Quotes About Paganism

The suppression dates back to the early Christians who tried to root out calendrical paganism, denounced classical cycles, and pushed underground entire branches of nonlinear learning, such as the hermetic fields of alchemy and astrology.

I do not worship their devil. Nor do I worship their other gods--Jesus, Jehovah, the Holy Spirit--but I respect them, for all gods are One. I worship the Great Mother, the one many call Diana, whose secret name the inquisitors shall never know. If this makes me a witch by their definition--very well then, I am a witch, just as surely as they are Christians and murderers.

Religion itself is an absurdity and an anomaly, and paganism is acceptable only because it represents that purely orgiastic phase of religion farthest from reality.

We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and that worried us a good deal.

Let it be clarified here that neither the Akkadians nor the Sumerians had called these visitors to Earth gods. It is through later paganism that the notion of divine beings or gods has filtered into our language and thinking. When we employ the term here, it is only because of its general acceptance and usage that we do so.

A wee child toddling in a wonder world.... I prefer to their dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers. If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a Pagan.

Not only is the archaeological record incomplete, but it has been sifted largely by male archaeologists, wearing the blinkers of patriarchy, assuming that monotheism represented an advance over polytheism and paganism, and seeking to justify the holy books upon which their patriarchal civilization was based.

Ninety-nine percent of the things that seem weird in my life can be answered with my religion. Paganism is mostly about nature-worship. It's about being in harmony with your environment and bringing the world of spirit and world of man together. It's about balance.

widdershins

At the beginning of a new year, many people have nothing better to do than to make a list of bad deeds and resolve from now on—how many such "from-now-ons" have there already been!—to begin with better intentions, but they are still stuck in the middle of their paganism.

Paganism is the worship of life itself in its supreme mysteries of ecstasy and love.

Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life.

that Power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That Power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy. What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany

paganism was "no more than a spongy mass of tolerance and tradition."3

But, then, you were born a pagan; I am trying laboriously to make myself one. I can take nothing for granted, I can enjoy nothing as it comes along. Beauty, pleasure, art, women - I have to invent an excuse, a justification for everything that's delightful. Otherwise I can't enjoy it with an easy conscience.

Sometimes, when you go on foot there, when you walk in the woods near the old pagan temples, you feel something very strong. It is like the energy you feel in a church, or the energy you feel when a boy and a girl are in love and touch hands for the first time.

The perfect man, for the pagans, was the perfection of the man that exists; for Christians, the perfection of the man that does not exist; and for Buddhists, the perfection of no man existing.

Often pagans, with their eyes wide open, do not see very clearly.

'Theogony' should be read before the great Homeric epics because it gives an account of the cosmology that is taken for granted by Homer. It does for paganism what the Old Testament attempted to do for monotheism.

In Bede's account, the "English people" derived their special significance from their conversion. Their Germanic ancestors, who worshipped several deities, such as Woden, were the longest-lasting pagan peoples in the former Roman Empire. Yet during the 200 years following Augustine's arrival they went from being pagan to being Christian. This is because conversion began at the top, with kings, queens and warriors.

Nevertheless, family gods in general held their ground, as did rural gods, right up to the period when government became Christian. In the early fifth century, in his commentaries on Isaiah (57), St Jerome bears witness to what he saw in Rome several years before. Like Tertullian in his De idololatria, he deplores the fact that nowhere escaped paganism. No sooner had one crossed the threshold of a house than one saw the idols of the domestic Lares, 'as they say!

The first eastern religion was imported into Rome very officially, with the agreement of the Senate, after consultation of the Sibylline Books. In 205 Bc, after a new and more serious outbreak of showers of stones (hail?), customarily expiated by a sacrificial novena, the Books were believed to indicate that the interminable war with Carthage would end in victory if the 'Idaean Mother' was transferred from Pessinus to Rome (Liv., 29, 11, 4-5).

The virtue of Paganism was strength: the virtue of Christianity is obedience.

Though most people reject that claim as extravagant, they are left with the impression that Mormonism is simply an extreme form of Christian fundamentalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, Mormonism is a modified 'form of paganism which is so carefully camouflaged with a facade of Christian terminology that it even deceives most Mormons.