The Mysteria, 11: The Persistence of Paganism

What’s really behind recent fears of a “pagan resurgence?"

This long essay is part of my ongoing series, The Mysteria, and is also part of the research I’m doing for a book of the same name. These essays deal with the way that Christianity shaped many of the chaotic political situations we are in now and led to the birth of capitalism, while also examining the buried history of demonology, magic, and the occult woven through actual Christian practice. This particular essay is a response to the many (many, many) recent essays in journals by cultural, political, and intellectual figures decrying the “re-paganization” of the West.

In the 6th century, the archbishop Martin of Braga — known as Saint Martin of Braga — wrote to a fellow archbishop regarding the ideal method for dealing with the persistence of pagan beliefs among Christians. His letter, “De correctione rusticorum,” (“on correcting the rurals”), first describes the creation of the world, then lists the many pagan practices local converts to Christianity had not yet eradicated. Martin’s list of demonic rural practices is quite intriguing, since he includes many things that people — including Christians — still do: lighting candles by holy fountains, decorating dinner tables, holding weddings on Fridays, and celebrating the beginning of the year on the first of January.

Martin of Braga’s letter, like many similar sermons and letters written by monks, missionaries, and bishops during the earliest parts of the middle ages, reveals a fascinating look into the struggle between an emerging Christian worldview and the older pagan practices and cosmologies that persisted throughout Europe. Such writing gives us glimpses of traditional European pre-Christian practices, even if sometimes the writers may have misunderstand what they were describing.

What’s particularly fascinating about De correctione rusticorum, however, is the title itself. Martin of Braga specifically wished to address and uproot the persistence of older pagan beliefs among the rūstica, “rural people.” They were people who had thus far not fully adopted the newer Christian beliefs of the more urban Christian leadership.

This association between rural people and paganism is not unusual, and the tension between rural and urban beliefs expressed in the letter predates Martin of Braga’s complaints. In fact, this tension is rooted in one of the original meanings of the word “pagan” itself.

In pre-Christian Rome, the term paganus referred initially to those who lived in the countryside, often outside the direct influence of the cultural and societal norms (the civitas) of Roman cities. This division was akin to modern tension between cities and the countryside. Consider, for example, the fashions, fads, and social norms of those living in sprawling urban centers such as London, Paris, or New York, versus those living in small villages in Britain, France, and the United States. Though we’d consider both groups in each situation part of the same nation, their ways of seeing the world and their values can often feel as if they are foreign to each other.

After Christianity became the official religion of Rome, pagan took on a negative connotation, becoming an insult. No longer did it only describe rural people, but it also came to describe the kinds of beliefs they held. After centuries of rarely appearing in writing, paganus became a common term — often meant as a slur, meaning something like “backwards” — for those who had not yet converted to Christianity. Something similar happened to a Germanic word often used as a synonym for pagan beliefs in the middle ages, “heathen.” Heathen originally meant literally “heath dweller,” those living on relatively difficult land far from the urban centers. They, like the pagans, were rural folks who had not been fully converted by the new, primarily urban, religious system.

It’s worth considering the kinds of lives such people would have lived in relationship to the urban centers and its fashions. Often dwelling in very small villages consisting of just a few families, they lived relatively self-sufficient lives, growing their own food, making their own clothes, building their own homes, and trading their “surplus production” (extra things they made or grew which they didn’t need themselves) with each other and with nearby villages.

This mode of living had, until capitalism, been the general default of human life for millennia. This is true whether we are describing ancient peoples on the European sub-continent or on any other continent, and it was also the primary mode of living of the indigenous peoples before European colonization in the Americas. So, though the words “pagan” and “heathen” were specific slurs designating peoples living this way in Europe during the ascendancy of Christianity, the life-ways those slurs described were much more widespread. This is why Catholic and Protestant missionaries and colonial forces to the Americas often described the people they encountered there with those same words.

Such peoples shared not just a similar material mode of living, but also a similar cosmological outlook. While the specific forms of those cosmologies differed, they were generally what later Western theorists summarized as “animist.” A key feature of animism is the belief that spirits exist and are intrinsic to parts or all of the natural world, and that being in relationship to those spirits is a crucial aspect of human life and survival. While what constitutes a spirit and what categories of spirits there are often differs greatly across animist cultures, the basic belief in their existence is the same.

Though this belief in spirits was widespread, the often stark differences between the names and types of spirits across particular animisms makes it incredibly difficult to codify animistic belief. This difficulty persists even among peoples who are geographically close to each other. For example, here in the Ardennes where I live, Celtic and Frankish peoples who lived in villages no more than 10 kilometers from each other focused their relational rituals on completely different gods and spirits, yet they were both equally animist.

The variations across such peoples, even living next to each other, is a crucial point to remember. Rural peoples cannot easily be categorized by the specific forms of their beliefs, their “religious” lives and cultural modes. Attempts to generalize across such peoples, to abstract or distill out the essence of their cosmologies into religious doctrine, will always leave us with nothing to work with. Rural (“pagan,” “heathen,” “animist,” “savage,” etc.) peoples and beliefs cannot be reduced, only compared and contrasted against another category.

That’s why, when the Roman Empire tried to codify the varying beliefs of the people it conquered and contained, it relied on the distinction between the civitas and the paganus, the urban and the rural. Urban beliefs, customs, and material modes of living became the standard against which all non-urban peoples were judged. The cities had formal temples and state-sanctioned priesthoods, while the rural had rudimentary shrines (often centered on sacred sites in nature) and informal priesthoods following a more shamanic method of initiation.

Think a bit like an empire for a moment, and you’ll start to see the breadth of the problem Rome encountered when trying to codify religious life. The Roman Empire consisted of multiple provinces and almost countless people groups, all governed from an imperial, urban center. Each of those people groups had their own gods and spirits, as well as their own methods of relating to them. Often those gods, spirits, and methods conflicted, leading to political strife, rebellions, and even all-out war when the Roman urban center tried to push its own fashions upon the people it ruled.

Rome’s solution to this problem was an effective one, at least for a little while. Rather than trying to force others to give up their own gods in favor of the Roman ones, it was much simpler to try to merge the gods. This process, called the Interpretatio Romana (“Roman translation”), involved finding similarities between foreign gods and the Roman ones, and then arguing that they were really the same god. Frequently, this just required the adoption of one name over another (Zeus to Jupiter, for instance). Another method was used primarily for the Celtic gods: the names of gods were strung together. Thus, here in the Ardennes, the Celtic goddess Arduinna and the Roman goddess Diana became Diana Arduinna, while in Celtic Gaul, Maponus and Apollo were merged into Apollo Maponus.

While this worked for larger people groups, not everyone had heard or even cared about these new translations. Though the Romans renamed Woden as Mercury, most Germanic peoples in the Roman Empire still kept calling him Woden. Much of this persistence had to do with the strength of their beliefs, but another important factor was that such peoples had only minimal contact with the Roman civitas, its influence, its pressures, or its fashions.

To understand the power of the Roman civitas, consider the influence that a city like New York, Paris, or Los Angeles has on the fashions, beliefs, tastes, and economic life of others. You may never have gone to Paris or even speak French, but you probably know what Chanel is or what the Eiffel Tower looks like. You might never go to New York City, but you’ve heard of the Yankees, Broadway, and Harlem. And L.A. might be the last place you’d ever consider visiting, but I’m guessing you’ve seen at least one Hollywood movie in your life.

Urban centers exert a powerful influence on the cultural forms of people around them. The way this happens in our modern age is primarily through broadcast and social media, but these methods only accelerate their influence. Even without them, the vast economic power of a city is enough to extend its influence far beyond its limits and to draw people into its orbit.

The Roman civitas exerted a strong gravitational pull on those outside of its geographical reach, both through its economic and its military strength. However, there were always people who were relatively immune to its influence, those who were generally self-sufficient and living in remote areas. Germanic peoples living in small villages and homesteads upon heaths, for example, or rural “pagans” who didn’t rely on the civitas for their livelihoods or trade often with the urban centers. Such people were also more likely to persist in their own beliefs, to keep to their own rituals to their own spirits and gods, and maybe never even to hear about the new religious interpretations declared in the cities.

Their situation didn’t change much when a heretical Jewish cult became the dominant fashion and official religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity was just one more urban fad that had nothing to do with their daily lives or the rich tapestries of their cosmologies, as relevant to them as the latest Kardashian drama might be to an “un-contacted” tribe in the Amazon Rainforest now.

This is the context for Martin of Braga’s De correctione rusticorum. Written in 575, just ninety-nine years after the fall of Rome, the Archbishop repeats a lament any pre-Christian Roman prelate would have immediately recognized. The rural people weren’t acting like the urban people, were still holding on to their old beliefs, and were either unaware of — or stubbornly ignoring — the latest theological fashions of the civitas.

Such a Roman prelate would have had another thing in common with Martin of Braga and the many other Christian leaders to follow him. As stated earlier, cultural and religious differences threatened the political stability of the Roman Empire, and this concern didn’t go away just because Rome did. Christian bishops and archbishops were not just theological leaders but also political leaders, and their interest in eradicating pagan beliefs among the “rustics” was part of a larger political project.

Christian readers might very much bristle at this suggestion, but they shouldn’t. Political power and religious power were not the separate interest spheres we think of them as today; it’s only a liberal democratic (secular Calvinist) conceit to believe religion and politics should or even can have nothing to do with each other. The Christianization of Europe only really began to occur in earnest after all the princes, kings, and other rulers were first converted to Christianity, and their conversions were only possible because of the political power Rome (the Pope) wielded over them.

Nor is this to say that these conversions, these concerns, or any of the beliefs involved were therefore inauthentic. The distinction between the political and the religious is a modern concept, and it’s a false one. It’s especially so because we have adopted a very narrow definition of what constitutes religious belief, associating it only with formal traditions and statements of faith. Religion is not just these, however, and to act otherwise is akin to an anthropologist discovering the skeleton of an ancient human and then concluding the world was once populated by skeletons.

More importantly: the cosmologies from which both religious and political beliefs derive cannot easily be codified into formal theological doctrines. For example, a person who believes there are only two human sexes is embedded in a different cosmology than someone who believes there are multiple genders and switching between them is possible. These are currently seen as political positions, but they are also matters of authentic (and differing) belief. To try to reduce these positions to merely political or merely religious and to then try to judge their authenticity is therefore impossible.

Martin of Braga was hardly original in his worries about the resistance of the rural peoples to the dominant political-theological order and the danger they presented to it. Nor was he hardly the last Christian leader to ink his concerns. In fact, such worries form a persistent type of literature which extends throughout the entire history of European (and later imperialist) Christianity. Oftentimes, extravagant and fantastical descriptions of pagan practices and beliefs — alongside exhortations to eradicate them — became a core theme of saintly literature, but these made their most dramatic appearances during the Reformation and the witch mania of the late middle ages. Everywhere there were dangerous pagan persistences, uneducated and unenlightened folks clinging to old ways and old rituals, and their existence undermined the security of the entire theological-political order.

Importantly, the Reformation versions of this narrative mark a shift in the geographical locations of these beliefs. Suddenly, the rustics were near or even in the urban centers, rather than on the far edges of the Christian civitas. With the exception of werewolf trials, whose accused were often rural and pastoral peoples (particularly men), the threat to Christian empire was most often now dwelling within cities, towns, and villages, not on the heaths or in other remote places.

However, though the actual location of the rustics shifted, their attributes and purported threat remained the same. This new pagan or heathen, called by any number of names, was no longer defined by where they lived, only by their resistance to the dominant political-theological order. They were all those who, even if nominally Christian, still clung to older modes of living and being in the world.

This is when we begin to see words such as “crass,” “rude,” “boorish,” and “impolite” become common words in English to describe uneducated or ignorant people. Each of those words is worth a little extra attention, since they can give us a sense of what shifted in the way we thought about each other. “Crass,” which now means someone who is un-mannered or who speaks offensively, once meant “thick” or “coarse,” referring to something that hadn’t yet been refined or whittled down. “Rude” is quite similar: it originally meant “unworked” or “rough,” like an uncut diamond or stone. “Boorish,” which now means “offensive or stupid,” was derived from an old French word that meant “cow herder,” and was originally a direct synonym for “rustic.” And the last word, “impolite,” is particularly informative. Its opposite, “polite,” derives from polis, which was the Greek equivalent of the Roman civitas. To be polite was to be in line with and to internalize all the concerns of the dominant order, while an “impolite” person did exactly the opposite.

A common theme in such descriptions is that there was something raw, unrefined, or unshaped about the person, which were all also qualities of rural life. The target of the insult hadn’t adopted the cultural norms and habits of urban life, and their behavior made this evident. It should then be no surprise that these synonyms for qualities associated with pagans, heathens, and rustics were used heavily in Protestant and Puritan literature during the birth of capitalism.

They also became common words the new urban class — the bourgeoisie — employed to describe the constantly rebellious lower classes. The political-theological order had changed again, but the concerns of this new class were the same ones shared by the witch hunters, by Martin of Braga, and by the Roman prelates before him. Some people kept holding on to old beliefs, old ways of being, and old ways of seeing the world; and by doing so, they threatened the stability of the dominant order.

This isn’t to say that the worry over actual rustics or actual pagans had gone away, though. Though the new type of capitalist urban centers spreading across the planet might seem quite different from the Roman civitas, the fear and disgust over the rustics outside them (called “hicks,” “white trash,” “rednecks,” and by other terms now in the US) is no different from the Roman and Christian condescending to the rustic. And up to the present, all the entire world outside the amorphous boundaries of Western Christendom was explicitly referred to as savage, primitive, barbaric, and even pagan by the intellectual, religious, cultural, and political leaders of Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.

This is how to make sense of the trend among intellectuals to warn about the threat of a resurgent paganism in our day. Paganism is returning, they declare in alarm, yet they seem to find their proof in places just as fantastical as the witch hunters did. In recent examples, such as an article in The Atlantic, we read of paganism being associated not with the simplicity or village life, but rather with the ostentatious wealth and power of figures like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. In other instances, writers conflate paganism with social justice identitarian (or “woke”) urban movements. Increasingly, we also read that newer transhumanist fantasies of a “godless, genderless, borderless, natureless world of all-seeing living machines” are also part of this resurgent paganism.

So, if “pagan” was once meant as a derogatory term for rural people whose ideas were out of touch with the dominant fashions of the cities, we now find ourselves in a situation where it’s often employed to indicate completely the opposite. Instead of simplicity, conservative social positions, and countryside life, paganism seems to mean for these writers all the excesses and quickly-shifting political fashions of urbanism.

Of course, there’s nothing new about this recent worry over a resurgent or persistent paganism threatening the stability of society. We’ve seen this concern so often throughout the history of both Christianity and Empire that it’s quite possibly an inherent feature of both. Still, it’s fair to ask why paganism seems to have become a large topic again, and why “pagan” seems to stand in for so many disparate and particularly urban ideas.

One reason this may be happening is because the term paganism lends itself quite easily to this usage: there’s very little agreement on what it actually means. Attempts to define what ancient pagans actually believed end up necessarily broad, and official definitions often include some reference to non-Christian beliefs. In other words, paganism is often defined in opposition to Christianity, a negative category into which to put all non-Christian ideas.

This problem of definition doesn’t just extend to ancient beliefs, either. Modern pagans (or perhaps more accurately, neo-pagans), rarely agree even on whether or not there are many gods, two god-principles, one goddess, or no gods at all. Some neo-pagans even embrace pantheism, an idea originating not with any indigenous or animist pre-Christian peoples, but rather introduced by the Dutch Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza.

With so little clarity about what paganism actually means, and with so many differing — and often contradictory — ideas thought to be part of paganism, it shouldn’t surprise us that the term has also come to mean whatever a writer wants it to mean. However, it’s also absolutely worth asking if there are other terms that might better suit the critic’s purpose, and I suspect in many cases, there are.

Take, for example, the association of “woke” or social justice identitarian beliefs with paganism. Because many of these beliefs — and accompanying protests, including tearing down statues — involve a desire to cleanse society of its earlier racist, sexist, and colonialists roots, it’s perhaps more accurate to note its similarities to the Calvinist iconoclasm of the 16th and 17th centuries. The common social justice idea that white or male privilege is something that a person is born with — and can never truly be forgiven for — could just as easily be compared both to Catholic ideas of original sin or the Calvinist belief in the predestination of the elect.

Another area where “pagan” might be a less accurate term than others is in the matter of transhumanism. Believing that the body can be augmented, transcended, or even fully escaped seems to have much more in common with a rather persistent Christian heresy: gnosticism. Gnostics, including the Bogomils and the Cathars, believed that the physical or natural world — and especially the flesh and blood of the human body — was a kind of prison. Such beliefs certainly sound more similar to modern fantasies of uploading consciousness to computers than to pagan and animist beliefs about the sacredness of the natural world and all the beings within it.

And, especially in regards to attempts to identify the glorification of wealth and power as a “return” of paganism, we might also ask whether, again, Calvinist beliefs might be better suited as a potential source. It was, after all, the Calvinists who ended the long-standing prohibition against usury — the charging of interest — instituted by the Catholics. This prohibition was not just a financial one, but also a magical one, since, in the older theological understanding, only God could create “ex nihilo” (out of nothing).

If so many other potential explanations and historical precedents are readily available to use for these particular tendencies, why then blame such things on paganism? It might just be because moralists and leaders have been doing so for at least as long as Christianity has been around. Calling things you don’t like “pagan” certainly sounds a bit more serious than saying something is “diabolic,” “witchcraft,” or “satanic,” but the underlying accusation is there regardless. There are ancient and dark forces moving about the land, tempting people away from right belief, and especially urging them on towards behaviours that undermine and even directly threaten the stability of the political order.

When that order — call it civilization if you like — could perhaps justifiably be called Christian, then it made quite a bit of sense to identify those forces with paganism. Now, however, it’s difficult to argue there is anything approximating a Christian consensus in the West. Less than half (46.2%) of people in England and Wales identified as Christian in 2021, and those identifying as Christian in the United States declined from 90% in 1990 to 63% in 2022. So, though a “second religiousness” might be on the rise, it certainly doesn’t appear to be a second Christian religiousness.

And perhaps this gets us close to the core reason why so many writers seem concerned with a resurgence of paganism, and thus so ready to rename the actors in social strife “pagan.” For centuries, belief in a singular creator God functioned as a foundational belief throughout the West. The unified cosmology, shared mythic forms, and general moral structure of Christianity functioned at least as a common starting point, but this is less and less the case now.

This is what’s really behind these concerns: the dominant political-theological order appears to be breaking apart. The times that Christians and the Roman Empire worried most about the rustics, the witches, the heathens, the rude, and the pagans were when the order itself was fragile. This is seen most clearly in the witch mania of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, a mania which Silvia Federici has convincingly shown was tied to the end of feudalism and the transition to capitalism. Political order was constantly unstable during that time, just as it also was when the Protestants and Puritans preached obedience and purity during the early industrial revolution, and when Martin of Braga wrote De correctione rusticorum as Christianity struggled to assert its dominance over peasants resistant to its urban fashions and taxation schemes.

And here its important to remember a point I made about the nature of animisms and pagan beliefs: they are not all the same, nor can they be easily codified into a coherent doctrine against which to fight. That’s why so many of these current laments pose a righteous but weakened “West” or “Civilization” or even “Democracy” against a falsely-unified “paganism.” Again, many — if not most — of these resurgent beliefs threatening the political-theological order are not even pagan at all. Much of the social justice identitarianism defined as “pagan” is much more accurately described as Calvinist, while the opulent pursuit of wealth and power called “pagan” by one critic hardly describes the average life-ways of indigenous and animist peoples throughout the world. And, though I have great admiration for Paul Kingsnorth, to describe transhumanism and its vision of a “natureless world of all-seeing living machines” as pagan is as inaccurate as one can possibly get, since I know of no ancient pagan or animist cosmology which posits that the natural world is something one can or should hope to transcend or escape. On the other hand, if we’re looking for a cosmology that does propose such a thing, that believes the natural world is mere “creation,” that for which the human body and its desires and drives are to be shunned or transcended, and that in which the physical existence of a human is inferior to its spiritual or mental existence, I think Christianity might be a great place to start such a search.

What is really happening is that the current political-theological order is receding, and there is no longer a single dominant narrative. For centuries, European and Anglo-American cultural and political narratives were so powerful that the rest of the world was drawn into their orbit, whether they wanted to be or not. There have many names for that dominance: hegemony, uni-polarity, the first world, democracy, Christendom, and Western Civilization. Regardless of what it was called, though, its power to shape the cosmologies of the people it ruled over is waning.

What’s replacing it isn’t paganism, but rather many, many different cosmologies. Certainly there’s an actual pagan resurgence, and much of my work has been to be among those who help usher this in. But pagans are far from the primary challenger to the current order, nor are formal religions also seen as threats by some, like Islam or Buddhism. Instead, the order is crumbling from within, unable to contain the heretical contradictions it has born into the world, while flailing desperately at the same specters that have always haunted it.

Recall again Martin of Braga’s list of rustic pagan practices threatening the Christian order in De correctione rusticorum. While some of those did eventually disappear, many others — lighting candles by holy fountains, decorating dinner tables, holding weddings on Fridays, and celebrating the beginning of the year on the first of January — are still practiced today. Martin of Braga — and others like him — never fully succeeded in their attempts to purge the old ways from the new. In fact, Christianity made a kind of peace, or at least a temporary truce, with many pagan practices, adopting them as their own. Candles are still lit at holy wells, prayers uttered in front of statues and images, and even sacred fires still lit on hilltops. Accepting those practices as something inherent in human relationships with the sacred, rather than evil beliefs to be eradicated, greatly enriched Christianity and led to its early stability. Thus, the resurgence of paganism is actually the persistence of paganism. It is hardly a thing to fear, but is instead a resilience from which to learn.