An old boyfriend of mine actually became pagan because of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

His mom never read any of the “literature” that they dropped off for her, but he did. It talked about paganism a lot.

Don't dye Easter eggs, they're pagan, it said. Don't have a Christmas tree, it's pagan. Don't celebrate Halloween, it's pagan.

“This pagan stuff sounds pretty good,” he thought.

 

The single most fascinating chapter in Michael Dowden's book European Paganism is the one titled “The Christian Pagan.”

“Pagan,” of course, is a category created by Christians. Before Christianity, we didn't know that we were pagans. Before Columbus, Native Americans didn't know that they were Native Americans either. Instead, they thought of themselves as Anishinabe, Lakota, Ho-Chunk, etc. It takes an outsider to lump us all together.

So the Christian Pagan is a category created to distinguish Them from Us.

What does the Christian Pagan look like? (Bear in mind, of course, that descriptions of the Christian Pagan are strongly prescriptive: i.e., they articulate what the Church fathers didn't want their people to be like.)

Well, we're promiscuous.

We have lots of sex.

We party a lot.

We're immoral.

We run around naked.

We don't have much of a sense of shame.

We've venal.

We eat too much and get drunk a lot.

We worship “idols.”

We sacrifice animals, and (sometimes) people.

We dance.

French pagan and Nouvelle Droite theorist Alain de Benoist criticizes much contemporary paganism on the grounds that it bases itself, not on what pagans really were, but on what Christians thought that we were. It's as if one were to reconstruct Jewish identity on the basis of Nazi propaganda.

One has to admit that there's a certain justice to this charge. We've all known “party pagans” who do their best to embody the stereotypes.

But of course, there's a certain justice to the stereotype of the Christian Pagan as well.

Thank Goddess.

Historian Sam Webster has remarked that, in the history of Western thought, paganism has always been the shadow-side of Christianity. In fact, nostalgia for Ye Olde Pagan Days began even before the church's triumph was complete, and has been a constituent (and defining) part of the Western psyche ever since.

That's the problem of defining yourself against the Other. There's really something rather appealing about those poor, benighted, naked, sex-crazed pagans.

And they sure do sound like they're having a lot more fun than we are.

This is not to deny the trenchancy of de Benoist's critique. As the new paganisms of the modern world deepen and mature, it's well worth pondering our collective identity and direction.

As for the stereotypes, we claim them and we own them. They're ours now, to do with as we please.

The stereotypes about us held by those who hated us may well not be where we want to end up.

But at least they're a place to start.

 

 

 

Ken Dowden, European Paganism: The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (2000). Routledge.