What are some of the things/names/tradition that are influenced or remnants/references from earlier paganism cultures?
At the top of my head I could think of
Names of some days of the week (ex. Friday= FRIGGA the germanic god)
Names of some of some months (ex. January from the roman god Janus)
Eastern holiday
Christmas
what are some of the less obvious examples?
Halloween/Samhain, and associated occultic lore
If we are talking about non-religious things we inherited from ancient pagan cultures, you can count pretty much the entirety of philosophy and mathematics (except calculus).
the alphabet
And our 24 hour day with 60 minutes per hour - that’s right out of Babylon.
And the Zodiac.
June weddings were supposedly favored as far back as Roman times because the month is named after the goddess Juno, the wife of Jupiter and the goddess of marriage.
Some superstitions, such as knocking wood, might date back to pre-Christian Europe.
Some Indian nations still maintain some of their pre-Columbian beliefs and customs, but that’s probably not at the level of social visibility you’re asking about.
There are neopagans, but that’s really more of a revival than a survival, despite Gerald Gardner’s claims to the contrary.
Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, respectively, carry strong echoes of Beltaine and Summer Solstice traditions. Beltaine is/was a holiday in early May (May 1, actually) dedicated to the Earth Goddess, one which celebrates fertility…not a far leap to honoring mothers. Summer’s Solstice, which falls within a few days of Father’s Day every year, is/was the height of the Solar God’s generative powers before he enters the harvest and decline of autumn…again, not a far leap to honoring fathers.
I always thought that was kind of neat.
There are others, like Groundhog Day = Lughnassah, Samhain = Halloween, but I think those may be as much the secular holiday informing the neopagan tradition as the pagan traditions inform the neopagan trad. In other words, I’m not entirely convinced that Samhain was as “Haloweeney” to ancient pagans as modern ones.
Harvest festivals are nearly universal in pre-Christian cultures, and indirectly give rise to our Thanksgiving holiday.
Considering Julius and Augustus Caeser both were considered divinities, I suppose July and August count as paganish as well.
The date connection for Father’s Day, anyway, is purely a coincidence. Father’s Day was invented in 1910 by a woman who wanted it to be in June because her father was born in June. And actually, in some countries it’s not in June at all.
What I came here to post. Go through Snopes’s stuff on superstitions, and you’ll find a lot of them started from pagan, or at least pseudo-Christian, beliefs.
Arguably the use of religious icons was borrowed from pagans. (Judaism did not traditionally tolerate figurative religious art.)
The month of May was considered an unlucky month to get married in, for many reasons dating back to ancient times. Romans deemed May the month to honor maiores, or elders, June to honor the young.
So did veneration of the saints icons represent. Many pagan gods were baptized, as it were – the early Church, as it expanded through Europe, substituted a saint for an old god, with a sphere of patronage similar to the god’s, and some elements of the god’s worship incorporated into the saint’s veneration. The Virgin Mary substituted for a lot of mother-goddesses.
And it’s possible that some Saints, like Brigid, weren’t actual Christians made Saints at all, but local God/dess(es) who were “promoted” outright. County Kildare Federation of Local History Groups
This question is next to impossible to answer for the following reasons:
A lot of European pagan culture was directly continued by European Christians. If you compare the Bible’s attitude toward money with that of early Germanic literature, it’s pretty clear that our capitalist culture has some nice pagan roots.
Some of this is deliberate borrowing. Churches were built on pagan centers of power, holidays were co-opted. Early Christians were quite forthright about this. That means a mixture: Christmas is not a pagan holiday, but it is not a Jewish holiday, either. It’s a Christian invention drawing on their mythology and already-existing (and therefore originally pagan) customary / festival behavior.
Some is coincidental: the Roman planets were named after gods. In Old English the planets were given names of equivalent gods, but the days of the week were only indirectly named after anything pagan. The bulk of it is folk tradition: people continuing any beliefs, behaviors, and value systems that did not directly contravene the church.
A lot of the reference material, even seemingly reputable stuff, is absolute nonsense. It’s either flat-out wrong or unsupported speculation, even things published by people with PhD after their names. A lot of this is due to enthusiastic pagan-friendly folks who post public-domain Victorian scholarship online. It’s pretty easy to find authoritative cites on the relevance of the Celtic quarter days to modern celebrations, but most of it doesn’t hold up to academic scrutiny. The origins of superstitions, in particular, are often projected back into the misty mists of time without much evidence.
The OP mentions the days of the week, but in a sense the whole language is pagan: most of our words and all of our grammar predates Christianity, even specifically religious terminology like the word “god.” There is no evidence I know of that the Easter holiday is especially pagan; Bede was famously wrong here.
Groundhog Day isn’t Lughnasadh (or Imbolg: I suspect a typo on WhyNot’s part). Imbolg might or might not have had a role in the creation of Candlemas. I believe it does, but there’s no evidence. Brigit is pretty clearly a pre-Christian deity, but there may also have been a human woman named after her who really existed.
In short (too late!), I think the answer can be “almost everything” or “nothing,” depending on how you view it. Cultural continuity was both far stronger than the Christians would have you believe, and far less organized than some Neopagans believe.
:smack: Ah, never mind. Bits of what Dr. Drake said, while I wandered off with my “post reply” box open.
People concealed shoes and other garments in chimneys and other parts of the home as recently as the early C20th. I can’t find a link but there were some shoes, and even bodies of cats, found in houses here in Sydney quite recently. The practice comes from pagan superstitions about personal articles and the home.
Typo? You’re too kind :smack: Nah, that was WhyNot’s big ol’ brainfart. Sorry! **Skald **says I get 14 brainfarts a week, so I’m left with 12. Yes, of course I meant Imbolc/Imbolg.
And the reason I meant to bring up Imbolc simply to discard it is that it’s one I hear (overenthusiatic) neopagans bring up to try to draw misplaced parallels between our celebrations and secular ones. I agree with you that they have nothing in common, historically, except a coincidence of date.
See the recent thread about the summer solstice celebrations in Europe.
Holy springs whose water is supposed to heal some ailment or another, cure sterility, etc…and similar places, placed now under the patronage of some saint but are pre-christian sites.
Saints who probably originated in previous pagan deities.