Christianity
Pagans and Christians from the Norman Conquest
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
The Normans
In England under the Saxons, despite the prominence of some Saxon kings and churchmen, Christianity had barely scratched the surface. The sacred groves of the Druids remained, and many remained sacred. Glastonbury Tor had on it a sacred grove until the Christians chopped it down and built S Michael’s church, only the tower of which remains. King Edgar (943-975 AD) had to order his priests to promote Christianity. Some must have felt their calling was more general:
We enjoin that every priest zealously promote Christianity, and totally extinguish all heathenism, and forbid well worshippings and necromancies, and divinations, and enchantments and man worshippings, and the vain practices which are carried on with various spells, and tree worshippings and stone worshippings, and that devil’s craft whereby children are drawn through the earth, and the vain practices which are carried on at the night of the year.
Then, in the time of the Danish king of England, Cnut (995-1035 AD), the king had to defend Christianity with a decree that showed what the people were still worshipping:
We earnestly forbid every heathenism—heathenism is that man worships idols, that is, they worship heathen gods, and the sun or the moon, fire or rivers, water springs or stones or forest trees of any kind, or love witchcraft or encourage death dealing in any wise.
Cnut’s Saxon subjects sounded much like the description Herodotus gives of the Persians. William Bonser, cited by Phillips, writes:
There is little doubt that there has been a continuous though unrecorded sequence of magical practices from the earliest Indo-European stratum, through the Germans to modern times.
Bonser seems to have pointedly chosen his word “magical” hinting at the magi! The Danes had sacked many Saxon churches, and they had never been rebuilt, such was the indifference of the Saxons to the religion Augustine told them to believe. William the Conqueror promised the pope the reformation of the English church for his help and approval in invading the country. Among the theses of Guy R Phillips is that the Normans reformed the church by building churches on the site of Pagan sacred enclosures, but did not, as Christians like to imagine, make them exclusive at all! The Normans were still sufficiently Pagan themselves not to sweat at the idea of building a church as a communal facility, dedicated to Christian saints, yes, but accessible to the Pagans for whom some cult objects were deliberately provided. They built churches with a door for the saints and a door for the devils, and decorated the chancel and tympanums with images that made the Pagans feel comfortable.
Willam the Conqueror is also called William the Bastard, and his father was called Robert the Devil, where Devil, as ever, signified not Christian—a Pagan or a heretic. Margaret Murray thought the accidental shooting of William Rufus in the New Forest was no accident, but the ancient ritual murder of the king—a sacrifice!
Rollo and his northmen founded the Duchy of Normandy in 911 AD. These Vikings must have worshipped teutonic gods. The Normans then used Normandy as a base for excursions further south ad into the Mediterranean sea.. In 1046 AD, they took Italy, from the fading power of Byzantium, led by Robert Guiscard, and in 1060 AD they captured Sicily from the Arabs.
In 1070 AD, William the Conquerer made archbishop of Canterbury an Italian, Lanfranc, born in Pavia in Lombardy in 1005 AD. Working together for the next fifteen years, they reformed the church in England. Italy seems like a sensible place to get a bishop, and doubtless it was, but it was not as burningly Christian as Christians, particularly Catholics would like to think. Italy at the time of Gregory the Great was still essentially Pagan. Jeffrey Richards wrote that “the groves and pools and mountain tops… magicians and soothsayers who prophesied and healed and exorcised according to arcane law and unchiristian ritual flourished”. Over a millennium later in the nineteenth century, C G Leland (Gypsy Sorcery) declared that “there was in the country of Tuscany ten times as much heathenism as Christianity”. So, Lanfranc around 1050 AD, though a Christian, had grown up in a markedly Pagan society, a society that was quite chaotic and did not unite for hundreds more years, part of which had been ruled from Byzantium, and most of which was subject to influences from its own Pagan roots, and heresies from the east beyond the Adriatic. Among them already by this time there were the Bogomiles and the Cathars.
The north door of Christian churches, a feature of Norman ones, is commonly called the Devil’s door, and is often blocked off. The north, sunless, side of churches was thought of as evil, and was reserved for the burial of murderers and suicides. Christians invented the myth that the Devil’s door ws there for him to leave by, but then blocking them off does not seem sensible! It is hardly a convincing explanation, especially as some Norman churches only had a Devil’s door! Bearing in mind that Pagan gods and believers in Paganism were called Devils by the Christians, the Devil’s door must have been the door that Pagans used to enter the church, a communal temple, apparently, as far as the Normans were concerned. Really there is nothing too surprising about it, considering that Christianity was a proselytising religion intent on converting everyone. What better place to get them for conversion than in the church?
The church of Saintbury in Gloucestershire, dedicated to S Nicholas, is full of Pagan symbols, and has one door only, the Devil’s door. Over it, almost hidden—when Phillips described it in the 1980s—by a porch that has been added, is a carving of a devilish figure, a horned god. Phillips said it looked like the Dorset Oozer. The church tower is not set centrally but is over the south transept, and below it is a stone altar of octagonal shape. What seems to have been the original stone altar is set in the floor of the north transept with a wooden altar standing on it. Stone altars were called “mensae”, “tables”, but the Puritans ordered all stone “mensae” to be destroyed during the Commonwealth. It is why some of them are now set in the floor as flagstones, and others are in crypts.
In the morals of sexuality, the Christian were not willing to compromise openly. The church blindly carried over, with total lack of understanding, the Essenic scruples about chastity and celibacy propagated by S Paul. In ritual, though, Christianity was fairly indifferent other than in the administration of the Eucharist and baptism. And why not? They had taken them all, other than these two, from other religions, anyway. The reminder of the sin of sex was apparently the sheela-na-gig, the eponymous “Witch on the Wall” of Jorgen Anderson’s book, (The Witch on the Wall). There is a sheela-na-gig at S Michael’s and All Angels at Copgrove in the North Riding of Yorkshire, originally in the chancel. It was a Templar church that passed to the Hospitallers, but supposedly in 1216 AD not when the Templars were disbanded by pope Clement V.
The sheela-na-gig is a symbolism apparently brought into Britain and Ireland from south west France, via Brittany and Normandy apparently after the conquest. Sheela-na-gigs are not ancient. The sheela-na-gig at Clonmacnois dated with the church to about 1160 AD is remarkably similar to one at Montbron in Charente, and other French examples probably came from the south. Under the Plantagenets, the English kings like Henry II ruled from Scotland to the Pyrenees, and it is in this period the sheela-na-gigs spread to the British Isles. Were these grotesque erotica meant to be witches? Were they Catholic propaganda aimed at the Cathars, supposed to be licentious? A church at Kilpeck in Herefordshire was built by Oliver de Merlemond, a seneschal of Hugh de Mortimer, after he had returned from pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. The pilgrim’s route led by ship to the Charente-Maritime, then by horse or foot by way of the Basque country to Santiago. Anderson found that in the Basque lands there were about a hundred “exhibitionist motifs” in churches.
Another Templar church with a sheela-na-gig in its chancel is at Halse in Somerset Comment, and this was supposed to have passed from them to the Hospitallers in 1220 AD. Halse church has capitals capped with images of Demiurgos—Satan—but possibly the Green Man. Other capitals have a supposed serpent, perhaps the dragon defeated by S Michael or S George. Perhaps the Baphomet of the Templars was the sun god depicted as the Green Man. Interestingly, one of the capitals of Halse church is said, by Phillips, to have the Qabalistic sign of the Ain Soph, the high spiritual god as conceived by the Qabalists, and perhaps the Cathars as the contrast with the god of material things called Satan. Halse church is dedicated to S James the Less, whose feast day is Beltane, May Day. Nunburnholme in Yorkshire is dedicated to the same saint and has Green Man decorations and a sheela-na-gig.
The Green Man is also Jack Straw, and Jack Straw’s Castle, associated with Hampstead Heath, is a sacrificial bonfire. Bob Stewart (Where is St George?) associates the Green Man as Green George with S George who is S Michael, Apollo, the sun god. Green George is the northern sun god manifest as the growth of shoots in the spring, the fertility power of the sun that returns the land to “leaf and life” when the dragon of winter is defeated at the vernal equinox.
Christian Witches
Some medieval women got away with practising Paganism or perhaps heresy—being witches—within the Church. They were described as mystics or visionaries.
The heyday of Christian mysticism was from the 1100s to the end of the 1300s, when the medieval mystic was seen rather like the Jewish prophet. They saw visions presented to them by God and so they were God’s mothpieces. Among them were several remarkable women who were not afraid to cross words with the clergy who could be seen to be flagrantly neglecting their supposed God-given duties. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179 AD) was the first.
She tells us she saw visions even before she could talk and when she began to speak she told about them. Perhaps that is why she was confined to an abbey at the age of eight. Like mystics in general, she considered that she had been chosen by God. S Birgitta of Sweden (1303-1373 AD) who was made a saint only eighteen years after her death wrote that God had chosen her as his “bride and conduit” to hear and see “heavenly secrets”, sounding remarkably Essene but doubtless taking her cue from Paul the Apostle. Hildegard was not directly called until she was 43. Female mystics seem reluctant to accept their calling and often only do so when they have fallen ill—God’s wrath—whereupon they accept the call and they recover.
Devout cults, like the Essenes, tend to think in Biblical clichés and, with nothing but the Bible to read, medieval monks and nuns were the same. Hildegard’s visions are identifiably taken from the Bible, particularly the apocalyptic works, Daniel and Revelation. Twice she speaks of a huge giant with a golden girdle, an image from Revelation. The visions often occur when the visionary is in ecstasy—a trance—though, by her own testimony, Hildegard never was. Fasting was an important way of inducing visions and medieval nuns often fasted to the limit. The visions were really hallucinations induced by neglect of the body. Hildegard, who fasted as rigorously as any, however, counselled against excess, urging that it was the devil whispering into the ears of ascetics urging them to destroy their bodies through their piety.
John Gerson would not accept stories of visions and revelations by the then modern mystics like Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. He considered them too common, in those times, to be true revelations. He decried what he called ignorant devotion, warning that religious life could make people depressed or even mad. Gerson wrote;
People do not know how to steer a middle course between unbelief and the foolish credulity of which the clergy themselves set an example. They give credence to all revelations and prophecies, which are often but fancies of diseased people or lunatics.
He also knew that severe fasting was the cause of hallucination, and many of these mystics considered it saintly to starve themselves. Sleep deprivation was another aspect of medieval ascetism that led to hallucinations. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380 AD) restricted her sleep to 45 minutes a night. The sleeping conditions were harsh too. They slept on stone floors or on sticks with a stone pillow. If they slept on a mattress they would fill it with holly leaves. Self-flagellation probably had an effect. Beating themselves with holly branches was popular. Wearing girdles studded with sharp studs which dug into their flesh was also popular. Often they abused themselves by making the marks of the stigmata in their flesh. They used meditation too. They chanted some holy phrase to themselves repetitively while breathing rhytmically.
Though some abbots and bishops kept nuns as a private seroglio, we can take it for granted that these nuns were sexually deprived, though some had lived an ordinary life before their call and had left husband and children to follow it. They must have felt a great sense of loss, socially. The Pythia of the Delphic Oracle used drugs to induce a trance but there is no certain evidence that any medieval sibyls did. Hildegard, however, wrote a treatise on the use of herbs and must have known of hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms. Everyone, however, depended on beer or wine to drink because the water was often diseased. With their self-inflicted corporal neglect, these women probably had a low tolerance to alcohol and their visions might have been alcoholic.
Because of the dangers of unorthodoxy, the sibyls had a priest as a guide and amanuensis, their Latin not being up to the standard of the men because of the restrictions on their education. Hildegard of Bingen sought official approval to publish her visions but the clergymen were all too busy watching their tails in case they were accused of unorthodoxy. None would venture an individual opinion about her visions. Only when an important synod was held at Trier did the collective of Cardinals and Archbishops, with the approval of the Pope, consider it safe to sanction Hildegard’s dreams.
Pope Innocent III, in the early 1200s, forbade lay preaching. Women were therefore unable to preach since they were not allowed into the priesthood. In fact this merely confirmed earlier papal decisions declaring that women were forbidden to give instruction, however learned they might have been. A major factor in the Cathar heresy was that Cathar women retained the right to give instruction, yet in her apostolic journey to Cologne, Hildegard of Bingen made alarmist declarations against “these people”, the Cathars. They “befouled the whole earth”, gave themselves over to “drunkenness and debauchery” and would “totally destroy the Church” because “the devil dwelt among them”. The Catholics destroyed them, yet the most likely explanation of them is that they were a primitive dualistic solar Christianity, with many Pagan attributes, ignored by the State religion until it became too numerous in the twelfth century.
The times were decadent enough in the Roman church, even if not elsewhere and Hildegard also accused the clergy themselves of “sins peculiar to their station”—lewdness, fornication covetousness and simony. She was worldly enough, even as an abbess, because she recieved many visitors, corresponded extensively and undertook several apostolic journeys. She even castigated the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, though he doesn’t seem to have taken any notice.
Perhaps her attacks on the Cathars were to protect herself for she was able to do many uncatholic things, though she often had to couch her recommendations in abstruse language. She obviously did not want to outrage the clergymen but the real purpose was perhaps to leave the real answer to the intuition of the reader. This is a standard magic technique, still used today by sensible clairvoyants. In seeking to interpret an opaque answer, the questioner has to solve the problem themselves. Magic is mainly the use of psychological techniques to satisfy problems. Other times, she seems more open. An incantation was the cure she gives for a girl with the flux—to be used in God’s name, of course, but otherwise requiring no moral effort on the girl’s part, as Christianity normally demanded for God’s attention in these matters. Often she was both obscure and quite open, offering an obscure parabolic answer followed by a simpler explanation.
At a Disadvantage
The Pagan religions and the heresies were always at a disadvantage. They were never centralised and could not fight back adequately against a Catholic Church strongly centralised despite its regional variations and arguments over practice and doctrine. The very polytheism of Paganism left it open to one-sided attack by Christianity. Pagans were ready to accept the Christian god as one of their Pantheon. They were always respectful to gods in case they got angry. The Christians however were not ready to accept the gods that were already there.
Liberals have the same weakness today. Freedom of speech is all right as long as everyone accepts it, but should the liberal let those speak who want to suppress free speech? Plurality depends on its general acceptance and as soon as some group is unwilling to accept it, then plurality is endangered. If Paganism had had a rule which decried any god as a demon that would not accept the gods of the pantheon, perhaps Christianity could not have succeeded. Free speech should only be the privilege of those who accept it.
Once Christianity became the state religion, it was in a position to steamroller its Pagan and heretical rivals, but even a steamroller does not crush the hardcore to nothing—just to finer particles. The official adoption of Catholic Christianity was not its final victory. Like the African slaves, many Europeans did not accept it, and many of those who did, did so only because Christianity took the important parts of their own beliefs into its body.
The intolerance of Christianity eventually drove the Pagan religions and then the heretical ones underground. For a long time after the Christian victory, and necessarily mainly passively, Pagan religions resisted the steamroller might of the multiform but centralised Church. But, they were harassed and hounded until they spallated into mere atoms of the old beliefs with no structural content—superstitions. So, despite its best efforts, the medieval church could not suppress Pagan thoughts absolutely.
The new religion took over a millennium to enter the hearts of the people, and then it was only done by inhuman tortures and by the Church accepting in Christianised form Pagan customs within the religion or tolerating Paganism outside it as folk-lore and superstition. After all, what more than magic is consuming a blessed wafer and what is its purpose other than stave off misfortune, even if the misfortune is putatively after death? Even in the midst of the Dark Ages, the Church found it impossible to stop people thinking and even practising in an enfeebled way, the Paganism it had aimed to destroy.
Though Pagan wisdom and practices were marginalised and made socially damaging because people could be severely punished for them, some survived throughout the medieval millennium. Only latterly have they more or less vanished as old wives’ tales or foolish superstitions, killed, not by the Church but by science and scientific method. A few even still survive and even thrive despite the Church and science. Soothsaying is banned in the Old Testament and the casting of horoscopes was banned by the Church in 1310 AD yet today a Christian US president with a finger on the nuclear button decided world wide policy based on the advice of astrologers! Reagan, before Bush, was the favourite of the Evangelical Right.
In truth, the Middle Ages were largely Pagan even though Christianity officially dominated. Aspects of Paganism which the Church rejected were categorised as manifestations of evil. Old gods and goddesses became demons, incubi and succubi. Those who continued to revere them, and many who did not, were called heretics and witches. Anyone who met in groups outside church were covens, anyone who made medicines out of roots and berries were sorcerers, witches or warlocks. The Old Testament states that witches should be killed. Before long the Church was saving us all from the devil by burning old women who talked to their cats. So much for the good Lord and the guidance of the Holy Ghost.
Some modern witches say the Old Gods never died altogether and they continue the Pagan legacy. If there is any truth in this—that Pagan ideas have survived underground and unloved by officialdom for 1700 years—they must have had some merit. Curiously, though, the witch hunts were Christians hunting primitive Christians, rather than Pagans, although the primitive form of Christianity believed by the heretics was Pagan enough, in that it was much closer to the original solar beliefs of the Jews and Gnostics than the form that evolved under state patronage.
Reference
- L J R Milis (Ed), The Pagan Middle Ages, Boydell, Suffolk, 1998
- Guy Ragland Phillips, The Unpolluted God, Northern Lights, Pocklington, 1987
From John Harding
I was wondering where you came across the reference to a Sheela na gig at Halse Church? I recently visited it hoping to take some pictures of the figure but could find nothing that even vaguely resembled a sheela (or I totally missed it). I had a fairly long conversation with two of the parishoners who while intrested could think of nothing that could be a sheela na gig.
The source of this is given on the page:
Guy Ragland Phillips, The Unpolluted God, Northern Lights, Pocklington, 1987
Phillips says, if I remember correctly, something to the effect that often these carvings are hidden deliberately by an incumbent vicar. They put some item of furniture in the way, or even build something over them. Unfortunately, I am accumulating too many books, many of which I have not read, and so got rid of the book by Phillips to a charity shop. I think it can be had on the internet, though, from specialist booksellers. Anyway, G R Phillips is the answer to your question. Phillips is dead, so we cannot ask him! If you are looking for these things and find anything interesting, or are keeping a website on them, then let me know.
Ah thanks for that missed the reference on the page, sorry. I do indeed run a website on sheelas http://www.sheelanagig.org and I am currently doing research for a book on exhibitionist figures, hence my interest in Halse. I found three green men in the church (capital, round modern looking carving and a roof boss in the chancel.) I also run a mailing list to do with exhibitionist figures… Both the website and mailing list tend more towards academic than esoteric.
I looked at your website and it is interesting and impressive. The sheelas are mysterious things. Incidentally I changed the spelling on the page of mine you saw from the Australian girl’s name to the one with double “ee” that you use, though I don’t suppose it matters much since it is an attempt to represent Gaelic in English. Despite my Irish ancestry, my knowledge of Celtic languages is zero, but I always supposed that the “shee” bit of “sheela” was the same as the “shee” in “banshee”, I gather Gaelic “sidhe”. So Banshee is the fairy (reading “sidhe” as “fairy”, though really they were the people who lived in the barrows, and therefore I suppose, originally the dead) woman (Gaelic, “bean”).
I speculate on my pages that the concept of the mythical fairy folk was mingled with the real people who escaped the heretical crusades and the inquisition, the Bogomiles (Dualists, Manichæans). These people escaped the oppression by fleeing elsewhere, and laid low in the hills and forests to practice their form of Christianity that was a death sentence if found out. Some called them witches. They were blackened by the church with all sorts of immoralities, including sexual promiscuity, something they were not, at least initially. Is the “Witch on the Wall” one of these heretics in the Catholic image of them shown as a warning, or even to trick the Devil? I notice, it is not an idea you considered, unless I missed it, but perhaps it is not well substantiated by evidence. However, G R Phillips seemed to think that the Basque country had over 100 churches with these exhibitionist grotesques in them, and this is close to the fount of Catharism in western Europe. The Plantagenets were also a link between Britain and that part of France.
I suppose there is no doubt that the word is a transcription of Gaelic and not some other language. Bulgarian?
Anyway, I’ll put a link to your website on that page for readers who are interested in the sheela-na-gigs.
Ah the name… my initial reaction is dont go there its a complete red herring :o). Its only been in use for about 100 and bit years (as a generic name) and its completely arbitrary. It was a local name for the Kiltinane (I think) figure and ended up being applied to all the figures. The name the Idol is the oldest recorded one. There was some discussion about sidhe meaning fairy on an Irish language list where they said it was a fairly modern usage along with gee as a slang word for a womans sex. Just my opinion but like I said its a red herring. Thanks for the link btw
It seems as if you are right about the Irish name. You do not mention though the route of the image into the British Isles being from the Spanish Marches, and the 100 churches with “Sheelas” or other erotic grotesque figures in the Basque country. A warning against lust no doubt, but was the lustful woman meant to be a heretic, so that it was a warning against heresy too? Perhaps we can never know unless there is some documentation to that effect somewhere, or unless the local name for these figures in SW France is more traditional and tells us something along those lines. Is the “Witch on the Wall” Andersen’s coinage?
I’ve tried to make the website theory agnostic as possible and sit firmly on the fence. Saying that it seems to go more and more down the Images of Lust route as time goes by. There is a theories page which outlines the theories and there is a good explanation of the Santiago di Compostella route on Anthony Weir’s webpages plus I dont have a lot of time to write pages very often. If you havent done so yet check out Anthony’s pages as they are really good. As for continental figures as far as I know they tend not to be named a bit like male figures in this country. If you come across any continental names please let me know. As far as I am aware the Witch on the Wall is Andersen. Come to think of it it’s worth going through the book again to see if its a traditional name.
