Very good points. There is even a movement to treat European Paganism and Hinduism as two sides of the same coin. This is not just a superficial social similarity - both European Paganism and Hinduism seem to derive from the Proto-Indo-European religion and have many similar aspects (e.g. belief in many gods, division of society into priests, warriors, and craftsmen, association of gods with various aspects of nature, tolerance of other religions, etc.)
They both fascinate me. Didn’t they both appropriate some tenets of Catholicism with traditional tribal beliefs?
We actually know little about these practices Pre-Christianity.
For example, here is what we know about Ēostre, from the Venerable Bede: Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated “Paschal month”, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance."
That’s it. One paragraph, from one source. Nothing about bunnies, eggs, or any of the Easter trappings.
Yes, they did.
And that brings up another point. Candomble and Santeria both relate back to West African practices that are still current to some extent. Does the fact that the religion never truly died in Africa mean that Candomble and Santeria are not “reconstructionist” faiths, but are actually American-based sects of the original, continuous religion?
The question then becomes how much of a religion must be lost before any attempt to revive it becomes a “reconstruction” rather than a revival. If Canterbury Cathedral burns down to the ground and the original manuscripts of Henry VIII are lost, obviously nobody is going to say that the Church of England thereby becomes a “modern reconstruction” of the original church. What is the threshold? Is it the reduction of followers to exactly zero, with no believer left alive anywhere in the world? Is it the death of all clergy? The death of all clergy empowered to appoint successor leaders, even if some minor clergy remain (e.g. ordinary priests in the Catholic Church cannot appoint a successor - without a bishop, their priesthood dies with them)? The destruction of formal or official organizational structures, even if (disorganized) clergy and believers remain? The loss of certain critical holy objects? The loss of certain knowledge, even if believers and clergy remain? The loss of any knowledge, no matter how insignificant (Pope forgot why he changed his career goal from accountant to priest at age 10, no more original Catholicism)?
I treat religion just like I treat language. Both are “alive” in the sense that they are always changing. Religions adopt beliefs from others just as languages adopt loan words. Religions have “rules” you can’t “break” if you’re pious, just as languages have “rules” you can’t “break” to have proper grammar. Over time a language in isolation changes from its parent like a religion that branches off.
So when does a language change to a new one? To me, it changes when people can’t communicate anymore. If someone is speaking English from the deep South of the US and he tries to talk to someone from a rural part of England, and both have thick accents and odd colloquial vocabularies, and they can’t understand each other, those are now different languages. Just as it is that if members of one religion see practitioners of another as completely alien, heretical, and different than their beliefs then they are no longer the same religion.
It’s subjective, but I think anytime you analyze a system created by people and changing as people change you have to be subjective.
All three did, yes. I couldn’t include a link to voodoo because the net was being slow and didn’t bother with a second post for the link because I thought most people here would have encountered it before (even if in whatever form a fiction writer was using).
Many practitioners of Santería would be terribly offended if you said they’re anything but fine, upstanding Catholics. So, to what extent it’s a religion and to what extent a series of “folk piety” practices depends on who you ask.
I don’t doubt that religions evolve much like languages, or to look at it a different way, like any human institution.
But in the context of this discussion, I tend to think that what the OP is getting at is active, primary practice of the particular pagan religions, not necessarily vestigial remnants of original pagan religions that have hung around through syncretism over the millenia.
I mean, there was probably a stretch when the average person hedged their bets, and prayed to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit on Sundays, but also left out some food for the brownies every night. But I don’t know if that really counts as practicing a pagan religion much more than a modern-day Christian knocking on wood or throwing coins into a wishing well counts as practicing paganism.
I tend to think that the real difference between continuous practice and revival would depend on if there was a sort of chain of worship of the pagan gods going on over the centuries or not. For the most part, the pagan religions were ruthlessly stamped out in Europe by the church. Remnants still remain, but they’re mostly in the form of folk superstitions and lore coexisting with more mainstream Christianity (or lack thereof).
I think in the case of most of the pagan religions, we have some notion of what their practices are, but since there hasn’t been that unbroken chain of worship as far as we know, it’s all reconstructed.
As far as being vastly different/unintelligble, I’d wager that with some salient exceptions in ritual, such as the Eucharist, a lot of modern-day Catholicism would seem pretty damned alien to a medieval parishioner, and his form of worship would seem about equally remote (albeit in Latin) to a late Roman period Christian. Protestant worship would seem even weirder- possibly so much so that the ancient Christians might not consider it part of the same faith. Of course, that’s from a lay perspective, and I suspect that educated clergymen of those eras might actually see the the enduring similarities, and conclude that they’re still the same religion.
Lithuania was the last country in Europe to go Christian, officially in 1387. The original pagan religion is confirmed to have survived through unbroken transmission in rural areas clear up to the 18th century. Further, there are published reports of continued Lithuanian paganism well into the 20th century. I think it’s plausible, even likely, that Lithuanian paganism never died out completely until it was formally revived in the late 20th century under the name of Romuva. This would be the OP’s answer. Also:
The Finnic-speaking indigenous people of the Mari El Republic in Russia state in this documentary that their original paganism has survived without interruption since time immemorial. The formally organized priesthood and rituals shown in the documentary certainly appear robust and healthy.
As for shamanism, though it may have been eventually stamped out among the Sami in Scandinavia, there are the Nenets people on the Arctic coast on both sides of the Urals who were never really Christianized and still practice shamanism like in Siberia and have kept their pagan beliefs.
So my answer for the OP is threefold: Lithuania, Mari, Nenets.
It was under Soviet Control for over 50 years. I doubt if Paganism survived* that.*
Thanks! I had just been reading the Wikipedia entry on this fascinating late survival of paganism in Lithuania :
Why? Other religions did.
Barely, and Paganism seems to have been practiced by less than 1%.
"The Lithuanian pagan movement was stopped by Soviet occupation in 1940. The Soviet Union forcefully annexed Lithuania in 1940 and renamed it the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. Due to the nationalist nature of Romuva, the faith was suppressed during the Soviet occupation and many practitioners were executed or deported to forced labor camps in Siberia. "
Gosh… they almost made it!
You appear not to have read the rest of the article. It says that paganism did survive, contrary to what you said.
The Wikipedia article, for what it’s worth, suggests that the discontinuity in Romuva was not the period of Soviet occupation, but rather the period between the Christianisation of Lithuania in the late medieval/early modern period and the Romantic revival of Romuva in the nineteenth century.
The Wikipedia article does say that, following Christianiation, “unofficially, Lithuanians continued in their adherence to traditional paganism”, but it doesn’t say that they did so continuously down to the nineteenth century revival. And it does say that the revival involved delibarate adaptation and rewriting of Greek myths, and the “creation” of other “new aspects of Lithuanian mythology”. In terms of continuity, the only claims are that “People were celebrating ancient pagan festivals mixed with Christian traditions”, which is true thoughout the Christian world, and that “ancient pagan traditions were still continued in folklore and customs”, which is also true in much of the Christian world.
Overall, the Wikipedia article doesn’t really suggest a continuous discrete practice of Romuva of the kind contemplated by the OP. It looks a lot more like the medieval absorbtion, followed by Romantic revival, which is a fairly typical story for various European pagan traditions.
Except that Romuva is neo-paganism.
*Romuva is a contemporary continuation of the traditional ethnic religion of the Baltic peoples, reviving the ancient religious practices of the Lithuanians before their Christianization in 1387. *
So the gap between traditional practice and modern reconstructionism is only 48 years in Lithuania. That’s able to be bridged by living memory, so I’d expect some traditional Lithuanian pagans who got shut down in 1940 were still around and giving pointers to the Romuvans, if not actually organizing. If original practitioners were part of the revival, that bridges the gap and allows continuity.
Underlining added. Is that like “invisible pink”?
“Discrete” could be indicating that paganism was separate from Christian elements, rather than there was a gap in its practice.
That’s not what they’re saying- what the article implies is that there was a few hundred years of clandestine paganism under a veneer of Christianity, and that in the end, the paganism more or less withered away as something actively and openly practiced, to be “revived” in the 1960s with Romuva.
Here’s another article on it: http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/christianization-lithuania.html
Essentially, Romuva isn’t much different than Asatru or Hellenism, with the main difference being the duration of time that elapsed between the area being Christianized and the revival.