Tag: polytheist

Ways the Gods Can Contact You

death-witch-envy:

This is one of the most frequent questions I receive. Otherwise, I would not make this post. Worship is incredibly personal, and Gods usually contact you in ways that you don’t expect, or ways you didn’t realize until you look back on the past.

These methods listed are common ones that I often hear from others. Do not limit your communication to these steps.

  1. You feel a very close connection with Them, even without legitimate reason. Some people feel a connection to Their area of rule (i.e. sea god for feeling close to the ocean). If you’re like me, you’ve felt drawn to a God and you don’t even know why. This could be the Gods trying to reach out to you.
  2. A God sends you strong gut feelings. Before I devoteed to Hades, I gave Him offerings during every Sabbat. I can’t tell you why; I just felt like I needed to. One day, I thought of making an altar for Hades, and I immediately put aside all other thoughts and responsibilities, determined to create that altar. If you’ve experience similar gut feelings, that may be a God speaking to you.
  3. Your favorites overlap. It sounds silly, but it’s an experience I’ve heard about from a lot of people. For example, if you’ve always felt connected to dogs, and feel drawn towards Aries, you might look up the correspondence of dogs and realize that Aries has a close relationship with dogs. A quick disclaimer: This doesn’t always happen, and it’s possible to feel attracted to a God you have little connectivity with.
  4. Your environment responds to you when you speak with the Gods. During my first ever Wiccan ritual, the God spoke to me by raising the candle flame higher than any I’ve ever seen. I’ve felt the wind shift when I spoke to the Gods about change in my life. Changes like these could be signs of response, especially during a prayer or ritual.
  5. You feel a response, similar to the last one, but more esoteric. Examples may include feeling a warm blanket on your shoulders, feeling yourself relax while speaking to the Gods, touching hands, or even smelling a certain scent from no obvious source.
  6. You hear a response. In some cases you may actually hear a voice in your head when a God speaks to you.
  7. The Gods come through divination, such as automatic writing, scrying, tarot, pendulum or omens. Certain signs or repeated animal sightings may also be a method of contact.
  8. The Gods communicate through dreams, visions, meditation or hedge crossing.

Anything I missed? Please add on. And remember that these are simply examples. Listen to your instinct, and you’ll know. It may take some time.

I wish you a fun and rewarding path, lovelies! .+(´^ω^`)+.

edderkopper:

criolize:

okay i feel like i should know this by now but…what does hard polytheism mean?

Hard polytheism means you view each deity as a separate entity. To a hard polytheist, Mars is a different god than Ares or Tyr.

The opposite of this would be soft polytheism. In soft polytheism, all deities are just different faces of the same divine being (or the same divine being.) Examples would be Wiccans who view all gods as aspects of the Horned God, or the Romans, who treated foreign deities as representations of their own gods under different names.

This is, of course, a spectrum. There are people who believe that, e.g., Woden and Odin are the same guy, but Hermes is different despite having been compared to him in the past. There are people whose polytheism is so “hard” that they believe that even deities by the same name might be different local entities (e.g., believing Athena Alea is different from Athena Polias, or that different regions of Ireland have different Cailleachs) and people whose polytheism is so “soft” that they’re basically pantheistic.

These also aren’t historical frameworks, or frameworks used in academia. They’re just useful terms for modern polytheists to compare views.

(prepares for hate on this post)

I struggle believing in God/Jesus after learning more about other ancient religions. How Christians came in and essentially erased them to be the ultimate religion. How people were literally burned at the stake and hung and tortured for not believing in Christ or in the faith. 

I grew up with God and Jesus. So I still feel drawn to Christianity. I miss it. And with the new wave of Christians coming in who are doing new interpretations of it, I want to re-join and explore the path. But I can’t just…invest? When it feels like there were gods that existed before Christ was discovered and the bible came to be. It feels like it’s invalidating the existence of God and Jesus’ being. 

This is a person struggle and idk how to deal/overcome it. 

I don’t know why, but I can’t and never have I ever connected with a feminine deity? “feminine” I suppose. I feel more connection with the masculine presenting energies most. I have never felt a goddess call to me. Do they not like me? Is there something wrong? like

📚Intro To Polytheism📚

thewitchofthenorse:

One of the most frequent asks I receive is how and where to get started when it comes to polytheism. This is a fairly broad subject and I’ll try to be as general as I can for advice but I will include specific references for Norse polytheists as that’s my shit. This information can be used to help you find a pantheon or to help you pick deities to work with it. If you’d like to use it to pick a patron deity that’s super, if you want to worship 20 gods and not have a patron deity that’s cool too. You do you dude. Please keep in mind this is all reflective of my research and personal practice.

🌻

Picking A Pantheon/Deity

This really boils down to personal preference. You’ll read a lot of posts and books that tell you many different ways and it’s entirely up to you because it is your practice.  That being said, there’s a couple of different ways to go about it. 

  • Research! This is one of my favorite ways to delve in. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with reading the stories of multiple pantheons and picking on that calls to you. You can also talk to other devotees and see what they have to say about deities and their religions. It is important to keep in mind that some religions are closed so please do proper research!
    • For example, I wasn’t originally a Norse pagan. I read some stories and thought the Hellenic pantheon would best suit me. I reached out to Eros for a while but after feeling no real connection to the pantheon I continued my research! After reading up on the Norse pantheon I decided to reach out to them out. Obviously, I fucking loved it because here I am. Point being, you can pick a pantheon based on research and not some divine message or whatever. You are also more than welcome to try out a religion, decide it doesn’t suit you, and move on. 
  • Divination! You can use runes, a pendulum, tarot, etc.This can go a few different ways. You can write pantheon/deity names on separate pieces of paper, mix them up, and place them face down then ask the pendulum to pick. You can assign a deity/pantheon to each suit of cards or major arcana card or even do the same thing with runes. 
    • For example, this is how I found a devotion to Frigg and Hel. I asked if there were any deities who were interested in working with me and pulled the runes Hagalaz and Berkana which read as Hel and Frigg to me. I followed up with tarot cards and pulled Death(Hel) plus the Queen of Pentacles(Frigg).
  • Asking/waiting for a sign. This isn’t something I’ve personally done so I don’t have much to say on the subject. You can go about meditating, praying, doing a ritual, or whatever and essentially wait for a sign after. It can come via a dream, something you experience, symbols you see in your daily life, it’s pretty much up to your intuition to decipher it. If anyone has information they’d like me to add in here please let me know!
  • If there’s a god you’re curious about and don’t want to do any of the above it’s totally cool to just reach out and ask if they want to work with you. 

Idk How To Research

Same, tbh my keyword search game is weak. Anyways, good portion of us are looking up dead religions with little reliable resources. To give those curious about the Norse an easy head start here’s a compiled list of  books by @witches-of-ouroboros. It’s important to take everything with a grain a salt of salt when doing research. In my experience a lot of the retold Norse sagas have been Christianized or written under heavy Wiccan influences. It’s a good idea to do research on the author before reading one of their books.

  • Other blogs! There are tons of great witches and pagans on tumblr that have information waiting for you. 💗 You can search their blog/tags for good references for books, websites, podcasts, etc. Plus lots of blogs are open to answer asks. If you don’t know where to start for searching it’s best to try things based around your interest like: “norse polytheist”, “hellenic witch”, “gaelic polytheism”, etc.
  • Media! How lucky are we that we live in the age of technology? Knowledge is right at our fingertips! There are countless documentaries, podcasts, and audiobooks on youtube full of information for different cultures and religions. I’d personally recommend almost anything by BBC, Myths & Legends, and World Mythology!
  • Books! I love starting on goodreads to find good books and trust worthy authors. They’ve had almost every book I looked up with bunches of different reviews so you can get varying perspectives. Check out your local library as well! A lot of city libraries have online databases now of all of their books so you can “check it out” online and read the PDF(personal fave). 

Feeling Lost Still?

That’s completely reasonable and your feelings are more than valid. It can be overwhelming and lot of information to soak up. Just do your best and take it at your own pace, there’s no rush to find a deity or pantheon. 💞 Below are a few other general concerns I hear a lot that I was hoping to address.

  • “I’m leaving a monotheistic(Christian, Catholic, Jewish, etc) religion and it’s giving me anxiety.” This is entirely common and almost expected in my opinion. I was raised Roman Catholic and my first year to two looking into polytheism riddled me with anxiety. I was constantly concerned that god would smite me down or I’d face an eternity in hell for worshiping false gods. While I can’t speak for everyone that fear was entirely erased for me when I found my gods. I’ve never felt so safe and strong and hopefully with time you can find the same in your gods!
    • It’s okay to want to learn more or to seek something more. I can’t tell you how to handle your anxiety but please know you’re not alone in that fear. There’s whole communities out there willing to support you and help you find your safe space(including me)!

  • “What’s UPG?” You’ll see a lot of posts, mine included, that mention UPG – UPG is Unverified Personal Gnosis. This is essentially someone’s personal thoughts and beliefs about a deity. For example, I associate Sif with hazelnuts. There’s nothing in the lore or any book that says that she likes hazelnuts; that’s just a personal opinion(aka a UPG).

  • “How do I reach out to the gods?” I have a lot of information on my blog about this topic although a lot of it is Norse specific. You can check out my beginner polytheist tag here and my beginner norse post/ask here.
    • Altar! This is my go to typically. Altars aren’t limited to the cookie cutter image that comes to mind(no hate though I have a few); one thing you can make a side blog dedicated to your pantheon/deity, make a small one in a tin can, or even make one in a video game like Minecraft or some shit. You can be as creative or as to the book as you want. It’s up to you.
    • Prayer! You can totally just sit down and be like, “Hey man wanna work on some shit together?”. While I’m not 100% that all gods would be down with you being that casual it’s still something you can try.😂 You can reach out to them by sitting down in a quiet space and meditating into prayer, praying in the car or in the shower, or just pray at the altar you set up if you did. Again, I can not reiterate this enough, it’s your practice, reach out to them as you please.
    • Do something personal! This is more like devotional work in my opinion. Let’s say you knit and you want to reach out to a creative or domestic deity, you can knit something as a devotional act to them and as a way to reach out. For example I pick up litter in honor of the Vanir and

      Jörð, or I play Skyrim for Thor and

      Týr.

    • Most importantly just be honest and up front with the god that you’re reaching out too. Considering that statement be honest with yourself as well. There’s no point going into a relationship with a god if you can’t be upfront, it’ll end up in nothing but grief.
  • “Can deities reach out through gods/signs?” They totally can. However, it is up to you and your intuition if a deity has and it’s not likely another witch will decipher that for you. Sounds, experiences, images, all have different meanings to each of us – they may show you something that’s very personal to you but would be mundane to someone else. Trust your instincts. However, please remember that not everything is magical, sometimes a raven is just a raven and not Odin.

Take everything you learn with a grain of salt.