Best. Ritual. Scheduling. EVER

[baxil]

Time to close the books on Pcon 2010, which means sharing the awesome and never-before-told Sunday evening anecdotes!

1: I chose that day to wear my Three Keyboard Cat Moon shirt. Although I did not achieve spiritual enlightenment, I did procure the following unsolicited testimonial: "The 3-Wolf Moon T-shirt is only surpassed in manliness by

Comments

[baxil]

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Actually, that reminds me of one of my rants about DJ Conway's "Dragon Magick" (which is a lot of mythological fluff wrapped around a core of some wannabe new-age Goetic evocation). As one of the ostensible targets of her summoning rituals I find the whole foofaraw amusing and a wee bit insulting. "Hi, I'm a mighty dragon (rawr!) and I have nothing better to do than kick around in the aether until some doof finds a pointy piece of metal, a stick, an oversized penny, and a glass of water and reads some prepackaged flattery amid strangely scented candles! Deary me, I think I might just faint from the awesome!"

Now, as far as I'm concerned, you can have a fruitful business relationship with spirits. "Hey fella. You do this thing for me, I feed you some energy and acknowledge your niftiness, then we each run off again and do our thing. Deal?" But that doesn't generally work as a long-term relationship, and it doesn't work unless it benefits everyone. Any ritual that includes, e.g., trapping someone in a summoning circle is just skeevy.

I don't worship any gods, though I off-and-on serve a few. I figure that gods are mature enough to not need my flattery or obeisance; and the ones that aren't, I don't particularly want to indulge. I try to respect them, and they seem to react to that. That anyone (or any pagan) could do differently is a constant source of bewilderment to me.

[paka]

Gods are sort of scary to me - I think because of growing up in the south, and kind of getting the fundamentalist Christian version of deity, where a god is something big and potentially hostile and whose decisions can't be questioned. I feel like as soon as something's named A GOD, you have to seriously be ultra super careful around them. It's weird - any river, and especially the ocean for instance, has the ability to turn very deadly in an instant, and yet they seem friendly enough and they're certainly worth honoring. So it's nothing connected to them; it's about my experience with adult types as a kid.

What's weird is actually being around people horsing deity types, they seem actually like pretty okay people. I don't hate them, and even the really scary guys, you can still see why they'd be that way. I've had some really humbling experience with godheads, which make them less hostile seeming. So you'd think I'd be more okay with deities...

... and I'm going to quit here because I sound like a real kook.