THE RELATIONSHIP OF PAGANISM TO UNITARIANISM
Talk by Rel Davis, minister, before the University Unitarian Universalist Society, in Orlando, Florida, on March 12, 2000.
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If we are to talk about the relationship of paganism to Unitarianism, we first must understand the historical background of the two movements. Let’s start with Unitarianism.
In the first half of the fourth century of the common era, Rome’s emperor, Constantine, was faced with serious political problems. His empire was crumbling from within and the barbarians were threatening the borders.
His army by now was made up largely of lower class citizens so it was about evenly divided into members of the Jewish mystery cult called Christians and by members of a Persian mystery cult called Mithraism. If these two groups both of them fanatical in their zeal ever began fighting among themselves, there would be civil war and the Empire would be left unguarded.
The Christian Jews honored a former rabbi by the name of Joshua who was sometimes called the Christ or the Messiah. The Mithraists honored the Persian sun god Mithras. Because of a quirk in linguistics, some of the Christians were beginning to copy a lot of Mithraic theology into their own.
The linguistic quirk was this: The Hebrew word Meshiach, usually transliterated messias in Greek, meant "anointed with oil." The Hebrews always used oil to recognize someone chosen for a high task or office. Jewish kings were always anointed with oil and so were high priests. Both kings and high priests were, to the Jews, messiahs. To the Jews, a messiah was always just a human being.
The Greeks also had a word which meant "covered with oil," christos, from the word, chrism, "oil." But the Greeks never used oil to crown their kings. Their kings and priests were usually crowned with laurel or other living plants. The Greeks used the oil to lubricate the phalluses of wooden statues of priapic deities. That is, if a woman wanted to get pregnant, she could go to a wooden statue of a male god and mount the statue. Such an act could be painful since priapic deities had to have very large phalluses. So the phallus was always coated with oil. Such a phallus and the god himself was called a Christos.
Now, in some areas, Mithras was considered a priapic deity, so he also was often called Christ. Because of the confusion of the two words, many Christians (those most removed from Judaism) were beginning to incorporate parts of Mithraic "christianity" into their own practice.
Back to Emperor Constantine: He apparently decided that the only way to save his empire was to get the two cults to come together as one. He couldn’t just order them to get together, but if he could put the Mithraic Christians in charge of all of Christianity, he could accomplish the same thing.
So he called a special council in the Asia Minor town of Nicea of all the Christian bishops. Bishop is simply the English transliteration of the Greek word episcopos (from epi, "over," and scopos, "a watcher") and means an "overseer." He ordered them to adopt the Mithraic concept. Remember: to the Jews a messiah was human; to the Mithraists, a christ was a god.
The council refused. A couple years later, in 325 C.E., he called another council, surrounded it with his army and told the assembled bishops that if they didn’t do what he said, he would kill them all.
Not surprisingly, the Nicene Creed, in which Jesus for the first time is called a member of the triune personhood of God, was passed by the council.
Christianity then picked up the bulk of Mithraic theology and only kept its name and some vastly edited "scriptures."
Instead of worshiping on Saturday, they began worshiping on Sundays. After all, you always worship a sun god on Sunday, right?
Instead of male and female elders, as in the early church, an all-male priesthood was instituted as in Mithraism.
The worship service stopped being a general discussion program, with a shared potluck dinner, as in the early church, and became a ritual meal in which the body and blood of the god was consumed. This was traditional in Mithraism:
Originally, a bull would be slaughtered and the meat and blood actually consumed. Later, in sophisticated Rome, bread and wine were substituted for the actual meat and blood. The Persian name of the Mithraic meal was mizd (from the Persian word Mazda, the name of the chief deity) while the Latin name was missa, the name for the ritual today. Though the English transliteration today is mass.
And the many disciples of Jesus were combined into twelve, just like Mithras had (one for each sign of the Zodiac.)
Constantine then ordered buckets of water to be thrown over every member of his army and the entire lot was "converted" overnight to this new form of Christianity-Mithraism. The Christians apparently were satisfied that they now were in the majority and the Mithraists were happy because all their theology had been adopted by Christianity!
Understandably, many Christians objected to all this. They were led by a bishop named Arius, from North Africa. They were declared heretics and, since Christianity was now the official religion of Rome, they also were considered traitors. Initially, an Arian or unitarian was prohibited from owning property or holding public office. Within a few years, anyone professing unitarian theology was put to death by order of the emperor.
It’s interesting to note that Constantine, although the "father" of modern Christianity, never converted to Christianity himself! He lived and died a pagan. Christianity was only another tool in his political arsenal.
Unitarianism thus became an outcast religion. Unitarians were forced to either hide their true theology or to live on the outskirts of society. Over the centuries, unitarians appear in history from time to time: in northern Italy, in the south of France, in Spain, in Hungary and in Poland. In most cases, the Church organized crusades against them, and slaughtered thousands at a time.
By the time Unitarianism reached England and the Americas in the 18th century, it had changed a bit. Instead of simply believing that Jesus was a human being, unitarians by this time had decided that the major problem with religion lay in the creeds themselves. So Unitarianism became the major proponent of what is now called Liberal Religion a religious system that calls for total freedom of belief for all human beings, and that teaches that each person ought to have the right to choose her or his own theology.
Unitarians were active in the American Revolution and their ideas of a free religion were incorporated into the American Constitution. They were supported in this effort by other oppressed minority religious groups, like the Quakers, the Baptists and the Universalists.
Today, Unitarianism is a movement that encompasses many different religious and theological positions each one accepting the right of the others to hold diverging religious beliefs.
That’s how Unitarianism began. Now let’s look at paganism.
When Christianity began to spread out from Rome, it followed the example of its true founder, Constantine, and didn’t bother to try to persuade people to its viewpoint. It spread by conquest and by forced conversion. Usually the conquered ruling class was given a choice: convert or die. It wasn’t normally a hard decision to make. The ruling classes invariably were members of patriarchal cultures which had only recently conquered the same areas. These included the Celts, by the way.
The farming peoples, who had lived on the land for thousands of years, were not much affected by this change in religion. They had seen religions come and go among the ruling classes, but they kept to their old ways simple seasonal rituals tied to the land and to the changing seasons.
The new conquerors, who spoke Latin (at least among the priesthood) called these farming people by the Latin word, pagani, dwellers in the countryside (from pangere, "to fix," from the ties these people had to the land.) The word pagan became a word of derision much like "hick" or "country bumpkin" or "hillbilly" today.
Actually, the pagans were following the most ancient religion of all, the earth-centered religion honoring the Goddess that all humankind had followed for more than 20 thousand years. But to the Church, they were simply heretics, people who didn’t agree with the ruling classes and deserved only death.
When a major crisis occurred in the Church in the 14th and 15th centuries, and people began questioning the authority of central religion (and Protestantism actually began to cut into the Church’s authority from all sides) the existence of millions of "heretics" in Europe became a possible threat to the Church. From this was born the Inquisition, which we call the Burning Times. This was also the time of the great plague of changing climate throughout Europe of wars and conquests and crusades.
The Church had to have an excuse if it were to torture and kill millions of people, so the "crime" of witchcraft was invented. Bible verses against male poisoners were mis-translated so they seemed to read "female witch" instead. The adversary of the Christian god, Satan, was re-invented as well. He became almost as powerful as god and was made to look just like the gentle forest deities of the pagans, Pan and Lupercus and Herne.
Anyone could be accused of witchcraft. Jews, unitarians, homosexuals, Moslems and members of other Christian sects than one’s own were also tortured and killed for the "crime" of witchcraft.
But the majority of people who died and probably more than 10 million were killed for
witchcraft were women. An estimated 85% of all victims of the Burning Times were
women. Why? First, because the Church feared women and women’s power. Second, because women were more likely to keep the old ways, to practice the old rituals and to serve as healers, midwives and herbalists for the community.
So pagans were forced to go underground, just like the Unitarians before them. They either worshiped in secret or they moved to outskirts of society to places like Hungary or Poland, for example, where Unitarianism also flourished.
Most pagans kept their old principles of tolerance for others. The pagan way always had been that each person has the right to their own religious beliefs. If I choose to honor the earth as Hecate, that does not mean that you must do likewise. You may choose to honor her as Demeter or Isis or Kali or even as Jesus or the Buddha.
The principle of freedom of religion and of freedom of the individual have been intrinsic to both paganism and Unitarianism from the beginning. But that isn’t what now is bringing so many Unitarians into the pagan camp and vice versa.
In the middle of the past century, many Unitarians (along with their allied Universalists) began to realize that a purely "spiritual" movement wasn’t doing anything very practical in the world. So many Unitarians began to become active in politics. Unitarians were at the forefront in the Abolitionist movement that led to the Civil War. They were active in the Suffrage movement that brought votes to American women. They worked on behalf of workers through the union movement.
And in our era, Unitarians were at the lead in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. The first white person killed in the civil rights era was a Unitarian minister shot in the back in Selma, Alabama, while attending a demonstration there. This "social activism" put Unitarianism in direct conflict with the religious right. One of our churches up in Alabama was burned to the ground during the civil rights era. They rebuilt it and then took a stand against the war in Vietnam. The church was burned to the ground again. They rebuilt it again. Then they took a stand against the teaching of creationism in the public schools. Another fire bomb!
In the past two decades, more and more Unitarians have become active in the ecology movement, the feminist movement and the move to limit the population explosion. As more of us became more concerned and active in the movement, it became apparent that the major problem was not simply a few businesses that polluted or a few nations that were overpopulating the planet. The problem was that our entire way of life planet-wide is out of whack.
This includes our attitudes toward religion, our attitudes toward women, the aged and minorities, and our attitudes toward the earth itself.
At the same time, more and more Unitarians were becoming fed up with some of the silly superstitions of the new age movement, and more attracted to the older religious traditions such as Native American, African and northern European ones.
In the middle of the current century, a few people mainly in England became interested in attempting to revive ancient paganism. They tended to be scholars rather than philosophers and concerned with forms rather than substance, but they did make a beginning in the revival of the religion of the Goddess. They faced such opposition (it was still illegal to call oneself a witch in England until the 1950s) that they tended to practice in secrecy and to foster age-old suspicions about the Craft.
Of far more importance than these early "witches," however, were the true scholars of our time: Karl Jung, J. J. Bachoven, Marija Gimbutas and James Mellaart. They demonstrated the reality of the early Goddess religion and provided a sound basis other than Victorian scholarship for modern paganism.
In the 1960s, two widely divergent fields began to come together. First was the radical feminist movement, which rejected out-of-hand the insanities of a male-dominated system and second was the deep ecology movement, which insisted that the only way we will save the planet and our place in the planet is by changing our religious outlook on life.
From these movements arose most of the modern pagans today. The modern pagan tends to be more activist than secretive and more realistic than romantic. Starhawk and her groups have been, for example, at the forefront in the anti-nuclear and the women’s movements.
The infusion of political activism into paganism and the infusion of earth-centered religion into Unitarianism brought the two movements full circle into perfect harmony with each other.
This is why about one in five Unitarians now considers themselves believers in earth-centered religion, and why many people searching for the pagan way are finding it within Unitarian churches across the nation.
Both movements have always been tolerant of other religious paths. Today, both are also united in their concern for the environment and their concern for the quality of human and other animal life.
In the future, I feel that Unitarianism will become even more heavily influenced by paganism as our natural activism becomes more closely united for survival’s sake with concerns for the earth and for the quality of life.
Today, the two stand poised together on the brink of a new world. If we succeed, the planet will be a much better place a century from now than it is today. If we fail, Gaia will be searching for another species to take our place.Blessed be!
The Reverend Rel Davis is retired minister of the Unitarian Fellowship of South Florida (Hollywood). Prior to his ministry, he was with the Federal Government for eleven years as a public information officer and eleven years as a computer specialist. He is a life-long Esperantist, former fak-delegito in Washington, D.C. and editor of the Nordamerika Esperanto-Revuo in the 1960's. He is also a practicing witch.