a love letter to vibes

Saw this take in the middle of a much larger post and it felt weird to call it out in the middle of a bunch of other comments, but the take was:

"You cannot engage with a god without following the doctrine and rituals their original worshippers did."

That sentence in particular really jumped out at me. My first reaction was like a professor grading one of my papers back in school: "which doctrines and rituals? which worshippers are we deeming original? what changes over time are you allowing for?"

Now partly I know I have a kneejerk negative reaction to arguments that individual pagans shouldn't believe/depict/interact with their powers in ways that are in inappropriate. I've been called inappropriate, rude, disrespectful, etc plenty over the years.

Speaking of inappropriate, the second thing I think about in this context is Loki. Because I remember too many arguments about how nobody should work with Loki since there's not sufficient proof anybody would have worshipped him back in the dark, and I'm too tired for that argument anymore.

Also because Lokeans are the contrary fuckers who took someone complaining someone else was making offerings wrong and turned it into a holiday, Spongecake Day. We're just like that.

The third thing I think about is that I was just reading some neat posts this morning about working with unrecorded spirits and how exactly are we supposed to do that when there's no original doctrines or worshippers to ask? Is there a point where it becomes valid again? When I veer into fictional recon and I'm the one writing the doctrine, does that count?

And I thought about replying but again, part of a longer post I didn't really want to deal with and I wasn't sure if I'd be starting an argument, since my initial reaction was to ask a lot of "nitpicky" questions that usually annoy people. So then I thought maybe I'd just drop it entirely, but I really do want to get back in the habit of talking about stuff.

There's a discord server I'm in and the folks there encouraged me to make a freestanding post, not as an argument but as a way to talk about my own thoughts on the subject, and I like that idea. I haven't written an updated "what I believe and how" type of thing for my site in ages, and I don't think this is quite that but… that's the vibe.

"That's the vibe" is a very appropriate thing to put in anything I write about my beliefs and practices, actually, because the older I get the more I'm vibing and the less interested I am in homework. I still enjoy research and reading and taking notes, and there's more interesting books being published now than pretty much ever before, but also I'm tired and I've accepted that I'm Weird.

If I'm approaching a deity I haven't worked with before that definitely has a history, yeah, I'll do some reasearch. Usually I approach it kind of inside out– I'll feel like Someone is on the periphery of my attention for whatever reason and I'll try to figure out who it is. When I started out I had mostly titles and I didn't know where they came from, like the Dark Lady.

I actually spent a lot of time trying to "figure out" who they really were, so I could do it right. I don't regret most of that time, because I did some really interesting work with deities I might not have reached out to otherwise, but I also spent a lot of time feeling like I was getting passed around like an intern no one quite knows what to do with.