[[Ahab]] | [[Canaan, (The Promised Land)]] | [[Easter]] | [[Inanna, Goddess of Power & Seduction]] | [[Jezebel]] | [[Moloch]] | [[Ostara]] | [[Remphan]] ## The Religion That Never Existed Here's the uncomfortable truth: "paganism" is basically a Christian insult that got turned into a category. The word comes from _paganus_ - Roman for "hick" or "country bumpkin." Early Christians used it to mock people who hadn't converted yet, implying they were backwards rural idiots clinging to dead traditions. Nobody in ancient Rome woke up and said "I'm a proud pagan." They worshipped specific gods in specific ways and would have found the idea of grouping their practices with Germanic tribesmen or Egyptian priests absurd. Calling it all "paganism" is like calling everything that isn't Christianity "not-Christianity" - technically true but meaningless. ## What People Actually Believed **The Greco-Roman World**: Religion was transactional. You sacrificed to gods to get stuff - good harvests, military victories, successful business deals. The gods were petty, horny, violent, and deeply involved in human affairs. State religion was mandatory civic duty. Not participating meant you were politically suspect. When Christians refused to sacrifice to the emperor's genius (divine spirit), Romans didn't see religious freedom - they saw treason. The persecution of early Christians wasn't about theology; it was about refusing to pledge allegiance. **Norse Religion**: The Vikings worshipped gods who were going to lose. The entire cosmology centered on Ragnarök - the prophesied end of the world where the gods die fighting monsters. They knew they were doomed and decided the only honorable response was to die fighting anyway. This wasn't a religion of hope; it was a religion of defiant fatalism. Valhalla wasn't heaven - it was a warrior hall where you fought all day, died, got resurrected, and did it again tomorrow to train for the final battle you'd definitely lose. Half of warriors who died in battle went to Valhalla with Odin; the other half went to Fólkvangr with Freya. Women, children, and anyone who died of disease or old age went to Hel, which was cold and boring but not torture. **Celtic Druidism**: We barely know what Celts actually believed because they didn't write it down and the only people who did were Romans trying to justify conquering them. Julius Caesar claimed druids performed human sacrifice by burning people alive in wicker giants. Maybe true, maybe propaganda. Probably both. The Romans exterminated druidism specifically because druids were the educated class who could organize resistance. When Rome invaded Anglesey (60 CE) - the druid stronghold in Britain - they slaughtered every druid they found and burned their sacred groves. This wasn't religious intolerance; it was destroying the enemy's command structure. **Slavic Traditions**: Eastern European paganism survived way longer because there was no centralized religious hierarchy to destroy. When Vladimir I of Kiev converted to Orthodox Christianity in 988 CE, he did it because marrying a Byzantine princess required it and Byzantine alliance meant trade access. He literally had the idol of Perun dragged through the streets and thrown in the river while his subjects were forcibly baptized in the Dnieper. But people just... kept doing pagan stuff anyway. Christian saints got merged with old gods. Festivals got rebranded. The Orthodox Church eventually gave up trying to eliminate it completely. ## Why Christianity Won (It Wasn't Theology) Paganism died because it couldn't compete with organized religion as a tool of state control: **Organizational Structure**: Pagan traditions were local and decentralized. Every town had different gods, different rituals, different priests. Christianity had bishops, councils, central authority, written doctrine, and standardized practices. For rulers trying to control large territories, Christianity was administratively superior. **Literacy and Education**: The Church monopolized education and writing. Once literacy became associated with Christianity, pagan oral traditions couldn't compete. There's no "pagan bible" because pagans didn't work that way - but that meant their traditions died when the last person who remembered them died. **Economic Incentives**: Becoming Christian meant access to trade networks, diplomatic recognition, and political legitimacy. Pagan kingdoms were isolated. Vladimir of Kiev chose Orthodox Christianity over Islam partly because Islam forbids alcohol and he reportedly said Russians "cannot live without drink." But mostly because Byzantine trade routes were worth more than religious consistency. **Military Conquest**: Charlemagne's Saxony campaign (772-804 CE) gave pagans a choice: baptism or death. After killing 4,500 Saxon nobles at Verden in 782 CE for refusing conversion, most chose baptism. The Northern Crusades (12th-13th centuries) conquered the last pagan territories in the Baltic through straightforward military force. ## The Modern Revival and Why It's Complicated "Neo-paganism" exploded in the 20th century, but it's essentially people reverse-engineering dead religions from fragments: **Wicca**: Invented in the 1950s by Gerald Gardner, who claimed it was an ancient witch cult that survived underground. It wasn't. He made it up from ceremonial magic, Freemasonry, and Aleister Crowley's occultism. Doesn't make it invalid as a religion, but the "ancient tradition" narrative is fantasy. **Ásatrú**: Norse paganism revival, particularly popular among Scandinavians and white Americans. Problem: we have maybe 10% of what Norse pagans actually believed, so modern practitioners are filling in massive gaps. Bigger problem: it's been heavily adopted by white supremacists who use "ancestral European religion" as cover for racial ideology. This is the awkward reality of pagan revival - when you emphasize "indigenous European spirituality" and "ancestral traditions," you attract people who think this means "white people religion." Major Ásatrú organizations have spent decades fighting off Nazi infiltration with mixed success. **Reconstructionism**: Attempts to rebuild ancient practices using archaeology and historical texts. Hellenic polytheists study ancient Greek sources, Celtic reconstructionists dig through medieval Irish manuscripts, Slavic pagans examine folklore. They're honest about how much they're guessing, which is more intellectually rigorous than Wicca's invented mythology. ## Geopolitical Angles That Actually Matter **Russian Neo-Paganism and Nationalism**: Slavic pagan revival in Russia (Rodnovery) is explicitly tied to anti-Western, anti-Christian nationalism. Proponents argue Christianity is a "foreign Middle Eastern religion" that corrupted true Russian identity. Some groups have connections to far-right movements and the Russian government has occasionally supported them as counterweights to Islamic and Catholic influence in border regions. **Baltic Identity Politics**: In Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, pagan revival is tied to post-Soviet national identity reconstruction. Emphasizing pre-Christian traditions is a way of asserting independence from both Russian Orthodox and Soviet atheist influence. **Hindu Nationalism's "Pagan" Alliance**: Some Hindu nationalists frame Hinduism as the world's largest surviving "pagan" tradition and seek connections with European neo-pagans based on shared Indo-European roots and opposition to Abrahamic religions. This creates weird political alliances between Indian right-wing groups and European far-right movements. **China's Attitude**: The CCP treats folk religion and traditional practices as harmless superstition to be tolerated (unlike Christianity or Islam, which have foreign organizational structures). Chinese "paganism" - ancestor worship, local deities, festival traditions - survives because it's decentralized and doesn't threaten Party authority. ## Why This Matters Now Pagan revival isn't just people playing dress-up with mythology. It's a response to modernity - people seeking meaning outside Abrahamic frameworks, connecting with pre-industrial traditions, or (more cynically) using "ancestral religion" to justify nationalist or racial ideology. The fact that modern paganism is mostly invented doesn't make it less real as a social phenomenon. All religions were invented at some point. The question is what people are using them for now. Paganism, as a modern revival of ancient polytheistic and animistic religious practices, emerged in the 19th century CE, influenced by European nationalism and the British Order of Druids. Contemporary Pagan groups, tracing their roots to the 1960s, emphasize archetypal psychology, nature spirituality, and ecological concerns. Based on the provided search results, there is a consensus among various sources that Babylon played a significant role in the development and spread of paganism. Here are some key points: 1. **Nimrod and the origins of paganism**: Many sources, including “The Worship of the Dead” and “The Apocalypse” by J.A. Seiss, attribute the origins of paganism to Nimrod, who lived in ancient Babylon. According to these sources, Nimrod’s worship and idolatry led to the corruption of humanity and the spread of false religion. 2. **Babylonian influence on paganism**: The search results highlight the Babylonian influence on various pagan practices and customs, such as the use of the cross symbol (associated with Tammuz), the veneration of Ishtar (Easter), and the celebration of midwinter festivals (Christmas). 3. **Paganism as a corruption of true worship**: The sources emphasize that paganism emerged as a corruption of true worship, specifically the worship of the one true God. Early Christians used the term “pagan” to describe those who did not worship the one true God, and who instead followed polytheistic or animistic religions. 4. **Panbabylonism**: The search results also mention Panbabylonism, a school of thought that posits a common cultural system extending over the ancient Near East, heavily influenced by the Babylonians. While this perspective is not universally accepted, it suggests that Babylonian culture and religion had a profound impact on the development of paganism. # Important Pagan Deities and Cultures ## Greek Pantheon: The Foundation of Western Mythology **Zeus/Jupiter**: King of gods, sky and thunder deity, serial rapist who disguised himself as animals and golden showers to seduce/assault mortal women. His mythology reflects Bronze Age kings who took whatever they wanted. Political function: legitimized royal power by claiming descent from him. **Athena/Minerva**: Goddess of wisdom and warfare, born fully armed from Zeus's head. Athens' patron deity. Represented strategic warfare (not berserker rage) and crafts. Her cult was central to Athenian identity - the Parthenon was her treasury and temple. When you controlled Athens, you controlled Athena worship, which meant you controlled civic legitimacy. **Apollo**: God of prophecy, music, healing, and plague. His oracle at Delphi was the most important religious site in ancient Greece. City-states and kings consulted it before major decisions. Controlling Delphi meant influencing Greek politics through "divine" pronouncements. The oracle's cryptic prophecies were designed to be right either way. **Dionysus/Bacchus**: God of wine, madness, and ecstatic religious experience. His cult involved ritual intoxication, sexual license, and women (Maenads) temporarily escaping social control. Rome periodically banned Bacchanalian rites (notably 186 BCE) because drunken orgies where women wielded religious authority terrified the Senate. The suppression was political - keeping women and lower classes controlled. **Demeter/Ceres**: Goddess of agriculture and harvest. Her mystery cult at Eleusis promised initiates better afterlife. These mysteries were so secret that revealing them meant death, and we still don't know exactly what happened. Thousands were initiated over centuries and almost nobody talked. That's impressive operational security. **Hades/Pluto**: God of the underworld and the dead. Not evil - just grim and inevitable. Greeks rarely worshipped him because drawing his attention seemed unwise. His abduction and rape of Persephone (Demeter's daughter) explained seasons: Persephone spends part of the year in the underworld (winter) and part with her mother (summer/growing season). The Greek gods were fundamentally amoral - powerful, petty, and dangerous. You didn't worship them because they were good. You worshipped them so they'd leave you alone or help you destroy your enemies. ## Roman Religion: State Control Through Divine Bureaucracy Romans adopted Greek gods but made religion a civic duty rather than personal belief. The **Pontifex Maximus** (chief priest) was a political office, eventually held by emperors. Religion was law, and law was religion. **Imperial Cult**: Dead emperors were deified, living emperors had their "genius" (divine spirit) worshipped. This made refusing to sacrifice to the emperor not religious dissent but treason. Christians died because they wouldn't perform a simple civic ritual that everyone understood was political theater. **Vesta**: Goddess of hearth and home. Her temple held Rome's sacred fire, maintained by Vestal Virgins - priestesses who took 30-year vows of celibacy. If the fire went out, Rome was doomed. If a Vestal broke her vow, she was buried alive. Their virginity wasn't about morality - it was about maintaining Rome's supernatural protection through ritual purity. **Janus**: Two-faced god of beginnings, transitions, and doorways. January is named for him. Romans invoked him at the start of anything important. His temple doors stood open during war and closed during peace. They were almost always open. **Mithras**: Persian-origin god whose mystery cult became hugely popular with Roman soldiers (1st-4th centuries CE). Underground temples, bull sacrifice rituals, seven grades of initiation. Exclusively male membership. Strong hierarchical structure appealed to military men. Christianity competed directly with Mithraism for converts - they had similar apocalyptic theology, moral codes, and organizational structure. Christianity won partly because it accepted women. ## Norse/Germanic Paganism: Death Cults and Warrior Aristocracy **Odin/Wotan**: All-Father, god of wisdom, war, death, poetry, and magic. Gave up an eye for knowledge, hung himself from Yggdrasil (world tree) for nine days to learn runes. Manipulative and treacherous - he stirred up wars to collect warriors for Ragnarök. Norse kings claimed descent from him to legitimize rule. **Thor/Donar**: Thunder god, protector of humanity, enemy of giants. Actually the most popular god in practice (more than Odin) because he protected crops and defended cosmic order. His hammer Mjölnir was a protective symbol. When Iceland debated converting to Christianity in 1000 CE, the debate nearly sparked civil war between Thor worshippers and Christian converts. They compromised: officially Christian, but you could worship the old gods privately. **Freya**: Goddess of love, sex, fertility, war, and death. She got first choice of half the battle-slain (Odin got the rest). Practiced seiðr - a form of magic associated with women that involved shamanic trance and was considered unmanly. That Odin also practiced it was transgressive and added to his dangerous, boundary-crossing nature. **Loki**: Trickster, shape-shifter, father of monsters (including Fenrir the wolf who kills Odin at Ragnarök and Jörmungandr the world serpent). Neither good nor evil - just chaotic and necessary. His punishment for causing the death of Baldr (beloved god): bound with his son's entrails while poison drips on his face forever. His wife Sigyn catches it in a bowl, but when she empties it, the drops hit him and his convulsions cause earthquakes. **Týr/Tiwaz**: God of law, justice, and heroic sacrifice. Lost his hand to Fenrir's jaws when the gods bound the wolf - it was the price of keeping the oath they'd made. Represented honorable warfare and oaths. Probably more important in earlier periods before Odin became dominant. **The Norns**: Three female entities (not gods exactly) who controlled fate. Past, present, future. Even gods couldn't escape their judgments. This reflects the Norse view that destiny was fixed but how you faced it defined honor. Norse religion was obsessed with doom, honor, and going down fighting. No salvation, no happy ending, just the certainty that everything ends in fire and ice. The appeal was facing inevitable destruction with courage. ## Celtic Religion: Lost in Translation We know frustratingly little because Celts didn't write things down and Romans destroyed most of what existed. **The Dagda**: Irish "good god," all-father figure, associated with abundance, life/death, and fertility. Had a magic cauldron that never emptied and a club that could kill with one end and resurrect with the other. **Brigid**: Irish goddess of poetry, smithing, and healing. So important that when Christianity arrived, they couldn't eliminate her - she became St. Brigid instead. Her feast day (Imbolc, February 1) became St. Brigid's Day. Perfect example of pagan absorption. **Lugh**: Irish god of crafts, skills, and oaths. Master of all arts. The festival Lughnasadh (August harvest festival) is named for him. Survived in Welsh mythology as Lleu Llaw Gyffes. **Cernunnos**: Horned god associated with nature, animals, and the underworld. Known mostly from the Gundestrup Cauldron (1st century BCE). Later became associated with Christian devil imagery - devils got horns partly because of him. **Druids**: Not gods but the priestly/educated class. They were judges, teachers, advisors, and religious authorities. Training took 20 years. They memorized vast amounts of law, poetry, and religious knowledge. Romans targeted them specifically because eliminating druids meant eliminating the intellectual/organizational core of Celtic resistance. When Rome conquered Gaul (58-50 BCE), they systematically integrated Celtic gods into Roman framework - _interpretatio romana_. Celtic deities got matched with Roman equivalents, making them easier to control. Jupiter-Taranis, Mercury-Lugh, etc. ## Slavic Paganism: Survival Through Syncretism **Perun**: Thunder god, ruler of sky, similar to Thor/Zeus. Supreme deity of Eastern Slavs. When Vladimir I converted Kiev to Christianity (988 CE), he had Perun's idol dragged through mud and thrown in the Dnieper River. Perun became associated with the prophet Elijah in folk Christianity - same thunder/sky attributes. **Veles**: God of underworld, cattle, magic, and trickery. Perun's opposite/enemy. Survived as St. Blaise in Christian veneer. Cattle blessing rituals continued under Christian names. **Mokosh**: Goddess of fertility, women's work, spinning, and fate. Only female deity mentioned in Kievan sources. Became identified with St. Paraskeva in Orthodox Christianity. Friday (her sacred day) remained special for women's rituals. **Marzanna/Morana**: Goddess of winter and death. The tradition of making Marzanna effigies, drowning/burning them, and throwing them in rivers to celebrate spring still exists in Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia. Purely pagan ritual that survived because the Church couldn't kill it, so they ignored it. Slavic paganism's survival strategy was going underground. Folk practices continued while people nominally identified as Christian. Christianization was shallow and incomplete - villages practiced both simultaneously for centuries. ## Egyptian Religion: 3,000 Years of Shifting Hierarchies **Ra/Re**: Sun god, creator deity, king of gods. Pharaohs claimed descent from him. The sun's daily journey across the sky was Ra in his boat fighting the chaos serpent Apophis. If Apophis won, reality ended. Every sunrise proved the cosmic order held. **Osiris**: God of death, resurrection, and the afterlife. Murdered and dismembered by his brother Set, reassembled by his wife Isis, became king of the dead. Offered promise of afterlife to regular people (not just pharaohs), making his cult hugely popular. Mystery religion with initiation rites. **Isis**: Goddess of magic, motherhood, and healing. Her cult spread throughout the Mediterranean and Roman Empire (1st century BCE - 4th century CE), competing with Christianity. Temple at Philae remained operational until 537 CE - one of the last pagan temples functioning in Roman territory. **Set**: God of chaos, storms, deserts, and foreigners. Not purely evil but dangerous and necessary. Associated with Upper Egypt while Horus represented Lower Egypt - their conflict mythologized political unification. **Anubis**: Jackal-headed god of mummification and the dead. Guided souls through the afterlife. Weighed hearts against the feather of Ma'at (truth/justice) - if heavier (corrupt), the heart was devoured and the soul destroyed. **Aten**: The sun disk, promoted to supreme deity by Pharaoh Akhenaten (1353-1336 BCE) in history's first known monotheistic reform. He tried to eliminate other gods and closed their temples. After his death, priests restored traditional religion and erased his name from records. His monotheism probably influenced later Abrahamic traditions, though the connection is disputed. Egyptian religion changed massively over three millennia. Gods rose and fell in importance based on which city held political power. Amun-Ra became supreme when Thebes dominated. Religion followed politics. ## Mesopotamian Religion: The Original Pantheon **Anu**: Sky god, king of gods in Sumerian/Akkadian tradition. Distant and uninvolved with humans by the time of written records. **Enlil**: God of wind and storms, chief of pantheon in most periods. Decreed the Great Flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh (predates biblical flood by ~1,000 years). Represented divine authority and cosmic law. **Inanna/Ishtar**: Goddess of love, sex, war, and political power. Descended to the underworld and returned - death and resurrection myth. Her cult involved sacred prostitution (probably). Major temple in Uruk had enormous political and economic power - owned land, collected taxes, commanded armies. **Marduk**: Babylonian supreme god who defeated Tiamat (chaos dragon) and created the world from her corpse. The Enuma Elish (Babylonian creation epic) was recited annually during New Year festival, reinforcing Babylon's supremacy and the king's divine mandate. **Ishkur/Adad**: Storm god associated with both destruction (floods) and life (rain for crops). Ambiguous - could save or destroy you. Mesopotamian religion was pessimistic. Gods created humans as slaves to do work they didn't want to do. The afterlife was a grim shadow existence regardless of how you lived. No salvation, no reward, just eternal darkness eating dust. Your only hope was making gods happy enough to give you a good mortal life. ## Why These Cultures and Gods Matter These weren't abstract spiritual beliefs - they were political technologies. Gods legitimized kings, unified populations, justified conquests, and explained natural phenomena that killed you randomly. When Christianity replaced these systems, it wasn't because it was "truer" - it was because centralized monotheism with written scripture, hierarchical organization, and exclusive truth claims was better at building empires than decentralized polytheism with contradictory local traditions. The gods died because they couldn't compete with bureaucracy. [[Ostara]] [[Eostre]] [[Eastre]] [[Inanna, Goddess of Power & Seduction]] [[Amorites, 2000 to 1600 BCE]]