Well thank goodness science has not disproven any of my pagan beliefs and experiences and I agree with everything that science has evidence for. There are things that science cannot yet study so for now I am quite comfortable with science and my pagan religion. The two complement each other to...
Yes, but try to explain that to most Christians. The dismemberment of Ymir is a mythological truth not a scientific fact of what actually happened. It places his skull in the sky with the upper world of traditional cosmology and the body with the lower world. This is the same as the creation of...
Before the return of a completely non-Christian paganism we have developments occurring particularly in the Romantic era that would provide an estuary for what would come. The romantics reacted to the increasing dominance of science and technology as well as the perceived patriarchal dominant...
In her book, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages, Barbara Newman looks at how European Christians wrote about gods and goddess in addition their primary god which was influenced by an early form of renaissance starting in the 12 century. This is the time when...
That is a very polytheistic answer. It is not a very Christian answer in so many of the discussions I have been involved in this forum. I believe that as Christianity got established in Rome and migrated throughout Europe it absorbed pagan practices as clearly in the case of the "goddess" Natura...
I agree. There is a strange tendency for Christianity to claim everything because it had the written form. You know the one that sets everything into a stone tablet. It almost fell like a virus where everything it touches becomes Christian. The goddess Bridget becomes saint Bridget because they...
In looking at the written sources which originally at least in northern Europe were all written by Christians, how do you distinguish what was pagan vs what was Christian of does it not matter?
One of the most confounding aspects of the return of paganism in Northern Western Europe has been what was pagan and what was Christian. Although we have writings from Egyptian, Greek, and Roman we have nothing written from the Celtic and Norse/Germanic religions that was not written by...
All of the gods had many names or epitaphs that allowed people to connect with them. There were no "right gods" and to say they were your friends is hard for me to comprehend and becomes almost to human like for me. Rather there were times when one would connect with Frey, or Freya, or Thor, or...
thanks, I appreciate the effort I know from writing what I did took time. I think this is worth consideration even if it is not necessary to practice. I think there revealing aspects to the nature of being human in our natural world also. More to come.
When I then read again Drawing Down the Moon which gives a journalistic perspective, the reasons for the return paganism. Hutton's work is impressive but its sources except for the end were from Christians. They may have been considering an alternative religion but at least as he found in his...
In the return of paganism in the form of witchcraft Hutton presents the following elements in its return. With each he traces all of the written evidence in detail in its development change and finally incorporation into our earliest modern pagan traditions in the form of witchcraft.
1...
This is what Margot Adler identified in so many she interviewed. Many who replied to her said there was a feeling of coming home when they found paganism.
There is fairly clear evidence that at least in the British Isles by the year 1000 there were no longer any organized surviving pagan gatherings and no written documentation at least to support that there were people continuing the pagan religion after that time. It is also apparently true that...
Why did paganism return as a religion?
In reflecting on how I got to the point of entering into the druid path I started to become interested again in how paganism returned to modern western culture. This story became both fascinating and enlightening so I thought I might be worth discussing...
My understanding of the terms reflects what others have said. The term hard refers to the stance that the gods and goddesses are numinous entities in their own right. They exist independently and exist beyond the human psyche. Saying they are the same but different names in different cultures is...
You may want to reconsider this statement. The scientific method has given us a new insight on many natural processes, but it also created technology which has started to create more suffering that it has relieved.
And it seems like it is true now more now than ever. Hate seems to be the new norm in American politics. We need people to disagree to keep us balanced but the new claims of our politicians make it sound we are on the brink of civil unrest. The state I live in is again raising the flag of Texas...