The power of persistence

Introducing 'Paganism Persisting'

At long last, it’s publication day for Paganism Persisting: A History of European Paganisms since Antiquity, which I co-authored with Robin C. Douglas for University of Exeter Press. One of the chief aims of the book is to provide new historiographical paradigms for the study of ‘paganism’ (for want of a better term) between the Roman Empire’s adoption of Christianity and the pagan revivals of the 20th century that produced the neopagan religions that remain with us to this day. Reading some accounts of the history of paganism, one might be forgiven for thinking that not a single pagan lived in Europe between the death of the Emperor Julian in 363 and Gerald Gardner’s foundation of the Bricket Wood Coven in 1946. That’s a rhetorical exaggeration, of course; but it is a source of perennial frustration to me that so little interest is shown by historians of religion in the phenomenon of paganism in the intervening period.

The main reason for this lack of interest is that, although pagan revivals happened, they generally didn’t lead anywhere; they were dead ends in religious history, with no living emulators or successors. I love Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon, which is by far the best known history of modern paganism, but a limitation of Hutton’s methodology is that his book is genealogical, and therefore teleological – meaning that he sets out to trace the lineage of contemporary neopagan Wicca, and therefore the appearance of neopagan Wicca is the telos towards which his narrative tends. There is nothing wrong with that, of course – it’s difficult to see how else the book could have been written – but it does mean Hutton had no opportunity to consider other revivals of paganism that didn’t lead to neopagan Wicca. And historians, as a general rule, tend not to pay much attention to dead-end movements if their primary interest is in how we arrived where we are today.

But I am very much of the view that lost causes and dead-end movements are deserving of study; indeed, if I’m honest I find them more interesting than anything else. This is precisely what draws me to the history of paganism. Paganism was (and arguably remains) an eccentric religious choice that invites ridicule; the seemingly perverse act of rebelling against religious hegemony by adopting a religious outlook even older and more retrograde than the religion (Christianity) you are rebelling against. That sort of perversity immediately attracts my attention.

The hermeneutic that long prevailed in the history of religion when it came to paganism was one of ‘survival’. From the late 19th century onwards, whenever paganism was mentioned it was likely to be in relation to supposed ‘lingering survivals’ of pagan beliefs and rites that could be found preserved in folk culture. This was the Frazerian doctrine of the Murrayites, convinced that English rural dances preserved in some debased way the relics of unimaginably ancient rites of human sacrifice – and such notions passed into the popular imagination and, of course, into the cinematic genre of folk horror. But the survivalist hypothesis, when it comes to paganism, exists in weak as well as strong forms. Margaret Murray’s strong survivalist claim that virtually all folklore was sublimated pagan cult was never fully accepted even in her lifetime; but the weaker claim that elements of paganism somehow survived into Christianised medieval cultures and that the medieval peasant remained ‘pagan at heart’ still holds sway in many quarters.

The trouble with the survivalist hypothesis – apart from the fact that it is largely wrong – is that it raises endless unanswerable and rather tiresome questions about what makes a person pagan, what constitutes the essence of paganism, how paganism survives in a Christianised society, and whether ideas and practices from the pagan era are the same as pagan religious practice itself. Because there is never enough evidence to answer these questions satisfactorily, they lead round and round in circles. The survivalists were wrong, in my view, to look to folk culture for paganism – for while folk culture in Christian countries had the capacity to produce figures and ideas with little or no connection with Christianity (this is the thesis of Hutton’s recent book Queens of the Wild), Christianisation ran deep and there is no convincing case to be made that paganism survived in any meaningful sense in countries converted centuries earlier (European countries that weren’t deeply Christianised are a different story, and they’re the subject of my next book Silence of the Gods).

So we’re in need of a new paradigm for studying the history of paganism in this middle period, and what Robin Douglas and I propose is a ‘hermeneutic of persistence’ to replace the hermeneutic of survival. What we mean by persistence is, essentially, that paganism (like the Terminator) just keeps coming back. There is no use looking for genealogically traceable survivals of religious practices from the pagan world, hidden mystery religions or secret orders of adherents of the Old Faith, because you won’t find them; this is the stuff of low fantasy novels, not history. The search for tangible continuity is on a hiding to nothing. But what is interesting, and historically demonstrable, is that people kept reviving paganism – suggesting that the idea of paganism as a religious choice had more life in it than the Church Fathers reckoned for. In Paganism Persisting we trace a series of (often little known) pagan revivals from the Emperor Julian (the original pagan revivalist), through the Byzantine era, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the 18th and 19th centuries before arriving at the more familiar territory of the 20th century.

But why did people keep reviving paganism? This is a deep question; perhaps deeper than the historian alone can properly answer. But in part it is down to the cultural inheritance of the ancient world. Most educated people over the last millennium and a half have found themselves able to shrug off the religions of Greece and Rome as dead history and interesting mythology. But in every society there will be a handful of people for whom this rich evidence of a sacral life will actually speak as an attractive and compelling path of union with the sacred. These people will become the pagan revivalists, although it was not until Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough supercharged the interpretation (or overinterpretation) of folk customs as pagan that paganism could take off as a viable and successful religious movement.

When Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon first appeared it was met with hostility in some quarters of the pagan community; it was, after all, a mythbusting tour de force against cherished historiographical myths. But in the intervening decades the idea of paganism as a revival has become popular even among pagans themselves, who are as likely to value creativity and innovation as they are to cling to dubious ‘granny stories’. In Paganism Persisting, Robin Douglas and I go even further than this, however; we argue that revival is an intrinsic part of what paganism is (as soon as paganism ceases to be hegemonic, anyway), and that revivals have been taking place since the reign of Julian. For it is through revival that paganism (for better or worse) persists.