ONE of the most common uses of the term ‘pagan’ is to name the ancient pre-Christian peoples.
Doing so with the lower-case ‘p’ is standard among academics to differentiate the ancient folk from us, whom they quite properly call Pagan’.
Most people don’t even grant us this capital distinction.
However, I see the use of ‘Pagan’ for the ancients as inaccurate thinking that needs to be discouraged.
It is common cause to say the Romans, Greeks and Egyptians were ancients who were not necessarily the same and so cannot be lumped together as pagans.
Lumping them all together is a way of diminishing their distinctiveness.
Consequently it is a finding of fact that no such people defined themselves as such.
Pagans existed as figments of imagination in the minds of those self-righteous ethnocentric exclusivists.
Equally logically, there never existed on earth people called neo-pagans either simply because if the ancients were not pagan, there is nothing for us to be neo-to.
‘Pagan’ originally simply meant not-Christian.
The in-group was later expanded to include the other Abrahamic traditions, Judaism and Islam, but as Christianity met yet other cultures, they too were labelled ‘pagan’ without the slightest attempt to understand these.
As for African traditional religion, there was not even any attempt to treat it as measuring up to the other paganised world religions.
Rather it was further relegated to mere ‘superstition’.
What is ideological imperialism?.
How can this make any sense, except with the myopia that divides the world into Christian and non-Christian?
We need to really understand other people’s religions and cultures if we are to be modest.
Let us take a leaf from Dan Brown’s deconstruction of the Bible itself.
He offers quite some insights which call for caution in our religious effervescence.
One of his characters in his novel, The Da Vinci Code, Teabing warns: “Everything you need to know about the Bible can be summed up by the great canon doctor Martyn Percy: ‘The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven. The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book’.”
About Christianity, which apparently is used to benchmark paganism, Teabing further enlightens us: “Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence, perhaps the most enigmatic and inspirational leader the world has ever seen.
As the prophesied Messiah, Jesus toppled kings, inspired millions, and founded new philosophies.
As a descendant of the lines of King Solomon and King David, Jesus possessed a rightful claim to the throne of the King of the Jews. Understandably, His life was recorded by thousands of followers across the land.
More than 80 gospels were considered for the New Testament and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them.
The fundamental irony of Christianity!
The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”
Those who are familiar with the history of Christianity will not take anything away from this incisive and compelling analysis.
Teabing further observes: “He (Constantine) was a lifelong pagan who was baptised on his deathbed, too weak to protest.
In Constantine’s day, Rome’s official religion was sun worship – the cult of Sol Invictus, or the Invincible Sun – and Constantine was its head priest.
Unfortunately for him, a growing religious turmoil was gripping Rome.
Three centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Christ’s followers had multiplied exponentially.
Christians and pagans began warring and the conflict grew to such proportions that it threatened to rend Rome in two.
Constantine decided something had to be done.
In 325 A.D., he decided to unify Rome under a single religion. Christianity . . . Constantine was very good businessman.
He could see that Christianity was on the rise, and he simply backed the winning horse.
Historians still marvel at the brilliance with which Constantine converted the sun-worshipping pagans to Christianity.
By fusing pagan symbols, dates, and rituals into the growing Christian tradition, he created a kind of hybrid religion that was acceptable to both parties . . . Transmogrification . . . The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable.
Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints.
Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus. And virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual – the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of ‘God-eating’ – were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions.”
I am quoting Dan Brown at length because he explains the evolution of Christianity better than I can do.
And he does that in a very simplified way: “Nothing in Christianity is original.
The pre-Christian God Mithras – called the ‘Son of God and the Light of the World’ – was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days.
By the way, December 25 is also the birthday of Osiris, Adonis and Dionysus.
The new-born Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense and myrrh.
Even Christianity’s weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans. Originally Christianity honoured the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun.
To this day, most churchgoers attend services on Sunday morning with no idea that they are there on account of the pagan sun god’s weekly tribute – Sunday.
During this fusion of religions, Constantine needed to strengthen the new Christian tradition and held a famous ecumenical gathering known as the Council of Nicaea (the birthplace of the Nicene Creed).”
The stunning truths here should tell you that Christianity, against which the rest of the religions are categorised as pagan, is in fact a direct beneficiary of especially African religion.
Need I remind you that the Roman gods are derived from the Greek gods which are in turn derivatives of Egyptian gods?
This point needs no belabouring.
Dan Brown has made it clear too.
I only happen to differ with him in one area: His uncritical use of the word ‘pagan’.
In his critical discourse, he makes no effort to stress that the terms pagan, gentile and heathen are derogatory, pejorative and negatively subjective.
Africans do not need to be pagan because they are different from the Romans or Christians at large.
We reserve the right to define ourselves and not see ourselves as we are defined by others.
Let’s all reject the tyranny of definition.
To this end, I declare that paganism does not exist.
Nobody is a pagan.
They are who they are.