I am not a theologian, nor do I play one on TV.* But as I watch the kerfuffle over Triumph of the Moon (still, after ten years!), I wonder what happened to Pagan theology.

In the 1920s, Margaret Murray claimed that “the Old Religion,” a self-conscious underground Pagan cult(s), persisted in Western Europe until at least the 17th century. (Her thesis, however, has not stood up well to further examination, and even many Wiccans abandoned it by the 1980s. But it retains its appeal in some quarters.)

Others wish to trace a different story, to the Middle Eastern city of Harran, to a tiny handful of late-Byzantine intellectuals, or whatever. The myth/story/legend of the unbroken transmission is a powerful one.

Writing in the 1950s, Gerald Gardner, the chief founder of modern Wicca, claimed that underground Pagan religion had endured right into the 20th century—and Murray backed him up.

Once Gardner opened the door, through press interviews and by writing Witchcraft Today in the mid-1950s, suddenly other people appeared saying, mirabile dictu, that they too were heirs to a underground traditions: Robert Cochrane, Alex Sanders, and so on.

It is as through without a person-to-person connection back two thousand years, Wicca or other forms of Paganism could not be “legitimate” religions.

Where are the gods in all this? Have they no agency? Does no one take them seriously?

Monotheistic theologians spend a lot of time on “How God manifests in history and to whom.”  Modern Pagans tend to say, “Oh, it’s all cyclical. Everything comes around again. Tra la la.” (I can’t cite a source here, sorry, but I have seen it argued that the Ragnarök story was influenced by the Christians’ Final Judgment teachings.)

But suppose that it was not the Pagan religionists but the god who went “underground,” into the collective unconscious, staying in touch only through art, literature, dreams, whatever, only to emerge (in the English-speaking world, at least) through late-Victorian and early 20th-century literature?

Three articles in the Pomegranate have discussed this issue, and I should note that Jennifer Hallett was a graduate student of Ronald Hutton’s, so she was building upon his earlier work.

• Freeman, Nick. “The Shrineless God: Paganism, Literature and Art in Forties Britain.” The Pomegranate 6, no. 2  (2004): 157-174.

• Freeman, Nick. “A Country for the Savant: Paganism, Popular Fiction, and the Invention of Greece, 1914-1966.” The Pomegranate 10, no. 1 (2008): 21-41.

• Hallett, Jennifer. “Wandering Dreams and Social Marches: Varieties of Paganism in Late Victorian and Edwardian England.” The Pomegranate 8, no. 2 (2006) 161-183.

Just three. Research might reveal other sources in other places.

We do not have many formal theologians, a vocation not necessarily synonymous with priest or priestess. Starhawk is often labeled one, but her primary concern is social justice, it seems. Constance Wise sets up a framework that might be helpful but does not tackle this particular issue, as I recall.

As I said, I am not a theologian. But it seems to be that an intellectually grounded Pagan theology of the gods in history might take some of the pressure of those people who think that they must have an unbroken person-to-person religious transmission in order somehow to be real.

If that is not enough, here is another list of possible topics for Pagan theologians to think about.

*That is a pop-culture reference.