![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
23 August 2020 11:33 It's one thing to suspect there is, perhaps, a kind of hipster tendency in those who want to revive very obscure cultus. This joke is partly about me: I've been studying Antinouus, Hyacinthos and Hermaphroditus recently - but not only about me, because social media is all about branding, and if you get in there quick with Artio or Epona or Walpurga, you can corner that market and that'll be your audience going forward, always looking for the new thing.
But I think, in part, because this is where the gods are at their most Landweirdy - the half forgotten and the strange. The Greek gods were never as flat as they now seem, like pictures from a children's book or a bearded actor playing divine chess above the clouds. Books of "Zeus, god of the family and Ares god of war" are dull, dull, dull, and they make dull spirits and traditions which were once alive and vital.
And so, I think that's what we're looking for when drawn to the gods that have only a name, or a statue and a name and a snatch of myth; because here they're at their most psychedelic, shifting and suggestive. Fencraft tried to teach people to cultivate this experience of the divine, that whenever a god becomes picture-like and static, or captured by a set of words, to let it loose again to become the Mystery once more.
So although I do feel a little sneery when I see it, to be sure, I cannot condemn it: it's the rarity of those gods that frees you from rigid expectations in approaching them, and produces the only attitude (in my experience) where the Landweird can break through to you, unconscious and unaware and unintended.
But I think, in part, because this is where the gods are at their most Landweirdy - the half forgotten and the strange. The Greek gods were never as flat as they now seem, like pictures from a children's book or a bearded actor playing divine chess above the clouds. Books of "Zeus, god of the family and Ares god of war" are dull, dull, dull, and they make dull spirits and traditions which were once alive and vital.
And so, I think that's what we're looking for when drawn to the gods that have only a name, or a statue and a name and a snatch of myth; because here they're at their most psychedelic, shifting and suggestive. Fencraft tried to teach people to cultivate this experience of the divine, that whenever a god becomes picture-like and static, or captured by a set of words, to let it loose again to become the Mystery once more.
So although I do feel a little sneery when I see it, to be sure, I cannot condemn it: it's the rarity of those gods that frees you from rigid expectations in approaching them, and produces the only attitude (in my experience) where the Landweird can break through to you, unconscious and unaware and unintended.
