It really annoys me when writers, usually wiccan, assume that all modern pagans follow the wiccan wheel of the year and traditions.
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The original blog that posted this is gone now. So if anyone knows who to give credit to for this, please let me know.
So I’m reading some Celtic mythology. While I believe in the Irish deities, and see their myths as possible, I have trouble believing in it’s Welsh counterpart. I think I might like the ancient Irish culture more than the religion.
If I’m asking myself what a the child of an Irish Celt and an Alexandrian Greek would believe, the culture is rather important. They’d probably have a very Irish lifestyle regardless of beliefs and their life and holidays would be regulated by the land they were in, so timing would likewise be Irish.. Just random observations and thoughts. Monday (8/6)
Wednesday (8/8)
Before I go into detail of what she's asking me, I just want to say my relationship with Demeter is complicated. I wouldn't call her a patron goddess exactly, and if I did I'd probably get a stern talking to. I did have a past life in Greece in which my mother claimed to be the daughter of Demeter. When my mother passed in that life I was still young and never really thought to question her. I do have a great deal of memory from that life and have questioned Demeter on the subject. I do firmly believe that demigods did and do exist. Demeter has never answered me on the subject, and the closest I ever got to an answer was "If you are my granddaughter, well, I'm already your grandmother. If you are not, it wouldn't change a thing". And so I call her grandmother, and because of this, view the Greek gods as family, which further mucks up how I choose my faith. It also doesn't help that I have had past lives in Egypt, and Celtic Ireland and England. So choosing a pantheon, is for me, completely impossible. As a hard polytheist, I honestly do believe all pantheons exist and are like little ruling families for a certain area. When a person honors and worships more than one, it's kinda like a marriage alliance between those pantheons. In this incarnation itself, my ancestors are Celtic and Cherokee. So often I honestly feel that by trying to choose a pantheon, I am in fact trying to choose a side of my family to honor, and the others to be ignored. Believing that they are all single individual entities, it's hard for me to be like "Oh, I like you people the best, and I'm just going to ignore you other people and pretend you either don't exist or that you're really the same people as the people I like". But I honestly do like reconstructionist types of worship, though I do very much still identify as a Witch and love magick. Further complicating things is whatever is going on between me and Christianity.
Because Demeter is awesome and very close to me, she sees how stressed I am. I barely know how to explain my path to others, let alone how to define it. "Oh it's a mix of all these things" is a crap answer. So her task for me is to pinpoint exactly what my path is. Reconcile all the different parts together. As I like a reconstructionist view, She wants me to basically be like "Well, I like this from modern paganism, so how would this have been done by the ancients and which culture would have done this? If it's entirely new, what's something similar they would have done?". In the end after all the research and questioning, she wants me to essentially write out a guide to my path and make it available to y'all to read. Will my end result be 100% reconstructionist of some kind? I doubt it. The way I'm honestly looking at this is "If a Greek from Alexandria married and Irish Celt, what would their children believe and practice?" Is that scenario far fetched? Yeah. It is. But not too much. The idea came from the knowledge that Rome conquered England while both were still pagan, and the people intermarried. Their children would have learned religious practices from both parents. So I just stretched the idea a little bit more. . . . what if that Alexandrian Greek was living in Alexandria after it became Roman, but didn't want to give up their beliefs, so they moved to this new land Rome had conquered (kinda like Protestants going to America), but found it disatisfactory as well? Hey look at that island! I'll go there! Yeah, I realize this almost certainly never happened, but it makes a good launch pad for what ifs. And considering I'm essentially trying to blend those three together. . . . If I can reconcile those 3, I have a feeling the christopagan aspect will just fall into place. So to figure this out, I'm going to start by researching Hellenic reconstructionist paths. Again. I do have much of my original research. And I just bought Hellenismos Today, and I've been looking around Hellenismos.us, and from there I'll be looking at Greco-Egyptian Polytheism. I don't want to necessarily honor the entire Egyptian pantheon, only those that have specifically called to me. And the Greeks are my main deities. I already know that much. I very much believe that a Greek who practiced Greco-Egyptian Polytheism wouldn't have actually worshiped the whole Egyptian pantheon, but only a few, with their main worship being reserved for the Greeks. From there I'll go poke around Celtic reconstructionism and reread some of my pagan/Wiccan books. While I'm in the middle of doing all this, or perhaps a little after, I get to detail my devotions and offerings and celebrations and things for a month so I can figure out what my daily/weekly "routine" is. It's going to be a lot of work, but I know in the end I will still be Hellenic. I will still be a Christopagan. Sekhmet and Ma'at will still be patron goddesses. And I'll no longer feel like I'm being pulled in 4 different directions. I may keep a journal of some sort here on the blog so you guys can go down this road with me. We'll see. I'd like to have this figured out by Samhain. :) hellenicproblems: |
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