Luca Fizzarotti, center, pours water on hands during a ritual with the Communitas Populi Romani, Feb. 10, 2024, near the Forum in Rome. (RNS photo/Claire Giangravè)
In the beginning, the group focused on reenactments and history, but it slowly shifted toward becoming an officially recognized religious group. There are 20 or so members, said Donatella Ertola, who joined the group in 2015 and now organizes meetings three or four times a month in the places that are closest to the original temples spread across Rome.
“We all believe in the gods, we make rituals at home, we have devotion temples at home, we have our priests and officiants,” she told RNS, adding that this is a “niche community that has been growing recently.”
But I had to laugh at this: “When I met her, she said, ‘I am pagan and vegan,’ and I thought ‘Great! I am celiac!’” said Pieri, who works as a sound technician.
Because what is the real religion of today? Diet. And however your therapist describes you in categories of the DSM-5, or its Italian equivalent.
Still I like that they are trying to reactivate old sacred places while simultaneously not feeling the need to dress up like the ancestors.
“Paganism and Its Others, a double issue that has been in the works for rather a long time, is finally published, including, among other things, discussion of Pagan-identified units on both sides of the Ukraine invasion and also perhaps the definitive (so far) article on Czech Pagan black metal music.
Here is the introduction by guest editor Michael Strmiska (free download).
But they are expensive, you say. You do have choices. Are you at a university with a religious studies program? If you are on the faculty, suggest a Pomegranate subscription to your library, and all the students will get online access. If you are not a professor, try to persuade a professor to recommend it to the library. Or use interlibrary loan; you should be able to that online nowadays.
If you visit a publicly supported college or university, you may still have interlibrary loan privileges as a “community member.” And even small public libraries are plugged into networks with access to all kinds of materials. Just ask. You might be surprised.
Finally, the online article preview will provide info about the author’s whereabouts. Universities have online directories in most cases. Sometimes a polite email explaining your interest in someone’s article might just get you a PDF.
For more than a century, scholars and Pagans (who are sometimes the same people) have debated the persistence — or not — of Pagan ideas and practices into the Chritian era. This is the question that Robin Douglas and Francis Young examine in Paganism Persisting: A History of European Paganisms since Antiquity.
“Trying to escape the binary between the “hermeneutic of survival” and the “hermeneutic of concoction” that have historically dominated discussions on the topic, Douglas and Young outline a ‘hermeneutic of persistence,’ maintaining that “elements of paganism continued to exist in post-classical European society, constantly ready to be revived and reanimated” (2). Even while pre-Christian religions themselves essentially became extinct in most of Europe, images and ideas from those traditions persevered, allowing them to be adopted and reutilized by later individuals, some of whom considered themselves Christian, and others who were actively seeking replacements for Christianity.”
Get your library to order it or buy some expensive English electrons.
So you can hear a sort of scratchy-voiced me (winter respiratory crap) talking about the field and some of its background. Religion Off the Beaten Track is carried by a number of the podcast sites, including Apple podcasts and Spotify.
I have been editing an issue of Pomegranate on Eastern European Paganism, and a lot of the writing from that area reminds me Anglosphere Pagan studies in the 1990s–2000s. It’s what I call “scouting,” which is the first step in writing about any new religious movement: Who are they? How many of them are there? Where did they come from? Are they friendly?
“Politics is downstream from culture,” people like to say online — which is just a re-statement of something that I have long believed, that “Life imitates Art.”
Maybe I am just reflecting my online environment and the podcasts that I listen to, but folklore is suddenly big. My feed has a lot of British contributors in it; some have MA’s in folklore, which won’t get you a teaching job but maybe will give you the skills to write, make videos, and so forth.
So there is a plethora of podcasts, such as the Modern Fairy Sightings podcast, hosted by Jo Hickey-Hall, one of Ronald Hutton’s former graduate students. Zines like I haven’t seen them since pre-Internet days. One of my favorites is Hellebore, edited by Maria Pérez Cuervo, also a former grad student (fill in the blank).
So this is also niche stuff, but you have to add it up.
These traditions may seem to belong to another time – yet interest in paganism and folklore is growing across the globe. Shamanism, although not an organised faith, is the fastest growing religion in England and Wales, according to the 2011 and 2022 censuses. In the US, the number of Wicca adherents is now over 1.5 million. Wicca, founded in the early half of the 20th century by Gerald Gardner, is one of the most influential and popular branches of the modern neopagan movement, with a complex variety of branches, denominations and traditions across the world.
I am not sure where those numbers come from, so just consider them to be “hand-waving.” Counting Pagans is a real difficult problem.
North America’s Pagan resurgence, should one occur, is going to look different. But there are cross-overs. Just today I stopped at the nearest small-town grocery store. This guy was stocking the shelves (not one of the employees that I recognized, so maybe new), and he was wearing a big ol’ Mjölnir amulet around his neck, maybe a reproduction of the one at the linked page.
Romuva has been granted official recognition following the Constitution and the Law on Religious Communities and Associations, as well as the Justice Ministry’s conclusion that it meets legal requirements. The ministry noted that Romuva has been active in Lithuania for 25 years [see below for why that matters] while its teachings and rites do not contradict Lithuanian laws and generally accepted moral norms. Romuva applied for official recognition on 17 May 2017, but at the time parliament rejected the move.
In 2019, [and again in 2023] the organisation appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which ruled in 2021 that by refusing official recognition parliament violated the European Convention on Human Rights
Lithuania’s rulers abandoned Paganism in the 1200s (for political reasons at least partly), and the country became majority Roman Catholic. But if any European country did have a hidden “Pagan survival,” it was Lithuania. Or the nearest thing to it.
Once free of the USSR in 1990, Lithuania set up a hierarchy of “registered” religions — a hierarchy that might be on its way out. Right now, it looks like this, says Scott Simpson, lecturerer at Jagiellonian University in Poland and co-editor of Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe.
The media understandably struggle to explain the complex Romuva situation in simple and interesting terms to the average reader. They sometimes err on the side of making it sound like this is the first time that Romuva is counted as a religion at all, and sometimes err on the side of making it sound like they jumped straight to ‘established church’ (TASS has good example of that).
What has happened is that the religious organisation of Romuva, in keeping with Lithuanian law in spite of some hard-to-forgive discriminatory delay, has moved from being in the first tier (a ‘registered’ religious organisation) to being in the second tier (a ‘state-recognised’ religious organisation). This will give them some more abilities, such as their religious marriages can automatically be counted as state marriages without the need for a separate trip to the registry office.
The change in status for the religious organisation isn’t, in theory, a change in status for the religion. Citizens of Lithuania have freedom of religion and conscience, and can practice their religions without registration if they wish to do so. (You could call that ‘level 0’ of registration.) But what those citizens get by registering as a religious organisation is the ability to act as a legal corporate entity, for example to collect funds in an organisation-owned bank account. Of course, there is also an intangible psychological and social element of seeming like a legitimate religion when one has an official registration. (You could call this ‘level 1’ of registration.)
One of the most important metrics for making the jump upwards is to have been registered as an organisation at level 1 for at least 25 years. Therefore, over time, there should be a small surge in requests to the Seimas for movement from ‘registered’ to ‘state-recognised’. Romuva reached that criterion long ago and yet was refused (twice!) the change in status by the Seimas. This was a democratic vote, and yet the lack of solid objections to Romuva (that is, they were not credibly accused of crimes against the state or any other saliant wrongdoing that could make them undesirable to the Lithuanian state) means that this decision was discriminatory. That’s not just my opinion, it was also the opinion of the European Court of Human Rights. At least one other religious organisation has been refused in a similar way: the Jehovah’s Witnesses. But a new government has come into power in Lithuania with a different composition of MPs and they voted this week to move Romuva to the position that they have qualified for. (We will see if the Jehovah’s Witnesses also get another chance in the coming weeks. Blood transfusions might be considered more an issue there.)
Presumably, although Romuva must be pleased to have been moved one rung up, they will someday want to try to move to the next rung, ‘traditional religion’. (We can call this one ‘level 3’.) It is much less clear what the procedure would be for doing that, or whether it is possible at all. The 1995 law says: ‘The State shall recognise nine traditional religious communities and associations existing in Lithuania, which comprise a part of Lithuania’s historical, spiritual and social heritage: Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, Evangelical Reformed, Russian Orthodox, Old Believer, Judaist, Sunni Muslim, and Karaite.’ One possible interpretation is that you only get on that list by being named on the list in the 1995 law. And therefore, no-one else will ever be added unless the Seimas decides to pass a new law that supersedes that one. Romuva will want to claim that they are ‘part of Lithuania’s historical, spiritual and social heritage’ and therefore should be added.
But if Romuva make a play for level 3, they will face a much murkier set of criteria with a lot more difficulty in proving incontestably to all stakeholders that they qualify. Romuva firmly believe that they should be recognised as continuing the ancient tradition which survived nearly intact from times centuries before those other ‘traditional’ religion’s arrival in Lithuania. (Note that current scholars of ancient Lithuanian religion are not in unanimous agreement with Romuva’s conviction in more than one way.) And they believe that their religion remained hidden in Lithuanian folk culture throughout the centuries means that they represent ‘spiritual and social heritage’ par excellence. To them, it is a gross injustice that they were not on the short list to start with.
But, because the current Romuva started their project in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and their current organisation was only registered in 1992, they will have to fight to be recognised as legally representing the same religion as existed in the 15th century. Technically, the precedence of Sunni Islam in Lithuania (where fragmentation of organisations does not mean that they lose ‘traditional’ status as a religion) means that they don’t actually need to show that this contemporary organisation is the same as that ancient organisation.
So far, so good. But they do need to show that this contemporary religion is the same as that ancient religion. (Cue discussion of the Ship of Theseus, etc.) As much as the adherents of Romuva believe in their hearts that these two things are essentially identical, their critics will have no great difficulty in finding academic experts who will call that into question and call them related, but essentially different. Academic fashions change, and different paradigms circulate today than circulated back in the 1970s. And without a very clear consensus from a strong majority of experts who are consulted on this, the Seimas has no great motivation to initiate the messy and controversial process of drafting and passing a new law specially for them. Especially knowing that it is likely to get bogged down in an abstruse discussion of nit-picky historical and archaeological details right from the start.
I suspect that the clock is ticking on these kinds of laws, anyhow. They are out of touch with the rest of EU law and they regularly run afoul of the European Court of Human Rights. I would bet that Lithuania tosses out the whole ladder system long before Romuva manages to climb to the highest rung.
Edited by Dver, a.k.a. Sarah Kate Istra Winter, Small Gods: An Anthology of Everyday Animism is projected to be an annual zine “featuring art, poetry, and essays describing our relationship with, and giving praise to, the smallest of gods — those spiritual entities who are closely bound to distinct physical forms or locations (whether natural or constructed). thereby limiting their interaction with humans.”
I have an essay in this first issue, “‘Don’t Get Cocky, Kid,’ A Little Lesson from the Locals in the Mushroom Woods.” Other contributors besides Dver include Nimue Brown, P. Sufenas Virius Lupus, Rebecca Scott, Sister Patience, Suzanne Thackston, Lannon, and Elizabeth Starling.
Some of her writings are available on Amazon too. I really liked The City is a Labyrinth: A Walking Guide for Urban Animists, and learned some things from it even though I don’t live in a city. It’s kind of like Randonauting without an internet connection — and more meaningful.
The city is alive with spirits—from those found in remaining natural areas to those who are unique to the realm of concrete and steel. But how can we connect with these spirits, and build a powerful, meaningful localized practice in an urban environment? Polytheist, animist, and spirit-worker Sarah Kate Istra Winter suggests a radically simple approach: walking. Inspired by the field of psychogeography and informed by her many years as a spiritually-minded pedestrian, she examines the ways in which walking can be a devotional and magical act.
UPDATE: This event has been postponed. I do not know why — I just got the email from “The Zoom Team.” I will post when it is re-scheduled. Sad.
Liz Williams is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in Glastonbury, England, where she is co-director of a witchcraft supply business. She has been published by Bantam Spectra (US) and Tor Macmillan (UK), also Night Shade Press and appears regularly in Asimov’s and other magazines. She has been involved with the Milford SF Writers’ Workshop for over 25 years, and also teaches creative writing at a local college for Further Education. Miracles of Our Own Making: A History of Paganism (2020 Reaktionbooks) is based in scholarly literature but written for an audience of anyone. Many will also have read Williams’ occasional columns at The Wild Hunt. Join us as she talks about life in Glastonbury as a Pagan and also the development and direction of UK Paganism over the last 20 years.
