Pagan History

Pagan History

by Tim Maroney (1986)

Paganism is a loose word for the large variety of polytheistic, shamanistic, and mystical non-monotheistic religions. Paganism exists in all cultures, from paleolithic to technological, but has historically waxed and waned. The ancient Egyptians are an example of a highly pagan society; so are the ancient Romans; and all paleolithic cultures from the Old Stone Age to the present have strong pagan elements. An example of a less pagan culture would be the West for the last thousand years or so, since the centuries following the Fall of Rome. The domination of the Middle East by Christians and Moslems has also largely shut out paganism.

Characteristic of paganism is a tolerance for other paganistic ideas, even those that literally contradict one's own. Such persecutions as have been directed against paganistic religions by each other are by-products of political struggles and mass population movements rather than ideologically motivated. The same is to some extent true of early Judaism, which was the direct inheritor to the traditions of a strongly pagan society. A slave revolt apparently led to a few hundred thousand slaves with no place to live; to get them, they butchered the inhabitants of pagan cities and took up residence in the cities themselves. They invoked their war god to justify this action. Similarly, when the beginnings of the modern Greek mythology were laid down, it was as a result of invading Northern barbarians supplanting the earlier (and somewhat gynocentric) Titan mythology with their imported religion, which grew more refined and less aggressive later on, as happened with Judaism.

Before it came under the thumb of monotheism, the West was dominated by the highly civilized Roman culture. The Roman Republic and Empire were characterized by an unusually large number of religions together in a single social whole, frequently sharing the same geography and even the same temples. This explicitly eclectic (or "syncretistic", as it is more usually known in studies of the Romans) synthesis is more similar to modern neo-paganism than any other form of historical paganism I know of. However, it ended after the Christian emperors took over and Rome fell.

The post-pagan West experienced frequent resurgences of paganism in various forms. If we date this at 1000 CE for convenience, we see first the Inquisitorial period, where paganism was punished with death and torture. Then there comes the Renaissance, in which pagan symbolism and ideas in art and philosophy were somewhat more common than explicitly Christian ones. The Renaissance lasted until the 16th century. Note that the Inquisitions lasted effectively until the Enlightenment period, and were bad during the Renaissance, but ceased to be mostly ideologically motivated after the first three centuries. The Inquisition had become a political arm of the Vatican, a force useful in many ways other than suppressing heresy. It spent much of its time accomplishing political, antifeminist, and covert goals of the Church. We see in the trial of the Templars in the fourteenth century that uncommonly faithful people were caught in a secular political struggle between the King of France and the Pope. They were routinely tortured, the usual prompted confessions were given, and they were executed, for reasons having nothing to do with ideology or heresy except as excuses.

It is also during the Renaissance that we begin to have evidence of what we may consider explicitly religious paganism again. Most of the grimoires we have date from this era; alchemists, often overtly Christian but employing pagan symbolism and texts, were most common during the Renaissance; the Kabbalah and Tarot originate in the Renaissance, forming the backbone of modern pagan symbolism. The Renaissance also saw the obscure origins of a rebirth, in improved form, of Greek humanism, technically pagan because of its suppression by Christian Rome and its use of theistic symbols.

The Reformation was again a less pagan period; Protestant rulers like Elizabeth and James carried out their own anti-heresy pogroms, annihilating most evidence of witchcraft. Of particular interest in the Reformation is Scot's "The Discoverie of Witchcraft", which presents the humanist and rationalist perspective on witches which has generally triumphed today: that witch accusations were more often driven by factors such as ugliness, personal enmity, poverty, and so forth than on ideological grounds, and that in fact there were no witches. This is probably true only of the later Inquisitorial period. Earlier on, the Inquisition certainly did help in the temporary stamping out of paganism; so if pagans are witches, there were witches.

We need not bother much with Murray's supposedly anthropological study of English witchcraft in the Inquisitorial period, except to note that it has been devoutly accepted by many modern pagans, and to point out some of its flaws. Based on late Inquisitorial evidence and the consistency of the confessions obtained by the Inquistors, and tossing in some disjointed scraps of English folk history and legend, Murray asks us to believe that a paleolithic subculture lasted in England, living semi-naked in the bushes, until nearly the beginning of the Reformation at least, and possibly until the current day. Of course late Inquistorial confessions were consistent; they were practically dictated to the torture victim. A much better account of the relationship of paganism to Christianity before and during England's post-pagan period is Jessi Weston's classic "From Ritual to Romance". Its conclusions were derived from decades of intense study of the Grail mythology and its anthropological, mythological, and social context.

As a parting note on the Reformation, we may note the peculiar phenomenon of court astrologers and alchemists and their ilk, the most notable examples being the sorcerer John Dee and the seer Edward Kelley under Elizabeth. These were the inheritors of Paracelsus and the other alchemists and Christian medicine doctors, using pagan symbols and methods with a veil of Christian symbolism. Kelley stopped the work of Dee and Kelley under unknown circumstances; he is said to have been told by the angels to form a group sex arrangement with Dee and his wife, which they supposedly did for a while; in another version, Kelley was driven from the work by a prophecy of a new age dawning, which was heresy.

So, on to the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century. This was more humanistic than religious, though humanism is a religion on alternate Tuesdays; it all depends which of the many reasonable definitions you use. In any case, the seventeenth centuries saw