What do you think about Paganism?
At the blog
http://velvet512.livejournal.com/ I've found very interesting piece about English Pagans.
I am beginning to take an interest in Old English Pagans.
I’ve quickly become aware of an implicit bias in the words of so many who have commented on this topic. It has a long history. I read a little of Bishop Asser’s Life of Alfred the Great. Asser writes about a battle between West Saxons and Vikings, how Alfred ‘attacked the whole pagan army’. On the face of it, this is a purely factual statement. But let us look at it again. Alfred’s men are fighting a ‘pagan’ army. This puts quite a different complexion on the observation. Since one side is described as pagan, the other side, by implication, is Christian. Christians versus pagans. Good versus evil. The forces of the one true God versus those who worship devils. A value judgement is perpetuated.
I look up ‘magic’ in an encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England. The writer begins by regretting that scholars disagree on a working definition of magic and we are soon back with Frazer (though not, apparently, with Tylor) and one of those academic roundabouts of repeating what other scholars have already written on the subject. Eventually we are left with some pointers towards original AS source material, though it does look to me as more of the same Christians versus devil-worshipping pagans.
I begin to feel the need for the position to be rectified. For someone who experiences magic and Paganism from the inside to inform those who, up to now, have had to rely on theories and opinions put together by outsiders.
francis cameron
oxford, 2 july 2007
