Neo-Paganism: An Old Religion for a New Age

by Otter Zell

As founder and priest of a Neo-Pagan church, I have often

been asked to explain exactly what we mean by the term

"Pagan." We find ourselves in the peculiar position of

having a public image that was created not by ourselves,

but by our persecutors. It is much as if the Nazis had

succeeded in eradicating Judaism to the extent that,

generations later, the common opinion of what the Jewish

faith was all about was derived solely from the anti-Semitic

propaganda of the Third Reich.

In Europe alone, as many as nine million Pagans were

martyred by the Christian churches during the Inquisition

and Witch trials. That figure is half again as many as the

six million Jews who died in Nazi concentration camps,

and does not even count the millions of other Pagan

peoples in North and South America, Africa, Polynesia,

Melanesia and Asia who fell before the advancing plague

of Western Christendom. Today, the concept most people

have of Paganism is the lurid one drawn by the Christian

church to justify its own reign of terror. It bears about the

same relation to reality as the similar propaganda

Christianity once fostered about Jews.

"In the 13th century the Church opened its long-drawn-

out conflict with Paganism in Europe by declaring

Witchcraft to be a 'sect' and heretical. It was not til the 14th

century that the two religions came to grips. . .

"All through the 16th and 17th centuries the battle

raged. The Pagans fought a gallant, though losing, fight

against a remorseless and unscrupulous enemy; every

inch of the field was disputed. At first victory occasionally

inclined to the Pagans, but the Christian policy of obtaining

influence over the rulers and law-givers was irresistible.

Vae victis was also the policy of the Christians, and we see

the priests of the Papacy gloating over the thousands

whom they had consigned to the flames while the ministers

of the Reformed Churches hounded on the administrators

of the law to condemn the 'devil worshippers.'

"What can have been the feelings with which those

unhappy victims regarded the vaunted God of Love, the

Prince of Peace, whose votaries condemned them to

torture and death? What wonder that they clung to their old

faith, and died in agony unspeakable rather than deny their

God." (Margaret Murray, The God of the Witches) 'Pagan'

does not mean "irreligious" or "barbarian." It is the correct

anthropological term to describe indigenous folk religions,

being derived from the Latin paganus, "peasant," which

derives in turn from pagus, "village." The Latin comes from

the Greek pagos, "standing stone," and paga, "sacred

spring," representing, respectively, the male and female

generative powers. Paganism is basically Nature worship.

'Pagan' is a proper noun or adjective denoting the name of

a religion, and as such, is properly always capitalized, as

is 'Jewish' or 'Hindu.'

Religions can be roughly divided into two distinct

categories: the naturally evolving, indigenous "folk"

religions of particular regions and peoples (the Pagan

religions), and on the other hand the "revealed" religions:

those religions owing their existence to a "revelation"

taught by some great "prophet" and formulated in various

creeds and dogmas. The latter category, of course,

includes most of the "Great Religions of Mankind": Judeo-

Christian-Islamic, Buddhist, Confucian, etc. Though

articulated by a great teacher, Lao-tsu, Taoism is

essentially Pagan in philosophy and attitude, while

Hinduism and Shinto are Pagan in origin and essence

even though they have become institutionalized as State

religions.

Pagan religions are characterized by being "natural" in

origin and mode of expression, as compared to the

artificiality of constructed revealed religions. Paganism

emerges out of the processes of Life and Nature and

continues to evolve as a living, growing, organic entity.

Revealed religions are like buildings: an architect

(prophet) get an inspiration (revelation) and lays down his

vision in blueprints (prophecy, scriptures). Then

contractors, carpenters, masons, etc. (disciples and

followers) build the structure more or less according to his

specifications. It is made of non-living materials and does

not grow naturally: it is assembled. When it is finished, it

cannot grow further and begins to deteriorate, until it is

eventually so outmoded and rundown it is demolished to

make way for new constructs. A world of revealed religions

is like unto a city, with all the problems (hunger, war,

hatreds, crime, pollution, dis-ease) of a city, and for much

the same reason: alienation from the life-flow.

A Pagan religion, on the other hand, is like a tree: it

emerges alive from the Earth, grows, changes (both

cyclically through the seasons, and continually in upward

and outward growth), bears flowers and fruit and shares its

life with other living beings. It is not made or designed

according to any blueprint other than genetic. And when,

after many thousands of years perhaps, it should come to

the end of its time, it does not pass from the world entirely,

for its own progeny have spring up all around, again from

the Earth, similar yet each unique. A world of Pagan

religions is like a forest.

Paganism includes Animism, Pantheism, Shamanism

and Totemism. (Wichcraft is the survival or reconstruction

of European Shamanism; i.e. the magical arts of tribal

peoples.) Pagan are the native religions of the American

Indians, the Africans, the various Island peoples, many

peasants in the mountains of Asia, the Aborigines of

Australia, and, at one time, the Gauls, Teutons, Norse,

Celts and Faeries (as the invading Saxons called the

pygmy neolithic race they encountered in Britain and parts

of Europe).

Long before they encountered Christianity, the Faeries

(known to archaeologists as Pretani, or Picts) had been

forced by the Saxons onto the inhospitable heathered

lands of Britain, and were later to be called "Heathens" by

the Church. By 1500 CE, they had been virtually

exterminated, save for those who managed to intermarry or

exchange their infants for those of the invaders_these

were the "changelings." Moreover, as it was later to do in

the case of the Witches, who inherited much of the Faery

lore and religion, the Church began a campaign to convince

the world and future generations that these people had

never existed, but were merely imaginary!

The old Pagan religions were never "created." They

had no founding prophets and no saviors. They grew up

with their people and their origins are lost in the mists at

the dawn of humanity. What little we can trace indicates a

descent from paleolithic and neolithic "fertility cults,"

hence the common symbols of the Earth Mother Goddess,

the Green Man and the Horned God_the fecund

embodiments of living Nature. We find them therefore

unanimous in their veneration of Nature and their sensual

celebration of life, birth, sex and death as expressed in the

seasonal Festivals of the Sacred Year.

All these Great Festivals of Paganism, wherever they

may be found, correspond in common with the Solstices,

Equinoxes and other natural annual cycles of life (animal

mating and birth seasons, planting, harvest). Most of these

remain with us today in more-or-less disguised form as the

so-called "Christian" holidays of Christmas (Yule), Easter

(Ostara), May Day (Beltane), Thanksgiving (Mabon or

Harvest Home), Halloween (Samhain) and even

Groundhog's Day (Oimelc). In addition to these six, there

are two others, Litha (Midsummer) and Lughnasadh,

comprising a total of eight Festivals (or Sabbats, as they

are known, sometimes under different names in

Witchcraft).

Thus it is obvious that the rich heritage of Paganism

forms a solid foundation for the emergence of the Neo-

Pagan revival today. In the midst of our current spiritual

and ecological crisis, it is appropriate that natural religions

are once again finding a place among the children of Earth.

Modern Neo-Paganism, however, is distinct from the

Old Religion, in that it is a relatively new phenomenon.

Neo-Pagan religions are many and diverse. They range

from the sublimely artistic Paradisal vision and

reconstruction of old Pagan Mysteries of Feraferia to the

astrological divination and ancient Egyption religion of the

Church of the Eternal Source; and from the Wiccan-oriented

myth and ritual of the Pagan Way to the transpersonal

psychology, science-fiction mythology and deep ecology of

the Church of All Worlds. All of the several dozen Neo-

Pagan religious traditions now in existence, and most of

the countless sects of Witchcraft, hold certain values in

common. It is these values which relate them to Paganism

in the older sense.

One of the key values of Neo-Paganism is its

insistence on personal responsibility. The Church of All

Worlds expresses this in the phrase, "Thou art God/dess,"

implying total personal freedom and individual

responsibility on the part of every one. Paganism has no

concept of "original sin," hence has no need of saviors.

Neo-Pagans do not expect divine retribution for breaking

social taboos. Rather, concepts of "sin" and "atonement"

are restated in the framework of ecological awareness and

karma. If our actions are discordant and in opposition to

the evolutionary flow of Life, we suffer the ecological

consequences, in much the same way, and for exactly the

same reason, as diseased cells in the body are attacked

by the antibodies and other natural defenses. Whatever

energy we put out returns to us multiplied threefold. Love

returns love; hate returns hate. Robert Ingersoll observed:

"In Nature there are neither rewards nor punishments;

there are consequences." Total responsibility (hence total

freedom) rests in our hands.

As in the Old Religion, Neo-Pagans conceptualize

Divinity as manifest in the processes of Nature. In a literal

sense, Mother Nature, Mother Earth, is "Goddess," and

She has been recognized as such since time immemorial.

Thus ecology is seen as the supreme religious study:

"Nature is Divinity made manifest...It is creativity,

continuity, balance, beauty and truth of life.

"Everything we encounter in the Biosphere is a part of

Nature, and ecology reveals the pattern of that is-ness, the

natural relationships among all these things and the

Organic Unity of all of them as a Biospheric Whole. Thus

ecology shows the pattern of man's proper and creative

involvement with Nature, that Nature which encompasses

his own life and on proper relation to which his survival

and development depend.

"Of all man's secular studies, ecology comes closest

to bringing him to the threshold of religious relationship to

his world. Ecology not only confirms the wonders of form

and function that other secular studies have revealed, but

it brings these into organic union with each other as one

dynamic, living Whole; and it points out the conditions for

the wellbeing of both this overall Unity and the parts that

comprise it.

"An intensive realization of these conditions, and of

one's own immediate role in their sustainment and

development, brings one to the threshold of religious awe.

To worship Nature, therefore, is to venerate and commune

with Divinity as the dynamically organic perfection of the

whole." (Council of Themis, from Green Egg #43)

Neo-Paganism is a recent mutation of the Old Religion

which had its earliest emergence during the European

Renaissance with the rediscovery of the ancient Greek

philosophers via Arabian texts. However, this was also the

time of the Burnings, and the budding Neo-Pagan

emergence was suppressed until the late 1700s, when it

found expression in the Romantic Period of art, music and

literature, especially in Germany.

This Romantic flowering of Neo-Paganism, notably the

element known as the Bavarian Illuminati (whose mottos

were "eternal flower power" and "eternal serpent power"),

greatly appealed to a visiting American named Benjamin

Franklin. Upon his return to the colonies it became a major

spiritual force in the post-Revolutionary America of the

1780s, where its influence continued to shape the new

nation through the presidencies of the Adams family. It was

Monroe and the War of 1812 that managed to suppress

this movement for a time, but it re-emerged 60 years later

in the form of the Transcendentalist Movement,

exemplified in the poetry and writings of Whitman, Thoreau

and Emerson, and the commune movement in the 1840s.

The Civil War, Reconstruction, the conquest of the

West and the Gold Rush drained the Nature-oriented

spritual energy from the people of America for another 60

years, but it blossomed again through Art Nouveau in the

1900s. Then came the World Wars, the Depression,

McCarthyism. Sixty more years had to pass before the

gathering impact of Eastern religious philosophy,

especially Zen, and Existentialism gave birth to the "hip

underground" counter-culture of the Beatniks.

Experimentation with drugs, sexuality, music, poetry,

communal living and alternate lifestyles paved the way for

the Hippie phenomenon of the 1960s, which curiously

resurrected the old Illuminati motto of "flower power." The

seeds of Neo-Paganism which had lain dormant for three

generations took root in fertile soil and emerged once more

into the light, to be joined in the '70s by the heirs of Wicca,

the last vestiges of the Old Religion of Europe.

The New Religion is still very much Paganism, for its

inspiration and orientation is based, as were its

predecessors', upon an understanding of the relationship

of Humanity with the larger perspective of Life, Nature and

the Universe. Fred Adams of Feraferia coined the term

"eco-psychic" to describe the type of awareness that

permeates this new religion.

Revealed religions, especially of the monotheistic

variety, tend to see man as a special creation, exalted

above all Nature, the epitome of God's handiwork. Thus the

Biblical injunction to Man to "have dominion over all the

Earth" is not seen by Judeo-Christians as outrageously

presumptious; nor is God's destruction of all life on Earth

in the legend of the Deluge seen as insane, immoral

ecocide. Both God and Man are considered to have a

"divine right" to desecrate the Earth at their pleasure. This

is in direct opposition to the view of Paganism, which sees

humanity's duty not to conquer Nature, but to live in

harmony and stewardship with Her.

Every revealed religion claims to have its own direct

pipeline to the Divinity and its own essential precepts

derived from direct, uncontestable revelation. Neo-Pagans,

on the other hand, have outgrown egotistical,

temperamental gods and expect no intervention from some

Big Daddy in the Sky to solve the problems of our times.

Instead, we look to Nature (through the clear glass of

ecology) for inspiration and direction, and to ourselves as

the instruments for all that needs to be done. Thou art

God/dess! Otter G'Zell, 1970 (revised Jan. 8, 1991)