#because also I think that Christianity as a cultural force and Christianity as a doctrine that I believe in

[daisydisciple]

the idea that """cancel culture""" (for lack of a better term) and "puriteens" and the like have roots in cultural Christianity is so interesting to me...are you saying they kept the concept of redemption only so they could call everyone irredeemable? You wanted to abolish sin but you accidentally abolished redemption instead?

because to me, “everyone is redeemable” is kind of...the whole point of Christianity. "I can become better; I can change and be changed" is infinitely more freeing than "I don't need to ever become better; I'm already good enough." Because I don't want to be stuck here forever, like this, in all my blunderings and mistakes and regrets! I want to grow and improve and be free!

But I guess if you interpret God as some kind of authoritarian despot who is just waiting to see you mess up, then you decide to throw of "the rules" as some kind of liberation. "Sin isn't real. just do whatever you want as long as it's not hurting anyone."

But we do hurt each other. And what then? The wrongs aren't as easily dismissed as "the rules." So instead everyone is unforgivable and irredeemable and everyone is toxic and secretly a horrible monster who was just biding their time. And no apology will ever be good enough. Everyone's a sinner and no one is redeemable and no one will ever be redeemed. But hey! At least we're free from the tyranny of Christianity!

[hussyknee]

I accidentally deleted this ask yesterday but fortunately had a screenshot. Ngl I'm kind of ??? about it because...why would you single out Hinduism to pick the most fundamentalist, cultural and political aspect of it, that's not even practised in most the Hindu minorities outside of India? Nearly every community in India has a caste system regardless of religion. Within Hinduism there's no just one caste system either. Eelam Tamil Hindus have a caste system, but it's not as violent as India's (although of course still violent and oppressive). Sinhalese have a caste system too, and the ones still invested in it would swear blind this was related to Buddhism somehow, a doctrine that preaches against inequality of any kind. Caste systems are literally haram in Islam and yet some Muslim communities managed to rationalize creating one because they wanted to assimilate into the worst of us I guess.

I know fuck all about Hinduism to tell you the truth, but my sister is a convert and devotee of Durga Matha. I asked her about it and she sent me this:

There are as many variants of Hinduism as there are varieties of grass. The only thing they have in common is the Vedas which is a bunch of hymns and stuff. It doesn't really go into detail about caste.

The caste system comes from a book called Manu Smriti. Some accept it as a Hindu text, some don't. Hinduism isn't even a religion actually. It's a bunch of similar belief systems that the Britishers lumped in together for ease of classification. Within Hinduism there are many sects- Saivism, Shaktism, Vaishnavism, etc. So to define Hinduism as some sort of oppressive religion doesn't make sense because it isn't a religion as Westerners define it. Anyway, truth is everyone cherry picks the parts of religion that suits them and discards the rest. Some think that's being dishonest. I think that's just common sense.

This makes sense to me. It's very colonial to monolithize belief systems that evolved from the disparate religious texts and syncretic practices of dozens of kingdoms and dynasties over 4000 years, just because it shares the unique character of belonging to the Indian subcontinent. (Which is precisely why its propagated by Hindutva nutcases. They're imperialist colonizers permanently snorting Indian manifest destiny crack.)

Bestie. Friendo. My guy (gender neutral). Ideology doesn't shape society. People wrap ideology around what they already want to believe and do. This is how you get Zionists (both Christian and Jewish), Wahabi/Salafi Muslims, Hindutvas and... whatever we're supposed to call this current iteration of Theravadin Buddhism that is also characterized by ethnosupremacy and genocide. Religion takes the character of the individuals and ideologues that choose to follow it. There are no exceptions.

To reiterate the point that inspired this ask: Some LGBT folks's queerness is inextricable from their religious identity. Stigmatising and ostracizing religion in queer spaces is alienating, racist and violent. Just like no one should force religion on you, no one should force secularism on people either. There is enough air for us all to breathe free.

[shivology]

okay. one day i will stop talking about islam but it's not gonna be today. anyway, to overcorrect on post-9/11 islamophobia, a lot of liberal spaces infested by the types of muslims who will call you islamophobic and disrespectful of their culture when you call them out on their homophobia or transphobia and who will deny the infestations of misogyny and antiblackness and antisemitism in their (our) communities because Um Actually You Don't Get The Full Context, have started to almost . idk the word but like, deify? whitewash? sugarcoat? islam as if it's like. One Inherently Good Singular Ideology Misunderstood By White People For Racism Reasons. when yes, obviously, islam and muslims who live in the west are oppressed, but that's not all islam is. and it's such disservice to act like Islam cannot be oppressive to so many people who do live in the global south living either directly under islamist rule or just in conservative muslim-majority communities, to say that no actually we're a peaceful religion and we WORSHIP women actually! like to gaslight people who have actually been forced to wear the hijab, who have actually been victims of misogynistic honor-based violence, who have actually been pulled out of school to be married off to a 50 year old man because "the prophet did it so it's islamically ok!"

and it's tricky to talk about because you don't want to fuel islamophobia (which, like antisemitism, is obviously a legitimate tangible thing, but also can be weaponized) also it is so fucking ANNOYINGGGGG to watch discourse on islam be led by people who have never experienced oppression fueled by islam like sure you're a good ally to guys like mohamed hijab but also people like sara hegazy mahsa amini etc etc all these people are real people who were tangibly hurt in the name of islam. there is a reason why a man like andrew tate felt it was ok for a man like him to convert to islam and there is a reason why so many Muslim men welcomed him with open fucking arms. you're sure not a good ally to queer people and atheists and christians and jews who have been tangibly hurt in the name of islam.

and we can discuss the doctrine itself, we can talk about the effects of colonialism, we can talk about how no actually islam doesn't say that lets not conflate between ~ real religion and corrupt regimes but the thing issssss. religion is literally what you make of it. it is an idea. there is a book and you take what you take from it. there is no such thing as "the correct way" to practice religion, especially when all Abrahamic religions have the capacity to be peaceful AND the capacity to be violent. what is REAL representation? who are you to say what real representation is, anyway? who decides what is extremism? why do you, personally, get to pick and choose who and what represents a certain religion?

islam, like Every Religion Ever, manifests itself in different ways depending on ur social context. whether you have the means to exact oppression via religion or whether you are disenfranchised because you're an ethnic or racial or religious minority. religion has and always will be used both as a tool for good (community building, etc) or for evil (daaesh, lol) it's not about religion itself. it's about how you use it and its place in the social pecking order.

anyway. tl;dr. i hate oversimplication and i hate overcorrection. quite frankly, it's orientalist and racist, to assume that an organized religion followed by over a billion people in most countries in the world, all believe the same beliefs. even if u think these beliefs are "good." here's over a billion of us and some of us are bound to be cunts! statistically.

[greater-than-the-sword]

I absolutely disagree with whatever the sjmattson guy said (why are we even acknowledging him? I hit block and ran the moment he showed up)

But I have a genuine concern tho, kinda related to the point he raised

Namely how true is the conversion of people who adopted Christianity as a result of colonisation? Not only the recent ones like in the Americas. I mean as far back as the early medieval period, when whole countries became Christian for political reasons. I'm certain many people genuinely believed, but provably most didn't, and this really pains my soul. That they exchanged one god for another, without actually seeking to be saved. That they got baptised just to gain an alliance with a Christian country or to get them off their backs at least. Converted just to marry that Christian princess. Converted because oh well their God and Zeus or Thor or whatever might as well be the same entity. One more God to add to the infinite pantheon.

The fact that Christianity is so widespread has countless advantages, I'll be the first to champion this. But it really seems to me, and it weighs heavily on my heart, that the more influential it is, at least politically, the more people adopt a fake faith just for social, political, economic benefits. Or in the case of violent conquest, just to be left alone. How can you guarantee in any mass conversion that even the majority are true converts, or even anybody at all. Conversion is a life vs death thing. It's THE most life vs death thing, the soul of a human being is at stake here?! You can't mass produce that! And yet that's how it was, whenever Christianity had to become state religion. I'd like to believe most of those people truly believed and are now in heaven, but it feels like wishful thinking....... it seriously breaks my heart.

"How true is the conversion of people who adopted Christianity as a result of colonisation?"

Well, if you're asking as it seems in such a broad sense covering all history from the time of Christ, I simply can't be sure, since I don't see how anyone could be studied enough in history to know intimately every major conversion event in the last 2,000 years.

There's 2 sides to consider in this, and one of them you seem to know well. The first is that we shouldn't envy the apparent "success in evangelism" of past eras where conversions were forced. I recall a conversation between my dad and his friend discussing the doctrine of Theonomy and how one of their friends who was in the Doug Wilson movement had said, "You know, in the days of the kings they used to baptize whole nations! What are we doing wrong?"

My dad and his friend quite rightly rolled their eyes about this, of course. A forced baptism does not a conversion make.

That being said....

The other assumption is that none of the conversions were legitimate, which is easy to assume without actually having been there. It's not as though mass revivals haven't been a real thing in history, with 3,000 converted at Pentecost, and personally, I have some optimism about the Christianization of Europe, as it was peaceful (well in some areas it was peaceful? Maybe some places it wasn't and I just don't know). Similarly to how Christianity has spread quickly in some other areas of the globe. Keep in mind that what might seem miraculously fast on a historical scale (~100 years) is actually longer than the average human's lifetime.... and just look at the change in the demographics of, for example, China in the last 100 years... there is a phenomenon where people of a dismal pagan culture (such as the Norse Pagans) can find Christianity immediately more appealing and enlightened. This is also true of the more successful missions to south asia for example (though who knows if these stories of missionary success are representative of global trends...)

Frankly this is such a huge question that I don't know how to answer it but I always kind of took it on faith that there have always been true believers, because,

...the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures for ever, and his faithfulness to all generations. (Psalm 100:5)

The gospel isn't a new thing and it has always been around since Christ.

[child-of-hurin]

Outside of the faithful/kings men/Sauron situation is there even much explicit religion in there? “Earendil/Aragorn/Frodo is Middle Earth’s Jesus” isn’t that literally eru, think it’s in the athrabeth

Anon, I have so much on my mind about this topic in general, it really became a full ramble and I'm not sure this is useful to anyone besides me. These are my thoughts:

I don't think there is a Jesus-like figure anywhere in Middle Earth, at least not in a way that matters. The son of god, born from a virgin, who teaches a new doctrine, gathers apostles and is betrayed by one of them, goes though abuse and murder by the hands of the state, redeems mankind from original sin by his death, then is reborn three days later; is alive in heaven waiting at the end of time to judge mankind. That's Christ. You don't get that in Tolkien, in fact you don't even get anything remotely resembling the framework that would allow such a figure to arise.

We can see traces of a framework akin to 'original sin' in some extra-canon stuff, like in the tale of Adanel, and some references Andreth makes in the Athrabeth. In the tale of Adanel, Men fall into thrall of Melkor and thus invent, among other things, slavery, and, as punishment, lose their immortality/long life. This is undeniably a narrative of "fall". If you incorporate it in your understanding of the Legendarium, even if not as a cosmological truth, but as a story that exists within the story and that is part of Edain culture, then it's really very easy to imagine that much later, in Númenor, that lost mortality is what the King's Men, their descendants, are trying to reclaim.

This is not, like, /completely incompatible/ with the published Silm, it's just irrelevant: the published text puts immortality as something the Dunedain covet and decide to conquer by force, and associate with the material Aman, not something they think originally belonged to them, that they are reclaiming. King's Men do not understand themselves cosmologically as "fallen men" -- on the contrary, they are men on the rise.

Middle earth has no Jesus, Middle earth needs no jesus, because there is no original sin in Middle Earth. Noldor have more of a narrative of "fall", but even so it's sketchy at best, and their "redemption" doesn't come from Jesus. I mean: Earendil isn't sent bu Eru to die for the sins of the Noldor after teaching them a better doctrine. Earendil is not even Earendil, he is Earendil and Elwing.

There isn't much religion explicit in Tolkien's legendarium in the sense of an organized religion with rites, but I'm also not sure how much it is fair to dissociate magic and lore in M.E. from religion. Some 'religions' in this world have no gods or worship. Many amerindians, for example, have an extremely complex and ritualized, even political, cosmology -- is it religion? Is it religion when a shaman has a spiritual conversation with a leopard? But going further: is it religion to believe in ghosts? In the evil eye? That fasting and positive thinking can cure cancer? etc. IRL the key "religion" needs to be conceptualized every time we open a discussion about a specific topic; it is a conceptual tool, right? So I think to talk about "religion" in Middle Earth we first need to assess what we are trying to discuss, and conceptualize "religion" and its opposite, "secular". If Middle Earth is not Religious, then is it Secular?

You see my point? Like, I'm not trying to be difficult: I don't think there is religion in the Legendarium in any analogue sense to Christianity, period. The closest thing we have to christian religion in the Silm is Sauron's temple to Melkor in Númenor (lol!).

But at the same time, Tolkien populates his world with a historian's understanding of lore, the past, and by consequence, the future. Aragorn talking about Beren and Lúthien is, at the same time, history, art, folklore, AND a spiritual belief in a certain afterlife, a certain organization of the cosmos and of life. When Sam sings about stars in Cirith Ungol, is that a prayer? What do you think?

It's funny to me that I'm complicating this when it would serve me better to just tell you: there is no religion in Tolkien! Because I am an atheist and because I am bothered by fans who, in their eagerness to defeat Christianity, end up shoehorning it where it literally has no place.

[cruelsister-moved2]

So you don't believe in separation of church and state? But yes, that's number one for a reason, we shouldn't be forcing religious beliefs on people.

did you actually read what i wrote 😐 or did you jst see the word religion and ur brain shut down. one of my main points is that for people from minority faith backgrounds, faith schools are a REFUGE from having christianity forced on their children. how are faith schools for religions that don't proselytise (which is basically all of them except islam and christianity btw, and even then christianity has its own specific history and doctrine regarding aggressive proselytism) even going to "force religious beliefs on people".....

and this has nothing to do with separation of church and state because that's about whether the church has influence over policy which I don't believe it should obviously. and i believe all children should receive the same secular instruction and graduate equipped with the skills and knowledge they need to function as adults. however, like i said, affirming schooling is associated with positive outcomes for children from minority cultural and religious backgrounds. so in case I have to be clear for the illiterate americans once more, the govt funding private unregulated fundamentalist propaganda factories is bad. but i take issue with the wording implying that state funded faith schools are a bad thing when 1. i believe all education should be state funded and 2. i believe faith schools should be an option, ergo i believe that government funded faith based schools are a good thing.

i think maybe you have wires crossed due to the difference in our backgrounds, I'm coming from the uk where state faith schools (mostly primary schools aka age 5-11) are very common and not a big deal. like maybe 50% of the students will be from that background and there will be subtle consideration of the needs of those pupils e.g. food, but like the curriculum is identical to that at a secular school and children are not denied any education but rather also receive additional immersion in what is largely just cultural i.e music, dance, food, history, community etc. a lot of atheist parents will send their kids there just because it's a good school. so that's what I'm talking about when I say a "faith school". if a school here refused to teach students science or something, it would fail its inspection and be closed down so its like the fact they are state funded AND regulated is an effective control against attempts to "force religion on people"

I'm just saying like the concept is not a bad thing & implying that the solution is to withdraw all government funding from anything associated with religion in any way, thus forcing the darker corners of it further out of public light, is just wrong and harmful. state secularism is something you can swing too far either way on, i.e France vs USA. assuming christian hegemony privileges all religious people is just ignorant, and not specifically targeting christianity if that's what you mean causes disproportionate impact for the most marginalised people (like i explained in my post, christians are already subtly privileged and affirmed by the education system in a christian country even when its supposedly secular bc religion and culture aren't really separable, so the main people who actually benefit from faith schools are marginalised religious minorities)

[yusratoth]

On The Planetary Spheres

Religion is social, and its basis is life. Every religious activity should be undertaken with an eye towards reproducing the correct social model of life. Often when we talk about the seven classical planetary spheres, we talk about them in a feudal register. Jupiter is the king, Venus the queen! Aah.

We have no use of kings and queens. We communists intend to destroy every feudal hereditary line and privilege. It makes no sense on one hand to behead a queen and then turn around and pay her a ritual tribute on Friday.

Ritual is a tool for tempering the world-outlook. It is necessary to read theory. But it is also necessary to live it. Marxism, as a world-outlook, cannot stay in theory. 1917 and 1992, for instance, should stay in a communist's memory like Yom HaShoah and Hanukkah, or the Nativity and Resurrection of Christ to a Christian.

I don't think this is a mystical doctrine and I don't treat it like one. It does not supercede the need to organise and revolt. But no "communist" organisation I've seen has been acceptable to me, because they have a blithe, undisciplined, inappropriate attitude towards our history and our leaders. They don't know their own context. They think it's for joking around with. There is not a single one who would not have acquiesced, as most of the national parties did, when Kruschev gathered them and compelled them to accept his slanders of Stalin. They will not, as it stands, weather the spiritual needs of a real revolution, real needs that the revolution has been put to in the past, and this is not an intellectual problem of theory but a spiritual problem of attitude and discipline.

As the feudal mystics laid their cosmology of the planetary spheres around the organisation of feudal society, I have laid mine around a revolutionary society, and from this, a greater artistic ritual vocabulary can be formed. For a young Christian to observe the Crucifixion yearly does not make it impossible for an adult to grow up and study the crucifixion as an adult; it rather lays an early foundation for understanding and promotes that study by raising it to a practical question. In the same way, contemplation of the spheres as laid out below can help bring insight into the real needs of a revolutionary society.

SATURN - A common misconception about Communists is that we think our system is a superior alternative to capitalism, on parity with it. The reality is socialism is not capitalism's replacement but its successor. Capitalism is a system grown old and necrotic, and it is destructive because it no longer meets the developmental needs of society. This is difficult to understand if your culture considers reality to spring from ideas, and not ideas to spring from reality, as the bourgeois conception of history does. As a result, the flow of time looks very different to a Communist, and there is therefore a great deal to gain from contemplation of the method of historical materialism that forms the philosophical basis of the Communist worldview. Communism is death come, finally, to harvest the capitalist mode of association, as a part of its natural life cycle, which has been artificially prolonged through unfathomable violence on a world-historical scale.

JUPITER - Jupiter has always been the sphere of the sovereign basis of society. In the old days this was a petty despot or a feudal lord, and was symbolised by things like crowns, thrones, sceptres. In the current historical epoch, it is the party, symbolised by a red star. Anyone concerned with a study of sovereignty in the current historical epoch needs to study, and consider deeply, the Leninist party.

MARS - Mars has always been force and it remains force in a socialist society. Mars is the sphere of the Red Army as it establishes the Russian SFSR and defeats the Nazis. Mars is the peoples of the world liberating their countries from colonial occupation. Mars is also the state force necessary to thwart counterrevolution and espionage from within. It is not news to anyone that to establish a socialist society requires force, though not as much as it takes to prolong the artificial life of the capitalist one. Which force do we consider to be justified? Many people require an attitude adjustment here, to come in line with the practical needs of the real world rather than naive pacifist fantasies from the degenerate TV garbage that the bourgeoisie use to rot our brains.

SUN - The Sun is the revolution itself. The Sun is the coming to fruition of history in, for instance, the October Revolution. In the past, the sun has been associated with the Resurrection of Christ and the Buddha's Enlightenment. The great driver gives us the revolution itself; the seizure of political power by the party of the armed proletariat. But its role doesn't end there. There is always a need to bring a revolution to new heights, as was famously done in Albania during the Cultural and Ideological Revolution which began in 1967 and has not yet ended.

VENUS - Venus is the productive sphere and has always been the sphere of labour. Labour, as we are aware, takes on a greater spiritual importance in a socialist society and becomes the basic social mode of society. Communal labour is to a communist what the lodge is to a Sufi. Communal labour brings the world into a state of peace, justice, and beauty.

MERCURY - As always, Mercury is the intellectual sphere. A Communist always needs to train intellectually. A Communist has to know how to read heavy books of philosophy, long political speeches, old party documents, political theories, and to know the differences between these things. This skill is lacking in many of today's would-be "Communists". The intelligentsia also plays an important role in socialist construction, in the development of science, in the articulation of theory, and in education.

MOON - The struggle of Dictatorship of the Proletariat to build socialism constitutes an entire historical epoch. During this epoch -- which was always to include victories and defeats, advances and retreats -- counterrevolution constitutes a part of the revolution, against which the revolution must steel itself in order to be fit for the task of building socialism. As the moon reflects the rays of the sun, the counter-revolution is an inferior reflection of the revolution, and nobody should be led to believe that just because it is full one night it will remain so the next. The waxing and waning of the moon symbolises the building up and the shrinking down of power of classes of society.

My approach when discussing Communism in a ritual setting is that anything accepted as a mystical truth should be independently verified scientifically. In this situation, someone not well-versed in the scientific and philosophical proofs might not understand why I say some of the things I say here. That is a shortcoming, definitely. But it is not one that should preclude action. Even if you don't understand the theoretical basis of one of my above claims, for example that capitalism is gangrenous and socialism is not its alternative but its successor, I encourage any individual student to take it as a premise for now and work towards a deeper understanding later.

My aim here is not to convince anyone of my opinion, but to work, however slowly, towards a scientific temperament with which to approach religious questions. Some of my questions may have been settled a century ago, but my understanding isn't at the level required to understand it if it was told to me. I accepted this years ago, and I have seen undeniable success in taking first a contemplative approach and later independently verifying my findings, while those I once considered my peers in this process have fallen off and now spend their time tweeting in support of the imperial aggression of countries like Russia and China, or still read anarchist or Maoist "theory" with intellectual seriousness, or some such embarrassment. In comparison, I'm deeply satisfied with my approach. Combining intellectual modesty with religious certainty, I have seen my understanding expand greatly in a short period of time.

[softeningmyheart]

Occultism & Chaos Magick Through the Lens of Islamic Teachings: True, but False.

As I go on this journey to learn about Islam, I'm finding something very interesting about the entire framework of how Islam approaches the unseen.

Full disclosure, I am a former pagan, former occultist, and former chaos magician. Practicing, by the way, not just your typical crystal girlie. I was in the muck. And coming out of the muck, its interesting how everything I ever learned about spirituality before Islam fits into Islam, one way or another. Not the doctrine or the perspectives mind you, but the actions and the results. It fits in a way that it simply does not fit into secularism or any other religious practice I have seen.

Chaos magick for instance, also known as results-based magick, the secular world says "No it is fake, what you saw and what you heard never happened, the story you lived is false. All your results were just one big crazy coincidence. Let us gaslight you and talk down to you until you change your story to fit OUR narrow view of reality." But that perspective is no less crazy than believing in magick in a secular world! I'm not only talking about atheism either. I'm talking about academic perspectives, cultural perspectives, I'm even talking about lukewarm Christianity and how they perceive it. If its not their narrow idea of what the non-physical can be, tightly wrapped up in a little box like they personally expect, then it is made up.

But what is rational about any of that? Ignoring your eyes and ears for the sake of books written by ordinary men with ordinary weaknesses and shortcomings? It's senseless. No ordinary human being should ever be worshiped. Human beings are made weak. We cannot handle the burden of being worshiped the way Allah can. That is one of Allah's gift to us in my opinion, that He takes on that responsibility because He knows it would only break us to put it all upon ourselves, but I digress.

Think of it like this: you don't watch the boiling pot on the stove turn bones and water into chicken stock and think "Oh, it's a coincidence that there's chicken stock here now, the bones and water and heat did nothing. Our books say nothing about this, so it cannot be." If someone said that to you after you cooked dinner, you wouldn't throw out your broth. You wouldn't restart dinner to fit their views. You would, rightly, roll your eyes and tell them to read a new book! And then they have the nerve to act like something is wrong with you while you're in the thick of the work they insist isn't happening.

Islam is the first doctrine I've seen that doesn't even attempt such nonsense. Islam tells me "Yes it is real, but it is a farse. A fabrication. It is a twisted imitation of the power of Allah and that is why all you put out always comes back to hurt you no matter how good your intentions. These forces will only turn your desires against you. Allah is the real source of power and change," and that is a much more sensible reaction to the reality of the situation in my opinion.

You can't tell me, if you saw a lightning bolt shoot down from the sky in response to your actions calling for such, that you would turn away and say "Bah, a coincidence." How many coincidences am I supposed to have then? Am I a lightning rod? A superconductor? If that's the case, I should be studied for my electrical properties! But I think we all know that if you hooked me up to an amp reader, you'd find nothing out of the ordinary. I'm only a normal human being.

Islam doesn't tell you "Do not worry" it tells you "Give your worries to Allah." and that is far more beautiful and far more practical than a bunch of self-absorbed academics who worship other self-absorbed academics telling you to just pretend it didn't happen. You will not heal most people in need if your approach is to just take drugs as a first resort rather than a last resort, pay $200 a week to have a stranger gaslight you over a life they will never live, and then institutionalize them if they get worse instead of better.

And why would they get better? You have told them it is all up to them, that they must be strong, that they must rely on nobody but themselves even if they are at their weakest, that they must emerge from this stronger than before, that they must deny their own eyes and ears, that there is no point beyond themselves and no purpose beyond chasing their own desires. Who wouldn't get worse hearing that? That's awful. You are sabotaged, and then punished again when their actions break you down even more. The pressure that secular psychology puts on people is absolutely insane. That is why I now believe Allah is far more merciful than secularism or occultism.

And that is not to talk badly of therapy or medicine as a whole. When done right they are good and necessary, but that is not what secular medicine actually provides most of the time and it is a shame. I'm just thankful that the word of the prophets is not only in existence but free.

Islam is as merciful as Allah. Islam tells me that I don't need to spend money I don't have and put myself into debt to receive wisdom and be guided toward healing, and toward results. Good results. Results that will bring me the peace that occult practices never could, or would even if they could, because that was never what Satan intended for any of us. Satan is real, and he is selfish, and he is clever. Satan is a lot like the idea of a genie in popular media, or a monkey's paw. Wicked spirits will give you exactly what you ask for, and it will be your ruin. Your desires are taken and used against you, and you are powerless to stop it without help. Allah is all knowing, and all merciful. Allah gives you what is best for you, even if you don't know it's what you want yet. Even in the thick of such sinful things, Allah is waiting for us to realize the truth and trust Him again, so he can truly help us.

That is why Allah will not tell me my eyes and ears are wrong because some random upper class western men from the 1800s and 1900s all said so. Rather than being told to suppress, and ignore, and dismiss myself as a credible witness, I am told instead to have patience in my heart and turn my gaze in the right direction. It's not that my experiences are a farce, it's the path I've been led onto that is a farce. Allah is the key and the answer, and He asks nothing of me in return but faith and patience. Alhamdulillah for that.

[skaldish]

So recently in a discussion I had with two other heathens about abortion rights and after both of them basically "mansplained" to me, a person that has the organs to push out a human how those organs worked. Told me to stop being a "snowflake liberal" and said that heathenry has always been a conservative religion and people like me are ruining it for everyone else. And they also said that I should watch for Freya, as She will most likely abandon and punish me because I'm a "baby killer supporter"

So actual question, as I'm not all that smart when it comes to academic research, is/was heathenry really conservative, I mean to the extent that it's starting to sound suspiciously like another religion..

Sorry, I know I should do the research but I have a really hard time comprehending academic papers, and need a layman's explanation 😅

No, and that is because our concepts of "liberal" and "conservative" are contemporary inventions. To retroactively fit either of them onto heathenry would be revisionist.

There is one exception though, and that is Odinism. This particular brand of Heathenry was born out of Nazi Germany and leans drastically right, valuing typical Nazi things such as "traditionalism," ethnocentrism, folkism, nationalism (in the form of tribalism, in this case), and "racialism" (separation of the races). The Nine Noble Virtues come from this lineage, actually, invented in the 1970's by actual literal fascists.

It's this kind of Heathenry that right-wingers (and some self-identifying libertarians and centrists) think of when they refer to Heathenry, often without realizing Odinism doesn't predate 1890 at the absolute earliest. (They also don't always call it Odinism--I just do for the sake of distinguishing it from older forms of Heathenry like forn sidr/forn sed).

They also tend to subscribe to a more boiled-down version of it, which is why the fascist components typically go unrecognized (or ignored in favor of the viking glamour).

Now, as for what Heathenry on the whole has always been? That has varied with time, location, and the sensibility of individuals. Our values are something we add to our Heathen practice, as opposed to something Heathenry gives us to follow. We can see this reflected throughout history.

The only real constant element in Heathenry is Animism--the belief that all things are interconnected and, to some degree, possess a vital essence of their own, and therefore agency. It's considered good manners to interact with the forces of the world in positive ways, because doing so will make our living environments and everyone in them happier and healthier for it.

Keep in mind that Heathenry is not a religion of doctrine. It's not like Christianity where you must do XYZ thing or be punished. We don't fear our gods, and they don't act as our lords, let alone the distant arbiters of our lives. And from what we can discern from text and culture and just the experience of them, punishing us for exercising bodily autonomy seems to go against everything they gods represent and stand for.

(The idea that Freyja would abandon anyone for saying women should have bodily autonomy is, frankly, fucking absurd. It's Freyja. Have they even met Freyja? This goddess rages at the mere mention of getting married off against her will. If you show her an idiot who tells her what to do with her body, she'll show him a one-way ticket to Helheim.)

If you want some gimmicky historical viking thing to go off of, consider this quote: "trúa á mátt sinn ok megin." I forget which exact saga it comes from, but it refers to trusting in one's own strength and power; the ability one has to exercise their own will and agency ("megin" has a complex meaning).

So in other words, choosing to exercise authority over your own body is probably as viking as you can get.

[testudoaubrei-blog]

Content note for discussions of eternal damnation, and all sorts of other shit that will trigger a lot of folks with religious trauma.

Before I get started I might as well explain where I’m coming from - unlike a lot of She-Ra fans, and a lot of queer people, I don’t have much religious trauma, or any, maybe (okay there were a number of years I was convinced I was going to hell, but that happens to everyone, right?). I was raised a liberal Christian by liberal Christian parents in the Episcopal Church, where most of my memories are overwhelmingly positive. Fuck, growing up in the 90’s, Chuch was probably the only place outside my home I didn’t have homophobia spewed at me. Because it was the 90’s and it was a fucking hellscape of bigotry where 5 year olds knew enough to taunt each other with homophobic slurs and the adults didn’t know enough to realize how fucked up that was. Anyway. This is my experience, but it is an atypical one, and I know it. Quite frankly I know that my experience of Christianity has very little at all to do with what most people experienced, or what people generally mean when they talk about Christianity as a cultural force in America today. So if you were raised Christian and you don’t recognize your theology here, congrats, neither do I, but these ideas and cultural forces are huge and powerful and dominant. And it’s this dominant Christian narrative that I’m referring to in this post. As well as, you know, a children’s cartoon about lesbian rainbow princesses. So here it goes. This is going to get batshit.

"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God." - John Calvin

“We’re all just a bunch of wooly guys” - Noelle Stevenson

This is a post triggered by a single scene, and a single line. It’s one of the most fucked-up scenes in She-Ra, toward the end of Save the Cat. Catra, turned into a puppet by Prime, struggles with her chip, desperately trying to gain control of herself, so lost and scared and vulnerable that she flings aside her own death wish and her pride and tearfully begs Adora to rescue her. Adora reaches out , about to grab her, and then Prime takes control back, pronounces ‘disappointing’ and activates the kill switch that pitches Catra off the platform and to her death (and seriously, she dies here, guys - also Adora breaks both her legs in the fall). But before he does, he dismisses Catra with one of his most chilling lines. “Some creatures are meant only for destruction.”

And that’s when everyone watching probably had their heart broken a little bit, but some of the viewers raised in or around Christianity watching the same scene probably whispered ‘holy shit’ to themselves. Because Prime’s line - which works as a chilling and callous dismissal of Catra - is also an allusion to a passage from the Bible. In fact, it’s from one of the most fucked up passages in a book with more than its share of fucked up passages. It’s from Romans 9:22, and I’m going to quote several previous verses to give the context of the passage (if not the entire Epistle, which is more about who needs to abide by Jewish dietary restrictions but was used to construct a systematic theology in the centuries afterwards because people decided it was Eternal Truth).

19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

The context of the allusion supports the context in the show. Prime is dismissing Catra - serial betrayer, liar, failed conqueror, former bloody-handed warlord - as worthless, as having always been worthless and fit only to be destroyed. He is speaking from a divine and authoritative perspective (because he really does think he’s God, more of this in my TL/DR Horde Prime thing). Prime is echoing not only his own haughty dismissal of Catra, and Shadow Weaver’s view of her, but also perhaps the viewer’s harshest assessment of her, and her own worst fears about herself. Catra was bad from the start, doomed to destroy and to be destroyed. A malformed pot, cracked in firing, destined to be shattered against a wall and have her shards classified by some future archaeologist 2,000 years later. And all that’s bad enough.

But the full historical and theological context of this passage shows the real depth of Noelle Stevenson’s passion and thought and care when writing this show. Noelle was raised in Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity. To my knowledge, he has never specified what sect or denomination, but in interviews and her memoir Noelle has shown a particular concern for questions that this passage raises, and a particular loathing for the strains of Protestant theology that take this passage and run with it - that is to say, Calvinism. So while I’m not sure if Noelle was raised as a conservative, Calvinist Presbyterian, his preoccupation with these questions mean that it’s time to talk about Calvinism.

It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that Calvinism is a systematic theology built entirely upon the Epistles of Romans and Galatians, but only -just- (and here my Catholic readers in particular will chuckle to themselves and lovingly stroke their favorite passage of the Epistle of James). The core of Calvinist Doctrine is often expressed by the very Dutch acronym TULIP:

Total Depravity - people are wholly evil, and incapable of good action or even willing good thoughts or deeds

Unconditional Election - God chooses some people to save because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not because they did anything to deserve, trigger or accept it

Limited Atonement - Jesus died only to save the people God chose to save, not the rest of us bastards

Irresistible Grace - God chooses some people to be saved - if you didn’t want to be saved, too bad, God said so.

Perseverance of the Saints - People often forget this one and assume it’s ‘predestination’ but it’s actually this - basically, once saved by God, always saved, and if it looks like someone falls out of grace, they were never saved to begin with. Well that’s all sealed up tight I guess.

Reading through these, predestination isn’t a single doctrine in Calvinism but the entire theological underpinnings of it together with humanity’s utter powerlessness before sin. Basically God has all agency, humanity has none. Calvinism (and a lot of early modern Protestantism) is obsessed with questions of how God saves people (grace alone, AKA Sola Fides) and who God saves (the people god elects and only the people God elects, and fuck everyone else).

It’s apparent that Noelle was really taken by these questions, and repelled by the answers he heard. He’s alluded to having a tattoo refuting the Gospel passage about Sheep and Goats being sorted at the end times, affirming instead that ‘we’re all just a bunch of wooly guys’ (you can see this goat tattoo in some of his self-portraits in comics, etc). He’s also mentioned that rejecting and subverting destiny is a huge part of everything he writes as a particular rejection of the idea that some individual people are 'chosen' by God or that God has a plan for any of us. You can see that -so clearly- in Adora’s arc, where Adora embraces and then rejects destiny time and again and finally learns to live life for herself.

But for Catra, we’re much more concerned about the most negative aspect of this - the idea that some people are vessels meant for destruction. And that’s something else that Noelle is preoccupied with. In her memoir in the section about leaving the church and becoming a humanistic atheist, there is a drawing of a pot and the question ‘Am I a vessel prepared for destruction?’ Obviously this was on Noelle’s mind (And this is before he came out to himself as queer!).

To look at how this question plays out in Catra’s entire arc, let’s first talk about how ideas of damnation and salvation actually play out in society. And for that I’m going to plug one of my favorite books, Gin Lun’s Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (if you can tell by now, I am a fucking blast at parties). Lun tells the long and very interesting story about, how ideas of hell and who went there changed during the Early American Republic. One of the interesting developments that she talks about is how while at first people who were repelled by Calvinism started moving toward a doctrine of universal salvation (no on goes to hell, at least not forever*), eventually they decided that hell was fine as long as only the right kind of people went there. Mostly The Other - non-Christian foreigners, Catholics, Atheists, people who were sinners in ways that were not just bad but weird and violated Victorian ideas of respectability. Really, Hell became a way of othering people, and arguably that’s how it survives today, especially as a way to other queer people (but expanding this is slated for my Montero rant). Now while a lot of people were consciously rejecting Calvinist predestination, they were still drawing the distinction between the Elect (good, saved, worthwhile) and the everyone else (bad, damned, worthless). I would argue that secularized ideas of this survive to this day even among non-Christian spaces in our society - we like to draw lines between those who Elect, and those who aren’t.

And that’s what brings us back to Catra. Because Catra’s entire arc is a refutation of the idea that some people are worthless and irredeemable, either by nature, nurture or their own actions. Catra’s actions strain the conventions of who is sympathetic in a Kid’s cartoon - I’ve half joked that she’s Walter White as a cat girl, and it’s only half a joke. She’s cruel, self-deluded, she spends 4 seasons refusing to take responsibility for anything she does and until Season 5 she just about always chooses the thing that does the most damage to herself and others. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that Catra is morally culpable in every step of her descent into evil (except maybe her break with reality just before she pulls the lever). The way that Catra personally betrays everyone around her, the way she strips herself of all of her better qualities and most of what makes her human, hell even her costume changes would signal in any other show that she’s irredeemable.

It’s tempting to see this as Noelle’s version of being edgy - pushing the boundaries of what a sympathetic character is, throwing out antiheroics in favor of just making the villain a protagonist. Noelle isn’t quite Alex ‘I am in the business of traumatizing children’ Hirsch, who seems to have viewed his job as pushing the bounds of what you could show on the Disney Channel (I saw Gravity Falls as an adult and a bunch of that shit lives rent free in my nightmares forever), but Noelle has his own dark side, mostly thematically. The show’s willingness to deal with abuse, and messed up religious themes, and volatile, passionate, not particularly healthy relationships feels pretty daring. I’m not joking when I gleefully recommend this show to friends as ‘a couple from a Mountain Goats Song fights for four seasons in a cartoon intended for 9 year olds’. Noelle is in his own way pushing the boundaries of what a kids show can do. If you read Noelle’s other works like Nimona, you see an argument for Noelle being at least a bit edgy. Nimona is also angry, gleefully destructive, violent and spiteful - not unlike Catra. Given that it was a 2010s webcomic and not a kids show, Nimona is a good deal worse than Catra in some ways - Catra doesn’t kill people on screen, while Nimona laughs about it (that was just like, a webcomic thing - one of the fan favorite characters in my personal favorite, Narbonic, was a fucking sociopath, and the heroes were all amoral mad scientists, except for the superintelligent gerbil**). But unlike Nimona, whose fate is left open ended, Catra is redeemed.

And that is weird. We’ve had redemption arcs, but generally not of characters with -so- much vile stuff in their history. Going back to the comparison between her and Azula, many other shows, like Avatar, would have made Catra a semi-sympathetic villain who has a sob-story in their origin but who is beyond redemption, and in so doing would articulate a kind of psychologized Calvinism where some people are too traumatized to ever be fully and truly human. I’d argue this is the problem with Azula as a character - she’s a fun villain, but she doesn’t have moral agency, and the ultimate message of her arc - that she’s a broken person destined only to hurt people - is actually pretty fucked up. And that’s the origin story of so many serial killers and psycopaths that populate so many TV shows and movies. Beyond ‘hurt people hurt people’ they have nothing to teach us except perhaps that trauma makes you a monster and that the only possible response to people doing bad things is to cut them out of your life and out of our society (and that’s why we have prisons, right?)

And so Catra’s redemption and the depths from which she claws herself back goes back to Noelle’s desire to prove that no person is a vessel ‘fitted for destruction.’ Catra goes about as far down the path of evil as we’ve ever seen a protagonist in a kids show go, and she still has the capacity for good. Importantly, she is not subject to total depravity - she is capable of a good act, if only one at first. Catra is the one who begins her own redemption (unlike in Calvinism, where grace is unearned and even unwelcomed) - because she wants something better than what she has, even if its too late, because she realizes that she never wanted any of this anyway, because she wants to do one good thing once in her life even if it kills her.

The very extremity of Catra’s descent into villainy serves to underline the point that Noelle is trying to make - that no one can be written off completely, that everyone is capable of change, and that no human being is garbage, no matter how twisted they’ve become. Meanwhile her ability to set her own redemption in motion is a powerful statement of human agency, and healing, and a refutation of Calvinism’s idea that we are powerless before sin or pop cultural tropes about us being powerful before the traumas of our upbringing. Catra’s arc, then, is a kind of anti-Calvinist theological statement - about the nature of people and the nature of goodness.

Now, there is a darker side to this that Noelle has only hinted at, but which is suggested by other characters on the show. Because while Catra’s redemption shows that people are capable of change, even when they’ve done horrible things, been fucked up and fucked themselves up, it also illustrates the things people do to themselves that make change hard. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, two of the most sinister parts of her descent into villainy are her self-dehumanization (crushing her own compassion and desire to do good) and her rewriting of her own history in her speech and memory to make her own actions seem justified (which we see with her insistence that Adora left her, eliding Adora’s offers to have Catra join her, or her even more clearly false insistence that Entrapta had betrayed them). In Catra, these processes keep her going down the path of evil, and allow her to nearly destroy herself and everyone else. But we can see the same processes at work in two much darker figures - Shadow Weaver and Horde Prime. These are both rants for another day, but the completeness of Shadow Weaver’s narcissistic self-justification and cultivated callousness and the even more complete narcissism of Prime’s god complex cut both characters off from everyone around them. Perhaps, in a theoretical sense, they are still redeemable, but for narrative purposes they might as well be damned.

This willingness to show a case where someone -isn’t- redeemed actually serves to make Catra’s redemption more believable, especially since Noelle and the writers draw the distinction between how Catra and SW/Prime can relate to reality and other people, not how broken they are by their trauma (unlike Zuko and Azula, who are differentiated by How Fucked Uolp They Are). Redemption is there, it’s an option, we can always do what is right, but someone people will choose not to, in part because doing the right thing involves opening ourselves to the world and others, and thus being vulnerable. Noelle mentions this offhandedly in an interview after Season 1 with the She-Ra Progressive of Power podcast - “I sometimes think that shades of grey, sympathetic villains are part of the escapist fantasy of shows like this.” Because in the real world, some people are just bastards, a point that was particularly clear in 2017. Prime and Shadow Weaver admit this reality, while Catra makes a philosophical point that even the bastards can change their ways (at least in theory).

*An idea first proposed in the second century by Origen, who’s a trip and a fucking half by himself, and an idea that becomes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which protestants vehemently denied!

**Speaking of favorite Noelle tropes

[balioc]

So here's a spooky parallel --

----------

The early history of the Church was an endless series of struggles with heresy. Constant doctrinal schisms, denunciations and counter-denunciations, excommunications, you name it.

Most of those heresies, like really a staggering proportion of them, were about one specific abstruse issue: Christology. What, exactly, is the metaphysical nature of Jesus Christ? What is the relationship between his humanity and his divinity?

From a contemporary perspective, this is real angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff. It's hard to see how anyone other than the very dustiest theologians could care. But wars were fought over questions of Christology.

See, the thing is --

"Christ is human" and "Christ is divine" are both critical legitimating ideas for Christianity. The human Christ is a powerful narrative figure: the broken man who suffered and died, in the worst possible way, so that you-yes-you could be saved. The divine Christ is the figure of infinite cosmic splendor who overawes the pagans and overshadows their lame little so-called "gods." You need both of those ideas, running at full strength, for Christianity to have its full power as a cultural and political force. If you weaken either of them, at all, a whole lot of worshipers are going to waver.

But those ideas are not actually compatible with each other. In fact, they are directly opposed. "Human," in this context, basically means "not possessed of godlike power or transcendence." "Divine" means "not possessed of human frailty or particularity." It's a real fucking problem.

Now -- it's a resolvable problem, sort of. You can come up with all sorts of theories to bridge the conceptual gap. You can say "all right, look, here's what's going on: Christ is human in these ways but he's divine in those ways, this is what it means to be a human-who-is-also-divine." That's what all those heresiarchs, Arius and Nestorius and Marcion and the rest, were trying to do.

But any such theory is going to have the effect of lessening Christ's humanity, or Christ's divinity, or both. And the Church wasn't willing to countenance that. The Arian and Nestorian versions of Christ weren't divine enough. The Monophysite and Marcionite versions of Christ weren't human enough. All the cogent theories were condemned as heresies.

The actual orthodox Nicene/Chalcedonian doctrine is...bogglingly hard to understand. But the basic idea is something like: (i) Christ is 100% human with all the relevant frail individual human traits, (ii) Christ is also 100% divine with all the relevant traits of the eternal cosmic Logos, which means that (iii) yes, he was dying on the cross in terror and loneliness, while at the same time being completely free of any kind of sin and weakness, and fully identified with the ruling power of Creation, and (iv) any difficulty making this story hang together is your problem, loser.

The Christological struggles lasted for centuries. Apparently that's what happens when the most powerful ideology in the world is founded on the idea that two directly-opposed claims are simultaneously true.

----------

Mainline social justice doctrine is founded on the idea that two directly-opposed claims are simultaneously true.

Oppressed marginalized people are strong and wise and noble and good. In fact, really, they're stronger and wiser and nobler and better than people from the hegemonic groups, who are honestly kind of malformed and stunted.

vs.

Oppressed marginalized people are so weak and vulnerable and fragile that they need massive amounts of help and support to keep them from complete collapse, and the slightest resistance or unkindness will utterly wreck them.

And, of course, you can come up with cogent theories that resolve this tension. You can do it in lots of ways! You can explain how one of the claims is true only in a weak form; you can explain how the one situation changes into the other (in either direction); you can develop a composite picture of the Oppressed Marginalized Person, who is strong/wise/noble/good in certain ways and vulnerable/frail in certain others; etc., etc., etc.

But if you do that, and your thinking makes it out in the public discourse, you're liable to get slammed as a heretic. Because both of those ideas are crucial legitimating ideas for contemporary progressive doctrine, and leaving them in a state of insane superposition is much more useful than letting either one of them be weakened.

And, of course, we're well into the phase where abstruse angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin issues are hashed out in the most general-purpose forums, with massive public furor behind them.

----------

I would really prefer that this new struggle not last for centuries.

[qqueenofhades]

Having just sent you a message the other day about how much I love your historical asks, I realized I have a question myself that you might know the answer to. I’m a Christian and I have never been able to figure out why Christianity has historically viewed non-procreative sex for pleasure as bad. (And none of my family, including my clergy father, have figured it out either. I think my dad has a bone to pick with Augustine? And I feel like Aquinas also has something to do with this.) But given that Jesus had a body and gives a speech about “the Son of Man came eating and drinking” as though he enjoyed it, how did this whole “the body is sinful especially the sex part” thing happen? I have been thinking about this a lot recently for Old Guard reasons, which should surprise no one.

Oof. So, a short and simple question, then. (Sidenote: did they expand ask limits? Because I’ve definitely gotten a couple asks today, including this one, that are longer than usual, rather than forced to space out and hope that Tumblr doesn’t eat them.)

The entire history of sexuality in the West and its relationship with Christianity throughout the centuries is obviously a topic that far, far exceeds anything I could possibly cram into this ask, but let’s see if I can hit on some of the highlights. First off, one could remark that some aspects of Jesus’s teaching managed to disappear from the official doctrine of Christianity almost immediately, and for a variety of theological, cultural, and social reasons. As anyone who has a passing knowledge of the late Roman Empire is aware, they were known for being sexually liberate (at least if you were a nobleman, as the freedom certainly did NOT apply to women), and the notorious run of emperors who were having orgies and sleeping with boys and their sisters and hosting nonstop sex parties did a lot to sour early Christianity’s relationship with it. Because pre-Constantine/Theodosian Code Rome was Christianity’s enemy (since Christians refused to perform the traditional civic sacrifices to the Roman gods, which was all that Rome required alongside permitting its citizens to practice whatever other religion they wanted), and because the emperors were such a high-profile example of sexual excess, that became an easy point of critique. Obviously, the Roman polemicists, like every other historian, should not be trusted on EVERYTHING they say about the emperors, but the general pattern is there and well-established. So Christianity, trying to establish its religious and moral bona fides, can easily go, “Well, Caligula/Nero obviously sucks, come join us and live a purer and more moral life!”

Constantine converted in the early fourth century and the Theodosian Code was issued at the end of the fourth century, which made Rome officially Catholic and represented a huge reversal of fortune for fledgling Christianity, helping it expand like crazy now that it was officially sanctioned. However, the Roman Empire was splitting into two halves, west and east, and the development of Greek Christianity in the eastern empire was strongly influenced by ascetic and austere traditions (if you’ve heard of the Stylites, i.e. the guys who liked to sit atop poles out in the Syrian desert to prove how holy they were, those are them). The cultural context of denial of the flesh and the renouncing of bodily pleasures also played intensely into the third/fourth/fifth century debates over heresy and orthodoxy. Some of the most vicious arguments came over whether Jesus Christ could have actually had an embodied (and therefore possibly inherently sinful) human body, or it was just a complicated illusion, the “shell” of a body that his entirely divine nature then inhabited without actually being part of. This involved huge theological arguments over the redemptive nature of the Eucharist and even Christ’s sacrifice: was it real/effective/genuine if he didn’t REALLY die and suffer the pain of being crucified, and was just assured that he’d be fine ahead of time? So yeah, the question of whether Christ had a real body (because then that might be sinful) was the knock-down, drag-out theological disagreement of the early centuries C.E., and left a lot of hard feelings and entrenched positions in its wake.

Likewise, your dad is correct in having a bone to pick with Augustine, at least in terms of his impact on views of sexuality in the late antique and early medieval Christian church. Augustine is obviously famous for agonizing endlessly over his sexuality/sexual urges in Confessions, his time as a Manichaean, his relationship with a woman and the birth of his son out of wedlock (and if you want a lot of repressed homoeroticism: well, Augustine’s got that too) and how his conversion to Christianity was intensely tied with his renunciation of himself as a sexual being. Augustine also pioneered the nature of the inheritance of Original Sin: therefore, every human who was born was sinful by virtue of sharing in humanity’s legacy from Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden. (And yes, obviously, this led to the beginnings of the embedding of clerical and social misogyny. Oh Augustine, I kind of hate you anyway because I had to read the entire goddamn 1000-page City of God during my master’s degree, but bro, you got a lot to answer for.) This involved EVEN MORE obscure speculations about whether original sin was passed down in male semen, and therefore Jesus was free of it because he was supposedly born divinely to a woman without a male father, but yeah, the idea that sexuality itself was already a suspect thing was fairly well correlated and then cemented by Augustine’s HUGE influence over the early church. Everything post-Augustine incorporated his ideas somehow, and so the idea of bodily pleasures as separating you from divine purpose got even more established.

Then we had the Carolingians in the eighth and ninth centuries, who were the first “empire” per se in Western Europe post-Rome, and who were also intensely concerned with legislating moral purity, policing the sexual behavior especially of its queens, and correlating moments of political or military defeat with insufficiently virtuous private behavior. The Carolingians likewise passed these ideas onto their successor kingdoms, especially the medieval kingdom of France (which would eventually become the pre-eminent secular power in Western Europe). Then the eleventh century arrived with the Cluniac and Gregorian Reforms (which were interrelated). One of their big goals was for a celibate and unmarried clergy on all levels of holy orders, from humble village priests to bishops and archbishops. Prior to this, clergymen had often been married, and there wasn’t a definite sense that it was bad. But because of this, and the idea that a married clergyman wasn’t pure enough to provide the Eucharist and would be distracted from his commitment to the church by a wife and family, the Cluniac and papal reformers intensely attacked sex and sexuality as evil. Priests didn’t (or rather, were not supposed to) do it, and if you weren’t in a heterosexual church-performed marriage and didn’t want children, you shouldn’t be doing it either. (Did this stop people, and priests, from doing it? Absolutely not, but that was the rhetoric.) This was about when celibacy began to be constructed as the top of the heap in terms of holy lifestyles, for men and women alike and laypeople as well as those in holy orders. NOT having sex was the most virtuous choice for anyone, even if sex was a necessary evil for having heirs and the next generation and so on. (Which is interesting considering that our hypersexualized present attaches so much value to having sex of one sort or another, and the asexual-exclusion types, but yeah, that’s a different topic for now.)

Of course, when the Cathars (a schismatic Catholic heresy in France and Italy) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries began attacking ALL materiality and sexuality as irredeemably evil, the Catholic church went a bit like “whoa whoa that’s a little too far, hold on now, SOME sex is good, sex can be nice, we’re not actually like those guys” (even though they had been about a hundred years before). Because Cathar spirituality taught that any kind of attention or indulgence to the body was sinful, that included any kind of sex at all, even married heterosexual intercourse. (Of course, the Cathars themselves didn’t always live up to it either; see Beatrice de Planissoles and her Cathar priest lover.) The Catholic church obviously didn’t want to go THAT far, so they began rowing back some of their earlier blanket statements about the evilness of sexuality and taught that husband and wife both had a responsibility to offer each other sexual pleasure and fulfillment. I’ve answered many asks about sexual behavior and unions in the medieval era, the arguments over the definition of marriage, and how that changed over time in response to social needs and pressures, so yes. We know what the IDEALS were, and what people were legally supposed to do, but the fact that church writers were complaining about bad behavior, sexual and otherwise, literally the whole time means that, obviously, this did not always match up with reality.

The theories of the Roman physician Galen, which prescribed that female orgasm was necessary to conceive, were also well known and prevalent in the medieval world, which meant that ordinary married couples trying to have children would have had some awareness that female pleasure was supposedly necessary to do it. (This ties into my “it wasn’t an unrestrained extravaganza of violent painful rape for women all the time YOU GODDAMN MORONS JESUS CHRIST” rant, but we will recognize that I have Many Rants. So yes.) Obviously, we can’t know what the sex life of individual married couples behind closed doors was actually like, but there were a variety of teachings and official stances on sex and how it was supposed to be done, and as noted in other posts, just because the church thought it is zero guarantee that ordinary people thought that way too. People are people. They (usually) like having sex. They had sex, both gay and straight, married and unmarried, so on and so forth, even if the church had Opinions. Circle of life, etcetera.

Anyway, then the Renaissance arrived (and we just had the “why the Renaissance sucked for women” ask the other day), which prescribed a reversal of all the comparative sexual and political and social latitude that women had gradually acquired over the medieval era. It very much wanted to see women returned to their silent, domestic, maternal, objet d’arte roles that they had occupied in antiquity, and attacked the actions of women in their public and private lives as one of the major causes of the crises of the late medieval era. (Because you know, misogyny is always a useful scapegoat rather than blaming the powerful men who have fucked everything up, as we’re seeing again right now.) Because the Renaissance is regarded, fairly or unfairly, as the start of the early modern Western world, it’s where a lot of modern gender attitudes and views of sexuality became more explicitly codified and distributed faster than at any point in history before, to a more extensive audience, thanks to the invention of the printing press. We’ve obviously had moves toward sexual liberation and agency in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the emergence of the modern feminist and gay rights movements, but now in some ways, we’re back in oddly Puritan attitudes in the twenty-first century. And since America was founded by Puritans, their social attitudes are still embedded in the culture, fanned today by hyper-conservative Protestant evangelicalism. Even though Puritans themselves ALSO, shock surprise, didn’t always live up to the stringent standards they preached.

...whoof. I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but hopefully that gives you the broad-strokes development.

[heymandalorian]

I don’t feel like Mando is in a cult.

Lots of people hve been saying that mando is in a cult and that he’s either problematic or whatever for being in a cult, but he just isn’t. People only think that because Bo-Katan says so, but she’s not in the same sect as mando is, and also she’s not exactly a reliable narrator. First things first, mandalorian culture as a whole(including Mandos) is non-religious as a rule. They may have religious devotion to their ideals, but their are cultural ideals, not religious. They believe in their warrior creed, but absolutely nothing is even close to being religious. Mando says that weapons are a “part of his religion”, but that’s less about actual religion and more about the creed he follows. In essence, the “Children of the Watch” as we know them, aren’t that much more extreme than any other mandalorian sects. The only actual thing we can point to is not removing their helmets, but how is that different than any other cultures practicing a head covering?(christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism all have had or currently have head coverings). The personal code of the children of the watch seems to focus more on honor and how you carry yourself than it does on any religious devotion to anything. It’s a personally upheld creed, not a forced religious doctrine. Now I do think it will be healthy for Mando to explore what it means to be a mandalorian and whether or not he needs to wear his helmet, but that is irrelevant. He’s a in a traditionalist sect, which is fine, and definitely not a a cult. And people who say that the “Mandalore is cursed” thing proves the cult idea, they’re wrong. Mandalore was glassed fifty years before the show even takes place. Most of the planet is a desert, and people can only survive in domed cities. Then the siege of mandalore takes place, which turns into an empirical occultation, and then what appears to be a genocide occurs on the planet. Most people would avoid the planet because it’s uninhabitable and also under empires rule, and folk stories would definitely rise from that. Saying that mandalore is cursed is honestly not that far from the truth. Anyways long story short, the children of the watch aren’t a cult, and let’s maybe let the show play out before assuming Din Djarin is some sort of brainwashed victim. Also I am very atheist so this is not coming from a place of trying to justify religion and or cults.

[to-many-towered-camelot]

book notes

for anyone who is interested in a nuanced take on fairy beliefs vs the Christian Church in the Middle Ages, this book by Richard Firth Green was actually so good, if your library has it:

[Image: Front cover of the book ‘Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church’ by Richard Firth Green]

like, obvs it’s just one person’s take on a very complex topic, but it’s well-written, well-researched, and it uses a bunch of Arthurian examples throughout to explore this dynamic (see under cut)

really interesting exploration of how the Church’s response evolved from the early-High Middle Ages (”dude, you believe in fairies? hhhmmm, do penance for 10 days”) to the Late Middle Ages/Early Modern Period (”kill them for heresy and witchcraft!”) 

and how it enfolded vernacular/fairy beliefs into Christian doctrine as fairies being either a) demons or b) the illusions of demons (and how dangerous/bad these demons were depended on the time/location/cleric in question - some packaged fairies as “neutral” demons who fell when the rebel angels did, and who must be punished on Earth but will return to Heaven on Doomsday - potentially doing this to soften things for their parishioners, who often held these fairy beliefs and reconciled them with Christianity, uh, differently than the Church officially would prefer)

and enduring belief in fairies existed in both common and aristocratic circles (can see this in medieval romances, although they’re not the only source of evidence), rather than just being used as cultural “decoration” by a more sceptical upperclass

aaaaand because of this conflation of fairy = demon, you get a really interesting blend/overlap with medieval demonology and enduring “folk” beliefs (obvs not all of medieval demonology was just rebranded fairies, but some of it defs was - you see stories being retold with “devil” instead of “elf”, for example)

INCLUDING in Arthuriana - how you get Morgan the Fairy (”le Fay”) vs Morgan who was raised in a nunnery and learned dark magic there, the Lady of the Lake as a (largely) positive force, Merlin inexplicably as a (perceived to be...) Good Guy despite being the literal antichrist, the Green Knight and all the overlap with Christian symbolism in that story, etc, etc. and they all just either??? co-exist in the same stories or appear through either more fay or more ~Christian lenses depending on the version

and it creates a very interesting and very confusing soup of Stuff stemming from a very confusing - and sometimes dangerous - soup of official and unofficial beliefs evolving over hundreds of years

anyway, WRT Arthuriana it’s got (and ymmv on these, but they’re all interesting thoughts):

(i think in Gottfried’s Tristan???) apparently Tristan has a rainbow fairy dog called Petitcriu...name a knight less deserving of such a Good Boy smh

Chretien’s Yvain flooding out Laudine at the fountain (...jerk) as a continuation of the beliefs surrounding a magical Spring at Barenton 

Gingalain moving from being the son of Gawain and the fairy Blanchemal (and having a fairy love interest, Pucelle) in the French OG version (~1200-ish) to being the son of Gawain and his human mistress (with Pucelle also being human) in a later 15th-C Middle English version)

AJDKN UJ IOE E Merlin’s conception, that one’s a wild ride - theologians REALLY didn’t like the idea of demons being fertile, and the work-arounds they came up with were...incredible. but skipping over that sheer comedy, the author draws links between Merlin’s conception and the general trend of claiming a fairy lover/whatever when a difficult-to-explain pregnancy arose. He also theorises that Geoffrey’s idea for Merlin’s father being a demon/fairy may have come from Nennius saying that Merlin/Ambrosius’ mother “never knew a man”. Later adaptations of this storyline made it even more fay-like (when they weren’t, like Robert de Boron, making it more fucked-up) by making Merlin’s father invisible (Wace) or a super attractive guy in swanky gold clothes (Layamon) - and Vortigern’s advisor explaining the creatures that lived between the earth and the moon until doomsday, etc, etc (walking that line between fairy and incubi, whichhhhhh was not clearly delineated in the Middle Ages the way it is now). also there’s one 13th-C Anglo-Norman poem where Merlin’s father is a bird that transforms into a dashing young squire, which isn’t terribly demon-y. So even though most versions of this story describe Merlin’s dad as an incubi-demon, what people understood this to mean may have been more fay-ish that we’d expect nowadays (depending on the reader, and also on authorial intention - some are pretty explicit that he’s a demon [many clerics keen to push this as the main narrative], while others refer to him as an elf or fairy). some contemporary scepticism during this time about Merlin having any sort of supernatural parentage as well

[none of the same Church anxieties about explaining away how the Plantagenets and other aristocratic families claim a female fairy ancestress - maybe bc there’s none of the stress about patrilineal bloodlines??? who knows! but yeah, much less thought given to those stories in ecclesiastical circles, and they were very popular in vernacular romances (male aristocratic wish fulfilment?). also, fairy enchantments =/= necromancy, so there are stories like the non-cyclic Lancelot where the Lady of the Lake is found out to be “a fairy by education, not by nature or heredity” (Elspeth Kennedy), with the spirits used in necromancy being demons, not fairies. also potential trend of female-associated magic becoming more passive and book-learned, gradually demonising it leading up to early-modern witch hunts.]

Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia and in the Vita Merlini being actually pretty circumspect about saying whether or not Arthur was alive/dead, returning/not returning, maybe due to his work/text being a (hypothesised) defence of the Welsh as being “civilised” (and having been so for centuries before the Normans came) - with the corollary that believing in Arthur’s return was somehow “uncivilised”. Author argues that this may be due to an association with fairy beliefs, and that Layamon is the one that makes Avalon explicitly fey. Also the author describes Arthur as living in a “feminised version of the Christian heaven” (iconic) and says that later writers and people could be very scornful of this belief held by the Britons/Welsh/etc, and that it was contrary to orthodox ways of thinking. 

Links the “discovery” of Arthur and Guinevere’s bodies in Glastonbury in the late 12th-C as similar to when individuals found the bodies of their loved ones, thus making it much harder to believe (and hope) that they were still alive in fairyland. Makes a suggestion that the monks in Glastonbury who “found” these bodies may have been trying to curry favour with the English crown (i.e. champion/hope of the Welsh isn’t coming back) but also may have been trying to “help”/”save”/correct the thoughts/ideology of the Welsh (i.e. “set them on the correct path to salvation”). Lots of medieval writers describing Arthur as living in “fairyland”. Precedent of people visiting fairyland and returning, so Avalon/fairyland =/= a place only for the dead (i.e. Arthur isn’t dead). An Arthurian example, albeit a less explicitly fay one, is Lancelot getting in and out of Gorre (with Gorre as a “typically supressed and rationalised” version of fairyland) in Chretien’s Knight of the Cart.

Some stuff about the wild horde (distinct from the wild hunt) being presented by some writers as very penitential (i.e. they are departed souls that may look like they’re bearing arms/hunting/whatever as they did in life, but really they are in agony e.g. because their weapons burn them) and tbh demonic (black armour, carrying torches, ominous aesthetic). Other writers thought maybe it was - once again! - demonic impersonators rather than actual mortal souls. (Should note also that the wild horde/wild hunt motifs were not always associated with their being dead). Relevant in the Arthurian context because Arthur and his court were sometimes associated with the idea of the wild horde (as in, sometimes the wild horde is described as Arthur’s court living it up in a cool, undying sort of way - “in the likeness of knights hunting or jousting, commonly known as the household of Hellequin or of Arthur” [Etienne de Bourbon, a medieval writer] - with Hellequin’s household often being used to encompass either the wild hunt or the wild horde). Ultimate point made by the author (props to him, he’s always like “if i’m right” lol) that for many clerical writers, it was very uncomfortable to leave people with the impression that Arthur and his court were living it up in fairyland (and similar for other figures associated with the wild hunt/horde) and this idea needed to be corrected/shaped to suit more orthodox perspectives - e.g. tying in with notions of purgatory, etc. 

Aaaand this one was exciting to me just bc i’ve vaguely heard about Arthur and his knights snoozing under a hill, but for some reason i could only remember this being in Victoria-era-and-onwards poetry. 3 versions of the same tale, where a servant looks for his master’s lost horse on a Sicilian mountain. Version 1) servant of a bishop finds his master’s horse in the beautiful palace of Arthur’s court beneath Mt Etna. Aside from the fact that the ancient wound Arthur received from Mordred opens once a year, it’s not very purgatory-like. Version 2) a dean’s servant is told by an old man that King Arthur has the horse on Mt Gyber (Mt Etna). he is told that his master must attend Arthur’s court in 14 days, but the dean laughs it off...then sickens and dies on the appointed day (whoops). Enough differences to this story compared to the first to suggest an oral circulation. Also a note in the version/text that such mountains are said to be the mouth of hell, and only the wicked are sent there, not the chosen. Version 3) Etienne again! Also likely changed with intervening oral circulation. The master is not an ecclesiastical figure, and Arthur’s palace is now a populous city - also Arthur is not referred to, just a nameless prince. There is a gatekeeper who warns the servant not to eat or drink while he’s there (that...is a very fairy-ish proscription). This mountain is apparently reputed to be the site of purgatory. The book author (Richard, i mean) ties these versions in with other stories/accounts of different entrances to purgatory (e.g. one on an island in an Irish lake) as being part of a gradual process of “rendering [...] fairyland purgatorial”. 

Finally, Gawain in Roman van Walewein: To get to an ‘earthly paradise’ [i.e. King Assentijn’s garden with its fountain of youth - side note that ‘earthly paradises’ were often popularly described to be fairyland/where fairies live, in addition to their theological functions, e.g. Avalon was sometimes described as an earthly paradise...i should also say that purgatory was frequently thought to be located beside earthly paradise, so there’s the proximity element] and the castle containing it, Gawain must cross a river (guided by a magical talking fox) that a) has waters that burn like fire, and b) can only be crossed by using a bridge sharper than a razor. His reaction? “Is it the enchantment of elves or magic / that I see?”. He is then guided by the fox underneath the river through a tunnel, and is told that the river’s source is in the depths of hell, and “[the river] is the true purgatory / All souls, having departed from the body / Must come here to bathe.” So it’s a very strong intermingling of fairy and purgatorial imagery/ideas!

I dunno, I just found this very ??? satisfying to read

it leaned towards lit-crit at times (which, considering the subject matter, is honestly fair enough), but it was more respectful of vernacular beliefs than so many other academic takes i see (ofc ymmv re: anything to do with non-Christian major religions, but i think the author’s pretty solid on this!), and it had an explanation for the survival of these beliefs that imo made a lot of sense, especially from a pan-European perspective, not just a Celtic one 

plus it explored the undeniable damage done by Christianity over history without making up some “ranged battle between paganism and the Church” that i see  e v e r y w h e r e  in casual Arthurian circles...which, like, i empathise with the vibe, but also! that’s just straight-up historical revisionism! (i blame MZB and the 80′s for that one)

(there was a fantastic post floating around a while ago about how the religious syncretism in Arthurian literature is much more interesting than peeling away all of the Catholicism in the medieval lit (...you ?? don’t end up with much left?) and saying that this is more “accurate” to some obscure original)

anyway yeah yeah ymmv but it’s v interesting 😊

[deerth]

my first mistake in witchcraft

yes i’m going to be petty over religion for a second here.

i have been slowly inching out of the broom closet as i now consciously move on from the atheist mindset to the pagan one. i was looking for more resources to research my path, and i ended up on a witchy server... woe unto me as i try to fit in once more, for it seems that not even witches are unified.

forget about all that shit about garden, cosmos and whatever witches. the religion actually broadly branches into two practices - Wicca and regular witchcraft. so you are primarily the one or the other, no matter what flavour of ritual you practice.

the primary difference between Wiccans and general witchcraft is your belief of whether religion can be used for harm or not. in short, Wiccans state “an it harm none, do as ye will” (as long as you don’t hurt anyone [including yourself], go bonkers), therefore you will not find Wiccans casting curses or hexes. we know the responsibility of our faith and we know that if you radiate bad vibes, it will come right back around to bite you in the ass later. that said, most Wiccans don’t mind witches who do curse or hex. some cultures use practices like voodoo, and even old eastern European practices were not free of rituals that were made to directly interfere with someone’s will (love spells that were supposed to make someone love you). therefore, a disclaimer: I’m not anti-hex. I would not use a hex because I feel that hate will not solve hate, and as long as you’re an adult, I trust you know what you’re doing with your power. maybe you are of an oppressed culture and have good reason to exact revenge on someone who severely hurt you, especially if you have a long-standing tradition of hexes. even Nina Simone sang “I Put a Spell on You” (albeit this is also a love spell). I know curses and hexes and even spells affecting with another’s free will are an inherent part of witchcraft and I won’t deny it. I follow my doctrine, you follow yours, that is fine by me.

what is NOT fine with me, however, is propagating hex culture among minors. why? because minors are not ready to take on that responsibility!!!! just like they are not truly ready to make healthy decisions about sex, alcohol or other substances, they cannot take true responsibility over causing harm, be it spiritual or otherwise. “what’s a little hex do?” you might ask, if you’re a minor. not to sound like a boomer, but when I was 16, I was edgy as fuck. I hated everyone while claiming to love everyone. I was in NO correct mental state to make decisions about the aforementioned things. even without casting any hexes, I made many mistakes. big ones. I hurt a lot of people. yes, I regret it all deeply. I wish I had thought things over rather than stay stubborn. in fact, most people under 20 are not ready to enter discourse, drama or a vicious cycle of hatred purely because it will always turn into “all bite but no bark”. I purposefully say it that way because although youngsters are admirably spirited and ready to take on the world... they often bite off more than they can chew. I see girlies straight out of high school trying to solve huge problems like racism, and although, again, admiring these young people, they have researched their stuff. to an extent, they know what they’re talking about... but I do believe hate will not solve hate.

one of the moderators of said server retaliated with it not being a universal truth, and claimed my take to be “unverified personal gnosis” (what is a verified gnosis, anyway? how do you measure it? especially in a practice like witchcraft where every bloody individual practises it differently and there are no priests or churches?). if the moderator happens to read this and wishes to elaborate, i’d be welcome for a bit of constructive discussion over what is and isn’t personal gnosis. I acknowledge that “hate cannot be fought with hate” is not a universal truth... that is perhaps where I went to the extreme. but believe me, I did not say it to be holier-than-thou. I was actually shocked to be called out by not one, but two moderators on my behaviour, instantly. I did not read in the rules that one would be forbidden to state their opinion or softly disagree, but perhaps it is so and I did not pay enough attention.

there comes another food for thought: is it possible to socialise without being opinionated in any way? would shutting down opinions truly prevent conflict? because I’m feeling very bitter and left out now. I know everyone on that server is not Wiccan. but to get slapped in the face right after I attempted to be friendly (laconic and feeble as that was), among who I considered to be my own people... I feel conflicted. now mind, I’m not going to leave witchcraft behind. it is my religion, and thanks to this experience, I learned that Wicca is the right thing for me. I don’t want to advocate for violence and a vicious cycle of hatred. my grandfather was Romani, therefore I believe I know a thing or two about mislabeling and hate enacted upon minorities and outcast people. does that mean I want to kill and hex every white in sight? the answer is no. if anything, me being both Wiccan and Romani, it would just add fuel to the fire. especially because Romani are stereotyped as evil witches in the first place, so it would be a double suicide. by propagating violence, I would give these people more reason to hate pagans and Romani people. both cultures are already feared and hated upon as it is. I am not going to give people more opportunity to hate me.

coming back to the minor I disagreed with in the server. I was shocked that the first thing that came to a teenager’s mind was a revenge hex. it screams of naiveté and irresponsible behaviour towards your faith. and not JUST your faith. as I am a student of psychology, I am well aware how mind patterns work, and here’s the funny thing: psychology has proven that witchcraft’s law of returns is somewhat true, not on a magickal level, but on a mental one. if you ponder over violence and revenge excessively, you are reinforcing those neural pathways in your brain. there is a reason why they say “hate breeds hate”. it is the same reason why depression is so hard to deal with. anything you obsessively ruminate over reinforces it again and again until escape seems impossible. I’m not only speaking as a witch, I’m speaking as a human being. is it correct to propagate petty violence among minors when we as adults can do better and guide young people to better paths?

I’m not saying young people shouldn’t use hexes. but I am questioning their ability to take on the responsibility of potentially hurting someone, or even just thinking of hurting someone. you plant a seed of hate and it may just grow. you knock on the devil’s door enough times and he will answer (disclaimer: I’m not Christian either, I just like the saying). soon there shall be nothing left but hate. if the person in question had not been a minor, I would have left it at that. but religion is sacred. a witch’s magick is essentially making something important to you sacred. it’s not a plaything. it’s not to be used light-handedly. it’s not a trend. and hexes should be the last resort if all else fails OR the person you hate has a damn good reason for being hated.

is it wrong to vote for love and peace? yeah, I sound like a hippie, but I think they’re right. love was not born from continuing to fight each other - love was born from unity, from coexisting. how does one fight racism? psychology says see more poc, interact with them, understand their struggles. how to fight religious fear? spend time with people of different views. how to get over homophobia? spend time with the gays and try to understand their views, and like, actually understand them. spending time with someone just to berate them is still bigotry. the interaction I mean here is coexisting with minorities in a shared space and them slowly, but surely becoming more accepted and normalised because we finally see them. even a bigot can’t stay a bigot if they are brought out of isolation. if they’re forced to see people different than them.

unfortunately, not even your own faith can comfort you sometimes, mostly because the community is still divided. there are rules on what should and shouldn’t be done, and woe upon thee if you dare to even peep one of your thoughts. I merely said thank you and sorry and left, as I always do when I feel misunderstood. it was a valuable yet harsh lesson, and I regret hoping for acceptance or even offering me a moment to be understood without being shut down without a second thought. I regret hoping for a little discussion where it is seen as a violation of rules.

again, as long as you are ready to bear the responsibility of harming another, do whatever you want. as a Wicca, I prefer staying benevolent and kind, even to those who traumatised me. you might argue that this essay in itself is not benevolent... after all, Wiccans don’t slander people behind their backs, you might say. but it is not my intent to slander. it is just me expressing sheer confusion over what I expected to be a community to hear out all voices, because why have a community at all if you allow for no discussion? do we shut off discussions entirely in fear of fights? but alas, it is human nature to be opposed, but it’s also human nature to still hold hands despite the differences - one just needs to acknowledge it.

blessed be.

[skaldish]

Hello, I saw a repost of one of your recent post and it's the first thing I've ever seen about you culture? Religion? Forgive me if I use the wrong term. I actually wanted to know if you'd be willing to explain more about it? Asking as someone trying to distance themselves from a far right wing childhood and become more open to the world around me.

TOPIC: The Basic Elements of Heathenry

This is a great question and I’ll do my best to give you a comprehensive answer!

I follow a folkloric (i.e. people-governed) spirituality/religion known as Heathenry. Before Scandinavia converted to Christianity, the Norse, Germanic, and Slavic people all had their own customs, worldviews, and beliefs. While these died out or adapted with Christian colonization, people are revitalizing these things in the form of a modern pagan religion called Heathenry or Heathenism. Practitioners may call themselves “Heathens,” which in this case doesn’t mean the same thing as “heretic.”

My particular Heathen practice is a Norse variety I describe as American Forn Sidr (the word “forn sidr” means “Old Customs”). My practice involves the following:

The Norse Pantheon and Cosmology

The Norse Pantheon is polytheistic, meaning it has more than one god. Thanks to Marvel, people are pretty familiar with figures of the Norse pantheon: Thor, Odin, and Loki to name a few. But these gods are not much like their pop culture iterations.

The stories of “Norse Mythology” are actually a sampling of Norse cultural stories, which are still mostly passed down through oral tradition in Scandinavia. These stories are metaphorical in nature and describe the natural phenomena of the world, complete with ideas about the world’s creation, how it works, and the afterlife. Unlike a codified religion like Christianity, these stories have regional variances and therefore no overarching “canon.” They’re also not viewed as literal or fundamental. 

A lot of Norse pagans work directly with the gods with no need for a mediator. Which gods someone works with and in what capacity is entirely up to them. Deity relationships typically aren’t that of Lord/Servant like they are with Christianity, but instead take on may forms in the same way human relationships can. There’s also no obligation to work with them closely if that’s something a Norse pagan isn’t particularly interested in.

Animism

Norse Heathenry is animistic. Animism is the idea that everything in the world has a spiritual essence, and therefore agency. This precludes the belief that everything’s place in this world is inherent simply because it exists. This is very different from Christianity, where you need to earn your place in the world.

Norse paganism acknowledges different spiritual beings connected to the world, including wights (an object’s essence), landvaetter (the “land spirit” or a land’s essence), and other beings like trolls, nisse (house spirits), Alvar (elves), and Jotun (which is crudely translated into “giant” and describes beings of wild, untameable places or concepts). Because I’m more omnist in practice, I believe there are more spirits outside the Norse ones, but if these spirits are tied to certain cultures it may not be appropriate for me to work with them, so I take care with that.

Ancestor Veneration

What it says on the tin. Norse pagans may acknowledge and pray to their ancestors for guidance and wisdom. Some build altars for them and there are even holidays for the ancestors. Ancestors may be your blood relatives, but not always. I personally don’t do a lot with ancestor veneration, currently.

Other Norse Concepts

Wyrd and Oorlag - Wyrd and Oorlag relate to the interconnectivity of all things and destiny. I’m still working on learning these concepts myself, so while I know what they denote, I don’t know enough about them to put them into words clearly.

The Polytheistic Soul - The Norse believed multiple parts of the soul made up a person. Some of these parts move on after death while others continue down the family line.

The Gifting Cycle - The gifting cycle is a form of right relations; we can acknowledge a person’s inherent worth and well-being in the form of exchanges that fortify them. This doesn’t always take the form of a literal gift or favor, but has a sort of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” quality to it. It’s not supposed to trap you in a sense of obligation, as that would defeat the point.

Holidays

Holidays are very regional and therefore there’s no universal Norse pagan holiday calendar. Most share acknowledgement of the Solstices and Equinoxes though. American Forn Sidr holidays line up and draw from culturally American holidays, so those are easiest for me to practice.

What We Don’t Have

Norse paganism doesn’t have a dualistic worldview (good vs. evil, us vs. them, objectively good forces vs. objectively evil forces, etc). If something’s bad for human beings that has to do with compatibility.

We don’t have rules for getting a good afterlife. Valhalla was an option for Norsepeople who couldn’t be laid to rest with their families. It’s taken on different connotations in modern Heathenry, but it’s not something all Norse pagans desire. I personally believe in reincarnation.

We don’t have holy books, scriptures, dogmas, doctrines, or rules about how we dress or how we must conduct our lives. But sometimes Heathens will create these things for themselves if they’re still stuck on a lot of Protestant hangups.

...Anyway I think that covers most of the very basics. It’s a huge topic to try to contain in one go, so I hope this gives you an idea!