Novelist R. A. Ramsey is looking to portray otherkin respectfully and intelligently in an upcoming book of hers--which is always a valuable goal! Wanna help her out? Look here.
My answers (warning: it's long):
1. How old were you when you realized that you were Otherkin/Therian? - I was 18 or so when I started having stirrings of otherkin per se, but I'd been "odd" as long as I could remember. I only came to terms with it when I was about 20 or so.
2. How did that realization come about? - I stumbled across some otherkin materials online, scoffed at it, moved on my way--and proceeded to be haunted by it for weeks, months..and gradually, over time, years. I ended up with a physical symptom that wouldn't go away, namely phantom wings coming out of my shoulderblades. Psychosomatic? Maybe, but even if so it was (and is) reflecting something deeper psychologically--namely me identifying with that nice big word 'otherkin'. Eventually I let go of the "but that's crazy!" struggle and grabbed hold of it with both hands as word that reflects who and what I am, and I haven't let go!
3. What was it like those first few years of trying to understand what was going on? - It was scary and upsetting. I'd always comforted myself with the idea that people who believed "that sort of thing" were most definitely and certainly crazy, and then falling into the crazy camp wasn't really very comforting. I tried to talk it out with a few friends but they weren't interested and dismissed it as "crazy" and thankfully it hasn't come up since since I don't think they'd be very open-minded or friendly about it--I've actually been known to make fun *of my own subculture* to them, without of course announcing what I am, to deflect suspicion and probably deal with my own insecurities. I dealt with varying stages of "this is crazy: I must be faking this" for easily two years before I finally threw up my hands, said the hell with it, and accepted what seemed to be going on.
4. Did you have anybody you could talk to? How did they help you get through this? - I tried bringing it up to some real-life friends, as I described above, but that didn't go so hot. Eventually I made a LiveJournal at maybewinged.livejournal.com (mostly defunct, although has a few essays on it still) to discuss stuff. I friended some people whose writing I liked, out of the blue, and they had the courtesy to friend me back and comment on my entries and generally cheer me through the whole scary process. I never got a very personal connection with any of them, unfortunately, at least on that journal--my "real" LJ, which I keep wholly separate from that one for privacy reasons, is where I talk with those people. It's kind of like I'm living a double-life, and I don't really like it.
Nowadays, however, I've met an otherkin in real life. We chat. I'm still largely in the process of awakening (I have no idea what I am in particular, other than that I'm "something fey"), and discussing things is helping me fine it down. I'm sure it helps her out too. :)
5. How does being Otherkin/Therian affect your everyday life? - It's hard for me to say--I've been otherkin to some degree all my life, so I don't really have a basis for context for how it'd be to be any other way. (In my case, it's a current of energy that I seem to naturally fall into, so yes it's a matter of degree.) There are a number of 'symptoms' that I gather are somehow related, like migraines with intense, vivid aura; synesthesia; ease of astral projection; and ease of connection with spiritual entities, and spiritual possession in ritual. Maybe the most practical and obvious way in which it affects my everyday life is in that it's *obvious* that I'm odd somehow--make me up in pretty makeup, dress me in nice clothes, but there'll still be something a little too intense and strange in my eyes. It really does affect the way people treat me, and the 'vibe' I give off--it makes me a little standoffish, I think. (An ex called it a "powerful" look--what a compliment!) --again, it's hard to discuss this because you're asking me to specifically describe something that's been interwoven through my whole life to varying degrees, so pulling out something from my life and saying "x is because of y and z" is hard.
6. How does it affect the way you view the world? - It's given me a sense of the wild, spiritual, and free, that I feel is more integrated with my life than it would be otherwise; I'm not prodding gently at the mysteries from the outside, and instead I'm engrossed in them wholeheartedly since I embody a part of them. I expect I wouldn't be bisexual, as liberal as I am, a heathen and magician, or that I would have such a strong environmentalist streak if I weren't otherkin at my core. Again, that's a hard question to answer in particulars. "It makes me wilder, feyer, and freer" isn't much of a useful answer to you...
7. Do you have any physical manifestations of your “animal self” such as cravings, markings, etc? - That look in the eyes, again. I store tension in my "wings" that I've been looking into releasing through stretching (in the physical) and qigong (in the energetic and the astral)--it gives me a real desire for backrubs. I expect I end up putting on glamours that make me look variously "fey" but I'm the wrong person to ask on how those turn out.
8. How did your family and friends react when you “came out” about being Otherkin/Therian? - I haven't done this. I only come out to people who come out to me first, and the only person who's done that for me has been the aforementioned real-life friend I'm still piecing stuff out with.
9. Have you experienced any discrimination because of being Otherkin/Therian? - Nope, and I'm deliberately laying low so as to not attract it. I'm applying for grad school this year and don't want anything attached to me when they google my name that might result in me getting the hairy eyeball during the application practice, so I'm doing everything very deliberately pseudonomically, and I am not out to friends and family.
10. If you are part of the Pagan community, what has been the reaction from them? - Haven't brought it up. Pagans are actually some of the *least* friendly toward the idea of otherkin, IMO. The desire to "not look fluffy" results in a whole lot of backlash.
General Questions
1. Is there a predominance of one animal type within the Otherkin/Therian community or is it a broad mix? - There's a broad mix, I think, but certain types are more common than others. You're way more likely to find dragons and elves, for instance, than you will imps and goblins.
2. Do the animal types tend to be more of the larger four-footed variety? Or does it include smaller animals, reptiles, birds, and even insects? - There are all sorts of animals out there, but I won't deny that mammals are more common than others. That said, I don't really "do" the Therian thing--they've got a lot in common with otherkin but I just don't hang with them.
3. Do Otherkin/Therians have two souls – both animal and human or is it one combined soul? - In my case it's one combined soul, but I know that plenty of 'kin are "multiple systems" with two or more souls.
4. Do Otherkin/Therians lean more towards Pagan/Non-Judeo Christian beliefs or are there Christian Otherkin/Therians? - I think they do in general, although I'd describe otherkin as more leaning toward "magic" than religion. We may or may not be interested in God(s) but we're definitely interested in cracking open the universe and trying to see how it ticks. Magic tends to go hand-in-hand with paganism; it's not quite such an easy fit with Christians.
5. How do you integrate your spiritual beliefs with who you are as an Otherkin/Therian? - I'm still working on that--in fact, that's been a big part of my spiritual journey as late. I'm a Thelemite, and Thelema has a strong gnostic component, and exploring and accepting myself as otherkin falls under the category of "knowing myself". With it, as I mentioned above, comes certain spiritual territory, like ease of astral travel, connection with spirits, and spiritual possession. With that in mind I'm looking at--and receiving a call to--traditional Norse shamanism called seidh.
6. What is some common terminology used among the Otherkin/Therian community? - Uhhh. I'm drawing a blank here. :P All I can think of right now is "mundane" or "muggle" for a non-otherkin--which, for the record, I object strongly to and consider it virtually perjorative.
7. Is there anything else I should know about the Otherkin/Therian community to properly portray it in my novel? - I can't think of anything. You've covered the bases pretty well here!
I'm learning Quenya :) It was a hard choice, between Quenya and Sindarin. I'm finding it very pleasant so far. Figuring out how to write in Tengwar, too, is hard, but worth it. Tengwar turns any crappy scrawl into calligraphy.
Admittedly, there are plenty more practical languages I could learn. But life is short, and Quenya is beautiful.
The other day I read an article on salon.com (you will probably have to watch an ad to get their free site pass first) riffing off of the idea that we use consumerism as identity. Contemporary Western culture is good at this. Hi, I'm Veamoryn! I like David Bowie, the Decemberists, Doctor Who, Robert Heinlein, Aleister Crowley, and Death Note.
You are what you consume, in other words--not what you produce, or are.
The article, naturally, thinks this is Bad. It recommends, for the sake of experimentation, seeing if you can brand yourself more sincerely. ("I like Nestea, Sobe, Fuze, Excedrin migraine medicine, and St Ives' apricot facial scrub" isn't that cool of a list.) And then--it's implied--eventually dispensing with this consumerist identity entirely.
But then what? A commentator I read remarked that that leaves a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. Or, rather--consumerism fills the vacuum of other identities, like tribe, religion, heritage, and "volk", and without consumerism they're what people would fall back on. ("I'm Veamoryn. I'm three-quarters Irish and one-quarter German, but I was raised culturally German even though I'm American. My mother spoke German to me when I was a child and we have a dirndl somewhere." Ow. Dangerous territory. I don't want to be proud of my particular flavor of human; people who are proud of heritage like mine join the Aryan Nation, and those people just aren't people I want to hang out with.)
So what happens when consumerism is seriously abandoned (rather than just pushed aside) in a society where the fallbacks of race and tribe are dangerous? I think it makes otherkin an answer. (And as I've written before--"making it an answer" doesn't mean that we're making it up. Instead it means it's an option that gets considered rather than discarded.) It has the trappings of tribe and race, but without the potential dangerous footing of nationalism and racism. It fills up that identity-hole.
It's not the be-all end-all of theories, but I think it's something to consider. It's significant, I think, especially in light of the strong individualism that tends to go along with otherkin, along with the environmentalism we show that's often hand-in-hand with a rejection of consumerism.
We can't go there, so we seek around, and eventually we find ourselves as 'kin.
The continuing saga. Check the tags for previous entries.
4) You're all just posers pretending to be your favorite story characters!
If I were doing this, I'd go whole-hog and claim to be a Time Lord. (Hell, last season made it easy.)
There's no convincing people like this, not that I'm very interested in convincing people I'm fey in the first place. I can tell people very sincerely that I don't read a lot of fantasy, I don't really like Tolkien, fey things of all sorts make me ill and queasy to approach due to my too-deep love. And I'd say I'm still romanticising and posing. That's okay. Again, I'm not really out to please anyone.
I don't think this is something we can remedy from the outside; the concern will always be there. (How do we know you're actually a dragon? How do we know you've achieved samadhi? How do we know you've achieved knowledge and conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel? You can see signs of it, but you can't know for sure.) And, honestly, it should be there, I think. Self-examination and self-doubt are healthy. Believing anything too firmly is dangerous. Maybe I'm in the minority, but while this one can be irritating and petty I like it too. It makes me uncomfortable, and it makes me think and reanalyze--and in the end that leaves my beliefs about myself stronger for it.
...you probably already know Paul Rucker's artwork by now, but if by some accident you don't, click that link. He's undoubtedly, in my opinion, one of the best pagan visual artists around--it's vibrant, surreal, psychedelic, evocative, primal, and sexy. And the "Faeries and Angels" section is, at least for me, just about as close to "lifechanging" as art gets. (That peri--on the left--is one of his works, and provokes in me a yearning I don't normally have. I've been thinking about getting a print of it for a while.)
I watched My Neighbor Totoro, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, last night. It's a cute little movie, very fun, mostly inoffensive, and clearly inspired by Disney.
It got me thinking about Hayao Miyazaki's stuff in general, and particularly as it relates to us (otherkin, that is). It all happens in what tvtropeswiki happily calls Ghibli Hills, a pastoral, magical land filled with Shinto land spirits (a modern take on them, generally). Often the world's out of whack and needs appeasing, setting back into that natural-mankind balance where humans live in and understand nature. Miyazaki's stuff isn't Buddhist in the slightest (although I maintain that Nausicaa's got an Amitabha Buddhist streak in there somewhere); it's overtly Shinto with a smidgen of Taoism.
What's this have to do with us, though? I'm not sure. I try to shy away from a lot of the typical conceptions of otherkin, because a lot of them just don't fit me or don't fit me as well as they could. (Otherkin think nature's super! Otherkin are all in-tune with the natural world!) But that sense of and connection with a natural flow, which is so often cited as being something we have and do, is overtly present in nearly all of Miyazaki's films.
I think, though, that what I personally react to that's "so very 'kin" in Miyazaki's work, is instead just the sense of wonder and amazement. A protagonist goes about her normal life (she's usually female) and then something happens, and all of a sudden she's aware that the world's a much bigger (cooler, scarier) place than it had been, and she's not the same for it. That's not an uncommon theme--hell, that's like half Joseph Campbell's monomyth right there--but the particular way Miyazaki does it, with otherworldly spirits and a childlike sense of wonder, tweaks my otherkin sensibilities like nothing else.
