A matter of rags and patches
I saw a post on social media today, the autumnal equinox, referencing Mabon, the pagan (Celtic) festival of autumn. I thought I knew the names of all the important calendar dates in Celtic polytheism, but I wasn’t familiar with Mabon. I looked it up. Turns out it goes all the way back to about AD 1970, when it was coined by some neo-pagan for the date. Apparently, no one remembered the name from antiquity, so somebody adopted the name of a minor Celtic deity and bestowed it upon the equinox. This is all too typical: the manufacture of tradition.
I first became acquainted with neo-paganism when I found a website specializing in Germanic linguistics. They had published in online form Jacob Grimm’s enormous Deutsche Mythologie in J.S. Stallybrass’s 19th Century English translation. I had encountered this work in physical form in the ISU library, but I had never been able to find it again in any other library or bookseller. Grimm’s philological study of pre-Christian religion about the speakers of the Germanic languages ran to five increasingly incoherent volumes. He thought it would be his greatest work, but today it is forgotten by almost everybody.
People forget that philology was the foundation of the modern social sciences, especially sociology. The desire to trace the roots of our civilization, its customs and its beliefs, was the start of many things. Fascination with the Indo-Europeans remains a constant in academia, even if nobody admits it. Grimm’s theories are out of fashion nowadays, and the culture wars over who “owns” what body of legends an embarrassing 19th Century nationalism. But his desire to find, or re-create, the original body of beliefs of our ancestors, remains a potent desire for many. For them it is a matter of, shall we say, cultural authenticity. We find neo-pagans who swing toward specifically Norse or sometimes pan-Germanic mythology, while others prefer Celtic mythology. The Wicca folk blend various traditions to discover what they imagine to be a common belief system.
Alas, the fascination is understandable, but there is no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. The modern attempts to re-create paganism that I have encountered have two general and one specific failing. The first general failing is that they fail to actually understand, and therefore fail to recover, authentic pre-Christian religion. Those of us who love to study the ancient past can tell you what can be learned about those pre-Christian religions: the actual beliefs, the actual practices. But these are a little bit crude for the neo-pagans. Unlike the practitioners of Santeria or Vodun (two actual non-Christian religions that might be thought of as “pagan”), they shy away from the bloody business of primitive worship. They want a nice, tidy sort of paganism. The second general failing of these neo-paganisms is that they think a properly organized religion has to have an ethical code, a core of teaching, and a well-ordered liturgical calendar and set of rituals, all laid out in a book – like Christianity. In fact, all the neo-pagan religions are simply Christianity without Jesus and the God of the Bible. They are the furnishings without the house. They are simply pale imitations of Christianity, all too similar to other modern heresies like Unitarian Universalism.
The great, specific failing they all have is that nobody actually believes in them. You ask them if they actually believe that the deities they have organized in such a tidy spiritual bureaucracy are actual supernatural beings that really exist, and they give you a mouthful of mumbles. They believe in their gods about as seriously as many of our progressives believe in God – as the reflection of their own face in the mirror, their own desire to order the world after their own wisdom. But is there really someone on the other end of the line when they pray? Are there real answers from Beyond? They fall back upon aesthetics and authenticity and ancient wisdom and whatnot. The more occult-minded of the neo-pagans at least get a little thrill out of doing magic, attempting to speak with the dead, or being mildly naughty. Some of the spiritualists I know actually believe they are in touch with something real. But when you ask them for something coherent, you get a mere pastiche of Christianity again. The only functioning Indo-European polytheism left is Hinduism, which has adherents who actually believe in the Vedic deities. My cousin converted to Krishna Consciousness in the 1970s. I disagreed with his choice, but I respected it. But the neo-pagans, Germanic, Celtic, Wiccan, or what-have-you, what they offer is neither pre-Christian nor post-Christian, nor do they believe in their own handiwork except as a rage against the culture they were born into, which they cannot escape but wish they could.
Years ago, I got trapped into a conversation with an aggressive proselytizer for Krishna, and when I demurred he said, “What’s the matter? You think it’s a cult? You think it’s bogus?” I replied, “No. But my ancestors had a perfectly good religion, which largely consisted of painting themselves blue and running naked through the woods and slaughtering horses to their gods. They liked it. It worked for them. But there came a time when they gave up their gods to follow Jesus Christ – and he’s all I’m really interested in.”
P.S.
Nobody in ancient times referred to themselves as “pagans.” The followers of pre-Christian religions in the late Roman Empire were usually referred to as rustici (“rustics”) and only occasionally as pagani (“pagans”). Both these terms mean much the same thing, since pagans came from the pagus, the countryside. In other words, when the urban population of the empire had almost all converted to Christianity, they turned around and started worrying about the country folk, who were still leaving sacrifices by holy wells and so forth. There were still a few non-Christians left among the urban elites in the late Fourth and early Fifth Centuries, but they would be offended to be called “pagans.” If you called them that, they would understand you to be calling them hicks and bumpkins.
I much prefer the word "heathen" to refer to modern non-Christians. I'll go into that another time.
I first became acquainted with neo-paganism when I found a website specializing in Germanic linguistics. They had published in online form Jacob Grimm’s enormous Deutsche Mythologie in J.S. Stallybrass’s 19th Century English translation. I had encountered this work in physical form in the ISU library, but I had never been able to find it again in any other library or bookseller. Grimm’s philological study of pre-Christian religion about the speakers of the Germanic languages ran to five increasingly incoherent volumes. He thought it would be his greatest work, but today it is forgotten by almost everybody.
People forget that philology was the foundation of the modern social sciences, especially sociology. The desire to trace the roots of our civilization, its customs and its beliefs, was the start of many things. Fascination with the Indo-Europeans remains a constant in academia, even if nobody admits it. Grimm’s theories are out of fashion nowadays, and the culture wars over who “owns” what body of legends an embarrassing 19th Century nationalism. But his desire to find, or re-create, the original body of beliefs of our ancestors, remains a potent desire for many. For them it is a matter of, shall we say, cultural authenticity. We find neo-pagans who swing toward specifically Norse or sometimes pan-Germanic mythology, while others prefer Celtic mythology. The Wicca folk blend various traditions to discover what they imagine to be a common belief system.
Alas, the fascination is understandable, but there is no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. The modern attempts to re-create paganism that I have encountered have two general and one specific failing. The first general failing is that they fail to actually understand, and therefore fail to recover, authentic pre-Christian religion. Those of us who love to study the ancient past can tell you what can be learned about those pre-Christian religions: the actual beliefs, the actual practices. But these are a little bit crude for the neo-pagans. Unlike the practitioners of Santeria or Vodun (two actual non-Christian religions that might be thought of as “pagan”), they shy away from the bloody business of primitive worship. They want a nice, tidy sort of paganism. The second general failing of these neo-paganisms is that they think a properly organized religion has to have an ethical code, a core of teaching, and a well-ordered liturgical calendar and set of rituals, all laid out in a book – like Christianity. In fact, all the neo-pagan religions are simply Christianity without Jesus and the God of the Bible. They are the furnishings without the house. They are simply pale imitations of Christianity, all too similar to other modern heresies like Unitarian Universalism.
The great, specific failing they all have is that nobody actually believes in them. You ask them if they actually believe that the deities they have organized in such a tidy spiritual bureaucracy are actual supernatural beings that really exist, and they give you a mouthful of mumbles. They believe in their gods about as seriously as many of our progressives believe in God – as the reflection of their own face in the mirror, their own desire to order the world after their own wisdom. But is there really someone on the other end of the line when they pray? Are there real answers from Beyond? They fall back upon aesthetics and authenticity and ancient wisdom and whatnot. The more occult-minded of the neo-pagans at least get a little thrill out of doing magic, attempting to speak with the dead, or being mildly naughty. Some of the spiritualists I know actually believe they are in touch with something real. But when you ask them for something coherent, you get a mere pastiche of Christianity again. The only functioning Indo-European polytheism left is Hinduism, which has adherents who actually believe in the Vedic deities. My cousin converted to Krishna Consciousness in the 1970s. I disagreed with his choice, but I respected it. But the neo-pagans, Germanic, Celtic, Wiccan, or what-have-you, what they offer is neither pre-Christian nor post-Christian, nor do they believe in their own handiwork except as a rage against the culture they were born into, which they cannot escape but wish they could.
Years ago, I got trapped into a conversation with an aggressive proselytizer for Krishna, and when I demurred he said, “What’s the matter? You think it’s a cult? You think it’s bogus?” I replied, “No. But my ancestors had a perfectly good religion, which largely consisted of painting themselves blue and running naked through the woods and slaughtering horses to their gods. They liked it. It worked for them. But there came a time when they gave up their gods to follow Jesus Christ – and he’s all I’m really interested in.”
P.S.
Nobody in ancient times referred to themselves as “pagans.” The followers of pre-Christian religions in the late Roman Empire were usually referred to as rustici (“rustics”) and only occasionally as pagani (“pagans”). Both these terms mean much the same thing, since pagans came from the pagus, the countryside. In other words, when the urban population of the empire had almost all converted to Christianity, they turned around and started worrying about the country folk, who were still leaving sacrifices by holy wells and so forth. There were still a few non-Christians left among the urban elites in the late Fourth and early Fifth Centuries, but they would be offended to be called “pagans.” If you called them that, they would understand you to be calling them hicks and bumpkins.
I much prefer the word "heathen" to refer to modern non-Christians. I'll go into that another time.