Pagan beliefs in a Christian World

Here in the UK our conversion to Christianity began more than fifteen hundred years ago with the Romans just before they left our shores. The process was a long one as our nation was invaded and colonized by non-Christians coming over from Europe. The Germanic and Scandinavian countries from which most of our invaders came remained at least in part non-Christian until the mid eight hundreds, and as a consequence Christianity was not established as the dominant religion until the defeat and conversion of the Danish leaders by the Christian King Alfred in the ninth Century. The process was completed as far as some historians are concerned by the invasion in 1066 by the Normans and the establishment of the Norman Church in Great Britain. So the process of Christianisation can be considered to have been an ongoing process over approximately five hundred years, and it should further be noted that there were additional discrepancies in that there were at least two rival versions of Christianity competing for influence, the Church of Rome coming up from the South and East and what has been loosely termed Celtic Christianity coming from the North and West, particularly Ireland.

It should perhaps be noted that there are some historians who consider that the Celtic Church was more or less influenced by the integration of Druidic teaching as a hold over from the Roman defeat of the Druids at Anglesey in the first century AD. There is evidence of a continuation of Druidic colleges in some form in Ireland and to a lesser extend in Scotland, but this evidence is not strong and exactly what influence, if any Druidic practices and teaching had is hotly debated. There has been, for the last three hundred years or so a movement to increase the perceived influence of Druidic thinking on early British Christianity that has clouded the question somewhat. Evidence of this can be seen in the attribution of chalk hill figures to ancient Druids when there is little evidence for any of them before 1700AD and it is likely that they are all at best recreations, and at worst complete fantasy. There have even been suggestions that Stonehenge was a Druid monument or temple when it has been dated to a period between 4000 and 2000BC which makes it firmly Mesolithic into early bronze age, and almost certainly pre-druidic.

When considering the spread and development of Christianity across Britain it should be considered that the majority of that spread was through Christian missionaries coming out of monastic orders that had been established as seats of power over several hundred years. They had developed strong links in the surrounding area and taken control of considerable farmland and resources. They had been destroyed and rebuilt several times in some case and they were largely intolerant of alternative faith views. Given this background it seems unlikely that there would be a place, even within small rural communities, for local non-Christian practices to continue, although this is not to suggest that practices such as herbal medicine, bone setting and the day to day practical solutions to practical problems that the church had little influence over didn’t continue. The role of cunning folk and wise men and women is likely to still have been prevalent, and this brings an interesting wrinkle to the story.

If we consider the role of healers and spiritual leaders in non-Christian societies we find similarities globally. There is a clear role of healing through medicinal plants as well as a role for integration of the spiritual wellbeing of the community, often linked to a veneration of, or at least a reference to, significant ancestors, particularly those within family groups. This family grouping is interesting because it appears anthropologically that in many non-Christian traditions, information such as the correct plants to use is passed down generationally within a family, rather than being passed around generally. This could be a consequence of the principle that knowledge is power, but it seems likely that there is also a possibility that there is a basic understanding of heritance and that if someone has an aptitude for a certain task within the group, then it is likely that their progeny may have that same aptitude.

It is also suggestive that the targets for the witch trials and accusations throughout the middle ages tended to be those who took a healing, and community leading role, the people who in other societies would probably be considered Shamanic. It could be suggested that there was a feeling of threat on the part of the Church from these people, as the aim of the Church is control, and these people challenged that control by offering alternatives. Certainly we see within the Roman Church an understanding that healing, weather, harvests and the like were at the divine providence of God and could not be influenced by man other than through the intercession of the priesthood. This belief persists today with sites such as Lourdes being incredibly popular as a site of healing and prayer. Thus the church appears to have considered that it could replace local healers within communities and excerpt greater influence and control over the populace.

It is interesting to note that there are regular debates and discussions about the way in which the Church may have taken over existing beliefs and customs and modified them to make the Church more acceptable to non-Christians, but this seem generally to be predicated on dates and locations, and is to my mind highly questionable given that the Church is not known for its tolerance of existing beliefs. If we look at the way missionaries within recent times have acted towards none Christian beliefs we see a tendency to obliterate rather than integrate. To use a recent example of Papua New Guinea we see a tribal society, largely functioning at a neolithic level of subsistence farming and hunter-gatherer communities, with a broad range of beliefs and local deities and spirits. The actions of Christian missionaries has been to eradicate existing idols and fetishes, to completely change, and in places ban traditional burial practices, and to effectively de-consecrate spiritual sites rather than integrate them.

Certainly it could be argued that this is the role of a Church secure in itself and it’s beliefs operating largely unchallenged, a position that is not equivalent to that faced by one of several Christian Churches attempting to develop early Britain into a Christian nation so parallels are not necessarily valid, but none-the-less it does make one wonder if the supposed integration of previously sacred sites, the use of pagan images in churches and so on are as relevant or indeed possible as is made out. A common reference to Pagan images in churches are the green men and the Sheila na gig carvings, but these are by no means exclusively pagan, and the image of natural generation shown in these carvings can certainly be traced through purely Christian iconography. Similarly, the discovery of sacred pagan sites supposedly under Christian churches almost certainly owes as much to the limited availability of suitably elevated and secure sites than to any overt move on the part of the Church to subvert existing beliefs. In general, and on principle the idea of Christianisation is to teach that the old ways were wrong and that any reference to them must be expunged by re-birth within the community of Christ rather than being integrated.

There is a lot of nonsense written about the history of “native” religions in Britain, but there is little if any direct evidence of any beliefs directly attributable to pre-Christians, the evidence that we do have coming from external sources, since the society before Roman occupation was pre-literate, and archaeological finds are subject to interpretation and speculation. Again a good example of this is the theories around deposits of broken metal artifacts in wetland areas, frequently categorized as votive offerings to the local water deity to alleviate flooding, rather than, lets say, the scrap waste from a bronze age metalworking site dumped in the river because it was convenient, and the idea of recycling hadn’t taken hold. Just a thought….