I’ve never been keen on pagans. They strike me as attention seekers with no actual merits to boast of except saying that they don’t believe in organised religion – something most of us got over at 15.
Claiming to be a pagan is also a way of hinting that you’re having better sex than everybody else, whereas the reality is rather like that of those alleged ‘witches’ who oft appeared in the News of the World when I was a child. Middle-aged suburban swingers sporting pendulous breasts and maternal thighs, posing coyly inside a pentagram – and the women were just as bad.
Pagans remind me of those idiots who bang on about former lives, but they’re always Cleopatra – never her slaves
Still, a vote’s a vote, and the state the Scottish Nationals are in, they’d do best to court all comers, no matter how much of a minority. The SNP minister for equalities, migration and refugees, Emma Roddick (she/her – of course), recently wished ‘Scotland’s pagan community’ a ‘very happy Winter Solstice’ on the Scottish government’s ‘social justice’ Twitter/X account.
She has been called ‘bonkers’ for her troubles. The waspish Scottish Tory Murdo Fraser reflected that ‘I’m sure the best wishes to Christians on the upcoming Christmas holiday will be along any moment’. Roddick clapped back, extending Christmas greetings to her constituents in the Highlands and Islands, writing on the 21st, ‘Yes it will, but not today, because today is the Solstice and not Christmas Day. See also the best wishes for Chanukah, Eid, and other important holidays.’ Determined to have the last word, Fraser wondered, ‘When is the satanist community getting their message of good wishes from the Scottish Government?’. For good measure he added a photograph of the Edwardian occultist Aleister Crowley with the caption ‘Scottish Government unveil their new spiritual advisor.’
I daresay that this was just a use-it-or-lose-it seasonal squabble between two adversaries; still, my sympathies are with Mr Fraser. It’s so predictable that someone had to mention the P-word at what used to be the one time of the year Christians could put aside meekness and mildness and get stuck in to their big festival without genuflecting to other belief systems.
As I’ve said, pagans are highly annoying. Like allergies (I bet pagans have loads) you get the feeling that a tiny number who actually believe what they say are bulked out by a geek chorus of dullards who want to appear interesting but can’t be bothered to do anything as time-consuming as read a book and thus become slightly less boring.
They’ve been on the march for quite a while now: in 2018 they demanded their own prison chaplains, called for their own ‘Thought for the Day’ slot on Radio 4 and acquired their own support group in the British Armed Forces, the Defence Pagan Network. For most of the year you can forget about them, but every winter they show up, dissing Christianity and capitalism and pining for the celebrations that went on before either, in the good old days when human life ended at the ripe old age of 35.
Having been traditionally oppressed by organised religion, women are falling for paganism in a big way; witch-influencers going wild all over Instagram. But – as with the rise of the TikTok hijabis – it’s a case of out of the frying pan and onto the pyre for daffy females who believe that Christianity is singularly mean to women. The Pagan Federation makes their racket sound a right old inclusive and diverse equal opportunities jamboree: ‘Women’s spirituality is one of the richest and most dynamic forces in modern paganism. Women are respected in all pagan traditions and have enriched paganism with a powerful vision of the goddess – the long-ignored feminine aspect of the divine. In paganism, women are priestesses in their own right, strong and proud…often deeply entwined with the aspirations of the women’s movement.’
I’m pretty sure, however, that would be the womb-worshipping wing of the women’s movement, the one which believes that menstruation, procreation and menopause are squad goals to be fetishised rather than the career, cocktails and contraception combo which is preferred by smart women. Pagans remind me of those idiots who bang on about former lives, but they’re always Cleopatra – never her slaves. With paganism, they’re going to be a high priestess – never a virgin sacrifice.
And where does paganism end and satanism start? It begins with saucy films like showing attractive Scandinavian chicks having mind-blowingly elemental pagan sex and ends up with Rosemary giving birth to a baby sporting a little curly tail – from horny to horned. Though I daresay that there are lots of lovely pagans who go around working at animal sanctuaries rather than sacrificing our furry friends as the season demands it.
Pagan progress in the 21st century has seen a similar rise in satanic boldness. The Church of Satan has issued a hilariously prim primer for prison chaplains. In 2004, according to the Sunday Telegraph:
A devil-worshipping non-commissioned officer in the Royal Navy has become the first registered satanist in the British Armed Forces. Chris Cranmer, 24, a naval technician serving on the Type 22 frigate Cumberland, has been officially recognised as a satanist by the ship’s captain. That allows him to perform satanic rituals aboard and permits him to a funeral carried out by the Church of Satan should he be killed in action. Ldg Hand Cranmer is now lobbying the Ministry of Defence to make satanism a registered religion in the Armed Forces. He says he wants satanists to be able to join the military without ‘fear of marginalisation and the necessity to put up with Christian dogma’.
Cranmer had added that he had been ‘warmly congratulated’ by his friends and family for becoming the Armed Forces’ first satanist. ‘From a military perspective, I believe in vengeance. I don’t consider satan to be an intelligently external force in my life; instead I consider it an empowering internal force. If I were asked if I were evil, I would say yes – by virtue of the common definition. However, if you asked my family and friends you would hear a resounding “no”. I get a massive amount from my career.’
I rarely agree with Anne Widdecombe but I do get why she told Reuters: ‘I am utterly shocked by this – satanism is wrong. Obviously the private beliefs of individuals anywhere including the armed forces are their own affair but I hope it doesn’t spread.’
People who think it somehow radical to reject Christianity as some kind of patriarchal plot should consider that Graeco-Roman critics mocked it for being not masculine enough. Celsus, one of the early church’s most merciless critics, said that Christianity was ‘able to convince only slaves, women, and little children’. The reasons I cleave to cultural Christianity are various. Aesthetically it wins hands down, comparing the Christian and pagan influence on everything from music to architecture. Christianity has got the St Matthew Passion and St Paul’s Cathedral – pagans have got Genesis P-Orridge and Stonehenge.
These days, though, Christianity is increasingly an act of rebellion and common sense – as Ed West recently pointed out in his essay ‘The New Theists’ for this magazine’s Christmas issue:
‘Perhaps the most influential of the New Theists is the historian Tom Holland, whose hugely influential book Dominion drew on a tradition going back to 19th-century French historians by arguing that liberalism and individualism were not 18th-century reactions to Christianity but its products. The New Atheist icon Ayaan Hirsi Ali cited Holland in her recent declaration of the Christian faith, which sparked a great deal of controversy, not because she had adopted irrational beliefs, but because of the almost calculating reasons for which she said she was embracing religion. Arguing that western civilisation is under threat from Putinism, the rise of radical Islam and ‘the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation’, Hirsi Ali wrote that an atheistic West lacks the tools to fight: ‘The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.’
From the hunting of the wren to the murdering of the unveiled women, what seeks to replace Christianity – and Christmas – will not be better. In light of this, let’s make it a merry one – and return refreshed to the task of defending our faulty, frail, beautiful and bold cultural-religious heritage in 2024.
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