Gargoyles On Churches

[escargot]

On a side issue from upthread, I do not buy the idea that the Christian church "took over" pagan festivals and sites, at least on the scale that many people assume

It did though. The new official state religion would naturally do that, both to conserve resources and to eliminate the opposition.

Remember, the new cult of Jesus didn't gradually catch on because people liked him. It was imposed on the population of Europe by the Roman empire from the 4th century onwards. In Rome it was later continued by stripping the ancient buildings of marble and other materials to build the Vatican.

Every aspect of the life of Christ can be found in the writings of previous religions. It's all much older than we've been led to think.

 

[Mikefule]

It did though. The new official state religion would naturally do that, both to conserve resources and to eliminate the opposition.

Confident assertion is not evidence.

For festivals, there are obvious times when a religious event might happen: the start of spring, the end of harvest the turning of the year. Various religions have festivals at roughly these times. The fact that religion Y has a festival around the same time as the previous religion X does not necessarily mean that X "took over" or "highjacked" the festival. It may sometimes be the case, but not always.

There are so many saints days and "starts of this" and "ends of that that" that a Christian festival of one sort or another would coincide with almost any date. It's a bit like astronomical alignments at stone circles. If you're prepared to include a dozen possible alignments with a dozen possible stars on four key dates, there's a pretty good chance of finding an alignment at every circle.

For sites, it is often forgotten that the ancient sites were ancient even in the early days of Christianity. In many cases, there was no continuous use. A long barrow, stone circle or standing stone near to a church does not imply "taking over" or "hijacking" the site. The earlier monument may not have had any significance for centuries before the Christians "moved in".

Furthermore, in the provinces at least, Christianity spread slowly and incrementally, sometimes living alongside so called pagan religions, sometimes in competition, sometimes in peaceful coexistence.

I'm not saying it never happened, but the easy orthodoxy that "the church always/usually/often" did it is simplistic and not supported by the evidence.

There are many books and competing opinions. I base my view largely on this one: Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy, Ronald Hutton. It's a while since I read it, but he fairly comprehensively dismissed this idea. Also — near to my heart as a Morris dancer — he dismissed the idea of widespread survival of pagan rituals and practices. Most of what we like to think we know about how Morris dancing is "pagan" and churches were "always built on earlier pagan sites" and "the Christians adopted and adapted the earlier pagan festivals" is a modern invention.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pagan-Reli...keywords=pagan+religions+of+the+british+isles

 

[Yossarian]

I can see, and largely agree with, your argument, Mike. The modern narrative is very much that Christianity consciously and actively usurped existing rituals and festivals, where there was more likely a bit more "give and take" than that.

Like any folklore or myth, the stories will have cross-pollinated with one another, with the beliefs of one group mingling with the beliefs of another as societies spread out, interact with one another, and share stories. A story told to Group A changes when told to Group B, to better reflect that group's preconceptions and shared experience. On a wider scale, that means Christianity borrowing a little from paganism, paganism borrowing a little from Christianity, and so on. And not just Christianity, but any religion - pretty much any religion of Indo-European origin can trace its roots back through shared stories and ideas, and it is an oversimplification of the spread of culture and the diversification of belief to claim that one religion "stole" or usurped a story from another.

And, of course, there are set times and dates that will carry religious significance almost universally - there should be nothing surprising in agrarian societies placing a great deal of importance on harvests and equinoxes, or in seeing the winter as a time for restraint and austerity.

Then there's the fact that an awful lot of "pagan" British traditions are in fact rather modern inventions - the earliest references to Morris dancing date from around the 1400s, so the notion of it as a pre-Christian pagan tradition doesn't really bear up to scrutiny.


I do have some sympathy for @escargot's point, though - with Christianity as a state religion, there is of course a little more agency than the natural intermingling of cultures, though there's a difference between the religion you state you believe in and religion as observed; I'm put in mind of South American cultures mixing South American and African religious beliefs with Christian iconography, as they rationalise their existing traditions with the "new" belief system brought to them by missionaries, or of different culture's flood myths being reconciled with the Biblical account, which again is an example of two cultures borrowing from another and their stories changing as a result, though there's a power imbalance when Christianity has a state backing.