Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge/Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge.iso/OCCULT/PAGANISM.HIS

Text File | 1993-04-05 | 17KB | 283 lines

[While, this is one of the more coherent accounts of pagan history
that I have encountered, it should be taken with as large a grain of
salt as any of the others]

(This message was written for USENET's talk.religion.misc in early
December 1986, in response to a request for information on paganism.
It fit my absolute criterion of quality - that is, a huge number of
compliments, even from people who usually think I'm an asshole - so I
thought some people here might enjoy reading it.)

Paganism is a loose word for the large variety of polytheistic,
shamanistic, and mystical non-monotheistic religions.  Paganism exists
in all cultures, from paleolithic to technological, but has
historically waxed and waned.  The ancient Egyptians are an example of
a highly pagan society; so are the ancient Romans; and all paleolithic
cultures from the Old Stone Age to the present have strong pagan
elements.  An example of a less pagan culture would be the West for
the last thousand years or so, since the centuries following the Fall
of Rome.  The domination of the Middle East by Christians and Moslems
has also largely shut out paganism.

Characteristic of paganism is a tolerance for other pagnistic ideas,
even those that literally contradict one's own.  Such persecutions as
have been directed against paganistic religions by each other are
by-products of political struggles and mass population movements
rather than ideologically motivated.  The same is to some extent true
of early Judaism, which was the direct inheritor to the traditions of
a strongly pagan society.  A slave revolt apparently led to a few
hundred thousand slaves with no place to live; to get them, they
butchered the inhabitants of pagan cities and took up residence in the
cities themselves.  They invoked their war god to justify this action.
Similarly, when the beginnings of the modern Greek mythology were laid
down, it was as a result of invading Northern barbarians supplanting
the earlier (and somewhat gynocentric) Titan mythology with their
imported religion, which grew more refined and less aggressive later
on, as happened with Judaism.

Before it came under the thumb of monotheism, the West was dominated
by the highly civilized Roman culture.  The Roman Republic and Empire
were characterized by an unusually large number of religions together
in a single social whole, frequently sharing the same geography and
even the same temples.  This explicitly eclectic (or "syncretistic",
as it is more usually known in studies of the Romans) synthesis is
more similar to modern neo-paganism than any other form of historical
paganism I know of.  However, it ended after the Christian emperors
took over and Rome fell.

The post-pagan West experienced frequent resurgences of paganism in
various forms.  If we date this at 1000 CE for convenience, we see
first the Inquisitorial period, where paganism was punished with death
and torture.  Then there comes the Renaissance, in which pagan
symbolism and ideas in art and philosophy were somewhat more common
than explicitly Christian ones.  The Renaissance lasted until the 16th
century.  Note that the Inquisitions lasted effectively until the
Enlightenment period, and were bad during the Renaissance, but ceased
to be mostly ideologically motivated after the first three centuries.
The Inquisition had become a political arm of the Vatican, a force
useful in many ways other than suppressing heresy.  It spent much of
its time accomplishing political, antifeminist, and covert goals of
the Church.  We see in the trial of the Templars in the fourteenth
century that uncommonly faithful people were caught in a secular
political struggle between the King of France and the Pope.  They were
routinely tortured, the usual prompted confessions were given, and
they were executed, for reasons having nothing to do with ideology or
heresy except as excuses.

It is also during the Renaissance that we begin to have evidence of
what we may consider explicitly religious paganism again.  Most of the
grimoires we have date from this era; alchemists, often overtly
Christian but employing pagan symbolism and texts, were most common
during the Renaissance; the Kabbalah and Tarot originate in the
Renaissance, forming the backbone of modern pagan symbolism.  The
Renaissance also saw the obscure origins of a rebirth, in improved
form, of Greek humanism, technically pagan because of its suppression
by Christian Rome and its use of theistic symbols.

The Reformation was again a less pagan period; Protestant rulers like
Elizabeth and James carried out their own anti-heresy pogroms,
annihilating most evidence of witchcraft.  Of particular interest in
the Reformation is Scot's "The Discoverie of Witchcraft", which
presents the humanist and rationalist perspective on witches which has
generally triumphed today: that witch accusations were more often
driven by factors such as ugliness, personal enmity, poverty, and so
forth than on ideological grounds, and that in fact there were no
witches.  This is probably true only of the later Inquisitorial
period.  Earlier on, the Inquisition certainly did help in the
temporary stamping out of paganism; so if pagans are witches, there
were witches.

We need not bother much with Murray's supposedly anthropological study
of English witchcraft in the Inquisitorial period, except to note that
it has been devoutly accepted by many modern pagans, and to point out
some of its flaws.  Based on late Inquisitorial evidence and the
consistency of the confessions obtained by the Inquistors, and tossing
in some disjointed scraps of English folk history and legend, Murray
asks us to believe that a paleolithic subculture lasted in England,
living semi-naked in the bushes, until nearly the beginning of the
Reformation at least, and possibly until the current day.  Of course
late Inquistorial confessions were consistent; they were practically
dictated to the torture victim.  A much better account of the
relationship of paganism to Christianity before and during England's
post-pagan period is Jessi Weston's classic "From Ritual to Romance".
Its conclusions were derived from decades of intense study of the
Grail mythology and its anthropological, mythological, and social
context.

As a parting note on the Reformation, we may note the peculiar
phenomenon of court astrologers and alchemists and their ilk, the most
notable examples being the sorcerer John Dee and the seer Edward
Kelley under Elizabeth.  These were the inheritors of Paracelsus and
the other alchemists and Christian medicine doctors, using pagan
symbols and methods with a veil of Christian symbolism.  Kelley
stopped the work of Dee and Kelley under unknown circumstances; he is
said to have been told by the angels to form a group sex arrangement
with Dee and his wife, which they supposedly did for a while; in
another version, Kelley was driven from the work by a prophecy of a
new age dawning, which was heresy.

So, on to the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century.  This was more
humanistic than religious, though humanism is a religion on alternate
Tuesdays; it all depends which of the many reasonable definitions you
use.  In any case, the seventeenth centuries saw the first
applications of the renewed Greek humanism that originated in the
Renaissance.  The counter-Christian current was running stronger; more
and more, people were beginning to demand equal treatment for all, and
freedom from the rigid boundaries of thought and expression imposed on
them by governments and churches alike.  This humanism has colored
most "opposition" religious movements in America since this time, much
for the better in my opinion.  This is because principles of respect
for the individual were put into the American system of government (as
an afterthought - the humanistic heyday had ended in the 1780's in
America, and the new would-be ruling class had to be forcibly
reminded), and the governmental structure was such that it was able to
make progress in its understanding of freedom.

Things did not work out quite so well in France's humanistic
revolution, largely due to Robespierre, the atheistic moral
grandfather of Stalin an