Hi. I'm an #agnostic #pantheist practitioner of witchcraft. I lean toward atheism (pantheism isn't heavy on the theism).
I tried working with Hekate as Queen of Witchcraft and nothing much happened, so I'm back to nontheistic practice. 🤷♀️
Add me if you're into #atheist, #nontheist, or #secular witchcraft!
@science_and_sigils Hi, Micah :). Cool to see more people out there into this stuff. Most of what I see are on FB groups, but they're rather contentious.
(they)
@ivydarkmoon I can't really show any witchy interests on my Facebook (family and all that), I've gotten here via Discord and Tumblr. But witches not working with deities in some aspect or another seem few and far between.
@science_and_sigils Yeah, I'm using an alt account on FB because I'm not fully out with everyone (and it's none of their business anyway). I hid my profile view of Groups I'm in, as well. It's why I have this username, frankly. Needed a pagan alias even though it's not magically significant.
@ivydarkmoon Yeah, makes sense. I've thought of doing something similar but I'm not big on Facebook anyhow so I just leave it be and turn to other social media for witchy stuff.
@ivydarkmoon I'm interested in your ideas. I try to keep a sort of "more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio" mindset, but my headmate @mona is a hard-headed, practical, materialistic sort--at any rate she tends to give the supernatural barely a second thought, and she likes to remind me that the personal experiences that I've used to develop my magickal practice (and what I imagine to be relationships with deities) might simply be "a highly elaborated form of confirmation bias".
@kara @mona [more at Mona] I'm a skeptic as well. I often step on the toes of New Age types and they dislike me for pointing things out.
On deity: I've "experienced" things in meditations, i.e. seen Hekate, but there was zero calling, zero "foreign" feeling, etc., so it felt very much internal. The ONLY thing I found external was my altar giving me the creeps (literal chill spine in the dark at bedtime) until I surrounded it with selenite and black tourmaline.
@ivydarkmoon @kara Kara is subject to many such experiences, often quite intense, and has worked to make sense of them in a way that's still consonant with my somewhat mechanistic view of the world.
whether or not the experiences are internal or external seems, after a while, almost irrelevant: one way or another, Kara is compelled to make some kind of judgment and stick by it: "do I treat these experiences as meaningful or not?" shi decided starting in 2016 that she would not deny them or write them off.
@mona @kara So you're the skeptic but shi's the judge? Or rather, shi's not okay with unresolved ambiguity of experience? Does that make sense? Question directly to hir, as well. (Please forgive me, I'm not super used to interacting with pluralistic peoples yet, so if I bother you feel free to correct me!)
@ivydarkmoon @kara I don't quite like the term "skeptic"; I just like to remind Kara from time to time that we may get to the end of this wild ride and find out that yes indeed we _were_ just dust all along and the story's over.
my male predecessor (basically, who I used to be, before Kara worked out that shi was trans) had a more troubled relationship with religious belief and duty; it was something he considered himself incapable of, but he yearned for its sense of purpose, and even tried Catholicism.
@ivydarkmoon @kara oh, I do as well. it is a necessary trait of clear thinking but it is far from a _sufficient_ trait--yet the modern-day cult of skepticism has made it into one.
if skepticism has a counterbalancing principle, I would not call it "faith" per se but rather decisiveness, or confidence: a willingness to commit to some definite course of action based on incomplete information, and even with doubt still remaining.
@ivydarkmoon Hello there! I'm a secular witch! Nice to meet you.
(er, well the internet version of meeting at least).