Okay this ultimately struggling to find a word for an idea and using a word that is loaded with all sorts of baggage and having to set up a couple books worth of qualifiers to mean what you say. FWIW, a lot like our discussions of Socialism and Fascism https://twitter.com/maestrojmc/status/1198850256030425088

@maestrojmc is right that we need liturgy and culture full of what I'd call charged signs. Liturgy must be filled with charged signs, in sacrament AND sacramental, which actually point beyond themselves to realities above. And our lives should be filled with these as well.

What do I mean? Handling objects in such as way that recognize they manifest greater powers than eye can see. Dipping fingers into a font with awareness of one's baptism. Incense making real the veil between us and God. Music which seeks to join with angelic choirs.

I recommend Danielou on a lot of this. Ambrose and Augustine's Mystagogic sermons. Cyril of Jerusalem of course. The mystics also lean heavily on this. Eastern commentaries on liturgy (e.g. Schmemann) are replete with this. The signs we use are realities.

Of course, this should not be limited to an hour on Sunday. Throughout the height of Christendom we filled our lives with these sorts of signs - statuary, regalia, heraldry, salutes and processions, cycles of feasts. For the Christian, this is how liturgy became life.

Recognizing the higher powers in these signs, higher powers which were manifestations of God's providence in the world, we even addressed inanimate things (e.g. holy water) as sacramental, for in praising them we praise God. The Psalms are replete with this sort of stuff.

But it isn't pagan! Paganism and Christianity shared this emphasis on signs, and Christianity even baptized quite a few from paganism, but at heart they are distinct. Paganism is divorced from a sense of a transcendent God. This is why pagan monotheists were seen as atheists.

A lot of pagan monotheists, emphasizing contemplation OVER sacraments, tended to also be skeptical of specifically this emphasis on signs - see Plotinus' skepticism of theurgy. Pagans that tried to synthesize it - e.g. Iamblichus - did so AFTER Christianity (a telling point...).

The importance of charged signs is universal. In Christianity, though, it takes new meaning because it is incarnational. God entered into our nature, into this world, and drew it into himself. Mortality is made, by divine grace, immortal.

Thus what @maestrojmc is really getting at is the importance of a full-bodied incarnational liturgy. Not abstractly didactic or appealing to the senses (most Boomer "liturgy"), but fully incarnational, that makes the Triune divinity and His retinue of heaven present.

Paganism says this world is divine by nature. Even the monotheists tended toward a sort of "world is God" or "God is but highest part of this world". The world is a charged sign because it is divine.

For the Christian, it's charged because it was made divine.

And yes, that's an infinitely important distinction.

Can we recognize some similar aspects between Christianity and Paganism? Sure. But those similarities are themselves founded and reached due to radical differences. One is reached due to error. The other, Truth.

NB: I love @maestrojmc like an online brother and think everyone should learn from his willingness to speculate wildly. Thus all of this is in a spirit of continuing the discourse.