I am a Devotional Polytheist, with a primarily revivalist sensibility. I do a lot of reconstructing of ancient rituals and practices, but I wouldn't call myself a reconstructionist: I don't stick with one culture, I practice a fair amount of non-historical syncretism, I involve a lot of Unverified Personal Gnosis (my personal experiences with the Gods, whether or not those experiences match what ancient people would have believed), and there are some aspects of my overall religious practice that are honestly downright eclectic (practically a pejorative term in some reconstructionist circles).
I have been both fully reconstructionist and fully eclectic in the past, and find both of these—along with everything in-between—have their own merits and downsides. What I want to write about today, though, are some personal tips I have when it comes to building a modern devotional practice around ancient Gods. Most of my examples will be Ancient Egyptian/Kemetic related, because that's where the bulk of my experience is.
I am not among those who would argue you absolutely can't practice polytheistic revival religions alone. If you stay at home, do your daily shrine rituals to your Gods, and never speak with another polytheist in your life, you're still a valid polytheist and your worship is still valuable to those Gods.
But it's definitely not preferred.
OK, if you've decided already that you don't give a fuck about anything your Gods' ancient worshipers did to worship them, and you're just going to completely wing it and worship them in an entirely modern, self-driven way, or using a Wiccan ritual structure, or whatever else, that's your prerogative and you can feel free to read absolutely nothing but instructional guides for modern Pagans if you so choose. Lots of people do it this way, and it seems to work perfectly fine for them. As far as I'm concerned, as long as you aren't misrepresenting history, this is entirely between you and your Gods.
But most people I have met who worship ancient Gods from dead religions have at least some desire to revive something about those ancient cultures, and if you're in that category, I strongly suggest that you start with reading resources by archaeologists and historians. These are people who are trying to paint an accurate picture of how those Gods were actually worshiped in antiquity, and who will present evidence for it. In all likelihood, if you're drawn to a particular ancient culture or pantheon, you probably already have been doing this, but even after making the jump to actually worshiping them, I'd encourage you to stick with these sources for at least a little while.
To be clear, you can and should read resources written by practitioners, too! Modern revivalists and reconstructionists have done a lot of work over the years to create modern living traditions, there's no reason to re-invent the wheel. The problem is that, for many years, there has been a problem where practitioners don't clearly express where the rituals and practices they talk about came from, leading people who engage with those works to believe they are practicing something ancient when they really aren't. A lot of guidebooks have been written that imply they are reconstructionist or revivalist, when really they are repackaging Wicca with the aesthetic of some ancient culture overlaid upon it. Others have developed new rituals and practices that get misrepresented, if not by themselves, then by other people who engage with their works.
For instance, in Kemetic Orthodoxy, they have a few rituals and practices that are completely modern, but that are presented in a way that low-key implies there is some ancient practice they are based on. In this religion, if you want to become Shemsu (a full member), a divination is done to determine which Gods are your "Parents" (the Gods who made you) and which Gods are your "Beloveds" (Gods who didn't make you, but have some special interest in your life). Their rationale for this is that, if we were born in Ancient Egypt, we would have had Ancient Egyptian parents, and we would have essentially inherited our Gods from them because people tended to worship the Gods of their cities and occupations, which would likely have been the same as your parents' cities and occupations. Most people are aware that there was no ancient precedent for this practice, but even people who left the religion in a huff and started their own tended to keep aspects of this practice. For instance, they might have "Parents" and "Beloveds," they just pick them on their own rather than submitting to a divination. Which, sure, that's fine, but I've met plenty of Kemetic worshipers who actually think the Parent/Beloved thing is from antiquity, when it isn't.
Kemetic Orthodoxy is absolutely riddled with examples of practices that are either completely modern or have very weak ties to ancient practices. Getting a special Kemetic-language name only after you've made vows to the Gods that were divined for you? Not ancient, in Ancient Egypt that was just your regular name. Fedw divination, a divination practice in which you learn to answer "yes" and "no" questions using the four sticks Ancient Egyptians used as dice for playing games? Not ancient. To be clear: I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with Kemetic Orthodoxy creating its own modern traditions. Participating in some of these traditions (including the extremely controversial Rite of Parent Divination I went through many years ago) have been some of the most spiritually significant moments of my life. But I was also fully aware of where these practices came from... and I'm not confident everybody else who did it alongside me was.
People who start off an Ancient Egyptian revivalist practice in Kemetic Orthodoxy or a Kemetic religion based on it run the risk of absorbing and learning things that are just not quite true about Ancient Egyptian religion (which then get proliferated as historical inaccuracies), or of running into dead ends when doing their own research. A lot of people think that fedw is an ancient divination method, and try researching how to do it themselves, only to find nothing because it's a modern innovation that was developed as a closed practice.
And also... it can help you learn things about that culture without potentially being indoctrinated with a bunch of modern racist Pagan ideology. Which brings me to my next point:
A lot of Pagans and other polytheists gravitate toward Gods that they believe their ancestors would have worshiped. This is fine and makes perfect sense... especially here in America, a lot of us have been alienated from our cultural histories, whether through voluntary assimilation by our immigrant ancestors, forced assimilation by churches and the government, displacement, slavery, the list goes on. It makes sense that people would want to learn more about where they came from, and to revive religious and cultural traditions representing that, in an effort to fill the void left by that alienation. I will admit that—quite problematically—I felt a lot of joy when I got my 23andMe results and found evidence of significant Scandinavian and Egyptian ancestries, because most of my Gods are Norse and Kemetic.
But ultimately, was I going to completely change who I worshiped due to these results? Not really... I mean, I've added a few practices and introduced myself to a few Gods based on populations that popped up I had no idea were in my ancestry, but for the most part I have stuck with the Gods I developed strong relationships with.
An open, complete non-secret is this: The revivalist and reconstructionist Pagan communities are swarming with racists. It's just a fucking fact that a lot of (especially white) people decide to worship "the Gods of their ancestors" because they have developed convoluted ideologies supporting deeply racist beliefs. Norse Pagans have to deal with this a lot; a number of quite large Norse religious communities are basically full of people who rejected Christianity because they didn't want to worship a brown Jewish man, and decided to go all-in on pre-Christian European Paganism. Over the years these people have come up with a whole bunch of ideology that supports their racism but has very little actual grounding in the ancient practices they are claiming to revive. Some of this is really obvious, but just as much is really subtle, so non-racist Pagans get covertly indoctrinated into racist beliefs.
A great example of this is the moral codes commonly used in Norse Paganism, such as the Nine Noble Virtues and Nine Charges. These are sets of moral guidelines written in the 1970s and 1980s by white supremacist Norse Pagans, and they continue to be used by white supremacist Norse Pagan groups, but they are vague and subtle enough that they do not immediately drive away non-racists interested in Norse Paganism, who may assume that they have at least some ancient origin story. Because they are so vague as to be easily intepreted non-racistly, there are endless blog posts out there from Norse Pagans defending them, acting like it's super obvious they aren't racist, and while I'm sure plenty of them are disingenuous white supremacists, the reality is that it is really easy to be tricked into thinking these are just racially-neutral Norse values because of how ubiquitous they are in Norse Pagan resources. I also see people frequently defend the use of the winged othala rune and black sun as cases of Nazis "appropriating Norse symbols," even though both of these symbols originated with the Nazis.
Pagans and Polytheists who hold beliefs like this also tend to hold other regressive ideologies, such as homophobia, transphobia, and general misogyny, but like their racist beliefs, they tend to couch these beliefs in terminology that isn't as outwardly bigoted-sounding. They really like promoting "traditional gender roles" and have aesthetics that are aggressively gendered. A lot of Norse Pagan men try to frame having a beard as a religious requirement, the way it's treated in Islam, Sikhism, etc. The times I've seen them pressed to explain why, the explanations they've given have generally boiled down to it being a signifier of mature masculinity in Ancient Norse culture, not a real religious mandate, and frankly the underlying reason they are so into beards is because they are cosplaying toxic hypermasculinity, not because the Gods want them to. Mind you: None of these people are otherwise dressing like Ancient Norse men, who had an aesthetic a lot of men today would consider borderline effeminate. They latch onto beards because they are a popular modern signifier of hypermasculinity that Norse men also happened to consider culturally important. Don't take this as if I'm somehow anti-beard—I have a lot of beard going on, myself—but this kind of gender politics should always be taken as a red flag that you're dealing with a group that is peddling bullshit.
Weirdly, a Pagan TikToker I saw today brought up a quote by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan that I found really relevant here: "The past has a vote, not a veto." It is very valuable, in my opinion, to look at the values and cultural and religious practices of the ancient people whose Gods we venerate as a strong source of guidance and inspiration, but sometimes they were just... wrong. They didn't have all the information they needed to understand things, or they were willfully stupid about them. And where they weren't necessarily "wrong," they still came to these conclusions in a specific context that may not be relevant to us in the 2020s. And it is our responsibility to allow our faiths to evolve and adapt to that knowledge.
A lot of ancient cultures were, by today's standards, pretty homophobic. There's a lot of retconning that goes on, where people point out the numerous archaeological and mythological examples of same-sex relations in the ancient world, but most cultures were still viewing homosexuality through a misogynistic lens. A man having sex with another man wasn't necessarily considered bad, but there were usually caveats depending on the culture, such as the receptive partner being heavily stigmatized, or needing to be very young, because that role is acting like a woman, which would be bad, right?
Occasionally these dynamics would be semi-codified in the writings of that culture... there's a whole thing in the Contendings of Horus and Set where Set asks Horus to have sex with him. Horus agrees, and takes the receptive role, but he catches Set's semen in his hand instead of in his... uh... body. He then goes to Set's garden and ejaculates on his lettuce, tricking him into consuming it. Later, Set boasts about what happened, asking the rest of the Gods to call forth his semen from Horus's body to prove he had had sex with him, but the plan backfires because his semen is in the Nile. Horus proclaims that, actually, Set was the receptive partner, and the Gods call forth his semen, which comes out of Set.
A lot of modern Kemetic polytheists have reframed this as proof Ancient Egyptians were fine with homosexuality, but the subtext of this story is that being the receptive partner makes you weak and unfit for rulership, because you are taking the role of a woman in sex.
While there are plenty of cultures that still hold beliefs like this, in general we have evolved to understand that a lot of these assumptions are wrong. Gay men having sex are not in some battle for domination over each other, taking a receptive role doesn't make you weak or womanly, and for that matter, women aren't weak. It doesn't matter if ancient polytheists thought otherwise, we know they were wrong, so it is our responsibility to adapt our traditions and reframe our mythology accordingly.
"But the Gods said"—it doesn't matter! Everybody who has ever gotten messages from the Gods, whether short prophecies or pages-long epics, has translated those messages through their own biases. Mythology tells us a lot about the general character and interests of our Gods, but the actual stories conflict with each other a lot, because people throughout history have interpreted things differently. It is important to remember that we are not Christians, we are not obligated to create a canon of approved stories constituting "the truth" that everybody is required to acknowledge and argue over, we are free to adapt our beliefs and conceptions of the Gods to align with our current understanding of things.
Happy Trails,
Wolfpeach