Are more people turning back to ancient religions and gnosticism?
I believe paganism has always been the worlds most widely practiced religion, people just don’t know it. Pagan beliefs emerged largely from the study of Astrology (which is the starting point for science too by the way). Human beings have a natural capacity for pattern recognition and systemic analysis which serves them in many ways, but like anything, used to an extreme it pushes us into the realm of generalization and superstition.
Well, Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism are all pretty ancient, Judaism oldest of all, and lots of people are turning back to them. But I assume you’re talking about pre-Christian pagan ones. (Though Gnosticism is slightly younger than Christianity, and a kind of rip-off of it by Platonists gone mad.) I’ve known quite a few people who were turning to what they liked to imagine were ancient pagan religions, but what they were really turning to was pretty much the invention of 19th century Romantics and charlatans. Real ancient pagan religions involved lots of paranoia about violating taboos, mind numbingly precise rituals held in secret for the preservation of the State, generational curses, fear of ghosts and unclean spirits and weird rituals to propitiate them, and ticking off the gods with trivial things that had catastrophic results (e.g., Rome’s greatest military disaster was attributed to the wrath of Juno because the general in command had – at his prio
