could you tell us of your religious journey? i've never had any real religious beliefs, but i've been trying to explore and it's hard to know where to start, so i was wondering if you had anything you could share that could help. maybe even some blogs you could point me to?
hey anon! i just got back from work so sorry if my thoughts are jumbled, but this is a great question!!
so like a lot of folks around here, i was raised catholic before i became pagan. i considered myself agnostic for a while after getting confirmed, but after about a year and a half, i had to reckon with that because of apollo reaching out to me! it was a crazy feeling, i jokingly say he was "tugging on my sleeve" for a while till i got the picture haha.
after that i just kinda ambled through religion for a while, cuz i was like 15 and didn't really know what i was doing, and just kept tacking gods onto the list of gods i wanted to worship, though i didn't really do anything for them. see, when i'm not in my dorm, i've got to practice in secret (still do), so i was sort of limited in what i (thought) i could do (until i started learning more about devotional activities and whatnot).
i'm not sure what made me stick specifically with the hellenic pantheon, but that's what i did for about 4 years. it took nearly 3 of those 4 years before i actually started researching the gods, the ancient cult they received, and ancient practices, so that's when my religious practice really started to finally take shape. i saw what others were doing and tried to work it into my practice in a way that worked for me, so i began doing morning prayers and weekly libations. it's important to make sure that you do these in a way that works for you instead of just parroting someone else! there are tons of academic books you can read about ancient greek life and religion, which a lot of blogs on here have links for. if you can't find any by just scrolling through the hellenic polytheism tag, i have a google drive of my own that i can hook you up with.
then, last july-ish, i became interested in learning more about the ancient gods of the place where most of my family came from, so i began researching the pre-roman gods of the iberian peninsula (specifically the area that later became portugal). from there, learning about them turned into wanting to connect to them, and after a year of on-and-off learning i'm finally beginning to do that! it's been a much more delicate process, because there's little surviving information on these gods, so it's been a big puzzle game of piecing together what information i have with practices from other areas and faiths to fill the gaps.
for as long as i've been a pagan, i've always been sort of an ominist, though i didn't know there was a word for it for a while. so it's really been a matter of putting out feelers about what i want to do, and what gods i want to include in my practice, and seeing what works (and being okay with something not working!). so my biggest advice is really just to stay open minded, and see what interests you instead of feeling a need to do things like everybody else.
this turned into quite the ramble lol but i hope this answered your question!! if you have any other questions, feel free to reach out again!
Its really funny and weird how, of all the european pagan mythologies, greek is the one white ppl know the most of by far.
Like, of course it makes sense, greco-romans were hailed as the peak of civilization by white european elites at least like, twice in history, but it’s still really wild like. We’ll know the names of every olympian and what exactly their deal is, know like 20 different random greek monsters who only appeared in like One Story,
but then u ask abt the british isles, site of a people who would eventually colonize the fucking world, and its like “uhhhhhh theres morrigan? Also some fairies. Is morrigan a fairy? I think there were some tree worshippers. Some dudes put blue paint on their body and had big shields i think?” and a book’s gonna claim there was an irish potato god and you’re going to believe them bcs you’ll be so wrapped up in the potato famine thing that you’ll forget potatos were IMPORTED FROM THE ANDES MOUNTAINS.
And then like folks will be familiar with like 4 norse gods maybe 5, know some words like asgard and ragnarok, but ask them who fenrir is and theyll be like “Is he important?”
Also if you ask them about germanic mythos they will draw a fucking blank bcs even tho the general public are familiar with at least a few germanic mythos things, we completely stripped out the germanic origins from them when we called them generic “fairy tales.” Same for france and the iberian penninsula i think. Also dont ask me which fairy tales come from where bcs i am a prime example of this, i do not fucking know, i just vaguely remember that they came from certain places and then spread from there.
Oh And absolutely FORGET about anything east of germany fucking forget about it. The slavic regions have a rich mythos and even ppl who are pretty knowledgable abt the stuff i said above won’t know shit about it, case in point, me! Go ahead! I know a bunch abt celtic stuff and norse stuff and a lill bit of german stuff, but ask me to bring up ONE slavic story! The only thing my brain is cookin up is that one about the lindwurm, and even that one i cant remember if its actually slavic!
Now Think abt how many white people claim heritage from places in europe that arent greece and italy. Think about how little those same ppl know abt their ancestor’s prechristian stories and beliefs. Im hispanic i know like one thing abt pre-christian spain and its that they had a funny word for fairies (i don’t even remember the name!), just as an example. Like isnt that fucking insane? You’d think a buncha colonizing douches competing with each other to take over the world would put a bit more effort into educating ppl abt the ancestral stories that set these guys apart from each other, but no, not really. And like dont get me wrong its not like this doesnt make sense. It does. The roman empire and later christianity overtook like all these myriad cultures years before colonialism and white supremacy was even a pipe dream, to say nothing about the internal strife that happened in the iberian peninsula and the british isles.
But at the same time, in recent years there’s been massive pushes to recover this lost culture (especially in those british isles places that arent england), and even with this effort, so much is unknown to a fuckton of people who, i repeat, claim heritage from these places. (In fact, one of those efforts probably set us back bcs it got caught up in bullshit ideology and mysticism and grabbed stuff from totally different people to support a bullshit point. Looking at you, nazis.) and it’s just kind of insane. Overall this is just a peak example to me of the hollowness and artificiality of the concept of whiteness. The master race can’t even remember their own ancestors, and ancient history had to be wiped away or made generic in order to support the notion that these people have something in common, and thus, something setting them apart from everyone else.