Mage: The Ascension, 20th Anniversary Edition - Page 488

Within the Mage world, the various Traditions have been arguing these points for centuries. The Technocracy discarded an official creed beyond Enlightened Science, and the Disparates have left that question off the table, definitely for now and probably for good. The Umbral Hierarchy represents an uneasy compromise with lots of room to move. It’s certainly not definitive, and it neither demeans nor demands a single point of faith. At the top of that Hierarchy, however, the terms Essential Divinity, Godhead, and The Adversary deserve some explanation:

* Essential Divinity is the name given to That Which Cannot Be Named – the I AM THAT I AM at the core of sacred mysteries. An indefinable essence that pervades Creation, it transcends names and identities. As ineffable things go, this one scores the top of the list.

* Godhead is what you get when you assign Divinity a face, personality, and name. Sometimes that Divinity incarnates itself in an avatar: an identity that humans can relate to (Krishna, Mary, Old Man, and so forth). Other times, it remains a transcendent yet still relatable force… a Holy Spirit, if you will, understood by certain people in certain terms.