T is for Transformations

(Look at me doing a PBP on time!  Holy shit what!)

Important truth of the universe: the shit doesn't stay put.

Things change.

One of the ways that people do religion wrong is using it to attempt stasis.  It's not that this system, these tools, this work changes you: it's that it provides a good set of excuses to not do anything.  (You know you have made a god in your own image when it hates all the same people that you do, right?)

Even the most passively performed religion still tends to posit some sort of ideal, which the practitioners are at least expected to think about moving towards.  (So pick a religion to passively ignore with an ideal state that seems useful/appropriate/valid/worthwhile/appealing, damnit.)

The more you actually take this sort of thing seriously, the more change it will make.  It's not a coin-operated system where you put offerings in gods and get back what you want in this fleeting moment.  I mean, you may get what you want at times, but there's a lot of backfill on that.  If spiritual stuff leads to more and more navel-contemplation and self-absorption, well ... is that the stasis creeping in?  The perverting it into a dodge for change?

If you're going into the mysteries - Craft traditions, attempts to reconstruct ancient ways, other things - then this is even more so, because a mystery religion is explicitly about transformational experiences, and if you back down from the work for that it's a damn good way to get hurt.  Or, simply and straightforwardly, to fail: to not get accepted for the initiation, to have nothing happen, to be turned away from the teacher for not learning the safety procedures, or whatever else.

And the risk there is a deep one, identity-deep: because the thing about the way the shit doesn't stay put is that one doesn't know where it's going all the time or, indeed, whether or not it is going to hit the fan. Initiatory work means rearranging your spirit in some fashion; even if one's not going for Specific Transformational Experience there is still the process of, say, becoming a better devotee for a god, or better embodying the virtues of the religion, or other things that actually matter, and which will, in the long run, change who you are.  And you can't know from the other side for certain if who that will be is who you wanna be.

Not that you can tell that about getting up in the morning either, but when making deliberate choices it's good to know if you are the sort of person who can live with having made those choices.

O is for Ordinary

Yeah yeah yeah I am so amazingly behind I know I know.  But I just made a list!

I'm sure I've touched on this before - certainly on the post on Goals - but it's worth coming back to.

Sometimes people will sneer about Beltaine-and-Samhain pagans (like people sneer at Christmas-and-Easter Christians), or possibly in my case Wep-Renpet-and-Opet pagans or something, I don't know what would be appropriately iconic really.

It's all kind of backwards isn't it?  As if religion orbits primarily - or even solely - about whether or not one properly celebrates a Special Day.

Here's a thing I'm coming to as a reconstructionist, though.  The Special Days are at least 200-level religion.  They're not the fundamentals, they're shiny things.  And sometimes they can distract from the fundamentals.

I write about ka theology a lot.  Ka theology talking about family and food and sex and magic.  This is not special day stuff.  This is today, tomorrow, next week, next month.  This is Little Foot asking me for a glass of milk just now.  There is no "I'm going to put off eating until the next holiday", even in a holiday-packed ritual calendar.

I think a lot of people get caught up in What To Do For The Holiday, to the extent that everything gets kind of dropped when there isn't an impending holiday or other obligation.  I do it too, hell; there are times that noticing an upcoming festival on my calendar is what kickstarts my arse into getting back to regular daily practices, breathing exercises, that kind of thing.

But that's the thing:  I have the ordinary stuff too.  I have the putting away the shopping carts and the theology of lunch, I have ordinary things to deal with, to get back to.  I have foundation.  I can say "I'm losing track of my sense of time" and fall back into the time liturgies that I learned and wrote to attempt to recenter myself, like I did recently.

The ordinary stuff is the basics, the where we are in the fundamental beginning.  When the ordinary is stable, then we can move on to advanced stuff like what to do for this holiday or that holiday.

Tools

I was given two tools: a wine carafe and a knife.

The first lesson was the knife.  I hated it, I hated the task: being held to a standard of challenge, of knowing the standard and being unyielding when the standard was unmet.  Of being, not cruel, but hard; of offering the support of critique and voicing an awareness of failure.

It was Ordeal work - both in supporting the Ordeal I was serving as challenge-master for, and in finding in myself a place where I could do this thing, rather than do what I wanted to - rather than be softer, gentler, more cuddly, more gracious, a haven rather than a fight.  And I did the work.  And it was hard. And I became stronger.

And I was glad of the resting time afterwards, the space to recover.  Holding to the knifework is hard.  The surgeon's mind - knowing when is the time to cut and when is the time to put the knife away - is a sharp and dangerous place, and it is not easy work.  I had longed for the place I thought of as more of the carafe - the healer, the sustainer, the refuge - and having to cleave to something sharper was exhausting.

There is a common false dichotomy in the gendering of tools - the knife as active, the cup as passive - the phallic nature of the thing that penetrates taking that masculine, dominating, urgent energy in symbolism, while the thing that contains and holds is that vulvar feminine, submitting to its contents, patient.  This is all through a lot of ceremonial magic and other things, and cultural things, and perhaps it infects the brain even when one doesn't symbolise the hieros gamos by stabbing something in the wine as a matter of standard protocol.

The idea is that the knife is work, and the cup just kind of sits there.

This idea, of course, is bullshit.

Even at its most simplistic, the vessel to hold power must be as strong as that which it holds or it will fracture.  That strength must be a held strength, something that sustains, not the sort of burst strength of a single action.  To cut takes strength in a moment; to hold takes strength over time.

Hold the power.  Hold it available.  Be the well, the place from which strength can be drawn.

Hold the image of the possible so that it can be found as a reflection.

Wait.

Try not to run dry.

Readercon: On "Socially Awkward"

I don't know how many people who are currently reading me have any feelers in the SF fandom community, something which I have been on the fringes of in the past and may again, someday, if I ever get back to working with fiction routinely.

But in any case: there was a recent convention called Readercon, which happens to be located about five or ten minutes from where I lived until last fall.  I never managed to attend; I had always been Meaning To Do So Sometime (one of the founders was enthusiastic about my potential enjoyment of the con; eventually, I also had a friend running programming), but honestly my social resources are sharply limited so I don't get out much in general.

Genevieve Valentine, an author attending the convention, was sexually harassed by a Big Name Fan, Rene Walling.  Readercon had a policy of lifetime bans for harassers, which had been implemented previously; Walling got a two-year suspension.  The internet exploded.  You can find a collection of posts on the subject here.

Among the many things that has been said is, roughly, "But but but but what if this man is an Aspie!", a matter which has been responded to by others.  And people have even noticed that, y'know, maybe this particular "sexual harassment is done by socially awkward people, so we have to be forgiving of their disability" strawman is perhaps the prime way that geeky/nerdy subcultures forgive assault and rape.

And a couple of people said something that i'm frankly embarrassed to have not come up with on my own:  if we're going to make spaces that are extra-forgiving of people who are socially awkward, how about the socially awkward women that are getting hit on, huh?

You know why this is embarrassing?

Because the fact that I'm a socially awkward woman is kind of a big chunk of why I have GODS-BE-FEATHERED FLASHBACKS.

(And is not unrelated to why I haven't had the spoons to go to Readercon in the first place.)

I actually saw a conversation that raised "Well, what about socially awkward women?" as a question that was promptly derailed into "Well, they shouldn't be touching people without consent either!"

As if.

As fucking if.

There's this goddamn myth that women are all fucking supergeniuses about body language, about indirect and oblique communication, about communicating in fucking smoke signals.  That, for example, "autistic" is something that only happens to people marked "male", and that the rare woman who is socially inept is the Creepy Stalker Ex type.

And apparently the fannish communication system doesn't have space for the wallflowers, the lurkers, the people who spent too much time reading to actually know how to talk to people easily.  At least ... if those people are women.

Don't know how to communicate - either subtextually or verbally - that attention is unwanted?  Get very flustered by social contact that is outside of a reasonably small comfort zone?  Tend towards that often-ignored 'freeze' response instead of fight-or-flight in social situations that go over a very low stress threshhold?  Only able to communicate with anything resembling fluidity with people one knows well and has had time to build a cognitive model for?  Get completely overwhelmed with anxiety when a situation might lead to any form of negative response?  Highly dependent on sidelong watching of other people to figure out whether or not behaviour is inappropriate?

You might be "socially awkward"!

And you might be all of that and appear female.  'Cos that there?  That's me at the age I was nearly raped.  It's still me, in a lot of ways, I just have much more sophisticated coping mechanisms than I did twenty years ago.

Now let's imagine someone like that.  (For some of us this will be easier than for others.)  They don't have to be "on the spectrum" or anything; as far as I know I'm allistic.  Let's imagine that she's participated in fandom online, gotten to know a few folks, and been convinced that a convention is a social gathering for people basically like her: sharing enthusiasms, probably a little socially awkward in some ways but we understand that and it's okay, we make allowances.  She checks her budget and decides to try a con.  Maybe she travels for it; maybe there's something local to her.  Doesn't matter.

She makes it to the con.  She makes it to registration, picks up her badge, gets a program, looks at interesting panels.  She finds a few names she recognises, makes note of them, wonders anxiously if they will remember her, if they'll actually think she's worth spending any time with in the vastly more energy-investing meatspace.  She lurks at the back of panels, completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of people present - and even a small con is gigantic.

(Back when I went to cons, I don't think I ever did more than two a year.  They completely wrecked me, in that 'that was fun while it was happening but now I have a hangover that will last at least two weeks from just the amount of social management it required to get through that without dying of mortification'.  I actually had an easier time with larger cons, energy-management-wise, due to the sense of anonymity they provided me.  Get to a certain size and the standard billing of fandom as being a place for people-like-me who should be treated as extended family becomes the giant laugh that it actually is, and I stop trying to figure out if I'm going to offend Distant Cousins Francis and Alex with something about my posture, my lack of conversational segues, my incorrect jargon terms (like saying "sci-fi", gasp), my tendency to fall totally silent, or my interruptions.  Or, you know, any of the other weird things that I tend to do and don't know about and thus have inchoate anxiety about whether or not I'm causing distress by.)

So.  She's at the con.  It is completely overwhelming, beyond what she entirely anticipated, but she is at least more or less enjoying herself, in a stressy kind of way.  Eventually she ventures out of the more regulated spaces of the panels or the anonymous free-for-all of the dealers' room into the consuite, or a room party where some of her online friends said they might be hanging out, or something.  Yes: she is brave enough to venture ...

... socialising.

Maybe someone notices the unfamiliar face and strikes up a conversation.  Maybe there's a Moxie-drinking station set up in the corner (for those not in the know: Moxie tastes like flat root beer with a Listerine chaser, and I would not know this if it weren't for a con).  Maybe she gets some cheese and crackers and sits down to amiably listen to the conversations, because that's comfortable and reasonably safe.

Now: someone approaches.  He's a little too close, a little too familiar, maybe a little handsy.

And she freezes.  Maybe she looks around to see how other people react: whether they're standing too close to each other, touching each other, or indeed whether they notice how this guy is behaving and find it notable.  She doesn't know if she feels unsafe because he's violating social norms or because she's socially fragile, and she knows that she's socially fragile, so hey - that's probably the way to bet unless there's countervailing evidence, right?  Because that's definitely true.  And nobody's finding the guy out of line, so....

This isn't me.

But I damn well know it could have been.  Fuck, I had a six month relationship that started basically that way and ended in attempted rape; all I would need for this to be actually me would be to have done that a little older and in a different venue.

And I damn well know that if it had been - and by some miracle I had managed to try to report it or even talk about what happened in coherent terms - someone would have come out with "You know, there are a lot of socially awkward people in fandom.  It could just be that."

Because, I guess, being the person trampling someone's boundaries is more awkward than being the person who can't figure out thing one about defending those boundaries?

(It couldn't possibly be that those people are more 'people' or more 'in fandom' than their targets.)

L is for Love

I touched on this briefly when I wrote O is for Obligation, but, y'know, advantages of writing things out of sequence or something?

There's this really common narrative in understanding of religion around here, the whole 'god is love' thing.  Now, again, I'm just going to note that this is one of those places where Christianity is leaking into other things and leave it; it's a thing that's out there.

Love and the divine is complicated.  Let's start there.

One of the reasons that I drifted out of Christianity was that divine love wasn't satisfying to me.  The love of that god was something that I could recognise, but it was far too generic and impersonal for me. "I love you because you exist" mostly left me wanting some sort of personal relationship, something that cared about me as something beyond a breathing entity.  Yes: the divine powers love existence.  The divine powers are working to uphold and support existence, that's what They do and what They are, which means that you - as a thing that exists - are precious.

But that doesn't mean all that much.  The mosquito that got swatted yesterday was equally precious, because it was equally in existence, and now its remains - which still exist, are just as precious.  As those remains decompose, become part of the humus, and support a new life that will feed on their nutrients, that will also be precious.

"The gods love us" as a generic is a very, very, very low standard.  And I think the people who say it mean something a whole lot more significant than "We exist in the matter/energy matrix that the gods preserve".

We're used to that sort of anthropocentric thinking.  We talk about being a danger to nature, as if - should we make the planet uninhabitable to ourselves - it will destroy the world, rather than simply ending ours.  Or how the world was made for us, as the special pinnacle of creation, even though our knees are laughable from a structural engineering standpoint and our retinas are all installed backwards.

The idea that gods might not always have humans as their prime concern - or indeed that there might be gods with no particular interest in humans at all - is an uncomfortable one.  "But the gods love us!" is a shield against the indifference of the rest of the world to our individual uniqueness.  But, like I said before, 'A storm god taking a fancy to ya is not going to give you electricity resistance 10; this isn't D&D. If you're lucky, it'll give you the sense to keep in out of the rain.'  The love of a storm god doesn't keep you from getting electrocuted; the love of a war god may very well get you killed.  Probably gloriously.  But even so, from your point of view, you're still dead.

This isn't to say that gods don't form personal bonds with individuals, because They obviously do.  But that's not something that comes from god-dom, it comes from individuality.  It is of necessity a personal thing, not a generalisable one.  And that's something that will come of individual resonances, attractions, dedications, needs: it's not an entitlement.  Treating it as an entitlement is a good way to discourage it from happening, for much the same reason that guys who whine about how all the bitches would rather go out with jerks don't attract a lot of women.  But it's better to look for love from people who live in your world - which means to expect to find it among people who live the life you do, not glamorous movie stars, and not gods.

A lot of myths talk about gods forming personal relationships with humans.  It tends to make that human's life harder, overall, whether because of being brought more intimately into divine conflicts, being expected to shoulder more of the weight of the universe, or simply having more stuff to deal with.  It's genuinely a whole lot safer, in a lot of ways, to only have the level of interest from a deity that's along the lines of "I am doing this profession, and thus the god who is particularly interested in that profession appreciates me".

Not that safety is high on the list of standard human motivations. ;)

I will conclude with a major flip on the concept of love and gods.

I was once asked by an atheist something like, "What's the point of worshipping a god that isn't omnipotent?"

Which I didn't know how to answer, on multiple levels, starting with, "Well, it's a lot more useful to deal with entities that actually exist than ones that don't"....

But really, the core of the question comes down to being asked "What's the point of love?"

And someone who would ask that question - or who doesn't know that's the question they're asking - I don't know how to begin to talk to.

O is for Obligations

A post I made on a message board got reposted - with permission - recently, and made a bit of a stir in a certain corner of the pagan blogs.  And part of that was, I think, that I talked about the big scary O: obligations.

It's all well and good to say you want a relationship with a god or goddess, that you want to be special and important in your religious practices, but that's not something that comes for free.  You may love and adore that particular entity to amazing levels, but your adoration does not obligate a response.  If you want a close relationship, there's going to be something you have to do.

"But the gods love us!" some people cry, in that usual kum-ba-yah kind of way.  But when love is generic - when you appeal to the concept of agape in the divine - it isn't that sort of intense, personal connection that some people want to have.  That's not "my god loves me because I am me", that's "my god loves because I am", and that's a different sort of thing.

The sort of thing that gets personal connection is personal work, personal dedication.  It doesn't just come for the wanting.  It doesn't matter how much you want if you're not stand-up enough to do what it takes to get it.  (And really, if you fill yourself up with desperate need, there are plenty of entities out there that will say "That looks like a tasty snack!" and will happily impersonate whatever deity you fancy in order to nosh on your spicy brains.)

I was seventeen or so when I fell in love with a god, and you know something?  He wouldn't fucking speak to me.  There were things that I needed to do to be worth His time (one of which was "get out of this Wicca phase and start actually paying attention", as it happens).  And that's only the beginning.  It doesn't get easier with more intimacy, and people don't always get what they want immediately.

And even if it's not a relationship with a deity that commands obligations, there are obligations that come with religion itself.  Some of those are devotional or ritual acts.  Some of those are social behaviour standards.  Some of them have to do with relationships and how one conducts them, with care for friends and family, with relationships one forms with entities native to the unseen realms.  Some of them have to do with self-care and taking responsibility for one's own actions.  There are various things which, if you say you are part of a religion, if you just don't do them, eventually people will wonder if they can take you at your word.  (At a bare minimum, if you, say, routinely defraud people, you're bad at most religions.  Incompetence may not be a sin, but it's certainly not a virtue.)

The sort of relationship you have with anything has dependencies on the sort of work you're able to do for the relationship.  Just like you're not gonna be an appealing date if you never bathe, never pick up the check, and never show up on time, you're not gonna be an appealing devotee if you don't do things that a deity values, offer useful veneration, or otherwise act like a worthwhile investment.  The first responsibility of deities is to maintain the useful running of the cosmos, and if you're not contributing to that actively, you're not helping, and you're not going to get the sort of personal caring attention that gets given to people who actually contribute something to the work.  (You might get the sort of personal smiting attention that gets given to people who are actively in Someone's way, but that's probably not what you're hoping for.)

Religion isn't something that you put on like a set of earrings and then get showered with adoration from the cosmos.  It comes with obligations, and the deeper you want to go, the more you'll be expected to carry.


Related reading, this post that I saw at Aedicula Antinoi while I was thinking about writing this one.

N is for Nice

You're so nice.
You're not good,
You're not bad,
You're just nice.
I'm not good,
I'm not nice,
I'm just right.
I'm the Witch.
You're the world.

"Last Midnight," from Into the Woods


I am not sure if Graydon would mind me quoting something he said years ago in another internet universe, so I will paraphrase instead:

"Nice" is behaviour which is socially unobjectionable.  It does not have to intersect with truth, and thus it cannot be a virtue.

I commented earlier in the PBP about one form of expectation of 'niceness', but that's far from the only form that ever puts in an appearance.  It's not even the first one I've talked about in this project thing.

It bothers me a good bit when people try to nice up paganism.  (This came up in a discussion, mostly in referring to dealing with deities.)

Let's get real.

One of my patron deities is best known for fratricidal murder.  This is not nice.

One of my religious paths is unabashedly and unashamedly sexual.  This is not nice.  (The fact that there is social objection to eroticism is a whole other barrel of rant, but it's still undeniably true.)

I have a religious obligation to the development of personal power.  This is not nice.  (The fact that there is social objection to genuine power, also.)

I don't even have a clue whether or not I'm technically a fucking Satanist, but regardless this is not commonly considered nice either.

(And that's not getting into the fact that polytheism itself is a matter of the socially objectionable, because that's a level of social objection that I don't generally grant the legitimacy of addressing.  But nonetheless, this is a genuine factor: being pagan, itself, in some environments, will be taken as being not-nice.  This is why people hang out in the broom closet.)

You know?  I could go on.

It does no good to not acknowledge these things.  Deities, for the most part, are not nice, though some may be more often than not pleasant, at least so long as you don't call upon them in one of their epithets that specifically isn't.  The natural world is certainly not nice; that charging bull will not respond to a citation from Miss Manners about how goring people is indecent behaviour, and aconite will stop your heart even if you ask nicely if you can pick its flowers.  A spirit doesn't have your best interests in mind just because it's not got a body.  Being socially unobjectionable can be useful - in certain social situations, so long as you can achieve your goals that way.  In non-social situations, or social situations in which it's impossible to get what you need by being nice?  Nice and five bucks will get you a latte.



There's a bit in Terry Pratchett's Maskerade where Granny Weatherwax draws a hatpin from her witch's hat, grins the sort of ferally savage grin that rather suggests that she is enjoying herself profoundly, and declares, "Let's do some good."

Granny: not nice.

Damn good witch, though.