June 3, 2025 • 48 mins
Paganism was the set of original ancient religions around the world. They all had plenty of gods, loved nature, sometimes sacrificed things, and so on. Then the Big Three religions came along and took over. But today paganism has come roaring back!
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and we both have antlers on our head and
this is stuff you.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Should Just a couple of wooded pagans.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Yeah, I'm excited about this one man.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Yeah, you know, we'll reference some previous episodes. We covered
WICCA and our witchcraft up and there's some Alistair Crowley
in here, of course. Yeah, for sure, you knew he
was going to make an appearance, and it seems like
there was something else too. But well, if you want
the full picture, you know, go back and listen to
all those together. Just for a spooky Why don't I
(00:44):
say spooky? This is not even spooky. That's the whole problem.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Conception.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, but it's so ingrained that even have to know
about it. You know, it's hard not to just shake that.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
I was a church kid, I was raised Baptist Pagans.
We're spooky, they killed the sacrifice things.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah. I ran across a couple of websites, Christian websites
that essentially still think all of the same things that
the church originally said about pagan's back. You know, fifteen
hundred years ago.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, so it's still alive and well it's cool to
know the story now, having you know, left the Baptist
Church many many years ago to finally understand like, oh,
at a certain point in history, they were just like
this is the religion and everything else is the devil.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Right, Yeah, And in retrospect looking at this now, it's like, gosh,
talk about getting your wires crossed.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, that's funny.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah. So we're talking about paganism everybody, And hats off
to Dave two first of all for helping us with this.
This is a huge, big lump of a topic that
almost every one of the things we're going to talk
about could be broken out into its own episode. Yeah,
so we're gonna have to summarize in a lot of ways.
(02:01):
We're going to get a lot of stuff wrong. So
apologies already to all of our pagan listeners out there,
and let us know, correct us about what we do
get wrong. But we're going to try our best not
to get stuff wrong because it's a really interesting set
of religions. We should say, that's what paganism is. It's
not a religion, it's a set of typically nature based
(02:23):
religions that before the original ancient paganism predated any of
what we call the Abrahamic religions, the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam. And that's my definition of paganism.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Can we stop there.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, we haven't gotten anything wrong so far.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
So yeah, yeah, Well you mentioned those religions, and it's
pretty key to mention the Abrahamic religions because basically anything
else outside of that was considered pagan. Historically, the word
pagan actually was pretty much an insultant firs first, when
Christianity was on the rise, and we'll talk a lot
about that here in a second. In the Roman Empire,
(03:06):
if you did not convert to Christianity Christianity, you were
called paganas, which is Latin for country dweller, which is
basically like, hey, if you're not a Christian, you're a
bumpkin aka pagan which is interesting.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Oh yeah, it's definitely interesting. It's funny because that means
that at some point in time, and we'll talk about
when that happened, Christianity suddenly leapt forward as like a
sophisticated thing, which is so the tables basically turned because
originally some of the Greek or actually Roman pagans were
(03:42):
very suspicious of Christianity and said all sorts of libelist
things against them, and then as Christianity rose to prominence,
it used that same playbook against pagans. But yeah, it
makes sense that it's like you were considered a hick
or not up to date if you were still a
pagan once Christianity became a thing in the Roman Empire.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I think Bumpkin summed it up nicely.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I thought so too. I like Bumpkin, cause it's like
it's an insult, but it's just so round and happy
that it's hard to be angered by it if somebody
calls you a bumpkin.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Yeah, for some reason, Bumpkin does have just sort of
a like, I feel like bumpkins are.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Happy, right, they don't care what you think of them.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
All right, So should we talk a little bit about
you know, there's kind of two parts of this. There's
ancient paganism, which is one thing that we're going to
speak about now, and then later we're going to talk
a little bit about modern paganism. But the kind of
key distinction here is modern paganism isn't like, hey, we
just brought back everything they were doing back then because
(04:47):
it went away for a long time, and now we're
going to do that same stuff. It was, you know,
inspired by some of this stuff. But as you'll see,
not a lot of text survived. So modern paganism is
basically its own new thing.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah, and we'll talk about where it came from. But
there's a lot of well just incorrect facts on the
Internet that basically says this tradition has continued uninterrupted. Yeah,
in secret. It had to be driven into secret by
the rise of Christianity. That just does not seem to
be true.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Yeah, but if we're going to go back to ancient paganism,
we can talk about some of the different elements of because,
like you said, this is a lot of different things
that they're wrapped up under the term paganism. But animism
is the first one, and that is the belief that
every object on the planet basically has a spirit. People do,
my dog does, your dog does, which I totally believe,
(05:42):
the rivers, trees, everything in nature does, animate or inanimate,
which is why it's called animism. And they thought that
nature can be like a great thing, it can help
protect us or it can be a dangerous thing. It
can cause us harm, and it's up to us to
influence that through sacrifice and these rituals that we perform.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Yeah, A good example of this, just real quick, is
there's no absolute good and evil. That's one of those
Abrahamic religious ideas, and paganism does not believe in that. So,
for example, if you are crossing a raging river, that
river might kill you and drown you, but it's not
like the river is evil and wants to do that.
(06:21):
It just can happen. So there's a risk, but it
can also be a neutral thing. You can increase your
chances of successfully crossing that river by maybe praying to
it the spirit or the god of that river, or
maybe offering a sacrifice. But it's not there's no evil
rivers in any of the pagan religions except for the
river sticks. Yeah. I guess maybe, but I think even
(06:45):
then it's not necessarily absolutely evil.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, We've got shamanism, which is sort of like animism
plus animism with a mascot, and that the shaman is
the person who steps forward and says, all right, we've
got all these objects that have spirits and I'm the
person that can communicate with them. I will enter a trance,
may take some drugs, maybe a little singing and dancing
(07:09):
to get there, don't you worry about that. But I'll
get there in that trance state, and I'll be able
to communicate with these spirits like go through me.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, I think the singing and dancing is subsequent to
taking the drugs.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Hey, I went to a raver two in my day.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Exactly every single person there was a shaman at that moment.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
At this is what it felt like at the time,
probably right.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
So there's a couple of things just from the ancient
pagan religions that are still carried on today. Ancestor worship
is another big one, Yeah, especially as we'll see in
the neo pagan Norse traditions. But it's essentially you can
see evidence of this and the fact that we buried
people in the way that we started burying people as
(07:51):
if they're venerated, as if we understand that they need
grave goods because there's an afterlife, and so it's not
like a hard leap to the idea that those ancestors
can help us out now that they're in the spirit world.
And so you can worship them. That's a big part
of it too.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah, for sure, then we're going to get into this
whole idea that and something I found that looking through
a lot of these pagan rights and religions is that
they looked at women very differently than early Christian and
some might even argue late Christian religions do, and that
(08:28):
women were worshiped and venerated. The earth Mother was a
big part of the early deities and worshiped. And they
found venus figurines, these clay and stone figures from like
thirty five thousand years ago that are clearly like probably
used in fertility rights because they have you know, exaggerated
(08:48):
breasts on these figures and wide hips, and so the
whole idea of the earth Mother has been around for
a long long time.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Yeah, and then you can pretty clearly demonstrate that the
earth Mother eventually evolved into Gaia from the Greek pantheon.
Guya is the mom of all the other gods, which
brings up to another point polytheism. It's not monotheistic. There
is not one single god. Even if there's a head
of the gods like say Zeus or Odin or something
(09:17):
like that. There's still plenty of other gods who are gods.
They're not saints, they're not angels, they're not assistants, they
are gods in and of themselves. And so Polytheism is
a huge, huge part of any pagan religion, ancient or
modern too.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
And I've never looked into this, but I mean, the
idea of Mother Nature that probably kind is kind of
a trickle down from goddess Mother Earth Mother, right.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
I would think so too, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Yeah, I'm just taking a stab at that though.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
So you gotta be right, you know. I mean, it's
not like that was just coincidental. Somebody came up with
that in the sixties or something.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
What about sacrifice, the stuff that Pagans don't like to
talk about.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yeah, I mean, this is a can of worms that
you know, we can't fully open because there's a lot
of debate about how much sacrifice there has been in
all religions throughout ancient world history. A lot of times
these the people that say, like, oh, they were just
killing babies left and right, are written by the enemies
of these people, in this case, Christian and Roman accounts
(10:22):
about how widespread it would be because they're trying to
paint them in a certain way. But there definitely has
been sacrifice, whether it was human or your finest crop
or your best sheep.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yeah, I mean, we know for a fact that Germanic
and Celtic tribes sacrificed humans. Just from the presence of
bog bodies in the state that they were, the way
that they died, they're pretty much proof positive that there
was sacrifice. And even outside of Europe. I mean, you
know the Inca Maiden, the lu Laya, you know, lou
Lailo lu Layelo.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
I think you mean Leilani the maiden.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
You remember the Inca maiden that has like your knees
pulled up her chest and she looks sleeping. But she
was sacrificed five hundred years ago. I mean, like it
did happen, but the idea that it was widespread, or
that they like drank baby's blood or that kind of stuff,
that was the exaggeration that really kind of were smears.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yeah. Yeah, you know, I finally watched it the other day.
It was about a month ago, I guess, the mel Gibson.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Apocalypto.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Yeah, I'd never seen that. For some reason, I finally
watched it.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
How was it?
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Did you see it?
Speaker 2 (11:29):
No, but I've seen the scene that made you think
of that.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
You know, it was pretty good. You know. I'm not
like championing Mel Gibson, of course, but I just hadn't
seen that movie. And I had a I guess Emily
was clearly not with me, and I was like, oh,
I've got a window and it popped up and I
was like, you know what, I never saw that. Let
me check it out. Very gross in gory in its depictions,
but you know it was okay.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Yeah, mel Gibson is basically into snuff porn, like, he
loves that stuff. Have you ever seen We Were Soldiers?
Speaker 1 (12:04):
I did not see that, But that's supposed to be
pretty gory too, right.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
It's one of the most violent, yeah, glorious war movies
I've ever seen in my life.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Now I've seen The Guns of Navarone.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Yeah. Oh was that Telly Sabalis?
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Now he was in the Dirty Dozen, that's what you think.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yeah, that was a good or forced in from Navarone
was seeing that one too.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
I don't know if he was one, he was definitely
in the Dirty Dozen. That was a great one.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, all right, We're getting away from off topic here though,
because we need to talk about idol worship and tree worship.
That's another pretty common element and a lot of different
pagan religions. You know, it's right there in the Ten Commandments,
do not worship false idols. Idolatry was a big no
no to Christians, and that's basically any physical representation of
a God or a spirit. We usually, you know, growing
(12:53):
up Baptist thought him of his like statues and stuff
from biblical stories, but it can be a rock or something.
And then trees. Trees are big in many, many, most
pagan religions. They love their trees.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Yeah, they love them for sure. So yeah, those are
some high points or basics, I guess is a better
way to put it, of ancient pagan religions. And because
as we said before, there's not really a lot that
survived from the ancients to today, a lot of that
stuff has been gleaned by archaeologists anthropologists, and it's from
(13:30):
that base of knowledge that modern Pagans draw from to
create the newer versions of the pagan religions.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yeah, it feels like a break time, right, yeah, I guess.
So all right, we'll take a break, and we'll come
back and talk about when Christianity decided that's it. We're
going to change the narrative right after this, all right,
(14:14):
So we promised talk of Christianity stamping out Paganism, or
trying to at least, and that started with Constantine, who
was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity officially.
I think you sort of hinted earlier that Christianity was
a pretty smallish persecuted sect of people at first, until
(14:34):
Constantine came along and said, actually, I'm Christian now, and
all the other Roman elites were like, well, off, Constantine
the Emperor's Christian, then maybe we should look into this
a little more.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Right, And so the tide turned on Pagans basically right
out of the gate. But Constantine himself didn't do anything
to persecute He didn't use his official position as emperor
to persecute pagans.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Yeah, he did his to in the pool publicly.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So actually I think he was fully
immersed in the baptismal font instead. Well yeah, his son, though,
went full boar after Pagan's and outlawed Paganism. He passed
the first Laws Constantineous Constantius, not Constantinople Constantius. Yes. Yeah,
(15:25):
he passed the first laws that made paganism and practices
of paganism illegal. It was basically amounted to any public
displays of paganism were outlawed. But not too long after
a couple of decades his successor, Theodosius, he said, Christianity's
the state religion of the Roman Empire, and if you
(15:46):
do anything pagan, including in your own home, like your
your toast, don't let us see you go anywhere near chicken,
or you're in big trouble.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
And they said, what is toast? When your bread gets
too close to the fire and it tastes better, that's doped.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
I hadn't tried that.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
So Christianity is on the rise. And they started to
stamp out pagan religions all over the Roman Empire through
the laws that you mentioned and through a pretty brilliant plan,
which was literally demonizing them. I never really have thought
about that word much until this is like, you know
that demon is the root there, but that's literally what
(16:29):
they did. They were like, you know what everyone that
you're have been worshiping, they are the devil in disguise, right,
like the literal devil Satan.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Yes, And they actually took some of the existing gods
and just basically copy pasted them into the conception of
the devil of Satan. And again keep in mind here,
these these pagan religions, they don't have anything even approximating Satan.
Like gods can be good or protective or dangerous, but
(17:03):
there's no like one evil polar foil to God, because
there is no one God. It's not dual, it's plural.
That's that's part of pagan religion, right, So it's ironic
that they're like, your god is Satan, and they're like
which one. They're like, the one with the horns, the
one with the antlers, right, And so that's that's basically
(17:23):
how the modern conception of Satan came along. And so
basically any god would just be equated with evil, with
a demon, with Satan himself. And if you were caught
practicing this, now you started to risk being killed by
the people in charge.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Yeah, they found this one pretty prominent Celtic gods. Yeah yeah, okay,
ce r In you in in.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
It's like it's a yeah, it's like a mashup of
Michael Sarah, John Cena, and John Sanunu.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Yes, Man, I almost said it wrong again. Sir Nunas was,
like I said, a prominent Celtic god and had it
was the antler god had antlers. And they basically look
back now and say between Sir Nunos and the Greek
god Pan, like, it's not a far leap to go
from antlers to horns. And that was basically the probably
(18:22):
the model for the Christian devil that you know, once
they decided, hey, we're just going to be binary from.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Now on, right, But the Sir Nunos is wearing antlers
because they were They indicated protectiveness, not necessarily of humans,
but of the forest and the countryside. And you could
be in Sir Nunosi's good graces by taking care of
those things, or you could run a foul of Sir Nunos.
And if you say, just stepped on a bunch of
(18:49):
docks for no good reason. Yeah, but that he became
Satan eventually, or he was one of the ones. I
think they went basically local religion by local religion and
then identified who could be Satan and then demonized them
and all the others.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yes, that makes sense. Like who do they identify with, Like,
who's going to scare them?
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Exactly? So, now, because your god, your ancient pagan god,
is Satan. If you are caught worshiping that god, or
any god or any kind of polytheistic pagan religion, you're
now in league with the devil. And again you can
be put to death for that kind of thing. And
that developed into which trials, the Inquisition, all sorts of
(19:30):
terrible stuff that was essentially the Christian Church persecuting in
an effort to stamp out it's like any local rival religions.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah, well, stamp out is one thing they did, and
you know, with the Christian armies and colonialism and missionaries,
that was what they were doing all over the West.
And then what they couldn't stamp out or I don't
know if it was what they couldn't stamp out, but
they were stamping out everything they wanted to. And then
they also said, but actually this Halloween and Christmas Easter
(20:00):
are pretty fun, and those are pagan you know based,
So we're just gonna tweak those and make them our own.
Because who doesn't like Halloween?
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Yeah, everybody likes Halloween. Which started out as Sowin as
we'll see. I think we've talked about that probably fifteen times. Yeah.
You know what I think actually triggered this me thinking
of this topic.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
What movie?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
No, it was Easter I was thinking about. I happened
to be up and out around sunrise on Easter and
it reminded me, as a kid, being raised Catholic, of
going to Sunrise mass in Eastern Yeah, and I was like, dude,
you're standing there celebrating a religious service, watching the sun
rise on a specific day in the spring. Like it
(20:48):
is so pagan based, and it's like in every single way,
I think even Easter is like a shift or an
adaptation of like oh Stare, which I believe was one
of the Polytheiets pagan gods.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, like it was.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
It's just there out in the open basically, and that
made me wonder about the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Yeah. You know, growing up in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the
most dedicated would hike up Stone Mountain in the in
the dead of night to go to the sunrise service
on top of Stone Mountain.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Yeah. Pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
So they were basically stamping with one foot, giving back
rubs with the other other with their hands stamp stamp
rub rob That's what the Christians did to basically win
the pr war of the religions and take over. Essentially.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Yeah, if you're looking at the pagan comeback, which we're
going to get into now, you can go back to
the Renaissance when they said, Hey, the Greek and Roman
philosophers and all those books they were writing, it's like
super interesting, we're into that stuff again. And we have
the printing press now, so we can really print this
stuff up and disseminate it. And there were Renaissance painters
(21:58):
painting all these amazing romantic paintings of like mythological creatures
and gods. And then the Enlightenment came along and said Renaissance,
hold my meed.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
So yeah, the Enlightenment was like, in a couple of
strange ways, it was really fertile ground for like an
interest in paganism to come along. For one, the Enlightenment
thinkers just essentially as a first step, just rejected Christianity
and monotheism in particular. And they also were like, I
(22:31):
really like the philosophy of these ancient Greeks and ancient Romans.
They were polytheistic. Maybe I could be too, So it
kind of aroused like an intellectual interest in that.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
But it also it created an interest in paganism in
a different way too, because the Enlightenment created such rational
thinking that some people were kind of repelled by it
and they're like, I'm going to go seek answers and
purpose in nature instead. And yeah, probably more than anything,
is how the Enlightenment led to an interest in paganism.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah. And also I thought it was super interesting how
much the arts played into all this. You know, I
mentioned the Renaissance painters, but also Romantic poets like you
can't read Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley without like wanting
to go out into the woods and like be among nature.
There were very just very moving poems about the world,
(23:26):
the natural world around us, and the sort of unseen
magic in nature.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Yeah, you've never wanted to take your clothes off in
the woods? Read some Keats, right, See how you feel
after that?
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Oh, I'm not a big naked in the I'm not
a big naked guy period. I think it's been established,
but probably because of the Baptist upbringing. But I feel
too vulnerable out there in the woods.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Yeah, I know, I get that there's mosquitoes and beetles
and those worms that crawl up your pehle.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Yeah, I'll just you can find me in my skivvies
at least are you a never nude? Yeah? I shower
in a bathing suit in cut off gene. Yeah, to
cut off. So man, it's so great.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
What else?
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Oh, there was another thing that kind of created it
might it might have grown out of this interest essentially,
like kind of scholarship on paganism. Yeah, some was good.
Some was the kind of stuff that you would equate
with finding on the History Channel today. You know.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
That was in the article and we talked about it
a little bit offline. I did not know. I don't
watch enough History Channel. I thought the History Channel was
just like we used to call it the War Channel
because it was always just black and white World War
Two documentaries. But I know there is another side of
the History Channel where with the alien sky, like did
they have a lot of that kind of stuff?
Speaker 2 (24:47):
I think it's pretty much all Yeah, that is it?
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Really okay?
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Yeah, pretty much, And I think it has been that
way for a really long time. And I mean not
to bag on the History Channel. It's interesting, but I
guess what I'm equating it to is really interesting unsupported
theories that like, if you're an actual scientist and you
look into it, you're like, this is just made up.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
They're trying to make the entertaining television basically.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Yes, but the problem is is they present it factually
and it gets taken factually by a lot of people.
So they've caused a lot of problems. They essentially have
ruined the world single handedly.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
The History Channel has well I'm glad I know this
because I'm going to stop saying, well, the History Channel,
I said.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Its top that.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Yeah, but yeah. There were a couple of key people
that came out of this that you kind of referenced.
One was a guy named James Fraser. He was an
anthropologist who wrote a book, very influential book in eighteen
ninety called The Golden Bow. Bo I'm sorry, yeah, you
w jesus, what's going on with me? B o U
g H.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
I'm going with boo.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
It's pronounced bo.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
I think that's a History Channel type.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Okay, we're not gonna argue with this because who cares.
But that's the way it's spelled. And his argument was
that you know, all religions basically go back to this
one pagan myth about a king that was sacrificed to
bless the land with fertility, and you can kind of
trace them all back to this.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah, and so modern historians have said it's a great
theory Fraser, but it's not correct. Fraser is not a
history channel type. He was a legitimate anthropologist. And one
of the reasons the Golden Bow Bow figures in is
that he did an amazing amount of exhaustive research that
in the book he describes a lot of ancient pagan
(26:43):
traditions and beliefs and stuff. So The Golden Bow became
kind of like a handbook for the modern pagan movements
that followed.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Do you know what I feel like concerning here? What
the way that you pronounce the word be? Like? Why
did they get count Dracula to Who is that guy?
Speaker 2 (27:02):
I don't know? What was this like a book on tape?
You heard once? No?
Speaker 1 (27:05):
No, no, no, this is the YouTube guy when you
look up pronunciations. Oh oh, one, gentleman, that dogs he
came from Thrensylvan.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah, he really does, doesn't he? I never thought about it.
He's great.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Well, now this is saying bo. But I looked at
up earlier and it said bo.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Okay, boo boo.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
I don't know if I believe that, lady.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Like when the bow breaks, wouldn't you just sit up
and tell your mom that she got it wrong if
she's saying when the bow breaks.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
I've always said bow, But you know, maybe I'm wrong
or maybe the internet's wrong. That'd be a first How
about boh, yeah, when the book breaks?
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
And then there is a History Channel type person that
we should talk about, the Egyptologist Margaret Murray. She was
She's definitely on that side of things, right.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Yeah. She came up in the Bella and the Witch
Elm episode because she was saying, like Bella was murdered
by a witch right And she's one of the people
who argued that the modern European witches trace their lineage
unbroken back to fertility feminist cult that's been in the
British Isles ever since time immemorial, and that that's one
(28:18):
of the things that's been debunked, is that it's just
not true. Like the Christian Church and in their turn,
Judaism in Islam as well, did such a thorough job
of interrupting the transmission from the ancient world to the
modern world that it's just like that's just not really possible. Now,
that's not to say that like in certain like super
(28:41):
you know, rural local areas, there's like not folk traditions
that actually do date back really far. I mean, everybody's
seen wicker Man, right, But the thing is, like, like
Wickerman would be actually a bad example because that like
is an actual ritual. They knew exactly what they were doing,
they were performing rites that kind of stuff. This would
(29:04):
be more like, hey, we're dancing around the may pole,
but we don't necessarily know every single thing that's going on.
We're not performing every single aspect of this ancient ritual.
Even though the ritual in some form or fashion still
survive today, it's not the full the full Monty, it's
(29:25):
not the full manty of the actual pagan folk religion
that they're they're kind of venerating. Still, yeah, does that
make sense?
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Yeah? Absolutely? Okay, should we take our second break?
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (29:35):
All right, we're gonna take that break and we're gonna
move into the world of modern paganism right after this.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Well, by the way, Chuck, you, me and I have
a friend named Alex Mary who's an artist and she
does something called Morris dancing, and a lot of the
Morris dances like resemble paganism, like there's sometimes there's antlers
and stuff like that. But also, more than anything, reminds
me of stuff they would have done in that A
(30:26):
twenty four movie Midsommer, and it's basically like folk dancing
that dates back to like the fifteenth century and probably before,
but they can definitely trace it back that far. I
was asking her about paganism. She's like, Nope, not a
pagan I'm a Morris dancer.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
That's super cool. Yeah, And not to get off topic,
but since you brought up a twenty four I just
have to shout out their newest weird comedy from Tim Robinson.
Oh yeah, actually not from Tim Robinson, he's in it.
But the movie Friendship I can highly recommend. And I
went to the opening eleven am screening in Atlanta and
my friend, because you love Tim Robinson, you'll be glad
(31:05):
to know. At Phipps Plaza at eleven am on a Friday,
there were probably twenty five to thirty like Tim Robinson
fans in there. Nice at that first showing.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Was it rowdy?
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Yeah, you know, it's been a long time since I've
seen a crowded and it was crowded because it was
probably a fifty person theater, so it was seventy percent full.
A crowded like movie with other people, like a comedy
where just a bunch of people are laughing at once,
and it was so much fun.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
That's awesome, man, it was great. I wish I could
have gone.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
I wish you could have gone too.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Oh oh yeah, are talking about what modern paganism.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah, so we mentioned, you know, in several different ways
that modern paganism is its own thing. One of the
reasons why it's its own thing is because they just
didn't write down a lot of stuff back then. And
stuff that was written down, it wasn't like the literal,
detailed handbook of how to do this ritual this right,
that's pretty rare. Yeah, So that's one of the reasons,
(32:03):
and it was all stamped out. Some of the stuff
that we've gotten modern wise comes from these Icelandic or
maybe all of it, these Icelandic texts called the Eda's,
Is that right.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Yeah. As far as Norse religions, Norse pagan religions that
fall under the umbrella term Heathenism. This is where they
get all their stuff. Yeah, I don't know if it's
Das or Eda's. I think I agreed too soon. Okay, Okay,
maybe as that and then the Viking sagas, and so
the Viking sagas aren't like you said, it's not a
handbook of how to worship Norse gods, but just mentions
(32:36):
of it, like incidental references to stuff like that. The
neo Pagans who worship Norse gods have kind of taken that,
glean from that what some of these rituals and thoughts
and mythologies were.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah, and we're not going to talk about all modern
pagan religions, but we're gonna mention if you know, we're
going to highlight a few. We have to talk briefly
at least about their medic Order of the Golden Dawn.
But again, if you want to hear a lot about that,
listen to our Alistair, a really good episode, I think
Alistair Crowley episode. Yeah, this was the secret society that
Aleister Crowley was a member of. He was never the leader,
(33:13):
right or was he just sort of a.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
I think he did break off and try to become
a leader at some point.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
I don't remember. Yeah, maybe I should go back and
listen to it.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
I don't remember either. But their whole thing, the reason
we mentioned them is they were probably the first what
you could consider modern pagan religion. They practiced magic and
they were into the Egyptian cult stuff. Yeah, so that's
why we bring them up there. I don't think there's
too many Golden Dawn people running around, but I guarantee
there are some.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Yeah, there's got to be.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
What about Wicca.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah, we talked about wick and our Witchcraft episode that
was from a long time and ago, though, so it
may not be our best.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Work, No, I would. That's one that would probably be
pretty good to redo someday.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
We're not going to read this stuf't fine Modern Witchcraft
or wicka Wicca. Originally it was Wica as named by
a guy named Gerald Gardner, who was a British customs
official who worked in Malaysia then came back to England
in nineteen thirty six, wrote a bunch of Golden Dawn stuff,
a bunch of Alistair Crowley stuff, a bunch of Margaret
(34:20):
Murray stuff, our History Channel lady. And he said, you
know what, one night in nineteen thirty nine, a covin
of witches initiated me, and they were members of this
ancient fertility cult that I read about from Margaret Murray.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
Yeah, so it depends on who you talk to. Gardner
might either be described as a huckster who made all
this up, or a very gentle man. I saw somebody
describe him who knew him as utterly without malice, may
have made all this up. But he was known for
(34:57):
writing what's called the Book of Shadows, which has become
a big part of the wick and religion, which is
essentially a personal recipe book of spells and rituals that
has worked for a particular witch or coven, and sometimes
it's shared and people can borrow from it and add
to it and they create their own Book of Shadows,
(35:18):
but having your own basically, you know in those Bugs
Bunny cartoons where that witch is like looking through her
book that would technically be a book of shadows that
she's looking through to find like the ingredients for her
potions or whatever. That's a pretty literally cartoonish depiction of it,
but that's, you know, essentially what she was doing.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
My favorite part is when she would leave the frame
very quickly, and her hairpins would fall out, her hair
float in the air.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
She was one of the most disturbing cartoon characters of
all time if you ask me, man, Yeah, like she was.
She had the high pitched voice, and didn't she have
like kind of a red cousin it type who wore
like tennis shoes. He was a little off putting as well.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
I don't remember that, but if I saw it, I'd
probably know it.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Yeah, So, yeah, the witch from Bugs Bunny.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
That's right. But back to Wickens. They became very popular
in the sixties and seventies with the feminist set and
the environmentalist set, and there's still the Gerald Gardner focused.
They call it gardenerian wicca. But if you're out at
the seven eleven and you meet a modern Wickan, she's
(36:31):
probably practicing what's called dianic wicca, which is small woman centered.
It came around in nineteen seventy one by wicked activist
name not Susannah but Susanna Budapest. Great name.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Yeah, And it wasn't until twenty I think fifteen that
Susanna Budapest indoctrined her first male clergy member into dianic
wicca and other Dianic Wicca temples split off, and so
it's it's rare to find a man. And in this religion,
like it's all women. And I read that they're anti patriarchy.
(37:07):
They actually try to use their magic against the patriarchy.
But they're not anti male. The reason that they exclude
males is because their religion is created to celebrate and
honor the life cycles, the biological cycles in a lot
of cases of a woman as she's born and then
ages and then dies, and that essentially there's not a
(37:30):
lot of role for men in that religion. But yeah,
you know, you guys, go form your own stuff. Go
become druids, I think is their motto.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Yeah, And here's a little dinner party factoid. If someone
brings up wicking it around the table, you can say, hey,
did you know that it was actually first recognized as
a true religion in nineteen eighty six in the United
States when the Supreme Court ruled and debtmer v. Landen.
You don't have to know that part, but you could
really knock their socks off if you do. It was
where a prisoner was denied the use of ritual ritual
(38:01):
Wiccan objects and they're like, hey, this is my religious
stuff and the First Amendment protects this, and the Supreme
Court said, you know what, you're right.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah, probably a liberal court.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
One other thing I gotta say, I ran across the
UK finally suspended their witchcraft laws. They're bans against practicing
witchcraft in nineteen fifty one, which is why Gerald Gardner's
books start popping up in the fifties, even though he'd
been doing this since the late thirties.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Mile isn't that interesting, Like he.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Could have been arrested and thrown in prison for practicing
witchcraft before nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Wow. All right, So those were sort of the big
heavy hitters that were the first big ones that of
modern paganism when it staged its comeback. But there are
dozens of other smaller, much smaller modern pagan movements. Wick
is definitely the largest, but heathenry is one of them,
which is basically a umbrella term for people who, like
(39:03):
you mentioned the Norse and Germanic deities. They're really into Marvel, I.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Guess Marvel and Lord of the Rings. Like if you
thought led Zeppelin was into Lord of the Rings, may
introduce yourself to a heathen like, they are into that stuff. Yeah,
and I think the two biggest Germanic Heathen religions actually,
I guess I don't even think they're sex but one
(39:31):
is true. They worship the Acr gods, who would be
the highest of the pantheon of Norse mythology, like Odin
and Thor, and so people who are into Asatru are
very much into honor and valor and getting into Valhalla.
And then there's the Vanatru, which they're concerned with the
(39:52):
Veneer gods, who are the rest of the gods who
are more earthy, more nature based. They're into prosperity, that
kind of stuff. And I think there's way more Asatru
than Vanatru right now. And then one other thing about Heathenism.
There's a really interesting kind of side history that you
can go look up about the black metal scene, specifically
(40:16):
the Norwegian black metal scene that essentially turned into turned
their focus from satanism like traditional metal to heathenry, and
so you've got like folk metal, Viking metal, like they
essentially just became heathens but metal, and it just got
really out of hand in the early nineties. It was
(40:37):
really interesting stuff.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Well, yeah, and I don't know if we could get
a whole episode out of this. We probably could, or
maybe a short stuff. But there was the very famous
case of well, there were there were these series of arsons,
these church arsens, like twenty of them, these very very
old wooden medieval churches in Norway that were burned down.
I think twenty of them were attributed. These arsens were
(41:01):
attributed to black metal fans, and a couple of the
arsonists were very prominent in the early Norwegian black metal scene.
These guys there were bandmates at first in this band Mayhem,
but I think Vargu Vicranese, sure he left Mayhem at
a certain point, but Uronymous is how this guy's known
(41:25):
ostein Arseth no aka Uronymous, I think stayed in this
black metal group Mayhem for the run until he was
murdered by varg.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Yeah, and they didn't exactly like set paganism's general public
image on fire. Well actually they kind of did. Y. Yeah,
Arsith was a Satanist. Vickernese is in addition to being
a murderer, he's avowed neo Nazi, and the whole scene
in particular kind of gets caught up with nationalism a lot.
(41:55):
So it's not a very representative make sure of paganism
as a whole or neo paganism as a whole, but
it's still I mean, it's just ridiculously interesting. What happened there?
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Yeah, totally mentioning, I guess, yeah, I remember when this happened,
and I just I didn't know much about I still
don't know much about that whole music scene, but it's
it's super interesting. My cousin is into it.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
Yeah, I was checking a lot of it out and
some of it's really good. I'm not into folk metal
though at all.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
What is that? What does it sound like?
Speaker 2 (42:29):
It's you know, that kind of like super proud Irish
music that's like rock from like Boston. Imagine that is
like metal or almost almost yeah or no, I'm the
so yes that that Irish like rock does from Boston.
(42:49):
This is like the Norwegian metal version of that.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
Okay, yeah, I'll listen to something, see see what it
does to me.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Okay, just look up folk metal and you'll see. But
some of the other stuff was really good, like Mayhem's
stuff was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
What if this changed my life and set me on?
Of course that one would never have expected, right, here
fifty four years old.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
He still wearing corpse makeup.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Yeah, maybe get some antlers.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Yeah, why not? Man? Why not, like really ask yourself,
why not do that?
Speaker 1 (43:18):
I mean, no, no, it's no crazier than any of the
rest of them if you ask me. Yeah, uh, you
mentioned druids earlier. Kind of been passing. But that is
a modern belief system that is tied to pre Christian
British Isle sort of religion. That's where the Druids came from.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
Right, Yeah, And I saw that Druids are a big
difference between them and others is that the nature itself
is the divine. It's not like a manifestation of God
or the goddesses or anything like. It's nature. And I
also saw that the practitioners don't really consider it a religion.
They consider it more of philosophy or a way of life.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Yeah, and it's it was modern Druidry was started. I
got named Ross Nichols, and I don't know why. I
just find it funny that, like the modern Druids and
modern Wickens were started by a guys named Ross and Gerald.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Is that a little weird?
Speaker 2 (44:12):
Yeah, they sound like a couple of guys who might
live in a van together.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
They might who knows.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
There's also ceremonial magic, which would trace itself to I
guess the Golden Dawn. There's neopaganism, which we should talk
about because a lot of people use neopaganism as a
term incorrectly to describe modern paganism, which is what we've
been talking about this whole time. Neopaganism itself is a
specific kind of pagan religion. So all neopagans are pagan,
(44:42):
but all pagans aren't neopagans. And if you basically want
to just come at this by saying I like a
little of this, I like a little of that. Oh,
I would like to do a little bit of ritual magic. Yes,
I want to go out in the woods and practice
all this stuff, then neopaganism is for you. It is
wide open. They believe that everybody's beliefs are equal. They're
(45:04):
very much opposed to the idea of absolute good and evil.
They're very into nature. It's pretty much, I think what
people think about when they think about modern pagan religions.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
And that's neopaganism.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Yes, all right, And if you want to know more
about that, there's a great site called neo paganism dot org.
They seem to be pretty authoritative on it.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
They should be with that website. That'd be a real
shame if they weren't.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
Yeah, it's in comic sane. And just one other thing
about neopaganism. I think I said that a lot of
people that's what they think of, but they might be
saying WICKA when they're talking about neopaganism. There's big differences
between those two. Wicka is very magical based. The intent
is to harness the power of nature to get something done,
(45:52):
like get a job successfully, or make someone fall in
love with you, whatever. And WICKA is very very much esoteric.
So that means that there's a set amount of knowledge
out there. There's hidden mystery knowledge in the universe that
if you are an initiate into wika, like you have
to be initiated into a coven, and you apply yourself
(46:15):
in work and study, and you can have these mysteries
of the universe revealed to you. Not at all what
neo pagans believe. There's just a ton of differences. But
I mean, if any of this has floated your boat
and you're like, I really want to check this out.
There's a lot of stuff on the internet that you
can go read up on. I would just say use
(46:36):
your you're just general common sense to decide what site
you're on is, whether it's legitimate or authoritative, or if
it's just some dude making stuff up.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
You got to have the right font where you know
you're in.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
Trouble exactly giveaway.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
You also mentioned a great band name in there, hidden
Mystery Knowledge.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
That's a good one. I feel like that's more an
album though, Okay, and you better believe they're gonna have
some Lord of the Rings character? Was the illustration true? Well,
if you want to know more about that stuff, like
I said, go out on the internet. And since I
said that and Chuck had just said true, that means
that it's time for a listener, ma'am.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
I'm gonna call this popcorn cooking tip. I'm surprised I
haven't thought of. Oh okay, hey, guys, writing because I
want to tell you about my favorite way to cook
popcorn and bacon grease.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Oh yeah, I've heard of that.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
I hadn't heard of it. It's just right there in
front of my face too.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
You got bacon grease in front of your face.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Yeah, I do. My aunt taught me her tried and
true method for cooking popcorn in the soap top. She
puts a spoonful of bacon grease in a skillet, pours
a popcorn salt over the grease. Oh boy, plops a
couple of kernels in there and heats the whole thing up,
And when the grease is the right temperature, those kernels
are going to pop and alert you you can start
cooking for in the rest of the kernels, cover your
skillet and let it pop away. The bacon grease gives
(47:55):
a popcorn a little extra flavor. It really makes it
even more delicious. You should give it a try sometime.
Just don't forget to cover your skillet.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Thanks for all the years of podcasting listening pleasure you
provided for me. I wish you both the best. That
is from Randy with an Eye.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Thanks a lot, Randy with an Eye. Did Randy sign
the eye with a little heart instead of a dot,
because I'd be fantastic. Yeah, thanks a lot, Randy. That
was a great tip. We appreciate it. I'm quite sure
everybody who loves popcorn and bacon that's listening appreciated that.
If you want to be like Randy and send us
a tip that everybody can appreciate, you can send it
(48:29):
off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and we both have antlers on our head and
this is stuff you.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Should Just a couple of wooded pagans.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Yeah, I'm excited about this one man.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Yeah, you know, we'll reference some previous episodes. We covered
WICCA and our witchcraft up and there's some Alistair Crowley
in here, of course. Yeah, for sure, you knew he
was going to make an appearance, and it seems like
there was something else too. But well, if you want
the full picture, you know, go back and listen to
all those together. Just for a spooky Why don't I
(00:44):
say spooky? This is not even spooky. That's the whole problem.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Conception.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, but it's so ingrained that even have to know
about it. You know, it's hard not to just shake that.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
I was a church kid, I was raised Baptist Pagans.
We're spooky, they killed the sacrifice things.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah. I ran across a couple of websites, Christian websites
that essentially still think all of the same things that
the church originally said about pagan's back. You know, fifteen
hundred years ago.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, so it's still alive and well it's cool to
know the story now, having you know, left the Baptist
Church many many years ago to finally understand like, oh,
at a certain point in history, they were just like
this is the religion and everything else is the devil.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Right, Yeah, And in retrospect looking at this now, it's like, gosh,
talk about getting your wires crossed.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, that's funny.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah. So we're talking about paganism everybody, And hats off
to Dave two first of all for helping us with this.
This is a huge, big lump of a topic that
almost every one of the things we're going to talk
about could be broken out into its own episode. Yeah,
so we're gonna have to summarize in a lot of ways.
(02:01):
We're going to get a lot of stuff wrong. So
apologies already to all of our pagan listeners out there,
and let us know, correct us about what we do
get wrong. But we're going to try our best not
to get stuff wrong because it's a really interesting set
of religions. We should say, that's what paganism is. It's
not a religion, it's a set of typically nature based
(02:23):
religions that before the original ancient paganism predated any of
what we call the Abrahamic religions, the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam. And that's my definition of paganism.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Can we stop there.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, we haven't gotten anything wrong so far.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
So yeah, yeah, Well you mentioned those religions, and it's
pretty key to mention the Abrahamic religions because basically anything
else outside of that was considered pagan. Historically, the word
pagan actually was pretty much an insultant firs first, when
Christianity was on the rise, and we'll talk a lot
about that here in a second. In the Roman Empire,
(03:06):
if you did not convert to Christianity Christianity, you were
called paganas, which is Latin for country dweller, which is
basically like, hey, if you're not a Christian, you're a
bumpkin aka pagan which is interesting.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Oh yeah, it's definitely interesting. It's funny because that means
that at some point in time, and we'll talk about
when that happened, Christianity suddenly leapt forward as like a
sophisticated thing, which is so the tables basically turned because
originally some of the Greek or actually Roman pagans were
(03:42):
very suspicious of Christianity and said all sorts of libelist
things against them, and then as Christianity rose to prominence,
it used that same playbook against pagans. But yeah, it
makes sense that it's like you were considered a hick
or not up to date if you were still a
pagan once Christianity became a thing in the Roman Empire.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I think Bumpkin summed it up nicely.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I thought so too. I like Bumpkin, cause it's like
it's an insult, but it's just so round and happy
that it's hard to be angered by it if somebody
calls you a bumpkin.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Yeah, for some reason, Bumpkin does have just sort of
a like, I feel like bumpkins are.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Happy, right, they don't care what you think of them.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
All right, So should we talk a little bit about
you know, there's kind of two parts of this. There's
ancient paganism, which is one thing that we're going to
speak about now, and then later we're going to talk
a little bit about modern paganism. But the kind of
key distinction here is modern paganism isn't like, hey, we
just brought back everything they were doing back then because
(04:47):
it went away for a long time, and now we're
going to do that same stuff. It was, you know,
inspired by some of this stuff. But as you'll see,
not a lot of text survived. So modern paganism is
basically its own new thing.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah, and we'll talk about where it came from. But
there's a lot of well just incorrect facts on the
Internet that basically says this tradition has continued uninterrupted. Yeah,
in secret. It had to be driven into secret by
the rise of Christianity. That just does not seem to
be true.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Yeah, but if we're going to go back to ancient paganism,
we can talk about some of the different elements of because,
like you said, this is a lot of different things
that they're wrapped up under the term paganism. But animism
is the first one, and that is the belief that
every object on the planet basically has a spirit. People do,
my dog does, your dog does, which I totally believe,
(05:42):
the rivers, trees, everything in nature does, animate or inanimate,
which is why it's called animism. And they thought that
nature can be like a great thing, it can help
protect us or it can be a dangerous thing. It
can cause us harm, and it's up to us to
influence that through sacrifice and these rituals that we perform.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Yeah, A good example of this, just real quick, is
there's no absolute good and evil. That's one of those
Abrahamic religious ideas, and paganism does not believe in that. So,
for example, if you are crossing a raging river, that
river might kill you and drown you, but it's not
like the river is evil and wants to do that.
(06:21):
It just can happen. So there's a risk, but it
can also be a neutral thing. You can increase your
chances of successfully crossing that river by maybe praying to
it the spirit or the god of that river, or
maybe offering a sacrifice. But it's not there's no evil
rivers in any of the pagan religions except for the
river sticks. Yeah. I guess maybe, but I think even
(06:45):
then it's not necessarily absolutely evil.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, We've got shamanism, which is sort of like animism
plus animism with a mascot, and that the shaman is
the person who steps forward and says, all right, we've
got all these objects that have spirits and I'm the
person that can communicate with them. I will enter a trance,
may take some drugs, maybe a little singing and dancing
(07:09):
to get there, don't you worry about that. But I'll
get there in that trance state, and I'll be able
to communicate with these spirits like go through me.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, I think the singing and dancing is subsequent to
taking the drugs.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Hey, I went to a raver two in my day.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Exactly every single person there was a shaman at that moment.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
At this is what it felt like at the time,
probably right.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
So there's a couple of things just from the ancient
pagan religions that are still carried on today. Ancestor worship
is another big one, Yeah, especially as we'll see in
the neo pagan Norse traditions. But it's essentially you can
see evidence of this and the fact that we buried
people in the way that we started burying people as
(07:51):
if they're venerated, as if we understand that they need
grave goods because there's an afterlife, and so it's not
like a hard leap to the idea that those ancestors
can help us out now that they're in the spirit world.
And so you can worship them. That's a big part
of it too.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah, for sure, then we're going to get into this
whole idea that and something I found that looking through
a lot of these pagan rights and religions is that
they looked at women very differently than early Christian and
some might even argue late Christian religions do, and that
(08:28):
women were worshiped and venerated. The earth Mother was a
big part of the early deities and worshiped. And they
found venus figurines, these clay and stone figures from like
thirty five thousand years ago that are clearly like probably
used in fertility rights because they have you know, exaggerated
(08:48):
breasts on these figures and wide hips, and so the
whole idea of the earth Mother has been around for
a long long time.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Yeah, and then you can pretty clearly demonstrate that the
earth Mother eventually evolved into Gaia from the Greek pantheon.
Guya is the mom of all the other gods, which
brings up to another point polytheism. It's not monotheistic. There
is not one single god. Even if there's a head
of the gods like say Zeus or Odin or something
(09:17):
like that. There's still plenty of other gods who are gods.
They're not saints, they're not angels, they're not assistants, they
are gods in and of themselves. And so Polytheism is
a huge, huge part of any pagan religion, ancient or
modern too.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
And I've never looked into this, but I mean, the
idea of Mother Nature that probably kind is kind of
a trickle down from goddess Mother Earth Mother, right.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
I would think so too, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Yeah, I'm just taking a stab at that though.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
So you gotta be right, you know. I mean, it's
not like that was just coincidental. Somebody came up with
that in the sixties or something.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
What about sacrifice, the stuff that Pagans don't like to
talk about.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yeah, I mean, this is a can of worms that
you know, we can't fully open because there's a lot
of debate about how much sacrifice there has been in
all religions throughout ancient world history. A lot of times
these the people that say, like, oh, they were just
killing babies left and right, are written by the enemies
of these people, in this case, Christian and Roman accounts
(10:22):
about how widespread it would be because they're trying to
paint them in a certain way. But there definitely has
been sacrifice, whether it was human or your finest crop
or your best sheep.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yeah, I mean, we know for a fact that Germanic
and Celtic tribes sacrificed humans. Just from the presence of
bog bodies in the state that they were, the way
that they died, they're pretty much proof positive that there
was sacrifice. And even outside of Europe. I mean, you
know the Inca Maiden, the lu Laya, you know, lou
Lailo lu Layelo.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
I think you mean Leilani the maiden.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
You remember the Inca maiden that has like your knees
pulled up her chest and she looks sleeping. But she
was sacrificed five hundred years ago. I mean, like it
did happen, but the idea that it was widespread, or
that they like drank baby's blood or that kind of stuff,
that was the exaggeration that really kind of were smears.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yeah. Yeah, you know, I finally watched it the other day.
It was about a month ago, I guess, the mel Gibson.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Apocalypto.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Yeah, I'd never seen that. For some reason, I finally
watched it.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
How was it?
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Did you see it?
Speaker 2 (11:29):
No, but I've seen the scene that made you think
of that.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
You know, it was pretty good. You know. I'm not
like championing Mel Gibson, of course, but I just hadn't
seen that movie. And I had a I guess Emily
was clearly not with me, and I was like, oh,
I've got a window and it popped up and I
was like, you know what, I never saw that. Let
me check it out. Very gross in gory in its depictions,
but you know it was okay.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Yeah, mel Gibson is basically into snuff porn, like, he
loves that stuff. Have you ever seen We Were Soldiers?
Speaker 1 (12:04):
I did not see that, But that's supposed to be
pretty gory too, right.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
It's one of the most violent, yeah, glorious war movies
I've ever seen in my life.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Now I've seen The Guns of Navarone.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Yeah. Oh was that Telly Sabalis?
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Now he was in the Dirty Dozen, that's what you think.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yeah, that was a good or forced in from Navarone
was seeing that one too.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
I don't know if he was one, he was definitely
in the Dirty Dozen. That was a great one.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, all right, We're getting away from off topic here though,
because we need to talk about idol worship and tree worship.
That's another pretty common element and a lot of different
pagan religions. You know, it's right there in the Ten Commandments,
do not worship false idols. Idolatry was a big no
no to Christians, and that's basically any physical representation of
a God or a spirit. We usually, you know, growing
(12:53):
up Baptist thought him of his like statues and stuff
from biblical stories, but it can be a rock or something.
And then trees. Trees are big in many, many, most
pagan religions. They love their trees.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Yeah, they love them for sure. So yeah, those are
some high points or basics, I guess is a better
way to put it, of ancient pagan religions. And because
as we said before, there's not really a lot that
survived from the ancients to today, a lot of that
stuff has been gleaned by archaeologists anthropologists, and it's from
(13:30):
that base of knowledge that modern Pagans draw from to
create the newer versions of the pagan religions.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yeah, it feels like a break time, right, yeah, I guess.
So all right, we'll take a break, and we'll come
back and talk about when Christianity decided that's it. We're
going to change the narrative right after this, all right,
(14:14):
So we promised talk of Christianity stamping out Paganism, or
trying to at least, and that started with Constantine, who
was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity officially.
I think you sort of hinted earlier that Christianity was
a pretty smallish persecuted sect of people at first, until
(14:34):
Constantine came along and said, actually, I'm Christian now, and
all the other Roman elites were like, well, off, Constantine
the Emperor's Christian, then maybe we should look into this
a little more.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Right, And so the tide turned on Pagans basically right
out of the gate. But Constantine himself didn't do anything
to persecute He didn't use his official position as emperor
to persecute pagans.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Yeah, he did his to in the pool publicly.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So actually I think he was fully
immersed in the baptismal font instead. Well yeah, his son, though,
went full boar after Pagan's and outlawed Paganism. He passed
the first Laws Constantineous Constantius, not Constantinople Constantius. Yes. Yeah,
(15:25):
he passed the first laws that made paganism and practices
of paganism illegal. It was basically amounted to any public
displays of paganism were outlawed. But not too long after
a couple of decades his successor, Theodosius, he said, Christianity's
the state religion of the Roman Empire, and if you
(15:46):
do anything pagan, including in your own home, like your
your toast, don't let us see you go anywhere near chicken,
or you're in big trouble.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
And they said, what is toast? When your bread gets
too close to the fire and it tastes better, that's doped.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
I hadn't tried that.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
So Christianity is on the rise. And they started to
stamp out pagan religions all over the Roman Empire through
the laws that you mentioned and through a pretty brilliant plan,
which was literally demonizing them. I never really have thought
about that word much until this is like, you know
that demon is the root there, but that's literally what
(16:29):
they did. They were like, you know what everyone that
you're have been worshiping, they are the devil in disguise, right,
like the literal devil Satan.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Yes, And they actually took some of the existing gods
and just basically copy pasted them into the conception of
the devil of Satan. And again keep in mind here,
these these pagan religions, they don't have anything even approximating Satan.
Like gods can be good or protective or dangerous, but
(17:03):
there's no like one evil polar foil to God, because
there is no one God. It's not dual, it's plural.
That's that's part of pagan religion, right, So it's ironic
that they're like, your god is Satan, and they're like
which one. They're like, the one with the horns, the
one with the antlers, right, And so that's that's basically
(17:23):
how the modern conception of Satan came along. And so
basically any god would just be equated with evil, with
a demon, with Satan himself. And if you were caught
practicing this, now you started to risk being killed by
the people in charge.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Yeah, they found this one pretty prominent Celtic gods. Yeah yeah, okay,
ce r In you in in.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
It's like it's a yeah, it's like a mashup of
Michael Sarah, John Cena, and John Sanunu.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Yes, Man, I almost said it wrong again. Sir Nunas was,
like I said, a prominent Celtic god and had it
was the antler god had antlers. And they basically look
back now and say between Sir Nunos and the Greek
god Pan, like, it's not a far leap to go
from antlers to horns. And that was basically the probably
(18:22):
the model for the Christian devil that you know, once
they decided, hey, we're just going to be binary from.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Now on, right, But the Sir Nunos is wearing antlers
because they were They indicated protectiveness, not necessarily of humans,
but of the forest and the countryside. And you could
be in Sir Nunosi's good graces by taking care of
those things, or you could run a foul of Sir Nunos.
And if you say, just stepped on a bunch of
(18:49):
docks for no good reason. Yeah, but that he became
Satan eventually, or he was one of the ones. I
think they went basically local religion by local religion and
then identified who could be Satan and then demonized them
and all the others.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yes, that makes sense. Like who do they identify with, Like,
who's going to scare them?
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Exactly? So, now, because your god, your ancient pagan god,
is Satan. If you are caught worshiping that god, or
any god or any kind of polytheistic pagan religion, you're
now in league with the devil. And again you can
be put to death for that kind of thing. And
that developed into which trials, the Inquisition, all sorts of
(19:30):
terrible stuff that was essentially the Christian Church persecuting in
an effort to stamp out it's like any local rival religions.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah, well, stamp out is one thing they did, and
you know, with the Christian armies and colonialism and missionaries,
that was what they were doing all over the West.
And then what they couldn't stamp out or I don't
know if it was what they couldn't stamp out, but
they were stamping out everything they wanted to. And then
they also said, but actually this Halloween and Christmas Easter
(20:00):
are pretty fun, and those are pagan you know based,
So we're just gonna tweak those and make them our own.
Because who doesn't like Halloween?
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Yeah, everybody likes Halloween. Which started out as Sowin as
we'll see. I think we've talked about that probably fifteen times. Yeah.
You know what I think actually triggered this me thinking
of this topic.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
What movie?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
No, it was Easter I was thinking about. I happened
to be up and out around sunrise on Easter and
it reminded me, as a kid, being raised Catholic, of
going to Sunrise mass in Eastern Yeah, and I was like, dude,
you're standing there celebrating a religious service, watching the sun
rise on a specific day in the spring. Like it
(20:48):
is so pagan based, and it's like in every single way,
I think even Easter is like a shift or an
adaptation of like oh Stare, which I believe was one
of the Polytheiets pagan gods.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Yeah, like it was.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
It's just there out in the open basically, and that
made me wonder about the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Yeah. You know, growing up in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the
most dedicated would hike up Stone Mountain in the in
the dead of night to go to the sunrise service
on top of Stone Mountain.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Yeah. Pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
So they were basically stamping with one foot, giving back
rubs with the other other with their hands stamp stamp
rub rob That's what the Christians did to basically win
the pr war of the religions and take over. Essentially.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Yeah, if you're looking at the pagan comeback, which we're
going to get into now, you can go back to
the Renaissance when they said, Hey, the Greek and Roman
philosophers and all those books they were writing, it's like
super interesting, we're into that stuff again. And we have
the printing press now, so we can really print this
stuff up and disseminate it. And there were Renaissance painters
(21:58):
painting all these amazing romantic paintings of like mythological creatures
and gods. And then the Enlightenment came along and said Renaissance,
hold my meed.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
So yeah, the Enlightenment was like, in a couple of
strange ways, it was really fertile ground for like an
interest in paganism to come along. For one, the Enlightenment
thinkers just essentially as a first step, just rejected Christianity
and monotheism in particular. And they also were like, I
(22:31):
really like the philosophy of these ancient Greeks and ancient Romans.
They were polytheistic. Maybe I could be too, So it
kind of aroused like an intellectual interest in that.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
But it also it created an interest in paganism in
a different way too, because the Enlightenment created such rational
thinking that some people were kind of repelled by it
and they're like, I'm going to go seek answers and
purpose in nature instead. And yeah, probably more than anything,
is how the Enlightenment led to an interest in paganism.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah. And also I thought it was super interesting how
much the arts played into all this. You know, I
mentioned the Renaissance painters, but also Romantic poets like you
can't read Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley without like wanting
to go out into the woods and like be among nature.
There were very just very moving poems about the world,
(23:26):
the natural world around us, and the sort of unseen
magic in nature.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Yeah, you've never wanted to take your clothes off in
the woods? Read some Keats, right, See how you feel
after that?
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Oh, I'm not a big naked in the I'm not
a big naked guy period. I think it's been established,
but probably because of the Baptist upbringing. But I feel
too vulnerable out there in the woods.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Yeah, I know, I get that there's mosquitoes and beetles
and those worms that crawl up your pehle.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Yeah, I'll just you can find me in my skivvies
at least are you a never nude? Yeah? I shower
in a bathing suit in cut off gene. Yeah, to
cut off. So man, it's so great.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
What else?
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Oh, there was another thing that kind of created it
might it might have grown out of this interest essentially,
like kind of scholarship on paganism. Yeah, some was good.
Some was the kind of stuff that you would equate
with finding on the History Channel today. You know.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
That was in the article and we talked about it
a little bit offline. I did not know. I don't
watch enough History Channel. I thought the History Channel was
just like we used to call it the War Channel
because it was always just black and white World War
Two documentaries. But I know there is another side of
the History Channel where with the alien sky, like did
they have a lot of that kind of stuff?
Speaker 2 (24:47):
I think it's pretty much all Yeah, that is it?
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Really okay?
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Yeah, pretty much, And I think it has been that
way for a really long time. And I mean not
to bag on the History Channel. It's interesting, but I
guess what I'm equating it to is really interesting unsupported
theories that like, if you're an actual scientist and you
look into it, you're like, this is just made up.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
They're trying to make the entertaining television basically.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Yes, but the problem is is they present it factually
and it gets taken factually by a lot of people.
So they've caused a lot of problems. They essentially have
ruined the world single handedly.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
The History Channel has well I'm glad I know this
because I'm going to stop saying, well, the History Channel,
I said.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Its top that.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Yeah, but yeah. There were a couple of key people
that came out of this that you kind of referenced.
One was a guy named James Fraser. He was an
anthropologist who wrote a book, very influential book in eighteen
ninety called The Golden Bow. Bo I'm sorry, yeah, you
w jesus, what's going on with me? B o U
g H.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
I'm going with boo.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
It's pronounced bo.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
I think that's a History Channel type.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Okay, we're not gonna argue with this because who cares.
But that's the way it's spelled. And his argument was
that you know, all religions basically go back to this
one pagan myth about a king that was sacrificed to
bless the land with fertility, and you can kind of
trace them all back to this.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah, and so modern historians have said it's a great
theory Fraser, but it's not correct. Fraser is not a
history channel type. He was a legitimate anthropologist. And one
of the reasons the Golden Bow Bow figures in is
that he did an amazing amount of exhaustive research that
in the book he describes a lot of ancient pagan
(26:43):
traditions and beliefs and stuff. So The Golden Bow became
kind of like a handbook for the modern pagan movements
that followed.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Do you know what I feel like concerning here? What
the way that you pronounce the word be? Like? Why
did they get count Dracula to Who is that guy?
Speaker 2 (27:02):
I don't know? What was this like a book on tape?
You heard once? No?
Speaker 1 (27:05):
No, no, no, this is the YouTube guy when you
look up pronunciations. Oh oh, one, gentleman, that dogs he
came from Thrensylvan.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah, he really does, doesn't he? I never thought about it.
He's great.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Well, now this is saying bo. But I looked at
up earlier and it said bo.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Okay, boo boo.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
I don't know if I believe that, lady.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Like when the bow breaks, wouldn't you just sit up
and tell your mom that she got it wrong if
she's saying when the bow breaks.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
I've always said bow, But you know, maybe I'm wrong
or maybe the internet's wrong. That'd be a first How
about boh, yeah, when the book breaks?
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
And then there is a History Channel type person that
we should talk about, the Egyptologist Margaret Murray. She was
She's definitely on that side of things, right.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Yeah. She came up in the Bella and the Witch
Elm episode because she was saying, like Bella was murdered
by a witch right And she's one of the people
who argued that the modern European witches trace their lineage
unbroken back to fertility feminist cult that's been in the
British Isles ever since time immemorial, and that that's one
(28:18):
of the things that's been debunked, is that it's just
not true. Like the Christian Church and in their turn,
Judaism in Islam as well, did such a thorough job
of interrupting the transmission from the ancient world to the
modern world that it's just like that's just not really possible. Now,
that's not to say that like in certain like super
(28:41):
you know, rural local areas, there's like not folk traditions
that actually do date back really far. I mean, everybody's
seen wicker Man, right, But the thing is, like, like
Wickerman would be actually a bad example because that like
is an actual ritual. They knew exactly what they were doing,
they were performing rites that kind of stuff. This would
(29:04):
be more like, hey, we're dancing around the may pole,
but we don't necessarily know every single thing that's going on.
We're not performing every single aspect of this ancient ritual.
Even though the ritual in some form or fashion still
survive today, it's not the full the full Monty, it's
(29:25):
not the full manty of the actual pagan folk religion
that they're they're kind of venerating. Still, yeah, does that
make sense?
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Yeah? Absolutely? Okay, should we take our second break?
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (29:35):
All right, we're gonna take that break and we're gonna
move into the world of modern paganism right after this.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Well, by the way, Chuck, you, me and I have
a friend named Alex Mary who's an artist and she
does something called Morris dancing, and a lot of the
Morris dances like resemble paganism, like there's sometimes there's antlers
and stuff like that. But also, more than anything, reminds
me of stuff they would have done in that A
(30:26):
twenty four movie Midsommer, and it's basically like folk dancing
that dates back to like the fifteenth century and probably before,
but they can definitely trace it back that far. I
was asking her about paganism. She's like, Nope, not a
pagan I'm a Morris dancer.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
That's super cool. Yeah, And not to get off topic,
but since you brought up a twenty four I just
have to shout out their newest weird comedy from Tim Robinson.
Oh yeah, actually not from Tim Robinson, he's in it.
But the movie Friendship I can highly recommend. And I
went to the opening eleven am screening in Atlanta and
my friend, because you love Tim Robinson, you'll be glad
(31:05):
to know. At Phipps Plaza at eleven am on a Friday,
there were probably twenty five to thirty like Tim Robinson
fans in there. Nice at that first showing.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Was it rowdy?
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Yeah, you know, it's been a long time since I've
seen a crowded and it was crowded because it was
probably a fifty person theater, so it was seventy percent full.
A crowded like movie with other people, like a comedy
where just a bunch of people are laughing at once,
and it was so much fun.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
That's awesome, man, it was great. I wish I could
have gone.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
I wish you could have gone too.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Oh oh yeah, are talking about what modern paganism.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah, so we mentioned, you know, in several different ways
that modern paganism is its own thing. One of the
reasons why it's its own thing is because they just
didn't write down a lot of stuff back then. And
stuff that was written down, it wasn't like the literal,
detailed handbook of how to do this ritual this right,
that's pretty rare. Yeah, So that's one of the reasons,
(32:03):
and it was all stamped out. Some of the stuff
that we've gotten modern wise comes from these Icelandic or
maybe all of it, these Icelandic texts called the Eda's,
Is that right.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Yeah. As far as Norse religions, Norse pagan religions that
fall under the umbrella term Heathenism. This is where they
get all their stuff. Yeah, I don't know if it's
Das or Eda's. I think I agreed too soon. Okay, Okay,
maybe as that and then the Viking sagas, and so
the Viking sagas aren't like you said, it's not a
handbook of how to worship Norse gods, but just mentions
(32:36):
of it, like incidental references to stuff like that. The
neo Pagans who worship Norse gods have kind of taken that,
glean from that what some of these rituals and thoughts
and mythologies were.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah, and we're not going to talk about all modern
pagan religions, but we're gonna mention if you know, we're
going to highlight a few. We have to talk briefly
at least about their medic Order of the Golden Dawn.
But again, if you want to hear a lot about that,
listen to our Alistair, a really good episode, I think
Alistair Crowley episode. Yeah, this was the secret society that
Aleister Crowley was a member of. He was never the leader,
(33:13):
right or was he just sort of a.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
I think he did break off and try to become
a leader at some point.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
I don't remember. Yeah, maybe I should go back and
listen to it.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
I don't remember either. But their whole thing, the reason
we mentioned them is they were probably the first what
you could consider modern pagan religion. They practiced magic and
they were into the Egyptian cult stuff. Yeah, so that's
why we bring them up there. I don't think there's
too many Golden Dawn people running around, but I guarantee
there are some.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Yeah, there's got to be.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
What about Wicca.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah, we talked about wick and our Witchcraft episode that
was from a long time and ago, though, so it
may not be our best.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Work, No, I would. That's one that would probably be
pretty good to redo someday.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
We're not going to read this stuf't fine Modern Witchcraft
or wicka Wicca. Originally it was Wica as named by
a guy named Gerald Gardner, who was a British customs
official who worked in Malaysia then came back to England
in nineteen thirty six, wrote a bunch of Golden Dawn stuff,
a bunch of Alistair Crowley stuff, a bunch of Margaret
(34:20):
Murray stuff, our History Channel lady. And he said, you
know what, one night in nineteen thirty nine, a covin
of witches initiated me, and they were members of this
ancient fertility cult that I read about from Margaret Murray.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
Yeah, so it depends on who you talk to. Gardner
might either be described as a huckster who made all
this up, or a very gentle man. I saw somebody
describe him who knew him as utterly without malice, may
have made all this up. But he was known for
(34:57):
writing what's called the Book of Shadows, which has become
a big part of the wick and religion, which is
essentially a personal recipe book of spells and rituals that
has worked for a particular witch or coven, and sometimes
it's shared and people can borrow from it and add
to it and they create their own Book of Shadows,
(35:18):
but having your own basically, you know in those Bugs
Bunny cartoons where that witch is like looking through her
book that would technically be a book of shadows that
she's looking through to find like the ingredients for her
potions or whatever. That's a pretty literally cartoonish depiction of it,
but that's, you know, essentially what she was doing.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
My favorite part is when she would leave the frame
very quickly, and her hairpins would fall out, her hair
float in the air.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
She was one of the most disturbing cartoon characters of
all time if you ask me, man, Yeah, like she was.
She had the high pitched voice, and didn't she have
like kind of a red cousin it type who wore
like tennis shoes. He was a little off putting as well.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
I don't remember that, but if I saw it, I'd
probably know it.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Yeah, So, yeah, the witch from Bugs Bunny.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
That's right. But back to Wickens. They became very popular
in the sixties and seventies with the feminist set and
the environmentalist set, and there's still the Gerald Gardner focused.
They call it gardenerian wicca. But if you're out at
the seven eleven and you meet a modern Wickan, she's
(36:31):
probably practicing what's called dianic wicca, which is small woman centered.
It came around in nineteen seventy one by wicked activist
name not Susannah but Susanna Budapest. Great name.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Yeah, And it wasn't until twenty I think fifteen that
Susanna Budapest indoctrined her first male clergy member into dianic
wicca and other Dianic Wicca temples split off, and so
it's it's rare to find a man. And in this religion,
like it's all women. And I read that they're anti patriarchy.
(37:07):
They actually try to use their magic against the patriarchy.
But they're not anti male. The reason that they exclude
males is because their religion is created to celebrate and
honor the life cycles, the biological cycles in a lot
of cases of a woman as she's born and then
ages and then dies, and that essentially there's not a
(37:30):
lot of role for men in that religion. But yeah,
you know, you guys, go form your own stuff. Go
become druids, I think is their motto.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Yeah, And here's a little dinner party factoid. If someone
brings up wicking it around the table, you can say, hey,
did you know that it was actually first recognized as
a true religion in nineteen eighty six in the United
States when the Supreme Court ruled and debtmer v. Landen.
You don't have to know that part, but you could
really knock their socks off if you do. It was
where a prisoner was denied the use of ritual ritual
(38:01):
Wiccan objects and they're like, hey, this is my religious
stuff and the First Amendment protects this, and the Supreme
Court said, you know what, you're right.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah, probably a liberal court.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
One other thing I gotta say, I ran across the
UK finally suspended their witchcraft laws. They're bans against practicing
witchcraft in nineteen fifty one, which is why Gerald Gardner's
books start popping up in the fifties, even though he'd
been doing this since the late thirties.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Mile isn't that interesting, Like he.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Could have been arrested and thrown in prison for practicing
witchcraft before nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Wow. All right, So those were sort of the big
heavy hitters that were the first big ones that of
modern paganism when it staged its comeback. But there are
dozens of other smaller, much smaller modern pagan movements. Wick
is definitely the largest, but heathenry is one of them,
which is basically a umbrella term for people who, like
(39:03):
you mentioned the Norse and Germanic deities. They're really into Marvel, I.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Guess Marvel and Lord of the Rings. Like if you
thought led Zeppelin was into Lord of the Rings, may
introduce yourself to a heathen like, they are into that stuff. Yeah,
and I think the two biggest Germanic Heathen religions actually,
I guess I don't even think they're sex but one
(39:31):
is true. They worship the Acr gods, who would be
the highest of the pantheon of Norse mythology, like Odin
and Thor, and so people who are into Asatru are
very much into honor and valor and getting into Valhalla.
And then there's the Vanatru, which they're concerned with the
(39:52):
Veneer gods, who are the rest of the gods who
are more earthy, more nature based. They're into prosperity, that
kind of stuff. And I think there's way more Asatru
than Vanatru right now. And then one other thing about Heathenism.
There's a really interesting kind of side history that you
can go look up about the black metal scene, specifically
(40:16):
the Norwegian black metal scene that essentially turned into turned
their focus from satanism like traditional metal to heathenry, and
so you've got like folk metal, Viking metal, like they
essentially just became heathens but metal, and it just got
really out of hand in the early nineties. It was
(40:37):
really interesting stuff.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Well, yeah, and I don't know if we could get
a whole episode out of this. We probably could, or
maybe a short stuff. But there was the very famous
case of well, there were there were these series of arsons,
these church arsens, like twenty of them, these very very
old wooden medieval churches in Norway that were burned down.
I think twenty of them were attributed. These arsens were
(41:01):
attributed to black metal fans, and a couple of the
arsonists were very prominent in the early Norwegian black metal scene.
These guys there were bandmates at first in this band Mayhem,
but I think Vargu Vicranese, sure he left Mayhem at
a certain point, but Uronymous is how this guy's known
(41:25):
ostein Arseth no aka Uronymous, I think stayed in this
black metal group Mayhem for the run until he was
murdered by varg.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Yeah, and they didn't exactly like set paganism's general public
image on fire. Well actually they kind of did. Y. Yeah,
Arsith was a Satanist. Vickernese is in addition to being
a murderer, he's avowed neo Nazi, and the whole scene
in particular kind of gets caught up with nationalism a lot.
(41:55):
So it's not a very representative make sure of paganism
as a whole or neo paganism as a whole, but
it's still I mean, it's just ridiculously interesting. What happened there?
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Yeah, totally mentioning, I guess, yeah, I remember when this happened,
and I just I didn't know much about I still
don't know much about that whole music scene, but it's
it's super interesting. My cousin is into it.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
Yeah, I was checking a lot of it out and
some of it's really good. I'm not into folk metal
though at all.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
What is that? What does it sound like?
Speaker 2 (42:29):
It's you know, that kind of like super proud Irish
music that's like rock from like Boston. Imagine that is
like metal or almost almost yeah or no, I'm the
so yes that that Irish like rock does from Boston.
(42:49):
This is like the Norwegian metal version of that.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
Okay, yeah, I'll listen to something, see see what it
does to me.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Okay, just look up folk metal and you'll see. But
some of the other stuff was really good, like Mayhem's
stuff was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
What if this changed my life and set me on?
Of course that one would never have expected, right, here
fifty four years old.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
He still wearing corpse makeup.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Yeah, maybe get some antlers.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Yeah, why not? Man? Why not, like really ask yourself,
why not do that?
Speaker 1 (43:18):
I mean, no, no, it's no crazier than any of the
rest of them if you ask me. Yeah, uh, you
mentioned druids earlier. Kind of been passing. But that is
a modern belief system that is tied to pre Christian
British Isle sort of religion. That's where the Druids came from.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
Right, Yeah, And I saw that Druids are a big
difference between them and others is that the nature itself
is the divine. It's not like a manifestation of God
or the goddesses or anything like. It's nature. And I
also saw that the practitioners don't really consider it a religion.
They consider it more of philosophy or a way of life.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Yeah, and it's it was modern Druidry was started. I
got named Ross Nichols, and I don't know why. I
just find it funny that, like the modern Druids and
modern Wickens were started by a guys named Ross and Gerald.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Is that a little weird?
Speaker 2 (44:12):
Yeah, they sound like a couple of guys who might
live in a van together.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
They might who knows.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
There's also ceremonial magic, which would trace itself to I
guess the Golden Dawn. There's neopaganism, which we should talk
about because a lot of people use neopaganism as a
term incorrectly to describe modern paganism, which is what we've
been talking about this whole time. Neopaganism itself is a
specific kind of pagan religion. So all neopagans are pagan,
(44:42):
but all pagans aren't neopagans. And if you basically want
to just come at this by saying I like a
little of this, I like a little of that. Oh,
I would like to do a little bit of ritual magic. Yes,
I want to go out in the woods and practice
all this stuff, then neopaganism is for you. It is
wide open. They believe that everybody's beliefs are equal. They're
(45:04):
very much opposed to the idea of absolute good and evil.
They're very into nature. It's pretty much, I think what
people think about when they think about modern pagan religions.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
And that's neopaganism.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Yes, all right, And if you want to know more
about that, there's a great site called neo paganism dot org.
They seem to be pretty authoritative on it.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
They should be with that website. That'd be a real
shame if they weren't.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
Yeah, it's in comic sane. And just one other thing
about neopaganism. I think I said that a lot of
people that's what they think of, but they might be
saying WICKA when they're talking about neopaganism. There's big differences
between those two. Wicka is very magical based. The intent
is to harness the power of nature to get something done,
(45:52):
like get a job successfully, or make someone fall in
love with you, whatever. And WICKA is very very much esoteric.
So that means that there's a set amount of knowledge
out there. There's hidden mystery knowledge in the universe that
if you are an initiate into wika, like you have
to be initiated into a coven, and you apply yourself
(46:15):
in work and study, and you can have these mysteries
of the universe revealed to you. Not at all what
neo pagans believe. There's just a ton of differences. But
I mean, if any of this has floated your boat
and you're like, I really want to check this out.
There's a lot of stuff on the internet that you
can go read up on. I would just say use
(46:36):
your you're just general common sense to decide what site
you're on is, whether it's legitimate or authoritative, or if
it's just some dude making stuff up.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
You got to have the right font where you know
you're in.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
Trouble exactly giveaway.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
You also mentioned a great band name in there, hidden
Mystery Knowledge.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
That's a good one. I feel like that's more an
album though, Okay, and you better believe they're gonna have
some Lord of the Rings character? Was the illustration true? Well,
if you want to know more about that stuff, like
I said, go out on the internet. And since I
said that and Chuck had just said true, that means
that it's time for a listener, ma'am.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
I'm gonna call this popcorn cooking tip. I'm surprised I
haven't thought of. Oh okay, hey, guys, writing because I
want to tell you about my favorite way to cook
popcorn and bacon grease.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Oh yeah, I've heard of that.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
I hadn't heard of it. It's just right there in
front of my face too.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
You got bacon grease in front of your face.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Yeah, I do. My aunt taught me her tried and
true method for cooking popcorn in the soap top. She
puts a spoonful of bacon grease in a skillet, pours
a popcorn salt over the grease. Oh boy, plops a
couple of kernels in there and heats the whole thing up,
And when the grease is the right temperature, those kernels
are going to pop and alert you you can start
cooking for in the rest of the kernels, cover your
skillet and let it pop away. The bacon grease gives
(47:55):
a popcorn a little extra flavor. It really makes it
even more delicious. You should give it a try sometime.
Just don't forget to cover your skillet.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Thanks for all the years of podcasting listening pleasure you
provided for me. I wish you both the best. That
is from Randy with an Eye.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Thanks a lot, Randy with an Eye. Did Randy sign
the eye with a little heart instead of a dot,
because I'd be fantastic. Yeah, thanks a lot, Randy. That
was a great tip. We appreciate it. I'm quite sure
everybody who loves popcorn and bacon that's listening appreciated that.
If you want to be like Randy and send us
a tip that everybody can appreciate, you can send it
(48:29):
off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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