WHY DO THE GODS KEEP GETTING TORN APART?

I have been torn apart more than once in this life.

There have been times when the person I thought I was simply could not survive what was happening.

And for years, I thought healing meant gathering all the pieces and putting myself back together.

Becoming who I was before.

Now I wonder if that was ever the invitation.

Because when I look into the old myths, I find something extraordinary:

The Gods are torn apart too

Perhaps the Divine was never broken at all.Perhaps breaking apart is how the One becomes the Many.

There is a strange story humanity keeps telling.

Across cultures separated by oceans, languages and thousands of years, we find stories of Gods and Goddesses who die, descend, are torn apart, scattered across the Earth — and somehow become more, not less.

I have always been fascinated by these echoes.

Not because I believe all religions are secretly telling exactly the same story. They aren't.

And we should be careful about forcing one tradition into another simply because the symbols look familiar.

But sometimes the similarities are too beautiful not to contemplate.

Isis and Osiris

In ancient Egypt, Osiris is murdered by Seth and his body is dismembered and scattered.

His beloved Isis searches for him.

Piece by piece she gathers him.

Through her power she restores him sufficiently for their sacred union, from which Horus is conceived.

It is an extraordinary image.

The masculine has been broken.

The feminine searches.

The feminine remembers.

The feminine restores.

And from death comes conception.

Not ordinary conception, either. Horus enters the mythology through an encounter between life and death, love and magic, Isis and the resurrected potency of Osiris.

People sometimes compare this with the Virgin Conception of Jesus. They are certainly not the same doctrine — and the Christian “Immaculate Conception” technically refers to Mary's own conception, not Jesus's.

But the archetypal echo remains fascinating:

Divine intervention.Extraordinary conception.A sacred Mother.A child through whom divine order enters the world.

And then there is that hauntingly familiar image of Isis holding the infant Horus.

Thousands of years later, the Christian world would be filled with images of Mary holding the infant Jesus.

Different religions.

Different theology.

And yet the human heart seems to recognise something in the image:

The Mother holding the Divine Child.

But Isis and Osiris remind me even more strongly of another story.

Śiva and Satī

Satī dies after the terrible events surrounding her father Dakṣa's sacrifice.

Śiva is devastated.

He takes her lifeless body and wanders with it.

The great Yogi who can sit unmoving in meditation cannot release the woman he loves.

Creation itself is disturbed by his grief.

Eventually Viṣṇu intervenes, and Satī's body is divided. Her body parts fall across the land.

And wherever they fall becomes sacred.

The Śakti Pīṭhas.

Sit with that for a moment.

The Goddess is torn apart…

and suddenly She is everywhere.

Her apparent destruction becomes her multiplication.

One body becomes many sacred places.

Loss becomes presence.

Fragmentation becomes geography.

The Earth itself remembers Her body.

And here the Osiris and Satī myths create an exquisite mirror.

Isis gathers the scattered body of her beloved.

Śiva carries the body of his beloved as it becomes scattered.

In one story, the feminine searches for the pieces of the masculine and brings them toward wholeness.

In the other, the masculine desperately holds onto the feminine until her singular form must finally be released into multiplicity.

Many returning toward One.

One becoming Many.

As a Tantrika, I cannot pass over that lightly.

Because this movement sits very close to the heart of Tantra.

And then I noticed something else…

They are not alone.

The ancient world is filled with broken Gods.

In Orphic Greek traditions, Dionysus is dismembered by the Titans. Yet destruction does not have the final word; Dionysian mythology becomes inseparable from transformation and renewed life.

In Mesopotamia, Inanna descends through the seven gates of the Underworld.

At every gate something is removed.

Her crown.

Her ornaments.

Her symbols of authority.

Layer after layer of identity is stripped from her until the great Goddess stands naked.

Eventually even her life is taken.

And still the story doesn't end there.

She returns.

How could a Yogini not recognise something in this?

Every genuine path eventually asks us to remove something.

The identity.

The title.

The story.

The wound we turned into an identity.

The person we thought we couldn't live without.

The certainty.

The control.

Until eventually we meet the terrifying question:

Who am I when everything I thought was me has been removed?

Inanna knew that gate.

So does Kali.

So does every human being who has ever been completely dismantled by life and somehow discovered that something remained.

Sometimes the body becomes the world

This motif becomes even stranger.

In Norse mythology, the primordial being Ymir is killed and his body becomes creation.

His flesh becomes Earth.

His blood becomes the waters.

His bones become mountains.

His skull becomes the heavens.

In Chinese mythology, something remarkably similar happens with Pangu.

After Pangu dies, his body becomes aspects of the natural world — mountains, rivers, wind and the great structures of creation.

The sacred body disappears…

because now you are standing inside it.

And India contains an extraordinarily ancient expression of this mystery.

In the Puruṣa Sūkta of the Ṛg Veda, the primordial Cosmic Being is sacrificially divided, and from that division the ordered cosmos emerges.

Again:

The One becomes the Many.

Suddenly Satī's scattered body looks part of an even greater human contemplation.

Perhaps our ancestors were asking:

How does Unity become multiplicity?

How does the indivisible become stars, rivers, bodies, trees, lovers, animals, mountains and human beings?

How does One become ten thousand things while somehow remaining One?

Tantra has been asking essentially this question for centuries.

Perhaps fragmentation isn't the opposite of wholeness

This is where these ancient myths become very personal for me.

Because we become fragmented too.

Life tears us apart.

Love does.

Grief does.

Trauma does.

Ageing does.

Desire does.

Motherhood.

Death.

Betrayal.

Illness.

Awakening.

Sometimes even the spiritual path itself dismantles the person we carefully spent decades constructing.

And our instinct is always:

Put me back together.

Make me who I was before this happened.

But what if that isn't always what transformation is asking?

Isis gathers the pieces.

But Satī becomes the Earth.

There are times when healing means gathering ourselves back together.

And there are other times when healing means accepting that the old configuration of ourselves is finished.

We are not going back.

Something has broken open.

And our task is not reconstruction.

It is expansion.

I know this in my own life.

There have been experiences I once thought had broken me.

Looking backwards, I can see that some of them actually broke open structures that had become too small to contain who I was becoming.

That distinction matters.

Tantra does not demand an unbroken life

This is one of the reasons I love Tantra.

It does not require me to pretend that existence is neat.

Śakti is not only the beautiful Goddess sitting perfectly upon her lotus.

She is birth.

Sex.

Blood.

Desire.

Ecstasy.

Grief.

Decay.

Death.

Creation.

Destruction.

And the mysterious force that continues moving through all of them.

Kālī especially refuses our obsession with keeping everything intact.

She cuts.

She removes.

She devours.

But what does she actually devour?

Ultimately, that which we falsely believed ourselves to be.

And beneath it?

Something astonishing remains.

Consciousness.

Maybe this is why humanity keeps telling the story

Osiris.

Satī.

Dionysus.

Inanna.

Ymir.

Pangu.

Puruṣa.

Different cultures.

Different centuries.

Different Gods.

Different meanings.

We should honour those differences.

But beneath them I hear an ancient question whispered again and again:

What if death is not simply disappearance?

What if destruction can become creation?

What if the sacred cannot actually be destroyed?

What if it simply changes form?

And perhaps the most Tantric question of all:

What if the One deliberately becomes the Many so that Consciousness can experience itself?

Then the world looks very different.

The mountain is not separate from the sacred.

The river isn't.

The body isn't.

Sexuality isn't.

Grief isn't.

Death isn't.

You aren't.

Śakti was never merely sitting somewhere in heaven.

She became this.

This body.

This breath.

This heartbreak.

This desire.

This Earth.

This moment.

This extraordinary, terrifying, exquisite multiplicity we call life.

And perhaps that is why the Gods keep getting torn apart.

Not because the Divine can be destroyed.

But because sometimes…

the only way Infinity can appear to become everythingis for the One to surrender the appearance of being only One.

हरिः ॐ

Bhairavi | The Yogini Academy