By the way…

Anyone looking for a great young adult series that uses pagan themes but doesn’t try to “save” your soul in the process I highly recommend Susan Cooper’s excellent “The Dark Is Rising Sequence”

“A writer, thoroughly familiar with English and Celtic myth, legend, and tradition, brilliantly selects and reconciles them with the folklore of her native Thames Valley region of Buckinghamshire to create a compelling fantasy.”

The Sneaky Pagan?

Christianity Today interviews Colin Duriez author of “The C.S. Lewis Encyclopedia” about the author’s “sneaky paganism” and how he used pagan ideas and themes as a “under the radar” conversion tool.

“In order to write to a post-Christian culture, Lewis used pre-Christian, pagan ideas.



C.S. Lewis’s ideas about returning to a paganism before coming to Christian faith still apply today. He recognized that we live in a post-Christian world, and for him that was the most basic category when trying to understand present society. We talk about modernism and now postmodernism, but if Lewis was around I think he’d still be saying that the fact that we’re post-Christian is more fundamental.

I’m not an expert on that period, but it seems to be a blend of pagan insights that are completed by a Christian understanding. Lots of pagan things are Christianized like Christmas. That seemed to be a strategy in the medieval period and before. Lewis and Tolkien carried on this mentality of fulfilling the insights people have as ordinary human beings into the nature of reality. Lewis and Tolkien had a kind of natural theology where they felt you could have insights into the nature of God’s reality independent of scripture.”

The insult to all pagan cultures is pretty plain to see. We are incomplete, flawed and human, we need the gospel of Jesus to “complete” us. What better way then to present paganism as simply a stepping-stone in a journey towards “truth”? The fact that Lewis himself longed for a pagan renewal at one point and then converted to Christianity doesn’t mean that Christ is the “finish-line” of theology. Simply accept him and you win the Cupie doll of salvation.

It would be interesting to see how Lewis would have gone if he was a contemporary author working today. Would the man who said “the spontaneous appeal of the Christian story is so much less to me than that of Paganism” have gone to the church if he had other options in faith? Would Aslan be Christ or would he be The Sacrificial King?

Needfire

Pagan author Raven Grimassi has issued a call for a “Needfire” on the Witchvox site.

” In ancient times when troubles beset the land, and the Kingdom seemed to be in peril, the people turned to a practice known as the needfire. Fire represented the spirit of the land, which gave life and purpose to everything in the realm. Therefore when troubles arose within the Kingdom it was a sign that the fire had been contaminated. The spirit of the land had grown ill and required renewed vitality.”

Grimassi is calling for a national needfire ritual on the full moon in October preceding the presidential election. Why?

” Here in contemporary times Americans saw life change drastically following the horrific events of September 11, 2001. The spirit of the land was unarguably contaminated in the aftermath of shock and fear. In an unprecedented reaction Americans relinquished several key constitutional rights with the establishment of the Patriot Act.”

The ritual is meant to “renew the heart and spirit of our land”. So perhaps this is the pagan version of efforts like this. If so it’s an encouraging sign that our community is taking the current political atmosphere in the country seriously. I can hardly think that pagans on the right or left are happy with the way things have been going. Values that are held dear by most pagans, conservation, personal freedom, religious freedom and a strong seperation of Church and State have all taken a beating in the last few years.

A Radical Re-Thinking

Sage at Goddessing posts with a story from late last year that could turn a lot of assumptions in the modern pagan community on their heads. Two famous chalk hill figures of Britain have been proven to be a lot younger than originally thought.

The Long Man of Wilmington in Sussex

The Long Man of Wilmington originally thought to date back to the Anglo-Saxon, Iron-Age Celtic or Roman periods in history is now thought to be much, much younger.

“New dating evidence are consistent in indicating that the figure was created in the sixteenth or seventeenth century AD. The new dating suggests a context in that period of religious and social conflict around the reformation, civil war and restoration.”

Meanwile the equally famous Cerne Abbas Giant of Dorset once thought to have ancient origins is now thought to be made during the reign of Cromwell (1650′s).

Cerne Abbas Giant of Dorset

Those of us who read a lot of books aimed at the pagan market know that these figures were often used as major landmarks for modern pagans in England (and in America) looking for evidence of Britain’s pagan past. The Cerne Abbas has been equated with Celtic Gods while the Long Man was recently portrayed as an ancient gate-keeper by Neil Gaiman in his comic adaptation of A Midsummers Night’s Dream.

Lest one loses all hope of ancient chalk markings, The White Horse of Uffington is still dated to pre-historic times and was made in Britain’s pagan past.

“Chalk figures were therefore present in the prehistoric landscape, but the giants at Wilmington and Cerne Abbas, now take their place as monuments of the early post Medieval period. That date is more recent than many had expected but these huge, still enigmatic, figures are none-the-less testimony to a social and religious context very different to the one which we know.” – Professor Martin Bell

One can only hope to see some revisions in the speculative non-fiction writings of modern pagans, I also hope to see some real investigation into the social atmosphere of the these times that would prompt the creation of these faux-pagan chalk structures.