A Cautionary Tale for the New Pagani of the West

He called himself a pagan, but what he really was, was an ex-Christian.

My coven-sib was dating a guy who worked at the Renn Fest. Because he identified as pagan, she invited him to our Sunrise Yule brunch.

Alas, though, he had nothing to say about the Sun, the Wheel, or the Season. All that he wanted to talk about—and he wanted to talk a lot—were Jesus, the Church, and “Christianity”—as if such a monolith actually existed.

Needless to say, the relationship didn't last long.

Needless to say, we never invited him back.

As Norwegian Egyptologist Jan Assmann sees it, the defining distinction between religions is not monotheism or polytheism, but whether they're Primary or Secondary.

Primary religions—what we may call the Old Paganisms—arise directly out of human experience of That Which Is.

Secondary religions—the Abraham religions being prime examples—arise out of reaction against Primary religions. Such worldviews, Assmann notes, are inherently dangerous because they automatically come with an enemy attached. This helps explain the bloody swath that the children of Abraham have cut through human history.

(Check out your favorite news-site. They're still doing it today.)

It also helps define an important distinction between the Old and New Paganisms.

The Old Paganisms were, by definition, Primary Religions.

The New Paganisms—alas—not so much.

I'm reading the collected essays of Garman Lord, the founder of Theodism: Anglo-Saxon heathenry, to vastly oversimplify.

I find myself in deep sympathy with many of his premises: that the human animal is inherently tribal; that paganisms reach their fullest flowering as tribal religions.

His aim, he writes, is what he calls retroheathenry, as distinct from neoheathenry: a present-day heathenry that picks up, as it were, where the ancestors left off, as if Christianity had never even existed.

A noble aspiration, perhaps, but one that—to judge from his own writing—he doesn't quite achieve. Christianity lurks on practically every page that he writes, if only as a point of reference, if only as a negative example. It seems to shape his language, his very thought. His words echo the Bible as much as—if not more often than—the Eddas.

Almost, “Christianity” —as he conceives it—seems central to his heathen vision.

Secondary, anyone?

I think of the modern pagans whose thought I most admire: my teacher Tony Kelly of the Pagan Movement in Britain and Ireland, Fred Adams of Feraferia, my friend Nick Ritter, himself a Theodsman.

In their writings—or, in Nick's case, in our conversations—Christianity virtually never comes up, so thoroughly pagan are the thought-worlds that they inhabit. In each case, their paganism is its own premise, not mere reaction against something else.

They're not pretending that Christianity never existed. They've taken what it has to offer, and moved on.

Now that I call future Primary.

As we craft for ourselves the narratives that will take us into the pagan future, let us take care not to place an enemy—be it “Christianity”, be it Abrahamic religion, be it “Patriarchy”—at the center of our story.

To do that is to embalm it and preserve it into the future like a fly in amber.

We have only to look at the current state of the Middle East to see where that leads.

Gárman Lord, Gesíþa Handbook: An Introduction to Théodish Belief (Richmond, VA: Háliggyld Books, 2018)

____, From the Giftstool: Collected Writings and Wisdom of the King (Richmond, VA: Háliggyld Books, 2021)