Pagans and Neopagans - Part Two

One podcast and the Wikipedia article in, and I have got way too much stuff already. I'd like to see what Brittanica has to say, and of course I have some background supporting material from my hobbyist following  of the history, language, literature, and later the archaeology of the place and time.  However, previous knowledge mostly just gives you more cuphooks on which to hang the new information coming in, which may be wonderful for completeness, but is hell on summarisation and detecting patterns.  Ah well, we likely impose too many patterns that aren't there on our knowledge anyway. But as I wrote recently, we create categories in order to break them in our learning, but they are necessary for the initial learning of a subject.  

My usual second level of research is to follow the footnotes and references of both the written and audible overviews, and my third level is to go looking for writers who think those mainstream theories are mistaken. We'll see. I suppose I could just post "Here's a podcast or two, plus read the wiki and the Britannica, I liked them," but that isn't going to help me get it organised in my own mind. And it wouldn't give all of you much incentive to comment, either.

Updates on Part Two will occur, because I haven't really said much about the topic yet.  It's looking like a Part Three is also likely, and at the end I will have to have names to go with the numbers.

Pagan is something of an approximate description, toggling between a formal definition centered on polytheism and a mere epithet meaning unbeliever. I will hew closer to the first definition here. Classical Greeks and Romans were pagans. But many tribes of the world are animists and/or ancestor worshipers. Many have nothing that would qualify as a god or goddess, but have spirits, mostly dangerous and harmful, who animate springs or mountains, or that various important animals participate in the generic spirit of. The spirits cause disease of bad harvests, and sometimes diagnosis is required to figure out which spirit, or which ancestor, has been offended and needs appeasing. The Chinese have ancestor worship, and are not thought of as so much polytheistic, but Buddhist temples include offerings to local gods strewn about.

The Norse can be considered mostly polytheistic, but animism is never far beneath the surface, with dwarves, esse, elves, trolls, and the like populating the borderland between the visible and invisible. Think of The Wild Hunt, for example. Odin leads them, but is not always present when they are mentioned.  Christianity since the Reformation and Enlightenment* downplays these or even ignores them, but when the creeds talk about God creating all things visible and invisible, such spiritual creatures that moved about the world was much in their minds. Christians encountering the Norse categories would have places to slot tomten, nisse, and the like right in. Gods may be more of an abstraction and strike us as a step up from animism, but apparently this is not universally acknowledged. 

The Brittonic peoples who the Anglo-Saxon peoples started pushing out in the 400s (or earlier!) were more animist than the Germanic peoples. More holy springs, more burial mounds with unquiet dead in them, more wandering spirits looking to trouble the living.

At least, that is what we speculate, because the Anglo-Saxons seem to be pagans with similarity to the continental Germanic tribes. But we don't know, because the written sources are few, and we mostly say that because the few written sources we have record gods with similar names to the Norse ones. Yet we mostly know about those gods from centuries later and far away. If groups in adjoining valleys on the continent can have different legends about Odin, how much more can there be variation across, say 500 miles and 500 years? We have very little we can nail down.

*Yes, I know, I am on record as disliking both categories.