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silveradept[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
It's Solstice Day, at least observed, as the actual astronomical solstice wobbles back and forth between the 20th and 21st, but the upshot of this is that we can expect to have more light in the Northern Hemisphere until midsummer. (The downside is that it's the brightest day of the year in the Southern Hemisphere, so they can look forward to less light and heat until the other solstice.) The returning of the light is often accompanied by the idea of success at having made it to the darkest point of the year, of harvest having carried you this far and hopefully, it will carry you the rest of the way until it is time once again to plant and grow, and then reap.
One of those things that's always interesting about the Julian (and Gregorian) calendar and the names of the months in English is that we have months that are presumably named for gods (Janus, Mars, Maia, Juno,) named for emperors (Julius, Augustus) who, if I remember correctly, would be part of the cultus as gods or to ascend to them after their death, a couple of months named for things that happen in them (Februa, Aperio) and then, there's the counting months (seven, eight, nine, ten), which were displaced from their rightful places by one of those emperors themselves when he moved the dead months to the beginning of the year, instead of leaving them at the end. I kind of wonder why there weren't more gods elevated to the calendar. It's not like the Romans didn't have plenty to choose from. (And, you know, the days of the week in English have astrologically and god-related names, too, but it shows the Germanic in English. (Sun, Moon, Tiw, Woden, Thor, Frigga, Saturn,) In other Romance languages, they stay a little closer to Roman gods and goddesses, but also make room for Judaism and Christianity (Lord's Day, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Sabbath). I mean, knowing that the pre-Julian calendar was only ten months and that past the ones that had major festivals or were dedicated to specific gods, they just counted, that makes a certain amount of sense why the other months never picked up certain godly associations, but it's still weird that none of the attempts to name any of the other counting months after something else stuck. Even after they were displaced by the two emperor's names.
Which, in a very roundabout way, brings us to this Solstice-themed question:
...that's a pretty wide-ranging question, there, floating blockquote. I mean, I could say things like I believe there's space for Jews to acknowledge and make songs about how Black Lives Matter (which I am indebted to bothgingicat for explaining that there is a backlash against this idea and the Maccabeats, who performed the song, responding to the criticisms they've received after posting the song for helping me gain at least a surface-level understanding as to why two groups with a history of being persecuted by the same hegemon would be at odds with each other on such a matter as this). You want to give that some scoping?
That's better.
I was raised in an explicitly Roman Catholic environment, with friends around who were explicitly being raised as evangelical Christians, in a greater context that assumes everyone is at least conversant with Christianity and believes, at least generally, that it is a worthwhile morality and ethics system to use in everyday life. When pressed, most of those people would respond either that terrible people aren't really Christian, because they have strayed from the teachings of Jesus. If the terrible person happens to be someone who is in a high office in a denomination of Christianity, then many of those same people swift to condemn others will usually rally around the terrible person and declare that they had a lapse in judgment and that the best thing for them to have now is forgiveness and grace, rather than accountability. It was never a matter of contention between myself and my friends, as best as I could tell, that we were part of differing denominations. Roman Catholicism, at least from what I remember of it, was mostly "yep, they're there, and they're Christians, too, so treat them nice," about other Christians, even if that ecumenism (is that the right word?) isn't reciprocated in many of those denominations, which I would only learn about later on in life. But, broadly speaking, I live in a society that is saturated in Christian imagery, vocabulary, and praxis. The kind of thing where the library is not open on Easter Sunday, even if it's not a paid holiday, because there are enough practicing Christians who would be taking it off that there wouldn't be enough people to open the locations, and perhaps not as many people who would come in for that day (or might make a vocal complaint about being open on a Christian holy day and how that's not American.) Or the thing where there hasn't been an elected President who wasn't some form of religious, most of them Christian, because there's an underlying assumption that people who haven't pledged themselves to the correct version of the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton lack both morals and ethics and cannot be trusted with anything important in any way at all. What the government is forbidden is the establishment of a single official religion or preventing someone else from exercising their own freely, and, unfortunately, what that means in practice tends to be that lawmakers and the elected choose to practice their religion in the functions of their office, even if they have learned not to be so obvious about it that a reviewing judge will be able to spot it and tell them to knock it off.
So, I suppose, even if not consciously or deliberately, there is some part of me that, just by participating in the culture that I am in, makes some amount of sacrifice to the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, because trying to clear every vestige of Christianity out of one's culture, dress, use of swears and oaths, and other such is very difficult. Cultural Christianity is still a thing that has to be navigated and used to achieve desired results. Similarly, this country prostrates itself before the great god of capitalism, and because I intend to provide for myself a house, and sustenance, and even entertainment and the like, I must make sacrifices of my time to that I receive the wage that permits me to have all of these things and pays the inevitable debts that come from it.
I also do not posit the idea that there are no deities, mostly because I would like there to be a space for the inexplicable. I agree, however, that the universe runs on the things that have been discovered and refined by science to provide greater understanding of the forces around us. As the domain of science grows, the domain of the metaphysical shifts and changes and often shrinks to reflect that new knowledge. Science may one day declare with certainty that humans are creatures that require the possibility of something beyond the material and the mechanical, even if no such thing can ever be explained or described by science, and even if science has expanded to the edges of the universe. After all, even if we know it's a clever illusion, with misdirection to steal our focus and Clarkian technology to fool our eyes into believing something is defying the known laws of reality, we still go to enjoy the show, right? And sometimes, it's socially easier to conceive of gods to help us with our tasks and witches to remind us of our obligations to others to keep the social fabric intact, because gods and witches can be rallied behind where people might fail. And stories have greater power to instill lessons and social norms than many other things do, because humans love a good narrative. (Plus, a lot of the loud and prominent atheists are assholes, and it does your ideas no favors in the public eye if the people seen at the head of the movement are assholes.)
Which gods, then, are the ones that get my sacrifices? That's complicated. Part of it being that I haven't formally dedicated myself to any of them in any way that's of my conscious choosing, rather than the ceremonies and rituals that I went through because that was what was expected of me while growing up. I also haven't really embarked upon a serious course of study in specific traditions or groups that emphasise one pantheon or set of deities over another. In the neopaganism boom of the early 1990s and 2000s, a lot of the material and Discourse that I saw was at the level of trying to get people who had been saturated in cultural Christianity to understand the principle that people might have a conception of the deities that include a Divine Masculine and a Divine Feminine equally worthy of work and worship (although, even then, I was seeing people trying to make things works with their own conceptions of gender and sexuality or discarding the paradigm in its entirety because it was still rooted in the gender binary, not that I had the language to describe that at the time). And, of course, many of the things that would be most useful in helping determine a tradition's fit for a person are things that they usually have to sign on to the course of study for to find out about. Some of which are sworn from being revealed to someone outside of the tradition or to someone who hasn't progressed sufficiently in their studies and dedication.
And that's before you get to the zealots who would behave like in the Saturnalia cartoon, summoning trouble of all sorts, whether from law enforcement or their own communities, to try and persuade the neighborhood of the dangerous not-Christian in their midst. Whether for pagan, Muslim, or some other belief system. And the other side of the coin, where people already in the community exercise care and caution about people who are new saying they want to join, not because they're worried about them being secretly zealots (although that's probably no unheard-of), but because there's a certain amount of (regrettably warranted) skepticism about people who want to join, because there are a lot of people who are going to use the space not for serious religious practice, but because it's trendy or popular or as a rebellious statement against something. ("Wanna-blessed-bes" was one of the more common ways of describing people in it for the trendiness values rather than the life values.) The closest analogue I have for this care and caution is the community of kinksters, who vet people through various means to make sure they're not people who are going to start trying to get practitioners arrested, but also to screen for people who have wrong ideas that appeal to them about the practices and limits of kink. First you get to know prospective new people, then you show them where the fun happens once you trust them enough to be sensible people about it.
So it's not quite like you can look on the community calendar for your metropolitan area, turn to the "public rituals" section, and see when and where the Church of the SubGenius, the Paratheo-Anametamystikhood Of Eris Esoteric, the Pastafarians, the Unitarian Universalists, Buddhist temples, and the various Abrahamic churches, temples, and mosques are holding their services suitable for outsiders. (It would be a big section, frankly.) Some of those things are easier to find and are more easily able to advertise themsleves, especially if they meet in a building specifically designated for the ritual purposes, giving dharma talks, and other such functions of the church/mosque/temple. The relationship that a person has with their gods is often intensely private and only shown to other people who have the same rituals. Because of their popularity and semi-officiality, lots of Christians want you to have a close, personal relationship with Jesus and to carry him in your heart and are really loud about it. Matthew has some opinions about that, but that would also be mostly incomprehensible to the early Christians, who spent a significant amount of time being secret, meeting in secret, and otherwise behaving like the persecuted cult they were. One would have hoped that upon obtaining power, they would have remembered their roots and done a significant amount of work toward making things better and easier for everyone to get along with each other, but this was not what happened.
Anyway, before we get too far into the weeds on that, let's bring it back toward the actual question. As my life currently is, I am at the moment only on a first-euphemism basis with one deity that I can tell, and she picked me instead of the other way around. So there's some part of my life that gets sacrificed to working with and through the blessings that come with being the chewtoy of chaos. (All of this, of course, is something that science has figured out, is related to weird brain chemistry that causes neuroratypicality, and that is probably fixable through the correct dose of brain-regulators, assuming that I'm willing to go through the necessary hoops for therapy and/or medicine. If there are gods to be had, they are smart enough not to discount science and its achievements.) Beyond that, though, I know that I believe in the Pratchettian Big Lies like Justice, Mercy, and Wisdom. All of whom, depending on the pantheon, might have names for themselves that I can use, if I find a particular aspect of that archetype that really speaks well to me. The archetypes, at least, receive some amount of my sacrifices, as they are things that I hold close to myself and try to keep their favor on myself by being a person who gives the things that I hope to be worthy of when I need them. I compose words in their honor (many of which you have been reading in my entries) and beseech them to act on situations that are offensive to them, whether directly or through interediaries. There's no formal ritual practice in this, but the prayers are still heartfelt. And there's some fear, as well, in seeing what happens in the world, and learning and seeing ways that people act that have damaging effects, but that are done without either understanding or malice, and I wonder if I am one of those people as well, for as much as I might want to believe, and might want to strive, not to be that. Or that given a situation where I could be better than others, that I will be selfish or afraid or angry and do the opposite of good and act on my prejudices, or in accord with a prejudiced society.
So, I suppose the answers, such that they are, are that I make my sacrifices both to the gods and archetypes that I wish to cultivate the benefits of association with and those gods and archetypes that are part of the public ritual, without whom I would be unable to participate in the society at large. I guess that would be a perfectly comprehensible answer to a Roman, based on what I've seen and read, so that, I guess, brings it all back full-circle.
It's Solstice Day, at least observed, as the actual astronomical solstice wobbles back and forth between the 20th and 21st, but the upshot of this is that we can expect to have more light in the Northern Hemisphere until midsummer. (The downside is that it's the brightest day of the year in the Southern Hemisphere, so they can look forward to less light and heat until the other solstice.) The returning of the light is often accompanied by the idea of success at having made it to the darkest point of the year, of harvest having carried you this far and hopefully, it will carry you the rest of the way until it is time once again to plant and grow, and then reap.
One of those things that's always interesting about the Julian (and Gregorian) calendar and the names of the months in English is that we have months that are presumably named for gods (Janus, Mars, Maia, Juno,) named for emperors (Julius, Augustus) who, if I remember correctly, would be part of the cultus as gods or to ascend to them after their death, a couple of months named for things that happen in them (Februa, Aperio) and then, there's the counting months (seven, eight, nine, ten), which were displaced from their rightful places by one of those emperors themselves when he moved the dead months to the beginning of the year, instead of leaving them at the end. I kind of wonder why there weren't more gods elevated to the calendar. It's not like the Romans didn't have plenty to choose from. (And, you know, the days of the week in English have astrologically and god-related names, too, but it shows the Germanic in English. (Sun, Moon, Tiw, Woden, Thor, Frigga, Saturn,) In other Romance languages, they stay a little closer to Roman gods and goddesses, but also make room for Judaism and Christianity (Lord's Day, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Sabbath). I mean, knowing that the pre-Julian calendar was only ten months and that past the ones that had major festivals or were dedicated to specific gods, they just counted, that makes a certain amount of sense why the other months never picked up certain godly associations, but it's still weird that none of the attempts to name any of the other counting months after something else stuck. Even after they were displaced by the two emperor's names.
Which, in a very roundabout way, brings us to this Solstice-themed question:
What do you believe?
...that's a pretty wide-ranging question, there, floating blockquote. I mean, I could say things like I believe there's space for Jews to acknowledge and make songs about how Black Lives Matter (which I am indebted to both
gingicat for explaining that there is a backlash against this idea and the Maccabeats, who performed the song, responding to the criticisms they've received after posting the song for helping me gain at least a surface-level understanding as to why two groups with a history of being persecuted by the same hegemon would be at odds with each other on such a matter as this). You want to give that some scoping? Ugh, fine. What gods do you make sacrifices to?
That's better.
I was raised in an explicitly Roman Catholic environment, with friends around who were explicitly being raised as evangelical Christians, in a greater context that assumes everyone is at least conversant with Christianity and believes, at least generally, that it is a worthwhile morality and ethics system to use in everyday life. When pressed, most of those people would respond either that terrible people aren't really Christian, because they have strayed from the teachings of Jesus. If the terrible person happens to be someone who is in a high office in a denomination of Christianity, then many of those same people swift to condemn others will usually rally around the terrible person and declare that they had a lapse in judgment and that the best thing for them to have now is forgiveness and grace, rather than accountability. It was never a matter of contention between myself and my friends, as best as I could tell, that we were part of differing denominations. Roman Catholicism, at least from what I remember of it, was mostly "yep, they're there, and they're Christians, too, so treat them nice," about other Christians, even if that ecumenism (is that the right word?) isn't reciprocated in many of those denominations, which I would only learn about later on in life. But, broadly speaking, I live in a society that is saturated in Christian imagery, vocabulary, and praxis. The kind of thing where the library is not open on Easter Sunday, even if it's not a paid holiday, because there are enough practicing Christians who would be taking it off that there wouldn't be enough people to open the locations, and perhaps not as many people who would come in for that day (or might make a vocal complaint about being open on a Christian holy day and how that's not American.) Or the thing where there hasn't been an elected President who wasn't some form of religious, most of them Christian, because there's an underlying assumption that people who haven't pledged themselves to the correct version of the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton lack both morals and ethics and cannot be trusted with anything important in any way at all. What the government is forbidden is the establishment of a single official religion or preventing someone else from exercising their own freely, and, unfortunately, what that means in practice tends to be that lawmakers and the elected choose to practice their religion in the functions of their office, even if they have learned not to be so obvious about it that a reviewing judge will be able to spot it and tell them to knock it off.
So, I suppose, even if not consciously or deliberately, there is some part of me that, just by participating in the culture that I am in, makes some amount of sacrifice to the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, because trying to clear every vestige of Christianity out of one's culture, dress, use of swears and oaths, and other such is very difficult. Cultural Christianity is still a thing that has to be navigated and used to achieve desired results. Similarly, this country prostrates itself before the great god of capitalism, and because I intend to provide for myself a house, and sustenance, and even entertainment and the like, I must make sacrifices of my time to that I receive the wage that permits me to have all of these things and pays the inevitable debts that come from it.
I also do not posit the idea that there are no deities, mostly because I would like there to be a space for the inexplicable. I agree, however, that the universe runs on the things that have been discovered and refined by science to provide greater understanding of the forces around us. As the domain of science grows, the domain of the metaphysical shifts and changes and often shrinks to reflect that new knowledge. Science may one day declare with certainty that humans are creatures that require the possibility of something beyond the material and the mechanical, even if no such thing can ever be explained or described by science, and even if science has expanded to the edges of the universe. After all, even if we know it's a clever illusion, with misdirection to steal our focus and Clarkian technology to fool our eyes into believing something is defying the known laws of reality, we still go to enjoy the show, right? And sometimes, it's socially easier to conceive of gods to help us with our tasks and witches to remind us of our obligations to others to keep the social fabric intact, because gods and witches can be rallied behind where people might fail. And stories have greater power to instill lessons and social norms than many other things do, because humans love a good narrative. (Plus, a lot of the loud and prominent atheists are assholes, and it does your ideas no favors in the public eye if the people seen at the head of the movement are assholes.)
Which gods, then, are the ones that get my sacrifices? That's complicated. Part of it being that I haven't formally dedicated myself to any of them in any way that's of my conscious choosing, rather than the ceremonies and rituals that I went through because that was what was expected of me while growing up. I also haven't really embarked upon a serious course of study in specific traditions or groups that emphasise one pantheon or set of deities over another. In the neopaganism boom of the early 1990s and 2000s, a lot of the material and Discourse that I saw was at the level of trying to get people who had been saturated in cultural Christianity to understand the principle that people might have a conception of the deities that include a Divine Masculine and a Divine Feminine equally worthy of work and worship (although, even then, I was seeing people trying to make things works with their own conceptions of gender and sexuality or discarding the paradigm in its entirety because it was still rooted in the gender binary, not that I had the language to describe that at the time). And, of course, many of the things that would be most useful in helping determine a tradition's fit for a person are things that they usually have to sign on to the course of study for to find out about. Some of which are sworn from being revealed to someone outside of the tradition or to someone who hasn't progressed sufficiently in their studies and dedication.
And that's before you get to the zealots who would behave like in the Saturnalia cartoon, summoning trouble of all sorts, whether from law enforcement or their own communities, to try and persuade the neighborhood of the dangerous not-Christian in their midst. Whether for pagan, Muslim, or some other belief system. And the other side of the coin, where people already in the community exercise care and caution about people who are new saying they want to join, not because they're worried about them being secretly zealots (although that's probably no unheard-of), but because there's a certain amount of (regrettably warranted) skepticism about people who want to join, because there are a lot of people who are going to use the space not for serious religious practice, but because it's trendy or popular or as a rebellious statement against something. ("Wanna-blessed-bes" was one of the more common ways of describing people in it for the trendiness values rather than the life values.) The closest analogue I have for this care and caution is the community of kinksters, who vet people through various means to make sure they're not people who are going to start trying to get practitioners arrested, but also to screen for people who have wrong ideas that appeal to them about the practices and limits of kink. First you get to know prospective new people, then you show them where the fun happens once you trust them enough to be sensible people about it.
So it's not quite like you can look on the community calendar for your metropolitan area, turn to the "public rituals" section, and see when and where the Church of the SubGenius, the Paratheo-Anametamystikhood Of Eris Esoteric, the Pastafarians, the Unitarian Universalists, Buddhist temples, and the various Abrahamic churches, temples, and mosques are holding their services suitable for outsiders. (It would be a big section, frankly.) Some of those things are easier to find and are more easily able to advertise themsleves, especially if they meet in a building specifically designated for the ritual purposes, giving dharma talks, and other such functions of the church/mosque/temple. The relationship that a person has with their gods is often intensely private and only shown to other people who have the same rituals. Because of their popularity and semi-officiality, lots of Christians want you to have a close, personal relationship with Jesus and to carry him in your heart and are really loud about it. Matthew has some opinions about that, but that would also be mostly incomprehensible to the early Christians, who spent a significant amount of time being secret, meeting in secret, and otherwise behaving like the persecuted cult they were. One would have hoped that upon obtaining power, they would have remembered their roots and done a significant amount of work toward making things better and easier for everyone to get along with each other, but this was not what happened.
Anyway, before we get too far into the weeds on that, let's bring it back toward the actual question. As my life currently is, I am at the moment only on a first-euphemism basis with one deity that I can tell, and she picked me instead of the other way around. So there's some part of my life that gets sacrificed to working with and through the blessings that come with being the chewtoy of chaos. (All of this, of course, is something that science has figured out, is related to weird brain chemistry that causes neuroratypicality, and that is probably fixable through the correct dose of brain-regulators, assuming that I'm willing to go through the necessary hoops for therapy and/or medicine. If there are gods to be had, they are smart enough not to discount science and its achievements.) Beyond that, though, I know that I believe in the Pratchettian Big Lies like Justice, Mercy, and Wisdom. All of whom, depending on the pantheon, might have names for themselves that I can use, if I find a particular aspect of that archetype that really speaks well to me. The archetypes, at least, receive some amount of my sacrifices, as they are things that I hold close to myself and try to keep their favor on myself by being a person who gives the things that I hope to be worthy of when I need them. I compose words in their honor (many of which you have been reading in my entries) and beseech them to act on situations that are offensive to them, whether directly or through interediaries. There's no formal ritual practice in this, but the prayers are still heartfelt. And there's some fear, as well, in seeing what happens in the world, and learning and seeing ways that people act that have damaging effects, but that are done without either understanding or malice, and I wonder if I am one of those people as well, for as much as I might want to believe, and might want to strive, not to be that. Or that given a situation where I could be better than others, that I will be selfish or afraid or angry and do the opposite of good and act on my prejudices, or in accord with a prejudiced society.
They are Man's and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance and this girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.And yet, and yet, no follower does good to their gods by burning the candle at both ends, so somewhere there must be a place to stop, to rest, to perhaps even have the small hubris of believing that one has achieved, to have people that support and succor, even if, by dint of things that were not chosen, one is also potentially complicit in the oppression of another, even unconsciously. I can only hope that if that is my case, those who I oppress take the advice given about how to help one who oppresses and work to stop me. Perhaps if I am lucky, or favored, they will tell me how I am doing it and why I should stop.
So, I suppose the answers, such that they are, are that I make my sacrifices both to the gods and archetypes that I wish to cultivate the benefits of association with and those gods and archetypes that are part of the public ritual, without whom I would be unable to participate in the society at large. I guess that would be a perfectly comprehensible answer to a Roman, based on what I've seen and read, so that, I guess, brings it all back full-circle.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-22 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-23 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-23 01:27 am (UTC)