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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
Big Oil conspiracy.
My grandmother called anyone who went to Mass after 8 am a “heathen”.
Our parish also had a 12 noon upstairs and a 12:30 downstairs. Anyone who went to those was a “pagan”.
So that’s how you acquire authentic lore. Interview Catholics who go to Mass between 8 am and noon for the heathens, and 12 onwards for the pagans.
tfw the trilogy you’ve waited a year to finish turns out to be a tetrology.
Angry baby doesn’t get enough play around these parts.
Yes. The “Sons of Odin” types are definitely embracing their deficient reconstruction of Germanic pagan religion to a large degree as a reaction to the absence of these very traits- and their being made into objects of derision – in the broader materialist culture.
A few years ago, I asked one of those sons of Odin types just how many prisoners-of-war he had sacrificed to old one-eye. He vociferously objected that their was no human sacrifice in pagan Germanic religion. I laughed at him.
That’s not how drive-throughs work.
Back to the OP, reconstructing the past always does run into the we-don’t-know-what-we-don’t-know problem, even when we’re dealing with our own country’s relatively short history. When we’re dealing with a completely alien culture, far removed in time and distance, and you’re starting with the certain knowledge that you’ve got only a shard of the establish-able truth, how far should intelligent deduction extend into intelligent speculation? It’s tough, and the standards differ (or they’re supposed to differ) if you are writing fiction.
How brief a snippet of Mozart would register as great music if you’ve never heard music in your life? To paraphrase a question that’s come up here, if there was a hypothetical world-shattering event that extinguished any living memory of Christianity for millennia, how small a fragment of the Bible–for the sake of recent Ricochet arguments, Old or New Testament–would it take to inspire enough people to even want to reconstruct the whole as best they could? We can imagine that they’d make attempts, within the limits of their science, to make a more thorough search for more fragments, and they might find some. The pieces are unlikely to fit, though. They’d still be faced with the problem Arahant poses: what do we really know about this long-dead people, this race, this culture?
As well you should have.
Was he ready to sacrifice you?
You can see many of the Bible tales with a different spin in the Koran. That is the thing about ‘dead’ religions, they don’t completely die. Many of the elements are incorporated in the victor religions. Christmas trees are from German religious practices. The trinity of Christianity is Roman. The virgin Mary had been around for millennia in Mediterranean folk religions. In order for a victor religion to be successful, it has to incorporate elements of the vanquished religion to be successful. Separating out the different strands and where they came from is interesting work.
Islam was one of the alternatives Prince Vladimir considered. Read the account of James Billington’s wonderful Icon and the Axe.
Shudder. Interesting thought experiment. Trying to think it through even just a little reminds us just how impossibly complex social evolution and history is. Trying to figure out where we’re or any new paganism or any ism might be headed is even more impossible and without the roots that shaped that past, the thing Islam would have quashed and destroyed, is way beyond our imaginations.
Yeah, “giving wings” wasn’t sacrifice.
No one seems to get that said question was in jest. I asked it specifically because the Rus had rejected Islam for its prohibition on alcohol and pork, two things the Rus enjoyed quite a bit.
In Professor Harl’s “Barbarian Kingdoms of the Steppes” course, he describes how to determine whether a tribe went Muslim or Christian: the vodka/ hashish line. If the culture had vodka, it went Christian; if hashish, Muslim.
There were also some who went Buddhist and some who went Jewish as well. It wasn’t only Christian or Muslim.
Granted. Of course, the one tribe that went Jewish appears to have been only a few elites that did so, as after their defeat their Judaism disappeared. And while Buddhism was the first non native religion to conquer the steppes, it wasn’t able to compete with Islam once it appeared. Of course, Buddhism nearly died out in its home country for much the same reason: earthly and heavenly delights sell better than asceticism with a goal of nonexistence.
One of my high school classmates professed to be a druid. Apparently, the nearest druid grove to central PA was in Pittsburgh next to a Buddhist temple, so he apparently routinely loaded up his hearse (he drove a hearse) and headed out west for ceremonies.
I think he and I we were on similar wavelengths, even though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time. He was squarely in the geek clique whereas I was desperately trying to pass myself off as a normal. But I think if circumstances were different I would have been very much like him.
He seemed to have a chaotic home life, I don’t think it was abusive, but it was definitely chaotic. His guardians weren’t his biological parents, and he boasted that he didn’t even have a social security number. He was into D&D in the 90’s when it was still unpopular to like D&D. We also lived in a rural, religious area so there was still the residual air of suspicion surrounding the hobby left over from the 80’s satanic panic. I think that rejection and suspicion from the culture at large drove him to druidism spiritually.
Myself, I had a stable home life: two biological parents, not too strict, not too lax, about as close to perfect conditions to be brought up as you can possibly get. Early on in high school I read a biography of JRR Tolkien wherein I discovered that Tolkien was a Roman Catholic just like me, and a devout one at that. That told me that despite the suspicion of the culture surrounding me, fantasy and faith could be reconciled. I’m not entirely certain that I would be Catholic today if it wasn’t for that biography.
All that to say, that I think I can somewhat understand where the neopagan types are coming from. If Christianity is too embedded in the culture, and the culture rejects the “odds,” the odds will look elsewhere to fulfill their spiritual needs.
Very interesting poser. I haven’t read through all the comments yet, but I plan to.
My immediate reaction is that this has happened innumerable times in history. It’s partly historic chance that Christianity has been so dominant in western civilization. The cult of Mithras, for example, was nearly equal in popularity when Christianity was new. The worship of Ba’al was very widespread until the Romans did their best over hundreds of years to stamp it out. We can note the worship of Cybele, and her influence on Christian cults of Mary the Virgin.
I’ve always found it curious that so many Norse/Germanic peoples gave up their religion for Christianity. I can only conclude that the force of monotheism over henotheism is pretty powerful. After all, if one religion insists that they are right and all others are wrong, and the other religion says that our gods are real and your gods are probably real too, the more confining religious beliefs will win out.
I think this is very interesting and I will enjoy reading all the comments and cogitating on them.
In Professor Harl’s courses on the Vikings and the Rise of Christianity, he notes that Christianity became associated with victory. Whether it was the work of God or just luck, leaders who abandoned paganism for Christianity tended to win, whether at the Milvian bridge or in intra-scandinavian fights. Christianity also helped reinforce the power of kings, as bishops conferred legitimacy and created a network of internal organization less controlled by local chieftains. And in the Viking age, Christianity was associated with civilization and wealth, most notably when the Rus were amazed by Constantinople, but also when Vikings sieged Paris and ransacked the Italian coast.
It’s impossible to overemphasize how Christian kings and victories in battle emphasized those victories as proof of God’s approval of their reigns drawing legitimacy and squelching rebellion from their lords.
This is much like my thinking. Add to this lore from D&D, Fantasy novels (or Yeats for that matter) and people can start building a faux framework for themselves, which they will often add too with what historical bits they can find.
This is not meant as a warning against gaming, indeed I think this guy has the better measure. (Yeats, should of course be avoided at all costs.)
Nevertheless, nostalgia grows best unimpeded by reality checks.
I recommend Svenskarnas Dag in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Murder is of course illegal, but what goes in Minnehaha Park stays in Minnehaha Park.
Build-a-God™
And live Yankees?
You’re a braver man than I.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
That’s what is persuasive on the rulers and powerful, but Christianity also proved remarkably tenacious with people at the other end of the social and political spectrum too.
Nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be.