#Mystery Cults

[kore-siciliana]

UPG: On the nature of the gods, ancestors, and maybe also mystery cults

What is a god but many of the blessed dead coming together in an afterlife.  Many joined together across space and time to form a consciousness. Together they can speak and act and live.  To me that is the mystery cult.  What is a blessed afterlife but joining with a god.  And when you pray and libate to a god you become part of them.  In life and death you then can join with many gods and in life they live close to you. 

They love to come together around you.  Each time you pray and give offerings you add to them as a god.  You give part of yourself and those blessed dead that are always around us can join to become part of that god to be near you. 

Giving to a god is also a way to give to the blessed dead or our ancestors.  There then is a way that ancestral gods mean something.  Our ancestors can remember what it means to be part of a god they themselves sacrificed to.  Though I should say, that doesn’t mean you cannot worship gods who are not ancestral to you.  You still help a god come together around you by giving to them. 

So libate! The gods live and they live around us. They can hear and feel us and they are always with us.

[theoxenia]

An alternative explanation for the lack of information about these gods and groups of gods [such as the Kabeiroi] is that nobody knew very much about them. For the Greeks who paid them cult worship, the gods had a real existence, but they were also invisible and did not usually communicate directly with mortals. Greek communities did not choose their gods on the basis of what they read in poems, but found gods in the places they inhabited. They might sometimes guess what some of those gods might be called, and how they should be worshipped. But there were also gods who could not be identified and about whom therefore stories could not be told. These are effectively gods without myths.

Mystery Cults in the Ancient World by Hugh Bowden [emphasis mine]

[spaceintruderdetector]

https://archive.org/details/mystery-religions-in-the-ancient-world-by-joscelyn-godwin

[theleakypen]

Allrighty! Our mage is in a mystery cult!

[thephilosopheroftheboudoir]

Mithras

[prairiefirewitch]

‘Liber Pater enjoys honey and we rightly offer him honey poured over warm cake.’

Ovid

‘Why not learn your lesson and just die? It’s time. Buy a funeral urn. I’ll prepare the dough for honey cakes.”

Aristophanes

Lysistrata

Are the cakes to ward off the Furies? Is the sprig of myrtle an invitation to the Underworld? Is she pregnant? Is she gazing out through centuries to invite you to join the mystery rites of Dionysus?

Incredible photos from Peter Mark Adams’ absolutely astonishing Mystai. The little naked boy is wearing his Dionysian boots and reading prayers to Him. Aren’t they each so breathtakingly alive?

[flamingkorybante]

Announcing: AMA with Rocket and Alder of the Agdistine Order! - Saturday June 17th, from 5-7 pm ET

Hello all! Saturday June 17th, from 5-7 pm ET, we will have an AMA with Rocket and Alder of the Agdistine Order.

Description of the Agdistine Order:

The Agdistine Order is a liberatory spiritual project working to build a transcendent mystery tradition that meets the needs of modern transgender and gender nonconforming practitioners. It honors the Anatolian mythological figure of Agdistis, a nonbinary Earth daemon with a powerful appetite for pleasure, and strives to provide practitioners with tools for transformation of trauma, shame, and dysphoria as well as a shared focus for ancestral veneration. This is accomplished through a mix of ekstasis and enthousiasmos, using both ancient and modern techniques. The Order is a work in progress, with particular attention on crafting effective rituals, while also not forming the bad kind of cult. The dramatis personae of The Order include Dionysos, Cybele, and Attis, all of whom had mystery cults in antiquity, but far as we know, Agdistis has never before had a mystery cult of their own. You don't have to be trans to venerate Agdistis but we make no guarantee that you won't be trans when they finish with you. If you'd like to do the reading before the AMA and come with questions, you can find the essay, "The Passion of Agdistis: Gender Transgression, Sexual Trauma, Time Travel, and Ritualized Madness in Greco-Anatolian Revival Cultus," first published in "Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries" in 2018. The piece includes very frank discussions of transphobia, transmisogyny, violence, and sexual assault, so please take care while reading.

Some info about Rocket and Alder:

Rocket is a cultist and mage of the Agdistine Order and the founder of the Anarcho-Surrealist Wizard Brigade, fully dedicated to 1) Cybele Magna Mater, and 2) being the weirdest pervert in the mystic groupchat and the weirdest mystic in the pervert groupchat. On the clock, Rocket can be found destroying the institution of marriage and teaching at law schools, and the rest of the time, they write poetry compulsively, glue rhinestones to things, organize with other leftist weirdo Jews, and push the flesh to its limit for art, magic, and pleasure. Rocket’s writing can be found in the Queer Magic Anthology, Nerve Endings: The New Trans Erotic, the Texas Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Advocate, and the Brill journal of Religion and the Arts, and Rocket can be found on Tumblr at @ flamingkorybante and in meatspace on a trans commune on unceded Lenape land. Alder Knight was raised as an animist and got into witchcraft in 1998. They began their work with Dionysos in 2012. As neither a classicist nor a reconstructionist, they rely heavily on divination, personal connection with the divine, and trial and error in their Dionysian practice. They are an herbalist and a rootworker, with a focus on local plants and a light touch, and they prioritize using their skills and resources to seek out healing, community resilience, collective liberation, and the ecstatic. A mystical experience in 2014 propelled them into intensive work with the transgender dead, which culminated in the annual Transgender Rite of Ancestor Elevation, @ trans-rite on Tumblr. Similarly, a mystical experience in 2015 planted the seeds of what would become The Agdistine Order. Their day job is in clean energy and climate education, and they live with Rocket and others at the all-trans intentional community they co-founded in 2018 on unceded Lenape land. You can find them on Tumblr at @ thegodwhocums.

Looking forward to this AMA! Mark your calendars!

[rivage-seulm]

Islam as Progressive, Reformed Christianity: 10 Reasons We Don’t See That

Islam as Progressive, Reformed Christianity: 10 Reasons We Don’t See That

Living here in Spain, for the last few months has given me a new appreciation of Islam. As some might remember, my wife, Peggy, and I are here with our daughter, son-in-law, and their five children (ages 3-14). We plan to stay till the end of June.   Our rented apartment stands in Granada’s historic Albaicin district overlooking the 10th century Islamic walled city, the Alhambra. Right next to…

[sejsoup]

ok example abt smthn im hella passionate abt: hadestown. in hadestown persephone (and other characters) repeatedly make references to wine. now this isn't anything to write home about, sure, but add in that the story is very explicitly about the cycle of death and rebirth and also about orpheus and it starts to maybe seem like a small nod to the orphic mystery cult.

the orphic mystery cult was a ancient greek cult that revered figures that had somehow died (or made into of the underworld) and then returned back to the living. figures like for example orpheus, persephone, and dionysus the greek god of wine.

i don't know if anais mitchell or any of the people who worked on it actually intended these references, but still, its a cool fact

cannot recommend more putting secrets and hints in your creative work that you dont expect anyone to figure out

[alephskoteinos]

An attempt to understand the "solar-chthonic barbarian" that Jake Stratton Kent was talking about.

[sinuheminem]

anthropology post

cults?

i am not a reliable source of information

under the break

i recently got a follow on my instagram from an account that claimed to be an order of the illuminati. their bio said that “he who controls the current, controls the power.” obviously i blocked the account, but it got me thinking. cults are a lot different today. with our new definition, do we fall into cults the same way people joined cults, like those in ancient greece, or even in the 1400’s during an experimental christian age?

to understand the question, we have to have a definition of a cult. well actually, we have two definitions of a cult: cults as they are today, and cults as they were before pop culture changed how we view things called cults.

in the book Cultish by Amanda Montell (our lord and savior,) she basically explains that cult-like behaviors occur all over the place, from your local gym to the jonestown massacre. the reason this is such an ambiguous term is because once cults became sensationalized, mostly due to the 60’s and the jesus freaks, the word “cult” entered every day vocabulary. this means that our definition of cult is any kind of group that follows one leader and has strict rules that monotonize members, usually in return for “love-bombing” behaviors.

but before the word cult became so popularized, it basically had the same functionality as any typical denomination: a religious sect focusing on one figure, or sometimes an object. not exactly the culty idea we have today.

but if they mean different things, did they function similarly? yes and no. cults “back then” (widely referred to as mystery cults) were typically a part of the wider religion and not explicitly monotheistic. examples of this are the cult of dionysius, in which participants believed in the wider pantheon but put emphasis on dionysius (basically, henotheistic.) this is radically different from new cults, in which members are expected to explicitly worship one entity. additionally, they were kind of seen as religious schools; mystery cults could offer better experience working with a particular entity and the religion in general rather than the normal citizen worship. additionally, new cults have the motto “a person who’s in a cult doesn’t know they’re in a cult.” mystery cults were very deliberate and intentional, and required intense schooling.

they were in a lot of ways similar though. mystery cults offered a strong sense of community and importance, much like new cults. they also required devotion and secrecy, which was pretty sketchy to outsiders and later frowned upon (again, like new cults.)

so back to the initial question: did people fall into mystery cults the way we fall into new cults? sort of, kind of, a little bit.

mystery cults did serve a lot of the same functions as new cults: they provided, at least for awhile, a better sense of self; they provided community; they were very secret; they required members to be devoted. but mystery cults were also typically far less malicious. even as secret as they were, they really only did so out of necessity. as christianity spread and killed off religions in it’s path, many cults arose in order to sanctify and preserve ancient rites and practices. the best way to do this is to confine your cult to one entity or one god. it would be really hard for one teacher to teach every single ritual.

so basically what i’m saying is, mystery cult leaders were essential workers and new cult leaders are not. with that being said, no, we do not enter old cults the same as new ones.

[softdisclosurecore]

It's time for people who are not epileptic or psychotic to STOP appropriating the concepts of divine insights, revelations, ecstacies, et cetera

I worked hard and contemplated long on my ecstacies to achieve gnosis. Fakers have made the wait lists for the mystery cults SO LONG.

Im not from one of the selected bloodlines. I can't just get initiated and become Dadouchos in a couple years when my dad retires.

Im lucky that out of all my siblings I got kicked in the head, and maybe have a chance in Eleusis

So maybe think about that the next time you come crying to me about how "pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart." think about that because if I can't be in the parade and get a glimpse in that basket by this time next year I'm just going to enlist with the maenads and trust me when I say to the fakers that

you do not want that

[chumpchanger]

I remember once I was wandering around in downtown Portland Oregon, as a young man, maybe 20, and I got roped into the Dianetics storefront. I don't remember anything about the questions, but, for some reason, they let me go. Must be something about the programming I got when I was young, from parents that were suspicious of anyone trying to sell you anything. And, my mothers experience in the thirties dealing with the Brownshirts of Oswald Mosely.

When I was in third grade, my teacher, Max Queen, was the Cub Scout den leader in the tiny community I went to school in. I eagerly brought the signup materials home, and my mother refused to look at them. And told me that I was not joining any paramilitary organizations. She didn't use the word fascist, but I know now that's what she meant.

Everyone wants to belong. Too bad some people think that is a weakness to be exploited.

Love bombing is not a euphemism for "too much affection too soon," or "high desire for contact."

"Love bombing" is a term originally used in the context of cults to describe a deliberate and coordinated recruitment method that involved feigning friendship and interest in a potential recruit, via flattery, flirtation, physical affection, and very directed positive attention to everything the recruit says in order to lure them into the cult.

Since cults and abusive relationships operate in similar ways and use similar tactics, love bombing in an interpersonal relationship looks like manufacturing closeness in order to trap someone into a relationship in which the abuser has all the control.

And I know these days there's a million bullshit junky articles out there that make you think this is a symptom of cluster b personality disorders, but there is no way for you to be love bombing somebody without realizing it.

If you are an affectionate person and the level of affection and attention you give makes someone uncomfortable, you are not "accidentally" abusing them.

If you are uncomfortable with the level of affection and attention someone is paying you, they are not de facto abusing you.

Love bombing is about using someone's desire for human connection to fast track them into a situation you control and will feel disinclined to leave.

[tristansherwin]

CHRIST | CHOREOGRAPHY OR DANCE (Col. 2:8—3:4)

CHRIST | CHOREOGRAPHY OR DANCE (Col. 2:8-3:4) "Our faith is not about trying to attract God with our fancy footwork. Our faith is an embrace of God's movements."

Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre service (dated 2nd July 2023), continuing our series in the letter Colossians. You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded). ‘’Chaps who did taps aren’t tapping anymore They’re doing choreography Chicks who did kicks aren’t kicking anymore They’re doing…

[dsrptstudios]

Lost movie - lost producer?

I searched my uni's online archive for anything related to the 'Simularcum' movie (unfinished? lost? bootlegs?). Jackpot. This is why it was never properly released.

[lorekeeper-backset]

My favorite thing I learned in Greco-Roman Religion class last semester is that the sentence "I'm going to join the local cult" was perfectly normal in Ancient Greece and not an immediate red flag.