The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

Over the years I've seen way more discussion of popcultural magic than popcultural religion out there, and I think it's because magic is easier to talk about.  All the riffs and tricks that crop up in fiction are easy to adapt and adopt into a magical system, and don't require a lot of explanation, and that's just... simple.  I don't know.

But religion is harder.  Because it's squishy, and the boundaries are complicated, and a lot of the stuff that is religion is a lot harder to point at and say "That's religion" outside of its context.

But.  How many people here have a playlist called "Hymnal" or something like it, or devotional playlists for their gods?  Show of hands?  (My Hymnal playlist includes stuff ranging from , which is explicitly based on religious materials, to , ....)  That there, that's religious stuff.  That's religious stuff rooted in pop culture.

Is it "pop culture paganism"?  That kind of depends on definitions of the terms.  But it's pagan religious activity that is heavily engaged with and part of the conversation that is "pop culture", so I don't see how it can not be.

Religion isn't just about cultus.  Pop culture religion can't just be about fictional reconstructionism that pulls out the implied religious practices from stories and does that, or veneration of popcultural entities.  The concepts, the ideas, the worldview-shaping stuff that's in our fiction is still real, and it's still something potentially religious.

One of the things that I like about Kemetic theology is the emphasis on true names and the power of naming.  Where did I get that fondness?

Earthsea.

Do I do a lot with Earthsea?  Not overtly.

But, you know, I ask you to consider this, and juxtapose it with my default pagan handle:



It's just there, always.  And that's a theological statement there that's important, on multiple levels, and in many ways.

So, you know.  What is religion?  It's not just what you get up to in shrines.

(And the thing out of the Discworld that's in my shrine?  It's not any of the overt religious content, or even the overt magical theory.  It's an artificial lilac sprig, because of The People's Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May. These are symbols, and symbols are magic, and symbols are religion, and the boundaries are hard to pin down unless one spends a lot of time on vigorously policing them.  And who has that sort of time?)

So, yeah.  Mostly I'm noodling incoherently around the question of "What is religion anyway?" and "Where does religion come from?"

(Meanwhile, I just described one of the Powers in my personal pantheon as "The God Of The Other Leg Of The Trousers Of Time."  For more Pratchetty goodness.  I mean, the god in question isn't popcultural, BUT.)

I just can't be a purist about it, because it's not pure.

There are huge chunks of actual theology that I first encountered in fiction in one form or another, or in music, or in other things like that, things that have long formed the underpinnings of my belief set and - among other things - shaped my psyche in a way that suited me to particular specific pagan religions.  Those things are not minor or trivial, they're not dismissable.

Religion is and always has been more than cultus.  If I literally feel the presence of my god during a particular Crüxshadows song that is using a pop cultural creation to relate to the divine, unless there's some weird way of chopping language that makes it magically not count for the literal meaning of the words somehow?

Or... one of my backburner projects is explicitly writing a novel where the worldbuilding is based on a particular bit of Kemetic theology and exploring it in a science-fictional context.  Now, all of my fiction writing is explicitly a devotional act, but setting that aside, thinly veiled theology is still theology.

And I am actively and vehemently opposed to the idea that religion is solely or even primarily about cultus; that way lies festival-only religion and people who feel a-ok about saying that they have no religious principles and no moral standards anywhere other than in front of their shrines because it's All About The Gods And None Of It Is About People.

Mostly I'm noodling incoherently around the question of "What is religion anyway?" and "Where does religion come from?"

Funnily enough, I've found far more overt devotion, ecstasy, and zealousness in fandom meta, that is, the analysis of the work that's generally considered secular but there's some effervescence (or the opposite, some magnetic intensity that can become obsession) that...well, the only thing stopping that from becoming Religious is that nobody uses the word in that space, but for occasionally joking, "I watch this show religiously" meaning they watch the show regularly as part of a routine, or "I love this celebrity/character so much that I made a shrine," and something about a joke like that can come off to me as more serious (deadly serious, like not a good thing to be this intense) than card-carrying pop culture pagans who actually set up some sort of actual shrine but might be like chill serious. Even though the one who said it as a joke might have done the same thing.

there's almost always a flavor of pop culture in whatever I'm doing that's important, whether it's religious - Secret Vatican Demon Hunters influencing my Catholic mysticism, Saiyuki weighing on my Buddhism, or seeing Odin wearing, well, half a dozen fictional faces and counting - or other things, like the way I used to thread pop culture references into my college papers, or working a job where I'm actually expected to keep up on pop culture and literature.

When you express it this way, the death of Lady Diana Spencer springs to mind. The people on the other side of the North Sea suddenly reacted in a spontaneous way, that would have canonized her into a Christian saint in the British middle ages (pre-congregation), and would have turned her into a lesser deity, had it happened in mediaeval China.

I have begun to suspect, lately, that modern fandom is a strong echo of many ancient religions in the emotions it evokes in people.