I'm a Bad Polytheist

Polytheistic worship involves cultivating relationships with deities, but those relationships are a lot of work. Here, I talk about the varying degrees of intimacy that might exist in a relationship of worship, the different kinds of relationship structures that polytheists might have, and why I don't have the energy to worship lots of gods.
The audio quality on this video is dreadful, but if I buy a real microphone I have to admit to myself that I'm a content creator, and I'm not willing to do that.
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[@pigmentcingle]

I love your insight in this, relationships differ from one person to another. Thank you for sharing, my pratique is different than yours but I can totally relate

[@MasterPoucksBestMan]

As an 80's-90's era solitary eclectic, to me the "subtitle" of Wicca has always been : Wicca: It's not about you. It's about your Parents I never bought the "all gods are one God and all goddesses are one Goddess" thing, which was cribbed afterwards from Dion Fortune anyway. To me the God and Goddess are the Parents of all, loving all their children equally. It's definitely an opportunity to have a Mother and Father who understand and accept you no matter who you are or how you identify, because they made you on purpose (IMO). All the other gods are like my big brothers and sisters, and the other life on the planet are my cousins. The other gods are only "faces" of the God and Goddess in the sense that so am I and everything else. At the level of my individuality, the other gods are individuals too. So, I'm an "al dente" polytheist, not too hard, not to soft lol. It's the different people interacting with the sun, for example, that makes the understanding of the sun different for different people and cultures, just as I am the same person interacting with my wife and my father. I'm not two different people; they are. It's them being different that makes the relationship and understanding of me different. Same with the sun, etc.

[@saggguy7]

I like your comparison to polyamory as a person who is both a polytheist and polyamorous. I've been in a poly relationship with a primary partner for 6 years, and in that time I haven't dated anybody else in a serious way - I'm in my mid 20s, and life has been taken up in those years by school, career changes, friends, hobbies, self-discovery, and all the other things you do when you're a young adult. I haven't had time to date other people. But my relationship is still fundamentally different from monogamy, simply because exclusivity is not *expected* of me. It may be what happens in practice, but there's actually a major, fundamental difference between a relationship in which dating others is on the table as an option, and one where it's not on the table, regardless of how those agreed-upon arrangements play out in real life. Similarly, I don't think polytheism necessarily has to imply anything about the number of deities that you are personally in relationship with. At it's core, polytheism is just about the belief that there are multiple deities, and I think generally also implies that you don't view any one of them as inherently more worthy of worship than the others. It doesn't mean that you worship all of them, or really even any of them for that matter - like, the way I see it, someone could believe in multiple gods but decide not to pursue a relationship with any of them, and that person would still be a polytheist - just as a person could be both single and polyamorous. And that person's practice (or lack thereof) might end up superficially mimicking that of a monotheist, duotheist or even an atheist, but it's fundamentally not the same as someone who is working from those belief systems. Like, if I as a polytheist choose to exclusively pursue a relationship with the Goddess because that's the spirit I connect to and I'm not interested in other deity relationships, that's a very different thing than if I were a Christian and exclusively worshipped Yahweh because I believed I'd be condemned to hell for doing anything different. Which one of those frameworks I'm working with is going to greatly inform my relationships to other practitioners, my willingness to expand my practice in the future, my overall views on theology and religion, etc. etc. So even though we, in Wiccan circles, tend to define ourselves by shared praxis, I don't think this applies when we're broadly discussing polytheism vs. monotheism vs. duotheism, because those questions are inherently about belief and not about praxis.

[@Mendlerka]

Hey Jack. I watched a few of your videos, but now I looked at your description and got interested in Slavic polytheism. Can you tell where your interests and beliefs came from?

[@JackChanek]

There are very few sources for Slavic polytheism. The books I'd recommend are Elizabeth Wagner's "Russian Myths," Linda J. Ivanits's "Russian Folk Belief," and Juan Antonio Álvarez-Pedrosa's "Sources of Slavic Pre-Christian Religion"

[@Mendlerka]

@@JackChanek thanks for the book titles. I was more interested in why you are interested in slavic beliefs. my curiosity came from the fact that I am Polish, so an ethnic Slav. By the way, I am also an initiated gardnerian. So we have even more in common. :)

[@JackChanek]

@@Mendlerka Part of my initial interest in Slavic polytheism was definitely rooted in a desire to connect more deeply with my Serbian heritage, but more broadly it was simply that the gods themselves appealed to me in a way I can't quite put a finger on. In my early days I discovered a myth (which I now know to be apocryphal, but didn't at the time) of Jarilo and Morena as divinely married twins, and it seized me. I wanted to know more about those gods, and know them more deeply.

[@ArtemisNYC]

I'm in this video and I don't like it. 😜

[@heathwitch]

Same! 😅