I can't even begin to tell you how much this has impacted my life as a pagan. Discovering and integrating locality into my practice has brought me so much closer to my gods and to my environment. Why do you need to do this? Well, first of all, you don't. However, this a practice that is very much pagan, even the Ancients believed in local manifestations of a certain god, rather than on all-encompassing god who keeps an eye on everyone and everything. This kind of thinking has birthed a multitude of Isis-es Horus-es and quite a few of Hathor-s and Amun-s way back, all with their own domains, personalities, and lore.
What I mean by that is the necessity to discover and cultivate your own local manifestations of the gods. You can go about it in many different ways. I have used and still use three reliable methods together in my practice.
The first way is to read up and see which gods have historically been worshipped in your area. If they happen to be from a different pantheon, you start experimenting and see equivalences between your personal practice and the god in question.
Second, you can go out and see what kind of geography your area has and try to connect your local landmarks to gods (either by connecting them with already established gods and identifying equivalents in your practice like in the previous method, or by divination and meditation.
To proceed with these methods, try using these equivalents as epithets for your familiar gods. You will soon see that a great many of these gods will reach out to you, since yu developed this new lens of viewing them.
I, for example, worship the Egyptian pantheon and am lucky enough that these gods have been worshipped in my area historically, so it was easy to see which gods have already had a presence here. But not stopping at that, I also realised that since we have a big, ancient river flowing through our area, there must be another god hiding there. And there was. Admitted, Khnum was not known here, but his syncretism with the Slavic Vodan (a freshwater deity) has resulted me in getting to know who the patron of the Drava river is.
Speaking of Slavic deities, Since I am of Slavic origin, I try to combine these Egyptian gods with equivalent gods from the Slavic pantheon. I use the Slavic gods' names as epithets for my Egyptian gods, staying true to a Kemetic practice, but bringing the locality into it. This was necessary in order to escape my cognitive dissonance and feelings of religious impostorship. Face it, we are not Ancient Nilotic Egyptians and we do not live in a dessert. I left a foreign dessert religion whose lore has nothing to do with my place or my time (it's as if God created the rest of the world as an afterthought, right?), so I wasn't going back to a dessert religion with no reference to my locality and which happens to be dead and has to be reconstructed, this time either. Also, why would I worship Amun of Thebes, if Thebes is 4 thousand kilometers and 2 thousand years away from the here and the now? Amun of Thebes, or Khnum of Esna do not live here (I go as far to say they are dead gods and are only a shadow of their former selves and will continue to be that, until their local cult has been re-established!). However, their local manifestations surely are alive and well and we need to start talking to THEM!
This brings me to my next point: intuition and meditation. Whatever you choose to do here, make sure your gods agree and approve of it. I have been lucky enough to have a smooth transition to this new kind of thinking about the divine. The revelations just kept coming in. I have had only one instance where the god explicitly rejected their role. They let me know that I had made a mistake. And that's okay. Again, you need to leave them their space.
In conclusion, introducing locality to your pantheon strengthens your relationship with your existing gods, because you get a clearer image of who they are and what they appear to be like where you live. The gods are multifaceted and appear in a multitude of different ways depending on the time and the place. The rewards are manifold. You will be a conduit to so many gods, of whom you know, but also to new gods of whom you don't know, who were here all along and are trying to reach out to us, and have been for so long!
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