Tag: Paganism

When the divine becomes the devlish

Posted on by Razib Khan

Over at his blog Rod Dreher has posted an email exchange we had with the title Razib Khan, Anti-Woke Mage Of Old Religion.

Blog-on-blog interaction. Feeling a 2005 vibe!

So here’s the context: I’ve been online for twenty years and have a “name” or “reputation”, and people approach me for advice a lot. If you’re surprised, trust me, I am too. This wasn’t a life aspiration of mine, I just kind of “fell into it.” Most people who read this weblog are aware of the nature of the cultural change over the past generation. In certain institutions and careers, people have to be very careful of what they say and exposing what they believe. They don’t feel they can trust anyone, but, they do feel that they can trust me. I can put people “in touch” who are “safe” close at hand because many people tell me what they “really believe.”

Last week I put a “blind item” out:

Once there is a reasonable gap in time I feel more comfortable saying things like this. For example, the far-left socialist who has more 50,000 Twitter followers who sent me a gushing fan message on Facebook in 2008, can you guess who that is? I won’t say!

In any case, who the person above is is immaterial. The person is influential among the high-middle-brow intelligentsia, and I think that’s a good thing. But Rod messaged me and asked what I was trying to say here. What did I mean “crypto-pagan” and “Christian”?

What I don’t mean is pagan and Christian in any literal sense. I speak in coded and cryptic terms that are clear to anyone who has eyes and awareness but is hidden to the blind. Some people follow me because of an interest in evolution and genetics have conventional liberal-left views. Obviously, I don’t mind offending people, but the outraged and over-wrought responses are tiresome, and engaging with people I am cordial with takes time and energy when our priors are so incredibly different that useful conversation is impossible (e.g., “cancel culture” is a myth, and clearly the people who reach out to me are “frauds who don’t exist”). So I have found if I speak in historical analogies these people simply shrug and move on since they don’t know enough history to make heads or tails of what I’m saying. In contrast, those who are “woke” to the intellectual conformity that many chafe under often become aware over time exactly what I’m talking about, and appreciate what I’m trying to get at (I have DMs to prove this).

These sorts of exercises do cause false positives. A prominent conservative writer unfollowed me immediately after I talked proudly of being an “out” pagan, who stood against the ascendent tyranny of the Christians. Similarly, when I use analogies to the Indian caste system while talking about something totally different, I routinely get unfollows from Indians who are following but offended that I’m talking about India…even though I’m not talking about India at all.

The fundamental issue is when you have many people who read you, you want to speak in a different register to different people. So this sort of “language game” becomes highly useful. It is, after a fashion, using the “master’s tools against the master.”

Finally, this strategy is a concession that my naivete about “information wanting to be free” which is a hold-over from the 1990s is no longer something I hold to. There may not be an Inner Party, but there should be.

Addendum: Some of you may want to know exactly the sort of moments where people get “woke” and then reach out to me. In 2018 a graduate student in population genetics in a prominent lab read David Reich’s op-ed in The New York Times. They were relatively new to the field, but they agreed with the thrust of the op-ed. Their own projects involved human population genetics. They were shocked and confused when many (though not all) of their colleagues denounced the op-ed, with some casting aspersions at Reich’s mastery of the subject matter. The question that went through their head: were they insane, or was everyone around them lying?

I am quite aware that this person’s mentor is very “woke” (I use quotes for a reason) privately, but in public, they present as you would expect. Their ideological beliefs in this area were as vigorous and sincere as Ausonius’ Christianity. The graduate student reached out to me, and my “circle”, and we confirmed that yes, they were not insane. The old gods were real, and the pagan rites were true. The salvation that their colleagues proclaimed was just a damnation of the mind. Mind you, I did counsel taqiya. There are others who venerate Ali that I know still in academia. There is no need to become Husayn.

Cultural and religious relics as clues to cultural process

Posted on by Razib Khan

Much of the public is given the impression that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under the reign of Constantine. Though it is hard to deny that it was the favored religion, especially by the end of his rule, modern ideas of the “official” religion of a given state are somewhat anachronistic for this period and place. In The Last Pagans of Rome Alan Cameron argues that the true death-blow to non-Christian religions in the Roman Empire occurred during the reign of Gratian, 50 years after Constantine, with the cessation of subsidies to the traditional religion (a contrasting view is that elite paganism was vital as a public force up until Theodosius the Great’s conquest of the Western Empire).

In The Final Pagan Generation the author reviews the almost imperceptible change that occurred in the lives of the Roman elite, who looked back to a continuous cultural lineage that drew from the late republic. These elite men and women exhibited passivity and complacency, as the norms which had come before would presumably obtain until the end of time. What they did not understand is that there are periods when societies go through rapid changes, so that a rupture occurs between the past and the future in the span of a lifetime.

Whether you think elite public paganism lost its vitality in the last decades of the 4th century or sometime in the 5th, the reality is that it was a spent force by the time Justinian began his the marginalization of the last of the Neoplatonic philosophers around 500.

Of course, this does not mean that sub-pagan practices did not persist among the European peasantry for centuries. But the reality is that they were at least nominally Christian, and a coherent sense of traditional religious identity apart from that outward affiliation did not exist (at least after Christianization).

Which brings me to the people of the Mani peninsula, in the southern Peloponnese. This isolated region was reputed to retain the practices of Greek paganism as late as the year 1000 A.D. Let me quote Constantine VII, Byzantine emperor from 913 to 959:

Be it known that the inhabitants of Castle Maina are not from the race of aforesaid Slavs (Melingoi and Ezeritai dwelling on the Taygetus) but from the older Romaioi, who up to the present time are termed Hellenes by the local inhabitants on account of their being in olden times idolaters and worshippers of idols like the ancient Greeks, and who were baptized and became Christians in the reign of the glorious Basil. The place in which they live is waterless and inaccessible but has olives from which they gain some consolation.

The Basil in question reigned from 867 to 886.

Of course, we don’t know if Constantine and his contemporaries were correct in all the details of the people of Mani. It seems unlikely that he would have misidentified them as Greek as opposed to Slavs (whose paganism was more recent), but perhaps they practiced a debased form of folk Christianity mixed with old superstitions? But, if they did continue to practice the religion of ancient Greece it illustrates how persistent traditional beliefs than be in a world where the state and cultural elites have more limited purview than one might have thought. It seems unlikely that the people of Mani would have been unfamiliar with Christianity (there are ruins of churches going back to the 4th century in the area), but they may have been socially isolated enough that the incentives to convert to the new religion did not exist.

The Tengerrese people of East Java, who remain Hindu, maybe a modern analogy. The worshippers of the gods of the old Norse were by chance the Sami, who did not become fully Christian until after the Reformation. And up until the Islamic period, the city of Harran remained predominantly pagan (the Persians were close enough that the East Roman authorities respected the religious liberties of these people lest they defect).