Paganism

The importance of extraordinary experiences for the process of adopting a heterodox belief system or an alternative religious world view is often neglected in the existing research literature. Scholars of religion commonly lay stress on the process of religious conversion characterized by different stages. Extraordinary experiences are, thereby, included as potential internal catalysts (e.g. mystical experiences or near-death experiences), but only among others. The particular quality of the extraordinary experience remains largely unconsidered. In our paper, we emphasise the personal extraordinary experiences of strongly subjective evidence as an important factor in the process of becoming a magical practitioner and adopting a heterodox worldview. Our examination is based on the interview data of three field studies with neoshamans, contemporary magicians, and German heathen (Asatru), conducted in German-speaking countries. First, we outline different functions of extraordinary experiences regarding the process. Second, we reflect on the process of converting the personal extraordinary experience into a narration (framing). Finally, we propose to distinguish between two classes of extraordinary experiences, with regard to their function in the process of adopting a heterodox (religious) worldview. Furthermore we address the methodological problem regarding the possibility of the reconstruction of factual/objective 'paranormal' events as potential catalysts of extraordinary experiences. This gives rise to the question of the validity of narratively embedded and processed extraordinary experiences. In this context, the German differentiation between Erlebnis (experience in the sense of a pure individual impression) and Erfahrung (social form of experience, based on shared knowledge) seems to be a crucial distinction.

The clash of the Christian and pagan religions was inevitable, as by definition the two religions polluted the other. Pagans viewed the bodies in tombs that Christians frequently built their churches over as desecrating, while Christians believed the worship of false gods in pagan temples was desecrating. By the fourth century, this struggle between Christianity and paganism had escalated into the use and abuse of ‘sacred space’, as both groups violated the sanctuaries of their rivals and sometimes built their own over the same sites. This conflict was carried on at the highest levels as the emperor Constantine aligned himself with Christianity, as did his son Constantius II, yet both were followed by Julian, the last pagan emperor. This paper examines this phenomenon in several cases involving Constantine and Julian and explores the intention and execution of both emperors.

This article is concerned with identifying, comparing and accounting for the principal rhetorical conventions within Pagan practitioners’ narratives of conversion. Applying key insights from studies on narrative identity and drawing on fifteen months of fieldwork and twenty-five in-depth interviews with Pagan practitioners, I first outline formal similarities in the content of participants’ narratives, arguing that these narrative conventions together constitute an ideal typical conversion narrative: what I call the rhetoric of continuity. This narrative form depicts the process of conversion as a rediscovery or uncovering of a temporally continuous and essentialized Pagan self. I suggest that while all conversions involve both change and continuity, adherents of different faith traditions vary in the degree to which they stress self-transformation and/or self-continuity. I then argue that the rhetoric of continuity reflects and reinforces practitioners’: (1) perspective on the locus and nature of the authentic self; (2) claims to legitimacy and social acceptance; and (3) understanding of the nature of religious truth.

Analiza istniejących opracowań ruchu rodzimowierczego wskazuje, że podstawową strategią opisu doktryn i działalności poszczególnych ugrupowań jest socjografia, a więc taki sposób przedstawiania rzeczywistości, który uniwersalizuje zarówno opisywanych, jak i opisującego. W artykule postuluję o partykularyzację opisu opartego o długotrwałe badania terenowe – etnografię. Posmak tego sposobu pisania o rodzimowierstwie daje opis sytuacji „pierwszego kontaktu” z członkami Zakonu Zadrugi „Północny Wilk”.

"Practicing the presence of the Goddess is a term I invented in the early 1990s when I started teaching a class with that name. It started out as a class where I taught women about the goddesses of the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Norse pantheons and gradually turned into lessons on modern paganism, then into a class on creating effective rituals and doing magic, and finally evolved into being in the world—practicing Her presence.

When I wrote about ways of being in the world on April 29, I went past mere existentialism and suggested that benevolence is a good way to be in the world. Be kind to people. Be polite. (Or as kind and polite as it’s possible to be in a world that is markedly unkind and impolite.) What benevolence really is, is one element of what I call practicing the presence of the Goddess.

Practicing the presence of the Goddess is a term I invented in the early 1990s when I started teaching a class with that name. It started out as a class where I taught women about the goddesses of the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Norse pantheons and gradually turned into lessons on modern paganism, then into a class on creating effective rituals and doing magic, and finally evolved into being in the world—practicing Her presence. As I kept refining and redefining it, practicing the presence of the Goddess became celebrating the wheel of the year plus demonstrating to Muggles that we pagans are not devil-worshippers plus practicing mindfulness in our daily lives. Mindfulness is, of course, paying attention to what we do."

This article explores the relations between the Neoplatonic criticism of Christian logos in Julian the Apostate and his predecessors, the Christenhasser Celsus and Porphyry. In the first part, we will introduce his motivations for apostasy from the Christian faith, as well as the foundations of his paganism, built on the Neoplatonism and Oriental theurgy of Iamblichus of Calcis. Next, we will endeavor to systematize the key arguments used in his Against the Galileans, emphasizing areas of common ground between it and the previous antichristian tradition, and stressing Julian’s rhetorical and instrumental use of Judaism.

Academics tend to look on 'esoteric', 'occult' or 'magical' beliefs with contempt, but are usually ignorant about the religious and philosophical traditions to which these terms refer, or their relevance to intellectual history. Wouter Hanegraaff tells the neglected story of how intellectuals since the Renaissance have tried to come to terms with a cluster of 'pagan' ideas from late antiquity that challenged the foundations of biblical religion and Greek rationality. Expelled from the academy on the basis of Protestant and Enlightenment polemics, these traditions have come to be perceived as the Other by which academics define their identity to the present day. Hanegraaff grounds his discussion in a meticulous study of primary and secondary sources, taking the reader on an exciting intellectual voyage from the fifteenth century to the present day and asking what implications the forgotten history of exclusion has for established textbook narratives of religion, philosophy and science.

Bafomé, a mais duradoura criação do escritor Éliphas Lévi, é um ícone do universo esotérico: é a imagem “satânica” mais conhecida da história. Na tentativa de desvendar a sua rica composição simbólica, uma exegese iconográfica será conduzida por intermédio da psicologia analítica, fundada pelo psiquiatra suíço Carl Gustav Jung. As origens de Bafomé na alquimia, na cabala e no gnosticismo serão perscrutadas e os conceitos Junguianos do inconsciente coletivo e dos arquétipos irão, em grande parte, balizar a interpretação proposta neste trabalho. Tal análise será dividida em oito subáreas, entre elas: o significado do seu aspecto animalesco na escatologia cristã, o hermafroditismo na psicologia e nas ciências arcanas, as qualidades mágicas do pentagrama e a importância hermética do caduceu. Por fim, conclui-se que o Bafomé é um símbolo de self, o arquétipo da totalidade psíquica. Bafomé tem por finalidade ser uma alternativa à imagem primordial cristã de autorrealização, mais integradora e menos repressora que esta.