Pondering myself in context.

[kiya]

I've been thinking a fair amount about how I got here, religiously speaking, and where I'm going; it winds up being really complicated, so I've been having urges to write it all down so I get it all out where I can see it.

Dunno if anyone else is liable to find it in the slightest bit interesting.


I really don't know what my parents think of religion these days. When I was a small child, my father identified as Anglican and my mother as Catholic; neither was church-attending. So I was raised secular-Christian (you know, with the major celebrations of Santa Brings Presents and Bunny Candy Day). (I'm always baffled by people who are stunned by the concept of secular Christians. It's sort of my default expectation of what people are; people who are notably religious in any form ping my unusuals. Including me. That last amuses me.)

I attended a preschool in the basement of the local United Methodist church. It wasn't religious in any way, just a standard preschool program; I realise just now as I think of it it was one of the things that that congregation did to be an active presence in the community. That church, by the way, had an excellent playground. Tire swings and tunnels and all kinds of excitement.

I must have been six or seven when my parents asked me if I'd be interested in attending church. I got the impression that they would prefer I did, but they didn't pressure me about it aside from that perception. (I should ask, someday, if it was accurate. I learned only a few years ago that they asked because some of the neighbours had raised the concern that I was being raised godless.) They told me that one of my friends had offered to take me to hers, and that our neighbours across the street, an elderly couple named Bea and Jack, had offered to take me to theirs. (I had adopted Bea and Jack as grandparents a while before that.)

Bea and Jack went to the Catholic church that was adjacent to Hyattsville Elementary. (It had an attached school; we always felt sort of sorry for all the children in their identical uniforms playing jump-rope on the asphault next to us, because we would go walking down to recess past them, all disorderly and chattery, and they were so restrained.) When I described the church to jenett a while back, she informed me that it had been built in the fifties. It was sort of cathedral-like in the interior, the quality of the light was faintly green -- almost all the light seemed to come filtered through the stained glass windows or from the banks of candles. And it was completely incomprehensible to me. Stand up, sit down, kneel, some people go up to the front to do something with the priest but I wasn't supposed to, completely unstructured. The incomprehensibility of the ritual, combined with the fact that it looked like it ought to have had Quasimodo swinging from the chandeliers, frightened me.

Shari went to the United Methodist church; her parents were very active in the community. (Her father sang in the choir.) Services there, after the processional, started out with the Children's Sermon, where all the smalls in the congregation were called up to the front for a little personal chat with the pastor. At the end of that, we were all given little pamphlets with word-finds and connect-the-dots puzzles in them, just a folded sheet of paper, and shooed back to our seats; the idea was, I suspect, to keep us quiet during the rest of the service.

Unfortunately for that purpose, the pamphlets were too simple to occupy me for more than five or ten minutes, which meant that I wound up paying intense attention to what was going on. I listened to the sermons with intensity -- Rev. Ewald gave lovely sermons -- I sang the hymns. (In time I wound up serving as an acolyte -- Shari was my partner, and her sister was generally the crucifer on days we served. And in church plays. Which bemuses people a fair amount when I mention it to them, and also gives me lots of handy referents for playing Finale.)

The Christianity I learned about was personal; the stories in the readings were all of people who had, in some way, encountered a God who was aware of them as individuals, who responded to their conditions, who was present and direct. I had my first experiences of transcendence in the hymn-singing, but the resonance I found there wasn't personal in the same way as in the stories. Sometimes I got the impression that people in the congregation had that sort of personal experience, but I never did. I sort of drifted away over time, not believing, not not-believing, expecting that somewhere there was a god who would be willing to talk to me. That became one of my standards.

Other Sundays I went with neither Shari nor Bea and Jack, but begged off and watched cartoons.

Somewhere in and around there, my schoolfriends had had a conversation about baptism, or possibly a baptism happened in one of the services, and I wound up curious about it. I asked my parents what I'd been baptised.

I hadn't been. (When I mentioned this to papersky, she asked if my parents weren't worried about the faeries. Given my life these days, perhaps they should have been.)

My parents told me that since they were from different religions, they didn't think it was right to raise me in one or the other of them, so they'd decided to let me get old enough to make a decision for myself. And then I could get baptised in that. I spent a lot of time thinking about that; it made the whole religion thing into an Adult Responsibility, and something that I'd been trusted to be able to work out for myself. (I sometimes say that my first encounter with actual religion was in a comparison shopping context, and I think that informs a lot of my attitudes.)

When we moved to Darnestown, I got asked once what my family's religion was. (My brother had taken up the habit of intermittently attending services with a friend of his who lived down the street from us.) My response was something like, "I'm a Methodist, my dad's an Anglican, my mom's a Catholic, and my brother's a Unitarian Universalist." I didn't know what a Unitarian was, but it was a nice big set of words and it sure sounded impressive. I was proud of that diversity in my family, though it wasn't a big deal for any of us.

I stopped attending church at all when we moved -- we only went back to First United for the Christmas Candlelight Concert services, which were glorious. (And there's a reason that the cross I wear I describe as a Methodist cross breeding with a treble clef.) (I said that once at alt.polycon, someone whipped around and stared at it, and then said, weakly, ". . . I thought I misheard you." Hah.)

I got increasingly agnostic over time, or what I thought of as agnostic; I was still looking for a god who was interested in talking to me, but I didn't know if any such existed.

Time passes without much other stuff going on, and I got to high school, where I started being able to deal with people again. (Junior high was hell. Shustal.) Among other folks, I met io, who introduced me to Wicca. I suspect we were at the age to be the leading edge of mass-market Wiccandom, back before Silver Ravenwolf was a twinkle in Llewellyn's eye. The first thing I read was The Truth about Witchcraft Today; I don't remember what else I borrowed, aside from Uncle Bucky's Big Blue Book and The Spiral Dance. So my exposure to pop Wicca wasn't as dumbed down as a lot of it is these days, at least.

There were a few of us who went through trying on Wiccan rituals and structures around then. Some of us it stuck to more than others. I always felt awkward and self-conscious trying on the rituals, as if I was trying to put on a garment that didn't quite fit right. I was still Wiccish enough, though, that when I got to college I spent a lot of time looking for a "non-kitschy pentacle". It took me a long time to find one.

I came back from Spain with a sword. (I went to Toledo. It was Required.) I had found a goddess who would talk to me; I bound myself to Her service with a vow on that sword. I didn't know how to hear other gods at all, only Her. I didn't have a name for Her; She wouldn't tell. I tended to refer to Her sometimes as Eris because of Her sense of humor; I had read the Principia Discordia by this point, probably as a result of having been lent Illuminatus! when I was at CTY. (It took me about a day and a half to read it; the fellow I borrowed it from was impressed.) After a conversation with erispope a few years ago, I added "Baubo" to my terms for Her. Mostly, I didn't use any name; She hadn't given me one to call Her by, and while there were no objections to what I used, they were clearly epithets or actings-as rather than identifications.

My mother, meanwhile, had gone somewhat new age shamanistic, though I don't know if it was for personal meaning or because it was a useful source of imagery for her art. I still don't know; we're not exactly close enough to ask about these things.

College: keshwyn and I wound up as roommates in part because of religious compatibility. We could do ritual together; we still can, and this is a good and fine thing, despite our increasingly differing angles on things.

A lot happened to me at Wellesley. Among other things, I had a catastrophic stress breakdown (somewhat influenced by the Unseen World, though that was sort of a last straw on a camel already somewhat battered by the IB) which led to me eventually dropping out of school. I wish now that I'd gone and talked to the fae who used to lurk around Lake Waban, though; I suppose it wasn't the right time back then.

I had several relationships that were deeply entangled with the Unseen in ways that turned out, in the long run, to be unfortunate. I don't know that I can talk about that here properly; it's not all mine to tell. Eric, then my crazy ex, then Chay; of those, the relationship with Chay was the only one that ended close to well. (As far as I could tell, we each had something the other needed to have in a relationship; once we had managed to give each other that thing, the remainder wasn't enough to sustain it.) All of these were vaguely pagan or magically-flavoured, and often through them I could hear other gods than my Lady.

This happened when I got involved with brooksmoses, too; I found this quite tidy, because he's a Methodist. And thus I'd managed to lurch around to more or less where I'd started from, winding up there from a completely different angle.

I had a fairly intense Christo-pagan period around then, which started to fade back as I got urges to start looking into my cultural heritages.

I'm an American mutt. I give my ethnicity as half-Yankee, quarter-Boston Irish, quarter Polish. (You know when that thing was going around that showed the way Bush and Kerry are related to each other? I'm related to 'em too, at about the same level of separation. Half-Yankee; it's an ethnicity, damnit.) The traditions of my Yankee side I know and have as important to me, and they persist in some of the family traditions that I maintain. (A while back on one of the Kemetic boards I read, someone got tetchy about people celebrating Christmas; I noted that damnit, I can't do a decent job of ancestor worship or continuity while rejecting the traditions of my bloodline.)

Which left me with the other two.

I have never been terribly drawn to Celtic stuff, which has probably saved me tremendous aggravation and inspiration of grey hairs. However, there's one thing that I wanted to track down information about, which is the Irish ways of treating and training the Sight. (My mother tells me that it's in our family line; I've had flashes, she's had them, and apparently her father had them as well.)

Recommendation: Do not bother trying to research actual historial Irish attitudes towards precognition unless you're a lot better versed in the stuff than I am. (Both historical Irish practices and serious research.) It's enough to make one want to put their eyes out with perfectly formed quartz crystals that have been left to bathe in the moonlight for the full moons of three months. Fluff fluff fluff fluff fluff. Agh.

I started looking into Polish pagan practices, and with them the Slavic forms of Christianity. In here I found the wonderful word 'dwojwierny', which I have kept. I also found a set of basic attitudes that were fairly familiar to me, overlapping dualities and a certain way in which the natural world intersects with the unseen, and I tried to find more out.

It's hard to find good books about Slavic paganism, by the way.

Somewhere in here nex0s recommended Jambalaya on alt.poly; I found it in a used bookstore when I was visiting brooksmoses and read it. It was fascinating and rich to me, and I found it inspiring; at the same time, the author's worldview was very much shaped by her ethnicity. I wound up feeling a bit that while I wanted to learn more about Vodou and the other Diaspora religions, I wasn't qualified, because I'm not black. I kept rooting around in my own heritage instead.

I pursued a good bit of the Slavic paganism, trying to find cultural practices and mythological information. None of the gods wanted me, though, at least not that I could find; perhaps I just need to be politely introduced. The spirits, those I had resonance with of sorts, but not the gods.

Somewhere in here, teinedreugan and I started discussing tattoos with each other. And I had an idea for a design, something that I wanted to work on, something that I felt I needed; I occupied myself with trying to track down what resonances a variety of cultures had for the images involved. I focused on the Slavic ones, mostly, but accumulated data from a variety of other sources. I mentioned this to jenett, who recommended to me a book on body modification as a spiritual practice. Which I got.

I was reading through it, and it had, here and there, charts of correspondences -- these symbols are associated with this particular god/goddess, and so on.

One of them associated Bast with the lotus.

I had a flash of vision, cat's eyes through greenery, the flower draped above, and I had to go look and see if that correspondence was genuine. (I'm highly skeptical of correspondence charts.) And as I researched and rampaged around, I found Kemetic temples, first the House of Netjer, then Per Ankh. And I found that I had to learn, a raging hunger of knowledge, and found concepts that suited me, that fit, that were articulating parts of a structure I had been trying to build.

It was a very intense following couple of months, as I collected book recommendations and meditated and tried to learn.

And I poked at my Lady a lot, and asked Her, "Are you a netjert? Which one are you, if you are?"

She said, "Do your research. You'll be more satisfied with the answer."

Then I noticed a second presence, one that I'd only perceived around the very edges of attention, someone I'd never been able to hear clearly before. And I developed a suspicion, and I researched a name. And I said to the presence, "Are you Set?"

He said, "About fucking time. When are you going to dye your hair again, kid?" (I hennaed it when I was in England in 2000 with erispope.) My understanding is that He flatly refused to speak to me directly when I was still thinking in a duotheistic structural setting; He'd show Himself enough that I could tell someone was there, but not actually much other than the sense of gathering storm.

Eventually I asked my Lady if She was Hethert. She smiled at me.

I made contact with a number of other netjer over time, Khnum and Wepwawet primary among those. I started making icons, getting my hands back into clay; the need to get back into the clay has only gotten more intense over time. I could never figure out how to sculpt Hetharu; She told me that when I had it right, I'd know, and not to worry about it until then. Netjer I knew less well I could shape; the one I'd known for ten years, I couldn't. It bothered me.

I spent a year or so intensely and solely Kemetic, building myself a strong foundation. On jenett's recommendation, I started reading The Cauldron, and started picking bits and pieces up about other pagan faiths. One side effect of this was meeting elfwreck and having my attention caught by Feri.

I poked about learning bits of this for a while, and ran up on some shoals with my relationship with Set. Basically, there's some stuff in my psyche that's broken; I recognise and am aware of its brokenness. Unfortunately, because of the way the brokenness ties into such things as sexuality and violence, it puts a bit of a spanner in my relationship with Set. He pointed me at the Feri poking I'd been doing and indicated, basically, that if I wanted to have a functional interaction with Him, I couldn't get them in Kemetic circles -- I should go learn the Feri ones and fix myself and then we'd be square.

I picked up a copy of Etheric Anatomy and read it. And, among other things, it described what I see. I've never seen another bit of writing about aura structure and aura reading that was in accord with what I see on the rare occasions I can perceive the damn things. It also had some stuff that explains some of my weirder Unseen perceptions, such as my phantom penis phenomenon.

I kept reading and trying to learn what I could. At about the point that I decided to join feri, by a fit of the sort of mad whimsical synchronisity that my life seems to function under (hail Eris and dua Wepwawet), a discussion started up about the possibility of a training group in Boston. I poked at bits and pieces of what I could find publically available about Feri theology, and realised that my mind was automatically assembling them into a system that syncretised with Kemetic stuff.

So now I needed to pick up that and see if it was right, or if it was just my mad pattern-making tendencies that were doing things like that. And I peer sidelong at Set and the rest of Them, who have this habit of just not talking in detail about what Their motivations are. Do the work yourself, kid, you'll appreciate the answers more.

I read a little about the Star Goddess, and pondered Het-herw, specifically in Her sky-goddess role, especially syncretising with Nut. And now I know how I need to sculpt Her, when I have real clay; the vision is there and clear and intense and real. And I have no clue whatsoever how much They're funning me here. (Back to the giant fluffy cat-toy with the bell in of the gods feeling.)

I was foiled in getting enough Feri information to feed the gaping maw of my religious hunger, and so I had time to start assimilating what I have here.

The thing is, from a Kemetic perspective, I fully believe in the possibility of two distinct entities simultaneously being a third, combined form; there's the being both A and B and also AB all over the damn place. So I can conceptualise that superstructure, and wonder at the bits that are trying to become AB on me, putting that structure together and hinting that I'll come out of it with something that's both-and-neither after going through all the bloody work. Scares the hell out of me, but it's still the long-term; I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.

In the pause, the Slavic urges come back, and I get poked by my akhu a lot and the spirits who knew them. And I'm going into another focusedly dwojwierny period, though that'll probably fade off if I don't feed it with theological interpretation.

And I study the Diaspora religions in my spare time, knowing that they are an influence on both the modern Kemetic practices and on Feri, and wondering what's all in there, because there are things there that I Know I need to know, and I don't know how much they're in the other practices.

I joked the other day that I'm trying to accumulate enough religions that, on average, everyone in my social circle has one. (And my social circle includes a fair number of atheists.) I'm making a good start.

I have to be a Discordian. It's the least sufficient explanation for my life.


I'm not actually sure that helps me sort my head out.