What is Important?

I’m doing a 30 Days of Me Meme on my personal journal, and one of the day’s prompts was “My Beliefs”. I tried very hard not to write about the practical end of my religion: Sure, I perform a daily ritual, sure I had a divination done for my Parent deities, sure I am a diviner and a priest. But I didn’t really think people wanted to hear about all that, especially considering how many people who can read my personal journal are members of Kemetic Orthodoxy. So I wrote about what I really believe.

It was really, really difficult. To narrow down what I actually believe about the world, I had to decide what was and wasn’t crucial to the lens of faith through which I view the world. It’s like developing my own personal creed, reciting what my convictions are.

• I believe in concrete gods, Who are intense, powerful, imperfect, and sternly loving. I also honor the Divine as a force existing in all of these gods, in every god, and in the world and Universe around me.
• I believe in spirits and sprites that exist in an Unseen world, which can wield as much power as the gods, without necessarily being divine.
• I believe in universal accountability and justice: the idea that in all things, there are consequences, and that the laws of the Universe do nothing but provide these consequences. I believe that you can do anything you like, so long as you accept the consequences.
• I believe that, in theory, those who do good will in turn be given good, but that the world is not always so cut and dry and that bad shit sometimes just happens for absolutely no reason.
• I believe in magic as a tool to affect the world around me.
• I believe that the dead live in the Unseen world, love us, and interact with us, and can affect our world like any other Unseen spirit. I believe that the dead are judged according to their actions, to their remorse for any wrong they have done, and their accountability. I believe that the truly wicked, who have no concept of remorse, cease to exist to the degree that they are absolutely obliterated from memory, and that anyone who is remembered must have had some remorse to be allowed to continue to exist.
• I believe that everyone serves their own purpose in this world; their own unique role. I don’t believe it’s preordained, but I do think it’s something that nobody else will fill.

These are things that I think would transcend the gods I worship, the rites I perform, or the community I participate in. The immediacy and the incredible love of the gods extends to ALL the gods I have met – Celtic, Kemetic, or even Christian. The dead are around us all, regardless of whether we hear them or not. And we live in a world populated by more things than the human mind can conceive of. That’s not to say that these beliefs aren’t Kemetic – they’re just not specific to Kemetic Orthodoxy. They comprise that “lens of faith” that I described earlier, through which I see the world, and through which I experience the gods and the Divine. That’s what’s important, I think, moreso than any rite or ritual.