The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

When I first met up with other pagans, all of them-- all of them-- had a patron god/dess.

 
Another thing:  "having a patron deity", even in the sense of personal relationship, it's... not at all simple.

Ways in which it is not simple that I have observed:

* communication with numinous entities is not typically constructed in human language.  Translating sensations, impressions, visual flashes, omens, 'this fucking song lyric won't get out of my head', dream fragments, extremely rare actual phrases that aren't quotations from somewhere, and similar material into "God X told me Y" - which is what most people who do that sort of thing are actually doing - is an art, it is an art that takes practice, and it is an art that has an unfortunate amount of commonality with wishful thinking.

* numinous entities have their own agendas and sense of time.  A close relationship by all apparent subjective evidence today may be entirely contactless tomorrow.  People expecting something more continuous can have a hard time with this.

* health issues can entirely suppress numinous senses and interpretative capacity, meaning that if those issues are present and untreated one manages approximately fuckall in that department, regardless of what relationships or communication skills one might have when healthy.

* numinous entities don't come with clear labels, and since their communication is not always clear as communication this means that they're often hard to notice even when they're right there.

* numinous entities don't come with clear labels, and one can be dealing with one or more of them for a very long time and still not know who the fuck they are other than "that spirit/deity/thing that's been around for the last decade" or what have you.

* some people with patron-type relationships are enough with the not great with pattern-matching that the numinous entities in question have to bloody well route through someone with the sensitivity to do the communication translation thing; that "personal relationship" doesn't mean that there's a language in common.  If there isn't someone to run interference here, well.  Woops.  (I know someone whose ability to interpret signs is fairly good for the powers they honour who aren't their patron.  Their patron?  Totally incapable of hearing a thing she says 99% of the time.)

* some numinous entities refuse to deal with people who don't approach them correctly, at all.  Which may require a particular practice or mindset, meaning that those entities will not deal with people who aren't already doing some of the right things.

* personal relationships with numinous entities, like with any other sort of people, come and go in complicated ways.

* sometimes they seem to operate under the squeaky wheel principle, where the direct attention of numinous entities is directly proportional to "hooboy, that shit is broken" in a person.  (Both positive and negative attention, as there are entities that like to exploit vulnerabilities as well as those that like to fix certain kinds of problems.)  As people get their act together - and/or get to work on things that need to be worked on - the entities become less overt, or stop being around altogether.  The ones that only care about problems tend to go away when the problems are solved.

* a lot of developing personal relationship involves honouring a particular numinous entity consistently for a period of time, which can lead to learning how to read that entity's communication.  Which is, as noted above, an art/skill/thing.  But the doing the work comes first.  And sometimes doing the work doesn't have the effect of building that sort of interaction, which means that it's probably a good idea to pick out work that's valuable on its own - which comes back to honouring patrons of one's work, one's primary recreations, one's interests, one's needs.

Um.  Other things that I could probably think of at a time not umpty-lump in the morning.  Also.

Even if Develop A Personal Relationship With A Deity were a useful goal (and honestly, I'm not sure it is, any more than I think "Get A Boy/Girlfriend" is a useful goal, given that it tends to get in the way of developing potentially romantic relationships with actual people), it's wicked complicated as a thing.  And whatever picture people have of how that sort of thing happens, it's probably oversimplified to the point of vast incorrectness.

I have searched for meaningful practice and have yet to find it but I shall keep trying but I am fast running out of ideas. I even did a few rituals that I have read in books and ones I had found online from various traditions to see how they felt. Some felt awkward to perform, some felt completely wrong for me, others I didn't feel a connection to at all. I have yet to find a practice that felt "meaningful" to me at all.

 
If you take 'a few' baking courses, you might still not be able to make delicious macarons. If you take 'a few' swimming lessons you might still be stuck dog paddling around the pool. 'A few' dance classes isn't going to turn you into a ballerina.

I'm not saying you should stick with anything that makes you actively uncomfortable, but trying something a few times may not give you enough experience to truly judge if it is useful for you. Compounding this issue is the fact that a lot of rituals have layers that are not immediately apparent when you're first starting out: something as simple as a quarter call can become more meaningful with practice and a knowledge base that grows as your practice does.

Gods don't always call to people. That's not a bad thing - your spiritual path is not, after all, entirely dictated by them. Even if you do get a patron somewhere along the line, it is ultimately up to YOU, the physical being, to create a practice meaningful and beneficial for yourself.

Perhaps you would like to list the errors of fact. Simplifications I will own up to — an adequate discussion would require a dozen pages, not lines. For example, not all Hindus believe in reincarnation, but how many Lingayats have you ever encountered?

 
Most glaringly, 'the Nine Noble Truths of Heathens': that would be Nine Noble Virtues. That might seem to you to be trivial nitpicking about word choice - but words mean things, and those two words are not synonyms; the difference in word meaning changes the meaning of the phrase significantly.

Your structure of, 'If you believe (or, don't believe) A, X and Y religions are out,' is not just simplification, but in several cases is oversimplification to the point of creating an error of fact: that is, it is false that it rules out those religions. (Often false on two counts: that of that particular belief, and that of positing 'belief' as the pivotal factor when speaking of orthopraxic religions.)

If you cannot avoid actual misrepresentation without taking twelve pages to do it, then take twelve pages - we don't object to long, substantial, meaty posts that do justice to a subject, but misrepresentation is likely to be challenged.

Sunflower

My advice: stop trying.

Any power worth honouring will value that.

Truth.  Or as I always told my students.  Be an instrument not a tool.

Another thing:  "having a patron deity", even in the sense of personal relationship, it's... not at all simple.

I don't have a ton more I could add to this, except to point out that a lot of times, people will bullshit about this. Sometimes, it's a case of using "patron" differently... i.e. one person will mean "that special intimate relationship where I was thwapped by a God" and another will mean "I just like this God and have a dedicated altar to him/her/it at home".

And sometimes people will make it up because it sounds way cooler to say you're "God Bothered" all the time.

I have a personal intimate relationship with Brigid, and she thwapped me. I've had other Gods come in and out of my life from time to time... Bast will show up because she's my husband's patron and we have two cats. Loki occasionally shows up with a suitcase to fuck up my life and make things interesting.

But I also have fulfilling relationships with Gods who I just like to work with in ritual... Cernunnos and Manannan mac Lir, Rhiannon. The Greenman, and the abstract Lord and Lady of Wicca. And that's because I just like those Gods, and choose to honor them in ritual either in their season or because I wish their help with something. Or I just like their style.

So there's nothing wrong with saying "Hey, I like Athena, I'd like to work with her for a while" and putting up a home shrine to Athena and considering her a patron. And there's nothing wrong with doing that for a while and then deciding to try establishing a relationship with Odin.

Maybe you'll find that special "thwap", maybe you won't. But you'll have taken the time to establish meaningful relationships with some Gods. I mean, every person you meet won't be your best friend, and you probably won't have the same best friend for your whole life, but you can establish strong friendships with many people, right?

Karen