beyond just him being Frigg’s spouse would be focusing on academia.
There’s a tendency, I think — and this is possibly based on Christianization or wanting a “baddie” — for people to take something like “hmm, I don’t think my personality will vibe well with this deity” and turn that into a good vs. evil thing. This has been discussed at length with Loki online. I’m aware of that conversation because I’m a curious person. It’s a shame that something like human anxiety around chaos and change could turn into making a God into a villain. There’s sometimes a similar conversation that comes up about the Titans among people looking to worship Hellenic Gods — they’re anxious to revere a God with a Titanic classification because they’re worried about offending the Olympians. However, many Titans are honored extensively. Their dividing function is essential to the cosmos, even if it results in stories that are sometimes very violent, and even if Titanic/Gigantic is sometimes used as an oblique side-eye at the iconoclastic and Gods-hating tendencies in culture that have created so much loss and destruction over the past 1600 years.
So. There will always be Gods whom we vibe with and Gods who make us anxious about stability and Gods who challenge us and Gods whom we won’t connect with until we find the right path to doing so. I’m a Tupperware person, and I’m well aware that my home is an anxious nightmare for someone who is a little more comfortable in a chaotic environment — the kind of person who looks at photos of minimalist homes and thinks that they look stifling and not that they’re the pinnacle of dust liberation.
One of the topics discussed in Platonic commentators like Proclus is what I tend to call the “frustrated spin glass” situation. While the Gods coexist in their beautiful feast without strife, and the Forms interpenetrate and are together, the state change that happens when all of this condenses into the material world — which has both spatial and temporal extent — means that things must happen sequentially and in a localized fashion, even if something possesses temporal symmetry (like a particle collision being the same regardless of where and when it happens, provided that all of the constants used in physics are, in fact, constants). This has a function in theodicy (how we account for evil in a good universe), and it also has a function in what it means on the ground for an individual person, whether we’re talking about the personality of your specific incarnation (based on your wiring, upbringing, and so on) or the God you’re suspended from intrinsically (an innate property of you, the soul using the body as an instrument). We see conflict between the Gods, as Proclus points out in his sixth essay on the Republic of Plato (where he’s discussing Homer), in the Iliad and in the Odyssey that are actually conflicts among members of the angelic and daimonic orders, the divine beings derivative of each of the Gods and who are in proximity to what is happening in the material world, based on the providential function of each God and the fact that the spin-glass-like material situation can only ever be metastable, never producing true stability, and what is metastable is prone to chaos when an apple is thrown.
What this means is that there are no bad Gods. There are definitely Gods who challenge us because they’re so different from our main orbit, and there are Gods whom we won’t click with until we figure out how to dance with them. Even the Gods who give evil-committing souls intensive post-life therapy in Tartarus are acting for the good of the souls by purifying them, providing a hard interruption to what would otherwise be the inertia of habitude.
One of the things we can do to think through this is to journal about a God when we feel resistance to them and try to get to the root of what we are seeing in their iconography, their myths, and the practices of their devotees that awakens our defense mechanisms. That is (sort of) what I did here in the examples that I provided, and although I could write more, that’s really something that belongs in a private space like my journal or in discussions with friends. You may find over the course of your private contemplations that your concerns seem flat and overmuch, or you may find a specific angle in which devotional practice for that God makes sense, or you may finally have some certainty about why a specific God is not an ideal match for your practice. (Sometimes Gods we don’t worship come up as focal points for worship on occasion in groups, and that’s totally expected and okay!) Being honest with yourself is key here.
I will close with some wisdom from the Chaldean Oracles.
KALLISTI 