Pagan Tropers Unite!

Makes Just as Much Sense in Context That's why it's awful to have.

Edited by Faemon on Jul 3rd 2018 at 6:34:18 AM

I'm catching up on Scythian religion and I'm liking what I find. Turns out fucking Hestia ("Tabiti", but still, since she is most likely related to Hindu Tapati, which is Hindu Hestia) is the queen of the gods.

Shame that it's difficult to find academic sources that aren't Turkic nationalists ignoring the established Iranian identity of the Scythians.

By "Hestia was the queen of the gods," do you mean "the Scythian version of Hestia was queen of the gods," or "A general goddess-of-the-hearth/home is the queen of the gods?"

Edited by Sharysa on Jul 15th 2018 at 9:22:21 AM

A god that Herodotus considered analogous to the Greek Hestia. Her name, Tabiti, is etymologically connected to Hindu Tapati, a character associated with fire, and Avestan "tapaiati" ("hot"), so she was probably a fire or sun goddess.

Ooh, that sounds fascinating. Any links to reading material or websites?

The links on Wikipedia's article should suffice.

So I've been seeing a lot of crows lately but I'm not sure if they're signs from the Morrigan, Odin, or the North American crow-spirit.

However, I have been getting unusual encounters from bees. Yesterday after work, a bee landed on my phone for a minute, and today a bee flew into my workplace's kitchen.

The main thing I'm working on right now is trying to finish Takotsubo for my college's "alumni-produced works" project. The fall semester's in about a week, and it's only halfway done. Lol.

I would have gotten more of it done if I hadn't been dealing with my craptastic former job and all its back-pain issues until a couple of months ago.

The bees feel like they're good signs since they were very chill, so I really hope it means I'll get this first draft done on time, even if it's a train-wreck with bad pacing. We can always fix it later.

It's been silent here......

I finished reading "The Filipino Women: Before and After the Spanish Conquest of the Philippines" by Sr. Mary John Mananzan, OSB. Basic gist of it is that the Western historical fantasy of having rescued brown women from brown men via white colonialization is just that, a fantasy, and we were plenty gender egalitarian before then no thank you any much.

Unfortunately, I find this essay keeps it plenty vague about which specific people the author is writing about, and it could very well be cherry-picking. However, customs of pre-colonial primogeniture did not discriminate by gender...it doesn't boast anything like "a higher literacy rate than Japan at the time" but kids were expected to know how to read and write, calculate sums, basic economics, and several kinds of crafts and agriculture. Men who married up economically or prestige-wise would take their wife's name. In addition to a "bride price" paid from the groom to the bride's parents to compensate them for the loss of skilled labour, a would-be groom was also expected to live with the bride's family for a few weeks to demonstrate the bride service—that is, what he could offer his wife in terms of practical skill. I imagine that this did not extend to intimacies, but maybe more like can he build and repair stuff. Married women were also more expected to keep records of the accounts. Of course, after colonialization, patrilineality and patrinomic lineages became more of a thing, while literacy and arithmetic savvy in women might be frowned upon as distractions from domestic duties and praying to have a baby. So, the roles of women became vastly limited whereas before the discrimination tended only to be based on the relationship to property, labour, and general ablebodied-ness.

I could probably dig into the footnotes for more details about who this writer is even referring to about all these customs, but as appealing as this portrayal is...I'm put off by the impressionistic style and some specious semantic arguments.

So I'm moving onto Demetrio's "Myths and Symbols: Philippines" which was published in 1978 and it reads like a text from 1978. Carl Jung is cited as an authority on the particulars of world religion...and much as I appreciate Carl Jung's works and core concepts, he's a Teutonic barbarian who thinks that rubbing a churinga makes Mana come out. Go home, Carl, you're drunk.

This is going to be a long read, and so far more pontification than I expected. So, this probably isn't the Philippine folklore version of Bullfinch's Mythology.

Jung is pretty outdated even in the West. Sure, he and Freud laid the foundation for modern psychology, but there's a reason relying too much on their work is so common among TV serial-killers—the broad strokes of human nature are there, but details like personality get pretty wonky.

I need daily ritual in order to thrive. I need to wake up and have breakfast with my spirits. I need to have dinner with them before I go to sleep. I need to create homes for them so they can more easily manifest in my life and exist outside the underworld without losing their energy.

I need to walk barefoot on earth that is not concrete. I need to fill bottles and jars with charms and jinxes. I need to leave my body and welcome my spirits into it. I need to forge my contracts with the air, earth, and water I live between, and with the Green Ones and the Red Ones who exist with me here.

I am so much an internal person, an inward-looking person, that I need the contrast of external, outward-looking spirituality. I can't be all in my own head, I need something to be in the world.

One thing I've been struggling with for some time now is with the idea of, on one hand, keeping secret things to myself and, on the other, wanting to share my experiences with others, especially with other "traditional" witches. I guess I haven't learned how to strike a balance between revealing too much and revealing nothing.

I'm rambling, hardcore.

I used to be really open about everything, thinking that if it was true to me then there's nothing bad that could happen just by saying it out loud. If anyone gave me a difficult time about it, then I should live as though it were their personal problem, because it was (as in, I ran away from home and eventually met with my super Catholic extended family, who as it turned out only took me in, in hopes of undoing my mother's heretical upbringing...and reuniting me with my abuser because Family. I stayed as true to my spirituality as I could in the circumstances—described it as "agnostic" rather than "pagan" but that wasn't contradictory to me—but, it was really never going to not be deeply offensive to such a rigid, purist, extremist.) So I thought nothing could be worse than that, but then I encountered the sort of "fellow" polytheists or pagans who take what you admit and twist it into something really terrible, when there was some established trust—more than the company of dogmatic mainstream religious people—that fellow weirdos wouldn't do that. But they do, and it happens, and it's really terrible—it's not as simple as, "if you don't get it or don't like it, then don't read because I'm not breaking your bones or picking your pocket by keeping a personal blog", it's more like...someone mirroring and love-bombing until you're comfortable, then spreading incriminating rumors to isolate you, then cultivating dependency and wearing down any sense of worth you have until you're a hollow husk that used to be a person, and all because someone who does that has unresolved persecution complexes and fantasies that they can't just keep in their heads but have to use and harm people to validate that it's real—so I think I've generally gotten a lot more selective about who I tell about what I've been exploring, because niche religions are already a place full of vulnerable people. Even people who purport that they're so savvy about how to make a safe community, have biases and personal issues that they do some horrifically wrong things and don't want to admit it and improve.

Demetrio's book that I mentioned upthread did point out that the problem with Bullfinch's Mythology style compilations is that it separates myth from ritual practice, when the link is necessary for...something.

I think, unfortunately for my misanthropic pessimistic introverted self that I described in the first paragraph, that would also include (grumble, grumble) community, as well as individual practice, and understanding of mythic theology or folklore.

Theoretically, that is...Demetrio seems to repeat the hypotheses of his contemporaries in academia at the time, so if this works then it works for witches and shamans—but alchemists do it alone, and that's where I am right now (...ey typed, on an internet forum.)

I'm sorry to hear you've had bad experiences. I haven't had any interaction with groups but I've heard of these toxic social environments where abuses and things of that nature occur. I hope you're able to find safe community.

For me, secrecy is an important aspect of witchcraft. If you reveal too much, you can literally give someone else the information they need to turn your craft against you or literally steal your cunning. I once shared here that I don't known any of my Dark Mother's true names because I haven't proven myself trustworthy; secrets like that are incredibly significant.

So there are some specifics that I shouldn't be sharing with anyone, particularly other magic practitioners. But there are plenty of generalities I can talk about openly. It's just a matter of balancing those things; y'know, finding a middle path.

Super late, but OUCH. At least my family just shakes their head at me for being weird and they don't try to "fix me," aside from wishing I was less spacey and did more housework. *lots of hugs*

I joined a practical-magic class at the start of October (run by the same woman whose essay gave me a better understanding of magic); for the first week's assignments, we need to leave offerings to the nature-spirits in gratitude, plus water-offerings for our creative genius, and then find a (concrete and probable) goal to help along with our magic. My findings are very interesting:

I'm currently leaving offerings to the nature-spirits of Turtle Island. I thanked them for letting me live here, because I'm a foreigner whose maternal family were brainwashed by the colonizer's "America is a land of opportunity" bullshit. My first offering on October 2 (I was at work on the 1st) was accepted by Cougar. He informed me that I have a lot of wildness in me, to the point where I feel like one of "the People" (wild animals), and he's here to keep the OTHER nature-spirits from getting confused and trying to eat me because "wild things eat other wild things."

It seems to be a very ritualized and tribal thing to "eat" someone; Cougar said that while the gods have the right to physically STOP animals from trying to eat me (because I like having all my limbs), they can't just TELL animals to not eat something/someone, since they are not Of the People—unless they're the deities with kinship to sacred animals (as in the gods who turn INTO their sacred animals, not just the ones who are fond of them), or the Anthropomorphic Personification of forces of nature. ...Which means about 95% of the deities I know are NOT able to tell a mouse that she can't take a nip out of my arm, which is why Cougar is here.

The Bruin is very much from the European half of the folklore and ALSO not able to help as much as he'd like—Turtle Island's spirits respect him, but they aren't as close to him as they'd be to the Grizzly/Polar Bear. (And I'm not trying to meet the Grizzly spirit AT ALL. NOPE NOPE NOPE. Grizzly has been either angry or hungry every time I ran into him, and even the Bruin has trouble making him back off.)

So yeah, Brighid and Macha are extremely upset that I "invited all the wild things into the house."

Edited by Sharysa on Oct 4th 2018 at 8:13:08 AM

I was wondering how well therianthropy (don't know which trope to link that word to) and animal associations of gods (was Macha associated with owls, or was that only in SongOfTheSea ?) intersect with something like that. Like are our animal selves (or plant selves—it could happen,) a "wild side" or is there like a metaphysical citizenship sort of thing needed to be A Wild Thing?

Ones I work lately with have community standards of being a bird...but I'm a wolf, though on some levels I'm a danger noodle. I used to like to think of myself as a sparrow, but They go "not really" and I sense that it doesn't mean so much you'll never be in our flock, buzz off and more like we can bring it out of you, but you have to find that part of yourself in Ouuurrrrr way.

Venus has gone retrograde! I wonder what that's gonna be like this time...I think when I last remember that happening it was 2012? 2013? But it must have happened at least once between then and now and I wasn't keeping up.

Edited by Faemon on Oct 5th 2018 at 5:36:37 AM

Yeah no, Macha is DEFINITELY not associated with owls in the proper mythology. That's a movie-only thing.

It definitely feels like a "citizenship" deal to be a Wild Thing; the various Nature Spirit deities are officially "mixed" but individuals get varying degrees of AUTHORITY. Macha is very firmly on the "civilization" side—I mean, she's a big-ass DOMESTIC horse and not a small wild one, so Cougar doesn't listen to her as much as he does to the Morrigan, who is very much wild in spirit. He has a good relationship with Haik, who might only be connected to crocodiles for me, but it makes sense because we viewed crocs as Asian-type dragons and we put crocodile-heads on our ships, so it's not a big leap to go from "Filipino sea-god is associated with crocodiles thanks to Asian dragon-worship and Filipino ship-culture" to "Filipino sea-god IS a crocodile."

Finn MacCool and Dionysus are BFFs with the Wild People, thanks to respectively being a deer-god and friends with Pan, Lord of Wild Things.

I remember two things very distinctly: 1) The gods are pretty adamant that I shouldn't be eaten, not just for the literal "I like having all my limbs" reason, but because I don't understand the full meaning of it, so I wouldn't be able to consent properly. 2) Early on, Macha freaked out and started crying because "IF YOU LET THE WILD THINGS EAT YOU, YOU WON'T WANT TO COME BACK." Not that I can't, but I won't want to.

I mean, my Shadow-Self has already mentioned that "you hate people and you hate cities" because half the time they're great, but the other half they just make no fucking sense to me, so this explains my constant desire to run off into the mountains and only talk to people, like, once a week for grocery shopping.

So usually I think Macha is overreacting to things because she assigned herself as my Deity-Mom and overreacting is what a lot of moms do, but her fear that I'll spiritually go "feral" and become a hermit is actually pretty well-founded.

Edited by Sharysa on Oct 10th 2018 at 12:38:57 PM

Good news, everyone—on Halloween, I got kicked out of the magic class for being too "unpleasant" (as in, being depressed and broke) and talking about cultural appropriation.

I probably shouldn't have made that last post that got me booted, but I've been noticing all sorts of issues with what she claims to be and what she actually ACTS LIKE.

The teacher told people that I got booted because "I know we do shadow-integration here and it's messy and painful, but this place is supposed to be warm and welcoming, so we shouldn't be too public and open about our sadness/anger. And cultural appropriation is important, but not here because we just want to get our witch on." Girl, your own first lesson literally tells people to do shadow-integration to get rid of any magical blocks from the conflict with what you CONSCIOUSLY want, versus what your SUBCONSCIOUS wants. Why don't you just make a sub-forum for anyone dealing with shadow-work and icky real-life issues???

It was hilarious since the teacher's website address IS LITERALLY CALLED "BAD WITCH."

I was planning to stay quiet and quietly slog through the class because the website does have GOOD magical stuff mixed in with the appropriation and general "this gives me a weird feeling" nature of a white Buddhist teaching everyone magic for money, but it's probably for the better.

I've been noticing two big issues with the course over the month: 1) The class' Facebook group is dominated by a white-girl-magic club where everything's Love and Light, and they post photos of their expensive (and gorgeous) altars/crafts/whatever, and the teacher's stuff is awesome and life-changing, and thinking positive will ALWAYS HELP if you've lost your job or are stuck in poverty or whatever. 2) There's some baaaaad organization. None of her course's PDFs have been edited SINCE THEIR ORIGINAL INCARNATION (the class I was taking has been running for at least a couple of years), so there have been an increasing amount of people struggling with weird instructions and it sucks all the mods' time to individually help out.

Yet somehow nobody has thought they should a) SIT DOWN WITH THE EMAILS AND EDIT THEM TO REFLECT CURRENT CHANGES, or B) MAKE AN ANNOUNCEMENT LISTING THE CURRENT FORMAT/RULES OF THE GROUP WHICH WILL STILL HELP A LOT. Which leads to a third issue, where anyone who struggles with the course (openly, at least) and doesn't automatically praise Miss White Buddhist is kicked out and refunded their money.

So with that amount of cluster-fuckery, I don't think I would have lasted much longer even if I hadn't started talking about cultural appropriation on top of my struggles. Eventually she's either gonna have to sit down and EDIT HER COURSES to reflect the changes from their original incarnation, or she's gonna boot out one too many people for daring to disagree with her or publicly struggling with her course, and she'll get a backlash from everyone ELSE she did that to.

Edited by Sharysa on Nov 2nd 2018 at 6:59:55 AM

Ugh, I'm so sorry they did that to you...making a subforum specifically for Shadow integration would have been a good idea too, especially as, while these do intersect with regards to the lived experience, it's been my experience that the personal Shadow stuff also can be very different than the broader, collective, systematic Shadow stuff like hello capitalism is a broken system try to magik out of that huh. Spoiler tag for disordered eating and systematic poverty: My middle class eating disorder had a different process of unpacking my emotional impoverishment from bad parenting, than the salad bowl region of my country having to consign tens of thousands of tomatoes to landfills because big-city distributors wouldn't buy them...and urban poor dying of malnourishment aren't considered in this, contriving famine during a circumstance of abundance.

Lately I had gotten the same feeling about Teal Swan, whose guided meditations I think I might have encountered on You Tube? But who I got the most information about from this podcast documentary. I considered it a generally fair critique of Teal Swan's methods, sort of cart-before-the-horse practical approach (except, personally, I object to the host pushing for the suicide hotline being the only best help when he admits in one episode that he's never called it himself...and his implications that genetics and neurology are the cause of mental illness, not that there's a human story within the madness also worthy of thorough personal examination or anything...and he keeps ragging on Teal for not being an expert! There's an actual institutional mental health expert being cited in those interviews, Barbara Snow, who is demonstrably full goose bozo! Institutions of knowledge are just as broken as capitalist systems.)

I think Teal Swan herself is certainly brilliantly media-savvy, and her integration methods look similar to practices that have worked for me as well...but...her insistence that she didn't do anything wrong or make any mistake or have any regrets with the fatalities in an intimate that she seems to have taken pride in bossing around, the psychic readings announced with such specificity and grandeur (like...get thee over to Uri Geller already, if that challenge is still up), the insistence on someone else she happened to find some camaraderie with had a shared childhood that they did not have, the fact that her tribe won't go ahead and eat until she's done privately browbeating her partner into spiritual submission...those all add up to a big nope for me, but the structure of her integration method that she's developed does sound very helpful—and, as she's said, there are no punitive consequences for leaving that intentional community.

I'm not quite at hand-wringing all, "Why do good ideas happen to bad people?!?" Or, "Why do good opportunities ditto?!?" But. Yeah.

So the state is currently on fire A LOT MORE than usual right now and with me being in the literal center of the state, we got smoke from two wildfires and I need a smoke mask to go outside for an hour. So TECHNICALLY, it's a good thing I lost my job a couple weeks ago because a lot of stores are STILL OPEN despite the obvious need for smoke masks and the severe decrease in customers.

But on good news, I got a callback to a Filipino theater after my very first video audition clip earlier this week, and I am anxiously continuing to rehearse my monologue in case they need me to read it in person. I AM ONE STEP CLOSER TO BEING A SUCCESSFUL ARTIST, MAN. The gods and ancestors find it hilarious that I'm so enthusiastic about getting a role while my applications for jobs are very NOT-enthusiastic.

I mean I'm applying for jobs, but I don't actually want them besides the income they'd give. Even a community-theater stipend is a good holdover so I can 1) pay for insurance for a few more months, and 2) have the creative energy to do more art.

Well, this is a very interesting forum. I was just drifting around trying to get reacquainted with the Tarot. But this was a quite the surprise.

Welcome! I love tarot cards. I've been dabbling in the Lenormand system too, lately, and been trying to design my own oracle based on playing cards.

What's your present explorational interest?

What do you mean by explorational interest?

Hello, and welcome to the pagan thread! God, I've been getting a lot of Tarot synchronicities lately and I think it's my deck trying to get me back in practice with readings.

Interest...with Tarot, some people are more into the aesthetic or collector's value, others are more into the history, others still are more into aspects of the system (numerology, elements, astrological correspondents, tarot spreads, Rider Coleman Smith versus Thoth...), others might be more into intuitive reading or spiritwork, or even astral travel into the tarot where you memorize what the image looks like and then imagine walking into that image: if something unexpected happens, that's astral otherworldly stuff...or something else.

Happy late new year! One week to Imbolc, too.

The week before last was full of low moods and animal encounters—after I parked in the driveway after getting home from work, I saw a raccoon run across my apartment's doorstep and it freaked me out.

At some point that week I'd also seen a hummingbird. I love those things, they're cute and they're such fearless, smoll motherfuckers.

My sister then saw a raccoon cross the doorstep AGAIN, and freaked out as I did. I noted that I'd seen a limping raccoon the first time, but she said her raccoon looked fine, meaning there are two raccoons somewhere in the building's vicinity.

I met a Hummingbird Spirit in one of my meditations a bit before my therapy session, but it didn't end very well. While Hummingbird was trying to take me somewhere in the Otherworld, we ran into a grizzly. Hummingbird clearly takes after his real-life counterpart since he tried to drive it off—which is valiant, but not helpful when he's the size of a golf-ball.

AND THEN. While I was at my therapy session: The room me and my therapist use has a large wall of glass windows, so we can see the ground and plants outside. Unfortunately there was also a rat wandering around. :/ He was just looking for stuff, but my city-dwelling self constantly thinks "Verminnnnn :( . Hey bro, I don't wish any ill on you, but plz stay away." He was clearly male because he was a brown furry rat with not-so-furred (and giant) testicles.

On the plus side, my constant low mood and pessimism over the past week was apparently because of my period. I remember talking for a LONG time about how shitty I felt with my therapist and I thought it was depression, but then my period started a couple days ago and I went "ohhhhh it's the last half of the month. No wonder."

I also met Amansinaya (male version). He is very very primal and prone to Hulk Speak like the Bruin is. He is also chained up to a pair of fucking cement/stone blocks, which he said are "our people's spirits." He can move them around sometimes, but it takes a lot of effort.

Edited by Sharysa on Jan 24th 2019 at 11:35:07 AM