I can remember once reading a few articles about the old Pagan faith and how it was dissolved by christanity and later all but destroyed. My memory of all the details are somewhat spotted, and some of the info I remember reading is somewhat questionable, but my question is "How did the Druids ( male priests) Wiccans ( female priest), and all followers of the Pagan religion get associated with the Demonism and where did Christanity Come from?
Please Advise
Because they weren’t Christian. Not sure what you were looking for as far as an answer
Whoops, forgot the crux of your question. Christianity came from the Romans. They were the rulers and what they said was went.
Hope that was clearer, but I’m sure someone else will be able to expound.
Oh, a self flogging is due for a 3rd post, but I must correct.
I meant, what the Romans said was what people lived. Hope that cleared it up.
(Doubt it) 
I read an answer to the same question refering to germanic tribes. It seems to work for the celtic world as well, but I have no cite for that case.
During christianization and well into the middle ages the church did not deny the existence of pagan gods but considered them daemons. Therefore pagans were not simply ignorant of the “proper” faith but prayed to very real “servants of evil.”
Oh…so in other words they were made as scapegoats so the “new religion” would prosper.
Someone pleae tell me, is this true?
Pretty much Starguard.
Since the rise to prominence of Christianity during the later period of the Roman empire, Christians have always looked to Pagans as backwards, uncivilized, and possibly dangerouss to their beleifs. I’m not a Christian, but from the comments I hear from fmaily members that are and others I know, I fear the same line of thinking is still around.
Why Christianity is supposedly more ‘sophisticated’ or valid than any other religion is beyond me.
As for modern Druids and Wiccans, please keep in mind that they are NOT practicing ancient druidical ceremony or rites. They do practice a very modern idea of what they think might have been druidical religious tradition based on some very modern (mis)conceptions.
So you can’t really say that christians have been after them all along, and certainly no wiccans or ‘druids’ have ever been burned at the stake. 
I also do not know why they chose to call themselves witches. (Someone will hopefully come along and clear that up), as the word has an already loaded meaning to christians. Maybe for shock value? I don’t know. But either way, just the word itself conjures up all sorts of nasty things in the (undeducated) christian mind.
I was watching a detective show once dealing with a real life case of a possible murder. Immeadiately, the wiccan in the family came under suspicion of everyone involved simply because of her religion. Some of the comments from those interviewed made me shake my head in frustration. Apparently if you’re not a christian you must be hafving sex with the devil, snakes, and drinking the blood of babies. :rolleyes:
Christianity has a very strong theme of the battle between absolute good and absolute evil; having categorised themselves as being on the side of good, an adversary must be found; if there simply isn’t an adversary, there are only really two conclusions:
-The adversary isn’t as universal or absolutely evil as we have been told (i.e. our views may be wrong)
-The adversary is subtle and may be lurking around any corner, in the cunning guise of mild opposition.
Scapegoats? No, I’d say the xtians honestly believed they were working with Satan and so they were enemies preventing the spread of the “good news”. According to Xtian theology there are only two sources of supernatural powers: God and the devil. Since any powers pagan priests and priestesses had weren’t coming from God they must have made a deal with the devil; similarly for the more recent witch trials.
I don’t know the sepcifics about Xtianity’s effect on the Celts but Wikipedia’s druidry page contains some mentions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druidry
Btw, there is no single pagan religion.
<i>Oh…so in other words they were made as scapegoats so the “new religion” would prosper.</i>
As others have said, basically yes. It’s quite a standard phenomenon: gods of older religions being treated as demons of the newer one. It’s not just a Christian issue; for instance, Judaism turned the Canaanite god Baal into the demon Beelzebub, and the Babylonian goddess Ishtar into the demon Astaroth, and Christian demonology elaborated on this.
We had a lengthy discussion on this in World Civilization, and it comes down to this. I’m assuming you mean the Witch Hunts held in the seventeenth century.
First of all, at the time, Europe was under much upheaval from the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Reformation (the Counter-Reformation). These involved a great deal of bloodshed, which devastated the population.
Second, people still did not have much control over their immediate environment. Plagues, fires, and other natural disasters were a normal part of life. Since we can’t understand what can’t be controlled, and vice versa, and since religion didn’t seem to be solving the problem, it was natural for the uneducated masses to go looking for a scapegoat.
The Catholic Church was happy to provide one in the Malleus Maleficarum (Witches’ Hammer). This was a guide written by two priests that was intended to help people identify, persecute and punish witches. It found a use in the Spanish Inquisition, and was held as irrefutable truth. By branding certain people “witches”, it found a solution that would at least keep the masses happy.
So who were these witches? For the most part, they were spinsters, childless, and living in a town with a particularly high level of misfortune. Not all of them were practitioners of Wicca; some were. Of the approximately 60,000 people persecuted, something like 95% were women.
The argument can thus be made that the Church went looking for a group to scapegoat that could not or would not fight back. The rest of it is that fear, ignorance, and hysteria combined to need this scapegoating. Jews saw similar treatment, as did Spanish Muslims. Basically, it’s just easier to find someone to blame than it is to fix the problem. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Now, having said all that, I think you’re a little confused in your terminology. Druidism was a distinct religion separate from Wicca. Wicca is, in itself, a modern attempt to re-create some of the “mother earth” religions of the Dark Ages. Practitioners of either can be of either gender. “Warlock” was the common term for a male witch, “witches” were women.
Robin
Excuse me? I find this hard to believe specially since Wicca has only been around since what, the 1950’s?
It is not an issue of sophistication at all and is only a question of validity in a specific sense. It is a matter of “Truth” (from a certain Christian perspective). There is a strong theme in Christian writings (probably borrowed from post-Exilic Judaism, but certainly expressed by Paul), that all other beliefs are the works of the devil manifesting himself as false gods. In this scenario, other beliefs cannot be allowed to co-exist with Christianity, not because they are “mistaken,” but becuase they are direct manifestations of the devil on Earth.
(A number of Christian denominations have moved away from this belief and now characterize non-Christian belief as a true attempt to find God that has fallen short for lack of knowledge of the Christian Truth. However, there are a number of Christian denominations who still look upon pagans (and, often, Christians with “incorrect” beliefs) as agents of the devil.)
As noted above, the choice by the neo-Wiccan groups that arose in the 20th century to identify themselves as witches (in English) was unfortunate, since the word has always meant a sorceror or one who used spiritual means to inflict harm. For some reason, it was converted in popular literature to mean “wise person,” but the word never had that meaning until the 20th century and using that word simply feeds into the hysteria that some Christian groups exhibit.
As one of the neo-Pagans on the board I feel obligated to clarify a few points.
In Celtic lands there were “druids”, an entirely male caste of holy people, but druids were by no means a universal feature of pre-Christian Europe. There was not just one Pagan reglion but many
Also, it is doubtful that the term “wiccan” was used to any great degee in pre-Christian Europe, despite propaganda written in the early 20th Century. If used at all, it was used solely in England and by that I mean the sub-section of Great Britain referred to as England - places like Cornwall, Wales, and so forth would have used different terms.
While there are neo-Pagan groups calling themselves “Druids”, they are a minority among neo-Pagans. Wiccans may be a much larger slice of the pie, but they are not interchangable with the neo-druids.
Although some groups are still in thrall to the florid writings of Gerald Gardner, most realize that neo-Paganism is exactly that - a new form of Pagan based only very loosely on the past. I can’t speak for all Pagans (no one speaks for all Pagans) but it doesn’t bother me a bit how new or old my belief system is, and I, for one, do not feel a need to invent a ten thousand year history for it.
Regrettably, Pagans, like most minorities, are judged by their most visible and vocal members who may or may not reflect the majority of those in the group.
Actually, quite a few neo-Pagans reject that label. The modern Asatru reject the words “Wicca” and “Witches”, perferring to be referred to as “heathens”. For the most part, they acknowledge theirs is a reconstructed religion at best, although there may be some actual holdovers in Iceland (much degraded from the original, though). There are also groups like the Kemetics - reconstruction of Ancient Egyptian practices - who likewise reject the term “Wiccan” and who, again, acknowledge theirs is not the original but a reconstruction. That’s just a sampling.
In truth, NONE of them were “Wiccans” Wicca is a religion founded by Gerald Gardner in the early 20th Century (somewhere between the late 1920’s to the mid-1930’s - I’m not a Gardnerian so I’m not 100% clear on this, it DID pre-date the 1950’s by a couple decades)
Some of the women might have been practitioners of old, Pagan rituals and some may have not. Pagan hangovers plagued the Catholic Church from day one, and still exist today.
There are some pre-20th Century “Pagan” practices, among them the Strega from Italy.
Yes. Wicca came more or less from a cheezy book of occult lore some lady wrote a while back. It’s actually more or less ridiculous and not very historically accurate. And I’ve gotten the feeliug that the practicioners of it I’ve met are not exactly interested in it as a real religion, but as a form of rebellion.
Just a note: No where in the christian bible will you find any support for the actions taken against other religions by the romans and later the catholic church. Christianity itself was persecuted for much of the roman empire’s duration. Later though they decided that it was easier to sanction and take control of the wildly growing religion than lose control entirely. This resulted in the catholic church.
So where did the image of “witches” being an old sodded sewer smelling women flying around on brooms and such originate?
Regarding witches and brooms, the Master has addressed What’s the deal with witches and broomsticks?
The Master has also addressed What is the historical basis of the Wicca religion (modern witchcraft)?
Well, you will find very little to support suppression in the New Testament. However, in the 16th century people looked to various wars that the Jews had launched against the Canaanites and Philistines on the grounds that those neighbors were acting contrary to the commands of God and both the Catholics and the Protestants decided to engage in their own varieties of purging God’s enemies from the Earth. Similarly, the Gendercide.org web site notes that the rise in persecution of “witches” (my quotation marks) tended to occur in the lands in which the social fabric was most disrupted by the Reformation and it quotes Ben-Yehuda that