Otherkin Names | Otherkin General Discussion | Forums

I’ve gone by a number of names throughout my tenure in the otherkin community, but I’ll talk about just two here:

Eshari was my main name for a long time. I originally got it when I was experimenting with Harner’s “core shamanism” in late 1998, and in a journey visited a city by that name. At the time (I have no idea of the real truth of this, but it was meaningful then) it was intimated to me that the city was “mine” in some sense and so I took its name for myself. This name has/had a longer form, Eshearendelari, which I sometimes talked about as being a “draconic” form attached to stardragon-me (an identification I no longer directly use), but that wasn’t “discovered”, that was put there because I liked the way it sounded. I remember retconning up some meaning for it with skiewing – something like “the (serpent?) from the high place of waterfalls of light” or something.

Over time it grew to bother me that the name Eshari wasn’t really attached to a specific existence. That is, I had no inklings of a past life or anything where I was named that. I tried to console myself that it was OK to go by something that was “me, here, now, the sum total of all that feyness” but I dunno, it just itched and felt like I was “less real”. (something which has been a giant boogeyman for me ever since I awakened in the first place, actually.)

Arethinn (it’s pronounced ARE-eh-theen or ARE-uh-theen, soft “th” as in “thin”, btw – I heard someone try uh-RETH-inn once and was like “wat?”) was kind of ginned up out of me playing around with syllables and phonemes I liked the sound of. I can’t say that it’s 100% “correct” but at least it managed to stick around in my head for several years before I decided to take the plunge and adopt it, rather than thinking it was nice one day and waking up the very next day going “OMG that sounds dumb”, so it’s got that going for it at least.

Long form, Arethinn na’eleth aTinderel. Now this, at least the last part, Tinderel, I can say I received. (pron. tin-DARE-ell or TIN-dare-ell – phase of the moon, it seems; I can’t decide, myself. Sometimes I feel like I should somehow be saying it both ways simultaneously, but that I lack the appropriate vocal apparatus or maybe psychic transmission skills to pronounce things “correctly”.) It’s one of only a handful of names I’ve ever dreamed (that is, sleep-dreamed) in my life, and although I didn’t know what to do with it at first, similarly it at least doesn’t make me itch like crazy just to look at it and I haven’t wanted to change it. I think if it’s really something “factual” that it is a family or clan kind of name. The mid part “na’eleth” would be a kind of designator of rank or position (which for me is to say, not high: I’ve bandied about the term “smallsidhe”, and I have some vague inklings that I might have mixed faery heritage which is kind of looked down on as “half-breed”-y) or maybe birth order (? I have a hard time contemplating family structure and kinships when half the time I think we were totally non-physical anyway and I have no idea how the heck such a race “breeds”).

Some other terms along these lines which I’ve “come up with” (which sounds like “made up from whole cloth, but I don’t really mean that; more like “tried to be quiet and listen and see what comes forward”) are ne ruinnas (nay roo-EE-nas), siltheri and oneth or uneth (see above about the feeling I should somehow be able to say it both ways at once).