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Teaching The Infinite
Anyway, one thing I'm thinking about right now is the impossibility of sharing anything that's really important about Paganism with anybody.
My trad stuff is now in a very shareable state, and it's giving me pleasure to work on it; it helps me to arrange my own thoughts to imagine I was explaining it to another. But. I don't think it's relevant to anybody else.
Or rather, I think the *act of development* is the powerful part of it, more than the specifics I've discovered. If you haven't seen the sunrises I have seen, or seen what I've experienced within them, then how could you understand the divinity of the sun in quite the same way?
I think the bit that needs sharing is the encouragement to go out and seek the divine, and be reverencing and perhaps naming the parts of nature one finds infinity in. It works because it reflects my experience of the world, not because it's objectively any good. The time I spent designing the system was the magical thing - not the end result - the time I spent reading, researching, exploring, and so forth. There's so much that is unspeakable, unnamable in what I have found; I could begin explaining, but I don't think it would have any relevance to anybody else's world.
I've got such a deep wellspring of associations now for each concept within the system - but it's so ideosyncratic, and that's the way it should be. Like, even if I could explain - would that benefit the listener? Clearly not to the extent that it is benefiting me.
Probably part of why Wicca works so well is the mutable emptiness of the Goddess. She can be all sorts of things, and it's thus easy to assemble covens where everyone's conception is a little bit different within the umbrella of a feminine divine. All the stuff I've pulled into my religious tradition - like obscure 1970s teleplays, and psychedelic records, and local legends, and colours and shapes - the primary thing they have in common is that I like them and they spark things. So what parts of the divine can and should one teach, and what parts are personal and meaningless? It's hard to know. I'm not sure anyone else needs a pantheon which can explain horror of the sea, nuclear war, the summer of love, the beasts and bones, public service announcements, it's such a grab bag of my things.
It's not so much "I don't want people playing in my playground" so much as "the playground is imaginary; it's actually urban scrubland; but I've decided this old mop is a broom and this bucket is a cauldron".
My trad stuff is now in a very shareable state, and it's giving me pleasure to work on it; it helps me to arrange my own thoughts to imagine I was explaining it to another. But. I don't think it's relevant to anybody else.
Or rather, I think the *act of development* is the powerful part of it, more than the specifics I've discovered. If you haven't seen the sunrises I have seen, or seen what I've experienced within them, then how could you understand the divinity of the sun in quite the same way?
I think the bit that needs sharing is the encouragement to go out and seek the divine, and be reverencing and perhaps naming the parts of nature one finds infinity in. It works because it reflects my experience of the world, not because it's objectively any good. The time I spent designing the system was the magical thing - not the end result - the time I spent reading, researching, exploring, and so forth. There's so much that is unspeakable, unnamable in what I have found; I could begin explaining, but I don't think it would have any relevance to anybody else's world.
I've got such a deep wellspring of associations now for each concept within the system - but it's so ideosyncratic, and that's the way it should be. Like, even if I could explain - would that benefit the listener? Clearly not to the extent that it is benefiting me.
Probably part of why Wicca works so well is the mutable emptiness of the Goddess. She can be all sorts of things, and it's thus easy to assemble covens where everyone's conception is a little bit different within the umbrella of a feminine divine. All the stuff I've pulled into my religious tradition - like obscure 1970s teleplays, and psychedelic records, and local legends, and colours and shapes - the primary thing they have in common is that I like them and they spark things. So what parts of the divine can and should one teach, and what parts are personal and meaningless? It's hard to know. I'm not sure anyone else needs a pantheon which can explain horror of the sea, nuclear war, the summer of love, the beasts and bones, public service announcements, it's such a grab bag of my things.
It's not so much "I don't want people playing in my playground" so much as "the playground is imaginary; it's actually urban scrubland; but I've decided this old mop is a broom and this bucket is a cauldron".