The times we inhabit

but yeah
the future was always telescoping
like the future was tens of thousands of years away in 1910
Millenia in the 30s
when you get to the 50s
and the space race
the future is centuries away
starting in the 70s the future is decades away
with cyberpunk it became 20 minutes into the future
and now there is no future

this is the high middle ages of capitalism
the end of history
where things are how they are ordained to be
no past
no future
the thing is
one thing that's been suppressing any cultural movement

is the influence of the peoples temple incident in suppressing NRMs

and the problem with having no past

is people forget quickly

yeah
you can't controll these forces once they're unleashed though
either a zeitgiest is built or it isn't
like
individual cults can avoid it
but a zeitgiest of spiritual seeking, and new growth, will be harnessed by plenty of people
but yeah, we live in an age of incredibly limited choices
the capitalist ideological hegemony, dead churches, or 'failed' communism

On writing

My working definition of paganism is 'the human individuals religious response to their 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, the human individual's response to their 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.

1

Manage

Examples of nature worship in classical polytheism

It starts with asking how did people in the pre-Christian world understand the gods? Part of that, part of where the gods exist, is in nature.

Nature worship and god worship have a lot of overlap. The bodies of the gods were in pivotal natural phenomena and manifested in a myriad of smaller and more localised aspects. There were big differences in interpretation of phenomena, and a large space for the creative and the novel (let alone the poetic) in Classical, and wider European, paganism.

>35 . The 35th introduces two shepherds grazing under Mt. Lysson in the Ephesian territory who spot a swarm of bees in some deep and inaccessible cave. However, one of them gets into a basket to go down, and well tethered he descends. The one who descends finds honey and also much gold, and filling up the basket three times he called for it to be drawn up. When the gold was finished he shouted that he himself was going to get in, but as he said it the idea of treachery came to him, so he put a stone in the basket instead of himself, and called for it to be drawn up. When it was near the crown, the lifter let go. Then, thinking he had killed the other he went away to some gorge and buried the gold. He then crafted plausible excuses to use with those who asked about the disappeared shepherd. Completely at a loss how to save himself, the shepherd in the cave was commanded by Apollo in a dream to slash his body with a sharp rock and to lie quiet. When he does what is commanded, vultures grabbed onto him as to a corpse with their claws; some to his cloak, others fixing onto his clothing, they lifted up and bore him safe to the hollow below. He came to the archive and told everything. And the Ephesians questioned the plotter and punished him after making him divulge the buried gold. Half the gold they gave to the wronged man, and and other half they allotted to Artemis and Apollo. The rescued shepherd, now very rich, installed an altar of Apollo at the summit of the mountain, and he called it Gypaieus (Vulturian) as a memorial of those who lifted him up together.

(from the epitome of Conon in Photius' 'Bibliotheca')

is a good example of the gods in nature, Apollo acting through a flock of vultures, which then ends in the building of an altar on the mountaintop. The magical in nature, as the sacred in nature, as the gods in nature.

Even more directly you get things like:

>"If you have ever come upon a grove that is thick with ancient trees rising far above their usual height and blocking the view of the sky with their cover of intertwining branches, the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, and your wonder at the unbroken shade in the midst of open space will create in you a sense of the divine (numen). Or, if a cave made by the deep erosion of rocks supports a mountain with its arch, a place not made by hands but hollowed out by natural causes into spaciousness, then your mind will be aroused by a feeling of religious awe (religio). We venerate the sources of mighty rivers, we build an altar where a great stream suddenly bursts forth from a hidden source, we worship hot springs, and we deem lakes sacred because of their darkness or immeasurable depth."

(Seneca the Younger, Letters 41.3)

or if you go to Burchard's Corrector in the aftermath of paganism (c. 1012ad) you get examples like:

>Canon 57 [66]: “Have you gone to any place to pray other than a church or some other religious place that your bishop or priest showed you; for example, to springs, rocks, trees, or crossroads; and have you burned candles or small torches there to venerate that place, have you brought bread or some other offering there, have you eaten there, or sought anything there for the health of the body or the soul? If you have done this or approved of it, you should do penance for three years on the appointed fast days.”

Neither of the last two are very distant from what is written off as ahistorical modernising nature worship.