Historical Roots of Neopaganism

Abstract

The article considers the philosophical and culturological prerequisites for the emergence of neopaganism in Western Europe at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It consistently outlines the history of neopaganism starting with the Renaissance, when the images of pagan gods became the pictorial embodiment of advanced humanistic ideas. Devoid of religious content as yet, they were already familiar to the educated people of Western Europe. The age of Enlightenment saw the myth of the Dark Ages being developed and popularized, directly linked with Christianity and Christian culture by Enlightenment philosophers in their works. At the same time, the image of a “noble savage” as an incarnate holder of virtues, Christian by nature, and yet emphatically deprived of the Christian religion and upbringing, was developing in literature. In the 19th century this was superimposed by the evolutionist theory of the emergence of religions, from the standpoint of which Christianity became only one of the forms that satisfi ed basic and universal human needs. A signifi cant contribution was also made by the concept of primordialism, which considered the people as a kind of ethnocultural historical constant. Within this approach, Christianity could be discarded without any signifi cant loss for culture, as values and virtues would not suff er from this, and the people would still comprise the same ethnocultural unity. Such ideas became the philosophical and culturological basis for the emergence of neopaganism. The upheavals of the twentieth century created the impetus for the emergence of the fi rst neopagan organizations. Many contemporaries considered world wars, the spreading urbanization and globalization as the inevitable consequence of the Christian-type development. The idea of returning to paganism became an attractive alternative for the part of the Western European society that was burdened by the processes of the twentieth century, The article also considers the origin and the emergence of neopaganism in Russia. It could be characterized by the same philosophical and cultural prerequisites as the one in Western Europe, but emerged with a certain historical lag. In addition, the Russian neopaganism had the ideological background of the communist propaganda as its important and striking distinguishing feature. The Christian images and meanings of the Russian traditional culture were either hushed up or openly replaced by pagan ones, as more suitable for the tasks of building a bright communist future. The knowledge of the described historical prerequisites will allow one to better understand both neopaganism itself and many related phenomena of the modern times.