¶ If I could visit Chauvet Cave, I could die happy. It’s one of “10 must-see cave paintings,” of which I have seen none. At least I know where there is signage-free rock art in southern Colorado.
Astronomer Ralph Hansen maintains that the disc was an attempt to co-ordinate the solar and lunar calendars to tell Bronze Age Man when to plant seeds and when to make trades, giving him an almost modern sense of time. “For everyday calendrical purposes, you would use Moon years. But for designing when to plough fields and when to harvest, you use Sun years,” said Hansen.
I am just a gardener, not a Neolithic farmer, but I do not think that Neolithic farmers needed stone circles or “portable instruments” to tell them when to plant. If you live in a place long enough, you know the local signs, for instance, “plant cool weather crops when the grass turns green,” or “it’s usually safe to plant warm-weather plants when the oak leaves are the size of a mouse’s ear” — whatever works for you.
But I have seen this so many times — members of the Clerisy like Hansen who think that the peasants are or were too stupid to know when to plant their peas unless someone like themselves, backed by the authority of a stone circle (“Lo, Father Sun is rising . . .”) tells them when to do it.
¶ “Perhaps the future Carthaginians were like the Pilgrim Fathers leaving from Plymouth – they were so fervent in their devotion to the gods that they weren’t welcome at home any more.” But do not let that sentence give you any warm feelings until you have read the rest.
My first year as an undergraduate, I lived a in four-person dormitory suit. One day I entered the (rectangular) room of my suite-mate Bill and found that he had placed his bed, desk, etc. at diagonal angles to the walls.
“I got tired of everything being so rectilinear,” he said. It was funny how Bill’s new arrangement felt oddly disquieting.
A circular room, however was not an option.
People in some times and places have favored circular shapes and in other times rectangular shapes. Do these preferences say something about the societies?
These kinds of idea have a long history. In the early 1930s, the Soviet city planner Mikhail Okhitovich claimed that the right angle in architecture originated in private land ownership: curvilinear structures, whether they be round buildings or chairs with curved backs, were therefore communist in principle.
This quotation comes from a review essay in the Times Literary Supplement: “Seeing Straight,” discussing three books that examine questions of shape, perception, and society:
Vision is a form of cognition: the kinds of things we see shape the ways we think. That is why it is so hard to imagine the visual experience of our prehistoric ancestors, or, for that matter, the girls of nineteenth-century Malawi, who lived in a world without right angles. Inhabitants of, say, late Neolithic Orkney would only have seen a handful of perpendicular lines a day: tools, shaped stones, perhaps some simple geometric decoration on a pot. For the most part, their world was curved: circular buildings, round tombs, stone circles, rounded clay vessels . . . . What does a round building mean? Does it mean anything, or is the choice of one shape of house over another simply a matter of practicalities?
As for my roommate Bill, he eventually put his furniture back in line with the walls, as the non-rectilinear arrangement made it too hard to move around his dorm room.
In The Return of Ancestral Gods, Mariya Lesiv explores Pagan beliefs and practices in Ukraine and amongst the North American Ukrainian diaspora. Drawing on intensive fieldwork, archival documents, and published sources not available in English, she allows the voices of Pagans to be heard. Paganism in Slavic countries is heavily charged with ethno-nationalist politics, and previous scholarship has mainly focused on this aspect. Lesiv finds it important to consider not only how Paganism is preached but also the way that it is understood on a private level. She shows that many Ukrainians embrace Paganism because of its aesthetic aspects rather than its associated politics and discusses the role that aesthetics may play in the further development of Ukrainian Paganism.
Thad Horrell, Heathen and graduate student, hurls himself against the issue of post-colonialism and reconstructed Northern religion in this article, “Heathenry as a Postcolonial Movement,” published in the online Journal of Religion, Identity and Politics, written by students in his PhD program.
His thesis is “that Heathenry is ‘postcolonial’ in complex and contradictory senses of the term. It both acknowledges and offers resistance to the imperialism of Christendom, while simultaneously trivializing colonialism and making it seem merely a thing of the past.”
I will argue that Heathenry is a postcolonial movement both in the sense that it combats and challenges elements of colonial history and the contemporary expectations derived from it (anti-colonial), and in the much more problematic sense that it serves to justify current social and racial inequalities by pushing the structures of colonialism off as a thing of the past (pro-colonial). Rather than promoting a sense of solidarity with colonized populations, Heathen critiques of colonialism and imperialism often serve to justify disregard for claims of oppression by colonized minorities. After all, if we’ve all been colonized, what is there to complain about?
The ideas of invasion, colonization, and resistance were important in the first years of Wicca too, although not so much since the 1950s.
Gerald Gardner played the nativist card as well, implicitly conflating the threatened invasion of southern England by the German army in 1940 with the “Gregorian mission” that brought Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England in the sixth century. (The earlier Celtic-speaking post-colonial-Roman Britain had been heavily Christian as well by the end.)
But the idea of resistance to “invasion” has put down deeper roots in contemporary Norse, Baltic, and Slavic Paganism than in the Anglosphere, I think.
At their first congress in years, the followers of the old beliefs will try to overcome their theological differences.
Making harvest offerings to the gods, jumping through bonfires and releasing wreathes [into running water] — that’s how Rodzimowiercy, the followers of the old Pagan beliefs, will celebrate Kupala [Summer Solstice]. Poland’s largest celebration in a chram, the temple at Pruszkow in Mazowia, will begin on Thursday. The culmination falls on the shortest night of the year — from 21 to 22 June.
Pre-Christian beliefs started to return in the 1980s, and the Pagans say that the followers of their religion is growing. In August, in Łódz the first National Convention of Rodzimowierczy will be held. “From the point of view of this milieu, this is a breakthrough,” Scott Simpson, a scholar of religion from the Jagiellonian University tells Rzeczpospolita.
Polish Pagans celebrate six major holidays, most of them related to dates marking changes in the length of the day. On the spring equinox they celebrate Jare Gody, Dozynki [harvest] marks the beginning of autumn, and Swięto Godów – the beginning of winter. Added to this Dziady [Forefathers’ Eve], in memory of the dead, which is celebrated twice, in spring and autumn.
The most important role, however, is played by Święto Kupaly [Midsummer Night]. Pagan rites will be celebrated, among others in Warsaw, Szczecin, Wrocław, Opole, Poznan, Łódż and Sopot.
Ratomir Wilkowski, who is a żerca, that is, a Slavic priest of the Native Polish Church tells Rzeczpospolita that the biggest celebration near Pruszkow expects some [missing number] participants. “A similar turnout came last year. However, more and more people are asking about the celebration,” he adds.
How many Rodzimowierców are there in Poland? Scott Simpson says that there are around two thousand committed followers.”But there is a much broader periphery of supporters. I think that the number is growing, although not as rapidly as it was in the 90s,’”he says.
However, recently the Pagans have done much to integrate their movement.
They have managed to reactivate the Gniazdo periodical dedicated to their religion. The next step will be to organize the Congress for several communities in Łódż. One of the speakers will be author Witold Jablonski, who recently published a novel [Słowo i Miecz] about the Pagan uprising in the eleventh century in Poland.
In the registry of the Ministry of Administration and Digitization there are currently four religious Rodzimowiersto organisations: the Polish Slavic Church, Native Faith, Slavic Faith and the Native Polish Church. They try to find the principles of the faith of their ancestors in historical sources. They believe in the gods, who are identified with the forces of nature. Mother Earth is Mokosh, the Sky — Swiatowid, the Sun — Svarog, and Lightning — Perun.
However, there have arisen theological differences between the adherents. “Some Rodzimowiercy claim that their religion can be combined with other faiths. I think that is unacceptable. I am counting on the congress helping to dispel theological doubts,” says Stanislaw Potrzebowski of Native Faith.
Why are Poles going back to pre-Christian beliefs? Religious Studies Professor Zbigniew Pasek argues that the reason is the desire to seek alternatives to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. “For these people, it is not credible today. The claim that we Slavs will never regain our identity if we do not go back to our roots, rejecting foreign gods, falls on fertile ground,” he explains.
The scholar adds that many people get involved in the Neopagan movement, because they are drawn to participation in the reconstruction [re-enactment] of history. Ratomir Wilkowski argues that his faith is authentic.
“We’re not a bunch of lunatics running around half-naked in the woods. If we did not believe in it we would not create religious organisations,” he assures.
To which he adds, “Again, the journalist (relatively harmlessly) made my vague hedging answer into something short and punchy that I didn’t really say. ” So it goes!
Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Kaarina Aitamurto and Scott Simpson, has now been released in hardcover. (No paperback edition appears to be coming in the near future.)
Back in 2000, I was writing an article about a prescribed fire on the national forest near my home, so I hiked in with the ignition crew. Some point during the day, I heard a radio crackle with the message, “Come up that little ridge and bring fire with you.”
Bring fire with you. I thought of one of my favorite movies, Quest for Fire, and the language of its Neanderthal characters. And I thought of how that sentence could probably be translated into Neanderthal — if only we knew how — and certainly into a later Proto-Indo-European.
Those might be “utraconserved words,” as defined by this piece from the Washington Post.
You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!
It’s an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying.
That’s because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then.
Pagel and his co-workers took a first step by building a statistical model based on Indo-European cognates. Incorporating only the frequency of a word’s use and its part of speech (noun, verb, numeral, etc.)—and ignoring its sound— the model could predict how long the word persisted through time. Reporting in Nature in 2007, they found that most words have about a 50% chance of being replaced by a completely different word every 2000 to 4000 years. Thus the Proto-Indo-European wata, winding its way through wasser in German, water in English, and voda in Russian, became eau in French. But some words, including I, you, here, how, not, and two, are replaced only once every 10,000 or even 20,000 years.
The next issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies will be devoted largely to new forms of Paganism in the Baltic countries, if all goes as planned.
One article that I have been reading is entitled “The Dievturi Movement in the Reports of the Latvian Political Police, 1939–1940.”
This movement itself started in the 1920s—and promptly fissioned. (Insert “Peoples’ Front of Judea” joke here.) But that origin does make it an old-timer in contemporary Paganism.
Latvia gained its independence in 1919, following the collapse of czarist Russia and Latvia’s own factional war. It became a republic, but a politician named Karlis Ulmanis dissolved Parliament and seized power in a bloodless coup in 1934. His authoritarian nationalist government lasted until the Soviet Union occupied Latvia in 1940.
During that time, however, the political police were spying on all political, dissident, and unusual groups, including the Pagans. I don’t want to steal Prof. Anita Stasulane’s thunder, but she made an interesting discovery in the national archives: notes on Pagan meetings and rituals made by a police “mole” in the group.
There is so much there: who attended the meeting, what was talked about, what songs were sung, how the altar was decorated . . .
Imagine, for example, if someone had infiltrated that Yeshua ben Yusef’s group two thousand years ago — and that the scrolls had survived and been re-discovered. New Testament studies would sure look a lot different.
My first year as an undergraduate, I lived a in four-person dormitory suit. One day I entered the (rectangular) room of my suite-mate Bill and found that he had placed his bed, desk, etc. at diagonal angles to the walls.
Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Kaarina Aitamurto and Scott Simpson, has now been released in hardcover. (No paperback edition appears to be coming in the near future.)
