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Veneration 20181203: Reviving a Dead Religion
Imagine, if you will, that a battle had gone differently on October 10, 732 in France. The Battle of Tours not only stopped the Islamic conquest of Europe from Africa and up the Iberian Peninsula, but started the reversal which would culminate in 1492 with the Iberian Peninsula united into two Christian kingdoms with the Muslims (and the Jews) eventually cast out or forced to convert. What would have happened had the Muslims won? The battle took place at least half the way into the heart of France. Had the Muslims been successful there, things would have been dark for European Christendom. It’s possible that Byzantium could have faced a two-front war within a few hundred years. Byzantium might have fallen earlier, leaving only Islam in Europe with Paganism on the Northern fringes in areas that were not yet Christianized. Over time, those areas, too, might be brought into Islam.
Now, imagine further that a thousand years after the thorough conquest, a thousand years after the last Christians and Jews had converted to Islam, that someone wanted to revive the old religion. Perhaps Islam was starting to fall under its own weight. The only problem is that nobody had wanted to be seen as trying to preserve the old religion against Islam, so very little was left. All that scholars had found about Christianity was one fairly well-preserved version of the Book of Psalms, and then some attestations throughout time that didn’t really get into exactly how the whole religion worked and was practiced. Certainly, it lacked the cosmogony and theology components. Further, there had been three scholars writing about “the old ways” a couple of hundred years after the fall of Christianity, but the true scholars of the old languages, history, and archaeology were pretty sure that their writings were very tainted with their Islamic religion, plus they were probably misunderstanding things from spotty oral history that had passed down for two hundred years by the time the stories reached them.
Imagine, then, that you wanted to revive this old religion to take the place of a moribund Islam that nobody any longer believed or cared about, at least in Europe. Would you look at the lack of data and give it up as a lost cause? Or would you fake it until you make it?
Germanic Neopaganism is in exactly that situation. During the Romantic Period of the Nineteenth Century and into the early Twentieth Century, some German Romanticists tried reviving the old religion of the Volk. This was tied up with German Nationalism. Germany only “kind of” became a country in 1871. Before that, it had been a loose confederation of states with related languages and traditions for about a thousand years. Even then, it was still not what we would think of as one nation until after WWI. Beginning especially after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, many Germans were feeling the lack caused by their disunity. They wanted one ring to rule them all…or something like that. And that is the period, while the Brothers Grimm were starting to study old German folk tales and Beethoven was writing big works and Richard Wagner was glorifying the old stories with the Ring Cycle, that there was first interest in reviving the old Germanic Paganism. These revival movements went through into the Twentieth Century and got themselves entangled with German National Socialism, which sort of put a damper on them for a quarter of a century. But by 1970, some people were back at it, trying to revive the old Germanic Paganism.
There was only one problem. They really never had too much information to revive it with. You know how I asked you to try imagining restarting Christianity with only the Book of Psalms, a few historical attestations, and the writings of some Muslims trying to record the traditions two hundred years after they had died out? Well, the old Germanic Pagans weren’t really big on writing things down, and about all that is left is the equivalent. There is the Poetic Edda, a collection of old poems that mention aspects of the old religion as it existed in Iceland, at least. There are a few attestations of how things were supposedly done that have come down through other cultures, such as the Romans and at least one Muslim traveler. This includes accounts of human sacrifice, by the way. Then there are the works written by Christians, two of three of whom were probably monks, and all of whom were writing hundreds of years after their area and country had converted to Christianity.
The rest of what these German Neopagan movements have been doing is filling in the prodigious gaps as best they can. They are classified as New Religious Movements, not as revivals of old religions. Why? Because the gaps were that big. Again, imagine trying to restart Christianity without the Gospels or most of the Old Testament, only the poetry of the Psalms.
I am left wondering what sort of desperation drives people to try to reconstruct religious practices based on so little information. Certainly, the Germanic Neopagans are not the only example out there these days.
What do you think, Ricochet? Are such things worth the effort? Are they all stuff and nonsense? Should the Mexican peoples try to reconstruct the old Aztec religion? What is your reaction?
Published in Group Writing
Cod help me. I’m finishing up volume three of my current one and have five parallel volumes in the can already, and then it moves forward again. No way I’m starting another series yet.
Right-click the word, click on “Add to Dictionary.”
Brother, I don’t know, but it would be for curmudgeons for certain.
“It is the time for neopaganism.”
Actually, I’m willing to bet it’s a combination of resurgent German nationalism in the face of Frau Merkel’s open borders, and trying to get chicks.
@drewinwisconsin would be eligible. On some days I might be.
Maybe we could convince them to start with the Hondurans.
Russians give up vodka? Never.
I have three neopagan coworkers (of the Odin worshiping variety): a gay married man in his 50s, and a married couple in their early 30s. I don’t know as much about the reasons of the latter, but as for the former, as far as I can tell, he’s just a guy who flirts from one religion to the next. Interestingly enough, all three complain about the hippie treehuggers who infest neopaganism. And truly, if there was anything that deserves the name “cultural appropriation,” it is the act of creating a religion that embodies all your philosophical presumptions and then saying that it’s really an ancient cult.
No. If you aren’t sacrificing nine men at Upsala every nine years, if your Odin doesn’t release watery farts in the faces of giants, if your Loki isn’t the mother of an eight-legged horse so that the gods could get a wall around Asgard without paying for it, whatever you’re claiming to worship isn’t the traditional Germanic gods.
Have you been secretly reading the PIT?
Romance. Really, this stuff all comes bubbling out of the Romantic movement, a sort of Western-world-wide reaction against 30+ years of revolution and science-applied-to-society madness.
The Enlightenment had already leveled several mighty blows against Christianity, and then (through the French Revolution, Wars of Religion, English Civil War) effectively dislodged Christianity from the hearts and minds of many as a default, much less a valid belief system. Well, if the Jesus stuff is uncool and passé, and the Science nuts have just shown that the end result of their line of thinking is either megalomaniacal Frenchmen or, well, other megalomaniacal Frenchmen (Napoleon or Robespierre, take yer pick), and if you are looking about for the oldest lodestone you can find on which to hinge your identity (race), then dredging up what your most distant forebears believed, at least romantically (because, nod and a wink here) because of course you don’t really believe any of it (though you suspect one of your friends is perhaps talking it way too seriously, and you wonder about what happened to his pet goat, and why there’s a stone altar where his grille used to be).
A number of years ago I read a rather lengthy tome called Goddess Unmasked, about the rise of other iterations of neopaganism, particularly goddess worship in Wicca, which is an equally reconstructed mess of dredged up pseudo-Celtic lore, largely invented by a notable occultist in the late 1800s. This is all Romantic-era thinking (emoting, really), where you have an unhealthy mix of true believers (meddling in who knows what exactly) and a ton of dabblers in their larger orbit who mainly do it for a sense of recreated nostalgia – they discount the supernatural, but love the symbolism of it all.
What’s new in the mix is that today’s hyper-individualism and self-created personal realities feeds on the neo-pagan impulses, much as do other groups that (ironically) claim to foster individualism – in that sense you can lump the neo-pagans in with the furries (though both would vociferously deny it, and I give the NPs at least a 20 pt spread if it came to a battle), or even with the cosplayers at the extremes.
See my prior comment where I mentioned the Furries.
Curmudgeon was one of my original aliases, long, long ago.
I thought I was joking, but nobody else ever laughed.
Can’t I sacrifice them somewhere closer?
That is always an excuse.
They were probably all mad you took it from them.
Minnesota would work. There are enough Swedes and Norsemen there already for at least a quorum.
There is no doubt that I would be eligible. I’m still laughing at the very thought of a religion extended from Ecclesiastes alone. “It’s all vanity and vexations of the spirit!”
That’s not an improvement.
Right now, I think it wouldn’t take much prompting. Some of them are very cheesed off at the caravan.
Would suicide be thought sinful?
Well Arahant, there’s your answer.
Preach it, sister!
Picky picky.
If you aren’t making it a real pilgrimage, longer in distance than from your place down to the nearest beer drive-through, then it doesn’t count, you haven’t put in the effort, and Odin will consider you a cheapskate.
Hmm. Oddly enough, we don’t have beer drive-through in WI. I think it’s because it’s hard to pass 3o-packs and kegs through drive-through windows.
Now, if we judge from the closest place I can buy beer period…two blocks.
I’ll admit in Minnesota’s favor they have an Upsala. We used to have one but not anymore.
You know him, too, eh?
And, although not as extreme (mostly), the various types of historical re-enactors.
Well, I knew him once as Chad. Lately he insists on Lars Thunderrock.
I have enough Norsemen in my ancestry on both sides to be a quorum all by my lonesome.
I dunno. I’d say getting rid of the pet goat would be an improvement. And really, what’s grilling but a burnt offering you can eat?
I dunno – you’ve been to Ren Faires, rights? In the realm of historical re-enactors, there’s quite the variation in skills and budget, and, let’s be honest here, even these guys still aren’t allowed to use sharpened weapons or real bullets, so their experience is… questionable.
You don’t think the priests doing the burnt offering didn’t have dinner later on?