The illusion of a pagan West Modernity has descended into a spiritual void

This question wandered around my head as I wandered around Rome. What is it about ancient Rome that still speaks to us? Why has everybody heard of Nero, Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius? Why do we all still know, two millennia later, about Roman baths, gladiators, straight roads, centurions, Vestal virgins and the Colosseum? I like to spend my holidays developing spurious and lightly evidenced theories about human culture while I drink my espresso. It’s my idea of fun. This time around, my theory was simple and unoriginal: the Roman empire never actually ended.

Yes, Rome itself “fell” to barbarian invaders in the 5th century, but that, as every Orthodox Christian knows even if no-one else does, was not the end of the Roman Empire, which by then already had a new capital in Constantinople. There was a Roman Emperor reigning until that city fell to the Ottomans in 1453, which was when the Empire technically ended. But that’s not really what I’m talking about.

What I mean is that today’s “West” is really just Rome under another name. Not just because the Western Christian Church was and is quartered in the old Imperial city, and behaved like an imperial power itself for much of the Middle Ages. Not just because, for that reason, “the West” was in many ways ruled from Rome until the modern period. It’s something bigger than that, and yet also more nebulous. It’s the fact that, despite the Christian or pseudo-Christian, veneer, Western culture still really has many of the same values as those of Rome.

True, we don’t take slaves anymore, or throw people to lions, or crucify them, and all that is due to the legacy of the most famous man ever to be crucified. But we’re still, in some ways, Roman. We still valorise power and straight lines. We still have Emperors, even if we call them Presidents, and we still have Empires, even if we pretend we don’t. We still build vast amphitheatres for entertainment, even if the entertainment is an AC/DC concert or a Premier League match instead of a lions-vs-slaves face off. We still use Corinthian columns to demonstrate our social status. And we still make endless films and write endless books about the Romans — rather than, say, the Greeks or the Babylonians or the Assyrians or the Ottomans — because, deep down, we think we are their heirs.

Very near to the Colosseum, you can also visit the ruins of the Forum and the Palatine Hill, which are much less crowded. Walking around the Forum in summer will take it out of you. Fortunately, there is a cafe on the site. I took my children into it to buy a drink, and came out with some more evidence to back up my half-formed holiday theory. The young woman behind the counter, who took my money with a cheery smile, was covered in tattoos and piercings, but this wasn’t what made her stand out. That stuff is barely worth mentioning in the 2020s. It was her T-shirt that said the quiet part out loud, and it was quite a contrast to the optimistic cross which peered over the lip of the massacredome next door.

On the woman’s chest was emblazoned a giant inverted pentagram. In case you were in any doubt as to what this was supposed to convey, the words below it read: DEICIDE 666. “That will be €20 please”, she said, still smiling. Being English, I smiled back.

Deicide turns out to be the name of a bad metal band which began life when I was a teenager in the late Eighties. As a semi-metaller myself back then, I was more than familiar with the anti-Christian iconography that was required by any band that wanted to make a splash in the metal scene. From Black Sabbath onwards, if you weren’t praising Satan, wearing inverted crosses and pentagrams and writing songs with titles like “Death to Jesus” and “F**k Your God” (both stone-cold Deicide classics), you were in danger of being left behind. But we all knew it was an act. Nobody really believed it, so it was all OK. Most of these guys were probably playing golf in their spare time.

That was a long time ago, though. Since then, the Satanic, witchy and openly neo-pagan iconography has crept steadily out of the crepuscular corners of the culture and into its centre. In recent years, in fact, there has been no creeping about it — it has been a sprint. This, for example, was Ireland’s entrant for this year’s Eurovision song contest: Bambi Thug.

Bambi is an openly anti-Christian “non-binary” witch who performs what she calls “ouija pop”. Her songs include spells and hexes, and in her spare time she likes to practise “blood magic”. All of this makes her almost entirely uncontroversial in 2024. In fact, unlike the God-hating pioneers of the Seventies and Eighties, it makes her pretty mainstream. After all, other mainstream musical acts like Sam Smith and Lil Nas X have also been working hard to push the pagan-Satan-witch thing to the max.

What is the connection between Bambi Thug, Deicide and our continued fascination with ancient Rome? Pretty obviously, the answer is that none of these things are Christian. In fact, they are all openly anti-Christian, and we are increasingly obviously an anti-Christian culture. It is often suggested that the modern West is “anti-religious” in a more general sense, but this is not really true. Witness, for example, the easy ride given to Islam by progressive elites, or the open arms extended to Buddhism and neo-paganism, or indeed the patronising tolerance extended to the Bambi Thugs of the world. The West is not really against religion. What it is against is its own heritage. And that heritage happens to be Christian.

In my series of essays on the Machine, I wrote at some length about what I called the culture of inversion which now governs us. This is, at root, quite a simple thing, and it is not a novelty either. Ancient Rome went through something similar after the Christians almost miraculously captured its Imperial centre and the Empire turned, in a remarkably short time, against its ancestral gods and towards the new one that would supplant them.

Today’s culture of inversion is the result of the 20th century social and cultural revolution which some have likened to a new Reformation. It has manifested in the sexual revolution of the Sixties, and an accelerating trend towards individualism, radical liberation and technological solutionism. It is resulting in the reshaping of nations, families, cultures and values of all kinds. Most of all, it has manifested in a rejection, conscious or unconscious, of the religion — Christianity — which built the West. For better or for worse, that “West” is now being superseded. We are leaving what we were behind.

Where, though, does this leave us spiritually? As we reject our Christian past we leave an empty throne at the heart of our culture. An empty throne will always attract candidates to be the new king. Who, in the age of Bambi Thug, is vying for it now?

One notion that is currently doing the rounds is that the post-Christian West is “repaganising”. The argument is simple and in many ways convincing. “Paganism”, in this reading, is the default state of humanity, and now that Christianity is receding, it is returning. Paganism is here defined, in Louise Perry’s words, as “an orientation towards the immanent”; a definition with which most Christian theologians would probably agree. If the word “pagan” is frustratingly vague (it basically means “not Christian”), the religious systems it tends to refer to find their object of worship or veneration in this world, among created things.

To Christians, this is a terrible category error. But it is also an understandable one. Worshipping, making sacrifices to, or performing rituals with the things we can see — trees, mountains, fire, the sun — makes intuitive sense, in a way that Christianity, which looks beyond this world, does not. This is why Christianity is a genuinely revolutionary faith; something we tend to forget due to our familiarity with it. But paganism often ends up making practical sense in more sinister ways too, whether by justifying infanticide, sacrificing animals or humans to capricious nature-bound “gods”, or simply by reducing us to the base level of our humanity, as our passions and desires are justified or promoted by deities who personify them. This, it is argued, is where we are headed as we move further and further away from our Christian past.

I think there is a lot to this argument; and yet I don’t think it is quite right, for two reasons. The first is that there are a lot of people around these days who call themselves “pagans”, and they would all reject the values that this argument ascribes to them. The reason for this, ironically, is that most of our new “pagans” are in fact Christians in disguise. Their values — human rights, feminism, ecological sensitivity, and broadly liberal views — are derived from Christianity, and the “old gods” they claim to worship often have suspiciously modern attitudes. It’s true that there is a minority of far-Right pagan types who hang around on the fringes, blathering about the volk and the “old gods” of the Aryans, but the fact that they are roundly rejected by the majority of modern pagans just helps to prove my point.

This brings me to the second reason. Say what you like about modern paganism, but however you quite define the word, it implies religious belief. Pagans and Christians might tear chunks off each other for all sorts of reasons, but they are essentially fighting over the nature of the divine. They — we — are all religious people.

If we were really “re-paganising”, then, we would be returning to the worship of the old gods. And yet, despite all the Satanic witchery of popular culture, we are not actually doing so. What we are seeing with the likes of Bambi Thug, Sam Smith and the rest is not the resurgence of a threatening new (or old) religion. It is an aesthetic. Nobody would die for it. Nobody would fight for it. It is LARPing and play-acting. Rather than signifying a sinister new development or threatening new faith, it is a flimsy veil drawn over a gaping void.

As evidence for this claim, I offer you an image of the notorious drag queen parody of the Last Supper which was part of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. This featured a large lesbian in place of Christ, and Dionysius, god of dark drunken revelries, in place of the Eucharist. A pure product of the culture of inversion, this very public, very global tableau, was as anti-Christian an insult as could possibly be made on the world stage.

Or was it? It was hard to tell because, as soon as mass complaints began and sponsors began withdrawing, and nations began demanding explanations from the French Ambassador, our brave iconoclasts swiftly copped out. Lesbian Christ deleted the tweet in which she had described the tableau as the “new gay testament”, complete with an image of Da Vinci’s famous painting, and the organiser of the show put out a new story. Rather than being a parody of Christianity, this was in fact something called “the feast of the gods”. In the twinkling of an eye, as is the way of the things on social media, all right-thinking progressive people swung in behind this new message. After a few days, everything died down, and people began looking elsewhere for something to be outraged about.

Were these people “pagans”? Not if that word denotes religious belief. If this had really been a “pagan” tableau — if these people had been true believers in and worshippers of the god Dionysius, for example — then they would have stood by it. They would have damned the offended, and defended their gods. They would have made a case for paganism and its metaphysics. They would probably have been quite popular in some elite quarters had they done so.

But they didn’t: instead, they ran away. They did that because they did not, in fact, believe in or respect the “gods” that they were portraying at all. They were just playing with images that meant nothing to them, but which in some way seemed “queer” or “subversive” or “brave”. The fact that the images were none of these things did not seem to register. In some way, they were on autopilot: blaspheming against the God of a long-dead culture, but not believing in the ones they pretended to put in its place. They certainly weren’t wrestling with the implications of what Dionysian worship would actually mean for society.

Some theologians hold that hell is the result of getting everything you want. If the choice we are faced with is between following God’s will and following our own, and if we no longer believe in God, where does that leave us? It leaves us here. But “here” is not a new pagan age. Not yet, anyway. Neither is it a “secular” age. We dwell, rather, among the consequences of our liberation. We got everything we wanted. Now we have to live with it.

In the West today, this means that we have to live in a culture without faith. Without faith in the Christian God, obviously, but without faith in anything else either. We are not pagans because pagans, like Christians, believe in something. We believe in nothing. Most significantly, we are now even ceasing to believe in the ideas which arose to replace all religions in the age of “Enlightenment”. Reason, progress, liberalism, freedom of speech, democracy, the enlightened rational individual, the scientific process as a means of determining truth: everywhere, these “secular” beliefs, which were supposed to replace religion worldwide, are either under fire or have already fallen too.

Is this an atheist age, then? In one obvious sense, yes. We are perhaps the first godless culture in human history. Religious cosmologies have differed vastly across time and space, but no society has ever existed without one. Ours has tried to, for a brief, violent and explosive time. I don’t think that time has long to run. So yes, we are living in an atheist age — and yet, that’s not quite the full picture either.

Atheism, like religion, implies some sort of confidence; some sort of actual stance. A-theism is a position. It states: there is no God, and it can state that because it has a set of alternative beliefs, usually those which emerged from the European “age of reason”: the ability of science to demonstrate universal truth; the objectivity of rational thought; the knowability of reality. Atheism often also refuses religion on moral grounds: religions, it is said, are archaic, irrational, unjust and oppressive. Some version of “humanism” is a better and fairer fit for the modern world.

All of these are positions. They are statements of faith in the world working in a certain way, and in the way that it should work, and should be arranged. Atheism can even amount to a quasi-religious system itself. Orthodox convert Seraphim Rose, formerly a committed atheist himself, once wrote that “atheism, true ‘existential’ atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God”.

Does our age believe this? Hardly. These days even Richard Dawkins publicly regrets the results of the ignorant anti-Christian fatwa he helped to lead. So no, this is not an atheist age either. It is not any kind of “age” at all. It has no shape, no centre. Nobody sits on its throne. It is simply a vacuum, a void.

This is what I have taken to calling the time we live in now, here in the post-everything West: the Void. The Void is our new Colosseum: both bounded and empty, a place of entertainment and terror. In the Void, nothing is real, nothing has meaning, and nothing leads us in any direction but inward. When we get there, all we find is our passions, and they drag us in every direction we can think of. We have no idea who to turn to for help, and despair rises all around us as a result. In this culture, Satan is cool, but not because we believe in him: precisely because we don’t. In the Void, we all hate Christianity, but not that much. It is barely worth hating. Nothing much is worth hating, or loving anymore.

In the Void, we can believe anything we want. And so, we believe in nothing at all.

This can all sound apocalyptic: but what, after all, is an apocalypse? It is a revelation, an unveiling, a reflection of the failure of something. What is it that has failed us? The “Enlightenment”? The “West”? Some pseudo-Christianity we mistook for the real thing? It is probably too early to say. Perhaps we will never know.

No matter: here we are. And despite it all, we should be of good cheer. For the Void is, by its nature, a time-limited phenomenon. Precisely because it is empty, it cannot last. The Void is a phase; it is the place you come to after the end of a culture, and after the end of a theology. The challenge now is not to mourn, to cling or to look back. We are not in charge of this thing, after all. The challenge for us is to think about what comes next — and how to live in, through and with it.

***

A version of this article first appeared on Paul’s Substack, The Abbey of Misrule.