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[Main Blog Post] My Spiritual Path
So, I'm with some of my kinfolk for the holiday weekend, and I didn't wrap up the editing I was hoping to do before getting here. As such, I want to post something on time, but I may make some edits in the next few days. At any rate, this is a walkthrough of the beliefs I've had over the years, and how they got me to where I am now. This might be super self-indulgent, but I'd like to hear what you think.
As I said, I might make some edits, but in the meantime, let me have it.
As I said, I might make some edits, but in the meantime, let me have it.
no subject
Thanks for sharing your personal story. I also remember Magic the Gathering and Tolkien from my youth. It seems that a certain international uniformity was already present back then!
Eric S. Raymond's blog "Dancing With The Gods" was an enjoyable read. He had a "sudden intense" religious awakening. He worships different or no Gods at different times. He has a limited list of ways to contact his subconscious. It's amazing how varied religious experience is! Raymond also writes "Scientific method cannot ultimately be reconciled with religious faith". For me science and religions are both views of the same underlying reality. If they contradict, at least one of them is wrong. I wonder why Eric writes they cannot be reconciled.
That JMG sees "scientific realism" as what you can sense with the five senses is surprising to me. Our zeitgeist is very disconnected from our five senses. For most people, the spectacle is more important than what their senses tell them. Twentieth century physics is no exception: there's not much about quantum, space walks or relativity that one can sense. I'm no expert in planes, but I believe you won't find any modern science on the material plane.
To share, since you write you're interested in Roman history, I've been reading "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" https://acoup.blog/. Apologies if I learned about that blog from your blog!
no subject
It certainly is amazing how different different folks' religious experiences are. I'm reading William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, and even though I'm not too far, it already has done a lot to show how much very different stuff all gets called "religious." As for why ESR thinks science and religion can't be reconciled, here's a few of his posts where he expands on that - reading at least his comments in the comment thread might also be helpful: What is Truth?, Predictability, Computability, and Free Will.
As for JMG and scientific materialism, my understanding of what he's saying, and which I am pretty sure I agree with, is that the view of most scientifically-minded folks is that the material plane is all there is. Quantum mechanics and relativity may not be directly observable by us, but their experimental and theoretical grounding is in observations of the material universe. Sure, there's been a whole lot of speculation from there (for example, one criticism of the currently-fashionable string theory is that much of the work does not ground out in observations that can be tested by experiment). I agree that most folks are rather disconnected from actually using and experiencing their five senses, lost in varying degrees of spectacle, as you say, but those specatacles are still for your eyes, your nerves, and your tastes.
And thank you for the link to ACOUP! I actually just found him a month or two ago, and I don't think I've mentioned him on the blog. I read his series on Sparta and found it fairly interesting, so I'll have to look more into his archives.
no subject
Thanks for the ESR links! He writes "truth is what makes the future less surprising". He must define truth as a model of reality. So there can be multiple truths with varying degrees of truthfulness. I thought truth was reality itself, infinitely more complex than the human mind can hold, and something that makes the future more surprising.
The other essay says "The religiously inclined can believe in that perfect observer and identify it with God". Not sure what to make of that. I'm sure Thor can't predict what Odin will do. That God is all-knowing means you can't have secrets from God, not that God knows everything and can predict the future.
A spectacle's material presence consists of ink, sound waves or pixels. These are what you can sense. Yet when you listen to radio news, you do not think about the voice, but about the mental image that the spectacle projects. Most people are occupied by these images most of the time.
That struck me as I was sewing a red bag, per the Magic Monday FAQ. It's so unusual to to create a thing. We mostly buy commodities!
no subject
And as for the the all-knowing God, I think he was going for the most extreme version of omniscience in order to make the point of what an "outside perfect observer" could be, in service of making his wider point.
On spectacle: oh yeah, defintely. That's one thing I like about the occult philosophy JMG has introduced me to - it helps to make that distinction very clear and gives a good, solid way to think about it. It is perhaps one of the ironies of the modern world that so many folks spend so much time immersed in the non-material, but if you asked them what they believe about the world, they'd say that only the material world is real.
On making things: very much so! It really is shocking how meaningful it is to make something with your hands when you almost never do so. I'm always pleasantly surprised by how great it feels to do something crafty, even if I'm not very good at it.
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Likewise, real-life crafting is not my strong point, yet it feels very meaningful.
Thanks for your reply, and looking forward to the next post!
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Has your family been curious about your new practices or your new beliefs? Or have they just been happy to see that you're back on your A game?
Tamanous
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As for my family, my wife finds it a little weird, but is mostly like "hey, if this is what helps you be better, go for it." She's kind of "spiritual, but not religious" in a mostly-Christian-flavored way. My girls are 4.5 and 9 months, so most of their exposure to it so far is that my older daughter sometimes asks me to say a blessing before meals, and when she comes back from daycare talking about stuff she learned about Jesus, I tell her that some folks worship Him, and some don't. That and we sometimes read Norse and Greek myths, and I tell her that I worship more than one God. My approach is to try to get across that lots of folks believe different things, and that's okay, we each have to work it out for ourselves, while being happy to share what works for me when she shows interest.
The rest of my family, like my dad, sister, mother-in-law, and so forth, I mostly don't bring it up, but if they ever asked, I'd talk about it. My wife's aunt and her husband asked me what I believed (she's Egyptian, so Muslim in a fairly laid-back way) and I told them, and things got awkwardly quiet for a few minutes, but we were fine after that.
If I keep blogging about this stuff, though, it may come up more. I guess we'll see.
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I have read all the "New Atheists" and others (I do like pop science, myself) in order to understand their worldview, but never could fully take it to heart, probably expressly for the second reason you list. The argument seems to go "science works, therefore your consciousness is an epiphenomenal construct and its contents are meaningless." Which seems like a heckuva jump.
Speaking of jumps, I have a great affection for Saint Michael Archangel, who is both the patron saint of my dad's birthplace in the old country and just generally cool.
Axé
no subject
These days I very much agree with you that it's a very big jump. I didn't get as much into it in this post, but I think that's largely a result of privileging rational, explicit, verbal thinking - very much "Air" in the traditional five elements. If you can't spell it out from premises to logical conclusions, it's not "real."
As for Saint Michael, since renewing my religious practice, I have not had much interaction with angels of any sort, but that may very well be something I need to correct.
sources for learning about Germanic deities
(Anonymous) 2024-08-24 06:18 pm (UTC)(link)Although I have been reading JMG since the early ADR days, I have been diving into the spiritual side of his writings for about a year and I just found this post of yours. Thank for sharing your journey, some of which overlaps my own as I try to create a spiritual resting place for myself.
Do you have a recommendation of where to start learning about Germanic ditties? I am curious about that.
Thank you.
Re: sources for learning about Germanic deities
Thanks for commenting. You have a few options, which each have their own strengths and weaknesses. I've erred on the side of providing options below, but if you want the tl;dr answer, I'd say read Galina Krasskova's A Modern Guide to Heatherny and then pick up the Prose Edda and find a translation you like of the Poetic Edda. For all of the below, I'm assuming a primary focus on the Norse myths and Gods, as that's what we have the most information on, and any other subsets of the Germanish folks and their Gods will be pulling a lot from them.
The most traditional would be to start with Snorri's Prose Edda, which was, after all, written to introduce aspiring poets to the Norse Gods and their myths. It's short and very readable and is the basis for much that you'll find in more recent books. Much of what is found there comes from the Poetic Edda, which also has some myths not discussed in the Prose Edda (and vice versa), but it's a bit less clear for a new reader. These two works are the heart of the "Lore" you might hear Heathens talk about. The downside here is that neither will give you any tips on how to worship or integrate the Gods into your daily life, if that's something you're looking for. As for which translations to read, Jesse Byock's for the Prose Edda seems to be everyone's favorite, but there's more variation in opinion for the Prose Edda: Larrington's seems to be pretty readable, at the cost of poetic feeling, Crawford's is admirably straightforward but misses some nuance, especially from a spiritual point of view, and if you're okay with things being a bit old-fashioned, Bellows and Bray try to maintain some poetic feeling. Hollander's translation is great for giving the "feel" of Germanic poetry, being mostly rendered in alliterative verse of the kind I try to write my prayers in, but it's a bit tough to read if you're not used to that sort of thing and might not be the best first translation (though the introductory material and notes are pretty good if you can slog through the unfamiliar words and awkward phrasing).
If you are looking for more of a one-stop-shop on "how to Heathen," there are a lot of options, so many that some Heathens grumble that that's all we have, and there's no clear consensus on which is the single best. My personal favorite is A Guide to Modern Heathenry by Galina Krasskova - it gives clear, newbie-friendly summaries of most of the Gods and Goddesses, the Heathen worldview and cosmology, and some tips on how to worship. One of the books she co-authored with Raven Kaldera, Northern Practice for the Solitary Practitioner is, as you might guess, very practice-focused, and has lots of good tips on ways to pray and worship. A Book of Troth by Edred Thorsson was one of the first of these books and has been popular for a long time. These two, and any others like them, will be colored by their authors' idiosyncratic takes, and tend to be more focused on group/community ritual, which can be awkward if you're on your own.
For a more academic point of view, I like H.R. Ellis-Davidson's Gods and Myths of Northern Europe and John Lindow's Norse Mythology are good and pretty brief. E.O.G. Turville-Petre's Myth and Religion of the North is widely regarded as the best of this batch (I've only skimmed it, so can't comment personally), but unfortunately, it's priced for college classes (very expensive without a subsidy from your school, in other words), so might be best if you can find it at a library. Not great for reading straight through, but an extremely helpful reference is Rudolf Simek's Dictionary of Northern Mythology.
For some "how to pray/worship" resources, I rather like Kaye Boesme's The Soul's Inner Statues, which is not Germanic-focused, but is very hands-on and and step-by-step for cultivating an individual polytheistic practice. If you do video, Tom Rowsell at the Survive the Jive on Youtube also has this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzjx4yneCZs&list=PLcroOUap-NylUTTuzRzF2ywRXk-ftcp36
Lastly, if you're still hungry for more, I put together a (rather long) list of possibly relevant books with short comments on what I think of them: https://jpowellrussell.com/#list_of_books_on_germanish_belief_with_thoughts
Whatever you end up doing, please feel free to reach out with any questions, and I'll be happy to help however I can.
Cheers, and my blessings if you'll have them,
Jeff
Re: sources for learning about Germanic deities
(Anonymous) 2024-08-24 09:23 pm (UTC)(link)Re: sources for learning about Germanic deities