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More religious nattering!
We know certain things about ancient mystery cults. That they were specific paths within a religious culture, that they involved things treated with greater or lesser secrecy, that a particular induction path led to the apprehension of a specific experience. We know the names of some of them, little bits and pieces about them perhaps, and in very few cases do we actually know how the mystery was constructed for the participants.
Because it was a mystery, and even if people were inclined to talk about it, what they said wouldn't make sense to people who didn't have the requisite context, because that's what mysteries do.
For people who really want to do things In The Way The Ancients Did, this presents a problem. There were established paths for mysticism in the ancient ways, and we don't know what the fuck they were. (For varying degrees of "we don't know what the fuck they were"; I mean, I've heard a lot about how the Hrafnar people reconstructed seidh from bibs and bobs, but I've also heard about people claiming to put forth the authentic Eleusinian Mysteries, you know, the thing for which we know enough to define a bit of negative space but can't say what was there.)
Some recons deal with this by sticking strictly to what can be found and attested in the lore and archaeology. We know a fair amount about these bits, the argument goes, so if we're trying to be authentic we should stick to the stuff we can verify.
Some go off trying to find the inspirations to recover the ancient mysteries, because those are the authentic things that the ancients did for mysticism and thus they have significance.
There's a huge middle area, with zones like the one I tend to wind up in, which is something like "Stick to what we can be reasonably secure in and if the gods want us to have mysteries they'll give them to us."
And there's the rub, now, isn't it.
The hilarious thing about the thing I'm staring at is of course that it's ... not hidden. It's a pattern, and it's one that exists in the established lore at multiple levels, because the particular set of ancients I deal with did both recycling and redundancy kind of a lot. It's just that it takes looking at it from a particular angle to see the thing, which is an angle that I have been, to the best of my ability to judge, carefully nudged towards and positioned at.
And given how much iterating they did, I'd be genuinely shocked if nobody in ancient days did something with this. But, of course, there's no actual evidence. Just the evidence of all the other ways the same set of tools is used.
And of course, I'm angsting about this and giving it miscellaneous pokes and puttering along and come across a different version of the same thing while reading Francesca de Grandis for the first time. Different toolset, same concept, because while the imageset I'm working with is cultural the core idea can manifest in multiple ways. Which makes it ... interesting to try to figure out what's essential to constructing it.
I see this one way in. It's down that tunnel there.
We know certain things about ancient mystery cults. That they were specific paths within a religious culture, that they involved things treated with greater or lesser secrecy, that a particular induction path led to the apprehension of a specific experience. We know the names of some of them, little bits and pieces about them perhaps, and in very few cases do we actually know how the mystery was constructed for the participants.
Because it was a mystery, and even if people were inclined to talk about it, what they said wouldn't make sense to people who didn't have the requisite context, because that's what mysteries do.
For people who really want to do things In The Way The Ancients Did, this presents a problem. There were established paths for mysticism in the ancient ways, and we don't know what the fuck they were. (For varying degrees of "we don't know what the fuck they were"; I mean, I've heard a lot about how the Hrafnar people reconstructed seidh from bibs and bobs, but I've also heard about people claiming to put forth the authentic Eleusinian Mysteries, you know, the thing for which we know enough to define a bit of negative space but can't say what was there.)
Some recons deal with this by sticking strictly to what can be found and attested in the lore and archaeology. We know a fair amount about these bits, the argument goes, so if we're trying to be authentic we should stick to the stuff we can verify.
Some go off trying to find the inspirations to recover the ancient mysteries, because those are the authentic things that the ancients did for mysticism and thus they have significance.
There's a huge middle area, with zones like the one I tend to wind up in, which is something like "Stick to what we can be reasonably secure in and if the gods want us to have mysteries they'll give them to us."
And there's the rub, now, isn't it.
The hilarious thing about the thing I'm staring at is of course that it's ... not hidden. It's a pattern, and it's one that exists in the established lore at multiple levels, because the particular set of ancients I deal with did both recycling and redundancy kind of a lot. It's just that it takes looking at it from a particular angle to see the thing, which is an angle that I have been, to the best of my ability to judge, carefully nudged towards and positioned at.
And given how much iterating they did, I'd be genuinely shocked if nobody in ancient days did something with this. But, of course, there's no actual evidence. Just the evidence of all the other ways the same set of tools is used.
And of course, I'm angsting about this and giving it miscellaneous pokes and puttering along and come across a different version of the same thing while reading Francesca de Grandis for the first time. Different toolset, same concept, because while the imageset I'm working with is cultural the core idea can manifest in multiple ways. Which makes it ... interesting to try to figure out what's essential to constructing it.
I see this one way in. It's down that tunnel there.
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Good luck discovering the Mysteries on your own. Someone had to lead the way the first time, after all, and if humanity was dumb enough to lose the knowledge the first time, the gods may not be as nice about helping us rediscover it the next time around. I know I'd be scared to poke around in the dark out there all on my own. :)
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The thing about religious mysteries that I think is complicated is that you have two varieties: you have the ones that rise organically and happen for people, or don't happen for people, and very little outside those people (and the relevant Gods/entities/spirits) has any say over that.
And then you have the ones where the humans in question have come up with a method that has some level of repeatability: not that it will work for *everyone* the same way (people being different) but that given a combination of appropriate set-up and experience, people will get enough of the same stuff to make it hold together over time.
Which... there's different ways to do. Sometimes, depending on the thing you're trying to achieve, pretty vastly different ones.
That said, I think there's definitely something to the idea of trying to reverse engineer the black box - you know that you have a given end result, how do you get there using internally consistent tools and methods.
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