This was a decent try, but the unearned snark compounds the errors in logic to the point of cringe. It is extremely obvious you've never been formally trained in (Aristotelean) logic, which is fine until you try to critique my somewhat tangential but correct use of a syllogism.
> in the first place, P1 is not absolutely true. In the second place, your reference to 7,500 years ago is arbitrary
No and no. I explained in the article how it is true, which I suppose you can disagree with, but you haven't earned any credibility by just stating the inverse. If you were properly trained in rhetoric, you'd know that is the weakest form of non-fallacy response. For people who actually care about Ancient history and pre-history, it is commonly known that this is the start of the earliest known human civilizations and religious practices at roughly 5500 BC depending on the method of dating. Since Pagans attempt to claim the whole of known history, this is about when the discussion begins.
> I don't know of any "pagans" that are looking back that far with respect to their "reconstructionist" practices.
If you passed your remedial reading classes and actually read the article, you'd see the numerous examples I give. Including the author of the post I'm responding to.
> P2 is inconsistent.
No.
> You first reference 7,500 years ago (P1) and then state "recent presentation" with respect to modern paganism.
Because that is the definition of recent in the study of pre-history. I correctly used one of the few accepted academic terms for the dawn of recorded history at roughly 5500 BC. "Recent" is correctly used twice because modern pagans want their practice to be synonymous with that of time immemorial. "Recent" is also correct because I'm making reference to Germanic neo-pagans, who are contemporary to modern day.
Your bad faith attempts to sharpshoot my wording are seriously unimpressive.
> You make the same mistake that you accuse others of in your conclusion (and hinted out in P1) here
Nope.
> You must prove that pagans believe something that their ancestors didn't
Did you just stop reading after the first paragraph?
> For a syllogism to be valid (whether or not sound), the conclusion must follow from the premises. Your conclusion does not logically follow.
Nope. It actually does. Your inability to understand what I wrote does not detract from its truthfulness. I correctly anchored the discussion chronologically, correctly identified gaps in current reconstructionist efforts, and correctly derived a conclusion from this state of affairs.
> As for the rest of your article, other than being longwinded for the topic at hand,
Amazing lack of self-awareness given the confused word soup you just dumped out. Also, I responded to an article that is itself long. Would you rather have a picture book?
> you didn't accomplish what you set out to (discount the ancestral principle)
You can think whatever you want, but that is clearly not the consensus. However, I had objectively valid critiques of the text presented in the article whether you like it or not.
> I figured as much upon reading the "syllogism."
Hilariously, I was right the first time and this coyness is doubling down on being wrong. I don't care if you agree with me, but this entire little assault on the ad hoc syllogism I proposed completely failed.
> A few other notes -
Oh boy
> You lose sight of the fact that it was the pre-Christian Europeans falling into the fold of the Church that made Christianity and, subsequently, the West great
No I didn't. I know you didn't read/comprehend the article, but I in fact said the opposite and still demonstrated how the Church would/will survive without the contributions of Europeans.
> After Protestantism emerged, the Church was fragmented
Incorrect. Fragmentation and ideological divide occurred, multiple times, in the Early Church.
> and with the ecclesial body fragmentation, so too did the West begin to show its cracks.
?
the West started twerking?
> Not to mention that modern Christianity (with its 40,000+ denominations) has only exacerbated this decline
Not really, until maybe the last 50 years or so. According to you, this sentence is still incoherent because you didn't put an exact year in front of the word "modern".
> to your point, you now have of 40,000+ Christian denominations appealing to some "ancestral principle" to justify their existence.
"Muh 40,000" is a meme that is completely untrue. It's derived from dividing larger bodies and counting them as separate churches. There are about 500 Protestant churches with sizable congregations, and an unknown number of denominations between them.
Also, very few of them have ever verbalized anything close to the "ancestral principle" or some sort of justification of their existence.
> Interestingly, there is a diversity of "pagan" religion (and, thus, an expectation of a diversity of modern beliefs) throughout history but not Christianity,
Do you think history began in 1500 AD or something?
Normally I am pretty jovial when discussing with pagans but this bizarre attempt to pull intellectual rank on me was so retarded I felt the need to return some of that smugness you seem to think you've earned. This comment demonstrates a profound ignorance of Church history, European history, and formal logic. You'd fail a first semester philosophy assignment with the thought underpinning it. Don't try to larp as an academic when you're clearly not.
I'll give a full response but this article is very funny to me. To me, it’s a major mishmash that barely touched on actually theology or the ontology of Folkism. But I'm glad you are engaging and creating more dialogue. You should ping the other pagans too, though. They are much smarter than myself.
You fundamentally misunderstand paganism. Paganism is not a religion in the same way that Christianity is a religion. Under the hood, in the workings of both the individual and collective unconscious, it is something else entirely. It is not a belief system so much as it is an observation system. Paganism observes the world as it is and adapts to changing conditions. It is situational awareness within a living and intelligent universe. It does not attempt to impose a static and unchanging state on a dead, material universe. It certainly does not look forward to an eternal global tyranny headquartered in Jerusalem.
Paganism is primordial. It is the world-feeling that co-evolves with the genetics of a population group within a specific ecosystem. There are as many types of paganism as there are population groups.
A population group that evolves in a forest/mountain environment has a higher probability of becoming genetically predisposed to a polytheist and animist world-feeling, due to the abundance of life to which it is exposed over thousands or tens of thousands of years. A population group that evolves in a desert environment has a higher probability of becoming genetically predisposed to to a monotheist world-feeling, due to the relentless, overbearing, inescapable, and deadly presence of the sun.
As far as the archaeological record tells us to date, paganism, and more specifically animism, is the default world-feeling of all human and human-adjacent species. Revealed religions are anomalous in the history of human and human-adjacent species. They do not “take” without extreme violence and trauma, because they do not fit the genetic predispositions of most people groups.
The genetic predisposition to a particular world-feeling can be expelled from neither a population group nor from an individual. The best monotheism can do is break the human spirit, such that performance of the monotheism becomes automatic for the purpose of avoiding pain and death; and in the case of Christianity, avoiding eternal torture. It can never become the true nature of a population group in which it did not evolve. It is only ever a mask, a superego injunction so vicious it created and maintains the split between conscious (“good”) and subconscious (“evil”).
Those of us who pursue our ancestral world-feeling do so for the purpose of getting beneath the monotheist mask. Our goal is to recover and/or innovate ways of being in the world that permit authentic understanding and expression of our identity, including and especially our inherited, innate predispositions. Christianity forbids authentic understanding and expression of identity. Its goal is to crush "sinful" human nature out of existence and replace it with itself.
Paganism is what’s left after detoxing from the Christian imposition. It’s who we are underneath centuries of performing a false, externally-imposed identity. If we are not blank slates for communism, then we also were not blank slates for Christianity.
Great response. You succinctly laid out what I have labored to explain, however there is much more to be said about the syncretic Christian denominations and how they have intersected with various types of paganism. I am glad you made this comment, it touches on the living aspect of this religion very well.
Very well said. 'Pagan' meant 'rustic' which is associated with 'earthiness'. That 'earthiness' is what makes 'Pagan' different. We're close to the world-as-it-is.
Is the insistence that Christianity is in some way a "revealed/imposed" religion necessary because to assent to the anthropological evidence of its development along similar lines to any other religion invalidates your view? Specifically the view of the "collective unconscious?"
You said: "A population group that evolves in a desert environment has a higher probability of becoming genetically predisposed to to a monotheist world-feeling, due to the relentless, overbearing, inescapable, and deadly presence of the sun."
Okay, fine. But did Yahwism/Judaism evolve according to the "collective unconscious" process of "world-feeling" or was it "revealed/imposed?" Or, conveniently, was only Christianity "revealed/imposed" and not the religions from which it sprang? How so?
Nobody needs need to "understand paganism" to understand that the problem with the new pagan/heathen/folkish is that there is only a grasp of history and any logical categories when it's convenient. You clearly demonstrate that.
I'll not question your view of what the pagan worldview is. That's yours to have. But how do you know that's what it was? You said: "Paganism is not a religion in the same way that Christianity is a religion. Under the hood, in the workings of both the individual and collective unconscious, it is something else entirely. It is not a belief system so much as it is an observation system. Paganism observes the world as it is and adapts to changing conditions. It is situational awareness within a living and intelligent universe. It does not attempt to impose a static and unchanging state on a dead, material universe."
Is there a pre-Christian pagan theological text from which you take this view? Or is this a reconstructed, personal view that is necessarily set up in opposition to your view of Christianity?
No honest Christian apologist tries to pretend that Christianity is not reliant on paganism for everything from the philosophical language to the musical tones used in liturgies in it's own construction. It's funny to me that modern pagans can't be comfortable with this in the reverse.
Okay well, it's clear that nothing anyone says will cause you to get curious about your own position, but for the sake of others who may come across this I will clarify.
Of course paganism influenced Christianity and not the reverse. Paganism was there first. It was there for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years prior to the Christian revelation. It was the air Christianity had to breathe. Christianity never had anything to offer in the reverse.
According to the Old Testament and the archaeological evidence that I am aware of, the ancient Hebrews evolved into a people-group in the usual ways that anybody else does. They did not start off as monotheists. Over time they evolved into monotheists due to various pressures I won't get into here in the interest of brevity. You can see this transition in the Old Testament prophets railing continually against the ancient Hebrews worshipping "false idols." Monotheism was a political consolidation for the Hebrew tribes.
Judaism became a religion of revealed laws, according to Jewish mythology, when Moses came down the mountain with the tablets. At that point in the Jewish myth cycle, Judaism became a revealed religion.
Jesus came as a prophet of the new revelation and to establish the new covenant. Jesus himself clearly taught that he came to reveal a new religion. Or more specifically, a new take on an old religion for the Jews, and a new religion entirely for the gentiles. So yes, Christianity is also a revealed religion.
Revealed religions stand in contrast to paganism because they are not organically emergent. Paganism is organically emergent among any given people-group in response to environmental conditions over thousands or tens of thousands of years.
My view of these things comes from many decades of learning. I was raised as a fundamentalist, evangelical, charismatic Christian. My spiritual path has been largely been a matter of becoming increasingly honest with myself.
In addition to seeking and practicing radical self-honesty, I have also sought out reading and study into interpretations of ancient arts (cave paintings, figurines, etc) and folklore, as compared with modern tribal arts & folklore, to get at what was being recorded or communicated or transmitted. It turns out the shamanistic mindset of the ancients was so fundamentally different than the tiny religion box we've been forced into that it takes practice... praxis... to bring it to life and inhabit it. It is definitely knowable and it is definitely not lost. We have just lost touch with it.
So in case you missed it, the "text" I'm looking back to is archaeological evidence in the form of artifacts and rock art and folklore, as compared with contemporary shamanistic artifacts, rock art, folklore, and praxis.
It is of course not possible to know precisely what the ancients were thinking, and that is not my goal nor is it the goal of any pagan/heathen I've ever spoken with. As I stated previously, the goal is to discover ancient and/or innovate new ways of being authentically ourselves, including authentic expression of our genetic predispositions. According to our archaeological record, our genetic predisposition is toward animistic polytheism, NOT revealed monotheism.
I'm not sure you know my position (perhaps you can make good guesses), so the contention that I'm not curious about it doesn't make sense.
In paragraphs 1-5 of your reply, I have nothing to say as far as disagreement, though I do have an opinion that Iamblichus was building a theological framework in response to, and based on, Christian liturgical praxis. I am willing to bet that the Poetic Edda is full of Christian motifs, as well.
In paragraph 6, I would seek clarification from you that adherents of revealed religions contest that the religions aren't organically emergent, versus your own assertion that they're not organically emergent. Here again we have two different categories and I would need to know your position.
From a non-theist/naturalist view (and perhaps broadly non-Christian view with regards to Christianity in particular), it does seem as if all religions are "organically emergent." How could they not be? It even seems that, under the schema of a Pagan worldview, Yahwism/Judaism/Christianity do organically arise via this "collective unconscious/world-feeling" process. If the Pagan worldview is true, that must necessarily be the case. Otherwise, there are two options:
1. Christianity was a step towards our current liberal moment. It evolved the way any sociological endeavor evolved, and it is over and done with as we march into a more progressive, non-theistic age.
2. Yahweh is real, exists over-and-above the natural order, and guides history towards a certain end.
Option 3, to reiterate the view that must necessarily be true if the Pagan worldview is true: Christianity is an iteration of religion, the expression of which is natural to man as part of our connection to the "collective unconscious," that modern Pagans reject for a variety of reasons.
I appreciate you sharing some of your own background.
I'm familiar enough with fundamentalist evangelical Protestantism to understand that one major difference between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism as well as the Eastern Christianities is the focus on liturgical praxis.
Evangelical Protestantism seems very hostile towards communal acts of propitiation. But, it seems to me from my own years of study that the hallmark of any religion that hangs around is the following: structured acts of communal acknowledgment of the participants' deficiency in delaying gratification or in improperly ordering their lives.
People don't typically need to know where the world came from, or even how to deal with the "problem of evil." They need a way to deal with the cognitive dissonance that results from wanting to live a certain way and failing to do so, which is communal in nature. Ritual acts of worship are typically just that, with smattering of thanking whatever is perceived as divine and also asking for good things to happen.
This typically happens in spades in Catholic and Orthodox churches, as well as Anglican/Episcopal of the "high church" variety.
You said: "It turns out the shamanistic mindset of the ancients was so fundamentally different than the tiny religion box we've been forced into that it takes practice... praxis... to bring it to life and inhabit it. It is definitely knowable and it is definitely not lost. We have just lost touch with it."
Again, you indicate that the "text" you reference is not a standard text that would communicate, directly, that mindset. I'm not denying the validity of the methodology that you otherwise use to engage in your own form of orthopraxis. And it does seem as if you indicate that this modern Pagan movement is at least in part reconstructionist.
I suppose my contention is this: if this new Paganism continues to focus primarily on establishing provenance and pedigree, and less on developing a theology around communal propitiation (the only reason religions or spiritual worldviews are necessary), it's just not going to have any staying power. It's seeming more and more, and especially from IP, to just be the spiritualization of ethnocentrism.
The ancestral principle is not so much about belief as it is about ritual, it is about the greater legitimacy or theurgic significance of ancestral rites on account of their co-evolution with a people. It doesn't necessarily have to do with "older = better". The argument you are making against reconstructed Paganism is not new, in fact it was the same arguments that the Trads were making. They insisted that, because Paganism is a "dead" religion, its rites have lost their significance, and the solution is to default back to the most "Aryan" tradition that continues into modernity. For Evola, this was Theravada Buddhism. For Guenon, it was Sufi Mysticism. For Devi, Hinduism. For Eliade, Orthodox Mysticism. There is a reason that so much of the old Pagang put such an emphasis on the Rg Veda. It wasn't just to wewuz, or to piss off Indians, it is because it is the oldest surviving Indo-European religious text that was not passed down through a third party. Furthermore, it was an authoritative text that did not evolve with the evolution of Hinduism, as demonstrated by its archaic language (which even many Classical Indians had a difficult time understanding).
I don't think this is a reasonable argument, though. This may be the liquor talking, but In many respects early Indo-European religion is more robust than the Old Hebrew religion which most of the Bible is meant to represent, despite the former being thousands of years older. Comparative mythology is especially robust, because it is unlikely that the same myth would be fabricated in two different cultural narratives. Old Hebrew religion cannot really be deciphered using comparative religion because the very people who insist on its legitimacy deny even partial legitimacy to other ancient semitic religions. You mention that a Vandal and an Alan would castrate you for insisting their gods are the same, but there is simply no historical reason to believe this. The Vandal would have already understood certain Alanic gods to be localizations of his own gods -- perhaps distorted, but not demonic. The Hebrew tradition is mostly unique in its characterization of mostly similar deities as demonic enemies of the Hebrew god.
Furthermore, Pagan writings are mostly preserved in the Western world by a professional class of scribes and bards, who didn't really have an incentive to alter them. Their existence was more of a curiosity than a perceived threat. Abrahamics did have an incentive not only to alter Hebrew texts over time but more generally to select for texts they promoted and nignore texts they didn't view favorably. Roman and Greek Paganism had a very long and drawn out literary tradition, and was rewritten by scholars from Britain to Bukharia, from the Nile to the Oresund. As far as the Germanic tradition goes, Snorri is a very legitimate and trustworthy source. Most poems of the Poetic Edda use language which indicates they were composed centuries before Snorri's life, and the very purpose which altercation would serve is already served by the Prose Edda, particularly the Prologue where Snorri discusses his Christian interpretation of these poems as being real things that happened to very ancient people. The reason Euhemerization is directly added into the poems in most Gaelic works is because most Gaelic poems which survive today were not just recorded by Christians, but composed by a mid-Christianization Ireland and Scotland.
"The reason Euhemerization is directly added into the poems in most Gaelic works is because most Gaelic poems which survive today were not just recorded by Christians, but composed by a mid-Christianization Ireland and Scotland."
If one studies the names and epithets of the Gods and Goddesses, it becomes very clear that most Gaelic clannish and tribal genealogies go right to them, and most of the euhemerized texts like the Book of the Taking of Ireland, are entirely based on earlier myths which extend into an uncertain past. The more that I look, the more that I find the euhemerization follows a specific system. I read something covering this, and I am wanting to do an article on how euhemerization and poetic language covered up things, but I am busy these days.
What went on in early medieval Northern Europe isn't even really to be described as "euhemerization". It was more akin to Honji suijaku in Japan, where the Kami were considered to be Boddhisattvas or Devas. Beings of superhuman power and longevity, but not gods in the traditional sense
Anacharsis was killed by his own people for “becoming too Greek”. There is little reason to believe that the ancients had some perennial understanding of their myth. The Vedic people even considered other Iranians to be barbaric “mlechhas”.
There is a difference between viewing your rites and myths as superior to most, or being against the adoption of foreign rites by your countrymen, and disregarding the religious experiences of foreigners entirely.
Never really liked the idea of an "ancestral principle" for a number of reasons, for starters it comes off as obfuscatory to the vitality of paganism and all this entails, in favor of just continuing a tradition. There are dangers in making paganism "just" that, as you point out in some places. Further, it conflicts with my idea of paganism as ecological, which entails and necessitates change. I'm not sure how they would defend a clear chronology of change in those thousands of years—Odin, for example, is a titanic shift from "IE tradition"
I think the sought point of things like this principle is something that I've argued before, that paganism represents the "original", or default, religious inclination of mankind (and prior). We can trace back religious attitudes to the first humans, to neanderthals - and follow that gradient until its impossible to say anything at all, musing about the religion of bacteria and molecules. Christianity OTTH is immensely temporal, it has to be, as it exclaims a number of historical events as proof of the religious system. We can point exactly to where it began, why, by whom, and under what context. That has its strengths, but it leaves "what came before?" as a tantalizing question. For a lot of people, Genesis doesn't cut it.
I think you are still applying the ancestral principle, you just don't have the exact same take as IP. Your entire second half of the comment seems to be applying it
I'd be interested reading your own response to IP's article, then. This world is so small, that critiques should be taken seriously, and you have very measured critiques.
I mean, you could apply the ancestral principle to your own eyesight, since that in practice is the only way you actually know that you have ancestors, much less that they said anything. But that's very different from how IP uses it.
Thanks for reading. Would you say that this “eternal archetype” thing is an ecological function as I alluded to? As in, our brains evolve the same way due to shared genetics and environment?
There is that, sure, for example the idea of a "sky father", often with solar associations, seems expressly perennial—you see it everywhere from the "Great Spirit" of injuns to the Jade Emperor of the Chinese. Either these are all tangents of a singular religious system some thousands of years ago before mankind spread, or it is simply part of how the human mind comprehends reality.
But the ecological aspect explains differences as much as it does similarities. The Greeks and Germanics, despite sharing relatively recent ancestors, differed greatly in their environmental contexts. Different climates/seasons, different neighbors, different biomes, animals, & flora. Consequently, there religion/pantheons were different. Mutually intelligible sure, but still unique.
For this reason, I would expect an "American paganism" to be likewise unique in some way. Maybe only as unique as English paganism was to Norse, but still so. My contention is that I am not sure to what degree an ancestral principle permits this, and if not, how it explains clear changes & differentiation in the past
In evolutionary contexts change (ie mutation) is in individual cases almost always either pointless or deadly, but on a large scale beneficial, necessary. This is also why inherited epigenetic changes typically don't last over many generations: its expected that the environment won't be identical over an increasing number of generations. I would be interested in seeing AP confronted and rectified with Heraclitus, "No man can cross the same river twice, for he is not the same man, and it not the same river".
What would you say about non IE peoples teaching the same conclusion? As in, African sky deities resembling IE ones when none of the other variables you mentioned were present?
Like I said it's either something fundamental to human life, or all descendants of "the first religion". We know we can trace back a lot of Native American, Aboriginal, and IE traditions to a single origin in ice age Siberia (the world tree, for example), but I don't know about Africa. It would be remarkable that the latter hypothesis is true, but it is plausible. I think the former is more likely; human life shares enough similarity across the globe that we should expect its various religious expressions to be as similar.
I have a feeling that both sides are talking past each other, and that at the base of it, there is a misunderstanding of Christian civilisation in its entirety, up to the point that people who try to engage in pagan practices cannot help but frame everything, including their worship, in the theological language of Christianity. We are too immersed in it at present, to the point where our mental constructs jump to the Cross when religion is mentioned.
Pagan beliefs are gone, irretrievably. More often than not, they were a series of ancestral cults, that happened to grow as patronage of the stronger groups, or bigger city states encouraged others to adopt these beliefs. Syncreticism was an accepted occurrence, as polytheism outright demanded that existence of other gods had to be upheld to validate your own tribal divinity. This syncretic attitude found its way into Christianity too, sometimes despite ardent work to counter it, but on the whole, delivering faith that recognised aspects of the Revelation in its antecedents, and fulfilling them in Christ.
We have fragments of these beliefs in the records, but as no clear linrages remain, beyond loose ethnic consciousness, what form of ancestral worship are we talking about here? Do you pour libations at the graves of your grandparents, like some Russian Orthodox still do? Do you have harvest festivals like they have them in Poland, or burn the Yule log? Arguably, modern Christian Europeans perform more ancestral rituals than the sterile reconstructionists, purely because those remain an unbroken chain of rituals that have been performed by each generation in turn, enmeshed in an existing living culture.
"Pagans" look for spiritual element in their beliefs, which inevitably seeks to strip Europeans of everything European, as it is impossible to separate the two, after 2000 years. But hold on, would that pedigree not qualify Christianity as an "old-time religion" for most?
As for Christian attitudes towards the debate - there's a order of magnitude of difference here between the pagan predilections of the reconstructionists and the catechism of the Church, where the Church worked for centuries to uplift the folk understanding of spirituality and the world to the level of neo-Platonist considerations, culminating in St Thomas Aquinas. This will miss the point with most of them. As I see it, they crave a personal experience with their historical past, to the level where ancestral legacies are sought to be ressurected, and where understanding of the world is filtered through those legacies - communion with their anecsors, with the genius of their family, or a tutelary deity. Morality then, becomes filtered through that ancestral relationship, which infuses their beliefs with familiar experiences, just as Christians are called on to have such relationship with the Father. This unfortunately clashes with our current social structures today, and political reality, where such morality cannot be viably expressed, short of imposing tribal social structures more reminiscent of Afghanistan than Europe.
Perhaps instead of seeing a conflict here, reconstructionists should reflect on social and familiar ties within society as we have it, and work on strengthening those, since those are a foundation of a true ancestral legacy, rather than antiquarian curisities from a past that simply does not map onto reality as we have it today.
Perhaps this requires a more in-depth piece, as this is just my off-the cuff feeling on the matter upon first reflection. Happy to be corrected wherever.
Perhaps, hence my willingness to review these ideas, but maybe some of it is driven by nebulousness of the pagan position? We are taking several thousand years of disparate beliefs and cultures, and try to compare that to the Christian civilisation - it becomes apples and oranges really, unless one narrows it down to a particular culture or ethnicity, which then puts us up against a limited amount information of any one ethnic ancestral belief.
The problem is that there is a lot more that we can prove about these ancient cultures than Christians are willing to admit. Gaelic religion, for example, is often seen as impossibly lost even to many pagans. The more I learn though, the more I can see that enough was recorded and enough has been studied that we can make a reasoned approach to the religion. This only comes through voracious reading and actually partaking in ritual with these Gods.
I take European civilization as a racial thing, not a religious thing. There is a genetic continuity between us and our ancestors, but there is little religious continuity beyond from what has been so deeply ingrained that it will never go away. Does Christian civilization include non-Europeans? Yes. The church is majority non-White right now. To say that this religion is the whole meat and bones of our civilization, or the source of all our greatness, is really missing the point.
It is more like comparing myself to my ancestors, not apples to oranges. Comparing a modern European to a Biblical Israelite is more like apples to oranges.
Yawn. We have craploads of surviving documents & artifacts from pagan places & eras. "But we don't know literally every single detail!" is pathetic whining from someone who would just whine about some other fake complaint if we did know every single detail.
It's a great read, but to me the answer is simple: we need something new.
To my mind, even if a faithful appeal to tradition was possible, it wouldn't be entirely desirable; there is no stasis in the universe, flux is omnipresent.
Each mystical tradition (which is upstream from each religion) was generated through the creativity of a people's seers and poets, who invariably used what was around them like any artist (this is well documented with Christianity incorporating many pagan practices, etc.). We need a new tradition for our new age, and must look to the poets and seers for inspiration.
For the metaphysics behind this, that is another story. I'm not positing the gay trope of "we all worship the same god just in different ways", I'm saying each time and people must have their own gods and systems, and IMHO, looking to the past for a comprehensive blueprint is weak, corpse-like, and beneath the White man.
'Pagan' is in the eye of the beholder. For 'christians', 'pagan' is any 'cult' that deviates from their specific iteration of 'christian' beliefs. And this can include beliefs that 'pagans' would consider 'christian'. For example, the conflict between Lutherans and Catholics and between 'full immersion' and 'sprinkle'.
The term 'pagan' functions as simply the religious 'other'. That's it.
If you want to talk intelligently about the conflict between 'christianity' and European non-christianity ('pagan'), it's almost impossible. The 'christians' waged war on the people's of Europe for over a thousand years. In that past, 'christians' were quite open about stamping out the 'heathen' but now it seems like some 'christians' would like to pretend 'conversion' was all just rainbows and butterflies.
'Christians' want to use Abrahamo-Platonic standards and concepts to talk about *all* beliefs. It's build into Abrahamo-Platonism to look at the living world through alien - and alienated - eyes, always judging.
As a 'pagan', I'm not really interested in telling other 'pagans' how to be 'pagan'. In that sense, it's not a 'religion'. My religion is White Nationalism. But by 'spiritual beliefs' are a product of study and experience. How is that transferable to another? How is any 'spirituality' transferable from one person to another?
At a certain point, a person begins to experience the enormity of being born only to die. If they're embedded in a community that has adequate responses to 'being born only to die', then they have a religion that distracts or comforts them (or both). If they don't, then they either live with the anxiety of the knowledge of their mortality or the adopt a set of beliefs to distract or comfort them. But that rarely works. A belief freely accepted is one that is just as freely denied. The New Agers always looking for the next 'spiritual' innovation or the 'christian' looking for the 'best church' all have the same problem: The religion of their ancestors did not capture them and now they are adrift. And will be, probably, forever. Unless they have a *gnosis* that transforms them, not just informs them.
This is the problem with “we wuz everything” that I described in the post. Most GPs don’t mean “everything that isn’t Christian is pagan”. Are African tribal religions pagan? Is Shinto pagan?
We were 'everything'. Abahamo-Platonism is an alien creed from an alienated people.
Since 'pagan' is in the eye of the beholder, it depends on what *your* 'religion' is as to whether African tribal religions are 'pagan'. The same thing with Shinto.
Neither are 'christian', so, for a 'christian' both are 'pagan'.
The same with 'Buddhism' or 'Taoism' or 'Caodaism' or 'Thelema'.
Before Abrahamo-Platonism, peoples had beliefs and practices related to their prehistory that survived into the present. Their 'religion' was close to them and to their living space. Invasions produced conflicts between the 'domestic' religion of the invaded people and that of the invaders. The problem was resolved with violence and some accommodation. This can be seen Hinduism quite clearly.
As an example of what non-western 'paganism' looks like, let's take a place that is at the confluence of many 'spiritual projects': Vietnam.
Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the religious environment of Vietnam:
'The majority of Vietnamese do not follow any organized religion, instead participating in one or more practices of folk religions, such as venerating ancestors, or praying to deities, especially during Tết and other festivals. Folk religions were founded on endemic cultural beliefs that were historically affected by Confucianism and Taoism from ancient China, as well as by various strands of Buddhism (Phật giáo).[2] These three teachings or tam giáo were later joined by Christianity (Catholicism, Công giáo) which has become a significant presence.[3] Vietnam is also home of two indigenous religions: syncretic Caodaism (Đạo Cao Đài) and quasi-Buddhist Hoahaoism (Phật giáo Hòa Hảo).'
Here we see a country that is not dominated by Abrahamo-Platonism, where 'religion' is still something that arises from the people and returns to it.
'Pagan' means 'rustic, rural'. Cicero used the term in 'De Agricultura' to contrast the practices of rural people to the more cultivated practices of the Rome. So, the origin 'pagan' wasn't about 'christian' at all, between two different kinds of what 'christians' would call 'pagan'.
'Pagan' is in the eye of the beholder. But, the one thing it is not, is Abrahamo-Platonism, which is creed of imposition, not chthonic.
This was a decent try, but the unearned snark compounds the errors in logic to the point of cringe. It is extremely obvious you've never been formally trained in (Aristotelean) logic, which is fine until you try to critique my somewhat tangential but correct use of a syllogism.
> in the first place, P1 is not absolutely true. In the second place, your reference to 7,500 years ago is arbitrary
No and no. I explained in the article how it is true, which I suppose you can disagree with, but you haven't earned any credibility by just stating the inverse. If you were properly trained in rhetoric, you'd know that is the weakest form of non-fallacy response. For people who actually care about Ancient history and pre-history, it is commonly known that this is the start of the earliest known human civilizations and religious practices at roughly 5500 BC depending on the method of dating. Since Pagans attempt to claim the whole of known history, this is about when the discussion begins.
> I don't know of any "pagans" that are looking back that far with respect to their "reconstructionist" practices.
If you passed your remedial reading classes and actually read the article, you'd see the numerous examples I give. Including the author of the post I'm responding to.
> P2 is inconsistent.
No.
> You first reference 7,500 years ago (P1) and then state "recent presentation" with respect to modern paganism.
Because that is the definition of recent in the study of pre-history. I correctly used one of the few accepted academic terms for the dawn of recorded history at roughly 5500 BC. "Recent" is correctly used twice because modern pagans want their practice to be synonymous with that of time immemorial. "Recent" is also correct because I'm making reference to Germanic neo-pagans, who are contemporary to modern day.
Your bad faith attempts to sharpshoot my wording are seriously unimpressive.
> You make the same mistake that you accuse others of in your conclusion (and hinted out in P1) here
Nope.
> You must prove that pagans believe something that their ancestors didn't
Did you just stop reading after the first paragraph?
> For a syllogism to be valid (whether or not sound), the conclusion must follow from the premises. Your conclusion does not logically follow.
Nope. It actually does. Your inability to understand what I wrote does not detract from its truthfulness. I correctly anchored the discussion chronologically, correctly identified gaps in current reconstructionist efforts, and correctly derived a conclusion from this state of affairs.
> As for the rest of your article, other than being longwinded for the topic at hand,
Amazing lack of self-awareness given the confused word soup you just dumped out. Also, I responded to an article that is itself long. Would you rather have a picture book?
> you didn't accomplish what you set out to (discount the ancestral principle)
You can think whatever you want, but that is clearly not the consensus. However, I had objectively valid critiques of the text presented in the article whether you like it or not.
> I figured as much upon reading the "syllogism."
Hilariously, I was right the first time and this coyness is doubling down on being wrong. I don't care if you agree with me, but this entire little assault on the ad hoc syllogism I proposed completely failed.
> A few other notes -
Oh boy
> You lose sight of the fact that it was the pre-Christian Europeans falling into the fold of the Church that made Christianity and, subsequently, the West great
No I didn't. I know you didn't read/comprehend the article, but I in fact said the opposite and still demonstrated how the Church would/will survive without the contributions of Europeans.
> After Protestantism emerged, the Church was fragmented
Incorrect. Fragmentation and ideological divide occurred, multiple times, in the Early Church.
> and with the ecclesial body fragmentation, so too did the West begin to show its cracks.
?
the West started twerking?
> Not to mention that modern Christianity (with its 40,000+ denominations) has only exacerbated this decline
Not really, until maybe the last 50 years or so. According to you, this sentence is still incoherent because you didn't put an exact year in front of the word "modern".
> to your point, you now have of 40,000+ Christian denominations appealing to some "ancestral principle" to justify their existence.
"Muh 40,000" is a meme that is completely untrue. It's derived from dividing larger bodies and counting them as separate churches. There are about 500 Protestant churches with sizable congregations, and an unknown number of denominations between them.
Also, very few of them have ever verbalized anything close to the "ancestral principle" or some sort of justification of their existence.
> Interestingly, there is a diversity of "pagan" religion (and, thus, an expectation of a diversity of modern beliefs) throughout history but not Christianity,
Do you think history began in 1500 AD or something?
Normally I am pretty jovial when discussing with pagans but this bizarre attempt to pull intellectual rank on me was so retarded I felt the need to return some of that smugness you seem to think you've earned. This comment demonstrates a profound ignorance of Church history, European history, and formal logic. You'd fail a first semester philosophy assignment with the thought underpinning it. Don't try to larp as an academic when you're clearly not.
@Aodhan MacMhaolain
Thoughts
I'll give a full response but this article is very funny to me. To me, it’s a major mishmash that barely touched on actually theology or the ontology of Folkism. But I'm glad you are engaging and creating more dialogue. You should ping the other pagans too, though. They are much smarter than myself.
I mean, I’m replying to something someone else wrote. Is the “Ancestral Principle” not part of folkism?
Yes, but I'll reply in full soon. I've had a busy weekend
Well done.
Monotheism comes from The Jews. Are You Jewish?
Note that I do not defend Imperium Press who paid from that fucking Rachel Haywire disaster Fiume gallery.
Zoroastrianism isn’t Jewish.
It's also not 'monotheistic' as Abrahmo-Platonism would understand 'monotheism'.
Fair enough, but I wouldn’t call it traditional polytheism either.
Good stuff. 👍
You fundamentally misunderstand paganism. Paganism is not a religion in the same way that Christianity is a religion. Under the hood, in the workings of both the individual and collective unconscious, it is something else entirely. It is not a belief system so much as it is an observation system. Paganism observes the world as it is and adapts to changing conditions. It is situational awareness within a living and intelligent universe. It does not attempt to impose a static and unchanging state on a dead, material universe. It certainly does not look forward to an eternal global tyranny headquartered in Jerusalem.
Paganism is primordial. It is the world-feeling that co-evolves with the genetics of a population group within a specific ecosystem. There are as many types of paganism as there are population groups.
A population group that evolves in a forest/mountain environment has a higher probability of becoming genetically predisposed to a polytheist and animist world-feeling, due to the abundance of life to which it is exposed over thousands or tens of thousands of years. A population group that evolves in a desert environment has a higher probability of becoming genetically predisposed to to a monotheist world-feeling, due to the relentless, overbearing, inescapable, and deadly presence of the sun.
As far as the archaeological record tells us to date, paganism, and more specifically animism, is the default world-feeling of all human and human-adjacent species. Revealed religions are anomalous in the history of human and human-adjacent species. They do not “take” without extreme violence and trauma, because they do not fit the genetic predispositions of most people groups.
The genetic predisposition to a particular world-feeling can be expelled from neither a population group nor from an individual. The best monotheism can do is break the human spirit, such that performance of the monotheism becomes automatic for the purpose of avoiding pain and death; and in the case of Christianity, avoiding eternal torture. It can never become the true nature of a population group in which it did not evolve. It is only ever a mask, a superego injunction so vicious it created and maintains the split between conscious (“good”) and subconscious (“evil”).
Those of us who pursue our ancestral world-feeling do so for the purpose of getting beneath the monotheist mask. Our goal is to recover and/or innovate ways of being in the world that permit authentic understanding and expression of our identity, including and especially our inherited, innate predispositions. Christianity forbids authentic understanding and expression of identity. Its goal is to crush "sinful" human nature out of existence and replace it with itself.
Paganism is what’s left after detoxing from the Christian imposition. It’s who we are underneath centuries of performing a false, externally-imposed identity. If we are not blank slates for communism, then we also were not blank slates for Christianity.
Great response. You succinctly laid out what I have labored to explain, however there is much more to be said about the syncretic Christian denominations and how they have intersected with various types of paganism. I am glad you made this comment, it touches on the living aspect of this religion very well.
Very well said. 'Pagan' meant 'rustic' which is associated with 'earthiness'. That 'earthiness' is what makes 'Pagan' different. We're close to the world-as-it-is.
Is the insistence that Christianity is in some way a "revealed/imposed" religion necessary because to assent to the anthropological evidence of its development along similar lines to any other religion invalidates your view? Specifically the view of the "collective unconscious?"
You said: "A population group that evolves in a desert environment has a higher probability of becoming genetically predisposed to to a monotheist world-feeling, due to the relentless, overbearing, inescapable, and deadly presence of the sun."
Okay, fine. But did Yahwism/Judaism evolve according to the "collective unconscious" process of "world-feeling" or was it "revealed/imposed?" Or, conveniently, was only Christianity "revealed/imposed" and not the religions from which it sprang? How so?
Nobody needs need to "understand paganism" to understand that the problem with the new pagan/heathen/folkish is that there is only a grasp of history and any logical categories when it's convenient. You clearly demonstrate that.
I'll not question your view of what the pagan worldview is. That's yours to have. But how do you know that's what it was? You said: "Paganism is not a religion in the same way that Christianity is a religion. Under the hood, in the workings of both the individual and collective unconscious, it is something else entirely. It is not a belief system so much as it is an observation system. Paganism observes the world as it is and adapts to changing conditions. It is situational awareness within a living and intelligent universe. It does not attempt to impose a static and unchanging state on a dead, material universe."
Is there a pre-Christian pagan theological text from which you take this view? Or is this a reconstructed, personal view that is necessarily set up in opposition to your view of Christianity?
No honest Christian apologist tries to pretend that Christianity is not reliant on paganism for everything from the philosophical language to the musical tones used in liturgies in it's own construction. It's funny to me that modern pagans can't be comfortable with this in the reverse.
Okay well, it's clear that nothing anyone says will cause you to get curious about your own position, but for the sake of others who may come across this I will clarify.
Of course paganism influenced Christianity and not the reverse. Paganism was there first. It was there for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years prior to the Christian revelation. It was the air Christianity had to breathe. Christianity never had anything to offer in the reverse.
According to the Old Testament and the archaeological evidence that I am aware of, the ancient Hebrews evolved into a people-group in the usual ways that anybody else does. They did not start off as monotheists. Over time they evolved into monotheists due to various pressures I won't get into here in the interest of brevity. You can see this transition in the Old Testament prophets railing continually against the ancient Hebrews worshipping "false idols." Monotheism was a political consolidation for the Hebrew tribes.
Judaism became a religion of revealed laws, according to Jewish mythology, when Moses came down the mountain with the tablets. At that point in the Jewish myth cycle, Judaism became a revealed religion.
Jesus came as a prophet of the new revelation and to establish the new covenant. Jesus himself clearly taught that he came to reveal a new religion. Or more specifically, a new take on an old religion for the Jews, and a new religion entirely for the gentiles. So yes, Christianity is also a revealed religion.
Revealed religions stand in contrast to paganism because they are not organically emergent. Paganism is organically emergent among any given people-group in response to environmental conditions over thousands or tens of thousands of years.
My view of these things comes from many decades of learning. I was raised as a fundamentalist, evangelical, charismatic Christian. My spiritual path has been largely been a matter of becoming increasingly honest with myself.
In addition to seeking and practicing radical self-honesty, I have also sought out reading and study into interpretations of ancient arts (cave paintings, figurines, etc) and folklore, as compared with modern tribal arts & folklore, to get at what was being recorded or communicated or transmitted. It turns out the shamanistic mindset of the ancients was so fundamentally different than the tiny religion box we've been forced into that it takes practice... praxis... to bring it to life and inhabit it. It is definitely knowable and it is definitely not lost. We have just lost touch with it.
So in case you missed it, the "text" I'm looking back to is archaeological evidence in the form of artifacts and rock art and folklore, as compared with contemporary shamanistic artifacts, rock art, folklore, and praxis.
It is of course not possible to know precisely what the ancients were thinking, and that is not my goal nor is it the goal of any pagan/heathen I've ever spoken with. As I stated previously, the goal is to discover ancient and/or innovate new ways of being authentically ourselves, including authentic expression of our genetic predispositions. According to our archaeological record, our genetic predisposition is toward animistic polytheism, NOT revealed monotheism.
And with that, I must get ready for work.
Hey, thanks for the reply.
I'm not sure you know my position (perhaps you can make good guesses), so the contention that I'm not curious about it doesn't make sense.
In paragraphs 1-5 of your reply, I have nothing to say as far as disagreement, though I do have an opinion that Iamblichus was building a theological framework in response to, and based on, Christian liturgical praxis. I am willing to bet that the Poetic Edda is full of Christian motifs, as well.
In paragraph 6, I would seek clarification from you that adherents of revealed religions contest that the religions aren't organically emergent, versus your own assertion that they're not organically emergent. Here again we have two different categories and I would need to know your position.
From a non-theist/naturalist view (and perhaps broadly non-Christian view with regards to Christianity in particular), it does seem as if all religions are "organically emergent." How could they not be? It even seems that, under the schema of a Pagan worldview, Yahwism/Judaism/Christianity do organically arise via this "collective unconscious/world-feeling" process. If the Pagan worldview is true, that must necessarily be the case. Otherwise, there are two options:
1. Christianity was a step towards our current liberal moment. It evolved the way any sociological endeavor evolved, and it is over and done with as we march into a more progressive, non-theistic age.
2. Yahweh is real, exists over-and-above the natural order, and guides history towards a certain end.
Option 3, to reiterate the view that must necessarily be true if the Pagan worldview is true: Christianity is an iteration of religion, the expression of which is natural to man as part of our connection to the "collective unconscious," that modern Pagans reject for a variety of reasons.
I appreciate you sharing some of your own background.
I'm familiar enough with fundamentalist evangelical Protestantism to understand that one major difference between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism as well as the Eastern Christianities is the focus on liturgical praxis.
Evangelical Protestantism seems very hostile towards communal acts of propitiation. But, it seems to me from my own years of study that the hallmark of any religion that hangs around is the following: structured acts of communal acknowledgment of the participants' deficiency in delaying gratification or in improperly ordering their lives.
People don't typically need to know where the world came from, or even how to deal with the "problem of evil." They need a way to deal with the cognitive dissonance that results from wanting to live a certain way and failing to do so, which is communal in nature. Ritual acts of worship are typically just that, with smattering of thanking whatever is perceived as divine and also asking for good things to happen.
This typically happens in spades in Catholic and Orthodox churches, as well as Anglican/Episcopal of the "high church" variety.
You said: "It turns out the shamanistic mindset of the ancients was so fundamentally different than the tiny religion box we've been forced into that it takes practice... praxis... to bring it to life and inhabit it. It is definitely knowable and it is definitely not lost. We have just lost touch with it."
Again, you indicate that the "text" you reference is not a standard text that would communicate, directly, that mindset. I'm not denying the validity of the methodology that you otherwise use to engage in your own form of orthopraxis. And it does seem as if you indicate that this modern Pagan movement is at least in part reconstructionist.
I suppose my contention is this: if this new Paganism continues to focus primarily on establishing provenance and pedigree, and less on developing a theology around communal propitiation (the only reason religions or spiritual worldviews are necessary), it's just not going to have any staying power. It's seeming more and more, and especially from IP, to just be the spiritualization of ethnocentrism.
Hey thx for thoughtful response. I'm at work so will get back to you later tonight. Peace ✌🏻
The ancestral principle is not so much about belief as it is about ritual, it is about the greater legitimacy or theurgic significance of ancestral rites on account of their co-evolution with a people. It doesn't necessarily have to do with "older = better". The argument you are making against reconstructed Paganism is not new, in fact it was the same arguments that the Trads were making. They insisted that, because Paganism is a "dead" religion, its rites have lost their significance, and the solution is to default back to the most "Aryan" tradition that continues into modernity. For Evola, this was Theravada Buddhism. For Guenon, it was Sufi Mysticism. For Devi, Hinduism. For Eliade, Orthodox Mysticism. There is a reason that so much of the old Pagang put such an emphasis on the Rg Veda. It wasn't just to wewuz, or to piss off Indians, it is because it is the oldest surviving Indo-European religious text that was not passed down through a third party. Furthermore, it was an authoritative text that did not evolve with the evolution of Hinduism, as demonstrated by its archaic language (which even many Classical Indians had a difficult time understanding).
I don't think this is a reasonable argument, though. This may be the liquor talking, but In many respects early Indo-European religion is more robust than the Old Hebrew religion which most of the Bible is meant to represent, despite the former being thousands of years older. Comparative mythology is especially robust, because it is unlikely that the same myth would be fabricated in two different cultural narratives. Old Hebrew religion cannot really be deciphered using comparative religion because the very people who insist on its legitimacy deny even partial legitimacy to other ancient semitic religions. You mention that a Vandal and an Alan would castrate you for insisting their gods are the same, but there is simply no historical reason to believe this. The Vandal would have already understood certain Alanic gods to be localizations of his own gods -- perhaps distorted, but not demonic. The Hebrew tradition is mostly unique in its characterization of mostly similar deities as demonic enemies of the Hebrew god.
Furthermore, Pagan writings are mostly preserved in the Western world by a professional class of scribes and bards, who didn't really have an incentive to alter them. Their existence was more of a curiosity than a perceived threat. Abrahamics did have an incentive not only to alter Hebrew texts over time but more generally to select for texts they promoted and nignore texts they didn't view favorably. Roman and Greek Paganism had a very long and drawn out literary tradition, and was rewritten by scholars from Britain to Bukharia, from the Nile to the Oresund. As far as the Germanic tradition goes, Snorri is a very legitimate and trustworthy source. Most poems of the Poetic Edda use language which indicates they were composed centuries before Snorri's life, and the very purpose which altercation would serve is already served by the Prose Edda, particularly the Prologue where Snorri discusses his Christian interpretation of these poems as being real things that happened to very ancient people. The reason Euhemerization is directly added into the poems in most Gaelic works is because most Gaelic poems which survive today were not just recorded by Christians, but composed by a mid-Christianization Ireland and Scotland.
"The reason Euhemerization is directly added into the poems in most Gaelic works is because most Gaelic poems which survive today were not just recorded by Christians, but composed by a mid-Christianization Ireland and Scotland."
If one studies the names and epithets of the Gods and Goddesses, it becomes very clear that most Gaelic clannish and tribal genealogies go right to them, and most of the euhemerized texts like the Book of the Taking of Ireland, are entirely based on earlier myths which extend into an uncertain past. The more that I look, the more that I find the euhemerization follows a specific system. I read something covering this, and I am wanting to do an article on how euhemerization and poetic language covered up things, but I am busy these days.
Great comment, btw.
What went on in early medieval Northern Europe isn't even really to be described as "euhemerization". It was more akin to Honji suijaku in Japan, where the Kami were considered to be Boddhisattvas or Devas. Beings of superhuman power and longevity, but not gods in the traditional sense
Interesting 🤔
Anacharsis was killed by his own people for “becoming too Greek”. There is little reason to believe that the ancients had some perennial understanding of their myth. The Vedic people even considered other Iranians to be barbaric “mlechhas”.
There is a difference between viewing your rites and myths as superior to most, or being against the adoption of foreign rites by your countrymen, and disregarding the religious experiences of foreigners entirely.
Never really liked the idea of an "ancestral principle" for a number of reasons, for starters it comes off as obfuscatory to the vitality of paganism and all this entails, in favor of just continuing a tradition. There are dangers in making paganism "just" that, as you point out in some places. Further, it conflicts with my idea of paganism as ecological, which entails and necessitates change. I'm not sure how they would defend a clear chronology of change in those thousands of years—Odin, for example, is a titanic shift from "IE tradition"
I think the sought point of things like this principle is something that I've argued before, that paganism represents the "original", or default, religious inclination of mankind (and prior). We can trace back religious attitudes to the first humans, to neanderthals - and follow that gradient until its impossible to say anything at all, musing about the religion of bacteria and molecules. Christianity OTTH is immensely temporal, it has to be, as it exclaims a number of historical events as proof of the religious system. We can point exactly to where it began, why, by whom, and under what context. That has its strengths, but it leaves "what came before?" as a tantalizing question. For a lot of people, Genesis doesn't cut it.
I think you are still applying the ancestral principle, you just don't have the exact same take as IP. Your entire second half of the comment seems to be applying it
Yeah it's essentially the same thing in nature, just a different process with different conclusions
I'd be interested reading your own response to IP's article, then. This world is so small, that critiques should be taken seriously, and you have very measured critiques.
I mean, you could apply the ancestral principle to your own eyesight, since that in practice is the only way you actually know that you have ancestors, much less that they said anything. But that's very different from how IP uses it.
Thanks for reading. Would you say that this “eternal archetype” thing is an ecological function as I alluded to? As in, our brains evolve the same way due to shared genetics and environment?
There is that, sure, for example the idea of a "sky father", often with solar associations, seems expressly perennial—you see it everywhere from the "Great Spirit" of injuns to the Jade Emperor of the Chinese. Either these are all tangents of a singular religious system some thousands of years ago before mankind spread, or it is simply part of how the human mind comprehends reality.
But the ecological aspect explains differences as much as it does similarities. The Greeks and Germanics, despite sharing relatively recent ancestors, differed greatly in their environmental contexts. Different climates/seasons, different neighbors, different biomes, animals, & flora. Consequently, there religion/pantheons were different. Mutually intelligible sure, but still unique.
For this reason, I would expect an "American paganism" to be likewise unique in some way. Maybe only as unique as English paganism was to Norse, but still so. My contention is that I am not sure to what degree an ancestral principle permits this, and if not, how it explains clear changes & differentiation in the past
In evolutionary contexts change (ie mutation) is in individual cases almost always either pointless or deadly, but on a large scale beneficial, necessary. This is also why inherited epigenetic changes typically don't last over many generations: its expected that the environment won't be identical over an increasing number of generations. I would be interested in seeing AP confronted and rectified with Heraclitus, "No man can cross the same river twice, for he is not the same man, and it not the same river".
What would you say about non IE peoples teaching the same conclusion? As in, African sky deities resembling IE ones when none of the other variables you mentioned were present?
these are great questions, imo
Like I said it's either something fundamental to human life, or all descendants of "the first religion". We know we can trace back a lot of Native American, Aboriginal, and IE traditions to a single origin in ice age Siberia (the world tree, for example), but I don't know about Africa. It would be remarkable that the latter hypothesis is true, but it is plausible. I think the former is more likely; human life shares enough similarity across the globe that we should expect its various religious expressions to be as similar.
Did you block me?
I have a feeling that both sides are talking past each other, and that at the base of it, there is a misunderstanding of Christian civilisation in its entirety, up to the point that people who try to engage in pagan practices cannot help but frame everything, including their worship, in the theological language of Christianity. We are too immersed in it at present, to the point where our mental constructs jump to the Cross when religion is mentioned.
Pagan beliefs are gone, irretrievably. More often than not, they were a series of ancestral cults, that happened to grow as patronage of the stronger groups, or bigger city states encouraged others to adopt these beliefs. Syncreticism was an accepted occurrence, as polytheism outright demanded that existence of other gods had to be upheld to validate your own tribal divinity. This syncretic attitude found its way into Christianity too, sometimes despite ardent work to counter it, but on the whole, delivering faith that recognised aspects of the Revelation in its antecedents, and fulfilling them in Christ.
We have fragments of these beliefs in the records, but as no clear linrages remain, beyond loose ethnic consciousness, what form of ancestral worship are we talking about here? Do you pour libations at the graves of your grandparents, like some Russian Orthodox still do? Do you have harvest festivals like they have them in Poland, or burn the Yule log? Arguably, modern Christian Europeans perform more ancestral rituals than the sterile reconstructionists, purely because those remain an unbroken chain of rituals that have been performed by each generation in turn, enmeshed in an existing living culture.
"Pagans" look for spiritual element in their beliefs, which inevitably seeks to strip Europeans of everything European, as it is impossible to separate the two, after 2000 years. But hold on, would that pedigree not qualify Christianity as an "old-time religion" for most?
As for Christian attitudes towards the debate - there's a order of magnitude of difference here between the pagan predilections of the reconstructionists and the catechism of the Church, where the Church worked for centuries to uplift the folk understanding of spirituality and the world to the level of neo-Platonist considerations, culminating in St Thomas Aquinas. This will miss the point with most of them. As I see it, they crave a personal experience with their historical past, to the level where ancestral legacies are sought to be ressurected, and where understanding of the world is filtered through those legacies - communion with their anecsors, with the genius of their family, or a tutelary deity. Morality then, becomes filtered through that ancestral relationship, which infuses their beliefs with familiar experiences, just as Christians are called on to have such relationship with the Father. This unfortunately clashes with our current social structures today, and political reality, where such morality cannot be viably expressed, short of imposing tribal social structures more reminiscent of Afghanistan than Europe.
Perhaps instead of seeing a conflict here, reconstructionists should reflect on social and familiar ties within society as we have it, and work on strengthening those, since those are a foundation of a true ancestral legacy, rather than antiquarian curisities from a past that simply does not map onto reality as we have it today.
Perhaps this requires a more in-depth piece, as this is just my off-the cuff feeling on the matter upon first reflection. Happy to be corrected wherever.
I think this comment talks past the pagan position entirely while affirming the Christian one.
Perhaps, hence my willingness to review these ideas, but maybe some of it is driven by nebulousness of the pagan position? We are taking several thousand years of disparate beliefs and cultures, and try to compare that to the Christian civilisation - it becomes apples and oranges really, unless one narrows it down to a particular culture or ethnicity, which then puts us up against a limited amount information of any one ethnic ancestral belief.
The problem is that there is a lot more that we can prove about these ancient cultures than Christians are willing to admit. Gaelic religion, for example, is often seen as impossibly lost even to many pagans. The more I learn though, the more I can see that enough was recorded and enough has been studied that we can make a reasoned approach to the religion. This only comes through voracious reading and actually partaking in ritual with these Gods.
I take European civilization as a racial thing, not a religious thing. There is a genetic continuity between us and our ancestors, but there is little religious continuity beyond from what has been so deeply ingrained that it will never go away. Does Christian civilization include non-Europeans? Yes. The church is majority non-White right now. To say that this religion is the whole meat and bones of our civilization, or the source of all our greatness, is really missing the point.
It is more like comparing myself to my ancestors, not apples to oranges. Comparing a modern European to a Biblical Israelite is more like apples to oranges.
Will explain it since those guys are 1st-gen Pagans.
Lot to break down or explain, and it probably won't be that clear.
Suggest reading into things like the Mosaic Distinction & Pagan translation
====
The point of Aryan faiths is war.
The point of others including Hindus & Abrahamics is communal scholarship.
--
Literally have Kurgans in village & it's a bandit village.
How does ancestral principle work & why?
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In Aryan (pagan) faiths the DEFAULT is inclusion unlike the priestly ones.
--
We share blood so in war we must fight together.
That's the ancestral principle.
I don't have to argue capital v communist etc with you
We are BLOOD.
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Hierarchy & inclusion/exclusion is then determined not by "belief"
(political worldview really)
But by code & martial prowess.
Why is a Pakistani Jatt not my brother
1. Cuts hair & circumcised
2. inbreeding
Why is a Hindu or non-practicing Sikh one inferior?
1. Cuts hair
2. Less weapons
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So TLDR it's concentric circles of loyalty without the 10 commandments against violence.
Western pagans still have leftover feminism so harp on race too much.
A lot of their gripes comes down to a desire to avoid intermarriage.
Without the balls to command a ban on women marrying out.
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C Asia has joint Hindu, Buddhist, Hellenic & Zoroasatrian Mandirs going back centuries.
There's not really an idea of false gods, just some people will resonate with specific dieties more.
This depends on ancestry, temperament, lineage etc.
Specific cults, and temples can also have their own rules like no women, blacks etc.
The universal rule is theological inclusion simply because niggers exist.
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The Lord has given you weapons so do TND if you can.
That's the TLDR of paganism
Instead of mealy mouth condemnation or scholarceling it's about War.
My solar diety is in essence, the same as your's.
When we clash whoever wins had his favour that day.
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"Victory passes back and forth between men" - Illiad
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Train hard for war.
Worship weapons, Lift Weights.
https://manglacharan.com/Sarbloh+Guru+Granth+Sahib/Sarbloh+Instructing+Indra
Hail the All-Steel Protector
ਅਕਾਲ
Priestly faiths are about "believing" in your own version of reality.
Then collapsing horribly every few centuries because you're gay.
Reality exists, and rests upon Sword, tooth, and claw.
Every single One of the Gods has unshorn hair and weapons.
That is the divine image.
ਅਕਾਲ
To those reading this, singh is a brown foreigner. He's not Aryan, his ancestors were conquered and mixed by Aryans.
You're a simp who licks pussy.
My name is Singh & I have the Nihang battalions as my pfp.
Only someone of your IQ would need a clarification.
You're circumcised - I'm Aryan.
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
This guy is totally disgusting and deranged and admitted to raping little kids lol
Stop fantasizing about me raping kids.
No wonder you renounced sex.
Good riddance
Yawn. We have craploads of surviving documents & artifacts from pagan places & eras. "But we don't know literally every single detail!" is pathetic whining from someone who would just whine about some other fake complaint if we did know every single detail.
Did you even try reading the article?
Did you even try writing something worth reading?
Yep
Then I will give it another chance.
“Something about the Scandinavians has always seemed irreligious” *looks at Ferd*
Another banger, thanks Layne.
It's a great read, but to me the answer is simple: we need something new.
To my mind, even if a faithful appeal to tradition was possible, it wouldn't be entirely desirable; there is no stasis in the universe, flux is omnipresent.
Each mystical tradition (which is upstream from each religion) was generated through the creativity of a people's seers and poets, who invariably used what was around them like any artist (this is well documented with Christianity incorporating many pagan practices, etc.). We need a new tradition for our new age, and must look to the poets and seers for inspiration.
For the metaphysics behind this, that is another story. I'm not positing the gay trope of "we all worship the same god just in different ways", I'm saying each time and people must have their own gods and systems, and IMHO, looking to the past for a comprehensive blueprint is weak, corpse-like, and beneath the White man.
This ignores the bona fide and hierophany of Christians and Pagans alike
Not at all, it just expresses the need to rest it in an entirely new tradition (as “new” as a mystical tradition can be)
'Pagan' is in the eye of the beholder. For 'christians', 'pagan' is any 'cult' that deviates from their specific iteration of 'christian' beliefs. And this can include beliefs that 'pagans' would consider 'christian'. For example, the conflict between Lutherans and Catholics and between 'full immersion' and 'sprinkle'.
The term 'pagan' functions as simply the religious 'other'. That's it.
If you want to talk intelligently about the conflict between 'christianity' and European non-christianity ('pagan'), it's almost impossible. The 'christians' waged war on the people's of Europe for over a thousand years. In that past, 'christians' were quite open about stamping out the 'heathen' but now it seems like some 'christians' would like to pretend 'conversion' was all just rainbows and butterflies.
'Christians' want to use Abrahamo-Platonic standards and concepts to talk about *all* beliefs. It's build into Abrahamo-Platonism to look at the living world through alien - and alienated - eyes, always judging.
As a 'pagan', I'm not really interested in telling other 'pagans' how to be 'pagan'. In that sense, it's not a 'religion'. My religion is White Nationalism. But by 'spiritual beliefs' are a product of study and experience. How is that transferable to another? How is any 'spirituality' transferable from one person to another?
At a certain point, a person begins to experience the enormity of being born only to die. If they're embedded in a community that has adequate responses to 'being born only to die', then they have a religion that distracts or comforts them (or both). If they don't, then they either live with the anxiety of the knowledge of their mortality or the adopt a set of beliefs to distract or comfort them. But that rarely works. A belief freely accepted is one that is just as freely denied. The New Agers always looking for the next 'spiritual' innovation or the 'christian' looking for the 'best church' all have the same problem: The religion of their ancestors did not capture them and now they are adrift. And will be, probably, forever. Unless they have a *gnosis* that transforms them, not just informs them.
This is the problem with “we wuz everything” that I described in the post. Most GPs don’t mean “everything that isn’t Christian is pagan”. Are African tribal religions pagan? Is Shinto pagan?
We were 'everything'. Abahamo-Platonism is an alien creed from an alienated people.
Since 'pagan' is in the eye of the beholder, it depends on what *your* 'religion' is as to whether African tribal religions are 'pagan'. The same thing with Shinto.
Neither are 'christian', so, for a 'christian' both are 'pagan'.
The same with 'Buddhism' or 'Taoism' or 'Caodaism' or 'Thelema'.
Before Abrahamo-Platonism, peoples had beliefs and practices related to their prehistory that survived into the present. Their 'religion' was close to them and to their living space. Invasions produced conflicts between the 'domestic' religion of the invaded people and that of the invaders. The problem was resolved with violence and some accommodation. This can be seen Hinduism quite clearly.
As an example of what non-western 'paganism' looks like, let's take a place that is at the confluence of many 'spiritual projects': Vietnam.
Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the religious environment of Vietnam:
'The majority of Vietnamese do not follow any organized religion, instead participating in one or more practices of folk religions, such as venerating ancestors, or praying to deities, especially during Tết and other festivals. Folk religions were founded on endemic cultural beliefs that were historically affected by Confucianism and Taoism from ancient China, as well as by various strands of Buddhism (Phật giáo).[2] These three teachings or tam giáo were later joined by Christianity (Catholicism, Công giáo) which has become a significant presence.[3] Vietnam is also home of two indigenous religions: syncretic Caodaism (Đạo Cao Đài) and quasi-Buddhist Hoahaoism (Phật giáo Hòa Hảo).'
Here we see a country that is not dominated by Abrahamo-Platonism, where 'religion' is still something that arises from the people and returns to it.
'Pagan' means 'rustic, rural'. Cicero used the term in 'De Agricultura' to contrast the practices of rural people to the more cultivated practices of the Rome. So, the origin 'pagan' wasn't about 'christian' at all, between two different kinds of what 'christians' would call 'pagan'.
'Pagan' is in the eye of the beholder. But, the one thing it is not, is Abrahamo-Platonism, which is creed of imposition, not chthonic.
Is this a critique of neo-paganism or the entirety of non-abrahamic religion?