this community is hot off the press. Come join and share about your practice, ask questions, find new friends, and learn something new about ancient pagan and indigenous religions!
Not my cup of tea, but best wishes!
Enjoy your tea however you take it, and thanks for the good wishes!
Lol, syncretic and Anti-Historical inaccuracy, no paradoxes there. Plus against the basis of every ancient religion, spiritual medicines. No thank you
There’s a world of difference between a Nordic witch learning about West-African magical traditions and someone pushing the “Ancient Aliens - Akashic Records” theory. Syncretism has been widely practiced along the ancient world. A clear example is the goddess Venus, also known as Aphrodite… And Astarte, and Isis, and Inanna. She was not a Greek goddess originally, but was acquired by the Hellenic people from trade Egyptian and Mesopotamian people.
Another clear example is the Berenike Buddha, which was found in an Egyptian port city and is theorized to have been made in Alexandria around the second century CE. That suggests that Egyptians were blending Buddhism and the Dharma into their practice and ritual at the time. Religion has always been syncretic, so there’s no reason to silo them off today.
I also don’t know what you even mean by being “against the basis of every ancient religion”.
There is a difference between cultural amagamation as a result of historical migration and modern people cherry picking from disparate dead religions often with no cultural or ethnic claim or even inventing practices from whole cloth. Just admit you are making a new religion, not practicing an old one. And I mean the use of psychedelics. Documented use in every religion of the ancients and shamanic practices that predate even those.
Cultural amalgamation as a result of internet access and diverse information through the web is still valid cultural amalgamation. Greeks had no cultural or ethnic claims to the ideas brought from Eastern Mesopotamia and even Persia, so the line drawn here is arbitrary.
The rules in the community distinctly say:
“If you are practicing or trying to construct a faith based on non-abrahamic or pre-christian religion, this is an open space for you.”That we are building and constructing modern practices is transparent. I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that we’re resurrecting actual ancient practices wholesale. That’s impossible. The space is also open for people with real lineage to ancient religions and practices, so there’s also that. That’s why the rules ask people to keep discourse respectful.
The rules also don’t state that content about psychedelic substances is forbidden. You just can’t condone or encourage the use of psychedelics because the substances and blends of drugs used in ancient shamanic practices are still hotly debated, and substance use gone wrong can kill a person. All content about drugs is to be considered for educational or harm reduction purposes, but there can still be a discussion about it.
You also overestimate the use of psychedelics in ancient religion. It’s still an open case as to how they were used, and how they were combined with other practices like meditation, ritual dance, fasting, and exercise to induce altered states. Drugs alone are not the basis of ancient religion. Any academic of the subject will tell you that with confidence.
The rule against historically innacurate practices and “new age” seem to contradict that.
You’re just being willfully obtuse by now. Modern pagans know that it’s impossible to fully practice ancient traditions in their original forms, because these traditions were practiced by large groups of people within state-sanctioned and organized festivals and temple worship. Nevertheless, modern pagans do look at historical texts and value academic history of these traditions to reconstruct what we can in good faith and accordance with as much historicity as possible within our modern context. New Age is an uncritical approach to ancient religion that does not study or respect texts and scriptures, and tends to follow naïve anthropology and archaeology that came out of 19th century Europe and America. Your confusion about these speaks more to your lack of knowledge than the rules of the community.
What exactly are you responding to, may I ask? The modern concept of paganism, the community in question, that mods’ intents, or whatever the historical concept of paganism meant…?
The rules of the community
It’s hard to understand exactly what your points are with such a brief, dismissive reply, but FWIW I made some critiques here and I thought the mod answered rather well.
