Paganism and challange

Maybe I'm just generally out of sorts, but I wonder if this language of healing and making peace is actually helpful in terms of bringing about any kind of change.

Have we dealt with the reality that we are under attack and have been every step of the way? Paganism has played a very conservative game, in terms of risk and perception management. And it has worked well, in terms of keeping participants safe, but it's also not very energising, there's no risk of any wild enthusiasm carrying people away. Maybe that's good, maybe it's bad, it mitigates costly mistakes, while blunting potential, but it's also manifested as a reluctance to reach out to marginalised groups in our society, which is to say, prisoners and the mentally ill. But maybe this is just an extension of paganisms reluctance to do -any- outreach.

I feel like challenge isn't something that's explicitly valued in many pagan paths. Which isn't intended as a value judgement. I don't know how I feel about it myself. Just a reason things are the way they are.

*By challenge, I don't mean competition, or struggle, both of which are coded as good within our current spiritual environment. Nor to I mean suffering which is taken as an all consuming negative which justifies all actions by several religions. I'm thinking of something more like daring.

Divination and the gods

i've been thinking about the difference between the gods and the monotheistic conception of god in regards to divination lately
it's strange that divination to contact the gods is fairly ubiquitous in polytheism, yet almost unknown in monotheism
and i think it is tied up in the relationship of monotheistic conceptions of their god to authority

What's ur definition of divination

in this context it is the recieiving of messages 'of whatever articulation' from the gods through the use of a divinationary rite or practice
i.e. something insitgated by the human, rather than by the god
since the monotheistic conception of god exists to solve the problem of 'what is the basis of morality' his will must be embodied by human institutions, that can stay "on message"

i mean even the philosophers who hewed to monisim didn't attempt divination to communicate with the god as they conceived it

the monotheistic rejection of divination as a way of communicating with divinity disempowers the individual, forcing them to approach to the institution for sanction of any planned activities, and unable to counter an acts of oppression if the institution chooses to move against them

And ultimately it serves to place institutional authority between the human individual and the divine

how paganism survived

i think the business of paganism is to apprehend the gods
and the nature of paganism is mans religious response to his environment
so continuity is implicit in the pagan experience
which is why, though you cannot make the case for direct survivals, it's also hard to make the case that paganism was ever truly extinguished
which is also why it began to reassert itself the moment the christanities deathgrip on europe relaxed

1936

the age of consumerism bites, or manifests, some time in 1936, the coalescence of a number of factors that had began coming into being in the late 20's. One of which was the penetration, the saturation, of ubiquitous mass media. Not just as event, at the movies, or passively, surrounding text, but in the home in the form of the radio. Another is the intertwining of brand and lifestyle, most easily seen in early appliance commercials aimed at housewives, but increasingly seen in other types of products.

Perhaps more telling was the flattening of culture, the introduction of national censorship boards severely narrowing the tone and messages put into film, as the last ventures under way before the imposition of the censorship regime dried up. Most of all in the political arena, where the room for independent intellectual enquiry also narrowed as philosophers and cultural critics were compelled to be drawn into the camps of fascism or socialism, which, beyond the facts of the events overtaking Spain (which in themselves would have been enough), also promised the opportunity of actualising daring philosophical positions that liberalism had not and could not since the recapitulation of romanticism into the strictures of the cultural mainstream.