writing and the gods

My working definition of paganism is 'mans religious response to his environment'. I think once a holy text that must be differed to enters the picture that's a fundamental shift in how religion functions. 

Part of the advent of Christianity tied up with moralising the gods. I think the advent of writing unintentionally changed mans relationship with the gods, suddenly all these local gods that functioned effectively alone, or in little pantheons of 2 or 3 gods could now be woven into a sweeping tapestry of family relationships that places them all in conversation with each other, but in doing this all these stories that offend societal mores come into being. They then sit there, in text, to be dissected at leisure, and judged, and found wanting compared to 'right human action'.

If before the advent of writing your local deity does something 'immoral' in some part of the myth complex that surrounds them, it's justified by it's mythic potency, the meaning it imbues into your relationship with them. That's missing in a big complex of myths that exists to fix a structure to the gods interactions with each other. It's not about the relationship between the gods and the reader, the reader is a voyeur, they play no part.

Anyway, mans response to his environment is the same today as it was 2000 years ago, humanity hasn't changed, we are simple creatures and still find the same simple things potent. Death, fire, abundance, repetition, immersion, being engulfed, intoxication, the rhythmic, etc, etc. Christianity at one time or another has claimed domain over all these things, that's the thing about a holy book though, you can go back and read it and see a lot of the 'pagan undercurrents' in Christianity are things that remain in use 
(or have been 'rediscovered') because they are potent because of the kind of creatures humans are, and they don't really have much to do with Christianity at all.

.....


 I don't know if it's like... an inherent property of writing that this happens, though it may be inherent in the way writing is used by people over a long enough time line. But I think there are examples of writing that is good or useful to the survival or revival of polytheism. It's just not moralising writing. The Iguvine Tablets
are a straight forward example. Alcman's Partheneia is another. Ritual texts that reference ritual rather than other texts.

I'm sitting here thinking about the relationship between ritual texts, holy books and modernist manifestos. They're all texts of instruction... but the holy book aims to convince, the prominence of logos in the bible, the importance it places on reasoning its way into your world view (after it's fashion) sets it apart from the ritual text and the manifesto. The later two are performative, whereas the holy book seeks to transform the readers understanding, to make the texts construction of the way the world operates foundational.

The performative texts exist to construct something, the way they attempt to transform the world is through what it constructed through their performance... they create new possibilities.

existentialist paganism. the big upfront.

Paganism is mans religious response to his environment.

Religion is mans duty to the sacred.

As man has not changed his response today carries the validity of that first response.

New ritual actions are as valid as the old, when they are validated by their potency.

It is the ability of a ritual action to create a human response that validates it.

The relationship of existentialist paganism to other paganisms

i think the ancient pagans would have recognised 99% of people who call themselves pagan today

my starting point is that the gods exist, and everything flows from that... in terms of what are 'valid' and 'invalid' beliefs.  rather than 'this point is history was when people were doing -real- paganism and deviating from it is paganing wrong'. but if you just want to worship nature, or be a human in the world, or think of the gods as archetypes in your skull, you're like 90% of the way there anyway.
or think the gods are reflections of some deist conception of the overgod or whatever, i'm never going to agree with you, but it's not like a cause for rejection

2/3 existentialist paganism

I think there are a couple of things at play. The current ruling ideology of society cannot conceive of civilisation in pantheon. From within civilisation civilisation is all encompassing. Acknowledging other gods, even if we are distant from them, fundamentally changes a persons relationship with the accepted order.

To moralise the gods was the big fatal mistake. The gods are beholden to no law, and to shape them to fit our moral ideals killed our ability to see and comprehend them

*what would you say if i said one of the problems of polytheism is that if you are in communion with the gods then other practitioners don't matter a huge amount, and if you aren't then all the community on earth is no replacement

The trance of recognition seeking to give the inevitable meaning.

The fact he's describing it as cyberpunk, and the themes of cyberpunk (hi-tech dystopia) means that it's worth considering wider societal dysfunction. It's not for nothing that one of the predictors of the rise of cult activity is a loss of credibility of the prevailing social order and the myths that undergird it .

I'm with you 1000%, brother (or sister?). I'm way down into the eclipse of social constructivism and the Consensus Trance that is going on these days owing to "alternative explanations," only some of which are reality-grounded. You're barking upexactly the right trees on this.

There were problems in the '50s (to wit, "Rebel Without a Cause" and all that) and obviously in the '60s and early '70s). With the rise of further de-constructivism during the Internet age, the curious kids are finding their way to as much dangerous voodoo as they are to, say, "observant mindfulness." Sigh.

I'd say that the other big predictor for the rise of cult activity (people being secure in their needs and having money, coupled with a general dissatisfaction with their lives) explains the uptick from the 50s-80s (beginning with scientology) in America. and the same in the 80s and 90s in Japan.

People aren't secure or wealthy today, the problem is, if you are young and intelligent, it's painfully obvious that you have no future. Any cults emerging today are going to have more in common with the rise of cults in Europe during the black plague than with the cults of the 50s.

Hmm. Secular human potential gives way to religious pseudo-security. Interesting notions. Either way, though, observant empiricism takes a hit. (And we thought... Well. Yeah. We thought.)

I don't know if I'd characterise it as an offer of security, more a despair of security. More a kind of fatalism. The trance of recognition seeking to give the inevitable meaning.