👻2 -Deities, Ancestors, and Spirit Allies Course | Module 2 — Four Ways of Seeing: How Witches Understand the Divine
- Apr 30
- 8 min read
MODULE 2 — UPGRADED VERSION
Module 2 — Four Ways of Seeing: How Witches Understand the Divine Section: Orientation
Ask ten witches what a god actually is and you will get ten answers, sometimes from the same witch on different days of the week. This is not a flaw in the craft. It is one of its oldest features. The tradition has always made room for wildly different understandings of what gods and spirits are — what they are made of, where they live, whether they exist outside the practitioner at all — and the craft has continued to function across all of them. Two witches can stand at the same altar, light the same candle, speak the same name, and mean entirely different things by the gesture. Both can have real practices. Both can be doing the work.
What a witch believes about the nature of a deity or a spirit is not an idle question. It shapes how she approaches the altar, what she expects to happen there, and how she interprets the dream that arrives the next night, or the candle that gutters at the moment of asking, or the long stretch where nothing seems to answer at all. The framework is not the craft — the practice is the craft, the doing of it — but the framework colors every part of the experience. A witch who believes Hecate is a literal goddess walking the crossroads of the otherworld will read a sudden encounter with three dogs as a sign in a way the archetypal practitioner will not. The dogs are the same dogs. The meaning is filtered.
Four broad frameworks shape most of the modern landscape, and naming them clearly lets the learner recognize her own stance, understand the witch standing next to her at the bonfire, and begin relational work without needing to have solved the metaphysics first. The metaphysics, in fact, will not be solved — not by this course, not by any course, not by any practitioner. They have not been solved in three thousand years of theological writing and they will not be solved on a Tuesday afternoon. The good news is that they do not need to be. The frameworks are starting points. The practice is the teacher.
The first is the animist view. Everything has spirit. The rock by the door is not inert. The river running under the bridge is not merely water. The old oak at the edge of the field is not only timber and bark. The world is not a stage of dead objects with a few important presences laid carefully on top of it — presence is everywhere, in everything, all the way down. The cup the witch drinks her tea from has a faint quiet quality of its own. The mountain visible from her window has a vast slow one. Most indigenous worldviews across the world have animist foundations, and a great many modern witches arrive at this view not through study but through years of paying attention. They started somewhere else, and slowly the world got more populated. Animism is often less a belief one adopts than a recognition that lands after the practice has been going long enough.
The second framework is polytheism — sometimes called hard polytheism to distinguish it from the gentler variation that follows. The gods are real. They are distinct from each other. They are independent beings with their own personalities, preferences, histories, domains, and demands. Hecate is not Brigid. Brigid is not Freyja. Odin is not Zeus, and treating any of them as interchangeable is treating none of them as themselves. The polytheist witch approaches a deity the way one approaches a person — a particular person, with a particular character, who can be encountered in their own right. When she prays to the Morrigan, she means the Morrigan. Not the dark feminine principle. Not a useful symbol of sovereignty. The Morrigan, who is herself, who has her own ravens and her own demands, who exists whether or not the witch happens to be thinking about her at the moment.
A softer variation lives close to this, and many witches settle there as a middle ground. The soft polytheist also prays to Brigid and means Brigid — but holds open the possibility that Brigid and other fire-and-craft goddesses across cultures may be local expressions of something deeper, currents in a wider field rather than wholly separate beings. The soft polytheist does not collapse all goddesses into a single Goddess, the way some older feminist theologies once did. The distinctions still matter. Brigid is still herself, and offerings to her are not interchangeable with offerings to a fire goddess from another tradition. But the soft polytheist allows for the possibility that the universe has fewer fundamental divine principles than it has names for them, without insisting on the answer.
The third framework moves the action inward. The archetypal view holds that deities are powerful psychological and cultural images — figures that have accumulated enormous meaning through centuries of worship, storytelling, art, and devotion. They live in the collective imagination, charged with all the human attention that has ever been paid to them. Working with them activates real forces inside the practitioner: the fierce sovereignty the Morrigan represents, the disciplined wisdom Athena carries, the deep transformational descent Persephone walks. Whether these deities exist as independent beings outside the psyche is a separate question, and the archetypal practitioner is often agnostic on it or actively doubtful. The work still works. The descent into Persephone's underworld still cracks open whatever needed cracking. The forces are real even if the gods, in some literal sense, are not. This stance is common among witches with psychological training, secular backgrounds, or a temperamental allergy to anything that smells like dogma. It is not a lesser practice. Many of the most disciplined ritualists of the last hundred years have worked from this frame.
The fourth framework declines the question entirely. No gods. No spirits in any literal sense. Magic as technique, energy, will, attention — the practitioner shaping reality through her own focused intention, the natural world responding to ritual the way it responds to any other intentional act, but no presences answering on the other end of the line. The non-theistic witch may still read myth, honor the seasons, cast spells, work the elements, walk the wheel of the year. What she does not do is treat the practice as relational in the sense this course teaches. There is no one across the altar from her. The altar is hers, the will is hers, the work is hers, and the cosmos is large but not personal.
This is named here, in this course on relational practice, not as a way of dismissing the frameworks that came before it but to keep the door honest. Non-theistic witchcraft is a complete and valid way to practice. The witch who finds herself there at the end of long thought has not failed at the craft. She has simply located herself somewhere that does not include the relational dimension. The course will not be useful to her in the way it is useful to her relational sisters, and that is fine. Knowing where one stands is more valuable than performing a stance one does not actually hold.
Most witches do not hold any of these frameworks cleanly. This is the next thing worth saying. A practitioner may be archetypal toward Greek deities she finds beautiful but distant, polytheist toward the Celtic goddess who arrived in a dream and refused to leave, animist in her relationship with the specific juniper outside her bedroom window, and agnostic about most of the rest. She may shift over years — start archetypal, drift polytheist after the dream of Brigid that changed everything, settle into a quiet animism in her sixties when the world simply got fuller. Inconsistency across categories is not a problem. Integrity is more important than doctrinal consistency. The witch who genuinely meets each presence as it actually arrives — without forcing every encounter into the same theological shape — is doing the work more honestly than the witch who has decided in advance what every encounter must mean.
Choosing a starting stance, then, is not choosing forever. It is choosing for now. Whichever framework feels most true on an ordinary Wednesday morning, drinking coffee, looking out the window, before the question got dressed up in any robes — that is enough. The witch who begins as a soft polytheist may end up something else entirely after ten years of practice. The witch who begins as an archetypal practitioner may find herself, somewhere in year three, no longer entirely sure the goddess at her altar is only inside her head. Both can keep working through the change. The framework will evolve through practice rather than being decided into permanence beforehand.
What matters at the start is not certainty about what the gods are. What matters is that the witch lights the candle, speaks the name, and begins.
Internal Family Systems & Parts Work Integration Practice
IFS Parts Journaling
A witch does not need to solve what the gods are before she begins noticing where she stands.
For this practice, take five to ten minutes, or longer if desired. Find a notebook, journal, or blank page.
At the top of the page, write:
Right now, the way I most honestly understand gods, spirits, or unseen presence is…
Let a part finish the sentence.
Let the answer be honest, even if it feels uncertain.
When that first response feels complete, write one more line:
The part of me that holds this view may be trying to protect or preserve…
Let the answer stay simple.
Pause and read what came through.
Notice what your system is showing you about belief, doubt, openness, caution, and the framework that feels most honest for now.
When you are ready, put the pen down. Take a final moment to acknowledge and thank the parts of you that helped you meet this question without needing to force certainty.
Internal Family Systems & Parts Work Integration Practice
IFS Parts Journaling
Relational practice does not require certainty before beginning.
For this practice, take five to ten minutes, or longer if desired. Find a notebook, journal, or blank page.
Write this sentence at the top of the page:
The way I understand gods, spirits, or unseen presences right now is…
Let a part finish the sentence.
The answer can be simple, mixed, skeptical, devotional, unsure, practical, or changing.
Then write:
The part of me that wants room to not know says…
Let that part answer briefly.
Pause and read what came through.
Notice whether your system feels drawn toward relationship, distance, study, practice, doubt, curiosity, or permission to begin without deciding everything.
When you are ready, put the pen down. Take a final moment to acknowledge and thank the parts of you that helped you name what feels honest for now.
Internal Family Systems & Parts Work Integration Practice
IFS Parts Journaling
Relational practice does not require certainty before beginning.
For this practice, take five to ten minutes, or longer if desired. Find a notebook, journal, or blank page.
At the top of the page, write:
The way I understand gods, spirits, or unseen presences right now is...
Let a part finish the sentence.
The answer can be simple, mixed, skeptical, devotional, symbolic, uncertain, or still forming.
When that first response feels complete, write:
The framework that feels closest to where I stand today is...
Let a part name what feels most honest right now.
It might be animist, polytheist, soft polytheist, archetypal, non-theistic, agnostic, mixed, or something you do not have language for yet.
Then write one final line:
What helps this stance feel honest is...
Let the answer come from whatever part of you wants to speak.
When the writing feels complete, pause and read what came through.
Notice what your system is showing you about belief, uncertainty, trust, skepticism, experience, and the way your understanding may change through practice.
You are not choosing a permanent theology today.
You are only noticing where you are standing at the beginning of this part of the path.
When you are ready, put the pen down. Take a final moment to acknowledge and thank the parts of you that helped you listen for the framework that feels honest enough for now.
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