This is something of a journal entry. I saw in a flash that it is in the nature of mortality to say goodbye in every moment to the one in that moment. My children, my wife, we age with every passing moment. And it grieved me to say goodbye to each time of them passing by. I appreciated them so much for that, for these little times we have.

I had wanted some definite guide for my kids, some irreproachable code they could hold on to through life, even after I am gone. But I see now that all I can give them is my most authentic self. The whole of me. And whatever they make of that, it is all there’s.

I forgot myself somewhere along the way. The conclusions I fought so hard to discover. The relationships I had kindled; that I was so blessed to know. I forgot.

Reading back over Plato’s Apology, I can’t help but admire the kind of man he was. He lived in radical poverty, so lost was he in enacting the philosophical and moral life that Apollo had spoken into existence. Reputation, wealth, leisure, travel–none of this concerned him. Socrates would rather die than commit injustice, and while he perhaps rhetorically says even he was almost persuaded by the sophists, none were wiser than he because he would never have presumed to know what he did not.

That level of self-awareness; of self-critique.

Know thyself.

I am on a journey of restoration; of reconciling to the Gods.

Part of this is taking stock of what I’ve learned along the way, and it occurs to me that some of the pitfalls I succumbed to may be of use to others who are or will be endangered by them as well. So let this be whatever it needs to be.

What are polytheists to do with Christianity? This question began as an itch in the back of my mind, until it echoed in every corridor.

The world was pagan beforehand, and then something happens after which the old world rapidly eclipses. Coincidence? Inauguration?

Why didn’t the old Gods protect their people? How could this have happened.

How come we employ one set of principles and hermeneutics for every other deity, such as of acceptance and allegory, but an entirely different one when it comes to Christianity? Suddenly we become skeptical, cautious, guarded, and even reluctant.

The careful reader will notice a subtle shift in the previous paragraph between God and cult. I did not see this in my stumbled journey. I thought ‘Christianity’ was something that needed to be integrated or accounted for, rather than Christ.

But concealing this distinction is a pitfall, and a Trojan horse indeed. Once you start doing ontology as if it were henology, you bury what was genuine divine truth. This can give a false impression of having command of the facts and control of one’s fate, which is the poison of pride for the soul.

In truth, it reverses the natural order in which the Gods are to be participated in rather than ourselves. In one sense, this is a practical atheism. In another, it is demonic, in that it erects as a God what is an image of ourselves and our values, redirecting praise and validation in the subtlest ways to flatter or insulate ourselves.

But it isn’t horses drawing their Gods as horses in this case. Not so directly. It’s a cosmic narrative being written according to the will of man, so that Christ will go in one age from a radical social upheaver and friend of those on the fringes to a Republican who brings prosperity and a life of 1st world problems at worst.

In recent discussions with a friend, I was given the idea of Jesus as the God of humanity as such, introduced by Antonio Vargas. I do not wish to try and contribute to their work here as they are, frankly, light years ahead of me. But I do wish to journal a personal appearance that has helped make sense of things for me.

The reason Christianity has inclined toward ontologization, hegemony and monotheitization, it seems to me, is because Jesus is the God of humanity as such. The disclosure of himself is thus just as embodied and messy as humanity is for us. Ours is an intermediary unity, as Iamblichus wrestled with, a force of attraction and tension generated and crackling between two poles of opposite ends. More often than not, we yield to the bombardment of sensation and disperse as fleeting subjects. Many headed monsters. We lose sight of our place in the scheme of things, within Intellect and Soul, and in that state of amnesia think we must rebuild from the mistaken starting point of embodiment.

Jesus’ cultus is susceptible of the same mistakes that our embodiment fosters, and when Jesus is made to be in a vacuum, you get the monotheitizing of religion that we experience as like a lost race awakening alone in space, trying to start from scratch.

This tendency has only solidified in our day and age, where through historical contingencies, Christianity arrives to each new generation as a complete packaged ideology. A set canon of infallible scriptures, speaking with one voice, disclosing a well developed figure and such.

But this unity is an illusion, though so welcome to the starved soul.

We give ourselves over to embodiment, and pollute our line of sight with a carefully arranged selection of lights of Being. The ineffable is present, indestructably, but obscured and unrecognizable. Instead, we historicize, ontologize, and what cannot be accomplished by natural flow is forcefully reduced.

It’s a price willingly paid for a sense of assurance. Identifying faux knowledge is not celebrated as a triumph of intellect, but as a disconcerting loss of control. We sacrifice philosophy proper for fideism, blinding ourselves to stabilize an impression.

Dear polytheists, present or future. Disabuse yourselves of an urge to integrate Christianity. It is metachrosic, and will in each age cannabalize and even monotheitize earlier versions of itself.

The proper thing to integrate for the polytheist is Christ, not Christianity.