So I've been playing pic related and found that I can reform the Germanic Pagan religion to have a hierarchical central...

Then what did Julian "the apostate" try to do if not the very sort of thing you can do with pagans in CK2?

There needs to be a Rome Era Paradox game that links to CK2 so I can have Roman Paganism survive into the CK2 time-frame and then into EU4.

Yeah, that's why when you get a reformed religion, it also spawns a Heresy religion that didn't exist before.

Think about it like this, you are high king of the Finnish empire, you decided one day to create an 'official' version of your religion with a hierarchy and canon and everything.

Everybody under you either goes 'that's a good idea' or 'fuck off'.

The fuck-off guys become the "heresy".

>why didn't this happen
>BECAUSE IT DIDNT HAPPEN
The way it works in the game is that they priests and the King/chief/emperor whatever, come together and organise central leadership, document the epics and create a doctrine, and hierarchy with the King as the head

Why didn't this happen?

Roman religion was organized and wasn't folksy like the Germanic one.

Roman religion was very folksy.

You're talking about the Cult of the Ancestors.

...which coexisted with an actual priesthood.

They weren't like China where they just built temples, had 0 priests, venerated the gods, and honored their ancestors, and left it at that.

Not him but was it as (for lack of a better word) malleable as norse paganism? With every 20 miles having slightly different stories of the Gods?

>Why didn't this occur in real life?
because no pagan ruler ever owned all the holy sites at once, duh

>It did. The Polabian Slavs started building wooden temples, having organized clergy, etc, after contact with Christians.

Oh, that's sounds really interesting. Tell me more.

I though you only needed 3 of them?

Not necessarily true, High Kings in Ireland ruled over all of Ireland (not absolutely but still). And Irish paganism has very few holy sites to being with since it's based around all of the land as a whole with every tree, river and rock having its own spirit.
The High King and his councils could've organised central leadership and created a doctrine if they wished.

you can make a hellenic pagan religion with the character creator. it's pretty much the greco-roman pantheon. it's not a mod and it's an organized religion despite being pagan

Weren't the early church councils basically what the Roman Empire used to reform Christianity?

Hinduism reformed, but it took a long ass time. Time Germanic Paganism didn't have.

The dev team deleted that option, you have to use mods now to create a character with that religion now.

Same with the generic paganism religion.

I remember reading that not even everyone we would call a Hindu universally identifies as such. They're a really broad group and the Hinduism most westerners study is the very lofty minded Brahmic set of thought that's basically monotheist. Your average dirt farmer or whatever might have a totally different conception of the gods.

I wonder why, it's not like we don't have a historical precedent of a figure trying to revive and centralize hellenism.

rip Julian you tried

"Organized"

Most pagan religions in the game except ebin vikings and ebin mongols are completely forgotten and generic. They're there because they need to be and that's it.

There adding more pagan content next DLC.

Vladimir (maybe) tried to reform Russian paganism, but then just decided to accept Christianity.

>in the game
first of all I'd try not to base any real life historical knowledge off of vydia

You just don't get it do you? There was nothing to "reform"
"Pagan" is a generic term. Pagans in Belgium weren't worshiping the same thing as pagans in Estonia, they probably weren't even aware of each other's beliefs. The pagan religion didn't have conistent rules or taboos, nor did it have a single unifying force such as a government or hierarchy to put forth a "reform" anyway.
From the beginning Abrahamic religions had a hierarchy and sacred texts that were fairly consistent across, not to mention they were usually under some sort of hegemony. The Hebrew tribes were one culture, the Romans were one empire, the Islamic caliphate was centralized from the beginning....none of that was true for "paganism"

> Why didn't pagans reform their religion to contend with Abrahamic ones?
Well the Catholic church actually did. Wearing necklaces wasn't permitted by the church but everyone and their mother wore them in pagan Europe so they let go of that one. Some saints are pagan gods that were christianized. Christmas was moved to be on the 25th of December, even though Jesus was reportedly born in the summer time.

There are lot of examples have a look.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_saints_and_feasts

>Resembling that of the Catholic Church.
Actually the Reformed Norse Paganism of CK2 is directly modelled on the Caliphate of Islam.

Why didn't it happen in real life? Notice how in CK2 accomplishing it requires pretty much conquering the entirety of Scandinavia as well as the faith itself having a strong authority among the followers. Neither of those happened in the Medieval period IRL.

>Why didn't pagans reform their religion to contend with Abrahamic ones?
Generally they got christianized to fast. I think lithuania became pretty organized before they got crusaded

"Hellenism" is a religion thats present in the game because its the religion of a lot of the historical characters in the game files. You have to start a custom character with it in order for it to actually be present though

Yes but it's also nothing like historical Greco-Roman paganism and has 0 flavour.

I know, im just saying its there. Theres probably a mod that expands it

3 of them need to be in your direct control, and have 50% Moral Authority, which can be obtained when members of your religion control each holy site (+10% per).
You can also gain Moral Authority for sacking (not just looting) churches of different religions, doing county conquests, and building temples. It's easiest to just sail to Britannia or the North Sea and just get some easy plunders from 1-county independent territories with Bishoprics.

I'm not him but I believe it was very inclusive of local religion as long as they worshiped the emperor.

Basically "oh yeah you can keep dancing around your local fish deity, who is totally Neptune btw, but you must declare the Emperor as the son of God.

For what it's worth, Julian tried (and failed) to bring back and centralize Hellenismos (I know it's not really proper to refer to it as that, but you get the point). Sadly, Julian died like a retard before he was able to get the ball rolling on his Church of Paganism thing.

There was also some attempt to centralize or at least collect all of the Greco-Roman Pagan myths. This was done around the same time as the Constantine was formalizing the Bible. I can't remember the name of the book, but what we have left is referred to as the Bibloteka or some such.

The Church hierarchy essentially was a historical accident arising from the clergy being used as an old folks home for the senatorial class. They still held their senatorial status, and replicated in the Church institutions the forms and honorifics to which they were previously entitled. Ironically, this is the opposite of what is supposed to happen when one leaves the trappings of the material world for the spiritual.

>playing as a duke of sicily
>create kingdom of sicily
>conquer the holy land and create kingdom of jerusalem
>get independence from ERE
>vassalise holy orders
>grandmaster of hospitallers is my steward
>get the event with steward embezzling state money
>gib back ya cunt
>116k

>Time Germanic Paganism didn't have.
But hinduism was assailed by islam since the 8th century, not to mention the various hordes of central asian horse nomads who kept penetrating into greater india for many generations since the initial indo-aryan migrations.

WITNESSED

But that's what I meant.

The guys who followed your leader created a new organized religion out of the folk polytheism, were as the original folk polytheism becomes the heresy and still exists.

YHWH was once just the war god of a Canaanite pagan pantheon too, senpai

>get an itch CK2 again
>launch the game
>carefully choose some obscure character I'm not familiar with yet
>start playing
>soon find myself researching him, his dynasty, his title, realm, culture, people, history whatever online
>several days later I've strayed from him through several other historical topics to something completely else
>haven't touched the game in days, just read about shit on the internet making notes like I'm in school or something
>drawing fucking family trees and maps
Every time
Why can't I just play the game

Because the Northern bagans were illiterate savages (and no, carving magical incantations into weapons and rocks is not "literature")

>this autism
Didn't think this behaviour was possible, thanks for the kek user

Trust me, it's awful

Well you must enjoy it if you'd rather do that than play the game

That's the way it's meant to be played user.

Used to do the same thing with ministers in HoI2.

The various Islamic invaders didn't maintain as hardline a stance against organized Hinduism for as long as the Franks and their successors. The Baltic tied Eastern Europe to Christendom too well. In contrast the Hindu Kush regularly divided any invading Muslim Turkic dynasty into Eastern Iranian and Indian halves, and the now isolated Indian Muslim states had to win the support of organized Hindu people to survive until the next invasion from Central Asia.

I both play the game and engage in autistic research behavior

Actually playing the game is more autistic

Because there was a bunch of literate nerds with a book willing to offer the same soft power and already had the organization and experience to do so.

Plus indigenous religions were older and had more time to disintegrate on regional and sectarian lines while simultaneously lacking the written word to maintain uniform doctrine. Christianity was relatively young and centralized already in comparison.

You've answered your own question. There was no united government to centralize any of these pagan traditions.
Of course there is a significant problem. In order to reform in this sense, you would need orthodoxy. You would need to persecute (I'm some way) those that are heretics. The problem is that no one believed in paganism that much that they would be willing to maintain persistent persecution over doctrinal differences. If you ended up reforming paganism in this way, you'd end up with something that is radically different from paganism and something that ultimately most pagans would reject.

>Wearing necklaces wasn't permitted by the church
Really?
>Christmas was moved to be on the 25th of December
Before that it was on january 6th, during the Epiphany.

>arising from the clergy being used as an old folks home for the senatorial class.
Got more about that?

yeah, like exactly what happens in the game. You reform Norse paganism, your close family and your court converts to your new paganism, maybe the people in your capital, and everybody else stays "old norse" and has to be converted. They also often rebel and wreck up your shit.

>There was nothing to "reform"
I get what you're trying to say, but you're being incredibly autistic without knowing a thing about the game. They don't share one "pagan" religion, there's a bunch of loosely affiliated religions (Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Tengri, Finnish, West African, etc.) that have nothing to do with one another - they're only labeled pagan because the game has interactions between the different sects of Christianity and Islam and it needed a category for these religions.

They don't mean "reform" literally. It's just a word; the developers are Swedish, they probably don't understand the nuances of the word. It's incredibly vague about the process and the religions themselves, it's just a mechanic; for all we know the event is merely the promotion of a new state cult and the suppression of others - the point is that it marks a shift that can only be achieved if the player (or AI) has ahistorically created a kingdom among the various tribes and centralized authority.

Because it was a foreign concept to them. It was just not something they thought necessary.

Not really. They were happy to adopt the Gods of most religions. Sure you could be punished for the wrong faith, but that was rare.
Most Roman religion was private worship.

Wahhabism

Now this is the part where I ask "what was the point of this thread?" I assume that the reason was a stereotypically autistic yearning for paganism. If that's the case, then it would be futile. The whole appeal of paganism is that it is loose and decentralized, a folk religion with kitchy rites and familial pride. Any appeal paganism has disappears once you start taking paganism too seriously. If you start persecuting people for not putting flowers on their greatx15 ancestor's runestone ( or something) them you've already lost the point.
Paganism is organic, in the sense that it's entirely made up by people, but this doesn't harm it's appeal because the people who made it up were all your ancestors over many years, and though you may claim to worship wodan or perum or Jupiter, but in reality you're worshipping your relation to your family and clan.

Read "The World of Late Antiquity" by Peter Brown. I'd quote from my copy but I seem to have lost it.