Steve Mynott wrote: > > Tyler Durden wrote: > > > Well, I think there's an obvious disconnect on this issue. Clearly, > > pre-Christian religious practices survived Christian persecution > > throughout the ages. From the little I know, some of the practicing > > Druids actually have received a nearly unbroken chain of tradition. > > The modern druid traditions, as followed by Willian Blake, only date > back to the eighteenth century. > > There is no unbroken chain of tradition.
Completely correct. The stuff of modern neo-paganism is synthesised from bits of Celtic and Norse lore got from books (books written, of course, by Christian priests and monks who preserved the ancient pre-Christian stories - without them we would know nothing of the old stories); bits of renaissance & early modern astrology and magic; 18th & 19th century speculations; and stuff borrowed from India; and stuff that was just plain made up. Very little of it is older than about 1880, almost nothing older than about 1700. That doesn't mean it is bad, evil, or wrong; it does mean it probably has very little connection with anything our ancestors thought, said, or did 2,000 years ago. In a social sense it is fundamentalism's twin - both are reactions to a world dominated by liberal agnosticism, as it has been (at least amongst the educated ruling classes in western Europe) for the last 2 or 3 of centuries. It arose not in opposition to Christianity but in mourning for it. And if Christianity and her tomboy sister Islam are getting more powerful again, it might well be that neo-paganism, like the old-fashioned sort, is on the way out. There is certainly no significant unbroken pagan or magical tradition in Western Europe. Mediaeval and early modern magical practices in Western Europe were mostly post-Christian, or para-Christian, rather than survivals from paganism, and those that were survivals came through the *literary* tradition rather than through folk memory. Many of them arose in a Christian/Jewish context from a cobbling together of Classical and Cabbalistic sources with folk practices derived from debased versions of Catholic liturgy - people excluded from a theological understanding of Catholic ritual developed folk traditions that gave a magical or superstitious meaning to the rituals. Two books to read if anyone is interested: "Religion and the Decline of Magic" by Keith Thomas, and "The Stripping of the Altars" by Eamonn Duffy (the latter is basically an anti-Protestant polemic, but the vast amount of information in it about 15th century ritual makes fascinating reading, if you like that sort of thing)
