Qu’il est dur d’être païen ! Ou plus exactement « néo-païen ». Qu’est-ce que cela peut bien dire d’ailleurs « néo-païen » ? Peut-on être culturellement et/ou cultuellement « néo-païen » ? Et surtout à quoi cela peut-il « servir » d’être ou de se proclamer du paganisme en général ?
Dans cet essai paru en 2002 dans le premier volume de la revue TYR : Myth – Culture – Tradition, Collin Cleary expose la théorie de base de ce qui deviendra son système de pensée. En premier lieu, une mise au point salutaire quant au concept de « l’ouverture aux dieux » s’impose. En effet cette dernière est le plus souvent biaisée, faisant même office de simulacre car envisagée uniquement d’un point de vue moderne, c’est-à-dire, dans ce cas précis, rationaliste, alors que « l’ouverture au divin est rendue possible par un point de vue plus fondamental : l’ouverture à l’être des choses elles-mêmes », soit un parti pris heideggerien . La compréhension du divin passe donc belle et bien par une ouverture, mais une ouverture au sensible, véritablement naturelle pour les hommes, et non pas par une ouverture rationnelle. On comprend ainsi que c’est notre fermeture qui n’est pas naturelle. Le premier pas vers une réouverture consiste en un « changement radical dans notre manière de nous orienter vis-à-vis des êtres, et ceci doit commencer par une critique radicale et impitoyable de tous les aspects de notre monde moderne. »
Ce second essai qui, à l’instar du premier, fut publié dans la revue TYR : Myth – Culture – Tradition est une continuation de Connaitre les dieux ; texte pionnier dans la démarche spirituelle de Cleary et faisant également office de « mindset ». Après un bref rappel des causes de notre « fermeture aux dieux » (« pour les modernes, la nature n’a essentiellement pas d’Être : elle attend que les humains lui confèrent une identité » et « en nous fermant à l’être de la nature, nous nous fermons simultanément à l’être des dieux. ») l’auteur rentre dans le vif en exprimant sa thèse : « notre émerveillement devant l’être de choses particulières est l’intuition d’un dieu, ou d’un être divin. »
Pour Alain de Benoist les dieux seraient des créations humaines dont le substantif consisterait en des valeurs anthropomorphisées, ce qui confirmerait la thèse d’un humanisme athée d’essence nietzschéenne et paganisant. Là se situe la divergence première entre Alain de Benoist et Collin Cleary : « Sa position est fondamentalement athée ; la mienne théiste ». D’où un questionnement légitime quant à la notion objective de vérité (religieuse), et encore une fois l’auteur de Comment peut-on être païen ?, au même titre que Nietzche, se complait dans un relativisme moral qui « découle de son engagement en faveur d’un relativisme général concernant la vérité en tant que telle ». « Là se trouve le problème-clé avec l’approche de Benoist concernant la vérité et les valeurs : il a simplement accepté la prémisse du monothéisme, selon laquelle le seul standard d’objectivité devrait se trouver à l’extérieur du monde. Rejetant l’idée qu’il existe un tel standard transcendant, il en tire la conclusion que l’objectivité est donc impossible ». Et en conclusion « le relativisme de Benoist concernant la vérité et les valeurs semble être tout à fait étranger au paganisme » si bien que « ces difficultés philosophiques avec cette position sont très graves, et probablement insurmontables ».
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Minerva aveva la sua festa nel giorno delle Quinquatrus, giorno che cadeva, come dice il nome, il quinto giorno oscuro dopo le Eidus: il giorno era in origine sicuramente dedicato a Mars, dato che in esso i Saliari celebravano uno dei loro riti, ma venne in seguito “usurpato” da Minerva, certo in coincidenza con la sovrapposizione della Triade etrusca Juppiter-Juno-Minerva all’arcaica Triade Juppiter -Mars-Quirinus.
A deep and insoluble question that dogs the history of paganism in northern Europe before the advent of Greek and Roman expansion and christianity is that which asks about its structure and theology. Was it generally polytheist – believing in a host of different gods each with individual functions? If so, did it follow a similar system to the southern European religions? …. Or was its focus dualist – having god and goddess figures representing the perceived universal polarities? What if the dualist interpretation is the root of the polytheist, even?
Romans such as Julius Caesar (1stC BC De Bello Gallico) wrote that the ‘barbarian’ Gauls worshipped similar gods to them, but scholars consider such accounts as undetailed and lacking useful context. The fact that some Gauls in the south appear to have become quite Hellenized by the time of Caesar’s wars demonstrates the complicating factors at play. From the accounts we can see there are some apparent differences in theology and organisation between Gaulish/British and Roman official religion: Foremost was the system or college of learned druids at the apex of these societies, and also the reported emphasis on reincarnation, and the ideas about human ‘sacrifice’ that these appeared to engender:
They are said there to learn by heart a great number of verses; accordingly some remain in the course of training twenty years. Nor do they regard it lawful to commit these to writing, though in almost all other matters, in their public and private transactions, they use Greek characters. That practice they seem to me to have adopted for two reasons; because they neither desire their doctrines to be divulged among the mass of the people, nor those who learn, to devote themselves the less to the efforts of memory, relying on writing; since it generally occurs to most men, that, in their dependence on writing, they relax their diligence in learning thoroughly, and their employment of the memory. They wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another, and they think that men by this tenet are in a great degree excited to valor, the fear of death being disregarded. They likewise discuss and impart to the youth many things respecting the stars and their motion, respecting the extent of the world and of our earth, respecting the nature of things, respecting the power and the majesty of the immortal gods.
In the same book (De Bello Gallico Book 6 ch.21) Caesar claimed that the German peoples of the 1stC BC:
” … rank in the number of the gods those alone whom they behold, and by whose instrumentality they are obviously benefited, namely, the sun, fire, and the moon; they have not heard of the other deities even by report…”
Coupled to his assertion that the Germans had no Druids, Caesar was possibly making a declaration of their apparent primitivism and lack of philosophical gods and ideals. Surely no Roman would stoop to this? Caesar had his eyes on conquest…
However Caesar’s life was curtailed by jealous forces, and when his successor Augustus commissioned Vergil to write the Aeneid about Rome’s supposed cultural origins at Troy, Caesar’s comment on reincarnation (seemingly a barbaric tenet) has its waters somewhat muddied by Book 6 which depicts Aeneas’ visit to Hades to his father, Anchises. During this he is instructed how purified souls drink the waters of forgetfulness from the River Lethe before crossing into reincarnation. This crossing is sometimes associated with entering Elysium – a place Homer placed on the banks of the world-encircling river, Okeanos, and which Hesiod referred to as the Blessed Isles, watched over by the Titan god Cronus (Saturn to the Romans). This is not actually that unusual as Pythagoras had a well-documented belief in metempsychosis that – along with the writings of Plato (Timaeus) and with the Greek mystery cults – had a popular following among the intellectual elites of the Roman Empire, Vergil and Ovid being particular examples. Here is that part of the Aenied:
[723] Meanwhile, in a retired vale, Aeneas sees a sequestered grove and rustling forest thickets, and the river Lethe drifting past those peaceful homes. About it hovered peoples and tribes unnumbered; even as when, in the meadows, in cloudless summertime, bees light on many-hued blossoms and stream round lustrous lilies and all the fields murmur with the humming. Aeneas is startled by the sudden sight and, knowing not, asks the cause – what is that river yonder, and who are the men thronging the banks in such a host? Then said father Anchises: “Spirits they are, to whom second bodies are owed by Fate, and at the water of Lethe’s stream they drink the soothing draught and long forgetfulness. These in truth I have long yearned to tell and show you to your face, yea, to count this, my children’s seed, that so you may rejoice with me the more at finding Italy.” “But, father, must we think that any souls pass aloft from here to the world above and return a second time to bodily fetters? What mad longing for life possesses their sorry hearts?” “I will surely tell you, my son, and keep you not in doubt,” Anchises replies and reveals each truth in order.
[724] “First, know that heaven and earth and the watery plains the moon’s bright sphere and Titan’s star, a spirit within sustains; in all the limbs mind moves the mass and mingles with the mighty frame. Thence springs the races of man and beast, the life of winged creatures, and the monsters that ocean bears beneath his marble surface. Fiery is the vigour and divine the source of those seeds of life, so far as harmful bodies clog them not, or earthly limbs and frames born but to die. Hence their fears and desires, their griefs and joys; nor do they discern the heavenly light, penned as they are in the gloom of their dark dungeon. Still more! When life’s last ray has fled, the wretches are not entirely freed from all evil and all the plagues of the body; and it needs must be that many a taint, long ingrained, should in wondrous wise become deeply rooted in their being. Therefore are they schooled with punishments, and pay penance for bygone sins. Some are hung stretched out to the empty winds; from others the stain of guilt is washed away under swirling floods or burned out by fire till length of days, when time’s cycle is complete, has removed the inbred taint and leaves unsoiled the ethereal sense and pure flame of spirit: each of us undergoes his own purgatory. Then we are sent to spacious Elysium, a few of us to possess the blissful fields. All these that you see, when they have rolled time’s wheel through a thousand years, the god summons in vast throng to Lethe’s river, so that, their memories effaced, they may once more revisit the vault above and conceive the desire of return to the body.”
In truth, the Greek and Roman spiritual worldviews were a composite of oral traditions woven into the dialectic transmissive mediums of art, poetry, song and theatre. Although deriding ‘barbarian’ religion, the ‘occult’ practices of the mystery religions of Orphism, Mithraism etc allowed Romans to stay in touch with the primitive fundamentals of paganism. In this manner they mirrored what Caesar had seen among the Atlantic peoples and their druidic religious system. The difference with the Roman system of priests of the ‘Olympian’ gods was that they were often simply members of the patrician and aristocratic classes, acting out pietous civic duties. As such we have little evidence that they formed a primary collegium – it was more often a secondary role. The core and perhaps oldest Roman religious cult was that of the household – of the genius, the gens, the lares and manes – representative of the ancestral cults of traditional European societies. These are some of the ‘peoples’ Aeneas sees in Virgil’s vision of Elysium and Hades.
The peoples who the Greeks and Romans interfaced with and conquered generally took on their ways, and they ways of the conquered were fitted in to their cultures (albeit in a demoted form). As the Mediterranean cultures expanded their influence and merged during the progress of the 1st millennium BC, so the Pantheon became a reality. During the process, the figurative realities of poets and philosophers became increasingly concreted by power, religious celebrity and literature.
Rome’s active policy of the plantation of (not just ethnic Roman) migrants among conquered cultures, coupled to the introduction of vigorous consumerism successfully displaced native traditions and imposed Roman worldviews and practices in a relatively short period of time. The fact that we know so little about the paganism of the Atlantic Europeans is because the process was so successful that there was no need to make a detailed religious assessment as the machine of Empire marched sandle-shod across Europe. The final leverage from paganism to christianity was an easy step after Rome’s political multiculturalism ensured the breakdown and replacement of indigenous religious cultures.
Even before the advent of christianity, much derision was heaped upon this overly-complex, often contradictory mass of deities and interpretative ‘mystery cults’ began to become more common. Jewish theologians struggling to establish their model of post-exilic monotheist orthodoxy and theocratic rule in Judaea had been revolting against the cultural aspects of Seleucid Hellenization. This culminated in the Roman occupation of Judaea and within a hundred years, the cataclysmic fracturing of that nation whose emergent monotheist faith began to subdivide all over again. It would eventually partition into three parts during the subsequent displacement and migration of its peoples across the middle east and Mediterranean basin and beyond in the following 600 years.
The more pro-Hellenic ‘Christian’ faction of Judean monotheism would find itself increasingly leading the intellectual (and political) arguments against paganism as the empire of Rome fractured under the strain of the cultures it had absorbed. Christian polemicists such as Cyprian and Augustine of Hippo were to argue that pagan gods were nothing but deified ancestors and leaders, and that the various spirits, daemones, lares and genii that populated the pagan spiritual world were in fact evil: a simplistic but effective argument that suited an intensely confusing, doubt-ridden and stressful period in European history. This approach to Mediterranean polytheism was to influence the tone of subsequent Christian interpretation of paganism, no matter what its actual true form was.
During and after the establishment of christianity in their country, Irish monks began to compile a similar Christian narrative tradition to deal with their own land’s pagan gods and ancestor-traditions, following the template laid by the ‘Augustinian’ polemical style of the ‘New Empire of Light’. The Irish invented their own highly stylised euhemerist Christian literature to match and exceed these: it would consign paganism to the same fate as on the continent, and paint its divinities into a pseudo-history of failed invaders and tyrannical warlike and venal rulers. In the same manner, christian Scandinavians of the 12th and 13th centuries would produce saga traditions which portrayed their (more recently) former gods in a similar manner: multiple, hierarchical, euhemerised, amoral and modelled largely after the deposed ‘Olympian’ gods of the Mediterranean.
The widespread use of euhemerist interpretation, the control of literacy by Christian elites and the difficulties inherent in expressing aspects of oral traditions using the fixed literary medium means that there is little good historical evidence about what pagan North Europeans believed.
The answer to the difficult question about northern pagan identity and belief lies in a fundamental understanding of what ‘paganism’ actually is and was. The state-sponsored religious cults of the Mediterranean classical age were designed to reflect the temporal power of the civilisations promoting them, and as these temporal powers grew so did their religions, the spiritual system reflecting the temporal one in its hierarchy and complexity after the manner of the older religions of ancient Egypt and the ‘Fertile Crescent’. Christianity simply followed in these footsteps.
In fact, the popular religion of country peoples and tribal groups under the classical empires was quite different to that of those involved in expansionism and regional overlordship. It was much simpler and reflected the necessities of the worldview of those who subsisted with the land, and left fewer relics in art, masonry and literature. To metropolitan elites, these simpler versions of religion were considered barbarism and tended to be derided, or to be absorbed into the popular spectacles of the fast-moving, ever-changing mainstream metropolitan cultures. The adornments and trappings of paganism that survived in the archaeological remains to the current day are generally elite interpretations of this core spiritual root.
The core basis of the Greek mythos (derived largely from Hesiod and Homer) is that there were 3 phases of overlord gods: Ouranos, Cronus then Zeus. Ouranos was the sky, who coupled with the Gaia, the Earth. Her offspring were the Titans who deposed Ouranos, and led by Cronus (who famously castrated his father) ruled over the ‘Golden Age’ (which was something akin to Elysium – showing the conflation of historical time with contemporary ‘place’ in the ancient worldview). Cronus then fathered Zeus who in turn deposed him, and the rest – as they say – is ‘history’ (in other words, where the bard Homer picks up the tale). Similar tales of one order replacing the other are echoed much later in the Scandinavian saga literature of the 12th/13thC, which records some original epic verse and stories of their late pagan era. The similarities are interesting.
The Olympian Gods were the third order, but their inception and promotion of their respective cults is very much linked in history to the growth and expansion of powerful kingdoms and city states during the late Greek Bronze Age. During this age (that of Homer and Hesiod – creators of ‘historic’ epic verse for a new order), the idea of a ‘civilisation’ that was better than that of its ‘barbarian’ origins was born. The second and first order of Greek gods seem to be of the elemental order that existed much further afield than the Mediterranean, and which persisted in the folklore of the Atlantic peoples down to the modern day. Cronos, as Lord of the Golden Age and Elysium/The Blessed Isles becomes functionally identical with the British & Irish Isles’ own god – Manannan. Greek writer Plutarch even stated explicitly that Cronus was worshipped in an actual Island called Ogygia believed to lie west from Britain. To Homer (in the Oddysey), this ?mythical isle was home to Calypso and her father Atlas/Atlantis. Add in the mythology about Leto mother of Apollo, the river Lethe, and Leda and things become distinctly more interesting. These again, are so curiously similar to Irish and Manx legends that they are either the cause or derived from a common mythos…
![Fludd-SublimeSun(744x721)[1].jpg](http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/media/02/02/2842203225.jpg)
Dans la tradition égyptienne ancienne, le dieu le plus important du panthéon était le Soleil, qui était honoré sous différents noms selon les cités, mais qui portait dans toute l’Egypte le nom de Rê. En tant qu’Atoum-Rê, il apparaissait comme le dieu créateur du monde et sous les traits d’Amon-Rê comme un dieu souverain. Rê était également appelé Horus (Heru), sous la forme d’Horus l’ancien comme sous celle du fils d’Osiris et d’Isis. Le dieu Horus, son avatar sur la terre, aurait même guidé le peuple égyptien, à l’époque où ses ancêtres venaient d’Afrique du nord, sur cette nouvelle terre noire (Kemet) qui finit par porter son nom.
IIIème siècle après J.C. L’empire romain est en crise. A l’est, les Sassanides, une Perse en pleine renaissance qui rêve de reconstituer l’empire de Darius. Au nord, les peuples européens « barbares » poussés à l’arrière par des vagues asiatiques et qui rêvent d’une place au soleil italique et/ou balkanique.
and 
. (However, once my mother figured out that it was also a head shop she stopped letting me go in there.) Wicca was certainly on the scene, but Asatru was nowhere to be found.
Dans Le songe d'Empédocle, Christopher Gérard fait revivre le paganisme naturel et originel européen à la faveur d'un voyage initiatique et romanesque entrepris par un jeune homme de sa génération. 
Knut Hamsun
Hamsun
Ce n’era abbastanza perché, alla maniera con cui gli americani e i sovietici usavano trattare i loro oppositori intellettuali, nel 1945 venisse giudicato pazzo e rinchiuso in manicomio, ripetendo la medesima via di passione imposta a Ezra Pound. Nel suo libro 
Jan Stachniuk was born in 1905 in Kowel, Wołyń (in what is today Ukraine). In 1927, he began his public activity in Poznań, where he studied economics. There, he became active in the Union of Polish Democratic Youth and published his first books: Kolektywizm a naród (1933) and Heroiczna wspólnota narodu (1935). Beginning in 1937, Stachniuk published the monthly magazine Zadruga, which gave birth to a new idea current of the same name. In 1939, two additional books were published: Państwo a gospodarstwo and Dzieje bez dziejów (“History of unhistory”). During the Second World War, he inspired the ideology of the Faction of the National Rise (Stronnictwo Zrywu Narodowego) and the Cadre of Independent Poland (Kadra Polski Niepodległej). In 1943, Stachniuk published Zagadnienie totalizmu (with the help of the Faction). He fought in the Warsaw Uprising and was wounded. After the war, he failed to resume publishing Zadruga, but before the Stalinists attained power in the country, he managed to publish three more books: Walka o zasady, Człowieczeństwo i kultura, and Wspakultura. In 1949, Stachniuk was arrested and sentenced to death in a political show trial. The sentence was not carried out, and he got out of prison in 1955, but he was no longer able to perform any kind work. He died in 1963 and was buried in the Powązki Cemetery.
The sensation of the creative pressure, the feeling of the cosmic mission of creation, the desire to contribute to the creative world evolution by man is, in the lens of Culturalism, a sign of health and moral youth. According to Stachniuk, this is normal, the way it should be. Human history is the eternal antagonism of two, contradictory, directions—“the first one is the blind pressure of man towards panhumanism, the second is the escape into a solidified system.”
Nachdem die Zahl der Anhänger der nordischen Glaubensrichtung sich auf Island seit dem Jahr 2000 verfünffacht hat, soll in der isländischen Hauptstadt Reykjavík erstmals seit der Wikingerzeit wiedereine heidnische Kultstätte entstehen.Nach der Christianisierung Islands im Jahre 1000 durfte das Heidentum nicht mehr praktiziert werden.
Cette fresque mystico-politique a été écrite dans un village du Nouveau-Mexique en 1925. L’action se passe au Mexique, riche de son passé, mais usé, décadent, vidé de sa substance par les trois grands maux apportés par l’homme blanc, qui sont (selon Lawrence) le Christianisme, l’
Et le jour venu, c’est sans état d’âme qu’elle accomplira son destin. Une autre nouvelle du même recueil, intitulée Soleil, reprend encore ce thème de la femme mûre insatisfaite de son existence, mais il est traité de manière beaucoup plus pacifique, comme un conte naturiste. Juliette quitte les États-Unis, où elle dépérit, pour le Soleil de la Méditerranée. Là commencera pour elle une nouvelle existence à travers un face à face quotidien avec l’Astre divin (évoquant l’expérience d’Anna de Noailles [4]). Elle s’épanouira enfin sous ses rayons qui harmonisent à la fois le corps et l’âme :
Cette pensée, que Lawrence exprime de manière allégorique dans ses romans et nouvelles, sera explicite dans son dernier ouvrage, paru un an après sa mort, et qui représente son testament spirituel. Apocalypse est l’étude fouillée du texte de Jean de Patmos, qui clôt le Nouveau Testament. Si la notion même d’apocalypse lui répugne, à cause de cet « ignoble désir de fin du monde », Lawrence s’intéresse à cet écrit car il y découvre deux influences opposées. Tout d’abord, le message de ceux qui « ne peuvent même pas supporter l’existence de la Lune et du Soleil », mais par-delà la strate judéo-chrétienne, il y trouve une strate païenne. Car pour faire passer de manière frappante cette vision apocalyptique, le ou les auteurs ont eu recours à un langage, à une symbolique cosmiques, donc païens (5). L’étude de l’Apocalypse est ainsi pour Lawrence prétexte à comparer entre elles ces deux conceptions du monde antagonistes : 
Peter Bickenbach
Mythes et symboles de la tradition romaine seront étudiés sur le plan spirituel par Evola en personne, Giovanni Costa (auteur en 1923 d’une Apologie du Paganisme), Massimo Scaligero, du jeune Angelo Brelich (qui occupera après la guerre la chaire d’Histoire des Religions du Monde classique à l’Université de Rome), Guido De Giorgio, ainsi que par des collaborateurs étrangers comme Franz Altheim et Edmund Dodsworth. Mais ici, le discours est devenu purement culturel, ou, tout au plus, anthropologique : l’aspect religieux et spirituel manque et l’intérêt pour le rituel est inexistant.
In the Hebrew scriptures of the Jewish religion, known as the Old Testament in the Christian Bible, there occurs a single instance of the word “solstice” that is not in any way associated with the annual summer and winter astronomical events. In the book of Joshua, chapter 10 and verses 12 to 14, it is reported that the tribal deity of ancient Israel, called YHWH, caused the sun to stand still in Gibeon to give the Israelites, known to be the people of the said tribal deity, the best opportunity to slaughter and annihilate, in broad daylight, an enemy tribe called the Amorites.
One hears a great deal today about “multiculturalism,” and the multicultural society. We (i.e., we Americans) are told that ours is a multicultural society. But, curiously, multiculturalism is also spoken of as a goal. What this reveals is that multiculturalism is not simply the recognition and affirmation of the fact that the U.S.A. is made up of different people from different cultural backgrounds. Instead, multiculturalism is an ideology which is predicated on cultural relativism. Its proponents want to convince people that (a) all cultures are equally good, rich, interesting, and wholesome, and that (b) a multicultural society can exist in which no one culture is dominant. The first idea is absurd, the second is impossible.
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