This weekend, The Wild Hunt is presenting a collaboration between Luke Babb and Bat Collazo on the topic of the “godspouse” – a person whose Pagan practice includes romantic and/or erotic love between the practitioner and a deity. Luke and Bat have written about their relationships with deities for TWH previously – Luke and their love for Hermes, Bat and zir love for Loki – and their relationship with one another. Today, they begin with a conversation about their personal experiences with the concept, before turning to providing context for the idea of romantic or erotic divine love in other religious traditions.
In Conversation, I: “Fess Up”
As the sun sets over the ocean, a person turns away from the camera and frames the sun with their hands, shaped like a heart. [Author: “Caribbean young watch,” Wikimedia Commons, CC 4.0]
LUKE BABB: When I first started to look into Pagan romantic relationships with the divine, I had a hard time finding anything substantial in my usual sources. After some fruitless research, I turned to Facebook. ”Alright pagans, fess up,” I posted to a limited selection of my friends list. “Whomst among you has a romantic connection to a god? Asking for reasons.” As the comments started coming in, so did the confessions.
“Romantic or sexual?” one friend asked.
“You’re really expecting us to kiss and tell with a deity?” another responded, with a gif of a person abashedly raising their hand.
A third person responded with poetry, a fourth with quibbles about the difference between kinds of love, and more than a dozen responded with a simple “yep” and various levels of disclosure. “In my generation, this sort of talk was not advised in public posts,” one of my elders replied, along with a laughing, teary-eyed emoji.
That fit with what I had gathered before making the post, and what had started my curiosity off in the first place. Feeling something romantic or sexual towards a god seemed like a rare sort of connection, but when asked in a place where they felt safe, it appeared to be surprisingly common among my friends. I wondered if this was simply an oddity of my sample, the sort of people I hung out with, or if the connection was more common than I had been led to believe.
When I became a Pagan, one of the first people I met was oathed to a god, and wore his ring. They told me about their marriage quietly, in confidence, set apart from the larger gathering where we had raised the horn shortly before. When their turn came to offer a toast to their beloved, they were unspecific, with none of the passion and joy they’d used to speak about him in private. I wanted to know more about that relationship, and I wanted to know more about why they’d hidden such a crucial part of their practice.
“Fess up,” I told my friends, and I wondered why this topic felt like a confession.
BAT COLLAZO: I was never overtly told not to talk about my own spiritual romantic experiences, but at the beginning it did feel like a confession – which, by definition, carries shame or embarrassment. It’s funny, I remember the moment you asked me if I was married to Loki, and how cagey I felt before I gave my affirmative answer. It wasn’t that I was subtle – unlike your example above, I was pretty damn passionate during toasts. The love was clear, but I was vague about the type of love – and my actual marriage – in public for a while.
Near the beginning of my Pagan journey, I experienced the urge to present a palatable and level-headed portrait of my spirituality. I felt safest, at first, to express only an impassive and logical choice to practice religious rituals in a particular way because it was psychologically beneficial for me: a rational decision. This kind of self-policing of respectability was useless. It was also a lie. I’d originally tried to logic my way out of worshipping the Norse gods at all, based on my understanding that some followers were actively white supremacist. I wanted nothing to do with that. But that wasn’t the gods, and the truth wasn’t that I “loved” the gods like I “loved” a preferred brand of ice cream. I loved the gods with a racing heart, with shaking hands, with slack knees, with wet eyes, with an open mouth. With all of my senses and none of my sense.
Others’ perceptions of this jutted up against all kinds of fears and oppressions: my own neuroatypicality and labels like “insane,” or my own femininity and society’s misogynistic contempt for so-called “feminine” emotionality. As a Latinx person with Indigenous ancestors, I also struggled with my people’s long legacies of being seen as “primitive” or “uncivilized” under racism. So, I suppose, I made the mistake so many people make: I tried to stay quiet about my human wholeness, tried to stay bland and congenial. That was especially true when my feelings for deities strayed into erotic or romantic territory, which felt particularly “irrational.” This concealment became intolerable quickly. I’ve never been very good at hiding.
Today, clearly, I’m open about it and happier for it. What’s your experience been, with disclosure and with the love of the gods?
LB: I’ve written about this before. Loving a god, like many of my biggest realizations, was less feeling something new than finding a word for something that had been there a long time. I had been interested in the concept of “godspouses” for no reason I could put a name to for as long as I had known the word, but I had never considered the possibility that I might love the gods in a way that wasn’t purely platonic. When that possibility became a sudden surety, I did what I usually do – I panicked. I worry about discernment at the best of times, and about offering unwanted attention. This was an experience laser-targeted to send me into an anxious spiral.
That was when I started researching, and when I started to look for community. The problem with community is that it requires you to speak to people. It’s hard to talk about something when I’m that worried about it- and it’s still difficult for me, writing this, to treat my experiences as though they’re serious. I’m not a godspouse in the way I first learned about them. I’m not oathed to any practice or specific kind of devotion. Often I feel as though my practice is less devout and my feelings less valuable than those of people like you, who continually interact with a deity on an intimate level. I understand being hesitant about disclosure. I’m hesitant even now.
I know that I don’t have to be. The research I’ve done, and the experiences you’ve shared with me, have expanded my understanding of what a “godspouse” can be, and helped me to come to terms with my own practice in a much larger context. Still, I pause every time it comes up in conversation, second-guessing myself until I trip into saying something casual, as though my love for Hermes isn’t one of the biggest factors in my life.
BC: I hear you on some of these fears, and I think it’s important to put them out there where others with similar experiences can gain some reassurance. Love for gods or spirits absolutely does not have to look any particular way, and you’re not any less beloved to the gods for not currently having a formal oath or specific, structured practice. I also really like that you acknowledged the doubt! I know your doubt centers around worrying if Hermes or even gods you have a platonic connection with are annoyed by you or offended somehow by the ways you do or do not show up with them. I’d guess there are a lot of people worried about this, too, and I think it’s so important to normalize questioning and crises of faith.
For me, my doubt tends to show up as all or nothing – if any of the gods are real whatsoever, then I’m absolutely sure Loki loves me, and so many facets of my life, big and small, confirm this. Sometimes, though, I’m not entirely sure if any gods exist! It doesn’t mean I have any less love, and it doesn’t mean I’m not devoted to my Heathen path: it just means I’m human, with poor object permanence to boot.
I do hope that both of us, and all those in similar shoes, can continue to gain more and more confidence expressing our spiritual truths with reverence and sincerity, and be our expansive selves.
Statue of figures in the “yab-yum” position from the Buddhist tradition [KiraHundeDog, Pixabay]
Contexts, I: “The Way of the Heart”
There are a few words commonly used in Pagan circles for this sort of connection, when shorthand is used at all. Avnas Mars, for instance, coined the term “spectrosexuality.” The most well-known word, however, and by far the most contentious, is “godspouse.” This originally referred to a human in a marriage with a deity, but has expanded to become an umbrella term used for any sort of noncorporeal romantic or sexual relationship. It presupposes a theology that allows for the existence of distinct, noncorporeal people that can be interacted with on a personal basis and who have an interest in humans – a viewpoint typified by, but not limited to, hard polytheism.
Within this godspouse umbrella, there is an ever-expanding list of other terms which might apply to a practitioner who follows this path. Rather than going into each, it might be more helpful to explain what godspouse does not necessarily mean.
Someone under this umbrella may have relationships with gods and/or other sorts of spirits. These may be monogamous on the human’s part, but may also include other human or spiritual partners. People who identify as godspouses may be asexual and/or aromantic. To complicate matters further, godspouse dynamics do not necessarily have to involve normative ideas of sex and/or romance. Some of these experiences are transcendent and difficult to explain in typical human language, but may involve feelings of mingling energies with divine forces in ways that can be felt as broadly, classically erotic, if not literally sexual. (Literal sexuality is also a possibility.) Spiritual relationship structures are also not necessarily tied to marriage. Some identify as consorts, partners, or other sorts of connections. Some may choose not to label themselves at all.
This isn’t a new practice, though some of the words for it may be new. In 1918, Ida Craddock, who considered herself the “earthly wife of an angel,” claimed that “there are roads running into this one from every religion and folklore under the sun, since the pathway of marital relations on the Borderland was once, and still is… one of the main thoroughfares connecting our world with the world beyond the grave.” More than a hundred years later, her argument is, if anything, stronger from the weight of new information.
Erotic love of the divine, both metaphorical and mystical, has been documented in practices that span both space and time across many religions. Not all of these spiritual paths may identify with or agree with all the language used in this article, but there are clear through-lines and precedents that can be traced, though these examples will by necessity oversimplify complex belief systems. For example, in Judaism, the Song of Songs describes the divine and the Jewish people as lovers: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine,” for instance, and “my insides stirred because of him. I arose to open for my beloved…” That language has been interpreted in different ways over time, but the explicit sexuality of the text itself is hard to argue with.
In Christianity, figures like St. Teresa of Avila (born 1515) and Margery Kempe (born 1373) built on that language by expressing their own ecstatic experiences grounding divine love in the erotic. As discussed by Rabia Gregory’s book Marrying Jesus: Brides and the Bridegroom in Medieval Women’s Religious Literature, Kempe, while married to a human man, described a vision wherein Jesus encourages her to “boldly, when you are in your bed, take me to yourself as your wedded husband, your beloved darling…” More recently, Blessed Bernardo Francisco de Hoyos de Seña (born 1711) even described a mystical gay marriage to Christ.
In modern times, the 2014 Lifetime series The Sisterhood: Becoming Nuns featured modern young women beginning discernment towards becoming Catholic nuns or brides of Christ, discussing dreams of romance and flirtation with Jesus. One even lies face down on the floor during prayer, overcome with ecstasy. (It should be noted that so-called “reality television” is still at least somewhat fictionalized, so we should maintain some skepticism about the portrayal here.) While the stereotype of Christianity may be of a puritanical discomfort with sexuality, there is a long history of romance and, explicitly, of sex with the Christian god.
Within the mystical path of Islam, according to Maria-Rodica Iacobescu in “The Ecstatic Poems of Sufism,” Sufism is also known as “the Way of the Heart,” and implies falling in love with the divine: “Singing the ecstasy of divine love, Sufis use an erotic and bacchanal symbolism; they use the profane language of love which is then translated into the sacred language of love. The painful inability to express the infinite love felt in a language too human for a superhuman experience leads to the creation of intense writings, erotic phrases…” Here too is evidence of experiences that transcend the language of platonic connection.
These examples are only the beginning. In Hinduism, the path of bhakti involves passionate devotion to the divine, emphasizing a personal god. For instance, “the dancer may become Krishna’s beloved, so that the audience may taste the yearning she has for Krishna.” This can be related to the madhurya bhava, or an attitude of devotion as from a lover to beloved. In Haitian Vodou, spirits called lwa often marry humans in a ritual called maryaj, providing emotional support and spiritual protection to their human spouses, as well as tangible care, such as job opportunities. These precedents, and many others, make it clear that erotic connections to the divine are anything but a new phenomenon.
Tomorrow, Luke and Bat examine the history of the godspouse in both ancient and contemporary Paganism, and return to their earlier conversation about stereotypes surrounding the godspouse – and whether the instinct to debunk those stereotypes is a good one.
Bat Collazo is a queer Lokean and Heathen of color, author, handcrafter, ritual leader, instructor, and visual artist. Ze is the editor of the Troth’s Loki devotional book, Blood Unbound. Find zir at batcollazo.com or on Instagram @batcollazo.
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