Okay, the best way to preface this is to say that I'm being almost annoyingly pagnostic again, and I see no reason to hide it.

I've hid too much for too long.

When I was doing research on Wicca and the like for my final paper and presentation in front of my class -- yes, the thing I occasionally posted on in my journal as bringing up a lot of fears about being burned at the stake and the like, but that went amazingly well, despite my nervousness -- I found out a lot of things, that while they didn't seem to apply much toward the Wicca side of things, they did apply muchly to my own spirituality.

I do respect the Wiccans for believing what they do, but I cannot agree. Just as I cannot agree with the various flavours of Christianity for believing as they do. I respect them both equally, under the condition they respect me for my beliefs. Sometimes I wonder if both parties have it a little easier; their beliefs have names to put to them, and rituals that they can walk through. However, my belief system, while it feels valid and right, has neither.

I call it, with the help of a friend (and I do thank her every day in many ways), a form of being pagnostic -- agnostic with a pagan twist. Yet sometimes I do find that while it's always been my way to forge my own path in things, and do the long and hard search for my own personal truth, I wish for something to make it a touch easier. A ritual I can go by, instead of this fumbling that leaves me afraid that I am somehow doing it wrong, and unknowing to myself, am insulting the gods I wish to send my respect towards.

There are times when I find myself wondering if I actually just think too much about this, and should follow my own intuition. Yet, I do not trust my intuition 100%, and in matters like this, sometimes I do wish for some sort of confirmation that I'm doing things the "right" way. Until I find my way back to even ground, until I find myself moving back to the point where I can question the gods myself, I have to keep going and keep hoping.

I know this isn't a good place to be in, and not a good location either. It's just a feeling I get, and that is one intuition that I do trust. I have to keep working, keep stiving onward and forward until I am out of that place and in one where I can work more freely. Where I can exist more freely, in work or in leisure, for it wouldn't be my life if there wasn't some sort of balance there. Whenever there isn't, I find myself trying to get to a point where there is, or else all is chaos and I find myself uncomfortably vulnerable.

I know this isn't what I started out to say, the things that are connected to the research I was doing, but I'm just letting whatever comes come. I need to, I think, and look back upon it later to get the gist of all that came tumbling out here. It's been building for quite some time.

Yet, thinking on that research, there is apparently no true basis in archeology for the sort of Goddess worship that was spoken about in Starhawk's The Spiral Dance, and it was odd; despite the frustration that I would have to rework most of my essay because of that, there was a sense of inner relief that I promised myself to explore later when I had more time and patience to work with it. Now is that time, I believe, and I'm more than ready to get on with it.

I remember when I was going through books like the one by Starhawk (and for some reason, I had much more love for The Fifth Sacred Thing than I did for The Spiral Dance, which I put to my love of fiction instead of non-fiction at the time, although I'm not entirely sure now), finding that I didn't really agree with a lot of what was written, although there were some good ideas in it. I know I definitely didn't agree with Cunningham's Wicca: A Guide For the Solitary Practitioner (or whatever in the bloody hell it was called). I had such a strong reaction to it that there was the temptation to throw it across the room.

Needless to say, I have much love for books, and so I didn't. Instead, I kept it in mint condition and sold it for someone else to use and hopefully get more out of it than I did.

I still know far too little about the various other branches of paganism that exists in the here and now, but I do say jokingly that if ever someone stumbles upon a path that sounds even close to the sort of thing I describe when I speak of mine, I would be forever thankful. At first, though, I did say I would pay them, but it seemed overmuch like a promise I couldn't keep, so eternally thankful seemed to be a better way of phrasing it. (tongue firmly in cheek here ;))

I don't believe that there is one god and one goddess that all the other various gods and goddesses happen to be "facets" of. It's like I said on a mailing list a while back: it just seems so... insulting. I'm not sure I can put my finger quite on why it does, but I can't seem to get that out of my head. It is for this reason that I emphasized my respect for people who follow the different faiths, because I have a great deal of respect for people following their personal paths (just so long as they don't try to drag me along with it.)

Ironically, though, I see the gods and goddesses as separate entities that do answer to a higher energy, something so high that it can't really be seen. *smiles* I guess it could be said that they are part of that high spirituality, but in a way that allots for the individualized view. Because there is a learning in being an individual that has to be done before there is the joining into the higher energy.

Hence also why I believe that the gods and goddesses can be flawed, can make mistakes, and are sometimes caught not knowing what to do. I don't know; maybe it soothes me to think of my gods and goddesses as not being totally all-powerful, all-knowing and perfect.

And when I discovered, in my research, that there were signs of worship of a multitude of gods, and not totally organised, and such, I felt a little bit relieved. Maybe my beliefs aren't totally out there after all.

Then again, maybe they are. But if that's the way it is to be, then I can live with it. I do like being different, odd, strange, etc, after all.