Paganism?

iornman

i apologise for my lack of ignorance, but what does it mean to be pagan these days? i'm really interested in it since i believe ancient irish people were pagans and i'm more interested in that period of irish history rather than recent history, because i think thats the true ireland, but nowadays what does it mean to be a pagan? i'm sure it can't be practised the way it was and that it's more an individual belief people have but are there rituals that are still being practised? maybe someone could tell me of how to learn more about it?

dubhthach

well the irish pagan religion is for all purposes dead, there are a number of modern religions such as wiccanism that borrow's heavily from irish/celtic mythology, but are not equivalent to the now lost pre-christian religion (rituals etc.)

KlodaX

http://www.faeryshaman.org/

its not dead. People seem to be unconditioning themselves from the christian ways.
its good to see. learning what to believe empirically rather than from fear.

iornman

thanks for the link, yeah i think people are growing more disillusioned with christianity, especially with the present church which is definitely good and hopefully it'll continue, even though there is good in christian beliefs they way its been shoved down people's throats is disgusting, i hope people wll start choosing their own beliefs more.

Talliesin

Originally posted by KlodaX
http://www.faeryshaman.org/

its not dead.

I can't find anything there that claimed to be a continuation, rather than a revival and reconstruction, of the old ways.
I can find language which appears to be borrowed from Gardner's writings circa 1950 and language that appears to be borrowed from medieval alchemy - I don't think theirs anything wrong with that, but it's doesn't sit well with this being a continuation rather than a reconstruction.

rcunning03

i'd recommend the real witches hanbook just started reading it my self, the explainations make sense and are more scientific than flowery

http://www.mythicalireland.com/astronomy/astroart/index.html

it was recommended to me by other users of this forum

Talliesin

Great link rcunning03. I especially like the difference between "Brennan says" and just flat out stating something as fact.

Far too many pagan writers don't give their sources, which both frustrates research and is also plagiarism.

rcunning03

cheers

KlodaX

I can't find anything there that claimed to be a continuation, rather than a revival and reconstruction, of the old ways.

but thats just the site right? ... you don't believe that yourself? do you?

nothing died ... people just weren't open about their beliefs .... probably out of fear what would happen to them... or fear of being mocked.

Yoda

That sounds like wishful thinking, KlodaX.

Some was preserved. The Yule trees we decorate and light represent the Year God. Once, people would burn trees to waken that God and get him to quicken the Mother from her slumber to bring back life and spring to the world. (Or a thousand other ways of telling the story.) Most people don't recognize the God there, though. Or the Goddess who usually crowns the tree, for people who put a fairy or angel there.

Are the life-giving regenerative properties of tumuli like Newgrange or the Mound of the Hostages – which are thought now to be schematic representations of the Mother's body – preserved in general consciousness? Sort of. Rip van Winkle spends a night underground with the fairies and 100 years passes on earth! Farmers preserved a superstition which prevented them from ploughing the sites over, thank goodness.

But much was lost. Great scholars like Marija Gimbutas have helped to rediscover the rich pre-Indo-European culture of Old Europe. But that's nonetheless the reconstruction of what was, from what was lost or remembered much-altered.

KlodaX

thats cool ... I knew there had to be a good story behind the christmas tree... its a shame humans only live as long as they do ... or that trees can't talk...
we seem to only be able to know things from the past if they are documented.
people stopped documenting from fear of being killed for their beliefts .... I think ... but maybe they didn't stop practicing ... I suppose its difficult to pass something down from generation to generation without a book to keep the truth in tact.

still .. if you believe in something enough I don't think you'd let it go that easy.

Talliesin

Originally posted by KlodaX
but thats just the site right? ... you don't believe that yourself? do you?

nothing died ... people just weren't open about their beliefs .... probably out of fear what would happen to them... or fear of being mocked.

Well through the overlapping conversions, migrations, minglings of one bunch of beliefs with another, there have certainly been some practices and beliefs that have remained with us throughout the period. Of course even then a lot of what we have with us now that is of Pagan origin would have been foreign to the pre-Christian Irish.

Yule is a time when a lot of these things can be seen. At this time of year just about everyone who isn't from a faith that explicitly forbids celebrating Christmas will celebrate it if only in so far as joining in the general partying.

Now, as we know many of the details of these celebrations, including the date chosen, are of Pagan origin; the tree, the log, the holly, the mistletoe, the large quantities of meat.

Now, quite a few of these are as much a practical matter of what food is or is not available in the middle of winter as anything else, and if the spiritual aspect was lost or changed you still have to eat. Many are from forms of Paganism that would have been foreign to this part of the world (Saxon and Nordic traditions are well represented in both how we celebrate Yule and how Christians celebrate Christmas). Indeed while the pre-Celtic Irish clearly held mid-winter to be significant, as indicated by Newgrange, there is little to suggest that the Celtic Irish found it particularly significant, at the least they probably considered it less important than Samhain and Imolc by a large degree (of course this has survived too - current traditions for Hallowe'en and St. Bridget's Day both show more being exported from the Celtic countries than imported unlike Christmas and Yule). So in the case of some Pagan practices we can show that they quite definitely weren't survivals as our pre-Christian ancestors didn't practice them.

Now the more general question of "was there a continuing underground practice of Paganism between the coming of Christianity to Western Europe and the Gerard Gardner's public annoucement of the survival of Witchcraft in the 1950s?" is a trickier one.

Certainly we can find not only surviving Pagan customs, but evidence of people practicing Paganism as Paganism in some form or another at just about every point in the period in question. However some of the evidence is less than convincing, and there is a serious lack of evidence of a continuation between these different groups. Some of these forms of Paganism coincided with very conscious attempts to reinvent how society functioned, the French Revolution for example, and so it seems more likely that a group of people having difficulties with the orthodoxy of the Churches had decided that a new religion was needed and they turned to their current understanding of what Paganism was to create it. Really we can't find any compelling evidence of there being a predecessor of modern Pagan practice any earlier than the Romanticism movement, and the sincerity of much of the Paganism of that time is questionable.

One of the problems is that in the earliest days of modern Paganism some pretty strong claims were made by several people about representing an unbroken link with the pre-Christian era; any weaker claims that might have had validity were lost amongst the invented grandmothers and secret societies, many of which have been pretty thoroughly debunked and most of the others are dubious at best.

Professor Hutton's examination of the early days of modern Witchcraft, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft is a good examination about what can be confirmed of the claims, while he is reluctant to completely dismiss the idea of their being a link going much further back than Gardner he does have to conclude that there is little promise of such a claim ever being backed up.

The question is what does this mean for modern Paganism. It doesn't invalidate our religion that it is almost definitely modern (there have been other religions formed since). It doesn't lessen the importance that the Paganism of the past has for us that there are breaks and reinventions between us and them.
Rather, if there isn't a continuing link between the pre-Christian era and ourselves then there was not only a revival in the middle of the 20th Century, but a series of revivals - some religious, some cultural, some mere entertainment - throughout the history of the time that Paganism began to wane. The Goddess has meant something to people throughout the entire period since her worship was supposedly stopped, and we are part of that unbroken line, if no other.