christ, I'm a Pagan.

I will sing of Zeus, chiefest among the gods and greatest, all-seeing, the lord of all, the fulfiller who whispers words of wisdom to Themis as she sits leaning towards him.

Be gracious, all-seeing Son of Cronos, most excellent and great!

There’s something weird, a bit funny and a bit painful and more than a little confusing, about worshiping a god you have been traumatized in the name of. Worshiping, venerating, seeking a relationship with. The shadow of Christianity on this earth is wide and dark and terrifying to comprehend. It’s horrifying when you’re actively being subjugated by it and somehow worse when trying to figure out how you fit into it. Wring the flood water from your belongings and see what’s salvageable.

I believe that faith and belief are not something that can be changed at a whim. I believe that what you believe, while influenced by many, is widely concrete inside you. A christian can’t just decide to be an atheist, they have to be convinced of atheism and vice versa. Whether this is from some great trauma or finding new evidence doesn’t matter, but beliefs rarely change on their own.

I was raised Christian, widely nondenominational, but my father was raised witness and my mother is a (as far as I know) lapsed Catholic, so I got a little bit of both growing up. All of the weird cult logic and guilt at once, with no understanding of why the spiritual mattered. I’m not sure I really understood religion as something to believe, and not just something that was done. We went to church as kids, but that stopped when I was about seven. We mostly watched Veggie Tales and bad christian youth rock. I don’t remember most of it, honestly. Apparently our church scammed my family out of a lot of money and we were homeless for a season. Fun.

I don’t know if I ever really considered myself christian. I still don’t think I do, honestly. I was about ten when I started considering the existence of other gods. It didn’t make sense to me that they didn’t exist, so I tried to find someway that they could, mixing and melting together mythologies to find one that would stick. My dad really hated that. To this day, he will often cry in front of us- typically to get out of an argument he’s losing- about how his greatest failure as a father is not making us good Christians. Really makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I was about eleven when I first called myself pagan.

I fell into Wicca first, spent a few years reading fake spells on wicca.com on my mom’s laptop. I look back on that time in my life and cringe, truly. I wrote all my little notes and spells in a composition notebook. I still have it, though most of the old parts have been painted over or ripped out. Wicca wasn’t for me, but I was still into witchcraft.

I was a bit of a militant pseudo-atheist for a while, so I was into anti-christian youtubers as a poor impressionable preteen. After a few months, for some reason, these videos made me uncomfortable. Afraid, even. They made me feel like I was doing something wrong when I watched them, and not just because I knew my older brother dissaproved. Part of this was undoubtedly religious trauma, the idea of god as angry and vengeful, hateful even, watching me for every mistake. The other part was that it just made me feel bad, like I was making fun of a cousin.

I fell out of religion after that. Not because I didn’t feel pagan, I still called myself pagan of course, but because I was sad. Depressed, aimless, etc. all the classics for a mentally ill teenager. When I found time and remembered to do so, I jumped back and forth between gods, giving offerings to Loki, Dionysus, Set, Hel, Aphrodite, Odin, it went on. I’ve never been a pantheon purist. I was trying to find my place in a universe full of gods and spirits who I wanted to love, but didn’t think loved me. That’s about how I spent most of high school.

During this time, I’d mostly forgotten about Christianity as a practice rather than a political/historical concept. I pretended to pray at the dinner table, averted my eyes when I touched crosses, stayed out of churches. The whole concept made me itch. While I was sure I was pagan, I didn’t consider that separate from the idea of the Christian god existing. So, I did (and do) believe he exists, he just made me uncomfortable. Around here was when I came up with my go-to response to people asking me if I was Christian- “Oh, I believe in god, sure. We’re just not close.”

By the end of high school and in the few years that followed, my ideas of religion mellowed. I stopped hopping around gods and took a break from witchcraft or active worship. I questioned who exactly I wanted to throw my lot in with. The Netjeru, sadly, were the first I decided I wasn’t close enough to work with or worship. Mad respect, though. Pop culture pagan entities also, while I respect (and fear, sorry Bill) them, I didn’t see a future with them. The Aesir are very cool and I do try to honour and pray to them regularly, but they’re not my major pantheon (I actually made a string of pony beads as prayer beads dedicated to Hel and I use them when I’m afraid or thinking about death.) At some point, I just had to accept that I was basically a Hellenic pagan. My ‘altar’ is almost all objects for, dedicated to, or that remind me of the Olympians and oil offerings for them. And, like, four ceramic rabbits I got for Loki.

I was fine with this. I’d been pagan for most of my conscious life at that point, I was more than comfortable with my gods and I love and believe in them and always will. But I still felt off. I had a blog that I used to reblog painting of saints and poems about Jesus and Mother Mary to- I even did saint fanart in high school. I had a joke in the bio about how running the blog just might be blasphemy.

At some point, while capital-G God still made me cringe away in fear, I had become enamoured with saints. Maybe it was the inherent tragedy or maybe I got caught up in the way queer Catholics connect to Joan of Arc and Saint Sebastian. The paintings are both velvety and rough, the music enchanting and heart rending, the poetry both uplifting and horribly melancholy. My dad’s protestant, our church was baptist, my mom wasn’t practicing. I hadn’t experienced Christianity in that way before, and it was captivating.

It might be from looking into the netjeru and the whole “words are magic” thing, and it might be the constant paranoia of being watched, but I’m careful about my words. Not in a way that makes any material difference, but specifically when it comes to things that might be considered ‘blasphemous’ or kind of rude. Things like depictions of Zeus as a frat boy douchebag rapist or God as a vindictive, uncaring parent or literally anything any man has said about Aphrodite. It felt normal to be a bit protective of my gods as a pagan, but I was also deeply uncomfortable with people saying the same about God and wasn’t sure why. It’s one of the reasons I stopped watching militant atheist channels, they made me uncomfortable. I was recently diagnosed with OCD, in part because of this discomfort and fear.

It felt so stupid to realize that I didn’t need to be contained to worshiping the gods and giving Mother Mary a ‘whats up head nod’ every so often. I felt stupid because I knew christopagans. I knew folk Catholics. I just didn’t apply it to myself. Like an idiot.

Sadly, the idea finally broke through while on Tiktok. Users like Chaotic Witch Aunt who were going through their own religious journeys towards christian syncretism inspired me to actually look more into Christianity and Catholicism, folk or otherwise. I prayed, first just Hail Mary’s, then the whole Rosary. It felt good, even if I was nervous about messing it up. I felt right praying to God or to Mary, the same way it felt right to pray to Dionysus and Zeus.

It’s currently Lent and I gave up fighting/arguing. It seems silly to say, but its actually very nice to have a reason to hold myself back (I have slight anger issues.) I have a small space on top of a dresser with a candle for the Virgin Mary, and a small statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. On another dresser, I have offerings and items for the gods. I prayed on Christmas last year, staying awake until midnight to wish Jesus a happy birthday.

None of this is to say I haven’t felt my fair share of grief over my religious leanings. My psychiatrist thinks my folk paganism is… notable, considering my mental health. And I have to keep my pagan side secret from my christian family, not to mention to ever present (but slowly lessening) fear that I’m a stupid fuck up idiot who’s going to hell because I was led astray by demons. Or something. But those feelings, as awful as they are, are widely over shadowed by the happiness and, dare I say, pride I feel in my self and my spirituality. When I pray to/with Mother Mary, I can’t imagine that she would ever cast me out of her heart.

During the winter and spring months, I lean further into the catholic part of my beliefs, Celebrating Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, etc. In the summer and fall, I fall back into the hands of the gods. Like Lady Persephone, the seasons guide me (though, in a religious sense, not in a marriage way). It feels kind of silly and maybe a little blasphemous, but it brings me comfort and, above all, joy. I can only hope my attentions bring my gods joy too.

Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?”

John 11:40