Kearil:
We’ve known of Raven Kaldera and the Northern Tradition folks he usually hangs with for quite a while – how could we not? – but we hadn’t done much poking around the Northern Paganism site before today. Another site linked me to one of NorthernPaganism.org’s virtual shrines and it was about as dangerous to our prior plans for the afternoon as TVTropes or Wikipedia. But more holy, so I don’t really feel guilty about that. ^_-
Of course I had to look for the god/desses we’ve interacted with more than a few times, and of course I had to see what others were saying about Niorun considering that there’s next to no information out there for her. And of course, when I found a copy of Shaynin’s personal account of our experiences with Niorun attributed to another author, it was pretty damn obvious.
The misattributed version is still live on NT.org at the time of this writing but Raven un-linked it from the parent page within minutes of sending him an e-mail about it – he assumed on good faith that it was written by the person who sent it to him. I think it’s reasonable to keep the page around “just in case”…I really wish we’d kept our e-mail correspondence with the supposed author, Bethany, “just in case”.
Yup, she contacted us several months after Shaynin’s Niorun piece went live and asked some questions; I originally thought that the oh-so-familiar text must have come from one of those e-mails, not realizing it was lifted from this blog.
This public blog. Yeah.
Granted, WordPress can alter timestamps so they’re not necessarily proof Shaynin wrote it before Bethany submitted it, but the use of plural pronouns to describe things that may not be true for other devotees of Niorun is either a smoking gun or an indication of assuming one’s personal experiences with a deity are the same as anyone else’s personal experiences with that deity. Either way, not cool. On this blog, it’s pretty clear from context that we’re talking about our own experiences and not necessarily what others will experience; over there, not so much.
I offered to write something that made it clearer which parts are likely subjective, Raven said that would be nice, I sent him something, and hopefully it’ll be up there soon, credited to Clan Nautilus. We’ve had too much social anxiety to go mix with the NT community but this makes me think there are some really good reasons for mustering up the spoons and the courage. Like making sure people can tell what’s our work and not someone else’s. Like seeing people link to, or ask us to rehost, things we write that they think are helpful rather than seeing someone else submit it to a site without acknowledging or telling us.
We never approved Bethany’s comment when she made contact with us and we’re not planning to, because it contains her e-mail address – in a form that could easily be eaten up by spambots, no less. But we’re keeping it in our pending comments, “just in case”. And if you see an e-mail address beginning with bethany6996, or another address coming from a Bethany H., be alert. It could be a prelude to your content winding up on someone else’s site, under her name.
And while I’m posting…we have discovered how easy it is to install WordPress on the hosting provider we plan to use for our Web 1.0-style site, if and when we get off our ass long enough to make said site, so it’s likely that at some point we’ll move this blog again. The copy here will probably be left as-is, “just in case”, but we’ll also copy everything over to the new location. I’m not sure when we’ll be in the swing of writing again, but we’re getting into the swing of spiritual exploration again and it would be nice to also resume writing here regularly. The focus may change, as we warned in the last entry, but the skepticism we felt is largely gone and we’ll probably still be getting mystical on a regular basis.
Until then, may others be excellent to you, and for the love of the gods please cite your sources.