09 - The Afterlife of Paganism w/ Dr. Robin Douglas

In today’s interview, I speak with Dr. Robin Douglas, co-author of Paganism Persisting: A History of European Paganism Since Antiquity. Robin is an independent scholar and a writer on the history of religion. He has a PhD from Cambridge University, where he previously completed his master’s and bachelor’s degrees in classics (with specialization in ancient history).

From the back cover

Paganism in Europe was not defeated by Christianity: it never went away. From the fourth century to the twentieth, against the background of a largely Christian culture, people repeatedly attempted to revive various kinds of pre-Christian religion - beliefs and practices that we have come to label as 'paganism'. Ancient paganism did not survive the Middle Ages in its original form; this book tells the story of the persistence of elements of paganism and the pagan idea through Europe's pagan revivals, from Byzantine Greece to medieval Eastern Europe and Renaissance Florence, from eighteenth-century Norwich to revolutionary Paris and Edwardian England. While some of these revivals are well known and others are almost entirely forgotten, they reveal the rich diversity of interpretations of paganism - and how those interpretations have been conditioned by the surrounding culture. Revived paganisms ranged from the austerely rational to the earnestly romantic, from the mystical and occult to the stridently nationalistic. Paganism Persisting reveals European paganism's long afterlife, up to and including the emergence of modern paganism as a mass movement in the twentieth century. The authors are both historians of religion specializing, respectively, in the intellectual history of the idea of paganism and in the development of popular religion and folklore. This book has much to offer to anyone interested in European cultural history, the history of ideas and religious studies.

I am interested in this subject, since I am myself part of a current revival of Hellenic polytheistic practices. I have many questions about this revival and how it may connect to the previous revivals, that of Plethon in the 15th century and beyond.

Robin along with Francis provide a “persistence model” which I think is helpful for examining the reoccurring revivals of paganism across Europe. Enjoy the conversation!

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