Tag: i didnt realize that infighting about doctrine was an issue in the pagan community

thedesertgod:

magica-pseudoacademica:

“The Roman religion consisted of worshippers holding disunified polythetic sets of beliefs. The overlap of these sets of beliefs might produce some beliefs that were more common than others, but the lack of an orthodox mandate for uniformity meant that the beliefs of an individual need not be affected by the variant beliefs held by another Roman. A man who believed that di manes had powers to preserve life in their own right and a man who thought they preserved life by posthumously invoking the help of other supernatural beings could both believe, on a practical basis, that honoring the manes could help preserve their lives. A Roman who thought the lares were another form of the deified dead and one who thought they were the children of a nymph could both believe that the lares were important guardians of the home who needed to be worshipped. Worshippers could disagree about the nature of the god Mars or the god of the Lupercalia while all agreeing that these gods existed and had powers that could benefit the lives or worshippers. Rather than searching for orthodox doctrines in the Roman religion (or seeing their absence as a weakness) it is better to study clusters of beliefs in the understanding that each individual variation could be important to the belief holder’s understanding of how to obtain the benefits that Rome’s pantheon of gods could offer the individual.”

— Charles W. King, “The Organization of Roman Religious Beliefs” (2003)

Important to remember how much doctrinal infighting amongst reconstructuonist pagans is very much a biproduct of Christianized culture and not actual paganism.