Growth of Neo-paganism

Didn’t Hercules rescue him? Or Zeus let him go because he was worried he was going to be killed by his own kid or something?

Yeah, those guys too.
But I don't for a second believe any neo pagan actually believes in Odin or whatever.

Because it's an edgy belief that will give a person a lot of attention when they proclaim to be one

>I'm Christian
Fuck off mate

>I believe in the world of Valhalla
I'm interested

You will never see a neo paganist practice his religion in private, because they have to tell everybody.

It's like vegetarianism basically; you only do it so you can tell everybody

Also, you have to be a fucking retard to believe in a polytheistic religion in which the main God sucks and swallows jizz of the poor people that got killed.

This perfectly describes every “Christian” on /pol/

Don't you ever call me a Christian you piece of fucking shit

I'd rather be a kike than a Christian

>But I don't for a second believe any neo pagan actually believes in Odin or whatever.

For the WNs at least its basically just race-worship with a fig leaf of paganism

He was too good for us

>implying race-worship is not pagan itself

That nigger is literally the serpent in the garden.

>created man
>stole metal working and fire for man
>god of forethought so he must have known that he’d eventually be punished for his actions
HURRRR DUURRRRRRR DATS LIKE MY BIBLE STORY CAUSE IT REMINDS ME OF ITS!!!

It's like the believe the antidote to white self-hatred is white self-worship.

they believe*

Replacing one extreme with another is typical autistic behavior.

He's an analog for Satan so literally any of them

Isn’t he older than satan

Because people have an instinctive need for the numinous, but Christianity has proven itself utterly corrupt and abhorrent.

>theyre growing ridiculously large.
Not really, as far as I can tell. I've only ever seen 1 in real life and she was a pink-haired tumblr type.

older how? All creation stories are an attempt to understand the same story. In fact its uncanny how you'll find a forbidden fruit in the Aztec creation story.

No, Catholicism has. Orthodoxy is mint

This 100%

Because it’s no longer legal to burn them

Because people want something that sounds good but has no real substance to study or adhere to. It's also the same reason people go to church as opposed to reading their Bibles etc.

The reasons are degeneracy, decadence, vanity, and sin.

They're all Feminist New Agers.

>how can one made up character be older than another
Hmmm I don’t lnow?!

My point is these are all analogs to figures probably best summarised in Zoroastrianism

epimetheus

Mostly in liberal and left leaning parts of the United States and Britain where there is a big cult of individualism.

I'd guess because Christianity's group mentality and traditionalism is incompatible with a cult of individualism, so neo paganism gives an alternative spiritual fix that allows self exploration and experimentation.

Being an atheist isn't too edgy if you just don't talk about religion.

in east europe its because right wingers, in west europe its because larping hippye faggots, idk what is in USA, i assume its just the internet generations being standardised special snowflakes

In the USA it was hippies and rock and roll culture in the 70s/80s, Goths/Emos in the 90s/2000s, and now the internet generation.

> theyre growing ridiculously large
I find it pretty hard to believe. How large exactly? Any figures, any studies?

>Orthodoxy
You mean "State Tool of the Kremlin" the Church?

In the US it's usually only cities with a big college age population or stereotype blue states that have these guys in any real numbers

thats complete crap tho, not only that but its technicaly wrong since pre-christian religions had a gritty almost anti-humanist stance to human life, especialy a individual life, let alone a 'person'

but yea, since when do neo-pagans have anything to do with anything, they just make shit up as they go along, except they claim this and that for no reason

thing is theres some realy interesting and complex concepts in old mythology, people dealt with all sorts of aspects of reality and meta-problems of sorts, its realy all metaphisics and mysteries, none of it had two shits to do with nature and hugging trees

what i dont get is why not just make up a new thing, its all made up any way, why not base a religion on warhammer gods or develop some autistic meta-system where you worship tools and weapons or consider everiday experience as holy revelation or the internet as a manifestation of god or something

i mean they could just make up anything

Because neo-paganism is usually sanitized to fit a progressive, hippie ethos

>Why has neo-paganism and Wiccan belief grown so much over the past 20 years?

Because if protestantism is just "God's will is whatever the fuck i interpret it as it is", then people naturally develop the skeptical sense that anything goes when it comes to theology, so worshiping trees and rocks makes much more sense than any abstract idea preached by some random guy, in an organisation with absolutely no hierarchy and no checks and balances to what the canon is.

>my religion is the first religion
>anything that sounds similar to characters from my religion are in fact characters from my religion
You sound like a muslim. Go leap somewhere else

Each state has it's own autocephalous leader in form of the patriarch

Go read a book, nigger

well, in east eu its the opposite, its made grim and brooding to fit a mentality of beligerent defensive traditionalism mixed up with a kind of death metal approach to life

Do you have more pics like this ?

>grown so much over the past 20 years?
The opposite happened. Wicca was at its peak during the late 90's, due to a huge influx of new converts from shitty media like Sabrina and Charmed. The numbers have gone downhill ever since.

The Aztec gods literally sacrificed themselves to sustain the world.

But then they demanded human sacrifice in return.

And if they killed themselves then their suffering was very short. Where as Prometheus was tortured day after day for a very long time

What is Wicca?

Fuck off Joseph Campbell

>Each state has it's own autocephalous leader in form of the patriarch
Ah yes, all those Slavic countries that look up to Kremlin.

Even then, the Orthodoxy cucked itself to state interests and nationalist rhetoric. Countering the universality of Christianity.

Isn’t he the one who doomed humanity when he accepted the gift of Pandora?

More people who study history realise that the jewish god was imposed upon their ancestors by force or political needs.
By trying to continue the cult of their native Gods, they pay homage to their predecessors.

>Look up to Kremlin

>Universality of Christianity

Fuck off back to Rome, catholishit.

Stole the fire from heavens to give to Humans to always be protected.
Can't even protect himself against a pussy God

There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging the fact that the gods of your ancestors weren’t demons

>Zeus
>a pussy god

Having one god who created the world and a religious dogma that tells you to convert many makes Christianity essentially a universal religioun, Vatnik. Retarded Orthodox nationalism is contrary to that.

Christianity is kind of repressive in it's nature, it gets on my nerves tb h

>makes Christianity essentially a universal religion

>Retarded Orthodox nationalism is contrary to that.

yes he did finish creation

>Any belief that isn't Christianity is edgy: The Thread

Not even. I'm just saying at the beginning of all this some weird shit went down that has been lost to time. Atlantis existed too btw

I thought he was the one who gave away all the “tools” that animals use without saving any for humanity and then Prometheus had to solve that problem. And then he also accepted the gift from Zeus

Zeus Arrhenothelus

It isn't even about Christianity. Morons who have no understanding of pre-Christian beliefs want to just take a few elements that we know and make up the rest, and then call that a religion. And then claim that their narcissistic meanderings on the divine that they came up with during homeroom are somehow deep insights into human spirituality, or claim that they are following the ancient way. Fuck them.

A real religion needs discipline. It needs history. It needs a thoroughgoing process of interpretation and discovery and rigorous scrutiny. They need a real theology. The great religions, like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, et al. all have these elements. A religion worth respect is forged through fire and trial and longsuffering. Neopaganism is just a bunch of bored white bourgeois motherfuckers who decided that the world's institutions are bullshit, so I'll just make up my own reality. With like, holly leaves and shit.

>It isn't even about Christianity. Morons who have no understanding of pre-Christian beliefs want to just take a few elements that we know and make up the rest, and then call that a religion. And then claim that their narcissistic meanderings on the divine that they came up with during homeroom are somehow deep insights into human spirituality, or claim that they are following the ancient way. Fuck them.
This is where you were making a lot of sense.

>A real religion needs discipline. It needs history. It needs a thoroughgoing process of interpretation and discovery and rigorous scrutiny. They need a real theology. The great religions, like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, et al. all have these elements
This is when you stopped doing so and think all religions ought to develop in the same way.

Folk Chinese Religion has absolutely no theology. Does this exclude them as a religion?

I consider folk religion to be quite different from the "neo-"s. It's its own beast, and I don't necessarily disqualify it despite lacking a rigorous theology. Yeah, I misspoke. I'll admit it. Although folk religion is still a very different beast from the "great" religions. I actually have a strong interest in folk beliefs of the Romantic period (Goethe, et al.), which sort of lies somewhere in between older established folk traditions and neopags.

>Because neo-paganism is usually sanitized to fit a progressive, hippie ethos
Nah, at least where I live hippie pagans are a tiny minority compared to edgy nationalist/nazi pagans.

>A real religion needs discipline. It needs history. It needs a thoroughgoing process of interpretation and discovery and rigorous scrutiny. They need a real theology. The great religions, like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, et al. all have these elements. A religion worth respect is forged through fire and trial and longsuffering. Neopaganism is just a bunch of bored white bourgeois motherfuckers who decided that the world's institutions are bullshit, so I'll just make up my own reality. With like, holly leaves and shit.
What a load of crap. The only thing a "real religion" needs is people who sincerely believe in it. Granted, there are probably not many of them compared to the large number of larpers, but they absolutley do exist.

The most sustainable form of modern paganism (?) is syncretism of christianity and local ancestral folk beliefs

>Wiccan
>without a central governing body
British Traditional Wicca comes in two flavors; Alexandrian, and Gardnerian, each with their own actual governing bodies.

The answer you're looking for is the mass-market release of texts rooted in various forms of Wiccan thought, spurred on by figures like Doreen Valiente.

And really I don't think there's much "growth" going on. Just because you see a run of softbacks from Starmoon Ravenwank at your local Barnes and Noble doesn't really mean they're being read, or integrated, just bought.

"New Age" means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I generally confine it to these forms of mass marketization of various esoteric concepts.

In terms of Neopaganism, there's been a LOT of development of our anthrohistorical record to the point where Brill puts together compilations of Greek State-Religion temple law, so someone with a SERIOUS interest in reconstructing what most would call Pagan forms of worship have plenty of material to chose from.

This leads to developments like Andrew Chumbley integrating some of the folk magick practices with outright historical Paganism using some forms of both historical and "new age" witchcraft: Historical texts plus Cochrane plus Tantra plus Crowley with a splash of Grimoire work and it's honestly useful as fuck.

This. Most of the arguments that people put forward about how neo-paganism isn't really a religion for various reasons are ultimately idiotic bullshit.

I don't believe in it any more then I believe in christianity, judaism, or islam, but some random angry asshole on Veeky Forums doesn't get to dictate what is or isn't a "real" religion.

The gradual wane of actual Christianity (not cafeteria Christianity) in the West since the 1960s has left a gap in certain people looking to fill a spiritual void. Neopaganism fills that void for a substantial niche. It offers something rebellious to mainstream society. For left-wing inclined types it's a return to "tolerant" and spiritually inclusive practices of pre-Christian Europe that never actually existed. For right-wing inclined types it offers something "volkish" and ethnically exclusive which is also free from Jewish influence (Another fictions point as kabbalah/Jewish esotericism influenced neopaganism quite a bit). Finally since neopaganism is lacking formal institutions or a continuous history people can pretty much make what they want out of it without a fuss. You have neopagans who are literal atheist and neopagans who are mythical literalist.
>inb4 only brainlets think the 60s changed everything blahblahblah, yes I understand this phenomena goes back a good 300 years but by the 1960s you had multiple court rulings heavily diminishing the power of Christianity within the public sphere, the Vatican II council which was essentially the Roman Catholic hierarchy submitting to humanistic ideology , and adoption of Christian Zionism along with other bizarrely paradoxical principals which undermine the entire faith itself

New age is declining generally.

>But I don't for a second believe any neo pagan actually believes in Odin or whatever.
Think of how the Hindus believe. They don't actually believe that Ganesh is a four-armed elephant out there bouncing around on a ball, but they believe in the spirit behind the image of Ganesh. It's the same for any genuine, eloquent pagan.

>You will never see a neo paganist practice his religion in private, because they have to tell everybody.
Anonymous guy on a Mongolian masturbation forum telling you that I do practice in private exclusively. I keep a shrine in my room and refuse to associate with 99% of pagans/heathens because they make me cringe.

99% of the Western ones are all nihilistic white nationalists or faggot hippies, but there's good spirituality down there. People that look to the millions of pagans in Eastern Europe and the Hindus in India and Java for inspiration are trying to reconstruct a functional tradition and morality.

A good pagan has a more complicated and intense intellectual path than a good Christian. There is a lot of written text and a lot of archeological evidence to parse through.

From what I know, I agree with this. Wicca has slowed down a lot, but neo-paganism of a Traditionalist, Nietzschean bend has picked up a lot just in the last few years. It seemed to me that this sort of paganism has existed independently of the hippy school and was birthed long before it by right wing esotericists in the romantic period.

>A good pagan has a more complicated and intense intellectual path than a good Christian. There is a lot of written text and a lot of archeological evidence to parse through.
oh please. How many Christians do you think read famous Christian works such as Summa Theologica or the Divine Comedy? let alone countless variations of Christian including the various Saints and Mystics, Church fathers, non-mainstream sects such as Böhme's Theosophy, variations of Christian thought such as Christian hermeticism, Christian Gnosticism, Christian Alchemy and the history of Christianity?

Probably close to nil?

Maybe I miscommunicated, because I think I agree with your point. Christians rarely read that stuff and they don't have to. Intellectual rigour isn't required for them because the heavy-lifting to make a functional tradition has been done for them in the form of the bible, among other things.

see theres a key there

pro vs epi mentis

he who thinks first vs he who thinks later

conscious deliberate action vs impulsive, irrational blind action

thats what they mean, thats what they personify, thats why one 'creates humanity', and the other caused all evil to get loose upon the world, except its not as simple as that cause both are living active aspects of 'human nature'

also gods made pandora to be irresistible, she is all-gifted, all-endowed, shes that which has everithing you could possibly want, shes temptation but also the fullfilment of what is desired - so impulsive post-thinking being cannot resist her, he can only do now regret later

another thing is, both brothers are titans, so they are 'before gods', a generation priror lets say, they are more fundamental than gods, gods would be compilations of archetypes and formulated forces, principles, but titans are more basic things, like direction, emotion, force, mental state

but then prometheus gets punished, he gets punished because the intellect gets uppity and proud and fucks with the gods, thinking he can outsmart reality, prometheus dosent just 'steal fire'(and before that he also teaches humans things that pressupose use of fire as in combustion so its not vulgar fire, its something else) he also tries to fool the gods several times to get more benefits for humans he made, the gods see this but dont react at first, they let him fuck it up to the end, even athena, who is at first with prometheus and helps make humanity, she also abandons prometheus because he insults her - now athena is usuay associated with wisdom

ultimately humans 'forget' the fire, or forget how to maintain it, its only there as a spark or a ember, if anything

theres a fuckton of these things in every myth, they are like rebuses, riddles, mysteries under key and code, its all about these and those aspects of reality and how they relate in the metaprocess of being

(cont'd and saged)
The bible was a meh example because few even read that, but certainly the practices and religious ordainments have been distilled and made absolute.

t. Jordan Petermeme drone who didn't check any source

Well specific to American Neo pagans anyway with the hippy culture

Left leaning feminists especially love Wicca and see witchcraft as a powerful women’s lib symbol and stuff

Actually the only thing a religion needs is followers

It's impossible to reconstruct so it just serves as a blank canvas for what people want religion to be.

e.g. Rodnovery/Odinism for racist Europeans, Goddess worship for feminists etc.

>It's impossible to reconstruct
That's incredibly dependent on what, exactly, we're talking about.

We have gaps in the Nord-o-sphere, sure, but we have enough fragments that have been syncretized with broader occultic movements in the grimoire traditions like through Galdrabok and later Svartkonstböcker to do some heavy lifting.

It gets WAY better when we start migrating into the Mediterranean and Near East where we have enough material, again, for Brill to pop off a few editions of Temple law and for academics to put together reasonable reconstructions of Gnostic initiations, not to mention the Greek Magickal Papyri and a lot of Neoplatonism didn't even get lost really. Folks aren't flying blind out here.

That's horseshit, though. The sources are a little fuzzy for Germanic and Celtic paganism, but not at all fuzzy for Greco-Roman pagans. Feminist fluffballs overtly make this shit up. There is no record whatsoever for goddess worship, globally pan-polytheism, or worship of the gods as aspects of male and female gender. Witchcraft has some historical sources to draw from, but modern witches don't do that. All their shit is based off 90's jibberish.

Rodnovers, I don't know a lot about personally, but I do know that reconstructionists actually base their practices off surviving materials and don't try to innovate because they 'feel like it.' That's the point. That's why they're called reconstructionists. If conservative/reconstructionist pagans are racist on top of that, there is no religious justification used or required. Sometimes ancestor worship is cited as a religious reason for tribalism, but rarely. And even if it wasn't cited rarely, it's literally how existing societies with ancestor worship think anyway.

>People that look to the millions of pagans in Eastern Europe
>millions
lol

>another thing is, both brothers are titans, so they are 'before gods', a generation priror lets say, they are more fundamental than gods, gods would be compilations of archetypes and formulated forces, principles, but titans are more basic things, like direction, emotion, force, mental state
That’s not the way I see it. There is no difference between a titan and an Olympian
>but then prometheus gets punished, he gets punished because the intellect gets uppity and proud and fucks with the gods, thinking he can outsmart reality, prometheus dosent just 'steal fire'(and before that he also teaches humans things that pressupose use of fire as in combustion so its not vulgar fire, its something else) he also tries to fool the gods several times to get more benefits for humans he made, the gods see this but dont react at first, they let him fuck it up to the end, even athena, who is at first with prometheus and helps make humanity, she also abandons prometheus because he insults her - now athena is usuay associated with wisdom
I’d be careful when suggesting that Prometheus didn’t know what was coming and let his pride get the best of him. He was after all the only titan who foresaw the rise of the olympians

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_Native_Faith_in_Russia
Read.

it isnt so much about rasism as it is about nationalism and identity larping, these things are way more problematic in europe than americans can understand, theres a war in ukraine right now, whole refugee crisis all over, in most cases catholicism and orthodoxy are actualy used as paganism, a multitude of divine entities lead by a queen of heaven, under her divine death-rebirth son as a avatar of the word of god, all topped by the boss god who made everithing, and satan and his deamons covering temptation and evil, and this is a tribal totemic religion, emphasis on local identity, local custom, local tradition, tied up in ethnic and territorial denominations, linguistic and cultural fields of belonging, as well as supperstitions and morals - the reason a lot of europeans are skeptical of christianity is precisely because in its effective form its just group identity reinforcement and a flag to gather together under for purposes of organised violence

neopaganism is mostly people wanting to have that but being too edgy for the local mainstream religion, which means they fail cause they do not support wider group cohesion

on the other hand theres that radical right-wing crap about how christianity be invented by juice and make people weak and all that jazz

>Witchcraft has some historical sources to draw from, but modern witches don't do that. All their shit is based off 90's jibberish.
I mean, I've spent time with Grimoire of Arthur Gauntlet and Saducismus Triumphatus and looking at the historical development of Quimbanda since I got into Andrew Chumbley, and that's not even getting into the weird as toad shit.

I'm not making an accusation against you or literally anyone who would browse Veeky Forums, but in truth I've met many female witches and the kind of stuff they're referencing has no historical integrity. I don't think witchcraft is an inherently ahistorical or innately laughable practice, but I'm just talking about its modern manifestation.

Oh know I've met complete retards that self-describe as witches.

I've also met BTW initiates more competent than OTO initiates and those Cultus Sabbati cats are often out in their own little world of funky research.

It's a mixed bag mate.