Pagan History

Pagan History

Paganism is a loose word for the large variety of polytheistic, shamanistic, and mystical non-monotheistic religions. Paganism exists in all cultures, from paleolithic to technological, but has historically waxed and waned. The ancient Egyptians are an example of a highly pagan society; so are the ancient Romans; and all paleolithic cultures from the Old Stone Age to the present have strong pagan elements. An example of a less pagan culture would be the West for the last thousand years or so, since the centuries following the Fall of Rome. The domination of the Middle East by Christians and Moslems has also largely shut out paganism.

Characteristic of paganism is a tolerance for other paganistic ideas, even those that literally contradict one's own. Such persecutions as have been directed against paganistic religions by each other are by-products of political struggles and mass population movements rather than ideologically motivated. The same is to some extent true of early Judaism, which was the direct inheritor to the traditions of a strongly pagan society. A slave revolt apparently led to a few hundred thousand slaves with no place to live; to get them, they butchered the inhabitants of pagan cities and took up residence in the cities themselves. They invoked their war god to justify this action. Similarly, when the beginnings of the modern Greek mythology were laid down, it was as a result of invading Northern barbarians supplanting the earlier (and somewhat gynocentric) Titan mythology with their imported religion, which grew more refined and less aggressive later on, as happened with Judaism.

Before it came under the thumb of monotheism, the West was dominated by the highly civilized Roman culture. The Roman Republic and Empire were characterized by an unusually large number of religions together in a single social whole, frequently sharing the same geography and even the same temples. This explicitly eclectic (or "syncretistic", as it is more usually known in studies of the Romans) synthesis is more similar to modern neo-paganism than any other form of historical paganism I know of. However, it ended after the Christian emperors took over and Rome fell.

The post-pagan West experienced frequent resurgences of paganism in various forms. If we date this at 1000 CE for convenience, we see first the Inquisitorial perio...

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...ents of intent, often incorporating powerful symbolism. They have literary value in this respect; and literary or other artistic value is a type of spiritual value.

Modern religious paganism has made a unique contribution. No eclectic/pagan movement of the historical past has brought the contributions of paleolithic shamanism into the fold as well as has neo-paganism. In large part this is due to a rise in knowledge of such religions at the same time as the rise of neo-paganism. This is an extremely valuable contribution; in shamanism lies the roots of all human religion. A coven meeting still resembles a Golden Dawn lodge considerably more than it does a shamanistic lodge, despite the valuable addition of techniques originating in shamanism.

This has been a neccessarily brief and incomplete account. I have not mentioned Rabelais, the Rosicrucians, the decadent poets, Nietzsche, de Sade, Levi, Gurdjieff, James, Augustine, Shakespeare, Masonry, Paine, American utopian communities, Jung, Merlin, art and spirit, or Gnosticism, all of which are vital elements of the story; I have given short shrift to the psychical movement and its influence on nineteenth and twentieth century