I don’t think there can be any principles at root, we ascribe principles to things, but prior to those things there is something else one would imagine.
The Divine Realm is “physical” too, just not obvious obviously. It’s way more than mere principles. You have memories of a life lived, but no emotional attachments to those memories.
According to pantheism God is in everything resp. everything is in God, because God is nature resp. nature is God, or there is no God but only nature and humans just call nature "God“ resp. there is no nature but only God (the existence of the world is repealed - so to say).
The “gods” are the principles. The “God” is the one underlying (or over-arching) Principle from which all others are formed. As Moses put it [paraphrased], “The only true God: It is what it is. Worship nothing else”.
And only false principles “die”.
You have a different definition of “physical” and “divine” than I.
They can vanish from human thought. A perfect circle doesn’t stop being a perfect circle just because none are around and no one thinks of it. Principles and forms don’t change what they are or change in any way at all, thus there is no “dying” to be had. Perfect squares, laws of motion, and such “divine” concerns never, ever change in any way at all. They are “outside of time”.
This is exactly in line with my own thinking. As I’ve defined “God” myself once before: God is a metaphorical understanding of what itself, as this very understanding, is. I have to add “metaphorical” because “understanding”, technically speaking, is an artifact of human mentality, and I think Mind writ large (note the capital M) far surpasses human mentality. But I do think the underlying principle of the universe is something like a human understanding (of a fundamental principle)–enough so that the metaphor works.
Essentially, it is an apprehension of an existence that justifies itself at face value.
This captures the gist of it. I sometimes struggle with the logic of this myself, being the subjectivist/idealist that I am. I sometimes get confused (over my own philosophy of all things ) about how an understanding of a universal principle can, at once, be permanent and ephemeral at the same time. It is ephemeral as a thought (in virtue of the way we reflect on them), but permanent as the principle the thought projects as (where “projection” has a special meaning in my subjectivist philosophy). The key is timelessness. Thoughts as such are subject to time, but principles are not. I haven’t fleshed this aspect of my philosophy out in as much detail as it needs (thus the occasional confusion) but I know that the timelessness of principles is key.
That’s such a cute little avatar you have going, gib.
I know that it has become such a cliche but yes speaking subjectively, eternity is in the moment.
That moment may feel like heaven or hell.
Heaven doesn’t usually for some reason seem to last such a long time - we do have to learn to be epicureans if not stoics and be grateful… but hell, ah, like a walk on the surface of Venus or what I might imagine it to be. lol