Paganism broadly refers to spiritual beliefs and practices that fall outside the major Abrahamic religions, primarily Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Historically, it describes ancient polytheistic and nature-worshipping religions, and in modern contexts, it encompasses contemporary nature-based spiritual movements like Wicca and Druidism.
Key Aspects and Definitions
- Historical Origins: The term comes from the Latin paganus, meaning “rustic,” “villager,” or “country dweller”. Early Christians used it to describe those who held onto indigenous, pre-Christian traditions in rural areas while the cities converted.
- Polytheism and Pantheism: Pagan traditions typically recognize multiple deities (polytheism) or view the divine as synonymous with the universe and the natural world (pantheism).
- Reverence for Nature: A central tenet of most Pagan belief systems is a deep, sacred connection to the earth, the environment, and the changing cycles of the seasons.
- Non-Authoritarian Structure: Paganism rarely has a single central text or overarching religious leader. Instead, practitioners often focus on individual experience, personal ethics, and harmony with the natural world.
Types of Paganism
Modern Paganism (often called Neopaganism) is an umbrella term for a wide variety of traditions:
- Reconstructionist: Traditions that attempt to revive specific historical religions, such as Hellenism (Greek) or Heathenry (Norse).
- Wicca: A prominent contemporary movement that blends ancient traditions with modern witchcraft, emphasizing ritual, nature worship, and the balance of male and female divine energies.
- Eclectic: Practices where individuals draw from a variety of different spiritual paths, folklore, and traditions to create a personalized belief system.
For more information on the origins of the word, check out the Merriam-Webster Paganism Definition. If you are looking for introductory resources on contemporary practices, you can explore guides from The Pagan Federation.
Paganism – taken from the Catholic Dictionary
Paganism, in the broadest sense includes all religions other than the true one revealed by God, and, in a narrower sense, all except Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism. The term is also used as the equivalent of Polytheism (q.v.). It is derived from the Latin pagus, whence pagani (i. e. those who live in the country), a name given to the country folk who remained heathen after the cities had become Christian. Various forms of Paganism are described in special articles (e.g. Brahminism, Buddhism, Mithraism); the present article deals only with certain aspects of Paganism in general which will be helpful in studying its details and in judging its value.
I. CLAIMS OF PAGANISM TO THE NAME OF RELIGION
INFLUENCE ON PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE
Historians of religion usually assume that religions developed upwards from some common germ which they call Totemism, Animism, Solar or Astral Myth, Nature Worship in general or Agrarian in particular, or some other name implying a systematic interpretation of the facts. We do not propose to discuss, theologically, philosophically, or even historically, the underlying unity, or universal originating cause, of all religions, if any such there be. History as a matter of fact presents us in each case with a religion already existing, and in a more or less complicated form. Somewhere or other, some one of the human elements offered as universal, necessary, and sufficient germ of the developed religion, can, of course, be found. But we would point out that, in the long run, this element was not rarely a cause of degeneration, not progress; of lower forms of cult and creed, not pure Monotheism. Thus it is almost certain that Totemism went for much in the formation of the Egyptian religion. The animal-standards of the tribes, gradually and partially anthropomorphized, created the jackal-, ibis-, hawk-headed gods familiar to us. But there is no real trace of the evolution from Zoolatry to Polytheism, and thence to Monotheism. The monotheistic records are more sublime, more definite in the earlier dynasties. Atum, the object of a superb worship, has no animal equivalent. Even the repression of popular follies by a learned official caste failed to check the tendency towards gross and unparalleled Zoolatry, which was food for Roman ridicule and Greek bewilderment, and stirred the author of Wisdom (xi, 16) to indignation (Loret, “L’Egypte au temps du totemisme”, Paris, 1906; Cappart in “Rev. d’hist. relig.”, LI, 1905, p. 192; Clement Alex., “Pæd.”, III, ii, 4; Diodorus Siculus, I, lxxxiv; Juvenal, “Satires”, xv).
Animism also entered largely into the religions of the Semites. Hence, we are taught, came Polyd monism, Polytheism, Monotheism. This is not correct. Polyd monism is undoubtedly a system born of belief in spirits, be these the souls of the dead or the hidden forces of nature. It “never exists alone and is not a ‘religious’ sentiment at all”: it is not a degenerate form of Polytheism any more than its undeveloped antecedent. Animism, which is really a na ve philosophy, played an immense part in the formation of mythologies, and, combined with an already conscious monotheistic belief, undoubtedly gave rise to the complex forms of both Polyd monism and Polytheism. And these, in every Semitic nation save among the Hebrews, defeated even such efforts as were made (e.g. in Babylon and Assyria) to reconstitute or achieve that Monotheism of which Animism is offered as the embryo. These facts are clearly indicated and summed up in Lagrange’s “Etudes sur les Religions s mitiques” (2nd ed., Paris, 1904).
Nature Worship generally, and Agrarian in particular, were unable to fulfil the promise they appeared to make. The latter was to a large extent responsible for the Tammuz cult of Babylon, with which the worships of Adonis and Attis, and even of Dionysus, are so unmistakably allied. Much might have been hoped from these religions with their yearly festival of the dying and rising god, and his sorrowful sister or spouse: yet it was precisely in these cults that the worst perversions existed. Ishtar, Astarte, and Cybele had their male and female prostitutes, their Galli: Josiah had to cleanse the temple of Yahweh of their booths (cf. the Qedishim and Kelabim, Deut., xxiii, 17; II Kings, xxiii, 7; cf. I Kings, xiv, 24; xv, 12), and even in the Greek world, where prostitution was not else regarded as religious, Eryx and Corinth at least were contaminated by Semitic influence, which Greece could not correct. “Although the story of Aphrodite’s love”, says Dr. Farnell, “is human in tone and very winning, yet there are no moral or spiritual ideas in the worship at all, no conception of a resurrection that might stir human hopes. Adonis personifies merely the life of the fields and gardens that passes away and blooms again. All that Hellenism could do for this Eastern god was to invest him with the grace of idyllic poetry” (“Cults of the Greek States”, II, 649, 1896-1909; cf. Lagrange, op. cit., 220, 444 etc.)
Mithraism (q.v.) is usually regarded as a rival to nascent Christianity; but Nature Worship ruined its hopes of perpetuity. “Mithra remained”, says S. Dill, “inextricably linked with the nature-worship of the past.” This connexion cleft between it and purer faiths “an impassable gulf” which meant its “inevitable defeat” (“Roman Soc. from Nero to Aurel.”, London, 1904, pp. 622 sqq.), and, “in place of a divine life instinct with human sympathy, it had only to offer the cold symbolism of a cosmic legend” (ibid.). Its very adaptability, M. Cumont reminds us, “prevented it from shaking itself free from the gross or ridiculous superstitions which complicated its ritual and theology; it was involved, in spite of its austerity, in a questionable alliance with the orgiastic cult of the mistress of Attis, and was obliged to drag behind it all the weight of a chimerical or hateful past. The triumph of Roman Mazdeism would not only have ensured the perpetuity of all the aberrations of pagan mysticism, but of the erroneous physical science on which its dogma rested.” We have here an indication why religions, into which the astral element entered largely, were intrinsically doomed. The divine stars that ruled life were themselves subject to absolute law. Hence relentless Fatalism or final Scepticism for those sufficiently educated to see the logical results of their mechanical interpretation of the universe; hence the discrediting of myth, the abandonment of cult, as mendacious and useless; hence the silencing of oracle, ecstasy, and prayer; but, for the vulgar, a riot of superstition, the door new opened to magic which should coerce the stars, the cult of hell, and honour for its ministers — things all descending into the Satanism and witchcraft of not un-recent days. Even the supreme and solar cult reached not Monotheism, but a splendid Pantheism. A sublime philosophy, a gorgeous ritual, the support of the earthly Monocracy which mirrored that of heaven, a liturgy of incomparable solemnity and passionate mysticism, a symbolism so pure and high as to cause endless confusion in the troubled mind of the dying Roman Empire between Sun-worship and the adorers of the Sun of Righteousness — all this failed to counteract the aboriginal lie which left God still linked essentially to creation. (See F. Cumont, “Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain”, 2nd ed., Paris, 1909, especially cc. v, vii-viii; “Le mysticisme astral”, Brussels, 1909, invaluable for references and bibliography; “Textes et Monuments . . . relatifs aux Myst res de Mithra”, I, 1899, II, 1896; “Théol. solaire du paganisme rom.”, Paris, 1909.) We do not hint that these elements which have been assigned as the origin of an upward revolution have always, or only, been a cause of degeneration: it is important to note, however, that they have been at times a germ of death as truly as of life.
II. SOCIAL ASPECT
Christianity first and alone of religions has preached, as one of its central doctrines, the value of the individual soul. What natural religion already, but ineffectually implied, Christianity asserted, reinforced, and transmuted. The same human nature is responsible at once for the admirable kindnesses of the pagan, and for the deplorable cruelties of Christian men, or groups, or epochs; the pagan religions did little, if anything, to preserve or develop the former, Christianity waged ceaseless battle against the latter. As for woman, the promiscuity which is the surest sign of her degradation never existed as a general or stable characteristic of primitive folk. In China and Japan, Buddhism and Confucianism depressed, not succoured her; in ancient Egypt, her position was far higher than in late; it was high too among the Teutons. Even in historic Greece as in Rome, divorce was difficult and disgraceful, and marriage was hedged about with an elaborate legislation and the sanctions of religion. The glimpses we have of ancient matriarchates speak much for the older, honourable position of women; their peculiar festivals (as in Greece, of the Thesmophoria and Arrephoria; in Rome, of the Bona Dea) and certain worships, as of the local Korai or of Isis, kept their sex within the sphere of religion. As long, however, as their intrinsic value before God was not realized, the brute strength of the male inevitably asserted itself against their weakness; even Plato and Aristotle regarded them more as living instruments than as human souls; in high tragedy (an Alcestis, an Antigone) or history (a Cloelia, a Camilla), there is no figure which can at all compare, for religious and moral influence, with a Sara, a Rachel, an Esther, or a Deborah. It is love for mother, rather than for wife, that Paganism acknowledges (see J. Donaldson, “Woman in anc. Greece and Rome, etc…. among the early Christians”, London, 1907; C. S. Devas, “Studies of Family Life”, London, 1886; Daremberg and Saglio, “Gynæceum”, etc.).
Essentially connected with the fate of women is that of children. Their charm, pathos, possibilities had touched the pagan (Homer, Euripides, Vergil, Horace, Statius), even the claim of their innocence to respect (Juvenal). Yet too often they were considered merely as toys or the destined support of their parents, or as the hope of the State. With Christianity, each becomes a soul, infinitely precious for God’s sake and its own. Each has its heavenly guardian, and for each death is better than loss of innocence. Education, in the fullest sense, was created by Christianity. The elaborate schemes of Aristotle and Plato are subordinated to state interest. Though based upon “sacred” books, education in ancient times, when organized, found these highly mythological, as in Greece or Rome, or rationalized, as in Confucian spheres of influence. Both Greeks and Romans attached great importance to a complete education, supported it with state patronage (the Ptolemies) state initiative and direction (the Antonines), and conceived for it high ideals (the “turning of the soul’s eye towards the light”, Plato, “Republic”, 515 b); yet, failing to appreciate the value of the individual soul, they made education in fact merely utilitarian, the formation of a citizen being barely more complete than under the narrow and rigid systems of Sparta and Crete. The restriction, in classical Greece, of education among women to the Hetairai is a fact significant of false ideal and disastrous in results (J. B. Mahaffy, “Old Gk. Educ.”, London, 1881; S. S. Laurie, “Historical Survey of Pre-Christian Educ.”, London, 1900; L. Grasberger, “Erziehung u. Unterricht im klass. Alterum”, Würzburg, 1864-81; G. Boissier, “L’instruct. publique dans l’empire romain.” in “Rev. de Deux Mondes”, March, 1884; 3. P. Rossignol, “De l’educ. des hommes et des femmes chez les anciens”, Paris, 1888).
Error in education was conditioned, we saw, by error of political ideal. No doubt, all the older polities were sanctioned directly by religion. The local god and the local ruler were, for the Semites, each a melek (king), a baal (proprietor), and their attributes and qualification almost fused. Or, the ruling dynasty descended remotely, or immediately, from a god or hero, making the king divine; so the Mikado, the Ionian and Doric overlords. Especially the Orient went this way, most notably Egypt. The Chinese emperor alone might pray to the Sublime Ruler whose son he was. Rome deifies herself and her governors, and the emperor-cult dominates army and province, and welds together aristocracy and the masses (J. G. Frazer, “Early Hist. of the Kingship”, London, 1905; Maspero, “Comment Alex. devint Dieu en Egypte”; Cumont, “Testes et Monuments de Mithra”, I, p. ii, c. iii; J. Toutain, “Cultes paiens dans l’emp. rom.”, I, Paris, 1907). It is hard to judge of the practical effects; obviously autocracy profited, the development of obedience, loyalty, courage in the governed (Rome; Japan) being undoubted. Yet the system reposed upon a lie. The scandals of the court, the familiarities of the camp, the inevitable accidents of human life, dulled the halo of the god-king. Far more stable were the organizations resulting from the subtle polities devised by Greek experiment and speculation, and embodied in Roman law. Aristotle’s political philosophy, almost designed — as Plato’s frankly was — for the city state, was carried on through the Stoic vision of the City of Zeus, of world-empire, into the concrete majesty of Rome, which was itself to pass, when confronted in Christianity with that individual conscience it would not recognize, into the Civitas Dei of an Augustine. Aristotle and Plato survived in Aquinas, the Stoic vision in Dante; Gregory VII reproduced, in his age and manner, the effective work of an Augustus. And of it all the soul was that Kingdom, Hebrew-born, which, spiritualized by Christ and preached by Paul, has been a far mightier force for civilization than ever was the polis of the Greeks. As long as the ultimate source of authority, the inalienable rights of conscience, and the equality of all in a Divine sonship were unrealized, no true solution of the antinomy of state and individual, such as Paul could offer (Rom., xiii etc.) was possible. [Cf. E. Barker, “Polit. Thought of Plato and Aristotle”, London, 1906, esp. pp. 237-50, 281-91, 119-61, 497-515; G. Murray, “Rise of the Gk. Epic.”, Cambridge, 1907; P. Allard, “Ten Lectures on the Martyrs”, tr. (London, 1907); Idem, “Les Persécutions” (Paris, 1885-90); Sir W. Ramsay’s books on St. Paul, esp. “Pauline Studies” (London, 1906); “Paul the Traveller” (1897); “Ancient King Worship”, C.C. Lattey, S.J., English C.T.S.]
In these systems, the weakest necessarily went to the wall. Even the good Greek legislation on behalf of orphans, wards, the aged, parents, and the like; even the admirable instinct of aidos which shielded the defenceless, the suppliant, the stranger, the “stricken of God and afflicted”, could not (e.g.) stop the exposition of sickly or deformed infants (defended even by Plato), or render poverty not ridiculous, suffering not merely ugly, death not defiling. Yet the sober religion of the Avesta preaches charity and hospitality, and these, the latter especially, were recognized Greek virtues. In proportion as travel widened minds, and ideals became cosmopolitan, the barbarian became a brother; under the Antonines charity became official and organized. Always, in the Greek world, the temples of Æsculapius were hospices for the sick. Yet all this is as different in motive, and therefore in practical effect, from the “mutual ministry of love” obligatory within the great family of God’s children, as is the counterpart of Christian self-sacrifice, Buddhist Altruism. (Cf. L. de la V. Poussin, “Bouddhisme”, Paris, 1909, especially pp. 7-8, where he quotes Oldenberg, “Buddhismus u. christliche Liebe” in “Deutsche Rundschau”, 1908, and “Orientalischen Relig.”, pp. 58, 266 sqq., 275 sqq.) In slavery, of course, a chasm is cleft between Paganism and Christianity. By proclaiming the rights of conscience and the brotherhood of men, Christianity did for the slave what could never have been accomplished by demanding the instant and universal abolition of slavery, thereby risking the dislocation of society. In Christ, a new relation of master to man springs up (I Cor., vii, 21; I Tim., vi, 2): the Epistle to Philemon becomes possible. Yet while it is true that in many ways the slave’s lot might be miserable (the ergastulum), and inhuman (the Roman slave might technically not marry), and immoral (Petronius: “nil turpe quod dominus jubet”), yet here too, human nature has risen above its own philosophies, laws, and conventions. Kindness increases steadily: even Cato was kind; social motives (Horace), philosophical considerations (Seneca), sheer legislation (already under Augustus), devotion (at Delphi, slaves are manumitted to Apollo: contrast the beautiful Christian emancipation in Ennodius, P. L., LXIII 257; sentiment, and even law protected the slaves’ tomb or loculus) answered the promptings of gentle hearts. The contubernium became parallel to marriage; nationality never of itself meant slavery; education could make friends of master and man (“loco filii habitus”, says one inscription); Seneca generalizes: “homo res sacra homini; servi, humiles amici.” But not all the sense of the “dignity of man”, taught by the Roman comedians and philosophers, could supply even the emancipating principles, far less the force, of Christian equality in the service of God and the fellowship of Christ (H. A. Wallon, “Hist. de l’Esclavage de l’Antiq.”, Paris, 1847; Boeckh, “Staatshaushaltung d. Athener.”, I, 13; C. S. Devas, “Key en.” (1906), 143-150 and c. v; P. Allard, “Les Esclaves chrét.”, Paris, 1876; O. Boissier, “Relig. romaine”, II, Paris, 1892).
III. ART AND RITUAL
Omnia plena deo: the nearer God is realized to be, the richer the efflorescence of religious art and ritual; and the purer the concept of His nature, the nobler the sense-worship that greets it. Hence the world’s grandest art has grown round Christ’s Real Presence, though Christ said no word of art. Thus, heresy has always been iconoclastic; the distant God of Puritanism, the disincarnate Allah of Islam must be worshipped, but not in beauty. To Hindus, gods were near, but vile; and their art went mad. To the Greeks, save to a smaller band of mystics, whose enthusiasm annihilated external beauty in the effort after spiritual loveliness, all comeliness was bodily; hence the splendid soulless statues of gods (though for a few choice perceptions — Pausanias, Plutarch — the Olympian Zeus had “expression”, and conveyed divine significance); hence their treatment of the inanimate beauty of Nature was far less successful and profound than was that of the austere Hebrew, to whom, in his struggle against nature worship and idolatry, plastic art was forbidden, but whose nature-psalms rise higher than anything in Greek literature. The pure new spirit breathing in the art of the Catacombs disguises from us, at first, that its categories are all pagan — though in human models little was directly borrowed, the Orpheus, Hercules, Aristeas type are given to Christ; strange symbols (the disguised cross, the dolphin speared on trident) occur sporadically; “pagan” sarcophagi were doubtless bought direct from pagan warehouses; most startlingly is the difference felt in the spiritual treatment by early Christian Art of the nude (E. Müntz, “Etudes s. l’hist. de la peinture et de l’iconographie chrétienne”, Paris, 1886; A. Pératé, “L’archéologie chrét.”, Paris, 1892; Wilpert, “Roma Sotteranca: le pitture, etc.”, Rome, 1903).
Christian ritual developed when, in the third century, the Church left the Catacombs. Many forms of self-expression must needs be identical, in varying times, places, cults, as long as human nature is the same. Water, oil, light, incense, singing, procession, prostration, decoration of altars, vestments of priests, are naturally at the service of universal religious instinct. Little enough, however, was directly borrowed by the Church — nothing, without being “baptized”, as was the Pantheon. In all these things, the spirit is the essential: the Church assimilates to herself what she takes, or, if she cannot adapt, she rejects it (cf. Augustine, Epp., xlvii, 3, in P. L., XXXIII, 185; “Contra Faust.”, XX, xxiii, ibid., XLII, 387; Jerome, “Epp.”, cix, ibid., XXII, 907). Even pagan feasts may be “baptized”: certainly our processions of 25 April are the Robigalia; the Rogation days may replace the Ambarualia; the date of Christmas Day may be due to the same instinct which placed on 25 Dec., the Natalis invicti of the solar cult. But there is little of this; our wonder is, that there is not far more [see Kellner, “Heortologie” (Freiburg, 1906). See CHRISTMAS; EPIPHANY. Also Thurston, “Influence of Paganism on the Christian Calendar” in “Month” (1907), pp. 225 sqq.; Duchesne, “Orig. du Culte chrétien”, tr. (London, 1910) passim; Braun, “Die priestlichen Gewänder” (Freiburg, 1897); Idem, “Die pontificalen Gewänder” (Freiburg, 1898); Rouse, “Greek Votive Offerings” (Cambridge, 1902), esp. c.v]. The cult of saints and relics is based on natural instinct and sanctioned by the lives, death, and tombs (in the first instance) of martyrs, and by the dogma of the Communion of Saints; it is not developed from definite instances of hero-worship as a general rule, though often a local martyr-cult was purposely instituted to defeat (e.g.) an oracle tenacious of pagan life (P.G., L, 551; P. L., LXXII 831; Newman, “Essay on Development, etc.”, II, cc. ix, xii., etc.; Anrich, “Anfang des Heiligenkults, etc.”, Tübingen, 1904; especially Delehaye, “Légendes hagiographiques,” Brussels, 1906). Augustine and Jerome (Ep. cii, 8, in P. L., XXXIII, 377; “C. Vigil.”, vii, ibid., XXXIII, 361) mark wise tolerance: Duchesne [“Hist. ancienne de l’église”, I (Rome, 1308), 640; cf. Sozomen, “Hist. eccl.” VII, xx, in P. G., LXVII, 1480] reminds us of the occasional necessary repression: Gregory, writing for Augustine of Canterbury, fixes the Church’s principle and practice (Bede, “Hist. eccl.”, I, xxx, xxxii, in P. L., XCV, 70, 72). Reciprocal influence there may to some small extent have been; it must have been slight, and quite possibly felt upon the pagan side not least. All know how Julian tried to remodel a pagan hierarchy on the Christian (P. Allard, “Julien l’Apostat”, Paris, 1900).
IV. MORALITY, ASCESIS, MYSTICISM
For an appreciation of pagan religions in themselves, and for an estimate of their pragmatic value in life, it should be noted that, in proportion as a pagan religion caught glimpses of high spiritual flights, of ecstacy, penance, otherworldliness, the “heroic”, it opened the gates of all sorts of moral cataclysms. A frugi religio was that of Numa: the old Roman in his worship was cautissimus et castissimus. For him, Servus says, religion and fear (=awe) went close together. Pietas was a species of justice (filial, no doubt), but never superstitio. The ordinary man “put the whole of religion in doing things”, veiling his head in presence of the modest, featureless numina, who filled his world and (as their adjective-names show — Vaticanus, Argentarius, Domiduca) presided over each sub-section of his life. Later the Roman virtues, Fides, Castitas, Virtus (manliness), were canonized, but religion was already becoming stereotyped, and therefore doomed to crumble, though to the end the volatile Greeks (paides aei) marvelled at its stability, dignity, and decency. So too the high abstractions of the Gâthâs (Moral Law, Good Spirit, Prudent Piety etc., the Amesha-spentas of the Avesta to be — Obedience, Silent Submission, and the rest), especially the enormous value set by Persian ethic upon Truth (a virtue dear to Old Rome), witness to lives of sober, quiet citizenship, generous laborious, unimaginative, just to God and man. Exactly opposite, and disastrous, were the tendencies of the idealistic Hindu, losing himself in dreams of Pantheism, self-annihilation, and divine union. Especially the worship of Vishnu (god of divine grace and devotion), of Krishna (the god so strangely assimilated by modern tendency to Christ), and of Siva (whence Saktism and Tantrism) ran riot into a helpless licence, which must modify, one feels, the whole national destiny. We cannot pass conventional judgments on these aberrations. It is easily conceded that pagans constantly lived better than their creed, or, anyhow, than their myth; blind terrors, faulty premisses, warped traditions originated, preserved, or distorted customs pardonable when we know their history: astounding contradictions coexist (the ritual murders and prostitution of Assyria, together with the high moral sense revealed in the self-examination of the second Shurpu tablet; the sanctified incest and gross myth of Egypt, with the superb negative Confession of the Book of the Dead). Even in Greece, the terrifying survivals of the old clithonic cults, the unmoral influence (for the most part) of the Olympian deities, the unexacting and far more popular cult of local or favourite hero (Herakles, Asklepios), are subordinate to the essential instincts of aidos, themis, nemesis (so well analysed by G. Murray, op. cit.), with their taboos and categorical imperatives, reflected back, as by necessity, to the expressed will of God. The religion of the ordinary man is perfectly and finally expressed in Plato’s sketch of Cephalus (Republic, init.) whose instincts and traditions had carried him, at life’s close, to a goal practically identical with that achieved by the philosophers at the end of their laborious inquiry.
All asceticism is, however, founded on a certain Dualism. In Persia, beyond all others dualist, the fight between Light and Darkness was noble and fruitful till it ran out into Manich ism and its debased allies. Certainly, from the East came much of the mystic Dualism, enjoining penance, focusing attention beyond the grave, preconizing purity of all sorts (even that abstention from thought which leads to ecstacy), which inspired Orphism, Pythagoreanism etc., and transfused the Mysteries. Till Plato, these notions achieved no high literary success. Æschylus preaches a sublime gospel: his austere series — Wealth, Self-sufficiency, Insolence, God-sent Infatuation, Ruin — has echoes of Hebrew prophecy and anticipates the “Exercises”; yet even his stern drasanti pathein is calmed into the pathein mathos — a true wisdom, repose, reconciliation. Even in this life Sophocles sees high laws living eternally in serene heaven, a joy for men of obedience. Euripides, in the chaos of his scepticism, lives in angry bewilderment, not knowing where to place his ideal, since Aphrodite and Artemis and the other world-forces are, for him, essentially at war. It is in Plato, far better than in the nihilist asceticisms of the East, that the note — not even yet quite true — of asceticism is struck. The body is our tomb (soma, sema); we must strip ourselves of the leaden weights, the earthy incrustations of life: the true life is an exercise in death, a homoiosis to theo, as far as may be; like the swans we sing when dying, “going away to God”, whose servants we are; “death dawns”, and we owe sacrifice to the Healer-hero for the cure of life’s fitful fever; “I have flown away”, (the Orphic magic tablets will cry) “from the sorrowful weary wheel” of existences.
Directly after Plato, the schools are coloured by his thought, if not its immediate heirs. Stoic and Epicurean really aimed at one thing when they preached their apatheia and ataraxia, respectively Anechou kai apechou: be the autarches, master of your self and fate. In Roman days of imperial persecution, this Stoicism, “touched with emotion”, passed into the beautiful, though ill-founded religion of Seneca: all philosophy became practical, an ars vivendi: Life is our ingens negotium, yet not to be despaired of. Heaven is not proud: ascendentibus di manum porrigent. Ano phronein, St. Paul was even then enjoining (Col., iii, 1,2), echoing Plato’s phronein athanata kai theia (Tim., 90 c), his tes ano hodou aei hexometha (Rep., 621 c.), his “life must be a flight” apo ton enthende ekeise (529 A), and Aristotle’s doctrine that a man must athanatein eph oson endechetai (Eth. N., X, vii), written so long ago. The more acute expressions of this mystical asceticism were much occupied with the future life and much fostered or provoked by the developed Mysteries. Impossible as it seems to find a race which believed in the extinction of the soul by death, survival was often a vague and dismal affair, prolonged in cavernous darkness, dust, and unconsciousness. So Babylon, Assyria, the Hebrews, earlier Greece. Odysseus must make the witless ghosts drink the hot blood before they can think and speak. At best, they depend on human attendance and even companionship; hence certain offerings and human sacrifice on the grave. Or they can, on fixed days, return, harry the living, seek food and blood. Hence expulsion-ceremonies, the Anthesteria, Lemuria, and the like. Kindlier creeds, however, are created, and, at the Cara Cognatio, the souls are welcomed to the places set for them, as for the gods, at the hearth and table, and the family is reconstituted in affection. Hopes and intuitions gather into a full and steady light, even before the inscriptions of the catacombs show that death was by now scarcely reason for tears at all. The “surer bark of a divine doctrine”, for which the anxious lad in the “Phædo” had sighed, had been given to carry souls to that “further shore” to which Vergil saw them reaching yearning hands.
But the Mysteries had already fostered, though not created, the conviction of immortality. They gave no revelations, no new and secret doctrine, but powerfully and vividly impressed certain notions (one of them, immortality) upon the imagination. Gradually, however, it was thought that initiation ensured a happy after-life, and atoned for sins that else had been punished, if not in this life, in some place of expiation (Plato, “Rep.”, 366; cf. Pindar, Sophocles, Plutarch). These mysteries usually began with the selection of initiandi, their preliminary “baptism”, fasting, and (Samothrace) confession. After many sacrifices the Mysteries proper were celebrated, including nearly always a mimetic dance, or “tableaux”, showing heaven, hell, purgatory; the soul’s destiny; the gods [so in the Isis mysteries. Appuleius (Metamorphoses) tells us his thrilling and profoundly religious experiences]. There was often seen the “passion” of the god (Osiris): the rape and return of Kore and the sorrows of Demeter (Eleusis), the sacred marriage (Here at Cnossus), or divine births (Zeus: Brimos), or renowned incidents of the local myth. There was also the “exhibition” of symbolical objects — statues usually kept veiled, mysterious fruits or emblems (Dionysus), an ear of corn (upheld when Brimos was born). Finally there was usually the meal of mystic foods — grains of all sorts at Eleusis, bread and water in the cult of Mithra, wine (Dionysus), milk and honey (Attis), raw bull’s flesh in the Orphic Dionysus-zagreus cult. Sacred formulæ were certainly imparted, of magical value.
There is not much reason to think these mysteries had a directly moral influence on their adepts; but their popularity and impressiveness were enormous, and indirectly reinforced whatever aspiration and belief they found to work on. Naturally, it has been sought to trace a close connexion between these rites and Christianity (Anrich, Pfleiderer). This is inadmissible. Not only was Christianity ruthlessly exclusive, but its apologists (Justin, Tertullian, Clement) inveigh loudest against the mysteries and the myths they enshrine. Moreover, the origin of the Christian rites is historically certain from our documents. Christian baptism (essentially unique) is alien to the repeated dippings of the initiandi, even to the Taurobolium, that bath of bull’s blood, whence the dipped emerged renatus in æternum. The totemistic origin and meaning of the sacred meal (which was not a sacrifice) wherein worshippers communicated in the god and with one another (Robertson Smith, Frazer) is too obscure to be discussed here (cf. Lagrange, “Etudes, etc.”, pp.257, etc.). The sacred fish of Atergatis have nothing to do with the origin of the Eucharist, nor, even probably, with the Ichthys anagram of the catacombs. (See Fr. J. Dölger: ICHTHYS, das Fischsymbol, etc., Rome, 1910. The anagram does indeed represent Iesous Christos Theou Houios Soter, the usual order of the third and fourth words being inverted owing to the familiar formula of the imperial cult; the propagation of the symbol was often facilitated owing to the popular Syrian fish-cult.) That the terminology of the mysteries was largely transported into Christian use (Paul, Ignatius, Origen, Clement etc.), is certain; that liturgy (especially of baptism), organization (of the catechumenate), disciplina arcani were affected by them, is highly probable. Always the Church has forcefully moulded words, and even concepts (soter, epipsanes, baptismos, photismos, teletes, logos) to suit her own dogma and its expression. But it were contrary to all likelihood, as well as to positive fact, to suppose that the adogmatic, mythic, codeless practices and traditions of Paganism could subdue the rigid ethic and creed of Christianity. [Consult Cumont, opp. cit.; Anrich, “Das antike Mysterienwesen, etc.” (Göttingen, 1894); O. Pfleiderer, “Das Christenbild, etc.” (Berlin, 1903), tr. (London, 1905). Especially Cabrol, “Orig. liturgiques” (Paris, 1906); Duchesne, “Christian Worship”, passim; Blötzer in “Stimmen aus Maria Laach”, LXXI, (1906), LXXII, (1907); G. Boissier, “Fin du Paganisme” (Paris, 1907), especially 1, 117 sqq.; “Religion Romaine”, passim; Sir S. Dill, op. cit.; C. A. Lobeck, “Aglaophamus” (1829); E. Rohde, “Psyche” (Tübingen, 1907); J. Reville, “Relig. ` Rome, s. l. Sevès;res” (Paris, 1886); J. E. Harrison, “Prolegomena” (Cambridge, 1908), especially the appendix; L. R. Farnell, op. cit., and the lexicons.]
As strange historical phenomena, we note therefore the coexistence of the highest with the lowest; the sublime tendency, the exiguum clinamen, and the terrific catastrophe: human nature buffeted by the craving for divine union, prayer, and purity, and by the sense of sin, the need of penance, and helplessness of its own powers. Hence, savagery and blood attend the communion-feasts, grotesque myths accompany the loftiest ideals, sensual reaction follows flagellation and fasting. And we admire how, in the Hebrew nation alone, the teleological ascent was constant; sobriety meant no lowered aim; passion implied no frenzy. In the strong grasp of the Christian discipline alone, the further antimony of self-abnegation and self-realization was practically and spiritually solved, though theoretically no adequate expression may ever be discovered for that solution. As historical problems remain certain connexions yet to be more accurately defined between the “dress” of Christian dogma and rite (whether liturgical, or of formula, or of philosophic category) and the circumambient religions. As historical certainty stands out the impassable gulf, in essence and origin, between the moral and religious systems of contemporary Paganism, especially of the Mysteries, and the Christian dogma and rite, formed on Palestinian soil with extraordinary rapidity, and rigidly exclusive of infection from alien sources. [Cf. L. Friedl nder, “Roman Life and Manners, etc.” (1909-10), espec. III, 84-313; O. Seeck, “Gesch. des Unterganges der antiken Welt”, I (Berlin, 1910), II (1901), III (1909), and appendices, B. Allo, “L’Evangile en face du syncr tisme palen” (Paris, 1910).]
V. RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY
This, we suppose, is the highest form of human reaction upon the religious datum of which the soul finds itself in possession, or at least may provide it with the purest, if not the most imperative, mode of worship. From this point of view the older rationalizing cosmogonies (as of Greece) are of little interest to us, save in so far as they witness already to that distinction between Zeus, supreme, and Fate, to which he yet is subject, an earlier unconscious attempt, perhaps, to reconcile the antinomies easily seized by true religious instinct in the popular traditions as to the gods. The mythological cosmogonies of Babylon and Assyria will, however, be of surpassing interest to the “comparative” student of Semitic religions. Noteworthy is the curve of Greek tendency — starting in Ionia, monistic, static, and anti-religious; grown dynamic in Heraclitus, whose Fire will pass, as Logos, into the Stoic system; transferred after the Persian wars to Attica, and profoundly dualized in Plato and Aristotle, whose concepts, however, of World-soul and of the Immanent Nature-force were powerful for all time. Through the Stoics, expressed in terms borrowed consistently from the exquisite Egyptian mythology, of Thot, of Osiris, and of Isis, this elaborate system of converging currents is synthesized in Plutarch, while from Plutarch’s sources Philo had drawn the philosophy in which he strove to see the doctrines of Moses, and in terms of which he struggled to express the Hebrew books.
Thus was it that the Logos, in theory, impersonal, immanent, blindly evolving in the world, became (transfigured on the one hand by pagan myth, and by too close contact, on the other, with the Angel of Yahweh and the ideals of the Alexandrian sapiential literature) so near to personification, that John could take the expression, mould it to his dogma, cut short all perilous speculation among Christians, and assert once and for all that the Word was made flesh and was Jesus Christ. Yet many of the earlier apologists were to make great trouble with their use of Platonic formul , and with the Logos. Two principles emerge as governing Greek thought — God must have the first place, ou gar parergou dei poieisthai ton theon, — and yet the nearer we approach Him, the less can we express Him, theon eurein te ergon, euronta de ekpherein en pollois adynaton (Pythagoras, Plato). To how many answers tentatively given does Euripides’s sad prayer witness: “O Thou that upholdest earth, and on earth hast Thy Throne, whoe’er Thou be, hard to guess, hard to know — Zeus, be Thou law of nature, or human thought of man, to Thee I pray: for Thou, moving in silent path, in justice guidest all things mortal.” To the immanent, supreme Force, consciously exacting service, or, at least, blindly imposing obedience, Greek philosophy almost inevitably came, and, in spite of itself and its sceptical and mechanical premises, amounted to a religion. In the mouth of Epictetus God is still sung triumphantly — “What can I do, I, a lame old man, save sing God’s praises, and call on all men to join me in my song?” — till the Stoic current died out in Aurelius, stunned to acquiescence, no more enthusiastically uniting himself to the great law of God in the world.
But into neo-Platonism, coloured with Persian, Jewish, and even Christian language, the movement passed; already, in the “Isis and Osiris” of Plutarch, a pure mysticism and sublimity of emotion barely to be surpassed had been achieved; in the “Metamorphoses” of Apuleius the syncretistic cult of the Egyptian goddess expresses itself in terms of tenderness and majesty that would fit the highest worship, and, in the concluding prayer of the Apuleian Hermes, an ecstatic adoration of God is manifested in language and thought never equalled, still less surpassed, save in the inspired writers of the Church. But all these efforts of pagan religious philosophy, committed nearly always to a rigid Dualism, entangled accordingly in mechanical and magic practices, tricked out in false mythology, risking and losing psychical balance by the use of a nihilist asceticism of sense and thought, died into the miserable systems of Gnosticism, Manich ism, and the later neo-Platonism; and the current of true life, renewed and redirected by Paul and John, passed into the writings of Augustine. [Consult Zeller, “Phil. der Griechen” (Leipzig, 1879), tr. (London, 1881); Idem, “Grundriss, etc.” (4th ed., Leipzig, 1908), tr. (London, 1892); Gomperz, “Gr. Denken” (Leipzig, 1903), tr. (London, 1901); cf. Flinders Petrie, “Personal Relig. in Egypt before Christianity” (New York, 1909), unsatisfactory; J. Adam, “Religious Teachers of Greece” (Edinburgh, 1908); Dill, op. cit.; Idem, “Roman Society in the last century of the Western Empire “, especially valuable as a picture of the tenacity of the dying pagan cult and thought; Spence, “Early Christianity and Paganism” (London, 1904); L. Habert, “Doctr. Relig. d. Philosophes Grecs” (Paris, 1909); L. Campbell, “Religion in Greek Literature” (London, 1898); E. Caird, “Evolution of Theology in Greek Philosophies” (Glasgow, 1904), “Evolution of Religion” (Glasgow, 1907); H. Pinard in “Revue Apologétique” (1909); S. Lebreton, “Origines du Dogme de la Trinité”, I (Paris, 1910), where the summits reached by Greek and Hellenized Jewish religious endeavour are appreciated. On the general question: de Broglie, “Problèmes et Conclusions de l’hist. des Religions”, Paris, 1889.]
VI. RELATIONS BETWEEN PAGANISM AND REVELATION
Ethnology and the comparative history of pagan religions do not impose upon us as an hypothesis that primitive Revelation which Faith ascertains to us. As a hypothesis it would, however, solve many a problem; it was the easier therefore for the Traditionalist of a century ago to detect its traces everywhere, and for Bishop Huet (“Demonstr. evangelica”, Paris, 1690, pp. 68, 153, etc.), following Aristobulus, Philo, Josephus, Justin, Tertullian, and many another disciple of the Alexandnians, to see in all pagan law and ritual an immense pillage of Jewish tradition, and, in all the gods, Moses. The opposite school has, in all ages, fallen into worse follies. Celsus saw in Judaism an “Egyptian heresy”, and in Christianity a Jewish heresy, on an equality with the cults of Antinous, Trophonius etc. (C. Cels., III, xxi); Calvin (Instit., IV, x, 12) and Middleton (A letter from Rome, etc., 1729) saw an exact conformity between popery and paganism. Dupuis and Creuze herald the modern race of comparative religionists, who deduce Christianity from pagan rites, or assign to both systems a common source in the human spirit. Far wiser in their generation were those ancient Fathers, who, not always seeing in pagan analogies the trickery of devils (Justin in P. G., VI, 364, 408, 660; Tertullian in P. L., I, 519, 660; II, 66; Firmicus Maternus, ibid., XII, 1026, 1030), disentangle, with a true historic and religious sense, the reasons for which God permitted, or directed, the Chosen People to retain or adapt the rites of their pagan ancestry or environment, on at least, reproaching them with this, recognize the facts (Justin, loc. cit., VI, 517; Tertullian, P. L., II, 333; Jerome, ibid., XXV, 194, XXIV, 733, XXII, 677, is striking; Eusebius, P. G., XXII, 521; especially Chrysostom, ibid., LVII, 66, and Gregory of Nazianzus, ibid., XXXVI, 161, who are remarkable. Cf. St. Thomas, I-II, Q. cii, a. 2). The relation of the Hebrew code and ritual to those of pagan systems need not be discussed here: the facts, and, a fortiori, the comparison and construction of the facts, are not yet satisfactorily determined: the admirable work of the Dominican school (especially the “Religions sémitiques” of M. J. Lagrange; cf. F. Prat, S.J., “Le Code de Sinai”, Paris, 1904) is preparing the way for more adequate considerations than are at present possible.
Whether Paganism made straight a path for Christianity may be considered from two points of view. Speaking from the standpoint of pure history, no one will deny that much in the antecedent or environing aspirations and ideals formed a præparatio evangelica of high value. “Christo jam tum venienti”, sang Prudentius, “crede, parata via est”. The pagan world “saw the road”, Augustine could say, from its hilltop. “Et ipse Pileatus Christianus est” said the priest of Attis; while, of Heraclitus and the old philosophers, Justin avers that they were Christians before Christ. Indeed, in their panegyric of the Platonic philosophy, the earlier Apologists go far beyond anything we should wish to say, and indeed made difficulties for their successors. Attention is nowadays directed, not only to the ideas of the Divine nature, the logos-philosophies, popular at the Christian era, but especially to those oriental cults, which, flooding down upon the shrivelled, officialized, and dying worship of the Roman or Hellenic-Roman world, fertilized within it whatever potentialities it yet contained of purity, prayer, emotional religion, other-worldliness generally. A whole new religious language was evolved, betokening a new tendency, ideal, and attitude; here too Christianity did not disdain to use, to transcend, and to transform.
Theologically, moreover, we know that God from the very outset destined man to a supernatural union with Himself. “Pure nature”, historically, has never existed. The soul is naturaliter Christiana. The truest man is the Christian. Thus the “human spirit” we have so often mentioned, is no human spirit left to itself, but solicited by, yielding to a resisting grace. Better than Aristotle guessed, mankind echei ti theion. For Christus cogitabatur. Aei ponei to zoon, said the same philosopher: and all creation groans and travails together until the full redemption; “all nations of men” were by God “made of one blood for to dwell on all the face of the earth . . . that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might grope after Him and find Him.” They failed, alas, though they had the epignosis of God (Rom., i, 32; cf. i, 19): the higher they went, the more terribly they fell: but, alongside of the tragic first chapter of Paul’s Epistle, is the second, and we dare not forget that the elect people, the Eldest Son, the heir of oracles and law fell equally or worse, and made the name of God to be blasphemed among the Gentiles it contemned (Rom., ii, 24). Yet for all that, God used the Jews in his plan, and none will dare to say He did not use the Gentiles. They reveal themselves in history as made for God, and restless till they rest in him. History shows us their effort, and their failure; we thank God for the one, and dare not scorn the other. God’s revelation has been in many fragments and in many modes; and to the pagan king, whose right hand He had holden, He declared: “For Jacob my servant’s sake, and Israel my chosen, I have called thee by thy name: I have surnamed thee, though thou, thou hast not known Me: I am Yahweh, and there is none else; beside Me there is no God: (yet) will I guide thee, though Me thou hast not known (ls., xlv, 4 sq.). For still Cyrus worshipped at the shrine of Ahura.
C.C. MARTINDALE
Transcribed by Douglas J. Potter
Dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XI
Copyright © 1911 by Robert Appleton Company
Online Edition Copyright © 1999 by Kevin Knight
Nihil Obstat, February 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor
Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
Paganism
Taken from the New Encyclopdia of the Occult (Greer)
Paganism (From Latin paganus, “rural”) A general term for the traditional polytheistic religious traditions of Europe and the Mediterranean basin. The word was later applied to all religions other than Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and has also been borrowed by many groups and people in the modern Neopagan revival, some of which claim connections to ancient Paganism.
The controversies and difficulties around the concept of Paganism begin with the word itself. The term paganus was originally applied by Christians to followers of the traditional religions of the Roman Empire; it was apparently never used by followers of these religions as a label for themselves. Nor is it clear at all why this particular label was chosen. It has been suggested that it referred to Pagans as rural rustics, “hicks,” who held to the older religions after the urban population had converted to Christianity; that it was a piece of Roman soldiers’ slang, meaning roughly “civilian,” and thus came to be used for someone not enrolled in the army of Christ; or that it meant followers of the religion of the pagus, the local unit ~of government in the Roman Empire. No firm decision among these possibilities has yet emerged from scholarly disputes.
Another major source of difficulty in understanding Paganism is that outside of the literate cultures of the Mediterranean basin, which left a number of theological and liturgical writings that still survive, nearly everything we know about Paganism was written down by Christian authors more interested in denouncing Pagan ideas and practices than understanding them. Some modern Pagan writers have compared the situation to trying to understand Jewish theology and practice if the only sources one had to go on were published by the Third Reich. Still, the clues that remain have been fitted together with the evidence of archeology and cross-cultural comparisons to make some conclusions fairly certain.
Perhaps the most important key to understanding ancient, classical and medieval Paganism was that there was never one “Paganism.” Rather there were “Paganisms” hundreds or even thousands of them, forming a wildly diverse patchwork of belief and practice that extended across the pre-Christian world. No single generalization is true of them all. Some worshipped Goddesses, while others did not. some were polytheistic, while others worshipped a single deity, and still others had object of worship that are difficult to fit into the modern category of “deity” at all.
Practice was a diverse as theology. While there were common patterns of ritual and devotion, every deity had his or her quirks and habits, and in many cases different temples had their own unique traditions of ceremony. In the Greco-Roman world, the focus of most surviving documentation, animal sacrifice was the most common form of Pagan ritual, and the scraps of information that survive about Celtic and Germanic Pagan ritual suggest that sacrificial offerings of various sorts were also central in these very different cultural settings; SEE SACRIFICE. Still, there were many other. traditional rites and practices in these Pagan areas, and even within the broad label of “animal sacrifice” there was constant variation. Elsewhere-for example, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, both of which contributed much to classical Pagan thought and practice-entirely different theological and ritual traditions flourished, and no doubt there were many other wildly different threads in the tapestry of ancient Paganism that have fallen through the gaps in historical records and are lost completely.
In such an environment, religious diversity ran riot. What can most confidently be said of classical Pagan religions, as they appear in the historical sources, is that they were deeply rooted in the life and traditions of local communities. Each city or rural area had its own particular gods and spirits, who were honored with their own traditional rites. Certain deities had a wider appeal and were popular across large regions, and a few such as the divine twins Castor and Pollux were all but universally revered across the classical world.
There was little if any sense of exclusiveness. Travelers routinely offered sacrifice to the gods of the towns they visited, and a priest or priestess of one divinity would as a matter of course take part in offerings to others. The political and economic structures of the classical world, in turn, were deeply intertwined with Pagan religious life; in Rome, for example, most political figures had religious duties, and the Senate usually met inside temples.
The dominant role of community in classical Paganism turned out to be one of its most serious weaknesses, once the stability of the Roman world began to break down. During the latter half of the third century, a period of severe economic and political crisis throughout the empire, records show that many Pagan religious organizations were severely affected. The Arval Brothers of Rome are one example of many. They were a college of twelve Pagan priests who worshipped the ancient goddess Dea Dia, using a litany dating from around the fifth century B.C.E.; according to legend they had been founded by Romulus himself. They lost three-fourths of their revenues in 241 C.E., struggled on until 304 when the last inscriptions of their activities are dated, and then apparently went out of existence.
Economic troubles of this sort had a major impact on the survival of Paganism, because they left Pagan religions vulnerable to the rise of a rival force. Christianity emerged in the course of the first century of the Common Era as a radical break with traditional Pagan ways. It rejected all gods besides its own, classifying them either as lifeless nonentities or as demonic forces-or sometimes, inconsistently, as both. It required its members to renounce many of the public ‘ceremonies and activities that kept the classical world functioning. It also urged members to recruit converts by any available means.
Christianity’s isolation from the wider community was a source of weakness in its earliest days, and fostered widespread suspicions that played a large part in spurring on the Pagan persecutions of Christianity. As the political and economic structures of the Roman world broke apart, however, this source of vulnerability turned into a source of strength. The collapse of other religious traditions left it an increasingly open field. By 312 C.E., the Christian church included a large enough fraction of the population of the empire that the Emperor Constantine legalized it in order to enlist its political support.
Constantine’s Edict of Milan was the first stage in a series of swings that convulsed the religious side of the Roman world. Under Constantine, the Christian church quickly gained wealth and political power, and began to use it to attempt to suppress other religious traditions. Au edict of Constantine’s successor Constantius in 341 banned sacrifices to Pagan gods; in 351 all Pagan temples were ordered closed, and entry to them was forbidden on pain of death. A decade later Constantius was succeeded by the Pagan emperor Julian, whose short reign saw a massive Pagan backlash against Christianity. This backlash was spearheaded by the rise of Platonist theurgy, a new religious and philosophical movement that sought to create a mystical Platonic theology in which all traditional Pagan observances could find a place. Led by major Platonist philosophers such as Iamblichus of Chalcis and Proclus, the theurgical movement provided the last systematic opposition to Christianity in the Roman world, and was strongly supported by Julian, himself a theurgist.
Julian’s death in 363 ushered in a short period of uneasy truce, but by 380 the Christians were secure enough in power to begin legal measures against Paganism once again, and the year 391 saw the ban on sacrifices renewed. By 435 offering sacrifices to the gods was a capital offense. In 571, Justinian completed the process by legislation that stripped civil rights from all non-Christians, barred Pagans from all teaching positions, and nullified any will that left anything to a Pagan person or organization.
There was also a great deal of direct violence against Pagans from the late fourth century onwards. Some of this was carried out by government troops acting under the new laws, but much more was unofficial, carried out by the Christian church itself. As Christianity grew in power and gained control over local law enforcement, mobs of monks became the shock troops of the new religious order, burning Pagan’ temples and attacking people who were known or suspected to be Pagans. One famous victim was the philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria, who was dragged from her chariot and hacked to pieces by a crowd of monks urged on by the Christian bishop of Alexandria. Her case was one of scores that can be traced in the records of the time.
Despite these pressures, Christianity was still a minority religion in the empire until after 450, and Paganism continued to hold fast in certain areas and in certain social milieus much longer. The upper classes remained largely Pagan well into the fifth century, defending their traditional faiths in the face of steadily increasing political and religious pressure. As late as 536, Pagans secretly opened the gates /of the ancient Temple of Janus to call down help from the gods when Rome was beseiged. A handful of important Pagan centers, including the Academy at Athens and the great temple of Isis at Philae in Egypt, remained publicly active into the sixth century, when they were finally closed by the Emperor Justinian.
Pagan practice endured longest in the countryside, where old habits died hard. In many regions of Italy, peasants kept offering sacrifices to their local gods dr-spite all the church could do; Christian writings from the fifth and sixth centuries express constant frustration at the persistence of Pagan cults in Tuscany and in the northern regions near the Alps. Gaul was similar, and Eligius of Noviomagus still found it necessary to denounce the worship of Roman gods, the veneration of springs and trees, and the celebration of the Pagan festival of the Kalends of January in Provence in the seventh century. Rural Greece was even more resolutely Pagan, and it was not until the ninth century that the last Pagan regions of Greece saw forced baptisms and the imposition of church hierarchy.
Outside of the area dominated by Roman culture, Christianity spread slowly at first. A few Germanic tribes, such as the Goths, were converted in the fourth century c.E., but the rest of northern and western Europe fell under Christian control more slowly. Much of France was still Pagan into the eighth century, western Germany and England until the ninth, Scandinavia until the eleventh, and Baltic countries such as Latvia and Lithuania until the eighteenth.
In the face of e strong Pagan presence in Europe, Christian miss’ naries developed an effective set of methods for seizing religious control over an area. The first priority’ was getting a local foothold via the construction of a monastery. Monastic schools, which offered the lure of literacy and classical education to the children of the local nobility, assisted with the next step, which was the conversion of the political leadership. The next stage involved legal measures to establish Christianity and prohibit other religions. Finally, as churches and monasteries were established throughout the new territory, Pagan religious practices could be suppressed more and more completely by persuasion or force. At any given time, different parts of Europe were at different stages in this process-with living Pagan traditions continuing until the last stage was finally complete.
This slow process left substantial areas of Europe largely Pagan until the high Middle Ages, as mentioned above, and might have been vulnerable to Pagan countermeasures if these had been carried out effectively. The Pagan religions, however, were never able to stage an effective counterattack. Their traditional tolerance of other gods and teachings left them constantly vulnerable to Christian incursions, and they lacked-even in the Roman world, where Pagan religions were most organized-the sort of self-supporting structure that allowed
Christianity to keep up a steady pressure toward universal control. Competing religions that did have solid organization and a willingness to reject Christianity outright. Islam, Judaism, and Manichaeism proved the point by surviving, in the first two cases, or going under only in the face of overwhelming violence, in the last.
The Pagan subcultures of Christian Europe can thus be traced with increasing difficulty up to the time of the Reformation, when the last traces died out amid the savage religious warfare and social upheavals of a chaotic age. The sources in any case are sparse, since literacy was almost entirely a Christian monopoly.
Most of the few solid sources of information on the survival of Pagan practices in medieval Europe are found in penitentials-handbooks meant for Christian priests, which gave detailed descriptions of common sins and the penances to be assigned to those who confessed to them. One particularly rich source is the Corrector of Burchard, bishop of Worms, which was written around A.D. 1000.
In Burchard’s time, centuries after the official Christianization of western Germany, peasants might still be caught making offerings to sacred springs and trees, worshipping the sun and the moon, or performing Pagan rituals at the wake for a dead person. The penances Burchard prescribed for these actions were relatively mild–a peasant who made an offering at a Pagan holy spring, for instance, would be absolved after thirty days’ penance of bread and water. (For the sake of comparison, adultery rated a full year on bread and water.)
The forms of Pagan practice listed in the penitentials, and other medieval sources, fall into a few clear categories. Magical rituals with Pagan or quasi-Pagan overtones, nearly all of them aimed at purely practical goals, formed one large category. Throughout the Middle Ages, huge amounts of once-Pagan folk magic remained in practice, much of it lightly Christianized by inserting the Trinity and the saints in place of Pagan gods and spirits, and the more Christian forms of this magic were accepted by most church officials as perfectly harmless. Overtly Pagan magic, on the other hand, was forbidden, and penalties for its practice gradually harshened until they were caught up in the frenzied witch hunts of the Burning Times.
Survivals of Pagan religious ritual, such as leaving offerings at holy places or celebrating festivals that were not part of the church calendar, formed a much smaller category of Pagan activities, and one that faded out relatively early. By the thirteenth century, such practices had been entirely absorbed into various forms of folk Christian practice, such as the veneration of local saints and holy relics.
A third category, found across Europe in one form or another, comprises a specific set of traditions that have only recently been explored in any detail. These first emerge in the penitential literature in scattered references from the tenth century, and play an important part in the genesis of the witch-hunting hysteria of the Burning Times. In these traditions, groups of people-most often, but not exclusively, women-took part in visionary journeys at night in the company of a mysterious goddess. SEE CANON EPISCOPI. It is difficult to connect this third category with older traditions of European Paganism, and they may have had another origin.
While some writers (see particularly Ginzburg 1991) argue that these accounts are records of archaic shamanistic traditions that had survived from the distant past, it is also possible that they were a new arrival on the European scene. Quite a few tribal peoples spilled out of the Asian steppes into Europe during the early Middle Ages, and might have brought shamanistic traditions of this sort with them. In any case, these traditions seem to have had a good deal to do with the origins of the legendary Witches’ Sabbath, but much less in common with any historically recorded Western Pagan tradition.
All these phenomena were mostly active in the early Middle Ages, and faded out of existence by the time of the Reformation. Traditions of folk magic and dissenting religion in western Europe from the early modern period onward have been documented in vast detail, but these show no trace of any coherent Pagan tradition of the sort claimed by some current Pagan revivalists. Rather, the gods and goddesses had become figures of literature, remembered mostly because educated people learned Latin (and sometimes Greek) and read ancient poetry that referred to them. Ironically, this turned out to be the foundation for the modern revival of Pagan worship, since the with the Scientific Revolution and was mostly forgotten old gods and goddesses remained widely enough known to attract new worshippers among urban intellectual circles as Christianity began to lose its grip on the Western world.
While it is just possible that some modern Neopagan movements have a direct historical connection to ancient Pagan religions, no serious evidence has yet been produced to document this. The evidence suggests, rather, that modern Neopaganism is a revival, not a continuation, and draws on older Pagan traditions primarily by way of literary sources.
It must be remembered, though, that the validity of the Neopagan movement does not depend on a continuous history. A revived religion can easily be as relevant, as meaningful, and as powerful as one with an uninterrupted history. The fact that the Pagan gods and goddesses were not worshipped for a time, as some modern Pagan theologians have pointed out, does not make them nonexistent or powerless, nor make reverence to them a waste of effort.
(Taken From: The New Encyclopedia of the Occult, John Michael Greer)
