Interpreting occult/pagan thought

I see a lot of posts on Yea Forums discussing occult or pagan thought. And I'm curious to how a lot of users approach these topics.

For some reason, I've recently become really interested in Neopaganism. Most of it has just been reading anthropological writings on these groups, and reading a couple of writings that have popped up from the movement. I'm noticing a lot of the writings that come from the community itself are big how-to guides. "If you want to be a proper Celtic shaman, here's how to meditate and go on a transcendental journey to meet your spirit animal."

For people interested in these ideas, but not necessarily interested in becoming a practitioner or true believer, how do you engage these texts? Should I just read them and say "neat?" Ignore the how-to guides altogether as a waste of time in understanding? Has anyone found value in sitting down and performing some of these rituals?

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Just skip the middleman and start a LARP guild

LARP is a toxic meme pushed by nihilists to wittle away any sense of rooted identity and turn you into another speck in the amorphous consumer borg. Every religious and social movement in history would be derided by idiots like you as a LARP, yet they accomplished infinitely more than you.

I go to gnostic mass Sunday’s and my local OTO temple pretty often.

I like the people there generally. They’re working / lower class urban intellectuals. There are a few fuckable women.

But theyre absolutely larping. It’s obvious they’re acting; some affect a mildly British accent.
The rituals are so far from how we act in the modern world.

That said, I think the rituals could be modernized (so they don’t sound like a 200 year old witch’s poem), intensified (think heavy yoga and / or certain drugs, animal sacrifice etc) and thus made realistic.

So larp as a catch all is a spook, but I think many are larping.

I reall dont find it a valid criticism at all, people on here point the finger at everything from Catholicism to paganism to fascism to leftism as LARPing. When you get down to it, the only thing left that's not considered a LARP is normalfag science-worship materialism. You look at history and you find it full of "LARPers" who succeeded and only succeeded because they "LARPed". If they're willing to put the time and effort in to go through rituals and traditions, it's not a LARP.

This is interesting. You think their lack of intensity makes them less authentic? I would personally see that myself more as roleplaying.

Is it because they have to invest more in the act of worship?

>people on here point the finger at everything as LARPing

Because it is. Very few of these people do anything, or even live according to their own beliefs. They don't go off into the wilderness, or plan revolution, or burn churches, or banks, or crusade for christ, or whatever. They are simply consumers. That's is what they really are. What you really are.

A LARP'ing insecure teen who needs to constantly talk about your fucking hobby to not have a nervous breakdown and start crying in the middle of the classroom.

That doesn't make them LARPers, that makes them hypocrites.

It’s because they don’t really believe it / they’re not really in a very meditative state.

I’m sure there are a lot of Christian / Catholic churches with charismatic, intelligent, and sincere pastors. But how much does the religion really permeate the lives of its followers?

I want a religion I can grow from, that I can live by. There has yet to be a codified way to live, so this should be a religion that is itself growing.

There should be physical, psychological, and intellectual feats involved. We grow and learn about ourselves / life from these extreme experiences.

The way we live is always more a product of chance (in our case, chance largely given to us from consumerism) than it being the best way. So I’d love to figure out, with a group of peers, a better way to live.

To me that sounds like a solid religion and wouldn’t be larping.

If they’re hypocrites then they’re larping when they worship.

And to build on this even if people did those things youd still call them larpers. Varg burned down a church and hes the posterboy for this toxic meme. Antifa and the altright go out in the streets and beat each other up and they still get branded larpers. Your so full of shit.

Yes! Celtic Magic by the late D J Conway! Opened my eyes! Learned how to astrally project myself and helped me get centered to the trees and Sun and Moon! I highly recommend it especially the Pagan self-initiation ritual!

>You think their lack of intensity makes them less authentic?
Intensity is easily taken as a reflection of sincere belief, which is the opposite of roleplaying. Of course there's always the opposite extreme where fervor masks internal conflict, but if OP is looking for something ideal than the former is a lot more appealing.

Hypocrisy has got nothing to do with it, the people who follow their beliefs with actions are considered the biggest larpers of all. The entire point of the larper meme is to discredit and shame anyone who even thinks of going down a path that might lead to some sort of action, ritual, tradition, or change.

If person A believes there is a deity and proper worship requires every facet of your life to be devoted to that deity and does so, that's valid religion. If person B who believes there is a deity and that proper worship requires less of a personal investment and still invests everything they feel is required to be a good practitioner, are they LARPers or do they just have different views than person A?

To me that's like saying people who read shitty romance novels don't actually like to read. They do, they just don't share the same culture of reading that someone from Yea Forums probably does.

So you consider yourself a believer. Do you think there would be value for a non-believer? In all honesty, I'm probably too cynical to come at the book with the type of open mind required to really have my eyes opened by it. I just want to understand shamanism and its contemporary practitioners.

I guess my issue is if I want to learn about Islam, there are a ton of books that are essentially "What we believe and why." But all I seem to find is "Here's how to do the things". Maybe because shamanism seems to encourage self exploration and determination and the first type of book is more incompatible with the those notions, but I have no idea.

for a postmodern post-truth ontology as discourse and power social constructivist everything (aside from some permutation of marxist metaphysics) is an ironic larp reducible to you nebulous hypostasis of choice - power or capital or whatever. But isn't the position of relativist social construction just the ultimate larp itself as no one can possibly live that way other than in the cybersphere BwO that is the interwebs or the headier larp of pee-reviewed academic journals?

No one views us as worthy of serious study...I think that the intellectual establishment views us a bunch of "Dungeons and dragons" and Game of Thrones Larpers....
But the best way to explain shamanism probably really is by "doing"...

To some extent I’m just trying to push my own idea of religion and see if anyone bites.

But I think if you worship the tree goddess or whatever, and you don’t strongly believe it, then you’re larping.

And on another level, like the other poster mentioned, intensity is an indicator of strong belief. Most practitioners of religion don’t strongly believe or adhere to the beliefs they claim. They larp as a good Christian, or a pagan, or an occultist without truly believing these things.

For them it’s more the act of ritual that drives them than the beliefs underlying the ritual or what they get from it. They just like thinking of themselves as a practitioner of such and such. They don’t strongly believe any of it.

I do think it’s possible to dramatically change lifestyles in a productive, authentic way.

In another post here ( ) I mentioned that, while using larper as a catch all term for those making religious pursuits is a spook, many people making those pursuits are larping.

Can you post that again without using all of those buzzterms

your own idea of religion is just limp wristed protestantism. The vast majority of religions we know of through history have been orthoprax not orthodox, i.e. not stipulated any particular belief in anything, basing religious identity more on what you do than what you think.

I see these occult traditions as proto-education. or education is a sort of mystic tradition, either or.
'you mean there's a special experience that changes how you see the world but can't be explained except to those who have undergone the same experience, or at least one as similar as possible?' sounds like literacy or education to me, because I've undergone the literacy/education esoteric experience. if I was an ancient Greek and was initiated into the nearest chthonian mystery cult then I'd call anything similar to that a mystery cult instead. education is a mystery cult about growing up, and so are all the other mystery cults in the world, whether they have organized doctrines like the Trinity or whether they're just a dude on peyote in California in the 90s.

>open ended, fluid, growing belief system
>intense physical, mental, intellectual feats
>limp wristed Protestant

Your nonstop use of buzzterms is an intellectual crutch and a weak shield from the fact that you have no clue what you’re talking about.

If you can’t quit doing it then you’re larping as an intellectual

:|

Hes not wrong in that many non-abrahamic belief systems are more concerned with the correct practice of their traditions and rituals rather than the orthodoxy of your personal belief. It really just seems like what you're saying amounts to "everything that doesn't fit my Christian capitalistic worldview is larping".

yes, it's the assumption that all religions are based around belief that I'm critiquing in this guy's posts.

Apologies I come from a place where Protestantism, orthodox, and orthoprax are just foundational vocabulary, not buzzwords

Agreed. You really have to experience it!

my first girlfriend was a wiccan. she fainted when i tried to fuck her in the ass.

I like this post. I really never thought of it this way.

In this case, it is a LARP. They are trying to reconstruct a dead tradition which many of its source texts have been lost hundreds of years ago. How do they make up for those holes in the doctrine and liturgy? You can't unless you make shit up. Hence, LARP.

Does it count as LARP if they make it a fusion of global pagan beliefs? Getting influence from modern indigenous pagan religions to inform their holes?

Larp meme is idealist, not nihilist. Nihilists are also larps.

Yes, a Frankenstein tradition is still larping.

then isn't almost every religion larping? they're all syncretic, even the ones that pretend not to be

Not really. What makes modern "religions" like Theosophy, New Age, and Wicca distinct is they either try to revive a dead religion and fill in the gaps with whatever the hell they feel like from the get go in Wicca's case, or it's all just one big hodgepodge of other religions without trying to hide it, yet say it's a legit religion with a straight face in the case of New Age and Theosophy.

I wasn’t talking about Christianity though. At all.

You did a good job explaining it, it’s just that you seemed to be trying to fit me into a mold of these preconceived notions. That and your other post was laden with buzzterms.

I don’t think I said anything remotely Christian. I think Jesus was like an anti Christ. He preached a philosophy that was anti power, anti life. He himself literally chose to die in a terrible way.

how does that description not fit Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or literally any other religion?

>anti power, anti life
Every religious doctrine is like that in one shape or form.

you dont think you said anything christian because you are unaware of the degree to which your most fundamental assumptions about religions are shaped by christianity. That's the point a number of anons have made about your posts. Your assumption that religion is all about belief is a specifically protestant assumption, and the metric by which you judge genuine religiosity -- something like the intensity of belief (how could you possibly know that anyway?) is just straight up pietism.

Every religion you listed is based on revelation, which their doctrine is built from that revelation. God revealed himself to Moses and taught him the Ten Commandments, God revealed himself as his son, Jesus. God revealed the Qur'an to Muhammad via Gabriel. Siddhartha Gautama achieved enlightenment and accrued disciples to teach them how to reach Nirvana.

you could say the same about theosophy though, blavatsky recieved revelations from kuthumi and the mahatmas. How is that any different than the revelations of Jesus and Mohammed or the enlightenment of the Buddha?

Blavatsky's views came from a variety of enlightened masters, which is very different from receiving revelation from God Himself.

>Every religion you listed is based on revelation
aka larping

well if revelation from God is your metric, then New Age religions are the place to look, as there are a large number of them that have been revealed to the world just in the past four decades or so.

Also your inclusion of Buddhism in religions "revealed" by "god" is deeply problematic.

And plenty of the religions I listed had intermediaries. Mohammed's revelations were facilitated by Gabriel. They didn't come from God himself. And the talmudic tradition similarly sees metatron as the intermediary between God and Moses. So they're all a lot more like Blavatsky than it might seem at first.

All religions are true.
Doesn't matter if you're Muslim or Bhuddist or Christian or whatever.
Just find a teacher who inspires you to become who you are.

How is that larping?

Pretending that your thoughts were implanted directly into your head by a diety that created the universe and that those thoughts are THE truth as told to you by the aforementioned imaginary diety. Role playing as a receiver of the instructions of the creator.

Just read Dumzeil m8.