AHC: Successful Pre-Enlightenment Pagan Revival

Redhand

Banned
Very true. A great example of paganism that has survived to this day is Easter. The holiday is meant to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, but how does the Easter bunny and Easter eggs fit into that? The answer is they don't, not at all. They are purely pagan. Easter is in the spring, and spring was regarded as a time of fertility by pagans, and rabbits and eggs are widespread symbols of fertility, thus the Easter bunny and Easter eggs.

The church basically had two options when it came to a lot of these traditions: accept them, and try to make as many of them as christian as they could, or piss off all the people and face a pagan resurgence.

In fact, there were a few pagan resurgences in history, and I think it's quite likely they happened because the church tried to tell the people they couldn't keep doing all their old pagan practices. Eventually the church learned they couldn't stop these practices, so they tried to incorporate them into christianity.

Early church doctrine was based on the spread of the faith and the idea that Christianity and the entire basis of salvation was something that could be met halfway on in terms of ritualistic practices but not core beliefs. If people who had Pagan like traditions used them to express worship and proper sentiment for Christ simply because they were Germans or Picts then that was okay because they realize that not everyone was from the Hellenized Eastern Mediterranean
and they had their own traditions.

If you get Christianity to for whatever reason decide not to proselytize and stay limited to the Judaic chosen people model, that is the best way to keep Paganism alive in Europe.
 
That's not entirely true. There are many folk beliefs that rural people in Europe maintained up until modern times that did not derive from Christianity, and quite a few of these beliefs can be directly linked to pagan beliefs (elf traditions of Iceland, krampus and perchten traditions of Bavaria and Austria, the Wild Hunt, etc). After many centuries, people who maintain such customs don't distinguish them as any different from their Christian traditions - For example, Christians in Austrian villages might see the act of parading around in Perchta masks as just as integral to celebrating Christmas as the acts of setting up a nativity scene or caroling at church. Neopagans often draw from these survivals just as much as they look to books about ancient times as a basis for their beliefs.

Surviving folk beliefs, practices, and customs =/= surviving Paganism. As you yourself pointed out those different populations saw themselves as God-fearing Christians, not Pagans of any sort. I do not deny those practices are used by and inspire many modern Pagans but that is a very far cry from a cohesive, non-monotheistic, non-Christian spiritual practice as one saw throughout pre-Christian Europe.

Unless one considers oneself or one's community to be worshiping something other than the Holy Trinity, regardless of the particulars of how, then you aren't talking Paganism. If ritual practice is sufficient to define a religion as Pagan then the Catholic Church qualifies as the largest Pagan tradition in the world with their plethora of saints, the symbolism and imagery used in European churches, and the ritual customs that in many ways borrow from earlier polytheistic practices. If you really push it then all of Christianity counts seeing as the whole reserructed savior motif goes all the way back to Osiris and demigod children like Herakles run amok in Hellenistic practices making Jesus just another one of many.

For obvious reasons this doesn't work, hence why claiming surviving folk practices without corresponding spirituality and cosmology that is most distinctly not monotheistic and either polytheistic, animistic, or pantheistic constitutes surviving paganism does not work. Modern Paganism was born out of a series of developments that trace back to the Enlightenment while drawing heavily on the practices of pre-Christian cultures, forms of spirituality, and surviving folk practices. If it genuinely was revived from some kind of polytheistic underground, a claim of dubious veracity at best (saying this as a near life-long Pagan), then it would be a very different thing from what we have today given the heavy emphasis on Paganism on what is best described as Do It Yourself spirituality which is a concept drawing most heavily from and was first truly articulated by Aleister Crowley and Thelema.
 
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