The Fall of the Fomorians

The Fomorians are described as sometimes having various features of animals, but also sometimes of
being very beautiful and completely human in appearance.

I am hardly an expert on Irish Mythology, these are just my observations from my hardly-expert readings on the subject.

The Fomorians are the bad guys of the Irish Mythological Cycle, which is the story of how the semi-divine Tuatha de Danann came to Ireland and were eventually supplanted by the Milesians, the ancestors of today's Irish. I am not going to suggest in this post that the Irish Mythological Cycle describes actual history: clearly it does not. What it does describe, in sometimes clouded and metaphorical terms, is a history that occurred in many places over long periods of time, and in a sense continues to this day. It describes in rough terms the outlines of the Neolithic Conquest.

I. The Neolithic Conquest

The usual term is "Neolithic Revolution" or "the Agricultural Revolution," the change that occurred when people starting raising crops and domestic animals more or less full time, in sedentary non-transient settlements. However, to call it a revolution suggests several things that probably aren't true. First is the suggestion that mesolithic peoples were unfamiliar with agriculture: this is almost certainly not the case. It's not rocket science to figure out that the place you spat watermelon seeds last summer is the place that is growing watermelon plants this spring. Mesolithic people had agriculture, but they used it as an adjunct to a primarily hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

The word "revolution" also implies that as soon as people were exposed to agriculture and village living, they had this "Aha!" experience and were immediately converted to the idea of working hard in the fields all day rather than goofing off enjoyably in the forest. More and more everyday the evidence is coming in that this was certainly not the case. Skeletons of people are compared before and after they undergo this revolution: the skeletons of sedentary agriculturalists show more signs of stress, spinal problems, disease, dental decay, and are overall shorter and show every sign of being less healthy than their own hunter-gatherer ancestors were a few hundred years previous. Agricultural work is hard, their diet less varied, and because of their closer quarters with other people they are more subject to disease. Also almost invariably with denser populations came more autocratic forms of government. A band of hunter-gatherers might have had some sort of informal boss-man, but he was probably pretty limited in the ways he could throw his weight around without encountering significant opposition. Compare this to the amount of labor that more hierarchical agricultural societies could compel from their people. The mounds and pyramids of the Americas and the pyramids of Egypt and many other ancient earthworks required immense labor, and that labor really wasn't done for the benefit of those who were doing the work. The labor was done to glorify the king. You get the "Neolithic Revolution" and soon you get chiefs and then kings and standing armies who can compel obedience on behalf of that king. None of this is an advance in human health or happiness compared with mesolithic hunters and gatherers.

Where the main advance does lie, is in physical security. Not food security so much, though of course there was always the possibility for hunters and gatherers that they might starve, and farmers can have granaries that can store food for years. No it was an advance in physical security, protection against attack. Obviously if you are in a neolithic village with a couple hundred people in it, and the other tribes around you are mesolithic hunter-gatherer bands of twenty-odd people, they would be a fool to attack you. You on the other hand are more able to attack them without putting your homes at that much risk. And this is what happened. The change to sedentary living dependent on agriculture wasn't an improvement to freedom, convenience or health, it adversely affected those things. What it was, was a stone-age arms race, and once a community converted to that way of life all those around them would likely either follow suit for their protection or eventually be annihilated as the agriculturalists required more and more land for their crops and flocks. Undoubtedly many hunter-gatherers looked at the early agriculturalists and said, "they live and work like slaves, their way of life makes them sickly, why would I want that?" Unfortunately, they would have eventually been destroyed or assimilated by these agriculturalists who if nothing else were able to have much higher and denser populations than their enemies. Even those who were not conquered or assimilated, the new villages and towns were disease factories, and although the hunter-gatherer's more dispersed groups would have given them some protection from these plagues, eventually they would have reached them too with disastrous results.

So we see that we cannot really call it a "Neolithic Revolution" or an "Agricultural Revolution," it was a conquest, an innovation in weaponry that gave those who had it power over those who didn't and who quite sensibly would have preferred to have nothing to do with a life of backbreaking labor under increasingly dictatorial chieftains. To quote Stalin on the topic of weaponry: quantity has a quality all its own. However strong or healthy or brave the hunter-gatherers would have been, the farmers just had way more numbers. It wasn't a revolution to a better way of life which hadn't existed before. Mesolithic peoples had agriculture and more freedom AND a healthier way of life. It was a change for military advantage. Hence, I call it the Neolithic Conquest. While we might be inclined to say that it all worked out for the best, now that we have televisions and Xboxes and jet planes and convenience stores (and computers and blogs), it is clear that up until the Nineteenth century perhaps (and even later), "civilization" was a bum deal for the vast majority of people who were subject to its effects. People were healthier and freer as hunter-gatherers than they would be for centuries to come, and probably much of that still holds true. They had no jobs, no bosses, better diets, and had to work for their sustenance maybe a third as much as people today do, and had no significant problems getting their needs met. You didn't have to wait for the weekend, or yearly vacation time, to knock off. If you had enough pemmican in your pocket, every day was a vacation day. No, they didn't have modern medicine, and many things that hospitals today can treat very handily might have proved fatal to them, but it remains to be seen what the long-term effects of medicine are going to be on the human race.

II. The Fomorians and the Tuatha de Danann

According to the mythology, when the Tuatha de Danann (the People of the goddess Danu) arrive on the shores of Ireland, they don't appear to have agriculture (although the matter seems slightly uncertain.) When they arrive, the Fomorians are already living in Ireland and they either have yet to develop a sedentary agricultural way of life or only recently developed it. It does clearly state that the Fomorians were known as hunter gatherers prior to this time. So as far as the Neolithic Conquest goes, they seem to be about at the same level. They both came to agriculture only lately, and they both have a moderate level of hierarchy (they both are referred to as having 'kings') If you read between the lines however, the Fomorians seem much more cut from the hunter-gatherer cloth and the Tuatha de Danann much more in an agricultural mode. Why do I say that?

First, the Tuatha de Danann: they are clearly referred to as civilizers. No hunter gatherers ever had reason or need to call themselves such, and the more hierarchical the society the more likely they are to call themselves such. Classical examples (literally) would be the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks clearly felt themselves to be culturally superior to all other societies, and the Romans not only considered themselves superior to the 'barbarians' but felt an obligation, a 'white man's burden' if you will, to bring civilization to them. This reaches its ultimate level in Victorian England and America, where it is considered not only right but a moral necessity to bring the benefits of Anglo-Saxon enlightenment to all the non-Western peoples of the world. What they were actually doing to the Africans and the Native Americans and other peoples all over the world, was enslaving them. The fact that they not only wouldn't admit this but honestly couldn't see it, couldn't see that what they were bringing was oppression, calls for levels of blindness to the faults of one's own society that are hard to imagine. I don't doubt the accounts of the time that they really believed they were civilizing the wild godless savages, doing them a good turn. They probably even expected to be thanked in some future time for bringing Anglo-Saxon superiority to their shores.

The Tuatha de Danann also possessed some magical objects, one of which was an inexhaustible cauldron of food that would never run out and from which no man would ever leave unsatisfied. One wonders why they would have needed agriculture if they had the magic endless bucket O chicken. One answer is that the magic cauldron wasn't a substitute for agriculture, it was the result of agriculture. Imagine a hunter-gatherer staring at a granary that contained enough grain to feed the whole village for two years. Would such a structure (roughly cauldron shaped perhaps?) not seem an inexhaustible supply of food and in fact magical? Certainly no one man would ever eat to the bottom of it. Granted, one might be tempted to write off the story of the cauldron, and the whole thing, as so much higgledy-piggledy nonsense, but that nonsense has been communicated down the generations for millennia. While the literal truth of the magic cauldron is of course nonsense, there are truths behind most legends. To a person who never sees any more food than one killed deer or whatever his next handful consists of, a large granary is very impressive and could very easily be mistaken for magic. The persistence of these magic cauldrons in Celtic myth certainly points to some powerful experience which has become obscured by the mists of time.

Secondly, the Formorians: they are clearly depicted as chaotic, primeval and atavistic. The opposite of the bright and shiny and civilized Tuatha. They have two related features that are most interesting for the purposes of this discussion: they are often depicted as partly animal, and they are depicted as having multiple forms. So for instance, some of the Formorians are clearly completely human in form, even beautiful, while some others are depicted as having goat heads on human bodies and other such things. And yet the Formorians are one people, not multiple, and they are the same species as the Tuatha (or very close) since they are able to marry them and have offspring. Again, you have to give some leeway for this being mythology, but maybe not completely. I think there is a kernel of truth behind these outlandish legends.

One tendency of hunter-gatherer societies that tends to diminish the more "civilized" the society becomes, is the tendency of priests and shamans to wear animal skins ritually or even take on the personality or become possessed by the spirits of animals. In hunter-gatherer societies it is basically a universal, and no better demonstrated visually than by the paleolithic rock painting of the shapeshifted "Sorcerer at Trois-Freres," made around 13,000 bce. Here the feet. legs and hands are human, and everything else is animal.

Images of antlered and semi-animal humans are very common in pre-agricultural and early post-agricultural societies and with a few exceptions tends to disappear in more hierarchical societies, as presumably does the wearing of animal parts by shamans and spirit possession of shamans by animals. One might be tempted to note ancient Egypt as an exception, with their plethora of animal-headed gods, but these are clearly gods not human beings. In ancient Greece and Rome, animal form disappears from both the figures of the gods and the regalia of the priests (with the exception of a few marginal cults perhaps.) Images of the gods become wholly human in appearance, denoting perhaps a disconnection from the animal world and a preoccupation with the human one. The fact that there are priests who officially handle a person's interaction with the gods signifies a distanced and abstracted relationship.

So a visitor from an "advanced" society who sees animal-human forms in a dark forest and who sees these creatures acting like animals not humans, might be excused for thinking that they aren't human. Moreover, shapeshifting is a common theme in most shamanic cultures, by which I mean that I don't think that they actually turn into animals but that they can put on the quite convincing appearance of being one. This shapeshifting is an attribute which is normally transferred to gods, not humans, in hierarchical cultures like the Greeks and Romans. Zeus might be able to turn into a swan, various divine beings change form with ease, but people cannot.

III. Semi-Divine Beings

Both the Tuatha de Danann and the Formorians were considered to be semi-divine beings by the Milesians who were considered the ancestors of the modern Irish people. The Christians who recorded these myths were careful to call them "semi-" divine, but they are often considered to be half-remembered relics of the archaic gods of Ireland. Of the two though, the Tuatha de Danann would clearly be agricultural and civilized gods, perhaps the very same gods as the gods of the ancient Celts, and the Formorians the wild ancient deities of the hunter-gatherers that preceded them. However the Tuatha de Danann and the Formorians can also be seen as the peoples that worshiped these gods. In other words, the Tuatha represent the first wave of the ancient Celtic invasion of Ireland and the Formorians represent the pre-Indo-European peoples that were there originally.

If so, then a rather sad picture emerges, one that was undoubtedly repeated around the world throughout the Neolithic Conquest. The Tuatha, the first wave of Celtic immigration, invade and eventually displace the Formorians by virtue of the high population concentrations that crops and flocks make possible. It is said that the Formorians are eventually "swept into the sea" by the Tuatha.

The Tuatha in turn are displaced by a new wave of Celtic immigration, the Milesians. According to legend, the Tuatha and the Milesians make a deal and divide Ireland, but the Milesians get all the land that is on or above the surface of the Earth and the Tuatha get all the territory below the surface. So the Tuatha retreat into the sidhe, the fairy mounds, the various ancient tombs and mounds dotting Ireland. They retreat to the underworld or otherworld, from which they supposedly occasionally make forays into the world of men as elves or other fey beings. The Tuatha have "become" ancestors, withdrawn into the world of the ancestors represented by the mounds, which is the same place as the underworld or otherworld. Which might just be a snarky way of saying "they're all dead," but certainly their influence on Celtic mythology was far from dead. They would continue to put in appearances even as far away as Britain, where the Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend and in fact Merlin himself were reputed to be at least partly "fey," supernatural descendents of the Tuatha de Danann.

The Formorians and their lore, unfortunately, was swept aside and forgotten, as one day the lore of the Celts in most of Europe would also be swept aside and forgotten, and their druids killed, when Rome invaded Western Europe. In other words, just as the Formorians were deprived of their culture by the 'civilized' Neolithic conquerors of their time, the Celts would one day be deprived of their culture by a more hierarchical and 'civilized' society with a more abstract and distanced religion, the Romans. It's a sad tale, both for the Formorians and eventually for the Tuatha. One becomes extinct, the other becomes a dim and misty legend. One that would probably have been lost to the sands of time had the Romans not stopped short of invading Ireland.

Modern shaman

Native American rock art

Perhaps the Celtic antlered god Cernunnos

Lion Man of the Hohlenstein Stadel, the oldest known zoomorphic (animal-human) sculpture and the oldest uncontested example of figurative art, period. 40,000 years old, twice as old as the cave art at Lascaux.

Native American rock art, a horned entity.

Little People

I have to confess to never having seen a fairy, pixie or gnome. When I was 5 or 6 years old however and living in the Park Cities, I firmly believed in them. We lived in a rented house next to a park with a duck pond, a wonderful place to grow up, and our back yard abutted on the park. I would go walking through the park looking for duck eggs to throw around. Anyway, near the fence abutting the park we had a tool shed of some sort, and a gap between the shed and the fence, and in this vicinity I was sure lived little people of some sort. I never saw them, perhaps never even visualized them as people-like exactly, but I was sure that they were there, that I liked them, and was pretty sure they liked me. This was in contrast to the gnomelike beings who lived in the house, who I didn't care for and I often accused of stealing my toys. Again I never saw them, but I was sure that tiny malevolent beings were responsible for the unexplained absence of my things. Having two younger brothers, it is entirely possible that tiny malevolent beings WERE responsible. ;)

Little people are one of those universal constants found in the mythology of people around the world, from Native Americans, Irish and Greeks to the Philippines, Indonesia and the Hawaiian Islands. Partly, like my missing toys, some of it can be explained by the human tendency to blame others when we misplace our things, or when something breaks. The "gremlins" which were blamed for equipment malfunctions during WWII, and the Dryer Gremlins who we halfheartedly blame for the fact that we only have one of each pair of socks, are other examples. Clearly, having only one sock from each pair wasn't OUR fault, it is some mysterious conspiracy of the cosmos. ;) Small sock-loving black holes distort the space-time continuum to nom on our socks. My mom, who has senile dementia, has poop gremlins. She can pull down her trousers and look at the load in her diapers and then look at me with a perfectly straight face and say, "I didn't do that." ;) Little people clearly were responsible.

Some little people like brownies and hobs are Christianized survivors of old household gods like the Roman lares, the Anglo-Saxon cofgodas, and the Germanic kobold. These in turn evolved mostly from ancestor worship, which was widespread in the neolithic world. The idea is that one's ancestors would look after the hearth and home if you treated them right, which is exactly how brownies, hobs and kobolds were perceived. Treat them right, and they look after you. There was a time, in some places not that long ago, when a seat by the fire was always reserved for such entities. Some, like the Tomte of Scandinavia, are still part of local customs: in the Tomte's case, part of Christmas customs. Others made their homes in mines or on ships at sea, and other places where people lived in dangerous conditions. Others were perceived to be of a definitely wilder sort, and either didn't care for the company of people or were outright dangerous to them. These were most likely survivors of ancient spirits of place, places where you might propitiate the local spirits with offerings but you definitely wouldn't want to meet one. When people became Christianized, they put different names on them: not gods but fairies or spirits. Necks, water spirits, were one: in the Bronze Age in Europe, vast quantities of goods were sacrificed in bogs and fens to the local water deities. These deities however, being at the gate to the Underworld, were to some extent dangerous beings and were often blamed for accidental drownings. With the advent of Christianity, people's thoughts about such beings didn't disappear but took on a less religious aspect or sometimes a demonic aspect.

It is very difficult for us today to place the word "god" on such beings, used as we are to the idea of one omnipotent omnicient immortal god. However in ancient times, even very local and specific gods of specific places were sacrificed to, and nobody thought they were omnicient or omnipotent, or immortal either. Even major gods warred among themselves and could die. In fact, the deaths of gods make up some of the most important stories in ancient mythologies. Marduk vs. Tiamat, Zeus vs. the Titans, and Ragnarok, the future death of the entire Norse pantheon. For the word "god" in pagan or animistic cultures, it might be best to substitute the concept of beings of the Underworld or some other dimension of reality, of varying powers, some of whom might be perceived as fairly important to the functioning of the Universe and others not.

Getting back to little people, walking in nature one often sees things happening, as it were, out of the corner of your eye. Things you might not have a ready explanation for. You may hear music that shouldn't be there and be unable to find its source. You may feel someone is watching you. Things pop out of the ground and go back into the ground before you identify them. Most of these things, like the Dryer Gremlins that steal your socks or the Toy Gremlins that stole my childhood toys, have perfectly prosaic explanations. Fairies, charming though they are, are at least mostly other phenomena misunderstood.

Mostly; I am unwilling to say always. I am agnostic on fairies per se. As much as they are often artifacts of human psychology, they are also pointers to the boundary of the Underworld or Otherworld, a world present but not readily perceived. It is usually called the Underworld because the clearest analogy to it is the soil: the dead go to it and new plant life springs from it. The past is present in it, literally in the form of fossils. It is the hidden part of the present. The future is planted in it as a farmer plants seeds. It is not cut off from the world like the Judeo-Christian heaven, but not readily accessible from the visible and normal world either. As it were, just beyond the corner of your eye. For the ancients, it is where the ancestors lived and continued to inform and feed into (and sometimes on) the world of the living. It's where today's dreams dwell on the way to becoming tomorrow's realities. I usually refer to it as the Dreaming.

Now, am I merely being poetic when I refer to the Underworld? In some form it is a near universal human constant, and people all through history and presumably prehistory did not find it at all difficult to believe. Part of the problem lies in our relatively modern myth of sequential time: that the previously manifest world causally produced the currently manifest world at a different tick of sequential time. So then the past that caused the present is entirely gone, as the future will replace the present, making it entirely gone. Tick, tick, tick: the past is replaced by the present which will be replaced by the next sequential present. This is not however how we experience time. We experience time as a continually morphing present which is never divided into static instants. Since the past has nowhere to go but the present and the future has nowhere to come from except the present, this gives rise to the idea that the world is divided into manifested and unmanifested parts, revealed and hidden parts, and that the past exists in this unmanifested part and the future also arises from this unmanifested part. This view of time was also one of the revelations of some of the phenomenological philosophers like Heidegger: being continually reveals itself and hides itself at the same time, and this continual morphing in the moment is time. So for instance when a Roman made an offering at the Umbilicus Urbis Romae, the symbolic center of ancient Rome and gate to the Underworld, or when an ancient Briton sacrificed to an ancestor, the effect of the offering wasn't viewed as being displaced in time but in place. From the manifest to the unmanifest world, and the commerce would operate in the other direction as well.

Ultimately this idea of the Dreaming or the Underworld will remain alien to most people because this idea of sequential time and sequential causality is hammered so fully into our heads that we literally can't think differently.

While I have never and might never see a fairy (nor do I expect to), in a moment of whimsy I made a little fairy house for them in the back yard, from pieces of bark and stones with pecan shells and acorn shells as furniture. It was a wonderfully ancient-feeling thing to do. I felt that someone 20,000 years ago might have done the same sort of thing. It's the sort of thing I'd like to do more often. A house for unknown little things to perhaps move in and make themselves comfy. ;)

They Won't Save What They Won't Love

Pythagoreans celebrate sunrise by Fyodor Bronnikov.
Already in ancient Greece there existed a significant tension between reverence and exploitation,
between pagan worship of the natural world on one hand and the world-denying abstract philosophers
like Plato on the other, and of course between democracy for some (male citizens) and servitude for
others (women, slaves.) The Pythagoreans to their credit gave women equal place among them.

It would be nice and tidy to blame the Christians for the process by which the natural world was stripped of its sacred nature. To blame them for the process which led to the natural world being considered "dead" matter and which led to the Spirit being considered at first completely otherworldly in nature, opposed to Nature itself, and then ultimately nonexistent as Christianity gave way to scientific materialism. However, they didn't start that fire, it started burning long before they came around. At the risk of sounding politically correct, you can start tracing that arc from the moment that power shifted to men from women; when people started mainly worshiping male gods; when the aggressive, property-making and property-seizing and objectifying aspects of the male nature started running rampant; when women became property. Science, which was once upon a time fostered by pagans who at least claimed to worship gods of Nature, got in bed very nicely with Christian philosophers who considered all except the "immortal human soul" to be dead matter. Cartesian dualism: the soul is alive, the world is dead. And then of course Science got rid of the soul too, so now there is no pesky religious reverence of anything to get in the way of the conquest of Nature.

It's really a simple process, and Christianity is only the latest in a long line of ideologies which can be used to justify exploitation. In wars, your government does its best to make you consider the enemy less than human. In political struggles, you do the same thing. Damn hippy liberals or stupid redneck conservatives. When you want to steal the land of some minorities or other, you do the same thing, as was done to the Native Americans when the Europeans wanted to steal their land, or to Mexico when the United States wanted to steal the Southwest. When you want to despoil the planet, you first kill it in your ideology before you kill it in fact. If you want to kill a river, choke it with pollution and the debris of industry and dam it and divert it, you first have to regard it as having been dead all along. Mere matter, mere things. Things don't matter. The ducks and fish and frogs and birds and beavers and raccoons and everything else that lived there, really they were always dead matter all along and of no importance. Only people matter... until THEY get in your way, in which case they don't matter either. So says power, so says the objectifying male worldview, so says the worldview that makes all things, even people eventually, mere property. To save a river you must first love it. To save the planet, you must love it. Not intellectually, not with your cerebral cortex alone, but with your heart. It is not enough to want to curb human predations on the environment for humans sake. A mother doesn't risk her own life to save her child, for her own sake. She does it because she loves the child and would do anything for it.

I can promise you that if the despoilers of the planet love their money more than you love the Earth, they will win. Because they love their money a lot. They love turning woodlands into Wal-Marts. They love razing boreal forests for tar sands. Unless a lot of people come to love Nature more than that, they will always win.

Therefore I want to make a scandalous proposal: bring back the old gods. Not the old gods of Odin, Tiw, Frig, or Apollo, Zeus and Aphrodite - older than that. Before the worship of the anthropomorphic, abstract and composite gods of ancient Greece, Rome, or the Vikings, was the worship of the concrete, nonhuman, mortal material gods of the real world. 

What gods am I talking about? It is I think a testimony to how far we've gone along the path of devaluing the natural world that most people really aren't going to get this at all, or will immediately think it foolish. 

I am talking about the Sun. I am talking about Water. I am talking about Earth, the soil under our feet, that grows our food and accepts our bones. Wind, clouds. Spirits of place. Rivers. Oak trees. The Celts had sacred groves of oak trees, as did the Romans (though this did not keep the Romans from destroying the Celtic sacred groves in their wars.) What is the difference between holding the oak trees holy in their own right or holding them holy because of their association with a god? One: to hold them holy on a god's account places holiness in an abstraction. To hold them holy in their own right is not an abstraction, it is an encounter with the real trees themselves. Sequana was held to be the goddess of the River Seine in Celtic religion, but Sequana was not a separate being floating around in some heaven somewhere. Sequana was in fact the Seine herself. Sulis was the goddess of the thermal springs at what is now Bath, England: but Sulis was not regarded as an abstract heavenly being that had adopted the springs but was the spring herself. Later on the Romans tagged on their abstract goddess Minerva to Sulis' name, and they became the springs of Sulis Minerva, but originally Sulis was a very local goddess.

Look at the picture at the top of the page, of Pythagoreans celebrating sunrise. Does it look like they are revering the Sun on behalf of some otherworldly god, or are they in fact just revering the Sun? The Sun, it seems to me. It is unfortunately an experience most modern people will never have. Their loss. Of course it will be said that the Sun is mostly a ball of hydrogen plasma, and who would worship that? This is because people think the Sun is "really" their abstract understanding of it (ball of mostly hydrogen) and not their actual experience of it (source of light and heat, powering all that lives.)

I was sitting in my Dad's old room a minute ago, with my cat Mango napping on the bed, and realizing that the Sun in fact powers all of this including myself. The Sun powers Mango by way of animal flesh, which is fed on plant flesh, which gets energy from the Sun. The lights overhead are mostly powered by the Sun by way of fossil fuels (some nuclear energy). I am powered by the Sun. All my friends and family and everything I know is powered by the Sun. If the Sun is not holy, nothing is holy. I have never seen a hydrogen atom with my own eyes, but I see all this with my own eyes, and none of it would live without the Sun. And yet all the time we regard the abstract Sun (ball of hydrogen plasma) as the "real" Sun. The scientific experience of the Sun is just another experience of the Sun, and is valid as far as it goes. It is not the ONLY experience of the Sun. The understanding of the Sun as ball of hydrogen plasma does not trump the understanding of the Sun as that which enables any of this to be here at all. They are just two different views of the Sun, one is not more real than the other. 

Water: is "two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen" more "real" than our actual experience of water? Our actual experience - water is what makes life possible. It gives life and it takes it away. Water has innumerable moods: fog, ice, snow, floods, gentle rain, terrible storms, heaving oceans, lily ponds. If the Sun is a god, Water is surely a goddess, by turns wrathful and benevolent. Again, if Water is merely di-hydrogen oxide to you, you will be unlikely to protect the places where it is busy giving life. Because you will think it is mere dead matter, and so you will not love her. Not loving her, you will not respect her.

Soil, earth, the ground below us, what a pregnant goddess that is. Accepts all the dead and brings forth new life from it. For very early Europeans, "heaven" (the afterlife) was not usually above us, it was below us. The soil is the past, and brings forth the future. It is not for nothing that in Greco-Roman mythology, Ceres, the goddess of fertility, grain, agriculture and motherly relationships, was deeply connected to the underworld. In the very center of Rome there was a deep pit that was considered the connection to the Underworld, and most days of the year it was covered, but three days a year it was opened and people threw offerings into the pit including the first fruits from the harvest, and one of the goddesses that were sacrificed to there was Ceres. Goddess of life and of the dead at the same time, because we are all either busy growing or busy becoming compost, and yesterday's compost is today's apple. ;)

And the old gods are capable of infinite gradations of being. There are little gods everywhere. I am a little god, you are a little god, the live oak tree at Flag Pole Hill is a little god. The goddesses of the thermal springs at Bath and the goddess of the Seine are examples, very local and small and not big headliners like the Sun, but maybe very important to your experience if you live near them. 

So in the end, either all are holy or none are, take your pick. If the Sun is not a god, there are none. I prefer to say that all is holy, even the little and perishable gods are holy, even maybe those less than gods are holy in their own right. All are holy, or none are. You will regard the world as either your property to be despoiled as you please, or as something that you should respect and love in its own right. As what it is, not as what you can use it for, not merely a means to your own ends. As beings not things. 

"Druids cutting the mistletoe" by Henri-Paul Motte

Agora

Only just now heard of and watched this movie, about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the death of Hypatia in 415 a.d. I very much recommend it, though it is a rather sad affair, as the events it is based on were sick and sad events.

In a way, the movie has only parenthetically to do with "paganism" - Hypatia appears more scientist and secular philosopher than religious, though of course the whole Hellenistic worldview and all Classical learning was considered by the Christians of the time to be pagan. Her dad was apparently a high-up in the temple of Serapis which was associated with the Library, but in terms of pagan practices we see very little except as it were in the corners of the action and the details of scenes. A majority of the characters in the movie, even the relatively "enlightened" characters, are Christians, though some were Christians of convenience perhaps. Due to the edicts of Emperor Theodosius, who eventually closed the ancient temples and outlawed pagan practices and holy days, anyone who wanted to keep their position in the Empire had to convert. Orestes, who at the beginning of the movie was clearly pagan is later seen as the "Christian" prefect of Alexandria. He tried in vain to resist the advance of the murderous Bishop Cyril and Christian mob rule. Very little time in the movie however was spent directly depicting paganism.

And yet I found the images of the desecration of the pagan temples and the destruction of the beautiful artifacts of classical antiquity powerfully moving, almost as if they stirred some sort of race memory of a time when anyone of a "pagan" persuasion was persecuted and killed. I actually stopped in the middle of the movie and lit a candle in my home shrine, which in some respects is a continuation of the Roman lararium, the shrine in every good pagan Roman household to the household spirits. I felt a terrible sense of loss, and of the losses that have only mounted since the time when the last threads connecting the sacred and the natural worlds were violently severed. It was a process that began long before then, began even in the days of the world-denying Plato and his teacher Socrates who turned away from the World and Life and towards words and concepts. Hypatia ironically was a Platonic philosopher. The rise of Christianity didn't happen in a vacuum, pagans themselves contributed some of the ammunition that would be used to destroy them. Paganism had become anemic and weak, divorced from nature, for most people a mere State ritual of the Roman Empire. The reverence of Serapis himself was mostly a State cult invented by an Emperor to weld together his European and African dominions. For Emperors to invent cults is an inherently cynical thing, and shows how little it was taken seriously, and how moribund Paganism had become. However prevalent the causes it all finally came crashing down then, at the end of the Empire and the end of the Classical world.

Lararium, household shrine in Herculaneum. Image by Kleuske

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I use "paganism" in quotes because Paganism is a big tent with many varied and unruly occupants. In the movie, Hypatia appears to have rarely had anything to do with actual pagan religion and was only pagan by exclusion, because she was a Hellenist and a Platonist. I am an animist, so for me the only gods in the classical sense are the Sun and sky spirits and water and Earth spirits, and I am perfectly happy to call them just that. Sun, Sky, Water, Earth. Below, innumerable spirits which might be called gods, spirits or just beings, mortal and perishable gods, but important just as they are. All are mortal gods really, even the Sun dies someday. Other people are adherents to the old Anglo-Saxon or Nordic pantheon, still others the Classical pantheon, and others, most prevalent perhaps, the various goddesses and gods of the witches. We are a varied lot and don't do a very good job of getting along it seems. But whatever we call ourselves, and whatever names we call each other, the Christians all call us one thing: 

Pagans. 

Perhaps it is well to remember 1600 years of persecution, as a history we all hold in common, and agree to keep on being varied and fractious agreeably. ;)