One God to Rule Them All

(the problems of a singular deity)

In the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien evil incarnate is Sauron, the great eye in the sky who wants to subdue everyone—elves and ents, hobbits and dwarves, and men, too—under his fascistic rule. Each of these beings has had, problematically, their own various rings of power but the greatest danger is the singular ring, one ring, one vision, one big all-seeing eye in the sky.

I am always in a panic when people say “it’s all one” because, without even knowing it, they are obliterating the fundamental reality of both nature and the cosmos—it’s all many, it’s all different, it’s all becoming. Nature doesn’t create one kind of beetle but hundreds of thousands. Nature doesn’t want the perfect tree—but many different kinds of trees, many different kinds of plants, many kinds of roots and branches. Nature effloresces with creativity and imagination and possibility. It’s not striving towards oneness—but ecstatic difference. The beauty of each galaxy is not how alike they are—but how individual and unique. Imagine a world with only one kind of flower. That’s where religion has stuck us for so long—only one god for all of our spiritual needs.

The fascist impulse of civilization is to homogenize as a means of control—there will be one kind of apple and it will be the best apple. Only it never is, is it? Monocrops give rise to monotheism lead to Monsanto, and the eradication of all that does not serve the human agenda. I always joke that you can tell a cult from the way they homogenize their followers—who must all wear this color, or that kerchief, or shave their heads, obliterating the ego they say, but really to annihilate personal expression, which is always dangerous to those in power. One god, my god, my way or the highway.

The real tragedy of The Lord of the Rings is that even though Frodo destroys the ring of power in Mt. Doom, Saurun is only seemingly defeated. He may be gone but his vision triumphs—men rise to power, the elves leave, the Ents grow quiet, the magic departs, middle earth becomes ruled by the singularity even so. Hitler is defeated (because that is the allegorical heart of Tolkien’s story whatever he said) but fascism itself wins. Modern capitalism wins. Everyone’s going to Mcdonalds, Coke is the real thing, cultural difference, individual creativity is enveloped in the great corporate marketing scheme.

Follow any culture back far enough and the deities proliferate. There are so many different gods and goddessess, holy beings for every occasion or necessity, every tree and spring, the land, the weather, all that is. In some religions these sacred beings are demoted to sainthood (Hecate becomes St. Catherine, Anu devolves into St. Anne.) But the homogenizing influence, be it Protestantism or Zen mindfulness, is to wittle away difference and focus on a singular expression instead of an embodied multiplicity. The more corporate power grows the more singular god becomes. Still we long for more…call them saints, call them angels, call them entities, we want more because one god is never enough to fill the god-shaped hole with us. One god leaves us feeling alone and fearful, easily manipulated by authorities which was always the agenda from the get go.

For our most ancient ancestors, however, every being they met was holy. There wasn’t a seperate abstract realm for a god, but the soul spark in each being they encountered. The old grandmother died and returned to feed her people as a salmon, a deer or a swan. These people knew that they would die and feed the wolf or the vulture people. Everyone was always coming and going, everyone was holy. To live in that world was to live in the long story of souls departing and returning to each other eternally—in which all beings had been our mothers, all beings our children. We are all each other’s gods and goddesses and we are legion.

What would it be like as a child to have those around you recognizing you for who you’d been, who you really were, who you were because of the prayers you’d carried for lifetimes? What would it be like to have your gifts, talents, and individuality honored and cultivated instead of forced into the narrow norms of society at any particular moment? How can we see each other as tree people, mountain or stone people, swan or sparrow people? How can we see the multitudes we have been and cherish the multitudes we might become?

The world of God is dominated by a human being who can name and define the animals. There are only two speaking animals in the whole Bible—the snake in the garden and Balaam’s ass. But in the folk stories handed down orally in cultures the characters are often other beings—fish and fowl, tree and stone, animals and plants of all kinds. The world is still speaking, still animate, still holy. In the oldest storytelling of all, in the paintings of our paleolithic grandmothers, their gods are all animals and there are almost no people at all.

If Sauron had really been defeated, new beings would emerge from the shadows and the hinterlands. The elves wouldn’t leave, the Ents would help the flowers remember how to speak, and the world would be alive and wild again. In his children’s book Prince Caspain, Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis imagined such a return. Even the rivers and the dirt are gods again. But human beings must choose—to live as equals among all other souls or return to another world, silent and alone. Do we want one all-seeing eye, a disembodied abstraction enacting judgement, or an efflorescing earth abundant with love from the smallest bees to the biggest mountains?

How do we learn to live amid the wild diversity of all that is? How do we become who we already are? To really defeat Sauron we must awaken the lost voices of what my daughter calls the animate everything. This has always been the only way to truly defeat fascism.

Starting on Wednesday March 5 my husband Clark Strand and I are offering a nine-month intensive journey to reorganize our belief-sphere and awaken the animate everything in each of our lives. Whole Earth Animism: A Field Guide to the Future is the summation for Clark and me of over 30 years of experience and study asking ourselves how to navigate a world on the brink of extinction and collapse. You can read more about the course, and learn more about Clark and me, here.

(Note: I’ll have my full workshop schedule for 2025 up in the next week or so. I’ll be teaching again this summer with Shift, in person at Omega, and offering my usual weekend adventures.)

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Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the forthcoming Mothers of Magic: Recovering the Love at the Heart of the World.

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