Sunday, March 26, 2023

Pagans and Neopagans, Part Five

I stress again that there were several invading tribes, which entered a Britain of several tribes even on the coasts. The invaders in Kent, including the few Jutes to Eastern Kent, seem to have been elites who were somewhat more part of the trading network than warrior specialists in advance of land-seeking peasants, but the proportion changed as one went north. Customs of authority (dynastic versus consensus), economy (coinage vs gift-exchange), and alliance (marriages vs. community) look from archaeology to be somewhat different along gradients, so differences in religious practice likely were also.

Origins:  Prior scholarship tended to view Anglo-Saxon paganism as a development from an older Germanic paganism. The scholar Michael Bintley cautioned against this approach, noting that this 'Germanic' paganism had "never had a single ur-form from which later variants developed."

There is an mportance of poetry in our understanding of paganism, but even at that, we are outsiders. Was it primarily religious or adventurous entertainment? Lots of Christians go to see Marvel movies now, after all, and Beowulf looks like pagan adventurousness refashioned for Christian audiences. And don't overlook "It's just fun."  (See also Tolkien "The Monsters and The Critics," and CS Lewis's "Hamlet: The Prince or The Poem." Both push back against the prevailing analysis of those works in their day with the simple and obvious reminder that people have liked them for centuries because they are whopping good stories. Appreciation does not imply belief. 

Snorri Sturluson was a Christian, writing in an Iceland that had long been Christian.  He wanted poets to understand the early references so that they could read the earlier poets and also perpetuate the stories. He tells stories in detail and is an imcomparable resource for Norse mythology. However, there are large separations between Snorri and Anglo-Saxon pagans in England. He is 700 years and 1000 miles away, just for openers. They speak related but not at all identical languages, and likely would not have been mutually comprehensible. He is Christian and his interpretation of events is filtered through that. And finally, he writes in poetry, which is, well poetic, and not always easily understandable even to insiders.

We know about sacred groves among them primarily because of the later stories of Christians coming in and destroying them.  When the Christian in question was not immediately destroyed, it was taken as a sign that the gods or spirits of those groves were not as powerful, leading powerful people, especially those who had hope of victory in battle, to convert so they could win. (And you thought your motives for conversion were a little weak?) This was also true of sacred wells, big trees, stones and stone outcroppings which we believe continued but know of no hierarchy.

The various Anglo-Saxons, though they were also Indo-European and thus descended from kurgan builders,  regarded mounds as places of unquiet dead, rather than friendlier ancestors. Of course that might not be much of a difference if one considers that they knew themselves to be intruders and reasoned "Well, those aren't our ancestors.  They might not be happy to see us here." Nonetheless, throughout Brit but more in Wales and North where there was less penetrance of Christianity, we see legends of knights under a mound or mountain, awaiting some signal to return and save their people.

There were Mjolnir pendants, but these seem new among the later Anglo-Saxons, and thus more associated with the new Scandinavian invaders of the 800s. There is no definitive evidence any were simply A-S*. They show up increasingly over the next two centuries. But the more common something is, the more likely it is to be a traditional decoration rather than an actual belief.  Cf Christian countries and the Christian  or semi-Christian symbols of Christmas and Easter. For that matter, compare Christian countries and the pagan symbols of Christmas and Easter. None imply the least belief. It just wouldn't be Christmas without those.

Christianity not supposed to be syncretic, and the official forms from monks or even secular authorities forbid it, but it often is nonetheless. Kings especially seemed to go back and forth between Christianity and paganism depending on alliances. Consider the Franks Casket, with both the Adoration of the Magi and Weland Smith on it.  Was Europe ever really Christian?  Festivals and practices which now survive across the Isles and are claimed to be ancient and pagan cannot be certified as earlier than 1000, and even then, we don't know what meaning they had. If Church authorities left it alone, what does that mean, that they feared blowback from the citizenry, or that they thought it was just a harmless old custom?

When The Vikings came in, we can only say for certain that Thor and Odin crossed the water with them.  Yet we have seen at least some evidence of other Norse-related gods before that. When Saxon and Danish followers of Tiw encountered each other, what was the result?(Oh, sure.  We know that guy... or "Y'know, that looks a lot like a festival we used to have back in Denmark..") Local customs can persist for centuries even when they are not understood the way the were even a few generations ago. Look at how the Christians of the time split over things as small as what a tonsure should look like or how to calculate the date of Easter. There's no guarantee that Frigg-worshipers would have welcomed each other as long-lost cousins. Sometimes people get killed or whole villages get wiped out over such things. 

I should mention St Aldeberge/Bertha, the Frankish princess who became the first Christian queen in England, at Kent around 600. She agreed to the marriage only if allowed to keep practicing her faith and bring a priest/confessor.  Aha!  A foot in the door. And also Eadburh, a Christian daughter of the pagan Penda about the same time. I keep hoping a granddaughter will decide to write a history paper about one of those.

Last bits that don't fit in elsewhere: I haven't discussed how powerful the concept of wyrd might have been among them, or if the triple goddesses owe anything to the Norns or Fates. I will note that a difference with the neopagans is the difference of Magic versus sacrifices. Magic and sacrifice are not the same thing, though from both a Christian and a modernist perspective they look similar.  Magic, which is more neopagan, seeks to change events and is more concerned with individual will and power.  Sacrifice is more about maintaining order between the visible and invisible worlds and creatures, and is more community based.

*With all these tribes perhaps we should designate them ASFFJ+


5 comments:

  1. You're right, even though they weren't proselytizing religions, there'd be disputes over who is supposed to be the priest (or who chooses the priest) if they agreed that both the import and native gods were really the same. If the gods were different enough, I'd expect the rituals to run in parallel--just in case.
    Maybe India provides examples. Some of the more popular gods seem, from this distance, to be worshiped uniformly, but in a place that big I'd expect differences, plus the "wilder" areas seem to have different gods.

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  2. "... perhaps we should designate them ASFFJ+..."

    In the name of Heaven, no.

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  3. To expand on the Jung argument from before, what he seems to have thought about all this is that the human mind is sufficiently similar from one person to another that the similarities of faith need not be carried through direct physical contact. Woden as the Anglo-Saxon understood him might be different from the Wotan that the German knew, just as the two men are different; but they are energizing the same pathways, as it were, and therefore in an essential sense are experiencing the same thing.

    All of this ultimately turns on the metaphysical status of the divine. If it doesn't exist in any metaphysical sense (or only in the One, and not in any part of the created world) then these anthropological accounts show us that different people necessarily believe different things. There are only customs and traditions, and really those don't pass perfectly even within a nuclear family; so in that sense every individual has his or her own gods.

    If Jung is right, the basic reality of these things has something to do with the working structure of the human mind (or brain, for those materialists who haven't internalized the discussion about how the mind and the brain are necessarily different and can't have a simple superveniance relationship). They may not exist outside the human beings, but the similarity between two or ten thousand human beings guarantees a similar experience when these things are invoked. People may still fight over their differences of interpretation, but they really are interpreting the one thing that is the same for all of them. People tend to become animists when doctrinal objections fade because that is the basic way that human minds approach the world. It's not just a custom; there's something deeper at work.

    On the third picture, which might be Neoplatonic, these things have a metaphysical status independent of (and prior to) human minds. Perhaps they are ideas in the mind of God, which existed therefore before a human being came about to encounter them. Then the differences are just different ways that individuals explain what they encounter 'out there,' as we differ in our descriptions of the sea.

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  4. I like an Otto-esque, um, "just-so story".

    Some people have an encounter with "the numinous" and associate it with the features of the way they had the encounter. Some events and places seem more suited to inspire awe than others, and in those situations under the guidance of the first, others also encounter natural or supernatural awe--and develop rituals associated with their initial encounters. The "natural" state of a tiny group would be a single cult.

    When meeting/blending with other groups with a different rituals and experiences (or if someone has a numinous encounter in a new situation), but without any clear revelation except custom, they append the new to their old, winding up with a poly-cult/polytheism/animism. The ideal would be that their understanding of god would expand beyond the single spring or mountain, but given the way people usually react it would seem likely to dilute devotion among different objects rather than sharpen it. If the rituals and customs clash--so do they.

    Stories grow up later, and rituals can be appended to, or even modified at need. (Like languages?) And the priests, especially when they're the same as the chiefs, can add what seems convenient (hadith-like) at the time. When the numinous isn't felt, there'd not be much to distinguish the sacred and the profane.

    Similar awe-inspiring situations could inspire similar-appearing objects of devotion anywhere, but the rituals could vary, subject to the more-or-less universal human reactions (sacrifices). As a for-instance, spitting on a Hindu shrine would mean something very different from spitting kola juice on a West African image (where it signifies respect and a promise that one day I'll bring a chicken or something). (At least so said Harley.)

    What happens when the devotion to the god of the well is diluted away to nothing, but its ritual of chucking in a white pebble remains? Maybe it gets forgotten too, but if the ritual is simple or interesting, maybe it hangs on as a village children's custom, or maybe something else takes it up.



    What I've seen on Hinduism is mostly about religious theory, not practice. It might be interesting, albeit somewhat depressing, to look for studies of the variation in practices.

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  5. When my son was filming a mission trip in India, his hosts would not let him even go out of the school when the festival to the river god was happening. They assured him he would not live through the frenzies. Not much theory there.

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