How to End a Relationship with a God
This post was originally an 11 minute video - if you’d rather take it in thusly, scroll down to the bottom.I'm here to talk to you all today about when it is time to let a relationship with a God go.
We spend all this energy reaching out, cultivating, nourishing, and maintaining these relationships. And for some of us, they're hard won and it's easy to be really resistant to them ending.
But they do, and there's no fault in that.
How can you tell when it might be time? Here are some ways:
1. You Just Don't Feel Like It.
The pull is gone, right?
The passion you once felt, the excitement, the joy at the thought of connecting with them. The same reason you'd end any relationship, really. Yeah. And you can feel that, when it happens.
Another way to think about that is...
2. The throne feels empty.
If you think about the altar as the place where the god sits, you can kind of tell when that's like a dead zone, now, and it's become just another part of your kitchen table or whatever. The sense of imminence of the god form is gone.
And that's not to say that you can't connect with the deity anymore, because like, they're still out there, they exist, but they're not like ...in the room with you.
3. You Decided.
toughest one, probably. The other two on this list are you interpretting external signals and going forward from there. This one is the opposite. You just decide that you don't wanna keep going. God doesn't have to want you to stop for you to stop. You can end a relationship with a godform at any time just because you feel like it.
The Red Herring
I actually find that most godform separations - ending those relationships - it tends to be pretty mutual. It's just like "oh, yeah, this is over now." These are these are things that we pick up through ephemeral signs. That's the way of omen-mind and deity work. But this way also lies confusion.
We need to use our discernment because there are a lot of reasons why we might feel like something is no longer for us. And not all of them are actually our own, or the gods', desires.
The most comon one I see is shame about not maintaining the relationship correctly. that is one of the things that might make us feel that way. Guilt, that kind of thing. I'm very familiar with the ADHD shame spiral where it's like, "Aw, fuck, I ignored this project for long enough that now I feel so bad about not having done it that I'm literally just never gonna do it. I'm never gonna look at that thing again." There's a thousand reasons why you could no longer want to do something that had nothing to do with "god wants me to stop doing that"
This is why know thyself is inscribed at the Temple of Delphi. Self knowledge in this regard, like the ability to detect when it's you doing something, versus a godform or an omen – it's totally critical. It's a critical piece for your ability to detect when God is doing something in your life.
If you can't discern between those two things...like, it's the first thing you need to learn how to do, basically.
A Note on Brain Worms:
(obstacles to surrender)
Let's talk about potential obstacles to letting the relationship go, because feeling bad about ending the deity relationship can contribute to slogging along in something that's no longer for you.
So- it doesn't feel good anymore. It's not getting you anywhere. That makes this so hard and one of the reasons why like, one of the things we have to do to make it so we can actually let these things go at the right moment unpack right, is a sign that we have done something to offend them or hurt them or just like a judgment on us because then we're always going to internally resist the probability that, like, that's what's happening if we have that piece of programming. Right? And you're not gonna see it even when it's there.
Or you will see it but you'll be like I don't want that to be the case because it means something harmful to you. So unpacking that, and conversely, unpack the belief that leaving the god's service in that moment is going to communicate the same to them, that you're like abandoning them. Sometimes like partners break up not because anybody's actually like abandoning anyone or is upset with the other one but because it just no longer makes, like, sense to be together, on a more, like, poetic level. It's just, like, you know, people come into your life to do certain things together, and then when the work is done, you separate. It's not like a love relationship where, like, the goal is to stay together.
There's a season for it. It's like a transit, right? Like Mars enters Aquarius, then Mars leaves Aquarius, and it's not like a Oh my god, like I'm so aggrieved that this transit has come to an end. It's like it was always going to be like that.
There were 30 degrees of the transit.
Now it's over.
It's fine.
So unpacking the beliefs about it being just like shitty or harmful. And even if you think that the relationship might be your forever-devoted deity relationship, it's fine to just gradually discover that that's not the case.
One of the things that I think we can do to make this all a little bit easier on all of us because we when we are working with that conditioning and it is emotionally hard on us to let things go, is to set time frames around our devotion especially when you're coming to a new god.
Like, "I will devote myself to your service for 5 months this for this span only."
And then at the end of that, you can decide whether or not to renew. Suss out the god form, through divination or your own inner sense, to discern whether or not they think you should renew and keep going. And this removes some of the emotional barrier to Gods-work in the first place, which is our fear of commitment - I hear this all the time where it's just like, "oh i don't really wanna do thatttt [internal squirming]" People are working with this guilt! Of being like, "What if I don't like it? God forbid I put it down after I pick it up."
It's like, God doesn't forbid. You can.
For example, I was inspired to talk about this today because I just commissioned my Deneb Algedi altar. And the way that I related to him was through the Akkadian mythological god of the waters, Ea.
He's associated with fertility through his association with semen and amniotic fluids, so, like, literally, like, the waters of the body. So I associate this guy with whales - that's what came through when I was working with him.
The star's symbol even looks like a whale. The culmination of my experience working with him was actually singing the song that I wrote, while I created his altar while I was on a boat and a hunch back whale showed up, like, just, like, appeared. We were looking for dolphins and, you know, it was the end of the day.
We were, like, about to have to go in. We hadn't seen any dolphins. We were all bummed, and I just, like, started singing this song, to the waters. Our tour guide was like oh my fucking god it's a whale! It was like a baby hunchback, which was weird.
Like, I don't know why there was a lone baby hunchback. Yeah, so I got to see a whale for the first time ever. That was fucking dope. And this is after I'd established this connection, like an association. I created the altar on on the Mars Saturn square in November (2021), and it was when they conjoined, months later, that I finally took it down.
And I'm just gonna like leave you with this thought which is that when we do this, when we decommission an altar, when we depart company from a god, they're not like, gone. It might be time for you to unbind the god from the container in which you understand them. Like, I think my relationship with Deneb Algedi has become this broader relationship with elemental water. My devotional relationship with Hera ended and returned as Juno.
You never know how these folks are gonna come back to you.
We are indelibly marked by our experiences worshiping god forms. It's never, like, a waste of time. It always, like, changes you semi permanently. In fact, when I decommissioned my altar today, I as I wiped away the symbol that was drawn on my window I noticed a marked in ash a little perfect like fish shape that's like indelibly stuck on my windowsill now. It's not gonna go away.
So even though I decommissioned the altar, it's like... that is still there. It still left its mark, in a way that's not so transient.
That's all I have for you today. Goodbye.
