Paganism and Tradition

Hi,

This question is directed primarily at those who are converts/adoptees of the worship of European pantheons. Given that prior to their displacement by Christianity, those things that pertained to the worship, ritual observance, etc. of a peoples' gods were passed down within select families, castes, or apprenticeship traditions (sometimes all three). And given that interloping where one was not properly innitiated into the tradition invovled the censure of the trbe... and presumably of the gods what does that mean for those seeking to recreate that worship as a matter of personal initiative.
I have read critiques by Buddhists who belong to an established tradition of those who merely adopt Buddhist beleifs and rituals without submission to one of the Buddhist schools and having a spiritual master one is responsible too. Similarly I've encountered comments from traditioanal practicioners of the Hindu relgion that speak in uncomplementary ways of ad hoc paganism for the reasons given above. They find make it up or remake it up as you go faith of any sort a bit of a modernist nonsequiter. It has no actual root. This is the same assessment I have seen of Protestantism from the perspective of the ancient liturgical traditions. Such worship is more rooted in personal preference than submission to the ancient tradition.
Is this a problem for neo-pagan's and how do they address the historical disconnect and loss of the historical tradition of their adopted religion's priesthood and worship culture. Is there a sense that the mindset of some neopagan groups is similar to the create your own church end of modern protestantism? Or is it a kind of Noahidic style... do the best you can at what is left at the level of personal piety, but not it's more formal and historical cultic institutions?

Any help will be apprecited.

I didn't find the right solution from the Internet.

References:
https://absolutewrite.c ... nd-Tradition
Marketing campaign

Thank you.

I can't speak for all pagans, and honestly no one can. I think that's a key flaw in how you are approaching the question. I would guess that the majority of the reconstructed European faiths/religions/traditions (those which try to reconstruct a pre-Christian religion as close as possible to the historical religion) have no formal central authority or institution. Even at a local level, it's generally only an administrative organisation and social group. Among many groups (I don't know if it's a majority though) the "priesthood" as you put it, is simply a logistical role and it may rotate among group members based simply on who has free time. There is also a vast amount of variations between groups of practitioners (of the same or similar religions) and even among practitioners within a group in regards to beliefs and practices. We know from historical and archaeological records that this was also the situation in the past. Some groups are more open about who they will accept within their group or who they will acknowledge as a member of the religion. Some are not so inclusive. Some groups claim to have existed for thousands of year, having simply been less open about their existence and activities during times in the past when they would have been persecuted. These groups frequently have a more formal system of initiation. Some claim that their religion is a reconstruction based on what we know about the religion in the past, when it was widely practised (the pre-Christian era). Many of these groups do not have a formal initiation into the religion or group, but in reality there doesn't appear to have been any pre-requisite to join these religions in the ancient past either. Some groups with initiations also claim that they have only existed since the twentieth century but are based on a system of religion and knowledge. Just because no one came before them, and they are "making up" their religion, doesn't mean that it's false. Scientists today are making up new knowledge as they go along and most people wouldn't consider it false just because no one had those ideas or insights in the past. During the Renaissance, a lot of new insights in art and science came about because more and more people were learning about a wider and wider range of topics and this permitted them to make observations which were previously not obvious to people who only had part of the information.

I may be misinterpreting your question. If so, please describe more of the historical religious institutions that you're think about.

Please also introduce yourself in the Introductions forum.

I really enjoyed reading this. I recently became interested in this topic. And I really enjoyed reading this. Thanks. [Smile]

Hi Taurusmandolin,

Welcome to the PFI Forum!
It is customary to post your introduction first before posting.

Please do so here: https://forum.paganfederation.org/viewforum.php?f=2

Thanks,
Morgana

Hello. Thanks for the welcome. [Smile]

Of course not a problem [Smile]

Lydia

Christians, Hindu, Jews, Muslims, they talk about tradition and feel they have one because they feel that there is a more or less continued history of thoughts within their faith. It is not actually the case. For example, what Christians believe and how they express their faith today is very different from what a Christian was supposed to believe 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. There is not one unique tradition within a single religion, in my opinion, traditions and faiths evolve with time, due to people and their culture evolving and adapting. We accept this as a basic tenant of our faith, but other religions need to feel they stand on rocks, even when they actually are not. It is nobody's fault but the consequence of the fact that there are people responsible to keep this status (e.g. priests, and gurus) that do not teach theology or history of religion, but basically support spiritually the flock and fill the holes with religious self-righteousness.
I think that our weak point, as pagans, is that we do not have a unified theology to present to people when asking "what do you believe" that is nowadays required to religions to be taken seriously. If "what we believe" makes sense from a scientific, philosophical, and logic point of view then not having a book millennia old, half full of nonsense to show that "we are right" would be the least of our problem both internally (people who doubt their faiths or struggle with it because just playing charmed does not answer the basic questions that we, as human, wonder when contemplating the Divine) and externally (when presenting to other people as pagans and able to defend our faith as legit).

P. S. Unified theology does not mean that we all have to believe in the same gods or express our faith in the same way, but at least have a philosophical honest answer to the main theological questions that a religion should be able to answer. e.g. what is the Divine, why do we live, do the gods exist and if so what is our relationship with them, why is there evil in the world and what the gods do or don't do and why...
I firmly believe that I should not have to defend a solid philosophy or theology based on how old it is, but present my points on how much more sense it makes when compared to theologies that try to fit old obsolete books into modern time, thought and scientific knowledge.

I would love to have a debate on this, preferably in person and listen to other's people opinions. It would make a hell of a meeting!

Honestly, I would question the implicit claim here that neo-paganism is historically disconnected from "original" paganism.
In late antiquity, paganism lost followers. Also, but not just, because of Christian aggressions. One reason was, that the Hellenistic tradition became more and more philosophical and less applicable to everyday life. Through the Interpretatio Romana this affected all the other pagan Gods as well because Pagan Intellectuals and Priests were affected by platonic Philosophy as THE Philosophy and any God became a platonic idea. But transforming pagan Gods into platonic Ideas made them more and more distant and uncaring for humans. So Hellenistic philosophers like Proclus developed something called Theurgy as a reaction.
They gave the reason why a smoke sacrifice is affecting the gods indirectly and that symbols, herbs and gems bring down their power to humans. That was the starting point of Astrology, Alchemy and many other magical practices which survived as distinctively magical practices during all times. We did not dig them up and heard about them only by archaeologists. Quite the contrary, for some practice it is quite interesting to use historical study to trace it back. take whatever bad introduction into white magic you can find in a random bookshop and choose one declarative statement. Like a certain gem relates to a planet. We can trace that back to Wicca, through Wicca to the Golden Dawn or the older Druidic Traditions in the UK, that to Rosicrucianism, renaissance occultism, medieval treatises on magical medicine back to some neo-platonic philosopher.
It is true, we are not connected to practices like animal sacrifice in Greek city-states or Germanic tripe rituals. But this is not because some external force stopped pagans to continue that practice and then they were suddenly forgotten. But rather during a process, they transformed first into magical practice before paganism was “destroyed”. But therefore, whenever you open up your newspaper’s horoscope you are part of a tradition, independent of whether you have a Christian faith or not. I claim, that for Europeans there is no outside of a pagan tradition. So, it is quite different to the example of Europeans adopting Hinduism.
From my perspective, when a European is adopting a neo-pagan faith, she is focusing on the spiritual resources which she always carried as a piggyback. For me, it is essentially changing focus from one spiritual resource to another in the same tradition rather than a chance of tradition.

@Milkam: I disagree partly with you on the requirements on a theology. I do not think that it has to be a unified theology that gives answers. What is needed is a living and productive theology, where pagans debate problems of certain stances in the pagan faith. Maybe even to the extent that it influences other religions' theologies by confronting them with good arguments they have to tackle or cannot ignore. Unfortunately, most pagan studies right now in academia are historical in nature (or in sociology) and not conceptual.