Where paganism goes from being benign to being dangerous

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I read on this board on one post someone who was angry about being subjected to prejudice or discrimination for their pagan beliefs.

Well I can sympathise although it is hard to know whether prejudice or discrimination occurred without more information. Sure. there are religious folk who are hell bent on destroying all that is pagan and associating all that is pagan with the devil due to their interpretation (which may be questionable) of a bible quote about paganism.

The problem with the word paganism is that it's a very broad term which encompasses all that does not fit into the main world religions. If you take the literal meaning, atheists and agnostics are both pagan.

Personally, i associate the word pagan with people who practice traditional religions from their country such as associated with Wicca etc. Although, i do believe a lot of their belief systems incorporate delusional beliefs that if werent part of a society or nations culture could be considered as a symptom of a delusionally based personality disorder such as schizophrenia (see magical thinking).

Now, although much of that which is classified or referred to as pagan is benign in nature, i do think that their is a subcategory of paganism which is abusive in nature. For example, there are systems of magick which incorporate ritual sacrifice as parts of their worship. Who or what is sacrificed depends on the exact magick practiced, the intentions of the person or people performing such ritual practices and on the day the event is taken place.
with the worst cases of ritual sacrifice abuse in the name of paganism being when children and adults are abducted and abused then sacrificed to whoever or what ever arguably imaginary god, goddess, deity or demon.

Where there is an element of sadism involved, i feel that one must always be extremely cautious and i would personally advise you to steer clear if not already involved.

I feel that when there is abuse involved then the religion goes from being benign and into something criminal.
I guess this is where paganism goes from being benign to being dangerous.
Any intelligent debate on the subject? Thanks

That is a term that needs to be unpacked, I'd fully agree. It worked as a cover-all at a time when the solution to such divergence of view was very simple and straight-forward.


It also includes the mysteries and, as much as it might bother people to hear it, most of the source material of the bible and quran.

As far as delusion in the mix I'd have to ask perhaps where you're coming from with your own assessment - ie. reductive materialism or just a different spiritual belief? It'll help me know how to take up this point.


I think most of that can be covered by the limits of the 1st amendment such as seditious/subversive speech, and clearly any conspiracy to commit a felony is exactly that - no religious exemption for groups like ONA (if they at all follow the demands of their charter).


I think that could be enunciated and clarified a bit more.

I think groups like those of Carlos Castanada are a great example of what you're talking about - ie. a charismatic cult-leader asking people to tell their parents that they're permanently disowning them and from this day forward are no longer their child, to cut off all ties to the world and burn all bridges to the life they lived, and then these people are kept on a very unpredictable diet of reward and punishment and constantly living under the thumb of and very close to that leader as well as being told that the outside world is 'evil'. Being the dashing/charismatic leader's right hand or closest groupie comes to mean everything and when that leader dies, in the case of Castanada, most of the women who were in his inner circle committed suicide one by one - ie. their world shattered and their lives, at least as far as they understood it, too ruined to rejoin the world they left (and I'm sure the conditioning he placed on them as well as their brutal abandoment of family worked hand in hand).

Stuff like that is incredibly insidious and should be loudly and outspokenly criticized - it's people being destroyed, not helped or advanced in any way inwardly or outwardly.

It's a different thing to, say, follow a highly rigorous system like that of the A.'.A.'. and take up intense lines of psychological and mental discipline because you see in the design that it's done to test the limits of the person whose in the system, grow their limits, and achieve a certain type of command of their own minds (which would probably work quite well regardless of whether the religious symbols are real deities or just religious phantasma of public imagination). In a lot of ways its like CrossFit for their brains if they really dot all the i's and cross the t's. Clearly not everyone is equipped for that, I'm sure if the right warning signs came up that a person is getting dangerously close to the limits of what their brain can handle they'd need to quit. That's of course one of the more well known systems to take a really hard run up the Tree of Life and there are other, slower routes (such as I tend to be inclined toward) that hopefully get the same job done without the question of whether you might render yourself useless at home or work in the process. As far as I understand the A.'.A.'. at least it's structure is always one on one, highly confidential, and customized to the particular aspirant and what they want out of the system as much as possible.

The point being though; spirituality and pagan, esoteric, or occult work when done right is a competition with yourself, it's like an internal weight lifting or martial arts system, and it's really there first and foremost to help you square your subjective life to the world you live in (and more importantly - square your subjective life to itself) in as productive a manner as possible. Quite often it can have nearly Catholic or Protestant levels of piety (usually with a lot more doing - like theurgy and various visual meditations), at other times you have what you might categorize as 'tantric' work; that's usually something that a person takes up when they realize that they've gone so far in moralizing themselves that it's damaging, not achieving the ends, and either in life or in imagination they break some sacred rule in a fierce and ceremonial manner for the sake of both making their superego less abusive and also freeing up energy (usually stuff like this falls unto categories like former religious sex, food, or sanitation repulsions that were hammered in from a young age). Tantric systems can outwardly look satanic but they're of the variety, like Crowley's philosophies, where the more you look at them you realize that the aim is the same as any other mystic school - ie. union with one's Holy Guardian Angel or what John of the Cross or Theresa of Avila might have identified in their experiences as The Christ within them, just that Crowley is helping people also blow their shame circuits in the process in ways that help remove some ideas and structures that often times do bar people from progress toward those types of experiences.

If I were to sum it up - if a system seems iffy or works with darker symbolism, just make sure you read up on it enough and are able go get enough circumspection to know exactly what it is, what the real core philosophy is, and it's probably equally helpful to know why you want in. If it just looks cool and rebellious don't bother - take some time, grow up, do some drunken pub crawls or hit some raves, get it out of your system the normal way. If on the other hand you've come to a pantheistic, panentheistic, or polytheistic view of the world (according to whichever system it happens to be) and you feel like there's something that the system in question has for you in the way of highly positive growth challenges or offerings that would help you become a more well-balanced, evened, and adaptable adult and you know that the goals of the group are both trustworthy and within the limits of what you can handle - go for it! Also important; if you get there and find out that it's not what you were looking for, thank them for their time and leave politely.



The good news - most of modern paganism isn't doing animal or human sacrifice. Those few groups who do are usually from more exotic places in the world with different points of view about animal or human life than what we generally hold in the west.

As a side note I see you talking about satanism in the law enforcement threads and it sounds like you've got some buy-in with the whole Infowars, Alex Jones, Mark Dice thing.

What I meant by what's in my quote:

If you were a reductive materialist atheist, I'd probably make a point to go over the aspects not so much of active faith and belief so much as active doing and involvement with that belief with respect to neurolinguistic programming and how it can improve mental integration and overall health. Aside from modern psychology suggesting things like placebo and nocebo they seem to just leave what a person can do with working their own endocrine system with thought or self-correction out in new-thought or new age land and offer a bear minimum of facts along these lines to make you say 'Woah! Head asplode!' and do next to nothing with it. If someone grasps the importance of integrating and wringing out the air-bubbles in their subjective mind all of a sudden concepts like theury, ritual, etc.. don't seem that strange at all.

If you were a Catholic I'd probably recommend Meditations on The Tarot - A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism by Unknown Author (or not so unknown - Valentin Tomberg) translated by Robert Powell, as he does a lot of zipping back and forth between the findings of various French occultists, Catholic saints and mystics across the life of the church, and essentially makes a pretty powerfully persuasive Martinist theosophy that sits well as an analysis of the values inherent in that type of Christianity. I'd probably also recommend that book to most atheists who don't get the Jungian subjective-work thing because he does a pretty good job on that as well. I won't lie - it's a heavyweight book, it's probably more in depth than trying to read Michael Novak and could be on par with Tielhard De Chardin in complexity but I can vouch for MOTT a lot more. Regrettably while I've wanted to read De Chardin I haven't found the opportunity.

If you're a fiery non-denominational protestant of the current United States flavor whose a young-earth creationist (ie. 6,000 year old earth) and who firmly believes that we're at the end of the 120 jubilee years described with respect to Noah's time and that the flying 70th week of Daniel is soon to hit any day now - it would be very difficult to have a whole lot of a conversation on this. In that case I probably just fully edified the belief in the paragraph above that the Pope is the Antichrist, that the Catholic Church is the Beast, that its quote-unquote mystics were simply possessed by occult demons, and everything marches along quite happily. We could probably try to debate whether the world is really 6,000 years old and fail, I could probably go through the old testament and pretty much name what concepts meant what, came from what cultures, etc.. which would meet with a powerful arsenal of excuses (one of the more interesting ideas being that the times 'need to be watched', hence the cosmic clock of the four-faced cherubim, seven planets, and twelve zodiacals constantly being mentioned - I suppose the Old Testament could have doubled as farmer's almanac but I have to wonder how much Protestant bible-verse gematria would be needed to make that shake out). Overall this flavor of open-source protestantism is as invincible as Communism, Islamism, and Freudianism in how it offers a complete system of answers for everything happening in the world between rather exact if not stilted/angular interpretations of what various verses of the bible mean and scores of conspiracy theories, much like at least Communism and Islamism have, to make up the difference and provide an entire virtual reality for the user in terms of their personal metadata.


I guess my point with the above paragraphs - I'm glad to help elucidate the topic in as many ways as I can. If I'm in a conversation about belief or if you live within a magic bubble or forcefield of the variety that comprehensive ideologies provide - I'd probably just let you on your way because we'd be engaging in an act of futility from both sides trying to discuss it further.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 11 Dec 2016, 10:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think sacrifice is one of the most controversial aspects of paganism, but I don't think it is common practice amoung most modern pagans to sacrifice living people or animals. Seems more of one of those things that was done in the past with limited understanding, like the cultures who practiced it saw it as a necessity and didn't see it as murder because it was assumed they would potentially have a decent afterlife or things like that. Even abrahamic religions have practiced sacrifice or at least use the concept...like the whole communion with the bread that represents jesus's body and wine(or grape juice) to represent his blood that people consume.

The only case I heard of where supposedly pagans or satanists where kidnapping people to abuse and sacrifice was proven to be a false claim. It ended up more like a witch hunt where people were persecuted even though there was no real evidence against them. Also paganism itself isn't dangerous, extremism is dangerous...I mean for instance there are Islamic extremists, but they don't represent the entire muslim population. Obviously a pagan extremist would not be good either but that would not mean all pagans are extremist.

I would consider myself and agnostic pagan, not sure if gods or deities actually exist in any sense but if I was to get into a spiritual path paganism is more appealing than the mono-theistic religions, also I sometimes pray to pagan gods/goddesses...I am not sure it does anything or if I am just talking to myself or not but it can be comforting at the very least.

Pagans aren't as bad as the religious right makes them out to be. They know that things like animal (and of course human) sacrifice are right out.

I do know that in some parts of Africa they kill albinos and use human bones for witchcraft, but this is roundly and rightfully condemned by most practitioners of traditional African magic. I also heard about an American pagan digging up bones from graveyards to use in their magic. When called out for it by other pagans, they defended themselves by saying they were black and this was their traditional form of witchcraft. I guess the news from Africa regarding the common attitude to this never reached them.