Christianity
Pagans and Christians 3
Abstract
There was no hard dividing line between orthodox and Pagan worship in England at the time of [ St ] George’s rise to prominence. Vested authority was officially Christian, but many groups and individual priests are known to have carried out Pagan forms of worship, while the bulk of the population was Pagan, as it had always been. Apart from this ecclesiastical Paganism, the structure, the structure of royalty, nobility or chivalry was based upon ancient and deep religious foundations, generally pre-Roman.B Stewart, Where is St George?
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, January 08, 1999; Friday, 19 August 2005
Compromises with Paganism
Although Christianity began among the poor of the empire, it triumphed by being the religion of the bureaucracy, the upper middle class, we might say today, and nobility. Many of the simple folk, particularly of the western empire, preferred the old gods and mostly they were not converted with ease. In the east, many preferred a simple semi-Pagan primitive Christianity devoid of sacraments. No one should be surprised at this. The Indians of South and Central America, after half a millennium of Catholic preaching have not yet abandoned their native gods. In profoundly Catholic countries, ancient superstitions still persist. Voodoo, which combines Christianity and native African religions in a curious but evidently compelling mixture, is a vigorous and growing religion in the Caribbean and some southern US states, hundreds of years after the slaves were shipped and nominally converted.
Arianism, founded by Arius, at one brief time had imperial Roman favour. Arius denied that Jesus Christ was divine, so his view in that respect was that of the Ebionites. Christ was therefore a created being—an angel, but not God. The Council of Nicaea, called by Constantine in 325—AD went against Arianism.
Barmy Christians can draw no conclusions from any of this because they are not open to persuasion, or to evidence, unless they have rubber-stamped it. They have the fixed idea that Christianity arrived gift-wrapped by God in bijou form, small but perfectly shaped. All it had to do was spread like the flu until it was large and mutated into hundreds of different forms, all of which their particular adherents think is perfect, still.
If we knew more about the rival Pagan religions we could tell for ourselves, but the Christians have purged the world of almost everything that might reveal a Pagan blemish on the holy cross. There is a story in Arthur Koestler’s, Act of Creation, explaining what socialist realism is. An artist was commissioned to paint a portrait of an old Communist general grossly scared on the right cheek fighting for the Red Army. The completed picture showed the scared man in left profile looking unblemished. A naïve western diplomat commented to the artist that it failed to show the general’s most characteristic feature, his ugly scar. “That’s socialist realism”, replied the artist.
With 1500 more years of practice at it than the Communists had, it is also Christian Truth! Christians do not like to see their scars, and live their lives pretending there are none. They have rewritten history to hide their scars and continue to do so, but, though they think the portrait on display is faultless, the fragments of the artist’s sketches, they failed to destroy, show us other aspects, scars and all. Christians will not look. They prefer the public portrait, Christian Truth!
Two centuries after Constantine, pope Gregory ruled a Christendom in which only the royal courts had converted, and often even that was nominal, the nobility too sticking to much of their old Pagan ways. Among the people, Christianity was a tolerated novelty, a social folly of the upper crust. In Germany, S Boniface was still seeking to make conversions even in 732 AD. The nobles had supposedly converted but had done so to found a lucrative business on the side selling Christian slaves for Pagan sacrifices. Pope Gregory III told Boniface it should be considered as murder, sensible that the trade in sacrificial victims, by Christians so-called, might have an adverse effect on the campaign to get the people Christian.
“As late as this”, Jeffrey Richards (The Consul of God) says “every aspect of country life was Pagan.” Candles were burnt at sacred springs—the clergy wanted them burnt in the churches before the holy relics. Sacred trees were dressed with offerings, pleas and charms to bring luck and cure sickness. Pagan gods were invoked in common speech, used for the days of the week, never being replaced in this by any Christian improvement. Even as Catholicism succeeded in making an impression at grass roots level, peasants could not comprehend Christian exclusivity. They could not see the wisdom of putting all their eggs in the untested Christian basket. They could see nothing wrong in worshipping their old gods as well as the Christian Trinity. Martin of Braga, in 574 AD, complained that the Celtic rustics of Galicia in Spain could not see why they should not worship “God and the Devil at once”.
The compromises Christianity made with Paganism were not always hidden or subtle.
Most village churches stand on sites that have been sacred since long before Christianity arose.G R Phillips, The Unpolluted God, 1987
Fr Hippolyte Delehaye has documented how holy days dedicated to saints replaced those dedicated to gods (The Legends of the Saints). S Lawrwnce was a saint because he patiently taught his torturers Christianity while they roasted him on a gridiron. Roasting people was something Christians were good at themselves, so, Christians were canonized both for roasting and for being roasted, suggesting a perpetual sanctification process. In fact, Valerian’s second edict under which S Lawrence was punished is incompatible with the story, which really seems to be a fiction based on previous atrocities, not involving Christians at all.
The Venerable Bede tells us that pope Gregory the Great (590-604 AD) directed S Augustine, Archbishop of Canterbury, seeking to convert the English:
The temples of that nation should not be destroyed but only the idols within them. Let blessed water be prepared, and sprinkled on these temples, and altars constructed, and relics deposited… And since they are wont to kill oxen in sacrifice to demons, they should have some solemnity of this kind in a changed form, so that on the day of dedication, or on the anniversary of the holy martyrs whose relics are deposited there, they may make for themselves tents of the branches of trees around the temples that have been changed into churches, and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasts.Bede, A History of the English Church and People
The pope could not have meant in general that obscure Christian martyrs should be used as the dedicatory saints of these churches, for no one would have a clue who they were and would have no inclination to respect them whoever they were, since they were unknown to the people. Nor could traditional saints have provided any relics handy for use in the church. At the least, this pope is inviting the English to identify the new saints of the churches as the “holy martyrs” with their old gods “whose relics were deposited there”.
Worse perhaps is that the “holy martyrs” mentioned were voluntary sacrificial victims. Why should the old gods be seen as “holy martyrs”? It is difficult to imagine that the Pagans would have really acceded to their old gods being killed off by Christians, and declared as martyrs as a consequence, but the martyrdom of a Christian monk for the cause could have impressed them! The martyr could then have assumed the old god’s relics as the spoils of victory that marked him out as the successor of the god—his Christian superior now wearing his clothes. A pair of decorated gelding irons were found in the Thames near the site of the temple of Cybele, the Great Mother or Magna Mater, whose priests were all voluntarily castrated, where there was later a church dedicated to S Magnus Martyr!
To this day in England it is evident. Chapels in high places are often dedicated to S Michael, who took on the role of the sun. High places were where the sun was often worshipped. Really he is the Archangel Michael, who appears in Revelation with the characteristics of the sun.
This became a general principle. Excavations of European abbeys and churches show a continuity of Pagan and Christian culture. A small private chapel in Namur in Belgium was converted from a Pagan temple of the late empire simply by extending the original temple structure by adding a choir and an altar to its eastern side. It was surrounded by Merovingian graves of the late sixth century. The most well known Pagan temples converted into churches are the Pantheon and the church of Santa Maria della Minerva.
The late eighth century church S Martin in the Ardennes was built on the ruins of a third century Pagan temple. Such a gap shows no continuity of use but certainly a long continuity of sacred tradition. Remarkably the church is built along the same axis as the old temple—to the north west—not aligned to the east as is usual with Christian churches. A Pagan monument consisting of a statue of a mounted god riding down a snake-legged giant is now the site of a chapel to S Wido, the patron saint of horses and grooms, again showing a remarkable memory of sacred tradition.
It has been possible to make long lists of churches built on the foundation of heathen temples, or constructed with their material, or established in the old building.Fr Hippolyte Delehaye, Legends of the Saints
Fr Delehaye admitted that Pagan temples were mostly on beautiful and deliberately chosen sites. The Christians generally were accepted into a new country with the conversion of the king, and had the king’s authority to set up in competition with the traditional religions. Pagans were ready to accept Christians as worshippers of another god, similar to some of their own, as it probably was at the grass roots of society. The rulers and the Roman priests, however, had the Roman empire in mind, and refused to accept Paganism on an equal footing, and eventually refused to accept the simple natural Christianity of the peasants either. Like all totalitarian systems, once the Roman Christian clergy sensed serious opposition, the grass roots religion, by then a heretical Christianity, had to be eliminated by any means.
Roman carvings were even erected in Christian buildings. Pagan gods support Christian altars, fundamentalists will be astonished to know. Plainly, the missionaries were happy to humiliate the old gods by putting them to mundane use in their new churches. In one instance the gods are upside down, a further humiliation. More neutral bits of decoration and plain stones are much more common.
Much of the alleged vigour of the missionaries in destroying the Pagan temples was the stuff of later Christian hagiography. When Paulinus converted Edwin, king of Northumberland, to Christianity, Coifi, Edwin’s Pagan High Priest mounted a stallion, though Pagan priests could only ride mares, seized a spear, though Pagan priests were not allowed to bear arms, rode to the temple, and hurled the spear into it, thus desecrating it. Desecrated as a Pagan temple, it could be reconsecrated as a Christian church. It is thought to have been where the church of Goodmanham is, near Market Weighton in the East Riding.
If a Pagan temple was not to be rededicated to a suitable saint, certain damage was done to render it unserviceable. Gradually, as sacred memories faded, the locals themselves would plunder the site for its building materials. Otherwise, churches or chapels were built on the sites of old temples and sacred groves and the missionaries used the materials they could scavenge from the old building for the new. Older Pagans would take comfort from the presence in the church of a sacred log and in a generation, their children would have carved it into a sacred cross. Indeed the cross really emerged in this period of conversion of Europe as the main symbol of Christianity. Earlier, the symbol had been the Chi-Rho symbol or the sign of the fish.
Many churches have a tradition that its site was chosen by the Devil, and fairy tales were invented to explain them. The tradition really reflects the fact that the situation of the church was that of a pre-existing Pagan temple, though oddly a few could be the precise opposite—it was resistance by Pagans to the siting of a church next to their Pagan sacred places that stopped the Christians from building where they wanted to. In these cases, the tradition is often that the Devil knocked down each day’s work on the church during the night, or even that the materials would not stay on site but were moved nightly to the site that eventually was adopted. The tradition of S Gregory’s Minster at Kirkdale by Kirkbymoorside is that the Devil would not let the church be built at a place called Stony Cross. Still marked by a stone monument marked with a Greek cross (not the Christian cross or even a Chi Rho), the place was a “three lanes end”, a Tri Via, sacred to Hecate, a form of Diana, as the moon in her three phases, and always associated by Christians with witches.
To burn candles at stones and trees and springs, and where three roads meet, what is it but worship of the Devil?Martin of Braga
The even armed Greek cross was a northern sun symbol, found engraved on stones dating from the bronze age (1500 BC) in Scandinavia, and so Pagan from ancient times. Indeed, the power of the cross for Christianity really only showed when they used it to prove to the Pagans of northern Europe that Christians were essentially like them. The opportunism of the missions in the lands of the Celts and Germans is the reason why today, the Christian symbol is a cross and not a fish. Ancient crosses, often with a solar ring, are very common in the north.
The Stony Cross at Kirkdale marked a Pagan site they valued to the extent of not wanting it polluted by Christianity, and the Minister dedicated to pope Gregory has always stood a mile off. In fact, the original church plainly built about the time of the canonization of Pope Gregory soon after his death was soon sacked by the Danes and remained derelict for 300 years, being rebuilt in the tenth century, when the same things were repeated, it seems.
So, there never was a Christian church at Stony Cross, why then is a large field next to the cross called Kirkside, and was so marked in a nineteenth century ordnance survey map? G R Phillips casts doubt on the claim that “kirk” and “church” derive from the Greek “kyriakon”, an adjective not a noun, meaning “of the Lord”. What “of the Lord”? is the obvious question. Why is there no noun to give this perfectly sensible adjective for Christians a subject? The OED cannot justify the explanation from “kyriakon”, but because it has nothing better, it eventually sticks with it. The various Aryan languages have a perfectly good origin for this word, and it is the same origin as that of the Latin “circus”, and our word “circle”. In Celtic, whence it probably comes to us now as kirk and church, it is “ciric” (A Hadrian Allcroft, The Circle and the Cross, 1930). The use of this word to describe Pagan sacred spaces explains why these places were called kirks and remained as kirks after the Christians had built over the Pagan site with the Christian church, which was the same word Latinized according to Catholic pronunciation, but had to be given the non-Pagan meaning that some ingenious Christian scholar invented.
Nearly all ancient churches stand on a mound like a barrow or in a circular enclosure marking out a burial ground, though, often, extension of the church grounds has hidden this fact, old maps show it is true. The sacred mound would be marked out by a boundary wall of wattle about five feet high, forming the roughly circular or oval space. The “ciric” explanation has the advantage of also explaining the churches that never existed as Christian churches. Ludchurch in Macclesfield, Derbyshire, seems to refer to a church dedicated to the Celtic god, Lugh, but has no history that can link it to anything Christian.
All Saints church at Appleton-le-Street in East Yorkshire stands on the site of an ancient temple or an ancient burial ground. It has been used for burials at least back to Roman times. A handful of ancient British churches have obvious signs of being built on a Pagan site. The Norman church of S Mary at Lastingham in Yorkshire is built on a mound that contains a chamber that seems to have been an original Pagan shrine or temple. Another church at Plouaret in Brittany, the Church of the Seven Sleepers, is built on top of a dolmen that is the crypt of the church.
The denigration of northern European gods by Christian missions is evident today in language. Hel was the Norse Goddess of the underworld where she ruled the dead. She was not evil, and her domain was not like the Hell of the Christians, a place of eternal punishment, but just the land of the dead where everyone who was not a god would end up. The missionaries gave the respected goddess, quite new connotations when they converted the Teutons. Similarly, the Old German word for a god was “god”, and because it meant a god it came to mean “good”. But this old word was a neuter word which remains today in German as the word for an idol! The same word but declined as masculine means God!
Celtic Christianity
Important archaeological finds at Hallstadt in Austria, Hochdorf in Bavaria, and La Tene in Switzerland, revealed the civilization of the Celts from 800 BC to 100 BC, respectively, with the Celts of Hochdorf flamboyantly burying a Celtic chief in the middle, about 550 BC. Grave goods suggest Celts believed in an after-life. The first Celts went to Ireland from Spain at about the time of the Hallstadt culture. They spoke Goidelic. From Ireland, these Celts invaded Britain from the west. Later, in the age of the La Tene culture, Celts from Gaul speaking Brythonic drove the Goidelic speaking Celts back to Ireland. That was when the British Isles got the name British, though Ireland was Goidelic speaking. Later the Goidelivc speaking Irish invaders took Gaelic to Scotland.
The pre-Christian Celtic religion was concerned with Nature—that crops should grow, beasts and wives should be fertile, and the universe should remain orderly. No archaeological evidence has shown the Celts made human sacrifices.
The goddess Brigit or Bride fostered the creative and magical arts, and so she was patron of poets, smiths and healers. Her feast was Imbolc (31 January), when spring showed the first signs of emerging from winter. Then she was imagined as a young maiden in contrast with the old hag of winter, and the mature woman of summer and autumn. She plainly was the earth goddess whose yearly aging was denoted by its fruitfulness.
The temple of Bride the Goddess was at Kildare under an oak tree. It was surrounded by a brushwood fence within which no man might go—and the tradition is clear that should a man do do so, he forfeited his life. The temple was known as the House of Fire, and in it a fire burned perpetually on the altar, tended by the goddess’s nine priestesses, the Daughters of Fire. No human breath was allowed to fall on the flames. Bride was regarded as the goddess of fire, of knowledge, of poetry, of motherhood, and these realms make it clear that her origin was very ancient indeed.Guy Ragland Phillips, The Unpolluted God
The saint who succeeded the goddess had the same powers and traditions except that priestesses became nuns. Even the sacred flame continued to burn until 1220 AD, when it was officially extinguished. The Church created S Bride of Kildare with her feast day on 1 February. In the Irish Church she became a sort of Irish Virgin Mary—Mary of the Gaels—presented as Christ’s godmother, and the woman who helped Mary find her lost son when he went absent among the temple priesthood.
Christianity was a Roman religio licita—permitted belief—from 260 AD, and by 314 AD, it was widespread even in Britain, particularly in cities. Annianus, a supplicant of the goddess Sulis Minerva at Bath, wrote on a small piece of lead, as was the custom, a request that the goddess help return some silver coins someone had stolen from him. The offering spoke of the thief “seu gentilis seu cristianus” (whether Pagan or Christian). The writer of this message intended for Sulis sounds like a Christian in using the Christian word for a non-Christian, “gentile”, the Jewish word for a non-Jew—the Jewish roots of Christianity were still obvious—but the plea implies both that the Christians and Pagans were equally common, and that Christians were not specially noted for being good.
Tertullian, about 203 AD, wrote of certain “districts of the Britons, unreached by the Romans, but subdued to Christ”. Strictly he could have meant only Wales or Scotland, but he might have counted the Irish as Britons. Saint Alban was the first British Martyr. In the reign of one of Septimus Severus (c 209 AD), Decius (c 254 AD) or Diocletian (c 305 AD), a Christian priest was persecuted in Verulamium (now St Albans). No one really knows when, but the dates all correspond to some of the few accepted periods of Christian persecution before Christianity triumphed under Constantine. That Christian priests could be openly practising at any of these times shows that Christianity was not generally persecuted at all. The priest was hidden by a Roman soldier called Albanus, and the priest converted him. To allow the priest to escape, the soldier agreed to distract attention by wearing the priest’s cloak, but he was exposed and executed for his trouble. The cloak is central to the story, and curiously is given the name Amphibalus. Moreover, a Christian priest’s white tunic is called an “alb”, and Britain has been known as albion since Roman times. The whole tale therefore looks composed for its purpose.
The Roman commander at York, Constantius Chlorus was made emperor in 292 AD. His wife, Helen, was already a Christian, though not baptised. She plainly influenced her son, Constantine, who succeeded as emperor in 306 AD, though he too was not a baptised Christian. Helen was baptised in 312 AD,. In 313 AD, Constantine made Christianity the religion he, as emperor, favoured, effectively making it the state religion of his emperorship.
The early British church sent Bishops to the Council of Arles in 314 AD—before S Augustine in Canterbury in 597 AD supposedly founded Christianity in Britain. Independent churches existed in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany, and Gaul. There were Celtic Christians in the kingdom of Dal Riata in northwest Scotland, S Columba or Columcille of Iona (521-597 AD) being among them. Some outposts lasted after the Synod of Whitby (664 AD), when Rome was acknowledged as the supreme Christian authority. The Celtic church in Wales finally submitted to Rome in 768 AD. In Scotland, the “Culdees” (Keledei)—clergy and monks who kept to the earlier Celtic ways—appear in legal and ownership documents until the early eleventh century.
S Martin of Tours, an ex-soldier from the Danube, was bishop of Tours from 372 AD. Until S Martin, Christianity had been urban, but he used monasticism to carry it to the countryside. Magnus Maximus (Maxen Wledig) briefly contested the emperorship from 383 until his defeat in 388 AD. His widow and son fled to Wales, in tradition, taking the monastic approach of S Martin with them. A few years later, monasticism was established in Wales. The prefix “Llan” in Welsh place names means an enclosure, and Christians claim it came from the enclosures made by the monasteries created at the time.
The head of these monastic communities need not have been a priest, but he might, on the other hand have been a bishop. The jurisdiction of a Welsh bishop was for centuries defined by his congregation not by any district. Mass was said in Latin not Welsh. Clergy not bound by monastic vows were usually married. S David’s (525-589 AD) father, Sant, was king of Cardigan. His mother was a Nun called Non! Only in 1188 AD did the Welsh churches come under the archbishop of Canterbury. Even then, Giraldus Cambriensis, in the diocese of S David’s did not join until 1203 AD.
The Venerable Bede tells us that pope Gregory replied to a letter from S Augustine of Canterbury asking about sexual matters concerning husband and wife so that he could guide the “uncouth English people”. The pope had said:
When a man’s mind is attracted to these pleasures by lawless desire, he should not regard himself as fitted to join in Christian worship until these heated sesires cool in the mind, and he has ceased to labour under wrongful passions.
Remember, it is married couples he is speaking about. They were to unite sexually only to have children and even then must not enjoy it! Admittedly the biblical Jesus spoke of those who renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom, but it was not an obligation on everyone.
The west of England (Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset) had few signs of Christianity before the sixth century, when evangelic activity spurted. Irish raiders drove emigrants from the west country to Armorica, which they called Brittany. Samson of Dol, with Gildas, a disciple of Illtyd, worked in Cornwall before moving to Brittany. The Christians set themselves up in small communities, later called monsteries, but apparently not communities of celibates. They were mixed sex communities, small hamlets really, and provided the base for evangelising the surrounding countryside.
The Cathach of S Columba, a Latin psalter of about 600 AD, curiously has a feature in common with Coptic manuscripts—the initial letters are decorated with red dots. What is the link between the Egyptian church and the Celtic? Was it simply a manuscript used as an example, or did some Alexandrine Christians somehow evangelize Britain and Ireland? The monastic emphasis of Celtic Christianity might have been inspired from the early desert Anchorites, and they, of course, were simply following the habit of the Essene saints. Both were strongly ascetic.
The Essenes withdrew to the desert before Christianity started. Jesus did the same. The first Christian contemplatives did. A desert is a deserted place, it did not mean just a hot, sandy wilderness. The point of it was to get away from crowds to reach God in solitude. The eastern church had no monastic orders each with its own rule and idiosyncrasies. All monks simply took agreed solemn vows of commitment, and therefter lived in monasteries or retreated to the desert, a monastic tradition they kept from their Essene founders. Thus they had no loyalties to their particular order as well as the church. They just had their vows.
Monastic life was reported in the Church from the second century. Were monasteries necessarily of celibates? The leading Essenes were celibates living a life considered monastic in the modern meaning of it, but village Essenes were not so committed. The Abbots of Dunkald were dynastic for generations. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the solitary monks of Ireland and Scotland came together into groups of thirteen, known as culdees (keledei—companions). Women were not admitted.
The Council of Elvira in Spain (306) tried to enforce clerical celibacy, but failed. The Council of Nicaea in Asia Minor, rejected a proposal that clergy should stop living with their wives. Pope Leo the Great (440-461 AD) forbade Christians to “put away” (abandon) their wives on ordination. But even though they could remain together, there could be no more sex! They had to live as brother and sister. Councils in the east constantly upheld the right of the clergy to marry. Justinian II at the Council of Trullo (692 AD) settled the matter in favour of marriage, and eastern clergy have always had that right, though the bishops were always chosen from among the ranks of the celibate monks. This follows the Essenic practice in that only the top clergy had to be celibate.
