Dear Ave Lucifer,
Thank you for your interesting and intelligent continuation of the thread. I think most of us have a trace, perhaps even a solid streak of pagan in our psyche, despite an assumed overall religion. Especially among those with strong connections to the land and the natural world, many of whom are rampantly superstitious, myself included. And having strong Celtic ancestry, inevitably my interest in their magick mythology, superstitions, druids and all asides, exercises a powerful pull.
Superstition of course is the belief in supernatural causality, i.e. that one event causes another without any natural process linking the two events. Of course these can equally relate to religion as they do to astrology, spanning omens, witchcraft, and prophecies, in other words, more or less any occurrence that contradicts natural science.
In fact, interestingly enough, the word superstition is generally used to refer to the religion not practiced by the majority of a given society, regardless of whether the incumbent religion itself contains superstitions. The word is also commonly applied to beliefs and practices that revolve around luck, prophecy, and certain spiritual beings, particularly the belief that future events can be foretold by specific but apparently unrelated precursor events.
Other than Judaism and Christianity, the mystery religions were the most influential religions in the early centuries after Christ. The reason behind the reference to these cults as ‘mystery religions’ is that they generally involved secret ceremonies known only to those initiated into the cult, with an objective of some kind of salvation.
Most of these mystery religions, would have fallen comfortably under the modern Pagan generic, and all exhibited common traits, we are certainly back to the ‘strong connections to the land and the natural world’ in my opening paragraph.
1) Central to each mystery religion was its adoption of an annual vegetation cycle in which life is renewed each spring and dies during autumn. Followers of the mystery cults found deep symbolic significance in the natural processes of growth, death, decay, and rebirth.
2) As observed earlier, each cult made important use of secret ceremonies or mysteries, often directly connected with an initiation rite. Each mystery religion, especially among the priesthood, also passed on a ‘secret’ to the initiate that included information about the life of the cult’s god or goddess and how humans might achieve unity with that deity. This ‘knowledge’ was always a secret or esoteric knowledge, unattainable by anyone outside the circumference of the cult.
3) Each mystery also centred on a myth in which the deity either returned to life after death or otherwise triumphed over his enemies. Implicit in the myth was the theme of redemption from everything earthly and temporal.
As Christianity developed in exactly the same environment as the existing Mysteries, and as none of us was around at the time, it is therefore safe to assume that there was a much stronger pagan connection than clerics would have us believe. The majority of Apothecaries, Healers and Doctors for example were pagan, as are a number of today’s alternative healers. They would worship at the totally pagan of temple of Asclepius in Athens where you went for major cures and to give thanks for them. In ancient Macedonia and Rome, an asclepeion was a healing temple. Another example of trade related pagan worship was Mithras worshipped by most members of the military.
Asclepius - The Temple of Asclepius was the world's first hospital
After all Christianity is only what we’ve been told by word of mouth or read, and the qualities of other religions would have almost certainly not have been highlighted in the zealous disciple's written word, more likely the associated evils and the impending damnation should one fail to convert! While working in a broad spread of Muslim countries in the past, you would regularly see articles in the newspapers published under the rules of the stricter regimes in the region, where people were accused of witchery, sorcery or exposed as exponents of black magic, all of which are considered as particularly serious crimes, within that body of belief and normally coupled with blasphemy.
