Pagan Theology

Paganism as a World Religion

Michael York

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780814797389
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In Pagan Theology, Michael York situates Paganism—one of the fastest-growing spiritual orientations in the West—as a world religion. He provides an introduction to, and expansion of, the concept of Paganism and provides an overview of Paganism's theological perspective and practice. He demonstrates it to be a viable and distinguishable spiritual perspective found around the world today in such forms as Chinese folk religion, Shinto, tribal religions, and neo-Paganism in the West.

While adherents to many of these traditions do not use the word “pagan” to describe their beliefs or practices, York contends that there is an identifiable position possessing characteristics and understandings in common for which the label “pagan” is appropriate. After outlining these characteristics, he examines many of the world's major religions to explore religious behaviors in other religions which are not themselves pagan, but which have pagan elements. In the course of examining such behavior, York provides rich and lively descriptions of religions in action, including Buddhism and Hinduism.

Pagan Theology claims Paganism’s place as a world religion, situating it as a religion, a behavior, and a theology.

1
Paganism as Religion

The difficulty in comprehending paganism as a world religion was made clear on the Nature Religions electronic discussion list after its participants failed to achieve official recognition in the American Academy of Religion. Part of the ensuing debate involved whether any future bid ought to be made again in the name of nature religion(s) or that of paganism. What emerged in the discussion of this question was the narrow understanding of paganism of many on the list. Most thought that the term referred only to modern, Western neopaganism.

The purpose of this book is to expand the concept of paganism. Western neopaganism is an important new development and can be considered an aspect of paganism more generally. But at the same time, it represents numerically but the merest fraction of those we can accept as pagans in the broader sense of the term.

I believe the most productive perspective is a global one. Despite its date, David Barrett’s 1982 World Christian Encyclopedia provides the most detailed and comprehensive population figures for the world’s various religions.¹ This work includes projections for 2000 as well. Extrapolating from Barrett, approximately 6 percent of the religiosity of the world’s population is considered pagan. While the results concerning paganism, Christianity, Hinduism, and the like are rough estimates at best, at the same time the completed picture allows us to assess the relative numerical strengths of the world’s broad religious traditions. When we speak of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism as world religions, how does the world divide them? What are the general positions of the various worldviews vis-à-vis one another?

To think again in cartographic terms, the religious maps of more than half the planet’s population may be described as theistic and centering on a transcendent personality as their creator. Despite the overwhelming differentiation even here, broadly speaking one-third of the world is Christian and another fifth is Muslim. In the present venture to develop a global perspective, the many varieties of Christianity and Islam are secondary. It is enough at this point to recognize that half the planet or more affiliates with one or the other of these two religious identities and/or options.

The next largest “block” in the world arena is actually nonreligious, due to the historic influence of Marxism, scientific rationalism, and the growth of secular thinking. However, using Tillich’s term, Barrett considers a category of “quasi religions”² consisting of secular movements that in part or whole can be regarded as religions, including both “antireligious quasi religions” and “nonreligious quasi religions.” Atheism, communism, dialectical materialism, Leninism, Maoism, Marxism, scientific materialism, and Stalinism all are examples of quasi religions that are antireligious, while nonreligious quasi religions comprise various forms of agnosticism, fascism, humanism, liberal humanism, nationalism, and Nazism. They also, according to Barrett, include some kinds of nonreligious secularists, such as freethinkers, liberal thinkers, nonreligious humanists, postreligionists, materialists, and post-Christians as well as those who are indifferent to both religion and atheism.

Barrett describes humanism as a philosophy based on agnosticism and/or the rejection of supernaturalism. Both philosophies regard the human being as a natural object.³ Essentially, whether naturalistic or scientific, humanism exalts the intrinsic dignity of the human individual and his or her ability to achieve self-realization through reason and scientific inquiry. However, this understanding leaves open the possibility of there also being a “religious humanism.” This we can recognize as not only a strain of thought in Christianity but also an important theological perspective that is part of a pagan worldview. But if Christianity and Islam represent roughly half the world’s population and if secularism (both atheism and nonreligious agnosticism) applies to slightly more than one-fifth of the global population, the Hindu-Buddhist orientation is the third largest with just under another fifth of the world’s population. These people identify with either Hinduism or Buddhism as their primary religious affiliation. The vast majority of Hindus are Vaishnavite (70%), centering on the god Vishnu or his incarnations such as Rama and Krishna. A smaller number, fewer than half the Vaishnavites, are Shaivite or devotees of the god Shiva (25%). The third most significant Hindu tradition (approximately 3%) is described as Shaktite, the worshipers of Shakti or the female manifestation of divinity. Hinduism also includes various reformist movements (e.g., Arya Samaj), neo-Hindu sects, and modern Hindu movements. Buddhism, in many respects a “Protestant” form of Hinduism, is divided among the Mahayana, Theravada, and Vajrayana traditions. Barrett places into a separate category the followers of Asiatic new religions, new religious movements, or syncretistic mass religions.⁴ These spiritualities represent major innovations since 1800 and mostly since 1945 that remain distinct from the world’s traditional religions. They include Japanese new religious movements developing from Buddhism or Shintoism as well as the syncretistic faiths emerging in such places as Korea, China, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Together, these new religions comprise about 2 percent of the world’s population.

What is interesting about these World Christian Encyclopedia figures is the relative position of a traditional world religion like Judaism. Excluding those orientations that we can identify as pagan, the followers of Judaism as well as Sikhism, Jainism, Bahai, and all other remaining religions (e.g., Gnostic, Masonic, Occult, Mystic) constitute together less than 1 percent of the number of total global inhabitants. In other words, the religious profile of humanity in broad terms breaks down into six general categories: Christian/Islamic (50%), nonreligious/atheist (21%), Hindu-Buddhist (19%), new religious (2%), other (1%), with, allowing for a 1-percent margin of error, pagan as a sixth grouping (5% to 6%). It is to these animist, spiritist, and/or polytheist traditions we shall turn now.

The World Christian Encyclopedia projects world estimates for both mid-1985 and 2000 as follows: Chinese folk religionists (3.9/2.5%), tribal religionists (1.9/1.6%), shamanists (0.3/0.2%), Confucianists (0.1/0.09%), spiritists (0.14/0.19%), and Shintoists (0.07/0.04%). Barrett considers Confucianism to represent non-Chinese followers of Confucius and Confucianism.⁵ The more than five million Confucianists estimated for 1985 are mostly Korean and found in Korea. Barrett recognizes six elements in the followers of traditional Chinese religion: local deities; ancestor worship; Confucian ethics; Chinese universism, divination, and magic; and some Buddhist elements. For tribal religionists, including shamanists, Barrett estimates 103,296,200 individuals in 1985 who would claim this orientation as their primary religious affiliation.⁶ This category includes what are variously called primal or primitive religions, animism, spirit worship, shamanism, ancestor veneration, polytheism, pantheism, African traditionalism, and local or tribal folk religions. The Chinese are excluded as a special case. Barrett also uses such government census terms as pagan, heathen, fetishist, and without religion in compiling this category.⁷ He includes adherents of revived or new paganism (e.g., the neopagans of Iceland) as well as non-Christian local or tribal syncretistic or nativistic movements (e.g., cargo cults, witchcraft eradication sects, tribal messianic movements, and possession-healing movements). The unifying element of this classification is the tribal or local association of the religiosity, one not open to all peoples but belonging to essentially a single tribe or people.

Tribal religiosity contrasts, therefore, with “universal” spiritism, whether “high” or “low.” For Barrett, high spiritists are non-Christian and concentrate on the institution of the medium. They can be described as spiritists, spiritualists, and/or thaumaturgicalists and can be distinguished from “low,” or Afro-American, spiritism.⁸ This last is a syncretization of Catholicism with African and Amerindian animisim. It includes followers of Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Haitian, and other African religious survivals in the Americas. It differs from “high” spiritism in its incorporation of Christian elements.⁹

The pre-Christian religions of Europe, especially those of the Greco-Roman world, constitute the paradigm of paganism. Before evaluating the Chinese folk, Shinto, tribal, and spiritist religions in terms of their pagan affinities and identities, I will therefore first examine the classical traditions, including the religions of the ancient Near East and Egypt and the European hinterlands, in order to gauge what might be considered salient features of these faiths. In this project, we do not possess the advantage of established properties, as ancient paganisms were living practices rather than defining dogmas or doctrines. We have little in the way of authoritative creeds and must approach pagan religiosity essentially as anthropologists in determining what might set this orientation apart from the Christianity that replaced it. We will therefore first consider the ancient paganisms of the Roman Empire and its neighbors before we examine kinship with other pre-Christian indigenous traditions and the living pagan orientations in the world of today.

In the multicultural cosmopolitanism of the Roman Empire, numerous mystery cults came to compete with the indigenous animistic religion of ancient Rome, a religion that had already been modified through both Etruscan and Greek influence. Particularly as the Roman state expanded to the East, mystery religions were imported into the capital. These included initiatory rites of the Anatolian Magna Mater-Cybele, Ma from Comana, the Egyptian Isis and Osiris, Sabazius from Asia Minor, the Syrian Heliopolitanus, and the Persian or Cappadocian Mithras. Along with these Eastern imports came Christianity, a religion that shared with its competitors the quest for salvation and likewise provided an emotional bonding for its fellowship of adherents. Membership in all these new religions rested with the voluntary choice of the individual, as opposed to an affiliation determined by either locality or family inheritance, but unlike the others, Christianity countenanced no compromise with other faiths, and eventually, with Constantine’s recognition in 313 C.E., it became the state religion.

For the Romans, the term paganus referred to a “person of the place,” whether town or country, who preserved the native customs of his or her locality. The pagan contrasted with the alienus, the “person from elsewhere,” who increasingly was Christian and out of touch with indigenous expressions of polytheism.¹⁰ While the term paganus acquired the additional connotation of “peasant,” the alternative Eastern designation for pagan—the Greek Hellene—suggests that the pagan could be equally urban and cultured. Consequently, whether rural or cosmopolitan, the pagan is someone with intimate connections to his or her immediate locality who respects the gods of the city-state. As Chuvin points out, rituals conducted in honor of the local manifestations of deity were the key issue, taking precedence over faith.¹¹ Paganism was not a practice of professing dogma and doctrine but instead was the performance of cult acts. In a more modern context, this predilection of paganism was described by Margot Adler (1986) as contemporary paganism’s concern with what is done rather than with what is believed. Paganism is experiential and not a religion of creeds and faith affirmations. Christianity came in large part to define itself in contrast to the indigenous paganisms it encountered. One approach to reunderstanding classical paganism, therefore, is to evaluate its contrasts with Christianity. Foremost, of course, is the polytheistic orientation of Greco-Roman religion as well as that of the Germanic, Celtic, Egyptian, and Near Eastern peoples. In contrast to the monotheism of the Judeo-Christian tradition, ancient paganism centers on a pantheonic understanding of the godhead, whether it includes the Roman Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Mars, and Quirinus; the Greek Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, and Dionysus; the Norse Thor, Frigg, Freya, Frey, and Tyr; the Gallic Taranis, Rosmerta, Epona, Teutates, and Cernunnos; the Egyptian Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, Horus, and Set; the Akkadian Enlil, Ninlil, Ninhursag, Ea, and Ishkur; or any of a countless additional enumeration of gods and goddesses in these and other traditions. In these pagan understandings, a particular deity was generally seen to possess certain functions and specialties rather than being an all-comprehensive, omnipotent, and omniscient figure. In other words, the range of cosmic being was apportioned and individually personified.

This pluralistic concept of divinity would appear to be typical of pagan identity. But this polytheistic bias does not preclude the possibility of a monistic understanding of the sacred cosmos. What ultimately distinguishes paganism from Christianity is not the number of its gods but the nature of its deity. Whereas the Christian God is transcendent, the pagan godhead is immanent. Spirituality for the pagan is corporeal or at least includes the physical. The pagan god is not “wholly other” (ganz andere), as is the Christian God. Consequently, paganism’s corpospirituality allows for perception of the divine in nature, for idolatry, for appreciation of the sacredness of place, for contact with the divine through both local geodynamics and pilgrimage to revered holy centers, and for multiplicity of manifestation. Its deities are in some sense corporeal, whether through metaphorical bodies or venerated physical representations.

In a profound sense, pagan gods are human. Their superhuman qualities, whatever they may be or symbolize, are secondary to their essential human nature. It is through this anthropomorphic understanding of the godhead that paganism affirms its recognition of the fundamental affinity between humanity and its gods. The human being and the divine are intimately related to the extent of sharing a mutually kindred nature. This relationship, along with the distinction between mortality and immortality, translates into the ubiquitous pagan concept of soul duality (the Egyptian ka and ba, the Greek thymos and psyche, the Roman genius-juno and animus-anima) which conceives of the individual’s free—or dream—soul as separate from the body—or life—soul (Hultkrantz 1953).

We will explore all these concepts in more detail as we find them in individualized, local, and ethnic pagan expression. We would be hard-pressed, however, to draw up a definitive list of necessary characteristics for any given practice to be assessed as pagan. At best, we can...