Pagan Eastern Europe

As far as we know it was not a new religion. It was an attempt to get together most of the good old Slavic gods (probably including some Finno-Ugorian and Scandinavian elements) and make a certain hierarchy of them.
As for spreading... This hierarchy was in the making, it did not live long enough to show if it was prozelitizing. My guess it was not. Like most of the pagan religions.

But we may assume that if that institutionalised collection of pagan gods survived the period of formation and became a state official established religion - then who knows? This religion might be enforced in the territories controlled by the Rus...

It gets at the question, what does it mean to say "Eastern Europe is 'pagan.'" Does that just mean Not-Christian? Heck, according to the schism between Eastern and Western Orthodoxy aka Catholicism, each side condemned the other as being the next thing to rejecting Christianity completely! Well, I don't know how harshly Orthodox regimes treated adherents to Rome (as a general rule, I'm sure a Pole could give us an earful!) but I do know that when they conquered most of Byzantium and indeed before that, in the lands the First Crusade conquered, Western Crusader regimes treated the Orthodox clergy and faithful quite badly--worse than they treated other Christian denominations that had more extensive and fundamental disagreements with the doctrines of the Roman papacy...but didn't challenge the right of the Pope to claim to be "Vicar of Christ" quite so directly and flatly as the Eastern hierarchy did. The Crusader regimes gave priority to upholding the political supremacy of the Popes in religious matters and therefore the schism between East and West has been bitter, despite the broad similarity in doctrine.

Again, there's the brutal way Catholic and Protestant regimes have gone after people of the rival side of the split.

Now I exaggerate a bit because I do think in most of these cases, a distinction was maintained between "Christian" and "Pagan;" even while torturing and executing people of the "wrong" and "heretical" denomination, they'd rarely deny the others were some kind of Christian.

The point here is, I certainly think it could have been in the cards for some movement to create an alternative centralized, hierarchal religion that displaced Christianity completely in the east, by taking its place and fulfilling its political and cultural roles. Islam would certainly qualify; so would Buddhism. Heck, the Kazars might have had a run of luck after adopting Judaism and imposed a Jewish East, I guess.

The odds are against most of these, except Islam, because it matters who one is aligned with. Islam would connect them with a large system of states not too far away that ties them into something big enough to rival Christianity's sphere. Buddhism--would be more isolated from other Buddhist powers, and by and large Buddhist powers have given way to Islamic ones or restored and reformed Hinduism in India itself; similarly Buddhism tended to get reabsorbed into an eclectic system clearly subordinate to the needs of the State and families in China.

Judaism a la the Kazars--well, that was, from the point of view of secular power anyway, clearly a mistake! The Kazar ruler who adopted it was torn between pro-Christian and pro-Islamic factions, and sought to square the circle by going for the root tradition of both, and wound up with the support of neither for his pains. A Jewish East would require a whole bunch of good luck for its founders and would be tantamount to just inventing a new religion from scratch.

Anyway, except the Buddhist alternative, none of these would be called "Pagan" by their Christian and Muslim rival neighbors. They might be called apostates and heretics, but not "pagans." The word "pagan," and in English also "heathen," both refer to the fact that the particular faith they adhere to is by definition not centralized in the power of the kings, but of the countryside--it is the "Old Religion" that was there before the current crop of kings and high priests who start their new, state-supporting religion in the cities and other centers of political power, and then must in some mix persuade, seduce, or beat the countryside--the land, "pagus" or some such in Latin, the "heath" in old English--into compliance.

So when we are talking about some region that has been settled by a particular people for a long time, so there's a broad consensus as to who the gods are and so forth, and then Christian or Muslim missionaries show up, the "country" religion is sitting more or less passively in their way. Similarly, in the time and place we are talking about, the current crop of "pagans" actually weren't around in those places a century or three before, they are wandering peoples who came in and rather brutally conquered, displaced or killed off the former locals--as in say post-Roman Britain becoming Anglo-Saxon England, the Germanic-and most definitely pagan!--conquerors either killed off the Britons or subordinated them--except for the ones who fled, to Wales or to Brittany. Either way the religion of the Britons--which was mostly Christian, conceivably with some "pagan" practices hidden or disguised--seems to have vanished completely. The "country" of the "pagan" beliefs moved with its practitioners.

Now instead of imagining whether Eastern Europe could come up with a truly "Pagan" as opposed to just not-Christian denomination that could survive and exist to this day, can we imagine the Anglo-Saxons doing such a thing?

I believe it's been done in works of fiction and in alt-histories, I'd guess. But in actual history, the adoption of Christianity, some centuries after the Saxons settled in Britain, seems to go hand in hand with all centralization of power, all advances of literacy, everything that could give a rival Nordic cult the kind of staying power that could enable Pagan England to face down the sort of crusading power that would surely have been aimed their way had they remained resolutely pagan, and mainland Europe followed its OTL course. (If it could have--OTL, missionaries from the British Isles were actually quite important in the process of re-consolidating the power of the medieval Church). To stand against people like the Normans, Pagan England would have needed some deep and sophisticated institutions that OTL went hand in hand with adopting Christianity. Like the Kazars, they'd be starting from scratch; they'd need a whole run of cultural geniuses to reinvent various wheels of civilization that Christians could adopt ready-made from their neighbors and old history.

In the course of doing so, what would our presumably Wotanist, more or less Norse-like English Pagan religion have evolved into? Would it be the same deep-rooted "country" faith and practices of the old Anglo-Saxon invaders? Or would it adopt characteristics that made it more and more parallel to the Christianity they stand against?

One thing to realize when looking at "pagan" practices--they don't have a centralized body of high priests defining the true, approved, orthodox faith for all the way religions like Christianity tend to. That's because the more "sophisticated" religions evolved in a context of powerful centralizing states that demand conformity and identity with the central power, whereas paganism, properly speaking, comes from a looser, less centralized state of society. A king might accumulate power, enough in fact to move his entire people onto someone else's land and sweep those luckless victims aside, but he'd do so on the basis of kinship among the leaders and persuasion that he can lead them well. He would not have the kind of authority that would give his favorite priests or shamans the ability to go into the communities of his followers and tell them that they are worshiping the gods and powers they placate all wrong! Every separate subgroup would have its own version of the more or less shared traditions of a people--they'd be united by having the same cultural heroes, but they'd tell the story of that hero each in their own ways. A pagan kingdom is a spectrum of what amounts to many related but different faiths.

And that's one way a new faith of the centralizing, doctrinaire kind can take over by the way--if the pagan realm is tolerant of some diversity by necessity and tradition, then if some of the realm start adopting the foreign ways taught by missionaries, that is not in itself out of line. So, the pagans can have it both ways for a while, claiming to follow as the case may be Christ or Mohammed, while still keeping their other practices--until it gets to the point there are a lot of Christians or Muslims, enough so that the missionaries can say, you have no excuse now, if you are a true Christian or true Muslim, you must reject the old idols; you have the numbers, do you have the faith?

For a pagan tradition that rejects these missionary feet in the door to survive, it needs to become doctrinaire itself. It needs to be in a position to demand that loyal followers of the king reject the missionaries in toto, and to do that it needs doctrines that are themselves persuasive and compelling, enough to displace all the comfortable local variations--or at least weave those, with all their contradictions, together into an unbreakable net that will not allow the alien doctrines in, not at any rate until they've been reinterpreted in the form of the new centralized Pagan faith.

The obvious way then for someone like Vladimir Sviatoslavich to get his way is to make the Paganism resemble the rival, foreign cult that otherwise would tend to take over. It would have less and less of a Pagan character.

Also, if there was diversity within a people more or less united by kinship, there would have been even greater diversity between more distantly related peoples, and still more between different nations. A Vladimir Sviatoslavich who stuck to the project of making his state Paganism a strong enough match for Christians and Muslims would almost certainly be elevating his own people's peculiar take on the gods to dogma, in a way that would strike discordant notes with neighboring Slavic peoples, and still more so with non-Slavic peoples. Pretty soon, however strong the new cult is in his own kingdom, he'd be up against others to whom the Christian and Sviatoslavichian missionaries would both look about equally alien; which will they choose? The one that allies them to another nation kind of like theirs, or the one that allies them to a vast sprawling set of kingdoms and a history going back centuries? Well, if Vladimir Sviatoslavich and his successors are powerful enough, they'll go with the one that just conquered them, or was in a position to make alliance with them look very attractive considering the alternative, and the Sviatoslavich-cult priests will move in and start "reforming" the local cults.

But my point here is, the new cult is looking less and less "pagan" and more and more like some new religion of the new kind.

The closest thing I can imagine to a truly Pagan alternative would be if the Paganism developed a new level of sophistication--perhaps the way Buddhism did relative to old Hinduism, or perhaps more like a new, reformed and improved Hinduism, which had learned to answer the challenge of the Buddhists. Certainly India did not convert to Islam, or Christianity, wholesale, and neither has Christianity or Islam taken over China, or in Vietnam, or many other places that over centuries of civilization and a long history of rival cults vying for supremacy evolved a more sophisticated version of traditional religions incorporating aspects of their rivals.

Vladimir Sviatoslavich was not in that position, and for a new and more robust paganism to be developed on the basis of what he had to hand he'd have needed, as the stubborn Saxon pagans I imagined briefly would have, a long run of many religious geniuses to develop much sophistication to stand up to the big, old, much experienced and highly sophisticated rival missionaries coming from the Christian and Muslim spheres.

It's not theoretically impossible, but in the conditions he faced Vladimir Sviatoslavich would not have been making the smart bet, given the cards he held, in staying stubbornly opposed to the foreign cult. Historically, he made the right choice, OTL.
 
Surely it is a subject upon which much has been written: Just why/how did India stay hindu? Even despite the muslim domination.
I guess something to do with India being such a developed and urbanised place which had lots of shiny temples and solidly written stories about its gods?
 

Incognito

Banned
Could Eastern Europe be mainly Pagan at this time with a long history of fighting Christendom
What, are you referring to the raids on Byzantium by Kivan Rus? Those were hardly anti-Christian "crusades", merely quests for gold & glory. They continued after the region converted to Christianity.
and a very different culture from the rest of Europe?
Please, do elaborate how Dark Age Eastern Europe was "very different culturally" form the "rest of Europe" at this time?
How about preventing the Christianization of the Germanic tribes? Without a Christian Germanic entity, then the Slavs won't be facing proselytization efforts.
Eastern Roman Empire would still be around. Kivan Rus's conversion to Orthodox Christianity was motivated, at least in part, in establishing links with rich Constantinople.
 
It gets at the question, what does it mean to say "Eastern Europe is 'pagan.'" Does that just mean Not-Christian? Heck, according to the schism between Eastern and Western Orthodoxy aka Catholicism, each side condemned the other as being the next thing to rejecting Christianity completely! Well, I don't know how harshly Orthodox regimes treated adherents to Rome (as a general rule, I'm sure a Pole could give us an earful!) but I do know that when they conquered most of Byzantium and indeed before that, in the lands the First Crusade conquered, Western Crusader regimes treated the Orthodox clergy and faithful quite badly--worse than they treated other Christian denominations that had more extensive and fundamental disagreements with the doctrines of the Roman papacy...but didn't challenge the right of the Pope to claim to be "Vicar of Christ" quite so directly and flatly as the Eastern hierarchy did. The Crusader regimes gave priority to upholding the political supremacy of the Popes in religious matters and therefore the schism between East and West has been bitter, despite the broad similarity in doctrine.

Again, there's the brutal way Catholic and Protestant regimes have gone after people of the rival side of the split.

Now I exaggerate a bit because I do think in most of these cases, a distinction was maintained between "Christian" and "Pagan;" even while torturing and executing people of the "wrong" and "heretical" denomination, they'd rarely deny the others were some kind of Christian.

The point here is, I certainly think it could have been in the cards for some movement to create an alternative centralized, hierarchal religion that displaced Christianity completely in the east, by taking its place and fulfilling its political and cultural roles. Islam would certainly qualify; so would Buddhism. Heck, the Kazars might have had a run of luck after adopting Judaism and imposed a Jewish East, I guess.

The odds are against most of these, except Islam, because it matters who one is aligned with. Islam would connect them with a large system of states not too far away that ties them into something big enough to rival Christianity's sphere. Buddhism--would be more isolated from other Buddhist powers, and by and large Buddhist powers have given way to Islamic ones or restored and reformed Hinduism in India itself; similarly Buddhism tended to get reabsorbed into an eclectic system clearly subordinate to the needs of the State and families in China.

Judaism a la the Kazars--well, that was, from the point of view of secular power anyway, clearly a mistake! The Kazar ruler who adopted it was torn between pro-Christian and pro-Islamic factions, and sought to square the circle by going for the root tradition of both, and wound up with the support of neither for his pains. A Jewish East would require a whole bunch of good luck for its founders and would be tantamount to just inventing a new religion from scratch.

Anyway, except the Buddhist alternative, none of these would be called "Pagan" by their Christian and Muslim rival neighbors. They might be called apostates and heretics, but not "pagans." The word "pagan," and in English also "heathen," both refer to the fact that the particular faith they adhere to is by definition not centralized in the power of the kings, but of the countryside--it is the "Old Religion" that was there before the current crop of kings and high priests who start their new, state-supporting religion in the cities and other centers of political power, and then must in some mix persuade, seduce, or beat the countryside--the land, "pagus" or some such in Latin, the "heath" in old English--into compliance.

So when we are talking about some region that has been settled by a particular people for a long time, so there's a broad consensus as to who the gods are and so forth, and then Christian or Muslim missionaries show up, the "country" religion is sitting more or less passively in their way. Similarly, in the time and place we are talking about, the current crop of "pagans" actually weren't around in those places a century or three before, they are wandering peoples who came in and rather brutally conquered, displaced or killed off the former locals--as in say post-Roman Britain becoming Anglo-Saxon England, the Germanic-and most definitely pagan!--conquerors either killed off the Britons or subordinated them--except for the ones who fled, to Wales or to Brittany. Either way the religion of the Britons--which was mostly Christian, conceivably with some "pagan" practices hidden or disguised--seems to have vanished completely. The "country" of the "pagan" beliefs moved with its practitioners.

Now instead of imagining whether Eastern Europe could come up with a truly "Pagan" as opposed to just not-Christian denomination that could survive and exist to this day, can we imagine the Anglo-Saxons doing such a thing?

I believe it's been done in works of fiction and in alt-histories, I'd guess. But in actual history, the adoption of Christianity, some centuries after the Saxons settled in Britain, seems to go hand in hand with all centralization of power, all advances of literacy, everything that could give a rival Nordic cult the kind of staying power that could enable Pagan England to face down the sort of crusading power that would surely have been aimed their way had they remained resolutely pagan, and mainland Europe followed its OTL course. (If it could have--OTL, missionaries from the British Isles were actually quite important in the process of re-consolidating the power of the medieval Church). To stand against people like the Normans, Pagan England would have needed some deep and sophisticated institutions that OTL went hand in hand with adopting Christianity. Like the Kazars, they'd be starting from scratch; they'd need a whole run of cultural geniuses to reinvent various wheels of civilization that Christians could adopt ready-made from their neighbors and old history.

In the course of doing so, what would our presumably Wotanist, more or less Norse-like English Pagan religion have evolved into? Would it be the same deep-rooted "country" faith and practices of the old Anglo-Saxon invaders? Or would it adopt characteristics that made it more and more parallel to the Christianity they stand against?

One thing to realize when looking at "pagan" practices--they don't have a centralized body of high priests defining the true, approved, orthodox faith for all the way religions like Christianity tend to. That's because the more "sophisticated" religions evolved in a context of powerful centralizing states that demand conformity and identity with the central power, whereas paganism, properly speaking, comes from a looser, less centralized state of society. A king might accumulate power, enough in fact to move his entire people onto someone else's land and sweep those luckless victims aside, but he'd do so on the basis of kinship among the leaders and persuasion that he can lead them well. He would not have the kind of authority that would give his favorite priests or shamans the ability to go into the communities of his followers and tell them that they are worshiping the gods and powers they placate all wrong! Every separate subgroup would have its own version of the more or less shared traditions of a people--they'd be united by having the same cultural heroes, but they'd tell the story of that hero each in their own ways. A pagan kingdom is a spectrum of what amounts to many related but different faiths.

And that's one way a new faith of the centralizing, doctrinaire kind can take over by the way--if the pagan realm is tolerant of some diversity by necessity and tradition, then if some of the realm start adopting the foreign ways taught by missionaries, that is not in itself out of line. So, the pagans can have it both ways for a while, claiming to follow as the case may be Christ or Mohammed, while still keeping their other practices--until it gets to the point there are a lot of Christians or Muslims, enough so that the missionaries can say, you have no excuse now, if you are a true Christian or true Muslim, you must reject the old idols; you have the numbers, do you have the faith?

For a pagan tradition that rejects these missionary feet in the door to survive, it needs to become doctrinaire itself. It needs to be in a position to demand that loyal followers of the king reject the missionaries in toto, and to do that it needs doctrines that are themselves persuasive and compelling, enough to displace all the comfortable local variations--or at least weave those, with all their contradictions, together into an unbreakable net that will not allow the alien doctrines in, not at any rate until they've been reinterpreted in the form of the new centralized Pagan faith.

The obvious way then for someone like Vladimir Sviatoslavich to get his way is to make the Paganism resemble the rival, foreign cult that otherwise would tend to take over. It would have less and less of a Pagan character.

Also, if there was diversity within a people more or less united by kinship, there would have been even greater diversity between more distantly related peoples, and still more between different nations. A Vladimir Sviatoslavich who stuck to the project of making his state Paganism a strong enough match for Christians and Muslims would almost certainly be elevating his own people's peculiar take on the gods to dogma, in a way that would strike discordant notes with neighboring Slavic peoples, and still more so with non-Slavic peoples. Pretty soon, however strong the new cult is in his own kingdom, he'd be up against others to whom the Christian and Sviatoslavichian missionaries would both look about equally alien; which will they choose? The one that allies them to another nation kind of like theirs, or the one that allies them to a vast sprawling set of kingdoms and a history going back centuries? Well, if Vladimir Sviatoslavich and his successors are powerful enough, they'll go with the one that just conquered them, or was in a position to make alliance with them look very attractive considering the alternative, and the Sviatoslavich-cult priests will move in and start "reforming" the local cults.

But my point here is, the new cult is looking less and less "pagan" and more and more like some new religion of the new kind.

The closest thing I can imagine to a truly Pagan alternative would be if the Paganism developed a new level of sophistication--perhaps the way Buddhism did relative to old Hinduism, or perhaps more like a new, reformed and improved Hinduism, which had learned to answer the challenge of the Buddhists. Certainly India did not convert to Islam, or Christianity, wholesale, and neither has Christianity or Islam taken over China, or in Vietnam, or many other places that over centuries of civilization and a long history of rival cults vying for supremacy evolved a more sophisticated version of traditional religions incorporating aspects of their rivals.

Vladimir Sviatoslavich was not in that position, and for a new and more robust paganism to be developed on the basis of what he had to hand he'd have needed, as the stubborn Saxon pagans I imagined briefly would have, a long run of many religious geniuses to develop much sophistication to stand up to the big, old, much experienced and highly sophisticated rival missionaries coming from the Christian and Muslim spheres.

It's not theoretically impossible, but in the conditions he faced Vladimir Sviatoslavich would not have been making the smart bet, given the cards he held, in staying stubbornly opposed to the foreign cult. Historically, he made the right choice, OTL.


Interesting.

What did the Christians within the Roman Empire think of Zoroastrianism? Like Hinduism did it benefit from being part of an advanced society?
 
What, are you referring to the raids on Byzantium by Kivan Rus? Those were hardly anti-Christian "crusades", merely quests for gold & glory. They continued after the region converted to Christianity. Please, do elaborate how Dark Age Eastern Europe was "very different culturally" form the "rest of Europe" at this time?Eastern Roman Empire would still be around. Kivan Rus's conversion to Orthodox Christianity was motivated, at least in part, in establishing links with rich Constantinople.


By this time, as in around about the time we are in now or at least a good bit after the start of the scenario. So time for wars between Christians and the Pagans.

Please, do elaborate how Dark Age Eastern Europe was "very different culturally" form the "rest of Europe" at this time?
Again a good bit of time after the start of the scenario.


Kivan Rus's conversion to Orthodox Christianity was motivated, at least in part, in establishing links with rich Constantinople.
Is a good point, i imagine they'd still be fairly drawn to Constantinople.
 
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