Paganism and Neo-Paganism
A Response to Saxon of the Fells
Paganism - It’s Influences
So, this will be a response to the good Sir
note, taking it in good faith. I’m doing it in a thorough post as something I can point back to so as not to do it repeatedly, and thus I’m going to try and be somewhat thorough.First, good sir. The original note that you’re responding to was a claim not that we’re living under pagan values, but that the introduction of pagan influences within the Renaissance period led to all sorts of mischief. The romanticism of those influences, the gods, the arts, and the change of how epics were told from the styles seen in Beowulf, El Cid, Nibelungenlied, Song of Roland, and The Heliand turned into things like Dante’s Inferno, Chancer’s works, The Fairie Queen.
We, as a culture, quickly traversed from a society where the passions were kept in check by reason yet still had a beautiful expression within the arts and sciences; to one where art permitted any breaking of boundaries, to one where love excused such things as adultery within the Romantic period and chivalry.1
So, while I acknowledge that we don’t live under a ‘pagan’ society, we do live under one influenced by them and broken by those influences. Is it their fault? Meh, does one blame the shepherd or the wolf when the shepherd is negligent and the sheep is slain? The sheep doesn’t care, it’s still just as dead.
Neo-paganism
So, if you’ve read the source material of things like Herodotus, you’ll be familiar with a few things. First is that he recognizes that there is only one god of certain areas according to the pagans. One god of war. One god of fertility. One god of wine and revelry. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Thus, he identifies different peoples practicing different means of worship to the same gods, under different names. For, after all, how could there be two beings in charge of one domain? Such an idea is silly on a philosophical level. Thus, no matter what time, area, or location - there is only one god of war, and that god may accept sacrifice in many names, go by many different images (just as he may take on the form of man or beast to play with mortals), but still the same being.
So, under those thoughts - what are we doing today? What kinds of beings do we make ritualistic sacrifices to in our modern day? I would absolutely argue that we make ritualistic sacrifices to Aphrodite in our universities in almost the exact way that Herodotus describes for those women going for a Mrs degree. The same for those looking for a little piece of paper that ritualistically says you make more money - you sacrifice your gold and time, you get your success. You ritualistically sacrifice to Bacchus to go to college for the experience. We ritualistically sacrifice to the god of war in all the sports ball like the coliseums, and the same for the military industrial complex. I’ve written on slavery - what do we sacrifice to the gods of fertility for our agriculture industry? For trade and the ‘hand of the free market?’
In other words, I absolutely think that we might not live in a traditionally ‘pagan’ society, but that we absolutely live in a neo-pagan one. Look all around us. Look at all the things that everyone denies have any enchantment, any life, any soul - and where you see the modern world dying to keep the systems as they are; there you will find gods of the neo-pagans, living on the life blood of our souls.
Pagan LARPing
And here we come to where people like
, , and myself will consider pagans to be LARPers. It’s not that we’re even trying to be disrespectful. It’s that, considering the source material, your practices don’t make sense.So, given what’s above, Paganism is both a simple and a deep thing. It’s simple in that any deity is a universal deity when you’re talking about things like war, fertility, etc. We get that and understand that. We’ve read the source materials just the same as you.
But then paganism is all about this incarnation of the deity for me and my ancestors. That is literally what every single source document is all about. From The Aeneid to St Boniface cutting down the oak tree, it was all about this thing is my god or my appointed sacred object. Let me explain.
When Troy was burning, Aeneas gathered all his household statues/gods, and was told to establish them somewhere else. That in doing so, he would be founding the glory of what we now know as Rome for all time. We’re told, over and over again, that it’s those gods, those statues, that he has to take. Not someone else’s, not a ‘universal god’ or that they’re representative of a universal god.
No, those are it.
And you see this repeated again and again every time that Christian missionaries encounter paganism. It’s not some “universal incarnation.” To us, looking in, it seems the same kind of “Christianization” of paganism that took place to Judaism after Christianity showed up on the scene and their Temple was destroyed. Suddenly there were no blood sacrifices and it didn’t need a Temple at all! Crazy, how that worked out so well for them, that they suddenly realized that they’d been wrong all these years.
When, in reality, they simply made up a new religion whole clothe and that it’s extremely easy to see so when looking at source documents in comparison to what they do today.
Conclusion
Anyways Mr Saxon, that wraps up my points on the matter. I’ve tried to be both thorough, straight forward, and polite as I can while being truthful. I hope that it can be taken as such.
One can Reference C.S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love
Strange article, and not in a good way.
If someone is pagan because they attribute prayer and ritual towards a being who oversees a particular region of being, then the whole of Christendom has been pagan for its entire existence since St. Martin was cut down at Poitiers. I don't see what young women having sex at college has to do with a "ritualistic association with Aphrodite". They didn't start doing this in the Renaissance, either, that's certain. This isn't something particular to paganism or Christianity, or any of the historical eras in between. It's just how divinity is understood, particularly in Europe.
There are specific things about the modern world that are decidedly un-pagan that you neglect to analyze. It still possesses a fundamental need for soteriology, escape/transcendence of a flawed and broken world, and a universalist ethos that packages all of mankind under the same reality, needs, and potential. If anything, we are closer to the Early Christian Church than paganism, just as Engels had intended, and just as his followers carry that torch today. Either way, what does the Renaissance have to do with this? Did the most brutal, fanatical period of Christendom not immediately follow it in the Wars of Religion? I would be extremely hard pressed to call Charles V or Cromwell "more pagan" than Clovis or William.
You misunderstand the difference between a universalist and tribalist conception of a deity. The varying ecology of varying peoples/cultures interprets the same phenomenon differently, of course, but this isn't a novel concept or an invention of the modern world (or Renaissance). In virtually every written account of pagan religion this is what's seen, from Heraclitus to Julian. This is not at all mutually exclusive to the idea of adherence to a particular pantheon. The pantheon is *your* interpretation of a "universal" phenomenon. Love may be a universal thing, but it is different to an Englishman and a Greek. Not to mention the relationships, traditions, and rituals that are tied to that specific deity/pantheon.
Plenty more to write about. You're only barely scratching the surface on a lot of these concepts. If this were Christian apologetics, you're on the level of asking if there were dinosaurs on the Ark and why God was mean to the Canaanites.
As James O'Meara so succinctly put it, 'paganism' is what White people do when they are no longer under the yoke of 'christianity' (or, more preferably 'Abrahamo-Platonism'. Consequently, it's not surprising that 'christians' don't like 'pagans'. Any criticism of 'pagan' by 'christian' is entirely in bad faith because under no circumstance can a 'christian' admit that 'pagan' has instrinsic value.
In the long run, 'christianity' for White people is the simply a suicide pact with the rising tide of color, the only people 'christianity' actually cares about.