This is the problem i have with this article, if not paganism itself. The writer is projecting onto an ancient belief system and over-reaching himself.
I can go along with the sense of ‘something being lost’ and feel there’s spiritual nourishment in nature, landscape and tradition. This in no way induces me to wish to ‘worship’ ancient human deities. Neither is it necessary, or even advisable, to do so.
I work with ceremonial stuff and exorcisms from the 18th century sometimes. It is fiendishly difficult. Yet the people who wrote that stuff were from the same religion I grew up in. And we have thousands of pages of their notes.
But it isn’t much help. We just cannot sufficiently put ourselves into the mindset of people from that era.
And, if we can’t do the 1770s, we certainly can’t do the 970s.
I think, among other things, the advent of the camera profoundly altered human self-perception and conceptions about the world.
I see the faces in colourised pics from the American Civil War and there’s just about the feeling that they have the same kind of conceptions as we do. Just about. It’s a thin strand. It’ll snap itself in a few years. Think that is about as far back as we are able to currently go.
Freemasonry (which neo-paganism is descended from) actually tells you in re-enactment or parable, that the ‘real secrets’ are lost.
And so those that are given to you are ‘substitute secrets’.
It’s a tangible warning that the substitutes, weak as they are, are what we have to make do with, rather than risk the dangers in trying to revive something older.
Thanks, not sure why I received so many downvotes for my comment. With the growing prevalence of printing presses in the 1600s literacy rates grew, but so too did the number of people who started to believe in demons and witches, thus giving rise to the holy wars and witch burnings that plagued Europe in the 17th century.
The internet is acting much the same way. Our digital literacy has increased but so too has the number of people who believe in whacky science and conspiracy theories.
They’re already planning that. Half the world’s food production relies on fertilisers made with fossil fuels.
If we really did ‘Just Stop Oil’ it would kill billions.
No drugs, raves or getting naked? b****r it then, I can’t be bothered. Thanks for keeping the tradition alive… April Fool’s Day, I mean.
Dumetrius
10 months ago
How can one ‘revert to the native faith of the English people’ by picking up something that started in the late 1940s and which is full of New Thought and masonic influences ?
Wicca, Doreen Valiente and Gerald Gardner, and what Hutton describes in “The Triumph of the Moon,” I imagine. And the trail left by Crowley (Aleister, not Vivienne), while trying to ignore the human-sacrifice bits in Frazer’s “Golden Bough.”
Actually, the more likely outcome is England becomes Muslim. Believing in nothing leads to a crisis of meaning, which Islam has an answer for. The Christian denominations of England don’t really believe in much these days but Islam, which is currently unassailable, has very strong beliefs.
AC Harper
10 months ago
The desire for the Sacred (sometimes the Holy) is very strong in some people. It is fulfilled by many, sometimes competing, beliefs.
Bless their hearts.
Neiltoo .
10 months ago
I wonder if the author was aware that this would be published on April 1st!
At the risk of what-about-ism, what about that 600k and the deluxe motor home in the driveway?
Glynis Roache
10 months ago
It is inevitable that many will find this article risible. Many find the idea of any gods/greater power risible. We have just celebrated Easter. Illness precluded a trip to church but my husband and I would probably have gone. One option open to us is a local abbey. We would have relished the architecture and the atmosphere. Yet, there would have been a strange, deep seated wish that Christianity hadn’t happened in another, drier land and doesn’t ostensibly offer a route to the heart through the things that would most likely resonate with us.
For around ten years after graduating, we both worked as large animal vets. In an era of many more individual farms, our practice cars did an average of eighty thousand miles a year each, travelling at all times of the day and night and all weathers across pastureland and moorland and cliff top, through woodland and bracken, passing peat bogs and Dartmoor tors. We witnessed nature as both wildly beautiful and unthinkingly cruel. In our job, more frequently than one would have liked, gory wouldn’t be too strong a word to use. Don’t ask for specifics unless you have a very strong stomach indeed. Evolution and nature are both dog eat dog businesses. As the modus operandi of a Christian god, both are hard to reconcile with the concept of love.
Hildegarde von Bingen managed it. As a twelfth century abbess she used the concept of viriditas as a metaphor for spiritual and physical health – a kind of holy greening power. As a gardener, I get it. As a soul, I find wilder gods easier to understand. Do I want to worship them? No. Acknowledge them? Possibly. I once read a quote that I am unable to attribute but which maybe sums up my vacillations:
‘Call me by any name, picture me in any form, for all names and all forms are mine.’
Life itself has intervened in many forms since our days in practice. Some good, some bad, some extremely odd. In old age, we count ourselves fortunate to have a few acres of England that we can call our own including a huge old oak tree just yards from the front door.
Atheism provides more scope for sophistication and intellectual superiority than does belief. It must be satisfying to wholeheartedly embrace it. I can’t. Science doesn’t have all the answers and I doubt it ever will. I sit beneath the oak tree and ponder and I won’t scoff at the man who wrote this article.
Thank you to Unherd for publishing it.
Thank you, Glynis, for this thoughtful reply – I actually enjoyed reading it more than the article itself (not that I’m scoffing at the man who wrote it).
A couple of points to quibble with, a) Christianity was here first. We were Roman before we were Anglo-Saxon (ask King Arthur). Christianity became the official religion of the empire by 380 AD so there were have been a lot of Christian Romano-Britons. (the place name Eccles relates to latin Eccelsia e.g. the location of a church)
b) I love the ‘ethical’ considerations that preclude animal sacrifice! Which ethics, obviously not pagan? The RSPCA was founded by Wilberforce the Christian reformer, not a by the pagans. Sacrifice requires blood, everyone knows that!
Enjoyed the article but I will stick with the older religion of England’s green an pleasant land!
And the Romans were pagan before they were Christian! Next Howard will be claiming that all our ancient stone circles were placed there by god to test our faith! You’re starting to sound a bit like a Jehovah’s Witness, Howard!
Pretty sure James Fraser’s Golden Bough is nearer the mark than most, he tracks the known evidence of his time (Late c19th) and tests it against what they knew then about pagan antiquity – across europe as a whole. The pre-Christians had a long and well developed history which was much more in tune with our lives than the screwball wackos of Abrahamic religion, none of which are compatible with peace, and only one, Islam, is compatible with scientific Mertonian norms.
The point I believe is that the author is confusing Anglo-Saxon paganism and ‘Celtic’ Brythonic paganism. Christianity was in the British Isles centuries before Woden was worshiped by the invading settlers.
Germanic paganism is a cousin of the celtic, iron age culture/religion that was here before the Romans (and the Romans were pagan when they first arrived too). It is also a direct descendant of the beaker folk who were here in the bronze age. Paganism was here thousands of years before Christianity.
Part of the problem stems from using a Christian term to describe all non-Christian beliefs as a definitive moniker to describe a singular religion. It’d be like claiming I’m a devout adherent of the faith of ‘Miscellaneous’.
Why does age matter? People thought the Sun went round the Earth before Copernicus: does that make them right? For that matter Judaism preceded Christianity, which preceded Islam – and Hinduism is older than all of them. That doesn’t make any of them more worthy of respect than any of the others
The Romans were not always Christian, old Emperor Hadrian who built the wall certainly was not. King Arthur certainly was not either (if you know you know). This is not even to mention the Britons before the Romans ever came along.
The RSPCA are not the inherent ethical authority on animal treatment, those are easily developed without any knowledge of their guidelines. In regards to blood, is the blood of Christ that you drink literally blood? Is his flesh literally flesh? Such substitutes have always existed in ritual and even appear in Myth.
I do indeed hope you stick with the older religion of jolly old England, the true one of course.
When you say “we”, you are presumably not including the Scots.
Citizen Diversity
10 months ago
Thomas Williams in his book, Lost Realms, describes very effectively that little is known about the post Roman peoples who populated what later became known as England.
Virtually no concrete evidence exists of the religious beliefs of these multiplicities of tribes and clans. Williams’ chapter on Sussex and its particularly impenetrable paganess is notable and well worth the price of his book. Williams writes: ‘The wider beliefs of the Old Saxons, as they were encountered by the (Christian) missionaries in the eighth century, is hard to recover.’
Other works, such as Francis Young’s Twilight of the Godlings, indicate how modern understanding of paganism rests on a vast web of speculation.
At least Christianity and the Churches stretch back in a traceable line though literate civilisations.
It has always been my view that if the Jewish guy who later became known to the word as Jesus Christ could see the Church established in his name now, he would say “You morons misunderstood absolutely everything I said”.
Yes good luck with their tolerance for pursuing other religions.
Bryan Dale
10 months ago
In a few years, what’s left of Britain will be an Islamic state and life for pagans and other infidels will become much more difficult.
Thomas K.
10 months ago
I respect the author of this piece for having such strong convictions, and being able to articulate them so well. But I do, of course, take issue with several of his assertions, and hopefully I can articulate my own convictions with a fraction of his skill.
First is the assumption that those who find Neo-paganism risible likely have never met any Neo-pagans. I know personally at least two friends who claim Odin as their patron deity, and as much as I, again, respect them for their convictions, find their ardent beliefs grounded in very little of anything real. Apart from the fact that we’re all Canadian, so it’s hard to find a connection to our ancestors’ homeland through their gods due to us being a continent away after all, neither of them are of English, Scandinavian, or Germanic descent (I however, am, but I consider Christianity to be my ancestral faith, not that it matters all that much). Both of them have long been extreme counter-culture types who still seem to think they’re the minority in a culture that still values Christendom (the ongoing church burnings across Canada that barely raise a peep indicate otherwise), and have been equally as vociferous as they have been nonsensical in their fiery denunciations of Christianity. One claimed that before their conversion, vikings settled disputes through respectful debates of logical, reasoned discourse, and it was only after becoming Christian that blood-duels to the death on matters of honor became the norm, while the other declared that the Christians adapting pagan customs to ease the process of conversion was tantamount to ‘cultural rape’, which apparently justified the actual rape of Christians, which, incidentally, occurred before said ‘cultural rape’. I hope that anyone reading this can see clearly that the first claim is laughable and the second repugnant, and that it is clear that my opinion of their faith has maybe been tarnished by its association with them (or at least their idiotic claims, they are still my friends after all), not the other way around.
The second claim I find false is that any distaste I might have for Neo-paganism is the result of associations with new age hippy-ism nonsense. As much as I find new age hippy types equally if not even more annoying, the reason I find the glorifying of ancient pagan religion distasteful is because my distant ancestors’ religious practices were the most distasteful thing about them! I find the blatant hypocrisy of many demonizing the evil Christians and their stupid, idiotic traditions while simultaneously praising the savage, blood-drenched barbarism of their poor, innocent victims painful in its blind and willful arrogance. Were not the ancient druidic groves described by the few Roman onlookers who glimpsed them as ‘those branches not wet with rain were slick with human gore’?
Perhaps English Neo-pagans are a different breed than the kind I’ve encountered in Canada. And, again, I respect the author of this for having the courage and intellectual fortitude to present his argument respectfully. I do not begrudge him his beliefs, even if I find little to respect about those beliefs themselves.
I think my thoughts could better be summed up by the words of Robert E. Howard, the American novelist behind the Conan the Barbarian stories, when a character in the story ‘the Black Colossus’ was describing Mitra, the god of the Hyborian peoples and clearly a thinly-veiled analogue to the Christian deity, to the titular barbarian: ‘Mitra would have folks stand upright before him – not crawling on their bellies like worms, or spilling the blood of animals all over his altars.’
Cathy Carron
10 months ago
Does 74,000 out of 67,000,000 really ‘make a movement’ ?
A close friend of mine was a pagan and knows the woman who runs their main website for England. She estimates that there are about 400-500 *active* pagans in the country.
I respect the author of this piece for having such strong convictions, and being able to articulate them so well. But I do, of course, take issue with several of his assertions, and hopefully I can articulate my own convictions with a fraction of his skill.
First is the assumption that those who find Neo-paganism risible likely have never met any Neo-pagans. I know personally at least two friends who claim Odin as their patron deity, and as much as I, again, respect them for their convictions, find their ardent beliefs grounded in very little of anything real. Apart from the fact that we’re all Canadian, so it’s hard to find a connection to our ancestors’ homeland through their gods due to us being a continent away after all, neither of them are of English, Scandinavian, or Germanic descent (I however, am, but I consider Christianity to be my ancestral faith, not that it matters all that much). Both of them have long been extreme counter-culture types who still seem to think they’re the minority in a culture that still values Christendom (the ongoing church burnings across Canada that barely raise a peep indicate otherwise), and have been equally as vociferous as they have been nonsensical in their fiery denunciations of Christianity. One claimed that before their conversion, vikings settled disputes through respectful debates of logical, reasoned discourse, and it was only after becoming Christian that blood-duels to the death on matters of honor became the norm, while the other declared that the Christians adapting pagan customs to ease the process of conversion was tantamount to ‘cultural rape’, which apparently justified the actual rape of Christians, which, incidentally, occurred before said ‘cultural rape’. I hope that anyone reading this can see clearly that the first claim is laughable and the second repugnant, and that it is clear that my opinion of their faith has maybe been tarnished by its association with them (or at least their idiotic claims, they are still my friends after all), not the other way around.
The second claim I find false is that any distaste I might have for Neo-paganism is the result of associations with new age hippy-ism nonsense. As much as I find new age hippy types equally if not even more annoying, the reason I find the glorifying of ancient pagan religion distasteful is because my distant ancestors’ religious practices were the most distasteful thing about them! I find the blatant hypocrisy of many demonizing the evil Christians and their stupid, idiotic traditions while simultaneously praising the savage, blood-drenched barbarism of their poor, innocent victims painful in its blind and willful arrogance. Were not the ancient druidic groves described by the few Roman onlookers who glimpsed them as ‘those branches not wet with rain were slick with human gore’?
Perhaps English Neo-pagans are a different breed than the kind I’ve encountered in Canada. And, again, I respect the author of this for having the courage and intellectual fortitude to present his argument respectfully. I do not begrudge him his beliefs, even if I find little to respect about those beliefs themselves.
I think my thoughts could better be summed up by the words of Robert E. Howard, the American novelist behind the Conan the Barbarian stories, when a character in the story ‘the Black Colossus’ was describing Mitra, the god of the Hyborian peoples and clearly a thinly-veiled analogue to the Christian deity, to the titular barbarian:
‘Mitra would have folks stand upright before him – not crawling on their bellies like worms, or spilling the blood of animals all over his altars.’
Thomas K.
10 months ago
(Reposting this for like the third time, for some reason Unherd’s algorithm won’t let me)
I respect the author of this piece for having such strong convictions, and being able to articulate them so well. But I do, of course, take issue with several of his assertions, and hopefully I can articulate my own convictions with a fraction of his skill.
First is the assumption that those who find Neo-paganism risible likely have never met any Neo-pagans. I know personally at least two friends who claim Odin as their patron deity, and as much as I, again, respect them for their convictions, find their ardent beliefs grounded in very little of anything real. Apart from the fact that we’re all Canadian, so it’s hard to find a connection to our ancestors’ homeland through their gods due to us being a continent away after all, neither of them are of English, Scandinavian, or Germanic descent (I however, am, but I consider Christianity to be my ancestral faith, not that it matters all that much). Both of them have long been extreme counter-culture types who still seem to think they’re the minority in a culture that still values Christendom (the ongoing church burnings across Canada that barely raise a peep indicate otherwise), and have been equally as vociferous as they have been nonsensical in their fiery denunciations of Christianity. One claimed that before their conversion, vikings settled disputes through respectful debates of logical, reasoned discourse, and it was only after becoming Christian that blood-duels to the death on matters of honor became the norm, while the other declared that the Christians adapting pagan customs to ease the process of conversion was tantamount to ‘cultural rape’, which apparently justified the actual rape of Christians, which, incidentally, occurred before said ‘cultural rape’. I hope that anyone reading this can see clearly that the first claim is laughable and the second repugnant, and that it is clear that my opinion of their faith has maybe been tarnished by its association with them (or at least their idiotic claims, they are still my friends after all), not the other way around.
The second claim I find false is that any distaste I might have for Neo-paganism is the result of associations with new age hippy-ism nonsense. As much as I find new age hippy types equally if not even more annoying, the reason I find the glorifying of ancient pagan religion distasteful is because my distant ancestors’ religious practices were the most distasteful thing about them! I find the blatant hypocrisy of many demonizing the evil Christians and their stupid, idiotic traditions while simultaneously praising the savage, blood-drenched barbarism of their poor, innocent ‘victims’ painful in its blind and willful arrogance. Were not the ancient druidic groves described by the few Roman onlookers who glimpsed them as ‘those branches not wet with rain were slick with human gore’?
Perhaps English Neo-pagans are a different breed than the kind I’ve encountered in Canada. And, again, I respect the author of this for having the courage and intellectual fortitude to present his argument respectfully. I do not begrudge him his beliefs, even if I find little to respect about those beliefs themselves.
I think my thoughts could better be summed up by the words of Robert E. Howard, the American novelist behind the Conan the Barbarian stories, when a character in the story ‘the Black Colossus’ was describing Mitra, the god of the Hyborian peoples and clearly a thinly-veiled analogue to the Christian deity, to the titular barbarian:
‘Mitra would have folks stand upright before him – not crawling on their bellies like worms, or spilling the blood of animals all over his altars.’
Good post.
The issue the extreme counter-cultural types have is that they can only adequately define themselves if there’s some monolith for them to separate from.
That is, storming out requires a bunch of people who are there to hear you slam the door.
But there isn’t anyone there.
Bowness Nigel
10 months ago
‘The feet of a popular Palestinian carpenter’? Ah hem, I believe it is commonly accepted that he was Jewish.
Phil Mitchell
10 months ago
If there is anything I hate it is a gutless religion. When are you bringing back human sacrifice? Or exterminating disabled babies? Or sanctifying total selfishness? Getting rid of all that human rights nonsense? Abolishing women’s equality? And on and on. The pagan who wrote this article is really talking about Christianity lite. He might as well be an Anglican.
Even if that Chesterton remark is true, why must it lead to the Christian god? There are many gods around, and not all of their priesthoods are as venal as the Christian one.
A false conception of God – He is, in the words of Aquinas, ipsum esse subsistens (being itself), not some creature among many possible different gods from whom to choose. So the quote is expressing the idea that if one no longer sees the ground of all being as the summum bonum (highest good), it will be replaced by fleeting fancies within the created order that will necessarily prove to be inadequate, since there will always be something we see as the highest good – the questions is what will that be.
P.S. that quote, though attributed to Chesterton, was actually Cammaerts‘ summary of Chesterton’s argument
Nicholas Taylor
10 months ago
About the only thing I agree with is “We have been severed from our roots by the axe of modernity.” True, I go into the oak woods, walk barefoot in the hills, and touch the ancient stones, natural and artificial, but the experience is mine alone, owes nothing to any spirits and cannot be shared with any base group.
Frederick Dixon
10 months ago
Interesting piece, and the ideas are attractive. But does the author actually believe in the old gods? Or is it really England that he worships?
I can understand the latter. The former though is more difficult – if he really believes that the old gods exist then he needs to explain why they put up virtually zero resistance to the incursions of Christianity.
Why is Christianity, at least in Britain, putting up practically zero resistance to ongoing progressivism and wokism? In fact in its institutional manifestation it spends its time seeming to largely emulate this new religion!
Martin M
10 months ago
“As a YouTuber and pagan priest, I receive hundreds, if not thousands, of comments each year from furious Christians“. That shouldn’t be a problem. Christians are a dying breed in the Uk.
As the ascendancy of the printing press gave rise to all manner of stupid superstitions, so too has the internet.
This is the problem i have with this article, if not paganism itself. The writer is projecting onto an ancient belief system and over-reaching himself.
I can go along with the sense of ‘something being lost’ and feel there’s spiritual nourishment in nature, landscape and tradition. This in no way induces me to wish to ‘worship’ ancient human deities. Neither is it necessary, or even advisable, to do so.
Basically it’s an impossibility.
I work with ceremonial stuff and exorcisms from the 18th century sometimes. It is fiendishly difficult. Yet the people who wrote that stuff were from the same religion I grew up in. And we have thousands of pages of their notes.
But it isn’t much help. We just cannot sufficiently put ourselves into the mindset of people from that era.
And, if we can’t do the 1770s, we certainly can’t do the 970s.
I think, among other things, the advent of the camera profoundly altered human self-perception and conceptions about the world.
I see the faces in colourised pics from the American Civil War and there’s just about the feeling that they have the same kind of conceptions as we do. Just about. It’s a thin strand. It’ll snap itself in a few years. Think that is about as far back as we are able to currently go.
Freemasonry (which neo-paganism is descended from) actually tells you in re-enactment or parable, that the ‘real secrets’ are lost.
And so those that are given to you are ‘substitute secrets’.
It’s a tangible warning that the substitutes, weak as they are, are what we have to make do with, rather than risk the dangers in trying to revive something older.
Thanks, not sure why I received so many downvotes for my comment. With the growing prevalence of printing presses in the 1600s literacy rates grew, but so too did the number of people who started to believe in demons and witches, thus giving rise to the holy wars and witch burnings that plagued Europe in the 17th century.
The internet is acting much the same way. Our digital literacy has increased but so too has the number of people who believe in whacky science and conspiracy theories.
Holy wars started in the 17th century. Check. Remind me when the Crusades were again?
Far better in the Middle Ages, when there was only one stupid superstition, promulgated by the Christian Church.
All warm and cuddly until different pagan cult starts sacrificing people to ward off climate catastrophe.
They’re already planning that. Half the world’s food production relies on fertilisers made with fossil fuels.
If we really did ‘Just Stop Oil’ it would kill billions.
That is totally inaccurate scaremongering. You clearly know nothing about agriculture.
Perhaps not people, but surely a few goats?
No drugs, raves or getting naked? b****r it then, I can’t be bothered. Thanks for keeping the tradition alive… April Fool’s Day, I mean.
How can one ‘revert to the native faith of the English people’ by picking up something that started in the late 1940s and which is full of New Thought and masonic influences ?
Not a single reference to Celtic tradition in the whole story. This story is written within an English context.
What are you talking about?
I’d ask the same of you.
Well you appear to assert that our indigenous traditions began in the 1940s…? So I repeat, what are you talking about?
Wicca, Doreen Valiente and Gerald Gardner, and what Hutton describes in “The Triumph of the Moon,” I imagine. And the trail left by Crowley (Aleister, not Vivienne), while trying to ignore the human-sacrifice bits in Frazer’s “Golden Bough.”
Actually, the more likely outcome is England becomes Muslim. Believing in nothing leads to a crisis of meaning, which Islam has an answer for. The Christian denominations of England don’t really believe in much these days but Islam, which is currently unassailable, has very strong beliefs.
The desire for the Sacred (sometimes the Holy) is very strong in some people. It is fulfilled by many, sometimes competing, beliefs.
Bless their hearts.
I wonder if the author was aware that this would be published on April 1st!
Woden seems not to have briefed him appropriately.
Haw, haw, haw. Of course he did!
I trust that POLICE SCOTLAND will be monitoring ALL comments on UnHeard for any deviant opinions or so called HATE crimes.
Yep, the McStasi were round this morning handing out the clype/snitch/grass-up forms.
At the risk of what-about-ism, what about that 600k and the deluxe motor home in the driveway?
It is inevitable that many will find this article risible. Many find the idea of any gods/greater power risible. We have just celebrated Easter. Illness precluded a trip to church but my husband and I would probably have gone. One option open to us is a local abbey. We would have relished the architecture and the atmosphere. Yet, there would have been a strange, deep seated wish that Christianity hadn’t happened in another, drier land and doesn’t ostensibly offer a route to the heart through the things that would most likely resonate with us.
For around ten years after graduating, we both worked as large animal vets. In an era of many more individual farms, our practice cars did an average of eighty thousand miles a year each, travelling at all times of the day and night and all weathers across pastureland and moorland and cliff top, through woodland and bracken, passing peat bogs and Dartmoor tors. We witnessed nature as both wildly beautiful and unthinkingly cruel. In our job, more frequently than one would have liked, gory wouldn’t be too strong a word to use. Don’t ask for specifics unless you have a very strong stomach indeed. Evolution and nature are both dog eat dog businesses. As the modus operandi of a Christian god, both are hard to reconcile with the concept of love.
Hildegarde von Bingen managed it. As a twelfth century abbess she used the concept of viriditas as a metaphor for spiritual and physical health – a kind of holy greening power. As a gardener, I get it. As a soul, I find wilder gods easier to understand. Do I want to worship them? No. Acknowledge them? Possibly. I once read a quote that I am unable to attribute but which maybe sums up my vacillations:
‘Call me by any name, picture me in any form, for all names and all forms are mine.’
Life itself has intervened in many forms since our days in practice. Some good, some bad, some extremely odd. In old age, we count ourselves fortunate to have a few acres of England that we can call our own including a huge old oak tree just yards from the front door.
Atheism provides more scope for sophistication and intellectual superiority than does belief. It must be satisfying to wholeheartedly embrace it. I can’t. Science doesn’t have all the answers and I doubt it ever will. I sit beneath the oak tree and ponder and I won’t scoff at the man who wrote this article.
Thank you to Unherd for publishing it.
Thank you, Glynis, for this thoughtful reply – I actually enjoyed reading it more than the article itself (not that I’m scoffing at the man who wrote it).
Outstanding comment.
Well said.
A couple of points to quibble with, a) Christianity was here first. We were Roman before we were Anglo-Saxon (ask King Arthur). Christianity became the official religion of the empire by 380 AD so there were have been a lot of Christian Romano-Britons. (the place name Eccles relates to latin Eccelsia e.g. the location of a church)
b) I love the ‘ethical’ considerations that preclude animal sacrifice! Which ethics, obviously not pagan? The RSPCA was founded by Wilberforce the Christian reformer, not a by the pagans. Sacrifice requires blood, everyone knows that!
Enjoyed the article but I will stick with the older religion of England’s green an pleasant land!
There were Druids here before the Romans.
And the Romans were pagan before they were Christian! Next Howard will be claiming that all our ancient stone circles were placed there by god to test our faith! You’re starting to sound a bit like a Jehovah’s Witness, Howard!
But no-one knows what the Druids believed.
What we do know without a doubt, is that there is ZERO link between them and anything called pagan today.
Pretty sure James Fraser’s Golden Bough is nearer the mark than most, he tracks the known evidence of his time (Late c19th) and tests it against what they knew then about pagan antiquity – across europe as a whole. The pre-Christians had a long and well developed history which was much more in tune with our lives than the screwball wackos of Abrahamic religion, none of which are compatible with peace, and only one, Islam, is compatible with scientific Mertonian norms.
Quite an… Original analysis.
Almost as if the writer had never heard of Copernicus, Newton, Mendel, Pavlov, Lemaitre, vulcanology, etc, etc.
Nor of the destruction of ancient monuments & artefacts by barbarians on the basis that they are “unIslamic”.
Might be a troll or a parody, I suppose.
The point I believe is that the author is confusing Anglo-Saxon paganism and ‘Celtic’ Brythonic paganism. Christianity was in the British Isles centuries before Woden was worshiped by the invading settlers.
Until one Gaius Suetonius Paulinus sorted them out in about 60AD*.
(*Otherwise known as 813 AUC.)
Germanic paganism is a cousin of the celtic, iron age culture/religion that was here before the Romans (and the Romans were pagan when they first arrived too). It is also a direct descendant of the beaker folk who were here in the bronze age. Paganism was here thousands of years before Christianity.
Part of the problem stems from using a Christian term to describe all non-Christian beliefs as a definitive moniker to describe a singular religion. It’d be like claiming I’m a devout adherent of the faith of ‘Miscellaneous’.
I agree, but when talking about English paganism you can deduce that it is of the Germanic type
Why does age matter? People thought the Sun went round the Earth before Copernicus: does that make them right? For that matter Judaism preceded Christianity, which preceded Islam – and Hinduism is older than all of them. That doesn’t make any of them more worthy of respect than any of the others
Aristarchus of Samos* proposed the heliocentric model more than a thousand years before.
(c310-c 230 BC, or alternatively c443-523 AUC.)
The Romans were not always Christian, old Emperor Hadrian who built the wall certainly was not. King Arthur certainly was not either (if you know you know). This is not even to mention the Britons before the Romans ever came along.
The RSPCA are not the inherent ethical authority on animal treatment, those are easily developed without any knowledge of their guidelines. In regards to blood, is the blood of Christ that you drink literally blood? Is his flesh literally flesh? Such substitutes have always existed in ritual and even appear in Myth.
I do indeed hope you stick with the older religion of jolly old England, the true one of course.
When you say “we”, you are presumably not including the Scots.
Thomas Williams in his book, Lost Realms, describes very effectively that little is known about the post Roman peoples who populated what later became known as England.
Virtually no concrete evidence exists of the religious beliefs of these multiplicities of tribes and clans. Williams’ chapter on Sussex and its particularly impenetrable paganess is notable and well worth the price of his book. Williams writes: ‘The wider beliefs of the Old Saxons, as they were encountered by the (Christian) missionaries in the eighth century, is hard to recover.’
Other works, such as Francis Young’s Twilight of the Godlings, indicate how modern understanding of paganism rests on a vast web of speculation.
At least Christianity and the Churches stretch back in a traceable line though literate civilisations.
Agreed. We know amazingly little about their beliefs.
At best, modern ‘paganism’ is a romantic project stemming from Christian / neo-Platonic roots.
It needs to get real about what it is.
It has always been my view that if the Jewish guy who later became known to the word as Jesus Christ could see the Church established in his name now, he would say “You morons misunderstood absolutely everything I said”.
You can never go back.
Or “you can never swim in the same river twice”, as Heraclitus*put it so elegantly.
(*c500 BC or 253 AUC.)
I’d say we never left. Modernity was just a short recess.
Pagan? You wish!
The UK will become an Islamic theocracy.
Yes good luck with their tolerance for pursuing other religions.
In a few years, what’s left of Britain will be an Islamic state and life for pagans and other infidels will become much more difficult.
I respect the author of this piece for having such strong convictions, and being able to articulate them so well. But I do, of course, take issue with several of his assertions, and hopefully I can articulate my own convictions with a fraction of his skill.
First is the assumption that those who find Neo-paganism risible likely have never met any Neo-pagans. I know personally at least two friends who claim Odin as their patron deity, and as much as I, again, respect them for their convictions, find their ardent beliefs grounded in very little of anything real. Apart from the fact that we’re all Canadian, so it’s hard to find a connection to our ancestors’ homeland through their gods due to us being a continent away after all, neither of them are of English, Scandinavian, or Germanic descent (I however, am, but I consider Christianity to be my ancestral faith, not that it matters all that much). Both of them have long been extreme counter-culture types who still seem to think they’re the minority in a culture that still values Christendom (the ongoing church burnings across Canada that barely raise a peep indicate otherwise), and have been equally as vociferous as they have been nonsensical in their fiery denunciations of Christianity. One claimed that before their conversion, vikings settled disputes through respectful debates of logical, reasoned discourse, and it was only after becoming Christian that blood-duels to the death on matters of honor became the norm, while the other declared that the Christians adapting pagan customs to ease the process of conversion was tantamount to ‘cultural rape’, which apparently justified the actual rape of Christians, which, incidentally, occurred before said ‘cultural rape’. I hope that anyone reading this can see clearly that the first claim is laughable and the second repugnant, and that it is clear that my opinion of their faith has maybe been tarnished by its association with them (or at least their idiotic claims, they are still my friends after all), not the other way around.
The second claim I find false is that any distaste I might have for Neo-paganism is the result of associations with new age hippy-ism nonsense. As much as I find new age hippy types equally if not even more annoying, the reason I find the glorifying of ancient pagan religion distasteful is because my distant ancestors’ religious practices were the most distasteful thing about them! I find the blatant hypocrisy of many demonizing the evil Christians and their stupid, idiotic traditions while simultaneously praising the savage, blood-drenched barbarism of their poor, innocent victims painful in its blind and willful arrogance. Were not the ancient druidic groves described by the few Roman onlookers who glimpsed them as ‘those branches not wet with rain were slick with human gore’?
Perhaps English Neo-pagans are a different breed than the kind I’ve encountered in Canada. And, again, I respect the author of this for having the courage and intellectual fortitude to present his argument respectfully. I do not begrudge him his beliefs, even if I find little to respect about those beliefs themselves.
I think my thoughts could better be summed up by the words of Robert E. Howard, the American novelist behind the Conan the Barbarian stories, when a character in the story ‘the Black Colossus’ was describing Mitra, the god of the Hyborian peoples and clearly a thinly-veiled analogue to the Christian deity, to the titular barbarian:
‘Mitra would have folks stand upright before him – not crawling on their bellies like worms, or spilling the blood of animals all over his altars.’
Does 74,000 out of 67,000,000 really ‘make a movement’ ?
It’s a crock.
A close friend of mine was a pagan and knows the woman who runs their main website for England. She estimates that there are about 400-500 *active* pagans in the country.
How many has the CofE got nowadays? I mean, actual observant, church going ones? How many of them are under 70?
There will be none if woke Welby stays.
I respect the author of this piece for having such strong convictions, and being able to articulate them so well. But I do, of course, take issue with several of his assertions, and hopefully I can articulate my own convictions with a fraction of his skill.
First is the assumption that those who find Neo-paganism risible likely have never met any Neo-pagans. I know personally at least two friends who claim Odin as their patron deity, and as much as I, again, respect them for their convictions, find their ardent beliefs grounded in very little of anything real. Apart from the fact that we’re all Canadian, so it’s hard to find a connection to our ancestors’ homeland through their gods due to us being a continent away after all, neither of them are of English, Scandinavian, or Germanic descent (I however, am, but I consider Christianity to be my ancestral faith, not that it matters all that much). Both of them have long been extreme counter-culture types who still seem to think they’re the minority in a culture that still values Christendom (the ongoing church burnings across Canada that barely raise a peep indicate otherwise), and have been equally as vociferous as they have been nonsensical in their fiery denunciations of Christianity. One claimed that before their conversion, vikings settled disputes through respectful debates of logical, reasoned discourse, and it was only after becoming Christian that blood-duels to the death on matters of honor became the norm, while the other declared that the Christians adapting pagan customs to ease the process of conversion was tantamount to ‘cultural rape’, which apparently justified the actual rape of Christians, which, incidentally, occurred before said ‘cultural rape’. I hope that anyone reading this can see clearly that the first claim is laughable and the second repugnant, and that it is clear that my opinion of their faith has maybe been tarnished by its association with them (or at least their idiotic claims, they are still my friends after all), not the other way around.
The second claim I find false is that any distaste I might have for Neo-paganism is the result of associations with new age hippy-ism nonsense. As much as I find new age hippy types equally if not even more annoying, the reason I find the glorifying of ancient pagan religion distasteful is because my distant ancestors’ religious practices were the most distasteful thing about them! I find the blatant hypocrisy of many demonizing the evil Christians and their stupid, idiotic traditions while simultaneously praising the savage, blood-drenched barbarism of their poor, innocent victims painful in its blind and willful arrogance. Were not the ancient druidic groves described by the few Roman onlookers who glimpsed them as ‘those branches not wet with rain were slick with human gore’?
Perhaps English Neo-pagans are a different breed than the kind I’ve encountered in Canada. And, again, I respect the author of this for having the courage and intellectual fortitude to present his argument respectfully. I do not begrudge him his beliefs, even if I find little to respect about those beliefs themselves.
I think my thoughts could better be summed up by the words of Robert E. Howard, the American novelist behind the Conan the Barbarian stories, when a character in the story ‘the Black Colossus’ was describing Mitra, the god of the Hyborian peoples and clearly a thinly-veiled analogue to the Christian deity, to the titular barbarian:
‘Mitra would have folks stand upright before him – not crawling on their bellies like worms, or spilling the blood of animals all over his altars.’
(Reposting this for like the third time, for some reason Unherd’s algorithm won’t let me)
I respect the author of this piece for having such strong convictions, and being able to articulate them so well. But I do, of course, take issue with several of his assertions, and hopefully I can articulate my own convictions with a fraction of his skill.
First is the assumption that those who find Neo-paganism risible likely have never met any Neo-pagans. I know personally at least two friends who claim Odin as their patron deity, and as much as I, again, respect them for their convictions, find their ardent beliefs grounded in very little of anything real. Apart from the fact that we’re all Canadian, so it’s hard to find a connection to our ancestors’ homeland through their gods due to us being a continent away after all, neither of them are of English, Scandinavian, or Germanic descent (I however, am, but I consider Christianity to be my ancestral faith, not that it matters all that much). Both of them have long been extreme counter-culture types who still seem to think they’re the minority in a culture that still values Christendom (the ongoing church burnings across Canada that barely raise a peep indicate otherwise), and have been equally as vociferous as they have been nonsensical in their fiery denunciations of Christianity. One claimed that before their conversion, vikings settled disputes through respectful debates of logical, reasoned discourse, and it was only after becoming Christian that blood-duels to the death on matters of honor became the norm, while the other declared that the Christians adapting pagan customs to ease the process of conversion was tantamount to ‘cultural rape’, which apparently justified the actual rape of Christians, which, incidentally, occurred before said ‘cultural rape’. I hope that anyone reading this can see clearly that the first claim is laughable and the second repugnant, and that it is clear that my opinion of their faith has maybe been tarnished by its association with them (or at least their idiotic claims, they are still my friends after all), not the other way around.
The second claim I find false is that any distaste I might have for Neo-paganism is the result of associations with new age hippy-ism nonsense. As much as I find new age hippy types equally if not even more annoying, the reason I find the glorifying of ancient pagan religion distasteful is because my distant ancestors’ religious practices were the most distasteful thing about them! I find the blatant hypocrisy of many demonizing the evil Christians and their stupid, idiotic traditions while simultaneously praising the savage, blood-drenched barbarism of their poor, innocent ‘victims’ painful in its blind and willful arrogance. Were not the ancient druidic groves described by the few Roman onlookers who glimpsed them as ‘those branches not wet with rain were slick with human gore’?
Perhaps English Neo-pagans are a different breed than the kind I’ve encountered in Canada. And, again, I respect the author of this for having the courage and intellectual fortitude to present his argument respectfully. I do not begrudge him his beliefs, even if I find little to respect about those beliefs themselves.
I think my thoughts could better be summed up by the words of Robert E. Howard, the American novelist behind the Conan the Barbarian stories, when a character in the story ‘the Black Colossus’ was describing Mitra, the god of the Hyborian peoples and clearly a thinly-veiled analogue to the Christian deity, to the titular barbarian:
‘Mitra would have folks stand upright before him – not crawling on their bellies like worms, or spilling the blood of animals all over his altars.’
Good post.
The issue the extreme counter-cultural types have is that they can only adequately define themselves if there’s some monolith for them to separate from.
That is, storming out requires a bunch of people who are there to hear you slam the door.
But there isn’t anyone there.
‘The feet of a popular Palestinian carpenter’? Ah hem, I believe it is commonly accepted that he was Jewish.
If there is anything I hate it is a gutless religion. When are you bringing back human sacrifice? Or exterminating disabled babies? Or sanctifying total selfishness? Getting rid of all that human rights nonsense? Abolishing women’s equality? And on and on. The pagan who wrote this article is really talking about Christianity lite. He might as well be an Anglican.
He may rejoin Anglicanism so there’s someone to see him storm out. Even if it’s only his reflection.
I recommend actually checking out his works. They’re certainly not for the “airy-fairy” peace loving hippie types you may be imagining.
“Christianity lite”? You mean the version where the priests don’t sexually abuse minors?
I thought it is going to be Islamic.
This sounds like a pretext for getting drunk. I wonder how many wives buy it when Wotan staggers through the door.
You say that as if it’s a bad thing.
Your Anglo-Saxon ancestors were overwhelmingly Christian. They had more intelligence than some seem to credit them with.
GK Chesterton once observed: if you take away people’s belief in God, they won’t believe in nothing; they’ll believe in anything – any old rubbish.
Even if that Chesterton remark is true, why must it lead to the Christian god? There are many gods around, and not all of their priesthoods are as venal as the Christian one.
A false conception of God – He is, in the words of Aquinas, ipsum esse subsistens (being itself), not some creature among many possible different gods from whom to choose. So the quote is expressing the idea that if one no longer sees the ground of all being as the summum bonum (highest good), it will be replaced by fleeting fancies within the created order that will necessarily prove to be inadequate, since there will always be something we see as the highest good – the questions is what will that be.
P.S. that quote, though attributed to Chesterton, was actually Cammaerts‘ summary of Chesterton’s argument
About the only thing I agree with is “We have been severed from our roots by the axe of modernity.” True, I go into the oak woods, walk barefoot in the hills, and touch the ancient stones, natural and artificial, but the experience is mine alone, owes nothing to any spirits and cannot be shared with any base group.
Interesting piece, and the ideas are attractive. But does the author actually believe in the old gods? Or is it really England that he worships?
I can understand the latter. The former though is more difficult – if he really believes that the old gods exist then he needs to explain why they put up virtually zero resistance to the incursions of Christianity.
Old gods give way to the new. The Christian god will be gone one day.
Why is Christianity, at least in Britain, putting up practically zero resistance to ongoing progressivism and wokism? In fact in its institutional manifestation it spends its time seeming to largely emulate this new religion!
“As a YouTuber and pagan priest, I receive hundreds, if not thousands, of comments each year from furious Christians“. That shouldn’t be a problem. Christians are a dying breed in the Uk.
Didn’t the pagans dabble in human sacrifice?