With the Christmas season in full swing and Yule coming up quickly, I wanted to take this joyful time of year to talk about something very special to me!

A God of Death! 

So hear me out on this one before anyone grabs their pitchforks because I’m about to share an unpopular opinion. Not just an unpopular opinion but a bit of my own personal history with Deity as a whole as well and one that I feel has basis not just in the Christian tradition but in modern Wicca as well.

I am proposing to you here and now that the Christian God the Father, Christ, is in all actuality a deity of death, souls, and the afterlife.

Alright, it’s out there. Now for the mind numbing part. A bit of my personal history with the church. It’s not something that I usually talk about, granted, however, in order to explain my thoughts, I must first explain how I came to believe those thoughts in my own personal faith practice. 

I came from a Free Will Baptist upbringing that I eventually decided wasn’t for me when I was in my mid to late teens. The realization occurred to me that, just because it was what my family believed, didn’t mean it was what I had to believe. There were several conflicts and points of theological contention between the church and I. I didn’t agree with their lack of pacifism, the ideas on gay marriage, or a handful of other things that I just wasn’t able to justify to myself anymore. It didn’t mean that I thought others weren’t fine doing their thing and believing what they wanted, I just wanted to be able to do the same.

I did know one thing for sure though. I knew that I wanted God in my life. Just because my faith in the church had been lost didn’t mean that my faith in Him had been. So for the next few years, I spent the time trying to find a faith that did work for me. I thought long and hard about what it was that I did believe and set out trying to find a denomination that paralleled those beliefs. Eventually I found a temporary home in the Anabaptist faith. It was pacifistic, had a very olden way that called to me, and fit many of my other values. I joined the church and was very happy there for a time. I grew and developed as a person, as people in their twenties do. I learned new things and outgrew old ones. My college experience came and went and so too did jobs, some good and some so horrible that it would take two years of therapies to work out entirely. 

In that time, I met the love of my life and we decided to have a baby.

As happy and joyful as both of them would come to make me, a change in the winds was set to unfurl. 

When I got pregnant, we had been trying for a baby for three months, and in that time, I had been open and honest about this. Those that I had come to associate with on a faith-based level were…well, less than supportive. When my pregnancy was actually confirmed, it was like I became some sort of pariah to them. No one knew how to be around me anymore, how to take me. It was uncomfortable and no amount of me trying to wiggle my way back into their good graces helped. 

Eventually, I let the associations and friendships go with a heavy heart. 

Inevitably, I found my way back to the God/dess in the form of paganism and the Earth-based religions. I say ‘back to’ because I had once explored the idea and dabbled a bit in my younger years and even been drawn to it from my childhood before that. Every so often in my life, I had found myself pulled to the Mysteries. This time, I was determined to follow the call.

But where did that leave God the Father? Where did that leave Christ on the altar of my heart?

He was still there with me, even though I no longer knew what to make of Him. All my life I had been told that He hated and loathed a witch and that I would burn in hell for eternity for forsaking Him. By my own beliefs though, I hadn’t. He was carried there with me every step of the way. With a hindbrain anxiety over the whole issue, that same contention that had me leaving the Church years prior, I resolved to move forward regardless and still continue worship of him in my own way.

While my relationship with other forms of Deity developed, my relationship with Christ-God of my Christian faith stagnated. I didn’t really know what to do with Him or how to connect. Then one day, it struck me. Perhaps it had been a knowledge that had been growing for quite some time but one that reached maturity in that moment.

“Christianity is basically a blood-based religion, isn’t it?” Said a friend in a sort of derision, but the idea stuck with me in a way and developed into something else entirely.

The Blood of Christ indeed. And it did crop up quite a lot in the Bible, hadn’t it? Blood as a sacrifice and death as the ultimate cost. The more I thought of it, the more an idea began to take shape in my mind’s eye.

Was Christ, God-Head of the Holy Trinity, a Death God? 

The whole eating of His flesh and drinking of His blood aside, there did seem to be a merit for it. On His own, away from the Son and Spirit, His purpose was to see to the afterlife. To rule over the deaths of those who passed on and determine where they would go and what manner of afterlife they would have. Jesus preached to the living and the Spirit moved the hearts of mankind, but their endings were His to command. 

In modern Wicca, in association with the Goddess as her consort, is the trinity of the God. The Child, the Lover (protector, warrior, an eventually father of life), and the King or Sage. Just as the Triple Goddess is associated with phases of the moon and the Wheel of the Year, the God is in turn associated with the sun’s phases of the day (morning, noon, and sunset) and the seasons alongside his beloved.

It was like a lightbulb went off, one of those moments of profound inspiration. The idea gave me something to work on, something entirely apart from the terrible growing pains I had gone through at the hands of the Church. 

With that in the forefront of my mind, I went into my practice and worship of Christ with a whole new foundation to build upon and it made a world of difference. Instead of crucifixes of Jesus, I made my own statuette out of clay and surrounded it with small skulls, little (ethically sourced) bones and a rosary that I’ve had since high school. I no longer feel the same embarrassment or shame that I once lived with everyday. I have a relationship with Christ that has evolved and grown but is all the richer for it. Somehow, being able to see Him in a different light was what I had needed all along. 

I still have Bibles that I hold close to my heart though they aren’t read like I use to. I still love the old Mennonite hymns and even consider myself still a Mennonite at heart even though I’ve run my own coven since then.

I was so different than I had ben as a child and my faith was simply growing to reflect that and grow alongside me. To this day He has a place of high honor on my altar-space rather than an epilogue. Then again, one day, He’ll see to my own epilogue.

What are your thoughts and opinions on the Christian God as a god of death?

With Peace and Passion.

Ta! ❤

Here are some further reads on the topic from both sides of the fence, Pagan and Christian!

*The Pagan Roots of the Trinity- https://www.biblicalunitarian.com/articles/pagan-roots-of-the-trinity-doctrine-ed-torrence-2002

* Honoring the Triple God- https://thewiccalife.blogspot.com/2011/05/honoring-triple-god.html?m=1