So I've taken it on myself to start pontificating at length about a cluster of dubiously related subjects, and to put that on a website that's accessible to the universe. It probably behooves me to explain what the hell I'm doing here.

So here's the bio and background.

I've been pagan of some sort since my teens, when I caught the early crest of the Wicca 101 books and thought that it was something I could deal with. A large portion of that time was as a sort of shapeless mass of eclecticism in which I didn't really know what I was doing or have the structure to do it with, but I was looking for something functional and working with what I had.

I took out of that a certain kitchenwitchery attitude: go with what works, learn from the environment, study herbalism, and yeast is the foundation of civilisation.

I started looking back at organised paganism again a while back, largely because I was getting sick and tired of faffing about without any sort of structure. I started trying to pursue several things: some actual lore about bits of my Irish heritage (as that branch my family apparently has a couple of heritable knacks that there has to be lore for dealing with somewhere), a pursuit of Slavic paganism as a result of my Polish heritage, and general approaches to spirituality in body modification and entheogens. I also picked up some stuff on the indigenous and practical lives of the people who lived in my area when the Europeans showed up, as part of a sense of getting into local cycles.

As the result of a sequence of odd events, I wound up getting dropped through some sort of warp into Egyptian reconstructionism. I found there a set of principles that were almost entirely cognate with my own gut impression of how the universe works, which is a pretty good thing to start with in a religion. I also found rituals that I found worked for me at the gut-deep level, which is another good sign. I delved into study and practice.

Now, the tricky thing about Egyptian recon is that it seems everyone who's hooked on Egyptology is obsessed with Pharaohs. I never really thought about the Egyptian gods as my own before They kicked me in the head because I find obsessiveness about Tutankhamen and the like tremendously dull. I'm not a royals-watcher or a king-botherer, and it doesn't seem to matter whether those kings are several thousand years dead or just around the corner. And there's a lot of information about the culture as a whole, but as is often the case, a lot of that is focused on the upper classes and how they lived. Anything I've come across about daily life or everyday living in ancient Egypt I've acquired and read, and it helps.

The Egyptian religion that is being reconstructed by Kemetics is strongly a state religion. And that's not where I am; I'm still in the kitchenwitchery, and I want yeast in with my gods. We know that private homes had shrines, and the people spent time there; we know that the junior priests in temples were drawn from the local population as part-time workers. We presume that this combination and the Egyptian fascination with consistency and continuity means that whatever rituals were performed in home shrines were similar to the temple rituals we have documented information about.

So I hunger for the folk process that gives me a lived-in religion, not the state pageantry. State pageantry is all well and good for big festivals, down the road to the big bash; it's not the sort of thing that plays right at the level of Bes and Taweret.

At the same time, the emphasis on the ancestors brings my back around to the paganisms of my ancestors and the traditions of my family. It matters me to think about how to incorporate these in -- non-strict-reconstruction though they may be -- because these are my ancestors, these are the ways of my ancestors. The spirits who associated with my ancestors occasionally nudge at me to treat them right, and I have to figure out how to do that, which means going back to finding the folk traditions, the way everyday people handled the everyday matters of the unseen world. It brings me back to the Irish, the Polish, and the Christian, mostly.

The other major thread is my getting nudged back into religious witchcraft once more. I am studying Feri with Thorn Coyle at the moment; Feri is an American religious witchcraft tradition, a parent of the better-known Reclaiming tradition (known because of Starhawk of The Spiral Dance fame). It has roots in a number of things, including American folk magic (getting back around to the everyday and practical end of the obsession).

I'm studying Feri for a number of reasons. The central provoking one being that I am a scarred person with a lot of baggage (which I may or may not wind up writing about here, depending on relevance), and I was told by one of my gods that I was not a proper worshipper unless I fixed the broken bits. (He left it up to me whether or not being a proper worshipper was something that I was interested in being.) He told me that Kemetic practice did not have the tools I would need to repair my damage, and that if I wanted to heal, I should study Feri. I looked into Feri, studied its attitudes and approaches to the world, and decided to take Him up on it.

I wonder sometimes how many ulterior motivations there are. (One of my guiding principles is that gods always have at least three reasons for what They do: the one they Tell me, the one I figure out later, and the one I never learn.) I'll work with this and see where it goes, going through the process of assimilating the good and needful and letting the bad get worn away by the wind, the sand, and the sea. My writings in this area I'll make public because the work I'm doing might be useful, somewhere, to someone else -- and I'd have to write them anyway to get the thinking done, so I might as well stick it somewhere.

So that's why I'm here. Why are you here?