Principles of Paganism, Lesson 1

Introduction

In this course we shall be concerned with getting to the roots of pagan religion.  We shall clear away anachronisms and

deceptions in an attempt to uncover the historical origins of nature religion before these were obscured by empire-builders

and hierarchical priesthoods.

I say ‘the historical origins,’  because it is no use trying to get hold of the religion of prehistoric peoples.  Marija

Gimbutas has made a valiant effort along those lines in her Language of the Goddess, but until we come to written records

we really have only shards of pottery and old bones, and not much else to deal with.

Writing in the Western world began with the Sumerians, during a period of foreign domination named by archaeologists after

the location of its principle site, the Jamdat Nasr period.  Jamdat Nasr is on the middle Tigris.  Before that period,

perhaps around 3000 BCE or a little earlier, we get picture writing but nothing we can tie to spoken language.  And what we

get thereafter are what are known as laundry-lists, that is, inventories of animals and crops for temples, the centers of a

storage economy. 1 For anything religious we have to wait for the ensuing period, when the Sumerians threw off the yoke of

the Jamdat Nasrites, a time called ‘the Period of Warring States.’

However, though the Sumerians present us with the earliest written records, their religion was already sophisticated and in

its finished form when they first appeared on the scene in southern Mesopotamia in the early 4th millenium BCE.  They were

already urbanites, and the religion we learn about is largely that of the court, not of the common people, though we can

deduce a lot of the latter from cylinder-seals and burials.  This is not paganism in its nascent form, for which we shall

have to go to the barbarians of more recent times.  And most of the earlier written records we shall consult must be taken

with more than a grain of salt, because they were written by people who were either hostile to the indigenous faiths and

determined to wipe them out, or else by conquerors like Caesar who wished to produce propaganda promoting their own

political ambitions.

At the outset I mentioned two hurdles we shall have to overtake to get at much of our evidence for robust (that is to say,

root) paganism as being anachronism and deceptions, by which I meant deceptive translations.  For a good example of both,

let us consider the first two verses of Genesis, in the Old Testament:

Gen. 1:1 is usually translated “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  The word translated ‘God’ is the

Hebrew ‘Elohim,’  which is plural, 2 and in fact means ‘the family of El’.  El, as Elya, was a god of the Canaanite

pantheon, and is found as El among the baked archives of the city of Ebla in North Syria, destroyed by Naram-Suen the king

of Akkad (in Mesopotamia) around 2200 BC.  Another of the gods of Ebla was Yah, who later became Yahweh.  Yah and El were

separate deities.

Gen. 1:2, as usually translated, starts with the word ‘And,’ but this is always put into italics, meaning that it has been

added by the translator.  The reason it is added in is to create the impression of passage of time, that the second verse

is describing an event after that described in the first verse.  If we leave out the word ‘and,’ it becomes probable that

the second verse is simply expanding on the first, telling how the creation came about.

The verse as translated then says: “The earth was without form and void…”  Here we come to the crux of the matter.  The

word translated ‘void’  actually means ‘a desolation’ in Hebrew.  It is the same word used later in the Old Testament for

the ruined temples of Baal and Asherah, which were described as ‘the abomination of desolation.’  It didn’t mean there was

nothing there; it meant it had been abandoned and was no longer inhabited.

If you travel in Iraq outside the cities (not recommended in these dangerous days), you will see tells scattered here and

there in the desert.  These tells are mounds of earth of interest to archaeologists, for they were once cities and towns. 3

A common reason they were abandoned was because the river changed its course.  For instance, the ancient city of Ur in

southern Iraq, once a thriving port linked with the Persian Gulf, is now 17 kilometers out in the desert from the present

course of the Euphrates River.

Interestingly enough, if you were to go back in time to deep antiquity and walk through the same countryside, while some

parts would be greener, you would still see tells.  Towns were always being abandoned from time to time.  The Akkadian or

east Semitic word corresponding to the Hebrew ‘desolation’  was applied to these once-inhabited mounds.

This tells us something about creation in Gen. 1:2.  We are not starting with a void, but with the ruins of an earlier

world.  The beginning mentioned in the first verse is not the beginning of time, it is the beginning of this particular

world – this cosmos.  As we shall see, ‘cosmos’  and ‘world’ are synonymous.  One of the meanings of ‘cosmos’  in Greek is

‘order’.

Creation, then, is an ordering and a reclamation of an older world in ruins.  It begins to look like the ancients, in

describing the beginnings of their world, were not asking the same questions asked by later philosophers and theologians

concerned to know the absolute origin of everything.  This is the main thing to bear in mind when attempting to reconstruct

original paganism: it is asking, and attempting to answer, a different set of questions.  It is neither theology nor

philosophy nor science in the modern sense.  It is in a category of its own, for which we do not possess a label.  We must

examine and consider it on its own terms.  That is what I propose to do in this course.

Suggested Reading:

Ancient Mesopotamia, Portrait of a Dead Civilization, by A. Leo Oppenheim, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press,

1977 (revised edition).

The Beginnings of Civilization, by Sir Leonard Wooley, New York and Toronto, a Mentor Book published by The New American

Library, 1965.

Exercise:

The sky was once thought to be a crystalline dome, lit by the sun during the day, through which one could see the moon and

stars at night.  This is the meaning of the word ‘firmament’ (‘welkin’ in Anglo-Saxon) in the first chapter of Genesis.

Not a bad guess for 5,000 years ago.  We know better today, of course; but now that we know the blue daytime sky is only

apparent, we tend not to look at it, except to check the weather.  Specifically, we do not look at it as one single thing,

a blue dome or vault overhead.

Paganism is about perception, about being alive to the world as it appears and feels.  Try including the sky in your

everyday awareness.  See it as a great dome or vault of blue.  It’s all right, you won’t get a letter in the mail from

scientists denouncing you as a traitor.  You can go on knowing about diffraction while still enjoying the sensation of

being in an enormous building roofed with an azure dome.  You can be modern in your knowledge and ancient in your

perceptions.  This is what neopaganism and post-modernism are all about.

Questions:

1. One barrier to understanding ancient religion is anachronism, the tendency to read into ancient ideas the meanings of

later ideas.  What is the other?  Give an example of both hurdles.
2. Why are the Sumerians unsuitable as a source of information on root paganism?
3. This course presents root or robust paganism.  What is meant by root or robust paganism anyway?
4. Concepts are attempted answers to questions.  How does the ancient question about creation differ from the later
question?  How do the answers differ?
5. How can modern scientific knowledge be reconciled with ancient views of the world?

Lesson 1, Part 2

Cosmos and Chaos:

Cosmos and chaos are relative terms.  The universe at large is not uniformly organized; instead, it is corpuscular,

consisting of units of greater organization surrounded by areas of a looser, freer organization.  The corpuscles contain

within themselves greater- and lesser-organized areas, and exist within larger corpuscles containing both them and the

surrounding, less-organized areas.  In other words, there are corpuscles within corpuscles.  Each corpuscle is what the

ancients called a cosmos, an ordered world.  The Milky Way is more ordered than the intergalactic space surrounding it, and

the space within my home is more ordered than the outside, which is subject to the ravages of weather.  My body is a

cosmos, striving to maintain itself against the forces of disease and aging; and my mind is a little cosmos, with its

illuminated circle of thoughts surrounded by shifting feelings and half-conscious urges.

Pagan religion pictures the world, to the limits of human perception and reason available at the time, in terms of this

template of cosmos and chaos.  Instead of providing an overview, like the later revelatory religions, it applies the

template of relative cosmos and chaos on whatever scale we are examining at a given time.

Thus, ancient Egypt, which was continuously inhabited through all four Ice Ages, was a cosmos, centering on the Nile and

surrounded on both sides by desert.  In the desert lived bedouins, and Egyptians knew that their lives were ordered as

well, but considered that order to be less orderly, less civilized than their own.  When the noble Sinuhe, in the Middle

Kingdom period, had to flee Egypt and live among the bedouins, he achieved great fame in their kingdom (for one Egyptian

can beat ten bedouins, hands down, any day) but in his old age longed to return to Egypt.  He was granted a pardon by the

reigning Pharaoh and given a place at court.  In the end he died happily, knowing he would be mummified and buried in the

proper manner, not covered with sand like a wretched Asiatic. 4  For Egyptians, to die outside Egypt was a sort of

damnation.

We see the same thinking in Norse myth.  The nine worlds ranged along the boughs of the World Ash-Tree are not equally

ordered.  Åsgard, at the top, is protected against the depredations of the Jøtuns or Giants, but Midgeard – Middle earth,

where we live – is a spottier affair.  I live in Norway  now, and six hours by car north of Oslo are very high mountains –

one approaches them gradually ascending –  called Jotunheim, the home or realm of the Giants.  The Giants, like the Greek

Titans, were older than the Gods, survivors from an older, wilder, more chaotic world; and through Gods like Loki, who were

part Giant, their destabilizing influence tended to undermine the efforts of the Æsir, the Sky-Gods, to build up and

maintain a civilized order. 5  At the same time, the struggle between order and chaos leads to development and evolution in

the world,  and many of the treasures and weapons of the Æsir came from Loki as reparations to the Gods after being caught

in some mischief.  Yggdrasil, the World-Ash tree, itself draws its nourishment from an underlying sea of chaos.

The Hindu Vedas, ancient sacred writings from the 2nd millenium BCE, teach that each cosmos, including the souls inhabiting

it, has existed from eternity and will always exist, but goes through endless cycles of creation, growth, decay and

eventual destruction, followed by a period of quiescence when it rests in a seed-state, waiting to be reborn.  The seed

rests within the womb of Kali, the dark Goddess of fate, the active principle of the ultimate reality, an impersonal or

trans-personal sea of blissful sentience called Brahman. 6 Brahman and Kali are implacable, unlike the Gods; that is, it is

no good praying to them.  Kali’s empire begins where prayers fail.  Some of her Western counterparts were Skadi, the

Cailleach, the Norns, and ‘the Old ‘Un’ of the Eddas.  It is she who turns the wheel of cosmic cycles and decrees when a

world will founder.  As the prophetess says in the Younger Edda:

“The ancient one lives in the east / in the Wood of Iron / and there gives birth to Fenrir’s brood; / one of them all /

especially / in form of a troll / will seize the sun.” 7

Ironwood is a type of tree that turns rust color when it dies; thus this is a death symbol pertaining to Ragnarøk, the time

of the end of the world-cycle.

Ragnarøk, however, is the end of a cycle for Middle-earth only, though the old Gods go down to destruction in our defense.

But Åsgard itself is untouched, and when the new cycle begins, the game-pieces the Gods were playing with on the lawn

before Åsgard are found undisturbed.  The game, incidentally, is hnefatafl, not chess, as scholars, following an idiotic

academic convention, often mistranslate its name.  This deception is doubly ignorant, for chess is of all games

quintessentially Zoroastrian (that is, anti-pagan), depicting a battle between matched but opposing armies, the very image

of the forces of Ahura Mazda squaring off with those of Angra Mainyu on the field of the Earth; whereas hnefatafl is a

siege game, with the forces maintaining order in the center under attack from the forces of chaos coming in from the side.

It is that easy to conceal pagan symbolism by deceptive mistranslation.

Suggested Reading:

The Upanishads, vols. 1 – 4, translated by Swami Nikhilananda, New York, Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1977.

Tales of Ancient Egypt, Roger Lancelyn Green, London, Penguin Books, 1967.

The Prose Edda [The Younger Edda], translated by Jean I. Young, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California

Press, first published 1954.

The Poetic Edda [The Elder Edda], translated by Carolyne Larrington, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Questions:

One: Name one way in which cosmos and chaos are relative to each other.

Two: What does the dark Goddess do in favor of chaos?  How does she help cosmos?

Three: Sometimes chaos within cosmos makes a positive contribution.  How does this come about?

Exercise:

When the wind or a breeze is blowing, become aware of your own breathing.  Your breath and the wind are connected.  Your

breathing is a little wind, and the wind breathes life-giving air into your face, nostrils and lungs.  They are one breath.

Feel them as one thing.