Jeff Russell

Howdy,

0) No problem! I saw your question right at the cut-off for MM and wanted to give you a more thorough response than I could without abusing JMG's time limit, and as I said in the post, it seemed like an opportunity to see if anyone else had anything they wanted to ask, so my pleasure. And I don't mind your listing the questions at all, as you say, makes things efficient.

1) The short answer here is "not especially," but some nuance might be helpful. I grew up in a fairly lukewarm Methodist family. We went to church weekly from when I can remember until I was 9 and we moved from Dallas to Northern Virginia, and with one thing and another, we just never found a church to go to, and it wasn't a priority to my parents, so we didn't go. As a teenager, I had a Wiccan girlfriend, so I got exposed to that side of things, along with the general thrust of 90s/00s pre-Reddit atheism/agnosticism, where most of the smart folks I knew didn't take religion very seriously, so I had a vague sense that religion was nice and all, but it wasn't really a factor in my life. Two things contributed to changing that. An older friend that I idolized when I was a kid, who was very smart, got more seriously into Christianity when he went to college and told me some about that. It didn't make much of a change on my habits or practice, but I had a counter-example to the whole "smart people aren't religious" thing. Then, my freshman year of college, I met another friend who became very close, who was also quite smart, and he was fairly religious (Christian). He created a "Religious Study Book Club" and we read a few books on religion (including Drawing Down the Moon and Mere Christianity, which stand out as the ones I most remember). Mere Christianity struck me as a good argument, and combined with the example of my friend, I decided that Christianity made sense and started taking it somewhat more seriously. This mostly took the shape of trying to pray more regularly and reading the Bible, but I never found a Church, and I never took any particular tradition all that seriously. The individualist "every man his own priest," scripturally-based approach of Protestantism meshed well with my views back then, so I considered myself kind of generically Protestant, believing, but not practicing.

That said, I mostly found Christianity intellectually and emotionally appealing, but I never had any obvious "spiritual experiences." So, while I was in the Army, I drifted more into vaguely Christian-flavored agnosticism, but spiritual stuff wasn't really a big part of my life. After I got out, I went to business school and got a job as a management consultant (if you're not familiar, about as PMC a job as it gets), so I wasn't really around folks who were religious much, and it continued not really to be an important part of my life, whereas a lot of thinkers I read and respected were more hard-edged atheists, like Eric S. Raymond (the guy who did the most to popularize the term "open source" for software, rather than Richard Stallman's more ideologically-colored "free software"). I had some personal experiences that challenged my comfortable, uncommitted vaguely religious beliefs, and I ended up more agnostic leaning toward atheism. Basically, I felt like we couldn't reason appropriately about non-materially-verifiable things, so it wasn't worth taking a strong stance on them.

As will come as no surprise to anyone to whom spirituality is important, but did come as a surprise to me, this led me to some dark places psychologically, and I wasn't doing so well for a while, though it took me a bit to notice that. When my mother died in 2018, I was about as atheistically materialist as you can get, and I didn't allow myself the comfort of thinking she had gone on to something better, I thought she was just gone, because believing otherwise seemed like a cope. I loved her very much and we were pretty close, so that was rough, and I wasn't doing so great for a while.

Through all this, I had gotten into some folks who tried to find meaning in non-"supernaturally" grounded ways, including Jordan Peterson, and ironically enough, Eric S. Raymond. ESR believes that the rituals and practices of religion serve important emotional and psychological purposes, but that they are all grounded in depth psychology. So, I decided to give "religion" a try, with the intellectual understanding that what I was doing was using a toolkit that was good at getting in touch with my own subconscious, elements of which I shared with my culture and maybe all of humanity. The Germanic Gods and myths had always resonated with me (in college, I would joke "if I didn't think Christianity were true, I'd worship Odin"), so I started praying to the Germanic Gods, seeing Them as "just archetypes," but with an understanding that those archetypes were nonetheless powerful and significant. I also started learning to do divination with the Runes and dabbled in Edred Thorsson's magical system.

The problem was, I felt like I was just talking to myself, and I wasn't getting much out of it, so I eventually let that drop. Some of the personal issues I was dealing with continued, and I kept trying to find my way to something that worked. I had started reading JMG's work in my "magic and religion are just tools for interacting with the non-rational parts of the mind" phase, and so I decided to read A World Full of Gods. I found the arguments therein convincing enough to try an experiment. I'd try JMG's recommended magical baseline of "ritual, meditation, and divination," open to the idea that it's not just "all in my head," but not convinced just yet. I started doing the Heathen Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and Middle Pillar exercises JMG had posted, and have since been incorporated into The Heathen Golden Dawn by Isaac Hill, with meditation material drawn from the Eddas and some Heathen magic/religion books I had, and doing a daily runecasting. Well, within three weeks, I had some pretty dramatic results (more on that in 3) below), and I was like "I guess I'm a polytheist now," and since then, I have round religion to be an important and meaningful part of my life. This experiment and experience was in May-June of 2021.

While exploring this, I have found worth in some Christian writers and texts (especially from the Orthodox end of things), and I've basically adopted JMG's view that Christ is, in fact, a real God, His religion works well for many people, but they're mistaken when they claim it's the only true one.

2) Yes, I've felt some of this, more so early on than more recently. At times I was aware of the fact that if Christians are right that their God is the one true God, and all others are false, I could be making a big mistake. Coming from the occult side of things, I was also aware that unpleasant spirits could be pretending to be something more wholesome, and could be fooling me. To deal with this ambiguity, I fell back on "by their fruits ye shall know them" - my experience of the Heathen Gods and related spirits has encouraged me to be kinder, more understanding, and to make hard changes that seem to be in the right direction - keeping my word even when it's hard, being a better father and husband, working on my own emotions and desires, that kind of thing. My current thinking is that it's quite possible all of this is some kind of delusion, but a. it doesn't "feel" that way, and b. even if so, it's a delusion that makes me happier, healthier, and more responsible, so I'll take it. I fully acknowledge that a lot of folks get that out of Christianity, but it didn't seem to work for me, so I've been going with what has worked.

For what it's worth, having read other writers, especially Galina Krasskova, these kinds of feelings of fear and guilt are extremely common in folks who grew up Christian and have since converted to other religions. It doesn't seem to me like there's a logically-provable argument one way or the other, so I've ended up erring on the side of trusting my own experience and looking to the example of folks I've come to trust, like JMG, but then, I'm nearly pathologically individualist and eccentric, so there's a chance I'm leaning into my own proclivities here.

3) Yes, though I'm not sure whether "mystical" is the right word, having done some reading on "mysticism," so I usually prefer to use the broader term "religious experience" (purposefully echoing James's The Varieties of Religious Experience. As I said above, within about 3 weeks of starting Ritual, Meditation, and Divination from the standpoint of "maybe there's 'really' something to this after all, let's find out," I had a religious experience. I was working my way through a set of "pathworkings" (guided active imagination meditations, so somewhat different from what JMG uses that term to mean in his books) from The Teutonic Way: Magic by Kveldulf Gundarsson, one for each Rune. While going through the visualization for one of the Runes, I began to feel "tingly" in my chest and face, and I felt a sense of the Goddess Idun being present. I let things go as they would, departing from the script in the book, and then also felt the present of Woden. Afterward, I felt energetic, giddy, and boundlessly happy and optimistic. Reflecting on it, and asking a semi-panicked MM question, I realized that this was a near textbook religious experience, and so even though nothing about it couldn't be explained as some combination "my imagination" and a physiological response to a meditation-altered state of consciousness, I decided that I had knocked and gotten an answer, so maybe I should go with it. For the past 3.5 years, I haven't regretted it.

4) I had a similar background: I was always interested in mythology and folklore, and the Germanic myths just grabbed me more than others. For example, I've also always liked Celtic myths of various stripes, and doing JMG's druid work has led to digging especially into Welsh myths and legends, but they never spoke to me the way the Germanic stuff did, and the Irish stuff is interesting, but doesn't have the same resonance - for me, it's mostly useful as a better-documented end of the Celtic family of beliefs and stories, which are mostly interesting as a neighbor to the Germanic and a fellow descendant from Indo-European forebears.

So, not that you asked for advice, but if you'd like some, I'd encourage you to keep digging into Irish myth, legend, folklore, and belief and see where it takes you. Maybe you end up an Irish-flavored druid, maybe you end up a heterodox Christian (very Irish!), or maybe you find Catholicism does, in fact, work for you, but you have a continuing intellectual interest in Ireland's pre-Christian belief, I dunno.

If you feel called to a more involved spiritual practice, a few tips/thoughts. JMG's Celtic Golden Dawn leans on the Welsh druidic Gods and myths, but could likely be re-worked to the Irish with some work. The magical framework in the Druid Magic Handbook or the The Way of the Golden Section is very flexible, with room for Christians, polytheists of every stripe, and even calling upon the elements as impersonal forces. I put down the Golden Dawn-derived work and picked up the SOP-based work because a. it was more readily flexible for incorporating the Heathen Gods, b. I wanted to follow JMG's advice to complete a magical system "by the book," and the DMH seemed to work better for me than the CGD, and the HGD wasn't available yet, and c. I got the sense that I would benefit from the SOP's balance of Solar and Telluric energies, versus the GD's focus on Solar (my ego is already out of control, so I didn't want to lean too hard into the ego-inflation that GD work can sometimes bring).

For divination, if you want to stick with Irish, the Ogham has worked very well for me, and I've gotten a lot out of not only doing divination with it, but meditating on it (I'm most of the way through pathworking JMG's Wheel of Life, with an Ogham Few assigned to each path from the DMH). In my own work, divination has seemed more like a helpful supplement than a core part of the practice.

Beyond ritual and divination, though, I have really found discursive meditation to be the beating heart of my practice. I've gone through most of the material in the DMH and am working my way through the Dolmen Arch, but I eagerly look forward to meditating on the Germanic myths, the "Fellowship of the Golden Section" workbooks, and more.

All of these tools can be readily incorporated into Christianity, unless you end up siding with the "all magic is bad" end of theological arguments. Obviously, that's not where I am, but I can respect some of the arguments there. Even if so, though, discursive meditation has a long history in the Christian church, and combined with prayer, can do a lot of good all on its own.

Anyhow, sorry for the long response, but I hope this helps, and please feel free to ask any follow-ups or discuss any of the above. And as for anonymity, no worries, many of my favorite writers are anonymous or pseudonymous, I just have opted to do everything under my own name for personal reasons, but sometimes I wish I had decided otherwise, so I can't fault anyone who finds anonymity more helpful.

Cheers, and my blessings if you'll have them,
Jeff

Hah, fair enough - "a lot to unpack," indeed, with a comment longer than the original post!

That said, yes, feel free to reply here with any follow-ups. Given that no one else has taken me up on the "AMA" yet, I'm not exactly swamped with responses, so I'll cut off new questions at midnight tonight as planned, but we can keep existing threads going as long as needed.

Thank you for your blessings, and cheers,
Jeff

Not really, no. Growing up Protestant, I said the "Lord's Prayer"/"Our Father" fairly regularly, but not any of the other prayers involved in the Rosary, and I knew next to nothing about it until I started investigating it with an intent of learning from it to craft something that fit my religious sensibilities. In doing so, I've read and said aloud the prayers involved to get a feel for how they sound, what they mean, and and what theological ends they have, and I've done a similar analysis on the Mysteries, but since I started learning about it after coming to Heathenry, it didn't feel right to try to pray it in earnest, since I don't have a relationship with the beings/Beings involved, and haven't felt called to cultivate one.

That said, who knows what might come down the line - maybe Mary or Jesus will reach out and I'll give it a try at some point, but right now, that doesn't feel like where my path leads.

Cheers, and my blessings if you'll have them,
Jeff

D'oh! Simple oversight is the answer. I create the dreamwidth entry and the link to it manually, and apparently I forgot to do that for that post.

I'll add one now. Thanks for the catch.

Jeff