Paganism

[HondurasKeiser]

The question of what Paganism is and the corollary assertion on the part of some that Western society is re-paganizing (that's a paraphrase) came up in the Lititz/Moravian Church thread and it happens to dove-tail with much of what I've been reading. I'm wondering if it would be fruitful to have a discussion about what paganism is (it's not just a catch-all term to describe non-Christians in my opinion); how and why our society is re-paganizing (I take as axiomatic that, elements of paganism have always been part and parcel of Western culture and that as Christianity comes to have less and less purchase in the minds of Westerners, those pagan countervailing forces will come to the fore more fully); and finally how does this knowledge (what is Paganism and what does re-paganization look like) equip us to engage with paganized minds in ways that might be different from engaging with committed, devout Muslims, Jews, Mormons, JW's, etc.?

For starters, I stumbled upon this conversation between N.T. Wright (Christian, N.T. scholar and former bishop in the CofE) & Tom Holland (Classical scholar & author of Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World). While this may seem like a stretch, I think it's worth giving a listen to Mr. Holland's brief explanation on just how different the Classical world was in comparison to the Christian world, to understand what the (dominant) pagan worldview was like and what the effects of the "Christian Revolution" have been:
(start at minute 8:00 for Mr. Hollands intro)

[HondurasKeiser]

I have a number of other essays that we can look at but I want to read through them before beginning to post them willy nilly.

[HondurasKeiser]

The French, Christian philosopher, Chantal Delsol argues that pace modern thinkers of the 20th Century (think Bertrand Russell as both emblem and example) throwing off a comprehensive religious system, like Christianity, does not mean we all become rationalist, atheists:

Once Christianity faced off with modernity, Delsol says, the handwriting was on the wall. And even though a handful of elites deluded themselves into believing in the future of atheism, most people need gods—and soon the old gods began to creep back in.

"We all worship something" might be another way of putting it, and even though one might be atheist in thought, the worship of a material thing, be it a person, a technology, a commodity or a physical artifact, nevertheless will dominate one's life - a hallmark of the pagan society.

n pagan societies, religion and morality are separate: religion demands sacrifices and rites, while the rulers impose a morality. This is the situation we are in the process of rediscovering: our governing elite decrees morality, promotes laws to enforce them partly through insults and ostracism. Our morality is post-evangelical, but it is no longer tied to a religion. It dominates the television sets. It inhabits all the cinematography of the age. It rules in the schools and families. When something needs to be straightened out or given a new direction, it is the governing elite.

Where does the re-paganization come from?

Paganism, a belief in immanent gods, never completely disappeared from the Christian landscape. These gods appear naturally in the human mind and imagination. And, if Christianity put them backstage and deprived them of their legitimacy, it did not manage to annihilate them. We can cite a number of schools of thought and Western authors who were tempted by this reasoning, from Freemasonry to the New Age through Spinoza and Nietzsche. In Science as a Vocation, Max Weber described these gods lurking in the corner; still alive and ready to return at the smallest sign of weakness in transcendent monotheism.

As soon as doubt or disinterest in the dominant Christian religion develops, the temptation of paganism reappears. Read Montaigne, for instance. I believe that, since the Renaissance, many authors in Christian countries were no longer believers, even though they could not express their doubts openly. But the cracks became larger several centuries ago, and multiple revolutions in the 18th century placed an emphasis on the process of reassessment.

What overt signs of re-paganization do you see?
Insofar as paganism is defined as a belief in a world filled with immanent gods, we can say that environmentalism may belong to pagan thought. Animals, plants, and the elements of nature in general are often considered sacred and even adored.

This belief is different from those that preceded Christianity. Nevertheless, it is a return to the veneration of sacred nature. Moreover, what is called pagan refers to societies with pragmatic and consequentialist morality, unlike Christian, Jewish, or Islamic moral codes, which are based on transcendent dogmas. The pagan society belongs to the great Pan, god of sex and violence. In this respect, our societies are becoming pagan once again. We do not lack morals, but our morals are no longer anchored in absolute principles. They are pragmatic and consequentialist. In pagan societies, religions deal with rituals; it is the state that decrees and governs morality. This is what we see in post-modern Western societies today.

Read the rest as she does not give, pat, political responses and I think some of her conclusions are at odds with a certain evangelical, Christian mindset that assumes political action can stave off re-paganization.

[temporal1]

Hold on Professor Keiser!
i’m still reading about the “French Laïcité model” ..

Where is Knight when we need him?!

[HondurasKeiser]

This next piece from Liel Leibovitz at Commentary Magazine probably hits a little too hard at Progressive political positions for some here but I think the heart of the piece is certainly germane for the purpose of unpacking the pagan worldview:

Leaving permutations and particularities to the pedants, though, it’s quite possible to observe paganism as one sweeping vista and find common themes and threads that haunt us still. Let us begin: Just what do pagans believe? The answer, while wonderfully complex, may be distilled to the following principle: 'Nothing is true, everything is permitted.'..... [This] dictum perfectly captures the soul of paganism, illuminated by the idea that no fixed system of belief or set of solid convictions ought to constrain us as we stumble our way through life.

To the pagans, change is the only real constant. Just consider the heathens of old: Believing, as they did, in the radical duality of body and spirit, they enjoyed watching their gods breathe the latter into a wide array of incarnations. To please himself or trick his followers, a god could become a swan or a stone, manifest himself as a river or adopt whatever shape suited his schemes. Ovid, the greatest of Pagan poets, captured this logic perfectly when he began his Metamorphoses with a simple declaration of his intentions: In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas corpora, or, “I am about to speak of forms changing into new entities.” This was not understood as fickle behavior by the gods’ cheerful followers. To the contrary. With no dogma to uphold, the sole job of deities was simply to be themselves. And the more solipsistic a deity chose to be, the better. Nothing, after all, radiates inimitable individuality more than marching to the beat of your own drum and no other.

...lacking a prescribed credo passed down from generation to generation, pagans began answering this question by casting off the tyranny of fixity. The gods are precarious and ever-changing? Let us follow their example! We should sanctify each sharp transformation in our behaviors and beliefs not as collective madness but as a sign of the wisdom of growth.

Still, change alone does not a belief system make, and pagans, despite differences galore, unite by providing similar answers to three seminal questions: what to do about strangers, how to think about nature, and how to please the gods.

1. First, the question of difference. What to do with those who are not like us? Easy enough, argued the pagans: Observe any group of humans, no matter how small, and you’ll see it striving to differentiate itself from the group next door. The nomadic Bedouins expressed this idea neatly in an idiom: me and my brothers against our cousins, us and our cousins against our neighbors. Tell children at summer camp that a color war’s afoot, and pretty soon Team Red is likely to develop healthy disdain for Team Blue. Rather than seek to transcend this basic instinct, the pagans sanctified it: It wasn’t for nothing that the Slavs, for example, named their top god Perun, an Indo-European word meaning to strike and splinter, and portrayed him as swinging a mighty axe and engaging in ongoing battles with his fellow divines.

2.Next, then, the pagans turn their lonely eyes toward nature, asking themselves how to understand the creations in their midst. Here, too, a relatively straight forward answer presents itself immediately: If the boundaries between the human world, the natural world, and the divine world aren’t clearly defined—if Zeus, say, can transform himself into a beautiful white bull so that he may rape Princess Europa—then nature should be revered as the repository of divine revelation and rebirth. The Roman historian Tacitus, for example, tells us that the ancient Germanic tribes often worshipped in groves rather than temples. It’s easy to figure out why: Observe the oak in winter, and it stands, barren and leafless, a pillar of death. Visit it some weeks later, when spring is in full bloom, and you see it flourish again. The oak, like the gods, is change embodied, and therefore deserving of worship.

3.But if pagans have always found the questions of how to treat others and how to live in nature relatively uncomplicated, the third question—that of how to please the gods—is infinitely more shaded. What do the gods want? Study pagan mythologies and you’ll emerge none the wiser, in part because the gods, like their human worshippers, seem to consist of little more than appetites and caprices. But while they may not be understood, they have to be appeased—and this left classical pagans with a question of a more practical order, namely what might they possess that the all-powerful deities could possibly want.

Gold, silver, and other dear things were frequently the answer, but rarely exclusively: Being the creators of the natural world, after all, the gods could hardly care that much about things that they can easily forge themselves, ex nihilo, by virtue of their divine will. And so the pagans scanned the horizon for something truly precious and exquisite, something whose sacrifice would be an unmistakable sign of devotion. And, across time and across cultures, they alighted on exactly the same thing: kids.

At once the embodiment of innocence and the object of our deepest and most sincere emotions, children, the most vulnerable of mortals, were the ultimate offering to the gods—proof that the pagan believer was so certain in his belief that he would offer up his own offspring to show the gods the strength of his faith, appeasing them and avoiding potential punishment. So prevalent among the heathens of antiquity was the practice of child sacrifice that the Torah issued a strongly worded prohibition against it, in Leviticus 18:21: “Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molek.”

and a note on the rise of paganism in the U.S.:

In 1990, scholars from Trinity College set out to learn just how many of their fellow Americans practiced some form of pagan religion. The numbers were unsurprisingly small: about 8,000, or enough to pack your average Journey reunion concert. But the researchers asked again in 2008, and this time, 340,000 Americans said yes to paganism. A decade later, the Pew survey posed the same question, and, if it is to believed, there are now about 1.5 million Americans professing an array of pagan persuasions, from Wicca to the Viking lore, making paganism one of the nation’s fastest-growing persuasions. So fast-growing, in fact, that my colleague Maggie Phillips recently reported in Tablet magazine about the thriving, and officially recognized, pagan faith groups within the U.S. Army. “What’s important now,” one of its leaders, Sergeant Drake Sholar, told Phillips, “is showing religious respect and understanding across the board as Norse Pagans, or Heathens, return to a distinguishable religious practice.”

[temporal1]

mind blown

[Josh]

One of the most shocking things to me is families that I grew up with who thought they were conservative, homeschooling Christians whose children now practice outright paganism. And by that I mean, casting spells, brewing potions, growing a "witch's garden", and publicly claiming to practice "witchcraft".

In one case, a young mother practices it because she believes she can protect her children so she can avoid having a stillborn and a young child (her sibling) die like her mother experienced. This strikes me as very similar to the reasons heathen peoples practice paganism.

More interestingly, these people seem to see no problem blending being both Christian and practicing witchcraft.

[Neto]

Perhaps I should not be posting yet, as I will not have time to listen and read the things you've already put up here until later, but one of my first questions would be to ask what is the difference, if any, between animism and paganism.

A quick on-line search brought up the following:

Pagan vs animism
A Pagan is a person who believes that everything has a soul or spirit. This is called Animism, and all Pagan religions share this belief. Rivers, animals, rocks, trees, land are all filled with there [sic] own unique spirits for people who are Pagans.

Religious beliefs like that of the pre-Christian Banawa are normally classified as animistic, but their traditional beliefs do not really fit the description above. Mainly, they would not say that "everything has a soul or spirit". It is very easy to tell, just by the grammatical differences in the way that animate vs inanimate "things" are classified. For one example - the "heavenly bodies". The sun and the stars are animate beings, while the moon is not. (My memory fails me at the moment in regards to the planet Venus, which is the only other heavenly body that has a distinctive name.) Trees and other plants are also specifically not animate. (There is no plural form for any inanimate thing.)

To further confuse the issue, (in the traditional Banawa belief system) a spirit MAY inhabit a place like a water falls, or a deep pool. Also animals, but I never heard any suggestion that a spirit would inhabit a tree.

[HondurasKeiser]

Perhaps I should not be posting yet, as I will not have time to listen and read the things you've already put up here until later, but one of my first questions would be to ask what is the difference, if any, between animism and paganism.

A quick on-line search brought up the following:

Pagan vs animism
A Pagan is a person who believes that everything has a soul or spirit. This is called Animism, and all Pagan religions share this belief. Rivers, animals, rocks, trees, land are all filled with there [sic] own unique spirits for people who are Pagans.

Religious beliefs like that of the pre-Christian Banawa are normally classified as animistic, but their traditional beliefs do not really fit the description above. Mainly, they would not say that "everything has a soul or spirit". It is very easy to tell, just by the grammatical differences in the way that animate vs inanimate "things" are classified. For one example - the "heavenly bodies". The sun and the stars are animate beings, while the moon is not. (My memory fails me at the moment in regards to the planet Venus, which is the only other heavenly body that has a distinctive name.) Trees and other plants are also specifically not animate. (There is no plural form for any inanimate thing.)

To further confuse the issue, (in the traditional Banawa belief system) a spirit MAY inhabit a place like a water falls, or a deep pool. Also animals, but I never heard any suggestion that a spirit would inhabit a tree.

Thank you, Neto. Do you think the Banawa animism as you understand it maps well with Leibovitz's 3 categories for describing the similar characteristics of a pagan worldview?

[temporal1]

Neto and HK. i’m in heaven.