'Humpty, do you ever come across pagans?’
He laughed. ‘All the time. A day never passes when I am not invited to something like Lupercalia or a New Moon festival.’
I thought, Say what you will but he does get about.
Take it all in all and I suppose you might say laughter without limits might define pagans. Charles the Second brought merriment (and the maypole) into the Anglo-Saxon melancholy that had prevailed for a millennium in England. Blame the weather. Blame, too, the arbiters of the Christian faith who had imposed a sour regime of gloomy sin-avoidance on the baptized. Swinburne had a word for it: ‘a world grown grey’. A reinstatement of the virtues, as Alasdair McIntyre has proposed, is long overdue.
O.K. then. All pagans are cheerful. To be a pagan is to celebrate Samain, Beltane and other natural high-points. Pagans are not short of days to have a knees-up. And for some pagans that is the beginning and ending of the matter. Nature must have its way. And although nature has some unpleasant characteristics (red in tooth and claw), it does on the whole favour the principle of choosing life rather than apathy, colour rather than drab, enjoyment rather than restraint. Because it is far from being tightly defined, paganism overlaps with pantheism and recognises the activities of the gods and the need to work with them rather than against them. If we in our green enthusiasm give too much rope to the reinstatement of nature, we may find ourselves playing into the hands of organised paganism.
And that may mean Wicca. Wicca is the reinstatement of witchcraft, the purview of witches and the manipulation of natural forces. Something like this is theosophy, the religion of Madam Blavatsky and Annie Besant, a vicar’s wife who lived a few miles away from where I am writing, who left her husband to became vice-president of the National Secular Society and later President of the Indian National Congress. Needless to say, Frank Besant’s old parish now has a cheerful incumbent who is far from being a pagan or theosophist.
Paganism takes many forms. It is a d-i-y religion and is hostile to the Christian understanding of revelation. Whereas the Christian faith can be seen as vulnerable because its title-deeds are universally available and subject to close examination, paganism is a moving target and can re-invent itself ad lib.
Be careful. You may find yourself to be a pagan without knowing it. Humpty knows better than to get involved.
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