… is that, for the most part, modern neopagans are largely projecting a Christian worldview on paganism:
Most “pagans” strike me as harmless people in pursuit of a sacramental vision of creation who, through various accidents of their personal history, are either unaware of the Catholic tradition or else traumatized against it by sundry factors (often having to do with Catholics who have sinned against them). They are usually gentle souls who have internalized a lot of Christ’s teaching better than many alleged Christians have.
Various paradoxes emerge from this, particularly when such “paganism” is compared with Super Duper Reactionary Traditionalist Catholics who deeply hate the Church since the Second Vatican Council and long for a crusade of blood and iron. For apart from Protestant Fundamentalists, nobody is more shockingly ignorant of historic Catholic belief and practice than Traditionalist Paladins of Truly True Traditional Catholicism. The ironic resemblance between it and alleged “neo-paganism” is that both typically have an imagined historical memory that thinks it is recreating late Roman antiquity, but in fact extends back to the Age of Bill Haley and the Comets.
Neo-Pagans at least have the excuse for their made-up fantasy religion that one of the marked features of a great deal of pagan religion is that it deliberately left no record of their secret rites.
Why?
BECAUSE THEY WERE SECRET!
But the historical record the Church leaves behind is profuse, so “Traditional” Reactionaries have no excuse for their made-up pretend “ancient faith” at war with the actual Church whose development we can trace right down to this second from remote antiquity. They just don’t like how it has developed and so are just cosplaying at an imaginary Church more to their taste. The real Traditional Catholic Church is, as it has ever been, the Church in union with the Pope and the bishops.
I think that if you are going to do the whole cosplay pretense of Ye Ancient Religion, you should just be a Wiccan and not try to kick Catholics out of their own Church so you can swan in and pretend you own the joint.
Another irony of recently-invented “neo-paganism” is, as the video points out, how much of it has deeply internalized Christian assumptions that would have been opaque to many pre-Christian real pagans. I don’t think that a bad thing since I approve of Christian assumptions whether conscious or unconscious. But I do think that Tom Holland is simply right when he observes in his brilliant book DOMINION that Christianity is, without any possible comparison, the most successful revolutionary force in human history and that the measure of its colossal success is how much of its assumptions about the world are so taken for granted that nobody realizes they are not self-evident. Neo-Pagans who take for granted things like human equality or universal human rights are taking for granted things that real pagans like Aristotle or Caesar or the average Spartan would never have dreamed of and would have laughed at.
And that leads to the last and bitterest irony, which is that of all the forms of paganism at work in the world today, the form that comes closest to a really and truly pre- (and anti-) Christian paganism is not pop paganism, but white, racist, nihilist, Nietzschean, power-worshipping MAGA KKKhristian conservatism. It is a white racist fertility cult of blood and soil, worshipping the blood purity of the Herrenvolk and the Orange Fuehrer. It is truly at war with Christ and love for the least of these, which it denounces as “weak” and “woke”.
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Agreed on all counts. I have a former co-worker who is a neo-pagan. Super nice guy. In fact, you couldn’t ask for a sweeter guy. Great sense of humor and never said an unkind word to anyone. Faithful to his wife. A good guy. And a neo-pagan. As much as I liked him, I knew he wouldn’t have made it 2 weeks amongst real pagans 2,000 years ago, because much of what he believes about paganism is not, in fact, paganism but was largely invented by the Victorians. Lots of confluences, but Margaret Murray’s pseudo-history really got that ball rolling. She popularized a lot of what many neo-pagans believe. The problem is that none of it was actually true. Modern historians have disproven it.
Discussions like this always remind me of Lewis’s poem “Cliche Came Out of Its Cage.” It is often cited as satire, and it is, but people often forget its coming from a place of genuine admiration. Lewis admired a great many things about the real ancient pagans, which is why he had such a hard time taking modern neo-pagans seriously.
You can read the whole thing here: https://allpoetry.com/Cliche-Came-Out-of-its-Cage
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men,
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim.
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs;
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).
Dear Mark not-Shea, thank you so much for this. Lewis baptised my imagination in my first conversion to Christianity, so that the Calvinism and Fundamentalism of my Protestant brothers did not enter into my heart. Lewis was not a Catholic – but he it is who was my beginning of entering into the Church. One of his books that I and my wife have read repeatedly is “Until We Have Faces.” Read, all of you!
I got news for you: The vast majority of today’s Christians would not make it two weeks against their progenitors from 2,000 years ago either. Or even 1,000 years ago.
Most of us who are Pagan these days don’t pretend to be like the ancients nor seek to emulate them in every way. I’m not a Viking or Iron Age Celt or Bronze Age Greek, and I don’t want to be. Most things about the ancient world sucked. Like dying before age 30 or 40 routinely.
I don’t know what the “secret rites” were, and nor do I care. Fretting over things like “apostolic succession” and having the right translation of ancient texts is not a thing for Pagans. Christians, at least most of them, worry about whether they have the full and correct transcript of what their god said thousands of years ago, and whether the men delivering that word are dully qualified.
We don’t. We go straight to the source. Being Pagan is much less to do about dense theology textbooks and precise liturgy and more about cultivating and nurturing relationships. With the gods (though not all Pagans are deistic), with ancestors, with family and community and with every living thing.
The racist pseudo-Norse MAGA Pagans of today in no way have their basis in the world of the ancient Pagans. There is zero evidence that the historical Vikings were obsessed with white skin or some kind of pan-Northern European nationalism. They traveled across most of the known world at the time and worked with and intermarried with many different people, including those in the Middle East. Nor were they all raiders and pillagers. The Vikings created far more wealth with vast trade networks than they did sacking monasteries.
The ideas that right wing Pagans of today cleave to are 100% the invention of modern and Christian societies. The anti-Semitism that marks most MAGA-leaning Pagans arose entirely out of of medieval Christian Europe. Their theories about the “white race” came almost entirely from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. The modern fixation with race based on skin color was not even a thing until well into the 1600s when Europeans – the Christian ones, struggled to come up with scientific justifications for the global slave trade they created. A major league slave trade which made the slavery of the ancients look like little league sand lot ball by comparison.
As vile as I find today’s “folkish” Pagans, they remain a tiny shard of the MAGA movement. For every faux racist “Viking” there are a thousand more men whose racial fantasies are inspired by Christian medieval crusader mythology.
It’s notable that Pete Hegseth’s extremist tattoos include no Mjolnir or Sig runes or anything remotely Pagan in origin. They’re all crusader themed images that play on themes of Christian nationalism and ultimately white nationalism.