I don't believe everything I think. It's a rule I follow for myself. I was well-trained by a powerful and wise man, however human and messy he was, he was certainly filled with gnosis and power, and this is one of things he taught me.
I understand the Faery Tradition, the House of traditional witchcraft in which I'm initiated, as containing a kind of internal spirit-science, in line with the admonishment from Victor Anderson to "perceive first, then decide what to believe." That power of discernment, the power of the Witches' Knife, of the keen razor-edge of fire-forged integrity, is foundational to how we have an epistemology in the Craft, a theory of how we gain true gnosis. It is Luciferian, for certain.
Anyway, I do believe these things, having interrogated my experiences over and over:
1. The gods—spirits (I use them interchangeably a lot these days, on purpose)—are real. They are intersubjectively real, meaning they can be sensed and interacted with and don't just exist or manifest through our subjective imaginations. They manifest in phenomena, as all things numinous do, being that matter and spirit aren't distinct or separate.
2. The gods, while dissolved of their edges in ways that we as particulate forms of consciousness have trouble seeing about ourselves in the fog of our human confusion, have their own agency. At least as much as we do. "God is self and self is god and god is a person like myself," another saying from Victor.
Spirits aren't just amorphous forms to be "tapped into" by us. And they don't need our minds to have agency. That's so ego-centered. We can certainly ally with them, but the witch-gods as I know them are Powers and Forces of the Wild, and have their own agency and agendas.
I have a hunch that gods, being that they are dissolved of their edges and existing on the "inside" of reality—the Depths and Heights, the Underworld and the Upperworld—are more cognizant of their wholeness, and have even *more* agency than we do. Their anchoring in the perpetuity and timelessness of the vertical-axis of reality shows this, whereas we are anchored in the horizontal, and move from birth to death just as the Sun travels from rise to set, and where we apprehend ourselves as particulate consciousnesses.
But a witch, a technician of the sacred Art of Arts, can gain access to that vertical-axis through the spiritual Flight of the Soul, "to die before you die." This requires uniting the Auric soul and the Fetch into an intently laden purpose, to extend from the flesh-body, and get caught up in the Mill of Stars, the "Lathe of Heaven." This is where witchcraft happens to the witch as much as being something we perform. We become agents among Fate’s Fair and Foul Fellowship.
In doing this as a religion, what some of us call the "Faerie Faith", we can become masterful; we can become gods, the mighty dead, when we die. And you always have to die, dissolving the edges.
As the body goes into the grave (whether burnt or buried), the Fetch goes into the Depths where Fateful Forces dwell and toil. If we follow our passions and unite all the "opposites" within us into the mantic third-road of being, we win true gnosis, and perhaps if the Faery Queen deeds it, the so-called Gift of Immortality. This is apotheosis that is born from the henosis we craft by uniting our souls and calling down the Daimon. In Truth, Love, and Wisdom we do this. This is another playing out of the same Story of our sorcerous origins, just as the stars fell from the heavens into the Land.
I am a child of earth and starry heaven, and I am whole and complete unto myself.