Traditions, Religions and Crafts

[pt_tangles]

I have been churning something in my head lately, and I think it needs to come out now. I think I might be falling back into agnosticism. It isn't that I don't believe in gods. It is more that I am not entirely certain of their nature. I am finding more and more that I don't really see them as gods. Not in the traditional sense of the word, anyway.

I am sort of starting to look at them as powerful spirits. Similar perhaps to Catholic saints. Those who help us to do our work in the world. I don't know if there is a creator deity, and further, if there is, I don't know that it is a conscious being. I have always had a easier time seeing big g God as more of an energy field (like 'the force', I guess) from which the gods we know sprung like flowers from the earth.

I am going to start looking into the concepts of ghosts, spirits, angels and demons. And more about the fair folk. There are connections there, I think. Connections of magic that transcend religions and mythologies and politics.

I am going to step back from the Wheel this year. I am going back to the secular holidays that I celebrated as a kid. I am not going to try and juggle Yule and Christmas. I will enjoy the season, alone. The days I will let pass with a moment of reflection and thought.

I started with Halloween. To me it was a quiet night of reflection on those who have passed before and plans for the future. The end of the year.

I hope that this year will bring me some illumination. I am done trying to fill specific days with ritual that doesn't seem to do much for me. All days have the potential for illustrating the beauty of the season.

I am moving off the path again. Who knows where I will end up. Wish me luck.

--Phae

Comments

[brock-tn.livejournal.com]

Don't think of it as stepping off the path. Say rather that your path has brought you to a branching, and you're exploring one of the branches.

[pt_tangles]

That is a good way to look at it. Thanks, Brock :)

--Phae

[matrinka69.livejournal.com]

Brock's comment is spot on. Have you ever gone exploring in the woods? First, you start on a well-travelled path and maybe even one that is mown and raked, laid out before you. The walking is easy. Then you see a deer track that is wide enough to slip down, so you follow that a way. It will wind around here and there through the woods, branching off now and then into narrower, less used paths that are closer, harder to walk, but if you follow them, you find they often open out into meadows that few people ever find.

You never really leave your path. It is what is right underneath your feet. We aren't set in stone. We grow and change and flow through our lives, like that deer track. Sometimes we take wide, cleared path, because that's where we need to go. Sometimes we take the close, difficult path, because that's where we need to go. It is still our path.

The spirits- from the tiniest of fae to the deities, are, IMO, part of Creator, just as we, the incarnate, are. Creator isn't really terribly aware of us. Not sure if Creator has specific conciousness or not, but at the scale, it doesn't really matter much, since I cannot comprehend how Creator would think, nor do I believe that Creator would be able to comprehend how we think.

So, yeah. Good journey!

[eldriwolf.livejournal.com]

---What they have been saying!

I myself do not deal much, or at all, with many gods bigger than the Solar system---
(I often deal only with 'part' of "The Ocean"--the pacific--I don't think of the indian ocean)
-so limiting my gnosis to planetary entities probably keeps my head from 'exploding'

Sometimes i lie on my back and stare at the stars, and Wonder, and put myself 'in scale' with the Galaxy. (It can be comforting to know we are down here in the warm depths of a gravity well--that we have not left the womb---that any mess we make is Tiny...)

--- I Think of the darkness between the stars, but don't Do much with it---'The Star Goddess' is There all right-"There are Galaxies like grains of sand", but it is all too big and distant for My brain. Creation is ongoing, I have my part in it, but not a big one.

I feel no shame in "I don't understand"---that is not, to my mind, Agnostic, as much as Honest.


Many religions have the distant "creator" that does not interact much, lesser gods that do...