Transcription
[Applause] Thank you very much. I'm going to start a look at modern paganism by deciding which are the actual links that join together ancient and modern paganism, spanning the centuries between. I'd suggest that there are four of them.
And the first is high ritual magic. That is the summoning and control of spirits, in theory, using spells, incantations, ritual formula, and equipment and geometry, such as circles, pentagrams, triangles, wands, pentacles, swords, and white or black-handled knives. This is traditionally a solitary pursuit of individual magicians, but in the 19th century, important groups were founded to pursue the study and sometimes the practice of magic. Above all, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and those continue.
The second direct connecting stream is folk magic. That is much more simple charms, spells, and conjurations to deal with practical problems like lingering illnesses, lost or stolen goods, hemorrhaging, or the feeling that people are cursed. And again, this is a continuous tradition from the ancient world to the present.
The third stream consists of folk rituals and customs, often seasonal, such as Midsummer bonfires blessed and then lit, the decking of a home with greenery and with lights and fires at midwinter, the blessing of crops at New Year, and feasting at all of these celebrations.
And mightiest of all is the fourth and final stream: the tremendous love affair carried on by Christian Europe with the ancient paganism, especially of Greece and Rome, as a genre of literature and art.
Vellius and Lord Leon of Stron under Victoria all painted the goddess Venus as a shimmering symbol of female beauty and power, as did scores of lesser artists. Medieval intellectuals like Pierre Abélard and Christine de Pizan both recorded themselves as kneeling at the feet of Minerva, the ancient goddess of wisdom. And it isn't just the Greeks and the Romans who get remembered as such. When the Earl of Argyll marched off to die at the Battle of Flodden in 1513, his court bard hailed him as Lugh, the Shining One, the ancient Gaelic god of many skills.
In the Victorian period, the most muscular of Victorian Christians, Charles Kingsley, the Reverend Kingsley, wrote a book for children in which he informed them that the ancient Greeks were all around them at the present still, and that unless they understood the mythology of ancient pagan Greece, they could never regard themselves as truly civilized. Another muscular Victorian author, Henry Rider Haggard, author of ripping imperial yarns like *King Solomon's Mines*, read lessons in his local parish church, acted as a church warden there, and led his household in prayer every morning. But every time he took an oath, he would clench his fist and swear by the god Thor. And every time he saw the new moon, he would bow to it as the goddess Isis and pray to her.
Kenneth Grahame was one of the most timid of authors, a bank manager for much of his career, and when he retired to the countryside, he attended parish church every Sunday. But into his best-known book, *The Wind in the Willows*, he thrust an utterly irrelevant chapter which contains a stunningly serious religious apotheosis of the pagan god Pan, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Now, what all these four streams have in common is that, in Britain at least, they were carried on by nominal Christians for 1,500 years. What the 20th century did was to recombine them and put actual deities back as beings with whom to work or whom to venerate at the center.
So, what are the general characteristics of modern paganism? We have a very successful British Pagan Federation, and it announces three. The first is a recognition of the female principle of divinity. In other words, having goddesses as well as gods, or a goddess instead of a god. This can take many forms in practice: a single Great Goddess, a bisexual great spirit, a goddess in union with and partnership with a god, or a genuine polytheism with many different goddesses and gods. And there's a knock-on effect at the human level, and that is that priestesses tend to play at least as important a part as priests in modern paganism.
The second principle is the acceptance of an imminent divinity in nature. In other words, that the natural world itself is inherently divine, rather than being the creation of a divinity. This, however, again can take many different forms. It can take the form of animism, the belief that there is an indwelling spirit in all natural places and all major natural things. Or you can go to the other stream and regard the entire planet as being the living body of a goddess, often called Gaia. That is the ancient goddess of the Greeks combined with the hypothesis of a 1970s scientist called James Lovelock, that the planet operates as if it were a living organism. And this idea of an inherently divine natural world can be a spiritual or religious dimension of modern ecology, which can, in some practitioners, take on the atmosphere of a crusade. I could cheerfully describe paganism as the green prayer, but this would be unfair to the whole kaleidoscope of other religions that are found in modern environmentalism.
The third principle, enunciated by the Pagan Federation, is a morality of responsible personal liberation and self-realization. For those used to other forms of religion, this can come as something of a shock. In modern paganism, the goddess and the god, or goddesses and gods, are not expected to make laws, commandments for humans, or to monitor their behavior and save or damn them according to the result. In fact, pagan deities are often regarded as not terribly interested in human beings. And this again is a genuinely ancient idea. So you have to catch their attention. Both of these, as I've suggested, actually are found in ancient paganism across the entire European pagan world. And the main way to catch the attention of deities is to put on a show, to mount a really good, eye-catching ritual in which they'll take an interest.
So, in the pagan view of morals, humans have the duty to fulfill their own potential and discover their true selves as much as possible, but ideally for the benefit of others. The aim is to do as much as one can for oneself while doing as little harm, at the least, to others and the planet as possible. And this can be a very powerful ethic, in many ways more demanding than other, better-known religious ethics.
Now, I'm going to add some further characteristics of modern paganism from my own study and observation of it. The first is that in paganism, the aim of working it is not just to supplicate the divine, to ask the divine to do things, or to honor it, but to draw out the divine within human beings. In many ways, a strip to literal belief in deities is not absolutely necessary, although many, many modern pagans have one. So other kinds of pagans would regard deities as archetypes, as mighty representatives of particular forces in the universe, or of projections of human needs, that in some fashion humanity creates the deities and empowers them, even though once empowered, they are mighty indeed, or as symbols. So that Venus represents love, Jupiter majesty, Lugh human skill, and so forth. So it can be the romantic rationalist kind of religion. But equally, there are very many pagans to whom the deities are extremely real and vivid and personal.
One of the aims of modern paganism is to cultivate powers of self-control and self-knowledge as part of the ethic of self-realization, and to those who have more adventurous ideas of human potential, perhaps to acquire more straightforwardly occult skills like clairvoyance, the ability to sense things you can't actually see, clairaudience, to hear things you can't naturally hear, to predict the future, and to achieve some kind of mental willpower over material objects. Or all these are hypothetical, but some pagans attempt them. The bottom line, however, is that modern magicians and modern pagans tend to seek power over themselves, to have an enhanced sense of self-worth and enhanced personal abilities as a result of practicing. Which does mean that there are rarely, if ever, any passive participants in paganism. People have to do something in order to be part of it, rather than have others minister to them and do the job for them.
Second observation I'd make personally is that modern paganism abolishes the traditional distinction between religion and magic. Now, this is a very old European one. It goes right back to ancient Greece, in fact, to the earlier days of ancient Greece, and was taken from Greece into mainstream European civilization ever since. And the difference is that in religion, if you want something to happen, you ask a deity to do it for you, and then it's up to the deity whether it happens. In magic, humans are presumed to have some actual control over getting the thing done and to be able to help it become reality themselves. So there's a mixture of magical and religious traditions in a lot of modern paganism. In many pagan operations, you can have Greco-Roman deities, the Olympians, and Hebrew spirits invoked in the same circle.
The idea of modern magic, and this is true of occultism whether inside or outside paganism, is not so much to control spirits and to get them to do things for you. In many ways, traditional ceremonial magic is just a glorified form of room service, in which the magicians seek to be very popular, very rich, or have a wonderful love life. The modern change, which came in the 19th century, was to induce the practitioners to achieve a greater harmony with the state of the cosmos in order to remove problems or obtain goals by sensing how natural things are working and putting yourself in alignment with them, so that things will happen better, or if you don't like them, stop them happening.
All this adds up to one tremendous difference between ancient and modern paganism: that the central act of ancient paganism was sacrifice, whether by burning incense or pouring libations or going up markets and sacrificing an animal. I might say, before eating it, because ancient pagan rites tended to be barbecues preceded by a dedication of the forthcoming meal to a deity. Nowadays, we are no longer faced with a mysterious, all-powerful, and terrifying nature. A natural world, in many ways, the natural world is the vulnerable force in the modern world, which human beings are busy destroying. And so, rather than deferring to deities and offering gifts to them, the assumption is that what a pagan should do is put on a good enough ritual to excite and attract the attention of a particular deity, and then invite them in like a friend, or like a particularly honored being, and then cooperate with them to achieve an effect, if only the effect of a shift of mentality, of perception, of consciousness.
That's why those pagan traditions that have a main magical ingredient, and I'll come on to what they are later, do get the problem in that those practicing it are both priests or priestesses and witches. And whereas the term priestess or priest has a kind of neutral, anodynous quality to it, the term witch is much more emotionally charged. It's on the one hand, the only or one of the very few images of independent female power that traditional European culture has bequeathed to the present. But on the other hand, it is a very primeval stereotype of fear and menace.
The third characteristic of modern paganism is that it's mostly composed of mystery religions. That's because wider society now is not pagan, unlike, by definition, society in the pagan ancient world. And so most paganism now resembles the initiatory mystery religions of the Roman Empire, because these were closed bodies of worshippers and friends who operated in private within a wider pagan cosmos. And now we operate within a wider cosmos which is not pagan. And so the model of the closed initiatory society of friends is one of the ancient examples which matches the modern need most closely. So that means a closed group based on training and initiation, or at least some kind of foundation course.
Now, here the classic model used is that of Freemasonry, which developed it in the 18th century. That is of rising through three degrees. And the three degrees come out of medieval crafts, hence the Masons, that is apprentice, journeyman, and master, to use medieval male terms. But in lay terms now, first degree is the right to take part, second degree is the right to compose and suggest things to people and direct them or guide them in action, and the third is to set up your own groups. And it's quite a strong system which has its own logic. As I suggested, it's not simply participation in the passive sense. It's actually quite hard work, usually a minimum of three years is needed to climb the degree structure in most pagan traditions. Which is why nowadays, since the century began, most people who identify as pagans don't actually do it, rather than belonging actively to actual groups. Although many do, they are classed as solitary pagans. But solitary is a relative term. Although the abundance now, the majority of pagans would describe themselves as that, they network often very closely through the internet, including taking part in group rituals online, and feel part of a wider community. And the kind of paganism they practice, or which they identify, is very much that of the closed initiatory groups, a kind, in their case, a kind of paganism light, with the group experience taken out of the actual world.
The fourth characteristic I would identify is the central importance of ritual. Modern paganism, in many ways, has no theoretical structure, and it's got no theology, just a vague belief system. And it's got no scriptures, no holy writings, except books of ceremonies. And the books of ceremonies are encouraged to vary, at least in detail, from one practitioner to another, according to their tastes and experiences. The only sacred words in modern paganism are those used to contact deities or spirits, building on the tradition of invocation in ceremonial magic. And there are very few modern pagan temples or shrines, although many pagans relate to the remains of the holy places of ancient Britain and Europe. They quite recognize those as public spaces, shared with many others. So most pagan ritual takes place in a garden or a normal living space. And usually the space in which the ritual takes place is carefully prepared and reconsecrated every time for ritual, and then deconsecrated at the end. And the object of ritual is to experience the divine or magical directly and personally and individually, and then to rationalize the experience later, if it seems appropriate to do that at all. If many religions say this is what you should feel about the divine, paganism today tends to say this is how you can feel the divine, or even this is how you can feel divine. Now you work out what it means, if you want to do so.
Fifth, it's eclectic and protean. Two rather hooten technical terms. Eclectic, that it snatches ideas from all over the place. Protean, that in detail, at least, it's always changing shape because of the freedom of members to add and develop ideas for themselves. It has a roughly similar format taken from ceremonial magic, that is of casting, making a sacred circle, inviting elemental and or divine powers at the four cardinal points, the quarters, East, South, West, and North, and engaging in invocation, talking to the divine or the spirit world to invite it to come and play, come and work. But within that basic format, it takes texts and images from a vast range of traditions: Irish, Welsh, Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Greco-Roman, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, from folklore recorded in the last couple of hundred years. Some, of course, in the groups will concentrate on one of those to the exclusion of others, but many others will pick and mix and change the mix according to developing membership and interest. But also ideas are taken from Buddhism and Hinduism and other Oriental traditions. Mandalas, chakras, and meditative techniques are quite often found in modern paganism. From Native America, pagans can take sweat lodges, totemic animals, spirit guides, and vision quests. And from the modern Earth Mysteries, some of them work with ley lines and Earth energies. And for American modern feminist spirituality, they can have a stress on the goddess as the senior or the only deity, and a belief in the literal existence of women-centered societies, women-run societies in prehistory.
So, what are the main varieties of modern paganism? The oldest, the best known, and the most influential is Wicca, which is modern pagan witchcraft. And that has in turn encouraged the appearance of many other varieties of modern pagan witchcraft, inspired by, influenced by Wicca. It has produced the most books, it's the best organized still at the national level, and it appears in England at the very opening of the 1950s, probably having developed in the 1930s or 1940s. It's revealed to the world, and maybe created, by a retired colonial civil servant called Gerald Gardner and his friends. And their Wicca blends an idea which was paramount among academic scholars at that time, which was that the people persecuted as witches in the notorious early modern European witch trials were actually practitioners of a surviving pagan religion of feminism and love of the natural world. That idea was something like academic orthodoxy in the '40s, '50s, and '60s. Academics abandoned it, having carried out further research in the late 20th century. But although it wasn't an accurate vision of the past, it provided a very good blueprint for a feminist and environmentally friendly religion in the present. And Gardner and his friends mixed it with traditional ceremonial magic.
Wicca is especially good. It's enabling people to get in touch with the divine, or at least a sense of the divine, and their own magical selves. Basically, it's a religion of the Goddess and God. The Goddess is often regarded as being in three aspects, like the phases of the visible moon: Maiden, Mother, and Crone. And she's also a goddess of nature, as well as the night sky. And she's paired with a consort, a horned god, like the Greek Pan, who's also a deity of the natural world. Some see the deities in other forms, but the divine couple is standard in Wicca, and so in much modern paganism inspired by it. And the important feature to grasp is the Goddess is the senior partner. She is slightly superior to the God.
Wicca is traditionally organized in covens, groups which normally number four to 12 people in size. And they are run, in theory at least, by a High Priestess, who is supported and helped by a High Priest. Note the feminist edge again in this. The intensity of Wiccan workings mean that small groups are the optimum model for enacting it. Above 12 people, Wiccan covens tend to explode, because the nature of the workings can't be sustained with more people. And there are three degrees of initiation of the classic kind described.
Wicca carefully blends magic and religion in a way that I discussed earlier, hence the figure of the witch as being coupled with the priestess or priest among Wiccans. Wiccans often work in the evenings or at night, because the Goddess is associated with the night sky, the moon and the stars, as well as the Earth. Rituals in Wicca usually consist of setting up the circle and the cardinal points, and include a sacred meal, usually of blessed wine and cakes. The personification of deities by the celebrants, this is the central rite of Wicca, based on very ancient ceremonial magic, in which a goddess or god is actually invited to blend with the body of a member of the group and speak through them as an oracle. Also, some magical work of sending healing to people who request it, or consecrating objects, and also seasonal festivals, usually of light and dark in winter, and flowers, fire, and fruit in the summer half of the year.
One aspect of Wicca which has always worried or delighted outsiders, especially journalists, is the fact that at the beginning, Wiccans generally worked naked, and they still often do, although many Wiccans now are also robed instead or as well. The idea of the nude magician is actually very old. It's built into the history of magic, as I remarked in a previous lecture, for Greeks, not merely in Europe but worldwide. And you even find it in the Bible, where Saul removes his clothes in order to acquire the gift of prophecy, and prophets go naked for a sign, like Ezekiel. It's got an obvious resonance in that it's a way of separating people from the normal world, so they feel empowered to work magic. They shed, literally, their everyday selves with their clothing. And also nudity has a very powerful role throughout the world in initiation rites, and the initiates, and this includes early Christian baptism, are expected to undress, bathe, and then rise and be reclad anew as part of the ritual, a symbol of rebirth. And Wiccans have both the magical working and the initiatory element. So these are the streams by which nudity makes sense in Wicca. There are no sexual associations. There is no Wiccan ritual at all which obliges anybody to have sex. And what it means in practice is that groups really do have to know and trust each other well. It's a very good test of how viable they are. The main effect of nudity in Wicca is to enhance a very strong sense of otherworldliness, combined with candles, shadowy spaces, incense, invocations, liturgy, and often mood music as well. Removing one's clothes in Wicca is a very simple and inexpensive way of signaling to people within this surrounding that something unusual is going on and a different mental space has been entered.
The second main modern pagan tradition is Druidry. Pagan Druidry appeared from the late 1980s. There were plenty of Druid groups around in Britain before that, going back a couple of hundred years, but like the Freemasons, they were strictly non-denominational. But from 1987-88, Pagan Druid reappeared and spread very fast. It was modeled for its basic forms on Wicca: the three degrees of training, the magical circles, the cardinal points. Druids, though, pretty well always work with robes, usually white robes, from a passage in the Roman natural historian Pliny, that said priests in a society which had Druids, he must mean Druids, put on white robes for a ritual. Druidry is less concerned with goddesses and gods than Wicca, and not much concerned with working magic. What it does do better than other pagan traditions is give a very powerful sense of a mystical relationship with the land in which you're working, whatever land it happens to be, and therefore through the land, with the ancient peoples who shaped it and left their monuments in it. It's less intense than Wicca because of the reduced element of divinity and magic, and so larger groups are possible. You can have local Druid groups of 30 to 50 without much sense of strain. Often Druids regard themselves as having a special relationship with the sun, and so Druid ceremonies are more likely to take place in daylight than Wiccan ceremonies. Because of this lighter, more open atmosphere, Druidry is a good pagan tradition for public rituals, often put on for the community, and they can be occasions for all the family. Most of the imagery of pagan Druidry is taken from medieval Irish and Welsh literature, because that embodies the Celtic culture which had ancient Druids.
The third, not the second as the typo shows, the third tradition is Shamanism. Shamanism appeared in Britain in the 1980s, spreading from America as a loose term for practices gained from tribal peoples in other parts of the world, initially Native American, North and South, but then spreading the anthropological net much wider. These are trance techniques to contact a spirit world directly. So they can be group practice, they can be perfect for individuals, and they took off so well here because they united two quite different points of cultural reference. One is the spiritualist movement, which began in America in the 19th century and became very popular in 19th and 20th century Britain, that of mediums who go into trance in order to contact spirits. And although it declined in popularity from the 1930s and '40s, there is still a lot of spiritualist churches around, and they fit the fact that there's simply a large minority of people in any society who see and hear things the rest of us don't, to whom the spirit world is very real. And Shamanism provides a very effective mechanism for organizing relationships with it. But the other point of reference was the hippie counterculture that appeared in the late '60s and its links with tribal traditions, such as tattoos, mind-altering substances, and dreadlocks. So from two very different points of origin, one quite familiar and staid by the 1960s, and the other the exact opposite to that, Shamanism has got a basis which helps explain its burgeoning and popularity. In its links with the counterculture, it resembles the New Age. But it also took in a stream from Eastern traditions, because Shamanism is often the result of training by a teacher, a practitioner, and this fits into the Eastern tradition of the guru figure training people in techniques of meditation and of abilities to change consciousness. It links directly into the ancient pagan idea of animism, of a world teeming with spirits.
And indeed, there are loads of other traditions. They're smaller than those I've described in detail, but there are quite a lot of them. When you put them all together, though they never are altogether: Odinists and other people who follow the Norse and Germanic traditions, those who base their workings on fairy lore, those who follow classical Greek and Roman or Egyptian models. And there are huge numbers of non-aligned pagans who are vaguely Druidic or more usually post-Wiccan. They're now the majority, as I've said, although they connect in large numbers on the internet.
The one thing with which there's no overlap at all in modern paganism is Satanism. Simply because Satanism is a Christian heresy. You've got to buy a large part of the Christian cosmos to be an effective Satanist. There actually is no organized satanic religion in Britain. There are a few intellectual groups that glorify the self and tend to admire Lucifer because he rebelled against an all-powerful God. But in addition, there's a wider kind of penumbra of teenagers and bikers in rebellion against the Christian backgrounds who use Satanist symbols to empower themselves and wind up everybody else. But there is no connection with paganism. They are incompatible ways of looking at the world and of practicing.
So my conclusion: modern paganism in Britain, and elsewhere, is a religion or an umbrella term for a set of religions. It's not a cult or a group of cults, because a cult, and as an academic I use strict definitions, is the veneration of a single being, or a person, or an object. So you can have a cult of the Goddess Venus, you can have a cult of brown rice, you can have a cult of Sir David Attenborough, who is certainly worthy of one. But paganism clearly is much more complex than a cult.
Is it artificial? Is it a modern attempt to recreate bits of things that died out a long time ago and can be denigrated for that? Well, not really. Because most religions have revivals in which they return to their roots. As a massive European example, in the 16th century, Calvinist Protestant Christianity claims, with some justification, to be scrapping the last 1,500 years of established Christianity to get back to the ancient sources and recreate true Christianity, forgetting everything between as an aberration. And most of the great world faiths have gone through a process of rejection of the more recent past and a fresh look at the ancient sources of inspiration to recreate themselves. And paganism fits into that.
Is it inherently ridiculous? Clearly, I don't think so. It has its own logic, and it can only be judged from the outside by the good or harm done to the members of the group or to the wider society around that religion. And there seems to be remarkably little harm done, as yet. There have been no mass suicides of pagan groups. There haven't been widespread accusations of brainwashing attached to them, or of systematic financial or sexual exploitation of members. And pagans have produced a criminal population of about the same percentage as other religions in the United Kingdom and Europe and America, inflated by the fact that quite a lot of people in prison convert to paganism when there, because it is a religion which can be brought into one's own particular space, however confined that is.
And the imagery of it is leaking out into the cultural mainstream. Songwriters like Tori Amos in the 1990s, bands like The Pretenders, and best-selling comic authors like Terry Pratchett, all made very creative use of pagan symbols and images. In other words, paganism is now acting as a generator or generatrix of ideas, motifs, and associations which wider culture can appropriate for art, music, or blending into its own thought systems and spiritualities. In other words, paganism is simply becoming one component, if an increasingly significant component, of a multifaith modern society.
To give you some kind of flavor of it, in conclusion, I'm going to end by quoting one of the most famous texts of modern paganism, but I'm going to reverse it. It's the most famous text of Wicca, and it's the Charge of the Goddess, but it's spoken in Wicca by a woman personifying the Goddess. And I would never do that. So what I'm doing instead, as a courtesy, is to reverse it and address a goddess instead of presuming to speak of one.
"You who are the beauty of the green earth and the white moon among the stars, the mystery of the waters and the desire of the heart. Heart of man, you call to my soul to arise and come to you. For you are the spirit of nature who gives life to the universe. From you all things proceed and to you all things must return. And before your face, beloved of gods and men, my own divine self will be revealed in rapture. Let your worship be within the heart that rejoices, for all love is your ritual. Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you, within us. And I who think to look for you know that my yearning and seeking shall avail me not unless I know the mystery. If that which I seek I find not within myself, I shall never find it outside myself. For you have been with me from the beginning, and you are that which is obtained at the end of desire."
When a people have learned to speak like that, I think they have the right to be called religion. And on that suggestion, I conclude.
[Applause]