#and starting by honoring hermes doesn't necessarily mean you will follow that up by honoring zeus and hera and ares etc

[thegodwhocums]

it is so so so tempting, even as someone who's not a reconstructionist, to find the TRUE way that polytheists worshiped back in Thee Olden Days - like there's something purer and more efficacious about methods tested and proven over millennia, and like if I just Study Harder I will connect all these fucken dots and do things the RIGHT way like the ANCIENTS did

like there's a way to time-skip over the war and colonization back to the agrarian bonfire dances and the queer mystic mentorship circles

and yet, this yearning, while understandable, is misplaced.

we asked Dionysos about the deities that preceded the expansion of global patriarchy, and got a really compelling response:

Don’t get hung up on the archetypes. You’re not living in the Stone Age. You don’t need to recreate Stone Age rituals. Create rituals for now. What thanks do you need to give? What do you need to ask for? What would it serve you to have represented? I’m thinking of an expression – “form follows function.” [You’re allowed.] Your heart breaks at the beauty of the lilac. To whom do you express that transcendent joy? If there’s no one, then you have a vacuum. Who is best suited? Old gods, new gods? They’re all sort of the same. Don’t try to achieve temporal purity – to try is limiting. [The insight here is that your heart is filled with gratitude that you live in a world that has this particular kind of beauty in it, and that’s something you should be sharing with divinity.]

- Dionysos, channeled 27 May 2023

it's surprising in some ways to hear such a pragmatic approach to the gods FROM a god, but like - what does it serve divinity to have offerings from a disaffected devotee?

I think if you're determined to honor all 12 Olympians or an equivalent box-set sort of pantheon, that is a little different - if you're building your own set (to make this sound more like Lego than a spiritual practice whoops), then the advice as I'm taking it is to see where you're overflowing with the kind of passion that a mortal can offer to divinity, and follow that! be guided by the things that make your heart explode! this, as I interpret it, is the most precious thing that humans can offer to the divine: overflowing appreciation and love and agony and all the things that make us human, directed to gods and spirits who can share in those beautiful and terrible emotions with us.

still hashing all this out so it's not my most polished set of thoughts but: damn.