Not surprisingly, the increasing influence of Christianity led to changed attitudes, with a little top-down guidance:<\/p>\n
The notion of suffrages [prayers, petitions] helpful to the dead gave birth to the directives serving to eliminate worship of the dead, a core feature of paganism. It was adulterated and recuperated with great subtlety and wherever possible, the saints replaced the good ancestors\u2014the objects of a cult connection to the [Indo-European] third function (fecundity\/fertility)\u2014and liturgical feasts replaced the pagan festivals (50).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Naturally, the concept of multiple souls familiar to more shamanic cultures had to be dampened down to the Christian norm, although some ideas of “the double” lingered.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, both these early-medieval\u00a0 European Christians and their Pagan ancestors shared a pre-modern world view that was more alike than ours with theirs. In the author’s words, they participated in “a divine cosmogony: [where] perpetual motion animated the world, pulling men and things; everything fit inside a perfect circle encompassing the visible and the invisible; human beings and gods; the real and the possible; past, present, and future” (153).<\/p>\n
We try to return to what we imagine that pre-modern “wholeness” felt like. Indeed, such a return has been a theme of art and religion for several centuries. Through ritual, magic, entheogens, or extreme experience we cross the divide going backwards, but it is very very difficult to stay.<\/p>\n
Perhaps that longing for the “perfect circle” is why one colleague argues that in contemporary Paganism, the calendar\u2014the wheel of the year\u2014is more important than the gods.<\/p>\n
One digression: through reading The Return of the Dead, <\/em>I understand better why people being executed are often given hoods or blindfolds. It is not to spare their feelings, nor even is it just to depersonalize them and make the the executioners’ job easier. It is to prevent the dying person from casting the Evil Eye upon the living.<\/p>\nI am keeping this book at hand for reading on winter nights.<\/p>\n
(For the grammarians reading this: The vague pronoun reference in the post’s title is deliberate.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few key ideas hold the promise of keeping Pagan religions distinct from the people who go around claiming the “all Truth is one” etc. (When I hear that, I also hear “You will be assimilated.”) An obvious one is polytheism. Another is the concept of the multiple soul, which wends its way through Claude […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[96,131,97],"class_list":["post-2123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-death","tag-europe","tag-ghosts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-yf","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4374,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4374","url_meta":{"origin":2123,"position":0},"title":"The Wizard and the “Reality” Ghosthunters","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 1, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Oberon Zell, co-founder of the Church of All Worlds and headmaster of the Grey School of Wizardry, looks to have a bit part in a reality TV series, Ghost Girls. Its Facebook page calls it \"an off-beat Supernatural\/Reality Based TV show pilot about three 'Real' claravoyant [sic], beautiful women, who\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"ghosts\"","block_context":{"text":"ghosts","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=ghosts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7888,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7888","url_meta":{"origin":2123,"position":1},"title":"CFP: “Pagan, Goddess, Mother”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 1, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"DEMETER PRESS Seeking submissions for an edited collection entitled Pagan, Goddess, Mother Editors: Sarah Whedon & Nan\u00e9 Jordan Deadline for Abstracts: September 1st, 2016 Pagan spirituality and Goddess spirituality are distinct, yet overlapping movements and communities, each with much to say about deity as mother and about human mothers in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":669,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=669","url_meta":{"origin":2123,"position":2},"title":"Pagan Studies at AAR 2006","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 29, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"These papers are scheduled for presentation at the Pagan Studies session during next November's annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion: \"The Pagan Explosion,\" James Lewis \"The Fourfold Goddess and the Undying God: Anatomies of Minnesotan Bootstrap Witchcraft Traditions,\" Murph Pizza \"Children of Converts: Generational Retention in the Neo-Pagan\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10568,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10568","url_meta":{"origin":2123,"position":3},"title":"Pagan with a Capital P","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 28, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"In editing the current issue of The Pomegranate, one of my \"favorite\" issues came up again: whether or not Pagan is capitalized. American scholars and Pagan authors tend to say yes. There has been a small campaign to convince the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook, widely used in the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Letter-P.gif?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3913,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3913","url_meta":{"origin":2123,"position":4},"title":"One Week Left for AAR Paper Proposals","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 6, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The deadline for proposals for the 2012 American Academy of Religion annual meeting is Tuesday, March 13. Here are the suggested topics for the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group: For a possible cosponsored session with the Indigenous Religious Traditions Group, we invite papers on the intersection of contemporary indigenous traditions and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12836,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12836","url_meta":{"origin":2123,"position":5},"title":"CFP: Pagan Studies Conference at Masaryk University","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 11, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"Paganism and its Others 13-14 June 2022 Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Brno, Czechia The Department for the Study of Religions at Masaryk University invites your participation in a conference on the overall theme of \u201cPaganism and its Others\u201d to be held in Brno, Czechia, 13-14 June, 2022, with in-person\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2123"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2130,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123\/revisions\/2130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}