Paganlore.com
The True Beginning
of Christianity
With the coming of Christianity
there was NOT the immediate mass-
conversion that is often suggested. Christianity was a man-made
religion.
It had not evolved
gradually over thousands of years, as we have
seen that the Old Religion did. Whole countries were classed as
Christian when in actuality it was only the rulers who had adopted
the
new religion, and often only superficially at that. Throughout
Europe
generally the old religion, in its many and varied forms, was
still
prominent for the first thousand years of Christianity.
An attempt at mass conversion
was made by Pope Gregory the Great. He
thought that one way to get the people to attend the new Christian
churches
was to have them built on the sites of the older temples, where
the people
were accustomed to gathering together to worship. He instructed
his bishops
to smash any "idols" and to sprinkle the temples with
holy water and
rededicate them. To a large extent Gregory was successful. Yet
the people
were not quite as gullible as he thought. When the first Christian
churches
were being constructed, the only artisans available to build them
were from
among the pagans themselves. In decorating the churches these
stonemasons
and woodcarvers very cleverly incorporated figures of their own
deities. In
this way, even if they were forced to attend the churches the
people could
still worship their own gods there.
There are many of these
figures still in existence today. The Goddess is
usually depicted as very much a fertility deity, with legs spread
wide and with
greatly enlarged genitalia. Such figures are usually referred
to as
Shiela-na-gigs. The god is shown as a horned head surrounded
by foliage;
known as a "foliate mask", and also sometimes referred
to as "Jack of the
Green" or "Robin o' the Woods". Incidentally these
carvings of the old God
should not be confused with gargoyles. The latter are the hideous
faces and
figures carved on the four corners of church towers to frighten
away demons.
In those early days, when Christianity
was slowly growing in strength, the
Old Religion - the Wiccans and other pagans - was one of its rivals.
It is only
natural to want to get rid of a rival and the Church, pulled no
punches to do
just that. It has frequently been said that the gods of an old
religion become
the devils of a new. This was certainly the case here. The God
of the Old
Religion was a horned god. So, apparently, was the Christians
Devil.
Obviously then, reasoned the Church the pagans were Devil worshipers!
This type of reasoning is used by the Church even today. Missionaries
were
particularly prone to label all primitive tribes upon who they
stumbled upon
as devil-worshipers, just because the tribe worshiped a god or
gods other
than the Christian one. It would not matter that the people were
good,happy,
often morally and ethically better living than the vast majority
of Christians...
they had to be converted!
The charge of Devil-worship,
so often leveled at Witches, is ridiculous. The
Devil is purely Christian invention; there being no mention of
him, as such,
before the New Testament. In fact it is interesting to note that
the whole
concept of evil associated with the Devil is due to an error in
translation.
The original Old Testament Hebrew Ha-Satan
and the New Testament Greek
diabolos simply mean "opponent" or :"adversary".
It should be remembered
that the idea of dividing the Supreme Power into two - good and
evil - is the
idea of an advanced and complex civilization. The Old Gods, through
their
gradual development, were very much "human" in that
they would have their
good side and their bad side. It was the idea of an all-good,
all-loving deity
which necessitated an antagonist. In simple language, you can
only have the
color white if there is an opposite color, black, to which you
can compare it.
This view of an all-good god was developed by Zoroaster (Zarathustra),
in Persia in the seventh century BCE. The idea later spread westward
and
was picked up in Mithraism and, later, in Christianity.
As Christianity gradually
grew in strength, so the Old Religion was slowly
pushed back. Back until, about the time of the Reformation, it
only existed
in the outlying country districts. Non- Christians at that time
became known
as Pagans and Heathens. "Pagan" comes from the Latin
Pagani and
simply means "people who live in the country". The word
"Heathen" means
"one who dwells on the heath". So the terms were appropriate
for non-
Christians at that time, but they bore no connotations of evil
and their use
today in a derogatory sense is quite incorrect.
As the centuries passed, the
smear campaign against non-Christians
continued.What the Wiccans did was reversed and used against them.
They did Magick to promote fertility and increase the crops; the
Church
claimed that they made women and cattle barren and blighted the
crops!
No one apparently stopped to think that if the Witched really
did what they
were accused of, they would suffer equally themselves, After all,
they too
had to eat to live. An old ritual act for fertility was for the
villagers to go
to the fields in the light of the full moon and to dance around
the field
astride pitchforks, poles and broomsticks; riding them like hobby-horses.
They would leap high in the air as they danced, to so the crops
how high
to grow. A harmless enough form of sympathetic Magick. But the
Church
claimed not only that they were working against the crops, but
that they
actually flew through the air on their poles...surely the work
of the Devil!
In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII produced
his Bull against Witches. Two years later
two infamous German monks, Heinrich Institoris Kramer and Jakob
Sprenger,
produced their incredible concoction of anti-Witchery, the Malleus
Maleficarum (The Witch Hammer). In this book definite instructions
were given
for the prosecution of Witches. However,when the book was submitted
to the
Theological Faculty of the University of Cologne - the appointed
censor at that
time - the majority of the professors refused to have anything
to do with it.
Kramer and Sprenger, nothing daunted forgot the approbation of
the whole
faculty; a forgery that was not discovered until 1898.
Gradually the hysteria kindled
by Kramer and Sprenger began to spread.
It spread like a fire flashing up suddenly in unexpected places;
spreading
quickly across the whole of Europe. For nearly three hundred years
the fires
of the persecution raged, Humankind had gone mad. The inhabitants
of
entire villages where one or two Witches were suspected of living,
were
put to death with the cry: "Destroy them all...the Lord will
know his own!".
In 1586 the Archbishop of Treves decided that the
local Witches had caused
the recent severe winter. By dint of frequent torture a "confession"
was
obtained and one hundred twenty men and women were burned to death
on
his charge that they had interfered with the elements.
Since fertility was of great
importance - fertility of crops and beasts - there
were certain sexual rites enacted by the Wicca, as followers of
the nature
religion. These sexual rites seen to have been given unnecessary
prominence
by the Christian judges, who seemed to delight in prying into
the most
minute of details concerning them. The rites of the Craft were
joyous in
essence. It was an extremely happy religion and so was, in many
ways, totally
incomprehensible to the gloomy Inquisitors and Reformers who sought
to
suppress it.
A rough estimate of the
total number or people burned, hung or tortured to
death on the charge of Witchcraft, is nine million. Obviously
not all of these
were followers of the Old Religion. This had been a wonderful
opportunity
for some to get rid of anyone against whom they bore a grudge!
An excellent example of the way in which the hysteria developed
and spread
is found in the case of the so-called Witches of Salem, Massachusetts.
It is
doubtful if any of the victims hung* there were really followers
of the Old
Religion. Just probably Bridget Bishop and Sara Good were, but
the others
were nearly all pillars of the local church up until the time
the hysterical
children "cried out" on them.
* In New England the law was in in
England: Witches were hung. It was in
Scotland and Continental Europe that they were burned at the stake.
(TAKEN FROM BUCKLANDS
COMPLETE BOOK OF WITCHCRAFT)