tinypagan:
asksecularwitch:
lindentea:
so hey tumblr pagans, what does one do when different people give entirely contradictory UPG accounts?
discuss.
Honestly, I take my own UPG with a grain of salt. If I can’t explain or I can’t disprove my ownself, then I am okay with it. As for others? I question the nature and origins of their UPG.
Does it match with their deity? Does it historically seem accurate? Does this match up with anyone else’s upg of this thng?
That kind of mentality.
UPG are important, I feel, to how people exist.
What Sec said.
As I wrote somewhere else, it would have been really helpful to me years ago for, rather than people saying, ‘Oh you just have special UPG for [insert god here]’, to actually say, ‘You know, that doesn’t match up with [x] deity, but it does sound like [y]’. That applies to stuff beyond deities to, at least in my work with the faeries (‘Did it try to drown you and then eat you?’ ‘Well, no…’ ‘Then maybe it’s something else.’) IDK how it applies to other people.
But I guess that’s a problem I have with the larger culture in modern Paganism atm.
If two people have completely different and opposed UPG - I usually think one of them is interacting with something else (heck, they could both be interacting with something else and just misidentifying it) at best. At worst, it’s really common for people to just spout off whatever ideas pops into their head about a deity or they are trying to sanitize it.
Personally? I accept whatever they’re seeing/feeling/experimenting as their UPG. Which doesn’t mean it is mine.
I’m generally accepting but skeptical of other people. Different masks for different people and all that. I’m not unconvinced that certain facets of deities and beings show themselves however the fuck they want whenever they want however and to whoever they want.
Their truths, beliefs, realities doesn’t need my validation, does it?
