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   Anime Wong (elliptica@poa.st)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Nov-2023 09:38:22 JST Anime Wong

   in reply to
   @parker @cowanon I think there is a big misunderstanding with how modern people and Pagans view gods, which is very much in the way Christians view God, as distinct very important gods who were always watching you.
   
   I don't have time to go too deep into it here, but from what I've read pagans did not think this way. The most important gods for "pagans" wouldn't have been the big ones that we all know about, but lesser spirits associated with individuals, families, and the location they lived in, as these would be the ones average people believed were more likely to encounter.
   
   EDIT: In the US, a good way to look at it might be how Christians view angels and "guardian angels". For a larger cultural setting, look up the "Joplin butterfly people".
   
   Largely, paganism, animism, and pantheism are all roughly the same thing, which is another concept a lot of people miss. Zeus didn't control the sky, he was the sky. Nyx was night time (which is why she was shown in the top left in this Christian painting of the Hebrews fleeing Egypt).
   
   The problem with a codified doctrine for paganism then is that there never was one. Paganism was never rigidly organized in the same way that the Abrahamic religions were. What little we have of the Germanic religion was what Christian missionaries wrote down. Roman myths varied depending on who was telling them, the Japanese never had a consistent depiction of what Inari was supposed to be, and modern revivals of Eastern practices such as Caodaism are about as "authentic" as wiccan. Instead paganism was largely cultural, and without that culture, it's all but meaningless.