12:53 PM
Pagan Study Group introduction
Hey there, #PaganStudyGroup! I’m Linden.
Here, have a crappy webcam shot of me (that’s one of my degus, Charlie, sitting on my shoulder):
My hair is longer than it looks, it’s just pulled back into a ponytail because fuck it why not. Say hi to a couple of my houseplants. I think you can see the christmas cactus, one of my aloe babies, and my cycad. So yeah anyhow…!
I’m currently in the learning phase of my pagan practice, which I foresee lasting perhaps many more years before I feel like I’ll have studied enough. When I was a kid (about 10-12 years old) me and my BFF’s set up altars and made potions and called to the elements (especially after The Craft came out in theaters, oh boy) but I “”officially”” became a pagan over a decade ago when I bought my first book about Wicca (maybe around 2000-2001??), but in my early 20’s I went through a (necessary) reactionary time where I was an Angry Bitter Atheist™. I feel like the time I spent as an atheist helped me develop better critical thinking habits that I am still using with my religious beliefs and practices. Right now I’m not sure if I want to go the reconstructionist route or not. I’m basically only interested in Heathenry and Celtic (wanting to lean toward Welsh/Gallic) pre-Christian religions, but so far I’ve found that neither of those two options on their own seem to “fit” for me. I am rather disinterested in modern New Age-y neo-pagan practices, although that’s fine if others are into it (although many of that type are supremely irritating to me).
Also, I’m a Lokean, inasmuch as I’ve been Claimed by Loki, however I don’t see it as a patronage type of “relationship” that many pagans are tending towards lately, and more as a… mandate? I don’t know, it’s more like I feel as though I was given a direction to refuse complacency & hypocrisy and to engage in emotional honesty.
I’ve been focused on working kitchen and garden witchery, not exactly based on historically reconstructed magical practices, but I’m still learning about that. I also have been doing spirit work/journeying for years and I use entheogens for that. (I’m not down with the holier-than-thou attitude and shaming that goes on when pagans/witches claim that sober meditation alone can “totally do the exact same thing as LSD” because whoever says that has obviously never taken LSD.)
So, you see Charlie up there on my shoulder? His grandpa Diego is buried in my garden and every time I go out to pull up weeds or plant something I give a little offering of incense and sometimes light a candle. Diego is my garden’s little spirit helper. :3 (I miss you, Mister D.)
At this point I’m focusing my reading on historical/archaeological works, because I have found that many (most?) pagan writers are terrible at citing their sources (although I do have several good pagan books that I’m working on as well). I can’t read books in a serial manner (read one entire book, then another entire book, etc.) so I tend to be reading about ten at once. I get through each individual book much slower, but it helps my attention span; if I get burnt out on one book, I just pick up where I left off in another. It also helps me absorb things better.
I tag the fuck out of my posts, so you might be interested in checking out some of my tags: #paganism, #heathen, #loki, #witchcraft, #gardening
[ETA] Oh, and I forgot to mention that last year I put out a zine on the subject of trans & queer experiences of paganism, called Re/crafting Spirit. You can read and download it on Scribd or Google Docs (I intended to make print copies on-demand, but nobody who showed interest sent me their mailing address, so it’s just in pdf form for now, heh). I still really want to put out another issue, but I’m having a bit of trouble deciding what direction I want to go in. In the year since I put out the first issue, I have learned a whole lot more and developed my own ideas and practices greatly (so I kind of want to take a look at what I wrote the first time around and make an addendum and whatnot); in addition, the issue of trans* pagans has become a mainstream topic in paganism since the last two PantheaCon ~controversies~.
