Holy Fuck (Pun Intended)

For those of you who didn't know, I'm in a college sociology class. Our topic of the day was religion.

So then there was at some point talk about converting to another religion and what that was like and how you can go from one religion to another, and at one point a woman mentioned being pagan (I think she's eclectic but I don't know what faiths her beliefs come from - like, religio romana? Kemetism? Rodnovery? Asatru? Was she polytheist, and if so was she devoted to a specific deity?) who'd been raised Christian because that was relevant and we were talking converting from one religion to another (the teacher's sister was raised Hindu but converted to Christianity) and what it was like to suddenly be the only person of your religion in your family. Like, how she (the pagan woman) doesn't go to church with her Christian sister because there's nothing for her there, it contradicts what she believes in.

So then another woman revealed that she was also a pagan (Wiccan) who had been raised Christian.

And seeing that no one was mocking them, I decided to take a risk and say I was also a pagan. Which was nerve-wracking by the way. But then...

The teacher was saying how in most religions, only male entities are worshipped but that's not always the case, so she showed us a picture of one of her goddesses as an example.

And, since today was the first time she'd ever heard the word pagan, she asked us what pagans worship (I don't think she knows paganism is actually an umbrella term for several different religions either, even though among the three pagans in class, religious beliefs varied greatly).

So the Wiccan woman explained how her religion is duotheistic, how pagans believe in a mother goddess and father god but some focus more on the mother and some focus more on the father.

Which, whatever. For her, that's accurate. She's pagan and that's what she believes, therefore it's a pagan belief.

My issue came from the fact that she didn't say that's what Wiccans believe, she said that's what pagans believe. Which, honey, no. That's nothing like my religion. Don't act like all pagans worship the same way unless you want me to start acting like being pagan automatically makes you an Aphrodite devotee.

Not that I would, of course, because that's inaccurate and disrespectful. But I digress.

So I was just, nope. Fuck that. Nothing against Wiccans, but don't misinform people about my religion.

I said, "What she just said about pagan worship is actually more specific to Wicca. I'm actually more Hellenic, Greek polytheist. I worship Aphrodite, and unless you include Zeus and Hera there's really no mother and father in Hellenism. And not all of us worship them anyway."

And yeah my voice may have gotten louder and higher-pitched, which I think made me sound kind of pretentious and know-it-all-ish or like I was saying my religion was better than hers, but the truth was I was just nervous.

After all, saying I was pagan was...slightly innocuous when most of the class had no idea what the fuck that really meant.

But we're a group of millennials, mostly 18-25 years old, and most people in that age group, at least in America, have at least vaguely heard of a major part of pop culture that has a very distorted version of Greek mythology that yeah, I actually do happen to be a fan of, but is not at all representative of actual Hellenic polytheism and is so, so glamorized and removed from reality.

That meant exactly one thing: in the space of a two-hour class, not only had I told like thirty people I was pagan, something I rarely tell anyone offline, but I'd also told them something that was likely to lead at best to annoying questions and at the worst to harassment, bullying, and stalking.

I'd accidentally convinced my entire sociology class that I worship Piper McLean's mom from Rick Riordan's Heroes of Olympus.

Which, no disrespect to actual pop culture pagans. You do your thing, I do mine. As long as nobody gets hurt, who gives a shit? It's just that your thing is not my thing. I don't worship a fictional character, I worship an ancient goddess.

But I knew when I said the names of my gods, ancient powerful deities would not be the first thing that crossed their minds. No, if not Percy Jackson, it would be who actually worships the Greek gods anymore? It would be, is this some kind of cult? (Which would be virtually impossible, as Hellenics are too loosely organized to actually establish a cult even if we wanted one.) It wouldn't be reality.

Most people who aren't reconstructionist or revivalist polytheists think of us as an absurd foreign concept (as in "well it's not like anyone actually worships Thor/Zeus/etc anymore"), maybe as an interesting character in a fantasy novel. We don't get to be just people who, compared to what you're probably expecting, are actually pretty boring.

The truth is, being a Hellenic revivalist isn't any more interesting, mystical, mysterious, outrageous, or exciting than any other religion. We just have more gods than some of them.

I hope someday, people are going to realize that.