Divine Epiphany

When the divine and human worlds intersect. Following up on "Questioning Our Religious Experiences," do we have experiences with the Gods?

This post is a follow-up to Questioning Our Religious Experiences. In that post, I started discussing religious experiences in polytheistic discourse. It is timely that I post this on a major holiday in a religion where religious experience was a cornerstone of its growth. By this, I mean Paul’s alleged vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus, which converted him to the religion that he previously persecuted. Paul was the primary figure who helped Christianity grow.

Photo by Egor Myznik on Unsplash

It is partly because of him that I am highly defensive and skeptical when it comes to the topic of religious experiences in polytheistic discourse. I am especially dismissive when it comes to alleged experiences where knowledge is supposedly shared with someone who uses said experiences to justify something for others to accept or believe. For example, in Questioning Our Religious Experiences, I take issue with the idea that the Gods’ names remain the same, though their myths and domains of influence differ from tradition because “they tell us their names,” as was claimed by the Pagan I was conversing with stated.  

Yes, we can have experiences with the Gods, but what kinds of experiences should we expect to have? What is reasonable?  I want to avoid the word experience because it is too broad. I want to use epiphany instead. Epiphany (Greek, ἐπιφάνεια) is a word that means manifestation or appearance. When dealing with religious experiences with the Gods, I will use the term divine epiphany, which I picked up from Georgia Petridou's book "Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture," which I highly recommend.

In sum, Georgia defines divine epiphany as the manifestation of a God to an individual or a group of people, either in sleep or waking reality, and can occur in crisis and cult contexts. The God may appear in various forms such as anthropomorphic (human-like), enacted (through actions), effigies (as images or idols) among other forms. The perception of a God’s epiphany may be sensorial (seen, heard, felt, or smelled) or intellectual (a deep awareness of the deity’s presence without direct sensory perception).

Epiphanies occur in moments of critical need or indecision, serving as divine intervention in times of crisis or as part of healing rituals. This highlights the close interaction between the divine and human worlds in Greek culture and religion. This interaction underlines the belief in divine agency and the Gods' direct involvement in human affairs, whether for guidance, support, or punishment, reflecting a world where the divine and human spheres frequently intersect.

I accept that the divine and human spheres can intersect. How frequently should they intersect? What is an actual epiphany? When we explore epiphanies in Greek culture and how the Greeks approached the entire topic, we will be able to draw distinctions between epiphany and the broad “experiences” Pagans claim to have.

I will use the following Reddit post from the “Hellenism” subreddit to demonstrate the differences.  Someone posted a photo of an oil stain on the driveway and asked “what or who could this be a sign of?” “I was at work yesterday when I saw this perfect circle in the driveway. My intuition told me it has to be something. Help??”

Someone replied, saying, “Rainbows = Iris. Oil = Athens. Oil + Water = conflict. You could look at it as the wisdom and beauty of letting conflict rest. Or something like that.”

Returning to my original post, Questioning Our Religious Experiences, I wrote, "…for an experience to be considered religious, the experiencer must interpret it as being caused by something supernatural. This precondition implies that religious experiences are not independent phenomena that can be used to ground religious beliefs; instead, they are deeply entangled with the pre-existing beliefs of the individuals who have them.”

Is the oil stain a sign? Is it sent by a God? I don’t think so. It is just a random oil stain. While Pagans may group this into the category of ‘religious experience’ through symbolic interpretation, “Rainbows = Iris. Oil = Athens. Oil + Water = conflict,” it is not an epiphany in the Greek sense.

A standard/common form of epiphany in the Greek religion is through cult statues. The cult image of the God was treated as the God themselves and demanded recognition and devotion as if encountering the God directly. Cult statues, thus, served not only as representations but as actual incarnations of the God's presence, allowing for a safe form of interaction between the divine and worshippers. However, not all statues were considered living embodiments of the God. There is a distinction between statues animated by the divine presence and those inanimate representations influenced by the beholders' expectations and perceptions. Experiences one would have in a cultic setting, engaging with the cult image, could then be treated more seriously than mundane experiences.

Regarding religious experiences, we should always keep a tempered and sensible attitude about these things. We should never be governed by fear when it comes to the Gods, nor should we act in irrational ways rooted in our misunderstanding of the nature of the divine. Healthy religious behavior aims toward a rational understanding and respect for the divine. Proper religious observance is simple - honor the Gods through virtuous living, ethical behavior, and engaging in rituals that reflect an appropriate understanding of how the divine sphere intersects with the human sphere.

Polytheists/Pagans should be wary of people using their experiences as a reason to accept ideas and practices that are novel without a rationale behind them independent of their experiences.