I was making no judgement on Armstrong’s essay at all. I was simply including a quote from her own forward.

I don’t agree with everything she says. But I do admire the scope of the project she is involved in. Perhaps that is why you felt I was giving her statements the official Wildhunt “seal of approval”.

Anyone who knows of Armstrong’s background as a former nun would know that her worldview of Paganism would be colored by that past.

I consider my gods very much “real”, but I’m not going to judge the entirety of the essay until I have the chance to read it and draw my own conclusions.

Thanks for commenting.

The idea that the pagan Gods were not historically conceived as discrete individuals or as distinct from natural phenomena is not one advanced by friends of paganism, even if there are some contemporary pagans who might accept this picture and even find it edifying. Armstrong would make of pagan religion something archaic and exotic without a place in the contemporary world, part of, and inseparable from, a pre-scientific, “enchanted” worldview, when paganism was and is so much more than this.

It is one thing to point out the differences between pagan religions and the Abrahamic faiths, in the area of tolerance, for example, but it is quite another thing to claim that pagan religions, in effect, lack Gods as such. And yet that is just what she is saying. This picture of pagan religion is just a way to ensure that pagan religions not be seen to compete with the Abrahamic faiths on their own territory, and even if it is presented in a superficially friendly — but clearly patronizing — manner, this picture nevertheless derives immediately from the Christian perspective on pagan religions as primitive and materialistic, worshipping blind forces of nature and thus offering no salvation. Also typical of the Christian image of paganism is that pagan religions always contained much material their own adherents neither took seriously, understood, nor were prepared to defend.

Some modern pagans perhaps reflexively identify with notions of divinities as “immanent” rather than “transcendent”, either because they think that to conceive of divinity as in any way transcendent denigrates nature, or because they think that transcendence implies monotheism. They should not be so quick to take the bait that is being offered them. Were pagans to accept Armstrong’s picture, their religions would be reduced to an empty shell, the myths to mere stories, the identities of the Gods and the national pantheons liquidated. Accepting the stereotype foisted upon us of a “nature religion”, we would willingly abandon any claim to credit for, or any stake in, civilization after the Bronze Age. I, for one, am not prepared to do that. Pagans invented urbanism, art, writing, philosophy and theology, why on earth should we abandon them to strangers?

Edward Butler