#devotionalism

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Based on a talk on Christian and Hindu (bhakti) loving devotionalism to a deity, I have written a short essay on whether the phenomenon is universal enough to point back to a basic human instinctual urge: https://thewordenreport-religion.blogspot.com/2025/03/on-comparative-bhakti-hinduism-and.html

When I used to write for the public from 2007-2010, keeping a public blog from 2008-2010, the climate of the online pagan community was a lot different than it is now. Today, there are literally hundreds of blogs from people claiming to be devotees or spirit-workers or god-spouses, who have intense relationships with gods and discuss their "woo" publicly. Back when I started out, I knew of maybe three or four dozen of us *at most*. We were not just in the minority, but we were fairly regularly subject to "who do you think you are" type criticism from recons or snotty attitudes from "scene pagans" who didn't get it. Most of us found each other on LiveJournal and for a few years, we talked intimately about our experiences there. Then, as now, the majority of us were Norse or Greek, and the overwhelming majority of god-spouses were Odin's or Loki's. Flash forward to today; even just a casual perusal of current pagan blogs will clue you in that devotional polytheism is the current hot thing. I have no idea why or how the pendulum has shifted from this being an extreme rarity a few years ago, to the norm now, but it is the norm, despite all the polytheists who whine all over the Wild Hunt blog comments and then their own blogs about how oppressed they are in the pagan community.