INTRODUCTION - PAGANISM 101
Paganism is a religion. In contrast to other religions,
specifically Judaeo-Christian ones, Paganism is a natural religion,
viewing humanity as a functional organ within the greater organism of all
life, rather than as something created and separate and "above" the rest
of the natural world. Other religions seek to glorify man's special
relationship to God and his conquest of Nature; Paganism emphasizes the
harmony of man and Nature.
There are and have been many forms of Paganism. All traditional
"native" religions are Pagan, such as those of the American Indians,
Africans, Celts, Norsemen, etc. The classical religions of the ancient
Greece and Rome were Pagan, as were the mystery cults of the ancient
world.
The word "Pagan" comes from the Latin, "paganus" meaning "peasant"
or "country dweller". As a religious term, it is used correctly by
anthropologists to refer to the indigenous folk religions of particular
regions and peoples and the historical religions of the ancient world.
The word "heathen" is an Anglo-Saxon word for the same concept, referring
to the people who dwell on the heath. Christians used these terms to
describe people who held to the Old Religion because Christianity arose
among the discontented poor of the cities. Its spread to the countryside
was slow. Furthermore, when Christianity became dominant, and
Christians
set out to convert the remaining non-Christians and sly those
who
refused, non-Christians fled to their brethren in the
countryside.
It should be clear that just as a person cannot be a
citizen of two
countries, he cannot have two religions. A person cannot be
Pagan and
Christian at the same time, for the views of the two faiths
are
fundamentally different and in many ways diametrically
opposed. When
Gerald Gardner wrote Witchcraft Today in 1954, he tried to
make it appear
that one could be a Witch and still remain a Christian. He
did so
because he was writing for an essentially hostile audience.
and he felt
it was necessary to "sugar-coat" the pill. But the fact
remains that
Witchcraft is a form of Paganism and as such it is
incompatible with
Christianity.
Witchcraft is thus one form of the "Pagan Way". It is
not the only
way, but it is the one that has survived in Europe. As such
it is often
referred to simply as the "Old Religion or "La Vecchia
Religione. The
word Witchcraft comes from the Old English "wiccian", (to cast
spells, to
work magic, or to predict). In the Old Religion of Pagan
Europe, the
shamans or medicine men were called "wicca" (pronounced
Witche) if male
or "wicce" if female.
Witchcraft survived where other Pagan religions perished
partly
because of the courage of its adherents, who braved centuries
of
persecution rather than give up their faith, and partly due to
the
strength of the ancient tradition itself. For elements of
Wicca, such as
God and Goddess figures are found in prehistoric sites from
the Stone-Age
and modern Witches still regard the great stone circles such
as
Stonehenge as sacred places. By classical times, the strain
of Paganism
that became Wicca was already distinct from the state
religions of Greece
and Rome, for it had given rise, in late prehistoric times, to
the so-
called mystery cults of the Goddess such as the cult of Isis
in Egypt and
the Dionysian, Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries of Greece. The
mystery
cults inherited from primitive times a concern with light,
fire,
fertility and the importance of woman to which was added in
historic
times a philosophy of life and behavior which as Cicero put
it, "made it
possible for man to live with joy and to die with a better
hope."
For Wicca is a religion of Nature. It reflects man's
basic concerns
with the light that fades each winter and is born again each
spring, with
the fertility of the soil and of all the creatures that live
from the
soil, with the continuity of life, and with the unity and
harmony of all
Nature.
For in Paganism, and thus in Wicca, man's place is in
Nature, not
above Her. In this Wicca is in fundamental disagreement with
Christianity. For the Book of Genesis states clearly (1:28)
"And God
said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and
subdue it;
and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds
of the air
and over every living thing that moves upon the Earth.'" Such
a
philosophy is alien to Paganism where the Gods are Nature's
Gods, the
good life is the life in harmony with Nature and the creatures
of earth
are man's friends and familiars.
The Gods and Goddess of Paganism are the Gods of Nature.
Chief
among them are, of course, the two great Gods of Earth -- the
Great
Mother and the Horned God. The Great Mother is the
personification of
Earth and her daughter the Moon. She is a Goddess of
fertility and of
life. But she is also Hecate, Goddess of the crossroads, of
death and of
the underworld. Hence she is call the the three-fold Goddess
and her
three aspects, Selene, Diana and Hecate, are symbolized by the
full, half
and dark of the moon. As the Moon rules the tides, she is
also Goddess
of the Sea. So strong was her hold upon the mind of man that
Christians
could not do without her and so they renamed her Mary, the
Mother of God,
Star of the Sea. She is known by many names: Demeter the Corn
Mother,
Cerridwen the White Goddess, Cybele, Astatre, Artemis, Vivien.
She is
Diana of whom St. Paul's audience cried out "Great is Diana of
the
Ephesians."
On a more philosophic plane, she is the all-embracing
Earth Mother,
giver of life. And she is the cool light of hope in the
darkness of
night.
Her consort is the Horned God of Earth, the other half of
the
duality of life. In his aspect of God of life and of all
living
creatures, he is Pan the Goat-foot God of Arcady. But He is
also God of
the crossroads and hence Mercury, God of Commerce. And he is
Pluto, Lord
of the underworld. His picture in stag's mask and antlers
appears on the
walls of Stone-Age caves.
In many primitive religions, He is the Corn God, born in
the spring
and slain in the fall. As such he is the son of the Earth
Mother in
spring and her consort in the Autumn. Seen in perspective,
Christianity
is merely one of many cults of the dying and rising God.
But Christians were not content to be one of many cults.
They had
to be the only one, the worshippers of the one true God. And
so they set
out to destroy the God who was originally theirs. They
created Satan,
the Devil. They modeled him after the Horned God images of
Pagan
cultures, such as Pan of the Greeks and Baphomet of the
Persians. Satan
is a Hebrew word meaning "adversary" or "obstructor." It is
related to
the Egyptian Set and the Roman Saturn, both Gods of the dead.
Translated
into Greek, Satan becomes "Diabolos" (slanderer) from
"diaballein" (to
throw across, to slander, to mislead).
In the Witch trials of the Middle Ages, whenever the
defendant spoke
of the Horned God being present at the Sabbats, as he was, in
the person
of the High Priest who costumed himself in a horned mask and
assumed the
role, the word "Satan" or "Devil" was substituted by the
magistrates, for
to have written the word "God" as spoken by the accused would
have been
considered blasphemous by the Christian court.
Not all Pagans see the Gods on such a personal level. A
Pagan is
one who worships the Gods and Goddesses of Nature by
observation, study
and love. He may not choose to call on them by name,
considering this
fanciful, but he recognizes them as personifications of the
powers of
Nature which can be loved and understood. For as Harold Moss
put it
(Green Egg #55, Midsummer 1973), "The Gods as we perceive them
are the
rules of the game. For dead matter they are gravity, say or
electromagnetism. For living beings they are more personal,
more
emotional. But our emotions are merely our perceptions of the
universal
forces that govern all existence." In a political analogy,
the Christian
world is a tyranny where laws are handed down from above; the
Pagan world
is a republic where laws are fashioned by those they govern.
It follows that one of the proper occupations of a Pagan
is the
study of Nature. But unlike Christians, Pagans study Nature
to better
understand and love her, not to rule her. If post-Renaissance
man had
been Pagan instead of Christian science would never have
created the
debacle it has created in the modern world, for it would have
have been
practised as an end rather than as a means to power.
Pagans would never have misused science as Christians
have done,
because Pagans are inherently more ethical people than
Christians. Such
a statement perhaps seems strange to people brought up to
believe that
Christianity6 rescued the Roman world from the sin and
depravity of
Heathenism. It is true that the Roman world had become
depraved, but the
fact that people do not practice their religion does not
invalidate the
religion. In fact, Christianity was able to succeed, not
because it was
more ethical, but because it was less ethical. For
Christianity has no
ethics to speak of. It has a rigid set of "Thou shalt nots".
And if you
obey them you do not have to think of ethics at all. Paganism
has only
one rule of ethics: "An ye harm none, do what ye will." But
that is a
very difficult rule to follow because you have to think about
it and you
have to make decisions. There are no absolute standards of
right and
wrong. Anything that brings happiness and causes no one or no
thing to
be harmed is good. What does harm or renders the soul
disharmonious with
Nature is wrong. It is thus wrong to let your child starve
because you
can only feed him if you steal. Right and wrong have to be
evaluated in
each and every instance. And if you do wrong it will come
back to you --
three times over the Witches say.
It will not, however, result in you condemnation to Hell
for all
eternity. For the Christians, lacking an innate feeling for
ethics, had
to invent a system of rewards and punishments to keep people
in line.
Pagans, on the other hand, usually believe in some form of
reincarnation,
whether it be a personal rebirth in successive lives or a
dispersal of
the soul into the world soul and its rebirth in new forms of
life. For
Paganism is a Nature religion in which life is a continuum and
the
artificial distinctions between here and the hereafter is
meaningless.
Nothing exists except what is on Nature and Heaven and Hell
are not of
Nature. But rebirth is of nature. It was a Christian who
said "The
resurrection is written in every grain of corn," but the
sentiment is
Pagan.
Morgana Silverthorn
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