But most religions offer safety in numbers, a sense of belonging, a dream of salvation, if not in this life, then in the next, and the patriarchal reassurance that our future is in the good hands of wise deities and their representatives on Earth.
Apparently, while the Apple Isle Druids are singing together to the Dagda, that wise and good deity, your typical cosmopolitan is blindly communing with an Android device.
The concept of providence is rooted in the belief in the existence of a benevolent, wise, and powerful deity or a number of beings that are benevolent and that are either fully divine or, at least, appreciably wiser and more powerful than human beings (e.g., ancestors in many religions).
Traditional Cheyenne religion focused upon two principal deities, the Wise One Above and a god who lived beneath the ground.
Both spirits were created by Ahura Mazdā (Ormizd or Ormazd), the Wise Lord and supreme deity of Zoroastrianism.
So if the name for a new planet met these rules, what are our options, deity-wise?
But, as with the titanic, motionless deity-figure in "Immortal, Invisible, Wise" who "has held so long this, his repose, /that no one sees him any more", this other reality is mostly lost to plain sight in the fretful human world.
Although now an unimportant sea god, Varuna, as portrayed in the Rigveda, possesses many features of the Zoroastrian supreme deity Ahura Mazdā ("Wise Lord").
Ultimately, by making ourselves independent of male culture, we can better understand our heritage, and, as Stone writes, cultivate "a contemporary consciousness of the once-widespread veneration of the female deity as the Wise Creatress of the Universe and all life and civilization".
