Pagan stuff.

[bladespark]

I keep starting to type out a post about this, but it's SO MUCH.

How do I put the complete-yet-ongoing transformation of my spiritual life into words in any sort of coherent way?

This is at least 17 years worth of slow travel, and another year of...I don't even know what to call it. Tumbling off a cliff, possibly. I'm not sure I've landed yet, either?

That said, two links:

The Dragon's Teeth
A personal-journey zine that covers some tiny slice of what I've been experiencing.

The Call To Arms
A discord server dedicated to Hellenist paganism in general and the worship of Ares in particular.


Yeah, uh... Like I said, it's been a bit of a journey there.

You do not have to follow Ares to join the group. But it is adults-only because I cannot even with trying to moderate something that gets so easily into heavy and dark topics while having kids present. :3

Anyhow, yeah. A little over a year ago I was putting together my first altar, now I'm running a group. Admittedly that latter is because there is shit all for Ares out there. The "most hateful" god continues to be so, I guess. (That's from the Iliad. Zeus said it about Ares. Oof, dad, A+ parenting there. But a lot of us can relate, can't we? That's part of the appeal.)

Comments

[hitokage]

I wish I could say I was surprised about the having to build your own, but as someone now claimed by two Lord of Night and who's been in and out of general pagan circles for 25-ish years ... yeah, I'm not. I have my theories why war gods get especially shat on, but... 🤷‍♀️

[bladespark]

Yeah, I have some thoughts too... :P They have a lot to do with the same kind of performative purity that tends to piss me off about certain Christians, funnily enough.

[hitokage]

Oh yeah. There's something about certain pagans coming from conservative Christian backgrounds that just ... idk, words. They'll cling to that same binary hard morality despite leaving the church because it's the framework they know and the thought of exploring, let alone possibly having to *build* a new, more nuanced framework is too much like work and too scary for them to approach. Christian non-scholars injecting their moralizing versions of ancient mythos and NEEDING a clear-cut Antagonist (looking at you Legendary Adventures of Hercules, which I can never watch again thanks to stupid Kevin Sorbo, which is unfortunate because Ares was kinda hot) hasn't helped. :p

[bladespark]

Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuup. Some people leave Christianity because the black and white morality is suffocating. But a lot of people leave for other reasons, and pack that shit along with them.

(Also, I have not seen Legendary Adventures of Hercules, but funnily enough a friend of mine elsewhere posted a gif of Ares from that or maybe Xena appearing from nowhere all smoldering-look "you rang?" so I fully agree. And with the rest, too, everybody likes to use Ares as a villain.)

[hitokage]

My bigger problem with the series now is that it was already so cheesy when it first ran in the 90s, so it's aged HORRIBLY, both for how it looks and the stories it was telling. Sorbo showing his whole ass as a Trumpist just made it worse. Which is unfortunate because Xena was a better series, but it's so tangled in Hercules that I can't watch either now and dammit, Xena was part of my bisexual awakening!

From my memories of my Hellenistic period, the common antagonists of the myths were either other mortals or one's own pride. Or both. Usually both. But I think some people are really invested in the idea of an Evil God of Evil so they can blame someone else, someone too powerful to fight, for the evil in the world. Christians do seem especially attached to their learned helplessness.

[bladespark]

Yeah. Ares in myth was more of a force of nature? Which, well, Greek gods in general, hello God of Lightning, etc.! He wasn't good, but he wasn't evil, he was just...war, part of human experience and existence, especially in those days.

[silveradept]

I share your pain about Sorbo and Hercules, even if I was more interested in Xena as a general rule. (I also think Xena was part of many a person's awakenings.)

I think that having a personified evil, and especially a personified evil of power greater than humans, helps to make the universe more orderly and more understandable and allows a person to feel much more like they are a being of good or one with the potential to be one. Which, now that I write it out, sounds an awful lot like whiteness at work in individuals basing much of their identity on being a good person who doesn't do racist things, even if they participate in and use systems that definitely are racist or toward ends that are racist.