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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
Right on. All the pageantry with none of the proscriptions.
The meta-nostalgia is getting miasmic in here.
OMG. I’ve been…focus grouped!
I feel used.
You know, I initially misread that as “All the pageantry with none of the prescriptions” and nearly spewed coffee on my monitor as hitting way below the belt / loincloth / codpiece.
No, those start around 1700, not 732.
He also considered Google but they wanted too many tax concessions.
The Coke vs. Pepsi choice is somewhat less correlated.
For a wonderful fictional treatment of the period of the Viking transition to Christianity, read Frans Bengtsson’s The Long Ships.
Don’t be put off by the fact that Michael Chabon likes it. In this case, he’s right.
Very insightful. That might account for the Nation of Islam as well.
The Christian God also didn’t have an expiration date, so He had that going for Him.
Edit: Capitalization.
I wonder if this is also part of Islam’s success.
I had a classics professor, a German, who considered himself a “G.R.P. Graeco-Roman Pagan.” (Imagine a very high pitched, staccato, German accent.) His personal practice seemed to be a mishmash of Christian devotion and literary classicism; he referred to Athena as his “personal lord and savior” and seemed to think he had the same relationship with her as Odysseus. I never worked up the courage to ask him if he was sacrificing goats to her in his back yard.
Mostly he seemed enamored of the Polytheistic religions ability to coexist and grant the existence of each other’s gods while maintaining their special devotions. As with the nordic pagans of the ’70s I’m guessing this sprung from the same German war guilt which has sapped their confidence in so many institutions.
While he was a kook, he made one convincing point in favor of his faith. Has any system of belief, secular or religious, offered a better explanation of romantic love than Cupid’s bow? It’s a question I’ve never been able to shake. While most pagan Gods, even in the most refined forms of polytheism, can be brushed off as being one or two steps removed from primitive totems symbolizing forces of nature, their are a couple–Mars, Mercury–who represent forces that effect the human soul. A man seized with bloodlust or extreme romantic devotion does seem more at place in a world of quarreling mischievous deities than “nature and nature’s God.”
That’s called henotheism.
The Jude0-Christian religions are the complete opposite, and it’s this, um, intolerance (for lack of a better term) that has been the key to their success, as it has been for Islam. Judaism has succeeded for the same reason but they “tend” to require a racial component. The irony of Judaism is that they were essentially established as a master race. I’m sure that conclusion is bound to be contentious, but it really is how it appears.
I think my detour into paganism started with Charles Fort, and Uri Geller, in the library on an Air Force base overseas.
I was a voracious reader in middle school, and had torn through the science fiction section. I wasn’t yet into fantasy.
I was disillusioned by organized religion, thinking my mother was the emblem of it; and knowing she was just in it for the social aspect. I thought that organized religion was simply a yoke for the gullible and that I was smarter than that.
I fantasized that magic was real and it took a long time to recover.
So where are you now?
Nominally catholic, like my father. My wife is lapsed catholic and I’m trying to set a good example so that maybe we will go back to church. I pray the rosary and have done for about 8 months now.
Wrong post.
It seems like I’ve seen similar wording somewhere recently.
Not terribly similar, although there are some similarities given it’s the same topic. Are you attempting to imply something, sir?
You stole other people’s facts!
Too tolerant of differences? My wife is a devout Pepsi drinker, wile I strongly prefer Coke (because it tastes better). I notice that in times of desperation, each will resort to the other. When I was confined to Korea for a year, the only available cola was Pepsi. I had to compensate by squeezing a lemon or lime wedge into the can to counteract the unbearable over-the-top sweetness. See some other comment on some thread for context. Think ‘curmudgeon.’
I suppose that makes us ‘nominal cola cultists.’
Now how can I relate that to Ecclesiastes?
But Genesis Chapters 1 to 3 pack a reconstructive punch. Milton and Bunyan made hay with it. A favorite (gorgeously spare) summation from Heinrich von Kleist: But paradise is locked and bolted, and the cherubim stands behind us. There’s nothing to do but make a journey round the world to see if someone perhaps left a back window up.
Pepsi is the Devil’s drink. Best say goodbye to your wife now, before she leaves you endure eternal damnation.
There are a long list of things I would rather drink less than Pepsi. It’s at worst maybe an imp’s drink. One of the lower levels of demon for sure.
But Dr. Pepper is better than all of them.
Nope. Your wife is doomed.
Well it’s not my wife, but…
It won’t be easy; prior to the second century BC, most Jews drank Royal Crown cola.
I call attention to member Parker’s actual, honest to God (if you’ll all forgive the expression) adherence to the puzzle of the OP. This is a level of thoughtfulness well worth a reader’s time. And needless to say, so are the comments of the rest of you!–but SP really does a nice jazz riff on the OP theme.
Something about the way Arahant posed this that made me think of a @hankrhody sort of metaphor for what you’re talking about: holography. There was photography 120 years before there was holography, and even today holograms are limited to 1890s fairground-level motion or color. After a half-century of hyped progress, we’re still ages from being able to display a lifelike “Help us, Obi Wan Kenobe. You’re our only hope”. About 100% of the pop culture stuff you’ve seen called “holographic” isn’t. And yet, and yet…
What connects it to Arahant’s post is the peculiar fact that if you tear it in half, both halves possess the complete image, like looking at the same object through a smaller window. You have to crane your head more, but the object is the same size. If you keep tearing it in half, the effect keeps happening, but at dropping standards of granularity.
Most literature is, to use this metaphor, not “holographic”. There’s nothing wrong with liking “Fahrenheit 451”, but if it hadn’t been written, roughly the same ideas would have been expressed in related ways elsewhere, as indeed they have. But certain towering works of faith seem in some ways to be holographic, able to reconstruct themselves despite fragmentation.
That is a brilliant metaphor; illumination where there should by rights be darkness.
I think I’ll go back to making cheap cola jokes now.