Any Pagans around here?

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What kind of Paganism are you most interested in?

Personally I'm interested in Celtic Paganism (Druidry).

Happy Solstice!

I was sorta into wicca as a teenager. A "dabbler" basically.

I was a little into the whole nordic paganism thing (great stories) as a teen on a very superficial "atheist with a sense of humour"-sort of level. Kinda backed away slowly when people started talking about their get-togethers with magic drums and pouches of unspecified herbs.

I'm probably tough to define because it seems like all kinds of different things offer pragmatic footholds and my life path is a bit difficult to map.

When I first moved into this sphere it was sort of the jump from Christian mysticism to Golden Dawn-style Qabalah (Dion Fortune, Gareth Knight, W.E. Butler, etc.), I've also been looking at the Qliphoth a bit as a place to do certain kinds of shadow work and so far that's taken some interesting directions. I also find myself really appreciating a lot of what Mark Stavish inputs on the content - he takes a pre-Golden Dawn approach (technically Martinist I'd gather) and being one of the foremost Hermeticists / alchemists in the US its always fascinating to hear his input.

I also find that I hug more toward a kind of Sheldrake naturalism rather than leaving these things supernatural, ie. the more I look at them when people talk about angels, demons, Holy Guardian Angel (ie. Golden Dawn and Thelema's take on the higher self), even gods or goddesses, when it comes down to cross-comparison and taking all of the info in they're best described perhaps under a panpsychist interpretation of fields or, in the smaller cases, it's a recursive system with something akin to biological needs but just not biological. That seems to serve me well in terms of comparing their existence to what the world is (probably the worst bit of cognitive dissonance a person has after being an atheist and having encounters with the impossible) .

That said I find myself debating how I want to approach these things quite often. While I'd love to do Solomonic evocation, and it seems like one of the most credible way of phoning a celestial intelligence, I also don't have the luxurious space to set up a proper circle and triangle of art.

In a way too I understand chaos magic, I respect it in the sense that some people are just better suited for improvisational approaches - I find myself sometimes good with that, other times I like the depth of a traditional structure such as what BOTA (Builders of the Adytum) offers - which is really a deep study of the contents of the Golden Dawn version of the Tree of Life (and a slight twist on AE Waite's tarot).

So far there are a lot of 'good' systems out there but none of them 100% nail it IMHO.

Yes, and the same flavor.

I am an initiate but it took a lot of work and a year and a day's training. That's not necessary, of course. I wanted to get really serious. The training also helped me to decide if this was really what I wanted to do and taught me discipline.

While I practiced before I had mentors or formal training, I felt that I had a deeper understanding of the whys and wherefores and learned some of the more obscure knowledge than I was able to gain when muddling through by myself. That said, I then went on to be a solitary practitioner because... people. I've been at it for 27 years.

If I was just starting out today though I would be dependent on books and the internet because where I am now there really isn't a pagan presence to speak of, or we keep a low profile. It's a much more rural, conservative area and people don't understand paganism here the way they did in the more worldly metropolitan areas. They tend to mistake it for devil worship, but of course it's entirely different. Thus I don't mention my religion at all unless asked and then I am very careful until I know that the person is open-minded enough not to react with hostility.

Most of my friends are Christians of the more tolerant denominations. I respect their faith and they respect mine even though we don't agree about everything. We don't have to agree on everything.

I don’t know too much about it, but it’s always something that interested me. I’ve dabbled in learnings similar to freemasonry, but I think I’m more of a free thinker who dabbles in it all.

I like the way Gordon White (Rune Soup podcast) puts it - everyone has teeth but not everyone needs to be a dentist. That's a good analogy for practical hear-and-there vs. making it a primary life focus.