#e shrine

[shinyshrine]

and it is lord zeus in the heavy air of summer. my nerves are on edge as humidity rises and the air crackles with anticipation for lightning and thunder.

[xxdoggodxx]

Little virtual shrine / e-offering I made in honor of Anpu. Feel free to use as a wallpaper or lockscreen. Please credit if you repost.

[thetwistedrope]

Something I've always wanted to know: will people get upset if I worship the Netjeru in a more modern way ? I have very limited resources and often resort to digital shrines and journals. I've dedicated a digital journal to Djehuty and a digital sun shrine to Ra that I created. They seem to be okay with it, but I'm not sure if that's something I'm able to be open about in the community.

nah, its totally fine in our community. i've seen digital shrines, digital offerings, digital spells, emoji spells. i've seen minecraft servers with temples and digital rites being done. you name it.

i don't have many tags with examples, but you may find the e-shrine tag useful. you could also see the techno witchcraft tag.

it's definitely a Thing.

[panzeht]

Lovely Aphrodite! I am presenting to you this shrine, offerings and thank you for all the attraction and harmony you have brought to my sphere. I pray that you bring beautiful hot sex workers in my life. May I have fun, hang out and have pleasure with them. Bring healing and harmony to my relationships, and sweeten the words that I speak, and those that are spoken to and about me... (you can make further specific requests, as desired). Please accept these offerings as treasured gifts, and heartfelt thanks to you, Aphrodite, who is Most Beautiful! Amen.

[quoitanree]

I don’t know what I’m doing. This might just be another attempt to speak, to write, to share. An attempt that will have no follow up, that I will neglect as soon as I started it, out of fear perhaps, wondering whether it’s worth it, whether I should be this vulnerable, whether my writing is any good, whether what I do is intelligent enough, refined enough, respectable enough. I’m afraid to be cringe, to be sappy, to be kitsch, to be outright tasteless, or worse to be boring, to say things that have been said before, a thousand times over. 

But the thing is: All important things have been said before. All important things have been said, again and again and again and if we haven’t heard them before, they’re still lurking there, somewhere, in a book that we haven’t read yet or in the mouth of a person we will know someday. 

The other thing is: Part of me thinks that being cringe is theologically valuable. That embracing the cringe, the kitsch, the pure emotion, the madness and that which has been deemed ‘too much’ perfectly showcases the human relationship to the divine. We are small, insignificant creatures after all and we don’t understand much of what is going on. We all have fears, we all have traumas, we all have weaknesses and problems. And yet some of us are trying to relate to something higher than us. To something that goes beyond our petty human concerns. Something that is beyond all of this, something beyond and yet so close, so visceral, so much more human and so much more real than our day-to-day lives. How on earth are we supposed to relate to something like this and not be cringe, or kitsch or sloppily over-the-top? All our attempts to praise it, to glorify it, to worship it, are bound to end up like this, at least if we’re being honest to ourselves. If we are but children in a cosmic scheme of things, then even our best artistic creations, our greatest thoughts and most beautiful music, will be nothing but child’s play, the cringey art of a teenager perhaps. 

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

This is the line that always comes to my mind when thinking about Manannán and devotion. It's from Oscar Wilde and in the original context the line is said by someone unhappily in love describing their beloved; And yet, or maybe exactly because of this, the line is so fitting to describe the human relationship to the divine. A drunken, mad love, the type of love teenagers feel, even. Teenagers don’t understand much about love, you might say. And yet – do we really understand much of it either? Not really, in the grand scheme of things. And a lot of us have lost the boldness of teenage love. 

Devotion has almost become a dirty word today. People think it has something to do with making yourself little, with being afraid of some higher power. “We don’t bow to our gods, we talk to them as equals”, some Pagans say. Even some Christians don’t seem like the idea of devotion anymore. They think it has something to do with outdated ideas about sin, about a vengeful God. “No”, they say if you talk about the importance of devotion, “God has forgiven you all your sins. He loves you!” Yet devotion has little to do with appeasing a capricious god or with doing good deeds so you’ll be rewarded and not punished once you’re dead. Devotion is the relationship you have to the divine. And like any relationship, it needs to be two-sided. That doesn’t mean it has to be perfect. Human beings are imperfect, the world is imperfect, so why should we expect our devotion to be perfect? The most important thing is that we try. Try and try and try again. That, down here, in the gutter, we do not turn our eyes away from the stars, but keep admiring their beauty. 

I’m not equal to Manannán. He is a god. A being beyond petty human notions of personhood, a complex idea perhaps, if you’re feeling more philosophically inclined. He is beauty, he is sorrow, he is the wind that whispers over the endless sea. He is the rain gracing the fields with water, the liberating tears falling from my cheaks, the exuberant laughter of greatest joy, the thundering waves in a storm. He is all that and more, he is so much beyond of what I am, so much greater and yet there is a relationship between me and him. Not a relationship where I'm being pitied as a small human being, not a relationship in which he commands me to do things, no, a relationship that is soft and raw and vunerable and flawed like all things humans do. He loves me. He is there. Even if I suck at devotion, if I don't do anything for ages, he is there, watching me in the corner, with kind eyes. 

It is human to fail, it is human to be cringe and admitting to that is not making yourself little. It is embracing your humanity, it is embracing a vunerable, honest and raw relationship to the world and to the divine. Being brave never had anything to do with having no fear. Being brave has something to do with admitting that you're afraid and still going on. Being strong is showing your weakness and devotion means knowing your limits. Knowing your limits, not to stay within a bounded cage, but to transcend them. To trascend them in a love for that which is wholy other, wholy beyond the limits of your own understanding and yet so beautiful, so entracing, so far away and yet so close to our imagination as the glistening stars in the sky. Devotion is a relationship of two, a dialectical embrace of the other, a longing to transcend your own human limitations through the loving union with the divine.

I have been very afraid recently. Afraid to be wrong, to be a fraud, to step out of line, to be ridiculous and stupid. And yet I know that I'm at my best when I embrace being ridiculous. When I embrace being cringe. When I embrace all of my silly ways of showing passion and love and the rawness that is human existence. 

If you have read this far and feel the same, please go on if you're afraid. Go on being passionate. Go on with every cringey attempt to show devotion. Not for any reward or purpose, only for a hot date with transcendence. Because, ironically, it is this transcendence, this crossing of the boundaries between the I and the other, that makes us really us, that makes us raw and human and beautiful. 

A thousand praises to Manannán, god of boundaries and of transcendence, liminal messenger between the worlds, ruler of the worlds of the dead and the ever-living, god of beauty, loss, pain and the love that keeps us going in the face of tragedy!

[beifongkendo]

Deer at a shrine in Nara, by Kawase Hasui (1936).

[charbies]

<you enter the shrine>

available on me inprnt :)

[mondaymelon]

me n who ?!?!?!? ME N WHO GUYS ...

picrews: 1 2 3 4

mking silly girlfailure picrews are the only thing saving my sanity which took quite a number of blows today ( its hanging on by the measliest thread but i think its better to consider it go n e )

anyways i wanna make a silly tag game so we are going to make a silly tag game because in the wise words of martin luther king i think wait it was probably gandhi "be the change you wish to see in the world" arent i so cool guys im taking like the first step forward and :stareyes: ahahah

(no pressure) tags !! 🏷️ : @cienxpidity, @ilyuu, @anonbinaryweirdo, @suntoru, @tuesdayberries, @lume-nosity, @mrcrazyvillainvillainn, @ceneid, @amalythea, @xianyoon, @aeon-yao, @ryuryuryuyurboat, @auroratumbles, @snobwaffles, @the-white-void + everyone i probably forgot to tag (SPS IM SORRY) n anyone else whod like to join !!

[wgm-beautiful-world]

Sakhi Shah-e Mardan (Ziyarat-e Sakhi) Shrine in Karte Sakhi, Kabul, AFGHANISTAN

[mikamanga]

[sewercentipede]

Shah Abdol-Azim Shrine, Shahr-e Rey, Tehran, Iran (source)

[shinyshrine]

[artschoolglasses]

Yasaka Shrine, Kyoto, Kawase Hasui, 1936

[newplaces2drown]

Armand Hammer - Shrines

Signed by billy woods and E L U C I D

[sherosefromseafoam]

[beifongkendo]

Snow at the Inokashira Benten shrine, by Kawase Hasui (1929)