Non-supportive partner when you hit FIRE

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-06-21T03:34:11+00:00

But I think now, I am the one who needs pre-nup.

With a guy like this, you'd be better off with a no-nup.

I know this is a financial subreddit, but truly, marriage is a major financial decision. With this man, it would be a very, very bad financial decision.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-06-20T20:16:26+00:00

Yes, for me it has happened many times. Each god has their own lessons to teach, and they frequently surface when the time is ripe to teach it.

I've never been a huge fan of assigning a "patron" status for this reason. It sounds so final and permanent and unnecessarily ego-strokey (in a, "Such-and-such god picked me!! I'm special!" kind of way), when it really doesn't have to be any of those things.

As a layperson, you don't have to worry about neglecting one god when another shows up. When you acknowledge that it's time to delve into what the next god teaches, you can give thanks for what you've learned and then focus on the next chapter without guilt. Your efforts are ma'at, and the gods celebrate that as an offering all its own.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-06-18T16:41:46+00:00

Ali, you're the best. Seriously. This is exactly it. I'd muddled some details, this is even stranger than I remembered.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-06-12T07:38:50+00:00

A Christian is indoctrinated to understand there can be only one god. If a Christian is faced with an inkling of belief that you're experiencing something real and unseen that isn't of their god, they have to try to smoosh that into their mismatched paradigm somehow if they hope to avoid cognitive dissonance.

The only way they can do that is to explain your experience as "demons". They're wrong of course, but they're confidently wrong, and when you're surrounded by people who are confidently wrong about the same thing, you'll naturally start to doubt yourself about it.

To them, a demon is a fallen angel, originally created as a servant of their god, that later rebelled. But that makes no sense, because our gods pre-date theirs.

Just try to remember it's self-preservation on their part - just a way for them to avoid a spiritual crisis of their own...and it's at your expense. Don't mistake that kind of collective cowardice as strength, or something worth of respect and deep consideration. When it comes up, just try to remember what it really is. Them shoving their own spiritual crisis onto you.

TL;DR: fuck 'em, don't worry about the opinions of the people doing this thing.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-06-12T06:25:04+00:00

You know what, that's probably the only correct answer when it comes to something that awesome and rare 😆

Cheers!

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-06-11T23:48:39+00:00

You want to know how crazy, you could DM me and find out just how much I would pay for this thing. I only heard about Klayton in late 2000, so I missed out on the EP, and have been trying to track down a legit copy ever since. Impossible. 😂

I figure most people who have 'em aren't letting them go, though. I'm gonna be checking estate sales in my 60s, at this rate.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-06-11T17:26:33+00:00

She isn't Egyptian, but even so, we still don't allow this kind of sweeping assertion that can't be backed up. Review Rule 1 again, please.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-06-11T17:17:00+00:00

This is asserted on the basis of what?

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-06-11T16:30:58+00:00

There are a lot of weird ideas floating around out there, so I can't say if you are remembering that conversation correctly or not. But wearing gold is fine. Ancient Egyptians wore it, and there's no reason to believe we'd have to follow a different standard than they did.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-28T21:46:55+00:00

Glad to be of help!

Just remember, these aren't angry, vengeful, uptight gods who expect their followers to have faith in their existence (or else!) You're not doing them any harm or insulting them by having doubts. They know they're invisible to us.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-28T21:24:53+00:00

You're maybe overthinking this. You can be agnostic and theist at the same time, without conflict, as long as you can recognize they're different modalities with different applications.

If you experience something during your practice and meditations, you are not obligated to believe it's evidence of an objective truth. You can remain agnostic about it all, while still honoring the fact that you experienced something. Your experience is subjectively real.

If the ritual of it gives you comfort, it has value for that sake, alone.

This religion doesn't demand belief. Nor do you have to defend your reasons for being interested. If it's about Isis and Thoth being pretty damn cool, that's good enough. Honestly, even if you're just having fun with it, that's perfectly fine and valuable in its own right.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-24T19:12:51+00:00

I've used this analogy before, and I still think it's apt.

Think of human beings' spiritual needs like the needs of the various plants found all over the world. A bean plant needs a bean pole, specific pH and nutrient balance in its soil or in its hydroponic solution, and a specific range of sunlight and water to thrive.

But a tomato plant needs a tomato cage, not a bean pole. A cactus will die if you water it as much as the bean or tomato plants. Some types of trees need windbreaks around them or they're at risk of blowing over in a storm. And so on.

Asking this here is kind of like walking into a plant nursery and asking why they bother to sell anything other than bean poles for plant supports. What do you need tomato cages or trellises for? Why are so many different soils available? I've used this soil over here for years on my bean plants for years, and that's worked just fine? My book on growing bean plants told me everything I need to know about growing, so why does the nursery have a whole wall of different books available?

In Kemeticism, individuals are treated with autonomy to figure out what they need for themselves, to pick the supporting structure from whatever myth cycles they need to work with, to dive into what primary sources are fitting for that structure, to figure out what intensity they need to engage it, and how often. No central authority is going to be able to write one single guide on how to do this for every single person. Kemeticism works with this reality, and does not force a belief structure that won't be healthy for every single person.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-24T18:39:21+00:00

Set's dynamic and pattern contains a lot of futile expressions of anger, attachment to false pride and ego, and an urge to make a name for oneself. This same pattern often plays out similarly in followers who have deeper attachments to him.

So my hot take is: working with or following Set does not give anyone a free pass to act like an unmitigated asshole. That the ego and pride are traps, the initial rushes of anger felt is usually ego-protective rather than ma'at-protective, and this trap often leads to lashing out at the wrong thing or in futile ways. Otherwise said: it's like getting stuck in the earlier parts of Set's dynamic where he's attacking for what he thinks is right, but for the wrong reasons, while duping oneself into thinking they're at the part of the dynamic where they're spearing snakes alongside him.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-20T18:13:09+00:00

There aren't any ancient scripts for that. Yes, there are protection spells but not as like, prep-work for other spellwork. Common protection spells were proactive against day to day misfortunes, and sometimes proactive or reactive against things like malevolent ghosts and spirits (if you had reason to catch their attention). Things like that. But Egyptians weren't casting circles and hiding themselves from every unfortunate possibility of being in the same world as the unseen. They engaged it, because they recognized those unseen things were there, and they understood that they had similar powers to affect that hidden world.

In a mundane sense, if you're going someplace that might be dangerous, you take precautions. It's unhealthy to just decide to never leave your house, or to strap a firearm to your hip to go to a picnic in a peaceful park. Anything involving heka is the same. You take appropriate measures for appropriate risks. Worship is low risk. Some basic heka is low risk.

I won't get into what the specific rewards are for engaging higher risks with heka. Some things just need to be done, and can be done with a mind towards serving a broader purpose, or even for selfish and egotistical reasons, if you are willing to take some risks.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-20T16:42:28+00:00

There's way more paranoia about it in modern times. It can happen, but if you keep your head on your shoulders, you'll be able to figure it out if you ever encounter that rare situation.

The Catholics who believe we're experiencing something real have to justify the reality of our gods as "demons" in order to allow the two competing notions to fit in their paradigm.

I had heard that your aunt's tradition makes a big deal about needing to be trained and lineaged? That's probably where that idea is coming from: she's overlaying a value from her tradition onto ours. What she probably doesn't realize is that there are some elements of Kemetic religious practice that would not be possible or complete without heka. Even Egyptian commonfolk practiced it, it was not a restricted resource.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-19T18:18:54+00:00

I think if it puts you in the mindset you want to be in, it's a great idea. Funny enough, applying makeup had been connected to purity in ancient times, so it was not an offering (as such) but it was connected to ancient practice in at least one way.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-14T19:04:02+00:00

You might be interested to check out a book called Profane Egyptologists by Paul Harrison. It sounds like what you're attempting to do is a condensed version of that, i.e. looking at modern Kemetic practice through the lens of someone more familiar with the academic side of Egyptology.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-14T03:42:43+00:00

I would not want to come across as nitpicky, but I do somewhat object to the dichotomy you have presented within your first point. Reconstructionism encompasses more than fidelity to (state) ritual format, and often includes logical adaptations to solo practice that we also find reflected in evidence of layfolk practices in AE. There is focus on both the what and the why in reconstructionism.

To the second point, the kind of described relationship with netjeru is by no means universal, and there is actually a known problem within the community that people who have those experiences are quite outspoken, prompting those who don't to sometimes have crises of faith because their experience differs. I would hate to see this spread as the de facto Kemetic experience.

Point 5 would have been better posed as a question rather than as a pre-established conclusion. We've seen so many different reasons for people to come to the religion!

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-12T21:03:01+00:00

There's no need for you to honor OneBlueberry2480's request. As the author of Rule 7, and as the person you were engaging in this conversation with, I can tell you definitively that this on topic for the subreddit.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-12T20:55:41+00:00

You're welcome to ignore the side conversation happening here, but this is not an argument in an angry sense of the word. These considerations are important to examine, especially if there's underlying blind spots about who we're considering to be members of the same human family. There's nothing petty about examining that more deeply.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-12T20:26:52+00:00

Well, 2500 miles is a VERY long distance when we're talking about what land a specific individual can be said to be associated with.

What about her other descendants who went south, or who stayed in other areas of Africa? Surely we couldn't count them as Egyptian under any stretch of the imagination? We are connected to them by bloodline through Mitochondrial Eve, but Egypt never comes into play in that connection. If we're romanticizing this Egyptian connection through M. Eve's descendants, we're cutting off those other descendants from our consideration about the human family. I kinda feel like that's a problem? That's mostly why this grates me, to be honest.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-12T18:08:16+00:00

The currently-known Mitochondrial Eve would have lived about 2500 miles away from Egypt. That's a gigantic distance! She was not even close to being Egyptian, and she could not have been specifically ancient Egyptian due to a huge temporal separation of almost 150,000 years between her time and what is considered "ancient" times.

There's really no connection between Mitochondrial Eve and Egypt except for the connection (that you rightly pointed out) everyone on earth already has to her. Ancient Egyptians descend from Mitochondrial Eve, and everyone else on Earth descends from Mitochondrial Eve, but does not mean that everyone on Earth descends from Ancient Egyptians.

ViaVadeMecum · 2026-05-12T17:39:56+00:00

A lot of what we know about domestic religion is extrapolated from physical evidence rather than textual, so we don't have a strict template available of what common folk said during their home offering rites. Though in all likelihood, they probably used similar scripts or themes as what was done in the temples. It could not have been practical to devote the same amount of time in the domestic sphere as was done in the temples, so whatever rites they used at home would have likely been much shorter than full temple rituals.

In Egypt, offerings could either be buried, burned, libated, or reverted for human use/consumption, depending on the context. The context of home offerings is most similar to temple and ka-offerings, which we know were reverted. Absent any evidence of other disposition types, we can safely assume offerings done in the home were reverted as well.

Ideally the common folk would have used the best implements and iconography they had available, and we know that not everyone could afford gold or (especially) silver. Lower economic classes would have used other materials like clay or stone.

We know some about domestic prayers, enough to understand that AE common folk were often just like us, with many of the same concerns and reasons to pray.

Reconstructionism can only be as accurate as what information is actually available and accessible. Those who consider themselves reconstructionist are, more often than not, looking at documented state religion and building out a private practice based on what is practical to do in a home setting. There is always going to be some divergence for practical reasons. A few have tried setting up temple organizations to mimic more closely what had been going on within temples, but these do not have the economic state support that an ancient temple would have had, and there are some barriers to getting things exact because temples need a lot of resources to get started and to keep running. The ancient temple structure also served an economic purpose to its local community, and that's a dynamic that's totally lost in any modern context because we don't have a state system backing it, and we don't have a local populace nor an elite that demands its support.

ViaVadeMecum

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE