PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

In 1346, a particularly virulent form of the bubonic plague, known as the Black Death, arrived in Europe. In subsequent years, according to some estimates, it killed off something like 60% of the continent's population.

Did it also spark a pagan revival?

So says journalist Gavin Ehringer in his 2017 Leaving the Wild: The Unnatural History of Dogs, Cats, Cows, and Horses:

...[T]he Black Death caused many people in Europe to lose faith in the Christian god and the Catholic Church. (Many astute people observed that Rome had been better off during the management of of its myriad gods and goddesses than under the Christian God.) So, ironically, paganism made a comeback in some regions....Liberated from Christian thought, people also turned to the study of ancient Greek and Roman culture, which helped kick-start the Renaissance (145).

Well, now. A compelling tale, to be sure, especially for Latter-Day pagans like us, one with a very real ring of likelihood to it.

Consider. Six out of every ten people that you know have died miserably. Clearly, the Church has got something wrong. You remember those old stories that grandma used to tell. Well, the new god's not working. Maybe we should give the old ones another try.

So on Beltane you go out to the woods and light a fire. Out of old, half-remembered bits of folklore, and snippets of things you've heard in church, you cobble together a new paganism for yourself.

You get a little drunk, you dance, you have some sex. In a time otherwise notably lacking in good times, you have a good time.

So Midsummer's Eve, you go out and do it again.

What could be more likely? Who could doubt that it happened, spontaneously, again and again, all over the continent?

A good story, certainly. But is it historical?

Is Alexander the Great Actually Buried in Wisconsin?

In the dream, I'm attending a pagan festival, the main claim to fame of which is that the body of Alexander the Great—yes, that Alexander the Great—is buried on grounds.

Now, the ultimate fate of the sôma, body, of Alexander the Great, Talisman of Alexandria, remains one of history's enduring mysteries.

Said festival being held in Wisconsin, then, this strikes me—even in dream-logic—as unlikely in the extreme, to say the very least.

How he got there, the stories don't tell. A likely enough scenario readily presents itself, though: late Antiquity, the rising power of the Church, hostile to a rival Savior, an epic journey westward of the faithful across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and thence (presumably) up the Mississippi: fodder for a C-grade popular novel, one might think, with scenes switching back-and-forth between the ancient world, and an incredulous archaeological present.

A Religion of Converts?

One might, on the face of it, think that most New Pagans are—in effect—converts.

Some seventy-five years into the Pagan Revival, I suspect that, still, the vast majority of us didn't grow up this way. I myself was, as they say in New Crete, “hatched in the wrong nest.”

And yet, if they asked you, “When did you become pagan?”, would the most honest answer really not be, “This is who I've always been”?

In my travels, I've met a spare handful who became pagan as the result of (if you'll pardon the comparison) a “road to Damascus” experience: the overwhelming, life-changing epiphany of a god or, more often, goddess.

But the fact remains that, for most of us, becoming pagan is not so much a matter of becoming something that we weren't before as it is of discovering a name for who and what we've always already been.

Dyspeptic right-wing alarmists like Rod Dreher notwithstanding, Christianity isn't really dying in the West.

Changing, yes. Losing market share, yes.

Dying, no.

But, to a not-unsympathetic outside observer such as myself, the slow ebb of its unquestioned spiritual monopoly here in the West offers an opportunity to understand an outstanding problem of human religious history: how did the old paganisms of Europe manage to die off so quickly?

Again and again, in region after region, the pattern emerges: within a few generations of conversion, cultic paganism has all but disappeared, leaving behind it little but a tide-wrack of half-remembered lore and behaviors. Where once religion was, only folklore remains.

Nor was this pattern unique to the West. The last bastion of Indo-European-speaking paganism was in the Hindu Kush mountains, the northeastern region of Afghanistan then called Kafiristan, “land of unbelievers.” Here the ancient ways persisted into the 1890s.

The emir of Kabul's jihad against the infidels changed all that. A decade of fire and sword, genocide and forced conversion, later, the land of unbelievers came to be known (as it is today) as Nuristan, “land of light.” 100 years on, sociologists have found that contemporary Nuristanis remember virtually nothing about the old ways of their great-grandparents: a few old god-names, perhaps, but little more.

All too often, historians have viewed this pattern, in effect, through spiritual Darwinist spectacles: as the product of some inherent qualitative superiority of the new ways over the old. That this is simply not so is proven by the emergence of the same pattern, but reversed, in our own day.

(Fueled by the inherent spiritual defficiencies of Abrahamic worldviews, the same reemergence of the Old Ways that here in the West we call “paganism” is simultaneously taking place among peoples all over the world.)

From our own experience, we can easily see how, and how quickly, such culture-loss can happen. Despite the cultural omnipresence of the various Christianities in contemporary America, the children of pagans, or of the non-religious, grow up knowing very little about Jesus, the Bible, or the Church. Once the chain is broken, the Forgetting sets in quickly. One generation is all it takes.

Why did Gerald Gardner choose the Horned God and Moon Goddess as the divine patrons of his Revival Witchcraft and, by extension, of the entire Pagan Revival?

Well, in a sense, he didn't choose them: one could say—again, in a sense—that they chose him.

These, in fact, were two of the three available strands—the third being Ceremonial Magic—from which Gardner plaited the cord of the Modern Craft: the Murray/Horned God/solar calendar strand, and the Leland/Moon Goddess/lunar calendar strand.

But let us go deeper.

The Horned God, of course, is preeminently God of Animals and, as such, of the Body. Insofar as Revival Paganism personifies the Western world's necessary return to the body, its truths and cycles—the reembodiment of Western spiritual life—one could hardly choose a more fitting divine patron.

As for the Lady of the Moon: she herself is the goddess who grows, who wanes, who is no more—and who returns. Lady of Cycles, of birth, death, and rebirth, she in her very being shows forth the truth of the New Paganism. What once was, but was no more, is now again.

It was the flowing-together of these two currents—this confluence, this Great Rite of traditions—that brought forth the Modern Craft, and—by extension—Modern Paganism as a whole.

I'm pleased and proud to announce the release of the new second edition of Labrys and Horns: An Introduction to Modern Minoan Paganism. Since the publication of the first edition in 2016, we've expanded our pantheon and sacred calendar, created a new standard ritual format for both groups and solitaries, and developed a set of spiritual practices that we all share.

When I say the second edition is expanded, I mean it. The first edition, in print format, is 140 pages long. The new second edition clocks in at 243 pages.

It takes a number of different approaches to build a revivalist spiritual tradition like Modern Minoan Paganism. We started with some of the usual reconstruction methods: ancient artifacts and art; archaeological information about cities, buildings, and homesites; astronomical building and tomb alignments; myth fragments recorded by later writers; dance ethnography; and comparative mythology. But even with all those methods stacked together, we still ended up with holes to fill in order to create a functional modern spiritual practice. In the case of Minoan religion, those holes are pretty big.

What do we use to fill those gaps? Shared gnosis.