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Pagan Blog Project: D is for Dualism. (Living With Other People’s Gods)

I was pretty grossly unimpressed with the suggestions for the letter D, again, until I reread more carefully and saw dualism.

Oh man! Dualism! Memories!

I developed a deep hatred of dualism when I was very early (like, a few months) into what I guess I would coyly term my pagan adventure. I decided that then, the only god I spoke with consistently at the time — Loki — was anathema to dualism in all its forms — good/evil, man/woman, helpful/harmful, friend/enemy, Aesir/Jotun.

Which … I still think he is. But I don’t remember why I cared so much. It was seriously life-changey at the time, a conviction I held with a weird kind of fanaticism, and I don’t remember what started me out on it with quite the fervor that I had. Dualism wasn’t just wrong; it seemed to me to be a complete left-turn from a good, solid understanding of how the world worked.

I’ll make a guess as to why I cared so much, though:

I was still feeling my way around paganism at the time, and much of what was available to me in suburbia was various shades of Wicca — most of them deeply uninspiring shades. I picked up a copy of Cunningham’s The Truth about Witchcraft Today (which has a different cover every time I look it up) and read through it and tried to work through it, with its pedantic and overly simplistic talk about the difference between high and folk magic, and its discussion of Wicca as duotheist. Duotheist, but the God spends a lot of time getting ignored, despite the fact that the whole seasonal cycle moves with him.

Read more at Living With Other People’s Gods