Perilous
Times and The Great Falling Away
For growing ranks of pagans, October 31 means a lot more
than Halloween
By Susanne Gargiulo, Special to CNN
As pumpkins, witches and faux cobwebs have taken over much of
North America for Halloween, Clare Slaney-Davis is preparing an
October 31 feast that some would consider much spookier, with
table settings for her grandparents, a great-aunt and other
relatives who have passed away.
As she and her living guests eat, they'll share stories and
memories of loved ones they've lost.
The Christian debate over Halloween
Slaney-Davis, who is based in London, isn't preparing the feast
for Halloween. Instead, she and pagans around the world are
celebrating Samhain, the beginning of the pagan new year, a night
when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is
believed to be the thinnest of any time during the year.
That's why it's a night devoted to ancestors. "We honor them, and
we recognize that we don't live in a world of people who are
merely dead or alive," says Slaney-Davis, 46. "Ancestors are
central to us."
Along with the Catholic holiday All Saints' Day, Samhain is
considered an ancient forerunner of Halloween. Samhain began as a
Celtic celebration marking the end of harvest and the beginning of
winter's hardship.
Today, pagans play down the Halloween-Samhain connection. But the
growing popularity of the pagan new year in Europe and North
America is part of what many experts say is a global revival of
paganism.
Slaney-Davis, who trained as a witch and a druid, says her
religion has nothing to do with ghosts and ghouls. "To me, being a
pagan means being in divine balance with nature and being
responsible for my actions," she says. "I understand that my
behavior has an effect on people I don't even know exist. It is
not a theology of perfection but one of belonging."
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But it is a theology that's gaining ground. According to the 2008
American Religious Identification Survey, the number of members of
"other religions" or "new religious movements," categories that
include pagans, more than doubled between 1990 and 2008, to 2.8
million.
The survey, conducted byTrinity College in Connecticut, reported
that the numbers of Wiccans and neo-pagans had also doubled in
that time.
Contemporary pagan religions like Wicca and druidism are
considered neo-pagan movements.
"(Paganism) is one of the fastest growing religions in the world,"
says Michael York, a retired religious scholar from Bath Spa
University in the UK. "True numbers are impossible to come by
because many people are wary to admit they are pagan, and reliable
statistics just don't exist."
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While paganism covers a range of individual religious groups,
including Wicca, druidism, and shamanism, they're bound by some
common denominators, such as roots in ancient, pre-Christian
beliefs, and their view of nature and the whole physical world as
sacred.
"In traditional religions you have a conflict between God and
nature," says York. "But for pagans, nature becomes the truest
expression of the divine."
That, he says, is a big reason why paganism is seeing a revival:
"If nothing else, because of the impending destruction of our
environment, and our focus on finding a way to live in balance
with nature."
Another key pagan belief is the freedom for each person to
determine his or her own way to and view of the divine. "Paganism
doesn't put restrictions on what you can and cannot believe," says
Jason Pitzl-Waters, co-founder of the Pagan Newswire Collective
and the pagan blog The Wild Hunt. "It grows out of an ethos that
there isn't just one sacred way to understand the world."
But that lack of dogma has become something of a stumbling block
for the movement. "Because paganism is very individual, it creates
the problem of not having a unified voice, because nobody speaks
for the movement as a whole," says York.
Another problem pagans face is one of image: For centuries,
including during the Roman Catholic inquisition, pagans were
denounced as heretics and devil-worshippers.
"One of our greatest challenges is to overcome the hostility of
groups that still see us as evil," says Pitzl-Waters. "To some
conservative Christian groups, we are an early warning sign of
societal collapse."
Just last week, an opinion column in The Christian Post, an online
newspaper, warned that the "dark festival" of Samhain is an
invitation to the devil. The column said that "even though you
don't consciously call upon Satan, his demons are nevertheless
present any time a Wiccan goes through a spiritual door by using
magic." It calls on Wiccans to ask forgiveness for their sins and
to turn to Jesus.
"Part of what is scary for conservative religions is that as a
pagan, I consider myself part of the divine," says Holli S. Emore,
executive director at South Carolina's Cherry Hill Seminary, which
has one of the world's first graduate-level programs for pagan
ministry. "That means God lives in me, and that is blasphemous to
some. To me, it's a big responsibility to do good and act right."
Scholars say that the neo-pagan view of God being everywhere and
in everything is not a foreign idea on the global religious stage.
"Much of modern paganism looks to older religions like Shinto,
Hinduism and indigenous religions, which see spirit in
everything," says Jenny Blain, senior lecturer in sociology at
Sheffield Hallam University in England and author of several books
on paganism.
"If you add all those to modern paganism, that is a considerable
part of the world that does not live with traditional Abrahamic
views," she says.
There are signs that paganism is gaining some acceptance in the
nonpagan world. For the first time last year, the government of
Britain recognized druidism, an ancient pagan belief system, as a
religion.
"People either see paganism as dangerous or as a joke," says
Pitzl-Waters. "But it is a serious global movement. Paganism has
arrived as a world religion. It's not just a bunch of
counterculture types playing witchcraft games."
That said, traditional witchcraft rituals, like gathering in
circles and uttering spells, have an important place in modern
paganism, which further unsettles more traditional religious
believers.
"Because Christianity is more conservative, anything seen as
supernatural or magic automatically becomes of the devil," says
York. "Because of that dichotomy, paganism is automatically seen
as satanic."
"People fear what they don't understand," says Emore. "But spells
are basically prayers with props. What we call magic is the
intentional use of power to achieve change, and just like with
prayer, what you are doing is tapping into an inner resource.
Gathering in a circle and acknowledging the four elements is
nothing new – this is something Native Americans and many ancient
nature-based religious people did as well."
For neo-pagans, the four elements – earth, air, water and fire –
are closely linked to their view of a sacred planet. "The
attributes associated with each element become tools in our
meditation and in practices such as spells," says Emore. "Water is
associated with emotions and intuition, air with intellect and
communications, earth with foundation and stability, and fire with
passion and action."
To York, paganism's ancient rituals also help bring a sense of
enchantment back into life.
"The ancients had a sense of the magical, but with Christianity
came a diminishment," he says. "The magical was denied, everything
became inanimate, and from a pagan perspective we lost our
connection with the sacred. I think we are rediscovering that
now."
"Pagans understand there comes a winter, which is a time to ready
for rebirth," York says. "For us, the last 2000 years has been the
pagan winter."