Stone Age Beast with Space Age Dreams

Trying to figure out this mess of a spirituality - so far a mix of asatru, popculture, pantheism, alterhumanism, ancestor worship, and futurism. Time is an illusion, but space is very real. carrd | main | kin

[bullgirldick]

I would love to hear about the deities (?) in your spirituality! and a very curious to see if they are similar to mine.

Hello! The deities I mainly feel and work with are an aspect of Freyr (Frej the Tender), an aspect of Odin (Greybeard), and three forces of nature I've dubbed the Matriarch, the Patriarch, and the Crooked Horn.

Frej represents everything that needs to be cared for and tended to, from seed to harvest and the relationship throughout. Some of the places I find him are in ploughed fields, domestic animals, food storage, tame/captive/domestic plants, baby animals, hunts, and intimate acts, including sex. I also see him in boars, which are sort of a symbol of him.

Greybeard is an amalgamation of every old teacher I've had. He is wise, kind, and stern, he demands respect but loves to tease, and more than anything wants us to learn and grow wiser. I haven't worked with him in a long while, but I've started to come back to him in recent months.

My Parriarchs can't be separated from each other. The Matriarch's primary domain is consuming (eating, drinking, taking, giving), while the Patriarch's primary domain is growth. His seed falls to the ground when she rustles a branch, he makes it take root as her waters flow over it, and as she nourishes him, a sprout appears. Though she will devour many of his sprouts, some will persist and grow by his hand, as she digests the many and fills the soil with her nutrients to once more feed him. They're two strings of DNA - without being tightly intertwined, they just break apart.

The Crooked Horn is everything that doesn't go as we planned. They're entropy, I suppose. I see them in lightning strikes and dice rolls and birth defects. I've only very recently understood that the Crooked Horn also represents a detachment from your own stubbornness and preconceived notions - like the ultimate opportunity to learn. I've long felt that the Patriarch was tied to Frej and I'm starting to think the Crooked Horn might be tied to Greybeard.

I also work with several smaller spirits: The Pheasant, the Bison, and Spindekælling (an aspect of the Spider), as well as the Idealist who is a character from modern fiction that I prefer not to name by name here. Pheasant is my primary guide - he tries to teach me to open up and show my true colors, even if it's sometimes to my own detriment. It's very difficult for me to listen to him because I have a lot of self-repression due to trauma, but I still have many years left to learn. Bison teaches me to be present and grounded and to live in the moment. I have a tendency to "live in the future," (i.e., I'm a planner, rather than a doer) so a reminder to just sit down and close my eyes and listen to the birds singing is often needed. Spindekælling creates. She's the aspect of Spider that spins webs and she teaches me patience, focus, and to hone my crafts, rather than jumping from hobby to hobby. It's very difficult for me to listen to her too. The Idealist is who I'm most connected to. His lessons are about hope, understanding, conflict resolution, and looking towards the future.

All this is tied together by Dust. I don't... really believe that these entities I work with are tangible, definable, finite, observable entities. I think they're all aspects of Dust, which is the essence of consciousness. If you've read His Dark Materials you'll understand because I basically believe in those books' idea of Dust. Dust particles can band together to form entities for a time, and you can talk to those entities and sense their presence, and they can affect the world around them. But at the end of the day they're all just dense gatherings of Dust - they're all different aspects of the same particles. Particles that are everywhere around us, in every rock and tree and droplet of water. So all this is basically pantheism with extra steps.

[letmeinimafairy]

A recent commission, back to the cave. Slowly started creating some kind of a story in cave paintings in my head, a continuation of the ammonite cave.

[b0chelly]

This statue at the antique store I just went to was gorgeous! Labeled as One-of-A-kind Antique Wooden Statue of NANDI (Shiva's Guard)

[illusoryfem]

[bullgirldick]

The parallels between my own discovered gods and Hinduism are getting scary. I've meditated on the bull, and he's white and radiant, not black like my idol figures. He's not above the other gods, but he encompasses all the gods in a way. He's the Earth itself, and he carries the sun. So anyways

The only difference is that the bull is a bull. Both of them even have wings sometimes.

Similar feelings about Dust and prana, the Matriarch and Kali, the Patriarch and Shiva (though I haven't looked into him much yet)... Organized religion is not for me, so I'm not gonna convert to Hinduism or anything. But the parallels keep striking me.

[bullgirldick]

Sometimes I can feel in my bones the way my ancestors revered mammoths. It feels like genetic memory.

[chronicallyhomoerotic]

this is a poem. To me.

[4est]

[wonders-of-the-cosmos]

This globular cluster, NGC 6723, sometimes called the Chandelier Cluster, is much like its namesake because it sparkles with countless lights. However, each ‘lightbulb’ in this chandelier is an individual star 27,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius (the Archer).

[vitterdotter]

I truly believe being able to name the world around you is integral to animism. learn the names of plants and flowers. learn how the rocks and soil you walk over daily form. sit with the streams and rivers, learn where they flow to and from. learn the names others have given, and give them your own as well. animism is interconnectedness, and one simple step is learning the names of your neighbors

[futuremissingperson1]

[vintage-tigre]

The lifecycle of a cherry

[tlirsgender]

It actually kind of pisses me off how mainstream consumerist predominantly-white culture ate the vague concept of ~witchy~ spirituality the more I think about it but we don't have to do this right now

[tlirsgender]

Like the most crazymaking thing is I'm a ~spiritual~ person myself but watching people who would have called me delusional and/or possessed by the devil when we were kids get into all the crystals and the tarot cards and whatever feels ........ odd. Lol. Lmao. Not even in a hipstery "I did it before it was cool" way this is about racism. It's racism. It's appropriation and commodification in the most classical sense. It's weird that it's only acceptable for me to practice these things now that it's cool to white people. Can anyone fucking hear me

[wifegideonnav]

i cannot stress enough how nonexistent the context for this museum display was

[rebeccathenaturalist]

A Vital Part of Your Body Will Continue to Live Years After You Die

Each human body contains a complex community of trillions of microorganisms that are important for your health while you're alive.

I'm working on clearing out some old tabs, and ran across this piece from last fall. The short version is that your gut microbiome and other microbes that accompany you in a series of symbiotic relationships throughout your lifetime persist even after you die. While you might assume that these bacteria and other little beings would perish along with you once you're no longer warm and living, it turns out that they shift gears upon your death, being part of the massive effort to return your remains en masse to the nutrient cycle.

There's honestly something rather poetic about that. Here you've spent a lifetime being the center of a holobiont--a sort of miniature, migratory ecosystem. And these many millions of life forms that you have given safe harbor to for thousands upon thousands of their generations are among the funerary vanguard caring for your remains after you're gone. They pour forth from their ancestral lands--the gut, the skin, and other discrete places--and spread out through even the most protected regions of your form.

And then, just as you constructed your body, molecule by molecule, from a lifetime of nutrients you consumed, so do these microbes go through the process of returning everything you borrowed back to the wider cycles of food and growth and life and death. The ancient halls where their ancestors lived in relative stability are now taken apart in the open air, and their descendants will disperse their inheritance into the soil and the water through the perpetual process of decomposition.

I've always wanted a green burial, and I find it comforting that when my remains are laid in the ground, they'll be accompanied by the tiny ecosystems I spent a lifetime tending, and who will return the favor by sending my molecules off in a billion new directions.

[phaeton-flier]

Bear religion probably fucking rocks. You're a fucking bear, you're the deadliest thing on earth, once a year an endless supply of salmon just flings itself up the river to gorge on and then you nap for 3 months.

[phaeton-flier]

The most delicious food in the world is protected by tiny demons who can defend it from everyone except you. Your natural armor is thick enough that you can just eat the damn hive while they buzz around you. God's chosen animals right there

[theaudientvoid]

[centrally-unplanned]

Regular bears tell stories of angel bears sent by the Bear God, pure white and twice as strong as any normal bear could be, who rule the summit of the Earth and kill all who stand in their path.

And they are right, those bears exist and totally do that. Humans just have fake angels as a cope.

[theabigailthorn]

love the idea of bears being the chosen species actually. having a near death experience and glimpsing heaven and realising it's just full of bears, no humans at all, humans not ensouled actually, humans an accidental byproduct of God's plan for bears

[creature-wizard]

Hey white pagans, if you're calling the polytheistic traditions of nonwhite people "pagan" even though the practitioners don't choose to identify with this term themselves, you're doing colonialism and being racist.