Christianity
Pagans and Christians 4
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
S Columba and Culdees
The Culdees, referred to as the Ceile De in an entry for the year 806 AD in an old Irish annal, were supposed to have been early British Christian monks and saints. Before the arrival of Augustine in 597 AD, they lived in various parts of England, Scotland, and Ireland, being particularly noted around the kingdom of Dal Riata in northwest Scotland, but their practices were so odd, if they were Christians as we understand them, that Bede says they were persecuted by the Catholic clergy. In Ireland, the Culdees wore the white robes associated with Druidism.
Their chief saint was S Columba, or Columcille, of Iona (521-597 AD). S Columba was born in northern Ireland about 521 AD, of Fedlimid, son of Fergus, an aristocrat of a family of kings called the Cenel Conaill, rulers of county Donegal. As a child, Columba was fostered to a priest, and was allegedly taught by the most noted scholars in Ireland, but nothing is sure about his early life. In 561 AD, Columba’s clan were victorious in the battle of Cul Drebene against the southern kings, the Ui Neill. Two years later, Columba left Ireland in exile for Britain, no one knows why. Also recorded but unexplained is that Columba was caught copying from a precious book, and was reprimanded. The Venerable Bede did not care for him, commending him for having distinguished successors—faint praise indeed!—but the editor of Adamnan’s writings, Dr William Reeves, was more blunt, calling him imperious and vindictive.
When, in 563 AD, Columba came to Briton, it was to the Hebrides, arriving at Iona with a convent (coven) of twelve monks (Culdees) and founding a famous monastery there. Iona became a center of scholarship, renowned for its scriptorium. The Book of Kells might have been made on Iona and taken to Ireland about 800 AD to save it from the Vikings, who attacked Iona in 795 AD. Columba’s other foundations besides Iona were on the island of Hinba—which is unknown—and Mag Luinge on the island of Tiree, where Columba sent those who came to him as penitents.
He went on to build 300 churches according to his hagiographies, the best known of which is The Life of Columba, about 690 AD, written by Adamnan, an Abbot of Iona. Other manuscripts mentioning Columba include The Cathach of S Columba, part of a psalter dated around 600 AD, an early example of Irish Latin. The initial letters are sometimes surrounded by red dots, a feature earlier found in Coptic manuscripts. The Coptic Church is Egyptian, so did Egyptian Christians have any direct connexion with the early Celtic saints, who seem to have used them as a monastic model. The connexion might have been Alexandrine, or early Byzantine and eastern Christian sects might have been it. The early Syrian monastic communities, with their strong emphasis on the Anchorite desert hermit tradition, were a likely model for the Celtic monastic saints. Certainly they shared a severely ascetic lifestyle, just as the Essene saints had done, but other practices were peculiar.
They dwelt in colleges, practising useful crafts and music, but, unlike Essene saints, they married, and their abbots usually held office by hereditary right, so that in Armagh fifteen generations held the episcopate successively. Two islands are situated in the bog of Monincha. One of these was a monastery for men, their wives occupying the neighbouring women’s island. Giraldus Cambrensis, writing of this community in the twelfth century, called it “The church of the old religion”, and described its inhabitants as “demons”. This same Giraldus called it a disgrace to Wales that sons should follow their fathers in the priestly office, so it happened in Wales too. Only in places where Christianity was influenced by Druidism did hereditary priestly descent in the Christian Church occur. In Brittany, it prevailed until it was abolished by Hildebert, Archbishop of Tours, in 1127.
They celebrated Easter at a different period from the Roman hierarchy, holding it a month before the Roman festival. They shaved their heads in a curious tonsure, from their foreheads backward in the form of a crescent. They baptized infants by immersion, without the consecrated chrism, were opposed to the doctrine of the real presence, and denied the worship of saints and angels. They condemned the mass, paid no respect to holy relics, and refused to offer up prayers for the dead. Many early Christian writers condemned their primitive worship and the unorthodoxy of their ecclesiastical management. Bede disdainfully says of them that they would “as soon communicate with pagans as with Saxons”, implying he thought they were pagans, or only one step removed from them.
The second Council of Chalons denounced them as heretics in 813 AD. In England, they flourished at Ripon and York in the time of Bede, and despite the fifth canon of the Council of Ceal Hythe in 816 which decreed they were not to act as priests in England, they were still worshipping at the Church of S Peter in York as late as 936—AD. And the registry of the Priory of S Andrews in Fife records that Culdees “continued to worship in a certain corner of the church after their own manner, nor could this evil be removed till the time of Alexander of blessed memory, in 1124”, so that Culdees and Catholic priests performed their services in the same church for nearly three hundred years! Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury (1010-1089 AD) was horrified on hearing that they did not pray to saints, dedicate churches to the Virgin, nor use the Roman service, and even S Bernard, in his Life of Malachy, Archbishop of Armagh, states that up to the year 1130 there was none worthy of being called a Christian monk in the whole of Ireland. He stigmatized the Irish Culdees as:
Beasts, absolute barbarians, a stubborn, stiff-necked, and ungovernable generation and abominable, Christian in name, but in reality pagan.
Keledei pops up often as a word in thirteenth century writing. As late as 1595 AD, friars in Sligo were still called Ceile-n-De, and Archbishop Ussher (1581-1656 AD) admitted the Northern Irish “continued in their old tradition in spite of various Papal bulls”.
A popular Easter pilgrimage in the Welsh Principality before the Reformation was to the image of Darvell Gadarn at S Asaph. By making an offering of an animal such as a horse or an ox to the idol, or donating money to its “friar”, their reward was to be released from hell if they were damned! This is known from a letter in 1538 to Richard Cromwell, secretary to Henry VIII, architect of the dissolution of the monasteries. The idol and its “friar” were taken the same year to Smithfield in London and burnt!
Darvell looks like a corrupt spelling of devil, and ancient Pagan gods were always called devils by Christians. One such god in Wales was Hu Gadarn, possibly Esus, Lactantius’s Heus and Lucan’s Gallic Hesus—the Welsh Hu is pronounced He—and presumably the god represented by this idol. Esus was associated with a tree, and the idol was evidently combustible, so was probably a post or carved tree of some kind. Many of Hu’s characteristics were inherited by king Arthur, perhaps because Arthur was a later name of the god, or Arthur as a hero was considered the old god incarnated and given his attributes, a common process, viz Brigantia becoming S Bridget. Hu was a solar god, and they are commonly associated with horses and oxen. Oxen are featured in a legend of Hu using them to haul the Avanc, a sort of monstrous beaver out of a lake one sunrise. So, Hu was thought to have drawn souls from Annwn, the Welsh underworld. As the “friar” was incinerated with the idol, he was plainly considered dangerously heretical. It all seems to be a hangover from Celtic Paganism, perhaps preserved so late as a tradition of the Celtic church.
The Assembly of the Church of Scotland only 350 years ago testifies to the need to put down heresy, possibly Druidism preserved by custom from the time of the Celtic church. The records of the Presbytery of Dingwall from 1649 to 1678 show that bulls were sacrificed in the parish of Gairloch in Ross Shire, and libations of milk poured on the hillsides. A garlaoch is an elf. Entries in the Kirk Session Register Book of the parish of Slains show that people were summoned for practising rites connected with the hallow fires of Beltane, Yule, Halloween and Midsummer on pieces of land that had been set aside for centuries to lie fallow dedicated to the “Good People”, considered to be elves. Elves to Christians were whatever they did not approve of, here apparently ancient gods, probably Druidic. It is likely, though, that an old tradition was put under scrutiny by being associated with Cathar refugees.
Christian Human Sacrifice
The island of Hy (Iona) was given to Columba by Conall, son of Comgall, the king of the Scottish principality, Dal Riata. Hy was already sacred to Pagans, being called Inis Druineach, “the island of the Druids”. Jamieson (History of the Culdees) says that, when Columba came to Iona, he was opposed by king Brude’s Druid, Broichan, whom he subsequently healed using a magic white pebble. Odonellus relates that, when the Saint landed in the island, he was met by a party of Druids disguised as monks, claiming they were there like him to preach the gospel. The story is that he discovered the imposture, and the Druids fled. Or are these later apologies for the evidence of continued Druidical practices by the Christian monks? In connexion with the church of S Patrick, we read what sounds like the same Christian excuse:
The earliest Christian missionaries found the native religion extinct, and themselves took the name of Culdees from inhabiting the Druids’ empty cells.Rev W G Todd
Culdees appeared in places where Druids had recently lived and practised. Jamieson points out that the time between the Culdees’ and the Druids’ presence in Iona is not long. It suggests the Culdees living on Iona under the rule of Columba were really “Christianized” Druids, mingling their Christian faith with the Druidic practices they were accustomed to. Lewis Spence, the Scottish folklorist, tells us many Druids actually became Christian priests, adding that the bull of pope Gregory I (540-604 AD, pope 590-604 AD) rendered Christian belief easier to accept by the Celts without erasing Druidic traditions. A E Waite concurs, writing that elements of old Druidism merge into Christianity:
There are traces of a time when the priest who said mass at the altar was not only a Druid at heart, but in his heart saw no reason also for the Druid to be priest any less. In the fourth century, there were professors at Bordeaux who had once at least been Druids. S Beuno in his last moments is recorded to have exclaimed: “I see the Trinity and Peter and Paul, and the Druids and the Saints!”.
Later Christians had been thoroughly embarrased by what seems to have been a missionary agreement with the Druids that, as they were actually practising Christianity, they could call themselves Christians. No conversion was simpler. And it had a base in fact. Some Druidical practices were the same as Christian ones, assisting the mingling of beliefs or conversion, if that is what it really was! They wore white vestments, and had a tonsure. They baptized infants. They presided at burials, and had healing skills. Cuchulain said, if Fergus were to become ill, he would not rest until he found a Druid to discover the cause of his illness. Surprisingly, considering the notion that everything they knew was memorized, Druids had holy books, because king Leogaire asked that the books brought by S Patrick be subjected to the ordeal by water, along with the Druid books, to test which was more effective.
Caesar tells us the Druids were not shy of using the sword to settle their disputes. Christians always claimed to be personally pacific, yet we read that the Irish clergy used to attend the many synods they called with weapons, and fought pitched battles between them, killing many. Later Christians were not averse to ordering genocide, as in the Albigensian crusade, but, except for orders of knights like the templars, priests and monks sought to avoid killing people directly. So, here, it sounds as if Druidical habits had transferred to the Christians.
Jamieson (History of the Culdees) writes of legends associated with the monastery of S Columba at Iona. In one story, the saint could not build a church there because a devil kept throwing down the walls as soon as they were built. Only a human sacrifice buried in the foundations solved the problem. Hadrian Allcroft writes that Columba “called for a volunteer human sacrifice to consecrate his new house”. Columba announced to his convent, “it would be well for us that our roots passed into the earth here”. He goes on, in Adamnan’s account:
It is permitted to you that one of you go under the earth of this island to consecrate it.
The monk, Odhran, arose quickly, saying:
If you will accept me, I am ready for that.
The outcome, Adamnan records simply:
Odhran then went to heaven. He [S Columba] founded the church of Hy then.
The Rev Baring Gould writes that Columba consecrated Hy “by the burial of a monk of his own retinue, a sufficiently obvious case of what we should today call human sacrifice”. According to G Higgins (The Celtic Druids), a human body was found under each of the twelve pillars of one of the circular temples of Iona. Reeves notes that “the principal, and now the only cemetary in Hy is called the Railig Orain, after Odhran not Columba.”
An old Christian belief until recently, and perhaps still, was that the Devil had the first person to be laid into a newly consecrated cemetary, irrespective of the consecration ritual. It is a memory of consecration by sacrifice, perpetuated because, even when sacrifice had stopped, people continued to believe it was necessary, and that the first person laid down was the sacrifice. The Christian habit was to call all Pagan gods devils, and the sacrifice would have been in pre-Christian times to a Pagan god—a devil! The sacrifice was, of course, an honour to the victim, however doubtful we might think it. Moslem suicide bombers believe that their sacrifice to the Moslem cause would be rewarded by direct ascent to heaven. The belief is no different from the belief that the monks of S Columba evidently had. S Columba plainly invited volunteers to be sacrificed to consecrate ground as Christian, suggesting that Christians continued human sacrifice in Europe much later than any of them will admit.
Columba died on Iona in 597 AD aged 76. Adamnan’s life of the saint shows Columba knew of Druidic practice and magic. The question over Columba is the extent to which he, and perhaps the Celtic Church was influenced by Pagan religions—indeed, the extent to which primitive Christianioty was Pagan. At Beltane, the Scots sang hymns to S Columba, as guardian of their cattle, along with The Trinity! Columba went back to Ireland several times to speak with religious leaders and kings. He appears in a conference of kings, in 575 AD, which Aed mac Ainmirech, later king of Tara, and Aedan mac Gabrain, king of Dal Riata, attended. Here Columba famously defended the bards.
In Christian legend, he countered the Druids with their own type of magic. Canon MacCulloch (The Religion of the Ancient Celts) observes that Christian writers recorded how Christian saints miraculously overcame the Druids with their own weapons. Christian belief never stopped Christians from believing in black magic—it was any magic opposed to their own, and so attributed to the devil—but Christian magic was divinely superior. When Druids raised snowstorms and darkness, or brought down fire from heaven, S Patrick turned the occult phenomena against them. S Columba and others did the same. Here in the Christian annals were not moral victories but magical ones. The lives of Celtic saints are full of miracles which are simply copies of Druidic witchcraft as Canon MacCulloch relates. In saying “Christ is my Druid”, S Columba regards Christ as a Druid. MacCulloch concludes:
The substratum of primitive belief survives all changes of creed, and the folk impartially attributed magical powers to pagan Druid, Celtic saints, old crones and witches, and Presbyterian ministers.
The Scots thought ministers of the kirk were levitated, shone with celestial light, were clairvoyant, could bring about dire results by cursing the ungodly, prophesied, used trance utterances, and exercised gifts of healing. A bit like modern US Christians, really, eh?
The Synod of Whitby convened in 664 AD was to settle the differences between the Northumbrian (Celtic) church and Rome. The differences cited seem trivial—the date of Easter and the form of the monk’s tonsure being mentioned explicitly, “and other matters”. It seems that the real purposes of the convention were not explictly mentioned but among them was Columba’a method of consecration. Allcroft tells us of another earlier convention in 603 AD, forgotten because it failed to reach agreement, but which had the tonsure on the agenda and the Celtic Church’s interest in cemetaries and how they were consecrated. The Celtic tonsure was that of the Druids, and the suspicion remains that the consecration of burial grounds was an issue because it too was Pagan, needing a willing victim for the consecration, just as sacrificial animals had to be willing. The importance of burial was that that was what consecrated a space. Christian mumbo-jumbo could not equal an actual dead body.
In 597 AD, king Oswald of Northumbria wanted to convert to Christianity. Aidan went from Iona to effect the process, setting up at Lindisfarne, another Holy Island, with his convent of 12 monks. Bede makes no observations on the procedures used by Aidan, though churches dedicated to S Oswald, the canonized king, are not uncommon on the north eastern side of Britain, often on old Pagan sites, so it must have been done repeatedly and with the utmost of gravity.
The Celtic Church had a significant presence in Briton. There was a Celtic church at Tilbury on the Thames estuary, a seagull soar from Kent where the Roman Church had its British base at Canterbury. Oswald’s son, Ethelwald, offered Cedd, a Northumbrian monk, land for a monastery “among some high and remote hills, more suitable, according to Bede, for the dens of robbers and haunts of wild beasts than for human habitation”. Now, considering the bleak situation of Iona or even that of Lindisfarne on the North Sea, to describe the gentle Vale of Pickering in that way is “extravagant”, as Phillips puts it, to say the least. Bede explains that Cedd’s purpose was that “the fruits of good works might spring up where formerly lived only wild beasts or men who lived like wild beasts”. Bede is clear that the site was in firmly Pagan country, “wild beasts” being another Christian slander for Pagans. Bede describes an elaborate and tedious consecration ritual by Cedd and his fellow monk Cynebil consisting of prayers, abstinence and fasting for the whole of Lent.
The contrast with previous skimpy or absent descriptions of consecrations suggest that Bede meant to emphasise the piety of a new practice compared with the indescribable one of S Colomba. Having founded Laestingaeu (Lastingham), Cedd went on to many great things, returning as an old man with thirty monks all of whom died… of the plague! Were these another batch of martyrs necessary because the monks discovered a boy had been buried unbaptised thus rendering the site again Pagan! That is as may be, but, given that some monks did volunteer for martyrdom, how did they die? A few centuries later the Cathar Perfects were ready to lose their lives either by jumping or being cast into fires, or by voluntary starvation, like modern Jains. Both were seen as holy ways to die, and Buddhist monks did the same in past times. Were these monks of the Celtic Church doing it arounf 600 AD, only to have it officially stopped in 664 AD, at Whitby?
King Henry II (1154-1189 AD) was seeking from pope Hadrian, the only English pontiff, the lordship of Ireland. A papal bull, Laudabiliter, granted it—though it is said to have been forged—on the grounds, among others, of bringing the Irish into the Christian Church! Dermot macMurrough, king of Leinster invited Henry to help him seize power over the Irish kings. Henry promptly agreed, but had no intention of handing the kingdoms to Dermot. In 1171, the Irish bishops were made to conform with Roman practices.
S John is said to have been the inspiration of the Celtic Church, S Peter that of Rome. S John, was the beloved disciple, and, the Celts believed, held as the central message of Christianity that God is love. That “God is a love-affair” (Rev Anthony Duncan, apparently meaning the doctrine of the Trinity) seems to have been the idea of the primitive gnostic Christians that gave rise to Catharism.
The round towers of Ireland are associated by tradition with the Culdees, but they are not mentioned in Irish hagiography. Nor are they Christian, because only three out of sixty three have any Christian symbols in or on them, and even those three are considered as modern additions.
The Wild Hunt
Jeffrey Richards, cited by G R Phillips, writes that, in the time of Gregory the Great (590-604), Christian pastors were annoyed by the celebrations of the New Year, “when there was immoderate feasting and drinking, lubricious singing and dancing, the exchange of gifts and fertility rituals in which men dressed as women or as animals in skins and beast-heads”. The pseudo Theodorion Penitential shows that they disguised themselves with the head and skins of the animal. It was described as devilry, and invited a three year penance! S Augustine gave a sermon about the New Year traditions in which he warned:
…be careful not to let yourselves be merged in the crowd of Gentiles (Pagans) by copying their principles and their practices. They give presents, do you give alms. They are all captivated by the carols of debauchery, see that you are entranced by the music of the scriptures. They run to the theatres, do you run to the churches. They yield themselves to intemperance, it is your part to fast and be abstemious. If you cannot fast today, at least dine soberly.
At the Synod of Auxerre, towards the close of the sixth century, Christians were forbidden to dress themselves up as the Pagans do as an old woman, a cow or a stag. The fact is that many people just ignored the Christian proscriptions. Some of the Christian authorities—we noted Gregory the Great above, but also S Augustine and Gregory Thaumaturgos—recommended absorbing the Pagan festivals by giving them a Christian raison d’etre. The contradiction was that these were joyous and even boisterous festivals, but Christians wanted solemn and soulful piety. Christians took to holding night long vigils—the ancient practice that led to Greek matrons claiming their sons were sons of a god!—at the chapel of some saint on the night before big festivals. Though intended to be solemn, they led to many scandals—and Christian children named after the saint! Even so, the Church accepted them as suitably devotional.
Some of the clergy were particularly outraged when the peasants made use of the churches in their celebrations. Elsewhere, as at Inverkeithing, Fife, north of the Forth Bridge in Scotland in 1282 (Chronicle of Lanercost 2:8), John, the vicar, led the festivities in Easter week “according to the rites of Priapus” by gathering the maidens of the town to sing and dance around a phallic pole. Cited before his bishop, he pleaded “the common usage of the country”, and was allowed to retain his benefice with no recorded reprimand. Indeed, as the church was either the ancient temple put to re-use or was built on the site of the Pagan temple that stood there for time immemorial before the Christians, and was represented by the bishops as the Christian version of it, the peasants naturally thought it served the same function. Popes like Gregory were happy that it did so long as the festivities were given a suitably Christian meaning.
But Burchard of Worms says that, in the confessional, the priestly confessors were to ask whether the Catholic believer had accompanied Diana, the goddess of the heathen, in a nocturnal ride with countless women and animals, placing themselves at the goddess’s service and obeying her commands—or even believed any of this to be true. Into the fourteenth century, the Pagan goddess, Diana, was a still force to be opposed by the Church after a millennium of Christianity. Our word for a bad dream—nightmare—reflects these nocturnal events, though it also means an incubus, so the night ride could have been something different.
A Norman monk reported that one evening on New Year’s Day around 1100 AD, a priest visiting a dying man at the extremities of his parish heard a great din. Then appeared a large procession of people carrying animals and clothing across their shoulders like a band of robbers returning from plunder. But they were lamenting not rejoicing, and the priest recognised some of the faces as those of his dead parishioners. The priest concluded that they were the spirits of the dead, but he had been obliged to stand at bay by a very material horseman who refused him permission to approach. Was it an heretical or Pagan New Year procession?
At New Year, northern Pagans indulged in “guising”, dressing up wearing the skins and horns of animals. It seems a reasonable guess that the animals the priest referred to were the clothing and the account has been garbled. The lamenting and faces of the dead sound like Christian additions to make their flocks fearful of such rituals. It was about this time that guising was banned by the Church.
Walter Map, a friend of Thomas Becket, and an envoy to France wrote that in Brittany people had seen at night hordes of soldiers and animals directed by horsemen. They passed by continuously and in total silence. They were not spirits because the bolder Bretons had grabbed some of the animals when they had the chance, and some had been murdered for their audacity. Despite this evidence that the assembly were live enough, Map reports that dead faces were also seen among them.
A similar procession had been reported in the Welsh Marches at midday during the first year of the reign of Henry II. The whole procession apparently just disappeared. S Valerius of Galicia reported coming across, in the forest in the dead of the night, a secret ceremony of people dressed as horned animals chanting and swaying, the whole supervised by the local priest.
Such processions were called the Family of Herlechinus or the Hosts of Herlething, a corruption, it is thought, of the Dutch, Hellekin, a diminutive form of Hel, Goddess of the Dead, meaning Little Hel. In England, where the name was not understood it was further altered to Herodias, the wife of Antipas who had John the baptist beheaded.
The twelfth century Abbot of Cluny tells a ghost story about a knight who died in France. The local priest passing his castle some time later hears the clamour of arms. Suddenly the ghost of the knight appears and tells the priest about his woes, being trapped on earth until injustice was righted. The priest promised him he would seek justice and the knight disappeared satisfied. The story begins like a familiar story of the Hosts of Herlething, but becomes a sweet ghost story about an unhappy spirit settled by a conscienscious priest. Christianisation.
Ellebaud, chamberlain of the Bishop of Arras, was riding on horseback to Arras, preceded at some distance by his servant on the lookout for brigands. The servant pulled sharply round and rode helter-skelter to his master saying he had heard the Family of Herlechinus, typically sounding like an army, in a coppice ahead. He declared that the dead souls had said the Archbishop would soon join them. He died shortly afterwards.
In 1215, with the Fourth Lateran Council, the Church tightened its grip on its fearful flock. Compulsory annual confessions were introduced and regular attendance at mass made an obligation. In theology it introduced the idea of Purgatory as a place for the purification of souls before they could enter heaven. It was plainly a device to explain the popular belief in ghosts, the Wild Hunt and so on. A locus purgatorius had been considered before by clerics of a philosophic bent, as the equivalent of the Hades of classical religion or Sheol of the old Jewish religion—a way of accommodating the older ideas but it never caught on. In the thirteenth century, the clergy saw it as a way of incorporating the cult of the dead into Christianity. The purification necessary to enter heaven explained the lingering on earth of restless souls liable to haunt the living, and it required the living to play their part in helping to release tormented souls.
In 1180 AD, Herbert of Clauvaux told how a priest left his church to be met outside by a procession of the dead, men and women, on foot and on horseback and young and old. Not only did the priest recognise some of the dead faces but he actually spoke to one of the dead men he had formerly known! He confessed that the shades of dead sinners had to wander the world until they confessed. A punishment of eternal restlessness on this earth is not a Christian form of judgement—burning in Hell was the preferred Christian punisment. What is it all about? Are these clergymen using the word dead metaphorically like the Essenes, meaning eternally dead, in other words, damned. They would be damned then because they were Pagans and indulging in Pagan processions. It follows that Pagan processions were processions of the dead because they were damned but they were not dead.
The Wild Hunt is reported in many parts of western Europe and as far south as Italy, but its linking by such as Map with Wales and Brittany hints at a Celtic, or at least a northern, origin. Most parts of Western Europe have been influenced by Celtic culture. The way the stories are related betrays an oral tradition and they seem not to be corruptions of Christian traditions or myths. The church was always ready to condemn them and they never seem to draw any scriptural inferences from them as if they were concerned not to mix these particular customs with Christianity. Plainly they were alien to the Catholic Church and indeed, the clergy, while tightening its grip on the people seemed to be getting more aloof from them. They called the people the “vulgus” and eventually worked themselves up so much about these popular beliefs, they again turned to the label of heresy.
Many of the spiritually inclined laity had seen enough of the Church and preferred wandering preachers who formed lay brotherhoods around themselves. Some rejected the Church’s doctrines on the sacraments. The Arras heretics of 1025 AD and the Petrobusians rejected marriage, penance, baptism, the Eucharist, church burial and prayers for the dead. The church marked important dates in a lifetime with rites of passage, baptism, confirmation, marriage and extreme unction, but the earlier Pagan ones remained popular for a long time. Established traditions for these important occasions are hard to break. Today in a secular society in which 19 people out of twenty are not interested in attending church, most people still like to have their children baptised and to get married in church.
