Divinity

The definition admits its own imprecision and says why the imprecision is in the source rather than in the account. Divinity has traditionally been used loosely, sometimes for the universal or quantum will and sometimes for the conscious, and rather than pick one Marsh keeps the ambiguity and names both referents, because what people have meant by the word across cultures genuinely covers both. Two identifications follow. Jung's collective unconscious may be the same thing, and so may the source of Kant's synthetic a priori knowledge, the knowledge that is neither derived from experience nor merely definitional and which Kant could not account for without positing structures already in place. Both are attempts to name something known without having been learned individually, which is what universal conscious would supply. Within the series the word is used in the colloquial way rather than a technical one, which is a deliberate choice. The associated terms are precise where they need to be. Contact with divinity produces the divinity-self, the circle of expansion built from euphoric interactions with the universal conscious or will, and it need not be experienced as spiritual to count. Divination is the attempt to reach the same thing through method. Abstracting divinity, the title concept of the book, is the process by which conscious and will were disguised and moved into institutions of governance, religion and science.

Theology distinguishes the divine as personal deity from more abstract formulations, and the philosophical tradition contains many attempts at the impersonal version, from the Neoplatonic One and Spinoza's substance to Hegel's Geist and Whitehead's process account. Jung's collective unconscious and Kant's transcendental structures, both of which Marsh names, come from different projects and are not usually read together. Comparative religion after Rudolf Otto describes the numinous as a category of experience rather than an object. Marsh's use is closest to the impersonal philosophical strand while remaining deliberately unresolved, and her reason is methodological. Fixing the term prematurely would obscure the fact that the same word has long been reaching for two different things, both of which her framework needs.