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Author Topic: Sharing for Recons: What and How?  (Read 3026 times)

Juni

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Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« on: January 21, 2013, 10:27:11 pm »
Reading Kiya's thread The Reconstructionist Book Problem and Jenett's recent PBP post B is for Book I began to wonder: given the difficulties that the reconstructionist approach can have with regard to academic books and the perception of academic culture, how does the average recon, or otherwise historically-informed practitioner, best share the knowledge they have acquired? What kind of information is best shared, aside from a general reading list? What kind of information does not share well? What kind of information is not shared but really needs to be?

Obviously, the answers to these questions will vary between the cultures each religion is attempting to reconstruct, and I'm looking forward to culture-specific answers as well as more general answers that apply to the approach as a whole. What do you share? What don't you share? What ways do you disseminate information, and do you think these methods can or should be improved?
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Darkhawk

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Re: Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« Reply #1 on: January 21, 2013, 11:19:32 pm »
Quote from: Juni;93000
What do you share? What don't you share? What ways do you disseminate information, and do you think these methods can or should be improved?

 
Broad strokes categories:

I collate a lot of information from translations of primary sources and academic books.  This winds up getting turned into articles, when I'm coherent enough to assemble it into articles, that get posted on my blog; in the long run I suspect I'll polish them up and put them in other formats.  (I also have a static website that I really should update as I accrue more data, I haven't done any festivals updates for ages.)  I try to keep footnotes and references attached to these articles; I consider it essential that other people be able to go back, confirm the sources say something like what I suggest, and formulate their own agreement or disagreement.  This is a fair amount of the substance of my public reconstructionist output, and - for all the problems within the concept of Kemetic community - I perceive myself to have a moral obligation to share this work with that fractured/fractious community, which is a good chunk of why I blog it.

Next layer, theological interpretations.  Large portions of these are also publically shared, because my thing is building a consistent corpus of practice, and that requires there being a consistent unifying system.  I will cite/footnotes influences and support for interpretations, but these tend to be looser, and I am well aware that not all of them will be useful to all people.  (For example, whenif I post something that is cognitively structured around a king-figure who is not explicitly embodied in a priest or cadre of priests, that's not going to be useful to a member of a Kemetic temple organisation who has a king or king-substitute figure.  And I'm not going to put in a side interpretation so they can figure out how to apply it to their own denomination; if they want the juicy bits they can do the damn translation work themselves to make it viable within their system.)  However, those footnotes/references will not all be primary or academic sources; my Craft training is relevant to many of my interpretations, for example, and I have drawn on not only (for example) Hindu and African Traditional influences but also Judaism where it has been relevant to the work.

I have gotten less and less talkative about my relationships with the gods over time.  I will respond to queries about them, specifically, with both attested mythological/cultic lore and personal experiences, but I rarely volunteer information in the more general sense.  Some of this is strictures within my service, but by far the majority is not - mostly, this is frustration with the thread of pagan religion that seems to treat the core and most essential portion of religious practice as forming a relationship with one or more spiritual entities and, once that relationship is constructed, the practitioner is basically Done Now, or at least that cultivating that relationship is the ultimate and essential religious achievement.  The central/foundational focus of my religious practice is not deity-driven, it is ka-driven, in any case, so I don't want to distract people with Big Shiny Things that so frequently seem to be a diversion into Pokemon, fantasy dating games, or star crushes on ethereal entities who will magically fix everything ever if they're properly wooed with the correct brand of chocolates.

Mysticism is a funny middle ground on dissemination and secrecy.  I keep drafting up bits and pieces of things - little meditations, trance progressions, and so on, and some of those wind up getting shared more publically.  That's foundational work, though, rather than the deep stuff, but the deep stuff is both in flux and not something that I will ever do publically because there's no way of checking to see if someone has done the necessary foundational work.  A lot of what I do publically has signposts to say 'there's deeper stuff here', but I don't expect most people to see that, because most mystical paths are not interesting to most people.

The flip side of both the mysticism and the gods thing is that sometimes I get - through a complicated combination of wrestling with lore, myth, and academia and my own approach to systematics and occasional UPG - what amounts to a little koan of something, a "public secret" about a god.  Those I tend to put out there, but I never say Who sent them.  (They are all under the same tag on the pro blog though.  Heh.)

Gnr.  That was long.
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Aster Breo

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Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« Reply #2 on: January 21, 2013, 11:20:10 pm »
Quote from: Juni;93000
Reading Kiya's thread The Reconstructionist Book Problem and Jenett's recent PBP post B is for Book I began to wonder: given the difficulties that the reconstructionist approach can have with regard to academic books and the perception of academic culture, how does the average recon, or otherwise historically-informed practitioner, best share the knowledge they have acquired? What kind of information is best shared, aside from a general reading list? What kind of information does not share well? What kind of information is not shared but really needs to be?

Obviously, the answers to these questions will vary between the cultures each religion is attempting to reconstruct, and I'm looking forward to culture-specific answers as well as more general answers that apply to the approach as a whole. What do you share? What don't you share? What ways do you disseminate information, and do you think these methods can or should be improved?

Add to this the problem of documentation.  

F'ex, a long time ago, I put together a couple of things I'd read about Brighid with a couple of things I'd read (in different sources) about Sulis, and came to the conclusion that they might be the same entity.  (I subsequently read that theory other places.)  When I floated the idea here on TC, the natural response was to ask for my sources.  But at that point, being someone who does not document everything I read, I couldn't provide specifics without spending a lot of time and energy retracing my reading.  Is my conclusion less valid because I can't cite all my sources?

I don't know how to get around that.

Of course, it's possible that this is a problem more or less unique to me and my memory issues, but I doubt it.

~ Aster
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Re: Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« Reply #3 on: January 21, 2013, 11:38:12 pm »
Quote from: Juni;93000
I began to wonder: given the difficulties that the reconstructionist approach can have with regard to academic books and the perception of academic culture, how does the average recon, or otherwise historically-informed practitioner, best share the knowledge they have acquired?


We write stuff. Lots of stuff. Stuff for beginners. Stuff for "advanced users". We write it, then put it up and let the users pick what they like.

Quote
What kind of information is best shared, aside from a general reading list? What kind of information does not share well? What kind of information is not shared but really needs to be?


The best stuff to share is the solid, practical stuff. What to do day to day. What the moral ideal of the particular tradition is. Anything mystical will probably not translate well, but sometimes it seems like the line between mystical and mundane gets blurred.

Quote
What do you share? What don't you share? What ways do you disseminate information, and do you think these methods can or should be improved?

 
I share. . . stuff. Y'know, stuffy stuff. A beginner guide or two, something about chaos, and more stuff's in the pipeline. I just blog it and if somebody finds it important enough, it'll get around. It's hard because it's so easy to come across as a know-nothing in recon circles. Hurrdurr-dee-durr.

Meh, that was petty.

I don't know what not to share. Haven't found the line yet. But, like pornography, I'll know it when I see it. :whis: I do find myself sharing less about what I do with the gods though, because that's kind of private.
Leave your darkness with me, and I will make you shine.

Juni

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Re: Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« Reply #4 on: January 22, 2013, 12:08:06 am »
Quote from: Aster Breo;93009
But at that point, being someone who does not document everything I read, I couldn't provide specifics without spending a lot of time and energy retracing my reading.  Is my conclusion less valid because I can't cite all my sources?

I don't know how to get around that.

Of course, it's possible that this is a problem more or less unique to me and my memory issues, but I doubt it.

 
It's not unique to you, certainly- but I've got some head trauma/neurological damage and resultant memory issues, and I have this exact problem. I don't have a solution either, unfortunately.

My current work-around- and part of my prompting for this thread- is to start actively taking notes in all of my path-related reading for my own future reference; unfortunately this requires more brain (and spoons) than I often have, so it's going to be a significantly long-term project.
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Jack

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Re: Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« Reply #5 on: January 22, 2013, 12:15:04 am »
Quote from: Aster Breo;93009
Add to this the problem of documentation.  

F'ex, a long time ago, I put together a couple of things I'd read about Brighid with a couple of things I'd read (in different sources) about Sulis, and came to the conclusion that they might be the same entity.  (I subsequently read that theory other places.)  When I floated the idea here on TC, the natural response was to ask for my sources.  But at that point, being someone who does not document everything I read, I couldn't provide specifics without spending a lot of time and energy retracing my reading.  Is my conclusion less valid because I can't cite all my sources?

I don't know how to get around that.

Of course, it's possible that this is a problem more or less unique to me and my memory issues, but I doubt it.

~ Aster

 
I'll note that even outside of my memory issues, I tend to run into the problem where I've just read a lot, quite a bit of it before it occurred to me to start taking notes on everything just to be thorough. I try to recreate the research if I can, using Google Scholar and Google Books and JSTOR, but I think it's better to share and admit you can't remember the source than not to share.
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Re: Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« Reply #6 on: January 22, 2013, 12:21:09 am »
Quote from: Juni;93023
It's not unique to you, certainly- but I've got some head trauma/neurological damage and resultant memory issues, and I have this exact problem. I don't have a solution either, unfortunately.

 
I have the same difficulty, and don't have memory issues in any substantive way.  I've learned to be better with making note of academic, or otherwise 'formal', sources, but informal ones such as forum comments are far harder to do that with.

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Re: Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« Reply #7 on: January 22, 2013, 12:27:37 am »
Quote from: Jack;93027
I'll note that even outside of my memory issues, I tend to run into the problem where I've just read a lot, quite a bit of it before it occurred to me to start taking notes on everything just to be thorough. I try to recreate the research if I can, using Google Scholar and Google Books and JSTOR, but I think it's better to share and admit you can't remember the source than not to share.

 
Agreed.

Y'know, I was thinking. Part of the problem is that we have people writing things. . . doing things, but half the time it's scattered everywhere. It would be awesome if we could make a sticky or something for the SIGs interested where people could post links to work they've done. For example, if someone made, say, a ritual script for Hatmehyt, they could post it.

At the very least, the stuff would be documented in one place.

And then perhaps there can be discussion of certain links within the thread or the SIG if someone so desires? Like, discussion about how maybe a ritual script can be improved, or a set of household practices can be expanded, and things like that.

If we put the stuff in one place that gets pretty decent traffic and doesn't do too bad when it comes to particular searches, then maybe that'd help people. It could be a community project for the SIGs that would like to participate.

I dunno. There's probably rough patches in the idea I'm not seeing, although I can already see a couple places where it could go horribly, horribly wrong.
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Jack

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Re: Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« Reply #8 on: January 22, 2013, 12:35:02 am »
Quote from: Shine;93032
Agreed.

Y'know, I was thinking. Part of the problem is that we have people writing things. . . doing things, but half the time it's scattered everywhere. It would be awesome if we could make a sticky or something for the SIGs interested where people could post links to work they've done. For example, if someone made, say, a ritual script for Hatmehyt, they could post it.

At the very least, the stuff would be documented in one place.

And then perhaps there can be discussion of certain links within the thread or the SIG if someone so desires? Like, discussion about how maybe a ritual script can be improved, or a set of household practices can be expanded, and things like that.

If we put the stuff in one place that gets pretty decent traffic and doesn't do too bad when it comes to particular searches, then maybe that'd help people. It could be a community project for the SIGs that would like to participate.

I dunno. There's probably rough patches in the idea I'm not seeing, although I can already see a couple places where it could go horribly, horribly wrong.

 
I think part of the difficulty there is that people come and go, and no group or link list is ever going to have everything, and link lists get outdated remarkably fast. I mean, the SIGs here already have resource lists, but obviously you're noticing the flaws in them based on your reply here.

I also think there's value in cross-pollination, and not just for Greco-Egyptian syncretists. This is one of the things I think ADF does pretty well, creating a framework that values and encourages scholarship while also creating a real group feeling.
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Juni

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Re: Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« Reply #9 on: January 22, 2013, 12:39:22 am »
Quote from: Shine;93032
Y'know, I was thinking. Part of the problem is that we have people writing things. . . doing things, but half the time it's scattered everywhere. It would be awesome if we could make a sticky or something for the SIGs interested where people could post links to work they've done. For example, if someone made, say, a ritual script for Hatmehyt, they could post it.

At the very least, the stuff would be documented in one place.

 
Speaking for the Hazel & Oak SIG, this is a project that's already in motion by Finn and myself with significant help from Aster and others; unfortunately, my health sucks so we've made less progress on that front than we'd like. I've been about halfway through a volunteer thread draft for about a month now, but haven't had the spoons to get it finished.

And, as Jack has pointed out, stickied resource threads are not exactly news in the SIGs. Merely collecting links, though, is a significant quantity of work, and maintenance is not an easy task either.
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Re: Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« Reply #10 on: January 22, 2013, 12:51:08 am »
Quote from: Juni;93035
Speaking for the Hazel & Oak SIG, this is a project that's already in motion by Finn and myself with significant help from Aster and others; unfortunately, my health sucks so we've made less progress on that front than we'd like. I've been about halfway through a volunteer thread draft for about a month now, but haven't had the spoons to get it finished.

And, as Jack has pointed out, stickied resource threads are not exactly news in the SIGs. Merely collecting links, though, is a significant quantity of work, and maintenance is not an easy task either.

 
This is true. Then how might we bring together scattered works by our community members? We can all write the most brilliant gems ever, but if few or, even worse, none, see them, what good has been done? Perhaps we should post more often to our respective SIGs, with the material directly in the first post? That wouldn't be possible for larger works, but smaller works, possibly?

So, to pick up the Hatmehyt example again, if someone wrote a short ritual script for her, that person would post it in the Kemetic SIG. Then again, the SIGs could get awfully cluttered. A wiki perhaps? But even that requires a lot of maintenance. . . .
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Sobekemiti

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Re: Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« Reply #11 on: January 22, 2013, 12:51:33 am »
Quote from: Juni;93000
I began to wonder: given the difficulties that the reconstructionist approach can have with regard to academic books and the perception of academic culture, how does the average recon, or otherwise historically-informed practitioner, best share the knowledge they have acquired?


I built a website! :D Per Sebek is nearly ten years old (and that makes ME feel old), and I originally made it so I could share all my information and experiences about Sobek. It's gone through several different incarnations on several different hosts, but I find that's the best way to share all I've got so far.

I don't pretend it's the perfect way to do it, and I know I would like to have more solid sources to work with, but it is what it is, and it will always be a work in progress. You're never done with this sort of work. There's always something more to do.

Quote from: Juni;93000
What kind of information is best shared, aside from a general reading list? What kind of information does not share well? What kind of information is not shared but really needs to be? What do you share? What don't you share? What ways do you disseminate information, and do you think these methods can or should be improved?


I've thought about putting up some sort of reading list about Sobek, but it would be very short at this point in time, because I have only got two articles, and a book I haven't read because I can't afford to buy it. I have a very tiny Kemetic library, and it is almost impossible to access these books through the library system here in Australia, which makes doing research incredibly difficult. I would like this to change, but I don't think that will happen any time soon.

That said, I like sharing historical information about Sobek, as well as any personal or devotional materials, and my experiences and thoughts on things. I like making these things available, because there aren't many Sobek devotees around, let alone ones maintaining websites for Him, so I feel like if I don't do this, no one will know about Him. I do this to spread His name around, so others can get to know Him. I also want to collate as complete a picture about His historical worship as possible, just so it's all in one place. But that's much more of a long-term goal, given my limited access to the resources I need.

I'm also beginning to share my rituals and practices, as well as my prayers and hymns, because I feel like sometimes you just need to see how someone else is doing it, and making it all work from the book reading they've done. An attempt to bridge that gap between 'go read all the books' and 'build a religious practice' in a way that helps someone actually do that. This is part of the 'information that isn't (readily) shared but needs to be' thing.

If you're not part of a Kemetic temple, with its own rites and practices, I feel like you're pretty much left to do it yourself, if you don't have access to those things. And yes, I know of a couple of books out there that might help, but not everyone can buy books or is able to access them through a library, so part of my desire to have this stuff freely available is to help someone start, and maybe try these things out to see if they're working for them. I don't presume to present these things as the one true way to practice, because I don't think there is one. I see it more as offering some building blocks so someone can build their own foundations, which they might combine with other building blocks they find elsewhere on the Interwebs or in other Kemetic communities.

I don't share everything, though. Sometimes there are things that only make sense to me, or are too UPG-ish to feel comfortable sharing. Sometimes there are things that are just between me and my Gods, and they don't get to go on the site either. It is a fine balancing act, but I'm getting the hang of being able to tell when to share something, and when to keep my mouth shut. The more Mystery-ish stuff, dreams and UPG (if it's weird enough), or other really personal things that won't make sense to anyone else, those are the things I don't see much point in sharing, because no one will get anything out of them. I might make oblique references to them here and there, but I won't openly talk about them. But that's why I have a private WordPress blog, so I can throw all that information on there without it being public.
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Re: Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« Reply #12 on: January 22, 2013, 01:15:47 am »
Quote from: Juni;93000
how does the average recon, or otherwise historically-informed practitioner, best share the knowledge they have acquired? What kind of information is best shared, aside from a general reading list? What kind of information does not share well? What kind of information is not shared but really needs to be?

Obviously, the answers to these questions will vary between the cultures each religion is attempting to reconstruct, and I'm looking forward to culture-specific answers as well as more general answers that apply to the approach as a whole. What do you share? What don't you share? What ways do you disseminate information, and do you think these methods can or should be improved?

 
I'm not a recon, but I do think of myself as an academically-informed pagan, so I'm going to take a crack at these. :)

In my particular area, there's not a whole lot available in English, so my priority is getting the information out there at all in case I'm not the only one interested in it. What Latvian recons I've found are pretty much in Latvia (and Wisconsin); while the Wisconsin group welcomes all who are interested in Latvian traditions, it'd still be a hell of a commute for me, and it's not precisely the direction I feel pulled to go.

I should probably cite sources more often than I do on my blog; that's something I intend to work on. I try to share UPG that I expect might be relevant to other people, citing it as such, because I think that kind of sharing is also important. I don't share personal UPG (ie relationship details that I wouldn't share if they were about people? don't get shared about gods either.)

Right now, all of my information sharing is on my blog. At some point, if I have enough information, I'll probably put together a devotional or something that collects it, but I don't yet feel like I have enough to even worry about it. :)

I'd love to be part of a more generic "here are recons doing nerdy stuff" community since I don't have much of a my-pantheon-specific community to speak of, but I'm not sure we'd have enough in common to talk about.
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Jenett

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Re: Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« Reply #13 on: January 22, 2013, 04:59:34 pm »
Quote from: Juni;93000
How does the average recon, or otherwise historically-informed practitioner, best share the knowledge they have acquired? What kind of information is best shared, aside from a general reading list? What kind of information does not share well? What kind of information is not shared but really needs to be?


Not a recon, though I do like my history accurate when it's relevant.

One of the things that's true for me is that *keeping track* and *sharing* are two vastly different things for me, and it's sharing where I tend to get tangled.
 
My 'reading' workflow is fairly straightforward:
- on the web, I mark it with Instapaper's 'read later' bookmark, and every so often (every week or two), I go through those and add them to my bookmarks with useful tabs. (I use pinboard.in but there's tons of options.)

(I do this because it works from every device I might read stuff on - home computer, work computer, iPad, iPhone, and it dumps into a single location. If you're reading things only one place, it's a lot simpler.)

- for books, I take notes when I can (which is not as often as I'd like), but I often do private notes to myself that can be very brief, along the lines of "Liked this for the discussion of X, Y, and Z" which at least gives me a running start at finding it again.

Sometimes these notes are exceedingly rough, and make very little sense to me when I find them tucked in a folder on my computer a year later. I'm working on being better about that.

(In an ideal world, I would either remember to dump stuff to Evernote and set up tags properly, or do the equivalent with a wiki. And yeah. Haven't managed yet. However, it's also a lot less essential for me than people who are more heavily recon, because most of what I'm tracking is "Oh, there was an interesting ritual seed thing there" or "I liked that explanation of X exercise", and there's usually multiple source that do sufficiently similar things and/or other workarounds.)

Sharing:
As I said, this is the tricky one, because I feel like when I share stuff, there ought to be context, at least briefly, of whether I liked it, what I think is worthwhile about it, why I'm suggesting it in whatever context.

And that's *really hard* to do in general terms. I'm usually fine in specific conversations of "I would like a thing that does X." "Here is a thing that talks about that. Mind chapter 5." "Oh, thank you!"

But the general "Here is a list of stuff I like, and why you might also find it handy" takes me forever. (And I am, here, a trained professional. Weirdly, I have a much easier time with professional resource-list building here than in other parts of my life, because "display of YA novels you might like that's going to be up for the next 2 weeks" is a lot less personally revealing than "HEre are the books I hold close to the heart of my idea of how the world works."

Ok. That isn't that surprising, when I put it like that. But you see what I mean. The personal stuff is often harder to talk about, and yet, if we don't, people will not understand that we like this person's approach to text and translation, but disagree with them about what to do with koala fur colour changes, and that person writes really awesome explanations of chocolate teapot rituals, but their take on the proper classification of white chocolate is entirely messed up.
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Lykeia

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Re: Sharing for Recons: What and How?
« Reply #14 on: March 02, 2013, 02:35:38 pm »
Quote from: Juni;93000
Reading Kiya's thread The Reconstructionist Book Problem and Jenett's recent PBP post B is for Book I began to wonder: given the difficulties that the reconstructionist approach can have with regard to academic books and the perception of academic culture, how does the average recon, or otherwise historically-informed practitioner, best share the knowledge they have acquired? What kind of information is best shared, aside from a general reading list? What kind of information does not share well? What kind of information is not shared but really needs to be?


I write a lot, I have a blog that I write informally on and I also have been working on a series of booklets for publication in regards to Apollon who I have been devoted to for a decade now, and will likely be putting out booklets on Artemis too who I was dedicated to in my youth and still retain a strong worship practice for. I have a degree in history and it has rather trained me to keep copious notes as well as the hows for documentation (which I admit I don't do much with on my blog but do in my published writing). I have my own personal library going of various source books I draw from in my writing as well as relying on ideas that have been developing for about 20 years of worshiping the Hellenic gods for my writing. These are the primary ways that I share my knowledge. I have a Hellenic Study Group kicking off here locally as well which will be another way of sharing.
I talk about major festivals (not just Athenian because my own fondness is for Doric festivals too) that can be modified to be celebrated by a solo or small group and to be meaningful to one's local environment, and what they mean to us in our spiritual lives. I also speak of the understanding of the nature of the gods and how it impacts our relationship with them, civilization and nature. Domestic worship is another big thing and perhaps the most important because the regular domestic worship is the most crucial thing for folks who are beginning.
I think that a recommended reading list is good, I have one up on my own blog for folks who are interested in reading the literature themselves, but I think that just sharing a reading list is perhaps the least effective way to go about it. I am a private person and so I rarely talk about my own personal religious experiences, but I never run short on anything to talk about.

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