Extraterrestrial wiccans, pagans and the like

[kengr]

Dunno if I'd actually, use this in a story, but I figure that it's an interesting question in its own right.

What affect would being on another planet have on pagan/wiccan practices?

Both other places in the solar system, Mars, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn , etc and colonies on earth-like worlds around other stars.

Lack of the moon, *being* a moon, and in the casae of extra-solar colonies, the very constellations being different would be the merest beginning.

so, anybody have ideas?

Comments

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Well consider for a moment that I follow the religion of a culture from another planet, a planet with three moons and virtually no seasons. I suspect neopagans of many kinds would adapt to new worlds. They'd probably still pray to their original Mother, as well as to their adoptive Mother.

Heh, now consider the possibilities of neopagans on a terraformed planet/moon. Which would kinda make that world the literal child of Mother Earth, via the humans.

[kengr]

More fun. What if it wasn't "terraformed" by humans?

For that matter, if there are natives on a planet, what affect will *their* "spirituality" have on things?

If magic, spirits, gods etc are real, then you *definitely* need to take the locals into account.

Heck, even among humans you get big differences. If you've ever seen shogun, one of the interesting historical bits is that the Jesuits in Japan at that time started wearing orange instead of black, because that was what the Japanese priests and monks wore. Black signified something else that wasn't appropriate. and then there was white being the color for mourning...

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Yup. On Traipah, in the Yahgahn culture white is a color of death (for bones and sometimes skin of corpses) and black is a color of creation because from their perspective the world came from the black of the heavens. And while the Yahgahn culture would interpret green as a good color, cultures of the other two species native to Traipah would not so much (or at least certain shades wouldn't be), because they're carnivores and green isn't a good color for meat to be. Also the Duenicallo are a furred species as fastidious as cats and would generally consider algae growing in their fur to be a bad thing.

Oh, and it would be funny to watch Christian missionaries try to convert the people of Traipah in general when Christianity is so full of plot holes, contradictions, and all sorts of nonsense, it would be most hilarious watching them trying to speak to Duenicallo of the Gosgolot culture; one mistranslation of "son" to the Gosgolot word for "sun" and all hell breaks loose, because that culture fears the sun as an angry god-monster. And good luck trying to sell them on the idea of worshiping an all-powerful God when their only concept of all-powerful gods is the kind of thing where they'd think Lovecraft was adorable. "A blind idiot god? He'd get eaten alive in our pantheon."