I can't help but note how telling it is that most pagans' response to this call out is to either quibble with the language used, to deflect, or to find ways to take potshots at Christianity.
That they can't refute what you've said, that they're focused on issues that are miniscule in comparison to what you've brought up, is all we need to know on how wrong they are.
Have you ever heard of the podcast NewPolity? They are doing a breakdown of paganism right now and had a lot of the same points you did especially about the human sacrifice part
How are satanic practices pagan? Those who form satanic groups or cults do so by wanting to countersignal Christian values, not by actually valuing what pagans did before they were destroyed. Paganism is not inverted Christianity.
For that matter, the Roman's were very tolerant of other cultures and religions. So why the destruction of Jerusalem and the extermination of Carthage?
The former due to heinous perfidy derived from imbibing Middle East Pagan slop and the latter for Human Sacrifice.
Someone is either twisting the historical record or ignoring the fact that they were the only major culture earmarked by the Spanish for total eradication in South America. Due to pervasive Human Sacrifice.
The Spanish eradicated most of the native cultures they encountered. Tlaxcala, which also practiced human sacrifice, was spared on the basis of the alliance they wrangled with Cortes
They forced everyone around them to practice ritual cannibalism, and rewarded their closest allies by flawing the king's daughter and making her skin into a costume.
> Greene systematically eviscerates neo-paganism like some kind of flensing knife wielding serial killer. He lures the victim in and starts removing the skin so delicately that it doesn't hurt at all, just a bit of pressure and a cool breeze on the senses. Before long, neo-paganism is skinned, vivisected, pickled, and labeled.
Okay, enough glazing... Are you gonna give him a blowjob awhile you’re at it? We pagans responded to that post in droves with long comments. I wrote two actually, because substack has a comment length limit. If he “eviscerated” us so devastatingly, why are we not left speechless?
> All we know of paganism comes from the societies that destroyed it. As a memeplex, as a discrete and coherent interpretive rhetorical framework1, it was insufficient to the challenge in the forge of nations.
Well, no, not really. We have plenty of means of comparing different but related pagan traditions and finding out which traits are most likely to have the deepest origins. Also, plenty of pagan records were recorded by multiple different groups at different times, so they can be cross-validated. Also, your argument could be expanded to the entire record of human history.
> Indeed, polytheism is always inferior to monotheism when directly contrasted. When it's time to fight, the side with One Name to call upon always trumps the quivering thralls of the pantheon.
Ah yes, because Christians are so well-known for only calling upon one name in battle! It’s not like entire nations fly the banners of their patron saints into battle… Face it, if Polytheism was so inferior then Christians would not have spent so much time in history trying to adopt polytheistic attitudes via the cult of the saints.
> The managerial elite of the United States has a rotten core of practicing paganism at its very heart. They don't flaunt it, but they also don't allow access without it. The Comet Ping Pong Nightmare2 is a glimpse of it. The secretive retreats, the dress-up play at the LHC facility, the tunnel opening ceremony; these are all signals between elites of what it takes to participate, to belong
Occultism need not be pagan, in fact I would call something like Satanism intrinsically anti-Pagan because it is entirely focused on a rejection of metaphysical order. If anything, the most “pagan” secret society today is the Freemasons and only due to their vague association with the Rosicrucians, who were Hermeticists. But, that’s a very loose connection and obviously plenty of Freemasons historically considered themselves Christian.
> Here is the deeper truth, the ugly nightmare reality we won't be hearing from the Voices That Speak anytime soon: Epstein was not some sadistic flesh trader sitting on top of a massive blackmail generating network; he was a cog in a larger machine whose job was to identify the real freaks and perverts out of the run-of-the-mill hyper-hedonic elite and pass them up and in further for “cultivation.
A little off topic, but Epstein was a glorified pimp. The girls he was “trafficking” (paying tens of thousands of dollars to fuck celebs) were high school aged and up, he wasn’t kidnapping 5 year olds off the street and stealing their adrenochrome. Do you really think the average inner city pimp is not also working with high school aged girls? They’re already committing a crime, they’re not gonna get all conscientious when they find out the girl they’re prostituting is 15.
> Paganism always, always, ALWAYS leads to the adoption of human sacrifice as a core tenet of faith.
Human sacrifice in most Pagan societies, like all sacrifice for that matter, is a form of ritualized slaughter. Criminals, POWs, homosexuals etc were the ones being sacrificed. Societies like the Aztecs and Carthaginians are the exception, not the rule. Plenty of Pagan societies did not have sacrifice, so you’re wrong anyways, but the idea that there is a fine line between religiously sanctioned execution and human sacrifice only comes from a place of ignorance.
> This essay just refused to comply with my wishes. Even now, I am convinced it is a failure. It’s a mess, I can’t fix it, and it is maybe the most important topic I have ever tried to write about. I have backspaced for fucking weeks, trying to find the right words. Alas.
Perhaps some pagan god stopped you in your tracks…
Again, I ask: why are the satanic elite so enamoured with paganism in both symbol & practice? Are you going to play "real paganism hasn't been tried," "no true pagansman," or some other word game? Or can you address the issue head on. Paganism gets no pushback, precisely 0%, from the Cathedral. It's treated like Islam, Sikhi, and every other polytheistic fetish, which is to say, so long as you are attacking Christians, so long as you are attacking tradition, so long as you are helping deconstruct identity, you'll get head pats. If you stray from that path, they jerk your leash, and you start walking to heal like a good little pitbull.
Your final comment illustrates precisely why I don't take neopagans seriously in the theological realm: You guys most often seem to be materialist atheists LARPing as your preferred character from a video game. It isn't real to you, you just like the way it looks. For me, daemons are real. It is not a construct, it is not a metaphor. There are principalities and Powers that operate on the edge of our perception. The pagan societies of the past fell into hideous practices and were extirpated precisely because they opened their doors to daemons. You can see the same thing happening with modern Christianity, by the way. The spiritual baggage of equality, feminism, and sodomite veneration are the smoke; daemonic manipulation is the fire.
The “satanic” (Jewish) elite is not enamored with paganism, I don’t really understand why you think that. Paganism doesn’t get pushback because of its relative obscurity in the west, as well as a confusion of what “pagan” actually means. Wiccans are not Pagan, Wicca was created by Gerald Gardner in the 20th century and is only loosely connected to any actual Pagan traditions of the Isles. Satanism is obviously not Pagan, it’s not even really a religion. Both Gardner and LaVey, by the way, would be quite confused to see what’s come of their religious systems they invented. In other parts of the world, particularly in Japan, Paganism does get pushback from progressives quite heavily. In India too, the Pagan Hindu caste system has been hated by the left, as well as the idea that India is a Hindu nation (which it is, that’s why the Brits divided it from Pakistan).
> so long as you are attacking Christians, so long as you are attacking tradition, so long as you are helping deconstruct identity, you'll get head pats.
Christians have proven themselves incapable of countering the ills of liberalism, and the more you put your faith in Christian institutions the more you are betting on a losing horse. I don’t have any issue with Christians on the right, but I have issue with them trying to change our struggle from “the world hates white people” to “the world hates Christians”.
> You guys most often seem to be materialist atheists LARPing as your preferred character from a video game. It isn't real to you, you just like the way it looks. For me, daemons are real. It is not a construct, it is not a metaphor.
Daemons are real, and some of them are malevolent. But whatever one stopped you, well perhaps it is a eudaemon because you were spouting rubbish. Pagan societies always recognized both eudaemons and cacodaemons, and worshipped only the eudaemons. The forces of nature and perhaps even the spirits of certain ancestors are eudaemonic, but the gods are not daemons. They reside entirely in the noetic realm (or according to Proclus, above even that) while the daemons reside in the noeric realm and are subject to change. The Christian notion of Demons as fallen angels is wrong, however. Pagan conceptions of cacodaemons is that they are ontologically evil, or at least harmful to humanity. Christian Demons were once good, and chose to be evil.
I feel as though this critique and similar ones are weak. Not because Paganism is this almighty powerful or even influential thing for the people who say they believe in it, but because the people who attack paganism like this are often bereft of true faith themselves.
Sure, you say you believe, but is it because you have truly felt the divine in your heart? Is it because you wield a flaming sword of justice or because the lords grace courses through you? Or is it just another logical choice you have made in modernity among all the other choices and found it to be “the best one™.” Even in Dave’s own admission at times he finds it hard to honestly pray, to honestly participate in the rituals as a devout believer outside of the ceremony of it all.
Of course you all conveniently gloss over this fact in your own lives. You point to an ancient and ultimately dead (and overly politicized) book that itself has fading relevance to all but those who study it (improperly I might add in a framework such as Catholicism) for some pursuit of alternative truth to the one they have been given at birth in modernity. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge you for taking up the mantle of Christian. But its one thing to do this with the self awareness that you are coming to it at the end of a very very very long and arduous civilizational cycle wherein spirituality itself is being challenged and another thing entirely to pretend like you are being righteous warriors of god by spitting on your fellow tired seekers who are simply looking for solace from the modern hell they have been born into and finding different answers.
I’m not sure if you believe in the aphorism “let he who is without sin throw the first stone” but I feel as though you should be reminded of it. The way forward is not through a fractured and desperate and ultimately divided group of people who want to see real faith restored but can do nothing but fight as to which one they’d like to see on top. The way forward is through a coalition of modernity’s enemies working to undo it and expose its terrible nightmarish worship of these eldritch forces who use us and our peoples as slaves in their concrete machine of suffering. The way forward is a unity of spirit, not a complaining of particulars amongst ourselves.
What modernity challenges most is not Christianity, is not Paganism, is not any spiritual or theocratic idea. What modernity challenges most is the depravity and numinous reality of nature (through a God or gods) that allows for the natural growth and necessity for religion in the first place. No modern man can be truly religious when he is culturally, materially, and morally enslaved to the machine state which makes itself the exclusive provider of his lifeforce, his shelter, and his peoples. This is the true enemy, and no spiritual order, personal or otherwise, can be established until this terrible edifice comes tumbling down.
All infighting before this point is just stupid bickering.
The worst thing about modern paganism most of them don't even read the scholarship most of your texts were preserved by Christian scribes and what is not a Christian edition and what is authentic in the text is impossible to tell for example one of the Irish pagan tales literally starts with Genesis like the story of Noah the book of Irish invasions literally starts with Genesis 1 about the the daughter of Ireland her grandfather was Noah that's definitely a Christian edition
I hate Neil paganism as a Christian myself it's my own biases but you have to admit so much of your Western society did grow out of Christianity and that's the consensus of historians not the new atheist dribble you hear so often there's some excellent books on it I could recommend Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
Tom Holland a Larry Siedentop
Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism
No honest pagan will take a dump on early Christian Europe, because it's all paganism in the name of Christ. Your Chesteron, Tolkien, Lewis romantic and noble Christianity took centuries to form. The Normans, Visigoths, Lombards and Franks were Christian in name only.
I’m sorry, but is pagan==atheist in this telling? Because they seem to be used interchangeably and…that kinda makes sense from a Christian perspective but there are major issues with it.
Not trying to fight (yet), just trying to understand.
I believe that all humans, with very rare exception, are biologically faithful. Put another way, every human has a Faith, and the variation is what they put their faith in, and what they call that faith. Atheists, like lesbians, are things I read about but don't really believe exist.
I can't help but note how telling it is that most pagans' response to this call out is to either quibble with the language used, to deflect, or to find ways to take potshots at Christianity.
That they can't refute what you've said, that they're focused on issues that are miniscule in comparison to what you've brought up, is all we need to know on how wrong they are.
I just want one of them to explain why the child molesting elites love pagan symbolism. They always sidestep this.
Have you ever heard of the podcast NewPolity? They are doing a breakdown of paganism right now and had a lot of the same points you did especially about the human sacrifice part
How are satanic practices pagan? Those who form satanic groups or cults do so by wanting to countersignal Christian values, not by actually valuing what pagans did before they were destroyed. Paganism is not inverted Christianity.
Tell that to the Aztecs
This literally doesn't mean anything. Satan is only relevant to Christian and broadly Abrahamic religion.
I think it might be reasonable to draw parallels to Hades and Loki, but your point seems well made.
The Aztecs believed that promiscuity was sinful.
For that matter, the Roman's were very tolerant of other cultures and religions. So why the destruction of Jerusalem and the extermination of Carthage?
The former due to heinous perfidy derived from imbibing Middle East Pagan slop and the latter for Human Sacrifice.
The Romans destroyed Carthage for being a threat and Jerusalem to send a message that they would not tolerate rebellions.
Someone is either twisting the historical record or ignoring the fact that they were the only major culture earmarked by the Spanish for total eradication in South America. Due to pervasive Human Sacrifice.
The Spanish eradicated most of the native cultures they encountered. Tlaxcala, which also practiced human sacrifice, was spared on the basis of the alliance they wrangled with Cortes
They forced everyone around them to practice ritual cannibalism, and rewarded their closest allies by flawing the king's daughter and making her skin into a costume.
Ritual cannibalism was a general mesoamerican practice, as far as I’m aware.
Certainly you can argue that the Aztecs overdid it following the infamous drought.
Thanks for missing the point, heretic
https://artemis6.substack.com/p/the-virtues-revisited
> Greene systematically eviscerates neo-paganism like some kind of flensing knife wielding serial killer. He lures the victim in and starts removing the skin so delicately that it doesn't hurt at all, just a bit of pressure and a cool breeze on the senses. Before long, neo-paganism is skinned, vivisected, pickled, and labeled.
Okay, enough glazing... Are you gonna give him a blowjob awhile you’re at it? We pagans responded to that post in droves with long comments. I wrote two actually, because substack has a comment length limit. If he “eviscerated” us so devastatingly, why are we not left speechless?
> All we know of paganism comes from the societies that destroyed it. As a memeplex, as a discrete and coherent interpretive rhetorical framework1, it was insufficient to the challenge in the forge of nations.
Well, no, not really. We have plenty of means of comparing different but related pagan traditions and finding out which traits are most likely to have the deepest origins. Also, plenty of pagan records were recorded by multiple different groups at different times, so they can be cross-validated. Also, your argument could be expanded to the entire record of human history.
> Indeed, polytheism is always inferior to monotheism when directly contrasted. When it's time to fight, the side with One Name to call upon always trumps the quivering thralls of the pantheon.
Ah yes, because Christians are so well-known for only calling upon one name in battle! It’s not like entire nations fly the banners of their patron saints into battle… Face it, if Polytheism was so inferior then Christians would not have spent so much time in history trying to adopt polytheistic attitudes via the cult of the saints.
> The managerial elite of the United States has a rotten core of practicing paganism at its very heart. They don't flaunt it, but they also don't allow access without it. The Comet Ping Pong Nightmare2 is a glimpse of it. The secretive retreats, the dress-up play at the LHC facility, the tunnel opening ceremony; these are all signals between elites of what it takes to participate, to belong
Occultism need not be pagan, in fact I would call something like Satanism intrinsically anti-Pagan because it is entirely focused on a rejection of metaphysical order. If anything, the most “pagan” secret society today is the Freemasons and only due to their vague association with the Rosicrucians, who were Hermeticists. But, that’s a very loose connection and obviously plenty of Freemasons historically considered themselves Christian.
> Here is the deeper truth, the ugly nightmare reality we won't be hearing from the Voices That Speak anytime soon: Epstein was not some sadistic flesh trader sitting on top of a massive blackmail generating network; he was a cog in a larger machine whose job was to identify the real freaks and perverts out of the run-of-the-mill hyper-hedonic elite and pass them up and in further for “cultivation.
A little off topic, but Epstein was a glorified pimp. The girls he was “trafficking” (paying tens of thousands of dollars to fuck celebs) were high school aged and up, he wasn’t kidnapping 5 year olds off the street and stealing their adrenochrome. Do you really think the average inner city pimp is not also working with high school aged girls? They’re already committing a crime, they’re not gonna get all conscientious when they find out the girl they’re prostituting is 15.
> Paganism always, always, ALWAYS leads to the adoption of human sacrifice as a core tenet of faith.
Human sacrifice in most Pagan societies, like all sacrifice for that matter, is a form of ritualized slaughter. Criminals, POWs, homosexuals etc were the ones being sacrificed. Societies like the Aztecs and Carthaginians are the exception, not the rule. Plenty of Pagan societies did not have sacrifice, so you’re wrong anyways, but the idea that there is a fine line between religiously sanctioned execution and human sacrifice only comes from a place of ignorance.
> This essay just refused to comply with my wishes. Even now, I am convinced it is a failure. It’s a mess, I can’t fix it, and it is maybe the most important topic I have ever tried to write about. I have backspaced for fucking weeks, trying to find the right words. Alas.
Perhaps some pagan god stopped you in your tracks…
Again, I ask: why are the satanic elite so enamoured with paganism in both symbol & practice? Are you going to play "real paganism hasn't been tried," "no true pagansman," or some other word game? Or can you address the issue head on. Paganism gets no pushback, precisely 0%, from the Cathedral. It's treated like Islam, Sikhi, and every other polytheistic fetish, which is to say, so long as you are attacking Christians, so long as you are attacking tradition, so long as you are helping deconstruct identity, you'll get head pats. If you stray from that path, they jerk your leash, and you start walking to heal like a good little pitbull.
Your final comment illustrates precisely why I don't take neopagans seriously in the theological realm: You guys most often seem to be materialist atheists LARPing as your preferred character from a video game. It isn't real to you, you just like the way it looks. For me, daemons are real. It is not a construct, it is not a metaphor. There are principalities and Powers that operate on the edge of our perception. The pagan societies of the past fell into hideous practices and were extirpated precisely because they opened their doors to daemons. You can see the same thing happening with modern Christianity, by the way. The spiritual baggage of equality, feminism, and sodomite veneration are the smoke; daemonic manipulation is the fire.
The “satanic” (Jewish) elite is not enamored with paganism, I don’t really understand why you think that. Paganism doesn’t get pushback because of its relative obscurity in the west, as well as a confusion of what “pagan” actually means. Wiccans are not Pagan, Wicca was created by Gerald Gardner in the 20th century and is only loosely connected to any actual Pagan traditions of the Isles. Satanism is obviously not Pagan, it’s not even really a religion. Both Gardner and LaVey, by the way, would be quite confused to see what’s come of their religious systems they invented. In other parts of the world, particularly in Japan, Paganism does get pushback from progressives quite heavily. In India too, the Pagan Hindu caste system has been hated by the left, as well as the idea that India is a Hindu nation (which it is, that’s why the Brits divided it from Pakistan).
> so long as you are attacking Christians, so long as you are attacking tradition, so long as you are helping deconstruct identity, you'll get head pats.
Christians have proven themselves incapable of countering the ills of liberalism, and the more you put your faith in Christian institutions the more you are betting on a losing horse. I don’t have any issue with Christians on the right, but I have issue with them trying to change our struggle from “the world hates white people” to “the world hates Christians”.
> You guys most often seem to be materialist atheists LARPing as your preferred character from a video game. It isn't real to you, you just like the way it looks. For me, daemons are real. It is not a construct, it is not a metaphor.
Daemons are real, and some of them are malevolent. But whatever one stopped you, well perhaps it is a eudaemon because you were spouting rubbish. Pagan societies always recognized both eudaemons and cacodaemons, and worshipped only the eudaemons. The forces of nature and perhaps even the spirits of certain ancestors are eudaemonic, but the gods are not daemons. They reside entirely in the noetic realm (or according to Proclus, above even that) while the daemons reside in the noeric realm and are subject to change. The Christian notion of Demons as fallen angels is wrong, however. Pagan conceptions of cacodaemons is that they are ontologically evil, or at least harmful to humanity. Christian Demons were once good, and chose to be evil.
Hey can you send me the image you used as the banner for this article? I like it very much.
On Twitter?
Sure, I have the same name and pfp there
Its just jews lol.
I feel as though this critique and similar ones are weak. Not because Paganism is this almighty powerful or even influential thing for the people who say they believe in it, but because the people who attack paganism like this are often bereft of true faith themselves.
Sure, you say you believe, but is it because you have truly felt the divine in your heart? Is it because you wield a flaming sword of justice or because the lords grace courses through you? Or is it just another logical choice you have made in modernity among all the other choices and found it to be “the best one™.” Even in Dave’s own admission at times he finds it hard to honestly pray, to honestly participate in the rituals as a devout believer outside of the ceremony of it all.
Of course you all conveniently gloss over this fact in your own lives. You point to an ancient and ultimately dead (and overly politicized) book that itself has fading relevance to all but those who study it (improperly I might add in a framework such as Catholicism) for some pursuit of alternative truth to the one they have been given at birth in modernity. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge you for taking up the mantle of Christian. But its one thing to do this with the self awareness that you are coming to it at the end of a very very very long and arduous civilizational cycle wherein spirituality itself is being challenged and another thing entirely to pretend like you are being righteous warriors of god by spitting on your fellow tired seekers who are simply looking for solace from the modern hell they have been born into and finding different answers.
I’m not sure if you believe in the aphorism “let he who is without sin throw the first stone” but I feel as though you should be reminded of it. The way forward is not through a fractured and desperate and ultimately divided group of people who want to see real faith restored but can do nothing but fight as to which one they’d like to see on top. The way forward is through a coalition of modernity’s enemies working to undo it and expose its terrible nightmarish worship of these eldritch forces who use us and our peoples as slaves in their concrete machine of suffering. The way forward is a unity of spirit, not a complaining of particulars amongst ourselves.
What modernity challenges most is not Christianity, is not Paganism, is not any spiritual or theocratic idea. What modernity challenges most is the depravity and numinous reality of nature (through a God or gods) that allows for the natural growth and necessity for religion in the first place. No modern man can be truly religious when he is culturally, materially, and morally enslaved to the machine state which makes itself the exclusive provider of his lifeforce, his shelter, and his peoples. This is the true enemy, and no spiritual order, personal or otherwise, can be established until this terrible edifice comes tumbling down.
All infighting before this point is just stupid bickering.
The worst thing about modern paganism most of them don't even read the scholarship most of your texts were preserved by Christian scribes and what is not a Christian edition and what is authentic in the text is impossible to tell for example one of the Irish pagan tales literally starts with Genesis like the story of Noah the book of Irish invasions literally starts with Genesis 1 about the the daughter of Ireland her grandfather was Noah that's definitely a Christian edition
I hate Neil paganism as a Christian myself it's my own biases but you have to admit so much of your Western society did grow out of Christianity and that's the consensus of historians not the new atheist dribble you hear so often there's some excellent books on it I could recommend Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
Tom Holland a Larry Siedentop
Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism
Monotheism is Jewish Poison, BAPist.
https://artemis6.substack.com/p/the-virtues-revisited
This was pagan. https://outgoingmisanthrope.substack.com/p/a-knife-twist-for-neo-paganism?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I find it funny you bring up cool axes, when Charles Martel, Hero of The Crusaders and Most Based of French Men, was an axe enthusiast.
And there's Getter Robo too.
No honest pagan will take a dump on early Christian Europe, because it's all paganism in the name of Christ. Your Chesteron, Tolkien, Lewis romantic and noble Christianity took centuries to form. The Normans, Visigoths, Lombards and Franks were Christian in name only.
I’m sorry, but is pagan==atheist in this telling? Because they seem to be used interchangeably and…that kinda makes sense from a Christian perspective but there are major issues with it.
Not trying to fight (yet), just trying to understand.
I believe that all humans, with very rare exception, are biologically faithful. Put another way, every human has a Faith, and the variation is what they put their faith in, and what they call that faith. Atheists, like lesbians, are things I read about but don't really believe exist.
Agree, though I'd say "religious" instead of "faithful". It's not a new idea, but recent political events forced me to conclude that it must be so.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=1F_B87iDmss