Culture and Conflux
Before I get particularly into the specifics of beliefs and practice, I figured it'd be helpful to define some terms and basic assumptions. I talked a bit in the last post about this whole exploration being involved with culture, because gods, spirituality, and religion are themselves intimately involved in culture. (That, among other things, is why cultural appropriation is so important to consider; practices can't always be disentangled from the rest of the culture that birthed them.) Sarenth Odinsson wrote a lovely post recently on what developing culture could look like for modern heathens. That path isn't mine, but the writing about it shows the interrelations and considerations between spiritual practice and culture.
The idea of making, or at least establishing, culture has captivated me ever since I started getting involved in some of the groups that could be called modern countercultures. Paganism, furry culture, queer culture. These have their own values and traditions, and more importantly, they seem to birth other smaller microcultures. Sometimes we call this regional cultus, sometimes we call it worldbuilding, sometimes we just express it in turns of phrase and regular get-togethers. It was this exploratory attitude that led to me first being open to, and later actively seeking out, the sorts of gods and spirits who might want to get involved in that sort of culture.
I want to be clear. I'm not trying to come up with a pantheon for the entirety of queer culture, or furry culture, or even my own little corner of it. I'm imagining what a culture could be like if it held and persisted and exalted the best parts of those things. It may not be exactly the sort of things that even my close friends would be interested in, and that's fine; pluralism is a (cultural) value I hold. Perhaps it will remain only theoretical (because it's hard to argue that it's a culture if there's only one person following it), but even so, it would still be valuable to me, as a way to explore how other cultures, other worlds, are possible.
The name I keep coming back to for this practice, this spirituality, this culture, is Conflux. A flowing-together. That imagery features prominently in the myths I've come to know about the Wanderers; it describes how they came together after wandering, for a start. It suggests to me a flow. Not the only flow; there are many rivers, many places where they flow together, and they're all always changing. But, when I talk about Conflux, that's what I'm talking about. Conflux culture, Conflux spirituality, Conflux practice. Maybe I'll come up with something better later, but for now, this seems to suit it well.