To be fair, there appears to be evidence that medieval witchcraft, such as it was, was a continuation of the cults of Hecate and Bacchus, cults which were so awful and horrifying that the Roman Senate proscribed them in the middle to late Republican period.
To be fair, there appears to be evidence that medieval witchcraft, such as it was, was a continuation of the cults of Hecate and Bacchus, cults which were so awful and horrifying that the Roman Senate proscribed them in the middle to late Republican period.
It's certainly plausible. A lot of people's conceptions of paganism is based solely on wiccans casting their ~magick~ and practicing ye wytcheecrafte. I mean I obviously think that a lot of the witch hunts practiced in Europe can be attributed to mass hysteria, but realistically a lot of pagan worship is not so nice and cool.
You can look at Nigeria where some cults still practice blood magic, for example. This involves either killing people or stealing women's underwear (yes I am serious) and both are a lil bit sketchy. Wiccans generally don't go that hard.
To be fair, there appears to be evidence that medieval witchcraft, such as it was, was a continuation of the cults of Hecate and Bacchus, cults which were so awful and horrifying that the Roman Senate proscribed them in the middle to late Republican period.
There's also some overlap with (sorry to bring it up again) Catholicism. Reading about, for example, the Pendle witch trials or the history behind James I's Daemonologie is really interesting; in at least some cases, witchcraft (with all its weird rituals and spooky incantations) was linked to Catholicism in the mind of Protestant England. It didn't help that a Catholic had just tried to blow up the king. Witchcraft and Catholicism were both weird devilish treason.
Sometimes, I wonder if modern fluffy paganism appeals to people because of the lack of ritual and ceremony in modern American Protestantism. People want to feel like part of something bigger and more significant, and if they're shallow enough to care about robes and incense and things, they might gravitate towards Wicca.
Also, very happy to see this thread beginning to wake up again. It's an interesting topic!
It also has aspects of pseudo-intellectualism. Philosophy is difficult and nobody cares about it, but you can put on airs of a philosopher when you're larping as a witch, describing things in terms nobody else understands - playing the source of "true knowledge" in the eastern religious sense, etc. Organised religion is full of people who can talk rings around a dabbler, as every ecumenical matter has been discussed to death, but if your primary audience is dungeons and dragons players and washed out feminists, you're not going to find many people educated enough to see through your nonsense.
This definitely has precedent in mystery cults, or Elizabethan occult philosophy, which was largely nonsense serving to impress the patrons of the writers.
Loki isn't as unequivocally evil as Satan. He was still a son of Odin and was a big help to the Aesir loads of times. Though, in the end he was on the bad guy's side during Ragnarok.
Really we don't know that much about Norse myth though, a lot of what we have was written post-christian. In one of the post-christian stories he appeared as two separate characters. One called innungard Loki, a good guy, and the other utengard Loki, a bad guy.
Innungard and utengard (meaning inside and outside of the fence) were two of the most important concepts in Norse philosophy. Innungard things were good, they represented order, stability and society. Utengard things were bad, they represented chaos and the wild. Loki was a bit of both.
Personally, I see him as being representative of a criminal. A bad egg but still fundamentally part of society. Not the best thing to run into on a dark night but a hell of a lot better than something truly utengard like a hungry bear.
Loki isn't as unequivocally evil as Satan. He was still a son of Odin and was a big help to the Aesir loads of times. Though, in the end he was on the bad guy's side during Ragnarok.
Really we don't know that much about Norse myth though, a lot of what we have was written post-christian. In one of the post-christian stories he appeared as two separate characters. One called innungard Loki, a good guy, and the other utengard Loki, a bad guy.
Innungard and utengard (meaning inside and outside of the fence) were two of the most important concepts in Norse philosophy. Innungard things were good, they represented order, stability and society. Utengard things were bad, they represented chaos and the wild. Loki was a bit of both.
Personally, I see him as being representative of a criminal. A bad egg but still fundamentally part of society. Not the best thing to run into on a dark night but a hell of a lot better than something truly utengard like a hungry bear.
Loki isn't as unequivocally evil as Satan. He was still a son of Odin and was a big help to the Aesir loads of times. Though, in the end he was on the bad guy's side during Ragnarok.
Really we don't know that much about Norse myth though, a lot of what we have was written post-christian. In one of the post-christian stories he appeared as two separate characters. One called innungard Loki, a good guy, and the other utengard Loki, a bad guy.
Innungard and utengard (meaning inside and outside of the fence) were two of the most important concepts in Norse philosophy. Innungard things were good, they represented order, stability and society. Utengard things were bad, they represented chaos and the wild. Loki was a bit of both.
Personally, I see him as being representative of a criminal. A bad egg but still fundamentally part of society. Not the best thing to run into on a dark night but a hell of a lot better than something truly utengard like a hungry bear.
In one of the eddas it says a lot of people had the same names back then, most people went by nicknames or titles, otherwise everyone would be "Olaf Olafsson" in the stories. The two Loki's were not the same person any more than two people named John would be (and neither were in any way evil in that story unless you think tricking Thor into drinking the entire ocean down two inches was evil). Modern man wants to put way more meaning into things than the people who actually believed in the crap did.
Well no, that's why they're two separate characters, but they are both Lokis and I can't imagine the name was chosen randomly. In any context, if a fictional story has two major characters both with the same name there's a reason for that.
He's not evil exactly. He is the antagonist. The protagonists are trying to beat him in contests and he keeps cheating by tricking them. Behavior which really highlights why he's Loki.
Nobody ever believed this. Sturluson was writing long after the Norse religion was dead and his work includes enough Christian influence to betray that it wasn't actually copied from an older text. It was just loosely based on actual Norse myth.
Personally I think that the two Lokis was Sturlusons invention and an attempt to reconcile the character of Loki into something more palatable for Christian thinking by splitting them up. Whatever the case, that he just happens to have the same name, race and defining personality traits is too much for total coincidence.
I don't think she deserves her own thread, but I recently learned about the weird internet world of weird nazi pagans, and that has lead me down a curious rabbit hole of internet pagan drama. I'm going to be frank that I'm more in it for the lolcows and I don't know anything about European paganism and I also don't know much about Ancient Greece. So how accurate their TOTES RECONSTRUCTED paganism is, is completely beyond me, and if any Kiwis know anything about this stuff and would like to dig into this, please go ahead.
Anyway, meet Aliakai Gauch/Ashleigh Gauch, a writer, polyamorous nonbinary Hellenistic pagan, vore enthusiast with a chip on her shoulder about Greek people.
ah, the face of someone who gave up a major in nutrition.
She claims to be Haida and I have no idea if that's true or not, nor how to verify it. She could be, or she could just be another Rose Christo. At one point she said there are only 13 Haida families so that's probably traceable. She also says that she is one of the only speakers of her native language, but later says she never learned it, which would make English her native language. Is she registered with the Haida tribe, though? Nope, by her own admission, apparently her great-grandfather removed their family from the registry, so she's unlisted despite being half Haida. Her author Facebook page is almost entirely posts about being Haida.
She's also a Youtuber who makes videos on Hellenic Paganism. I guess there is a part of the Greek Hellenistic pagan community the feels like it's cultural appropriation and that only Greek people should worship the Greek Gods, and these people are referred to as "folkists."
Here is some of the interactions she has had with the YSEE... it's pretty deranged on all sides.
truly everyone involved in this is awful
This is the part where I'm not really sure about who's in the right here, but everyone involved kind of spergs out about it. the YSEE threatened to contact the UN to get her to stop making videos, and she just keeps making videos saying the same things over and over about them. Here are a few:
Her hobbies include: fighting with the YSEE on Twitter, bringing being Haida into every conversation, fighting with a guy who used to write for Patheos on Twitter (who, in turn, spends his time threatening to sue non-Greek people) I guess, and writing bad books. I can't find the videos on the Angelo Nasios guy, so perhaps they were taken down? But apparently she made several.
I dunno man if I wanted to worship Zeus's meaty rape dick and Greek people got mad at me I would simply continue to worship him. It's not like they can stop me. There are plenty of gay Christians and plenty of Christians who say gay people go to hell, and that doesn't take their Christianity away. There's a lot more to this stuff than what I covered, she's been at this for years and I only just found this, but I don't know a lot about Ancient Greece so I can't say much more besides her ongoing back and forth drama with the Greeks.
