Man, The God-Animal

Reflections on God, in my current understanding thereof

“Apotheosis” by Julio Reyes

All my life, I’ve searched for God.

It’s an obsession that stayed with me for as long as I can remember, rattling in my mind in the attempt to find meaning. Over the course of a short 19 years, the obsession has grown and evolved, transforming my life into something odd yet beautiful.

I was my mother’s miracle child. Her and my father believed she could never have children. And yet, there I was. Impatient to get out into the world, I was born prematurely, arriving bloody maelstrom that left me sick with jaundice and her half-dead. (Apparently, I’ve been a mess since day one.) But once things got on track, and our health restored, my mother intended to raise me as a Protestant Christian.

The first books I ever had were biblical picture-books. These depicted simple, foundational stories, such as the Garden of Eden and the resurrection. At some point, I realized that in each of these works—amid the bright colors and watercolor drawings—there was one, universal theme that unified them: God.

That was when my search began. This God was important, it seemed, and I wanted to know who He was. Where was He? What was He? And how do I get to meet Him? Little did I know that I was participating in a quest extending back to the dawn of Mankind.

“Rain Angels” in Sego Canyon, Utah depicting humanoid figures with tendrils or wings, surrounded by a human and an animal-human(?) figure

Man is a brutal animal that was blessed with a higher consciousness. We have the ability to be wild and violent in one breath; meditative and contemplative the next. We can tear our enemies limb-from-limb with no remorse, but we can also care for those who have been brutalized. This dual-nature is of no stranger to us. In life, we often live between the two extremes, yet there are moments in which we are reminded of our higher nature.

Take, for example, when we look up at the stars. When we stare into the vast, mysterious, and ancient cradle from which we emerged, we’re often awestruck and feel a primordial tugging deep within ourselves that we can neither shake nor explain. Man has long known that there are things in this universe that we cannot understand. There is a current that flows through everything that even science cannot yet described. Such a current and other impossible-to-describe things have been dubbed the ‘supernatural’, the ‘divine’, the ‘godly’. And this divine current flows within each of us, the force which responds to that primordial tugging and brings us to our higher nature. This force—unchanging and eternal—is what we now call the soul. The soul operates at a higher level than the feral vessel that it is placed in, making Man a sort of god-animal. We walk this Earth straddling between divinity and savagery. What side we give into is up to us.

Some give in wholly to their animalistic side, making life miserable for the rest. Most, however, simply live content between the two worlds. Yet, for others, that divine itch is too much to bear. They yearn for the higher, wishing to somehow decouple themselves from their primal nature. Many of our prehistoric and ancient ancestors were of this mindset. Guided only by instinct, they ventured into the unknown realms of the soul, seeking the nameless Source that called to them. In time this Source was dubbed the “creator god.”

But our ancestors found that the Creator and its divine glory were impossible to describe! To relay heavenly knowledge to the masses, Man did what he does best: tell stories. The Creator was adorned with a name (i.e., Brahman, Ahura Mazda, Khaos, etc.), a sex, appearance, and intentions. These traits made the unseen more understandable and relatable. Man also gave the Creator children: lesser gods, demigods, and humans who managed to achieved godhood. Some of these figures were wholly fictional—devices to relay meaning¹—though others were real men and women who were sanctified and mythologized as reward for their enlightened lives and dedication to the Creator².

By the time I was born, the Creator was commonly known as Our Heavenly Father, Lord of the Host, the Alpha and the Omega, Elohim the God of Israel—or God, for short. Though concept of the Creator fascinated me as a young child, there was nowhere I could go to receive spiritual guidance and education.

At Sunday school and during church service, I was often left with more questions than answers. No matter what I asked, no one seemed to have an answer. Despite the adults seeming to know what, who, and where God was, they only ever succeeded in leaving me more confused.

To be fair, perhaps the adults didn’t know how to answer me. If a six-year-old were to come up to you and ask, “What does God look like?” or “Why did God make us?”, how would you answer?

Eventually, however, I grew frustrated and irritated. So, around age ten, I decided to stop asking questions and read the Bible for myself. Everyday, I sat down and read the Word of God, hoping to finally understand who He was. But the Bible, with its ancient structure and layered metaphors, was not written for children. I grew even more discouraged and gave up by Leviticus.

I prayed day and night, hoping God would reveal himself, but to no avail. In my disillusionment, I began to wonder if God even heard me at all. A feeling worse than irritation set in: alienation. Eventually, I no longer felt welcomed in church, as though I were intruding in something meant for the Chosen Ones.

By twelve, I stopped going to church. I refused to go, much to my mother’s chagrin, and instead stayed home feeling sick. At this stage, I was becoming a rather pitiful creature. I found myself sinking into a depressive state that would trap me for years, accented by occasional, less-than-pleasant hallucinations, but no God.

Then, one day in school, I discovered there were other religions. After recovering from such a startling shock, I wondered if I could find God in one of those places. For a while, I sampled a few religions—including Wiccanism—but with no success. I felt like a fraud no matter what I tried.

Often, when person reaches this point, they becomes either an atheist or agnostic (if they weren’t already) and the search ends there. I, on the other hand, became a misotheist—that is, bitter towards God. And because I was an impatient, bratty, pubescent child, the hate was unnecessarily strong. I began to see God as some wicked monster who only answered the prayers of self-absorbed, peabrained hypocrites, allowing and even encouraging evil in the world. Any good that came from the Creator was happenstance! And once I “realized” I was Actually Trans™, I was even more furious for being the “wrong sex”. It was all His fault, I thought. I hated God and God hated me.

Predictably, misotheism only made me more depressed and more lost. After raging at the cosmos, I would often collapse in tears. I didn’t know where to go or who to talk to, because I knew God existed, I just wanted Him to make Himself known to me. I just wanted to know I was loved and wasn’t alone on this strange planet; that there really was a Heavenly Father waiting for me to come Home someday.

By 14, my existential tantrum finally ended. Tired, spiritually battered, and still lost, I dusted myself off and went back to square one. I picked up the Bible again, bought a cross and wore it daily, and offered a sincere apology to God and Jesus alike. Yet, I was still miserable and restless. I felt like a liar and deceiver; an alien disguised as a Christian.

I had set my expectations too high and thought my life would be fixed overnight. This is because people often speak of religion as though it were a cure-all. Though faith equips us with the strength and mental clarity to cope with and solve many of our problems, it doesn’t solve all problems right away. It would be years before I learned this, and at the time, wondered if I had damaged my relationship with God so badly that He would never want me back. Ready to collapse, I had no one to comfort me. Then St. Raphael paid me a visit.

“Saint Raphael the Archangel” by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Various religions and spiritual practices (i.e., Abrahamic faiths, Zorastrianism, esoterism) believe in angels. These are spirits that assist the Creator. Beautiful and benevolent, they are representations of natural forces (e.g., death) and the human psyche (e.g., knowledge, war), though others are more abstract in nature with roles such as “scribe of God.” Angels can be violent, with the power to decimate entire populations for the divine plan. But most of the time, they’re caring and gentle creatures, so long as you aren’t a demon.

In another time and place, they would’ve been given the status of “lesser deities.”

Throughout religious texts, there are multiple angels addressed by name, rank, and function. Raphael is known as the archangel of healing.

I’d not cared much for angels prior to this dream, finding them to be too sugary sweet entertainment-wise, and too off-limits spiritually. That being said, however, I had some knowledge of the angels from my prior search for answers.

In the dream, I was in a neighborhood filled with children. We were all playing in the street when they suddenly began to scream with joy. The children took off running towards a glowing figure, who I immediately recognized as the archangel Gabriel, messenger of Elohim. Gabriel greeted the children fondly. I wanted to speak to him badly, but I couldn’t get through the crowd.

I turned away, discouraged, when I felt a presence behind me. I turned and saw him—St. Raphael. Framed by heavenly light, this striking being spoke to me. He spoke with patience and earnest, asking me about my suffering. I told him. To my surprise, the angel neither mocked me or judged me. Instead, he smiled tenderly, and let me know that one day my pain would subside. I would heal, he said, in time. Patience and faith were the lessons of the day, lessons I would soon forget and have to relearn a thousand times over. In my pain, I needn’t despire, Raphael assured me, because the angels were on my side.

Then, I woke up. For once, I didn’t dread being alive.

Spiritual dreams have always been a mystery to man. Was I actually visited by an angel or was it just my subconscious talking? In time, I have come to decide that these dreams are, in fact, divine in nature. Though where they come from is beyond me. Perhaps they come from the soul as a way to urge us towards the Most High. Perhaps they come from the collective unconscious of Man, divine in its own right. Or perhaps they come from the spirits who operate in our world but can only be described in mystical terms.

In any case, I didn’t stay Christian for very long after my dream. Why? I still felt like a fraud no matter how hard I tried. Somehow, believing I was the opposite sex was easier. But I’ve never been a stranger to irony.

But, again, rather than turn atheist, I became a Deist. I discovered this once widespread but now near-forgotten belief system during a lesson on the Enlightenment. Deism posited that there is a Supreme Creator of all things. However, it does not interact with humanity or the universe except, perhaps, on very rare occasions. This is because God’s universe is already perfect in every way, so the Creator needn’t tinker with anything unless it really, really wanted to.³

Something about the philosophy clicked with me. I jumped on board almost immediately. Though I held onto my dream of St. Raphael, I considered myself a Deist through-and-through. Deism provided me a bit of mental stability, allowing me to cope with a God that may not hear me, but ultimately did care about me, or at least the universe I lived in. If anything, it made me want to learn more about the cosmos, and how God’s masterpiece worked.

At age 15, I began deep-diving into various topics, from philosophy to astrophysics. After school, I’d spend hours pouring over academic books, papers, videos, and articles. In my eyes, attaining knowledge was the highest form of worship. Overnight, the world became my classroom. My teachers: Carl Sagan, Lao Tzu, Epictetus, and everyone in between. Through their wisdom, I gained newfound health. I began meditating, stopped identifying as trans, and started college.

Hooray! End of story…Or so I thought.

AI Generated. Based a vision, in which I was a lamb who, after wandering through the woods, found Jesus in a meadow and laid at his side as the sun rose.

Late last year, at 18, Heaven came knocking at my door. Four years after meeting St. Raphael, I was granted with a series of visions and dreams of divine figures: Dionysus perched in a twisted tree; Shiva lamenting the corruption of Man; Jesus rising from the sea, robes soaked in the blood of demons.⁴ I began to hear the Earth itself ringing softly during the day, and at night caught glimpses of Christ smiling. Around this time, I accidentally triggering what’s known as a Kundalini experience⁵ and felt my soul rouse. I wanted to dive headfirst into the divine, growing weary of the earthly world but finding meaning in the Higher.

Suddenly, Deism didn’t seem to clearly define my views anymore. When I sat back and looked at my ideas, I realized they were a mixture of many things—Buddhist, Taoist, Hermetic, even Jungian—all unified by Deism.

Now more mature than I once was, I didn’t let this bother me much. Instead, I slowly worked through each viewpoint until I got to where I am today as of writing. In doing this, I was able to answer my initial question: What is God?

From my understanding, God is our Creator, the Source from which all things flow. Perfect and infinite, it⁶ has crafted this world over countless eons, with delicate precision and beauty. If God is an entity, then it does not interact with us on the day-to-day, but will occasionally intervene, sometimes without us knowing. Yet, God’s essence lives. It flows through the natural world and lives within our immortal souls—the precious “inner god” which we all have that connects us back to the Source.

Nature is our Creator’s masterpiece, with wonders to be discovered on both a cosmic and microscopic level. And we as children of the Most High are here to discover these wonders. In these mortal forms, we were gifted with consciousness. We are creatures of duality and creativity. We are the god-animals of our solar system. Through practice, we can return our divine nature, if we so choose. By avoiding sin, educating ourselves, having faith in our souls, and serving the great species and planet of which we are a part of, then we can each find our inner Heaven on Earth.

By reading this, you may say that I truly am a Deist. You may say I’m a mystic, an Christian in-denial, insane, or something else entirely. However, labels aside, all I know is that I love God. I love life and humanity and this universe, for all its duality and confusion. It is an infinite masterpiece 14 billion years in the making.

I have grown to deeply respect religion for the function it serves in the lives of many—providing community⁷, structure, morals, and inspiration. Religion—sans corruption—reminds the average man of his inherent divinity. Though not everyone seeks enlightenment or theosis, religion lets us know that we have the free will to rise above our animalistic nature or let it drag us down.

However, I also understand that religion can be used to control and harm. From religious leaders to those closest to us, when dogma, ego, and vanity overtake us, religion becomes a weapon of destruction.⁸

Further, I have found that I cannot fully believe in religious texts. Religious texts, we must remember, were written by man. Though divinely inspired, these texts were each products of their era(s), culture(s), and the personalities responsible for authoring them. They are laden with human biases, both positive and negative, in addition to metaphorical meanings that are now taken as literal because the original context has since been lost, largely due to the passage of time, the evolution of language, and translations of varying quality. Though I respect and value religious texts, as of writing I cannot say I wholeheartedly, 100% believe in any.

I have also come to understand the rationale behind both polytheistic and monotheistic religions. Monotheistic religions—such as Christianity in which “thou shalt have no other gods before [Him]”—worship the Creator directly. God is simply given a name and attributes. Polytheistic similarly worship the Supreme Being, but also recognize a litany of other deities that—as I mentioned before in regards to angels—represent aspects of nature (e.g., Helios is a god of the sun), the human psyche (e.g., Set is a god of envy), and other unseen forces that reside in our universe, both benign and evil.

Yet, at their core—beneath the rituals and chants and prayers and debates—most if not all religions and spiritual practices have the same aspirations. Each wants to understand the invisible workings of the cosmos; how to unlock inner potential; and how to find peace in all things. That itself is something pure and divine, and something I think our Creator would certainly approve of.

I do not claim to have all the answers. I know I’m a child in many people’s eyes, sometimes even my own. Further, I am only human. Yet this is the clearest understanding I have of the eternal divine. I pray my understanding becomes clearer in time. How my views will evolve is beyond me, but I have faith that my soul will bring me closer to our Creator, perfect and everlasting.

From the JWST

1. Take, for example, my own allegory Death and the Worm. If I can do this, then it’s likely many of our ancestors did, too.

2. Religious stories also include histories that have since been forgotten in their entirety, due to lack of written records. Through oral traditions fragmented histories became myths.

3. Deism is technically an off-shoot of Abrahamic faiths, but because it does not use any official texts or practices is not considered a religion.

4. Interestingly, these three are each associated with life, death, and rebirth.

5. To give you an idea as to what this is like, imagine an invisible snake moving up your spine, heading up towards your skull. Pair this with hot flashes, nausea, and euphoria. Both uncomfortable and electrifying, it’s a sign of spiritual progress. Either that, or psychosis!

6. I refrain from using ‘He’ in this context to help differentiate my understanding of God from the Abrahamic understanding.

7. I myself have begun to attend an Orthodox Christian church for the heavy overlap of beliefs, the community, and general atmosphere.

8. And some religions are explicitly more harmful than others for various reasons, though such specifics are beyond the scope of this essay.