High religion and low religion

Warning: Rambling follows. Not bothering to translate too much out of internal language.

Religious practices in a culture have high tradition and low tradition. High tradition: dealing with gods, structured rituals, major festivals. Low religion: peripheral accumulation of less-related symbology, day-to-day home-centred ritual, application of major forces or representatives to minor situations. Superstitions, sometimes.

See also applied hagiology.

Low religion permeates beyond followers of high religion: see also Jewish foods intended to follow kashrut strictures being taken up by goyim, Christmas season . . . foo, etc. Major defining component, culture.

New religion: no low religion. Folk practices rarely documented; lost to reconstruction. Ritual structures yet to spawn resonances in secular reality.

Low religion critical; this is where the mishmash of daily life develops new ideas, grows, it's where people live. Creole regions spawn new high religions from the reconciliations of their lows. People live here; hard to live without the culture, the day-to-day, the mundane components of religious practice and live within a religion.

Wicca develops into kitchenwitchery, permaculture, similar things: developing a low religion over time. Many modern-pagans adopt portion of Wiccan low religion (symbol-sets and attitudes) even if not Wiccan; part of the surrounding culture. As reconstructions and non-Wiccan independents develop, subcultural information, low religion develop. Discordianism rich in all sorts of stuff; this is open-source religion that explicitly invites patches and hacks.

Customs. New high structures have different geometry; old things rearrange, new gaps, patch old gaps. Culture develops. Bang.