Pagan Tropers Unite!

I might be considered one. Nice to meet all of you. Do you write pagan literature?

Welcome! I do not, but not for lack of trying. (Actually...yes, it may perhaps be due to lack of trying.)

Welcome!

As for the pagan literature, it depends on what kind you mean. Do you mean "have we published any academic/real-life works regarding paganism," or is it a general "have we published pagan-oriented works in general?" Would fantasy/sci-fi or general fiction be included?

Edited by Sharysa on May 6th 2020 at 4:40:57 AM

I'd be interested to hear of that first one.

As long as you don't feel it compromises any privacy you wanna have, of course.

Disclaimer that I'm a complete amateur layperson researcher, so while this might read like I'm responding to the above subject because it might be related, I'm really not because this is not a qualified work of scholarship.

However, I'm beginning to build an idea of all the characters in my "small happy village in archipelago Southeast Asia" setting...not all the villagers, because I don't want it to be that small, but enough development I hope that it reads as though it functions more like a community with a culture.

This has to do with paganism because I caught sight of somebody else's full-body portrait illustration interpretation of the Tagalog (Northern Philippine) goddess of the stars, wearing a belly-revealing outfit inspired by the Bodhisattva Tara found in Agusan del Sur (Southern Philippines).

I am completely all right with the sort of North/South mashup, I just feel that I need to get the original inspiration clearly contextualized so that I can more comfortably reason something like, "Oh, hey, this character's from a mercantile family who goes on long boat trips a lot, so when she saw all of the other girls wearing badlah at that other port, she just...liked it...came back home, likes to show off that she's been places that way, y'know how it is," and it doesn't literally have to have been all the way in Egypt (edit to add, or Tunisia◊ if Ferdinand Max Bredt can be trusted), it could've been a boat ride to India, or mainland Southeast Asia, or even just the next island over and a little bit to the south on the account of the spread of cultural influences (writing systems, architectural motifs, cuisine, religions, etcetera.) Especially if by then, the people further East than Egypt had long ago stopped calling that specific article of clothing part of a ''badlah''.

This link only describes the Tara statuette as "wearing a richly-adorned headdress and other ornaments on various parts of the body." The cording down the center front that loops above the belly remains to me very suggestive of badlah construction, especially with the long-established textile technology being able to produce really very consistently fine and even sheer fabrics (and not really that much stigma around the décolletage), so I can't unsee that upper armlet as really being the edge of a sleeve. However this other link (yes those are both Wikipedia, I did say I was a lay researcher) describes Tara only as wearing a tiger-skin skirt, without much mention of anything going on up top anthropomorphically.

Edit again to add: I found the article of clothing that I was looking for. It's apparel-y called a choli or ravike.

Edited by Faemon on Jul 31st 2020 at 3:54:35 AM

Oh no, I thought I replied to Merry Mikael a LOT earlier! I don't have any scholarly paganism stuff, unfortunately, so my paganism is limited to bookmarks and discussions.

The thread's been quiet for a while, so happy spooky season! Any plans for Halloween?

It's been some year. Not the "2020 Vision" anybody had when those joke memes were going around, I'd wager...and, while I've heard it's going to be a full moon on Halloween night and that's marvelously appropriate, I personally am probably just going to get extra candy and not even watch horror movies.

Since I've been down the fashion historian rabbit hole of the YouTube, here's a fashion historian vlog that covers the history of the witch hat...turns out that it started off as a fashionable hat in the 1600s but then the best way European normies in the 1700s could think to portray religious minorities to make it obvious that religious minorities bad was to woodcut caricatures of them dressed sooo last century. Real mature!

Don't forget that a lot of the Christian holidays were moved by the church, Rome or other to take over the Pagan holidays.

This is the first year I'm celebrating Samhain rather than Halloween. I've got my fire pit set up and I'm planning on holding a fire vigil.

@ The Shadow: this is super late, but how did the vigil go?

Edited by Sharysa on Nov 16th 2020 at 10:03:41 AM

What's up? It's Black Friday in North America but I'm not buying anything, lol. Instead I answered some questions from someone who used to go to TVT and then found my blog!

https://norcalbabaylan.tumblr.com/post/635973315268362240/how-do-i-start-being-pagan-im-new-to-it-and-want

Edited by Sharysa on Nov 27th 2020 at 1:21:02 AM

Hi. I’m trying to get into paganism, but it’s been a slow process. A question I’m curious about is relating to deities. How did you go about choosing one to follow?

Many newbies are attracted to something called henotheism...that is, picking one god to devote themselves to from a pantheon or, maybe, a catalogue of world religions, like an aromantic way to swipe right. This works well if it works for you, it's just that it can seem as though henotheism is the only way to do things, and that can be plenty of missed opportunities to practice in a way that suits you, if you haven't been told what other options there are. I do notice and both the "Choosing my God, Which One?" approach, and the rallying pushback against that ("No, They Choose You") are missing some prerequisites.

And if a catalogue is what you're starting off with, then I want to be clear that there's nothing wrong with a catalogue existing, because that's the information that's out there and that's the way that information about polytheistic religions are organized.

Most Western secular schools will teach some Greek mythology and Roman mythology, so that students can better understand the works of literature in Western canon. I learned about Lwa from a Broadway musical that did not entirely represent the culture with any accuracy (all the productions of Once On This Island that I saw costumed Agwe as a Viking and Papa Ge as...Dracula?) I think most people outside of Japan would have learned about Shinto from the untranslatable allusions to that religion in Japanese anime or video games that subsequently get worldwide releases. I'd dabbled in researching Sumerian religions before, as a way to contextualize my Abrahamic birth religion, but I only got more serious about it after watching all three seasons of the vlog version of Carmilla...All of this to say, that I think there's nothing wrong with having first learned about a specific pagan mythology through entertainment, or through The Godchecker Website.

With many pagan religions having been developed and consolidated without the internet, you could probably understand how it can seem that each pagan religion had originated in a specific region and among specific people. (It promptly gets more complicated than that, consider a god such as Serapis who was sort of this...combination of Osiris from Kemetic/Egyptian pagan mythology and Hades from Greek mythology. Egypt at that time had plenty of cultural influence from Greece, so things like this can happen. Benzaiten is a Hindu goddess in Japan; in whose homeland she's known as Saraswati, for another example.)

I think more importantly is the way that these pantheons have been developed and consolidated—My issue with "a catalogue" is that it doesn't present this integrity, and therefore picking a God to follow out of a catalogue can become unfulfilling.

A pantheon develops and is consolidated with a history of a people, a material culture, a social structure, values, beliefs and customs.

I feel that it can be more immersive if you explore the contexts of whatever from a catalogue sparks your interest...If you think an aspect of Norse mythology is interesting, for example, or you feel that Freya specifically is jiving with where you are right now in life...then I recommend exploring what would have been the lives of people who consolidated this mythology, at least alongside deciding for now that "I'm dedicating myself in utter devotion to Freya" or something. It could be immensely helpful to examine the values system of pre-Christian Nordic people at the time—What winter meant to them, because of the geographic location and the cycles of the year; What poetry meant to them, because there was indeed a writing system and oral traditions; What honor meant to them...how adaptable the beliefs were, as I have read of an early missionary who'd preached Jesus to some Norse pagans who liked what they heard of this Jesus fellow so much that they'd make a statue of him and put him right beside Thor. So, you see, they did not entirely understand things that we take as a given now that so-and-so can't or shouldn't mix in religion...which, in a way, ironically, I think is an argument for getting familiar and immersed in "the vibe" of the whole thing, so to speak. What the catalogue doesn't often cover is also the "low mythology", or that devotion to a single deity in the State pantheon (continuing this example: Odin, Frey, Bragi, Idunn, etc.) wasn't as emphasized as belief in and honor of unnamed land spirits and ancestral spirits, in parts of the spirit body such as the hugr or hamr or fylgjia, and in the wyrd or the orlog as metaphysical forces or order in the universe and poetic justice or consequences.

This isn't to say that proper devotion to a pagan deity requires pre-historic reenactment. It requires adaptation into modern life, in a very different context than the culture that formed these beliefs and customs. I should hope that contemporary Norse pagans recognize and sympathize with the oppression of now being of a minority religion in a 21st century context, and not sustain the taboo traditionally known as ergi because it's 2021.

But after all that, I hope that you do build a fulfilling practice. I think that it shouldn't be restricted to spiritworkers (or those with extrasensory perception) whether there's a sense of a God "choosing you" right back. I understand why the rally of, "You don't choose the gods, they choose you" had emerged, as I mentioned, I think it was pushback against the shallow sort of accessorizing-with-deities attitude that some old-timers perceived among younger seekers as disrespectful. However, even, "You don't choose the gods, they choose you" has its own shadow side, in that a devotional relationship or interaction surely ought to have the 'mere mortal' still be a conscious and active participant, who is allowed to say, "Actually, I'm not going to be your devotee even though the divination says that you want me to be", and I think the irritated people who push for "the God you're meant to devote yourself to, will be the one to choose you" didn't consider that also-unhelpfully passive attitude emerging if they pushed for this.

I also want to point out that in some cases, customarily, the apparent "henotheism" would be meant to change...I can't remember from where exactly I'd read this, but I remember reading that young girls who dedicated themselves to Artemis would be expected to transfer their devotion to Demeter or Hestia as a rite of passage. So, devotion to a deity wasn't always about preference but sometimes about societal expectations. So much depends on cultural context, not only by region, but through time.

I hope this helps!

Uhm long time lurker first time poster. I can't find a general witch coven that's active but uh I dunno what I'm doing all I know is that I'm some flavour of witchy and today I was scalped by my tarot deck.

Hi??? Help me on my witchy journey.

If you mean that the tarot cards that you pulled out and put down insulted you with truth...haha, yes that happens. I think it's a good thing when that happens, because that likely means the reader has moved beyond Thematic Apperception in the sense of only interpreting each card in the way that benefits the reader's own ego. However, sometimes cartomancy decks just seem to have a specific personality.

When I first got into witchcraft, it was during a time that all the information about it squished it in with...uh, open-source versions of initiatory traditions. Which people either initiated or allied to traditional initiates would discourage the tweens who were exploring in that direction, and at least one of those that I met told me to basically cut it out with witchcraft and do Psychic Energyworking instead because that was definitely public domain and not culturally-appropriative or invasive and misrepresentative of Wiccan mystery cults (Gardnerian, Dianic, etc.)

So I did the Psychic Energyworking stuff for a while...plenty of overlap with New Age sort of neo-Theosophy, David Icke conspiracy theories, but also at the same time very serious about being scientific with these not-exactly-scientific-though pursuits. I never had any success with telekinesis, but I did have plenty of success with lucid dreaming.

Later on, I discovered that there was a technically "public domain" version of the non-denominational Wicca-influenced sort of witchcraft that was (sorry, initiated Wiccans) trendy in my tweens: British Traditional Witchcraft. Well, that's fair enough, as I have never set foot in any part of Britain in my entire life, I live in the tropics, so if I had known that British Traditional Witchcraft was a thing when I was younger then I would have been immature and spoiled enough to have imported everything from there just so that I could have the correct aesthetic and stuff, and not have really been thoughtful about what it was supposed to mean, not wrestled internally with the good and bad sides of globalization and how to honor the signifiers (of community or solitary practice) that practitioners have and also being responsible and thoughtful, all so that it's not basically a practice based on consumerism or image.

Beyond that, it's difficult to explain. The lines between "folk witchcraft", and its culture of origin, and religious systems within aforementioned culture—all that started to get much more blurry...so, I don't really think of spells or rituals as recipes anymore? Not like, "Do ABC thing gets XYZ thing done and happened by magickxs", at least not as though it's completely isolated or independent from everything else; I don't design rituals anymore, or follow old ones, it's always very improvised nowadays (although I suppose the Psychic Energyworking background could have something to do with that too.)

Archetypalism seems to have gotten a bad reputation, and now that I've actually read works by Carl Jung who coined that term (and Synchronicity too)...I've got to say that pretty much the entire New Age and Occult literature genre has misrepresented the entire concept, and misused it, and encouraged misuse of it, no wonder people think that the impact of bad information is what the information was, and no wonder it's unpopular. All that said, I'm personally into Archetypes, but rather a version of "Archetypes" and an understanding of "Archetypes" that is definitely not like what's described in this paragraph.

So, I don't know if you would be more into a specific pagan Reconstructionist approach, or more into intuitive Spiritwork, or a specific craft of witchcraft specifically (such as herb lore, or music like song-spells or playlist divination, or writing out sigils,) or Western Ceremonial traditions (these are usually based on the consolidation of Victorian-era occult fraternities, although I can understand the roots of even those being around the creations of medieval Alchemy grimoires)—

There's definitely plenty of explore, and just because I have been into this for a long while doesn't mean that where I am now is necessarily where you will end up in the same amount of time. You're a different person with a different path. There are others who have been doing this much longer than I have, more prominently, who have gone very different paths into definitely more Ceremonial, or who say "it's scary how the magic that young people are getting into nowadays are so much less theistic" (and I'm sitting here like, "?? Psionics always was not theistic...Where have you been, ghorl?") Obviously not the part of the pool where I have been, and that's actually okay.

I'm probably most intrigued by like, spirit work I suppose. And like, "eclectic" witchcraft,which is cringe, I know, but my altars been feeling a lot cleaner since I decided to put my Cassidy doll on there so basically I'm down for anything that isn't appropriative, even up to pop culture witchcraft (oof I know). Idk I just Do Not Know where to start.

I'm starting to get a good relationship with my cards and I want to build my altar more (though I don't have much room for one) but beyond that I'm like WHERE DO I GO.

Preacher Cassidy? Unfortunately, I don't know the source material, but usually the media itself will have some in-world indication of what working with the entities who take those forms would be like.

In archetypalist depth psychology, there's something called Active Imagination in which...whatever or whoever is trying to guide you, can be communicated with through something called Art Dialogue. Basically, you start drawing some drawings, or writing a story, or writing a poem, or sculpture or dance or whatever your artistic expression inclines you to do. And, during the process you'll get a message. If you try writing self-insert fanfiction, because this is pop culture witchcraft/paganism and is already cringe so we might as well live in cringe all the way, then sometimes you might get a message that simply feels more inspired than egotistical.

Once you know how that feels like and can get into the state of mind, then usually you'll be able to work more consistently with whoever you want to work with.

(While art is one very common avenue to spiritwork, however, and it's one that I personally favor...I have heard that it's possible to be a spiritworker by other avenues, that I cannot speak on because I don't know what those are, but I'd believe that they exist.)

I also recommend Dream Tending, a method by Stephen Aizenstat that I think accidentally becomes pagan. It begins with dream "analysis" (not the right word), or working with dreams, but that's more about getting an altered state of mind to approaching waking life. After that there's ancestral work that isn't called ancestral work, animism that isn't called animism, making offerings that are actually called making offerings, and ending up with a pantheon that isn't called a pantheon but is so a pantheon. As the book itself might be prohibitively expensive, there are also some free official resources.

The only point of contention that I can predict is the caution in the text against "artificial" dream images, that is, the invasion of commercialism into even the altered mindset of mysticism and spiritwork (that is, in this context, Dream Tending)...not that I don't believe spiritworkers should be on guard against unfulfilling messages or interactions with spirits that is for some ulterior motive, we definitely should be on our guard against things like that, but even when pop culture is sold to us as a commodity for no more depth than momentary entertainment, I do believe that those images and messages can still be a window to a presence, power, or quality of energy that can bring a depth of fulfillment to our lives.

As for cartomancy, I do so enjoy the meditation in which a cartomancer visualizes a specific card in their mind and then walks into the image. Usually there's something that happens there that can have a valuable message or positive impact.

Thanks for the response, Faemon. Now I’m mostly focusing on learning what I can about the pantheons I’m interested in (and the surrounding cultures). I feel drawn towards the Celtic gods mostly, though I’m also interested in some of the Nordic and Greek myths. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia are also interesting.

Maybe put the ancient Egyptian gods on the backburner; after I found out that the Egyptian pantheon is closed to outsiders, I am HEAVILY wondering now if I actually got into contact with Anubis and Sobek and other African deities a couple of times, or if it was just other gods who happened to take their names.

According to others in closed traditions, their gods would not often bother to show themselves to outside people, but if they DO, it's very important. Best case scenario is that they have a reason that overrides their closed natures, but that usually involves you doing heavy work at best, not because they tapped you to be "special."

Ironically enough, one closed-tradition spirit I found out is actually contacting me is Anansi the Spider.

So Anansi showed up a while back looking like Orlando Jones from American Gods and told me that he was "Anansi's stand-in." He mostly likes laughing at what a mess I am with trying to figure out my trickster/chaos-energy, AND he likes reading my decolonization fantasy stories. Sometimes he mooches off my offerings, but we don't really "work with" each other so much as "he shows up if shenanigans are happening in my meditations. And SOMETIMES he gives me a couple bits of advice."

I had the feeling that he was messing with me, but I got unexpected confirmation when an African-American person in one of my Facebook witch groups did a reading with some dice. It's hard to argue when the dice show Anansi's face.

His biggest loophole is that I am not working with him, but HE is working with ME.

Ah, tricksters. They exhaust my introverted ass.

Edited by Sharysa on Feb 1st 2021 at 12:57:21 PM

To my understanding, the Ancient Egyptian pantheon is open because those religious practices are a reconstruction: Everybody who originally consolidated that specific tradition have died off. Of course, to guard that reconstruction against anybody who might want to claim it for nefarious purposes and twist it into something unrecognizable, then those with a claim to Egyptian heritage must be centered and entrusted with the consolidation of these reconstructions and revivals.

What Shamanic Arawak Priestess on YouTube said here had really stuck with me, basically, less the shouting into the void of the internet communities that this practice or that practice is Closed, but more contemplating that if a tradition or spirituality that is consolidated by marginalized people does indeed resonate with you, even without you having a claim to that heritage...then, you have a duty to fight for and work towards the basic personal safety of those very people when that safety is under threat in the physical world and on the political level—not only jumping into the magic spirit awesome cool stuff.

That makes so much more sense to me than declarations of Closed into the void of the internet...I'm guessing, from the same platform that brought us Rose Christo (who claimed to be a Native American survivor of abuse while in foster care...but she wasn't,) and The Hamilton Trash Fire of 2017 (in which a white middle-class university student pretended to be an HIV-positive Chinese-Pakistani human trafficking survivor...and also wasn't.)

There are many reasons to strive for more thoughtfulness and consideration. There are many ways to legitimize the consensus of a community with policies and protocols that add up to a Closed tradition. But I can never ever again instantly believe an internet stranger, even plural, who only says, "Don't do that, because I said so." They could be the same person on six different accounts for all I know, and it might not even be their culture they're claiming to be authorities on.

That's more like it, not because of the result but because I expect Facebook to be at least slightly better about people being themselves on there—not that even that is a guarantee—but there you go, when in doubt, ask someone in the in-crowd for a divination.

Edited by Faemon on Feb 1st 2021 at 4:47:42 AM

I mean, most people aren't JUST saying "X practice is closed because I said so," it's "X practice is closed because outsiders keep 1) barging in WITHOUT invitation and 2) ignoring the people who it came from." Is it any wonder that people in a group would finally get fed up with outsiders flat-out demanding access and misinterpreting key aspects, and thus declare a religion "closed?"

One of the things that made me leave a Filipino Wiccan Facebook group (besides my growing discontent with Wicca as a whole) was how they refused to acknowledge cultural appropriation, or accept that some cultures/practices might not be meant for every single person in the world. It's one thing to be mindful of "who says this is a closed tradition, and why?" but the other extreme of "everything is open if YOU feel like it!" isn't that good either.

One person wrote a whole fucking essay about their hoodoo teachings, but they both brushed off my concerns about how other Black Americans would view a Filipino in hoodoo when we have historically been VERY anti-black ourselves, and then they said something like "lol, the only hate I've gotten about this was from people online or who aren't from the South!"

So brushing me off is one thing, because I know my immediate approach to "closed tradition = no touching" isn't always followed, and it's their choice to listen or not, but I keep wondering: Did the person also brush off AFRICAN-AMERICANS who disagreed with them? What if their teacher is actually disliked in the wider community BECAUSE they teach outsiders, and the Filipino never bothered to break out of their bubble to find that out?

And in hindsight, I find it very fucking weird that an alleged hoodoo practitioner would go even near a Wiccan group to begin with. Wicca is infamous for its lovey-dovey "white magic good, black magic bad" message, when a large part of hoodoo deals with... curses and rightful vengeance against oppression.

Wicca is also pretty hypocritical about the "do as you will if you harm none" approach—at least the Wiccans I've encountered are, since they had such a limited view of "no harm." "No hexing and no bad intentions! It's fine!" Like no, what if the act of coming into a practice uninvited IS the harm? Why do some witches want to separate "magic" and "culture" into their own little boxes? Why do people think non-Christian religions don't have rules, and standards to adhere to?

Just some late night musings.

Edited by Sharysa on Feb 3rd 2021 at 10:07:50 AM

I think I know the group that you're talking about and, yeah, I left it too.

Ironically, Wicca was (is?) one of those closed traditions, but for different reasons than the fetishization of the ethnic-exotic. When open-source versions of it were popular back in the 1990s to early 2000s, tween-me was totally into it but got checked early on by people saying, "You can't just read one book or even twelve books about Wicca and call yourself Wiccan, it's like three specific organizations of people that will tell you what Wicca actually is and how to do it when you've proven yourself a good candidate for inclusion...everything Mama Silver and those teenaged LiveJournal bloggers writing about Wicca is wrong. That's not the real Wicca community."

And they turned out to be right, it just so happens that there are also members currently in some of those Wiccan lineages now who openly admit to having started out with the trendy "how to be a teen witch" introductions to it. But they just took it seriously as they got older, instead of treating it as a phase or a trend like uncountable others did. At the time that all this misinformation about Wiccan practices was being disseminated for a cash grab, many initiated Wiccans apparently hated it.

I'd still be more inclined to go "if you're going to get into this, then you have to accept your duty to the marginalized peoples that this came from" or at most "who invited you?" instead of Closed Period Full Stop Forever In All The Ways. It's an understandable response, but I doubt that it's a true solution: I think that hardline baits fetishization and promotes misrepresentation/misunderstanding too much more than it protects the integrity of a culture.

So! Some recent personal experience with the issue above. I still prefer, if it's up to me, that exclusion be based on dishonorable conduct than based on something that isn't a person's fault that they can't change.

Life lesson learned after this: expand "dishonorable" to "disruptive and annoying".

White guy from one group tends to comment plenty without much substance or citation, seemingly with an earnestness that I don't want to discourage, but it's basically shows the reason why I cannot replace the phrase "attention-seeking" with "support-seeking".

Because he put out there that he'd married into the religious tradition of a minority culture that is not a world religion, and was having some spiritual experiences that he then asked the void of the internet basically if that's possible or allowed that the spirits make this calling towards a complete outsider.

And I'm like, well I won't tell the spirits what not to do...but 1. shouldn't he be asking his offline spouse? (Does this offline spouse even exist...?) and, 2. he should be aware and accountable for what he puts out there getting whatever response it's going to get; that's not saying "somebody else being rude to you is your fault actually somehow" because that's surely not a good rule to live by—but there must be something in-between living authentically even if it challenges most of the world, and just feeling the room like everybody's going to have a right to their perspective and to express it.

Demonstrably:

After maybe four or five encouraging and welcoming comments, there was one slightly more tepid one, with maybe the occasional capslock for single-word emphasis because tone of voice is challenging on text-based online communities and the shift key is right there. It wasn't "get out of here, we are Closed" it was "This is where I'm coming from and why I'm taking it in this way..." Aaand...

...The response from White Guy OP was something to the effect of "well nobody else has ever responded so negatively to me" which is a weird way to react when the OP was a yes or no question about a complex and ambivalent subject that would inevitably get some No responses, which this wasn't even, so...What'd you even want, dude? I reminded OP of prior history of warnings he received for in-group conduct (times that he'd gone so far as to write something to the effect of, "I'm sure that so-and-so entire demographic will be okay with this because I think so and I married into it"), so that this not-even-categorically-negative response was not the first "negative response"...

...And OP's response to that instead of 'sorry, got it, doing my best to not do that' was, instead, something to the effect of: "Remove me from this group then and remove me from all the groups and I'll keep my spiritual experiences completely to myself. And the capslock means you're shouting at me."

What.

The.

Everloving.

F...yeah he ought to keep his spiritual experiences to himself, if this is how he takes online communities being online communities.

And hours later he seemed to have switched moods completely and seemed to be all 'yey you didn't banhammer me so you must like me and really really like me' and "if you let me stay I'll be better"—

—But you know what? That was enough time for me to sleep on what the everloving fug I was even reading...and...

Yeah, no, my doubt benefit container has run dry. H/T to the moderator who was trying to make him aware that what he's taking from all this isn't what anybody is giving him to anywhere near the degree he seems to think. But. I'm bringing down the banhammer, being really in his feelings like that brings some low-quality and bad-faith content to these communities.

(Doesn't this bloke have an offline community to hang his fragile ego on, instead?)

And That's Why We Can't Have Nice Things like the benefit of the doubt.

Edited by Faemon on Mar 2nd 2021 at 6:13:39 AM

@Sharysa: Super late, but it went well. I probably need to do more to really get them right.

To add to the discussion of closed practices (generally, not specifically at Sharysa), you see the idea in Norse neopaganism. It's called Folkism and it's (rightly, I believe) called racist. I can't see how it would be any different with the Egyptian pantheon.

Certain specific practices may be closed, but worship can't be. The gods and goddesses will call who they will.