Pagan Revivals

Why a ‘dead’ religious tradition continues to exist

A small but significant number of people in Western countries today describe themselves as Pagans, and embrace beliefs and practices which are inspired by ancient Pagan religions.

Why is this?

Wasn’t Paganism defeated long ago by the Gospel of Christ? Or – if one has a different set of prejudices – wasn’t it discredited by the advent of science and reason?

Apparently not.

So, why are there Pagans still walking around today? How has this seemingly unlikely thing come about?

Theories

There are two main theories which have sought to explain why Pagan religions exist today in Western countries, despite the advent of both Christianity and secular rationalism. These may be called the survival theory and the concoction theory.

According to the survival theory, Paganism literally never went away. European countries were never fully Christianised. Pagan religious traditions survived, either under a thin veneer of Christianity or in an explicitly Pagan form. In the countryside, peasants continued to practise the same fertility rites that they had practised for thousands of years.

There were a couple of reasons why people were ready to believe this. In Protestant countries, it provided a means of explaining the existence of Catholicism. Why were people who called themselves Christians venerating a pantheon of saints and a virgin queen of heaven, and using incense and holy water? Catholicism was just ancient Roman paganism, with a few of the names changed.

From the nineteenth century, secular scholars got in on the act too – in particular, Wilhelm Mannhardt in Germany and James Frazer in Britain. Folk customs were interpreted as direct survivals of the Pagan past. This way of explaining folk culture was hugely popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Green Man is a Pagan symbol! (He isn’t.) Morris dancing is a Pagan ritual! (It’s not.) It allowed middle-class academics in London – people like me, essentially – to indulge in a pleasing fantasy. If you take a 30 minute train ride outside London, you can go back thousands of years into history. It was comforting to think that colourful heathen peasants were still around, particularly at a time of enormous social and technological change.

The high water-mark of this stuff was the theory that Pagan religion had survived into Christian times in the form of witchcraft. This notion went back to the 1820s, but it was popularised by the academic writer Margaret Murray from the 1920s onwards. Murray told journalists that murders in modern Britain were actually sacrifices carried out by surviving witch covens. The theory that a Pagan witch religion had survived to the present day was taken up by a retired colonial official, Gerald Gardner, who used it as the origin story for his new religion of Wicca.

The survival theory was greatly exaggerated. Some Pagan religious practices did survive into Christian culture, but not nearly as many as the advocates of the theory claimed - and the ideas of Murray and Gardner were certainly false. Sooner or later, a crunch was bound to come. The theory was in trouble by the 1970s, although quite a few people still believe some version of it.

The concoction theory goes to the opposite extreme. On this view, contemporary Paganism is an entirely modern construct. It has only a superficial connection with ancient Paganism. It’s really a new religious movement – it’s Scientology. Or perhaps Star Trek cosplay. It is fundamentally a product of modernity, designed by modern people to fulfil modern needs.

This theory is often taken to the conclusion that revived Paganism is invalid because it is modern. That doesn’t follow. The spiritual validity of a religious tradition doesn’t depend on it having a long history.

But in any event the concoction theory is wrong. Contemporary Paganism has real, substantive commonalities with ancient Paganism. To the extent that it has modern elements and meets modern needs, it is no different from any other religion – one could equally say that the modern Church of England is a concoction which has major differences from the church of the early apostles or the church of the Renaissance popes.

The concoction theory is not new. It originated in the nineteenth century among Christians who wanted to attack the early Pagan revivalists. “You’re not really Pagans,” they said. “You don’t understand what ancient Paganism was, and if you met real ancient Pagans you wouldn’t like them.”

There is a third way between the two established theories - we may call this the persistence theory. It essentially goes like this. Christian European culture inherited an enormous amount of Pagan stuff. Myths, literature, philosophy, art and architecture. This doesn’t mean that Paganism survived as a religion. But it did mean that Christian culture contained a lot of Pagan ideas, narratives and symbols which could be reactivated at any time and turned back into a living religion.

Some Christians understood that the Pagan legacy was a real temptation for people to fall away from Christianity. For example, when St Paul’s School in London was opened in the early sixteenth century, a disapproving bishop called it a “house of idolatry” because it taught the children classical Pagan literature. He was not the last devout Christian to make this critique.

The Christians who worried about this were right. People did give into the temptation of embracing Paganism. They did revive Pagan varieties of religion, and they did so repeatedly through the centuries.

The first Pagan revivalist

We now move on to some examples of the ways in which people have given in to the temptation to revive Pagan religion. We may start with the first of all the Pagan revivalists: the Emperor Julian.

The story of the Christianisation of the Roman Empire is fairly well-known. The Emperor Constantine is said to have converted when he had a vision before a major battle in 312 CE. His successors on the imperial throne followed in his footsteps as champions of the Christian gospel.

But there was an interruption in the succession of Christian emperors. This came with the brief reign of Julian from 361 to 363 CE.

Julian was a philosopher. He stood in the tradition of Plato, being an adherent of the late iteration of Plato’s thought known as Neoplatonism. His version of Paganism wasn’t quite the same as traditional historical Paganism – it was infused with Neoplatonic elements.

Julian was an opponent of Christianity; but he was also strongly influenced by the rival religion. You get the sense that he wanted not so much to roll back the influence of the Christian church as to replace it with a Pagan church headed by himself as the Pagan pope. He wanted to create an alternative clerical hierarchy. He also thought that the Christians had got ahead of the Pagans in their ethic of charity to the poor.

Julian didn’t live long enough to restore Paganism. It is interesting to speculate on whether he would have succeeded in his project if he had lived longer. Was Christianity already too large and powerful to defeat?

Byzantine Pagans

The Roman Empire ceased to exist in the west about a century after Julian. But in the east, it never fell. It just evolved into the Byzantine Empire.

The Byzantine Empire was a very Christian place indeed – the last place that you would expect to find attempts to turn back the clock to the time of the old gods. But a succession of figures in Byzantium engaged in the project of reviving Pagan ideas. They were inspired primarily by the Platonist tradition of philosophy.

One prominent example of a Byzantine Pagan revivalist was a dubious character by the name of Michael Psellos (1018–c. 1078). He was interested in the magical side of Paganism. While he claimed to be a pious Christian, this interest is barely concealed in passages like the following, which purports to explain the obscure term strophalos in an ancient oracle:

The strophalos of Hekate is a golden ball, with a sapphire embedded in the middle of it, which is whirled around using a bull’s hide. It has characters written all over it. People whirl it around while making invocations. They generally call such objects iynges: sometimes the object in question is spherical, sometimes it is triangular, and sometimes it is another shape. People spin them around, beating the air with them, while laughing and making unintelligible or animal-like noises. The oracle teaches that the ritual is accomplished by whirling this strophalos around because it has some unspeakable power. It is called the ball ‘of Hekate’ because it is dedicated to Hecate. Hecate is a god of the Chaldaeans. The wellspring of virtues is at her right side and that of souls is at her left. This oracle is complete nonsense.

Perhaps the best-known Byzantine Pagan was George Gemistos Plethon (1355–1450/52), who promoted a different kind of Paganism. His rationalistic, philosophical approach was quite different from that of Psellos, and he had little interest in magic. The clearest statement of his Pagan ideas comes in a work entitled The Laws, a blueprint for a new Pagan society which survives in fragments. People still debate how serious Plethon’s vision was. It’s always possible to dismiss it as an intellectual exercise. But I think he was serious. This is the sort of thing that he wrote:

King Zeus, you are Being itself, Unity itself and Goodness itself: you are great, great in being, and surpassingly great.… You have existed in yourself since time before time. Alone of all things, you are wholly and entirely unbegotten.… Through you and from you everything exists, is born and is established.…

The Renaissance

The Byzantine Empire finally fell to the Muslim Ottomans in 1453. But that was not the end of the story. Pagan revivalist ideas were carried to western Europe by a number of people who were associated with or influenced by Plethon. In Italy, such ideas had a warm reception. It was the Renaissance – Italians were absolutely obsessed with being like the ancient Romans, and this unavoidably involved a temptation to embrace ancient Roman religion.

The most famous centre of Pagan-friendly thinking in Italy was Florence, where the Platonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) attempted with some success to combine Paganism with Catholicism. He was followed in this endeavour by his younger associate, the aristocrat Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494). Meanwhile, in Rome, a group of Paganising intellectuals known as the Roman Academy was formed around Pomponio Leto (1428–1498). They ended up being arrested and tortured on the orders of Pope Paul II.

An example of the sort of thing that people got up to in Renaissance Italy is provided by the work of Michael Tarchaniota Marullus (c.1454–1500), a soldier and poet who was exiled from his native Byzantium due to the Ottoman conquest. This is an extract from his hymn to the god Pan:

But, when resplendent Hesperus has raised his holy

face from the waves of his mother Tethys,

and Night, veiled in darkness, has spread

Lethean sleep throughout the world,

Then Father Jupiter reveals himself to the powers of heaven

in full glory, riding on his swift chariot, now here, now there,

travelling around, blessing and

nourishing every place under heaven!

Behind him in a long train

follows a great chorus of gods,

ranked under the eleven chiefs,

while only good Vesta remains in her temple,

Until they arrive at the sacred heights

of serene Olympus, their bodies tired by

the journey and the jolting of the chariots,

and they refresh themselves with banquets of ambrosia.

There by turns they occupy their days

in feasting, free from the savage attacks of

troubles and sleepless complaints,

and in refilling their capacious goblets,

And, given strength to sing lovely songs by the abundant

nectar, they sing of you, the father

of the Earth and of the windy Sea,

and of the fertile Air—good Pan.

Over in Rimini on the east coast of Italy, we find the dubious figure of Sigismondo Malatesta (1417-1468). A brutal warlord, Malatesta was the first – and so far the only – person in history to be personally condemned to hell by a pope. He was attracted to Pagan ideas, and he built a Pagan temple in Rimini known as the Tempio Malatestiano, in which he deposited the ashes of Plethon. The edifice was thinly disguised as a Catholic church, and Masses are still celebrated there today.

The modern Pagan revival

The modern Pagan revival essentially dates from the eighteenth century. By this time, years of religious warfare and the growth of sceptical philosophy had broken the Christian monopoly on the European religious market. The idea of religious liberty was gaining ground, and people had a greater degree of freedom than ever before to embrace forms of religion that differed from those of the established state churches.

The principal competitor to Christianity that arose was secular rationalism. The main alternative to believing in the Christian God was believing in a minimal, rational God or no God at all. Indeed, this still is the main alternative in the West to being Christian.

Modern Paganism was created by people who wanted a third way. What if you wanted to be religious (or spiritual) but not Christian? The persisting inheritance of Pagan elements in European culture, and its colonial counterparts, provided a ready-made answer. It was no surprise that several distinct groups of people would seize the chance of reanimating Paganism as a living religion in the modern age.

First, there were the philosophers and intellectuals. People in this category played a key role in initiating the modern Pagan revival. Two individuals are worthy of particular mention in this regard. The first is the philosopher Thomas Taylor (1758-1835), a radical Platonist of anti-Christian views. Taylor was a prolific writer: he published numerous Pagan texts and translations and became quite a well-known public figure. The second is Sir William Jones (1746-1794), a scholar who worked as a colonial judge in India. He was not a dedicated Pagan like Taylor, but he flirted with unorthodox religious ideas, and he helped to unlock the door that others would kick wide open. He was so enamoured of Hindu religion that he wrote his own poems to Hindu gods. Reviewers at the time assumed that they were translations because it was unthinkable that an Englishman could compose such works.

Next, there were the Romantics – the people for whom Paganism was a form of taboo-breaking rebellion against convention. Romantic Paganism can be traced to eccentric aristocrats in the eighteenth century, such as Francis Dashwood, a Chancellor of the Exchequer who played with Pagan rituals on his estate in Buckinghamshire. Like Sigismondo Malatesta, he had a church constructed in the style of an ancient Pagan temple. (This is St Lawrence’s, West Wycombe – it’s not far from the M40.)

The Romantic Pagan current was taken forward by a series of poets and writers, including Percy Shelley, John Keats and Thomas Love Peacock. These figures – who were influenced, as it happens, by Thomas Taylor – wrote and translated poems and stories about the ancient gods. Sometimes, they even worshipped them. Percy Shelley is famous for, amongst other things, dying young at sea off the coast of Italy in 1822. Shelley’s funeral, which was held by his friends on the beach, may have been the first public Pagan ritual to be performed in Italy since the Christianisation of the Roman Empire.

Finally, there were the occultists. Pagan revivals through history have repeatedly been associated with an interest in magic and mysticism. Not all modern Pagans are magicians, but many are. The first magical Pagan ritual of modern times – an invocation of the ancient holy man Apollonius of Tyana – was apparently performed by Éliphas Lévi during a visit to London in 1854. The first successful occult society of modern times, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, was founded in London around 1888 as a kind of semi-Pagan, semi-Christian hybrid. The writer and psychotherapist Dion Fortune (1890-1946) was another esoteric figure whose outlook was shaped by both Pagan and Christian influences. She ended up hosting rites in honour of Isis, and perhaps also Pan, in a former church in Belgravia. The church, which is known as the Belfry, is now a restaurant.

Modern Paganism has always been a minority tradition, but it has occasionally come close to obtaining political or state backing. One example of this came in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the new rulers of France were experimenting with religious alternatives to Catholicism. The revolutionaries tended to be rationalists and deists, but they were willing to dabble with forms of religion that looked suspiciously Pagan. The best-known expression of this was the Culte de la Raison: in 1793, celebrations were held across France involving women acting as goddess-like figures, most famously in Notre Dame cathedral. In more sinister vein, Pagan revivalism had some degree of state sponsorship in Nazi Germany, when Heinrich Himmler’s SS dabbled in ancient Germanic Paganism:

On the table lay a yellow sun disc made of flowers on a blue background; to the left and right stood torchbearers and behind the table a bowl, containing fire … The choir opened the ceremony with a chorus from Lohengrin. A representative of the new usage, SS Comrade Elling, gave the dedication – an address based on the song from the Edda Helga and Sigrun … Then the bridal pair were offered bread (representing the germinating force of earth) and salt (the symbol of purity) on silver vessels. Finally, the pair thus married according to German custom received their wedding rings.

Revived Paganism finally became something like a mass movement after World War II. To a large extent, this was driven by the popularity of Gerald Gardner’s witch religion Wicca, which obtained a significant following across different countries from the 1950s onwards. It is also worth mentioning here the revival of interest from the 1960s onwards in the Pagan-esque ideas of Aleister Crowley, and the development of Nordic, Druidic and other Pagan movements from the 1970s. More recently, after the fall of the Soviet bloc, there has been a resurgence of interest in ‘native faith’ traditions in Eastern Europe.

The modern revival of Paganism is exceptional only insofar as it has succeeded in breaking out of a narrow literate élite into popular culture – something that earlier revivals largely failed to do. It is in essence no more or less than a recurrence of the same project of breathing life back into Pagan religion that has been undertaken repeatedly since Christianity first rose to hegemony. People in the Christian West just cannot stop trying to reanimate the legacy of pre-Christian polytheism. If Christianity is an integral part of Euro-American cultural heritage, so too is Pagan revivalism.

Further resources

I have posted a series of videos about Pagan revivals on Youtube here

I published an article on Pagan revivals in Antigone magazine here

I co-wrote a book on this subject with Francis Young entitled Paganism Persisting, which can be purchased here

Other recommended books include Liz Williams, Miracles of Our Own Making and Ronald Hutton’s magisterial history of the modern Pagan revival, The Triumph of the Moon. For further treatments of Pagan influence in premodern European culture, see Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods and Joscelyn Godwin, The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance. There is a separate literature on the Emperor Julian: Adrian Murdoch, The Last Emperor is the best introduction.