A PAGAN RECKONING

Attempting to move forward as a Pagan in contemporary times requires looking back in history with an open mind, to find an incredibly complex and disparate set of reasons why Pagan cults harbored the seeds for the destruction of the Pagan worldview and opened the door in some cases to Monist domination.

Paganism should not be thought of as a religion in my opinion, what we understand to be religion as we know it has been defined by the monist Abrahamic religions. We should not rebel against it, nor we should we be defined by it. We can choose to use as many typical religious structures as we want, with the awareness that these can be traps and lead to spiritual bypass, centralization, dogma and corruption. We should understand that Abrahamic religion is largely rooted in what came before them, and threads of Pagan practice and ideas form the foundation of Abrahamic religions; however, this often points to the ways in which late Paganism in the Mediterranean and Near East was degenerating and falling into cultishness, human trafficking and slavery, leaving the landscape open to the rise of Monism.

We should not dehumanize monists as people, we must simply be very wary of monist ideas. Monism naturally forms people into cults that destroy the individual's connection to their family, clan and tribe- and connection to the natural world. This gives the illusion that the individual is becoming part of something greater than their tribe, but according to ancient tradition, this is not how the universe works. Tribal/ clan/ familial ties to ancestors bring us into the spiritual world, breaking these ties leaves us bereft of spiritual connection.

The process of initiation into a cult, which is vestigially continued in the Christian religions in the form of Baptism, was originally a pharmaceutical initiation intended to bring initiates into and beyond a death state. The Mystery Cults were formed around this type of drug-induced psychopomp event, exactly what Christ is said to undergo during and after crucifixion.

I believe that these Mystery Cults and their initiatory processes could be held and maintained in a fashion that did not break tribal bonds; they did not always lead to human trafficking and slavery. However, these initiations were based on use of mind-altering pharmaceuticals, in the context of rituals that use sensory deprivation and extreme isolation and suggestion, plus sexual rites, the potential for severe trauma-based mind control is significant.

We can also see many ideas that may have predominated in ancient Goddess cults, such as the concept of “Virgin Birth”, are clearly intended to break the paternal bond between the father and the child. The child who has no connection to the father, born to a temple prostitute, becomes the property of the cult, and can be used and/ or sold by the cult to benefit the priesthood. The ancient communal or communitarian-style organization of cults was maintained by early Christian cults and groups such as the Knights Templar and the Essenes, which demanded all of the property of the cult members be taken by the cult.

This may have led to a backlash against the communal-oriented matriarchal or gynocratic power structures that quietly dominated parts of the ancient world, and may have led to brutal patriarchal rules and practices, like what is maintained in Islam to this day.

Pagan people believed in reincarnation into a clan or a bloodline whose stories were based in mythology that contains cosmology- this was the source of identity for ancient people, there was no salvation through simple belief or drug-based initiations. All Pagan practice springs naturally from the mythology which was a reflection of nature, and the idea of a pantheon of different embodiments of godhead whose interactions create the cosmos is key- not one absolute creator god who demands abolition of other ideas of godhead. There were chthonic gods and celestial gods, neither was better than the other, and the interactions of the groups were vital to the unfolding of the cosmos.

The acknowledgement of a generative tension between opposites, a recognition that there is power in darkness and in light, the ultimate power of consciousness and the nuances that arise in the liminal states are well expressed in documents like the Kybalion. This way of thinking maintains that the Universe is moral in its nature.

In Germanic tribes, there were separate co-existing councils of women and of men who had different areas of influence in the life of the tribe. Neither could entirely overrule the other, and many things required a consensus between the councils to move forward.

All of the Abrahamic religions were rooted in the same mystery cult culture that dominated the ancient Mediterranean world and beyond, and the Abrahamic tradition has categorically and serially repressed and attacked the culture from which it arose: Monism by definition needs to maintain its own mythology as unquestionable and cannot permit any competing ideas.

Virtually all Judaic and Christian doctrine is rooted in Platonic philosophy; it was a basic tenet of Plato that a society needed a class of philosopher-priests to teach and guide (rule), in order to have a harmonious and well-ordered society. Therefore we have to look to Pre-Socratic thinkers, and those few who have stepped outside of the Monist worldview since, to get an idea of a truly nature-based tradition not bound to any priestocracy or theocracy. We can also look to the Slavic, Celtic, Germanic and Norse mythologies as well as the Vedas, Native American lore, etc. Even when we do come into contact and study ancient (and modern) non-Abrahamic thought, we tend to gloss over things that don't jibe with the monist lens that we understand and keeps us in moral comfort zone.

The Abrahamic paradigm is so pervasive in our culture that even atheists and agnostics are generally monists, our science and medicine is monist. Woke globalist "multiculturalism" is an extreme extension of this ideal, though they don't understand it and mostly would not admit it. There are literally thousands of sects of Abrahamic religions but they are all monist: they view the individual as intrinsically defined by membership in a cult, which rips us away from familial and tribal connections.

Moving forward was a Pagan demands that we understand the larger context, not simply the obvious victimization and genocidal assaults on Pagan people by the Monists. Cultism was the undoing of many of the pre-Christian groups, as they became cultish, they destroyed their own heritage. Human trafficking and slavery in ancient times also helped destroy this way of life.