witches/polytheists in my phone. mostly polytheists
you know its okay to be wrong. you can be wrong. in fact you will probably be wrong and you probably have been wrong before and you didnt die
i see a lot of posts that are eyerolling about how 'ewwww beginners when they dont know something yet' and in response i see even more posts like 'guys is ___ happening or is ____ happening because i dont know i think its ___ but i dont want to get it wrong'
and usually its over really minor things too. like. just guess. youre not gonna go to hell if youre wrong
like youre not sure if the signs youre getting are from Aphrodite? guess! if you ignore it and they were signs, youll get more signs. she wont smite you. if she wasnt reaching out and you made her an alter? then she'll get offerings. and you'll just get a sense you aren't working on anything. and she still wont smite you. and whoever was reaching out also wont smite you !
people are telling you a divination method isnt reliable but its working for you? your gods will correct you if it isnt working Or maybe theyll just let you be wrong if it isnt a big deal. you thought a deity made a joke with you but youre not sure? guess! you can just be wrong. if it matters youll find out eventually
or you can just not know. thats also fine. you can just shrug and say 'not sure what this means'. a candle can flicker in a weird way and you can just go 'dont know what that one meant'
like i have a dissociative disorder and ocd. the amount of times my gods have told me something and i was just too dissociated to understand, or i amnesia'd an important detail, or i was too anxious to figure out what was true or not and i simply said 'i dont know what you said, we'll figure it out later im sure'. and it was fine. and i did not get smoted
you cant move forward in your practice with the goal of just not being wrong. you just have to plan to be wrong sometimes. you have to think 'what is the worst and best outcome, how likely is each outcome, and how would i recover if i fuck it up'. your gods know that youre learning.
if you want to be confident in your practice and not feel like you have to constantly ask for someone else to check your work, you need to build experiences, including experiences where you fucked up. thats how you turn 'some people are saying not to use candle divination and some people are saying its fine and i dont know what to do' into 'most of the time when i read candles its been accurate but every now and then its kind of off so when it doesnt feel right i double check with tarot'
spiritual matters are inherently woo woo and literally unprovable. it would be veryyyyyy difficult to formally confirm most of what people say. like 'pendulums are unreliable because your hand subtly moves it' a lot but who told you the spirit only communicates by moving the pendulum. whos to say its not just your intuition knowing the answer and influencing you to move the pendulum. whos to say its not a spirit slightly channeling through you to move slightly move your hand in the right direction(literally so many people say we are channels for spirits but then turn around and say you cant trust a divination method because the answer was influenced by your body or your mind. thats like saying you cant trust a voicemail because you heard it through a phone. the phone could be broken but also. its still built to receive and relay messages). whos to say every spirit is doing something different, whos to say theyre not changing their method each time.
all you can do is research what you can and use trial and error and critical thinking. if it has been accurate for you, then its reliable for you. if it keeps being wrong for you, then it's not for you. maybe its reliable for one because their gods communicate with them that way and its unreliable for another because theyre gods dont communicate with them that way. what you do know is if it works for you specifically or not.
and if youre scared of cultural appropriation, remember the most immediate harm of cultural appropriation is physical and emotional, and it usually comes from ignorance or an internal issue like insecurity or jealousy. dont drive yourself insane trying to figure out if something is cultural appropriation by looking for the spiritual indicators. learn how it affects real life people and the environment. keep working on healing emotional wounds and fulfilling yourself. you wont want to steal from another practice if youre fulfilled and satisfied with your own (also work on learning how to process guilt and shame if being wrong absolutely terrifies you, people double down after cultural appropriation bc theyre scared to confront the shame and guilt).
but also with how prejudice is in everything, even the best of sources, youre likely going to get a bad piece of information and accidentally do something appropriative one day. so just learn how to apologize and correct yourself. do your best to catch and filter out prejudice, and learn what to do when you mess up. you dont have to be scared all the time. every single person no matter their background has and will fuck up. thats human. just correct yourself and do better next time
also doxxing and harassing people who fuck up is what makes other people who fuck up double down so hard. they see other people get doxxed and harassed and build up so much anxiety over making a human mistake that when they inevitably do, they go into severe denial that they were wrong and/or delete their account and/or put up a faux apology. so maybe we should be normal when people fuck up and simply say 'hey thats bad' bc clearly doxxing and harassing has not yet lead to genuine accountability. dont give people hell and then be surprised when they act like a fake nice christian
TLDR you need to let yourself be wrong. its fine. youre not gonna die or go to hell you will simply learn not to do that next time
