One of the reoccurring critiques and challenges I get from Christians and others regarding Paganism is the accusation that I don’t “Really” believe in the Pagan Gods… that I believe or “believe” only as some calculated political/philosophical expedient or aesthetic choice and that really my professed “belief” is some sort of white or darker shade of lie or “LARP”, and that I must plainly KNOW that the Greek, Roman, Nordic, Celtic and other pantheons and only legends, mere mythologies, and cute stories…
I don't know if I literally believe in the old Indo-European Gods, or Sol, or any of the above, but through the process of natural theology - coming to an understanding of the divine by observing patterns in the world around me, as Aristotle and many of the other great ancient minds did - I've come to a singular, irrefutable conclusion:
God loves white people, and doesn't care much for the browns.
Christian theology is obviously very complex and sophisticated, even if wrong. The average believer in any god on the other hand simply imagines a literal person sitting beyond the skies, someone you can talk to who might directly and personally intervene in your day to day affairs.
In my opinion, this is about the level of metaphysical sophistication one can expect from average people, which is fine, and we should rather look to which traditions and teachings make for a healthy foundation that ensures our people's continued existence.
If you look at your family tree, you'll notice that your ancestors double every generation. This exponential growth eventually will lead to the problem where you have more ancestors than would have been alive on the entirety of the earth or even just in a certain country at that time. What's going on? Well, as the number of your ancestors increase the amount of your unique ancestors decrease. You start having ancestors that are related very distantly to each other. The further you go back on your family tree the more and more you keep finding the same common ancestors. This is called pedigree collapse. The same thing happens when you compare two people's family trees side by side.
Therefore, every single English person is a direct blood descendant of Edward III and his ancestors. Out of the Europeans alive in 1000, only 80% of them passed on their genes to a living descendant today. Out of those 80%, they are the blood ancestors of every single European alive today. For one example out of many: Charlemagne. When he is referred to as the father of Europe, this is meant in a literal physical sense.
So assuming that the All-father and other gods, Jimmu Tenno etc. were real people, that means that according to pedigree collapse, they are the blood ancestors of the entirety of their respective races today. So Paganism then is nothing other than ancestor worship and so we can talk about blood memory and things like that.
As for the approach that Pagans took to their myths, among the elite intellectuals they ranged from rationalists who tried to find an explanation for the miraculous and unlikely tales like Palaiphatos and the agnostics like Socrates whereas the common people took the myths literally.
However, no one discounted them entirely thinking that they were completely made up, but just merely exaggerated or with fictions added over time and while there were some people that were agnostic as to the existence of gods, there were no atheists. The closest was the term ἄθεοι (godless), which simply meant someone that didn't worship in the proper way. The very concept of believing in nothing but the physical world would have been considered abhorrent and treasonous. Hence why the Romans executed Christians who refused to worship the gods and thus were bringing misfortune down upon the Empire.
Unfortunately most Pagan communities today are either racists who are pagans second or Marxists who are Pagans second.
The irony is striking to those Christians who ahow hate towards you. C.S. Lewis the beloved Christian apologist had Aslan say "that is me in many forms" to followers of other gods. Even more fundamentally Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all rest on the philosophy of Aristotle, and Aristotle was a pagan who honored the old Greek gods.
If we truly believe in divine wisdom, then surely judgment belongs to God (or the gods) alone and not to those who presume to speak for the divine while harboring hatred.
You sincere seeking of the sacred deserves respect. The gods of our ancestors called to human hearts for millennias and there is profound wisdom in those ancient wells.
The divine is far greater than any single tradition can contain. With solidarity I stand with you my friend.
I would like to begin by saying that I really appreciate a great deal of what you write, and your prose is always insightful and informative. You are a very skilled and thoughtful writer, no doubt.
With that being said, however, your post above illustrates the inherent problems with neopaganism; it isn’t what it claims itself to be. Rather, it is a cheap facsimile, a counterfeit. It is, in no way, connected to Classical Paganism in anything other than the most superficial exterior forms. It is post-modern nihilism masquerading as Iron Age religion. It has no spirit; it has no essential belief. “Neopaganism” is not even, in and of itself, a “thing” in the religious sense. It has no doctrine, no dogma, no theology. Others have written more thoroughly than I how modern notions of it are simply reflexive anti-clericalism, pseudo-spirituality, and post-liberal romanticism. I see many sophistries and soliloquies in its defense, but they are never satisfactory, nor satisfying. “The gods are tribal, ethnic, or racial energies, the gods are the collective unconscious, the gods are aspects of nature or reality.” The answers are always slippery, never solid, never sure. Do the gods exist or don’t they? Are they real persons, or aren’t they?
I am no saint, but I am a Catholic, and a militant one, and I can say unequivocally that I believe in the “old gods” more certainly, more truly, and more completely than any self-professed “pagans” that I’ve ever encountered or talked to. Zeus is real, Odin is real, Ra is real, but they, like us, are all doomed. They cannot save you; they cannot even save themselves! Even if one or another favors you, there is nothing that they can do, for they are finite, like men, and shall die, slaves of Destiny, like men. The gods are the agents of the Fates, but the Fates themselves are the agents of God, of the One Triune God, from whom and within whom the Second Person came into the world for our sake. Only Christ Jesus can save you, only He can save us.
As the great Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset once penned (and I paraphrase): “The paganism of our ancestors was a love song written to a hidden God, but modern paganism is a declaration of war upon a God who has already revealed Himself.”
I deeply relate to the part where practical wisdom that comes from strangers just at the right time ends up saving your life. This happened to me too many times to be a mere coincidence. On another note, and something you did not seem to touch here, i think most of western civilization that folks like to call "Judeo-Christian Civilization" is based on the Renaissance/Baroque period when the classics of Pagan Rome and Greece were studied at length. My favorite century is the 17th, and i like to call it "When the old gods met the new". It was a period of much intolerance but also of much rediscovery. The 1600s laid the groundwork for western civilization, and i find everything about that century fascinating precisely because it transpires old European paganism, even in paintings let alone Palaces and Dissertations. Obviously they had to deal with monotheistic religious authorities, so you'll find fascinating ways in which such paga motifs were hidden.
The Major Irony is that what they like to call Christian Civilization only became robust due to pagan influences.
I was not expecting the most coherent defense of folk religion to come from the cat girl psyop. I would call this larpy but I’ve poured a lot of whiskey into rivers to let me pass and even though a trout off a mountain to stop a storm. Both worked.
"every warrior elite in western history found the Iliad, Odessey, Sagas and Legends of King Arthur compelling"
Maybe they did, but a lot of them were *also* Christian
Hail Our Ancestors!
Hail Our Gods!
Let us be as Mighty and find the Glory they found! ⚡️
Hail! Hello fren. Carl to you on FB. I was going to share this with Michael but it might be behind a paywall.
Maurice Druon: Les Mémoires de Zeus ! Very interesting book.
THIS is what we will discuss next time you’re on the show!
I've had many similar lived experiences. Cheers for sharing. Fantastic essay.
Thank you Kulak. This helped me to gel a few things that had been coalescing in my mind for a while now.
We have no Ravens down under. But we do have blue eyed Crows…
I don't know if I literally believe in the old Indo-European Gods, or Sol, or any of the above, but through the process of natural theology - coming to an understanding of the divine by observing patterns in the world around me, as Aristotle and many of the other great ancient minds did - I've come to a singular, irrefutable conclusion:
God loves white people, and doesn't care much for the browns.
Christian theology is obviously very complex and sophisticated, even if wrong. The average believer in any god on the other hand simply imagines a literal person sitting beyond the skies, someone you can talk to who might directly and personally intervene in your day to day affairs.
In my opinion, this is about the level of metaphysical sophistication one can expect from average people, which is fine, and we should rather look to which traditions and teachings make for a healthy foundation that ensures our people's continued existence.
A raven showed up once when I was doing my as many burpees as possible in an hour challenge.
Dismiss?
Game recognizes game.
If you look at your family tree, you'll notice that your ancestors double every generation. This exponential growth eventually will lead to the problem where you have more ancestors than would have been alive on the entirety of the earth or even just in a certain country at that time. What's going on? Well, as the number of your ancestors increase the amount of your unique ancestors decrease. You start having ancestors that are related very distantly to each other. The further you go back on your family tree the more and more you keep finding the same common ancestors. This is called pedigree collapse. The same thing happens when you compare two people's family trees side by side.
Therefore, every single English person is a direct blood descendant of Edward III and his ancestors. Out of the Europeans alive in 1000, only 80% of them passed on their genes to a living descendant today. Out of those 80%, they are the blood ancestors of every single European alive today. For one example out of many: Charlemagne. When he is referred to as the father of Europe, this is meant in a literal physical sense.
So assuming that the All-father and other gods, Jimmu Tenno etc. were real people, that means that according to pedigree collapse, they are the blood ancestors of the entirety of their respective races today. So Paganism then is nothing other than ancestor worship and so we can talk about blood memory and things like that.
As for the approach that Pagans took to their myths, among the elite intellectuals they ranged from rationalists who tried to find an explanation for the miraculous and unlikely tales like Palaiphatos and the agnostics like Socrates whereas the common people took the myths literally.
However, no one discounted them entirely thinking that they were completely made up, but just merely exaggerated or with fictions added over time and while there were some people that were agnostic as to the existence of gods, there were no atheists. The closest was the term ἄθεοι (godless), which simply meant someone that didn't worship in the proper way. The very concept of believing in nothing but the physical world would have been considered abhorrent and treasonous. Hence why the Romans executed Christians who refused to worship the gods and thus were bringing misfortune down upon the Empire.
Unfortunately most Pagan communities today are either racists who are pagans second or Marxists who are Pagans second.
This was a fantastic read. Living in a polytheistic world is so much more beautiful and exciting than the dead monotheistic one.
The irony is striking to those Christians who ahow hate towards you. C.S. Lewis the beloved Christian apologist had Aslan say "that is me in many forms" to followers of other gods. Even more fundamentally Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all rest on the philosophy of Aristotle, and Aristotle was a pagan who honored the old Greek gods.
If we truly believe in divine wisdom, then surely judgment belongs to God (or the gods) alone and not to those who presume to speak for the divine while harboring hatred.
You sincere seeking of the sacred deserves respect. The gods of our ancestors called to human hearts for millennias and there is profound wisdom in those ancient wells.
The divine is far greater than any single tradition can contain. With solidarity I stand with you my friend.
I would like to begin by saying that I really appreciate a great deal of what you write, and your prose is always insightful and informative. You are a very skilled and thoughtful writer, no doubt.
With that being said, however, your post above illustrates the inherent problems with neopaganism; it isn’t what it claims itself to be. Rather, it is a cheap facsimile, a counterfeit. It is, in no way, connected to Classical Paganism in anything other than the most superficial exterior forms. It is post-modern nihilism masquerading as Iron Age religion. It has no spirit; it has no essential belief. “Neopaganism” is not even, in and of itself, a “thing” in the religious sense. It has no doctrine, no dogma, no theology. Others have written more thoroughly than I how modern notions of it are simply reflexive anti-clericalism, pseudo-spirituality, and post-liberal romanticism. I see many sophistries and soliloquies in its defense, but they are never satisfactory, nor satisfying. “The gods are tribal, ethnic, or racial energies, the gods are the collective unconscious, the gods are aspects of nature or reality.” The answers are always slippery, never solid, never sure. Do the gods exist or don’t they? Are they real persons, or aren’t they?
I am no saint, but I am a Catholic, and a militant one, and I can say unequivocally that I believe in the “old gods” more certainly, more truly, and more completely than any self-professed “pagans” that I’ve ever encountered or talked to. Zeus is real, Odin is real, Ra is real, but they, like us, are all doomed. They cannot save you; they cannot even save themselves! Even if one or another favors you, there is nothing that they can do, for they are finite, like men, and shall die, slaves of Destiny, like men. The gods are the agents of the Fates, but the Fates themselves are the agents of God, of the One Triune God, from whom and within whom the Second Person came into the world for our sake. Only Christ Jesus can save you, only He can save us.
As the great Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset once penned (and I paraphrase): “The paganism of our ancestors was a love song written to a hidden God, but modern paganism is a declaration of war upon a God who has already revealed Himself.”
Yes
Thank
…..
I deeply relate to the part where practical wisdom that comes from strangers just at the right time ends up saving your life. This happened to me too many times to be a mere coincidence. On another note, and something you did not seem to touch here, i think most of western civilization that folks like to call "Judeo-Christian Civilization" is based on the Renaissance/Baroque period when the classics of Pagan Rome and Greece were studied at length. My favorite century is the 17th, and i like to call it "When the old gods met the new". It was a period of much intolerance but also of much rediscovery. The 1600s laid the groundwork for western civilization, and i find everything about that century fascinating precisely because it transpires old European paganism, even in paintings let alone Palaces and Dissertations. Obviously they had to deal with monotheistic religious authorities, so you'll find fascinating ways in which such paga motifs were hidden.
The Major Irony is that what they like to call Christian Civilization only became robust due to pagan influences.
I was not expecting the most coherent defense of folk religion to come from the cat girl psyop. I would call this larpy but I’ve poured a lot of whiskey into rivers to let me pass and even though a trout off a mountain to stop a storm. Both worked.