Bulk exposition upon paganism

There's plenty of Orphic and Neo-platonic material still around. There's probably enough written records of Roman civic practice that combined with the iguvine tablets and the balls to do something about it you could reconstruct that practice in a meaningful way.

Most pagans are pretty focused on finding reasons you can't do things. It's an understandable backlash against the tide of utter shit published for an entirely uncritical audience from the 60s-90s but it means if you want to find anything that will motivate you to go instead of stop you need to turn to primary and academic sources rather than the "pagan community".

Sorry, don't know how coherent or useful this will be to you.

We have the mythology, a context for viewing the world, we have descriptions and an example of ritual instructions.

Considering how paganism operates I don't know what more could be asked than an example of specific ritual instructions. Especially when it's derived from the native agrarian religion (rather than a third hand description of Italians attempting Greek ritual).

You aren't ever going to get a holy book saying -this is the one immutable and correct way to do religion-. I know there are people who think saying paganism is nature worship is a simplification, but at it's core it is about mans religious response to his environment.

I think it is possible to understand the Greeks if you read broadly enough. I think the most important is understanding the local cults but reading about the Orphic and Neoplatonic conceptions of religion are useful to get an idea how wide the outer limits of "acceptable" understanding were.

On the Italian side a little reading on Etrusca Disciplina and the myth of Numa Pompilius is I think instructive.

The main advantage we have over previous generations is our ability to access basicly all the information man has collected, even if none of these things are gone into in depth they illustrate in their difference the futility of finding the indisputably correct way to think about or practice paganism.

All we can do is learn as much as we can so when we speak on the gods and attempt to interpret their signs we aren't coming from a place of ignorance.

As to the Egyptians, unfortunately they are outside of my wheelhouse (though I am fascinated by the Greco Egyptian magical papyri). I can't help but feel that the focus of Egyptian religion on the afterlife makes it in some way materially different from classical paganisms.

Would Hermeticism also fall into the realm of Greco-Egyptian mythology or is that too far removed?

A Greco-Egyptian mythology would be the wrong term to use. The papyri are a drawing together of Egyptian, Greek, Jewish and Gnostic sources, though they are part of the same milieu that gave birth to the Hermeticism. So I guess you could speak of a Greco-Egyptian metaphysics (though solely in relation to the performance of the kind of magic found in the papyri).

At best there are hints to possible linkages (Hermes the god turning up often, though not as the thrice great as far as I'm aware). If you are interested I recommend Betz's Greek magical papyri in Translation (which if you have access to a university library should be available there, though it is just texts of the papyri themselves and not much in the way of commentary) and Skinner's Techniques of Greco-Egyptian Magic which is the only comprehensive academic text *I am aware of that deals with the papyri at this time.

My current working definition is

That which has power over man, and man is powerless to overturn.

Sometimes I'll say forces, sometimes entities, sometimes the ability to command devotion comes into it

Though I use devotion in place of a word I don't think exists what would cover the concepts of worship, devotion and submission, without being any of them... a word I imagine philosophers would hate and wrestle into something more specific, if it existed.

Maybe "capable of causing rapture" would be a better marker that talking about worship or devotion. I think the important thing about gods, why they matter to humans, is their ability to *incite religious rapture, ecstasy or terror.

So I guess I'd say

Gods are forces or entities more powerful than man, unable to be overturned by man, that *incite religious rapture.

I don't think the gods are all one kind of entity, one class of being, if that is what you were asking, even for the classical pagans. Especially at the level of local cult which is where the Olympian pantheon eventually arose from.

Rites of Artemis don't require a belief that Athena is the same kind of thing... except at the level of being an inescapable power.

Take it for what it's worth. Clearly I'm still puzzling it out. I'm painfully aware that I'm early on *in my path.

I guess it's a question of gods and lesser beings, or Gods and gods (and once you get below the level of inescapable power that incites rapture, I think it becomes more coherent to talk of "beings" as a generalisation).

There are a lot of angles to attack this from so forgive me if it's not structured optimality.

The most obvious way (it seems to me) that something that humans could destroy could be a god, is to view it through the lens of (a pseudo) platonic idealism. Once a concept exists, once a metaphor exists, then it exists and even if you destroy the object or situation that gave rise to it, it can still be employed conceptually or metaphoricly, it can still occupy a place in the collective unconsciousness (if you find that a useful concept).

An example I sometimes consider is the idea of a "god of the breaking rock". A god whose material existence/manifestation lasts only between the moment the rock is shattered and the time it takes the pieces to come to rest. but the concept of the god of the breaking rock exists as long as it's in someone's head... and possibly as long as there is a being capable of being effected by the breaking rock.

My problem with treating every potential god, or every god the ancients paid tribute to as on par with divinity/deity of the Olympian gods (as a convenient example) is that there are some things that are clearly not gods.

Systems of government for example, the gods smiled and frowned equally on democracies, oligarchies and dictatorships.

So if not everything is a god this leaves us with 3 options (or at least 3 interpretations that I think work) when dealing with the (ancient) deification of things that man can (on the face of it) overcome.

The first is magic. Which I think interlinks (at least at the point where the rubber meets the road) with your idea of "finding of the sacred". Someone with spiritual authority (The "mana" of the New Zealand Maori, charisma, wisdom, the madness of being touched by the gods, or in some other way marked as special) "finds the sacred" in a place or thing, perceives it's spiritual power that in some way allows it to affect the fate of people in the community beyond what it's appearance/ material conditions would suggest. There are a million ways this could manifest itself. It's magic.

The next is hope/hopelessness, just a feeling of having no control. A god of plumbing makes sense if you have no ability (or limited ability) to fix the pipes. If the inescapable powers of the sea, or war, or love, can be placated by correct offerings or ritual actions, then if you deify plumbing it becomes possible to placate it through ritual action. Deification for the purpose of instrumentalisation.

A third possibility is Numina, the idea that a place or thing has been touched, or nodded at, by a god and this imbues it with divinity.

I really like Edward Anwyl mythopoetic explanation for the origin of animism:

Prehistoric man... Knowing from the experience of dreams that he himself seemed able to wander away from himself, he thought in course of time that other living things were somehow double, and the world around him came to be occupied, not merely with things that were alive, but with other selves of these things, that could remain in them or leave them at will. - Celtic Religion in Pre-Christian Times

Maybe in this there is another way to attack the problem.

As an aside I'd see Athena as a goddess of civilisation or society, something that cannot help but arise when a certain amount of humans congregate for an extended period. Her benevolent character in the classical period I think is a product of the constant warfare between citystates (which made civilisation, society, the city, absolutely necessary for survival) and the development of the useful arts and technology's the citystate gave rise to. In the modern world she is no longer so unambiguous a figure.