Are the Gods Picky?
A little while ago, I saw one pagan I follow get upset at another pagan I follow because the latter had posited the possibility that gods only look out for their own worshippers. The first person insisted that of course all the gods love us and suggested it was morally wrong or oppressive to say otherwise. This admittedly hit me as confusing because:
1. I didn't think the first opinion disputed that the gods love everyone, necessarily. It basically just read that if you believe in a certain god and were in a relationship with that god, it would advocate for you.
2. That still doesn't account for the reality that there are ton of shitty current events happening now, including several ongoing genocides, and to our tiny human knowledge, no literal deux ex machina has dropped in to curtail any of it. This kind of forces to question the idea that all gods love all humans equally because if that is true, the natural follow up question to this reality is, why then is this all still happening?
I think it's fair to give human/deity relations a little bit more complexity. Lucifer has more than implied to me that the Trojan War, although fictional, makes a good allegory for the occurrences in the land of the devas or wherever deities are situated. Supposedly from what I understood, there are more than 50 deities--which you can't condemn me for suspecting there is less because they all have so many damn faces--they are all related like a family, and yes they "have drama" as I once put it to Lucifer in a way he found very amusing. Really, I meant politics, but apparently it's all the same. The gods, which the Mesopotamians thought decided the course of worldly events and maybe that's still true, often wildly disagree on what to do with us. That's apparently when our human factions end up clashing.
I don't know how much political magic others have done with their spirits, but I have certainly done a little bit. Deities often seem bizarrely unbothered when you point out terrible things are happening (this is quite in line with Buddhism's cosmology that they are so separated from suffering they don't naturally note its continuing existence). Lucifer and the demons, although still calm, have appeared to me to be much more outwardly concerned about the cruelty humanity shows other living beings. Maybe that's how I ended up going to them for political and anti-fascist magic in the first place, come to think of it. I had understood demons as inherently more lateral to humans and found more empathy as a result.
I didn't actually see a ton of political change within my work, admittedly, and Lucifer has put in effort to deter me from influencing elections. He told me to reach out to Belial for help on fixing the world, but when Belial actually arrived he informed me, "I can't do outside work in this way, I can only work on you."
This suggests that as humans we have to become the work. If we want a better society, we need to be that better society. We need to angle ourselves as individuals that help and support other people as well as build new structures to make that sustainable. Without allowing ourselves to become vessels, whether you want to see that as literal or not, for the gods' work, the gods cannot reach our realm.
But also, not every god is able to or wants to work through you specifically. Maybe it's because I was in a rough space back when it happened, but a number of years ago when I was starting my pagan practice, Persephone outright rejected me. I then moved onto working with the planetary pantheon, which was years of experience that taught me that the spirits seem to prefer certain people. This preference was often evident in the natal charts: Jupiter, who is often called the best of the planets, for the most part ignored my friend and I whose natal Jupiters are in detriment. More to my positive self-esteem, I once witnessed Mercury show preference toward me over someone else during a group rite. I am very Mercurial and that other person was not, which may or may not correlate how much of Mercury's energy we have within us or our capacities to carry Mercury's work forward into the world.
So maybe the gods do love us all, but that doesn't mean they love us in the same way. Not everyone is the same, and that's okay! Not everyone can do the same amount or type of work with all the gods and that should be seen as a positive thing. Diversity in our gods, our relationships with them, and our practices is beautiful!
