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You bring a tear of joy to my eye, LadyShrewsbury! Thank you. Sincerely!
Yes, more lefty and overtly esoteric Catholicism, please! Catholicism is already esoteric, but has to speak to a broad audience. My Latino Cradle Cath family, I adore, but the culture is very uh, normie. All good! Normies deserve Love too.
The Catholic mystical system is more emotion-based, grounded in the love of the example of Mary. Love, forgiveness, charity, hope, the endurance of suffering. It also rejects sterile intellectualism, and the assertions you need secret magical rites to enter into "Heaven" (the good part of the afterlife.)
There is a lot to unpack but a good lens: Catholicism "is" or is similar to Roman Stoicism, and MAYBE includes whatever Buddhism looked like when it was translated into Hellenic and Mediterranean culture:
The current academic consensus is that the Church Fathers were the intellectual participants of a deeply Hellenized Roman world. Some may have been initiates, but they also really didn't need to be initiated into the mystery cults. The grammar of the mystery systems was the cultural language everyone spoke when trying to explain how humans meets the divine. The better pagan reconstruction efforts today are reintroducing similar ideas, particularly in Hellenic and Hermetic paganism, our close brothers and sisters.
Both Stoicism and Catholicism believe the universe is ordered by a divine, rational principle called the Logos. To get to the better part of the afterlife does not require super secret decoder-ring knowledge, or special magical rituals, but only to live a "good life".
When Gnosticism, early Hermeticism, and the Orphic-style mysteries tried to infiltrate early Christianity in the 2nd and 3rd centuries the early Catholic Church went to war with them because those systems require deep intellectual philosophy, high-jargon "magic", hidden passwords, all of which inherently excludes the poor, the illiterate, and the ordinary person. The everyday person is someone we in "magic culture" still to this day treat with disdain and a high level of contempt. I even call them normies, which is not meant to be too perjorative.
We can quibble over the exact specifics with the more conservative wings of the Church what the "good life" means (they are still too tied to earlier agrarian cultures, imho ), but at a fundamental level it means living in accordance with nature and reason, and cultivating the four cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. It's similar to Orphism but without the requiment for special "magic" rituals or "facts" for a postive post-mortem experience.
er... and cultivating the four Stoic cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance.
Catholic mysticism is deeply experiential and very 'touchy-feely' but in practice its foundational principles are baked into the Church's general advice for ordinary living. Yes it is conservative. We have to remember that this is an ancient, planetary-size organization and its message has to scale to translate across centuries and vast cultural divides, not just appeal to an audience of bored, white, college-educated Westerners.
The core Catholic strategy, while I may diagree with some points, is essentially Orphic, and is a system created to shield the human soul from the heavy, low-vibrational psychic sludge (the Orphic 'soot') that drags you down if you are 'heavy." So the system has you consciously avoid extreme negative emotions, cheap drama, and the Vanity Fair 'Instagram hell-world' of envy, greed, grasping, comparison, and artificially curated low self-esteem. Refusing to seek advantage in a late-capitalist hellscape, by simple seeing it for what it is, temporary, while taking care of the poor, and needy. The idea was you keep the soul light enough to rise, and not sink into a Buddhist (imho) hell world. Probably needs some updating but whatever.
Yes, more lefty and overtly esoteric Catholicism, please! Catholicism is already esoteric, but has to speak to a broad audience. My Latino Cradle Cath family, I adore, but the culture is very uh, normie. All good! Normies deserve Love too.
The Catholic mystical system is more emotion-based, grounded in the love of the example of Mary. Love, forgiveness, charity, hope, the endurance of suffering. It also rejects sterile intellectualism, and the assertions you need secret magical rites to enter into "Heaven" (the good part of the afterlife.)
There is a lot to unpack but a good lens: Catholicism "is" or is similar to Roman Stoicism, and MAYBE includes whatever Buddhism looked like when it was translated into Hellenic and Mediterranean culture:
The current academic consensus is that the Church Fathers were the intellectual participants of a deeply Hellenized Roman world. Some may have been initiates, but they also really didn't need to be initiated into the mystery cults. The grammar of the mystery systems was the cultural language everyone spoke when trying to explain how humans meets the divine. The better pagan reconstruction efforts today are reintroducing similar ideas, particularly in Hellenic and Hermetic paganism, our close brothers and sisters.
Both Stoicism and Catholicism believe the universe is ordered by a divine, rational principle called the Logos. To get to the better part of the afterlife does not require super secret decoder-ring knowledge, or special magical rituals, but only to live a "good life".
When Gnosticism, early Hermeticism, and the Orphic-style mysteries tried to infiltrate early Christianity in the 2nd and 3rd centuries the early Catholic Church went to war with them because those systems require deep intellectual philosophy, high-jargon "magic", hidden passwords, all of which inherently excludes the poor, the illiterate, and the ordinary person. The everyday person is someone we in "magic culture" still to this day treat with disdain and a high level of contempt. I even call them normies, which is not meant to be too perjorative.
We can quibble over the exact specifics with the more conservative wings of the Church what the "good life" means (they are still too tied to earlier agrarian cultures, imho ), but at a fundamental level it means living in accordance with nature and reason, and cultivating the four cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. It's similar to Orphism but without the requiment for special "magic" rituals or "facts" for a postive post-mortem experience.
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er... and cultivating the four Stoic cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance.
Catholic mysticism is deeply experiential and very 'touchy-feely' but in practice its foundational principles are baked into the Church's general advice for ordinary living. Yes it is conservative. We have to remember that this is an ancient, planetary-size organization and its message has to scale to translate across centuries and vast cultural divides, not just appeal to an audience of bored, white, college-educated Westerners.
The core Catholic strategy, while I may diagree with some points, is essentially Orphic, and is a system created to shield the human soul from the heavy, low-vibrational psychic sludge (the Orphic 'soot') that drags you down if you are 'heavy." So the system has you consciously avoid extreme negative emotions, cheap drama, and the Vanity Fair 'Instagram hell-world' of envy, greed, grasping, comparison, and artificially curated low self-esteem. Refusing to seek advantage in a late-capitalist hellscape, by simple seeing it for what it is, temporary, while taking care of the poor, and needy. The idea was you keep the soul light enough to rise, and not sink into a Buddhist (imho) hell world. Probably needs some updating but whatever.
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