The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

This thread got me thinking about christo-paganism. I've never really stopped believing in God and I even pray to him occasionally. Yet I've never really taken any steps to build a Christo-pagan worship or belief system.

My spiritual life is pretty fluid right now, and I'm kinda curious to explore what that would look like for me: What sort of debate would I encounter, would my impressions of it stand against challenge, and what sort of research/learning/growth would it inspire?  

I don't even know where to begin with this experiment, so throw anything at me I guess. (Please?)

I don't even know where to begin with this experiment, so throw anything at me I guess. (Please?)

 
Darkhawk's article On Eclecticism has lots of good advice for how to combine religions/paths without making a complete mess.

Sunflower

This thread got me thinking about christo-paganism. I've never really stopped believing in God and I even pray to him occasionally. Yet I've never really taken any steps to build a Christo-pagan worship or belief system.

My spiritual life is pretty fluid right now, and I'm kinda curious to explore what that would look like for me: What sort of debate would I encounter, would my impressions of it stand against challenge, and what sort of research/learning/growth would it inspire?  

I don't even know where to begin with this experiment, so throw anything at me I guess. (Please?)

 
I suppose a lot the issues would depend on how you interpret the first commandment.  It's either (depending how you number them) "I am the Lord thy God," or "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."  Now either way I don't necessarily see this as prohibition of acknowledging other gods, it just means that you would have to put the God of Abraham first.

Start with this.  Then this.

Darkhawk's article On Eclecticism has lots of good advice for how to combine religions/paths without making a complete mess.

Thanks for the recommendations.

The book recommended above, Christopaganism: An Inclusive Path, by Joyce and River Higginbotham, is a really interesting read, but I will warn you, there's some stuff in the beginning claiming that Christianity was ripped off old pagan religions. That part has much inaccurate information that tends to get recycled in all kinds of material.

Most approaches I've seen to Christopaganism combine it with neo-Wicca. If you find anything else, though, I'd be interested to know about it.

That's fine. I think to be on either extreme in that debate ignores the fact that cultures are naturally influenced by other cultures. Christianity has pagan influences and Neo-Wicca has Christian influences. It is what it is, and the overlap is potentially interesting.

This thread got me thinking about christo-paganism. I've never really stopped believing in God and I even pray to him occasionally. Yet I've never really taken any steps to build a Christo-pagan worship or belief system.

My spiritual life is pretty fluid right now, and I'm kinda curious to explore what that would look like for me: What sort of debate would I encounter, would my impressions of it stand against challenge, and what sort of research/learning/growth would it inspire?  

I don't even know where to begin with this experiment, so throw anything at me I guess. (Please?)

 
I am a syncretist myself. I find much of value in books by the Christian authors Evagrius of Pontus, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, Eckehart, Marsilio Ficino, Paracelsus, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Heinrich Khunrat, Jakob Boehme, Robert Fludd, Athanasius Kircher, Ivan Lopukhin, Eliphas Levi, Arthur Edward Waite, Evelyn Underhill, Dion Fortune, Gareth Knight and Matthew Fox.

If the Supreme Being exists (and the only ones I have read denying that are either Atheists or hard polytheists) it may be known under many names: Ahura Mazda, Amun, Brahman, Ayn Soph, Eheyeh/YHWH, Allah, Parvardigar, Ik Onkar, The Monad, To Hen, Chronos (in the Orphic sense, not the Homeric one) et cetera. The Universal prayer - a poem by Alexander Pope - is delightfully syncretic reading (written by a Catholic!).

The pantheon you worship in your pagan path (Does Heathen mean 'Norse Pagan'?) are possibly part of the emanatory chain from the Supreme Being on the intelligible, intellective, hypercosmic and encosmic levels of reality, or they might be ancestor spirits who have achieved apotheosis, or they might be powerful thoughtforms. You would probably find interesting reading if you try to read Proclus, one of the last Pagan philosophers in the Ancient world.

 

This might not be exactly what you meant, but I've been reading Gerald Gardner's book, The Meaning of Witchcraft, and though I'm only about 50 pages in, he has already said several times that the mother-and-son veneration of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus in Catholic Christianity is very similar to the worship of the Great Mother and her son in the "witch cult." He has also stated that witchcraft (and I'm sure we can extend that to most forms of paganism) doesn't forbid practitioners from also going to church. It's definitely what I needed to read right now.

Just remember that the fact that Gardner thought it "very similar" does not actually mean that it is. I know adherents of both religions who would strongly disagree with him.

As for the last sentence, that's true of most non-monotheistic religions. In most polytheistic religions, few see anything wrong with attending ceremonies for a deity of a different pantheon.

Just remember that the fact that Gardner thought it "very similar" does not actually mean that it is. I know adherents of both religions who would strongly disagree with him.

 
That's true. Maybe I should have been more clear that Gardner wasn't saying that the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary was the same as the religion of the witches, just that it resembled the worship of the witches' goddess in many ways. He said the same thing about other traditions that also aren't directly related to pagan witchcraft, like Sumerian goddesses, and the cult of Cybele from Phrygia.

To add to what Randall said below, it's important to remember the context that Gardner was writing in: to an almost entirely Christian audience (though the approach via Catholicism is, now I think about it, historically really interesting for England) and that one of the things that Gardner was very talented at was coming up with ways to explain things that made sense to his audience.

It is interesting, and I've often wondered if Gardner was influenced at all by the Oxford Movement, which started in the mid-nineteenth century as a revival of the Catholic style of worship within the Church of England, and was becoming more prominent by the early 20th century. Anglican churches that follow this movement (also called Tractarian or Anglo-Catholic) have a much stronger medieval flavour than even Roman Catholic churches post-Vatican II, and if they use the Book of Common Prayer, the services are in Elizabethan English that BTW witches seem to like so much, too. there are usually lots of candles and incense in these kinds of churches, as well as ornately decorated altars and statues of the Madonna and other saints.

I've always found Wiccan ritual in general to be very similar to Catholicism, maybe because it is the most accessible form of mysticism and borderline "magical" ritual in western society, so it could have been a source of inspiration for occultists.