Religion Handbooks
21 November 2019 19:08![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
haptalaonSo the Fencraft book isn't finished and online as promised. I'm struggling to choose between a couple of potential formats:
1. Archival: a dry but complete collection of everything I've figured out and how it works.
2. Educational: a step by step guide so YOU too can make rhis your new faith
3. Proselytising: the mystic, the mythic, the images and poetry which make you want to join a religion and really understand in your soul what it is
These, it turns out, are three very different things!
Archival is by far the simplest - but it's being derailed by the fact the system isn't finished yet. It'll never be in a sufficiently fixed form (one thing I appreciated about Triumph of the Moon was tracing how figures like Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley's belief systems changed over their life). But there is plenty of it that is useable now!
Teaching is a very, very different beast: particularly figuring out what order in which to present material so that it builds and makes sense, and neither overloading not boring the reader. I've started and abandoned so many versions of a teaching course it's not true. I find them helpful for me, because a voice telling you what to do step by step makes it easier for me to overcome my executive function issues. But it's also a fragmentary, messy way of archiving information. One thing ive tried is writing archive essays ("a list of planet correspondences") and then booking them up to a separate lesson ("chapter 6: working with planets"). This does work quite nicely, and makes it easy to update changing information, but I also get quickly overwhelmed by indexing it well.
One advantage of Teaching is im inspired to find out things like "what are our values?", interesting little challenges like that. One disadvantage is, again, how unfinished it is: I don't want to teach thst this colour is for thst spirit if I know it will change. And there are some huge gaps, like, "how do you cast a circle?" which I can't really share a thing without. If I don't know what the finished product is yet, then how can I write steps towards it?
Proselytising is more important than you might think, but it's also absurdly hard work. Without it, you get a Scott Cunningham book: clear and easy on the how, but no sense at all of the why. Fencraft is assembled from walks in nature and cultural detritus - colours, weather, landscapes, and archetypes are extremely important. And a lot of the time the best way to express a thing is to just show a picture and say "it's like this!". But this is overwhelmingly hard work. Finding images which truly represent all the states ssnd elements and gods is more time online than I desire. And assembling a liturgy is a work in progress: it's the work of a lifetime, my lifetime. I can't accelerate it.
I spend a lot of time on this stuff, and it never feels fulfilling. I think perhaps because it takes lime 3 hours for me ro write a post on recommended children's books, say, but there's no new information there for me - im just writing it nicely and formatting it and finding pictures. 3 hours I could have spent walking or seeking new texts. Proselytising feels like it takes away from my own practice and redirects my focus to things which are artificial, like pictures and tumblr, rather than interacting with the divine. And yet, this is rhe make-or-break thing which makes what im doing count. If I can't write about what I do in a way which makes others go "oh my! This! This is what I have been looking for!" then there's really no purpose sharing it at all.
1. Archival: a dry but complete collection of everything I've figured out and how it works.
2. Educational: a step by step guide so YOU too can make rhis your new faith
3. Proselytising: the mystic, the mythic, the images and poetry which make you want to join a religion and really understand in your soul what it is
These, it turns out, are three very different things!
Archival is by far the simplest - but it's being derailed by the fact the system isn't finished yet. It'll never be in a sufficiently fixed form (one thing I appreciated about Triumph of the Moon was tracing how figures like Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley's belief systems changed over their life). But there is plenty of it that is useable now!
Teaching is a very, very different beast: particularly figuring out what order in which to present material so that it builds and makes sense, and neither overloading not boring the reader. I've started and abandoned so many versions of a teaching course it's not true. I find them helpful for me, because a voice telling you what to do step by step makes it easier for me to overcome my executive function issues. But it's also a fragmentary, messy way of archiving information. One thing ive tried is writing archive essays ("a list of planet correspondences") and then booking them up to a separate lesson ("chapter 6: working with planets"). This does work quite nicely, and makes it easy to update changing information, but I also get quickly overwhelmed by indexing it well.
One advantage of Teaching is im inspired to find out things like "what are our values?", interesting little challenges like that. One disadvantage is, again, how unfinished it is: I don't want to teach thst this colour is for thst spirit if I know it will change. And there are some huge gaps, like, "how do you cast a circle?" which I can't really share a thing without. If I don't know what the finished product is yet, then how can I write steps towards it?
Proselytising is more important than you might think, but it's also absurdly hard work. Without it, you get a Scott Cunningham book: clear and easy on the how, but no sense at all of the why. Fencraft is assembled from walks in nature and cultural detritus - colours, weather, landscapes, and archetypes are extremely important. And a lot of the time the best way to express a thing is to just show a picture and say "it's like this!". But this is overwhelmingly hard work. Finding images which truly represent all the states ssnd elements and gods is more time online than I desire. And assembling a liturgy is a work in progress: it's the work of a lifetime, my lifetime. I can't accelerate it.
I spend a lot of time on this stuff, and it never feels fulfilling. I think perhaps because it takes lime 3 hours for me ro write a post on recommended children's books, say, but there's no new information there for me - im just writing it nicely and formatting it and finding pictures. 3 hours I could have spent walking or seeking new texts. Proselytising feels like it takes away from my own practice and redirects my focus to things which are artificial, like pictures and tumblr, rather than interacting with the divine. And yet, this is rhe make-or-break thing which makes what im doing count. If I can't write about what I do in a way which makes others go "oh my! This! This is what I have been looking for!" then there's really no purpose sharing it at all.
