Hearth & Horn

Needless griping about people who don't even believe what they say they believe and therefore don't require a meaningful rebuttal on the territory they have chosen, you can just read between the lines of what they're saying & ignore them - but:

cryptofascist pagans who insist that politics in our spaces are

1. a distraction from actual magic/practice/etc


2. just people imposing their modern politics onto their religious life rather than actually listening to the spirits

are doing the exact same thing they're accusing others of.

The quickest way to stop culture war issues taking over your community conversations is to - say - get on board with resisting transphobia and racism. Even if just at a superficial level so the conversations can stop! If your actual stance is, you think it's all a bit stupid and it takes energy away from The Work - then it costs nothing for you to concede, and doing so is in alignment with your goal to move the conversation on.

as or the second half - I'm not without sympathy. I actually really dislike it when a blogger's persona seems to be posting the same stuff they would have been posting anyway, but in a witches hat. I guess cus if i wanted to be reading politics, I'd read a politics blog from a person whose area of expertise was studying society and philosophy instead of being a wizard. My religious life is escapist; I have things I wish to escape from; and besides, the role of religion is both to guide and support people in their day to day lives but also to transcend it, to draw our minds to the great beyond.

but drawing meaning from religion which is in accord with your other values and other experiences - I think it's inescapable, tbh. I aspire to the sort of religious life and connection, where I could say I would not otherwise have taken this road if not for the spirits leading me there - but I'm not self-deceived enough to think I've discovered it yet, or, have discovered it always and in all circumstances. Most people don't have that kind of godphone. And much of paganism considers the agency of its workers - we aren't compelled to say yes to gods, by and large, so why would we not seek otherworld connections in much the same way we seek mundane ones, with shared directions. To be New Age woo woo for a moment, but we all put a certain kind of ~energy~ out there for the universe to respond to, and to a great degree in this work, you find what you set your mind to looking for, to the ways you have consciously tuned your attention.

& I actually do believe that a lot of mighty powers cba with the little details of human culture wars - that's part of the Solar-to-Stellar distinction, right? The difference between Solar entities who are perhaps ancestors or who are intertwined with humans and their history, and may care a great deal, because they are a part of our lives; Lunar entities who are people-but-not-human, who may have unusual persectives on our quibbles or none at all because have their own culture's struggles at the center of their thought; and Stellar entities, the ones quite beyond it all. But within that pattern, we tend to assume that most entities have several of these faces - meeting an entity in their vast and cosmic awe does not preclude also meeting them as a thing-of-the-hearth with things to say about who's excluded from the feast.

But that posture of the rational centerist whose above it all which is without fail a mask for very right wing desires. & it's no sillier to assume an ancient god is a SJW than it is to assume it shares your secret hatred, and the contemporary ways in which you understand and express it.

Anyway, you dont need to take these people seriously because they're using a lot of words to obscure their own human political desires on the assumption others will be stupid and not see. But it is useful to be able to refute an argument on someone's own territory (sometimes! but rarely as useful as just giving them the block as beneath your notice)