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 Posted: Mon May 31, 2010 10:27 pm
1:Genral into, outline
My path is much, much less about Deity than about spirituality and applied energy manipulation.
2: History
Most immediately, my mother was a member of the Emissaries of Divine Light, and did attunements (Reiki, basically, but from a different path) from when I was really young. She, my grandfather, and my great-grandmother, that I know of, all saw/see auras and did at least a little faith healing. Everyone but my mother was Christian their entire life, and my mother has since returned to Christianity. That in no way impacted their practices, which I could go more into detail about but that's long and tedious. So the whole religion thing has been separate from the whole magic thing. I could see ghosts until I was about five, and started seeing auras when I hit puberty. I looked into Wicca a couple years after that, but it wasn't really for me.
3: Central beliefs
Mine are essentially that life can be made easier and more fulfilling through applied energy manipulation.
4: Deities
Deities in my family were optional, as long as you knew the literature (as literature; my mom freely admits to sending me to Sunday School to make sure I had a good grasp of common themes in Western Literature). A combination of my upbringing and some other experiences made me fairly indifferent to gods, though I have some I can work with. Deities and me is a complicated sort of story, which I'll expand later.
5: Core Myths
I don't see all that many true contradictions between most of the myths I've studied. I'm most familiar with Christian mythology, though I'd like to do more study of demonology and various religions' eschatology.
6: Ethics
I'm an ethical egoist. The ethics I were brought up with essentially amounted to 'be a good person.'
7: Sabbats
Considering the world is a bleak dark hell for me the dark half of the year, I tend to celebrate the Celtic Fire Festivals, the Solstices, and the Equinoxes in addition to the holidays that are family celebrations (Christmas, Easter, Fourth of July).
8: Rituals-why perform them, how to perform them, what goes into them)
I tend to not do them. I have done one, as a thank you, with a tealight candle and electrolyte beverage and rice crackers as an offering.
9: Other Practices/Other Theology
I meditate, and do guided meditations. I tend to use various kinds of stones as focuses, though not always.
Questions would probably help me flesh this out.
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Posted: Wed Jun 02, 2010 11:39 am
Family Parking Spot
Magic in my family isn't a big deal. This was very, very disappointing when I was thirteen and wanted to be ubermagicalawesome like a character in a book.
Most of my mother's paternal side of the family are farmers. They use their abilities to make themselves better farmers. Like, for one cousin, during calving season, using that extra sense to know when to check on the cows so he doesn't have to go out into the hell of a February night in Northern Canada as often.
For my maternal grandmother, it was knowing when it was safe to plant the first flowers so they wouldn't get frost, and making sure that she didn't get problem renters.
For my mom, it was knowing who was calling before she picked up the phone. This was before caller ID; that little electronic display confuses her now.
For my dad and paternal grandfather, it's always getting a good parking spot, termed the family parking spot.
Mundane things, small things, but things for convenience. Soul-crushingly practical things. It's hard to emphasize this sort of thing, since it doesn't really stand out from the norm all that much. But that, I guess, is the point; they didn't want to make it the only or even an important aspect of their lives, and didn't want the neighbors to look at them funny, but that little something extra makes life that much easier.
That's the attitude I grew up with, that magic was a practical tool, like a screwdriver. When I started seeing auras, my mom was excited for me and did some exercises with me to strengthen it, but told me I probably wouldn't want to mention it to too many people. Then she started teaching me about attunements, but that stopped when school started up again, because homework came first.
I didn't even meet any pagans until I was in high school in a different country, and didn't learn much about the various neo-pagan religions until I hit college and joined the pagan group on campus. So I'm still learning a lot of the basics of the shared language, because I didn't come to magic and an eclectic sort of paganism through any sort of big change or transformative shift. I've drifted though the United Church, the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, the Unitarian Church, the United Methodists, some of the community around Circle Sanctuary (one of the legally recognized Wiccan churches), and various but not in depth study of many, many others. The whole religious study thing has been more for edification than for establishment of belief, and most of my beliefs can be summed up by a quote from Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies:
"But all them things exist," said Nanny Ogg.
"That's no call to go around believing in them. It only encourage's 'em."
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