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To the uninformed, it may seem as though western pagan tradition died out completely. We have after all, a relative
handful of texts remaining from a number of cultures that passed their stories through word of mouth.. some, like the people
we now call the celts(1) insisted on passing their sacred texts orally.
Anyone who says otherwise is deluding themselves.
We are looking upon the ancient ruins of our past.
But we believe there is still this thing that we long for; this place in each of us.. an albion. A golden isle much like
Anglesey, the isle of the druids, raped by quintus sentonius prior to (3) boddica's own destruction, it's physicality destroyed..
but that was nothing but a physical reflection of the eternal.
There is still, beneath these things we see, stifled by our language of industry and consumerism; a sea of energy and
beauty, of activity and spirit.
We know it through our intuition, through love of light and dark equally, by the movement of birds, by the stirring of
leaves & grasses.
But we must work for it, through repetition, through sifting our minds, through careful excavation. Through practice.
Through sacrifice.
We will find many of our own western pagan beliefs beneath the surface of the Christian symbols, distasteful as it might
seem. Part of the process of recovering our own identities as western pagans, must of necessity involve taking back our stolen
gods.
We must make our own souls warm with a hearth fire, in order to invite the gods back once more.
If the old forests are gone, perhaps we can find our groves in our deep collective consciousness, and make a place habitable
for the sacred.
In these black days, who once worshiped in the sacred temples and groves and in the temple of the wider world and nature,
are called demonic and worshipers of the devil. Even today they watch us with fire in their eyes, they who are masked by their
own repressed shadow.
It is a grotesque shade these Christians throw, made gross and malformed by their own iniquities.. this shade that we
as pagans must live under.
The christian clergy wears the stolen clothing of the pagan, uses our own ceremonies and rites against us.. which he plundered
from our own store of knowledge.. the mosiac
of the bible is turned like a knife against us.
They exorcised their 'demons' with holy water from the lituus which our own once wielded in solemn prayer and augury.
They stole our festivals and threw a limp cloth of their own hastily cobbled up beliefs over them, so that every thought
should be directed through their own godless institution.
"Nothing but such pitiable prejudice," says Gross, "can have thus misrepresented the theology of heathenism,
and distorted -- nay, caricatured -- its forms of religious worship. (2)
Welcome then, fellow pagan, to this pantheon of hostages.
1 a term used only in 1707 to describe Irish. Welsh, Cornish and breton ethnic groups.
Terry Jones, Babarians: An alternative roman history
2. PAGAN ROOTS: Destruction of Sources http://www.blavatsky.net/magazine/theosophy/ww/additional/christianity/RitesCeremonialDress.html
3. Boddica, Bodicea, queen of the Iceni of Britain.
a "lovers" saint to replace the pagan deity Lupercus.
n Vespasian's days we saw Veleda, long regarded by many as a divinity. In former times, too, they venerated Aurinia, and
many other women, but not with servile flatteries, or with sham deification.
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