an actual post!

I shall not apologise for saying I'd use this journal and then not posting, because in fact I've been reasonably active over at [Bad username or unknown identity: friendsofenglishmagic,] so it's not so much that I've been not using dreamwidth as that I've only had fandom thoughts. But here's A Thing Wanted To Talk About:

Hi, I'm Book, and I am a very bad pagan.

I don't talk about this too much on my main tumblr because I still feel slightly selfconscious talking about paganism on tumblr to people who have known me since I was a Christian. This is one reason why I'm a Very Bad Pagan: because I am extremely selfconscious about being a pagan, and also because I am not very committed to paganism.

Like. I don't think I really believe in anything.

The thing about being a pagan is that capital b-Belief is not necessarily a strict and crucial part of religion. I mean, the thing about paganism is it's infinitely flexible and adaptable because it is not organized. That's what I like about it, and that's one reason I decided to stay.

I really want religion and ritual in my life. I want a sense of the numinous and of things greater than me. I read too many fantasy novels as a child and now I want the world to have magic. But I was raised a fundamentalist Christian, so anything that has what you might call a high degree of structure makes me break out in guilt hives. 

So, paganism is ideal. There's a bunch of different traditions: revivalist and completely new ones, ones that involve witchcraft and ones that don't. Syncretism and eclecticism is allowed in many of them.

I went with Roman polytheism, because much of the metaphysical ideas appealed to me. The Romans were very big on little gods, which I love; many philosophers were into the idea that the gods were teachers, fair and just and understanding, not angry masters who could destroy you if you did wrong. That's important for me as an ex-Christian. The Romans were also religious magpies who added gods to the pantheon like they were going out of stock, which is pretty important for me as someone who doesn't want to feel "locked in" to a certain set of gods. And  household worship was explicitly individual. It was not required to worship all the gods (in fact I'd reckon that's impossible) or even any given set of gods, which is nice*. And the community on tumblr is composed of very chill people who all feel like terrible Romans and don't mind**. Moreover, there are a lot of gods I feel some connection with (Minerva, Janus, Diana, Vesta, and so on). 

It's not very queer as a pantheon, unlike, say, Heathenry. I suspect this is due to the fact that an organized patriarchal society passed down all the religious information we have, as opposed to Heathenry where we have a less organized urban structure. Roman imperialists, living in a society where dudes were the best and gender roles were extremely strict, had no interest in passing down gods who didn't fall into the appropriately Manly tm and Binary social structures (which did admittedly sometimes involve men having sex with men, but this was not considered nonnormative if it was Done Right). There's stuff we can construe later as potentially queer now, but it's a little harder. Also, obviously, the Romans were imperialists. But a good community helps the former, and the latter is, well....no society is perfect, and because I live in an intensely imperalistic, oppressive society, it's almost comforting to know the gods have seen it all before.

The thing about all this is: a. I don't really believe in anything, I just want it to be true, and b. I'm not actually great at practicing either.

Pagan religions are often considered orthopraxic, rather than orthodoxic, religions. In other words, it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you do the right actions. But I don't do that either. I never put stuff on my altar, I don't really even pray. It all feels completely pointless because I don't think it will actually change anything, and that makes me not want to engage with it.

So like, I like the idea of being a cultorix deorum***, but I'm really bad at it.

And I don't hang around with other pagans much. There are some I like, but the Broader Pagan Community is full of cultural appropriation.....they're more sincere than me? This latter point is a condemnation of me, not them. I want to be sincere, but it isn't in me to be sincere about religion. Yet? I don't know.

And, also, honestly: I am bad at group emotions. I've never participated well in them. Going to a ritual sounds great, but I'd probably just end up standing awkwardly on the edge, wishing I was somewhere else. Which is a solid enough metaphor for my entire experience with religion that I'm going to stop this post here.

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*This is one thing that turned me off Hellenism. Most of the Hellenics I know (not all of them but most of them) hold to the idea that you're supposed to have some kind of veneration for all of the Twelve. That's too much commitment for me. I can barely handle, like, four. Also the biggest and loudest Hellenic community on tumblr is, uh, heavily reconstructionist and somewhat dogmatic about certain things. You get a lot of people saying "The gods are THIS way". I don't mean to say that Hellenismos is inherently like that, but since I interact with coreligionists mainly on tumblr, I'd end up getting a lot of that and I can't be bothered. I get enough of it being Hellenismos-adjacent as a cultorix deorum. 

**the community off tumblr is a bunch of Rome LARPers who take Roman names and assign themselves ranks in their organizations. Fine for them as wants it, too organized for me. On tumblr we like hoodie-togas and talk about what gods have histories potentially interpetable as genderqueer.

***bad Latin I made up in a fit of pique about the lack of gender-neutral options.