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The rise of neo-paganism (No, this one is NOT SATIRE)
National Review Online ^ | 27th September 1999 | Roger Scruton

Posted on 05/04/2002 7:45:25 PM PDT by Tomalak

America was founded by Christian Puritans, who had a deep aversion to idolatry, popery, and magic. The hardships and dangers of their predicament made them cling to their religion as the one thing that justified the perilous pilgrimage to the New World. And from time to time they would tremble before the thought that paganism lay not only around them, but within, where it was all the more dangerous because hidden from view. So began the trials of suspected witches and the vigilant denunciations of neighbors that tore the New England communities apart.

Constant immigration has diversified the religious inheritance of the United States. Nevertheless the country remained until recently predominantly Christian, with a continuing aversion to pagan cults and superstitions, and a trust in the Bible as the common inheritance of the Judeo-Christian faiths. Indeed the United States has been held together more effectively by its Bible culture than by its Constitution: for the Bible has shaped the language, the morality, and the aspirations of ordinary Americans and provided them with a common frame of reference. American patriotism is scarcely thinkable without the Judeo-Christian God as its Almighty Guardian, and it is hardly surprising to find that the outlying communities in America-many of them suspicious of the Constitution as a weapon used against them by urban liberals-cling to the Bible as their most trusted guide. Debates over school prayer, over creationism and the curriculum, over abortion and sex education, are not, in America, the halfhearted affairs they are in Europe. On the contrary, they are at the center of politics since they affect the deep-down loyalty of many Americans to the settlement under which they live.

Strange things are now happening to this religious inheritance. The Christian churches have clung to their congregations, but often at the cost of dividing and subdividing into ever more marginal sects, each striving to accommodate the eccentricities of some obstinate community of believers. Almost none of the old denominations retains any centralized authority that can control the doctrine, liturgy, or membership of its peripheral congregations, while new cults and new services spring up everywhere, as dormant religious passions ignite like forest fires. In Europe we observe the slow, steady decline in faith, and the gradual disappearance of human hopes behind a cloud of skepticism. In America, however, every loss of faith is met by a gain, as new religious practices rise in the places vacated by the old. That this should be happening now, in the age of scientific inquiry, is testimony to the strength of American society, which finds new sources of hope beneath the never-ending stream of disappointment. Nevertheless, these sources of hope make less and less reference to the Bible and the Judeo-Christian tradition and are more and more pagan in tone. That which the Pilgrim fathers found most horrendous- witchcraft-is the latest, and one of the most successful, among the pagan cults now colonizing America.

Of course the witches-devotees of "Wicca," as they like to say-strenuously argue that their faith has been traduced in the past, that it is older and deeper and more spiritual than Christianity, and that it was branded as evil only because it was seen as a threat to the "patriarchal" culture. And by way of proving the point they have cobbled together a very up-to- date and user-friendly version of goddess-worship, which answers so well to the spiritual hunger of modern Americans as to cast serious doubt on its antiquity. Their basic principle-"Harm none and do what you will"-is the gospel of liberalism dressed up as law, rather than the lack of it; their "covens" are in many cases vamped-up feminist circles, devoted to boosting the confidence of women downtrodden by men, or at any rate by their own image of men; their symbols-the pentagram, the altar, the nine- inch daggers or "athames," the long robes, and the leaping over flames-may have ancient precedents, but they come to the Wiccans from 19th-century charlatans like Eliphas Levi and Aleister Crowley, men who cannily judged the spiritual hunger of the new middle classes and thereby notched up women by the score. Indeed, as Philip G. Davis has shown (Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neo-pagan Feminist Spirituality), the Wiccan theology is derived not from the old forms of goddess-worship, but from the writings of 19th-century commentators like Johann Jacob Bachofen, who invented the notion of a lost matriarchal past in a work that is now entirely discredited.

Feeding a hunger

Still, religion will survive any amount of skeptical scholarship, and the Wiccans are no exception. They offer the commodity for which modern Americans are hungry-the conversion experience, the transition from dark to light, lost to found, outsider to insider. In comparison with this redemptive gift, other things are of no account. The covens have been spreading through the suburbs; even the military now recognizes the Wiccans as a "minority religion," with the right to hold rituals and classes for serving personnel. Weak though their doctrines may be from any intellectual or historical perspective, they are a triumph of applied anthropology. Feminism, environmentalism, and liberalism all come together in a religion that recognizes the goddess as the object of worship, the priestess as her representative, and the earth and its seasons as the source of sacred rites.

It is tempting to regard the Wiccans in the same light as the other cults that have recently sprung up in America-the Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, the Moonies, the church of the notorious Rev. Jim Jones. There are, however, two important features that distinguish them. There is no leader or founder of the Wiccan cult; and there is no sacred text. Witchcraft is a religion without any structure of command and without any written law. True, there is an attempt to compensate in the use of antique and fustian language-"yclad," "mote," "hallowmas." But the religion recognizes no objective authority to which the worshipper must submit. On the contrary, it is a religion of "empowerment," to use the feminist word. Spells and brews, chants and talismans are all weapons in the hands of the individual Wiccan, who gains power over self and others through the manipulation of things. True, the Wiccan draws on mysterious cosmic forces; but the purpose of the spell and ritual is to join these forces to yourself-to amplify your own power and so achieve a kind of here-and-now redemption.

THE WICCAN'S POWERS

In this, at least, the Wiccans are close to the witches as they were once imagined. The witch was anathema to the Christian believer because she had arrogated to herself the powers that belong to the Almighty. Her spells were the antithesis of the sacred text-indeed, it was often thought that they consisted in reciting Biblical or liturgical texts backwards. For they were expressions of the individual will, rather than admonitions and counsels of a higher power. All the discipline of religion-which consists in obedience to the divine command and a day-to-day study of its meaning- was negated in the Puritan image of the witch, which is why witches were so greatly feared. They were the archetype of the liberated human being- the human being who had stepped free from the chains of morality and seized the world and its glories for herself.

For this very reason, however, witchcraft has a singular appeal to modern Americans, increasing numbers of whom are brought up without any knowledge of a sacred text and without the language and the concepts of the Judeo- Christian tradition. The idea that religion might be a matter of obedience and example strikes them as weird; the idea that it is a matter of the self and its empowerment connects immediately with the surrounding secular culture.

But why isn't feminism enough? Why the need for a Wiccan religion? What is added by religion that is absent from the politics of the group?

The answer is enchantment. Science has disenchanted the universe and deprived us of our place at its center. Human beings cannot live with this demoralized world. They need to see their environment as their tribal forebears saw it: as an enchanted place, which mysteriously returns our glance. The spell answers directly to this need, since it enables the witch to reanimate her universe. It gives supernatural power to a human being, and so rescues her from nature.

Rituals, spells, and incantations are deliberate defiances of reason. They place nonsense in the center of people's lives and ask them to unite in believing it. People on their own are nothing-victims of the natural world, and at the mercy of their own skepticism. People in a group, however, have a power that is more than the sum of their individual efforts. And the spell symbolizes this power. Alone you could not possibly believe in it, since alone you have only reason as your guide. Together, however, you can believe anything. In short, the Wiccans have rediscovered the phenomenon observed by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep-the rite of passage, which purges the individual of his isolation and grants him membership in the tribe. The rite of passage works by summoning occult powers, by standing outside nature and against it, and by reassuring the individual that, absorbed into the community, he cannot be harmed.

And that is what is missing from modern life, and especially from life in the American city. The most important rite of passage in recent Western societies was marriage-the consecration before the community of a lifelong commitment. The collapse of marriage is not the result of feminism, but the cause of it. Without lasting marriages, women have no real guarantee of security, and no reason for trusting men. If men cannot be trusted, then women have to set up on their own. Feminism turns on the masculine realm and deconstructs it, representing it as a realm of lies, manipulation, and the brutal misuse of power. It thereby reassures women that they don't need men in any case. But it relies on rational arguments, sociological theories, and objective policies-so leaving the heart unconsoled. What is needed is a new form of membership, a new rite of passage, and a new lifelong commitment-hence a new form of nonsense. In other words, what is needed is witchcraft. This is surely why the Wiccans are expanding, even though they have neither a leader, nor a doctrine, nor a text.

On the other hand, a cult that spreads so quickly, and that has so little substance when it comes to answering the great metaphysical questions, is ripe for takeover by the real witches. Strong personalities like Aleister Crowley preyed on the vulnerable loners who had lost their religion but not their religious need, and who wanted to throw themselves beneath the juggernaut of some crushing ego. Modern America has seen the emergence of these leaders-Koresh and Jones being symptomatic. And it has discovered that their promise of a new life is also a death threat. For the moment, the Wiccans speak only of peace and love and finding oneself. But without a doctrine or a text to protect them, they may soon find themselves opening the door to the Devil. Those old Puritans were wrong about many things; but they were not entirely wrong about witchcraft.


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To: discostu
I believe what Chesterton actually said was "If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."

You obviously have fallen for the familiar and banal notion that it is not important to believe in something greater than yourself.

Alas, Chesterton's epigram applies to you more fully than to most people--because you have fallen for the oldest cop-out in human history.

181 posted on 05/05/2002 9:05:40 PM PDT by hinckley buzzard
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To: EternalVigilance
"That's quite a leap in reasoning. I have a number of reasons for caring about persons other than myself..."

Ah, but every single example you have given me is from a purely selfish viewpoint...which proves my point.


I never claimed otherwise. It still disproves your assertion that lack of belief in a transcendent God leads to a lack of concern for other people and even a desire to cause them harm.

"Then there's the matter of human empathy."

If you are counting on human empathy when the chips are down, completely separate from faith in Christ, you are setting yourself up for a huge disappointment.

I never claimed that human empathy was a universal trait, only that it is a non-divine reason that humans will look after one another.

"What you've described isn't atheism, it's sociopathy."

Atheism ends in sociopathy...always has, and always will.


Unsupported generalization.
182 posted on 05/05/2002 9:39:05 PM PDT by Dimensio
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To: Dimensio
Self-worship aka selfishness is the world's oldest and perenially most popular religion. "Ye shall be as gods!"

Every religion except true Christianity (which really isn't a 'religion'), if you dig down to the core, is man-centered; and leads to futility, emptiness and darkness.

Do I expect to convince you? Nope.

Why? Because even though the evidence is all around you; in history, in nature, in reason, in the testimony of untold millions of people who have experienced the salvation described in the New Testament; you will call all of it unsupported generalizations.

But I will pray for you.

EV

183 posted on 05/06/2002 7:11:09 AM PDT by EternalVigilance
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To: OrthodoxPresbyterian
"No...'deistic religions' would be tolerated."

As long as IT were by State imposed decree; IT's authority superceded all others; and there weren't too many "pesky" conditions to abide by.

"Where is our focus?"

Our "focus" is on this political/cultural/religious obsession with "inclusivity" and "tolerance" -- afterall, NO religion is anymore valid then any other -- including Wicca, Scientology, Satanism. And as Al Gore once reminded us, everyone essentially prays and worships a "higher power" in the final analysis afterall, don't we? ;-)

184 posted on 05/06/2002 7:29:44 AM PDT by F16Fighter
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To: RnMomof7
BUMP
185 posted on 05/06/2002 7:31:34 AM PDT by F16Fighter
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To: hinckley buzzard
I believe what Chesterton actually said was "If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."

I thought it was my dad that always said that:>)) It was part of his parental wisdom

186 posted on 05/06/2002 7:39:36 AM PDT by RnMomof7
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To: LiberalBuster
As long as neither neo-paganism nor any other "belief system" infringes on my person or property, I don't give a rat's @ss what people believe/preach/practice/etc.

Exactly. As long as the prostelizing doesn't infringe on me and mine, they can do what they want.

187 posted on 05/06/2002 7:42:08 AM PDT by mhking
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To: Tomalak
Moral: Don't eat mushrooms before writing unless you've checked and double-checked their identification.
188 posted on 05/06/2002 7:57:28 AM PDT by steve-b
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To: Cicero
Chesterton was engaging in the fallacy of accretion. The fact that (the aggregate of) people who do not agree with Chesterton's religious doctrines believe (individually) all sorts of different things does not in any way imply that any given individual is torn by conflicting notions. (It is true that some individuals are so torn, but a much larger number of others are not.)
189 posted on 05/06/2002 8:02:19 AM PDT by steve-b
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To: Tomalak
Rubbish. Chesterton said that if people don't believe in God they believe in anything. He was not talking about me or himself. He was talking about everyone. Now either he was right or he was wrong, but he was making general claims.

Since it is a general claim, it is refuted by a single counterexample. Once one finds a single individual who does not believe in God and also does not believe any old notion that is presented to him, Chesterton's claim falls. It is quite easy to find such individuals (the late Isaac Asimov is the first example that comes to mind). QED.

190 posted on 05/06/2002 8:04:15 AM PDT by steve-b
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To: Tomalak
Surely you agree that Christianity must be supreme above pagan, immoral superstition?

As a supporter the American Constitutional Republic, I obviously cannot believe any such thing.

191 posted on 05/06/2002 8:06:06 AM PDT by steve-b
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To: Tomalak
Good post.

Almost none of the old denominations retains any centralized authority that can control the doctrine, liturgy, or membership of its peripheral congregations

The Bible is the check and balance on this. You read your Bible. If the church you belong to veers away from what's taught in the Bible, you get a new church.

192 posted on 05/06/2002 8:12:21 AM PDT by berned
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Comment #193 Removed by Moderator

To: gg188
Your comment IS the satire, right?

What satire? Msg#9 is solid historical presentation -- the Puritans went to Holland, were unhappy there because they had to live with non-Puritan neighbors (and, though the post doesn't mention this point, because their children were exposed to the Dutch culture and non-Puritan religious viewpoints), so they left to establish a community from which "heretics" could be excluded completely.

194 posted on 05/06/2002 9:05:14 AM PDT by steve-b
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To: wimpycat
"Love thy neighbor" is a much better moral foundation.

This is a principle that has never been universally applied, because as a practical matter it cannot be universally applied. If Osama bin Laden moved next door to me, I would not love him; I would call the FBI and warn my other neighbors to get out of the crossfire.

195 posted on 05/06/2002 9:11:50 AM PDT by steve-b
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To: F16Fighter
Islam, Wicca, and even Secularism Humanism for that matter, operate and worship under the good graces and tolerance of a Christian taught and inspired "tolerance"

Nonsense. Christians began to be tolerant because the political results of sectarian warfare stripped from them the power to persecute. There is no credit in do good because you lack the power to do evil.

196 posted on 05/06/2002 9:23:53 AM PDT by steve-b
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To: Lazamataz
In fact, many of the founders of the original colonies (most notably the Puritans) set off for freedom to practice their religion -- and to make damn sure that everyone within the community practiced it too whether they liked it or not.

The mutual warfare of Christian sects in the two centuries after that fellow tacked his list onto a church door forced them to come to a modus vivendi of toleration, which was gradually extended to religions generally. This is not a result of "Christian morality"; it is a result of the political circumstances in which Christians found themselves after fighting one another to a standstill.

197 posted on 05/06/2002 9:30:52 AM PDT by steve-b
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To: Avoiding_Sulla
Put it more simply still. To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence and will are in themselves good. Therefore he must be getting them from the Good Power: even to be bad he must borrow or steal from his opponent....

Here, we have a switch between two different definitions of "good". Existence, intelligence, and will are "good" in the sense of "desirable" or "beneficial"; the distinction between the two powers posited by dualism depends on "good" in the sense of "morally upright". The two concepts can exist independently of one another -- one need only cite an example of a real, intelligent, and/or strong-willed advocate of an evil cause (e.g. Josef Stalin), or a fictional, stupid, and/or easily distracted advocate of a good cause (e.g. Inspector Clouseau).

198 posted on 05/06/2002 9:51:22 AM PDT by steve-b
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To: steve-b
No, the switch wasn't her. Perhaps you missed it. Lewis made the switch further up and explains the distinction. At this point of your criticism, Lewis was presenting what we may conclude.

Have you read Lewis' The Abolition of Man at all? I ask because Lewis demonstrates there too why he expects your question.

199 posted on 05/06/2002 10:20:53 AM PDT by Avoiding_Sulla
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To: OrthodoxPresbyterian
Keep me BUMPED. I am slowly cathcing up, but too busy to participate fully at this time. Are you aware that The Days of Vengeance is available for reading on the internet, either in HTML or PDF?
200 posted on 05/06/2002 11:23:45 AM PDT by Jerry_M
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