On the Christian Slander Against Our Pagan Traditions.

In the last few years, I’ve noticed that there are more Christians spreading slander and exaggerations about the ancient Pagan Traditions of Europe.  These misunderstandings and exaggerations are many, and it doesn’t help that most people in the West, especially in America which has a virulent strand of Christian fundamentalism, have their minds clouded with church propaganda and don’t know the actual history of the ancient European religions and what the Christian religion did when force-converting the ancient Pagan peoples.  The Greeks and Romans had an advanced civilization with a love of education, philosophy, art, and science.  Christianity emerged as a cult when a form of scientism began infecting the culture and people stopped believing in the divinity of the gods, and assumed that the stories were just exaggerations and what were gods and goddesses were just humans who convinced people that they were gods through acts that seemed “superhuman.”  Early Christians in acts of wanton destruction, destroyed art, libraries, and killed and tortured people to enforce their religion and plunged Europe into the Dark Ages.

            The scientific and cultural advancements made in the ancient Pagan world were lost until around the Renaissance when a new interest was taken in the Classical Pagan world.  Science, astronomy and astrology, classically influenced art imbued with eroticism, along with the revival of the esoteric and alchemical spiritual Traditions in the Renaissance brought us out of the Dark Ages.  This revival heralded a return of inquiry both scientific and spiritual that was once forbidden by the church.

            The ancient Pagans weren’t just “nature worshippers” or ignorant.  The ancient Nordic-Germanic peoples, thought of as “barbarians,” actually had a complex written language and a cosmology with a creation story whose symbols could easily be seen as exhibiting an understanding of the origins of the Universe and the world that match modern science and its view of the “Big Bang” and evolution.  The story of the great Void of Ginnungagap in which the two worlds Niflheim and Muspelheim collide in an explosion of Fire and Ice to create the primordial elements of the Universe and life is a beautiful allegory that describes in a spiritual sense what modern science has been grasping toward.

            The gods and goddesses were suprahuman, otherworldly entities and lived on an alternate plane of reality.  People thought that the gods participated in human affairs.  Unlike the human Jesus Christ, the gods symbolized energies in nature and in the Universe.  The stories and myths of the gods reveal to humans how these energies and elements of the natural world, space and time, and the Universe interact with the human psyche and psychosomatic complex.

            In the last twenty years, the two religions of Thelema and Asatru have been the paths that I follow, but over the years the Northern Tradition has been more attractive.  Thelema is in essence a revival of Greek and Roman mysteries, but with a Qabalistic Abrahamic influence as it has some of its origins in the Western Occult Tradition which maintains the secret knowledge of the Pagan world hidden in Christian texts and symbolism.  Thelema is Southern Paganism and mostly focuses on Egyptian Gnosticism as a form of attainment though it uses Eastern Traditions such as Yoga and Tantra to augment it. 

            The Nordic-Germanic Tradition has its own Qabala in the form of the world Tree of Yggdrasil.  Its 9 worlds closely match the Qabalist Tree of Life and the Ten Sephiroth.  This is seen below:

            Much of the Northern Tradition is similar to the Vedic culture and religion, as they both had a common source.  The Celtic, Roman, and Greek godforms also come with this source.  The Egyptian and Avestan godforms do as well.  I tend to think that the Egyptian and Sumerian cultures also came down from the North.   The desert god of Jehovah or YHVH, was a storm god and has very little relation to the Indo-European psyche.  The Christian religion, an amalgam of the Egyptian, Judaic, and Zoroastrian religions is a foreign influence. 

            The Christians in the modern West, especially in America use the word “Pagan” as an insult against other religions and their political enemies.  Much ahistorical misinformation abounds regarding the ancient Traditions and the Indo-European peoples.  I’ve decided to clarify a few misconceptions.

1.       The Greco-Roman and Nordic-Germanic Pagans weren’t ignorant and backwards savages.  The Germanic tribes referred to as “barbarians” had a written language, a complex cosmology, and lived in large log structures.  Women also had a certain “equality” with men, though it was not a “matriarchy.”  Also, women were High Priestesses and went to war along with the men. The Greeks and the Romans knew the world was round, named the seven known planets, and Archimedes brought forth the notion that the Universe was heliocentric.  The poet Hesiod had a vague understanding of the evolution of man while Romans had a form of evolution in nature called Atomism.  These cultures had medicine, surgery, and the Romans had certain technologies such as torches that never burned out and bendable glass that we in our modern world still can’t replicate.  They were also masters of sculpting the human form and understood things like perspective in portraiture; techniques of artmaking that were lost in the Christian era until the Renaissance.

2.      Christians exaggerate, based on Biblical and theological propaganda, the amount of and nature of human sacrifice on the European continent.  Most of the people sacrificed were criminals.  In the Germanic cultures, human sacrifice was rare and only done under extreme circumstances.  Even then, the practice was either frowned upon or vehemently discouraged.  In Rome, according to Pliny the Elder, wrote that in 97 BCE Rome made an “official decree” banning the practice of human sacrifice in the empire, though it was practically unheard of for 500 years, and even then, its reports were sporadic in the most ancient times.  This seemed like a decree “done for show” to virtue signal, most likely to shift focus away from carnage inflicted by Roman military conquest.  Again, most “human sacrifice” on the European continent were criminals.  There is very little evidence of the human sacrifice of the sort done by the Phoenicians when they supposedly offered their children to Moloch, which is also now thought of as bogus propaganda by archeologists.  It was thought that pregnant women danced through flames to purify their pregnancies.  The South American continent, who are people of a much different race than Indo-Europeans, practiced quite a bit of human sacrifice, but we must understand that these peoples’ civilizations were in a state of collapse long before the arrival of the conquistadors.  Also, in Egypt there was very little evidence for human sacrifice.  The Celtic tribes had some human sacrifice when they would occasionally burn a criminal in a wicker man.

  We must also understand the historical truth of the brutal violence of the Christian and Islamic religions.  The wars over religious theology killed more than any war on the European continent waged by the Pagan culture.  To this day Christians and Islamists perform human sacrifice in public and private executions, something modern Pagans no longer do.  In the United States, prison chaplains say prayers over inmates prior to execution, which is a form of human sacrifice.  Some of these executions are done in a brutal manner, such as lethal injection (which doesn’t always work,) the electric chair, or firing squad.  Christians in the past were also fond of burning people at the stake, public beheadings, and strange forms of torture.

The misconceptions have made it difficult for many of us who follow the old ways to convey our spirituality and Traditions to the greater public.  It seems as though Christian propaganda continues to retard our understanding of the ancient world.  This is unfortunate, as the only way to revive Western culture is for those of European descent to rediscover their ancient religions that were taken away from them.   The mostly forced conversion to Christianity created a split in the Western psyche.  The tension between the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman and Nordic-Germanic consciousness would be reconciled if we returned to the old ways.  However, it does not seem as though this is going to occur any time soon. 

It is important for Pagans to educate people about the Truth about our spiritual Path, and to not let false information spread.  However, it is important to be honest about ancient culture.  These cultures did, on very special occasion practice human sacrifice, but it wasn’t the all-out mayhem of murder over theological differences of the Christian religion with its totalitarian theology.  Pagans did not slaughter each other over religious differences as the godforms of these cultures were similar and the different peoples understood this fact.  The Greco-Roman and the Nordic-Germanic godforms, along with the Vedic, all harken back to a lost, Primordial Tradition in Europe.  These are the godforms of our culture, and it is best that we defend them and not let others slander them and the ways of our peoples.