Defining my path

Once again, life got in the way of me blogging. But I'm back again, starting the new year off well.

I might as well kick off the year with a more thorough explanation of my personal religion, my path--or, rather, where I am on my path at this point in time. It might provide some context, and more personally, writing it all down helps me to understand what I'm doing and who I am.

At present, I describe myself a syncretic Roman reconstructionist. My primary religious and spiritual practices are Roman in character and structure. My household rituals are Roman, most of the gods I worship are Roman, and the concepts I use to elucidate my spirituality are mostly Roman. I use a modernized form of the Roman civil and liturgical calendar, and I celebrate most Roman festivals using Roman rituals.
At the same time, I do perform rituals outside of what is traditionally Roman. Even if I use Roman models for some of these practices, they are not things the Romans themselves did (though I can argue some of them are things the Romans would have done, if they were around today and lived where I live). I worship gods that certainly belonged to ethnicities and time periods quite distant from the Classical Romans and Greeks. I worship ecstatic Greek mystery gods; I worship the gods of my Celtic ancestors; I worship local gods and the spirits of dead heroes pertaining to the nation of my birth and residence, the United States of America.

I do not see this variety as un-Roman. The  Romans were syncretic, and I would argue that their syncretism is what afforded Roman religion its success in the ancient world. It had the ability to adapt and absorb the local cults and customs of people and places upon whom the Romans left their mark. Even for individual Romans, religion didn't stop at the home and in the public, state festivities; mystery religions were quite popular, as were cults to foreign gods--though often in a Romanized form. The Roman army had considerable freedom of religion, and a great variety in shrines, votives, inscriptions, and offerings abounds in Roman military sites. Syncretism is not antithetical to Romanitas, so long as Roman custom is honoured. I think of myself a Hellenized Romano-Briton, if that helps conceptualise things; I am of mostly Celtic heritage, and that is important to me; but my main religious framework is Graeco-Roman. This is something that has clear precedent in Classical Antiquity, evidenced by the rather heavy Hellenization of Roman civilisation after the 1st century BCE and by the considerable admixture of Roman and indigenous cultures in the British Isles.

Broadly, as my sacra publica, I follow the  Roman calendar and celebrate Roman festivals. I worship the Capitoline Triad, the Dii Consentes, and other Roman gods that the traditional festivals honour. In addition, I worship some local gods in a Roman manner, particularly Columbia, the personification and patron goddess of my homeland.
My domestic cult is primarily Roman in character, and I worship the lares, the penates, the local spirits, Jupiter, Juno, Janus, and Vesta in Roman rituals at my household shrine at regular intervals. I celebrate a series of three Roman and three Greek days of religious significance each month, as part of my household rites: the Kalends, the Nones, and the Ides to mark the beginning, first week, and middle of the civil month, and the Noumenia, Dikhomenia, and Hene kai Nea to mark the start, height, and end of the lunar month. I also worship my ancestral goddess Brigid/Brigantia in a sacra privata, as she too is a goddess of the hearth and home.
Connected to my domestic cult is a cult of the dead; this is an area where my syncretism is a bit obvious, as I celebrate beyond the Roman festivals to the dead at the Parentalia, Feralia, and Lemuria, but also the Celtic festival of the dead at Samhain, and the American holiday of Memorial Day. I honour my dead ancestors, those who died in service to their country, and the spirits of the dead as a whole. I also pay homage to gods who rule over and guide the dead during these times.

Now, here comes my more specific sacra privata:
I celebrate a Hellenistic fertility cult, focused on Demeter, Persephone, Pan, Plouton, and Dionysos in their roles as agricultural and rustic fertility deities, and is based around the mythical abduction and return of Persephone. The main festivals for this are the Demeter festivals of Proerosia and Thesmophoria in October and Haloa in late December. I hesitate to describe it as Eleusinian, as the mysteries died out at the end of Classical Antiquity and it would sacreligious to pretend at recreating them without being initiated; but I am influenced by what is known about Eleusinian theology.
I celebrate the life and deeds of Dionysos. I would not necessarily describe this as Dionysian Mysteries, as it is not an initiatory faith, but it does involve my developing attempt at a personal relationship with Dionysos and what his mythical deeds mean to humanity. I have a pattern of festivals I follow, some ancient and some less-ancient.
I cultivate the worship of an array of Celtic gods, primarily those of South Britain and those of Alba/Caledonia. My ancestry is heavily rooted in both area, and I have long sought a connection to that heritage through spirituality and religion. I celebrate the main four Celtic high holy days, and I worship Celtic gods in a traditional manner on these days, and on the days of the Full Moon each month. There is a considerable overlap in Celtic and Roman values, in that both uphold hospitality and reciprocity and sacred, and both place emphasis on honour and emotion. In particular, I honour Brigid/Brigantia, Epona/Rhiannon, Nodens/Nuada/Lludd, Lugus/Lu/Llew, Danu/Don, and the Continental god Cernunnos.

As you can see, religion can be a bit complicated. It helps sometimes to compartmentalise it into distinct cults, into sacra publica and sacra privata, into cultures, into traditions. But aspects of them weave together, because the gods, the spritual forces, and our lives can't be bolted down, boxed up, and constrained. They are part of a bigger, interconnected world--which I think is an idea that features well into Paganism both ancient and modern.