Christianity
Pagans and Christians 2
Abstract
When we read of the conversion of the west to Christianity, it is well to remember that the change was more apparent than real. It might be even truer to speak of the conversion of Christianity to the west.R L Thompson, The Devil
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, January 08, 1999; Friday, 19 August 2005
Paganism and Penance
Burchard, Bishop of Worms, attempted to draw together Christian law in his book, Decretum, at the turn of the last millennium. A chapter on penances is particularly interesting because it is the most complete list written until then of Christian taboos, and the punishments for not observing them. Curiously, it is remarkably reminiscent of the penitential parts of the rules of the Dead Sea sectarians. The penance for attending a wake, singing and dancing and getting drunk to send off the dead was 30 days on bread and water. The same punishment was prescribed for eating offerings by the side of graves or stones, springs, trees and crossroads. Five hundred years after Jacobus of Serugh, the Church was still warning its flocks about the same Pagan habits.
The list of penances was taken by the father confessor and he went through each misdemeanor saying, “Have you…?” then reading out each successive sin from the book. Proceeding through the list, the priest must have given some innocents ideas they would never have thought of. The punishments, though, were lenient—the tabloids today would be much more outraged. As the Church got progressively more frustrated at the persistence of Paganism and more oppressive, confession was made compulsory. By then the confession manual of Petrus of Poitiers urged priests not to suggest to the innocent anything they had not already thought of. Eventually, the Church really lost its temper and turned western Europe into an inferno not exceeded until this century.
Burchard’s book confirms the persistence of Pagan ideas in the popular imagination. It is epitomised with the penance of two years’ fasting on feastdays for anyone who “follows in the tradition of the heathen, which even to this day fathers still pass on to their sons” namely to worship “the elements of nature, the moon, the sun or the motions of the stars”.
Tasting “the seed of your husband” to “inflame his love for you” was described as a devilish act. Penance—seven years’ fast! Assenting to the Pagan act of pouring of a jug of pure water under a dead person’s bier merited 10 years on bread an water. These punishments implied the crimes. Despite the increasing oppression of the Church, 600 years after Christianity took control of the Roman empire, it had still not destroyed the spirit of Europe’s Pagans. The ultimate victory of Christianity did not begin until the thirteenth century and it took wholesale slaughter and terror through the Inquisition and the Witch Trials to blot out Paganism. I doubt that anyone today can conceive how oppressive it was for ordinary people to live under this devilish regime they called Christianity. Though it began reasonably tolerant of the northern people, it got progressively more oppressive for a thousand years! How can modern Christians ignore this?
Since Christianity had every power available to impose its beliefs, the persistence of Pagan practices was because the practice of this ersatz religion failed to fulfil many spiritual needs. Pagans had accepted the Hebrew God in place of Jupiter or Thor because they were ready to accept a god touted as superior to their familiar ones, but there was no goddess in this new religion and no place for magic—the psychological benefits of personal ritual. This new god was too powerful. He knew everything and could do everything. There was nothing left that the people could do to help themselves spiritually.
People expecting to be liberated by a hugely powerful god at their side found themselves slaves. God had His will and all people could do was appeal to Him through prayer. Believers came humbly in supplication, praying for mercy. God was not listening. His mind was made up and prayer was fruitless. They had to bear it and look forward to their reward in the next world. Many Christians have the same experience today, but few have the courage to say so. It betrays a lack of “faith” and they cannot lose “faith”. They are stuck in an awful psychological dilemma that their stern beliefs will not allow them to escape, except of course by having even more “faith”.
How could all this faith and the terrible lie of reward beyond death help a woman who wanted to arouse her husband with her deft oral skills. She had to suffer unnecessary deprivation for a reward when she was a stinking corpse. And what was the reward? If she were a Moslem she could hope to become a black-eyed houri, but for Christians there was no sex in heaven. Physical love was only a prayer short of a mortal sin to the average medieval prelate. It was necessary for the “vulgus” to produce a new generation of believers but they were not to enjoy it. “You must raise yourselves above it, as we, the clergy, do!”
Witchcraft and magic—Folk Medicine
Nor was there any magic to effect cures—only sterile blessings and and prayers. The use of herbs, stones and roots was forbidden. What was the Christian to do with feelings of hate? Simply suppress them. Hatred was nominally not allowed, so it could not be expressed. Yet we sometimes hate, it is a natural emotion like fear or sadness and ought to be expressed in some way if it is not to fester and become morbid. No one suggests that hatred should be acted upon by murder or burning down someone’s house, but is simple suppression enough? When strong feelings are repressed, people get bitter and neurotic and might even crack and do the very deeds that suppression was intended to stop—but even more violently. The psychology of witchcraft had something to offer here that the Church had not. The plaintiff could issue a curse knowing that if it was unjust it would rebound upon themselves—a harmless release of the tension.
How was the Church to relieve the life-long sense of pain, unfulfilment and loss of a childless mother? Equally, how could the hopeless poverty and endless grind and depression of the fecund poor be relieved, once exposing unwanted children was banned. The church was fond of moralising but could offer nothing except despair and hardship in this world. Its answer was pie in the sky, as it is still. People were and are offered a reward in heaven for being physical and psychological slaves on earth.
In these observations are the reasons for the persistence of Paganism and the prospects for its revival. Paganism allows people to do something, and the role of the facilitator often fell to women whose only role in Christianity was to be a wife and a mother. An earth mother could comfort, cure and invite the spirits to rectify wrongs—like a modern medical psychiatrist. They made potions and medicines, they could formulate curses and recite spells, they could invoke nature spirits to consider your particular problem.
The Hebrew God had the reputation of being so powerful, he could not be coerced into doing anything against his will. The childless woman had to endure God’s will. Amulets were forbidden for this reason, apparently implying that they had some effect on God but only as an annoyance. If they had no effect at all, why should they have been forbidden? The truth is, of course, that amulets have an effect—it is the same as the effect of prayer, or belief in God, a psychological effect. The church was concerned that all such effects should come only from official sources. Many people took no notice. The denuciations of Pagan practices for hundreds of years proves that the “vulgus” preferred them.
The Hebrew God was too remote and too arrogant, which is the very reason that He had a saviour, closer to humankind, who had once been human and therefore knew what it was like! The saviour was the intermediary or mediator between mankind and God. Sadly, once the saviour had returned to the right hand of God on his throne in heaven, he was seen to be too remote, so other intermediaries were invented. The Virgin Mary and the saints were appointed as intermediaries to get the attention of Jesus so that he could pass the message on to God. The church then saw it was silly to ban amulets and talismans as the work of the devil and invited people to wear Christian ones and to give gifts to the saints. Of course, they were only symbolic but, if the peasants wanted to believe they worked, fine!
Now, science has explained and cured many of the problems that plagued medieval people. But it has demonstrated too that amulets and spells have a psychological effect on people. They are a type of Couéism, as is prayer. Nevertheless, in this secular age superstious belief has fallen faster than church attendances as science has proven that they have no forces associated with them other than psychological ones.
Now there is a growing awareness of the importance of psychology for improving the emotional balance of people. Psychological and placebo effects are accepted and medical trials of medicines have to take them into account if any genuine physical effect is to be detected. Our scientific knowledge is getting more subtle and modern Pagans are sorcerers only in the sense that psychiatrists are. A spell can be heard, a talisman worn and an amulet touched and carried with you. Unlike the God who is everywhere and therefore nowhere, they are definitely there and therefore can have more psychological value than that distant God with his long list of mediators calling one to another:
Message for the Most High…
Message for the Most High…
Message for the Most High…
The Use of Herbs
The Merovingian legal code, the Lex Salica, declares a fine of 62½ pence for anyone who administers herbs to a woman to stop her conceiving children. The church, which hated knowledge as the devil’s work, would not admit officially the use of herbal medicine.
Medieval herbals used the stoicheia of Aristotle to classify plants as hot or cold and moist or dry, reflecting the four humours and the four elements. The cosmos was supposed made of four elements: water—cold and wet; earth—cold and dry; air—warm and wet; fire—warm and dry. Parallelling this, mankind was constituted of four humours: phlegm—cold and moist; black bile—cold and dry; blood— warm and moist; yellow bile— warm and dry. If one humour dominated the others then that person was chracterised by it as respectively, phlegmatic, melancholic, sanguine or choleric. Medicine was in principle simply the restoring of the balance of the humours. A phlegmatic person needed warm, dry herbs to counter his excessive phlegm. Understanding herbs therefore ment identifying their characteristic degrees of warmness and dryness.
It seems remarkable that these Pagan concepts from the eastern Mediterranean should hold good 1500 years after the philosopher’s death and in wide areas of western Europe. Is it possible that Aristotle was merely systematising widely held popular beliefs? Even if the system was founded by Aristotle, it preceded Christianity by nearly half a millennium and, if the philosopher was compiling folklore, it was much older still. That philosophic speculation should filter down to village witchdoctors seems less likely than that the philosopher gathered the information from doorsteps. Either way, herbal medicine based on these principles is Pagan.
Albertus Magnus records that henbane, a poisonous herb, was used by sorcerers to call up demons. The mandrake plant, with its divided root giving it a vaguely human shape, could only be dug up with a fixed ritual. Many other dangerous plants had protective rituals attached to them and eventually many were Christianised, but all of it is magic because such spells limit God’s will.
Hildegard of Bingen seemed not concerned about coercing God with an incantation for the girl with a flux or a ritual involving mandrake to suppress excessive passion. The root had to be purified by washing in spring water, the Pagan and Essene element of purity, tied to the body for several days, removed and split, tied to the arms for several more days then crushed and eaten—that tied to the left arm for a man and that on the right for a woman. There is no hint of personal moral responsibility in this ritual. Perhaps its aim, that of taking a bromide or having a cold shower, was enough. Otherwise it was a typical spell which again limited the will of God and so could hardly be thought of as Christian. The Christian remedy was self-continence, but this is the plain magic of a Christian witch!
There are even earlier examples. Isidore, Bishop of Seville, in about 630 AD informs those with the opposite problem that coriander decocted in wine is a love potion—an aphrodisiac. Furthermore, many plants were not eaten but worn—as amulets against various ills. A leek worn on the wrist was recommended for toothache.
Little of this knowledge was garnered by the objective observations of medieval folk in western Europe. Though naïve monks in monastery gardens doubtless gathered information about their horticulture, they did not often record it. Few books were written by these practical workers. The church did not encourage observation. It detracted from important things like reading the scriptures and uttering pointless liturgies.
There were two sources: ancient folklore and scientific works from classical times or the Arab empire. Until the beginning of the second millennium, what fragmentary medical knowledge remained was from classical books used by the Romans. Isidore of Seville’s book, Origines, a compilation of these fragments of knowledge remained state of the art for two centuries unaltered. Charlemagne made a conscious effort to stimulate intelligent thought in his efforts to re-establish the Roman empire and Isidore’s book was “improved” by the insertion of biblical references to harmonise this secular knowledge with the scriptures. It then remained a standard work for centuries longer, now with the authority of the Holy Ghost! Nothing could be a better example of the stultifying influence of Christianity on the world for many centuries.
Harmonising books like this with the bible obviously does not add one jot to our knowledge or enlighten the book’s readers one tittle. It is as effective as the fundamentalists who run competitions to try to find new proofs of the infallibility of the bible. They are exercises in “explaining away”, a discipline akin to harmonising. Exercises in ingenuity, no matter how ingenious these wacos are, leaves the bible full of inconsistencies and errors, that even the saner varieties of Christian are happy to accept. Fundamentalists do not realise that elevating a human book to the level of the perfection of a god is idolatry, the worst sin in their bible. Fundamentalists violate their own First Commandment and, by their own rules, will burn. Harmonising or explaining away are designed to disguise falsehoods not to reveal truth.
Isidore says that names are the essence of things, a pre-historic Pagan idea. Knowing someone’s or something’s name was anciently thought to give power over it. It was important not to let enemies have names and particularly the names of your gods, lest they get power over the god and all is lost. That is why the name of the Hebrew God is ineffable. But Isidore gives little of practical use for most of the plants he lists—much less than the classical natural historians, Dioscorides and Pliny, knew.
After about 1200, there was a new influx of knowledge partly from classical and Roman times passed from Byzantium to the Nestorian Christians, expelled as heretics, and thence to the Moslems, and partly new work by the Arabs themselves. Some came through the Reconquista of Spain from the enlightened Arabs of Toledo and Cordoba, some came via southern Italy, notably the city of Salerno and a little came from crusader contacts in the east. Constantinus Africanus in the eleventh century, a converted Arab monk of Monte Cassino, was an important influence after he settled in Salerno. Africanus had travelled widely trading in spices, and after conversion dedicated his life to translating Arab works into Latin. In particular, he translated Galen who had introduced the theory of degrees as a refinement of the theory of humours. Stultification set in again however and it was not until the sixteenth century that scholarship shook off the baneful church and experimental work began.
What of the other source—folklore? Hildegard of Bingen detailed in her book, Physica, 275 herbs and 81 trees but she gives little indication of written sources and there is little evidence in the book that she copied from any written sources. Unlike her letters which are in good Latin because she had a monk as a secretary, this is written in imperfect and rather immature Latin, the sort she might have been expected to know herself from her inadequate general education as a nun. Most often, she uses the German rather than the Latin name for the plants again showing that she had no written sources.
Finally, she often gives information which is unparallelled elsewhere. It seems her book is an original work. She claimed all her knowledge came from her visions but there is little doubt that the true source was local folk medicine. Later writers ignored her book showing either that they had no faith in her visions or that her work was known to be Pagan folklore. Since she was in the abbey from eight years old, her knowledge must have been had while she was there, but she will have had some from her many visitors and some from her correspondents. She describes some Mediterranean plants that she could not have known locally.
The book contains the medicinal and magical properties of the herbs, usage and incantations and rituals to accompany their use. Much of it depends upon the principle of similarity by whcih the plant declares its use by some aspect of its appearance. The leaves of the lungwort are blotched and look like a lung, whence its name and use. Hildegard recognises some plants as good and some as bad. Plants suitable as protective amulets against demaons and sorcerers were bracken, lavender, betony, burnet saxifrage, pine, cypress and hornbeam. Those Christians who put a bag of lavender with their linen or on their windows think it is for the scent. Really, it is an ancient Pagan protective charm.
Deadly nightshade, mandrake and arnica are the devil’s plants. Mandrake root is always washed in pure spring water before it is used, not to cleanse it of dirt but to immunise it against the devil. Pure water is the Pagan cleanser of choice, suggesting that the ritual is magic. Thus, pure spring water poured through a hole in a piece of freshly cut cypress wood, and caught again before it touched the earth, accompanied by a suitable incantation, cured anyone of demonic possession or sorcery. Admittedly her incantations have often been Christianised, God being supposed the agent of the cure, but the whole procedure is obvious witchcraft. Hildegard also recommended changing the properties of herbs by picking them according to the phases of the moon!
It is hard to believe she did not know of the hallucinogenic properties of some of the herbs and mushrooms, but she does not mention them. Discretion, no doubt. She might have secretly been tripping when she had her visions.
Why Bigotry Succeeds
Pagans were never bigots in the way Christians are. They were happy to accept other gods and godesses because they could never be sure that any one was not more powerful than another, and it seemed wise not to anger them unnecessarily. They therefore had no pronounced missionary instinct to shove their own beliefs down the throats of others. Worship of a popular deity was widespread but not centrally administered, so that each temple was effectively independent. Some religions had no professional priests, running their services rather like the quakers by those who volunteered to lead.
Once Christianity with its missionary zeal, its zeal for for centralisation, its imperial-style administration and its preference for dogma rather than truth or even instinct, took control of the Empire, Paganism was placed in the situation of ill-disciplined barbarian tribes against well-drilled legions. No contest.
There is a psychological principle at work here which will be the death of humanity. Those inclined to freedom and creativity reject discipline and authority as stultifying to the individual and society and liable to misuse by a minority. Those inclined to discipline and order, reject freedom and creativity as disorderly and chaotic and inducive of criminality. It is the disciplined army that will succeed against a similar sized undisciplined army. How then can mankind prevent the genuflecters from abetting tyranny again? Freedoms are won only to be lost to those who love self more than others, and love bending their knees to visible and even invisible potentates, rather than questioning bad law. The relatively few liberals in the world of the invisible potentate should take note. Even they can surely not deny that Christian churches are overwhelmingly authoritarian.
The weakness of Paganism in the face of an all-conquering church means that today we have no medieval Pagan temples to set against the gothic cathedrals, no illuminated Pagan manuscripts to set against the illuminated bibles of the medieval monasteries. It might seem the will of God to the Christian bigot, but the beauty of the classical era, which most people consider unsurpassed, shows that mankind was no less talented as a builder or artist, as a Pagan and arguably was better. The artistic and architectural treasures of other non-Christian people proves that God has blessed Christians no more than anyone else.
There is much in the indifference of the Christian West to the world it rules to show that God has thrust hot irons through our eyes and into the depths of our souls. Christians and its product, the Western World, are blind, and dead inside.
Faith and Superstition
Objectively, faith and superstition are the same coin. Superstition is belief in what is forbidden by officialdom, faith is belief in what is acceptable. There is nothing to chose between them, then or now. Touching the knuckle bone or foreskin of a dead saint brings good luck to a Catholic Christian. So does touching wood, it seems. The value of it is in the head. There was material sense in beating an apple tree to drive away malicious spirits so that the apple crop would be better, but none in beating drums and tambourines in a happy-clappy hymn to please Jesus, a Jewish malefactor hanged by the authorities, unless it is to warn us we are getting near an evangelist.
Both faith and superstition are pre-scientific ways of trying to understand and control an uncertain world. Those who stick to them in this scientific age fall into one or more of three categories:
- they are too lazy or ignorant to understand science;
- they are charlatans seeking gullible dupes to keep them in comfort;
- they are gullible dupes conned by one or more charlatans.
It was ever thus but, unlike the Dark Ages or Biblical Times, today only the insane have an excuse. Chances are, then, the Dark Ages will return.
Reference
- L J R Milis (Ed), The Pagan Middle Ages, Boydell, Suffolk, 1998
- Guy Ragland Phillips, The Unpolluted God, Northern Lights, Pocklington, 1987
