Posts talking about the need to unpack religious trauma from pagan practices or the influence of cultural Christianity on how modern pagans interpret their experiences practices ... Are not an attack.
You do not need to feel defensive. You don't need to feel confused by confused by what different people say online when it comes to things like "you're not actually being pagan if you do x thing" and then someone else says the opposite.
What you read is not always a conversation spoken directly to you.
(Except this. This, I am speaking directly to you.)
You're not sure where to begin with connecting to faith? Well congrats, no one ever is, welcome to the club, pull up a chair and start listening. Here is a tangled ball of yarn - what you make with it is entirely up to you. There are no easy answers, and there never were and never will be.
To people coming from more dogmatic faiths, this transition is jarring. You want a ritual, you want to know the right words to say, you want someone to teach you the steps of the dance. What you should sacrifice, how you should do it, what does this god like, what rules you should follow.
The rules are always the same, and they never changed for you regardless of your faith.
Be honest. Be kind. Be brave.
Example: offering the gods mead. Does the recorded history say that mead was offered to the Norse gods? Absolutely. Do we know why mead? Why the blood of cattle? Why these sacrifices and not others? You can read about these things on the surface level and never think about what made these things valuable for this purpose, and be no closer to any answer. You've done the ritual and said the words but gotten no meaning from it.
To the point that I frequently see newbies coming in wondering anxiously what they should do if they can't find mead to offer a god. And I sort of want to shake them a bit and ask why are you so desperate to connect to a deity you don't understand? Is it because you were conditioned to believe that this is how humanity should interact with the divine? Do you believe that to have faith really means to believe in a god, and you just mentally swapped out which ones?
Why on earth do you think that sparkling apple juice is any less valuable than honey wine?
When were you going to question why everyone told you to offer mead? When were you going to ask "why this specifically though"? When were you going to wonder why you were looking for a book of do's and don'ts and why you were prepared to believe that the only acceptable offerings were the ones you were told?
The mead is decorative. It doesn't matter. The offering itself doesn't even matter - it's a representation of kindness and reciprocity. It has as much meaning as leaving a gift basket at a neighbor's door. You want to have a good relationship with your neighbors, so you build one. It's very important as an action, but the substance doesn't matter that much. The intent does.
So do yourself a favor and stop stressing. You are only hurting yourself. Your trauma needs healing and the scars may always remain, but you need to learn to put down the sword before it can begin. You don't need to fight, you don't need to boast, you don't need to read every book of medieval Norse poetry to understand any of it.
The rules are the same. Be honest, be kind, be brave. Start there. Decorate the rest however you want.
