/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17824252]

How come pagans like their Gods to be so fun?
Greeks, Norse, even Hindus (although to a lesser extent), some of their Gods are just like a cool guy who was good at fighting. People would just tell stories about them because the story was cool. What's the moral of the Orpheus myth? I have no idea, but it's cool.
And then shit like Buddhism or Christianity is INCREDIBLY try hard.
I'm so jealous of Pagans.
>want gf
>give offering to love Goddess
Sounds like a better life than "oh god pls I'm so bad I fucked up so hard please forgive me I love you please don't send me to hell I'm a good boy".
Buddhism is the same "all existence is suffering", you have to spend your whole life sitting still and doing nothing, that's the only way to escape.

[Anonymous No.17824267]

buddism is correct though.

[Anonymous No.17824276]

>>17824252
You're literally a teenager without the slightest understanding of Paganism or Christianity.

>yeah bro Grecian Paganism was just so fun bro it was just like A BIG FUN BALL PIT where everyone had fun and we just believed in the Gods because they were fun and we just gave libations so we could have fun guys

[Anonymous No.17824289]

Why did Christianity uproot paganism across evropa? I have never understood why and am geniunly curious

[Anonymous No.17824299]

>>17824289
>evropa
shut the fuck up.

[Anonymous No.17824309]

>>17824276
Dionysus is literally the God of having a blast.
Shut the fuck up you fucking autist, being a pagan is clearly more chill than being a christian.

[Anonymous No.17824343]

>>17824289
· Author has 1.1K answers and 31M answer views
I think a major reason is that Christianity fulfilled a spiritual need for many, at a time when the traditional pagan beliefs had stopped doing so.

Christianity had slowly spread throughout the Roman world from as early as the 1st Century, AD - within just a few decades of Jesus’ death, there was already a Christian community in Rome. But it really started picking momentum in the second half of the 2nd Century, AD, then took off and started gaining widespread following during the 3rd Century, AD - a period of extreme hardship, civil strife, foreign wars, political instability, plagues, economic decline, anarchy, and a population crash known as the Crisis of the Third Century .

The pagan religions against which Christianity competed were transactional or contractual in nature: you make offerings to the gods, do the rituals right, and the gods help you in this world. Problem was that during this period, this world was going to sh*t, and no amount of offerings and rituals seemed to help. In other words, as the world seemed to be spinning into chaos, and the certainties and safety and security of centuries evaporated, the pagan gods seemed to many to have stopped fulfilling their side of the contract.

In the midst of that turmoil, Christianity offered salvation in a world to come. If you already accepted that this world was sh*t and full of suffering and nothing could be done to change that - and there was plenty of evidence all around during that era to support such a proposition - then salvation and safety and reward in a world to come is a major consolation prize. One that makes this world more bearable. Which explains why Christianity spread like wildfire amongst the lower classes and the most disadvantaged - the ones most likely to suffer, and least likely to have a say or control over their destinies.

Moreover, the Christian church’s structure, with its congregations and parishes, offered its followers a stronger sense of community and belonging, with grassroots level input and responsiveness to the congregation’s needs and concerns, in a way that most pagan religions could not. They simply were not structured that way.


Correspondingly, Christianity spread more slowly amongst the upper classes and those with some measure of control over their lives. During the first few centuries, it had a reputation as the religion of the poor, the uneducated, or the rif raff, if you would. As such, it was looked down upon by the elites precisely because it was embraced by the slaves, the disadvantaged, and the lower classes - which facilitated the waves of persecution, since those elites had the machinery of state and means of repression at their disposal.

[Anonymous No.17824350]

>>17824309
>knows nothing about paganism

[Anonymous No.17824360]

>>17824309
>Dionysus is literally the God of having a blast.
You would literally be removed from town if you said this in ancient Greece.

[Anonymous No.17824364]

>>17824289
because God willed it

[Anonymous No.17824371]

>>17824343
thx makes sense now :)

[Anonymous No.17824386]

>>17824309
>be pagan, minding your own business
>the gods start fucking with you for fun
>try to trick them back
>they make you roll a boulder up a hill for eternity or turn you into a fish or something like that

[Anonymous No.17824394]

>>17824289
Saul of Tarsus was an evil jew who corrupted the teachings of Jesus (who was a decent buddha-like guy) in order to subvert and destroy Europe. Christianity was a cult for homeless and dumb people, but because of material conditions their numbers could grow quickly. Corrupt leaders then found out they could get power by converting to christianity (it espouses absolute truth) and started forcefully converting their peoples (or killing them if they refused) in order to consolidate that power. Not very nuanced but that's why in a nutshell.

[Anonymous No.17824402]

>>17824360
>>17824350
Tryhard faggots.
I've been to Pompeii. Carvings of dicks everywhere, hilarious shitposts on the walls about making all the girls cry because you turned gay, it was a chiller time and you know it.
You squares would never get invited to a Bacchanalia party.

>>17824386
That only happens if you literally try to fuck with them.
You have to piss them off by stealing fire, they aren't going to make you burn for coveting your neighbour's ox.

[Anonymous No.17824416]

>>17824402
Judgement of Paris

[Anonymous No.17824435]

>the gods were anthropomorphic and not originally symbolic representations of the divine and metaphysical
*ahem*

>Algis Uzdavinys
To say that Thales' [statement: everything is full of gods, water] moves "beyond representations to the underlying, intelligible reality amounts to saying that the creators of mythological world pictures were extremely ignorant and unable to comprehend pure noeric reality which transcends all words and images.

But in this respect Thales says nothing new, nothing that had not been already and
better said by the Egyptians and other ancient nations a long time before.
The world is a living being, a divine body (like a statue) in need of the
animating principle [everything is full of gods]

This doctrine is the same as the Egyptian one: the gods (netem), who bring life (ankh) and animate all bodies, are manifestations (kheperu) of the supreme transcendent Principle and constitute the different levels of reality. For Greeks, the gods (theos) are ever-living and everlasting principles.

The concept of the primordial Waters (Nun as the ineffable God, the
Neoplatonic One) reflects the Egyptian cosmological picture of the
noetic universe as a sphere of the divine light

To think that Hesiodic genealogies or Homeric accounts were
accepted at face value by the Hellenes, even by the initiates and the
educated minority, would be to indulge oneself in rationalistic naivete
instead of trying to explore the metaphysical exegesis and symbolism of
the sacred.

[Anonymous No.17824441]

>>17824402
>they had carvings of penises everywhere just because they were free and happy and celebrating sex
You are either a stupid nigger, or a young teenager who went with his parents and has a (as yet) shallow interest in philosophy and culture.

[Anonymous No.17824535]

>>17824435
Yeah that's just slightly standardised animism. It's not a sign of being incredibly deep and sophisticated. Every fucking uncontacted tribe thinks this way.
But it still seems chill to me, less overhead. That stuff works on the level of perception more than it does thought. It's a deeply ingrained way of seeing the world.
Not saying it isn't deep and sophisticated either, I just think it's less tryhard.

>>17824441
I'm neither, I'm just exaggerating and shooting the shit.
>doesn't paganism seem to be more chill than other religion
>NO SPERG YOU CAN'T SAY SHIT LIKE THAT YOU HAVE TO TAKE EVERTHING SUPER SERIOUS
Say something smart about the question posed in this thread you dumb faggot. Actually show your intelligence instead of trying to denigrate mine.

[Anonymous No.17824581]

>>17824535
Lol what a bunch of cope. You tried to degrade myths as some sort of cool fairy tail which just tries to have fun. In reality, these myths brought on a whole different other meaning. It was relaying truths through the medium of myth. This is why Hesiod and Homers stories resemble ones found in other cultures like Egypt, who multiple ancient authors like Herodotus said influenced greek myth and thought. The Myth is therefore much more than a fanciful story to entertain like you originally said it was.

[Anonymous No.17824663]

>>17824581
Look, can you imagine what it's like to be a random pleb in ancient rome?
Not a philosopher, not a scholar, just a normal guy. Maybe an apprentice carpenter or something. He hangs out, drinks, hopes to find a good wife.
He's going to hear stories and be like "that was a fun story, I liked hearing that story".
He's not going to be furrowing his brow thinking about metaphysics the whole time.
So I'm saying as someone brought up in a Christian culture, who has a Christian way of seeing the world, I think it would be maybe slightly more chill if we still had pagan religion today.
The encounters a normal person has with religion in pagan societies are lower stakes.
Christianity teaches little kids that if they say "oh my god" they're going to hell. I'm not seeing an analogue to that in pagan societies.

I mistakenly assumed people would be able to understand my light-hearted approach to the topic, but like all pseuds your only interesting in these topics is to try and jerk yourself off about being smarter than the other guy.

[Anonymous No.17824674]

>>17824343
>>17824289
easy: Christianity offered administrative boosts to pagan overlords, convincing them to convert to christianity and in turn convert their nations to christianity

conversion to christianity was basically like joining the EU back in the day

[Anonymous No.17824809]

>>17824663
You are degrading the source and meaning of what the Myth really was and attaching your desires to an ideal that didn't exist. Don't attack us for correcting your fever dream consisting of a new conceptual view of myth which has no basis in reality. We are simply correcting your assumptions.

Here have some more Uzdavinys
>Thales and the Egyptian Myths
Modern scholars have tried convince us that the only positive function of myths and traditional tales is to make us feel at home in the world, as if sacred myths were devoid of
any metaphysical content and serve simply as a pleasant intoxicant.

The variety of world-representations found in different religious-mythological
traditions are providential veils, nor arbitrary fictions which would compel
poor Thales to reject all of them in the name of one single "physiological" world picture, naively held to be the only one which was both true and adequate.

Homer playfully presented the same teaching of the Egyptians [the metaphysical idea of the one] using poetical and mythological images. "Homer's poetry had the advantage over the dryness of philosophic prose." And the Egyptian myths, used in sacred rites, had clear advantage over Homeric literature.

>He's not going to be furrowing his brow thinking about metaphysics the whole time.
But we see that the origin and purpose of myth is not one of entertainment, but one of meaning and truth to be presented to the partaker or listener of the myth. One that makes him wonder at the world he exists in and digest this story in a manner not solely for enjoyment. Because the myths do not come from the entertainers but the true first philosophers. The myth transmits this "wonder" that Aristotle speaks of.

[Anonymous No.17824819]

>>17824809
Shut the fuck up dude, you've totally missed the point.
Can you not imagine what it's like to be a normie for a single second?

[Anonymous No.17824831]

>>17824819
Your main point was obviously wrong though! The point that the purpose of myth was solely to entertain is, ironically, a modern myth!

[Anonymous No.17824841]

>>17824663
The other anon has said it perfectly, but to perhaps express a very complex idea which you still have not grasped, very simply: the meaning of the religious mystery is something that can be felt by all.

[Anonymous No.17824894]

>>17824289
Christianity didn't uproot it*, it covered it like a mantle. We still put candles on birthday cakes so Diana will protect the kids. We still offer presents at 'christmas' in honor of Saturn.
>* Ok St Boniface did uproot some tree but that's missing the forest of barbarian leaders converting voluntarily

[Anonymous No.17824967]

>>17824831
That wasn't my main point.
To be fair to you, I should have expressed myself better in the OP. I promise I'm not moving the goalposts, my intention was to discuss the effect the mindset of the religion would have on the common man. I hold my hands up, I messed up with the OP.
But c'mon. They might not be solely to entertain, but they do entertain, do they not?

>>17824841
>something that can be felt by all.
My point kind of hinges on this. There is a mindset and a way of seeing things that goes along with a religion. And that mindset is not necessarily the best representation of the religion.
So with Christianity, that might be the fear of judgement over petty infractions. It could also be the idea of god as a remote and unreachable other. If you know about Christianity you can debate the validity of those perceptions, but those are very common perceptions.
I was once caught in a lightning storm with no shelter, and as I was shitting myself thinking I might die, I thought about Thor. I could see the appeal of understanding the storm as having a will, of almost being alive in some divine way.
And it was appealing to me because I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was Thor's power, he was in full force, and I made the mistake of getting in the way. If I was being more Christian about it, that storm might have felt more like a punishment. And yes, divine punishment exists in pagan shit, but it's very different to Christian judgement.

[Anonymous No.17825020]

>>17824402
Unlike now, when crude graffiti is extremely uncommon.

[Anonymous No.17825041]

>>17824967
Neoplatonism, which was inspired by Egyptian mythology and which has influenced Christianity to an extent sees a slight against God as an obstacle that blocks you to your final end. In other words, an action that hinders you from being in union with God, the One. Perhaps this vision of slighting God being a block in your union with Him has been lost. But nonetheless the truth of the matter remains in the spirit of Christianity and which has existed in myth transmitted through Neoplatonism.

>Ramesside magical papyrus of the XIX Dynasty (1295-1188 B.C.): "Hail. the One who makes himself into millions, Whose length and breath are limitless. Power in readiness, who gave birth to himself..."

My comment here is to maybe give you a new conceptual view of what slighting God means and how it might relate to the myths that you are interested in. (Of course Norse myths are probably detached from Egyptian and Near Eastern myths).

[Anonymous No.17825042]

>>17825020
funny graffiti is actually very uncommon.
It's all either "this is my personal brand" or political shit. Or straight up just art, which is a little cringe but sometimes is cool.

The only thing we have in common with graffiti is "this person is a whore, this is her number/this is where she hangs out"

[Anonymous No.17825264]

>dudes human sacrifice is so fun and based amirite hahah it's nothing like boring christianity lol

[Anonymous No.17826568]

>>17824894
This sort of mixing is doubly weird when a significant percentage of your ancestors didn't practice proto-indo-euro-derived paganism before their conversion, either.

[Anonymous No.17826704]

Modern religion is done to satisfy other, while the old polytheism was to satisfy yourself. The satisfaction others got from it was just a nice side effect. Same thing with modern work, most people do their job to satisfy others, even if it makes you miserable and you don’t actually help anyone with it, while all the great inventors and entrepreneurs do most of the stuff they do because they enjoy it, with all the developments they produce being a happy side effect