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.”
