goddessing

...who looks down on whom...

(Ashley Yakeley's tree chart: The Pagan Hierarchy)

Hilarious, exhaustive, and a fun poke at all of us.

According to Yakeley's chart, I'm looked down on by

• Published Pagan Scholars, All Other Published Pagan Authors, and Published Authors (LLewelyn).
• Mystical Visionaries, Feri and other Ecstatic Amoral Witches, Reclaiming and Other Activist Witches, and Dianic Witches.

Apparently, I look down on politically-motivated Goddess Worshippers and probably: Channelers, Mediums, and Spiritualists; People Who Think They Were Historical Figures in a Past Life; People Who Think They're Dragons, Faeries, or Otherkin, and possibly: Schizophrenics / Mystical Visionaries.

So it's fun, and an interesting mirror for looking up, down, side-ways, and within. And it also captures how the "someones" we're sometimes looking down on are (gosh) ourselves, and how we sometimes have a really hard time defining for ourselves just what kind of "Pagan" we are.

Labels: paganism

The label thing is fraught, and fun. I've decided that Pagan is definitely the umbrella under which I sit, though for a long time it was the Goddessian umbrella (term I coined independently from Judith Laura, who has published about it).

I don't know, though, whether Goddessian, or Pagan, or even Goddess-worshipping Pagan captures all of what's central to my spirituality.

And then there's what's crystallized as a result of my illnesses, search for wellness, recoveries, and resulting lifestyle focus: practitioner of hearth arts (Priestess of the Hearth?). This one I will be writing about, somewhere.

Perhaps we should just throw in the towel and accept New Age, but we don't for good reasons, just like we keep exploring identity and finding names to capture the nuances and/or centrality of our spiritual practices: because there's individual agency involved here, not a creed to be swallowed and followed (some traditions notwithstanding).

The looking down on business, that's a sad but true reality generally speaking. It seems to me it's about controlling connection and conversation, and all mixed up with some isms we can all see for ourselves.
 

2003-2005