I Am A Pagan – Let The Rant Begin

I’m a Pagan. To be more accurate, I’m a Polytheist, meaning I believe in the agency and existence of many gods. I have a profound and wonderfully terrifying relationship with one specific deity and have everything from close, familial relationships to passing acquaintances with still others. There’s a pantheon I’m most at home with. I might call that my default pantheon and it’s to that family of gods that I spend most of devotional time with.

I’m a Pagan. To be more accurate, I’m a witch in an activist, eco-feminist, consensus-based tradition that is both full of structure and paradoxically almost totally without structure. My politics, my witchy agenda, the way I walk in the world is guided by the principles of that tradition. It asks that I honor the wild, and calls for service to the earth and the community. My tradition  implores me to work for all forms of justice: environmental, social, political, racial, gender and economic. My Pagan path says that my feminism includes a radical analysis of power, seeing all systems of oppression as interrelated, rooted in structures of domination and control.

I’m a Pagan. To be more accurate, I’m a Pagan that writes a blog or two and is starting to find my way to writing as much as I can about the Pagan topics that interest me. Topics like magic and the practice thereof and how we use music to affect our rituals and how it is to be a married Pagan man, hand-fasted to an incredible Pagan woman.

I write about Pagan gatherings and witch camps and how I engage with devotion and where I fail in my practices and how the world holds so much wonder and enchantment for me, especially when I let myself step into the flow of my life, me against the world, as my Druid friends might say.  I write about living a life informed by, influenced by, completely, one hundred percent, totally and indefatigably defined by being Pagan.

I posit that Christianity has dominated religious thought for far too long and has done more damage than it could ever hope to do good, no matter what it’s martyrs and evangelists might proclaim. But you’ll notice that my writing is devoid of Christian clap-trap and comparison. It is almost totally without reference to that most odious religion. I dislike it. I despise it. I do not wish to read about it. I do not compare my Paganism to Christianity. I do not want churches. I do not want seminaries. I do not want holy texts that defile and diminish my own sacred authority. Although I welcome ex-Christians that find their way to the various Paganisms, I categorically reject their attempts at recasting and reforming Paganism in their image, with the not so subtle implication that my Paganism lacks something. I understand, even sympathize, that some come to Paganism with their hands and feet still bleeding from the nails Christianity pounded into them, but understand that if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it in Paganism. My Paganism is not a second choice, not a redeemer, there is no messiah with a crushed velvet cloak waiting to heal your wounds. Do that work before you get here, before you start presuming to tell me about what Paganism is and is not.

I am a Pagan. I write about being Pagan and the things that Pagans in my world do or might be interested in. I live my life, raise my children, approach my livelihood, manage my affairs, practice my politics, love who I love and build community as a Pagan. I am not lesser for it.