The Crafts: Wixes, Spells, and the Weaponized Placebo Effect

My mom got me some cool tombstone-shaped boxes to serve as new deck boxes for my HS and Silouhettes tarot decks!

Which is good because the decks they were in are about to come apart, NEGL, those little cardboard things are not designed to put up with constantly-carries-deck-around habits.

 

Nice! And yeah, those boxes do not stand up to any degree of use. Which is a shame when they are visually appealing.

 

Is this the right place to put this question?

Spoiler: hard polytheism and closed religions

The more I see hard polytheists on the sj side of things respecting the idea of closed religions the more it bothers me. Like. Atheist/agnostic pagans basically see it as a more respectable version of LARP with more importance to the people/community and it makes sense to choose who you let into your community. Soft poly sees deities from closed religions as secretly the same as deities from open religions, so access to them isn't really restricted after all.

So... I saw this the other day and it keeps bothering me: http://answersfromvanaheim.tumblr.c...y-anon-because-im-not-sure-how-people-besides

I keep reading it and thinking... "so I met this nice person, Alice, and she wants to be friends, but Bob and Chris told me it's an important part of their culture that she can only talk to them and their friends, what do I do?" "ask Bob and Chris if you can be friends, or tell her you can't talk to her anymore because they didn't give you permission"

So glad I'm not hard poly because if I were I'd be wondering how to start a domestic violence shelter for abused gods.

I'm so confused. Why is this okay?

 

It is, of course, up to a god's followers to protect that god from accidentally engaging with yucky outsiders.

I'm especially bothered by this line:

Because Alice is basically interchangeable with Mary, and no one cares if you're friends with Mary. So cut ties with Alice and be friends with Mary, instead.

 

I think it's bullshit, personally. Just don't set yourself up as an authority on that God, and learn about them and be respectful. Also, Tumblr-SJ's idea of closed religions frequently bears no resemblance to what people in that culture commonly believe.

 

I think it honestly implies this idea that the gods don't actually exist (so cannot actually choose a follower). Therefore, the god was made up by the culture they're a part of, and therefore worshipping that god is appropriation. Thus, you should instead choose to worship a god that's not off-limits.

I also think the idea of a "closed religion" has less to do with whom you worship and more to do with how you worship them, or even more to do with the non-worshipping aspects of the religion. The closed religion may have practices that are for initiates only, and so you shouldn't do those without having been initiated. This isn't usually a problem, because those practices are usually very secret and told only to initiates!

What it comes down to is Tumblr failing to grasp nuance, yet again.

 

I don't really see the issue with answersfromvanaheim's answer there, honestly. It seems pretty solid.

Like, if you have a closed religion, you're not going to be able to find accurate information outside of asking actual practitioners, so, if you do think this is a god from a closed tradition approaching you, it would be disrespectful to claim to worship them without making an effort to do it properly, yeah?

And like, no one is stopping you asking multiple people. If X group say you can't join, but Y similar group say you can, cool! You'll have to navigate being-an-outsider issues, of course - there was a post about being a white voodoo practitioner and the cultural issues that brings floating around a while back, which I wish I could pull up - but that's, well, that's gonna happen.

But - if you don't respect the culture around a religion, why are you trying to follow it? The culture exists for a reason, and it's usually the reason of the religion, when it's that closely tied.

(Personally, I would think that most-times when people think a god is calling them, but all communities that they seek to join shut them out, it's probably not that god, because if that god were calling them, they'd also make their other followers open to this person joining them. But that is again from a hard polytheist viewpoint.)

 

I can see that and think it's reasonable... from an atheist/some kind of soft poly perspective... but from a hard poly perspective? "So Alice came and talked to me and wants to talk more in the future... how will I ever find out Alice's likes and dislikes, though? Maybe I'll read a book? No? Oh, well, the obvious answer is to ask Bob and Chris." If Alice is a real person, can't she tell you about herself?

And again: soft or atheist perspective? Makes sense! Hard? "Hey, Alice is a tenured professor at Yale and Yale wouldn't let me in... but the other day Alice told me some cool stuff about her field and said she'd love to infodump at me more later! But can I really understand? I mean, I bet her lectures make lots of little references to the culture and the campus and other Yale classes..."

THAT makes sense from a hard poly perspective! (In theory, anyway.) That instead of the community deciding who can talk to the god it's the other way around and the god decides and has the community enforce it? I can't see anything creepy about that.

Thanks.

 

But if the god can control their followers and make them accept you into their practice, can't they also prevent you from joining if they actually don't want outsiders practicing their religion?

Either the god can control everyone, in which case if you're actually welcome you won't run into a closed-religion barrier because the god will have told their followers to let you in, or you won't have any problem at all because the god wouldn't have called on you and you won't have a desire to join the religion

Or, the god can't control everyone, because people have free will, in which case you may run into a closed-religion barrier because some people won't want you to be part of their culture, but you may well be talking to that actual god, who actually wants you to worship them

ETA
Here's my thinking: Religion can be messy, and trying to break things down into absolutes isn't going to work. Sometimes, I think, people who aren't part of a culture can be called by a god from that culture, and may run into barriers in trying to be accepted by people who are part of that culture. (Me? I don't live anywhere near people who are part of that culture, so must practice in private, which happens to be an acceptable thing in this religion.) So long as the person in question, like @Morven said, doesn't present themselves as an expert or "talk over" people from that culture, so long as they treat the culture and the god with respect, I do not see the problem.

 

Well with getting information from the god themselves there's always the issue of UPG around. That and "Is this real or not?" Gods can definitely tell you things, but actually backing that up with outside sources is important. I might believe that Lugh definitely exists and is his own separate being all that hard polytheistic jazz, but how can I say what I think I am hearing is real? I need to investigate and I need to study. Multiple people coming to the same conclusion especially in large numbers like, say, Thai beliefs on Phra Mae Khongka is more valid that my opinion alone. That and I do value tradition very heavily. I may have individual ideas about Buddhism and Guan Yin, but those need to line up with my traditional background. I like me some initiation rituals.

The closed vs. not closed discourse on tumblr is pretty fucking atrocious though. Like Lib said you can and should ask multiple people. Some Thais might not be fine with my religious practices. Others are. There are differences of opinion on the whole outsider thing. There's also the issue of gods being present in many different traditions in vastly different forms. Buddhist Indra is not Hindu Indra in the slightest. These different traditions also happen to have different initiation requirements. I get kind of furious about people who claim to be part of Tibetan esoteric Buddhism without being properly initiated, for example. Unless you go through those channels you are not part of that particular tradition. I cannot suddenly declare that I am Catholic. I need to go and become Catholic through the accepted method. Unless of course said accepted course completely fucking falls apart like with the Theravadan nunhood. Even then revival needs research and tradition. But any random schmo can instantly become Buddhist in general religiously without any ceremony involved.

Religion is hard!

 

And I totally agree that you cannot and should not just swap in a different deity. They are NOT THE SAME and pop-"wiccan" bullshit ideas about "let's plug in three random deities we have one-sentence descriptions of in our Big Book Of Deities" things are stuff I hate.

 

This is what I was trying to say here:

You can be called by and worship the Christian God without stepping on anyone's toes, but if you want to be Catholic, or Baptist, or whatever, you need to be "initiated" into that religion, by people who have already been initiated.
Christianity isn't closed, so it's not an exact parallel, but.

Another one: Wicca is a closed religion. You need to be initiated into it. You can still worship the horned god and practice neo-wicca witchcraft without being initiated, but practicing specific, secret wiccan rites is not okay because you need to be initiated into the religion to do them.

(Going backwards...)

There are multiple methods of verifying that the information you're getting from your god is solid, and I agree that talking to other people is a big one.

 

Guanyin frowns upon those who swap her and others around. And then moms 500000000000 sick puppies.

Also I am aware that is what you were trying to say. I simply wanted to put down and collect my own thoughts on the matter. Which are that TRADITION IS EVERYTHING TO ME EVER. But religion is hard because like we shoot Rama in the kneecaps and tell Visnu to go watch over Sri Lanka but the term "Blue Jesus" isn't used without reason so yeah. Both are traditions with large numbers of devotees. And they are incompatible ones at that. So what do.

 

I wonder if gods have support groups for those abused by their followers

 

No, sorry, I was also just clarifying my thoughts. You said what I wanted to in a clearer way than I did, so I repeated you.

 

Oh. Pfft. We are both clarifying then. Whoops. Words. Things.

 

So long as everything is clear.

 

The issue here is one of discernment.

Suppose I thought I'd been called by Baron Samedi, and given that he comes from a closed culture, I can't find much reliable information online to research this further. I then have little to go on to help me discern whether this actually is him, or whether it's a malicious or neutral spirit trying to stir shit up, or whether I'm just making things up.

Seeking out confirmation and community helps ensure that we are all on the right lines. Sure, some small things will differ from person to person - that's what the concept of UPG is about - but having access to some sort of community, whether it's in-person, online, research-based, whatever, helps you figure out what is true, what's not true, what's masquerading spirits, what's leftover cultural bias from whatever former religion you followed, etc.

The gods can tell you truth. Other things can tell you lies. We are just mortals, and on our own, figuring out the difference can be hard.

fakeedit: Aon also elaborated on this while I was writing the post. Yay Aon!

That's not really a valid analogy, from my perspective. Religion isn't completely separate from culture; it informs it, and if you don't understand the culture, you're probably missing something in the religion.

A better analogy might go like this: Alice is a physics professor at Yale. I've never had the chance to study any physics or maths, but she said she'd love to tell me about her work in Monte Carlo simulations! But I feel like doing any work to learn about basic maths and physics would be too hard. I mean, she'll be okay explaining everything from algebra up, right? She doesn't have anything better to do with her time or anything?

(Also - you keep representing the gods as if they were people, equivalent to mortals, controlled by mortals even. That's just not the case; they are gods because they are more than mortal. More powerful than us, more knowledgeable than us, etc etc. Trying to create analogies where they are on the same scale as us is kind of hugely missing the point; they aren't, and that's why they're worth worshipping.)

There's a difference there - if they Really Want you joining their religion, they will tap their leaders/shamans/whatever on the metaphorical shoulder and say 'hey that kid. that kid's important'. If they don't care about you? You're just another random schmuck that they're not calling, that they don't give a shit about? They're not going to bother to try to contact you specifically to say 'hey don't join this religion'. You're still able to pester people about joining closed religions as much as you want! But if those leaders are generally like 'no outsiders please', and on praying/meditating/etc have no reason to exclude you from the set of 'outsiders', you're not getting in. There's no reason for the god in question to intervene more strongly than that.

 

I exist to elaborate on your thoughts.

 

Why are the only options here "I am so important that the gods themselves demand my acceptance into this religion" or "I am nothing." Why can't the god be like "Hey, kid, you're useful to me, but I've got shit to do, find your way into this religion"?

Hell, why can't some gods be like "Hey, I'd like it if you worshipped me, but have no particular problem with you doing it outside of the traditional structure"?

It's unlikely, sure, but here's the thing, gods do unlikely things sometimes. And, yeah, in any case, you need to make damn sure you're actually being called by the god you think you are. But my entire point is that these things can be complicated, and messy, and hard, and that hard rules can cause problems.