As I have probably mentioned before, I was raised without religion.\u00a0 Christianity was pervasive and ubiquitous throughout my childhood, of course: on television and in the Cub Scouts, in my textbooks and in everyone else\u2019s assumptions.\u00a0 I even went to church for Christmas, sometimes, and Easter.\u00a0 But my upbringing did not include any actual, direct instruction in Christian religious doctrine or practice.<\/p>\n
My early explorations in religion, such as they were, were self-guided, and\u2014ultimately\u2014their own undoing.\u00a0 One hears about That God and the Bible quite a lot in Cub Scouts and in a Kansas elementary school, but always in ways which presume that one already knows what the speaker is talking about.\u00a0 Now, generally, this is actually a very effective indoctrination tool: the presumption of knowledge backs most people into a corner where they will agree to anything to avoid admitting that they don\u2019t know what you\u2019re talking about.\u00a0 That never worked on me.\u00a0 Gathering the impression that the explanations for all the gibberish could be found in a certain book, I picked up the children\u2019s Bible my parents house.\u00a0 There were rules, I learned (so many rules, but mostly the Big Ten), with dire consequences promised for breaking them.\u00a0 But I could see that those punishments weren\u2019t being meted out.\u00a0 The only conclusions that my pre-teen mind could make from this contradiction were that That God must be absent or unjust.<\/p>\n
Thus began my decade-and-a-half \u201cphase\u201d as an angry agnostic.\u00a0 I wanted no part in any gods.\u00a0 I found the Neo-pagan movement (Wicca and its offshoots, in particular), and although I found a home, of sorts, for myself \u2026 I rejected their gods, too.<\/p>\n
All of which is to say that I have no early-life framework for worship or devotion.\u00a0 I have, in fact, often compared worship of any sort to spiritual slavery.\u00a0 So\u2026. For about twelve years I celebrated seasonal festivals to satisfy needs I can no better articulate now than I could then.\u00a0 Nor am I yet certain what changed in my head or why, that day in St. Louis when I suddenly called out to Dionysus, Hephaestus, and Apollo.<\/p>\n
Six years after that sharp about-face, my altar is home to nine gods and three familiar spirits.\u00a0 The spirits I have solid working relationships with: although we are still negotiating the precise terms of our arrangements, we are friends and partners.\u00a0 The gods, though \u2026 Dionysus, Hermes, Hephaestus, Baphomet, Rhea, Athena, the Kouros, the Witchmother, and the Sun \u2026 some of them are as uncertain what to do with me as I am with them.\u00a0 Each has reached out to me, or me to them, and made solid contact at least one time.\u00a0 Rhea was the first power whose voice I could discern calling to me from the darkness; Athena found her way to my altar through a series of omens; the Kouros answered my call when I went searching for meaning in the Divine Masculine, and the Witchmother came to me through the statue I had used to search for the Divine Feminine; Hephaestus stood at my side when I sat at the bench; Hermes is the chief god of the modern Western esoteric tradition; and Dionysus \u2026\u00a0 well, that\u2019s a slightly longer story.<\/p>\n
I recall deciding, in the strange days leading up to that first call, that if I were ever to worship the gods, Dionysus would be among them.\u00a0 A youthful, effeminate, sometimes cross-dressing god.\u00a0 The god of wine and ecstasy, of loosing yourself in the beat of the drum, and of running and fucking in the woods.\u00a0 The god who causes and cures madness, and who disdains the kings appointed by his father Zeus.\u00a0 Himself an initiate into the Mysteries of an older, more primal goddess.\u00a0 As long as I have made mead, I have done so in the name of Dionysus; those of you who have had my wine can attest to its improbable efficacy.\u00a0 Dionysus was the first god to appear before me at my initiation, and he is always the most firmly present when I perform my pentagram rite.\u00a0 His leopard visits my astral temple.\u00a0 And yet, at the same time, he is the most inscrutable of the gods upon my altar.\u00a0 When I seek him out, I cannot find him.\u00a0 Only Athena has less to say to me when I pour the libations.<\/p>\n
I wonder, sometimes, if it would be easier if it were in my nature to devote myself entirely to a single god.\u00a0 Could I then count on the god to tell me what was wanted of me, and what I would get from it in my return?\u00a0 If that were my only dilemma, though, I could simply go the other obvious route, joining one of the Hellenistic recon communities.\u00a0 I could be well-loved there, as an actual Classicist.\u00a0 But my own UPG is too far afield, and my witchcraft too radical (to say nothing of my feminism) for those groups I\u2019ve seen.<\/p>\n
Each of the powers who has come to me has told me a little bit of what I need to do.\u00a0 Just enough that, with a little bit of luck and creativity, I have (so far) been able to struggle up to the next step.\u00a0 I make offerings of coffee, candles, wine, and\/or mead at least three times a week.\u00a0 I must not abandon my visionary practice\u2014I must, in fact, escalate it\u2014but I must also have daily planetary ritual<\/em>.\u00a0 But the Orphic hymns aren\u2019t quite \u2026. working.\u00a0 There\u2019s something lacking : something maybe 25 degrees off.\u00a0 And while they\u2019ve been showing me how to make masks, magically, I\u2019m still trying to puzzle out some of the material components of the process.\u00a0 And I have to keep with the lunar and solar calendar I have already devoted so much of my life to.<\/p>\n Now, don\u2019t get me wrong.\u00a0 So far, none of these are hardships <\/em>(well, except for the occasional extremely hung over Saturday or Sunday dawn offering rite, and they\u2019re usually pretty forgiving if I\u2019m late).\u00a0 But \u2026 there are disparate pieces that I haven\u2019t figured out how to smelt into a cohesive hole.<\/p>\n How do you obey the gods when they talk so little, and you can\u2019t quite hear them when they do?\u00a0 When you have no background in \u201creligion\u201d as it is so frequently understood?\u00a0 When your knowledge of history, and the way in which the gods have been deployed to further\u2014or, given a less charitable set of assumptions, participated in and even instigated\u2014injustice in the name of power for as long as there have been priests and kings, makes the whole idea of \u201creligion\u201d more than a little suspect?\u00a0 When your grip on sanity is adequately shaky that you\u2019re not one hundred percent certain you\u2019re hearing anything but the echoes of your own derangement?\u00a0 And, perhaps most to the point, where do you find the missing pieces of a ritual practice that has never quite existed in the form you\u2019re working toward?<\/p>\n True story, y\u2019all: I have no fucking idea what I\u2019m doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I have probably mentioned before, I was raised without religion.\u00a0 Christianity was pervasive and ubiquitous throughout my childhood, of course: on television and in the Cub Scouts, in my textbooks and in everyone else\u2019s assumptions.\u00a0 I even went to church for Christmas, sometimes, and Easter.\u00a0 But my upbringing did not include any actual, direct … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[38,94,194,258,265],"class_list":["post-1060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-by-the-way-im-crazy","tag-gods","tag-personal-practice","tag-stories","tag-talking-to-spirits"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-h6","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1060\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}