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Searching for a way to relate to divinity forms the core of Numenism. Religion is ultimately about how we interact with and define the inexplicable, unknown, yet occasionally glimpsed Big Picture. The early decades of Numenism were spent defining what divinity was to us, how it related to a modern world (modern as in the 50’s and 60’s that is, although Dea Nutrix has withstood the test of time so far), and how it motivated us both spiritually and mundanely.

We’ve already explored the sources which contributed to the development of Dea Nutrix. Before we look at how we took that source information to create Dea Nutrix, let’s spend a bit of time discussing why we chose to create a new perception of divinity instead of continuing with the original Christian God and his son, Jesus.

Imagine WWII – technology leapt forward at an amazing, unprecedented pace – and so did weapons of mass destruction. The deployment of the Atom Bomb was beyond shocking and stunning and the devastation it wrought unimaginable to human minds even after it was there. Seeing did not translate well into believing. It took years for the results to sink into human minds. That mushroom cloud may be a joke now, but then, it was a symbol of the end of a world. And it was. It was the end of Christianity, of God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost, in the way they’d been known for centuries.

The teachings of peace, turning the other cheek, and being a Good Samaritan shriveled under the shadow of that mushroom cloud. There were those who couldn’t reconcile what humanity did with what their religion taught. Some ignored it, pretended it didn’t happen. Others considered it a human failing. And some couldn’t accept either the Christian God as they’d known him or humanity’s role in the Atom Bomb and its massive, long term destruction, not as they knew it. These people didn’t see humanity returning to the pre-Atom Bomb days. Instead, they saw a future of increasing technology and feared it would mean a lessening of humanity unless they revisioned humanity and divinity in such a way as to temper technology with spirituality. Humanity had to grow up.

For those of us who became Numenists, this meant the way we’d always seen the Christian God – as the Great Patriarch; the dispenser of rewards and punishments, always in control, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, inscrutable, and remote – wouldn’t work anymore. The attempts to revision the Christian God as a mentor and assistant – the role we now needed our God to fill – didn’t work. Centuries of viewing God as the Great Patriarch stymied our Founders’ best efforts. In the attempts to revision God, during the research of ancient philosophers and with exposure to Shinto, our Founders learned God was much more than they’d ever imagined, and there was room in this expanded view to explain the previously unexplainable and to accommodate the future they saw coming. It was such a different view, they weren’t comfortable referring to it as “God” anymore – that view was too limiting, too narrow.

The ancient philosophers they researched – Philolaus, both Zenos, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and the rest – each revealed portions of this wider vision our Founders were beginning to see and understand. Their knowledge of Shintoism blended in with the words and visions of these ancient philosophers, as did learning about other religions – the various Native American cosmologies and rituals, the pre-Christian Roman and Greek religions which echoed faintly the Japanese Shinto, the African Diaspora religions, the Middle Eastern philosophies – and the newer scientific knowledge coming out about quantum theories, string theories, unified world theories, and the discoveries of new dimensions of existence. Each new piece expanded their vision of divinity. They were reluctant to assign a personality or a name to this view of divinity, and definitely not a gender. It was beyond gender as we knew it or understood it, beyond personality. It was a force, and in our human need to name it, our founders chose to place a title on it rather than a name – The Great Good, or Dea Nutrix.

Our founders and the new members they attracted worked on this vision, trying to see how they related, and how it related back to them and the world. It wasn’t a single defining aha! moment that gave us a clear vision of what we came to know as Dea Nutrix. It was many smaller discussions where words and definitions came to be accepted and spread among us. It was very organic and natural the way the pieces we pondered fell into place. We weren’t polytheistic or monotheistic because our vision allowed both to exist simultaneously. We were polytheistic AND monotheistic at the same time.

Dea Nutrix was one and many, in layers, extending through space, time, and dimensions. We were all integral to the functioning of Dea Nutrix because we were part of Dea Nutrix. No – we ARE Dea Nutrix in the same way a thread is both part of a weaving AND the weaving itself, that the thread is the cotton plant (or sheep, or flax plant or whatever). It’s not a circle of life, it’s just life in all its permutations. We are the soil, the air, the water, the grass, the vacuum of space – and together, we are Dea Nutrix. We don’t die so much as we morph into a different aspect of Dea Nutrix. We don’t retain awareness of what we once were, although Dea Nutrix does. We can tap into that awareness, so it seems to us as if we – as individuated corporeal beings – existed in previous lives because we can remember those lives. We can also “remember” the lives others are currently living because we are also them and they are us – and we can “remember” lives we have yet to live – whether we lived it (will live it, are living it) as a bean or an ant or a drop of rain. Being in an individuated corporeal body, we have biologically imposed limiters on our memories and experiences. Being Dea Nutrix, we are unlimited.

We took the knowledge gleaned by our corporeal ancestors, and the scientific research of our corporeal contemporaries and the imaginings of all of them throughout the ages, and with this, we created a concept of divinity that allowed for the Atom Bomb and George Bush, that provided comfort when loved ones died, that put events and experiences into a wider perspective that we could – briefly – understand. Dea Nutrix is thought, and thought made manifest, a collective of patterns with purpose, unbounded by the limits perceived by us in our current forms.

Because of the influence of Shinto in Numenism, we have chosen to believe that Dea Nutrix is not merely benign but actively benevolent towards us, a partner with our best interests at heart, cooperative and friendly, hence “the Great Good” title. It is our desire and in our best interests to emulate Dea Nutrix.

Once we developed our concept of divinity, all other additions were measured against it. That meant we could no longer consider ourselves modern Christians. Christianity had evolved into something too narrow and rigid, too sharply defined and delineated to hold us, and in recent instances, too cruel. When we defined Dea Nutrix, back in the late 60’s early 70’s, we felt it was still possible to be Christian, just a different sect of it, but by the 80’s with the rise of televangelists, we knew we weren’t Christian anymore, even though our roots were there. The Christian God became an individuated noncorporeal being within Dea Nutrix, a numen among other numena.