Pagan Tropers Unite!

Wait... a gallon of mead needs at least a month of aging before you can actually drink it. Was it just a drink somewhat LIKE mead?

it's aging now at a friend's house. A mutual of a friend had drunk a cup of it when we had left the house to get her kids. She said he shouldn't have drank it like that, but he liked it a lot. (Now, that i'm thinking about it maybe a bit too much)

Edited by KeironCioran on Oct 17th 2019 at 1:03:18 AM

Wow, okay then. The water/yeast/honey combination probably isn't gonna kill someone, but lol at the impatience.

I mean, the whole situation threw me for a loop, like, why would you drink something that you don't even know what it is or what's in it?

Aye, General question for the thread.

Have any of you experienced or know somebody who experienced racism from a pagan community?

Edited by KeironCioran on Oct 25th 2019 at 9:49:26 AM

Back in the days of forums, I followed a link being advertised to one from another—and, I just Noped. It was 2007ish. There was somebody in that other forum being really loud about how discussions regarding slavery are so one-sided because there were colored-on-colored slavery before white people civilized everyone by indentured servitude, and if coloreds didn't like it then why don't the different races "keep to their own countries"...like, what??

But everybody else was replying to that really weird diatribe with...uh...bland agreement.

It was advertised as a pagan forum, but it was mostly posts like that.

Otherwise, I was very on the margins of the much more recent hashtag of Tarot So White. I own Stephanie Pui-Mun Law's Shadowscapes deck that I was happy to see the Knight of Cups representing brown Asians...and, the Koppel Zombie Tarot, which shows The High Priestess as a Voodoun priestess and the Six of Swords a black couple in a convertible fending off zombies like Pam Grier decided to guest star in the Thriller music video.

There being seventy-eight cards in a tarot deck, one or two cards showing figures that would fail The Paper Bag test is...not equity achieved...but, I was just glad that they were there even though I know somebody's going to write dissertation-length blog posts about how zombies are appropriation and a Black high priestess card figure is worse not better representation, and I don't usually find criticisms matched with, "Oh well what should be done instead going forward? What isthe good unproblematical deck to get?"

Offline, I feel like it's more of a class schism between literate metropolitan elite who have a sentimentality towards pagan stuff...and, actual indigenous people living below the poverty line that are fetishized or not considered authentic enough (by city-slickers) because their great-great-great-grand-aunt who taught them the way of it had also incorporated elements of the mainstream colonizer religion that wasn't only accessible but inescapable.

They might look a lot more like me, a city-slicker, but there's at least a subtle difference in ethnicity and an obvious difference in social power, priorities, and cultural understanding that I don't feel it's right for neopagans to treat indigenous elders the way that we do.

Edited by Faemon on Oct 26th 2019 at 1:12:24 AM

In addition to the Neopagan versus indigenous issues Faemon mentioned: Yep, there is quite a bit of elitism in the pagan world.

You'd think my home state California would be liberal and multicultural everywhere, but it's really only the big cities who are like that. And then among the big cities, there's quite a distinction between "paganism" (the Celtic practices and Wicca are common in my particular area, and there are some Greek and Norse practitioners), versus Native American religions like Santeria and North American "shamanism."

"Paganism" is routinely dominated by white folks. They write books about European religions and hold fancy celebrations/rituals, and there's an awful lot of "experts" in Reiki or yoga, or some such exotic (and probably bastardized) brown tradition wandering around. They love to talk about your Inner Goddess, or Healing From Trauma, or Channeling Your Ancestors.

Santeria and shamanism and "imported" religions that don't catch the white folks' eye as much as Reiki and yoga? Not nearly so well known, and they're usually mocked by average folks who think they're superstitious and haven't assimilated enough into 'Murican culture.

Even I don't know that much about the non-white pagan communities as a whole (though I do know a couple of individuals). I live in a white-heavy suburb and I spend a nice chunk of time just trying to stay on top of the housework, so I don't have much time for socializing and getting to know people.

So, a little time has passed, I've been spending it trying to get familiar with the tarot card meanings. I've even gotten a sheet of the card meanings being summed up in a few words for easy perusal if I need it (I think I'll check it a few times a day in breaks), which I put to good use yesterday when I did a few readings for a friend.

I did some readings for myself before, but this was the first time I read for someone else. Overall, it was 4 reads (the easy 3 card kind), getting progressively difficult to interpret to be honest. I was actually almost grinning the first time because the 3 cards that came up were one of the ones I knew the best. :D

I'm still struggling with the court cards sometimes and I'm not always sure how to weave the meaning of the card into an answer for that specific question/topic, but I'm not going to give up.

Happy Halloween, all!

Samhain maith, leanaí

Hope everyone had a good Samhain and All Souls' Day!

im curious: does anyone here practice technopaganism?

Technopaganism? I try. Giving my phones and cameras names, certain meditations that involve elevators and cities...but, really I'm Renaissance Faire hippie trash at heart, so I usually seek and find more of a "nature, red in tooth and claw" presentation.

Have I yet asked what you people think of channeling and trance channeling?

Well, what do you think?

I never had a problem with it as a concept thanks to Once On This Island being a big hit when I was a kid, and some casual research giving me the idea that...well, that's just how some people practice and experience.

But it wasn't for me. I stay me, and never "switch", and probably never will in this lifetime because when an entity that I recognized as a shard of my psyche accidentally did an almost-possession integration, it was weird for the both of us so we agreed never to do it again.

There are maybe two spirits that I would be comfortable working towards being even a temporary vessel for, but I doubt it would ever be a regular thing.

My notes on a sort of paradigm linking channelling and Babaylan ritual traditions:

So, that convinced me to be a tad more open to it, with this paradigm of what was supposed to happen to "me" while "something else" had taken over.

I never minded taking diction, with something like Automatic Writing...because, the way I do it, nothing is taking over my arm or hand that's holding the pen. It's only that I get ideas that don't feel like mine, and I write them down. There's a feel to these not-my-ideas that I can get familiar with, so that I do get to know and name whoever is saying whatever.

All that said, most new agey "channeled messages" that I've watched strike me as far too heavy on a specific suspiciously selfish agenda to be worthwhile, let alone real. What I would give as examples of the most fraudulent footage, fortunately, have all been deleted...so...most times, I suppose, the frauds see themselves out. When they don't, then I still can't be arsed to convince sycophants of the bloody obvious—that's an exercise in futility, and I'd rather spend my life doing literally anything else.

Naming objects? You mean like servitors?

Not like creating their personhood, just thinking in an animistic way that they already have a personhood. The name just makes it easier for me, but on that wavelength of consciousness they probably don't need names the way I do.

I haven't checked this thread in a while, but yay for the interesting new topics! I often talk to objects in case they can hear me, but I don't necessarily name my laptop/phone.

Edited by Sharysa on Dec 9th 2019 at 9:25:11 AM

Merry Almost Gregorian-Calendar-Reset, everyone! Ideas for your 2020 vision?

In 2019 I got a couple of goals started, but one was a flop and the other remains at "begun"—and I still haven't seen a dentist, which I penned for a goal at Christmas 2018.

2020 is another chance (if you want to get schmaltzy, every day is another chance, but I mean a "temporal whip crack" new chance) for me to actually finish an overly-outlined-not-one-word-of-actual-prose novel for what I call my own personal JanuaWriMo and FebruWriMo. Two other writing projects require intensive historical research that I do have a compilation of actual physical books (and highlighters and notecards) for, but I'll leave that researching for March and April, and the writing for May and June. And will aim to see a dentist again someday.

My goals are to finish all my half/nearly-finished projects that I kept getting distracted by, lol. Making good headway on them, at least.

Januawrimo and Februawrimo were a bust—I got an unanticipated case of Visual Arts muse instead—but hey! Look at that! You did it! You finished a the thingggg ~

What're you going to be working on while you wait for the project to get editable (as in, wait to forget it enough that you can turn a fresh new eye on it again for editing)? Is there a new epic in the works, or more the short stories and poems? Gardening and crafts, even?

Indeed! I finally finished "The Crocodile God's" first draft. It was weird not having to frantically stare at the screen and do my "delete/undo/delete-again" dance for the first couple of days, but now I've spent time just feeling some relief that I knocked out one of my many, many unfinished projects. <3

Also, Haik is obviously happy that I finished a "new story" for him, like he told me in that one poem everyone loves on Tumblr, but I'm a little freaked out. Like, I understand that he's happy because none of his old myths have survived Spanish conquest, but he's just SO FUCKING HAPPY for a new one, to the point where his energy is starting to feel different in meditations now. Sometimes he doesn't act or even SOUND the same anymore. I don't know what the fuck is going on, but... Yay for Happy God?

While I'm trying to get that last bit of feedback to get the draft seen by an Inkitt editor, I'm basically gonna finish my next two unfinished projects. And then I'll start working on the potential webcomic I'm thinking about.

I planted some strawberry seeds and sleeping fern seeds, and they are very cute little sprouts now, but they'll need a couple more weeks to start looking like proper plants. And for the strawberries, I need a couple of weeks to actually photograph them. SPROUTS ARE TINY. I can barely see them when I look at them, so my iPhone is hopeless.

And in more Otherworld news, my therapist advised me to talk to the plants about my lack-of-money issues, and they seem... happy? Usually I just pet them a minute and tell them "hi guys, time to get water and grow big!" because I don't like venting about my issues to my plants, but whenever I finally admit "hey, I really need more money and I would like my work to finally take off after years of struggling, but I don't know how to get either of those," I hear a tiny little chorus of "Yay!"

It's not "Yay! Human spoke to us!" like they say when I greet them for a regular watering session, but more like "Yay! Human said something important! "

Edited by Sharysa on Feb 29th 2020 at 11:47:48 AM

Personal goals: Finish my first draft and edit a second draft.

Spiritual goals: Continue my rune study. Figure out what the divinations I'm getting mean.

So that went down like an iron balloon.

How's everybody holding up? My offline friends of over a decade had been jokingly prepping and refining plans for a reanimated undead plague scenario...which we never expected to actually enact, but here we are in the designated safehouse out in the country. (It's nothing fancy, not a nuclear bunker or anything, it's just one of our friends could never quite figure out a way to move closer to the city, and we joked that it would be more ideal to take a stand against the walking dead of an overdone and passe sci-fi genre, over there. Which is to say, here. It was a joke. It was supposed to be a funny.) Anyway, I guess this is suburbs, except that every other empty lot has coconut palms, or plantain trees, or citronella mixed in with lemongrass which is annoying even though we shouldn't be stealing aromatherapeutic blades of grass from the neighbours anyway. Besides, we can't anymore. Despite being outside the big city, the municipal government still came down pretty hard with firefighters trucking by, spraying the outsides of houses with disinfectant.

And then issuing only one quarantine pass per residential unit.

And then extending the lockdown two more weeks than originally announced, because the number of new cases in my country are going up instead of going down.

The dystopian-apocalyptic sleepovers have been grand, I could not hope to have gotten stuck indoors with a better adventuring party.

But I'm about three-fourths of the way through The Boxer Codex which is a primary historical document describing early colonial (that is, necessary precolonial) Southeast Asian religions and cultures.

That's Miguel Roxo de Brito, Papua New Guinea, 1581 or 1582. Footnotes say this Final Fantasy Summon is corroborated by Francisco Viera SJ in 1559, and Nicolau Nunes SJ in 1576.

The real-life animal and stone must have been, respectively, the cuscus (a marsupial endemic to that region of Papua New Guinea) and fossilized damar resin. But there are uncannily similar folkloric Carbuncle Creature beings with origins attributed to the New World and South America. So the King of Waigeo might have been trolling Miguel, or Miguel is trolling me the reader.

Holding up, mostly. I was kicked out of one of my forum games last week for being inactive. This wasn't a surprise so much as a long, slow inevitability, but I WAS surprised to get banned without even a courtesy warning of "hey, we know we were planning on doing a plot to fix X Character's inactivity, but you're going through a lot of stuff and at this point, we think it's best for you to give up X Character or make a new account entirely."

Ironically, this happened when I was about to tell them something NICE. I got a hurdy-gurdy kit and I was gonna talk to them about how I could now occupy the quarantine time with cheap, bare-bones renditions of "The Witcher (2019)'s" music.

And I’d really feel less blindsided if things hadn’t gone on for seven/eight years. I mean, they put up with me for this long, and right when I told them I was finally getting my muse back and was in the process of solving things so everyone gets less hassles to deal with, that’s when they finally decide to ban me? Did they only put up with me because I was a good roleplayer for the first few years, and then I was going through too much stuff to keep at my former level?

By all means, I’m probably overthinking everything because of the damn quarantine and barely going outside for a month, but whenever I stop getting mad about it, there’s just so many weird little questions I keep asking.

Btw, the spirits are actually running amok with this, despite being a pretty minor issue. The Morrigan AND American Gods' Anansi are starting to goad me into being more angry because "ANGER GETS SHIT DONE, TIME TO UNLEASH ALL THIS PENT-UP TRICKSTER ENERGY."

Edited by Sharysa on Apr 19th 2020 at 8:48:14 AM