pagansprite

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making things for your gods, or to honor your gods, making things that will go on your altar or be used in your worship, is such a powerful thing.

i love and adore all kinds of devotional art

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i love and adore all kinds of devotional art

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dionysus bracelets/earrings i made recently 💞

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We are almost 50% funded in just 24 hours!! Check out our queer tarot deck illustrated by nearly 80 artists from around the world and help us get these bad boys printed <3 Pledge here:

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annoyed about people thinking is Leto goddess of modesty ? Elaborate please (personally given how complex and fluid Ancient Greek cults are I wonder if we should retire “the god/goddess of “construct given how reductive it can be sometimes)

Well, what does goddess of modesty actually mean? What would be the functions of a goddess of modesty in the first place? What makes Leto specifically the goddess of modesty?

I think the "god/goddess of ..." thing should be simply conceptualized something like: a god can do pretty much anything he/she wants, but they tend to have a handful of functions they specialize in and are generally worshipped for by most people. They aren't limited to those functions, however, and depending on place they could take over functions more commonly associated with other gods. For example at Lokroi Epizephyrioi Persephone (rather than Hera) seems to have been the main goddess concerned with marriage. Many of these so-called domains also can and do overlap frequently, which is another reason why this formula can be misleading; often we are talking about "a god of..." rather than "the god of...".

So in short yeah, it's very reductive. How often is Artemis called simply the goddess of the hunt? I find this excerpt from Robert Parker's "On Greek Religion" a very good summary of her mode of activity, but it would be hard to get a straightforward "the goddess of" from it: "... she is not, as has been often supposed, the “goddess of the outside” or “of the wild” but rather the goddess who presides over those contexts in human life where the civilized and the wild, culture and nature or culture and the human potential for bestiality, come into contact. The hunt is an obvious point of encounter between the two spheres; so too in a different way is childbirth, a violent and dangerous irruption of the merely physical within the human world; so too are those rituals of transition by which Artemis “acculturates” the young. As for warfare, Artemis is no warrior, but she receives offerings immediately before battle begins, the point at which violence, controlled or bestial, is about to break out. She also intervenes in battles as a savior at moments when the annihilation of one side, the destruction of a city and thus the negation of order, are in danger of occurring. “The hunt, the care of the young, childbirth, war, and battle—Artemis always operates as a divinity of the margins with the twofold power of managing the necessary passages between savagery and civilization and of strictly maintaining the boundaries at the very moment they have been crossed.”" Artemis is even more than this, though, as Stephen Scully points out in "The Nature of the Gods in Early Greek Poetry": "But Greek religion further complicates our understanding of this goddess, as of all other gods, by attributing to her roles quite different from her "canonical" ones. So at Iasos in Caria, she is protectress of the city (Artemis Astias), and at Olympia, she is Artemis of the Market Place (Artemis Agoraia). Such is the Artemis in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos (161-62) who "sits on her round, and far-famed, throne in the agora" at Thebes."

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how i see lady hestia

i'm thinking of drawing more of "how i see {deity}". first, as always, lady hestia, i want to draw her more, her color pallets are always so calming

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for lady hestia

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Journal pages for my Household Gods - this has been such an enjoyable devotional activity and a great stress reliever 💜

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Among his other activities, [Steve Wozniak] collects phone numbers, and his longtime goal has been to acquire a number with seven matching digits. But for most of Woz’s life there were no Silicon Valley exchanges with three matching digits, so Woz had to be satisfied with numbers like 221-1111. Then, one day, while eavesdropping on cell phone calls, Woz begin hearing a new exchange: 888. And then, after more months of scheming and waiting, he had it: 888-8888. This was his new cell-phone number, and his greatest philonumerical triumph. The number proved unusable. It received more than a hundred wrong numbers a day. Given that the number is virtually impossible to misdial, this traffic was baffling. More strange still, there was never anybody talking on the other end of the line. Just silence. Or, not silence really, but dead air, sometimes with the sound of a television in the background, or somebody talking softly in English or Spanish, or bizarre gurgling noises. Woz listened intently. Then, one day, with the phone pressed to his ear, Woz heard a woman say, at a distance, “Hey, what are you doing with that?” The receiver was snatched up and slammed down. Suddenly, it all made sense: the hundreds of calls, the dead air, the gurgling sounds. Babies. They were picking up the receiver and pressing a button at the bottom of the handset. Again and again. It made a noise: “Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep.” The children of America were making their first prank call. And the person who answered the phone was Woz.

“The World According to Woz” in Wired (September 1998)

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Reminder that you don’t need to celebrate festivals on their exact or estimated day(s). Unlike the ancient worshipers our society does not revolve around our religion so regardless of when our festivals are supposed to be held we may still have work, appointments, personal engagements, and other responsibilities. If moving the festival to a different day allows you to not only celebrate the way you wish but actually celebrate it then why not do that?

Think of it this way, if the choice was celebrate on a different day or not celebrate at all, which do you think the gods would choose???

This also applies to those days where you do plan to do xyz but for whatever reason (chronic illness, disabilities, mental health issues, have a bad/off day, or just life in general happens) don’t have the energy or focus to do it. You can push it back and plan to do it another day. That is not only allowed but completely appropriate. You don’t need to fall on your knees and beg the gods for forgiveness or punish yourself for it. It’s okay. You’re okay. 💕

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🐍 year of the snake challenge 🐍

take a look into any snake associations or aspects your deities might have ! or just how snakes were viewed by the culture of your deities !

for me, this looks like:

isis and serapis were portrayed as snakes pretty often. isis has a specific form, isis-thermouthis, who is just a snake with isis' head. i know Of these things, but i don't really know anything About these things.

agathos daimon ! usually depicted as a snake. not very present in my worship. i will pay more attention to it this year.

zeus has some snake associations, and i dont really know anything about them.

so on and so forth. my examples are hellenistic, but you could probably do this for any pantheon or path. (kemetic pagans/polytheists have Options lmao !)

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starting working on new tag system. not gonna do it all at once bc its soooo many things i have other things to do today

but like. the thing is. i have the tag list settled and on the final list there's 22 just related to aspects and things. and then another few for things that overlap with other gods.

and its not enough. there are things that are more specific, or more broad, so the tag doesnt quite fit. lots of things that are like. adjacent to another thing but not quite It. most things are getting more than one tag.

i keep having to remind myself that im not like. taxonomically classifying him, im just trying to create tags for specific vibes. it doesnt have to be perfect.

and the whole point of this post is that: he is impossible to talk about or describe in any exhaustive way. he is a god with footnotes and alternate translations, and he is so much bigger and more complex than i could ever describe.

i think all gods are generally like this; but i could describe other gods in a few paragraphs, and feel mostly satisfied. i could cover their aspects, roles, domains, in broad strokes, and stop myself from really getting into the details. but i can't do that with hermes.

thought about going through my hermes e-shrine and extensively tagging everything by aspect and then really thought about how many aspects he has and god he really is everything.

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im actually going to have to draw like a diagram or something.

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god and im even coming up against aspects of his that i haven't really explored. that i know vaguely about, but never did any real research/worship for. i've been worshiping him for almost 10 years. and there are whole aspects of him that i know almost nothing about.

thought about going through my hermes e-shrine and extensively tagging everything by aspect and then really thought about how many aspects he has and god he really is everything.

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the amount of things that overlap and the various distinctions of them. the difference between guide of travelers and guide of souls, and the way they're the same.

sorting out the little details, tracing all the little aspects back to their last common ancestor. making a red string conspiracy board in my mind.

thought about going through my hermes e-shrine and extensively tagging everything by aspect and then really thought about how many aspects he has and god he really is everything.

[pagansprite]

thought about going through my hermes e-shrine and extensively tagging everything by aspect and then really thought about how many aspects he has and god he really is everything.

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“Don’t inject politics into the gods”, says the person worshipping the idea and gods of the Roman/Greek/Egyptian/Etc empires. the gods are inherently political both today (satanic panic, neopagan movement, & Christian nationalism) as they were back then. they were seen as patrons of cities and politicians. we have deities who personify politics & political ideas. fork found in kitchen.