Is your religion related to your ethnicity?
Yes and no. Spirit work was passed down to me through surviving ethnic practices, but not traditional Satanism in particular. Methods of summoning and talking to demons were, though, and they're methods I still integrate in my practice.
I later found out that S. Connolly, who recently began writing about a family tradition of demon worship, wrote pretty closely to what I was taught. She wrote about that in "Drawing Down Belial," which also included a variety of other similarities to my family tradition. It was published years after I learned mine, and my tradition is attested to by people I very much doubt know anything of S. Connolly.
do you find that harmful or beneficial?
It certainly helped me when I first began working with demons.
is it possible to separate the two?
I don't know. I know a lot of people mistakenly believe that the tradition I was raised in died "hundreds of years ago" and seek to revive it, and their revival very rarely looks anything like what my family taught me. I think it's meant to be passed down through your family, it's generally not something we share with other people. But there are interracial couples in my bloodline. It's not ethnicity that binds the practice; it's genetic lineage.
For that reason, I don't openly associate with or even name the religion I've descended in outside of my family. I've only made that exception once with a very close, like-minded friend of mine. If you're another Satanist and you're interested in what you might be able to take from my ethnic practices, again, I recommend the writings of S. Connolly. Most of the practices really do center around my family (and not just my ethnicity, but specific lineage) and wouldn't make much sense taken out of that context. You're going to have to trust me on that one.
where you 'born into' a religion?
I was born into Christianity, but I wasn't baptized. That's not the ethnic religion I'm talking about above.
is your religion connected to the land you are on?
No, it is not.
do you think we will continue to follow religion like this or is there another way?
I think "religion" is a very broad term that encompasses a variety of practices, most of which will probably continue for quite some time, and plenty that barely resemble the way I follow mine at all.
haha
