January 2021 “We Are Individuals in Communities” Divination

In 2020, due to feeling a lot of social burnout, pessimism, and pain about our wider polytheistic communities, I started doing a divination reading every three months about the polytheistic communit[y/ies]. The point of this divination, like most divinations I do, is to highlight growth areas that we may be missing that prevent us from being our best. My hope is that those who have a hunger and need for this will serendipitously find it.

💛 I don’t have any credentials and other people are way more experienced than I am, so please take everything with a grain of salt. 💛

The question: What course of action should [people in] the Western polytheistic revival communities take over the next three months to improve ourselves?

I used the Girls Underground Oracle, so the questions work best when they are phrased in ways that focus on the unfolding of a narrative or process, like a story being told from beginning to end. I made sacrifices to Apollon and asked him my questions. Hail to the God of the twinned light that dances, humming its notes eternal. 🙌

A single die comes with the deck, and for the type of reading I do, one rolls the die to see how many cards to draw (up to six). The die told me to take a single card, to my shock and surprise:

1. A fraud or secret is exposed. (#35)

This reading seems consistent with January 2021 so far. In the interpretation booklet, we are told that the “blindfold has been taken off” and that something concealed until now is finally revealed. New knowledge, it says, may even “help you overcome” the problem. There is cold ice water on our collective faces. We have seen something exposed — in all of its compelling symmetry or its horrifying malevolence, depending on the sense one would like to take — and now, we have to deal with it.

It’s hard for me to see this reading without thinking about last Wednesday.

There are a lot of things that I could say, and all of them go back to reflecting on that shocking (not surprising) day and on the past four years — a highly subjective lens that I refuse to universalize because my internal experience of the world may not even be the same as the experiences of those with whom I share a high percentage of values and life outlook. I think that the modern polytheistic movements face existential threats related to the misuse of symbols in far-right contexts, not just for those worshipping the Norse Gods, but for everyone reviving the worship of Gods whose pre-Christian cultus is endemic to parts of Europe. Not all desecration is physical — a symbol of a God being branded as a hate symbol, and the actions that lead to such a thing, are as impious as smashing said God’s actual statue. How we react, though, is not set in stone, and I have seen a lot over the past few days on the blogosphere. There are ways to create pious, grounded, boundary-setting, and positive-identity-cultivating movements, and I hope that’s the direction people decide to take even though it’s more challenging.

I hope that this was useful. Feel free to take or leave my commentary, as always!

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