The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

I know a lot of you have discovered ways to work through these issues I'm just wondering how you get past that?  

.  It's not going to happen.  Even if it happens by some lucky accident, you're not going to know you did.  And even if you knew you did, it would still be different, because you're living in an electronic era rather than an iron era, and even if the practices are the same, the world they exist in is gone.

Some people have a hard time giving up that illusion, but it is an illusion, and it's important to remember that.

My glib example of this is asking someone to imagine a Puritan reconstructionist.  They're collecting documents, they're text proofing "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", they're trying to figure out what of the mythologies of the early colonial US are accurate and which are history being written by the winners and which aren't, and they're bodging together something that works for them, right?

And then they meet some of the people practicing a religion that Puritanism evolved into over time.... they meet.... Unitarian Universalists.

:

The past is another country.  And it's really hard to get a visa.

There are times I really miss Chavi, and when this question comes up is one of them, actually.  Chavi noted that her family was Celtic reconstructionists, in the school of a particular scholar.  That scholar was known to have large chunks of it very wrong, with more recent scholarship.  But her family had built something on his model of Celtic religion, and it worked for them, and it worked for the gods, and that's the part that matters.  Not the 'does this match up with ancient stuff perfectly'.  What works.

A lot of people fall into the idea that reconstruction has to be perfect, that the gaps are unacceptable and intolerable, and that one has to keep working until one has perfected it.  This is wrong.  Reconstruction is a methodology to get to a point of having religion that works, not an excuse to avoid having a religion.

I'm a reconstructionist because of the imagery, the poetry, the ethos that I have learned.  I want the spirit not the form, which is good, because I don't have the resources to build multi-acre complexes with stone buildings and several hundred staff.

https://peacefulawakenings.wordpress.com/category/recon-theory/ has a lot of my writing on this topic, and I would particularly note:

https://peacefulawakenings.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/know-your-mortar/
https://peacefulawakenings.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/commitment/

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So my question is, is it a problem to worship gods and goddesses that are not from the same area as your ancestors?  

You're already dealing with something other than the powers of Catholicism, and those are the only religious background for your ancestors you've said you can identify.  Anything back that far is what you assume your ancestors did, which may or may not be accurate, and is almost certainly not universal; ancient peoples migrated, after all.

The idea that you must focus on the gods that your ancestors venerated is a) popular and b) extremely problematic, for several reasons.  (One of them being the way it is a step on the slippery slope to racism, which I note here explicitly so it is said.)  Remember that the idea of knowledge of the past is an illusion, as noted above.  Remember that ancient people moved.  Modern people move too.  Modern nations move, even.  (We recently discovered that one of my 20th century Polish ancestors - considered himself as Polish, Polish-language-speaking, etc. - was from Vilnius.  Which is the capital of Lithuania.  Now.)  This stuff just plain isn't tidy, and trying to figure out the Right Answer like that creates more illusion.

Which doesn't mean "Oh, if you go back far enough, who knows if you had an ancestor who..." because that's not how it works.  And it's buying into the folkish delusion that some bloodlines have better connections with certain gods than others.

Some cultures have living connections with gods.  That's different.

If you actually look at how different communities related to gods in the ancient world, you find something interesting.  While, yes, there were certain mystery cults and organisations that held their things private, where you needed a membership card to get in, other stuff was a lot more fluid.

You get things like foreign officials asking the Egyptian king to lend them a statue of Khonsu which was known for healing powers.  You get things like missionaries thinking they had "converted the heathen" and coming back and being shocked and horrified that the heathens in question had put their Jesus icon up in a place of honor next to Thor.  You get gods stepping across borders into the culture next door, changing their name and their portfolio a little, becoming Someone new, then doing it again, and again, and again.  You get gods crossing boundaries with their people, encountering someone new in the new space, and hanging out swapping wardrobe and eating snacks and becoming such good mates that a thousand years later we can't tell them apart and we don't know how many people thought they should be told apart back then.

The gods may be associated with particular cultures, but many of them went wherever their people went, and found new people where they wound up.

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I know the Celtic tribes were big on worshiping ancestors, not sure on Greeks.  I feel this might be a roadblock if I do decide to take the Hellenistic route.  

The ancestors are not the gods.  The ancestors are with you regardless of the gods you honour.  Venerating the ancestors is almost completely unrelated to venerating the gods.

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One last question, these all kind of connect so I put them here, thanks for bearing with me.  When choosing a pagan path, how do you know you've hit the right one for you?  Will I get a feeling that tells me, "Hey, this is the one!"  or will i be forever changing my mind, not knowing what is right?  If I start to delve deep into these will one of them stand out from the others as the right one?

 
Some people get that feeling.  Sometimes the feeling is right.  Sometimes it isn't.

Some people choose to make a commitment to something that's good enough.  Sometimes they grow into that thing.  Sometimes they grow out of it.

The problem is that there are still no right answers.  When you choose a religion you are choosing something that will, as you practice it, develop some parts of your psyche in particular ways.  Are those the ways you want to develop yourself?  Then that is a thing you might want to do.  Do you not want to develop that way?  Then don't do the work of that religion.

So I've been doing my research ad learning things, still not gotten into any kind of worship or veneration or....I'm not sure what pagans would call it, I'm just going on what Christians called it. But I've run into some problems.

First off, I've noticed with the old religions there is are gaps in history and a lot of unknown information due to other religions coming in and taking over.  I am reading all this and seeing a lot of things like "No one is exactly sure how this was..".  This is very common in Celtic history due to the fact that writing was so uncommon.  This is SO annoying.  I don't know if what I am trying to learn is right and I feel there is so much missing.  There seem to be so many variations of things and arguments over which variation is right.  I know a lot of you have discovered ways to work through these issues I'm just wondering how you get past that?  

Another problem I've had is the fact that the Celtic history is so spotty and coming from the Romans it makes me wonder how bias it is.  For some reason my mind has wandered over to Hellenistic Paganism.  I really don't know why, I was just thinking about how unknown the Celtic stuff was and my mind just wandered to the Greek religion.  Now I'm not changing my mind...because I haven't even made up my mind yet. (Though I have a bad habit of changing my mind easily.) I'm looking into both now.  The problem is, my ancestors are from Ireland. (We don't know how far back in Ireland they were, if they were a Celtic tribe or not. AS far back as we have gotten they are Catholic.  They could have come from another country, who knows.)
So my question is, is it a problem to worship gods and goddesses that are not from the same area as your ancestors?  I know the Celtic tribes were big on worshiping ancestors, not sure on Greeks.  I feel this might be a roadblock if I do decide to take the Hellenistic route.

One last question, these all kind of connect so I put them here, thanks for bearing with me.  When choosing a pagan path, how do you know you've hit the right one for you?  Will I get a feeling that tells me, "Hey, this is the one!"  or will i be forever changing my mind, not knowing what is right?  If I start to delve deep into these will one of them stand out from the others as the right one?

The most important thing is giving up on the illusion that you are going to do things The Way They Were Done Before .  It's not going to happen.  Even if it happens by some lucky accident, you're not going to know you did.  And even if you knew you did, it would still be different, because you're living in an electronic era rather than an iron era, and even if the practices are the same, the world they exist in is gone.

Some people have a hard time giving up that illusion, but it is an illusion, and it's important to remember that.

My glib example of this is asking someone to imagine a Puritan reconstructionist.  They're collecting documents, they're text proofing "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", they're trying to figure out what of the mythologies of the early colonial US are accurate and which are history being written by the winners and which aren't, and they're bodging together something that works for them, right?

And then they meet some of the people practicing a religion that Puritanism evolved into over time.... they meet.... Unitarian Universalists.

:

The past is another country.  And it's really hard to get a visa.

There are times I really miss Chavi, and when this question comes up is one of them, actually.  Chavi noted that her family was Celtic reconstructionists, in the school of a particular scholar.  That scholar was known to have large chunks of it very wrong, with more recent scholarship.  But her family had built something on his model of Celtic religion, and it worked for them, and it worked for the gods, and that's the part that matters.  Not the 'does this match up with ancient stuff perfectly'.  What works.

A lot of people fall into the idea that reconstruction has to be perfect, that the gaps are unacceptable and intolerable, and that one has to keep working until one has perfected it.  This is wrong.  Reconstruction is a methodology to get to a point of having religion that works, not an excuse to avoid having a religion.

I'm a reconstructionist because of the imagery, the poetry, the ethos that I have learned.  I want the spirit not the form, which is good, because I don't have the resources to build multi-acre complexes with stone buildings and several hundred staff.

https://peacefulawakenings.wordpress.com/category/recon-theory/ has a lot of my writing on this topic, and I would particularly note:

https://peacefulawakenings.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/know-your-mortar/
https://peacefulawakenings.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/commitment/



You're already dealing with something other than the powers of Catholicism, and those are the only religious background for your ancestors you've said you can identify.  Anything back that far is what you assume your ancestors did, which may or may not be accurate, and is almost certainly not universal; ancient peoples migrated, after all.

The idea that you must focus on the gods that your ancestors venerated is a) popular and b) extremely problematic, for several reasons.  (One of them being the way it is a step on the slippery slope to racism, which I note here explicitly so it is said.)  Remember that the idea of knowledge of the past is an illusion, as noted above.  Remember that ancient people moved.  Modern people move too.  Modern nations move, even.  (We recently discovered that one of my 20th century Polish ancestors - considered himself as Polish, Polish-language-speaking, etc. - was from Vilnius.  Which is the capital of Lithuania.  Now.)  This stuff just plain isn't tidy, and trying to figure out the Right Answer like that creates more illusion.

Which doesn't mean "Oh, if you go back far enough, who knows if you had an ancestor who..." because that's not how it works.  And it's buying into the folkish delusion that some bloodlines have better connections with certain gods than others.

Some cultures have living connections with gods.  That's different.

If you actually look at how different communities related to gods in the ancient world, you find something interesting.  While, yes, there were certain mystery cults and organisations that held their things private, where you needed a membership card to get in, other stuff was a lot more fluid.

You get things like foreign officials asking the Egyptian king to lend them a statue of Khonsu which was known for healing powers.  You get things like missionaries thinking they had "converted the heathen" and coming back and being shocked and horrified that the heathens in question had put their Jesus icon up in a place of honor next to Thor.  You get gods stepping across borders into the culture next door, changing their name and their portfolio a little, becoming Someone new, then doing it again, and again, and again.  You get gods crossing boundaries with their people, encountering someone new in the new space, and hanging out swapping wardrobe and eating snacks and becoming such good mates that a thousand years later we can't tell them apart and we don't know how many people thought they should be told apart back then.

The gods may be associated with particular cultures, but many of them went wherever their people went, and found new people where they wound up.



The ancestors are not the gods.  The ancestors are with you regardless of the gods you honour.  Venerating the ancestors is almost completely unrelated to venerating the gods.


 
Some people get that feeling.  Sometimes the feeling is right.  Sometimes it isn't.

Some people choose to make a commitment to something that's good enough.  Sometimes they grow into that thing.  Sometimes they grow out of it.

The problem is that there are still no right answers.  When you choose a religion you are choosing something that will, as you practice it, develop some parts of your psyche in particular ways.  Are those the ways you want to develop yourself?  Then that is a thing you might want to do.  Do you not want to develop that way?  Then don't do the work of that religion.