Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Keep your head down and watch your back

Likewise, ritual practices of at least some forms of “traditional religions” of various peoples seem as much or more to do with keeping potential spirit-dangers at bay and avoiding offending them, rather than “worship” and adoration of, and a positive relationship with, a deity as conceived, for example, by Christians. That is, in many cases, “religious” ritual practices can be intended to placate deities or even to avoid their attention altogether. Also, the ritual practices of various traditional peoples were obviously meaningful for them, but it would be a bit misleading, even cultural imperialism perhaps, to say that those who performed these ritual practices typically aimed to express or obtain some sort of “ultimate meaning.”— Destroyer of the gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World, pages 39–40

<idle musing>
In other words, try to keep them out of your life as much as possible! The last thing you want is for the gods to notice you! That's a sure way to have a miserable life. Of course, you want to keep your personal deity, variously called genius, δαιμῶν, dLAMMA, happy. Pour a bit of a libation to the ground before you take a drink, leave a portion of your food for them, throw that salt over your shoulder, things like that. You want your personal deity to run interference for you with the more powerful deities.
</idle musing>

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