OCCULTISM
NEOPAGANISM
Essays on being a polytheist, and the
history of paganism.
What is Paganism?
“Pagan” is an amorphous term that means different things to different people. Here are a few definitions that I’ve seen: Pagan as a “nature based” religion: This definition is commonly used by Western neopagans, but it doesn’t mean anything concrete. It’s almost completely useless as an actual definition because what the hell does “nature-based” even mean? It conjures up a kind of pseudo-utopian tree hugging image at worst, and ignores a lot of cultural context. Pagan as a non-Abrahamic religion: This is the most technical definition of the term. “Pagan” originally referred to any pre-Christian belief system that Christianity supplanted. Under that definition, Hinduism counts as a religion that has existed before Christianity. But Christians and Muslims threw the label “pagan” at each other, so in a way it just meant “not us.” The problem with this definition is that it encompasses all religions on Earth except for three, and it also only makes sense in contrast with those three. That makes it a useless term. Pagan as non-mainstream religion: I’ve seen this one pop up more often. Pagan religions are any religions that aren’t major world religions. So, paganism is anything that isn’t the three Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Sikhism, or Chinese traditional religions. But again, it’s still kind of too broad of a category. Pagan as polytheism: This narrows it down a bit, but that’s how we run into another problem — what’s polytheism? From what I know about Hinduism, I would describe it as “soft polytheist,” a term used by neopagans to describe the belief that all gods are aspects of one supreme being or divine source. But this is an etic term. I’ve heard some Hindus describe themselves as monotheistic, believing in one divinity that manifests itself in many different forms. Similarly, where does Zoroastrianism fit in? What about Buddhism, which doesn’t technically have deities but has figures that function similarly? What about Shintoism, which some people describe as being animism and not polytheism? (Personally, I think it’s pointless to distinguish between polytheistic religions and animistic religions, because most polytheistic religions have animistic elements. Most people don’t think of Ancient Greek religion as being animistic, but it sure as hell has animistic elements!) Pagan as European polytheism: Narrowing it down a little more, I’ve seen people use “pagan” to refer only to European polytheistic religions that were supplanted by Christianity. Most of the time, when people discuss “paganism,” they’re referring to Greek, Norse, Celtic, etc. polytheism. But there are some non-European religions that are described as pagan, like Egyptian polytheism and Aztec polytheism. Pagan as dead religion: Finally, “pagan” could be defined as any religion that hasn’t been practiced continuously, ruling out Hinduism, most other major religions, and most indigenous religions. But. Wicca is considered pagan by basically everybody, and it is not a reconstruction of anything. In a way this definition rules out eclectic neopaganism, too. So. I don’t really know what paganism is. The original meaning of “pagan” means roughly the same thing (and had roughly the same connotations) as “redneck.” But personally, I tend to use “pagan” to refer to polytheistic religions, i.e. anything with a pantheon.
Why I'm Pagan
I didn't intend to become pagan. I wanted magic. I came to learn magic. When I learned that there were people who called themselves witches, that there was a way to be a real witch, I decided I wanted in. So I began researching Wicca. Back when I was thirteen, I started practicing a form of pseudo-Wicca based on the information I could find. And that was fun, for a while! The thrill of reinventing my religious beliefs was exciting and interesting. I became kinda obsessed with paganism for a while, the way I would become obsessed with a new fandom franchise. (I even structured a birthday party around it because I’m weird…) There were things I liked about Wicca. I liked its festivals, for one thing. I used to wonder why May Day was even on the calendar, and now I freaking love Beltane. I already loved Halloween, but learning about Samhain taught me why it was so important to me, why that one year Halloween was canceled because of a snowstorm I felt like something deeply significant was being overlooked. It was like Christmas simply… not happening. Once I learned that Halloween was a holy day, my experience of it made more sense. I like that neopaganism has taught me how to talk to gods and have personal relationships with them. I’m not sure if I talked to them at all before discovering it. I started to craft a spirituality for myself. I thought rituals would be a hassle to do (do I really need to do a ritual every full moon to be a real witch?), but I actually liked them a lot. I liked having an altar in my room. I liked incense and candlelight and soft music. I loved the spiritual high that I experienced when Automatic Writing, and the answers to every big question I’d ever had just flowed out my hand. I’ve stopped doing rituals since I came to college, but I kind of miss it. I also like the amount of agency that paganism gave me in terms of my spirituality and practice. There’s a lot of things I like about paganism. I say paganism, I really mean neopaganism, because paganism is the religion practiced in agricultural societies where the forces of nature seem like unpredictable and fickle gods who need to be constantly appeased so they don’t destroy your crops, and you won’t starve when winter comes. Most people in the modern world don’t practice a religion based around that, and see gods more as friends, guides, instructors, or even resources, rather than unpredictable forces of nature. After a while, I realized that religion wasn’t what I came for. I never really intended to become a pagan, and there were a lot of things about Wicca that didn’t work for me. Wicca did not work for me. It slowly began to frustrate me. After a while, I decided I didn’t like how magic and paganism, we’re treated as synonymous, as though you had to be pagan (read: Wiccan) to practice magic. I started with Wicca because, if you use “witchcraft” as your keyword, then 99% of the material you find is going to be based in Wicca. I didn’t come for a religion, and I didn’t really want to convert to a different religion. I liked gods, and I liked rituals, and I liked festivals, but religion was not what I came for. I came for magic. So, things have shifted since then. I’ve started a self-guided academic study of magic in general, rather than witchcraft specifically — alchemy, ceremonial magic, divination, theurgy, chaos magic… folk magic will probably be next. My understanding of magic has grown considerably, and although I still don’t do a lot of practical magic, I’ve made a lot of progress in my level of understanding and my capabilities. I’m focusing on that to the best of my ability while in college, which mostly consists of reading books of advanced practical techniques and not putting any of it into practice because that’s easier said than done and I have more pressing things to worry about. Magic is hard! Mastering any skill is hard. I’ll continue to work on it, though, and get what I came for. Meanwhile, my religious identity just phased into the mists of Aion. I have no clue exactly what my religion is now. I suppose I could be called pagan because I’m not anything else. I’ve even stopped calling myself a witch, and I haven’t found a new label for myself. I’m definitely part of the group of “New Agers” that include a smattering of Unitarian Universalists, Hindus, Buddhists, pagans, hippies, shamans, and a bunch of other weird things, but that’s too broad a category. I suppose I’m some sort of mystic. “Spiritual but not religious,” Zachary clarifies. He doesn’t say what he is thinking, which is that his church is held-breath story listening and late-night concert ear-ringing rapture and perfect-boss fight-button pressing. That his religion is buried in the silence of freshly-fallen snow, in a carefully crafted cocktail, in between the pages of a book somewhere after the beginning it before the ending. —Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea Although I was no longer Christian or Wiccan, I’d spoken to enough entities and had enough mystical experiences that there was no going back. I’ve also learned a lot about myself. I’ve learned that gods really like me, that I have really good karma for reasons I’m not (and may never be) fully aware of, and I know for certain that I want to walk both the right- and left-hand paths. I want to speak with angels and summon demons, to embrace the darkness and see the light, to descend into the underworld and climb into the heavens. Perhaps it’s folly to try to master both worlds (just ask Inanna), but until the gods tell me not to, I’ll try. I liked the way (neo)pagans conceive of gods — as characters, as individuals, as friends, guides, instructors, resources. Since I’m a writer who is always talking to fictional people, thinking of gods as characters who are manifestations of primal universal energy worked well for me. I’m a “soft” polytheist, and I like perceiving the One as the Many, but I don’t like perceiving gods as archetypes. The nameless, faceless God or the generic “Great Goddess” didn’t work for me. I found myself praying to the Goddess, calling out to some remote thing instead of developing a personal relationship with it. That’s far from ideal. Multiple gods who are treated as individuals allows for more aspects of the Divine to be explored, but it also humanizes those aspects to make them easier to relate to and therefore more real. I’ll demonstrate what I mean by that. The premise of American Gods is that American versions of the Old Gods live among humans, but their power slowly dwindles because no one worships them. The natural question that prompts is well, what about pagans? And this is Neil Gaiman’s answer to that: Wednesday looked up at their waitress. “I think I shall have another expresso, if you don’t mind. And tell me, as a pagan, what do you worship?” “Worship?” “That’s right. I imagine you must have a pretty wide-open field. So to whom do you set up your household altar? To whom do you bow down? To whom do you pray at dawn and dusk?” Her lips described several shapes without saying anything before she said, “The female principle. It’s an empowerment thing. You know.” “Indeed. And this female principle of yours. Does she have a name?” “She’s the goddess within us all,” said the girl with the eyebrow ring, color rising to her cheek. “She doesn’t need a name.” “Ah,” said Wednesday with a wide monkey grin, “so do you have mighty bacchanals in her honor? Do you drink blood wine under the full moon, while scarlet candles burn in silver candleholders? Do you step naked into the sea-foam, chanting ecstatically to your nameless goddess while the waves lick at your legs, lapping your thighs like the tongues of a thousand leopards?” “You’re making fun of me,” she said. “We don’t do any of that stuff you were saying.” […] “There,” said Wednesday, “is one who ‘does not have the faith and will not have the fun.’ Chesterton. Pagan indeed.” —Neil Gaiman, American Gods. I remember being disturbed by this passage when I first read it. In fact, I felt a little bit attacked. And I certainly didn’t understand what the sly god meant, what the difference was. Then, in the last couple years, something big happened — I got a patron deity. Dionysus poked me until I listened. He’d shown up all the way back when I was fourteen, but then suddenly returned in full force, so his interest in me was more than a passing phase. And then, a lot of things started falling into place. I suddenly understood the Divine in a much more vivid and personal way. I began an in-depth scholarly exploration of Dionysus and the culture that he was born in, the beliefs and practices of those who worshipped him. I developed a personal relationship with a deity that almost snuck up on me. So now, now there are mighty bacchanals in the truest sense. Oh, you’d better believe there are! His view can be summarized as, “why even bother to have the faith if you will not have the fun?” And that is what he is here for, to help me get more joy out of life. I have been obsessed with Ancient Greek mythology since I was about seven, so it only makes sense that my own brand of neopaganism would center around Classical gods. I can’t call myself a Hellenist, because I don’t make any attempt at historically reconstructing ancient religion. I’ve realized that I don’t really like the religion part of religion — daily rituals, conventions, sacrifice, prayer, rules to follow. But I’ve landed in a sphere of Hellenistic-ish neopagan occultism. It honestly makes the most sense, because in a way it’s just a more sophisticated evolution of my emotional connection to Greek gods as a child. This was recently validated by the gods themselves — You’ve BEEN to Olympus already, you silly girl. You think that because you were a child, it somehow didn’t count? You think we haven’t been here for you this whole time? "For well I know they are not dead at all, The ancient Gods of Grecian poesy, They are asleep, and when they hear thee call Will wake and think ’t is very Thessaly..." —Oscar Wilde, “The Burden of Itys" So, maybe I’ve been pagan this whole time.
Arguments in Favor of Polytheism
I don't think that polytheism is necessarily "better" than monotheism. But this is why I prefer it: Diversity The Abrahamic God is, theoretically, supposed to represent the Absolute, the Great Divine, the Source. Such a thing must inherently be greater than all the universe, omniscient and omnipotent, eternal, unchanging, and so forth. Such a thing therefore cannot have human attributes and characteristics — hence the ban on idolatry — but this isn’t true in practice. In practice, the Abrahamic God is almost invariably portrayed as kingly, male, Ouranian, bright, transcendent, and usually an old man. He can be either kind and loving or cruel and jealous, and this sole contradiction causes an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance. He is portrayed as omnibenevolent, hence the Problem of Evil. Sometimes he’s split into three distinct aspects — the kingly Father, the humble Son, and the ethereal Holy Spirit — but some sects of Christianity can’t even bear the existence of aspects, and claim that the Trinity is “polytheism.” Not only is there only one God, there can only ever be one interpretation of God. (I would have much less of a problem with monotheism if it allowed for many different portrayals and interpretations of God.) The problem with this should be obvious. If there’s only one God, and that God is only ever portrayed as one thing, then all you ever get is that one thing. If the God is kingly, male, Ouranian, transcendent, and bright, then you never get a god that is undignified, female or nonbinary, chthonic, carnal, or dark. All of those things get either ignored entirely, or else shunted off to Satan, who makes up for the aspects that can’t apply to God. Meanwhile, the worshippers are never allowed to see the divinity in things that don’t match the Sky Father model. God must always be a powerful man — it cannot be a woman, a child, a genderless being, an animal. There’s some exceptions: Christ fills the child-god archetype at Christmas, and is well known for his humility and working-class origins as an adult. And in Catholicism, Mary is a goddess in all but name — in fact, her cult literally replaced those of some goddesses like Athena and Isis. All this is a pretty lackluster attempt to make up for the unintentionally limited perspective on divinity that Christianity offers. Polytheism doesn’t have this problem. Gods can have all sorts of different attributes! Sure, there’s often a Sky Father god, but there are so many other different types of gods. Some gods are female, some gods are children, some gods are sexy young men and women, some are light, some are dark, some live in the sea, some live in forests or on mountaintops, some are dignified, some are not, some are warriors, some are artists, some are universal, some are localized. The gods can be associated with anything that is important to any given group of people. The contradictions between them literally don’t matter, because every god is understood to be a unique individual. Even so, any individual god has many different aspects that slightly change the nature of it when it is worshipped in a different capacity. In short, polytheism gives you options. And because there can always be more gods, you never run out of options! Collectively, they offer you every possible face of divinity. Relatability. I remember closing my eyes during grace as a child and wondering what I was supposed to be visualizing. Often the Godhead is perceived as a great light, but light doesn’t have character or personality, or a face. As I explained above, the Godhead really can’t be personified without excluding some fundamental aspect of its nature. But personification is still necessary. It is much easier to relate to something that looks like you than it is to comprehend some grand transcendent thing beyond mortal comprehension. You might be able to perceive the whole of God during a mystical experience, but that almost requires some Lovecraftian-level mind-breaking. Gods aren’t always understood to be humanlike in polytheistic contexts, but they usually are portrayed that way. Personification makes them relatable. It places a filter on grand ineffable concepts — forces of nature, sources of inspiration, emotions, impulses, and so forth — and adapts them to be palatable to the human mind. Through interacting with this personified concept through telling the god’s myths and performing devotional rituals, you can come closer to understanding the ineffable concept that it represents. But I found out the hard way that perceiving gods as archetypes didn’t work, either. Archetypes were too generic, too theoretical. Perceiving gods as having human personalities, emotions, and relationships makes them personal. To pagans, gods are like people and also not like people. They’re grand, incomprehensible things that are much bigger than we are, but they put on human faces and speak with human voices because it is easier for them to think like humans than it is for us to think like gods. Therefore they become our friends, our counsellors, even our lovers or family. It’s through our personal relationships with the wonderful cast of characters that we come to understand the greater Divine. And it’s generally easier to relate to God if it looks like you. If you’re a powerful man, a king or a clergyman in the upper echelons of the Church, then you’re probably going to want to perceive God as a powerful man (and then use your power to claim that God can never be interpreted as anything else). But if you’re a young woman, well, a god that appears as a beautiful young man who invites you to dance with him in the woods is probably going to be more appealing! That’s why it’s nice to have those options. Specialization. This is obvious. Instead of throwing out prayers to the Great Divine, a nigh-incomprehensible thing, and hoping that it deigns to notice you, it’s much easier to appeal to specific gods for specific problems. You need to win a court case? Appeal to the god of law. Your crops are dying? Appeal to the god of the harvest. Your crush hasn’t noticed you? Appeal to the god of love. And when things go wrong, there’s once again no “Problem of Evil” — if a god is mad at you, you can give it something to make it favor you again, or you can always appeal to a different god for help. This specialization is so convenient that Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity actually kept it, with various saints and angels stepping in to fill the roles that polytheistic deities once did. Functionally, it’s no different — even the specific rituals and practices remained exactly the same in some places, and the Romans used the same word, cultus, to describe it. But it doesn’t count, because saints and angels definitely rank under the big-G God, making it technically okay. Technically. Maybe. Certainly not all Christians agree with that. The downside to this is that it does make pagans’ relationships with deities very transactional. Modern pagans are much less likely to sacrifice live animals to gods, especially because that’s illegal. I certainly don’t think it’s ethical or necessary. But I do understand why, when asking a god for a blessing, it’s important to give it a gift in return. Sexuality. This is a big enough thing that I think it’s worth a point all to itself. The Abrahamic religions have a weird complex around sexuality. Anything carnal or sensual cannot be spiritual or divine — these are contradictory things, and as I outlined above, we can’t have there be any contradictions. So, sex is stripped of all its divine and mystical nature. A natural aspect of human existence, instead of being celebrated, is shunned and despised. If it wasn’t absolutely necessary to make more humans, it would probably be banned entirely. But since it is necessary, you can only have straight vanilla sex within a marriage and that’s it. You’re gay, bi, pan, ace? You’re kinky? You’re polyamorous? Forget it. The amount of shame that this instills in people is unreal, and making people believe that they are inherently stained and broken because of something natural makes them very easy to control. Now polytheism doesn’t automatically get a pass here, because polytheistic societies weren’t much better in the ancient world. Ancient Greece is notorious for its repression of women, and its socially-mandated pederasty. I’m not trying to say that polytheistic societies were (or are) free-love utopias, because they’re not. But many of the gods themselves have sexuality as an inherent part of their nature, which means that modern pagans can worship the divinity of sexuality and dismiss much of the sexual shame that they were most likely raised with. This is one of the things I’ve gotten out of my relationship with my patron deity, Dionysus. He is a god that uses sensuality as an avenue to spirituality. Honestly the whole concept of “sin” and needing to be punished for it could go here, but sex is the big one. Tolerance. This is probably the biggest thing. This reason alone is why polytheism is better than monotheism. Pagans fought their wars over a lot of things — land, resources, politics, etc. — but they did not fight over religion. They didn’t attack other nations just because their version of the gods was wrong. In fact, this is one of the main reasons why Rome was successful as an empire — they interpreted the gods of all the lands they conquered as variants of their own, and therefore allowed the people of those lands to continue their native religious practices. It was also customary to worship the local gods alongside your own while travelling. Having many gods means that there’s always room for more gods, so there’s nothing wrong with worshipping new gods or worshipping the same gods in a different capacity. And then there’s syncretism — outright amalgamating gods from different cultures into single deities. Christianity doesn’t allow for this. There is only one God and there is only one interpretation of God. Therefore, because people are human and they will inevitably have different interpretations of the same texts, they end up fracturing into different sects based on tiny differences in theology or practice and going to war over it. What one believes and doesn’t believe about God is a Big-Ass Deal in Christianity and Islam, and a “whatever” in paganism. Paganism therefore allows for everyone to have their own interpretations of God, which means everyone gets along a lot more smoothly… at least on this front. (It’s my personal theory that the reason Christianity and Islam are so at odds is because of an uncanny valley effect — the religion that’s almost like yours but ever-so-slightly different is much more disturbing than one that’s not even on the same page. There haven’t been quite as many wars between Christians and Buddhists, at least, not over religion.) Finally, the gods do not care who you are or what your backstory is. They won’t judge you for anything superficial about you. Race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, language, family background… they don’t really care. (Any pagan who tells you that literal deities are limited by your genetics is trying to use their religion to justify some very harmful beliefs. The paradox of tolerance is not to tolerate intolerance, so don’t tolerate this sort of thinking. There are some very few, very specific exceptions.) I personally believe that everyone has a right to interpret the gods in whatever way best suits them. Whether it uses a polytheistic or monotheistic model, anyone’s personal interpretation is valid. I draw the line as soon as anyone starts claiming that their religion or belief is the only One Truth and everyone else is wrong. Monotheism doesn’t suit me, but I certainly don’t mind if it suits others. What I cannot abide is the exclusivity.
A Primer on Theurgy
The purpose of working with a deity is to add the deity’s energy and influence to your workings, or to have them aid in your own personal spiritual development. Exactly what the deity ends up helping you with is going to depend a lot on which deity it is, and what you want to get out of your relationship with them. A relationship with a deity is therefore very personal. You can choose the deities that you work with, but if you ask a deity to work with you, it may very well say no. Or, it may teach you one thing and then move on. It’s best to treat deities like people, and approach them like you would human teachers or colleagues. It’s also possible that a deity might choose you. So, how do you know if one has chosen you? Here are some indications that the deity is reaching out to you: You feel inexplicably drawn to this deity in particular: If you feel compelled to study a particular deity for no apparent logical reason, that can mean that the deity is trying to nudge you towards it. My patron deity turned out to be Dionysus, which I would never have guessed; I became inexplicably obsessed with him, and the more research I did, the more and more he resonated for me. If for some reason you feel like you need to research a deity, especially if that deity seemed to come out of nowhere, I recommend you heed the call. “Signs”: What most people mean when they speak of getting “signs” of a deity’s interest is encountering things related to it as you go about your daily life. Usually this means running into the deity’s iconography — continuing to use Dionysus as an example, this would mean seeing a lot of grapevines, leopard print, masks, or bull’s horns. There’s more than just iconography, though. Maybe you hear music with lyrics that remind you of the deity, or overhear a conversation that reminds you of it. Smells, tastes, and sensations related to the deity might crop up as well. Now, to be clear, seeing a raven and interpreting it as a symbol of the Morrigan does not change the fact that the bird is just a bird. What makes it a sign is that you noticed it. And, because this one is the easiest to be influenced by confirmation bias, you have to receive different kinds of “signs” with enough frequency, so that you know it wasn’t just a one-off or wishful thinking. You have to be able to distinguish between your confirmation bias and genuine intuition. Signs are also extremely obvious; if you find yourself asking if something is a sign, it probably isn't. Synchronicities: The most obvious signs are synchronicities — signs that occur in succession or in accordance with each other to draw attention to themselves. Seeing a raven is one thing; reading a book about the Morrigan in a park and looking up to find a raven staring directly at you is another. One time I was cleaning up one of my card decks shortly after speaking with Dionysus, thinking to myself, “lol wouldn’t it be funny if I drew the Satyr card?” I promptly drew it straight from the deck. Kind of hard to ignore or second-guess that! Pay close attention to any creepy coincidences. The deity approaches you directly: If the deity actually shows up in a dream or a meditation, that’s a pretty blatant sign that it wants to work with you, or at least wants your attention. If this doesn’t happen to you, don’t sweat it. Not everyone has dreaming ability. I certainly don’t! On one hand, if you’re looking for signs, it’s really easy to interpret anything as a sign no matter how mundane, because of confirmation bias. If you’re looking for signs, you’re inevitably going to find them. On the other hand, it’s possible to be receiving really obvious signals and keep second-guessing yourself: Why would the gods bother to talk to me? What makes me so special? They can’t actually be giving me signs, right? I frequently feel insecure about my own “worthiness.” I have felt undeserving of divine attention, but hey, it’s rude to ignore them! The only way to know for sure that you have caught a god's attention is to talk to it during a meditation or ritual. You can talk to any god you want regardless of whether it has given you “signs” or not. Most of them are open to listening if you reach out to them. The first thing to do is to research extensively. Buy books on the god. Learn as much as you can about its anthropological origins and the way it was historically worshipped and interpreted. What did it represent then? What does it represent now? See if anything resonates for you. Once you have a relationship with a deity, what do you do with it, in a practical sense? Devotional rituals: A lot of neopagans like to do daily devotional rituals to their deities. I don’t, but if you feel like you want to, it’s an excellent opportunity to become familiar with them. What exactly do you think worship should look like? When you’re just starting out, it may be a good idea to do devotionals in order to win the favor of the deity that you want to work with, and direct most of your other workings towards them. Spellwork: You don’t have to call on a deity for spellwork at all, if you don’t want to, but a deity can lend his/her/its energy to whatever you attempt and carry out the parts that you can’t. Just be wary of treating deities as pools of free energy. It’s disrespectful to do that. When you ask a deity to lend its energy to you, be respectful. Meditation: It’s important to find some sort of meditation technique that works for you, so you can communicate with the deity directly. My favorite means of meditation is pacing, a form of oscillation — very appropriate for whom I work with (see below). Divination: As another means of direct communication, find a method of divination that you like or that your deity likes. I tend to use automatic writing. Pendulums are popular, but they’re not that useful in the long run because they only answer yes/no questions. Ideally, you should be able to have a full back-and-forth conversation with it. Invocation: Another step up from the above, invocation is inviting the deity in your body so that it can share or take over your consciousness. I wouldn’t attempt full possession without other people there for your own safety, but you could still invoke the deity if you’re careful. Just talking: You can learn a lot just by talking to it. If you don’t know how it prefers to be worshipped, ask it. If you don’t know what you can learn from it, ask it. If you have spiritual or even practical questions, ask it. They don’t always give useful answers, but it’s still a good idea to talk to them. You should attempt to get to know them the way you would a person. I would start by finding a deity that you feel particularly drawn to, and then getting to know it. Ask it what you can learn from it, and what the purpose of working with it would be. If you’re lucky, a deity might approach you as your patron, and take a direct personal interest in your spiritual growth. My patron deity turned out to be Dionysus, and he is helping me to feel more joy in my life.
What is Wicca?
Wicca is a neopagan occult religion founded in circa 1950 by an Englishman named Gerald Gardner. Its adherents mostly identify as “witches,” because Gardner developed the religion as a system of modern witchcraft. Its ritual structure is mostly Golden-Dawn-style ceremonial magic with some alterations, and it also incorporates some aspects of traditional English “cunning” magic and also some Asian folk magic that Gardner learned while there. It takes a lot of influence from books of poor anthropology published around the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, like Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, and The White Goddess. From this mishmash of influences came one of the most popular and influential occult religions. •Wicca is polytheistic. Most Wiccans are actually duotheists, believing in a God and a Goddess. Many traditions of Wicca place special emphasis on the Goddess and the concept of the feminine divine, though the relationship between the God and Goddess is also important. A lot of Wiccans believe in all the gods from pagan religions across the world, interpreting them all as aspects of the God and Goddess. •Wicca has eight yearly festivals. Four of them are taken from the Celtic festival calendar — Samhain (Oct. 31st - Nov. 1st), Imbolc (Feb. 2nd), Beltane (May 1st), and Lughnasadh or Lammas (Aug. 1st). The other four are the solstices and equinoxes, called Ostara, Litha, Mabon, and Yule. (The names of Ostara and Litha come from The Reckoning of Time by the Venerable Bede, Yule is a Germanic pagan festival, and Mabon is named after a character from The Mabinogion that doesn’t have anything in particular to do with autumn.) Wiccans also acknowledge 24 esbats, the Full and Dark moon each month. •Wicca is an occult religion, and its adherents practice magic. Exactly what this means can vary, but in brief, it’s a way of causing positive change in the world using one’s willpower. Most Wiccans practice some combination of ceremonial and folk magic, divination, herbalism, and theurgy. Wiccans abide by an ethical code called the “Wiccan Rede” that forbids them from using magic out of spite. •Sexuality is considered sacred in Wicca, and one of the most important rituals is meant to represent sex between the God and Goddess. Usually it’s symbolically represented by dipping a dagger in a chalice, though rumor has it some covens enact it literally (though not publicly). Some of Wicca’s liturgy goes out of its way to celebrate sexuality in other ways, and the festival of Beltane often centers around it. •Some Wiccan traditions practice naked. This was mandated by Gerald Gardner, who was a nudist, and believed nudity to be an expression of freedom. Not all Wiccan covens operate this way, though, since not everyone is comfortable with it. Either way, ritual nudity is not inherently sexual (even while performing the Great Rite, see above). •Wiccans have no concept of sin, don’t believe in Hell, and don’t believe in any kind of cosmic adversary akin to Satan. Despite sometimes borrowing from Early Modern witch lore (e.g. the nudity), Wicca mostly doesn’t resemble the idea of the “Satanic witch.” In terms of the afterlife, most Wiccans believe in reincarnation and/or a peaceful afterworld called the Summerland. I'm no longer Wiccan, but I continue to recognize the enormous influence that Wicca has had over modern occultism in America, and its influence over my own practice.
Why I Left Wicca
I discovered Wicca about ten years ago, and got super into it. It was my obsession at the time. I had learned that magic was real, so by god, I was going to learn it! At the time, I didn’t know to distinguish between witchcraft as a practice, neopaganism as modern polytheism, and Wicca as a specific religion under both umbrellas. The sources I looked at lumped them all together as though they were interchangeable. So, I thought I had to invoke Hecate on full and dark moons to be a witch. I thought that was just what witches did. I don’t regret having done those early “drawing down” rituals — I really felt something when I did them, and I learned that I have a natural gift for interacting with gods. But that lack of context and conflation of multiple disparate things would become a much bigger problem. I don’t think I ever bought the “Old Religion” narrative, because I was lucky enough to find a documentary about Wicca’s origins early on. Some people still repeated it in 2014, but I was aware that Wicca was a modern religion that wasn’t even a hundred years old. That didn’t bother me. What mattered to me was that Wicca had a veneer of universality. At the time, I was also really into the Jungian or Theosophical idea that all religions had some kind of universal underlying concept. I thought that all religions worshipped the same gods under different names, and enjoyed grouping gods under the banner of archetypes, essentially claiming that all the gods in each box were the same entities under culturally-specific names. Wicca encouraged this notion, because it interpreted all gods and goddesses the world over as aspects of the Lord and Lady. For a few years in there, I really thought that Mithras, Attis, Horus, and Dionysus were all born on Dec. 25th. I wrote answers on Quora about how Christmas trees were obviously pagan, and most other Christmas traditions were pagan, claims that often showed up in Wiccan spaces and even in published books. It didn’t occur to me to try to find primary sources for these claims, because I didn’t know how to do that kind of research, or even that that kind of research looked like. (I owe a lot to Spencer McDaniel for leading by example.) It almost goes without saying that I was also super into Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, the “Monomyth.” Wicca’s apparent universality was why it appealed to me. I thought that Wicca had somehow dug through to the marrow of religion itself and constructed an ultimate religion, a universal religion that appealed to ancient and archetypal forces. Wicca felt primeval. I took for granted that every religion must worship the God and Goddess, and honor the cycle of their sacred marraige, death, and resurrection (except Christianity, which had unwisely done away with the Goddess). I didn’t question it when Wiccans said that Yule, the Winter Solstice, celebrated the return of the Light in the darkest days of winter, because it made intuitive sense. It was like Wicca had taken religion and stripped away all the superfluous bits to reveal the heretofore hidden ideas that all religions centered around. I thought I was tapping into a hidden, magical heritage that I didn’t know I had. That felt powerful, meaningful, magical. Then the cracks started showing. Here’s a simple but specific example: Early on in my studies into Wicca, I became absolutely ecstatic to learn that the festival of Lammas was on Harry Potter’s birthday, July 31st. That was a coincidence, of course, because Rowling had given Harry her own birthday. But Harry Potter’s patronus was a stag, and stags are symbols of the god Cernunnos. They shed and regrow their antlers each year, which represents rebirth and the Tree of Life. And Harry Potter’s wand wood is his birthwood, holly, which represents the Holly King (an aspect of Cernunnos) who dies on Lammas. Just like Harry Potter dying and being resurrected in Book Seven! So, let’s break this down: 1. Lammas or “loaf-mass” is an Anglo-Saxon (Christian) harvest festival at the midpoint between the Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox, that may or may not have had pagan origins. It happens at the same time as the Irish festival of Lughnasadh, which involved games and feasting in honor of the god Lugh. The Wiccan celebration of Lammas or Lughnasadh at which the Holly King dies, as detailed in the Farrars’ The Witches’ Bible, has nothing to do with any of this. 2. Cernunnos does have antlers, but we know almost nothing else about him. His associations, mythology, and mystical significance are almost all a modern invention. We certainly can’t say whether he was a “dying-and-rising” god or not, and the entire concept of a “dying-and-rising god” was pretty much invented by James Frazer in The Golden Bough. (The Farrars cite Frazer a lot.) 3. The emphasis placed on death and resurrection is, in part, a result of the cultural dominance of Christianity, which places an enormous amount of emphasis on that concept. Though it exists in paganism, it isn’t always that important and is often interpreted differently, but you wouldn’t know that from The Golden Bough. 4. The notion of “birthwoods” was invented wholesale by Robert Graves in The White Goddess, based on a very weird interpretation of the Ogham alphabet. There never was any “Celtic Tree Calendar,” but no one questions this because “Druids = Trees” in our minds. 5. We can also thank Robert Graves for the entire concept of the Oak and Holly King. He selectively interpreted various myths in the context of a battle between winter and summer, even though there’s no evidence that any of those myths were originally interpreted that way. The notion of a battle between winter and summer itself comes from Frazer again. Graves also introduced the concept of this battle happening specifically for the sake of the Goddess. So, that amazing revelation I had about Harry Potter turned out to be based on nothing authentic. That’s a small and kind of silly example, but there were a lot of moments like that. They added up. I realized, steadily, that almost all of the ideas underlying Wicca had their origins in poor scholarship from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and some of them were just plain made up. The Sabbat cycle wasn’t nearly as balanced as it appeared to be at first glance, because it had been cobbled together from different traditions. That’s why the story of the God and Goddess didn’t fit together properly (Hey, isn’t the death of the Holly King supposed to happen at the Winter Solstice, when Oak takes over again? Why does he die during the Farrars’ Lammas ritual? How many bloomin’ times must the God die?!). The God and Goddess concept is also painfully heteronormative and gender-essentialist. There never were any prehistoric matriarchies, that idea was made up by men in the nineteenth century like Eduard Gerhard and J. J. Bachofen. There’s a popular claim that the “Night of Hecate” is on Nov. 16th (or Nov. 30th), but there’s no historical source for that. (If an alleged Roman holiday doesn’t have a fancy Latin name, it’s not real.) Don’t even get me started on the stupid Jesus was really [insert pagan god here] memes or all of the claims about Yule and Christmas. It was like watching a house of cards collapse in slow motion. Wicca isn’t responsible for all of this misinformation, and I don’t mean to suggest that it is. But part of the reason I absorbed so much misinformation is because of the lack of historical context in Wiccan or Wicca-adjacent material. Wiccan material was especially likely to propagate ideas that were misleading or just plain wrong, usually because the author was just as misled as I was. Other pagan traditions aren’t immune to this sort of misinformation, but they’re not at the center of the web of it; I discovered that once I separated out all of the different things that were lumped together under Wicca, I could do more targeted in-depth research into each one. I learned that ancient pagans had very different mindsets from modern ones, that they thought about gods differently, that the assumptions under which they engaged with the divine were different. I learned that “witchcraft” is a particularly divisive term for several different varieties of folk magic, and that folk magic is often Christian. I learned about the differences and similarities between folk and ceremonial magic. I learned which traditions of both Wicca was pulling from. I learned that all this stuff I thought was part of one unified and universal system was actually a complex amalgam of influences, most of them modern. Why did it matter? Wicca is still a valid spiritual path, regardless of what its origins are, and if I personally find meaning in it, that’s enough of a reason to practice it. Also, complete historical accuracy is pretty much impossible for any pagan religion. It shouldn’t matter if the practice is ancient or modern, so long as it works. So why do I care? I care because that illusion of universality is what I liked about Wicca in the first place. Once I learned that it was all based on bullshit, the spell was broken, and I became too disillusioned to continue with it. Not just disillusioned, but angry. I felt betrayed. It’s never really felt the same since. If I’d learned the authentic history of it in the first place, I might not have felt that way. But I was only a kid, and had to learn the hard way how to find good sources and trace ideas to their origin. In a way, that trial by fire is what gave me my excellent research skills. This is also why I’m so aggressive about attacking those misconceptions and informing newbies of them early, even if it’s harsh or disappointing. I want to make sure they know what they’re getting themselves into, before they have the rug pulled out from under them like I did. But, after all of that, I’m sort of coming back around to Wicca. Learning the truth about it was sort of like finding out that Santa isn’t real; some of the magic is gone, but I still leave out milk and cookies for Santa, and there are still things that I can appreciate about Wicca. Something about it resonated, and that’s hardly worthless. What if there were a way for me to rediscover its magic? I’ve gotten a lot of practice at separating out my scholarly brain that looks for hard evidence from my mystical brain that makes a bunch of amazing connections, and letting them both operate in tandem instead of undercutting each other. Too much scholarship, and there’s no room for connections that give you the amazing feeling of everything suddenly making sense. Too much mysticism, and you end up with insane conspiracy theories with no historical grounding. It’s a difficult balance to maintain, but an important one. I’ve also gotten this experience of feeling betrayed by something that once felt meaningful several more times, and have had to find ways to deal with it without becoming entirely disillusioned. Harry Potter fell apart because of J.K. Rowling’s bigotry and the trashfire that was Cursed Child, not to mention the newer material… but the original books are still full of whimsy and wonder, and engaging with the story still makes me happy. More recently, I discovered that “spiritual alchemy” is also a modern construct with no historical grounding that was made up by people in the nineteenth century. And this was after writing my grad school admissions essay on it! I said that “real alchemists knew it wasn’t about making gold” in an academic paper, and I am so embarrassed! But I didn’t feel angry or betrayed when I learned that was wrong. Instead, I revised my historical claims to be more accurate, but still kept the psycho-spiritual interpretation for myself because I thought it was meaningful. It’s not the first or last of Jung’s theories to be proven wrong, but I still really like Jung and have found new meaning in his work while reading The Red Book. If I could do that, why can’t I do something similar with Wicca? Someone on Reddit astutely pointed out that Wicca was based on the scholarship of the time, just as reconstructionist pagan religions are now. The scholarship of the time just happened to be really shitty, and that’s not Wicca’s fault. I rant about Frazer and Graves and Margaret Murray as if the Farrars and other Wiccan writers should have known that their work was bunk, but why should they have known, when Frazer was a leading authority on anthropology for so long? Even if scholars knew better, it usually takes a while for hot new scholarship to reach the general public (longer, pre-internet). It might not have made it that far in 2014. With all that in mind, it might be worth giving Wicca another shot, or at least going through it to discover what worked and letting that inform my current (very idiosyncratic) belief system. There was something there, and who am I to deny myself that? Misinformation is bad and should be fought against, but none of us really have authenticity. No matter which pagan path you practice, chances are you’re working off of more modern material than ancient material, either because the ancient material didn’t survive or because the ancient material can’t really be adapted to the present day. That’s not a bad thing. Religion is constantly evolving, and there’s nothing wrong with building your faith out of crazy ideas or pure UPG, so long as you know that’s what you’re doing and present it as such. When it comes to your personal practice, you can base it off of anything you want, and the only thing that matters is if it works for you.
Why I Hate The White Goddess
A few years ago, I read The White Goddess by Robert Graves, and it recently came to my attention again. To say I resent Graves would be an understatement. I am, frankly, dismayed that it has defined so much of modern paganism, and that so many pagans continue to swear by it even though so many of its claims can be debunked by a quick Google search. I feel something twist in my stomach everytime I see anything about the “Celtic Tree Calendar” or “Celtic Zodiac.” I sigh with bitter regret every time I see anything related to the Triple Goddess, even though that concept still resonates for me on some level. Something in me died when I learned that the D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, which introduced me to the gods that I now worship and was generally a big part of my childhood, involved him as a consultant. The White Goddess had an enormous impact over neopaganism and its conception of the Goddess. The White Goddess helped to codify the idea of the God and Goddess in neopaganism, especially Wicca. In particular, it took the nineteenth century conception of the Great Goddess of Nature, which was retroactively projected onto ancient paganism but never truly existed, and connected it to the concept of the “dying-and-rising god” that had previously been codified by James Frazer. Graves tied these two ideas together into a monomyth concerning the interaction between these two entities — the Goddess is a great and eternal being of both destruction and creation, divided into three aspects (Maiden, Mother, Crone), and the God is both her lover and her son who must win her affection and die for her sake. The best summary of Graves’s mythology is, perhaps ironically, from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon: "In the ancient days, long before the wisdom and the religion of the Druids came here from the sunken temples in the western continent, the fairy people — of whom we are both born, you and I, my Morgaine — lived here on the shores of the inland sea, and before they learned how to plant the barley and reap it again, they lived by gathering the fruits of the land, and hunting the deer. And in those days there was no king among them, but only a queen who was their mother, though they had not learned to think of her as the Goddess. And since they lived by hunting, their queen and priestess learned to call the deer to her, and ask of their spirits that they sacrifice themselves and die for the life of the Tribe. But sacrifice must be given for sacrifice — the deer died for the Tribe, and one of the Tribe must in turn die for the life of the deer, or at least take the chance that the deer could, if they chose, take his life in exchange for their own. So the balance was kept. […] So the Mother of the Tribe chose, every year, her consort. And since he had agreed to give his life for the Tribe, the Tribe gave him of their lives. Even if little children at the breast starved, he always had abundance, and all the women of the Tribe were his to lie with, so that he, the strongest and best, might sire their children. Besides, the Mother of the Tribe was often old past childbearing, and so he must have the choice of the young maidens, too, and no man of the Tribe would interfere with what he wanted. And then, when the year was past — every year in those times — he would put on the antlers of the deer, and wear a robe of untanned deerskin so that the deer would think him one of their own, and he would run with the herd as the Mother Huntress put the spell upon them to run. But by this time the herd had chosen their King Stag, and sometimes the King Stag would smell a stranger, and turn on him. And then the Horned One would die." —Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon Now, Bradley has all kinds of issues that go far beyond taking some inspiration from Graves (in short, she makes J.K. Rowling look like a saint). But what bothers me about this particular passage is, at the time… I bought it. The Mists of Avalon is fiction, but for a time I really believed that Britain was a Goddess-focused place until Christianity came along and ruined everything. And I also resonated with this story of the God who dresses in a stag’s skin and goes out into the woods to face down his rival and potentially die for the sake of the Goddess. It was only after I started doing research to learn more that I realized that there was never any such society as the one described here. Once the holes started showing, my faith in Wicca crumbled. Wicca specifically owes a lot to this narrative. The Sabbats, the eight festivals that divide up the year, usually illustrate this myth in some way. Here’s the short version: The God is born at Yule, has sex with the goddess at Beltane, and is defeated by his “rival” (the god of the waning year) at Litha. Then the whole process repeats for the dark half of the year. I don’t know enough about the different traditions of Wicca to say definitively that they all follow a variation of this format, but it’s certainly common. Here’s an example concerning Beltane, from the Farrars’ A Witches’ Bible: "Back to Bealtaine itself. Oak is the tree of the God of the Waxing Year; hawthorn, at this season, is the tree of the White Goddess. The strong folklore taboo on breaking hawthorn branches or bringing them into the house is traditionally lifted on May Eve, when sprigs of it may be cut for the Goddess’s festival. (Irish farmers, and even earth-moving roadbuilders, are still reluctant to cut down lone hawthorns; a ‘fairy’ hawthorn stood by itself in the middle of a pasture of the farm we lived on at Fens, County Wexford, and similar respected examples can be seen all over the country.) However, if you want blossoms for your ritual (for example, as chaplets worn in the witches’ hair), you cannot be certain of finding hawthorn flower as early as May Eve, and you will probably have to be content with the young leaves. Our own solution is to use black thorn, whose flowers appear in April, ahead of the leaves. Blackthorn (sloe) is also a Goddess tree at this season — but it belongs to the Goddess in her dark, devouring aspect, as the bitterness of its autumn fruit would suggest. It used to be regarded as ‘the witches’ tree’ — in the malevolent sense — and unlucky. But to fear the dark aspect of the Goddess is to miss the truth that she consumes only to give new birth. If the Mysteries could be summed up in one sentence, it might be this: “At the core of the Bright Mother is the Dark Mother, and at the core of the Dark Mother is the Bright Mother.” The sacrifice-and-rebirth theme of our Bealtaine ritual reflects this truth, so, to symbolize the two aspects in balance, our women wear hawthorn in leaf and blackthorn in blossom, intertwined. […] (On the alluring and mysterious figure of the love-chase woman “neither clothed nor unclothed, neither on foot nor on horseback, neither on water nor on dry land, neither with nor without a gift”, who is “easily recognized as the May-Eve aspect of the Love-and-Death goddess,” see Graves, The White Goddess, p. 403 onwards.)" —Janet and Stewart Farrar, A Witches’ Bible The Farrars frequently cite from The White Goddess (and The Golden Bough), using it as the basis of their personal spirituality and designing their rituals around the ideas contained in it. So, their idea of the Mystery is based on this interplay between the self-sacrificing God and the dual-natured Goddess. The problem is that most of what’s in the above passage is bullshit. I don’t know how much, if any, of the stuff about hawthorn and blackthorn is authentic Irish folklore, but I know for a fact that the association of them with the respective light and dark aspects of the Goddess comes directly from Graves. The idea that sprigs of hawthorn could be cut on May Eve for the Goddess’ festival? No chance that’s true, because the whole idea that Beltane even is a “goddess festival” is a modern one, but it’s presented as though it’s historical fact. When my research was turning up zero primary sources, I realized that I couldn’t trust anything that the pagan writers like the Farrars said about ancient paganism. Ancient pagans didn’t even conceive of divinity as these generic archetypes, but rather as a multiplicity of distinct individuals. The more I dug into the Sabbat cycle, the Horned God, and the Triple Goddess, the less it made sense. It quickly became apparent to me that the entire concept wasn’t authentically ancient at all, let alone universal. So, where did it come from? Bradley’s take, at least, seemed to have its roots in The White Goddess. I decided to read The White Goddess because of how influential it was, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. If it was just Graves sharing his own interpretations of various myths and so on, then that wouldn’t be so bad, even if his takes were a bit wild. But Graves did not distinguish between historical fact and his own wild interpretations. Most of The White Goddess was conjecture worthy of a conspiracy theorist, with no basis other than “these words sound similar, so they must be related!” Sometimes Graves pulled stuff out of his ass (like his tree calendar) and then tried to retroactively justify it by shoehorning primary sources into the roles he wanted them to play (like rearranging the Song of Amergin). He claims that Greeks somehow migrated to Ireland and that all Irish and Welsh mythology can be traced back to Greece, because Graves is a classicist who just really likes the Celts. The purpose of the book is to make a pretentious point about “true poetry,” which Graves says is meant to be in the service of The Goddess. Any poetry written about men is somehow false, anything homoerotic was “moral aberrancy,” and of course women couldn’t be poets — only passive, idealized “Muses” (ironic, because The White Goddess inspired Sylvia Plath). Unless you have the foreknowledge to be able to spot all of its (many, many) missteps, you may assume that Graves knows what he’s talking about and take its claims at face-value, especially if any aspect of it resonates for you. Therefore, a lot of other pagan writers accept his claims and insights without question, and repeat them as if they’re a fundamental truth. I suffered through The White Goddess. It was painful enough to read on its own (if you want my thoughts on the book itself, I linked my two-part rant below), but to me it was like watching a building collapse in slow motion. My reading of The White Goddess by Robert Graves effectively destroyed paganism as I knew it. Ideas that I had once held sacred were entirely lacking of substance, and I couldn’t trust half of my books anymore. So much of what neopagans write about their gods and their traditions is based on nothing. Nothing but conjecture, and sometimes not even that. And now that I knew how to see it, I saw it everywhere. Admittedly, it’s unfair of me to place the blame for the pseudohistorical bullshit endemic in neopaganism solely at Graves’s feet. The White Goddess is not the only book of its kind. It’s more of a culmination and a codifier of an entire ideology’s worth of baseless ideas about paganism, which developed in art and academia through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fairness to Graves, I think it’s important that I dive into some of that context, so that I’m not merely indulging in dragging Graves through the mud. Let me turn to a source I can trust — Ronald Hutton (an actual scholar), who addresses where all these ideas come from in his book, The Triumph of the Moon. He traces the origin of the neopagan Goddess back to the Romantic movement, which personified Nature as a beautiful and terrifying female entity. Nineteenth-century classicists then interpreted all the goddesses of Ancient Greece through this lens, and extrapolated from there: "It is important also in this context that the ancient Greeks spoke of the Earth as being feminine in gender and the sky as being masculine (in sharp contrast, say, to the Egyptians). As most Western science is ultimately based upon Greek thought, this language became embedded in it. It was reinforced by the mindset of the patriarchal societies which occupied medieval and early modern Europe, in which intellectuals in general, and those who dealt with the sciences in particular, were overwhelmingly male. Carolyn Merchant has led a number of writers in emphasizing the development of a scholarly language which identified the author and reader as male adventurers occupied in exploring and exploiting a female natural world. None the less, when classical pagan goddesses [Diana, Venus, Demeter, etc.] were represented in art and literature, it was those with individual functions, usually expressing specific human needs and spheres of activity, who continued to dominate. This was the pattern which prevailed, with remarkable consistency, until the decades around 1800, when it was dramatically altered by that complex of cultural changes known loosely and collectively as the Romantic Movement. One aspect of this was the exaltation of the natural and irrational, qualities that had conventionally been both feared and disparaged and characterized as feminine. Cultural historians have devoted many works to tracing the course of this revolution in taste, which for the first time gave emphasis to the beauty and sublimity of wild nature and of the night. None has hitherto made a study of its impact on the divine feminine. […] In view of all the above, therefore, it makes sense that it was a German classicist, Eduard Gerhard, who in 1849 advanced the novel suggestion that behind the various goddesses of historic Greece stood a single great one, representing Mother Earth and venerated before history began. As the century wore on, other German, and French, classicists such as Ernst Kroker, Fr. Lenormant, and M. J. Menant began to adopt this idea, drawing support for it from the assumption that the cultures of Anatolia and Mesopotamia were older than, and in some measure ancestral to, those of Greece. Those cultures did contain some figures of powerful goddesses, identified with motherhood or with the earth (though never with both). The thoery meshed with another, which had emerged from a debate between lawyers over the origins of society and of the human family. One of the contesting theories in this exchange, articulated first in 1862 by the Swiss judge J. J. Bachofen, was that the earliest human societies had been woman-centered, altering to a patriarchal form before the beginning of history; what was true in the secular sphere should also, logically, have been so in the religious one." —Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon Put much more succinctly and snarkily by Tumblr user Jessica Price, in an essay called “You got your Known Minoans and your Unknown Minoans”: So, the Romantics were very much enamored with the idea of Mother Earth/nature as female (go conquest that land in “virgin” America, yo). The concept wasn’t new–lots of cultures personify the earth as female–but this was very much a 19th-century European imagining. Basically a lot of Victorian dudes liked the idea of their porn involving pretty landscapes. So, along comes a German dude named Friedrich Wilhelm Eduard Gerhard, because everything you say is credible if you’re a white dude with four names, who’s like “hey maybe all those Greek goddesses were actually ONE goddess, and she was Mother Earth, that tempestuous temptress.” And like as far as I can tell, that was it. That’s the Tweet. He had An Idea about how ancient religion might have worked, and everyone nodded sagely and suddenly it was a theory. The Greeks actually believed in *one* goddess, with a bunch of different faces. And then, some of those other dudes nodding along sagely to this theory that didn’t arise organically from studying the actual writings and artifacts of the time, but from Mother Earth as a concept being trendy in the 1850s, were like, *hey, so we know that the Anatolians and Mesopotamians influenced ancient Greek thought, so if the Greeks worshipped a single goddess, the Anatolians and Mesopotamians must have too! And then they were like, *hey, it was probably also true across Europe!* Because there’s this Swiss judge named JJ who thinks all of human society was once matriarchal and only later evolved into patriarchy so it seems logical that everyone worshipped a goddess. For those following along at home, no, this is not how logic works, but these dudes were probably drinking a LOT of absinthe." The supposed ancient religion of the Goddess was cast as, to use Hutton’s words, “a female-centered religion of magic and unreason preceding that of classical Greece, at once repulsive and fascinating.” It was a retroactive assumption, based on the notion that society operates on a linear progression from “savage” neolithic paganism to “civilized” Greco-Roman polytheism to Christianity. This isn’t the case — we now know that some version of the Olympians were worshipped in Greece literally since the dawn of their recorded history. Also, magic, ecstatic ritual, and other “irrational” beliefs and practices always existed alongside the more “civilized” aspects of Greco-Roman religion, but were ignored by scholars in favor of this linear narrative. But because this “pre-Christian matriarchy” idea was propagated by academics in the twentieth century, it gained a veneer of legitimacy, and every archeological discovery of any kind of female figure was used to justify it. So, I can’t really blame Graves for having believed it, and I also can’t really blame American feminists for having resonated with it. Graves didn’t invent the Goddess, but he did popularize her. It doesn’t surprise me that Graves’s conception of the Goddess has its ultimate origin in the Romantic movement. Graves himself points to these lines from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a famous Romantic poet, as the ultimate depiction of his Goddess: "Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold, Her skin was white as leprosy. The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold." There’s a lot that disturbs me about this specific image being that of the Goddess, but I’ll get back to that. For now, it’s worth asking why Graves, and a lot of other neopagans, were so invested in the idea of a pre-Christian matriarchy in the first place. It’s all well and good to personally conceive of the feminine divine as a Romantic personification of Nature in all of its beauty and terror, etc., but why try to claim that all goddesses were once one Goddess and that this is the origin of human religion? Hutton explains that twentieth-century British scholars fetishized local rural folklore as a kind of pagan time capsule, with folk beliefs and customs somehow preserving an archaic and fundamental truth of humanity. These scholars simultaneously looked down upon poor rural Brits as being too stupid to understand where their folk customs come from or why they exist. The elitist scholars regarded the rural populace with detached and condescending interest, rather like zoologists studying the social dynamics of animals: "When collecting data upon popular beliefs and customs, none of [the classicists and folklorists] attempted more than the most rudimentary investigation of their earlier history, and none made any study of how they might have developed over a span of time; the presumption that rural life was essentially unchanging rendered such an exercise apparently superfluous. Furthermore, it was also assumed that the people who actually held the beliefs and practised the customs would long have forgotten their original, ‘real’ significance, which could only be reconstructed by scholars. The latter therefore paid very little attention to the social context in which the ideas and actions concerned had actually been carried on during their recent history, when they were best recorded. Many collectors and commentators managed to combine a powerful affectation for the countryside and rural life with a crushing condescension towards the ordinary people who carried on that life." —Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon It’s basically the “noble savage” trope, but applied to poor British people. By the way, this is what “cultural appropriation” really refers to — fetishizing someone else’s folk customs because you think they’re cool and mysterious or whatever, but simultaneously looking down upon the people whose practice it is and refusing to listen to them when they tell you what it is actually supposed to mean. Or worse, denying them the ability to practice the custom altogether, while saying that only you really understand its “true meaning.” Speaking of appropriating ideas for one’s own purposes, combined with the above was the forerunner of edgy internet atheism, that looks down on religion in general as being “primitive” and “irrational.” In The Golden Bough, James Frazer wasn’t intending to uncover some archaic spiritual truth that underlies all human religion. He was intending to discredit Christianity, by demonstrating that it is not special and that all human religions are basically the same. It’s identical in spirit to the innumerable internet posts that claim that Jesus is actually Horus/Mithras/Dionysus/Krishna/Attis/insert-god-here, and about as accurate. (In fact, some of the “arguments” that those posts make can be traced back to Frazer.) In The Golden Bough, Frazer denigrates paganism as “savage” and “primitive” and so forth. He implicitly compares Christianity to paganism to make it seem foreign, barbaric, “Other.” If you’re wondering why so many internet posts profess the ancient pagan origins of [insert holiday], this is why. It’s why modern atheists will sometimes use paganism as a bludgeoning tool in their arguments against Christianity — “Ha! All that you hold sacred is actually pagan!” — without ever meaningfully engaging with paganism itself in good faith. But then you’ve got pagans, like the Farrars, who took Frazer’s work and interpreted it as an actual spiritual truth. According to Hutton, this is because “savage” paganism and rural folklore became the Romantic antidote to twentieth-century industrialism: "The new mass urban and industrialized lifestyle was condemned not just because it was frighteningly novel and because its setting was perceived as being ugly, but because it was supposed to be physically and mentally unhealthy. The countryside became credited with all the virtues which were the obverse of those vices. It was not simply regarded as being more beautiful and healthy, but as being stable, dependable, rooted, and timeless. Its working people became credited with a superior wisdom, founded upon generations of living in close contact with nature and inheriting a cumulative hidden knowledge. This organic, immemorial lore, which by the twentieth century had accumulated the numinously vague label of ‘the Old Ways,’ was viewed as both a comforting force of resistance to the dramatic and unsettling changes of modernity, and as a potential force for redemption. […] Suddenly the urban centers had turned into monsters, destroying the world about them and spreading ill health, pollution, ugliness, and social instability. The shrinking and depopulating countryside — especially the soft arable and downland landscape of southern England — had become the epitome of continuity, community, and social harmony. […] As said, by placing Christ in a context of dying and resurrecting pagan deities, Frazer had hoped to discredit the whole package of religious ideas. Instead, as some of the literary use of the Bough indicates, he actually gave solace to those disillusioned with traditional religion, by allowing them to conflate the figure of Jesus with the natural world, to produce a kinder, greener variety of Christianity. Frazer’s dying and returning vegetation spirit provided an easy means of accomplishing this." —Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon Neopaganism makes such a big deal of being “nature-based” (a concept that would have been foreign to ancient pagans) becuase neopaganism was a way of discovering the cycles of nature and learning to value them, in a world that was becoming increasingly divorced from nature. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but it did come with a huge helping of that “noble savage” stuff I mentioned earlier, as well as some pretty flagrant misconceptions about ancient pagans and how they related to their gods. There isn’t anything inherently more ancient or more authentic about “nature-based” neopaganism, and as Hutton points out, sometimes it looks awfully like Christianity with a green filter slapped on it. That brings us back to Graves, who built off of Frazer’s dying-and-rising god concept and connected it to his particular conception of the Goddess. Graves added the piece that the God dies specifically for the Goddess’ sake. The cycles of agriculture that the god’s death and resurrection are supposed to represent, are inherently intertwined with the Goddess and her supremacy. In particular, Graves introduced the idea that the God has a “twin” or Shadow, who is simultaneously himself and his rival. The two Gods represent the waxing and waning halves of the year, respectively, and their annual battles for the Goddess’s hand result in the tradeoff between summer and winter. This is where the “Oak King and Holly King” come from. (I’ve heard that it has some basis in English folklore, but I haven’t been able to verify that, and it certainly isn’t an ancient pagan idea.) Graves identified the bright god with Horus and the dark god with Set, ignoring the fact that Horus and Set’s battles are not over Isis (or any other goddess) and that they don’t represent a seasonal tradeoff per se. (Osiris does represent the fertility of the land around the Nile in contrast to Set who represents the desert, but that’s not the same idea, and it’s disingenuous to pretend it is.) And it’s not just Horus and Set — Graves also forces Heracles and Llew Llaw Gyffes into this sacrificial king narrative, no matter how little sense that makes. Underscoring it all is the veneration of the Goddess, who demands that her king-consort must die: "…the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God's losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird. All true poetry […] some incident or scene in this very ancient story, and the three main characters are so much a part of our racial inheritance that they not only assert themselves in poetry but recur on occasions of emotional stress in the form of dreams, paranoiac visions and delusions." —Robert Graves, The White Goddess There’s no real basis for this dynamic in ancient paganism. Oh sure, you can interpret any number of stories through this lens if you want to — like, say, Dionysus being dismembered at the behest of Hera — but it’s one thing to interpret a story in that way and quite another to claim that this is the actual hidden meaning of all stories, that only Graves is clever enough to understand. It resonated, though. Not just for me, but for a lot of people, enough to become a major piece in a phenomenon known as the “Goddess Movement,” the religious arm of second-wave feminism: "Still more widespread [in American feminist culture], and potent, was that of the prehistoric Great Goddess, usually linked with that of ancient woman-centered cultures, which grew in strength through the decade and into the 1990s. It was linked, in some cases inseparably, with the larger phenomenon of the movement to develop or recover a specifically female spirituality. By the late 1980s this was commonly subsumed under the label of ‘Goddess spirituality,’ or simply ‘the Goddess.’ The terminology was loose enough to be both convenient and confusing. To some it simply represented a general female right to a separate spirituality, irrespective of whether this involved actual belief in deities; it could, indeed, signify simply the spiritual power within women. To others, it meant the putative prehistoric Great Mother Goddess, or the triple lunar deity of Graves, Maiden, Mother, and Crone, or the living and divine body of the planet. By yet others it was understood to mean a composite figure in whom were subsumed all the female deities revered in any part of the world and at any age, who retained something of their individual identity as her ‘aspects.’" —Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon This is the Goddess that I was originally exposed to — a unified, feminist Great Goddess that had been forcibly dethroned by patriarchal men, and who was finally beginning to take her power back. I can’t pretend I don’t see the appeal in a Goddess-centered spirituality, but it’s always rubbed me the wrong way. Part of that has to do with my own gender identity; I don’t like being submerged in this utopian ideal of archetypal woman-ness. But another big piece of it is Graves. The Goddess of the “Goddess movement” always had a bit of a vindictive, violent punch to her, and that’s one that Graves intentionally gave her. As Jessica Price goes on to say, the idea of the Great Goddess and her glorious matriarchy in which men are constantly dying for her isn’t actually all that feminist: "The Romantics might profess to revere Mother Nature, but at the end of the day, they revered her as an object: there to be conquered if they wanted to feel manly, there to challenge them if they wanted to feel manly in a different way, there to soothe and inspire them as Muse, and even there to kill them if they were into the idea of la petite mort being la grand mort." I realized while reading The White Goddess that the notion of the Goddess that I had been introduced to through Wicca, and through other products of the Goddess Movement, was still invented by men. It was awash with gender essentialism. In fact, it was downright sexist, against both women and men. It was sexist against women because it denied women their agency. It put women up on a pedestal, transforming them into some archetypical ideal of Woman, like Galatea — idealized, glorified, and unchangeable. She’s defined by her genitals and her uterus, but she’s not really sexualized either. She could inspire art, but never create it. It was sexist against men by painting them as eternal victims of the Goddess, suggesting that they exist purely to adore women and die for them. Men aren’t expendable, and they don’t exist purely to adore women. Nor should they have to die (even metaphorically) for the sake of their sons. It sets up a kind of Freudian dynamic in which the Goddess’s son grows up to become her lover, and her previous lover (the father) is inevitably killed in the struggle between the old and the new king. Why should men have to be sacrificed to or for women? How is that a healthy dynamic? Hutton said it best: "This theme — that a man can gain immortality by first being tortured and then killed in the service of the Goddess — is a recurrent one in Graves’s work. In Seven Days in New Crete a young boy is ritually butchered in a public performance as part of a twice-yearly sacrifice, by priestesses who then feast upon his flesh. The Goddess herself materializes to reassure the narrator, who is at first appalled, that he was a willing victim and that his family are greatly honoured. The last words of The Golden Fleece concern the death of Orpheus, the character with whom, as a poet and a personal devotee of the Goddess, Graves most clearly identifies. He is torn to pieces by priestesses, winning the author’s comment that “the Goddess has always rewarded with dismemberment those who love her best, scattering their bloody pieces over the earth to fructify it, but gently taking their astonished souls into her own keeping.” Why do such intensely masochistic images keep appearing in Graves’s work? The short answer is that he was an intense masochist, who depended for his own creative inspiration upon being dedicated to the service of a specific woman, dominated by her, and made unhappy by her. […] The first was his mother, a powerful figure of profound Christian piety who used affection and punishment as instruments to encourage her offspring to succeed in the world. Under her influence, Robert spent his childhood and adolescence as a devout and somewhat priggish Christian. Her influence was broken in 1918 by his marraige to his first wife Nancy Nicholson, who immediately became the new dominant female in his life. She was a pronounced feminist and pushed him into a decisive loss of faith in Christianity by declaring that any religion with a male deity must be ‘rot.’ It can be no coincidence that he acquired his lasting belief in an ancient matriarchy during this period. The marraige became a time of acute unhappiness for him, from which he was rescued by falling under the spell of his third and greatest guiding figure, the writer Laura Riding, with whom he lived from 1926–1940. Riding proved to be more domineering than either of her predecessors, and actually believed herself to be something more than human, and to deserve the reverence accorded to a goddess. She inspired Graves to some ohis best work, and eventually to his greatest pitch of frustration and misery, before abandoning him. He was rescued by Beryl Hodge, who became his second wife and gave him a supportive love and understanding which he had never received before. He thus achieved a lasting domestic happiness, and yet lost that insecurity and emotional pain which he was gradually coming to recognize as essential to his ability to write poetry. His solution, from 1950 onward, was to fall in love with a series of young women whom he termed his Muses (more strictly, successive faces of the Muse, the lovely and cruel Goddess) and whom he pursued through doomed romances which afforded him the necessary excitement and torment. The main sequence of Goddess-centered writings, therefore, occured in the gap, when he was bereft of such a figure in his own life and coming to terms with his need for one. To somebody of Graves’s personality, what was true for him had to be true for everybody else; this absolute moral certainty was one of the enduring bequests made to him by his mother." —Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon So… yeah. To put it into less scholarly language: The reason why this all sounds like one guy’s masochistic sexual fantasy, is because it is. I don’t mean to shame Graves for his kinks — there’s nothing wrong with liking femdom (though I can’t say his approach to it is particularly healthy). I also can’t pretend that I haven’t incorporated any of my kinks into my interpretation of Dionysus. But the thing about sexual fantasies is that they’re intensely specific and personal, and what turns you on might be a complete turnoff for someone else. I mean, that’s true of any interest, but it’s especially pronounced in the case of sexual fantasies. Graves’s Goddess was at best an object to be either revered or feared, at worst, a fetishized nightmare. It scared me. As Hutton put it, what was true for Graves had to be true for everyone else, so he universalized a conception of the Goddess that was intensely personal and specific. He decided that the Goddess must leave the God for a dark, shadowy twin or rival, because that’s what happened to him — Laura Riding left him for someone else. He assumed that all men’s experience of the Goddess must be as intensely masochistic as his own, and then had the gall to say that all true poetry is based in this toxic femdom dynamic! He never bothered to determine what women’s relationship to the Goddess is, beyond the assumption that women should embody her, leading to generations of women confusing domineering viciousness with empowerment. If The White Goddess were just about Graves and his personal relationship to the Divine, I’d have no problem with it, but Graves presents it as if it were inarguable fact. And people buy it. I bought it. Here’s what it looks like when it’s been turned into an actual religion: "But what of the sacrificial mating theme as a single concept, instead of as two separate ones of sacrifice and sexuality? Has this vanished altogether in the Irish tradition? Not quite. In the first place, that tradition as it has reached us is mainly a God-and-Hero one, though with the Goddess hovering powerfully in the background; and it has reached us largely through mediaeval Christian monks who write down a body of oral legend (albeit surprisingly sympathetically) — scribes whose conditioning perhaps made it difficult for them to recognize Goddess clues. But the clues are there — particularly in the recurrent theme of the rivalry of two heroes (gods) over a heroine (goddess). This theme is not confined to the Irish Celts; it appears, for example, in the legend of Jack the Tinkard, who can be regarded as a Cornish Lugh. And significantly — as with the Oak King and Holly King, these heroes are often alternately successful." —Janet and Stewart Farrar, A Witches’ Bible Everything that the Farrars say here comes directly from Graves! They suggest that the “sacrificial mating theme” is an actual thing that exists in real Irish folk tradition, and imply that the emphasis on the Goddess that “should” be there must have been smoothed over by the Christian monks who preserved Irish lore. Instead of… you know… not being there at all, because Graves made it up! And the whole Oak and Holly King thing, the God and his rival, is just Graves universalizing his own feelings at having lost his lover to another man. The rest is all what Hutton was describing when he mentioned local folk traditions being shoehorned into a particular mystical interpretation by scholars, without the people who actually believe in and practice those traditions being consulted. But if you didn’t know any better, why wouldn’t you take this as fact? Why would you have any reason to doubt what the Farrars say here? That’s ultimately why I consider The White Goddess to be so insidious. It’s not just wrong (and it’s wrong about a lot of things), it pushes something personal to its author as The Old Religion, the most ancient and authentic of human spirituality that everyone would realize was the “obvious” ultimate truth if they just thought about it hard enough. And then well-meaning authors like the Farrars end up repeating it and interpreting evidence to support it instead of the other way around. If everybody does that, then “the Old Religion” becomes a self-sustaining meme that only ever references itself. It perpetuates plenty of misconceptions and problematic ideas that I’ve already discussed, but it also isolates anyone for whom it doesn’t resonate, or doesn’t fully resonate. I don’t like Graves’s Goddess. I don’t like how she is a vague, generic archetype. I don’t like how she is a Muse but never a poet. I don’t like how she is as domineering as Laura Riding, how she subjugates men and has them sacrifice themselves to her in pursuit of “feminism.” But this is the version of the Goddess that “Goddess spirituality” is based around. This is the modern feminine divine. The other option is to look to ancient paganism, but ancient pagan sources were also written by men, and Greek goddesses in particular fall along pretty strict madonna/whore lines. And of course, it’s worth emphasizing that Graves’s goddess model leaves no room for LGBTQ+ people of any kind; hell, it also completely fails to take into account the number of gay/bi and nonbinary gods there are. The utter heteronormativity of his “proto-religion” is unbearable. And yet, even despite my frustration, certain aspects of it still do resonate for me… what am I supposed to do with that? Where do I go from here? It’s been four years since I read The White Goddess, and I’ve made such little progress in developing my own idea of the feminine divine. Therefore, in my reading, The White Goddess doesn’t “strengthen” paganism — it does active damage to it. Whatever neopaganism might owe to The White Goddess, it has been outweighed by the amount of misinformation and the rigid, narrow specificity of its interpretation that is treated as inflexible and all-encompassing. It leaves room for nothing but itself. Whatever the real Mystery is, I’m sure I’ll find it, but in the meantime, Graves is standing in the way.
Christmas and Paganism
It begins: The endless parade of questions asking if Christmas is pagan, which turn up every year. I realized this year that I was somewhat unsure of the answer, and that I should do as much of my own research as I could to set the record straight. Introduction The hard truth is that modern Christmas is a lot less pagan than I’d like it to be. It isn’t a survival of an ancient festival like Saturnalia or Yule. Much of it is either too modern or too generic to have directly descended from either festival, in fact, Christmas is a lot like Wicca — it’s a mishmash of stuff that’s lifted from different religions, but that mostly originates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I can’t really improve upon Spencer McDaniel’s excellent post on the history of Christmas, which concludes that paganism does not influence modern Christmas very much. So, what I’m going to do with this post is analyze the relationship between paganism and Christmas more generally. Was Christmas a pagan holiday? The real answer is “well, yes, but actually no.” We know it was celebrated in Rome since at least 336 CE, and we know that it has been a festival of Christ’s birth since then. Many of the specific traditions associated with it have changed over the many centuries it has been in existence. The question is not whether Christmas has pagan origins — it doesn’t. The question is whether anything at all about Christmas is pagan. And if not, can modern pagans easily make it into a pagan holiday? I think that question is more important. Christmas does have a lot in common with certain pagan holidays, and to me that means that there are running themes that can be applied to winter festivals in general. First, I want to clarify the difference between similarity and influence: Just because Christmas and pagan holidays have certain things in common does not mean that they are anthropologically related, i.e. that one turned into the other. A great example of this is the alleged connection between Santa Claus and Odin. I really wanted that one to be real, but there isn’t any evidence directly linking Santa and Odin. It seems to make sense, because Santa and Odin have some things in common, mainly that they both appear as old men who travel among humans to reward the good and punish the wicked. But there is no evidence that Santa Claus was directly inspired by Odin, and they aren’t even that similar. Odin went from house to house to test mortals’ adherence to laws of sacred hospitality that exist in many pagan cultures — if you aren’t kind and welcoming to the mysterious old man, he will teach you a lesson. That’s very different from Santa Claus bringing presents to make children happy. With that out of the way, let’s address the idea of pagan Christmas. Why do people claim that Christmas is pagan? There are three groups of people who make this claim, and they are all diametrically opposed. There’s atheists, who attempt to discredit Christianity by calling their treasured holiday a farce. There’s neopagans, who attempt to aggressively “reclaim” Christmas from the domineering Christians who “stole” it. And, there’s fundamentalist Christians, who think that Christmas should be observed by praying quietly in church and not by doing fun things. What about Christmas is pagan according to them? There’s a couple particular things that people tend to harp on when comparing Christianity and pagan holidays: An article from a chef website called "These 6 Christmas Traditions are Actually Pagan Customs" mentions gift-giving, caroling, stockings, Santa Claus, holly, and Christmas trees. The article is completely unreliable. It claims that the Romans, Norse, Druids, and “Celtics” (cringe) all celebrated the same winter solstice celebration, as though all of these disparate groups celebrated the exact same holiday in winter. It mentions gift-giving and Saturnalia, the Santa/Odin connection, describes the origin of wassailing without connecting it to paganism (and suggests that this was a pagan tradition until the 13th century, when caroling was first introduced in churches — just because it wasn’t an official church practice does not mean it was somehow pagan in the thirteenth century), and connects mistletoe to Druids even though there is no reliable source for connecting Druid veneration of mistletoe (assuming that’s real, since it’s filtered through Roman sources) to Christmas. In addition to the above, an article called "16 Pagan Christmas Traditions that People Mistakenly Credit to Christianity" from History Collection mentions the date of Christmas, which is supposedly on the 25th because the Church tried to absorb Saturnalia. This one claims that wassailing is a pre-Christian fertility rite for chasing away evil spirits, without sourcing it. It also claims that Romans had sex under mistletoe and that somehow devolved into kissing, which I find questionable. (And apparently, Egyptians placing offerings of cakes on tombs evolved into Christmas fruitcake? How?) An article called "Twelve Christmas Traditions With Pagan Origins" from Holidappy mentions that ivy is a symbol of Bacchus, and yes it certainly is, but that doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas. It also tries to connect laurel wreaths awarded to victors to Christmas wreaths, even though the only thing those have in common is “plant circle.” At least it mentions that Christmas trees are victorian, so, points for that, but I retract those points for calling Odin “chubby” and failing to specify anything about him. Its reasoning that “pagans sang songs, therefore Christmas carols are a thing” is painfully weak. The Yule Log is a massive question mark, but it would be Norse, not Celtic, and the Oak King and the Holly King are a modern invention. An article called "Christmas: Its Origins in Ancient Greece and Rome" from Classical Wisdom just disappoints me. Dionysus was not born of a virgin, he isn’t really a solar deity (though we’ll get back to that), dithyrambs are not Christmas carols, the Kronia was celebrated in July and did not inspire Christmas, Christmas was not placed on the 25th to coincide with Saturnalia, Saturn is not the king of the gods… I have to stop. My brain hurts. It’s pretty plain that most of these articles don’t have an actual interest in the origins of Christmas — what they have an interest in is spitefully sticking it to Christianity. “HA, all your treasured Christmas traditions are actually pagan, you dumbasses!” I admit I’ve fallen prey to this myself, but it is not a foundation of good scholarship, to say the least. These articles all fall prey to the Golden Bough-problem of interpreting evidence to support an existing theory, instead of fully analyzing the context without any personal bias. And they don’t cite sources, or at least specify where the ideas they repeat actually come from. In general, these articles are extremely misleading — even when the information they present is factual, the information is presented in such a way that it draws connections between things that aren’t actually related. For the most part, there’s no direct line connecting any of these things to the modern Christmas, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything connecting Christmas and paganism at all. I think it would be quite easy to “paganize” Christmas! But before I do that, I have to determine which claims about ancient pagan holidays are actually true. Where are the truths in this web of lies? Why winter? A really common claim about Christmas is that it is in winter specifically to coincide with multiple different pagan solstice celebrations, and that all the candles and open fires and light imagery and so on that are associated with Christmas are carryovers from solar worship. There are a number of problems with this. First, Christmas is on the 25th for banally Christian reasons — it was believed that Christ was conceived around the time he died, which would put his birth around the winter solstice, which is Dec. 25th in the Julian calendar. Second, all of these articles that mention pagan solar-worship solstice celebrations never actually name said solstice celebrations, which is a red flag. They also conflate pagans and festivals from across Europe as though they are all the same thing. So what are these solar-worship solstice celebrations? I am completely unsurprised to find out that the main source for this one is the Venerable Bede. Of course it’s Bede. The modern pagan calendar owes a lot to Bede and his The Reckoning of Time, written in 725. It’s one of the only existing sources about ancient Anglo-Saxon calendars. It’s our main source for the goddess Eostre and the Wiccan festival of Ostara, and it’s also the source of the name Litha for the Summer Solstice. (To be honest, I have no idea what Bede’s source is for the names of Anglo-Saxon months, and I’ve never seen any of the other names for months that he lists mentioned anywhere else.) Bede may even be the reason why neopagans place much more emphasis on the solstices and equinoxes than the ancient pagans did. Regarding the date of Christmas, he mentions what I just said about it lining up with Jesus’ supposed date of conception, and also says this: "To this they add the explanation that it was fitting that the Creator of eternal light should be conceived and born along with the increase of temporal light, and that the herald of penance, who must decrease, should be engendered and born at a time when the light is diminishing." —Bede, The Reckoning of Time Here, Bede claims that Church leaders associate the birth of Christ with the return of the light after the winter solstice. However, he does not mention any particular pagan festivals associated with the return of the light. This also doesn’t say anything about Christmas being put on that date specifically to assimilate pagans. Apparently, Bede's source for this information is a Latin treatise on the solstices and equinoxes attributed to someone called John Chrysostom, from the fourth century. I couldn’t find much on it, except for a blog post by Roger Pearse It seems to be more rationale as to why Jesus would have been born on the winter solstice, but doesn’t connect it to any pagan festivals. So, the idea that Christmas was put on the 25th specifically to assimilate pagans doesn’t seem to hold any water. Bede does mention one pagan festival occuring on the date of Christmas: "That very night [Dec 25th], which we hold so sacred, they used to call by the heathen word Modranecht, that is, “mother’s night,” because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that night." —Bede, The Reckoning of Time I’m really surprised that people don’t claim that Dec. 25th was a night of goddess worship based on this line alone. Maybe that is a sign that no one has actually read Bede’s work. Modranecht is not mentioned in anything else, but scholars have connected it to a Germanic practice involving worship of a triad of female deities. Much like Eostre, the scholarly consensus seems to be, “maybe Bede’s information about the Anglo-Saxons is legit, but we don’t really know.” So, maybe it’s a thing, but it doesn’t have much to do with Christmas traditions regardless. Suffice to say, Bede is not the most reliable of sources, but we also don’t have any other ones. Some of these “pagan Christmas” articles cite a quote from the 4th century, written by a Scriptor Syrus: “It was a custom of the pagans to celebrate on the same 25th December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in the token of festivity. […] when the doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day.” There are a few glaring problems with this, though. The first is that none of the sites that use this quote actually say which manuscript it comes from. Second, “Scriptor Syrus” isn’t a name, it just means “the Syrian writer.” Which Syrian writer? I finally managed to track down where this quote actually comes from, and it’s a note that an anonymous scribe scribbled in the margins of a manuscript by Dionysius Bar Salibi, a twelfth century bishop. Here’s the actual quote: "The reason, then, why the fathers of the church moved the January 6th celebration to December 25th was this, they say: it was the custom of the heathen to celebrate on this same December 25th the birthday of the Sun, and they lit lights then to exalt the day. Even Christians were participants in these rites and ceremonies. When, therefore, the teachers of the Church saw that Christians inclined to this custom, they established a plan. The true Natal feast would be celebrated on this day, and Epiphany on January 6th..." There are still glaring problems with this. First, Christmas and Epiphany have always been two different dates, so Christmas wasn’t moved to Dec. 25th. Second, this is a medieval and not an ancient source describing lights as a form of solar worship, and it doesn’t refer to any ancient sources. Third, this was written by an anonymous scribe and we have no idea if he has any credibility. As such, I can’t take this as proof of anything. The “birthday of the Sun” festival being referred to in that quote is the birthday of Sol Invictus, a god associated with the Mithraic Mysteries. We don’t know much about Sol Invictus because mystery cults aren’t called that for nothing. They keep their secrets, so there’s only so much we know about them, and most of what we know about the Mithraic Mysteries comes from artwork. Our source for the birthday of Sol Invictus being on the 25th is the Chronograph of 354, which is also our earliest source for Christmas itself being celebrated annually on the 25th. So… we have no way of knowing which one came first, if they were influenced by each other, or if it’s just a coincidence. It’s very unlikely that Christmas was celebrated on the 25th because of its association with the Sun, but becuase both celebrations happened to be on top of each other, they became associated. There were some early Christians who were concerned about sun worship, for example, Leo the Great (5th century) said this in his Sermon 22: "[The Devil misleads] simpler souls with the pestilential notion of some to whom this our solemn feast day seems to derive its honour, not so much from the nativity of Christ as, according to them, from the rising of the new sun. […] Let not Christian souls entertain any such wicked superstition and portentous lie." As far as I know, Sol Invictus is the only solar deity that is associated with Christmas or even with the Solstice. Believe me, I’ve looked. I looked particularly hard to find a connection between Dionysus and the winter solstice, and the only thing I could find was this paragraph from Macrobius’ Saturnalia: "They observe the holy mystery in the rites by calling the sun Apollo when it is in the upper (that is, daytime) hemisphere; when it is in the lower (that is, night-time) hemisphere, it is considered Dionysus, who is Liber. Similarly, some images of father Liber are fashioned in the form of a boy, others of a young man, sometimes also bearded, or even elderly, like the image of the one the Greeks call Bassareus, and also the one they call Briseus, and like the one the people of Naples in Campania worship under the name Hêbôn. But the different ages are to be understood with reference to the sun. It is very small at the winter solstice, like the image the Egyptians bring out from its shrine on a fixed date, with the appearance of a small infant, since it’s the shortest day. Then, as the days become progressively longer, by the vernal equinox it resembles a vigorous young man and is given the form of a youth. Later, full maturity at the summer solstice is represented by a beard, by which point it has grown as much as it will grow. Thereafter, as the days become ever shorter, the god is rendered in the fourth shape, like a man growing old." —Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.18.8–10 Macrobius is a late and kind of weird source, but he does preserve a lot of obscure pagan lore. This section of the dialogue discusses solar worship, addressing many different gods — Osiris, Apollo, Dionysus, Hermes, Mars — as aspects of the sun. So, it describes Dionysus in a rare solar aspect, the dark “night sun” to Apollo’s daytime sun (which honestly makes sense given their summer/winter dynamic at Delphi). Macrobius compares the different depictions of Dionysus as a younger and older man to the seasonal waxing and waning of the sun, making Dionysus an infant when the sun is at its “smallest,” on the winter solstice. Now, that sounds remarkably like the line from Bede describing Christ playing the same role. It’s certainly enough of a justification for me to recognize the modern Christmas as Dionysus’ birthday, but nothing in this passage connects Dionysus directly with Christmas, or with any other solstice celebration. This supposed universal pagan festival of the winter solstice that honors the return of the Sun doesn’t seem to actually exist. In fact, the idea that it does exist is based on a misunderstanding of how polytheism itself works. In an article called "Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas," Steven Hijmans points out that thinking of solar worship in this way is applying a monotheistic model to a polytheistic religion that functions fundamentally differently from how Christianity functions. It’s interpreting pagan religions in a Christian context, instead of actually understanding them: "In practice, what many scholars have done is to approach individual pagan cults as interchangeable with paganism. treating those cults-singly or as a group-as the "opposites" of Christianity. […] Opposite "those who worship Christ" they set "those who worship Sol and/or Zeus and/or Isis etc." The Christocentricity of this approach is immediately apparent, and its effects clearly visible." This honestly explains so much about the entire “Christmas is really pagan” meme. All the kinds of people who make this claim — atheists, neopagans, fundamentalists — are trying to make a point about Christmas and Christianity. The atheists set themselves in opposition to Christians, whom they see as superstitious and gullible. The fundamentalist Christians set themselves in opposition to pagans and atheists, viewing them as evil. The neopagans mostly come from Christian upbringings, and may resent their former religion, while still carrying many of its mindsets and assumptions into paganism. They also set themselves in opposition to Christianity, attempt to discredit it by revealing the “pagan origins” of everything associated with it, and justify their own incorporations of Christian things that they liked (like Christmas) into their new religion. Rarely is the discussion about “Christmas is pagan” actually about paganism. Most of the people who repeat this claim aren’t trying to understand paganism in its own context. They harp on superficial similarities (if they aren’t just making stuff up), and never go into much depth about what ancient pagans actually practiced or believed. Pagans are not a monolith, nor are they the opposite of Christians. So, what did they actually do? What did their winter holidays actually look like? Saturnalia Saturnalia! It’s the pagan holiday most often compared to Christmas in modern popular culture. Most people have at least heard of it before. It is the Ancient Roman celebration of the god Saturn, which lasted from Dec. 17th to Dec. 23rd. Subversion was the name of the game — Saturnalia allowed for various activities that were normally prohibited, like gambling, and masters waiting on their slaves. Slaves could also say whatever they wanted about their masters without fearing that they would be punished, because “it’s just a Saturnalia joke bro, lol.” People wore silly hats, feasted and drank excessively, sang and danced, and gave each other gifts. Mostly, Saturnalia was associated with freedom, and the equal standing of all people. It’s the great-grandfather of all subversive festivals like it. The god Saturn is usually identified with the Greek Kronos, but there are some notable differences. Kronos was rarely, if ever, worshipped in Greece. Saturn was widely worshipped in Rome, and had more explicit agricultural associations than Kronos, making him a god of abundance. In his dialogue Saturnalia, Lucian mocks the story about Kronos swallowing his own children and then a stone, by having Kronos call it slander and dismiss Homer and Hesiod as ignorant: "Is a man conceivable–let alone a God–who would devour his own children? […] I ask you whether he could help knowing he had a stone in his mouth instead of a baby; I envy him his teeth, that is all. The fact is, there was no war, and Zeus did not depose me; I voluntarily abdicated and retired from the cares of office." —Lucian, Saturnalia This version of Kronos is more benevolent than the traditional version of him. He peacefully gave up his throne to his son and retired, instead of being deposed in a celestial war and imprisoned for all eternity. This is actually a great example of how myths weren’t always taken literally. Kronos describes that he abdicated to have a more peaceful and pleasurable life, instead of having to deal with the responsibilities of ruling the universe. He spreads his love of pleasure to humans during Saturnalia. The Romans interpreted Saturnalia as a temporary return to the “Golden Age,” the early existence of mankind under Kronos’ rule, during which there was no suffering and humans had long lives: "…during [Saturnalia] I resume my authority, that men may remember what life was like in my days, when all things grew without sowing or ploughing of theirs—no ears of corn, but loaves complete and meat ready cooked — when wine flowed in rivers, and there were fountains of milk and honey; all men were good and all men were gold. Such is the purpose of this my brief reign; therefore the merry noise on every side, the song and the games; therefore the slave and the free as one." —Lucian, Saturnalia The sentiment expressed here is actually quite similar to what Christmas itself is meant to represent. Christmas is an idealistic holiday that places faith in human virtue, whose message of “peace on earth and goodwill toward men” is so powerful that it literally halted a battle. The ideal behind Christmas is that we all deserve good things, that we all have good food and presents, and that we are all equals in the eyes of God. To be clear, that sentiment does not come from Saturnalia, it very much comes from Christian ideals, and it’s modern. But it is a way in which the two holidays are similar. There are other similarities between Saturnalia and Christmas, beyond when they occur. It’s true that gift-giving was a thing at Saturnalia. People gave each other gifts on Dec. 19th, called sigillaria, which were figurines made of clay or wax that were shaped like deities and other mythological figures. It would be like if the only thing you ever got for Christmas was gag ornaments for your tree. The worse and more worthless the gift, the better your friendship with the person who gave it to you. The practice of giving sigillaria isn’t directly related to the modern practice of giving gifts at Christmas — that practice was born mainly out of Saint Nicholas legends — but still, I consider it something of a mark of solidarity between the two festivals. Masks were also a gift at Saturnalia, which implies that maybe there was some version of guising at the holiday, a tradition related to both wassailing and trick-or-treating. If that’s true, then that is another point of solidarity. "Another claim I often hear is that Romans decorated with evergreens at Saturnalia, and that this represents the presence of life in the cold depth of winter. I have not been able to confirm this. I suppose I wouldn’t be surprised if Saturnalia involved evergreen decorations, since it’s winter and evergreens are what’s available in winter, but I have learned not to assume things. All I could find is this quote from Macrobius’ Saturnalia: The people of Cyrene, when they sacrifice to [Saturn], even wear garlands of fresh figs and send each other honey-cakes, believing that he discovered honey and fruit." —Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.7.25 So, candles were definitely a thing at Saturnalia, although they had nothing to do with solar worship. Honestly, it’s not surprising that candles are relevant to Saturnalia, because of pure common sense — Saturnalia crosses the solstice, and without electricity, candles were the only source of light during the long nights. It’s not a coincidence that candles are a big deal at Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. Christmas and Saturnalia definitely overlapped. They were celebrated almost concurrently, with Saturnalia ending just as Christmas began. Both were popular in the late Roman empire, and it took Saturnalia a relatively long time to die out. So, there must have been some syncretism between the two festivals. This was not because church officials were trying to encourage people to convert by hijacking Saturnalia. It’s because early Christians, who celebrated Saturnalia as secular in the same way people today celebrate Christmas as secular, wanted to keep their festival. You’ll hear some neopagans make the “Christians stole our holidays!!!” claim, making it sound like some kind of insidious conspiracy (not to mention the implications of the word “our”). It’d probably be more accurate to say that Christian converts preserved pagan holidays by continuing to practice them in the new context. There were many differences between Saturnalia and Christmas, or at least, the modern Christmas. Social subversion is either absent or deemphasized in the modern Christmas. You’re also unlikely to see much public drunken debauchery on Christmas in comparison to other holidays — not that there aren’t pub crawls on Christmas, but they’re not associated with Christmas specifically, and gambling isn’t associated with Christmas at all. Modern Christmas is warm and fuzzy and a time for being with your family in your home. The medieval Christmas bore much more resemblance to Saturnalia, being more riotous and unruly with lots of hard drinking and gambling. A tradition from Saturnalia that actually did carry over into Christmas is the “Lord of Misrule,” a person who would be chosen by lot to be king for a day and give people silly and demeaning orders. This is where the “King of Fools” tradition in The Hunchback of Notre Dame comes from. The more Saturnalia-like atmosphere of medieval and early-Renaissance Christmas made it a holiday for getting away with debauchery that would normally be socially unacceptable behavior. This is why the Puritans and the other Frollos of the world tried to cancel it. What changed? When did Christmas turn from this into the family-friendly, warm-and-fuzzy holiday that we know and love today? Well for once, it wasn’t the church. The makeover of Christmas as a holiday was mostly the result of a certain writer who wrote a little ghost story to encourage people to be kind to each other. Christmas had been dying out, but Charles Dickens’ novella boosted its popularity in cities and helped along the Victorian revival of Christmas. So, that means that Charles Dickens succeeded in Saving Christmas. Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit, but still. Most of the influence of Saturnalia on Christmas has long-since died out. Gift-giving, for example, is only a Christmas tradition because St. Nicholas’ feast day on Dec. 6th got conflated with it. The tradition comes from the St. Nicholas legends, not from Saturnalia. All of the other commonalities are coincidental, either common to festivals in general or a consequence of both being in December. However, the existing similarities do make it easy for modern pagans to adapt Christmas into a modern Saturnalia. Brumalia I first became aware of Brumalia when I joined the r/dionysus subreddit. Brumalia is an obscure holiday, and not much is known about it in comparison to Saturnalia. It seems to have been celebrated mainly in Byzantium, and after Saturnalia had begun to die out. It is more explicitly a winter solstice festival than Saturnalia is; “bruma” means “winter solstice,” and comes from the same root as the word “brevity” (i.e. the shortest day of the year). However, it may have been celebrated on November 24th, a month earlier when the days begin to visibly get shorter, and lasted from then to the end of Saturnalia. Perhaps “Brumalia” was the name for the entire winter festival season, the same way “the holidays” or more rarely “yuletide” are used today. John the Lydian [Lydus], a Byzantine writer and one of our main sources for Brumalia, describes it as being multiple festivals in December: "And Brumalia means "winter festivals"; so at that time, until the Waxing of the Light, ceasing from work, the Romans would greet each other with words of good omen at night, saying in their ancestral tongue, "Vives annos" — that is, "Live for years.”" —Lydus, De Mensibus Brumalia is first mentioned in one line by Tertullian, who complains about paganism in schools corrupting the minds of children or something like that. He mentions that schools must recognize pagan holidays and “all the presents of Midwinter [Brumalia].” He mentions presents, which suggests that gift-giving is associated with Brumalia, just as it’s associated with Saturnalia and eventually Christmas. Make of that what you will. Brumalia seems to have had agricultural associations, as one might expect. We know from Lydus that it involved sacrifices to agricultural deities — Kronos/Saturn, Demeter, and Dionysus. Lydus mentions the Dionysian practice of making a bag from the skin of a goat sacrifice, filling it with wine, and then playing a game to see who could balance on top of it the longest. This is associated with other Dionysian festivals. Lydus characterizes Brumalia as chthonic, both because Kronos is in Tartarus (very different from Lucian’s benevolent Kronos) and because seeds are sown in the ground. Therefore, Brumalia is spookier than Saturnalia: "The attention to [these] things goes on at night, such that finally, in truth, the Brumalia are festivals of the subterranean daemones." —Lydus, De Mensibus Of course, Lydus was a Christian, and subterranean daemons aren’t exactly good from a Christian’s perspective. He might be trying to characterize Kronos as being Satanic. But I like chthonic daemons, so I’ll take it! The last thing I could find related to Brumalia was the rules set down by the bishops of the Council in Trullo, who banned Brumalia and other festivals for being too pagan. They explicitly mention Dionysus and practices associated with him (showing that Dionysus was still being worshipped in Byzantium under Justinian II, which is the 7th century, so, pretty late). They ban women dancing in the streets, men and women crossdressing, wearing theatrical masks, and invoking the name of “execrable Bacchus” while making wine. That sounds a lot like the sorts of things the Puritans said about Christmas much later. (Also, the god I know would be flattered by being called “execrable.”) It’s unclear whether these practices were explicitly associated with the Brumalia itself, or whether they’re all included in the same general list of weird pagan stuff, but it’s telling that they’re listed together. This was basically all I could find. It’s impossible to tell if Brumalia influenced Christmas at all, and we simply don’t know very much about it. But it’s a winter festival involving feasting and gift-giving, and associated with Dionysus, as well as other agricultural deities. For a neopagan, “Brumalia” makes sense as a name for a paganized, Dionysian Christmas. I can understand why the subreddit uses it. Yule The other pagan festival that’s most often associated with Christmas is Yule. The connection between Yule and Christmas is so entrenched that the word “Yule” or “Yuletide” is more-or-less synonymous with Christmas today. And of course, “Yule” is the name for paganized-Christmas on Wicca’s festival calendar. But if you want to know anything about the authentic pagan Yule, the people to talk to aren’t Wiccans, they’re Asatru. I’ve found most information on the ancient Yule on Asatru blogs. We don’t know very much about the original, Germanic Yule. What we know is that it was a feast of meat and ale in honor of Odin, who had the epithet Jolnir, which refers to Yule. Our sources regarding Germanic paganism are scant in comparison to those about Greco-Roman paganism. One of our existing sources is the Saga of Hakon the Good from the Heimskringla, by the one and only Snorri Sturluson. (Snorri was a Christian, but he is also one of our most important sources for Norse Mythology.) Here’s the description of Yule from Hakon’s Saga: "To this festival all the men brought ale with them; and all kinds of cattle, as well as horses, were slaughtered, and all the blood that came from them was called "hlaut", and the vessels in which it was collected were called hlaut-vessels. Hlaut-staves were made, like sprinkling brushes, with which the whole of the altars and the temple walls, both outside and inside, were sprinkled over, and also the people were sprinkled with the blood; but the flesh was boiled into savoury meat for those present. The fire was in the middle of the floor of the temple, and over it hung the kettles, and the full goblets were handed across the fire; and he who made the feast, and was a chief, blessed the full goblets, and all the meat of the sacrifice. And first Odin's goblet was emptied for victory and power to his king; thereafter, Njord's and Freyja's goblets for peace and a good season. Then it was the custom of many to empty the brage-goblet; and then the guests emptied a goblet to the memory of departed friends, called the remembrance goblet." So basically, it was a big drunk feast where everyone was smeared with blood. What else would you expect from Vikings? It was held in honor of Odin, also honored Njord and Freya, and evidently contained some ancestor worship as well. It really doesn’t resemble Christmas very much, which is why it’s so interesting that the word “Yule” currently refers to Christmas. According to Bede, Yule (“Giuli”) was the Anglo-Saxon name for the both December and January, so perhaps it also referred to the holiday season in general. “Yule” is already used to refer to Christmas in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is from the fourteenth century, so the equivalency between the two is late medieval at least. Christmas supplanted the pagan Yule a long time ago. The saga recounts how Hakon, who Christianized the region, decreed that Yule would be celebrated at the same time as Christmas, deliberately moving it so that the two holidays would coincide. The connection between them may be as simple as that. Often it’s claimed that Christian holidays are placed where they are to coincide with pagan ones, but here’s an example of the exact opposite happening. I suppose if you really wanted to you could construe this as a Christian “stealing” Yule, but this isn’t really stealing. Hakon is letting his pagan subjects continue to celebrate Yule. He doesn’t even call it Christmas or demand that the pagans celebrate Christmas. He just moves it. Also associated with Yule was the Wild Hunt, a folk superstition in both Germanic and Celtic lore. The Wild Hunt is a band of spirits, usually ghosts or fairies, that rampage across the countryside to chase some ethereal creature or human souls. Christians associated the Hunt with damned souls who are condemned to ride across the night sky eternally. They’re associated with midwinter, becuase the howling winter wind sounds like their hunting cry. Modern pagans often consider the leader of the Wild Hunt to be Odin in Norse lore and Gwyn ap Nudd/Arawn in Welsh lore. Odin’s association with the Hunt is mostly because of folklorist Jacob Grimm (of the brothers Grimm). There’s a story from Teutonic Mythology in which Woden (Odin) on his hunt rewards a peasant for cunning by giving him a boot full of meat, which then turns to gold. (This might be the ultimate source for another weird Christmas claim I encountered on several websites, that Odin gives children gifts like Santa Claus, which he puts in their shoes. I haven’t found any other source for this. The closest thing to it is Dutch children leaving their shoes out for Sinterklaas.) Odin’s association with the Hunt is too recent to have come from ancient paganism. More interestingly, a leader of the Hunt in Germanic folklore is a many-named woman, Frau Holda or Frau Perchta, who is a personification of winter. She is interpreted as a witch who is sometimes benevolent and sometimes malevolent, depending on the circumstance. The Perchta/Bertha version gives coins to well-behaved children around the Twelve Days of Christmas, or slits open their stomachs and stuffs them with straw if they were badly-behaved. The Holda/Holle version is a bit more of a kind old lady, and one of the Grimms’ stories is about a girl who goes to visit Frau Holle at the bottom of a well and does chores for her. Shaking out her feather bed is what creates snow, and Holle rewards the girl with gold for her efforts. Both figures are associated with spinning, and take care of the souls of children who are unborn or who have died unbaptized. Frau Holle/Percht is also considered a queen of witches, and human witches join in on her Wild Hunt. Jacob Grimm recounts the story of a noblewoman named Frau Gauden who claimed that hunting was better than heaven, and so, all her daughters turned into hunting dogs and she was “condemned” to hunt eternally. She often shows up around the Twelve Days of Christmas, bringing luck or misfortune. These stories very likely have pagan origins, and they are all associated with winter and the Christmas season. Grimm interpreted all of these female figures as being offshoots of a much older goddess of winter, but I’m not sure if there’s evidence for this or not. It seems a bit speculative, but if it’s true, then she might be a variant of Frigg, or possibly an even older Proto-Indo-European deity. Despite the ubiquity of “Yule” as a term for Christmas, there’s very little explicitly connecting the pagan Yule with Christmas. The one thing Yule may have actually contributed to Christmas is the eating of christmas ham, a Yule Boar. There’s a line in a Norse poem called “Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar” that mentions a boar as part of Yule festivities: “That evening the great vows were taken; the sacred boar was brought in, the men laid their hands thereon, and took their vows at the king's toast.” Source. So, there’s that. The other modern Christmas tradition that people claim comes directly from Yule is the “Yule log,” a giant log that is left to burn throughout the whole festival. There’s also a kind of French sponge cake called a “Buche de Noel” that’s shaped like a log, and it is delicious! The fact that this tradition is so ingrained that it became a sponge cake indicates that it must be somehow significant, but… I hit a dead end. I’ve frequently run across the claim that the Yule log comes from the pagan Yule and is a form of solar worship. I think I covered the “solar worship” angle already, so, suffice to say, I mistrust older scholarship that says this. Assuming that the Yule log is at all related to paganism, the purpose of it is obviously practical when it’s winter and extremely cold up north. Yule was definitely not celebrated in honor of the goddess Sunna. I can’t find any scholarship published later than the early 1930s about this. So… I have absolutely no idea where the Yule log comes from, or if it has anything to do with pagan Yule. My guess is that it doesn’t. On the other hand, many Scandinavian Christmas traditions very likely have their roots in pagan Yule customs, for example, the “Yule goat” woven from straw and used to decorate Scandinavian households around Christmastime. It’s traditionally made from the last sheaf of grain from the harvest, implying that it’s a remnant of a form of offering to the harvest gods or nature spirits. (It’s goat shape may be a reference to Thor, but there’s nothing to prove this.) Modern Yule goats are usually Christmas tree ornaments or giant statues in public places. It’s also common in Germanic countries and the Balkans for there to be masquing parades during the Christmas season, in which young men dress up like animals or beasts. In Austria, these masquers are called Perchten, connecting them directly to Frau Perchta. I can’t say for certain whether these are a remnant of a pagan tradition, but it’s very likely, becuase masquing as animals is a common shamanic practice that appears in ancient pagan traditions all over Europe and beyond. In a pagan context, wearing an animal mask is a way of symbolically “shapeshifting” into an animal, and therefore becoming apart of the natural world. To temporarily lose your humanity is to enter a trance state, stand in between worlds, commune with nature spirits and deities, and also reveal aspects of your own soul. Christmas trees? Christmas trees are another thing that everyone just sort of assumes is pagan. And, once again, they’re not. I just sort of assumed that pagans at least used evergreen boughs as decorations for their winter festivals, but I found no evidence for evergreen decorations at Saturnalia or Yule. I am frustrated and angry that I cannot find primary sources for even simple evergreen boughs being used as decorations by pagans. The claim is made all over the place, even in scholarship (most of it older, like with the Yule log) but there is never an ultimate primary source. So, that’s why you don’t assume things, no matter how much it seems to “make sense.” Christmas trees could theoretically be descended from pre-Christian tree worship, but we have no way of knowing, and it’s unlikely. The modern tradition of decorating Christmas trees simply isn’t old enough to have pagan origins. A more likely origin for Christmas trees is “trees of paradise” in medieval mystery plays that are meant to represent the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, with red apples that later became symbolically represented with red ornaments. It was mainly a Lutheran tradition before Queen Victoria adopted them in the nineteenth century, which helped them gain traction in the Anglosphere. There is only one thing that I found that suggests a practice similar to decorating Christmas trees existed among any pagans, in any context. The practice of hanging ornaments on Christmas trees does not directly have pagan origins, but there is a similar practice existing in ancient paganism. There is a Dionysian cult practice that is very similar to hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree, as attested in Virgil’s Georgics: "Grim masks of hollowed bark assume, invoke Thee with glad hymns, O Bacchus, and to thee Hang puppet-faces on tall pines to swing." This describes masked worshippers hanging little carved ornaments shaped like masks on the branches of pine trees. They were called oscilla. It’s unknown exactly what these oscilla were meant to be. They could have been effigies of bodies of the hanged (connected with Dionysus through the myth of Erigone) as stand-ins for human sacrifices, or meant to represent the souls of the restless dead. They might have been amulets meant to ward off evil spirits, or votive offerings. To be clear, this practice does not have anything directly to do with the modern practice of decorating Christmas trees, and from what I can tell, it isn’t connected to a winter holiday at all. To call this line from Virgil the “origin of Christmas ornaments” would be incorrect. But, it is an example of pagans hanging decorations on pine trees! I’m not surprised that oscillum are associated with Dionysus specifically. The word “oscillum” refers to oscillation, the literal swinging and shaking of the objects in the wind. Oscillation has a lot to do with Dionysus, because his worshippers would also swing, shake, and spin to induce an ecstatic trance and thereby invoke Dionysus. There seems to be a more general Dionysian practice of hanging things from boughs or vines. I saw a Roman mural at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that depicted a cymbal, a mask, and a basket of ivy (with a snake) hanging from a grapevine. This really isn’t relevant to Christmas trees at all. I mention it because it is a good example of something that I, as a neopagan, can use in my own practice. If I want to, I can interpret Christmas ornaments as being oscilla, and hang them as an offering to Dionysus. That doesn’t mean that the custom of hanging Christmas ornaments “comes from” paganism, but it does give me an ancient source to point to if I choose to adapt the modern practice into a pagan context. That is why I am writing this answer — to determine what pagans actually did so that we can adapt our beloved Christmas traditions into a neopagan context, without making untrue historical claims. The only major thing I have not covered yet is Santa Claus, but this post is already long enough, so I am going to give him his own post. Conclusion Christmas is most assuredly not a pagan festival of solar worship that got a cheap Christian filter slapped on it. Like most old cultural things, Christmas is a complicated mishmash of many different influences. But, whether through coincidence, human nature, the collective unconscious, or the will of the gods, human beings tend to develop similar associations and practices in different times and religious/cultural contexts. That, and certain pagan practices got absorbed into and preserved through Christmas by way of normal syncretism, not through any malicious effort to “steal” paganism. In fact, this is usually the case when it comes to pagan beliefs and customs that got absorbed into Christianity. Christians did not “steal” “our” holidays (or gods, or rituals, or sacred sites, or [fill in the blank]). It is the precise opposite — former-pagans simply continued to practice their old rituals, but in the context of a different religion. This is how syncretism generally works. That brings me to what I was really trying to do with this article, and that’s to figure out how I, as a neopagan, should interpret winter holidays. I think that it’s important to go to ancient sources to know where practices actually come from and how the ancients interpreted them. Ancient texts give us something to point to — I am absolutely psyched that I can interpret hanging Christmas ornaments as an offering to Dionysus, and I have an ancient source to substantiate that. But even if that source didn’t exist, I could still interpret ornaments as an offering to Dionysus if I wanted to. I can still interpret the Solstice as a celebration of his birthday, even if I don’t have a source, as long as I admit that upfront. As long as you can distinguish between what’s ancient history and what’s your own interpretation, you can paganize Christmas however you like! If you look at all the candles and string lights and immediately think of the return of the sun after the solstice, that’s valid! Any occultist will tell you that correspondences are born out of intuitive associations. If you use candles as a form of solar worship, that makes candles a form of solar worship. If you interpret Santa Claus as the Holly King, that’s valid. If you believe Odin brings you presents, that’s valid. Christmas is not pagan in origin, but it could be called pagan in spirit — it includes many practices that make sense within the context of paganism. Therefore, I suggest that pagans take whatever traditions they want from Christmas and practice them in a way that makes sense to them. Sources: Bede, De Temporibus. Translated by Faith Wallis. Liverpool University Press, 1999. Graf, Fritz. “The Brumalia.” Roman Festivals in the Greek East: From the Early Empire to the Middle Byzantine Era. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015, Grout, James. "Sol Invictus and Christmas" Encycleopaedia Romana, Univeristy of Chicago. Hijmans, Steven. "Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas." Mouseion: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada, vol. 3 no. 3, 2003. Project MUSE. John the Lydian, De Mensibus. Translated by Mischa Hooker for Roger Pearse, 2013. University of Chicago. Macrobius, Saturnalia. Loeb Classical Library. McGowan, Andrew. "The Syrus Code: Deciphering the Origins of Christmas, or Not." Saint Roman Street Gallery, Blogspot. 2011 Motz, Lotte. “The Winter Goddess: Percht, Holda, and Related Figures.” Folklore, vol. 95, no. 2, 1984. JSTOR. Nothaft, Carl Philipp Emanuel. “From Sukkot to Saturnalia: The Attack on Christmas in Sixteenth-Century Chronological Scholarship.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 72, no. 4, 2011. JSTOR. Ocean Keltoi, "The Heathen Celebration of Yule, Ancient and Modern (and was it stolen?)." YouTube, 2021 Sturlsson, Snorri. "Hakon the Good's Saga," Heimskringla. Translated by Samuel Laing. sacred-texts.com Pearse, Roger. "Some notes on “De solstitiis et aequinoctiis” (CPL 2277)" roger-pearse.com, 2019. Taylor, Rabun. “Roman Oscilla: An Assessment.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 48, 2005. Virgil, Georgics. Project Gutenberg, 2008.
Comparing Christianity and Paganism
One of the biggest differences between Christianity/Islam and paganism is that the former two religions are orthodoxic while pagan religions are orthopraxic. In Christianity and Islam, what you personally believe about God matters a great deal. There’s only one God, so everyone else also has to worship that one God. There can’t be any other gods, because if there are, that means that your cosmology and your entire religion is wrong. Personal belief matters so much that a slight difference in theology or doctrine can make or break the religion. Christianity has splintered into ever-smaller sects over individual lines of the Bible, because the disagreement makes each sect incompatible, no matter how much they might have in common. It’s why Christians have historically persecuted entire demographics for heresy, the crime of having the “wrong” interpretation. (I’m less familiar with Islam, so I don’t want to give specific examples, but it seems to have many of the same problems.) For Christians, proselytization does two things. Firstly, many Christians genuinely believe that they are telling you critical information that will save you from a terrible fate that is definitely coming. Some of them believe in Hell as an “objective” reality, and believe that in telling you how to avoid it, they are doing the equivalent of telling you not to walk off a cliff into a pit of spikes. Why would you do that, when you can see the spikes at the bottom and the mutilated bodies impaled on the spikes? Why would you step off the cliff anyway, when you could just walk in a different direction? Many Christians also sincerely want to share the “good news” with you, because their connection with Jesus makes them genuinely happy. They’re trying to share that joy with you by telling you about it, and it doesn’t occur to them that you have almost certainly heard of Jesus before. In their mind, if you’d really heard of Jesus, if you really understood, then you would have said yes. And that’s the second reason: converting other people helps validate one’s own beliefs. You can’t let anyone else be right. If anyone else is right, about anything, then you must be wrong. It’s like a Jenga tower — remove the wrong piece, and the entire religion falls apart. Therefore, for some Christians, “live and let live” is not an option. Non-believers must be convinced of the “truth,” or else dismissed as evil/ignorant/deceived, because if you fail to convince them, then maybe you don’t have the truth. Hence, the self-righteousness. (That’s all without going into more actively malicious reasons for proselytizing, like using it as a means of oppression and control.) Paganism doesn’t have these problems. Pagans don’t care what you personally believe about the gods. That means that there are no internal schisms over differing interpretations of myths — myths are inconsistent by nature, being the product of oral tradition, so the people in the next town over will probably tell a very different version of the same myths. That carries no earth-shattering implications. If they tell a different version of a myth, who cares? They have their version, you have yours. Most pagan religions do not have scripture, so the words used to tell the myths don’t carry that much weight. There’s no point in splitting hairs over them. So, I have no reason to try to convince you that my version is right. Pagans also have no incentive to proselytize. Most pagan religions don’t place very much emphasis on the afterlife (outside of mystery cults), so, there’s no promise of Heaven or threat of Hell. There’s nothing to warn against, no “good news” to share. The existence of other faiths also isn’t threatening to paganism. If you have many gods, then there’s always room for more gods! Someone else’s gods existing doesn’t invalidate the existence of yours. This is why pagans mostly didn’t go to war with each other over religion (though, don’t get me wrong, they went to war for plenty of other reasons and still used religion to justify it). Pagan religions could peacefully exist alongside each other, through this lovely thing called syncretism. Syncretism happens when religions combine through being in proximity to each other. If you live in a multicultural community in which some people worship Greek gods and some people worship Egyptian gods, you can just… worship both. It’s that easy. It’s also pretty easy (though not necessarily accurate) to interpret other people’s gods as variations of your own. The Greeks did this a lot, which is why it’s called interpretatio graeca. Hellenistic Egypt saw a lot of syncretic deities that were literally Greek-ified Egyptian gods, like Zeus-Ammon (Zeus + Amun), Osiris-Dionysus (Osiris + Dionysus), Hermanubis (Hermes + Anubis), Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes + Thoth), and Serapis (Zeus/Hades/Dionysus/Osiris/Apis). Rome took this a step further and literally adopted it as a political strategy. They allowed all of their conquered territories to maintain their local religious practices, by slapping the names of Greco-Roman gods on the nearest local equivalent. For example, they claimed that the Germanic tribes worshipped Mercury (Hermes) as their chief god, because Mercury has some things in common with Odin. So, why wasn’t Rome tolerant of Christianity? Because Christianity threatened the Roman state in a way that none of these other religions did. Christians worship only one god, so, you can’t claim that they worship the Roman gods under other names (and unlike Judaism, they were spreading fast, making them more of a threat). The Christian God would not be a problem in and of itself, except for the fact that Christians also refused to worship any of the other gods. That was more of a problem. Pagans don’t care why you worship the gods. What pagans do care about is that you worship the gods, and how you do it. Pagans care that you participate in public religious functions like festivals and sacrifices, that you say your prayers and give your offerings, that you perform rituals properly. In paganism (or at least, in Greco-Roman paganism), “impiety” is defined by refusal to worship the gods correctly. Failure to worship the gods risks bringing their wrath down upon everybody. Now, does that make paganism necessarily better? No, it doesn’t. To be honest, I have just as many problems with orthopraxy. I don’t like people telling me how I should worship the gods, any more than I like people telling me what I should believe. For example, I’m very uncomfortable with sacrifice (of any kind — most modern pagans are uncomfortable with animal sacrifice), which would have been the cornerstone of one’s relationship with the gods in the Ancient World. Some modern Hellenic pagans would say that my refusal to give back to the gods for their blessings is extremely impious, since giving back to them is the entire point of worshipping them. In pagan spaces online, I’ve seen many of the same kinds of petty interpretive arguments, but over praxis: Witchcraft is hubristic, offerings of blood or bodily fluids are miasmic, etc. And, since we have to reconstruct these religions from what little scraps of material have survived, that means a lot of… arguing over specific language in old texts. I mostly don’t make any effort at reconstructing Hellenic paganism, because I took one look at the praxis and rolled my eyes: sprinkle khernips before and after every ritual, always dedicate offerings to Hestia first, scatter barley before the altar, yada yada. These rituals felt pointless and like a chore to me. If I won’t perform rituals correctly because I don’t personally like them, or because it’s too inconvenient, or because I’m lazy, then I must not really love my gods. Had I lived in Ancient Rome, I would probably be Christian for all of the same reasons that I’m pagan now. I’d have a whole list of criticisms of established religion and want to try something new that promises a more personal and direct experience of the divine. Roman religion would be a social obligation, like jury duty. It would be like if the government made you go to church on Sunday and listen to the sermon, regardless of how you personally feel about it. No matter how much I loved the gods, going through the motions of worship for the sake of fulfilling those obligations would be a pain in the ass, instead of a transformative religious experience. It would feel impersonal, chore-like, and meaningless. Christianity, by contrast, is basically a public mystery cult. Not only can you tell other people about the transformative experiences that it’s based around, but you are actively encouraged to do so! How awesome is that! Of course, I live in the twenty-first century, so, to say that it’s the other way around now would be an understatement. Christianity is the dominant religion in the West. It abuses its power in all kinds of ways on both individual and institutional scales, it places an absurd amount of emphasis on things that shouldn’t matter, and everything that was good about it has long-since been overtaken by its myriad of internal problems. It tries to crush everything that isn’t like it, and mandate what everyone should believe and experience regarding the divine. (Syncretism is actually just as common in Christianity, but Christianity will either try to force it into its doctrine or pretend it doesn’t exist.) When you look at religions around the world, Christianity is an outlier — it’s mostly an exception to the rules of how religions work. But most Americans are so inundated with it that they end up using it as a baseline for understanding religion, and assume that all religions work like Christianity. That’s like assuming that all languages work like English (which, granted, a lot of Americans also do). Christianity lost its status as an underdog religion a long time ago. Paganism is now in the underdog position. Many pagan religions are all but dead, and have to be reconstructed from scratch. The public community worship that would have been the cornerstone of our religions in the ancient world is not an option for most modern worshippers, so we’re limited in our ability to properly practice our religions at all. (Today’s the first day of the Dionysia-ta-astika, and I’m going to have to come up with something I can do alone in my home to celebrate what should be an enormous public parade and theatrical competition.) With so little power, there’s not a lot that pagans could do to pass laws, anyway. All of the problems that paganism would have if it were in power are underemphasized because pagan religions have very little institutional authority. That all makes paganism… sympathetic, in a way. It’s an enticing alternative to everything Christianity has pushed on us for two millennia. It’s a return to our roots, a completely different way of relating to God, an antidote to all of those issues with orthodoxy. And, because there’s no authority that demands I worship the gods in a particular way, I can worship them any way I want! The worst I’ll suffer is a few mean comments on the internet! I realized that, if all those rituals still feel chore-like even when they concern gods that I genuinely care about and want to worship, then what bothers me is the “religion” part of religion — the prayers, the hymns, the offerings, etc. If all of that doesn’t work for me, modern paganism gives me the freedom to find some method of worship that does work for me. Is it perfect? Hell no. Paganism still has plenty of internal problems. It’s just as vulnerable to misinformation, conspiracy theories, grifters, and cult leaders (that’s “cult” in the modern sense, as in the BITE model). A lot of modern paganism is based in nineteenth-century ideas about ancient or indigenous cultures that are extremely problematic for reasons I won’t go into here, and those that aren’t are dealing with very limited sources. The intersect between paganism, occultism, and the New Age movement is sticky and results in superficial or distorted approaches towards all three. There’s still a lot of community infighting over minor things. The biggest and most insidious problem is racism. Norse and Hellenic paganism are especially likely to be co-opted by white supremacists, and a lot of European nations’ local pagan movements are actually ethnonationalist fronts that corrupt paganism’s “return-to-your-roots”-ness into “blood and soil.” We call these people “folkists,” after the Volkisch movement, and they’re awful. Frequently, they use language that’s intended to promote inclusion and respect for others’ cultures, like, “if you call yourself a Hellenic pagan without being Greek, you’re guilty of cultural appropriation.” When these are some of the loudest voices, paganism can be downright dangerous. So yes, there’s plenty that’s wrong with paganism. But on the other hand, humans are human, so these problems would probably exist within any religious movement. I still find paganism preferable to Christianity. I like having multiple gods! I especially like worshipping Greek gods, because they have been an important and wonderful part of my life since I was a child. Honestly, the one-god policy is the only issue I have with Christianity on principle, and I’m perfectly willing to get along with Christians provided that they are also willing to get along with me. I won’t go around telling people that paganism is inherently better than Christianity. But, I hope that paganism gains a little more social ground in my lifetime. I also hope that everyone finds the path to the Divine that works best for them, on both a doctrinal and a practical level.
