Oh, You Fool.

When I was a baby Kemetic, surfing the KO website for a name of a goddess I could give my attention to, I found the name of Ma’at listed there. I was immediately entranced with this goddess because she was both a being and a concept. Almost nothing of value that I had access to at the time was written about her, but I chose her to be my starting point on this path. It took me a long time to realize that she had no interest in me.

During this childlike phase, I had a dream that seemed to indicate I needed to get a tattoo in her honor. So, I had one of my local tattoo artists put her name in a cartouche on my shoulder. I also had a feather of ma’at placed above her name. Years later, I was told that I got the message wrong. It was about living in ma’at, not the goddess herself. The tattoo is permanent so it’s a reminder nowadays to be really sure I know what the fuck the gods want from me.

We all make mistakes when it comes to the messages our gods send us. I am no different.

Hell. I still get shit wrong.

The Stranger

It was mid-to-late 2018 when the song from Lord Huron would crop up in my liked song list more often than usual. When it would play on my walks, while I cleaned, driving somewhere, I could feel my heart rate pick up and a feeling of uneasiness come over me. The message was from Sekhmet; a reminder that death is waiting for us all and not to be scared when the Year of Rebirth began. It took far longer than I am willing to admit to realize that the message was never from Sekhmet. A different god was pulling the strings on this.

I was coldly furious when I realized the truth. How dare he use my relationship with her to contact me thus? How dare he use my carefully curated playlists to speak to me? How dare he come to me at all? I think TTR was amused when I admitted the truth of the matter; it took me so fucking long to figure it out. But from cold rage to acceptance I went and began creating a playlist for Osiris too, one that put the song right at the top as a reminder that I wasn’t afraid to die.

Osiris didn’t want too much from me; only my death. A benefit for all gods involved (Ra, Sekhmet, him) with me as the catalyst. He recommended that I beef up my calendar for the year of 2019 and almost threatened to see me later. Sekhmet took the first few months of rebirth; Ra the middle portion; and Osiris formed the basis of the last four months. It was a busy time, trying to ensure that all gods were reaping the benefits of the Year of Rebirth project.

When Ra’s presence began to dim out around Samhain and the clock change, Osiris geared up and began taking his place. He spoke to me at first via the ancestors since it is through him that they have any basis at all. But as Ra faded down to a pinprick of light in my life, Osiris was there in stereo to take over the reigns. As the cold of winter began sweeping through the world, it was the green-faced one who spoke the loudest out of all of them. Though speak is a euphemism; he seems to prefer intuition and dreams to actual speech.

He was gentle, but firm. I needed that after years of not engaging with him on purpose. He was never supposed to be for me, much like Ra was never supposed to be mine. My engagement with Osiris had been minimal at best. I knew enough to get by but not nearly as much as others. He didn’t seem to mind how limited my information about him was. As it stands, I know more than I give myself credit for and the thanks for that falls squarely on TTR’s shoulders.

He watched me die and I was grateful for the audience.

As the closing of the Year of Rebirth and the Year of Rites came ever closer, the world around us continued to cool. And in the frost of the mornings and the frozen air of the afternoon, he spoke of a future that encapsulated more than mere death but a continuous rebirth cycle from here until forever. We dreamed of green plants and cookies together. He said the grave was only the beginning.

Beyond the Grave

Those of us who have had associations with Osiris often see him within the paradigm of a river. I am no different. I often see him standing thigh-deep in charcoal gray waters, looking introspective as he takes in the sights. But beyond the river stands the idea that it is through Osiris that all things have come into being. No matter which portion of history attributed various identifiers to his mythos, one keeps coming back to the fact that Osiris is as much the alpha and omega as Ra is.

Years ago, I was reading MHMM and a specific passage relative to Osiris pinged loudly for me:

Next the ostracon hymn continues with an unusual evocation of Osiris as the backbone of Egypt, the ground upon which the whole of Egyptian culture is built. Upon his spine rest the houses, the temples, the monuments, all the fields and tombs, and it is proclaimed that there are no empty spaces on the god’s body…

Without this stable foundation which is provided by Osiris, it is impossible to imagine that Egyptian culture could have survived three thousand years. He is the solid base, the enduring ground upon which the whole of Egypt rested.

It is as the base of the pillar that I spied Osiris staring back at me. It was as if he always knew that I would end up in this space, looking at him with a mix of fear and worry. I got the distinct image of a house’s foundation: a thick gray square of concrete open-mouthed and yawning at the sun that passed over it every day. This imagery was the very same foundation ping that I often came across in my relationship with Ptah, and by its association, with Ptah-Tatenen.

The image of the gray foundation morphed into a gray and dusty spinal column. From each nodule of the bones, I could see flowers and wheat, corn and apple trees. I had come full-circle, it seemed; from one who sees him only in death to one who finally saw him in the cycle of life.

One of the things that TTR and I have talked about at length is that Osiris is more than simply a deity associated with death. The myth cycle that we know tends to lose the thread of his associations with rebirth, rejuvenation, and green-living because most people only remember him as the god who was murdered by his brother and his son had to hide till adulthood to fight his uncle for the right to rule. While not everyone forgets this, it’s easy to push off the green aspects of his domain because we hear people talk about The Contendings so frequently.

But as we moved forward, I saw him more and more in the world around me. The golden shimmer of winter wheat and the ornamental grasses that populated the road side. It was as if he were telling me that he had always been there, I merely had to look with opened eyes and not the closed one that I preferred.

This felt a little like a game of hide-and-seek. As the winter wrapped its chilly fingers around the world around me, I began to see him in everything. I found him in places he had no business being and shrank back from the implications of every new instance until I came to a sort of acceptance about it all.

He was here, and he was here to stay.

The Appointed Time

At the time change in November, Osiris came upon me with a dramatic flourish just as Ra was leaving. It was as if he had been waiting in the wings, waiting for this very moment, to appear to me and say that it was time for us to truly begin this journey together. He began appearing around an ancient festival that began on Halloween, a festival about Horus welcoming the Nile.

Within two weeks of Osiris coming to me and Ra leaving, the Osiris Mysteries were upon me and I began to catalogue the differences between what I had known before and what I was beginning to suspect would occur after all of this was over. Osiris asked merely for the trappings of the Osiris Mysteries; he seemed to be implying that more serious things would come later.

He claimed the winter absolutely and totally. Everything about that winter whispered his name to me. The snow upon the ground, cold and crusted over with ice. The flittering red wings of cardinals fighting over resources in the backyard. The twinkle lights of Christmas on barren shrubs and trees. The false spring that caused old-timers and farmers to whisper about climate change. The roar of winter’s breath decimating sensitive skin on cheeks and lips. Everywhere I looked, there he was. He assured me that he would never leave with promises that both frightened me and beckoned to me.

As the world entered the beginning of spring, Osiris became pushy and forceful but only in small doses. He would come upon me as if I were waiting for him and give me direction, or a reminder of something. His presence seemed to be growing dimmer, not unlike what happened with Ra the previous fall. It was as if the louder the animals in the backyard grew and the higher the plants climbed above the soil, the quieter he became. It felt a bit like he was throwing all of his energy into the push for spring, the push of new life that was just around the corner.

As I looked to the calendar to remember when things would most likely change, I found three final Osiris holidays added to my calendar at some unknown previous time. The three holidays were scheduled to take place just after the time change. They seemed to be the types of farewell that he needed to truly leave to give Ra the chance to take over again. These holidays felt a bit like a good-bye before the switch between gods could truly begin.

Go Back to Start

When I began to question what the purpose of this religious life was, I knew that things would change. I didn’t know how the questioning would cause things to change, but I knew that what I had grown with and created over the years would change in its entirety. I’ve come to accept this, although [as always] I doubt that I am truly ready for any of this.

Around Imbolc, I found myself researching plants that are most often associated with the holiday. As I had mentioned then, I found it difficult to see my gods in those commonly ascribed plants. But eventually, I did find Osiris in many places that I couldn’t find in a book. I found other gods there, too, of course, but it was the presence of Osiris that ensnared me like I was a fly caught in the web of a spider. He seemed to be speaking to me soul to soul instead of mouth to ear.

As the months go by, I’ve come to realize that I like the idea of finding gods in the world around me, which is why I often ask myself whether this is a good thing or not. I’ve thought about why this means so much to me now when nothing before seemed to mean as much. I think it’s because, as a child growing up in a Methodist church, I could never really feel like God was anywhere but inside the church that we attended. I don’t know why I couldn’t see that God in the world around me, but I couldn’t. And as I continue moving forward on this unused path ahead of me, all I can do is see my gods in everything.

I asked him once what he thought about being a local god to a place that had never known him. I had the distinct impression that he took my question seriously, but he never really gave me an answer. I didn’t exactly expect one because he doesn’t seem to like answering in that way. He seems to prefer the idea of strewing clues about on the ground for me to find as I stumble across them. As my dreams have oft shown, he seems to like the concept of making me build the puzzle on my own.

But that question bothers me more and more as the days go by. It nags me in a way that I can’t quite explain. Who am I to see foreign gods in a land that was brutally stolen from indigenous cultures? How dare I stumble upon my gods here? But are these beings even my gods? Is it possible someone else’s gods wear the face of mine to whisper sweet nothings in my ear because they want, more than anything they want, to be remembered?

I’m hoping that one day, I find the answer to these questions. And that the guilt of this ancestor of colonial brutalizers can perhaps, maybe not be fully absolved, but reconciled with.

In Conclusion…

Just before Osiris left to make way for Ra, I found myself listening to The Yawning Grave by Lord Huron over and over again. I couldn’t have said what it was about the song that hit me so palpably until Osiris came to me in a dream, singing to me as if he were the singer of the song. He hit me hard with it, as if he needed to inject a little piece of himself into me while we separated for a while.

Osiris, like Ra before him, made it crystal clear that there was no going back now and that he would return in the fall. The cycle has begun again and there is nothing I could do to stop it. I don’t really want to because, as I’ve mentioned, I am quite interested to see where all of this is going and I haven’t felt that type of interest in my religion in a long time. It’s possible I become dissatisfied with these changes, but a part of me believes this direction is exactly where I needed to go when I wrote about how unhappy I was with the way things were.

One morning, shortly after Ostara, we woke up to snow on the ground. It was a dusting really and it disappeared as quickly as it came on us. I stood outside under the awning, marveling at the beauty of pure white snow on pine needles and at the base of my favorite tree. I felt the icy, cold fingers of Osiris on my cheek as if in final parting. And I knew that while the months ahead will be hot and belong to Ra, I would be looking forward to the cooler months and shorter days of Osiris.

Stand in the Sun.

As a baby pagan, after I had gluttoned myself on all the books by all of the authors that older pagans cringe at now, I found a website that told me believing and worshiping the ancient Egyptian gods was real. Floored by what I had found, I read through the list of names of the gods over and over again. I formed their names with my lips and wondered what worshiping them might look like. And as I went through those list of names, perhaps influenced by early divine goddess rumblings or merely my own past, I swore I would never worship the male deities. They had had enough worship; I would only honor the women goddesses.

I’ve thought about that time in my life and I’ve come to the conclusion that this was a childish form of rebellion against the wrong religion. All my life, I had been indoctrinated to believe that while God has no true sex, it was He this and He that. I was tired of all the He. Even my irritable changing the He in prayers and Bible readings to She wasn’t enough. I was sick of male deities after living a lifetime suckling the teet of male deity propaganda. (Side note: churches should only use They for God now.) So, I decided the ladies was where my attention would go and that was that.

Hoo boy, has shit changed in 20 years.

A Wild God Appears

In very late 2018, shortly after Samhain, I felt the first real kick from Ra. I was distinctly uncomfortable with the attention. As anyone who may have followed me for a while knows, we don’t get on. But there he was like a towering statue out of the thick fog. I knew why of course; the 2019 Year of Rebirth project may have started off about Sekhmet but it really was about more than just she.

One thing I’ve found more and more as I go deeper down this road is the fact that hard polytheism only works so much when it comes to the NTRW. If you’re working on things for one deity, invariably what you’re doing will no doubt effect or benefit others. Sekhmet, created from Ra’s power, is as connected to the other gods as the rest of them. Dying for Sekhmet’s benefit was dying for Ra’s benefit.

He was patient and quiet, which is what I needed to get over some things. Say what we will about gods busting down doors without knocking, occasionally they seem to be able to read the room before they even get in there. So he was mostly quiet while I came to terms with the idea that he was around, he was going to stay around, and that most likely his presence would continue well past 2019.

It didn’t start to become more of a relationship until about Spring of 2019. Things started kind of piecing together for us. He asked for very few things other than attention and a few little baubles. I asked him once if this would turn into something more. He kind of snorted and said no. I had assumed originally that this relationship would turn into a shrine, an icon, altar space for prayer. But when I had asked, I got the distinct impression he found my question amusing before he told me no.

He did ask for a daily rite that I had written for him for the Year of Rites project, which I managed to finish before 2018 came to an end. While the Year of Rites project fell apart about midway through 2019, he didn’t seem too unhappy that I had stopped doing the daily rites with the words I had written. I did the physical portion of the rite and that seemed to be enough.

For a while anyway.

Once you start down the rabbit hole, you get a little lost. No matter how many times you try to back track to the start to find your way out, the labyrinth closes up behind you until the only way out is through. The way through looked weird and strange to me. Not completely at any rate, but a good bit of it was new territory. Ra merely said to keep it up; I’d know where the exit was eventually.

That Wasn’t an Exit

As 2019 came to a close, I began to register that Ra’s presence was dimming so to speak. I don’t know how to put it that will make it clearer but as October hit, he seemed to have collapsed in on himself. I assumed it was because the year was starting to come to a close and he needed strength for the actual birth of the new year. I was partially right, but not completely.

It was the week of Samhain that it all came together. The clock change was set to begin the Sunday following Halloween and I could sense that this was it. He was going to do one of those dramatic exits that the gods seem to love to do and leave me with some vague request. The request wasn’t completely vague oddly enough.

“Look beyond the trappings and you’ll find me there,” he seemed to say as his time with me grew ever shorter. I remember standing in my backyard the weekend of the time change and staring at the sky. “My time for now is over. Use this quiet to figure out the puzzle.” Not like I needed clear cut answers anyway.

That winter, as the world cooled and the snow refused to fall, I would look up at the watery light of the sun and wonder what Ra was up to. I would imagine the rays of sunlight trying so desperately to reach me in my backyard but unable to do so through the winter wind and ice cold frost. I tried to play his playlist and found it didn’t work for the way the land and world around me had changed to winter.

The trappings are encapsulated by my altar room. That was the place where I found my gods over and over again and while I have pieces that are designated for Ra in there, I had never really felt him there. He was always outside, in the land, in the air, and in the world around me. I had looked beyond the trappings and found the god in the natural world.

This isn’t strange; it’s not abnormal. I’ve long had a local cultus push for my gods, but it was Ra who solidified it in a way I hadn’t been able to do until he showed up. The physical reminders of worship and altars are for the priests; the natural world and the worship within is for everyone else.

Timing is Everything

Since Ra all but disappeared at the time change, I wondered if I could expect him back in 2020 when it changed again. I waited throughout the winter, wondering if my hunch was correct. The Tuesday prior to the time change, my calendar told me there were Ra festivities coming up (feast for three or four days in his and the Irt-Ra honor) and just after the time change, the Divine Birth of Ra lined up nicely with his return.

I looked back to see what was going on, calendar-wise, in October as I hadn’t been paying as much attention to the holiday alerts since fall is a busy holiday time for my calendar. Nothing so concrete as a “say bye to the sun” but there were a few hints that I missed back then, which will become important in another entry.

It seemed that I had figured out that my relationship with Ra was to coincide with the world around me. As spring approached and the whispers of birds and plants began to grow louder, I could feel him more and more in the air and beside me. I remember waking up one morning between the time change and Ostara whispering, “oh there you are.” And there he was.

He hasn’t given any directives since he showed up and other than a matter-of-fact hello-how-are-you, he’s been pretty quiet while I try to figure out what all of this means. It’s one thing to understand, finally, the reason and the push, but it’s quite another to turn it into reality.

I kind of feel like I’ve been stumbling along, occasionally picking up clues and messages that tell me I’m headed forward to somewhere else. After talking about this a bit with TTR, I was happy to find that I’m not the only one in this boat, but it doesn’t necessarily help anyone at all. We may all be headed in the same direction, but who really knows what it will all look like at the end of the day?

Ra, probably.

The Beginning is Now

My local cultus push has been a thing for some years now. It started in fits and spurts around 5 years ago, maybe more, and has been increasingly felt throughout the rest of my relationships with my gods. Part of this push has caused decay in some of my relationships (Sekhmet and Ptah, who I have yet to find in the world around me) and solidified others in ways I hadn’t ever expected (Heru-Wer, Hetheru, and of course Ra).

Over the winter, I read through Hathor: A Reintroduction… by Lesley Jackson. One of the quotes that I ended up posting on my Tumblr has stayed with me most often, especially now that I understand the next phase of where this relationship with Ra is supposed to go:

…but the Egyptians also detected her presence in nature; in the rustling of papyrus in the swamps, in the breeze through sycamore leaves and in places in the desert where there were conspicuous outcrops of rock

P 198, Hathor: A Reintroduction to an Ancient Egyptian Goddess by Lesley Jackson

This isn’t, by all means, the only clue-by-four that’s showed up leading me down this road, but it’s the one that stuck with me the most often. Usually it comes up when I’m sitting outside, staring up at the sun and trying to parse out the nuance of how local cultus is supposed to formulate the basis for many things going forward.

All of this, whatever this may actually end up being, is a reset in a manner of speaking. The ongoing path project has always been a bit of a disappointment for me. I’ve always felt the push in one direction and never really felt comfortable in going that way. But I’m reminded that my path is ever-evolving and has always been best summed up by the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken.

Now, the path ahead is forged with oak and grass, bees and tree frogs, hawks and owls, mayflower and staghorn sumac. There are gods within these places as there always has been; the gods of these places may be gone now or colonized into silence, but there are other gods who seem to want to be found there, gods who have followed me for most of my life in some form or another. And while I’m not sure whether I have the right to see them there since I am living on land stolen from indigenous peoples, I see them there anyway.

In Conclusion…

In February, I did a month-ahead Tarot reading for the month of March. I didn’t foresee the pandemic (sorry) since I was looking at myself. The Theme of the Month was a card called Spellwork, which we can sum up as meaning this: “create a recipe of your own choosing; gather the ingredients together to gain clarity and insight; you know exactly what you need so follow your intuition.” If that doesn’t tell me what I need to know, then what does?

Ra has made it very clear that he is here to stay and while sometimes I still feel like this is all an elaborate prank on the stupid human, sometimes I think everything will be okay. His entrance into my life has overtaken many other areas of my practice, almost like he’s clearing the slate to a point where I can actually start over. I’m a little hesitant only because I don’t want to fully sacrifice the carefully created relationships I’ve already made, but I’m also interested to see how this could play out. And I can admit that I haven’t felt interested in my religion in a very long time.

The other day, as I was taking my daily walk, the sun threw its life-giving rays between a thick scattering of white pines. The rays of the sun were clear and reflected off of a small creek that traveled through the wooded area. I managed to snap a picture of it, and it looks like there are two suns: one in the sky and one on the ground. The rays of both suns meet in the middle in a sort of new horizon. I take a lot of nature pictures, but that’s my favorite so far. I think it neatly captures my religious life and where it’s always been headed.

Imbolc 2020.

A few years back, when one of the Wheel of the Year holidays was fast approaching (probably Samhain), I had the unmistakable zing from an ancestor to celebrate it. I refused as that was not my lane, not the right direction, and wasn’t even the right freeway. Nope. No, I think not. And as a consequence, or result whichever, I threw myself harder into ancient Egyptian holidays.

And that went about as well as one could expect because, for those just tuning in, almost every day is a holiday of some sort. This is mostly because modern Kemetics are integrating numerous calendars from various time periods and areas into a single functional calendar. Obviously, you’d want to celebrate only the ones that pertain to you and your relationship with your gods, but uh, even that is still asking a lot.

 

Just know that my entire Google calendar looks very much like this except for the four months I have yet to enter into it.

One thing I’ve found in these celebrations is that I dislike the ritualistic structure of much of what I had come up with. After last years 365ritual nonsense, I realized that I wanted spontaneity versus carefully planned celebrations. It’s possible to do this with our holidays; I just haven’t figured that part out yet and No One is pushing me to do so at the moment. And frankly, with the way my life has been since last October, my ability to can regarding my Kemetic calendar has drastically reduced.

So entered the reminder about how, once upon a time, an unknown-to-me ancestor had said, The Wheel of the Year would be a cool thing to celebrate right?

I know nothing about these holidays, so I pulled out my old copies of the Sabbat books by Llewellyn. Yes, yes, I know how shitty they are. The purpose here wasn’t to use what they talked about or cringe at some of the bullshit within some books, but to at least get a baseline and go from there. I’m less interested in the general pagan ideals of the holiday and more interested in a celebration of life and nature kind of way.

While I tried to start all this off with Yule, I didn’t actually get to celebrate much because of our surprise!bathroom renovation. So I tossed myself into Imbolc. I dithered a lot because most of what I found had a heavy push towards Brighid, who is not part of my pantheon. I also found a lot of very appropriating things that made me uncomfortable (as I figured I would considering the book I used).

But, you know, I figured that I could pull out the Brighid stuff I was finding and maybe make it into something else. Maybe look at it less from the usual point of view one sees across various social media and turn it into something else.

 

Imbolc Without the Appropriation or Gods That Don’t Work for Me

The historical precedent for the holiday is basically a midway point for winter. As my research indicated, this was kind of a positive and happy time because it meant that winter was almost over. And for people who once paid far more attention to the weather and how it impacted their lives, it was a time of celebration because, again, winter was almost over.

The holiday tended to be associated with lambs. The first ewes from mid-fall would be born around this time. This is also when the first spring sowing would begin (as long as there wasn’t snow on the ground) and typically, people who garden will spend the holiday planning out their future garden or at least start their gardens.

Candles and bonfires were a big part of the celebration, too, because it symbolized the lengthening of the upcoming days. Spring cleaning was also important since, after spending quite a few months stuck inside because of the cold and snow, things would be a stagnant energetically. In line with this, purification was a big thing for this holiday too.

There were a lot of things that I could do without following down a road that I found uncomfortable. I decided that I would try the following at least and see how it works out:

• Create an Imbolc altar
• Clean the house
• Light some candles
• Try and make soda bread
• Eat cheese and drink milk

I made a little list of various suggestions and decided to at least go forward with the items listed above. There were other items that I included in that list that didn’t feel right or that I didn’t think made sense to me.

I chose not to look at garden planning because I frankly have no clue how to plan a garden. I know that I want to plant the mint I got for Christmas in a container all its own and that I want to replant the paper whites I planted for the Osiris Mysteries (note to self, maybe finish those entries finally) somewhere in my yard. But other than the knowledge that I need some lilacs everywhere, I have no clue what else needs to be done. So, I figured I could table that until I have a serious chat with my mother-in-law about where things should go in the yard.

Another large push for this holiday is about planning ahead, about looking to the new projects that one may want to undertake in the next year or so and blessing them to fruition. The Llewellyn book had a cringy little spell or ritual you could do to bless the projects you had planned, and I considered turning it around into something that would work with what I knew (specifically looking at taking out the gross parts and including Wepwawet since this stuff seems like his bread and butter). However, I decided that I wasn’t quite ready for that.

While perusing the Brighid-centric stuff, I mused on how easy it would be to put any gods, really, into these holidays. As long as you get the general feel of them, you can find Greek or Roman gods, Slavic or ancient Egyptian gods in the feel of the holiday. And while I was distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of syncretizing a Wheel of the Year holiday with these types of holidays, I couldn’t help but find two of my gods staring at me as if waiting for me to make the connection.

 

Ancient Egyptian Gods to Associate with Imbolc

Let’s preface this with a few statements. I am not going into this with the need or desire to syncretize my Kemetic practice with the Wheel of the Year celebrations. In fact, as stated above, I am actually very uncomfortable with the idea of it. I am not Wiccan and I am not heading into a Kemetic Wicca world (I’ve researched it and I can safely say it’s not for me). I’m just trying to figure out what might work for me in future to help me feel like I’m not floundering anymore.

So, while I haven’t written the entry about it, Osiris has been around heavily for a few months. He started showing up more and more the closer fall came to winter. And while I will eventually get that entry out (one day – no actually I’m waiting on something else before I get around to writing it) suffice to say that he has been around and while he is not loud or in my face, he is an Ongoing Presence.

I wasn’t surprised to see him in the idea of Imbolc, not really. The holiday is about growth on the by and large; growth of the self, growth of one’s garden, growth of one’s life, etc. And Osiris is a god of growth, greenery, and fertility. We have all mentioned our shared personal gnosis where he likes to fuck around with our insides, forcing us to grow in ways we didn’t want or didn’t believe we were capable of.

He stood mummiform in my mind, surrounded by bay leaves and snowdrops and crocus and daffodils. There were birds chirping and his face was green. He held his distinctive scepter and I couldn’t pull him away from Imbolc even if I had wanted to. There he was.

As I pulled away from the idea that Osiris could easily be melded into this, I found someone else. I was startled by Heru-Wer standing there, but it took me all of 5 seconds to come to the realization that my surprise was silly.

We don’t typically see Heru-Wer in a fertile/growth paradigm. We see other gods in this place, but Horus the Elder has these associations just as much as all the rest. He is a god of growth and fertility, of greenery and the land around us. He doesn’t push us or mess around with our insides like Osiris does, but he has a subtle way about him that can push you in the same way as Osiris.

He stood falcon-headed in my mind, surrounded by pussy willows, feather reed grass, red-twig dogwood, moor grass, staghorn sumac, pink muhlygrass, and cattail fluff. These were all of the mid-winter images I’m used to seeing day-in and day-out. I’ll get into this more, but I was comfortable with the vision of him there not only because I have felt him everywhere lately but because he seemed to be in the here and now. It seemed right.

I wasn’t expecting to see either god in this place, in this time, but there they were. I don’t doubt that I could easily find more if I looked harder. But because these are my gods, the gods I have devoted myself to in some form or another, it was easier to see them there.

 

Changes for Next Year

While I was looking for ways to make me feel more connected to the point behind the holiday, I found it difficult to find artificial flowers that really made me feel like they worked for Imbolc. I found a number of artificial plants that reminded me of crocus, which I bought up in spades and used to coordinate my altar room and my altars with the purpose behind the holiday. But when I decided to make a general Imbolc altar, I found it hard to find plants that I wanted to include.

I’m not a large daffodil fan (they’re okay) and while I bought myself a small pot of them, it was mostly because they looked like they were crowded together and needed to breathe. And I couldn’t find anything that looked like snowdrops whatsoever. I was vaguely disgruntled. I ended up choosing a set of wheat-looking things that I absolutely hate because they have little stabby things at the ends that annoy me (because I keep stabbing myself accidentally).

It was after thinking about Heru-Wer and seeing him surrounded by the native winterized flora that it occurred to me that was what I probably should have done. I had found a couple of things at various crafts stores that would have worked well for the image I had in my head: an image of what I see everyday in winter.

While yes, it can get cold and there is sometimes snow on the ground (not as much as when I was a kid anyway), our winters are far more colorful than many people seem to realize.

Driving anywhere, there are red branches intertwined with gold (different types of dogwood); winter hay growing twice as tall as a human being; and staghorn sumac strategically placed along the side of the road. When the weak light of the sun filters down in the early morning, it’s breath-taking. (One day, I won’t be on my way to work and I’ll try to take pictures.)

There are also ornamental grasses all over the place here. I live in a very boggy area and that’s part of it. But a lot of locals like the look of feathery bushes, filled with golden or reddish native ornamental grasses. When the sun peaks over the mountains and shines down on them, they’re flooded with sparkles of color after a hard frost that can astonish the eye. (And again, one day, I won’t be in a rush to get somewhere and I’ll take pictures.)

This… this is what the middle of winter looks like to me. It’s not just piles of snow high above one’s head or the brown/yellow slush of melting snow. It is local flora dazzling with their brilliant color schemes and breath-taking themes.

So next year, I think, I will put away the stabby-wheat looking things (actually, I think I’m going to throw them away because I frankly don’t believe I can store them properly) and focus more on what I see in the world around me.

 

Pretty Pictures

And who can really end an entry like this without altar porn?

This was the altar I created for Imbolc. The golden things in the clear jars are the stabby wheat-looking things.

My ancestor and Osiris altar.

My Sekhmet and Ptah altar space.

My Hetheru and Heru-Wer altar area.

My Bes and Place of Truth area.

The Question.

 

One of the many little parts of my daily ritual includes the pulling of a daily card. I leave it out on the window sill beside my cupful of Ma’at to soak up the morning rays or the leaden skies that are forecast for the day. Sometimes, when I pull the card, I immediately understand it. It’s a reminder, a suggestion, and push in the right direction. Sometimes it begs me to slow down and to take care of myself. And sometimes it makes no sense whatsoever; it means nothing to me at the time. Whether it means something to me later is a matter of debate.

As part of this little ritual, I select a single deck to use for the month ahead. I prefer to use the same deck day-in and day-out for the full month because it helps me to understand decks that I may not use regularly and it also helps me to rotate my various decks. I have many, many types of oracle and Tarot cards and I can never use them all as much as I would like to.

This month of January I allowed my hands to float over my various decks until I pulled out a deck that I had been gifted with last year that I had side-eyed when I opened it but have found myself enjoying using: The Heart of the Faerie Oracle.

I know very little about the fae; it’s just not an area of interest to me. I love the posts about fae politics and culture and culture that go around Tumblr, but that’s about it. That’s why I didn’t understand why the deck was sent to me, but as I’ve used it over the last year, I’ve begun to understand the draw. Sometimes the cards are oblique, immaterial, confusing; sometimes it is like a punch in the gut.

Today’s pull was puzzling.

The candle is from CottageWicks and frigging amazing.

The guidebook had this to say about the card, The Question:

Intention / Dialogue / Answers

In Faerie, questions are very important. Questions, answers, and wishes, all of those things that help or hinder us on our journey are very much a part of our relationship with Faerie. “Who am I? What is your quest? Why have you come here, and what do you seek?” are questions often asked by the individuals you meet in Faerie. They don’t as often ask you who you are. It is more important for you to discover who they are.

It is important to know why you are traveling in Faerie and to be able to express that reason. You will be asked. When you cross the border into the otherworld, you should have a reason to be there. Are you a tourist, just looking around, hoping to send a postcard home? Are you on a quest, a journey of the spirit? Do you want knowledge? Experience of the otherworld? Are you looking for love? Are you searching for something that you have lost?

If you draw the Question in a reading, try to answer those questions for yourself. When you have answered, you can ask one of your own. What is that question, and of whom are you asking it? If you are clear about your quest (in Faerie and in life) and what you seek, you will then be able to ask the right questions and be ready to hear the answers.

This was all very nice and lovely, but it didn’t really explain why this card had come up this morning. I wrote in my Tarot Journal that I truly didn’t understand the purpose of all of this and figured that either I would eventually come to an understanding, or I wouldn’t. Sometimes I’m lucky and something pops up that allows me to connect the dots and other times, I’m left with a puzzled frown on my face, trying to understand what the cards are trying to say.

I was lucky that I was able to figure it out a bit after settling down to read through my WordPress Reader. I had a number of outstanding posts that I had been saving up for when I had a free moment and I had nothing to do for a bit while I waited for the world to wake up. The last post I had to read through was a post by someone I’ve known for years. I found myself at first uncomfortably interested and then visibly intrigued by what they had to say.

As I sat back, phone on my lap staring at the ceiling, I could understand what they had been going through. I, too, have watched as others have managed to bring to flesh their religious practice in a way that I cannot fathom. It is as if the language those people with fleshed out practices speak is so close to my own and yet, it is nothing like my language. I, too, have found myself envious and admiring of what those people have posted and wondered what that would look like for me.

I’ve known for a long time that the practice I’ve been kind-of dealing with hasn’t been enough. I knew it wasn’t enough four years ago, but I kept sticking to it because Kemeticism is what I knew and what I wanted. I can admit that it is still what I want; I want the relationships with the gods that I have and I suppose I’m amenable to exploring the relationships pushed upon me by such gods as Osiris and Ra. But I want flesh to cover the bones.

I want to be able to sink my hands into the dirt of my practice and feel it soak through my soul. I want to see it and smell it like a verdant garden, ripening eternally in spring-like splendor. I want to hear it and touch it. I want to know that it is there and it is made not only myself whole, but my life whole. I want to feel the ecstasy of release and the comfort of it all. I want.

I pulled my phone back up to my face and carefully typed a response to the post, “I’ve had similar issues myself. I can feel and see the bones but the flesh isn’t there. It’s been an ongoing issue for me for, well, a long time. Part of that is because I’ve felt very adrift lately.”

After leaving the comment, I put my phone down and stared at the ceiling some more. (This is actually something I do often when I’m lost in thought. I’m not sure that a ceiling has ever been able to answer questions, but it has been able to form the questions I was looking for.) The Question was there buried in the meat of my mind and it finally took form: “What would it feel like to have a fleshed out practice? What it would it look like to have something with tone and form and more than just tossing a dart at a dart board? How would I even do that?”

We don’t see this sort of stuff in Kemeticism; not really. The only person who really talked about it was TTR and they’re gone for the most part. I don’t doubt that there are Kemetics with something that is concrete and comfortable and livable, but if they’re out there, I haven’t seen them. Oh, I see people effect that persona and make it seem like that’s where they are, but I can see through the veneer. They’re no better off than I am.

When I compare what I do with what others have done, I see the difference. My practice and the practices of many other public Kemetics appear to be charcoal drawings. Others’ practices from other faiths look as if they have been shaded and painted and have a form that I can only marvel at. I want to know what that would be like for me, but alas.

Personally, I’m just cruising around, letting the flow of the world around me push and pull me wherever it decides I should go. That’s normal for me; I’m a go-with-the-flow kind of person and (contrary to popular misconceptions) I don’t like to cause a fuss. I just want things to be smooth, simple, easy, and ready for the taking. I’m just a little lazy that way.

But it doesn’t feel good. And as I’ve mentioned a time or six, it doesn’t seem to be working. As usual, I have to decide what’s best and where to go from here and I have to admit that fuck if I know. Fuck if I know.

So… well… This day started with a card pull; I should finish it with one.

The deck is the dual deck The Hidden Path & Well-Worn Path Deck which is a Raven Grimassi deck. I’ve had it since long before I learned how to better vet things and people in the pagan sphere.

I decided on this deck because it was always the one, back in those early 20-teens days that I could turn to and find a form to what I was looking for. It was the stop-gap when I felt like I was going off the rails. I needed to feel that foundation again; that feeling of knowing where I was going and what I was doing and using the very deck that steered me so well back then seemed to make the most sense.

I chose the ten-card spread called The Cauldron Spread from the book. The ten positions are listed below along with the cards I pulled for each:

1. The Present Situation – Yule
2. The Challenges Ahead – Ostara
3. The Underlying Root – Tree in Summer
4. The Querent’s Appearance in Relation to the Question – The Altar
5. The Influencing Aspects – Faery Door
6. Aspirations and Concerns – Wheel of the Year
7. The Probable Course – Between the Worlds
8. The Possible Alternative – Earth
9. The Final Outcome – The Old Ones
10. Transform the Outcome – Oath

I found it interesting that the card that represented my personification of this spread was The Altar. This card tends to mean a balance between the divine and yourself, which is the basis of one’s altar. The Altar is the direct interface, according to this deck anyway, between the divine and yourself. It is that physical connection that allows you to develop those relationships in many, many ways.

The reason I found this an interesting card for myself is that, no matter how many times I try to push it away, I keep coming back to that post from TTR, Ma’at Shines Through my Body and how it should relate to the utilization of one’s body as an altar-of-sorts for our gods, for our religion, and everything in between. Based on the card, I am a confluence of the physical and the divine.

The second most interesting card was the card, Between the Worlds. In effect, the card tells you that your vision isn’t clear and that in order to manifest what you want, you must have clarity of thought, clarity of vision, and cut out the distractions so that you can focus on that which you manifest.

The reason this was interesting is that it was low-key calling me out on my bullshit. I have a tendency of saying, “I will do this,” and then just not doing it. I did my Ritual365 last year, but I cut it back, cut it down, and didn’t bother to finish any of the entries I had originally intended on writing last year. Part of that is work and that nonsense, but I could have made more of an effort… which ties into that whole lazy thing I mentioned above.

And that is the crux of my issue, card reading or otherwise: I am a lazy creature. I do not want to do. I want it handed to me if it can be. That doesn’t mean that I won’t, it just means that I will put off until I cannot put it off any longer. Perhaps lazy isn’t the best word for it but that’s what I’ve always assumed it was. (That’s what all the adults told me when I was a kid. But it really goes hand-in-hand with the genetic heritage of sticking one’s head in the sand when big things happen, hoping that they will go away.)

To start, I suppose, I should solidify my vision. I should make a sort of vision board to give me clarity, to focus my desire in a specific arena that I want to flesh out first. But where? I’ve had so many ideas in the last year alone – reading subject matter that has little to do with Kemeticism but explores other avenues of religion so that I can try and figure out where I go from here – that I’m not quite sure which ideas make sense to include and which ones don’t.

I think I’ll just start with writing out the things that I want to include in my practice and see where that leads.

You’re Toxic.

Alternate Title: The toxic a-holes of the Kemetic community won.

On the first day of the leadership conference, the second panel was a Q&A panel. They do these to break up the 30 – 50 minute talks along with the breaks. The Q&A panels are usually pretty good, but my team and I were especially looking forward to this one because the topic was toxic work environments. After a year of having to deal with just that very thing, we were very interested in what Bozoma Saint John had to say on the topic.

After the session, we could all agree that the panel would have been better if she had been able to speak freely. She would begin to go down a specific rabbit hole related to the topic and the host would gently nudge her back to the primary topic, or force her to go off into other directions when we were interested in what she had to say on what she had just been talking about.

I also really enjoyed her energy. She was… vivacious and she grabbed your attention. As I was taking notes and processing what she had to say, I kind of got the feeling that no matter what Bozoma was talking about, everyone would have been entranced by her subject matter.

The reason she was invited to speak on this particular subject was because Bozoma went to work as the Chief Brand Officer at Uber. She had heard some of the horror stories of what was going on in 2017 for the company, which was having a bit of a bad year. After hearing what was going on over there, she left her position as a marketing executive at Apple Music to go to Uber in the hopes of helping turn the company around.

While I don’t know much about Uber or its current state, it kind of sounds like she wasn’t as successful as she had hoped. It sounds like the toxic environment of the company was all pervasive and while she made some changes, there were more people stuck in their ways than there were people willing to make the change.

When we think about the culture of a workplace, we start to think that the overall dynamic is created by the HR department or the CEO’s office. But that is a misnomer. The culture of one’s work environment can be found first in your cubicle or work station, and next in the cubicle or work station beside you. The CEO and the people of the HR department are, of course, part of this but it isn’t their rules or regulations that necessarily create a toxic or not-toxic work culture: it is the attitudes of the people that make up the company as a whole.

The problem is that a toxic work environment typically is created because there are multiple people coming at things from a completely different point of view or basis of an idea. Instead of everyone being on the same page about X, Y, Z thing, they all come at it from different directions.

Just like a school of fish, everyone in a work place need to swim in the same direction and together. When you have multiple fish going in a million different directions, it causes chaos. And this in turn will cause issues across the whole school, or in reality, within the work environment.

While competition between coworkers can be healthy as it can promote new ideas and growth, this doesn’t mean that people should be pitted against one another. Worker 1 and Worker 2 who have the exact same title and position would work better together as opposed to working against each other in the hopes of being recognized for one reason or another. They would be able to go further and make the job better for themselves and by extension, for the other people at that work place, if they are allowed to bolster up one another and work together towards a common goal.

Another way to ensure that the work environment is not-toxic is to ensure that you are empowering those who need it. Bolster up coworkers on a bad day, on a good day. Whenever and wherever you see a need for empowerment, give it to them. Work is hard and tiring for everyone more often than not and we need to be willing to bolster up others to promote a healthy and happy work place for everyone.

As the Q&A panel progressed, the hosted asked Bozoma what were three things that can make a work environment better for everyone. Her answer was:

1. Empathize.
2. Diversity.
3. Inclusion.

You have to be willing to empathize with others; not sympathize but to have empathy for your coworkers and the situations that they are in. If you look at a situation and fail to empathize with the person in that situation, you are cutting yourself off from them. This can and will cause work place issues in future, which will only snowball from there.

You have to have diversity within your work environment. Everyone must be invited to your workplace. Whether its an after-work get-together or the workplace itself, diversity helps to promote growth, positive change, and everything else you want to see in the place that you spend at least 40 hours of your life in every week.

You have to be inclusive for everyone. There can be no us vs. them, or me vs. the whole in a workplace. There must be inclusion for everyone. As Bozoma indicated, it’s like going to a school dance and standing on the sidelines, waiting for someone to ask you to dance. You’ll begin to feel badly if you continue to sit it out. You have to join and the other works have to allow you to join in order to make the work environment a good one for all parties.

The last thing that was discussed before the panel came to an end, albeit briefly, was branding. This is something that TTR has already discussed and I won’t be doing the post justice by either summarizing or rehashing it. But the point is that Bozoma indicated that branding is everything – just like TTR’s opening statement on their post – and that branding must also include the internal work culture of the company.

If the company is toxic, but you’re trying to brand it to look like it’s a good placed to work, you’re promoting dissatisfaction and lying to potential employees. Word will get out that this isn’t a good place, no matter what the branding online will tell you, and you’ll lose both potential and current workers. It’s better to ensure that the internal work environment has been cleaned of its toxic veneer in every way possible so that you can be the branding that you’ve put out into the world. This will attract the right type of people for the jobs available and promote growth of the company, which benefits everyone.

When I was listening to Bozoma discuss toxic culture in the work place, it is little wonder that I first thought of our Kemetic community. We have had a lot of problems in recent years. Some of it is simple growing pains – the more people who say they are a part of the community, the more problems are going to arise because of a variety of things. It’s a people thing. But beyond simple disagreements about how to do something or the way to go about introducing yourself to the gods, there have been Bigger Problems. Our community went toxic as hell and we never really recovered from it.

No matter how hard we try to make a welcoming community, there will always be people who get sucked into the racism problem that is prevalent within various pagan and polytheism communities. And as they slip down that rabbit hole, they change to fit the dynamic that their racist circle requires or desires to see in them. This will continue to happen as long as racism continues to be a problem within our communities.

Sometimes you can educate those people out of those circles, but as we’ve seen in our community with its issues, educating others tends to have them doubling down on their problematic rhetoric because “the loss of privilege often feels like oppression”. There will be people who can learn beyond what they’ve either been raised to believe about racism, or have been re-educated to believe about racism, and there are those who prefer their power and comfort over everything and everyone else.

We must be willing to understand that not everyone is going to be willing to examine themselves and their privilege. And if that is the way that they want to be, then we must do everything we can to police them, to make it difficult for them and their ideas to proliferate in the community. We must be willing to point out their wrong-doings, warn new people away from them, and everything else that we must do to ensure our community doesn’t turn toxic again. We must make it difficult for their shit to continue unabated; we must make them unwelcome and unwilling to continue to gain the foothold they are hoping to have.

The problem is that we all saw warning signs. I know that I did. I know that TTR did. I can remember having private discussions on what to do when we saw concerning behavior begin to manifest in various discussions. When we finally started pointing out the problematic behavior, it seemed to cause more headache than do much because there were so few of us willing to police it.

And I can understand why not everyone was willing to do anything about it. It can take a form of bravery that not everyone has, but part of the problem is that there were so few of us willing to speak up, to speak out. With so few of us willing to stand up and say, “no, this isn’t okay,” it became easy for the problematic people to simply block us. We couldn’t speak up unless we took the time to screenshot shitty behavior.

If a community is what is desired, then everyone has to be willing to think to the three points Bozoma made and do what needs to be done to see it happen:

• Empathize.

One shouldn’t be capable of empathy for a racist piece of trash. I’m going to throw that gauntlet down now. You can pity them for their misinformation and just generally being wrong, but you should not be able to empathize with them. They have no legs to stand on and therefore, as far as we as a community should be concerned, we cannot and will not attempt to see things from their point of view in any context.

It is more important that the minority members of our community be safe than the privileged and racist few who demand the same sort of “respect” that they see us give others. It is the minority members of our communities who should have our empathy, not the assholes who preach hate either overtly or subversively.

And it is the privileged person’s job, through the empathy we should all have with our minority, to speak over the racist pieces of trash in our community and refuse them a platform to speak from. If that means we get blocked, then so be it. We must make the racists as uncomfortable and unwelcome as humanly possible to ensure that the people who we need and want in our community are safe from that shit.

• Diversity.

We want to invite everyone – except racists – to the party. Everyone should be able to join us. Whether we agree with all of their ideas about what things are, or how things are defined, we want to extend an invitation to everyone that we want to see in our community. We cannot simply be a white, cisgendered person’s home away from home: everyone should be able to jump into the water and be able to stay. They should all feel comfortable and welcomed.

• Inclusion.

And in the same vein, we want to ensure that everyone – except racists – feel as if they were invited to the dance. We don’t want anyone to feel like they don’t belong. A newcomer will already feel overwhelmed with all of the resources and 101s that we’ve put out there. We don’t want them to feel like they shouldn’t be willing to post in our tags and be able to get helpful, thoughtful, and kind responses in return.

I know this is long, but for those of us who have stayed with me, thanks.

The community fractured because of the toxic environment it became and it has never recovered. We’ve all seen it.

The content creators are tired of the same old shit and tired of creating. The people who see shitty behavior going on openly in the tags aren’t willing to speak up about it. The new people who joined us after or during the toxic foothold in our community learned to keep quiet and to keep to the shadows, not posting in the shared tags, because it was too easy to get their content derailed by inter-community fighting or policing. The behaviors of the few continue to negatively impact a place that all of us are constantly looking for: a place to call home when it comes to our religious paths.

The toxic assholes won.

Our community broke down and we haven’t done a damn thing to fix it. Some of that is because we’re tired of fighting and policing. Some of that is because life gets in the way and we have things to do. Some of that is because people left, not willing to step a toe into our shitty environment considering the shit that was going on when shit was going down. Some of that is because people are scared to speak up. Some of that is because some people are just selfish.

Whatever the reason, we need to cut the shit and think critically when it comes to our community:

1. Do you want to be a part of this community?
2. Are you willing to speak up about concerns you have?
   1. Or. Are you willing to point out problematic behavior or call someone out if the need arises?
   2. Or. If you are worried about calling someone out, are you willing to say something to someone who isn’t worried about calling shit out?
3. Will you be able to help out the prolific content creators and put things out there?

If you can answer yes to these questions, awesome. Welcome aboard. If you can’t, then maybe it’s better if you go before the going gets rough [again]. This may sound harsh, but if community is what is wanted, it means that you have to put the hard work in and continue to put it in. But everyone has to do their fair share. You can’t rely on the few to do it all; we all have to partake and be willing to do what needs to be done.

Otherwise, there is literally no point in trying.

Related Content

• Good Enough
• Be Kind; Please Rewind.

Note: While I am specifically addressing the racism that was prevalent from the toxic shitheads that made our community anathema to many, please note that they also partook in sexist, ableist, and other shitty behaviors. While I may not specifically state that, please know that it is true and that we also must ensure that shit doesn’t get a foothold in our community either.

Be Kind; Please Rewind.

Alternate Title: The Kemetic community needs to re-embrace “don’t be a dick”.

One of the presenters during the leadership conference was Bear Grylls. My office just about lost it when they found out he was going to be presenting this year. I didn’t understand why everyone was so excited about it. To that point, my total knowledge of him was that he had a show about being outside (I have since learned he has had 3 shows about that subject). My coworkers kept going on about how excited they were to hear from him.

As his segment came up, I was mildly distracted by the sun glare on the snow behind him. He kept squinting at the camera and I had an urge to give him my sunglasses. But when he spoke, everyone quieted down to the point where you could hear a pin drop. I was finally beginning to understand why people gave this man a show. He evinced a sort of charisma that left you waiting for what he would say next.

The presentation that Bear gave was about what he called the Four Fs. These Four Fs were supposed to be in regard to leadership, but as I listened to him discuss them in detail and relate each word back to his own experiences, it was obvious that everyone has come into contact with these Four Fs throughout their lives. The Four Fs are:

• Failure

Everyone experiences failure at some point in their lives. No one enters into something and immediately gets it on the first try, the eighth try, the one hundreds try. Failure is a part of the human condition, a part of being human at its most basic level. Sometimes the failure is a large one and leaves you wounded from it; sometimes the failure is something small and easily overcome. Failure is something that everyone has experienced and these failures have helped to forge people into the person that they are today.

As much as we may want to deny the moments where we have failed at something, especially the more dramatic flops in our life, we must come to the realization that more often than not, a failure is teaching us. It may teach us how to do something better the next time we come into contact with it, or it may be teaching us that what we thought we wanted isn’t actually right for us. Don’t deny the fact that you failed; embrace it because these failures will be more, often than not, a doorway leading you forward.

• Fear

No matter what we have gone through in our lives, we have come across fear. It has found us in the dead of night; in the middle of a meeting; as you write a post on the Internet. It lurks around every corner and everyone has had some experience with this feeling. Life as a whole is scary; it is an unknown thing that we all experience and sometimes, we can experience it with other people. Sometimes, we can hold hands with someone beside us and let the feeling of fear wash over us. And sometimes, there is no one there to help you through it.

Everyone is fighting something; everyone is fearful of something. Sometimes we must embrace that fear and continue over the other side of it. There are moments where, no matter how much your instincts may be telling you to turn tail and run, you have to keep going through that moment with fear walking beside you. Face it; use it; embrace it. Take the energy of your fear and use it to keep moving forward. It isn’t a dark moment, not truly, when you stand beside your fear and have to keep going. As the Litany Against Fear says, “I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.”

• Fire

Everyone has a furnace of fire burning deep within them; a steam engine that keeps them going; a wood-burning stove deep within. This is the drive, the push, the desire to move forward and keep going. This fire may be dampened or darkened because of illness, but it is still there. It pushes people forward and keeps them going even when they don’t want to keep going. Sometimes you have to stoke the flames and sometimes other must stoke it, but the furnace is lit and will continue to burn.

Some people claim that they have none, but that is not true. Everyone has a fire burning deep within; it may be tamped down or hidden, but it is there. You must find it and use it so that you can keep going. Don’t listen to the voices within or without that may be telling you it’s dead and gone; keep looking. As Bear Grylls said, “N.G.U. – never give up.” Or as Galaxy Quest has taught us all, “Never give up; never surrender.”

• Faith

Everyone has faith. The faith may be in themselves; it may be for other people; it may be in what they’re doing; it may be for a higher power. It doesn’t matter what the cornerstone of that faith is but it is there, deep within. It can be used as the cornerstone or a slab of concrete to build up and outwards, but it is there. It isn’t simply a voice within telling you to keep going; it is a belief and trust that what you are doing is the right thing.

People may complain and say that people use it as a crutch, but it doesn’t matter. That blind trust, that faith, helps to stoke the fire, to face the fear, to admit and embrace the failure. It is the alpha and omega within everyone. It may start off as small and simple, but it can be built up to encompass the totality of the path ahead, a baseline to continue forward.

The one common thread between them all was the thread of kindness, a need for it. The kindness exhibited could be for others or yourself. But it is paramount to show kindness. Acts of kindness were woven through each story associated with each word and it became the overarching theme.

We all face these things, or have gone through these things, or are going through these things. It is imperative to understand that no one is alone in this. We have all experienced failures; we have all faced our fears; we have all stoked the flames of our inner fire; we have all kept going because of faith. Everyone has gone through this, no matter what the path ahead has looked like for each individual.

We must all understand that the path ahead is an individual path; no two are alike. But we have all experienced or are actively experiencing any one of these things at any given time. And it is with both humility and kindness that we can keep going and by extension, others can keep going.

Be kind to others; be kind to yourself. As we all go through failures and fears and fire and faith, it is kindness that helps to see us through. It is kindness to ourselves that reminds us that we are imperfect beings who are navigating through; it is kindness from others that can keep us going for one more hour, one more day, one more possible failure ahead.

The entire presentation was worth the watch, but it was the bit about kindness that stuck out for me because he was right. Kindness for yourself and kindness for others is paramount to success, paramount to continue on. If we cannot be kind to either ourselves or others, we are setting ourselves up for failure.

Something I have found lacking in the community is simple kindness. After TTR announced their hiatus, I went through the conversations we had had about the issues they were finding and began scoping out popular posts in the tags. And something that I kept seeing over and over again was this seemingly brusque persona that everyone had crafted for themselves. I suspect that this is a result of a two-fold problem: the toxicity within our community from a few years back and the exhaustion the prolific content creators tend to fall into after a few years.

As I mentioned in my post about TTR taking a hiatus, it can be exhausting when it’s your name being thrown out there the most and people keep asking for the same types of content or more new content. If you’re the only one giving out the information, then it wears you down until you can’t be kind to anyone anymore. You get jaded from all of the wear-and-tear that being a content creator brings with it and no matter how hard you try, it’s hard to find the benefit of the doubt and therefore, hard to find kindness.

When the community broke down, we all began doing our best to embody a little bit of Squidward in our online life. We needed to protect ourselves from the eventual break down of what we had worked hard for. We needed to distance ourselves from the inevitable explosion because it hurt too much to keep caring otherwise.

So everyone who has been around for that long has kind of started to come across a bit brusque when they respond to things and I think it’s a problem. We need to pull back from those parts of ourselves, the parts that we created to save ourselves from burnout or the burn down, and get back to kindness. We need to try and find the benefit of the doubt and we need to think critically when we respond to one another, to new people asking the usual 101 questions, and to outsiders just trying to understand.

I talked a bit about this last year after the last leadership conference I went to: it’s difficult to read tone when your community doesn’t have the ability or desire to be anything more than an online forum-type. It means that you have to sit back and ask yourself if the words you are choosing come across as rude, as ill-tempered, or flat our dick-like.

This is something that comes up for me a lot at work. As I mentioned in that post last year, the majority of my communication is through email. We have calls and talk to people, too, but I would say about 95% of my day is spent in front of a computer. And I can’t tell you how many times I hear complaints from my team about someone “being rude” or “being a dick” when that person is simply responding to something we sent them.

And you know what? When someone says that they got a “rude” response, it is almost always bias. It is a fear that they are coming from a place where they are wrong or a place of anxiety. The tone that they’re reading into the response isn’t there most of the time. It comes across that way because the person responding is trying to be as quick as possible in their response, which means they’re cutting out the fluff to get to the heart of the matter.

It makes things go by quickly, but it doesn’t necessarily mean things are going smoothly.

We do this within our community, too. We try to be quick and efficient, but sometimes you need to add in the flowery, the little kindnesses so that you don’t come across as rude or a dick. It’s a fine line that we walk, but if this community is going to grow as I would like it to and as others seem to want it to, then we need to remember how to not be a dick.

Over five years ago, TTR wrote about this very concept too. It wasn’t framed in a need for kindness, but in the need to embody the phrase “don’t be a dick”. They gave some handy hints on how to not come across that way. We need to go back to that. We need to sit still and think critically before we hit publish or reply. We need to refer back to the “yardstick of dickery” and try to remember that a little kindness can go a long way.

If we don’t, we’re as good as dead. All the chatter and discussion about content and creating it goes out the window if we can’t be nice to each other, or even to ourselves. We need to be kind. We don’t need to take shit, but we at least need to be kind.

Good Enough.

Alternative Title: The Kemetic Community needs to up its content game.

This past week, I attended a leadership conference through my job. This is the second year that I’ve gone and as a result, there will be a few posts based on things I learned about at the conference. As always, as I listened to the various leaders from various countries and background present, I took studious notes, not necessarily for myself, but because I wanted to take what I was learning and use that to help the wider community.

TTR is right – the community does need to do better. And if that means I can impart, perhaps, some form of wisdom to one person at the very right time because I spent two days wearing uncomfortable clothes watching people talk about leadership? Then, I’m fine with that. I’ll go next year and the year after until I finally can go no more because I have died or because I am no longer with this company.

The first presenter talked to us about cost benefit analyses. For those of you who work in certain businesses, like I do, those three words make sense to you. You may have even had to do one or two at work or maybe at home to determine if the cost of something would benefit you or your job or a project in the long run. While the phrase tends to pop up more in investment circles, an analysis of this type can be utilized in many different environments and for many different things.

Recently, someone on my team had completed a review for a site to see if it made sense to make some technological changes for them. As it stood, we found that if we could make the changes we were recommending, we could actually bring back a total savings of about $2500 a year. That’s a really good savings we could bring them and we were all about it.

But as we went forward with this project, we soon learned that there were other factors beyond what we had already studied that put the project into jeopardy. In order to make the tech changes we were recommending, we found that the site would require close to $2000 worth of work to make it ready and capable of accepting our changes.

The cost of the work we needed done to get them to where we needed to make our changes would eat up almost an entire year’s worth of savings. The costs that we were asking for didn’t outweigh the benefit of making the changes we recommended. So, we pulled the plug on the project.

This happens at my job periodically. A client will have an idea that sounds excellent on paper, but we have to help them to see whether or not there is a benefit in proceeding. Sometimes there is a benefit and we don’t find any extraneous costs as we complete our analysis; sometimes we find that the costs are high but so too are the benefits so we move forward; and sometimes there isn’t a benefit and we scrap the project in its entirety.

Now, in the presentation, the presenter had a little graph and his example was the time he spent on one of his speeches or sermons (he’s a pastor). I did my best to recreate it above.

As you can see from the example, if he spends 3 hours of time on something, he can get a decent way up as far as quality is concerned on the graph. He indicated that at this time frame, maybe his sermon or speech was at 75% on the quality scale. He knows he can get it better if he spends a little more time on it, so he does so and gets to the second dot on the graph, which he indicated was probably about 90% or so. If he spends more time on it, the quality of his speech or sermon would more than likely significantly start to decrease and bring the quality back down to the third dot, or what he indicated was probably like 80%.

The point that he spent a decent amount of time talking about was that dot after 5 hours spent, or what he indicated was about 90%. This point was what he called the G.E.T.M.O. point. (I literally thought he said Gitmo the first time he said it out loud and was very happy when he explained what he was actually saying). The G.E.T.M.O. point is the Good Enough To Move On point. This is the highest point you will achieve as far as quality and time spent, so it’s time to put the speech or sermon down and move on with your life.

Too often, people get stuck in this idea that the more time you spend on something, the better the quality. Nine times out of ten that is not true. Much like the bell curve that teachers and professors grade students on, there is a declination point on a cost benefit analysis. The difference being that after a certain amount of cost, the quality of the product, the project, the whatever it is will start to decrease.

Let me tell you a story.

I have a ton of drafts in my blog’s draft bin. I have about 20 right now and some of them go as far back as 2013. I had ideas and I wanted to work on those ideas, to get things out there that I felt needed to be spoken on. My issue is that after 6 years of working on some of those drafts that started in 2013, I have found myself frustrated and irritated with the overall point. I’ve scrapped and re-scrapped the entries so many times over the years that they no longer look like what I had originally envisioned. And frankly, they’re still drafts because they’re just not good.

I should have gotten the drafts to the GETMO point and pressed publish. Instead, I hit save and kept going back to it over and over again until I hated everything that I typed, hated everything that I had said and re-said and re-phrased. Those posts will probably never see the light of day because now, years later, I can’t even remember what the fuck I really wanted to say so the GETMO point has long since disappeared.

I suspect that my story above may sound familiar to some people. Perhaps they had an idea that they wanted to get out and into the world, perhaps to have others comment on or perhaps just to get it seen for future content from someone who was bitten by the bug to write about it. But maybe they hit save instead of publish and now that post will never see the light of day because it doesn’t look good after hours, weeks, months, or years of trying.

If I do it as a person who has tried diligently to bring content to the wider community, then I have very little doubt that there are others out there who have done the same. Or maybe someone has toyed with the idea but assumed they would never even get it to the GETMO point and jettisoned the idea of writing it in the first place.

The Kemetic community suffers from a lack of content creators (oh, boy, finally at the point of this post, eh?). Part of this is because of the breakup of the wider community whenever that was: 2015? 2016? Content creators came down on both sides of the split and that meant that the people who were creating before had to create that much more to fill the void. The problem being that more content creators didn’t fill the void.

As someone who was one of those content creators, it is very tiring to sit down and right a post when you know that it more than likely won’t go anywhere. Sometimes your brain turns on you and asks why bother? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat down at my laptop to write something and eventually deleted it because I talked myself out of it.

But even with that, I knew that there were ideas and thoughts that I needed to get out there. I would see TTR banging away at content and trying to get people to interact, to think, to come up with their own ideas and I did my best to emulate that with what I had available. But the interaction and follow up that we had once seen happen frequently seemed to dry up. Fewer and fewer were posting their own content or responses to our content and it began to feel very much like we were talking into the void (still does actually).

I can tell you that when I first started this blog nine years ago, I wasn’t writing for anyone but me. I didn’t care if people saw what I said. I didn’t care what the hell the wider community was doing. I needed a place to write down my thoughts and ideas, to figure out what worked and what didn’t while I explored my Kemetic path. When I started to network, I cared a bit more about putting out content because I was Having Ideas and I wanted to share those Ideas with People.

Whether those Ideas panned out or even went beyond a few conversations wasn’t the point necessarily. I wasn’t writing them down simply to write them down. I was hoping to have someone read it, get bitten by the Idea, and move it forward or rework it or maybe say it sucked from start to finish. The hope was that eventually another future content creator would see it and do with it what they would.

I have watched the community silently pack up shop seemingly on the idea of good content. Part of it is no doubt fear. “The thing I want to write is stupid.” Or maybe it’s a fear that assholes are going to do what they do best on the post in question and be assholes. Sure, those are valid fears. But you shouldn’t let them get in your way.

Write the post.

Write the ritual.

Write the rubric.

Write the hymn.

And then hit the word publish instead of save or delete.

Get it out there. Forge ahead on the path that you want to create for yourself, but let others see it.

If they see you making the posts that you want to see, I can assure you that someone, somewhere will see that and get an idea based on what you say. Or they’ll have a response post that they make to what you were originally saying. Or it will shove them into a niche area that they research and put out the content of what they found when they looked into it.

Yes, it’s a terrifying prospect. It is wholly possible that the thing you worked on to its GETMO point gets flipped and destroyed, no longer looking in any way like what you had hoped it would be. It is possible people will dogpile on it and try to shout you down. All of this is possible; absolutely. But that doesn’t mean that what you have in your mind doesn’t need to be said.

Look. We are all of us a long line of Dominoes ready to be pushed over, but only if that one finger pushes the first one over. And the only way to get shoved over is if you write the post and hit publish instead of talking yourself out of it. So go out there, get your idea to the GETMO point, and hit publish.

(Please note: the presenter referred to above is Craig Groeschel. I am in no way affiliated with him or his church. I just find some of what he says on leadership interesting.)

Loss of Faith: Polytheism Edition.

As a birthday present to myself, and after a recommendation from TTR, I picked up The Grief Recovery Handbook and immediately began reading through. Grief, as discussed in this book, is defined by the opening statement in the first chapter: “Grief is the normal and natural reaction to loss of any kind.” The authors make no specific distinction about what caused the loss, pointing out the most common (death, divorce, financial change, etc), but they make the point that any major change can cause a loss of some type.

The overall point in the first part of the book is to illustrate that we have all been “socialized to believe that those feelings are abnormal and unnatural.” This should not be the case for anyone as it means that we have not been given the tools necessary to contend with the very real emotional reaction humans have when it comes to loss.

The authors go on to stress that it is no one’s fault that they were never given the necessary resources to recover from their grief. Society as a whole is responsible and the only way to overcome this is to educate ourselves and therefore, eventually, be able to educate others, on how to recover from this.

During my reading, I found a specific section on faith that I found particularly interesting:

In 1969 John’s younger brother died. John remembers being told, “You shouldn’t be angry with God.”

John knew he shouldn’t be angry with God, but he was anyway. No one knew to tell him that anger at God is a typical response to an untimely death. We’ve relied on intellect for years, so we search for understandable reasons for events. When we can’t find a reason, we assign blame to God.

As someone who experienced the loss of their father at a young age, this particular passage made a good deal of sense to me. At the time of his death, I was too young to understand the full cause that resulted in my father’s death. I now know things I couldn’t understand or be told at 7 years of age, so it no longer seems like a reasonless death. But as a child facing the seeming untimely death of their parent, I assigned blame to God.

But placing blame on God for an event that seemed to have no reason is frowned upon. We’re told contradictory things like “God has a plan” and “Don’t be angry with God” and are never really allowed to voice that anger because it is seen as taboo or wrong. To voice our displeasure at God can be downright threatening for some people to hear and in general, such sentiments are shushed into oblivion.

The authors continued this passage with the following:

This anger will pass if we’re allowed to express the feeling. We have to be allowed to tell someone that we’re angry with God and not be judged for it, or told that we’re bad because of it. If not, this anger may persist forever and block spiritual growth. We’ve known people who never returned to their religion because they weren’t allowed to express their true feelings. If this happens, the groover is cut off from one of the most powerful sources of support he or she might have.

To reiterate the point, if we bottle these feelings up because we are either taught to keep them quiet or talked over when we voice them, we may never experience spiritual growth again.

While the above quotes did spark a series of thoughts relating to myself and my father’s death, it was not in fact his death that I first began exploring. I had already know about my anger with God at age seven and have managed to, for the most part, deal with it. My thoughts actually began rolling to when pagans lose their faith and my own experience with it.

For those who have only recently started reading this blog, I used to be an obnoxious “have faith” kind of person. By that, I mean that I loved my gods and my religion. I was here for it everyday and I worked hard to both maintain my faith and towards the common goals my gods had given me. I often thought of my faith as a shining gold blanket, thick and luxurious, and it made me feel comforted and happy. I suspect the reason I was this person is because my mother often told me that she cared not for what religion I followed, as long as I had faith. So, perhaps to overcompensate for the years where I had none, I was full of it.

But in 2016, I began to have a crisis of faith.

A crisis of faith is typically defined as when you seriously question whether what you believe/how you see/what you’re committed to is actually true. If you read editorials from pastors, reverends, and priests, many of them will say that a crisis of faith is a good thing. But while you are on the midst of one, and if your religion doesn’t have spiritual leaders to discuss these issues with, it certainly doesn’t feel like a good thing.

My issue was reciprocity. The word is commonly defined as “mutual exchange” and was a part of the ancient Egyptian religion. It was seemingly practiced by both the upper echelons of ancient Egyptian society and the laity. I felt like the gods were not holding up their end of the bargain.

I had made extensive strides in the areas I had been asked to, but the return I was expecting failed to materialize. It felt very much like the gods had welched on their part of the contract between us and no matter how many times I pointed out that their lack of fulfillment was both upsetting to me and concerning me on their behalf, I typically got the message equivalent of smashing the keys of a keyboard in answer.

When I spoke about my anger at being, seemingly, forsaken, I was told by many that I shouldn’t be angry. I shouldn’t rage and rant at the gods. I should effectively suck it up and keep on going about the work I was already doing because “the gods have a plan”.

Eventually, I brought it up less and less because the voices trying to drown out dissatisfaction and discontent grew steadily louder. Those who once commented on the things I said about being angry disappeared for fear of an eventual dog pile from those who seemed to be threatened by the idea that people could be angry with their gods. The discussions were eventually shushed into oblivion.

Sound familiar?

These statements and arguments kept cropping up whenever anyone mentioned feeling like I did on the matter and compounded an already stressful situation for me. I’ve come to the conclusion that many who say things similar to what the authors mentioned in the Handbook have taken the same point-of-view of many Christians: the deities are at a higher level than humans and we should simply be content with an occasional glance.

I suspect that people who shout down other polytheists with this negative rhetoric are still very much entrenched by the religious backgrounds they come from. While that is not necessarily their fault if they’ve not been given the means to recover from it, it makes it difficult for people who do not suffer from the same backgrounds or who have been successful in recovering from those previously held beliefs.

I also strongly believe that these same people are scared. They’re terrified of someone upsetting their status quo. And I understand that rocking the boat on the open ocean can be terrifying but sometimes you have to in order to grow.

Whatever the psychological or emotional reason behind this need to shout over the disaffected and grieving, they need to remember that they are speaking to real, living people going through some of their own shit. And they need to keep in mind that, more than likely, what they’re talking over or trying to shut down may in fact negate some of the basic tenets of their polytheistic religion. (Or in the words of Jake the Dog: they need to “go sit in the corner and think about your life.”)

Reciprocity in Christianity culminates in the Golden Rule more often than not. Reciprocity in the ancient Egyptian religion, at least, extends to include the gods and that means that I have a perfectly reasonable expectation to assume I will eventually be given what I have asked for especially after years of faithful service.

The idea that they could not or wouldn’t abide by what I expected threw me into a tailspin. This tailspin was further exacerbated by people who, perhaps thinking they were “helping,” voiced the same types of comments the Handbook authors specifically refer to as detrimental especially when someone is experiencing a loss.

And make no mistake: I was grieving for my loss of faith. I had blindly and lovingly followed for years and now, what I knew to be true about my gods and our relationships was thrown on its head. I could no longer view them with love or faith; I could only see them as capricious beings who were using me or figments of my imagination.

The situation never cleared up for me, not really. I just stopped talking about it, no longer willing to defend myself while I tried to work on my grief at the loss of my faith virtually alone.

2016 was a hard year.

So how do you recover from grief when, seemingly, everyone wants to shut your natural reaction about said grief down? How do you come out the other side, feeling better about it all? I must have done something since I’m back at the religion table again, doing my due diligence and trying to forge ahead as always.

I can say that I’m not sure. In the last three years, I have truthfully spoken to one (1) person about this in an unedited fashion. TTR seemed to be the only one who understood what I was saying, but at the time, they didn’t have all the tools necessary to be much more than the vent hole I needed when I was angry or upset about it. And besides, they too had had their own similar experiences regarding reciprocity and understood things from a similar perspective to my own.

I can truthfully say that I am still grieving. I can often look back at those years where I felt secured in my golden, fluffy blanket of faith and grieve for it all over again. This isn’t always the case, not by a long shot, because sometimes I look back and I am so angry that I once so blindly believed as I did back then.

I was able to at least come to terms with it, which isn’t the same thing as recovering. I was able to come to a point where I still viewed the gods as capricious beings that played games with people like me, but I stopped worrying that I was making it all up, that the omens and signs were coincidental and that I was imagining things.

I’m hoping that my reading of this book may better help me. Thus far it’s taught me what not to say when someone experiences a loss of any kind. The next section appears to be given the steps to come through one’s grief, so perhaps I will eventually be able to say that I have recovered.

Things will, of course, never go back the way they once were. I knew that two years ago when I started to say that I missed having a religion and went back to the gods I knew already. You can’t fill the hole of one’s loss and assume it will be as good as new. The myriad of patch jobs a city does on its potholes is all the physical reminder of this that anyone needs. But like a fresh patch job done well, the hole can at least become functional again for a time before a new patch is needed.

I am hoping the book will give me more than a patch job; maybe stitches to knot the edges of the hole together. I suppose I’ll find out.

Wep Ronpet 2014.

I like Wep Ronpet. The very feeling behind the celebration shoots both joy and excitement throughout my body and I can feel, almost, as if my body as renewing just as the year is about to. I think the excitement and joy comes from the knowledge that, soon enough, the year will reset itself and the hope of a new year will be upon me. Whatever sorrows and horrors that may have happened within the last twelve months will soon be gone and something new, something perfect, will be before me.

The best way to describe these feelings would be to explain about the first snowfall of the winter.

Just as with many people in the northeast, I am not a huge fan of winter. It is a long time to live with gray clouds and hardly any sun to peek through, with temperatures rapidly plummeting. There is nothing to commend it, really; icy roads, blizzard conditions, and depression. But there is something that has always made me, even as a little girl, look forward to the first snowfall. I can remember, when I was little and when November would start to stretch towards Thanksgiving, eagerly peering out my windows every morning in the hopes that the first snow had fallen.

And the gasp of joy at the beauty that the land awaited when it did fall! Everything was covered in ice crystals and the snow was pure and perfect, never touched by man or beast. The crusts of gray and soot from passing cars hadn’t yet touched it; it was glorious. To me, that glorious first snowfall is a lot like Wep Ronpet and what I can expect to see for the upcoming year: a pristine field of snow, untouched and unsullied, just like the New Year.

I was both excited and worried, in all honesty, for this year’s festivities. I thought I had more planned than I actually did, I think. I’m not sure what it was that made me worry I wouldn’t be able to get it all done. I have to admit that working a full time job really cuts into the whole religion thing. I often feel that the amount of time and effort I would prefer to dedicate to something is not available to me because I have to go out and into the world, work for a paycheck that barely gets me by. But, I also understand that this is way of most people, so I am at least aware that I’m probably not alone with my unhappiness at the prospect.

Initially, that morning, I was going to lay my icons out to rejuvenate in the sun. This is something that I have done for the last two years and I like the idea. However, with Sekhmet currently in hiding until The Feast of Drunkenness, it didn’t seem right to have the other three icons out and about. So, I nixed this idea that morning. I prepared the usual daily devotions to my home altar shrine and set up the altar space I had been using for the intercalary days in preparation for that night.

It was a little crowded and a little hectic, but finally, I felt that everything was set up properly.

On my way to work that morning, I ended up stuck in stop-and-go traffic. This isn’t actually very usual for my trips into work. As I watched the time click slowly passed when I should have arrived at work, I began to grow crotchety. There I was, stuck in traffic because some idiot got into an accident. Fuming, I shot off the closest off-ramp and sat in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot to have a pep talk with myself. (By that point, I was already very late and had called into work to let them know I would be there when I got there, so I figured a pep talk wasn’t really pushing the limits of tardiness.)

I reminded myself, carefully, that I was at a crossroads with the New Year. Things were still resetting and that wouldn’t solidify until tomorrow. It wasn’t my fault that someone hadn’t taken extra precautions while [possibly] driving [recklessly] down the highway. While I did have to sit in stop-and-go traffic because of it, I reminded myself that not everyone can be prepared for the chaos that the reset of a new year can cause. And I also reminded myself that chaos tended to float around the days outside of the year and impact Wep Ronpet, even though it’s most often seen as an auspicious day. Calmed again, I went off to work and kicked some telecommunications ass.

When I got home, I immediately started fully planning the festivities. My first step was to create a sa. I used this guide to create it and I used this one for figuring out how to and what type of sigils I would use in the interior. I had decided to create the sa about a month ago and purchased the supplies when I went on my merry little chase for all things Wep Ronpet. I chose silken cords for the interior and exterior in white and red and ended up choosing red felt for the actual sa itself.

I went through my book, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt by R.T. Rundle Clark for inspiration on what sort of sigils I wanted to use. It seemed appropriate that I would choose symbolism from ancient Egypt as opposed to anything that I myself would create. It seemed like it would be more effect, heka wise, if I chose something with extensive history. I ended up choosing the shen ring, the glyph for eternity, and the glyph for life. These three symbols were used to create this sa specifically as a protective amulet in my car. The message I was aiming for was, protection for eternity, protection for life; may a long life by lived. I also did create a personalized sigil specific to the aim as well.

I ended up finding out just how difficult it can be to braid something that isn’t your hair. I chose one red strand of cord and two red. I knotted them at the top and realized that, well, I had nothing to anchor the end to so that I could begin braiding. I ended up holding the knotted end in my mouth so that I could braid it all. When I got to the other end (measured against the length of the felt I had purchased), I knotted it together and beheld my work.

I also didn’t expect for the cordage to shrink so much because of the braiding. I had measure it out specifically to the length of the width of the red felt and hadn’t considered that I would end up with something that was completely hidden in its center. What I also didn’t expect was just how thick the damn red felt would get when I rolled it into a tube shape. It was thicker than any of my fingers and completely unwieldy. I ended up cutting it down until the sigils, which were in four strategic places on the inside, were at the very edge. When I rolled up the felt again, it was still pretty thick, but not as much.

It’s fucking huge.

I had my son hold out his finger to me so that I could use that to tie a single white cord around the center to hold its shape. With that in place, I took a long strand of red cordage to wrap around it, creating the distinctive sa shape by pulling it as tightly as I possibly could. I then managed, with much concentration and a bit of power words (f-bombs, mostly), to string a white string in the center. I had originally wanted to thread white cordage around the sides of the rounded top, but was unable to do so because of how thick the felt was. I ended up just using the white thread to hold it together for when I tie it to my rearview mirror.

Once that was completed, I placed it on Sekhmet’s altar in the middle of the offering plate.

Booze it up, up, up.

My next step was to hold a final celebration for the children of Nut and Geb. I ended up setting everyone up that morning, but chose to add an alcoholic beverage on top of the cupcake. I used my “royal cup,” which was a gift on my birthday last year. I didn’t use the crazy straw when I placed the vodka and diet Coke concoction down, but I did sing out that everyone had better get it before I snapped the damn thing up. Calories be damned; I was having me some vodka.

In a totally strange coincidence, by the KO calendar, my Wep Ronpet coincided with Heru-Wer’s birthday. I was enjoying all of the stories of peoples’ experiences with him throughout the day. Somehow, one of his kids (from KO) and I got onto the topic of getting him drunk as hell and it just kind of gamboled out of control until many people were offering him booze, whether they were celebrating his birthday or not. I joined in on this particular shindig and ended up with no fewer than two cups of alcoholic beverages out for him. I really can’t say if this was received properly or not (I had a distinct impression he had screeched, “CHALLENGE MOTHERFUCKING ACCEPTED,” at one point, but I could be mistaken).

It was fucking hilarious.

While this was going on, I danced around the house to a few tunes that deserve to be danced to. While I was shaking my booty up and down the hallway, I ended up pulling both my son and TH into the little festivity. With the three of us dancing around the kitchen until my knees and hips hurt, I figured we had done justice to the celebration of Wep Ronpet. And I have to admit, I was pretty happy to have had both of my boys join in since neither usually do.

While listening to calmer music, I ended up writing down 25 possibly dangers to execrate for the year ahead. I won’t list what I wrote down, but I will mention how I wrote them down: on a simple sheet of paper, I wrote a heading indicating why I was listing these words. I then went through a list of possible things that may come up in the next year and things that have been plaguing me this year, hoping to clear them from my life with this execration.

I took this and the heka I had been hoarding since November of last year and went outside to execrate.

It took two fucking hours to burn the massive chunk of heka. That’s right; I sat outside of my house, watching a myriad of visitors going to the bar across the street, for two fucking hours while every ounce of heka was burned into soft gray ash. I added my heka for the year to come to the pile and watched it blow the fuck up. In fact, in those two hours, it burned a soft steady coal red-orange and then would go back up into a pyre of flames when I stirred at everything. When I had enough (there were still some lit embers), I dumped the ash into the world in a pile.

I then stomped upon it and spat upon it. As I stomped I said, “I step upon your brows as pharaoh did to his enemies. I spit upon you so that you may know your vile presence is not needed. I beat you back as a pharaoh at the head of his victorious army. You are nothing. You are less than nothing. Be gone.” And then, I walked back inside.

I don’t know if I can really say if last year was a good year. I do know that I have hopes for the next year. And I hope, beyond all hope, that they come true and that the renewal of this year infiltrates my being, from my ba to my ka to my ib, until it is not just the year that renews, but myself as well.

I have high hopes for this upcoming year.

And right now, I intend on seeing those hopes come true.

Intercalary Days 2014.

Last year’s intercalary days, I often felt like I was always rushing about in an effort to get everything done before the netjer‘s birthday the next day. I didn’t like how I always felt like I was about twenty steps behind, so I decided that I would change things up a bit. I decided to go for what I classify as “simplistic ritualistic birthday.” I don’t know if that’s really a proper descriptor for what I ended up doing, but I do have to say that it makes sense. I wanted a touch of ritual, but I also didn’t want to feel like what I was doing wasn’t enough. So, I made sure that everything I needed I had in advance and I spent one entire day preparing things before the actual celebrations.

I’ll tell you what I learned: as much as I despise planning ahead, it kind of helps in the long run.

I knew that I wanted to change up the “icons” I used of the gods during their birthdays. I had bought a really awesome coloring book last year and was able to color in the designated netjeru the night prior to their birthday. That was, in a way, a kind of communing action while I introduced myself to the three children of Geb and Nut whom I had not interacted with previously. While I enjoyed the coloring book, and still do when I need to unwind and want to color, I wanted something a little more… I don’t want to say “adult,” but sedate might work.

I ended up purchasing card stock from Michael’s. I chose two black sheets, thinking that I would write their names in hieroglyphs, all along the same size and shape. However, after I purchased the card stock, I realized that I also wanted to honor Nut and Geb as well. They are, after all, the parents to whom we should pay homage for having given us Wesir, Heru-Wer, Set, Aset, and Nebthet. So, after realizing that I wanted to honor all of them, I went back out and purchased five more sheets of card stock in colors that I felt were best associated with the five: Wesir was given green; Heru-Wer was given sand; Set was given red; Aset was given blue; and Nebthet was given purple.

I believe the last two associations are probably UPG related. The Aset icon that I have in my own, in the altar space of my home, has a lot of blue and blue-related imagery associated with it. I have always chosen this color for her, though I can’t quite decide why. Purple was a last ditch effort for Nebthet, to be honest. I don’t know her and I have had one minor interaction with her, which occurred last year on her birthday. Outside of that, she is a complete and silent mystery to me.

To write out the names in hieroglyphs, I purchased a glitter gold gel pen. It didn’t occur to me how I would actually write the hieroglyphs. I ended up realizing the night before the birthdays that I couldn’t free hand hieroglyphs. I don’t know what I was thinking. Perhaps I was hoping that I could utilize the hieratic form and go from there, but it occurred to me that I liked the full version, the actual hieroglyphs themselves. So, with TH’s suggestion ringing in my ears, I printed out their names in hieroglyphs, cut out each individual glyph, and taped it to the card stock to trace over with pencil. I think I spent a good two solid hours doing it, getting everything right.

Surprisingly enough, everything came out okay. I was really thinking that it would look terrible, but things works out in my favor.

In preparation for the intercalary days, I had to do some altar moving. I ended up packing away the things I had set up for the lwa on my bookcase in the kitchen and moved the household deities to there. This opened up the top of my blue cabinet as an available area to stage the intercalary and Wep Ronpet celebrations. But as much as I enjoy having that much space, I also felt that I needed appropriate covering for it.

I chose a plain black scarf, thinking about the black silt of the Nile when it floods. I then added blue for the water of the Nile, but also for the sky as well. To top it off, I found some birthday confetti on sale with stars in it. In all honesty, all that was missing was the red for the desert. The glittery “happy birthday” confetti kind of took care of that.

I placed the black scarf down first and then followed it with the blue. I then very haphazardly arrange the confetti into a non-pattern. My son helped me here, finding it greatly entertaining to be sprinkling stars and “happy birthday” onto scarves. What I didn’t think about was how those fucking glittery stars would follow me everywhere. The second I walked away from the cabinet when my rites to the netjeru were over, I found stars in my hair, on my sandals, and attached to random areas of clothing. (I’m pretty sure my butt never fucking touched that damn thing and yet, I found one on the back of my jeans one night. What even is that?)

I had purchased the confetti specifically looking for the stars. I wanted to have stars or star imagery associated with my five days because I had chosen black, a color I associate with Geb, and blue, clearly a color associated with Nut, for the foundation. It felt off though because Geb is the foundation – he is the earth, whereas is counterpart is the sky and ephemeral. I can touch Geb, but I can’t really touch Nut. So I wanted physical reminders of her in more than just the color of the scarf. But what I got was more of a birthday celebration than I had intended.

Since I went with the happy birthday confetti, I ended up buying cupcakes (and nothing else) as offerings for each day. I have a metric shit fuck ton of birthday candles lying around. (I legitimately don’t even know why because we always have birthday parties at TH’s mother’s house.) I knew I was definitely going to have a birthday party… if a little muted.

Wesir

I don’t think I’ve ever really had any interactions with him that have ever left me feeling like, “hell yeah, I’m all about the fucking Wesir.” I don’t honestly think Wesir has any interest in me whatsoever and I’m mostly okay with that. Even though I have deep associations with my akhu, I didn’t come by that through my Kemetic background. I came through that because of the interactions I had with the lwa and even though both Anup and Wesir could fill in the gap, I never once considered it. (And when I tried it with Anup once, he was just like, “oh fuck no.”)

Or, maybe Wesir doesn’t like my sense of humor. So, on the way into work on Wesir’s birthday, I thought, “hey whatever song that comes on… that song is for you!” And then I kind of felt like he was there, waiting to see what would come on next. And then it was Dead and Bloated by Stone Temple Pilots. If ever there was a more appropriate song… I laughed until I was crying, which was clearly not well received.

I didn’t feel him around when I lit his blue birthday candle and sang “happy birthday.”

Heru-Wer

I really liked Heru-Wer when I met him last year. That was a complete accident, but he was so down-to-earth and so relaxing to be around that I find myself often thinking of ways to see him in the world around me. Sometimes, when I see the hawks or falcons (whatever they are) that are flying on the road I drive down every day to and from work, I think of him.

This year was quieter than last year. I didn’t necessarily feel his presence as I did with Wesir. And unfortunately, no really appropriate songs sprung up on the radio when I was hoping for one. But I did go out and spend time with family while listening to a cover band. (They mostly played old C&W or rock/C&W.) When I got home, I sang him his song du jour and lit that birthday candle all happy like. I can’t say if he was really, really happy with how things turned out in my household, but I know the cupcake went down well.

I had a fleeting image of a giant hawk-headed man with chocolate crumbs around his beak and puffed out cheeks. That, to me, says an offering well received.

Set

I didn’t really feel much from Set. I’ve been kind of ignoring him, but I also understand that he’s rather busy. He’s come around a time or two, but whatever connection we may have had has since faded. I’ve been told to expect this with the myriad of netjeru in my life (and I can definitely state that the connections have faded for most of them since October of last year, but even more so since the bonding took place).

I gave him a pink candle in his chocolate cupcake. I sang happy birthday to him and made sure to refer to him as titit, at Devo’s request. (I guess this is slang of some sort for ‘peen,’ which is received by Set in varying shades of irritation.) I don’t know if the reference irritated him with me or not, but I found it amusing.

Aset

Yet another no-go here. Aset and I haven’t really spoken since I screamed at her in October of last year. I’m not sure if she’s angry with me or if she is just no longer interested in maintaining a relationship with me. Of course, something that most of the netjeru have come to expect or are finally aware that they will always need to take second fiddle to Sekhmet. Some deities, such as in the case of Djehuty and Heru-Wer, seem all right with this. But I don’t think this is something that Aset likes (as I’m finding out with someone else in a similar situation), so we haven’t spoken in nine months.

I still had to go through the motions, though. I gave her a blue candle in her cupcake and sang her happy birthday. I got more interest, I feel, from her parents than I did from her. But so be it. Second fiddle is the game and she will either deal with it or she won’t.

Nebthet

I got absolutely nothing from this little lady. I’m not really surprised, though. I’ve had a few conversations with other Kemetics and they have had similar experiences with her. I often wonder if she’s just too shy, especially considering how “important” her siblings were in antiquity. Or perhaps her quiet is just merely a part of her nature. Whatever the case may be, I have never felt a thing from her except for briefly and that was last year when I introduced myself to her.

I honestly don’t know what to say to her.

I chose a pink candle for her cupcake and again, as with her sister, I felt more of a rush from her parents than I did from her.

I was relatively surprised but also pleased with how this year’s celebrations turned out. They were quiet affairs. Outside of the candle in a cupcake and the repetitive singing of happy birthday, I felt very much as though I had accomplished something worthy. It’s possible that this feeling stems more from the good feefees I’ve had since I “swaddled” Sekhmet on Thursday (as Devo deems it) or if it’s because I planned something out in advance and it worked out (for once).

I will say that the card stock idea is probably one of the better ideas and I’m going to use it from now on. It’s much cheaper than having icons and while it’s time consuming printing out the glyphs and tracing them, it also makes me feel much, I don’t want to say it but it’s the only word coming to mind, closer. Since I am not an artist and since all I can do is write on behalf of my gods, being able to write their names in the language that they know best makes me feel like I can touch them, in a way, even better than having an icon does.

I plan on using this for any and all further celebrations in future with any and all deities that I don’t have icons for.