#ramasee

As I said before, I don't really do spellwork in the way that you're thinking. It's a very different beast from where I'm standing. I believe that magic is too strained, thin, and weak in this world to be channeled in that sort of way. I look to my gods for blessings and curses, and I use invocations to them, but it's not... casting.

Well, the thing about an eclectic path is that there's not a text for it. There's not really a beginner's guide, as it were. My faith is the summation of a life of learning; I started taking Latin in the 7th grade, so my exposure to Roman religion began then. My fascination with their mythos started much earlier. But, as a few suggestions for the specifically Roman-derivative parts of my faith: Hamilton's Mythology, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Ars Amatoria, I feel like Virgil's Eclogues had some good stuff in them but I might be misremembering... Hesiod's Theogeny is Greek, not Roman, but a lot of the same ideas apply... Alberto Angela's A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome for a sense of the role religion played in everyday life... mmmm, honestly Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series is phenomenally researched when it comes to the role of religion in private and civic life (and everything else, really, those books are astonishing). Nova Roma and Cultus Deorum are two websites that would have information along those lines, though they're both more direct reconstructionist that I am. For my other pantheons... the Epic of Gilgamesh for Ishtar, I guess? I honestly can't remember where I learned everything I know about Hathor. Just various history books throughout my life, as is the case with so much of what I know and believe.

No. If I wanted to be called a witch, I would call myself a witch. I don't work spells or craft ritual in the ways that those who call themselves witches do. Both my thought and action patterns are different. Not all pagans are witches; not all witches are necessarily pagans.

I am a pagan and I am 100% absolutely not a Wiccan. Everything that follows will be said at the risk of offending any Wiccan followers I may have, but -- I have trouble taking Wicca seriously, not least because its followers tend to take themselves so seriously. And I find it to be an incredibly naive faith. Concepts like the threefold rule and "harm none" just seem... childish to me. The world is not that simple, nor that fair. The world is a dazzling array of moral possibilities, not just black and white, right and wrong. I can't help but wrinkle my nose at a lot of the New Age-y concepts that are still hanging on from the 70s and 80s. I need more gods than Wicca's dualistic approach allows me, I need more freedom in ritual, and I do not need the Wiccan hierarchical structure (which, from what I've witnessed, is every bit as prone to petty abuse as monotheistic priesthoods). And I twitch when people insist on adding unnecessary "k"s and "y"s to words.