"The Christians shut down our schools and destroyed our temples"
"Our"? A religion that has been dead for 1500 years? Puhlease, can these people be taken seriously?
I mean read through and see all the crap these folks are laying out. Do any of them really have ANY idea of how the ancient Greeks practiced their religions?
I'm gonna guess that these neo-pagans' message of "world peace", "ecological way of life", "brotherhood of man and do not single out nations", and "We do not believe in dogmas and decrees, as the other religions do. We believe in freedom of thought" would be scoffed at by ancient Greeks. So why bother laying claim to anything but their own living rooms and perhaps toilets? Burn your incense in your jacuzzi to have your religion have as much historical validity as it actually does have.
Take the Spartans for instance...heck they would have taken these hippie neo-pagans and tossed them into Kaiada.
Clearly, these people are not practicing the religion of those who fought the Persians. Instead of being giving permission by the government to use "their" temples (snicker), they should all be given free tickets to see THIS movie when it comes out.
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-Rick
LOL...Yes I'd forgotten about THAT aspect of pagan love, brotherhood, and freedom of thought.
Neo-pagans are the whiniest most ignorant people when it comes to talking about what they 'believe' (I don't think for a second that they actually understand even what they themselves purport to believe). Ancient pagan religions are remarkably strict. Freedom of thought my eye. Athiests or agnostics could be flat out executed in a good chunk of the ancient world, some places would even try them for treason, because it meant they didn't believe in the divine influences that they believe held their countries together or that protected them or what have you. Neo-pagans, with their warped idea of what ancient people believed, would certainly be sacrificed (human sacrifice was pretty big then, even cultures that decried it among others sometimes did it, like Romans sometimes starved people to death, and there were Celts and Germans who executed criminals with ritual sacrifice, Carthaginians who incinerated children for population control, etc.) or simply executed; most likely they'd be considered cowards, which is enough for a lot of the ancient world to kill them.
Maybe these Greek neo-pagans simply base their beliefs that all of Greece, and their religion, was like the popular view of Athens, which is of course flatly incorrect. Sparta was a proto-socialist military society that was run like a machine; there was intentionally no freedom of thought, it'd be quite dangerous to the structure and safety of Sparta. Athens even wasn't all it's cracked up to be; only men of a certain class could engage in the democracy, and specific philosophies were outright banned at times, considered dangerous, like with Sparta, to the safety of the city-state.
It doesn't even get into how ancient religions interacted with eachother. While pagans did pick up a lot of eachothers gods, this is often wrongly interpretted as them being relaxed with one another. The Celtic god Lugos (the Irish Lug) is very similar to the Greek god Apollo. Except, Celts apparently hated Apollo and ransacked temples to him when they raided Greece; it was probably one of the reasons (aside from loot) they targeted Delphi; they could have looted and raided with impunity all over northern Greece and got plenty of treasure (the weakened and green armies in Greece stood little chance against Brennos's battle hardened veterans; truth be told, Celtic armies weren't hordes, they invented the concept of standard bearers and horn blowers it'd seem, to control the movements of regiments), but Delphi had a big temple to Apollo, who they didn't like for some reason.
When Romans conquered Gaul, and later Britain, they 'allowed' Celts to worship their old gods by marrying their names to their Roman equivalent. The trick was, they killed every druid who would not preach the way they wanted them to, and every historian they could, and more or less destroyed the vast majority of their religious practices, and commited genocide against tribes that maintained their practices in the face of Roman authority. Ancient pagans utterly school Christianity when it comes to how much destruction you can justify via your religion, minding that pagans simply did not care. Christians at war are advised by various saints on proper conduct, on mercy and so on, and to do only what is necessary and all that. Pagans don't have restrictions, because their gods encouraged them to kill their enemies wantonly quite often. There are few pagan gods of mercy, and I've never heard of one where that mercy applies to enemies of one's people.
Roman religion was a mixture of traditional Italic paganism with Greek paganism. Not a great deal of freedom of thought. Even in Greece they curtailed numerous practices.
There's always the way various Greek and Roman pagans overtime dealt with the Jews. The Jews had an ancient religion and had been there a plenty long time. Did the pagans respect their religion? Hell no, they tried to replace it with their own, or at least syncretize it.
I'll cut myself off, been ranting too much, just pisses me off, can't stand the daffy nonsense these twits believe. If you're going to be a pagan, you could at least study what they actually believe and try to practice it (within reason to a modern society). They were not religions of tree hugging hippies, these were religions of societies born initially out of war, and they are not warm, cozy religions easy to slip into, they're strict, because they are a religion. Always said if a religion doesn't cause you some trouble adapting to it, you're not doing it right.
Thank you.
Truth be known, most Celtic deities were male warrior, law or merchant gods (which fits to their culture; the Celts were traders and soldiers, it only follows many of their gods would be dedicated to both, and their society was based on a divine precepts of what was lawful, so legal deities held greatest importance).
Most female deities were those over bodies of water, and those that weren't were little different from male deities; war, trade, and law were the most common among them. When Boudicca sacrificed Romano-Britons to her goddess when fighting the Romans, the goddess in question was Andraste, a remarkably xenophobic deity that was entailed incredibly violent worship; she was a goddess of destruction.
The most 'motherly' deities they had were Epona/Macha, the horse-goddess, and Brid/Brigita, the goddess of good health. However, the main deities we know of were;
Dis Pater, likened to Pluto or Hades, though incorrectly. Celts believed themselves descended from 'The Sky Father', who actually lived below the earth, so to pray to him, you placed your hands and head on the earth. However, he was not god of the dead, so the likening to Pluto/Hades is inaccurate.
Sucellos, or 'the Dagda' (Good God), in Ireland and Iberia, was the creator of the universe with a magic club or hammer and a magic cup or pot, husband to the goddess of the underworld (Cathbadhen or the Morrigan), more appropriately likened to Zeus and Jupiter, but even that's a bit incorrect. The Dagda, from Christian description in Ireland, is more like the Christian and Jewish deity; he existed in nothingness and created everything. Zeus was born. He was god of about everything, though seems to be most likened to warfare and trade.
Lugos/Lug/Llew, the 'Shining One', the god of the sun, great at all things, upstanding, law-abiding, and moral (even usually by Christian standards). As mentioned, he was likened to Apollo, which he appears to have been similar; stunningly beautiful, great in all crafts and skills, but less sexual than Apollo (Lug had countless children, but every woman he was with he loved; blatant lust was discouraged for a married men in Celtic societies, but Celts were polygamous often, though only allowed one spouse with who they shared legal rights). An incomparably great warrior who killed his own father (of whom Lugh was a bastard son) with a sling.
Ogma/Ogmios, god of the written word (Celts were not illiterate, but their religion apparently forbade extensive writing, and they prefered mnemonics), poetry, magic, the sciences, and eloquence, the recorder of all of history from the beginning of time.
There are a number more, but these are the big ones I'd like to note.
The point is, these are not the gods of nature worshipping hippies, they are deities of a law-obsessed warrior-merchant society. What is done to Greek paganism by neopagans is no different. Worshipping these gods was not a painless affair.
Celts were warriors. In every town, they had a girdle. If an otherwise able-bodied person couldn't fit in it at the beginning of a year, they were beaten and starved till they could; it wasn't considered fair a person in no way infirmed not by their own doing be a burden on the local tribe. They needed to be ready to fight the same as anyone. In Gaul, homosexuals (after a certain age; apparently in youth it was considered some manner of quiet indiscretion) would be trampled into a bog the same as traitors after being sacrificed to Teutatis (Tribe-Father, the individual god of each tribe). Prisoners of war were sacrificed to the law-god Esus if not of noble or high lineage (those who were were protected from punishment, and held as hostages instead, and were expected to be well cared for, a common practice in much of the ancient world for quite a time).
This was not remotely unique. Other ancient pagans weren't any nicer. They still killed and slaughtered their enemies, sacrificed them even in many cultures, and those that didn't still had no caveat against simply mass executing every enemy soldier they took captive. Tales of slaughter in the ancient world are on a scale that puts everything between then and the modern world to utter shame; the people of the middle ages couldn't have even dreamed of the horrendous levels of death caused by pagans, who neo-pagans seem to believe were so much less violent.
It is a shameful thing that it does such disservice to history, devoid of a remote sense of the reality of the situation. The Christian deity held quite a unique position in ancient Europe. This was a deity that asked for restraint against hated enemies.
For example, from my field; Gaelic pagans (minding, I study Gaels mainly, who are only part Celtic, they're actually a mash of various cultures) had few qualms with slaughtering their enemy soldiers to a man (Celtic laws, and Gaelic laws, did defend non-combatants to an extent), and selling their families as slaves (that's the extent; we won't kill you, but damn if we won't sell you to a far away land). If they were wronged, they would find their enemies and do their best to annihilate them.
When Christianity came, it was a bit different. The Christian tribes and kingdoms still went to war, but they'd no longer enslave absolutely everyone, nor would they simply kill every enemy they could (though, they did still take heads, even into the Renaissance). St. Patrick himself probably commanded at least three battles, but he also admonished people for fighting too bloody a series of wars, with too little mercy for their enemies.
What a terribly foreign concept to ancient pagans; mercy for the blood enemies of your people. Christianity should not be rightly termed a 'pacifist' religion, but it is neither a 'war-like' one, and had quite a lean away from it. Concepts of mercy for enemies are an obvious part of our beliefs. Fighting a war, Christian leaders of the period opted to be merciful quite often, far more so than their enemies would be to them. And they knew they were perhaps being 'too' merciful; they allowed huge portions of enemy armies to simply leave their lands, knowing they'd probably only return again.
The monsterously bizarre thinking of a neo-pagan doesn't grasp that concept. Ancient pagans weren't happy, cheerful people until Christians came along. Certainly they had accomplishments; amazing things far too often overlooked. But it cannot be denied, on the same coin, that these were war-like people, subsumed in war-like cultures with war-like religions.
For the Christian Irish, there were warrior-heroes, same as there were for pagan Irish, they even shared some of them. But specifically Christian heroes had certain qualities lacking in pagans; they were, like their pagan equivalents, brave, loyal, intelligent, and kind to their associations, but they were, unlike their pagan equivalents, merciful to defeated enemies.
It's no different anywhere in Europe. Warrior saints are not an uncommon aspect of early Christian Europe, they were almost a necessity. The press of heathens against the Christian world obviously sent Christians to the front to fight them, and from them would emerge pious examples of how a good Christian fought a war without being consumed by a hateful nature.
Sorry if I go on again, but it is so infuriating to see these people prance about complaining about Christians when Christians were an awful deal kinder than they certainly could have been.