Introducing “Dalliances with Deities”

On the first day of the year, I spent the hours praying and divining. The New Year comes with new goals, and having the good will of my Gods was an important consideration for me. I rang in the New Year, lit incense, and wrapped myself up in the blanket of isolation as I prayed. And then, after the night fell around our city, I wrapped myself up in jackets and wandered the city in search of coffee. For me, in truth, there was little division between those activities.

I have been involved with some form of Paganism or polytheism since I was a child, but I didn’t realize or understand what it meant to live (rather than just think) my faith. It took me a while to grasp that I had faith in the first place! The idea of daily practice and what a ‘daily practice’ should look like, how my faith affects the smallest moments, how much of the work of my Gods bleeds into the work done to survive – all of these are considerations that I return to again and again.

“Dalliances with Deities” will focus on these parts of religion and polytheistic faith. I am not nor wish to present myself as some sort of expert or authority (especially since polytheism is so complex), and this blog is more a young man’s wrestling with different aspects of modern polytheism. It will be grounded in the religious (I am religious and spiritual) and the gods and spirits, and little to no discussion will be made of spells, witchcraft, or magic. This blog will also have little in the way of scholarly focus or reconstructionism; those areas are incredible and deep and I don’t have enough knowledge to comment on them!

My faith is a huge force in my life, but religious and spiritual people all have different ways of practice that influence them. I hope that I can better understand and write about devotional practices and polytheistic religious life and that this blog becomes a good resource for others interested in those practices. I also hope it to be a good resource for youth (being a youth myself) and will touch upon issues I see in the community as they relate to young polytheists.

My own practice focuses on the faeries (giving offerings and more woo-woo spirit work) and my personal Gods. Though I don’t yet have all the vocabulary to describe my Gods in a theological sense, I consider Them to be new deities and, as a hard polytheist, not just archetypes or new facets of other deities. I also have a focus and emphasis on oracular work and seership. But, to me, the journey to better understand my deities goes alongside the journey to live more fully and in alignment with Them with every step and decision I make. This, the lack of division between the sacred and the mundane, is what this blog will explore.

I look forward to blogging for the Patheos Pagan Channel and learning and interacting with Pagans and other polytheists, and I’m incredibly honored to be able to blog here!