Pagans and Christians in the Middle Ages

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, January 08, 1999

 The Church in a Pagan World

 The Conversion of Europe
 Christian Truth
 Burial Customs
 The Feast of the Dead
 The Wild Hunt
 Paganism and Penance
 Witchcraft and Magick—Folk Medicine
 Christian Witches
 The Use of Herbs
 Judgement Day
 The Use of Literacy
 At a Disadvantage
 Why Bigotry Succeeds
 Faith and Superstition

The Church in a Pagan World

When the Church formed, the Roman Empire had a practical unity about it but nonetheless
consisted of many nations and ethnic groups. The church grew in this mixed milieu and its response
in those days was never uniform. Even within the Church there were battles against various
heretics. Indeed one of the factors which gave rise to its regional varieties and theological
squabbles was the extent to which different areas and theologians had been influenced by their
local Paganism. This extends right back to the founder of Christianity, Paul, the aposle to the
gentiles.

Christianity entered the Empire as “sheep among wolves”. The popular relgions were mystery cults,
and mainly they were well established, only Mithraism looking a little youthful. Christianity was
merely a babe. It had no philosophy. It had little ritual, only baptism and the holy repast, and
particularly had no unequivocal burial customs. It made peculiar and difficult demands upon its
converts, not so hard as the demands of Judaism but still hard demands for Pagans. How were
these first Christian missionaries to “persuade the heathen?”

Christianity used Paganism like a teenager building his hot rod—it was a great source of spare
parts. The large holes in Christianity were filled with adaptations from Paganism. The ancient
philosophers, whose schools the Christians shut, gave it philosophy. Christianity often cynically
adopted Pagan rites and ideas. They were “received” into the Church. Every important church
festival coincides with an ancient solar or Pagan festival. The roles of Pagan gods were given to
saints. It is a curious god this Christian one, that refuses to allow any other gods but cannot think
of any new dates for his own festivals. Instead, He choses ones used for countless millennia by the
gods he does not like and renames those old gods as Christian saints and lets them carry on with
their old jobs!
Many silly Christian fundamentalists deny that any compromise was made by the first Christian
missionaries. The same people try to argue that the Pagan converts instantly forgot all their Pagan
habits of a lifetime and took to the new Christian ones unerringly. So, when the converts
themselves, like the born-again clappies of today, earnestly went out enthusiastically evangelising,
they only told the perfect, unblemished Christianity given to them by the Holy Ghost. Not a Pagan
word fell from their lips or a Pagan thought entered their heads. Though Christians were a tiny
minority with an inchoate and incomplete religion in a world of well-developed and well-loved Pagan
religions, it was not influenced by them in the minutest detail. It offends all reason.

A very simple proof is that Christians are summoned to communion by the ringing of bells. That was
the way the Pagan Romans were called to meetings. Bells or “tintinabula” summoned Romans to the
forum for public meetings, and also announced that the hot bath house was open. Christianity
adopted the Pagan practice.

The Conversion of Europe

Missionary zeal, as most modern Christians will appreciate, comes from the newly converted and, in
the Dark Ages, the main source of new missionaries was most often the last country converted.
Missionaries approaching a Pagan country to convert always started at the top. Europe was
Christianised from the king downwards. At the highest level there will always have been previous
contact through travel, trade and diplomacy, unknown to the poorer people. In many instances, the
kings, for diplomatic reasons or, more often their queens because of the appeal of Christianity to
women, had already converted.

In any event, the missionary needed permission to preach and guarantees of safety, so, if the king
was not already sympathetic, he was the first one to persuade. Augustine of Canterbury arrived in
Kent from Italy seeking King Ethelbert to convert first. In less than two hundred years England
was sending missions to convert the Germans, and the Devononian monk, Wynfrith, otherwise
S Boniface, admitted that without the protection of the Frankish princes, he could not defend his
clerics or stop the worship of idols in Germany. In his case, the protection was insufficient anyway
—the Pagans got him. Often the king would invite some dependants or relatives to convert first,
just in case! These would be likely to be his children. If no terrible calamities ensued through the
anger of their traditional gods, he would invite others of his family to join him in baptism and his
nobles also. To history another country had converted but it would take generations if not
centuries for the peasants to convert in their hearts.

European kings were not stupid. They saw that Christianity was a powerful instrument for them to
strengthen their own rule. The help for the missionaries was not without conditions. Their condition
for supporting the Church was the support of the Church. The church had to help keep their
subjects subject. The church which had refused to recognise Roman Emperors as divine, declared
that kings had a divine right to rule. Direct intervention was also part of the deal. King Niels of
Denmark (1104-1134 AD) had enraged his subjects and was fearful for his position. He demanded
that the Archbishop of Lund, a respected churchman, should appeal to the mob on his behalf. It
seems the bishop succeeded in calming them. Furthermore, while keeping a close eye on the mortal
dangers to the souls of the subject people, the wise church man turned away from commenting on
potential dangers to souls of their benefactors. Christian missionaries they might have been but
they were not that keen to get to heaven.
After the kings, the missionaries always concentrated on the young. They realised that they it was
who would be running the country in future years and they had not been as indoctrinated with
Paganism as their parents. They were impressionable. Today evangelicals are no different and
Christians have alerted many other loony sects to the psychology of capturing young minds.
Christian parents are the first to be appalled. Can you believe it?

The method they used is that the Churches and Christian parents have used ever since. First, the
young ones were horribly decried as sinners, wicked, creatures of the devil and unworthy of
anything, least of all the love of God. When it is considered that the subjects are sufficiently
contrite and concerned, they are told that a continuation of their wicked, wicked ways can only lead
to one conclusion—eternal torture, burning in hell with no further possibility of repentance. When
the little ones are sobbing in anguish and fear for their eternal being, they are told that God had
personally arranged that they could, if they had sufficient faith, escape this gruesome and
everlasting torture. There was one way only, reject their previous life and put themselves in the
hands of the Almighty through His son Jesus Christ whom he had sent to atone for all the sins of
humanity. That alone would save them. The Pagan youth were being addressed by a man who was the
emissary of God himself, so it must have been true. Applied, as it is today by churches of many
different inclinations, to young children, this can only be seen as a psychological crime. And so it
was to the people of the Middle Ages, many of whom were mentally children, though adults.

Heaven, according to Irish Pagan traditions, was in the Fairy Hills with everlasting feasting with no
work. The gods of Olympus had a similar idyllic existence, eating, making love and sleeping, eternally
but with the occasional adventure thrown in. Mortals could only hope for elevation to an existence
like this if they had behaved as gods on earth. A few did and were raised up. Eventually, though,
every toiling and anxious human aspired to this wonderful life— everyone wanted to be a god, to
have immortality and live in eternal boredom. Christianity fulfilled their wish. Plainly, it is a racial
memory of the lost golden age of hunting and gathering, the Garden of Eden of the Jewish
scriptures, where food was simply picked from the trees and the sexes did what came naturally.
Christianity made the forbidden fruit specifically the key to carnal knowledge and then they had to
try to persuade Pagans that their ideas of heavenly bliss should be replaced for the Scottish
Presbyterian version—an austere place with a severe father making sure you were never naughty.

Finally, the practice of confession, quite unknown to the northern Europeans was introduced so that
the Church had knowledge and therefore direct control of every act of the Pagan converts. The
origin of private confession was in the early medieval hermits and monks of Ireland and Wales. The
Irish kings were above the law. How then could they be controlled? It all depended upon the king’s
honour, an important Pagan concept, and the moral pressure people could apply to their sovereign—
fasting. When Christianity arrived, the same method was used to get the attention of the King of
Kings in the sky. God was being forced against his will, a magical concept rejected by Christianity
but here it was allowed to prove that he was honourable!

In this ascetic atmosphere, the hermits and monks introduced personal private confession, a listing
of personal sins and promises to atone. The Irish and Welsh missionaries took the idea with them
to their European missions and the Church eventually adopted the practice universally for its own
totalitarian reasons. The church had substituted the Hebrew God for all the old gods and spirits,
then obliged people to “voluntarily” confess their sins so that their soul was transparent to the
priest. God became truly omnipresent. Through Him, the prelates knew everything the faithful
were doing and even thinking. At the Reformation, Protestantism rejected the confession on the
grounds of Jeremiah 17:8 which effectively declareds that, since everyone is wicked anyway, there
is no point in expecting them to confess honestly. The deceitful heart can never be known.

From the fiftth to the twelfth centuries, the Church gave out lists of sins with suitable penances.
As time went on the variety of sins and penances multiplied. In the sixth century two cases of
adultery were distinguished in an Irish list of penances. By the ninth century the German list of
penances distinguished 35 cases of adultery, even distinguishing the sexual positions used. By then,
the penances were not trivial, a few Hail Marys or Our Fathers as they might be today.
Masturbation by a pubescent boy was punished by 30 days on bread and water. Committing a lewd
act might get three years of fasting.

Christians like to contrast the growth of Christianity and the growth of Islam. Islam converted by
the sword but Christianity used reason. There was little to chose between them for the average
person. Whether the ruler is a native prince or a foreign one makes no difference to the peasants
who were told to abandon their old and trusted superstitions. Sweden was forcibly converted by
the Swedish prince Inge, who had been thrown out once for trying to impose Christianity on his
subjects but returned with a large enough army to get his own way. The Carolingians had a policy of
forcibly Christianising everyone they conquered.

Childebert I of the Merovingians (511-558 AD) decreed that all images of “false gods and demons”
(the Pagan gods) had to be removed on pain of 100 lashes, practically a death penalty. A Saxon
decree was less generous—baptism or death. With such inducement, the Christian fonts were
splashing liberally but the converts were hardly sincere. Nor was any instruction required.
Charlemagne, the warrior king, insisted that no one should be baptised without two or three weeks’
instruction! Why should it have been necessary? Most kings introduced new decrees offering the
death penalty for anyone not following Christian practice. Pagans had to appear in every outward
sign to be Christians.

In some times and places the transition from Paganism to Christianity was apparently seamless. At
others, there was conflict. Christians often accused Pagans of violence. The Pagan side of the story
rarely exists, except in the form the Christians were ready to publish it. It is not hard to discern,
though, that much of the Pagan violence was a response to the arrogance and disrespect of
Christians who felt justified in emulating their god in turning over, not only the tables in the temple
but the temples themselves and the images of the gods they contained. They then felt aggrieved
when the Pagan worshippers assaulted them.

The missionaries killed sacred animals, they split sacred trees, they sang loud Christian hymns in
the holy silence of Pagan sacred groves. Then they thought it spiteful that anyone should protest.
Most often, the Pagan worshippers could only look on in sorrow for their already converted ruler
permitted the sacrilege. Nevertheless, the protests continued. From 1021 to 1120 AD, anti-
Christian riots occurred almost every nine years in Sweden, matching the nine yearly cycle of Pagan
festivals at Uppsala.

Christian Truth
Although Christianity began among the poor of the empire, it triumphed by being the religion of the
bureacracy, the upper middle class, we might say today, and nobility. Many of the simple folk,
particularly of the western empire, preferred the old gods and mostly they were not converted
with ease. No one should be surprised at this. The Indians of South and Central America, after half
a millennium of Catholic preaching have not yet abandoned their native gods. In profoundly Catholic
countries, ancient superstitions still persist. Voodoo, which combines Christianity and native
African religions in a curious but evidently compelling mixture, is a vigorous and growing religion in
the Caribbean and some southern US states, hundreds of years after the slaves were shipped and
nominally converted.

Barmy Christians can draw no conclusions from this because they are not open to persuasion, or to
evidence, unless they have rubber-stamped it. They have the fixed idea that Christianity arrived
gift-wrapped by God in bijou form, small but perfectly shaped. All it had to do was spread like the
flu until it was large and mutated into hundreds of different forms, all of which their particular
adherents think is perfect, still.

If we knew more about the rival Pagan religions we could tell for ourselves, but the Christians have
purged the world of almost everything that might reveal a Pagan blemish on the holy cross. There is
a story in Arthur Koestler’s, Act of Creation, explaining what socialist realism is. An artist was
commissioned to paint a portrait of an old Communist general grossly scared on the right cheek
fighting for the Red Army. The completed picture showed the scared man in left profile looking
unblemished. A naïve western diplomat commented to the artist that it failed to show the general’s
most characteristic feature, his ugly scar. “That’s socialist realism”, replied the artist.

With 1500 more years of practice at it than the Comunists had, it is also Christian Truth!
Christians do not like to see their scars, and live their lives pretending there are none. They have
rewritten history to hide their scars and continue to do so, but, though they think the portrait on
display is faultless, the fragments of the artist’s sketches, they failed to destroy, show us other
aspects, scars and all. Christians will not look. They prefer the public portrait, Christian Truth!

The compromises Christianity made with Paganism were not always hidden or subtle. The Venerable
Bede tells us that Pope Gregory the Great (590-604 AD) instructed S Augustine, who was trying to
convert the English, to destroy Pagan idols but consecrate their places of worship to Christian
saints. To this day in England it is evident. Chapels in high places are often dedicated to S Michael,
who took on the role of the sun. High places were where the sun was often worshipped. Really he is
the Archangel Michael, who appears in Revelation with the characteristics of the sun.

This became a general principle. Excavations of European abbeys and churches show a continuity of
Pagan and Christian culture. A small private chapel in Namur in Belgium was converted from a Pagan
temple of the late empire simply by extending the original temple structure by adding a choir and
an alter to its eastern side. It was surrounded by Merovingian graves of the late sixth century. The
most well known Pagan temples converted into churches are the Pantheon and the church of Santa
Maria della Minerva.

The late eighth century church S Martin in the Ardennes was built on the ruins of a third century
Pagan temple. Such a gap shows no continuity of use but certainly a long continuity of sacred
tradition. Remarkably the church is built along the same axis as the old temple—to the north west
—not aligned to the east as is usual with Christian churches. A Pagan monument consisting of a
statue of a mounted god riding down a snake-legged giant is now the site of a chapel to S Wido, the
patron saint of horses and grooms, again showing a remarkable memory of sacred tradition.
Roman carvings were even erected in Christian buildings. Pagan gods support Christian alters,
fundamentalists will be astonished to know. Plainly, the missionaries were happy to humiliate the old
gods by putting them to mundane use in their new churches. In one instance the gods are unpside
down, a further humiliation. More neutral bits of decoration and plain stones are much more
common.

Much of the alleged vigour of the missionaries in destroying the Pagan temples was the stuff of
later Christian hagiography. If a Pagan temple was not to be rededicated to a suitable saint, certain
damage was done to render it unserviceable. Gradually, as sacred memories faded, the locals
themselves would plunder the site for its building materials. Otherwise, churches or chapels were
built on the sites of old temples and sacred groves and the missionaries used the materials they
could scavenge from the old building for the new. Older Pagans would take comfort from the
presence in the church of a sacred log and in a generation, their children would have carved it into
a sacred cross.

Indeed the cross really emerged in this period of conversion of Europe as the main symbol of
Christianity. Earlier, the symbol had been the Chi-Rho symbol or the sign of the fish. The
missionaries found that the cross was an important solar and cosmic symbol to the northern
Europeans, found engraved on stones dating from the bronze age (1500 BC) in Scandinavia. The
opportunism of the missions in the lands of the Celts and Germans is the reason why today, the
Christian symbol is a cross and not a fish. Ancient crosses, often with a solar ring, are very common
in the north.

The denigration of northern European gods by Christian missions is evident today in language. Hel
was the Norse Goddess of the underworld where she ruled the dead. She was not evil, and her
domain was not like the Hell of the Christians, a place of eternal punishment, but just the land of
the dead where everyone who was not a god would end up. The missionaries gave the respected
goddess, quite new connotations when they converted the Teutons. Similarly, the old German word
for a god was god, and because it meant a god it came to mean good. But this old word was a neuter
word which remains today in German as the word for an idol! The same word but declined as
masculine means God!

In the morals of sexuality, the Christian were not willing to compromise. The church blindly carried
over, with total lack of understanding, the Essenic scruples about chastity and celibacy propagated
by S Paul. In ritual, though, Christianity was fairly indifferent other than in the administration of
the Eucharist and baptism. And why not? They had taken them all, other than these two, from
other religions, anyway.

Burial Customs
Burial was one of the main areas where Christianity had no well-established customs, and so Pagan
burial customs often continued well into the Christian era. Not until the seventh and eighth
centuries did Christian traditions establish themselves through the severe condemnation of such as
S Boniface. Richly endowed graves have been found underneath Cologne Cathedral and the Abbey
Church of S Denis (the renamed and sanctified God, Dionysus) in Paris. Did early Christians think
they could take their wordly goods with them? Were they perpetuating Pagan ideas?
In the rich graves of Cologne, even meals were provided for the dead nobles, as if they were
Pharaohs. Did these people think that “Jesus would be here soon” and they would be resurrected
bodily in earth—soon! If so, it is a persistent thought, and agrees with church dogma that
cremation destroyed the body that was to be resurrected and so was forbidden. Any signs of
cremation in a grave is taken to be a sign of Paganism.

In Merovingian graves, evidence of fire is common, but was it cremation? The bodies often showed
no trace of cremation or signs of only partial incineration. Perhaps fires were built in the bottom of
graves and when they were burning vigorously, or perhaps when they had reduced to hot glowing
embers, the bodies were placed in. Was this a partial extension of Pagan crematory ritual into
Christianity? Did the early Christians justify this Pagan holy fire as a baptism by fire at death to
bracket the baptism by water when the Pagan was born-again into Christianity? Folklore speaks of
ritual fires called “nodfyr” or “needfire”.

Rich Merovingians buried people fully dressed and surrounded by utensils and provisions, the
custom lasting until the seventh century. The later Carolingians buried people naked or dressed in a
simple smock with no possessions. It seems no church taboo against rich burials ever had full
effect because well into the high Middles Ages, senior prelates as well as nobles were often buried
in full regalia, chalice and crozier and all. When burials are found with little else but simple
pendular crosses of base metal—iron or lead—they are taken to be Christian burials. The little
crosses are obviously not valuables but merely tokens, perhaps meant as Christian amulets, charms
otherwise being forbidden, purely for grave-wear.

Shield bosses and buckles are found with Christian images. Christian warriors, like Constantine
himself, evidently saw the Christian god as the same as the Pagan gods, in the sense that he
returned a favour such as success in battle or good fortune in exchange for worship. The lack of
ethical content to such simple ideas shows that Christianity for these converts had no more moral,
or little more moral meaning, than the older gods had had to them.

A practice strongly forbidden by Christians was the honouring or venerating of animals, yet nobles
were buried with their animals right into the Christian era. Christians will say it had no religious
significance. It was purely a gross example of conspicuous consumption by the wealthy classes. Yet
it is hard to accept such a simple explanation when the taboo was so often iterated. At the least
the prelates were using double standards, turning away from the practices of the kings and nobles,
their patrons and protectors. No one who was familiar with the sacrifice of animals for religious
reasons could have dissociated this from the old practice despite the declaration by the bishop
that it was merely to honour a great man. The Merovingian king, Childeric, was buried in amazing
grandeur leaning on his horse’s head in 481 AD. Later excavations revealed other graves containing
whole horses, dated to the same time.

The church had to keep issuing edicts repeatedly forbidding these and other practices right into
the Middle Ages. They could not have been necessary unless someone was doing whatever was
forbidden. S Eloi and S Boniface of the seventh and eighth centuries were forbidding people to call
upon “demons”—Neptune, Orcus, Minerva and Diana, or local spirits. Christians were warned not to
visit stones, springs, trees, crossroads, or temples to burn candles or make offerings, or to believe
in the magical power of plants. Honouring Pagan festivals, sacrilegious practices at the side of
graves, using amulets or magical spells, prophesying or soothsayng were all banned by the bishops.
At this stage of Christianity, Catholic Christians, particularly, might be surprised to know that even
venerating saints and the virgin Mary were banned. The reason is plainly because the saints and the
Christian Holy Virgin could be venerated as the gods and goddess they used to be! Only later when
the Church was confident that Paganism was finished did these practices get re-instated and such
customs as carrying bizarre images around the towns and fields at festival times get accepted
again.

What is the Christian of today to make of Christian burials containing additional disembodied
skulls? They were Pagan? Often, only one extra skull is found alongside the skull of the dead man,
but as many as eight arranged in a semi-circle around the dead man’s own head have been found,
more than once. Other graves, not surprisingly, have no skulls in them, just a headless body, yet the
graves have not been robbed or disturbed, so that is evidently how the deceased was buried. All of
the vertebrae and even the lower jaw are often present, showing that the man had not been
beheaded before death. Christians were known to break a dead person’s legs to prevent them from
walking again after death! Sometimes they were buried face down or even nailed down for the same
reason. Was this why they removed heads?

Elsewhere though, there are medieval ossuaries filled with nothing but skulls! It is suggestive of
the continuation of a pre-christian skull cult. It was perhaps a form of ancestor worship, in which
the skull was removed to be honoured as the vessel of the dead person’s personality. The skulls
might have been kept in the ancestral home or a private chapel in church and at some stage they
were collected and put into an ossuary.

Proof of the veneration of ancestors is the resources the nobility gave over to it. Ancestors were
laid to rest in a family chapel, either in the ancestral home or in a nearby chrch. The family chaplain
and the local priest held regular services for the family and abbeys were often necropolises for
ruling houses, most notably S Denis in Paris for the kings of France. The order of Cluny in Burgundy
was dedicated considerably to the cult of the dead.

Monks of orders like this, or the monks and chaplains of lesser haouses, wrote romanticised
chronicles of the deeds of the family, to gild its image and justify the status of the cult of the
lineage. The noble home was the benefactor of the monks so that they would devote their liturgies
to the house and daily comemmorate the dead in the obituarium, the list of those who had died on
that date. Part of the ritual was the issuing of pittances to the poor, the custom introduced to
substitute for the food given to the dead earlier in the Middle Ages and in Pagan times. In around
1150 AD, Cluny issued about 18,000 pittances a year.

The Feast of the Dead

A specific medieval form of venerating the dead was the cult of relics. The remains of notably holy
people, or even famous benefactors of the Church, were displayed at their death. They were
regarded as saints and the people wanted to touch them to tap their dynamis or power of healing or
for good fortune. Churches or abbeys commonly made themselves the centre of some relic cult,
writing vitae or lives listing the wonders of the saint and his or her bits, alive and dead, as
brochures to impress the pilgrims so that more would come again next year. Pilgrimages were the
equivalent of seaside or foreign holidays in the Middle Ages and churches and abbeys made
themselves very rich trading on the gullible travellers who came to venerate the relic.
When the cult began to wane, the monks exhumed the remains of the saint, exhibited them, then in
translatio they transferred it in solemn ceremonies to a newly built shrine in the hopes of renewing
interest, which it usually did.

Classical Pagan religions taught that the soul remained with the body for three days before
departing. The miracle of Lazarus in John’s gospel is that Lazarus had been dead for three days
and his soul had departed but Jesus was able to recall it—an astonishing miracle for people with
those beliefs. Medieval people retained the idea that death was not instantaneous. They thought it
was a slow process accompanying the corruption of the body, which actually began before death
with the symptoms of aging. The soul of the dead remained with the body until it was fully
decomposed, when it would leave it for pastures new, and the dead person was indeed dead. Before
then, there was a danger of haunting. This accounted for some medieval funerary customs.

In the uncertain period while the soul is preparing to leave the body for good, a dead man’s wife
thought it wise to remain faithful to her dead husband as if he were alive, lest jealousy should
persist beyond the grave. A dead person’s possessions had also to be retained as if he were alive, in
case he should haunt anyone who tried to dispose of them.

Fragments of these beliefs are used regularly in the Hollywood vampire cult of today. The undead
remain fresh in their graves, so their souls are still with their bodies and they can emerge to haunt
the living. It is this medieval idea. Until the body had decomposed, it might be re-animated to knock
on your door late at night like the midnight caller in the play, The Monkey’s Paw. One way of
ensuring that such horrors never happened was to make sure the proper liturgy was said to appease
the spirit of the deceased. Vampires in films always hate the Christian cross, but the legend’s
Pagan roots are there too in their dislike of the sun, their hatred of water and their death by a
wooden stake. Dead people in the intermediate stage still needed feeding and, if food was not
offered, again the mouldering corpse might come to get it, further roots of the vampire myth.

Putting food in a grave is distinctly non-Christian, as is commemorating a dead man by consuming a

meal on his grave, a common practice in Pagan religions. Bowls and dishes containing prepared foods,
wine glasses and pots are all found in medieval graves like those in Cologne cathedral, the pots and
vessels still containing the bones of the animals constituting the food. Bones of pigs, hare, birds,
cows, and deer, as well as walnuts, hazelnuts, grain, snails and mussels, and traces of honey, and
various brews and decoctions have all been found. The Priests had declared funerary gifts of food
as taboo, so what were these? It seems a Pagan custom that even the frequent declarations of the
priesthood could not stop.

Pagan burial practices like these were deeply rooted in the customs of the people and lasted on into
Christian times. Many of them are concerned with the belief that the soul of the deceased
continued to live in or about the tomb. The practice of eating meals on graves in memory of a dead
person became the fashion in the late Empire, about the time that Christianity was victorious.
Depictions of it occur in the catacombs. Archaeological discoveries offer evidence of such
practices. Excavations made in a Christian cemetery of the fourth or fifth century at Tarragona
show signs of these Pagan banquets for the dead.

It is attested by six tables, semi-circular in shape and with a depression in the center. Two are
covered with red stucco, red being the Pagan color of the dead. Near one of the tombs were found
fragments of glass, some coins, ashes, and bones, remains presumably of a banquet held there. In
two instances tubes were found leading down into the tomb where the body reposed. A vial in one
grave contained the remains of milk. A coin was discovered resting on the head of a corpse. This is
presumably to be traced to the common Pagan practice of placing money with the deceased person
so that he might be able to pay Charon. One sealed tomb contained no body, reflecting the Pagan
belief that the spirit of a deceased person whose body could not be found still needed a tomb.

Four hundred years later S Boniface was still warning about it, and ducts for the passing of food to
the dead were even built into graves from the fourth to the sixth centuries. Though prelates
constantly decried it, the serving of a meal to the dead persisted even in monasteries into the high
Middle Ages. A Pagan fashion of the late Empire continued well into the Christian era. Feasting with
the dead could not easily be stamped out.

Jacobus of Serugh, who died in 521 AD, advised Christians to prepare a banquet for the dead by all
means, but in the church, not by the graveside. Thus it became the love feast or agape which
originally accompanied the feeding of the spirit via the Eucharist, but, by the early middle ages,
became an annual commemoration of the dead person—a “deathday” party akin to our birthday
parties. It was held by the side of the grave and the dead person was believed to be there in spirit,
and so a place was set for them at the table. Guests addressed the empty chair as if the dead
person occupied it. They were offered food and drink with the blessing; “MayGod refresh
(refrigeret) you.” Food was then handed out to the poor as pittances.

This refrigerium sometimes was preceded by the Eucharist but often was not and the clergy
showed their disapproval by staying away. It would quite often degenerate into drunkenness and
gluttony, as it had already done as the messianic meal in the time of Paul the Apostle, impelling him
to lay down the rules which became the Eucharist. The first Christians apparently saw it as akin to
Dionysian festivities, but despite Paul’s instructions, evidently the agape kept its separate
existence, which only declined towards the end of the first millennium.

It even extended into the professionals of the Church. The rules of Eynsham Abbey near Oxford,
instructed monks to commemorate the anniversary of the death of its abbots each year by setting
a place for him and offering him food, “like a living monk”, A pittance of old beer was also given to
the poor. The funerary feast never disappeared entirely. Wakes are still held in Ireland. Friends
and relatives of the deceased gather by the open coffin to eat and drink, and address the dead
person as if alive. Even in Christian society at large, it is usual to serve a meal or buffet and a drink
to the mourners at a funeral. Though Christians might think it simply politeness, they might be
surprised to know it is the remnants of an ancient Pagan practice.

The Wild Hunt

Burchard of Worms says that, in the confessional, the priestly confessors were to ask whether the
Catholic believer had accompanied Diana, the goddess of the heathen, in a nocturnal ride with
countless women and animals, placing themselves at the goddess’s service and obeying her
commands—or even believed any of this to be true. Into the fourteenth century, the Pagan
goddess, Diana, was a still force to be opposed by the Church after a millennium of Christianity.
Our word for a bad dream—nightmare—reflects these nocturnal events, though it also means an
incubus, so the night ride could have been something different.
A Norman monk reported that one evening on New Year’s Day around 1100 AD, a priest visiting a
dying man at the extremities of his parish heard a a great din. Then appeared a large procession of
people carrying animals and clothing across their shoulders like a band of robbers returning from
plunder. But they were lamenting not rejoicing, and the priest recognised some of the faces as
those of his dead parishioners. The priest concluded that they were the spirits of the dead, but he
had been obliged to stand at bay by a very material horseman who refused him permission to
approach. Was it a Pagan New Year procession?

At New Year, northern Pagans indulged in guising, dressing up wearing the skins and horns of
animals. It seems a reasonable guess that the animals the priest referred to were the clothing and
the account has been garbled. The lamenting and faces of the dead sound like Christian additions to
make their flocks fearful of such rituals. It was about this time that guising was banned by the
Church.

Walter Map, a friend of Thomas Becket, and an envoy to France wrote that in Brittany people had
seen at night hordes of soldiers and animals directed by horsemen. They passed by continuously and
in total silence. They were not spirits because the bolder Bretons had grabbed some of the animals
when they had the chance, and some had been murdered for their audacity. Despite this evidence
that the assembly were live enough, Map reports that dead faces were also seen among them. A
similar procession had been reported in the Welsh Marches at midday during the first year of the
reign of Henry II. The whole procession apparently just disappeared.

Such processions were called the Family of Herlechinus or the Hosts of Herlething, a corruption, it
is thought, of the Dutch, Hellekin, a diminutive form of Hel, Goddess of the Dead, meaning Little
Hel. In England, where the name was not understood it was further altered to Herodias, the wife
of Antipas who had John the baptist beheaded.

The twelfth century Abbot of Cluny tells a ghost story about a knight who died in France. The local
priest passing his castle some time later hears the clamour of arms. Suddenly the ghost of the
knight appears and tells the priest about his woes, being trapped on earth until injustice was
righted. The priest promised him he would seek justice and the knight disappeared satisfied. The
story begins like a familiar story of the Hosts of Herlething, but becomes a sweet ghost story
about an unhappy spirit settled by a conscienscious priest. Christianisation.

Ellebaud, chamberlain of the Bishop of Arras, was riding on horseback to Arras, preceded at some
distance by his servant on the lookout for brigands. The servant pulled sharply round and rode
helter-skelter to his master saying he had heard the Family of Herlechinus, typically sounding like
an army, in a coppice ahead. He declared that the dead souls had said the Archbishop would soon
join them. He died shortly afterwards.

In 1215, with the Fourth Lateran Council, the Church tightened its grip on its fearful flock.
Compulsory annual confessions were introduced and regular attendance at mass made an obligation.
In theology it introduced the idea of Purgatory as a place for the purification of souls before they
could enter heaven. It was plainly a device to explain the popular belief in ghosts, the Wild Hunt
and so on. A locus purgatorius had been considered before by clerics of a philosophic bent, as the
equivalent of the Hades of classical religion or Sheol of the old Jewish religion—a way of
accommodating the older ideas but it never caught on. In the thirteenth century, the clergy saw it
as a way of incorporating the cult of the dead into Christianity. The purification necessary to enter
heaven explained the lingering on earth of restless souls liable to haunt the living, and it required
the living to play their part in helping to release tormented souls.

In 1180 AD, Herbert of Clauvaux told how a priest left his church to be met outside by a
procession of the dead, men and women, on foot and on horseback and young and old. Not only did
the priest recognise some of the dead faces but he actually spoke to one of the dead men he had
formerly known! He confessed that the shades of dead sinners had to wander the world until they
confessed. A punishment of eternal restlessness on this earth is not a Christian form of judgement
—burning in Hell was the preferred Christian punisment. What is it all about? Are these clergymen
using the word dead metaphorically like the Essenes, meaning eternally dead, in other words,
damned. They would be damned then because they were Pagans and indulging in Pagan processions.
It follows that Pagan processions were processions of the dead because they were damned but
they were not dead.

The Wild Hunt is reported in many parts of western Europe and as far south as Italy, but its linking
by such as Map with Wales and Brittany hints at a Celtic, or at least a northern, origin. Most parts
of Western Europe have been influenced by Celtic culture. The way the stories are related betrays
an oral tradition and they seem not to be corruptions of Christian traditions or myths. The church
was always ready to condemn them and they never seem to draw any scriptural inferences from
them as if they were concerned not to mix these particular customs with Christianity. Plainly they
were alien to the Catholic Church and indeed, the clergy, while tightening its grip on the people
seemed to be getting more aloof from them. They called the people the “vulgus” and eventually
worked themselves up so much about these popular beliefs, they again turned to the label of
heresy.

Many of the spiritually inclined laity had seen enough of the Church and preferred wandering
preachers who formed lay brotherhoods around themselves. Some rejected the Church’s doctrines
on the sacraments. The Arras hretics of 1025 AD and the Petrobusians rejected marriage,
penance, baptism, the Eucharist, church burial and prayers for the dead. The church marked
important dates in a lifetime with rites of passage, baptism, confirmation, marriage and extreme
unction, but the earlier Pagan ones remained popular for a long time. Esatblished traditions for
these important occasions are hard to break. Today in a secular society in which 19 people out of
twenty are not interested in attending church, most people still like to have their children baptised
and to get married in church.

Paganism and Penance

Burchard, Bishop of Worms, attempted to draw together Christian law in his book, Decretum, at
the turn of the last millennium. A chapter on penances is particularly interesting because it is the
most complete list written until then of Christian taboos, and the punishments for not observing
them. Curiously, it is remarkably reminiscent of the penitential parts of the rules of the Dead Sea
sectarians. The penance for attending a wake, singing and dancing and getting drunk to send off the
dead was 30 days on bread and water. The same punishment was prescribed for eating offerings by
the side of graves or stones, springs, trees and crossroads. Five hundred years after Jacobus of
Serugh, the Church was still warning its flocks about the same Pagan habits.

The list of penances was taken by the father confessor and he went through each misdemeanor
saying, “Have you…?” then reading out each successive sin from the book. Proceeding through the
list, the priest must have given some innocents ideas they would never have thought of. The
punishments, though, were lenient—the tabloids today would be much more outraged. As the Church
got progressively more frustrated at the persistence of Paganism and more oppressive, confession
was made compulsory. By then the confession manual of Petrus of Poitiers urged priests not to
suggest to the innocent anything they had not already thought of. Eventually, the Church really lost
its temper and turned western Europe into an inferno not exceeded until this century.

Burchard’s book confirms the persistence of Pagan ideas in the popular imagination. It is epitomised
with the penance of two years’ fasting on feastdays for anyone who “follows in the tradition of the
heathen, which even to this day fathers still pass on to their sons” namely to worship “the elements
of nature, the moon, the sun or the motions of the stars”.

Tasting “the seed of your husband” to “inflame his love for you” was described as a devilish act.
Penance: seven years’ fast! Assenting to the Pagan act of pouring of a jug of pure water under a
dead person’s bier merited 10 years on bread an water. These punishments implied the crimes.
Despite the increasing oppression of the Church, 600 years after Christianity took control of the
Roman empire, it had still not destroyed the spirit of Europe’s Pagans. The ultimate victory of
Christianity did not begin until the thirteenth century and it took wholesale slaughter and terror
through the Inquisition and the Witch Trials to blot out Paganism. I doubt that anyone today can
conceive how oppressive it was for ordinary people to live under this devilish regime they called
Christianity. Though it began reasonably tolerant of the northern people, it got progressively more
oppressive for a thousand years! How can modern Christians ignore this?

Since Christianity had every power available to impose its beliefs, the persistence of Pagan
practices was because the practice of this ersatz religion failed to fulfil many spiritual needs.
Pagans had accepted the Hebrew God in place of Jupiter or Thor because they were ready to
accept a god touted as superior to their familiar ones, but there was no goddess in this new religion
and no place for magic—the psychological benefits of personal ritual. This new god was too
powerful. He knew everything and could do everything. There was nothing left that the people could
do to help themselves spiritually.

People expecting to be liberated by a hugely powerful god at their side found themselves slaves.
God had His will and all people could do was appeal to Him through prayer. Believers came humbly in
supplication, praying for mercy. God was not listening. His mind was made up and prayer was
fruitless. They had to bear it and look forward to their reward in the next world. Many Christians
have the same experience today, but few have the courage to say so. It betrays a lack of “faith”
and they cannot lose “faith”. They are stuck in an awful psychological dilemma that their stern
beliefs will not allow them to escape, except of course by having even more “faith”.

How could all this faith and the terrible lie of reward beyond death help a woman who wanted to
arouse her husband with her deft oral skills. She had to suffer unnecessary deprivation for a
reward when she was a stinking corpse. And what was the reward? If she were a Moslem she could
hope to become a black-eyed houri, but for Christians there was no sex in heaven. Physical love was
only a prayer short of a mortal sin to the average medieval prelate. It was necessary for the
“vulgus” to produce a new generation of believers but they were not to enjoy it. “You must raise
yourselves above it, as we, the clergy, do!”

Witchcraft and magic—Folk Medicine

Nor was there any magic to effect cures—only sterile blessings and and prayers. The use of herbs,
stones and roots was forbidden. What was the Christian to do with feelings of hate? Simply
suppress them. Hatred was nominally not allowed, so it could not be expressed. Yet we sometimes
hate, it is a natural emotion like fear or sadness and ought to be expressed in some way if it is not
to fester and become morbid. No one suggests that hatred should be acted upon by murder or
burning down someone’s house, but is simple suppression enough? When strong feelings are
repressed, people get bitter and neurotic and might even crack and do the very deeds that
suppression was intended to stop—but even more violently. The psychology of witchcraft had
something to offer here that the Church had not. The plaintiff could issue a curse knowing that if
it was unjust it would rebound upon themselves—a harmless release of the tension.

How was the Church to relieve the life-long sense of pain, unfulfilment and loss of a childless
mother? Equally, how could the hopeless poverty and endless grind and depression of the fecund
poor be relieved, once exposing unwanted children was banned. The church was fond of moralising
but could offer nothing except despair and hardship in this world. Its answer was pie in the sky, as
it is still. People were and are offered a reward in heaven for being physical and psychological
slaves on earth.

In these observations are the reasons for the persistence of Paganism and the prospects for its
revival. Paganism allows people to do something, and the role of the facilitator often fell to women
whose only role in Christianity was to be a wife and a mother. An earth mother could comfort, cure
and invite the spirits to rectify wrongs—like a modern medical psychiatrist. They made potions and
medicines, they could formulate curses and recite spells, they could invoke nature spirits to
consider your particular problem.

The Hebrew God had the reputation of being so powerful, he could not be coerced into doing
anything against his will. The childless woman had to endure God’s will. Amulets were forbidden for
this reason, apparently implying that they had some effect on God but only as an annoyance. If they
had no effect at all, why should they have been forbidden? The truth is, of course, that amulets
have an effect—it is the same as the effect of prayer, or belief in God, a psychological effect. The
church was concerned that all such effects should come only from official sources. Many people
took no notice. The denuciations of Pagan practices for hundreds of years proves that the “vulgus”
preferred them.

The Hebrew God was too remote and too arrogant, which is the very reason that He had a saviour,
closer to humankind, who had once been human and therefore knew what it was like! The saviour
was the intermediary or mediator between mankind and God. Sadly, once the saviour had returned
to the right hand of God on his throne in heaven, he was seen to be too remote, so other
intermediaries were invented. The Virgin Mary and the saints were appointed as intermediaries to
get the attention of Jesus so that he could pass the message on to God. The church then saw it was
silly to ban amulets and talismans as the work of the devil and invited people to wear Christian ones
and to give gifts to the saints. Of course, they were only symbolic but, if the peasants wanted to
believe they worked, fine!

Now, science has explained and cured many of the problems that plagued medieval people. But it has
demonstrated too that amulets and spells have a psychological effect on people. They are a type of
Couéism, as is prayer. Nevertheless, in this secular age superstious belief has fallen faster than
church attendances as science has proven that they have no forces associated with them other
than psychological ones.

Now there is a growing awareness of the importance of psychology for improving the emotional
balance of people. Psychological and placebo effects are accepted and medical trials of medicines
have to take them into account if any genuine physical effect is to be detected. Our scientific
knowledge is getting more subtle and modern Pagans are sorcerers only in the sense that
psychiatrists are. A spell can be heard, a talisman worn and an amulet touched and carried with you.
Unlike the God who is everywhere and therefore nowhere, they are definitely there and therefore
can have more psychological value than that distant God with his long list of mediators calling one
to another:

Message for the Most High... Message for the Most High... Message for the...

Christian Witches
Some medieval women got away with practising Paganism—being witches—within the Church. They
were described as mystics or visionaries.

The heyday of Christian mysticism was from the 1100s to the end of the 1300s, when the medieval
mystic was seen rather like the Jewish prophet. They saw visions presented to them by God and so
they were God’s mothpieces.Among them were several remarkable women who were not afraid to
cross words with the clergy who could be seen to be flagrantly neglecting their supposed God-given
duties. Hidegard of Bingen (1098–1179 AD) was the first.

She tells us she saw visions even before she could talk and when she began to speak she told about
them. Perhaps that is why she was confined to an abbey at the age of eight. Like mystics in general,
she considered that she had been chosen by God. S Birgitta of Sweden (1303–1373 AD) who was
made a saint only eighteen years after her death wrote that God had chosen her as his “bride and
conduit” to hear and see “heavenly secrets”, sounding remarkably Essene but doubtless taking her
cue from Paul the Apostle. Hildegard was not directly called until she was 43. Female mystics seem
reluctant to accept their calling and often only do so when they have fallen ill—God’s wrath—
whereupon they accept the call and they recover.

Devout cults, like the Essenes, tend to think in Biblical clichés and, with nothing but the Bible to
read, medieval monks and nuns were the same. Hildegard’s visions are identifiably taken from the
Bible, particularly the apocalyptic works, Daniel and Revelation. Twice she speaks of a huge giant
with a golden girdle, an image from Revelation. The visions often occur when the visionary is in
ecstasy—a trance—though, by her own testimony, Hildegard never was. Fasting was an important
way of inducing visions and medieval nuns often fasted to the limit. The visions were really
hallucinations induced by neglect of the body. Hildegard, who fasted as rigorously as any, however,
counselled against excess, urging that it was the devil whispering into the ears of ascetics urging
them to destroy their bodies through their piety.

Sleep deprivation was another aspect of medieval ascetism that will have led to hallucinations.
Catherine of Siena (1347–1380 AD) restricted her sleep to 45 minutes a night. The sleeping
conditions were harsh too. They slept on stone floors or on sticks with a stone pillow. If they slept
on a mattress they would fill it with holly leaves. Self-flagellation probably had an effect. Beating
themselves with holly branches was popular. Wearing girdles studded with sharp studs which dug
into their flesh was also popular. Often they abused themselves by making the marks of the
stigmata in their flesh. They used meditation too. They chanted some holy phrase to themselves
repetitively while breathing rhytmically.

Though some abbots and bishops kept nuns as a private seroglio, we can take it for granted that
these nuns were sexually deprived, though some had lived an ordinary life before their call and had
left husband and children to follow it. They must have felt a great sense of loss, socially. The
Pythia of the Delphic Oracle used drugs to induce a trance but there is no certain evidence that
any medieval sibyls did. Hildegard, however, wrote a treatise on the use of herbs and must have
known of hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms. Everyone, however, depended on beer or wine to
drink because the water was often diseased. With their self-inflicted corporal neglect, these
women probably had a low tolerance to alcohol and their visions might have been alcoholic.

Because of the dangers of unorthodoxy, the sibyls had a priest as a guide and amanuensis, their
Latin not being up to the standard of the men because of the restrictions on their education.
Hidegard of Bingen sought official approval to publish her visions but the clergymen were all too
busy watching their tails in case they were accused of unorthodoxy. None would venture an
individual opinion about her visions. Only when an important synod was held at Trier did the
collective of Cardinals and Archbishops, with the approval of the Pope, consider it safe to sanction
Hildegard’s dreams.

Pope Innocent III, in the early 1200s, forbade lay preaching. Women were therefore unable to
preach since they were not allowed into the priesthood. In fact this merely confirmed earlier papal
decisions declaring that women were forbidden to give instruction, however learned they might
have been. A major factor in the Cathar heresy was that Cathar women retained the right to give
instruction, yet in her apostolic journey to Cologne, Hidegard of Bingen made alarmist declarations
against “these people”, the Cathars. They “befouled the whole earth”, gave themselves over to
“drunkenness and debauchery” and would “totally destroy the Church” because “the devil dwelt
among them”. The Catholics destroyed them, yet the most likely explanation of them is that they
were a primitive dualistic solar Christianity, with many Pagan attributes, ignored by the State
religion until it became too numerous in the twelfth century.

The times were decadent enough in the Roman church, even if not elsewhere and Hidegard also
accused the clergy themselves of “sins peculiar to their station”—lewdness, fornication
covetousness and simony. She was worldly enough, even as an abbess, because she recieved many
visitors, corresponded extensively and undertook several apostolic journeys. She even castigated
the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, though he doesn’t seem to have taken any notice.

Perhaps her attacks on the Cathars were to protect herself for she was able to do many uncatholic
things, though she often had to couch her recommendations in abstruse language. She obviously did
not want to outrage the clergymen but the real purpose was perhaps to leave the real answer to the
intuition of the reader. This is a standard magic technique, still used today by sensible clairvoyants.
In seeking to interpret an opaque answer, the questioner has to solve the problem themselves.
Magic is mainly the use of psychological techniques to satisfy problems. Other times, she seems
more open. An incantation was the cure she gives for a girl with the flux—to be used in God’s name,
of course, but otherwise requiring no moral effort on the girl’s part, as Christianity normally
demanded for God’s attention in these matters. Often she was both obscure and quite open,
offering an obscure parabolic answer followed by a simpler explanation.

The Use of Herbs

The Merovingian legal code, the Lex Salica, declares a fine of 62½ pence for anyone who
administers herbs to a woman to stop her conceiving children. The church, which hated knowledge
as the devil’s work, would not admit officially the use of herbal medicine.

Medieval herbals used the stoicheia of Aristotle to classify plants as hot or cold and moist or dry,
reflecting the four humours and the four elements. The cosmos was supposed made of four
elements: water—cold and wet; earth—cold and dry; air—warm and wet; fire—warm and dry.
Parallelling this, mankind was constituted of four humours: phlegm—cold and moist; black bile—cold
and dry; blood— warm and moist; yellow bile— warm and dry. If one humour dominated the others
then that person was chracterised by it as respectively, phlegmatic, melancholic, sanguine or
choleric. Medicine was in principle simply the restoring of the balance of the humours. A phlegmatic
person needed warm, dry herbs to counter his excessive phlegm. Understanding herbs therefore
ment identifying their characteristic degrees of warmness and dryness.

It seems remarkable that these Pagan concepts from the eastern Mediterranean should hold good
1500 years after the philosopher’s death and in wide areas of western Europe. Is it possible that
Aristotle was merely systematising widely held popular beliefs? Even if the system was founded by
Aristotle, it preceded Christianity by nearly half a millennium and, if the philosopher was compiling
folklore, it was much older still. That philosophic speculation should filter down to village
witchdoctors seems less likely than that the philosopher gathered the information from doorsteps.
Either way, herbal medicine based on these principles is Pagan.

Albertus Magnus records that henbane, a poisonous herb, was used by sorcerers to call up demons.
The mandrake plant, with its divided root giving it a vaguely human shape, could only be dug up with
a fixed ritual. Many other dangerous plants had protective rituals attached to them and eventually
many were Christianised, but all of it is magic because such spells limit God’s will.

Hildegard of Bingen seemed not concerned about coercing God with an incantation for the girl with
a flux or a ritual involving mandrake to suppress excessive passion. The root had to be purified by
washing in spring water, the Pagan and Essene element of purity, tied to the body for several days,
removed and split, tied to the arms for several more days then crushed and eaten—that tied to the
left arm for a man and that on the right for a woman. There is no hint of personal moral
responsibility in this ritual. Perhaps its aim, that of taking a bromide or having a cold shower, was
enough. Otherwise it was a typical spell which again limited the will of God and so could hardly be
thought of as Christian. The Christian remedy was self-continence, but this is the plain magic of a
Christian witch!

There are even earlier examples. Isidore, Bishop of Seville, in about 630 AD informs those with the
opposite problem that coriander decocted in wine is a love potion—an aphrodisiac. Furthermore,
many plants were not eaten but worn—as amulets against various ills. A leek worn on the wrist was
recommended for toothache.
Little of this knowledge was garnered by the objective observations of medieval folk in western
Europe. Though naïve monks in monastery gardens doubtless gathered information about their
horticulture, they did not often record it. Few books were written by these practical workers. The
church did not encourage observation. It detracted from important things like reading the
scriptures and uttering pointless liturgies.

There were two sources: ancient folklore and scientific works from classical times or the Arab
empire. Until the beginning of the second millennium, what fragmentary medical knowledge
remained was from classical books used by the Romans. Isidore of Seville’s book, Origines, a
compilation of these fragments of knowledge remained state of the art for two centuries
unaltered. Charlemagne made a conscious effort to stimulate intelligent thought in his efforts to
re-establish the Roman empire and Isidore’s book was “improved” by the insertion of biblical
references to harmonise this secular knowledge with the scriptures. It then remained a standard
work for centuries longer, now with the authority of the Holy Ghost! Nothing could be a better
example of the stultifying influence of Christianity on the world for many centuries.

Harmonising books like this with the bible obviously does not add one jot to our knowledge or
enlighten the book’s readers one tittle. It is as effective as the fundamentalists who run
competitions to try to find new proofs of the infallibility of the bible. They are exercises in
“explaining away”, a discipline akin to harmonising. Exercises in ingenuity, no matter how ingenious
these wacos are, leaves the bible full of inconsistencies and errors, that even the saner varieties of
Christian are happy to accept. Fundamentalists do not realise that elevating a human book to the
level of the perfection of a god is idolatry, the worst sin in their bible. Fundamentalists violate
their own First Commandment and, by their own rules, will burn. Harmonising or explaining away are
designed to disguise falsehoods not to reveal truth.

Isidore says that names are the essence of things, a pre-historic Pagan idea. Knowing someone’s or
something’s name was anciently thought to give power over it. It was important not to let enemies
have names and particularly the names of your gods, lest they get power over the god and all is lost.
That is why the name of the Hebrew God is ineffable. But Isidore gives little of practical use for
most of the plants he lists—much less than the classical natural historians, Dioscorides and Pliny,
knew.

After about 1200, there was a new influx of knowledge partly from classical and Roman times
passed from Byzantium to the Nestorian Christians, expelled as heretics, and thence to the
Moslems, and partly new work by the Arabs themselves. Some came through the Reconquista of
Spain from the enlightened Arabs of Toledo and Cordoba, some came via southern Italy, notably
the city of Salerno and a little came from crusader contacts in the east. Constantinus Africanus in
the eleventh century, a converted Arab monk of Monte Cassino, was an important influence after he
settled in Salerno. Africanus had travelled widely trading in spices, and after conversion dedicated
his life to translating Arab works into Latin. In particular, he translated Galen who had introduced
the theory of degrees as a refinement of the theory of humours. Stultification set in again
however and it was not until the sixteenth century that scholarship shook off the baneful church
and experimental work began.

What of the other source—folklore? Hidegard of Bingen detailed in her book, Physica, 275 herbs
and 81 trees but she gives little indication of written sources and there is little evidence in the
book that she copied from any written sources. Unlike her letters which are in good Latin because
she had a monk as a secretary, this is written in imperfect and rather immature Latin, the sort she
might have been expected to know herself from her inadequate general education as a nun. Most
often, she uses the German rather than the Latin name for the plants again showing that she had
no written sources.

Finally, she often gives information which is unparallelled elsewhere. It seems her book is an
original work. She claimed all her knowledge came from her visions but there is little doubt that the
true source was local folk medicine. Later writers ignored her book showing either that they had no
faith in her visions or that her work was known to be Pagan folklore. Since she was in the abbey
from eight years old, her knowledge must have been had while she was there, but she will have had
some from her many visitors and some from her correspondents. She describes some
Mediterranean plants that she could not have known locally.

The book contains the medicinal and magical properties of the herbs, usage and incantations and
rituals to accompany their use. Much of it depends upon the principle of similarity by whcih the
plant declares its use by some aspect of its appearance. The leaves of the lungwort are blotched
and look like a lung, whence its name and use. Hildegard recognises some plants as good and some as
bad. Plants suitable as protective amulets against demaons and sorcerers were bracken, lavender,
betony, burnet saxifrage, pine, cypress and hornbeam. Those Christians who put a bag of lavender
with their linen or on their windows think it is for the scent. Really, it is an ancient Pagan protective
charm.

Deadly nightshade, mandrake and arnica are the devil’s plants. Mandrake root is always washed in
pure spring water before it is used, not to cleanse it of dirt but to immunise it against the devil.
Pure water is the Pagan cleanser of choice, suggesting that the ritual is magic. Thus, pure spring
water poured through a hole in a piece of freshly cut cypress wood, and caught again before it
touched the earth, accompanied by a suitable incantation, cured anyone of demonic possession or
sorcery. Admittedly her incantations have often been Christianised, God being supposed the agent
of the cure, but the whole procedure is obvious witchcraft. Hildegard also recommended changing
the properties of herbs by picking them according to the phases of the moon!

It is hard to believe she did not know of the hallucinogenic properties of some of the herbs and
mushrooms, but she does not mention them. Discretion, no doubt. She might have secretly been
tripping when she had her visions.

Judgement Day
It is a remarkable thing that after 2000 years, Judgement day is still imminent or nigh or soon.
Earnest clappies are still issuing dire warnings over the net that Jesus will be here soon and we
should look for the good of our souls. Since they are warning us, they mean us, in other words we of
this “generation”, just as Jesus did. every generation between Jesus and the present have had the
same message—we are still waiting. Each generation, the evangelists die and their expectant
punters die—no Judgement—but the next generation of clappies jump through the same hoops, or
is it hopes? They die and—still no Judgement. Eventually, when it finally happens through their
perverse selfishness and disdain for Nature, they will have the nerve to say: “Told you!”

Elisabeth of Schönau (1129–1164) thought the kingdom of God was nigh 1100 years after her god
had vaunted the same opinion. Hidegard of Bingen also had visions of the Last Judgement, which
presumably she thought close even if it was not nigh. Reason was not the strongest point of
medieval people but today’s crucifixers ought to know better. When saints and mystics keep
declaring an unmistakeable event as “nigh” for 2000 years, and it never happens, only fools can
continue to believe it. That Christians ignore the plain evidence of history in favour of a bizarre
wish that the world will end so that they can meet Jesus, must itself be sure proof that they need
a psychiatrist not a redeemer.

The church has always been able to satisfy its simple followers by revising interpretations after
the event, confident that the normal functioning of the synapses had been clogged up with belief.
After all, that is how it started. Jesus expected the world would end in the Garden of Gethsemane.
It did not so the date was revised by his followers—he meant within a generation, forty years to a
Jew. It still did not happen, so the Church said he really meant the full generation of all those alive
at the time. It would not come until the oldest of them had died. Eventually, the old boy, John the
Apostle, died at a ripe old age. No end! Oh, buns! Postpone it indefinitely and claim that someone
who was awful to Jesus had bee cursed to live until God decided the world would end. Brilliant,
father! Somewhere now, there is a wandering Jew who cannot die until God lets him. Then the world
will end.

In the Middle Ages, each time the great day failed to distinguish itself from its predecessors, the
mystics declared that they had been successful. They had turned enough sinners back to God with
their dire warnings that He had decided to postpone Judgement till a more wicked generation!
Everyone breathed a sigh in relief. Hildegard and the other female visionaries also had their visions
re-interpreted. She had not seen the Last Days but the Protestant Reformation, the Fall of the
Holy Roman Empire or the Empire of Napoleon. No doubt, the holocaust of Hitler and a nuclear war
have lately been added. The female seers were too clever to give precise dates, but they did seem
to believe Judgement was imminent nevertheless, and that was 800 years ago.

The church has always subordinated women and, though these visionary women had a line to God,
they were unable to accuse the Church of being mistaken. Apparently, God did not think the
treatment of women was wrong or unjust. They all supported the status quo. Prophets see the
future but only to enforce the status quo. Hildegard affirms that women are weak compared with
men, and she did not mean physically. A woman was subject to a man as a servant to the master, and
women were the source of sin in the world.

When traditional values are worth preserving, then it is admirable to be traditional, but when
values are unjust, discriminating and oppressive, then no spiritual person can support them. We are
at a revolutionary time. Unjust, selfish, oppressive Christian values have ruled our brains for an
Age. It is time for them to be overthrown if the world is to survive. Only the Moslem faith looks to
have the vigour to succeed, and that can hardly be said to be better. A determined return to
Nature Spirituality via the Goddess is the only alternative to bullying patriarchal religions.

The Use of Literacy

The Christian administration of the Empire from the fourth century, set about creating a desert of
the Pagan culture that had given us Classical and Hellenistic Antiquity. The Dark Ages ensued. The
church controlled paper-making, publishing and writing. In only a few hundred years, only the
topmost levels of the clergy could read and write. Many of the monks copying their bibles were
simply copying the shapes of the letters as a pious duty, just as the post-nuclear monks in Miller’s,
A Canticle for Liebowitz, uncomprehendingly copied electrical circuits, imagining them to be holy
symbols from God. They prove it by making copying errors which could not have been made by a
literate man. A gothic “f” looks rather like an “s” but no literate person could mistake the two.
Doubtless they were allowed to illuminate the manuscripts with their own designs to alleviate the
excruciating boredom of copying what, to them, must have looked like endless pages of tedious
symbols.

Nevertheless, the Church controlled literacy and writing. Only its own people knew how to
communicate by the written word. Again Paganism was at a disadvantage. The only schools were
Christian schools. World famous acadamies founded by philosophers as prominent as Plato were
closed by the Christians—just shut. Almost a thousand years of educational excellence—shut! For
dogma. The Pagan teachers were impoverished, sometimes murdered or scattered to foreign
countries like Germany or Persia, and their libraries stolen. The church was convinced that
ignorance was godliness and writing was necessary only to propagate the holy books.

Illiterate societies substitute for writing an oral tradition that is often noble and highly creative.
Illiterate people often have prodigious memories by our standards but an immense effort would be
needed for memorising a whole culture.The memory man in John Buchan’s, The Thirty Nine Steps,
could recite the secret plans easily as he died but Druids had to train for twenty or thirty years to
learn the corpus of Druid lore which could have been stored for all by writing. And, was anyone
bothered if the poet extemporised?

An ability needed by the top bards was, like Mozart and the musicians of his time, the skill of
inventing variations on a theme. The young Druid, like all tyros, had to learn what he was set, but as
a mature and respected bard he had to modify them and adapt them for this king and that. His
originality would have been cheered not his ability to recite what they had already heard, though
the elements of the story were fixed. What then came down over the centuries? The Declaration
of Independence remains as it was at first because it is written. If it were sung by bards, it is
unlikely it would have stayed as it was. So, in a self-imposed world of illiteracy, the Church with its
few comprehending clerics, had a great advantage in preserving its tradition.

Worse, for us wanting to know about the Druids or Paganism in the Middle Ages, is that spoken
words fade on the wind. We know nothing about the Druid Shakespeare, yet the Druidic tradition
of poetry competitions lasted in Ireland until only a hundred years ago when the remaining
traditions were collected. Welsh oral tradition died and what now exists is only a revival. Teutonic
and Iberian traditions were also oral and have left nothing much. Nearly all of these oral cultures
were driven underground by what was considered civilisation—Christianity. An oral tradition that is
also secret might leave no trace at all—just what the Christians wanted.

A parallel situation, oddly, existed in Judah after the exile when the Hebrew scriptures were
compiled. The ignorant peasants that had not been selected by their conquerors for transportation
to Babylon because they had no skills, and the aged, preserved the oral tradition of the children of
Israel for the years that their fellow nationals were away.

When the descendants of the exiles returned they had been commissioned by Cyrus to build a
temple. They were placed in control of the country instructed to start a new religion and keep the
country as a model puppet state of the Persian Empire. The locals were all against it, but the new
people were in power, with the authority of the Persian king and the control of writing. They
refused all of the pleas of the locals to participate in the new project and rewrote all the old
legends to suit their improved religion of Yehouah.

The simpletons, called the Am ha-Aretz had one role only in this—to submit themselves to the new
god and his new priesthood, who pretended they, themselves, had the continuous authority of
Aaron and Zadok. Now the only tradition that remains in Judaism is the one allowed by the priests
returning from exile because they controlled publishing. Control of writing and publishing is an
immense power.

The Jewish scriptures were gathered together and re-written to suit the new hierarchy. Now, the
records that have come to us from those literate Persian Jews are central to the Christian religion
and have powerfully conditioned our culture for two millennia—they are the Christian Old
Testament. The other major influence on us was the Classical and Hellenistic culture of the
Mediterranean. No other ancient cultures could leave such marks because their words were not set
down, but faded on the wind. Yet, the product of the machinations of the CIA of the ancient
Persian kings are esteemed today by Jews and Christians alike as the word of God, the creator of
all things. Cyrus would have been astonished.

All we know about the Media Tempestas, apart from archaeological evidence, comes to us from the
medieval clergy. They were not ready to give us comprehensive accounts of the beliefs and
superstitions of the “vulgus,” but they did let us infer it from their frequent denouncements, and
the evolution of church practice to accommodate it. Culture is also usually more interested in the
growth of the new than in the decline of the old. The long, slow decline of Paganism was not directly
chronicled mainly because to do so would be to accept that it had not died instantly when
Christianity became the religion of kings. But the announcement of its death was premature and,
though old, frail and critical, it exerted its influence on the Church for over a thousand years—
perhaps until today, when its merits are again being seen and some Christians have had to invent
Creation Spirituality in reply. They might see the true resurrection—the resurrection of Paganism.

At a Disadvantage
The Pagan religions and the heresies were always at a disadvantage. They were never centralised
and could not fight back adequately against a Catholic Church strongly centralised despite its
regional variations and arguments over practice and doctrine. The very polytheism of Paganism left
it open to one-sided attack by Christianity. Pagans were ready to accept the Christian god as one of
their Pantheon. They were always respectful to gods in case they got angry. The Christians however
were not ready to accept the gods that were already there.

Liberals have the same weakness today. Freedom of speech is all right as long as everyone accepts
it, but should the liberal let those speak who want to suppress free speech? Plurality depends on its
general acceptance and as soon as some group is unwilling to accept it, then plurality is endangered.
If Paganism had had a rule which decried any god as a demon that would not accept the gods of the
pantheon, perhaps Christianity could not have succeeded. Free speech should only be the privilege
of those who accept it.

Once Christianity became the state religion, it was in a position to steamroller its Pagan and
heretical rivals, but even a steamroller does not crush the hardcore to nothing—just to finer
particles. The official adoption of Catholic Christianity was not its final victory. Like the African
slaves, many Europeans did not accept it, and many of those who did, did so only because
Christianity took the important parts of their own beliefs into its body.

The intolerance of Christianity eventually drove the Pagan religions and then the heretical ones
underground. For a long time after the Christian victory, and necessarily mainly passively, Pagan
religions resisted the steamroller might of the multiform but centralised Church. But, they were
harassed and hounded until they spallated into mere atoms of the old beliefs with no structural
content—superstitions. So, despite its best efforts, the medieval church could not suppress Pagan
thoughts absolutely.

The new religion took over a millennium to enter the hearts of the people, and then it was only done
by inhuman tortures and by the Church accepting in Christianised form Pagan customs within the
religion or tolerating Paganism outside it as folk-lore and superstition. After all, what more than
magic is consuming a blessed wafer and what is its purpose other than stave off misfortune, even if
the misfortune is putatively after death? Even in the midst of the Dark Ages, the Church found it
impossible to stop people thinking and even practising in an enfeebled way, the Paganism it had
aimed to destroy.

Though Pagan wisdom and practices were marginalised and made socially damaging because people
could be severely punished for them, some survived throughout the medieval millennium. Only
latterly have they more or less vanished as old wives’ tales or foolish superstitions, killed, not by
the Church but by science and scientific method. A few even still survive and even thrive despite
the Church and science. Soothsaying is banned in the Old Testament and the casting of horoscopes
was banned by the Church in 1310 AD yet today a Christian US president with a finger on the
nuclear button decided world wide policy based on the advice of astrologers! Reagan, before Bush,
was the favourite of the Evangelical Right.

In truth, the Middle Ages were largely Pagan even though Christianity officially dominated. Aspects
of Paganism which the Church rejected were categorised as manifestations of evil. Old gods and
goddesses became demons, incubi and succubi. Those who continued to revere them, and many who
did not, were called heretics and witches. Anyone who met in groups outside church were covens,
anyone who made medicines out of roots and berries were sorcerers, witches or warlocks. The Old
Testament states that witches should be killed. Before long the Church was saving us all from the
devil by burning old women who talked to their cats. So much for the good Lord and the guidance of
the Holy Ghost.

Some modern witches say the Old Gods never died altogether and they continue the Pagan legacy.
If there is any truth in this—that Pagan ideas have survived underground and unloved by
officialdom for 1700 years—they must have had some merit. Curiously, though, the witch hunts
were Christians hunting primitive Christians, rather than Pagans, although the primitive form of
Christianity believed by the heretics was Pagan enough, in that it was much closer to the original
solar beliefs of the Jews and Gnostics than the form that evolved under state patronage.

Why Bigotry Succeeds

Pagans were never bigots in the way Christians are. They were happy to accept other gods and
godesses because they could never be sure that any one was not more powerful than another, and it
seemed wise not to anger them unnecessarily. They therefore had no pronounced missionary
instinct to shove their own beliefs down the throats of others. Worship of a popular deity was
widespread but not centrally administered, so that each temple was effectively independent. Some
religions had no professional priests, running their services rather like the quakers by those who
volunteered to lead.

Once Christianity with its missionary zeal, its zeal for for centralisation, its imperial-style
administration and its preference for dogma rather than truth or even instinct, took control of the
Empire, Paganism was placed in the situation of ill-disciplined barbarian tribes against well-drilled
legions. No contest.

There is a psychological priniciple at work here which will be the death of humanity. Those inclined
to freedom and creativity reject discipline and authority as stultifying to the individual and society
and liable to misuse by a minority; those inclined to discipline and order, reject freedom and
creativity as disorderly and chaotic and inducive of criminality. It is the disciplined army that will
succeeds against a similar sized undisciplined army. How then can mankind prevent the genuflecters
from abetting tyranny again? Freedoms are won only to be lost to those who love self more than
others, and love bending their knees to visible and even invisible potentates, rather than
questioning bad law. The relatively few liberals in the world of the invisible potentate should take
note. Even they can surely not deny that Christian churches are overwhelmingly authoritarian.

The weakness of Paganism in the face of an all-conquering church means that today we have no
medieval Pagan temples to set against the gothic cathedrals, no illuminated Pagan manuscripts to
set against the illuminated bibles of the medieval monasteries. It might seem the will of God to the
Christian bigot, but the beauty of the classical era, which most people consider unsurpassed, shows
that mankind was no less talented as a builder or artist, as a Pagan and arguably was better. The
artistic and architectural treasures of other non-Christian people proves that God has blessed
Christians no more than anyone else.

There is much in the indifference of the Christian West to the world it rules to show that God has
thrust hot irons through our eyes and into the depths of our souls. Christians and its product, the
Western World, are blind, and dead inside.

Faith and Superstition

Objectively, faith and superstition are the same coin. Superstition is belief in what is forbidden by
officialdom, faith is belief in what is acceptable. There is nothing to chose between them, then or
now. Touching the knuckle bone or foreskin of a dead saint brings good luck to a Christian. So does
touching wood, it seems. The value of it is in the head. There was material sense in beating an apple
tree to drive away malicious spirits so that the apple crop would be better, but none in beating
drums and tambourines in a happy-clappy hymn to please Jesus, a Jewish malefactor hanged by the
authorities, unless it is to warn us we are getting near an evangelist.

Both faith and superstition are pre-scientific ways of trying to understand and control an uncertain
world. Those who stick to them in this scientific age fall into one or more of three categories:

1. they are too lazy or ignorant to understand science;

2. they are charlatans seeking gullible dupes to keep them in comfort;
3. they are gullible dupes conned by one or more charlatans.
It was ever thus but, unlike the Dark Ages or Biblical Times, today only the insane have an excuse.
Chances are, then, the Dark Ages will return.

Reference: Milis, L J R (Ed), The Pagan Middle Ages, Boydell, Suffolk, 1998