Reformation Paganism

In his polemics against Romanism, Luther writes of the Babylonian Captivity of the church. Such a metaphor is an interesting and apt choice - it’s never Luther’s intention to claim that the core elements of the church are invalid, but rather that they are held captive, frozen within a prison preventing them from being free and virile as they should be. An interesting comparison here can be drawn between the Babylonian Captivity of the biblical narrative and the on Luther claims. In both, “freedom” is the ultimate goal, with the implication being of a sort of castration, or life halted from its natural outgrowing, by the strictures placed upon it. The church appears as the Lovers card appears in the Devil card, the male and female once wed in a blindingly glorious marriage now twisted into chains held by an alien beyond and above, the iron shackles restraining them to be as if they never were.

While the most cowardly of Protestant theologians have backed down on the smearing of Romanism via the phrasing of “works”, a more intelligent response is not to capitulate, but to double down, instead first accepting that the “works” of Catholicism are entirely superfluous and as broadly reaching as some fear them to be, with a mechanistic investigation into the way in which ritual becomes empty action. The selling of indulgences, a granting of leniency for time spent in purgatory, by Pope Leo X, makes an important case study for the route that once sacred actions take through the process of institutional stratification that the Roman church underwent. When the original church swallowed the Roman Empire, the Empire’s institutional corpus remained intact, like a time-release poison that soon spread through all the arterial pathways and infected the entirety of the church. The church went from the community believes to a hierarchical and imperialist organization, with financial and legalistic bureaucracy taking precedent as the new linguistic form around which its mysticism would be hung. In doing so, it was only a matter of time before economic interest, in this case the varying ways patronage and favor worked in Renaissance Europe, would direct ecclesiastical policy, to generate the process of selling indulgences. It’s from this action, that the captivity the Roman institution puts the church under is shown, as the Roman captivity is one of a secular political order which has under its dictatorial control, a divine order of magic.

By the time of the reformation, the Roman Church had long wore out its welcome and the breaking-open that took place was only inevitable. Long under the surface, tensions between the secular and ecclesiastical authority over the nations of the Christian world reached their breaking point as the Church began to consolidate ever increasing levels of power, as the middle ages drew to a close. In the preceding years, the church reached new heights of power via the increasing wealth and thereby ability of centralized powers to exert control, of the Christian world. Ideological unification, economic centralization, and tighter leashes placed on local authorities, created a church newly empowered in a way it had never been before, with the medieval order of the church as one among many of the routes to the various spiritual and mystical forces in ones life falling to an ideological dictatorship not yet seen. By reasserting their own secular order, the monarchs who sided with the reformation sided with a return to an older state of affairs, where the authority of the church was again partially lost, with the once suppressed natural (or ‘pagan’) forms of religion breaking through once again the form of various protestantisms. Such a transformation occurred through christianity via the very same process that once made the church such a widely spread organization in the medieval era. Just as the priesthood was once a scattered collection of locals, the vernacular bible and its ensuing priesthood of all believers, restored the rights of divine contact to the common person, freeing them from the recently instituted centralization around Rome.

The case to be made against Romanism is a case not against the authority of a succession based church in itself, but a case against the authority of any sort of vertically structured order to be the ordainer of the linguistic forms by which an individual is contacted to the divine. The Romans can be disregarded entirely, not on the basis of the falsehood of their claims to authority, but on the basis of their making that basis, ie, the concept that there can be any authority to be had in the first place. The long con of Romanism has always been to identify itself with God, thereby identifying the institution of the Church with God’s faciality. In doing so, the situation of the believer becomes as the woman in Song of Songs, now, if entrapped within the Romanist discourse, forced to marry and bind herself beneath the legalistic superstructure of the church in order to interact with God through his faciality.

It's both against this binding marriage and against the opposite trend of total removal from any church, that the value of protestantism comes into being. The church’s mystical aspects divorce in every moment from the church via linguistic transmission, making them travel far afield from vertical organization as memes - such is the cause of biblical literacy being the catalyst for the reformation’s popularity. At the center of it, remains the Christian religion’s heart, the relationship between oneself and the masculine force, represented in Christianity by the phallic God. As this God is the genuine tradition of much of the western world, the answer is not to disregard all aspects of it as some judaic force upon an original paganism and then impose a “true” religion through tedious reconstructionism, but to embrace christianity as the form through which the content of paganism will re-emerge, as happens when christianity is freed as a meme to freely evolve in the world.