Why I'm Not Accepting Applications

More a humorous title than anything else. No one ever sent me a formal application. So, what am I writing about here?

About once a week on average, I recieve an email from someone asking me to teach them about Aztec religion. When I first started this website almost five years ago, I never believed it would reach that point. After my site had been up about a year and a half and I started to recieve these emails, I thought it was great. I wanted to help new people practice this religion if that was where their interests brought them. I still do. For a while, I tried to respond to everyone who wrote to me and to help them the best I was able. The more I wrote, the more people seemed to write to me. Some of the people who wrote to me were very serious about their interest in this religion, and I still converse with many of these people to this day. Some of them I don't talk to anymore, because we lost track of each other somewhere down the line or they no longer felt the need for my help, but during the time we spoke I found them to be respectable and dedicated individuals. Some people had no desire to actually practice the religion, but were respectul and curious about aspects of it. I even got contacted for information by an author writing a story about the conquest era. All of these were enjoyable interactions to me.

However, some of the people who wrote to me weren't that serious. Some of them asked questions, but only wanted to be told what they wanted to hear. Some of them were downright lazy. Some of them were creeps who feigned an interest in the religion only to try to goad me into conversations that they could get off on. To be honest with you, more people fell into these categories than the good ones. I kept getting more and more email. Meanwhile, my life situation changed in such a way that I had less time for pretty much everything in my personal life. These emails were and are time consuming to write - conversations with people of genuine interest tended to become more and more complex and lengthy over time. People who weren't worth my effort were often not obvious at first, and required some time talking to them before their real motives were clear. I also started to get some people who just made me uncomfortable, because for whatever reason, they felt the need to put me on a sort of "holy pedestal" which I damn well don't belong on - I'm talking about people calling me their "sacred priest" and other such things. Which, might I add, I did not approve of, solicit or encourage. It creeped me out big time, actually. That was usually a cause to cease communication with someone almost immediately.

I started to get burned out. Really burned out. I'm naturally rather introverted anyway, so dealing with all these people was taxing all by itself. Throw into the mix the growing time constraints, the growing number of demands, and the growing amount of bullshit and we're talking about some serious consequences. It started to effect many different aspects of my life. It even started dragging my own spirituality down. When this happened, everything pretty much ground to a halt. I stopped writing to almost everyone - even people that I had been talking to for a long time or who I knew were very serious about it. It got to the point where I wouldn't even write back to the first email I recieved from someone anymore, no matter how simple the question seemed. I just stopped. I couldn't do it anymore. This, in turn, made me feel terrible. I felt like I was failing everyone, including the gods. That's an unpleasant place to be in. I didn't really give a damn about the people who had proven themselves to be a waste of my time, but there were a lot of good people that deserved more than that. But, I just couldn't give it to them anymore.

I finally came to realize that this whole thing is about effort. I put a lot of effort into learning this religion. When I started it, no one else was doing it as far as I could tell. I pieced everything together myself, and being that it is a reconstruction, it's also an ongoing process that I'm still doing today. I made and maintain this website, which took a hell of a lot of time, effort, thought, and even money. I am working on an update for this site which will include some actual information on the how's of modern practice, at least as far as I practice if, which I realize have previously not been detailed much here. Meanwhile, I am once again starting to email people as much as my time constraints allow. However, I am no longer agreeing to "teach" people this religion. It isn't because I don't think that people are worthy of my knowledge, or that I don't want to share what I know. It is partially due to the above mentioned time constraints, partially due to the culmination of my experiences agreeing to "teach" people this religion, and partially due to the fact that I don't really feel like I am the great bad ass Aztec master.

All self-effacing aside, I do know a lot more about this subject than a lot of people (not all people, but a lot of people). I'm not going to pretend that I don't. But, and this is the key here: I don't know anything that you can't know. Everything that I know is out there, available for anyone to learn! My reading list is a good set of texts that I recommend to start out with, many of them the very same books I got my first information from myself. From my experience, I learned that one of the biggest clues as to whether or not someone had serious potential on this path was how much effort they were willing to put forth to learn these things themselves. I was, and still am, more than happy to point people in the right direction, share experiences and opinions, and generally communicate with people of like interests. But I found that a lot of people wanted me to spend my time essentially writing what amounted to a bunch of research papers just for their benefit, because they themselves were too lazy to spend the time to figure out thing one. The information is out there, I assure you. To this day, the people that I most respect are those that took a little bit of information and ran with it - and who had usually accumulated some decent information before emailing me. People who in many ways have surpassed me in knowledge now. I know a lot, I have a lot of experience, but I'm nothing special. So, while I am once again responding to emails again as time allows, and I do not mean to discourage anyone from writing to me if they want to strike up a conversation or have a question, I'm not taking any kind of official teaching role to anyone. I will, if I possess the information, direct you to resources that can help you if you're stuck. I'll answer simple questions, maybe even more detailed questions if I feel like it and have time. And I'm open to potential friendships with like-minded people. But I'm not holding anyone's hand, and I'm not doing all the work for anyone who can't crack a book for themselves.

If you're interested in the modern practice of this religion but don't know how to go about it because of the lack of information, I assure you that I am working on an update to this site that will serve as a sort of readable "course" on it. But, I am not doing this on a detailed individual basis, and will be offering it more for general knowledge and use, which you may take or leave as you see fit. If you're just starting on this path, my biggest recommendation to you is to research. Read, read, read. Some colleges even offer classes on these topics, which is worth looking into if you're already a student. Search the internet, but don't take anything that someone online (INCLUDING myself) says at face value. People can be wrong. I can be wrong. Some unscrupulous individuals even make things up for a buck or simply because it's what they'd like to believe. The only advantage over that that I can offer, and which I can assure only by my word and some references, is that I have done my best to offer what I have personally found most likely to be factual information, and that I have done my best to base my practices on that information. So, while the internet is valuable and shouldn't be thrown away as a tool, I encourage those with a serious desire to learn this to do the bulk of their looking elsewhere... primary sources, history and anthropology texts, etc. It's what I did, it's what others that I have found to be knowledgable have also done, and it, rather than the internet, should be your staple source for information.

If you are interested in a social environment with several other opinions to hear from, you will find a few email groups listed in the links section of this site that deal with topics of modern Mesoamerican religious practice and general reconstructionist traditions. Again, like anything else on the internet, these are not sources of ultimate knowledge (nor are any of them run by me, in case you were wondering), but they can be good places to hear the opinions of more than one person and to share knowledge and resources with the intent of building a community of like-minded people.

With all that in mind, I once again offer to correspond with others on these topics, within reason. Although, if you do choose to write to me, keep in mind that my time constraints are still in effect and that you may need to be patient for a reply. I don't mean any of the above to sound overly harsh or to completely discourage people from emailing me, but it was and is the reality of my situation in regards to accepting "students" over the internet.