My wife brought our cat to the vet today. When she told the receptionist her name was Freya, she said oh my goodness you wouldn’t believe how common that name is for cats nowadays. Yes, I asked Freya if I could name my cat after her. So, I live in the south United States, in what’s called the Bible Belt. This is a deeply fundamentalist, right wing Christian territory. I live in a particularly small town. There is a church on every corner. The fact that people are using the names Thor, Freya, Loki, etc for their pets is thrilling to me. It gives me hope that there are heathens on the rise and the closed minded attitudes of the past are being laid to rest.
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i live in a Christian controlled area where there is churches littearly every where and and everyone is old fashioned Christians
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Nice, what is interesting, the Freya’s chariot was pulled by… cats 
these animals are her companions 
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@J.A.Ragnarson Heathens are on the rise here in central Arkansas of all places to. Pagans in general but I’m noticing a lot more Heathens around lately. Marvel probably has something to do with it.
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I live in the Bible too…
I havent seen the name Freya for a pet yet …
But Zeus and Thor are common here as well.
I’m happy about that I have a black cat who was wild that I started putting food out for I call her Bastet.
She’s very beautiful.
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I live in an area where people are either Hispanic Catholics or white Mormons and there is definetly a drop in church attendance in the youth and they aren’t going toward atheism surprisingly, instead going to the occult or new age beliefs. The Catholics around here recognize magick and if they can get away from the church, they often sneak off and consult the occultists. Apparently, there is a whole community of brujas somewhere near my hometown. Never met them, that I know of at least.
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If only I could help my own family break their chains… funny story though. I’ve actually seen a very prevalent fundamentalist Christian all of a sudden come out with a form of Tarot called angels speak as well as an Ouija board for speaking with angels. The Christians are freaking out over it lol
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Here it’s either Baptist, Methodist, or pentecostal
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Here if you aren’t specifically a Southern Baptist, no other form of Baptist or Christian in general is ok, then you got problems.
You should see the way people freaked out when the Satanic Temple wanted to put a Baphomet on the capital of the state. The state congress put up a teen commandments statue and the Satanist were trying to get the Baphomet to prove ba point about the ten commandments being discriminatory as an establiment of religion. They didn’t get the Baphomet put up, however the ten commandments statue only lasted 12 hours before someone demolished it.
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It’s all Southern Baptist and Pentecostal in my area with a smattering of Catholicism in the nearby cities. But I’ve run into a number of Pagan groups in my tiny towns. Mostly Wiccans and people who focus on ghost hunting, but I did run across a traditional coven out in the middle of nowhere right over the county line. They had thrown a Yule party disguised as a Christmas party and they sussed me out and talked to me all night after I ended up there by chance.
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I got my start in the occult as a non-denominational Christian. There was healing, prophecy, psychic readings, kundalini energy work, curses, astral projection, channeling, spellcasting… hell we did everything but Evocation of demons at my church, all under the name “Holy Spirit”. When I woke up to the truth I already knew how to enter the TGS and several other techniques you’d need as a black magician. My pastor would push people’s auras and make them fall down and they’d writhe on the ground all serpentine like. I can verify it wasn’t a sham because when he did it to me I lost all ability to stand for 15 minutes and when I got up (helped up by ushers) I started developing the ability to do that to others, developed psychic abilities and healing. For that, I thank the church. I found my spiritual self through it. What I hate is the dogma, the fire and brimstone, the mental slavery, and the fear-momgering judgmental bullshit. They’re so close to truth and yet aeons away. When I evoked Lucifer, the antithesis of the church, I realized he was truly the father of enlightenment not the father of lies…
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I guess your experiences highlight the fact even more that dogma is stupid and oppressive and that none of the paths have the monopoly on magic. My Pentecostal church leaders growing up were liars that believed their own lies, so I didn’t get the privilege of learning anything useful from them.
When I was about 11, I think something tried to communicate with me in a dream to get me on my way out of there. I had dreamed about that church parking lot. There was a tiny snake hole to the side and I went over to look at it. It started to grow and widen. Eventually, it had grown so large that others noticed and became afraid. When parked cars began to fall into it, the parishioners ran into the church for protection. They weren’t safe, the hole went under the foundations and swallowed the church piecemeal, and all the people in it. Then it was satisfied. It never came after me. The message seemed to be that those people were doomed or buried or mistaken, and that I didn’t have to go down with them.
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I meant to say bible belt 
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Nice dream. I take away a different understanding. I believe it meant the serpent had eaten ( taken over ) the church. It could have been anything. A sink hole. A tornado. A collapse of the building onto the people. But it was a snake hole. A serpent’s home. And the church was brought there with all its parishioners. Lucifer is in charge of the church.
It wasn’t a very sane or nurturing church. I don’t know how much credit Lucifer would have wanted to have with it. It was strict Pentecostal with rules about women’s forbiddance to cut their hair or wear jewelry or pants or make-up. The pastor and his wife lied about tongues and translations. Swore the world was going to end in 2000, and we were the only people who would be Raptured (not the other churches, just us).
The church in the dream was one we were borrowing from another church after we had been kicked out of the greater United Pentecostal Church organization and their buildings for being too weird and ultra-religious for them. During that time, the pastor preached the building fund until they were able to erect a steel built church beside the interstate. They call themselves Apostolic now.
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