Shines within darkness

Michael Eldritch in Behind the Walls, Featured Voices

Why are we here? What is our larger purpose in life? What lies beyond the short span of years we possess with this realm… does anything? Are there gods, creators, or any other supernatural entity that oversees or coordinates our existence?

These are just a few of the questions we either have or should be asking ourselves. Our existence is defined by the journey we make, and without questioning that existence, it is a sadly linear trek. I am no spiritual expert- no adept in the field or awakened master- and claim no special power of perception beyond that which I believe we all possess. However, having said that, I have acquired a rather significant amount of experience in the school of life. I am well read, open minded to opposing views, and perceptive concerning the nature of my fellow beings.

I am writing this column not from a position of authority or superiority, but from a position of contemplation and consideration. I welcome any thoughts, comments, or criticisms. Most of what I will discuss comes to me as a result of my own spiritual development over the years. I have spent almost sixteen years “behind the wall”, as those of us incarcerated say. Despite this fact, I have managed to keep abreast of the modern community and the progress of our society through various media and most importantly the continued support of friends and family. The isolation of the years has resulted in an unusual environment for my spiritual growth to evolve. Prejudiced, disruptive, frustrating, and highly negative in nature. In addition, given my own physical build, the necessity of maintaining physical readiness is not an option but a requirement.

So how does one find themselves in such an environment? How do you overcome not only your own inner strife and complications, but also the frustration and negativity of the people around you? How can you set aside the anger of humiliation and the shallowness of your fellow men? Good questions and I’ll do my best to show you how I’ve done it.

First, I’ll give you a quick spiritual/religious background. I was raised in a relatively atheistic household until the age of seven, at which time my mother became heavily involved in the Christian church- specifically, the Pentecostal denomination. As a youth, many of the interactive events that the church provided for a young child were enjoyable, and while I have always questioned the “infallibility” aspect of the Christian Bible, I found a degree of peace in the religious trappings.

By the age of fourteen, I was highly active in youth group activities, and even contemplated a possible future in the church- perhaps as a missionary or pastor. I had also attended a Christian school for a few years at this point and my studies had revealed many holes in the modern Christian philosophy. I also possessed a healthy interest in the occult and alternative religions and philosophies- primarily because the synchronicities in the beliefs of history helped to confirm the elements I believed already. I was wise enough to keep this interest under wraps from both my parents and my fellow Christians because the close-minded mentality of people in general and monotheistic believers in particular were already an obvious factor in my life.

As time passed, less of the Christian mythos seemed to conform to common sense, and the historical aspect only seemed to confirm a high level of inaccuracy within the religion. A key linchpin finally broke me from that path completely, and though others have arisen since then, it was crucial in my transition. Over twenty years have passed, and I have made several mistakes. I have suffered numerous tragedies and few enough triumphs. However, my spiritual development has carried on, and my quest for who I am and why I am here has continued unabated. At this point, I have come full-circle from completely disregarding the reality of anygods, and believing in only higher and lower spiritual powers, to coming to the realization that the divine does indeed exist. It is only my perception of who and what the gods and powersarethat has shifted.

Reincarnation is a key component of my belief structure, and is one of the few elements of my faith that is indelible. The logical structure behind the process, which explains many of the anomalies of existence, has made it the bedrock on which I have built my beliefs. The gods and goddesses and their attendant spiritual entities are quite real to me. If you were to ask me which pantheon has it right, I could answer you easily- they all do. There are certainly false deities throughout the ages, but for the greater part, if an entity received the title and worship of a god, it probably existed in that state at some point.

Another factor, at least within my own mythos, is that all experience presents the opportunity for growth. Negative experience possesses at least as much potential as positive experience, and is in fact just as important as the positive. We require the contrast to understand the nature of the two polarities. This does not mean that we should engage in negative behavior, only that we should not avoid the negative at all cost, because it is a necessary component of our development. How we deal with such negativity is of great import. It can tear us down. It can crush us. On the other hand, it can result in the amplification of our spiritual light.

There is no light as bright as that which shines within darkness.

The Gargarean

The Dionysian Artist in The Dionysian Artist

Not to sound too much like an arse licker but I was honoured when I was invited to contribute a monthly column to this project. Polytheism is something that is deeply important to me, but also something that I’ve been a bit of an outsider of. Given that this is my
first post I thought I’d take the opportunity to introduce myself, while also deal with some issues I face as a Hellenic polytheist.

I go by many names, most call me Mark, but I prefer Markos. I’m a professional artist that makes a living producing artwork in the streets of Melbourne, Australia. It’s a fascinating job as I’m both part of the general public, but completely outside of it – being absorbed into my own world of art.

This is similar to my experience of the ‘pagan’ community. It is difficult to pin point my obsession with ancient Greece, but I know that it opened up when I was introduced to the internet at fifteen. As a silly teen, I thought I was the only one that felt drawn to honour these deities but quickly found out that I was not. Then I found myself deeply intimidated by what was being discussed on forums, chats and groups. A diverse range of philosophies, concepts, ideals. Often people wouldn’t flame each other over these augments, they’d send fucking nukes, really – it’s ugly. I didn’t want to get involved and for the last fourteen years I have lurked.

This is strange in itself, as I have been following and reading certain people for years and even though some talk very little about their personal lives I actually know who they are by years of abstract contact. Then again they have no idea who I am… it makes me feel a little creepy…

Something that is fascinating about the recent Polytheist Leadership Conference (PLC) in New York is reading stories of people meeting for the first time in REAL life, even though they have known each other online for years. Common posts talk about how their perceptions of others were changed and how even those that engaged in hellfire flame wars online came to agreeable terms in realty. As an outsider on the other side of the world this is beautiful… and it makes me feel a bit lonely.

I live in a very large country that has a small population, in general terms Australia’s common man is middle class, suburban and sometimes a bit intellectually dim. Even with the luxury of the internet it is difficult meeting people with likeminded concepts in my area, let alone similar beliefs. I have never met a person who actually knows what polytheism is without me having to explain it to them.

So, you see, I’m a bit of a loner.

Something like the PLC is a privilege, a gift. Although you dudes went to some hotel in a town with a weird name, gave lectures to one another for a weekend and went home, it has affected people outside. Reading and hearing the fallout of this event has really set a spark in my heart that makes me *want* to be part of the community.

This is why I am honoured to be invited to write on this site and sincerely hope I contribute some insight to the beauty of polytheism into the future.

Speaking of Syncretism

P. Sufenas Virius Lupus in Speaking of Syncretism

Bring up the topic of “syncretism” to a group of people, and those who even know what the word means at all might have mixed reactions. To many Christians, it implies what I hear people within a certain denomination deride as “Cafeteria Catholicism.” To Muslims, syncretism is fundamentally equal to shirk, their most grievous and heinous sin, because it challenges the completeness and perfection of Islam by “joining” other practices and/or beliefs to their religion, and in particular “partnering” the deities of other religions to Allah. To pagans, it tends to get thrown around relatively commonly as a synonym for “eclecticism,” and depending on the individual pagan’s viewpoint, that can be a good or a bad thing. To some types of historian or religious studies scholars, it might refer to a practice of linking two (or more) different deities between cultures, often with the assumption that such linking either indicates the decline and dilution of a given culture, or a trend toward pantheism and/or monism, which in many of their minds simply shows that monotheism is inevitable with the “advancement” of human cultures through history.

To almost all of the above, I would respond: think again.

While we can dismiss the Catholic (and other Christian) as well as Muslim critiques out-of-hand simply because they reflect theological contexts which are irrelevant to our own, I think the Islamic notion deserves a momentary closer examination for what it reveals. Both Christianity and Islam emerge–like every “new” religion–from a plethora of religious influences and contexts which pre-date their origins, and both were very good at syncretism in their embryonic stages (and, for Christians, their later developmental stages in proselytization and assimilation of other cultures). Even though Islam emerges from Arabic culture and continues many of its practices, including by virtue of denouncing some aspects of Arabian polytheism and revising others (e.g. promotion of Allah as father and head-of-pantheon to only deity), its re-mapping of Allah and his prophets over both Judaism and Christianity is an appropriation and revision of those individual religions. Few groups of people are spoken of more derisively and are condemned more strongly in the surahs of the Qu’ran than polytheists. I wonder if the reason that shirk is such a grave sin is because it is something which the early Muslims perceived, and correctly, to be intrinsic to polytheism, and which thus constituted the greatest threat to the hegemonic monotheism of their own religion.

For the most part, polytheism doesn’t proscribe which deities are valid to be worshipped, and in fact almost every polytheistic culture that exists has happily done so alongside peoples with very different deities, practices, and beliefs. More often than not, the deities of those other peoples cross over into their own pantheons, and have often done so at such an early stage that they have become completely naturalized over the course of time. When we speak of Aphrodite as a Greek goddess, we often do so in ignorance of her Near Eastern origins, despite the Greeks giving her epithets that connect her to her likely origin place of Cyprus. Aprhodite is one example amongst many of this process.

As much as I am of the opinion that polytheism is an expectable, and even perhaps a natural, tendency amongst humans, so too do I think that syncretism is just as intrinsic to polytheism. One cannot be a polytheist without also being a syncretist.

Yes, as much as you might not wish to acknowledge it, every single person reading this column who is a polytheist is already a syncretist. If that horrifies you, I’ll still be here when (or if) you would like to read further. If that excites and fascinates you, please continue to read. If you already knew you were a syncretist…well, you still may want to read to the end of this column, since you’ve come all this way already. 😉

Many polytheists, especially of the reconstructionist variety, have more nasty words for “fluffy” eclectics than anyone else, and they throw syncretists into that mix as well. The reconstructionists who insist on the notion of “cultural purity” as a necessity to be practicing their religion, in many respects, are as disingenuous as the Muslims who took so much of their mythological history from Jewish and Christian narrative, refashioned it, and yet insist that it is the one-and-only-truth about all the figures concerned. The Greeks and the Romans were promiscuously syncretistic, certainly, and the Egyptians were likewise heavily syncretistic at many different periods of their history. The situation with both the Germanic and the Celtic polytheistic religions is of a different sort, even though this non-existent cultural purity notion comes into their pre-Christian phases as well.

Almost all of our information upon which reconstructionist methodologies are employed to build modern forms of Celtic or Germanic practice relies upon sources that are not “native” to the cultures concerned. The ancient Greeks and Romans wrote about these peoples during the pre-Christian period, and interpretatio Graeca et Romana, as well as ideas about “noble savages” and other such literary themes that were more or less reified in the minds of the writers concerned, are so heavily employed in those sources that they cannot be extracted without losing a great deal of content. The same is true of the post-Christian period, even though people from given cultures were writing the literatures concerned, where both Christian and classical literature influenced every word written in the case of Ireland, and both of these plus Irish sources influenced every word written for Icelandic literate cultures. These influences are often more emphasized and have been employed to highlight, enhance, or revise materials that existed in the native Irish or Norse/Icelandic traditions. One is as much indebted to Jerusalem and Rome (both the polytheist and the Christian Rome) if one has ever looked at a source from medieval Ireland or Iceland as “lore.”

But–and here’s the point that many seem to miss in all this–that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

As long as what is being stated doesn’t invalidate polytheism, or simply is written to bolster “faith in One God and His Son Jesus” and the like, there isn’t really anything wrong with simply accepting myth as myth, whether it comes from an indigenous European (or other) culture, or it was invented with pre-existing characters and places in a given locality who are then written into a story that parallels the Greek epic tradition or the triumphs and hardships of the Sons of Israel. Specifically Christian non-creedal elements can be assimilated into a syncretistic mindset without any difficulty, and certainly without the severe “allergies” that many people seem to view as “necessary” reactions to them. One can accept a character, a story, or even a deity without having to accept the monotheism that is preferred (and required and enforced!) by the religious cultures that propagated them. It is, in fact, more polytheistic to accept their existence and to integrate it into one’s understanding than to reject them; there is no such thing as shirk as a sin for polytheists.

Even if a given piece of literature does suggest that Jesus, the Christian God, or the Holy Spirit are involved in ways that make them players in a narrative rather than as ideals of faith to be accepted and never questioned, what harm? There is nothing in polytheism which makes it necessary that Jesus, the Christian God, the Holy Spirit, any of the saints, the Jewish God, Allah, or any other divine being or heroic figure from these traditions be “rejected” as existing, or even as being deserving of worship, so long as it is understood that they are further beings amongst many other polytheistic deities beyond number. If you think that there is only one “Abrahamic god,” then that’s fine, but then you’re giving credence to Abrahamic monotheism, and a particularly Islamic form of it, rather than being a polytheist. To say or indicate by one’s actions “My culture and my culture ONLY” is a monotheistic position; to say “Many deities, many ways, many cultures, many possibilities” is the way of polytheism, and of syncretism.

There are many more threads that could be followed in the present discussion, and I hope to perhaps elaborate on a variety of them in future columns. The idea of “syncretism” in itself refers to several different phenomena, which also need to be distinguished from one another, explored further, nuanced and qualified (often with further terms added), and discussed at greater length. I hope to do exactly that in the months and years to come in the present column, and I eagerly look forward to discussing these topics with those who choose to read and comment here!

Syncretism happens: now, let’s talk about it.

The New World

Julian Betkowski in Featured Voices, Walking Through the Inhuman Hour

It was very strange for me seeing within minutes of arriving at the Polytheist Leadership Conference a Jehovah’s Witness walking out of the main entrance of the hotel. I recognized her immediately. The vinyl name badge holder clipped to the collar of her modest dress and the gray leather bible with silver embossment, just like my mother’s, were unmistakable. In a sudden sense memory, I could smell the vinyl of the name badge that I had worn clipped to my lapel fifteen years ago.

My mother converted to the Jehovah’s Witness faith shortly after I was born, and did her best to raise me in it. It is hard for me to say whether or not I really ever believed Jehovah’s Witness doctrine when I think back to my childhood. I do know that it caused me a lot of anxiety and fear. I was always a quiet, strange child, and in a community that valued high levels of conformity, I never really felt comfortable. My experience of religion throughout my youth was largely cold and loveless. Yet, that is what I knew, and so what I expected.

As a teenager, my allegiance to the Watchtower Society gradually waned. I began to tire of the constant admonitions to prayer, always with the caveat that only those prayers in accordance with God’s will would be answered. I never did understand what God’s will entailed, since it seemed so far removed from my life. By the time that I entered college, I was thoroughly disenchanted with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and religion in general.

Looking back, it would be easy to explain my departure from my mother’s faith in terms of my sexuality. However, that really is too simple. As a young teenager, I prayed over and over again to Jehovah, through his son Jesus, asking him to take my desires away. He did not see fit to do so, and I never understood why.

At sixteen, one of the elders who had taken a personal interest in me, and who had been meeting with me regularly for weekly Bible study sessions, confessed to me that the reason that he had taken so much interest in my growth in the faith was because his own son was gay, and had left the Watchtower Society. A great iron door slammed shut between us. I became ill, I asked him to leave.

I had decided earlier that when he came to visit that day, I would confess that I was gay, and that I knew the doctrines; I would not act on my desires, I would remain alone and devote myself to God’s work, but that I was afraid and needed help. I had several years to consider this decision: I realized the ramifications of what I was going through almost immediately. So, by sixteen, I had been rolling this idea around in my head for at least two years. Some, I suppose, would have seen this elder’s confession as a sign from God, as a confirmation of purpose, but rather than euphoria, I felt disgust. I felt as though a great black pit had opened up in front of me and that one step forward would plunge me forever into perdition. I felt as though I was being mocked.

It would be easy to look to this to explain my falling away from the Watchtower Society, but it would be incomplete. The Jehovah’s Witnesses do everything in their power to isolate themselves from the rest of society. They abstain from politics and keep away from public events. My peers and I were not allowed to join in after school activities or sports teams, because nothing could come before our love for God. Of course, in the modern era, that kind of isolation only works so well.

As I grew up, I encountered more and more people who believed differently than I did, who knew a completely different truth. What was even more confounding for me, though, was how obviously earnestly and intently they knew these other truths to be True. However, the Watchtower Society perpetually intones that only they have the Truth, and that all other faiths, beliefs, or anything that contradicts the Divine Word, are Satan’s lies. It became apparent to me that someone was being deceived, though I could not always discern who.

I began to wonder how any one person could know that their own personal beliefs were absolute and true over and above everyone else’s, over and above all of the other possibilities. I realized that I could not express this wonder to anyone in my congregation. I continued to go to the weekly meetings and sit in the bland and inhospitable Kingdom Hall, because it was what I knew, even though I was increasingly wary.

Not long in to my freshmen year of college, terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center. I was in class at time, and once we heard what happened, the university was closed and evacuated. There was some fear that the local universities would be targeted, as well, due to their government funding and open ties to the Defense Department. Driving home, caught in traffic, I listened to radio reports of the events with deepening horror and sorrow. I did not know how to react, I did not understand.

I remember, shortly after, going to a meeting at the Kingdom Hall. The sermon must have been bland, I remember none of it. Afterward, though, everyone gathered together in the lobby to speak in hushed tones about the terrorist attack. Surely this was a sign of the times, surely this was the beginning of the end, surely Armageddon must be coming! I was unsettled. I turned to one of my peers, and tried to speak of the suffering and horror that those people must have experienced, only to hear him, with tears in his eyes, and a smile on his face, exclaim that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. I was chilled.

I did not understand how these people, these people who were constantly reciting the virtues of love, could let their hearts be filled with so much joy in the face of so much atrocity. I saw so many smiles, so much self-righteous glee, and I knew that I could have nothing else to do with these people ever again. How could anyone rejoice amidst so much suffering? How could people who so constantly intone that God is Love ignore the real human cost of the horrors they anticipated? I would continue to struggle with these ideas for several years. Though I had left the Watchtower Society, I continued to see similar sentiments expressed across the American religious spectrum.

So, seeing this Jehovah’s Witness woman emerge from the hotel as almost my first experience of the Polytheist Leadership Conference made me wonder how I, at fifteen, would have reacted. What would I have thought if I, in my suit with my nametag clipped to my lapel and my copy of the New World Translation in my hand, had walked out of my hotel to attend a regional assembly of Jehovah’s Witnesses, as this woman surely was, and come across a group of people animatedly talking about not God, but the Gods and their experiences of them?

It is too easy, I think, to forget that our religious beliefs have real world consequences. What we believe, and how, influences our actions, our approach to the world, and the world is a complicated place. At fifteen, I was already struggling with the idea of truth as a monolithic block, against which sin and delusion were projected. The world is full of things, full of experiences for which there is no simple explanation. Religion can both open us up to these mysteries and close us off from them.

I think that there is a kind of relationship to truth that we must always be careful of. Religion and truth go hand in hand. Over and over again, religious people refer to their faith as the Truth, implying that Truth and faith are both singular. What happens to our world when God and Truth become synonymous? How much room is left for love?

Novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch provides us with a beautiful understanding of love, “Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real” (1959, p. 51). Individuals present us with difference, they open us up to new possibilities and ways of being. Love, the perception of individuals, the realization of their distinctiveness and unique being, should open us up to a profound understanding of Truth that can no longer be pinned to a single transcendental source. Murdoch, therefore asserts that, “Love… is the discovery of reality” (1959, p. 51).

I believe that it is necessary for us to cultivate a relationship to truth that encourages us to approach the experiences of others expansively and affirmatively. Love should move us to look beyond shallow, self-serving attempts to recontextualize and reduce the experiences of others into mere illusion, delusion, or derangement. Love, as the discovery of reality, transforms our understanding of truth into something much more dynamic and strange than we could ever have anticipated.

There is indeed a new world full of life, full of experience, full of being, and we only need to open ourselves up to it. If we are in love with difference, in love with the individual and unique, and if we allow love to reveal reality to us, then we must accept the multiform and various as innate features of the world. We must be willing to see the experiences of others as profoundly True in a way that we, perhaps, may never fully comprehend. If we really love others as they themselves are, then we realize just how necessary they are for us to understand the complexity and richness of the world. Through love, Truth shatters apart, and its single center opens up to reveal an endless array. Truth, in fact, becomes a process, and open ended procedure: the practice of love.

I see polytheism, then, as a framework for this complex, ongoing truth procedure. Polytheism encourages us to see the world as a place full of splendor, of incredible experiences, of wonderful surprises and variations. Polytheism encourages us to affirm the possibilities that surround us, to embrace life and explore its richness. Polytheism expands and opens Truth, and recognizes innately that it can derive from many simultaneous sources. As I see it, polytheism is the theological expression of love.

Understanding polytheism as being engaged with process means that it is constantly unfolding, expanding, and developing. While it binds tradition and history into itself, it is also powerfully oriented toward the future, toward the unknown and the possible. Guided by love, polytheism recognizes the necessity of individuals, and the irreducibility of individual experiences. Individuality and discrete experience become key features, absolutely necessary for our understanding of the world.

There is a tendency within singular understandings of Truth to simplify and apologize the complexity of the world in order to force it into alignment with some particular explanatory diagram. Polytheism seeks to avoid such procedures. The open-ended, forward-looking orientation of polytheism means that any explanatory diagram is at best provisional, and always open to adaptation and manipulation as more information becomes available.

I arrived at polytheism after a long struggle with the hypocrisy that I saw spread throughout the American spiritual and religious milieu. If we truly understand love as an important part of our spiritual and religious understandings, then I believe that it must manifest profound changes in our lives and communities. I honestly do not know how I would have reacted to the thought of polytheism as a real and lived expression of spirituality if I had encountered it at fifteen years of age. I know that now I see it as vital to an honest and loving understanding of the world.

My own experience, the work that I have done on myself, tells me that there is a great deal of work left to be done. I see polytheism as a powerful vehicle for change and progress. As we face increasing conflict globally, nationally, and even locally, I believe that it is absolutely necessary for us to examine how our relationships to Truth affect our approaches to the world around us, and whether or not that help us to come to a productive understanding of the experiences and needs of the manifold beings that we encounter. I firmly believe that polytheism helps us to understand our place in the complex lacework of relationships of life, community, and cosmos in a profound and far reaching way. I sincerely hope that love will open us up to the new world that is constantly unfolding around us.

References:

Murdoch, I. (1959). The sublime and the good. Chicago Review. 13, 3, p. 42-53

Zep-Tepi

Rev. Tamara L. Siuda in Kemet Today

The Oracle of the goddess Aset (Isis, as She is known outside Her home country) for this coming Kemetic year was delivered in early July. Once again, those of us who were privy to its words had to keep it quiet until Wep Ronpet, the “opening of the year,” or Kemetic New Year, about a month later. This is much more difficult than people realize, especially when the gods drop the sort of verbal bomb we got with this year’s oracle.

(Click here to read it for yourself.)

This is the first year that the Lady Herself has claimed the year, instead of just giving it Her blessing, since we started soliciting the annual Oracle a decade or more ago. That’s something special. It is also something frustrating, as Aset has a habit of speaking in riddles. This year’s oracle is no exception.

It’s possible to read it as quite negative, and in fact, many of us did when we first went through it. It’s also possible to read it as very positive: essentially, She’s saying that anything goes this year, that whatever we put ourselves to with heka (the ancient Egyptian word for “speaking with authority” generally translated as “magic” in modern English). In further discussion, the conclusion we came to is that it will be a year of heka, a year where our words will come back to bless us — or to haunt us — depending on how we use them. No year with Aset-Great-of-Magic over it, Aset-Clever-of-Speech, will be a simple year. And no year of Hers should be wasted.

Right after we received the oracle, I went to New York to be the keynote speaker at the inaugural Polytheist Leadership Conference. I spoke about organization, in a literal sense: how to start, and how to maintain, a polytheist organization in the modern world. More than two decades of succeeding (and failing!) at that in my own life have given me plenty to talk about on the subject, so I had much to say. If you want to read the transcript, you can read it, and see the slideshow, here:

My experience at the PLC was eye-opening, and anything but simple. It was also, as the Oracle promised, not what I thought it would be. I came home filled with ideas, and with hope. I met with people I knew, and those I didn’t know: allies, friends, strangers, even people who for whatever reason don’t approve of what I do. Yet we all managed to treat each other with dignity and respect, and made plans for continuing to do so in the future. It was a zep-tepi, in a year seemingly designed for them.

Zep-tepi is a Kemetic phrase meaning “the first occasion” or “the (very) first time.” It can be used to describe Zep-Tepi, the Very First Time: that is to say, the creation of all things. It is used as a euphemism for every sunrise: a new day, a new chance, and a new beginning. Zep-tepi is the beginning, the moment when a thing comes into being. It is a very delicate time, the most important time, and best of all, it’s constantly recurring. Every moment is its own zep-tepi. Even this one. Or that one just gone by. Or the one about to occur as you read this sentence — each one a starting point for some destination, known or unknown.

Today I offer a zep-tepi of my own, to the polytheist community. I will be moving my religious blog from its old website here, to enjoy the company and the encouragement of a wider community, one I walked away from many years ago thinking I’d never want, or need, to return. Back then, I didn’t think there would still be a community left to come back to, and in some ways, there is not. The people coming together now are not all of the same people, whether they stayed or left, two decades ago. Those of us who were there are older now: maybe wiser, certainly more experienced. Today we have the benefit of a new generation of fresh minds, eager hands, and hopeful perspectives.

Together I hope that we will be able to forge a more permanent legacy as polytheists: one that honors our ancestors and the gods and spirits they knew. I hope that our zep-tepi grows and creates more, spreading throughout the world.

It won’t be simple. And it won’t be what we expect at all, most likely. But it will be whatever we make of it. Let’s get down to business, shall we?