A Critical Analysis of Paganism
Milchar
“Satanism is Paganism that’s learned from its bitter experience”
/somebody on the old forum many years ago/
Many Satanists have positive feelings about Paganism. However, it’s worth remembering that Paganism was driven away by Christianity and other monotheist religions almost everywhere, and this does not seem to be a mere bad luck of history. Therefore, it’s advisable to analyse: what were the weaknesses of Paganism, and why did it fail to stand for itself? We need to learn lessons from the defeat of the ancient Paganism; this is the only way for us to hope for our future victories.
On the other hand, Paganism has survived in some places on Earth and is still a viable religion there. First of all, it’s Japan and (to a much lesser extent) India. (I’m going to explain later why modern Hinduism is a decline compared to its past.) These cultures give us a reason to think about differences between the national variations of Paganism and to look for strong points in those that managed to stand fast under the pressure of monotheism.
On the third hand, so to say, the monotheist religions did not appear out of thin air as somebody’s invention. They resulted from malignant degeneration of some cults that had existed within Paganism before. The most notable feature of the ancient Paganism was that it contained EVERYTHING — even the ideas that later gave birth to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
This, in turn, raises another question: how can we distinguish the healthy elements of Paganism from the ill ones? It’s no secret that Satanism often adopts ideas from Pagan traditions. This, however, poses the risk to catch some proto-monotheist infection that has been hiding behind the faces of the Pagan gods. Therefore, a very relevant question for us is: which cells of the ancient Paganism have grown into the cancerous tumors of Christianity and Islam?
And, the last but not the least: we need also to be critical towards our sources of information on Paganism, especially those about the traditions that no longer exist. Information about Pagan traditions does not often come from Pagans themselves; instead, it’s mostly Christian authors who have written it. They, obviously, aren’t interested to tell the truth about Paganism (if they know that truth at all). This is why it’s vitally important to be aware of the Christian propaganda that often fills the texts about Paganism written by mainstream historians. If Judeo-Christian authors say that Paganism is savagery, cannibalism and human sacrifice — it does not mean that cannibalism and human sacrifice are suitable for us and worth adopting. The same way, if those authors claim that the ancient Pagan peoples felt shame about nudity, abstained from sex before marriage, hated gays, and essentially differed from Christians just by not knowing about Jesus — this is yet another Christian lie and not a reason to take an example from those fictional “Pagans”.
This is why it’s also useful to specify what Paganism is not, e.g. to list the most common topics of Christian (Jewish, Muslim) lies about Paganism. As we are going to see, they are quite few and predictable. If we just throw away these known lies from the sources we have, it can become possible to extract some more information on Paganism from what’s left, from the details that seemed unimportant before.
I leave Buddhism beyond the scope here, because it’s neither Paganism nor monotheism. Among peoples that practice Buddhism I mention only the Japanese here, because they preserve their Pagan tradition and temples separately from their Buddhist ones.
Christian lies about Paganism
Surely they aren’t only Christian. Jews and Muslims have also made up lots of fakes. But, since the dominant culture of the world is based on Christianity, the Christian lies are much wider known and often claimed to be “science”. However, they don’t correspond to real scientific facts, such as archaeological findings.
The following points are the most common topics of Christian lies about Paganism:
• God’s servants. Christians, as well as Muslims, cannot imagine any other relationships between a human and a deity than servitude. However, real Pagans could talk critically about their gods, showed them in a hilarious way in comedies, and viewed the gods as powerful patrons rather than absolute lords.
• Bestiality. This is more of the harsh reality of life of Christian monks, or Muslim guys who cannot afford the bride price. A person grown up in the Pagan sexual freedom would not even think of this. The proof is simple: humans caught most of the sexually transmitted diseases from animals. Gonorrhea came from cows, chlamydia was taken from goats and sheep, and trichomoniasis came from chickens. (There was also syphilis that people caught from llamas, but it happened much later.) Ancient Greeks before the campaigns of Alexander the Great did not know any sexually transmitted diseases, although they had cows, goats, sheep and chickens. But when Alexander’s soldiers arrived at Palestine and acquainted closely with Jewish women there, they brought a whole bunch of consequences of the Old Testament morality back to their home…
• Anti-aesthetism. Christian authors often claim that Pagans worshipped some kind of crudely carved idols. But in reality, if we look at the surviving Pagan traditions (Japanese and Indian) or at the ancient cultures that we have enough information about (Greek, Roman, Egyptian), we can see that the aesthetic side of their cults has always been of great importance for them. All depictions of Pagan deities are made with outstanding finesse and embody their people's ideas of beauty to the maximum extent.
• Cults of abhorrent monsters. Essentially, this is yet another version of anti-aesthetism. Christian authors claim that Pagans used to worship the creatures that were actually a product of Christian fantasy: such as gargoyles and other fictional monsters that are often depicted by Christians when they want to show “Paganism”. It even prompted Jean-Julien Fulcanelli to erroneously assume that some of the church builders were secret Pagans who tried to preserve their faith for descendants by such a way. Certainly, this is nonsense: church buildings, especially in the Medieval times, could not contain anything that contradicted the interests of the church. Such pseudo-”Pagan” sculptures are Christian propaganda: look what terrible monsters those Pagans worshipped, while we worship god in the human form.
• Human sacrifice. Actually, it’s Christians who pretend to “drink Christ’s blood”, and it’s the Judeo-Christian Bible that describes Jephthah sacrificing his daughter and Abraham intending to sacrifice Isaac. Pagans don’t tend to commit such deeds. The claims of “child sacrifice in Carthage” were Roman war propaganda and have been disproved by modern archaeologists [1]. The tales of “human sacrifice to Moloch” from the Judeo-Christian Bible have no material evidence either: none of the surviving Phoenician texts ever mentions a deity named Moloch. So, the only place on Earth where we can find examples of repeatedly practised human sacrifice seems to be Central America, but even here we need to take the claims of mainstream historians with much caution. When I was searching for information about the Mayan calendar and possible grounds for claims of an impending apocalypse in 2012, I noticed that much of what we know about the traditions and myths of the native peoples of the Americas is based on Christian sources written a couple of centuries after those peoples were converted into Christianity. (Imagine a medieval Christian priest writing something about the Germanic or Celtic Pagan traditions: what would he have said about them?) Many depictions of blood rituals attributed to the Aztecs were actually made by the Spanish monk Bernardo de Sahagún, while the Spanish were burning all real Aztec and Mayan books they could find. Maybe there is no smoke without fire, and Aztec and Maya people really were practising something like this. But take into account that no other folks on Earth were target of so many libels as the Native Americans, because dehumanization of the victims is the first excuse for genocide that the perpetrators think about.
• Puritan morality of Pagans. Christian propaganda struggles to portray ancient Greeks and Romans as bloodthirsty savages and monster-worshippers, given their monuments and masterpieces of art that have been preserved. Therefore, some Christian authors lie in a smarter way: they claim that the people of Antiquity were essentially the same as medieval Europeans, and their morality was mostly the same too; it’s just Jesus that they did not know about. As a proof, they demonstrate texts in Latin, attributed to Ancient Roman authors, that propagandize views on morality almost indistinguishable from Christian dogmas. However, if we trace: where those texts came from, it often comes that they were “found” by the well-known forger of ancient manuscripts Poggio Bracciolini, and that it’s only a “copy” made by him that we have, while the original was lost in fire or disappeared some other way. Sometimes the text itself has Christian fingerprints: for example, using the word “god” only in singular, or condemning some sexual practices with words from the lexicon of Catholic theologians [2].
We can see now that the fantasy of Christian fakers is narrowly limited. What they attribute to Pagans is often actually some practices from Christianity itself. Notice also that educated Christians sometimes criticize the most obscurant practices of their religion (such as, for example, the "holy fire" in Jerusalem) calling them “Pagan”. So, we can make the conclusions:
1) church authors are totally ignorant about Paganism; they actually don't know anything but Christianity;
2) what they call “Paganism” is often some obsolete practices from Christianity itself.
The only point in the Christian propaganda about Paganism that does not appear to be 100% lie is the cults of ugly creatures. Such traditions, although they were quite marginal, really existed in some Pagan cultures. And it was just them that later transformed into Christianity.
The hidden roots of Christianity
Polytheism, which literally means “worshipping many gods”, is another name of Paganism. Some Pagan traditions know of several thousands of gods.
Satanists are often interested whether a particular Pagan deity is “dark” or “light”. This question appears to be way harder to answer than many people think. Wars between the gods are known in nearly every Pagan tradition, but the more I study the mythology, the more confusing the relationships between the gods look. Maybe I’ll write about it some day, but the information I have by now is definitely insufficient. The only things that I can say more or less surely are the following:
• Mythology mentions at least three wars between the gods.
• The opposing sides were more than two, and in different wars they were different.
• The wars of the Olympic gods against the Titans, and the Devas against the Asuras are conflicts within the same group of gods; neither of them can be defined as “dark” or “light”.
• The forces that look undoubtedly “light” appear quite late, almost at the very end of the epoch described in mythology.
Let’s start from the most obvious thing — the gods’ appearance in how the Pagans portray them. We can distinguish three main groups:
1) Anthropomorphic gods, e.g. looking so similarly to humans that they are depicted in, essentially, a human form. Sometimes they may have some non-human details (for example, extra arms or a third eye in Indian gods), but even in the depiction of these details, artists and sculptors maintain the human proportions.
2) Dragons and similar serpent-like creatures. The most interesting in them is that they don’t look similar to any reptilian species that lives on Earth now. Analogies can be drawn only with extinct dinosaurs, but how the ancient people could know the dinosaurs’ appearance? Maybe we lack knowledge of some interesting facts about our past…
3) Chimeras, e.g. creatures whose different body parts look similar to the ones of different animal species or humans. The ancient Egyptians worshipped especially many chimeras, which mostly had a head of some animal attached to a human-looking body. But some of them, like Sphinx, were the opposite.
Among the chimeras, the most relevant to our topic are the ones with a fish tail or any other fish-like body parts, because their cult had been one of the roots from which Christianity grew.
Strange as it may seem, but the creatures with a human upper body and a fish tail are a Christian element in the Western folklore. In Pagan traditions, the sea and river goddesses were fully anthropomorphic (like, for example, the Greek Oceanids, Nereids and Naiads). The sea and river maidens in the Germanic and Slavic cultures were portrayed as fully anthropomorphic as well; it was first in the Middle Ages when undines in Europe started to be depicted with a fish tail, and the Slavic rusalkas were shown as fully anthropomorphic attractive girls until the middle of the 19th century.
Then the question arises: where did all those creatures with the upper body of a woman and the lower body part of a fish come from? Their prototype was the Syrian goddess Atargatis. The priests of Atargatis used to cut off their penises and offer them to the goddess [3].
Now we can notice that Christianity has way more in common with the cult of Atargatis for it to be a mere coincidence. Let’s remember that:
• The “Revelation of John the Theologian” states almost in clear text that only castrated people will be “salvaged”.
• One of the first Christian theologians, Origen, castrated himself.
• In the Catholic church, singing of the castrates was an important element of the cult until the late 19th century.
So, the place is the same (Middle East), the idea is the same (hostility to human sexuality, ranging up to severing the genitalia), and the symbol is the same (fish). Think also about how thoroughly the Christian church used to erase all the dirty pages of its history, and to replace the memories of real Paganism with its propaganda. This is why we see now pseudo-”Pagan” gargoyles in churches and pseudo-”undines” copied from the scary Atargatis.
Another mutated Pagan cult that became a part of the Christian doctrine was the one of the Egyptian god Osiris. The very idea of the resurrection of Jesus was copied from the myth about the resurrection of Osiris. Some Christian church rites are also borrowed from the cult of Osiris: for example, the Christian baptism was copied from the ritual of initiation into the cult of Osiris, just replacing the Egyptian ankh with the Christian cross. The sale of indulgences in the Catholic church was also introduced first by the priests of Osiris.
But notice, that the Egyptian mythology says that Osiris too had its penis cut off, and it was a fish that ate his penis. And this fish became the symbol of early Christianity. The religion that hates human sexuality in any form took the fish that eats up human penises as its symbol. Then, what is the symbolic meaning of the water baptism rite? Is it a contact with that fish? It’s probably not accidental that some depictions of John the Baptist show him emerging from the water and having his legs covered with fish scales. Moreover: as we can see from medieval images, the crown of popes at that time had the shape of an open fish mouth with teeth.
So, although it’s often not easy to say whether a particular god is “dark” or “light”, one thing is now clear: any fish-shaped deities are definitely not on our side.
Analysis of the results of the religious war
The Persians: betrayed by infiltrated enemy agents
Initially, the Persians were nomadic people in Central Asia, before they settled down on the territory of modern Iran. Their religion was pretty similar to the Ancient Indian Paganism, even the names of many gods sounded almost the same.
Under the reign of Cyrus the Great, the Persians defeated the Neo-Babylonian Empire with unexpected ease and expanded up to the Eastern Mediterranean coast. Many cities, including Babylon itself, surrendered without resistance; some details hint on widespread betrayal.
After the victory over Babylon, Cyrus carried out radical reforms in his new empire. Mainstream historians claim that he was so deeply impressed by excellent organization of everything in the Neo-Babylonian Empire that he wanted to copy the Babylonian institutions in his realm. (The questions is why, since that empire collapsed in less than two years almost without attempts to defend itself.) Cyrus introduced a bureaucratic apparatus and hired Aramaic-speaking officials from the people of the defeated Neo-Babylonian Empire. This was yet another strange decision, because the official language of the Neo-Babylonian Empire was Akkadian, not Aramaic. Babylonian officials spoke and keep records in Akkadian, while Aramaic was the second most common language in the empire, spoken mostly in its northern provinces. It was just those places where the cults of Atargatis and Cybele were practised, whose priests used to cut off their penises to offer them to the goddess. And it was those places where many Jews lived, who had moved to there during the so called “Babylonian captivity” [4].
We see that Cyrus the Great established a bureaucratic apparatus in his new empire, and hired Aramaic-speaking officials, many of whom were Jewish. Mainstream history keeps silence about their influence onto the Persian religion. But it was exactly that time when the transformation of the Ancient Persian Paganism into the almost monotheist Zoroastrianism began. In particular, the ideas of hell and impending apocalypse were introduced, which were to a great extent similar to the Jewish Bible.
And it was just the beginning. A continuation followed about 700 years later. In the 2nd century a man of Jewish origin named Sassan managed to become a priest in one of the main Zoroastrian temples and to marry his son Papak to the king’s daughter. Then, as a result of court intrigues, all the other potential heirs to the throne died one way or another, and Sassan’s grandson Ardashir became the next king and the founder of a new dynasty, the Sassanides.
It was Ardashir who dogmatized Zoroastrianism to the final degree. He introduced a hierarchy of priests headed by the high priest. Tansar, appointed by him as the high priest, selected the texts from Avesta that he considered “true”, and ordered to burn the rest. Also he was destroying statues and images that did not conform to the canon he had introduced, and persecuted people who continued to practise the religion by the old way.
As a result, Zoroastrianism turned into a collection of long, boring and strictly regulated obligatory rituals. It was merely the name of Ahura Mazda and the respect to fire that remained from the original Persian Paganism. And, when the Arabs came, Persia became an easy prey for them, because for the Persians of that time even Islam looked like a livelier and freer religion compared to what Zoroastrianism had turned into by its end.
The Greeks and the Romans: underestimated the enemy
The Roman Empire conquered many diverse peoples with different cultures. Christianity in its beginning did not look outstandingly unusual within the Roman cosmopolitanism. The empire knew many other cults that were strikingly different from the Roman Paganism, and the Romans were quite used to this.
A significant weakness of any ancient Paganism, including Greco-Roman, was that it did not perceive itself as a separate religion, different from others (because there were, practically, no other religions at that time). For the Romans, the Christian god was just yet another deity among many others; they even erected a statue of Jesus in the Pantheon and were much surprised that the Christians did not like it. Initially, the aggressive spreading of monotheism looked for them as a conflict between the priests of different gods. This is why the defenders of Paganism struggled to clearly formulate: what exactly they were defending.
Even the proclamation of Christianity as the official religion did not make the Romans worry sufficiently much. That was not the first case when an emperor used his power to promote a new cult (although most often it was his personal cult). Commodus introduced Mithraism, Elegabalus pushed the Syrian version of the solar cult, and Constantine too looked for the Romans as yet another petty tyrant messing with religion.
However, the sneakiest stab in the back of the Roman Paganism came from the priests of Pagan temples themselves. They disagreed with Julian's reform proposal, because Julian's law regulating the activities of temples would have decreased the income that the priests were receiving from paid rituals on request.
Another important factor of the late Roman politics were mercenaries (mostly Goths) in the emperor's service. Those mercenaries were the first to convert into Christianity (since they were paid to do it), while the Romans and Greeks remained Pagan even when they risked serious persecutions for it. But there was one more problem: the proper Roman army was almost annihilated after the long period of civil wars (the so called "Period of barracks emperors"), and it was mostly foreign mercenaries who were hired into military service then. Also, the financial situation in the empire was quite precarious after those civil wars, and foreign mercenaries were paid less than Roman citizens. E.g. although Christians still were a minority of the population (by Constantine's reign: 16-17%, mostly in the Asian and African provinces [5]), the military force drifted more and more into their hands.
The history of the Christian offensive onto the Roman Empire leaves one question unanswered: what were the philosophers thinking? It was their task to do a comparative study of different cults that were practised in the empire, and it was them who should have been the first to realize the threat from Christianity. But nobody had really noticed it until the accession of Theodosius, when it was already too late to do anything.
Nearly all stories of "persecutions" of Christians in the Roman Empire are church fiction. In the 17th century a Jesuit priest, Jean Bolland, engaged into a serious study of the biographies of Christian martyrs. He came to be more honest than Christian priests use to be, and had to admit that the vast majority of stories about the massacres of Christians in Rome were obvious and easily refutable lies [6]. Mainstream historians, trying to prove the persecutions of Christians, cite Valerian's and Diocletian's decrees on dismissal of Christians from high positions in the state apparatus and military command, to which the "persecuted" Christians managed to climb before.
And, as usual, Sparta stands out on the common Greco-Roman background. There the cult of the Greek gods was preserved for longest, until the 11th century. When the Byzantines tried to convert the Spartans by force in the 9th century, they faced armed resistance. And the Spartans continued to worship the Pagan gods for two centuries more.
The Germans, the Slavs and the Hungarians: sold their freedom for glass beads
After the collapse of the Roman Empire, new folks came onto its territory. They saw the remains of a formerly great culture and, obviously, wanted to learn how to make something like this themselves. They did not realize that Christianity was what had destroyed that culture and not what had built it; nor did they know that their own culture and religion were much closer to the real Rome than what was called "Rome" by illiterate preachers wandering through its ruins.
"All the wealth of the world is divided into two halves: one is scattered throughout the world, and the other is collected in Constantinople." The luxurious Byzantine capital, which was supported by extortionate taxes from the rest of the empire, became an advertising showcase of Christianity, which was demonstrated to naive foreign visitors. It could be silenced that nearly everything in this city was built by the Pagans, and that the Christians managed to built their Hagia Sophia only on the third attempt: the first cathedral collapsed when still under construction, and the second was ruined by the first earthquake that came. No wonder, since the Roman Pagan science of construction engineering was already forgotten by that time. Christianity, like that pig from the fable, undermined the roots of the oak and now boasted of the last acorns from the already dead tree.
By the way, all petty kings and chieftains envied the Byzantine and Frankish emperors and wanted to obtain the same status for themselves. The Christian preachers sent to them explained soothingly that it was possible... almost. Just convert your people into Christianity, and that's all.
Here we see the same typical mistake of Pagans: treating the Christian god as just one more god, and seemingly a mighty one and bringing prosperity: look at that Constantinople! The Pagan peoples of Central and Northern Europe were just unaware: where that prosperity really came from, and what price the Christian god asked for it. By the time they learned it on their own skin, it was already too late.
Anyway, it's even interesting: when Olaf Trygvasson or Vladimir of Kiev converted into Christianity, weren't they afraid that Thor or Perun could strike them with a lightning for it? Did they really believe that the Christian god was stronger and would have protected them? Then we see that the principle "Might is right" is not Pagan. Where people live by this principle, Paganism does not last for long.
The Indians: fought back, but were severely wounded in the battle
First of all, it needs to be mentioned that only a tiny bit of the Indian culture from ancient Pagan times has been preserved until now. For examples: the ancient text Pannavana Sutra, dated back to the 2nd century BCE, says that there were 18 different alphabets in India by that time. Of them only Brahmi and Kharoshthi are known to modern linguists. Nobody knows where the rest of those alphabets has gone. There are several undeciphered alphabets found in India, but they are way fewer than 16. This means that a major part of the ancient Indian culture has been completely destroyed. Perhaps it happened during the times of the Muslim rule over India (from the 12th to 18th century, with some short breaks).
The oldest known manuscripts of the Vedas are dated to the 11th century, i.e. shortly before the Muslim conquest of India. However, it's important to notice that dating of Sanskrit texts is a complicated issue, because Sanskrit is a partly artificial language with a regularized grammar, which almost has not changed for over 3000 years. It's therefore possible that those manuscripts came actually from the 12th century instead, i.e. shortly after the Muslim conquest.
Mainstream historians claim that no older copies of the Vedas have been found because they were written on palm leaves, which are a short-lasting material. This sounds very strange, to put it mildly. Why use the cheapest and lowest quality material for writing down the main sacred texts? Paper was known to the Indians since at least the 7th century, and for the Vedas they could well be generous enough to use parchment.
The claims that the Vedas weren't written at all and instead were transmitted only orally aren't plausible for the same reason that Sanskrit is a partly artificial language that never has been spoken in everyday life. In order to spread a text in such a language you need to write it down first. Therefore, some written recordings of the Vedas must have existed since their inception.
It seems likely that the priests of Hinduism censored the Vedas according to requirements of the Muslim rulers, and this is why we don't have any copies dated long before the Muslim conquest. Scholars of Sanskrit texts note that some passages in the Rig Veda were definitely written later than the rest of the text. The allegedly "Hindu" text Shri Ishopanishad even speaks of one god and condemns sex other than for procreation. Also it's proven that the Manusmriti laws were redacted during the Muslim reign over India.
Can priests really commit such a sacrilege as rewriting the sacred texts at the request of a foreign religion? Surely they can! A well documented case took place just recently, in the middle of the 20th century: the Hindu priests on the island of Bali abandoned the Vedas altogether and wrote a totally new book Agama, which says that their religion worships one god named Achintya. This was the requirement of the Indonesian laws, which only allow to practise religions that worship one god and have one holy book.
Surely, preserving Paganism even in such a distorted form is better than nothing. But please note that this is not the first case when priests value their status and privileges higher than they value their gods.
The Japanese: won decisively without casualties
First Christians arrived at Japan in the middle of the 16th century; it was a Portuguese Jesuit Francisco Xavier and a group of converted aborigines from Portuguese colonies. From the beginning they lied that they came from India and not from Europe, and preached in a misleading way to make an impression to the Japanese that Christianity was yet another Indian cult. Since the Japanese knew that Buddhism had come from India, they were tolerant and even positively inclined to the new religion. Shortly after that, other Christian missionaries, mostly also from Portugal, joined Xavier's group.
It was a period of fragmentation and civil wars in Japan. Some Japanese feudal lords converted into Christianity in a hope of foreign military assistance in their fight against the rivals. Then the Christian missionaries, having obtained support from several local lords, got nasty and forgot that they were actually guests in Japan, tolerated here only in the hope of profitable cooperation. They called local paupers into their mission, gave them money for conversion into Christianity, and ordered them to go crash and burn Shinto and Buddhist temples.
However, the foreign aid that the converted Japanese lords had expected never came, and they lost the civil war. The resulted Tokugawa Shogunate regime viewed Christianity as a threat both to itself and to the Japanese state in general. The shoguns tolerated the Westerners to some little extent since they were interested in trade with Europe, but even trade contacts were reduced to the very minimum. At the same time, the Japanese converts into Christianity who refused to repent and return into Shinto were simply killed all up to the last one. Even those who converted back were treated with suspicion and had to prove that they did not secretly continue practising Christianity. So, this was the first time in history when Christians got treated the same way as they used to do with Pagans.
This was how Japan came to be the only place where people realized in time that Christianity was something else than just a cult of another god, and took appropriate countermeasures. The Japanese repelled the attempts to introduce Christianity on their land, which became the only clear victory of Paganism over monotheism by now.
The strengths and weaknesses of Paganism
Here are the most common mistakes that Pagans make when encountered with monotheism:
1) Failure to realize that monotheism is not just a cult of another god, but an ideology of genocide of everybody who refuses to worship that god.
2) Cargo cult in a broad sense, e.g. imitating the fashion and traditions of richer neighbors, including their religion.
3) The idea that, if somebody is stronger or richer, it means that the gods sided with him. The fortune of history is capricious, and the strong today can be the weak tomorrow. This is especially relevant for the ancient and medieval times, when too much of the fate of any folk depended on the person of the ruler.
Even one of these mistakes can become fatal for Paganism. The victory of the Japanese over Christianity was possible because they avoided any of these mistakes.
The strength of Paganism bases more in the culture than in the cult. The staunchest defenders of Paganism are those for whom it's not merely their faith, but also rich and flourishing culture, long and glorious history, memories about their great ancestors. And vice versa: peoples without great culture or long history are the first to convert into any other religion that's being imposed on them, especially if this religion comes from a richer nation.
However, long history by itself does not guarantee endurance of Paganism. If, in the course of that history, the Pagan religion was used as an instrument of politics and changed by request of rulers (like, for example, Akhenaten in Egypt), people would be way less ready to defend it. Notice that it was the Greek Paganism, not Roman, that survived for longest on the territory of the former Roman Empire. This was mainly because the Greek Paganism had never been an instrument of politics — unlike the Roman one, which was often messed with by the emperors wanting to introduce their personal cults.
The Japanese, despite all their successes by now, give also some reasons to worry. Their Paganism (the Shinto) became tainted with politics too after the Meiji revolution, and nobody knows where it's going to lead.
One more factor that can undermine the positions of Paganism is the institutionalized inequality between different population groups (like castes etc.), as it was the case in medieval Japan and still is in India today. If the Pagan establishment views this situation as the "natural order of things", those second-level citizens will be ready to convert into another religion if it claims to deny their low status.
Also, it's now clear that professional priesthood is an unnecessary and even possibly harmful institution. We have seen examples when the priests betrayed their gods for their privileges and money.
Anyway, despite all these problems and weak spots of Paganism, it has a very important and attractive strong point: freedom. From the assumption of existence of multiple gods it logically follows that you always have a choice — unlike those who believe in only one god.
Practical conclusions for Satanists
The pieces of art and even things for everyday use made by Pagans are a much more reliable source of information on Paganism than any written texts. The fact of Christian counterfeiting of Roman texts during the Renaissance epoch is known and proven, while it's not known about any forging of ancient sculptures and ceramics to a similar extent. Certainly, most of the ancient Greek and Roman art was just destroyed, but even the little that has been preserved can give much information on the culture that created it.
One more advantage of material artefacts over written texts is that they don't need translation. Even if a Pagan text is proven to be genuine, its meaning can get distorted in translation by multiple causes:
1) We cannot be sure that the ancient languages (for examples, Egyptian and Sumerian) have been deciphered correctly. Even in the seemingly well studied Ancient Greek the exact meaning of some words is still an issue for discussion among linguists.
2) One and the same word can have different meanings in different contexts. It can be so that some phrases in ancient texts were meant to be understood figuratively, but the knowledge of this died along with the native speakers.
3) The translators aren't Pagans either and, due to their Judeo-Christian prejudices, can have distorted something in the ancient texts. It can happen even unintentionally, because they are just unable to imagine a different worldview and different morality.
Anyway, it's way easier to write falsehoods in Latin or Greek than to fabricate a fake Greek amphora or Roman mosaic. Therefore, the images on amphoras and mosaics can be trusted more than any texts.
If you intend to use a supposedly Pagan text, it's worth to make some checks on it.
The first question to ask is: where has this text come from, under what circumstances have we got to know it? For example: if the text is claimed to be Roman, but it was found in a monastery in Poland, and its original was almost immediately lost in fire and only a copy was preserved, and the guy who claimed to find this text and to make this copy was a known counterfeiter of ancient manuscripts — you can throw this text into the garbage can with other Christian fakes.
The second question is: if the author of the text is known, how much can we trust him both generally and in this particular area? What was his reputation among the contemporaries? Did not they view him as a fantasist or an outright liar? And what could he know of the things he wrote about? For example: Plutarch wrote that the Spartans used to throw weak babies down from the rock. However, none of the ancient Greek authors who personally travelled to Sparta said ever anything like this, while Plutarch lived more than 200 years after the Roman conquest of Sparta...
The third test question is: could this text be written by a Christian (or Jew, or Muslim) pretending to be Pagan? E.g. whether the real author could be not a fanatic, but, for example, an educated European man from the 18th or 19th century, who could well disdain Christianity and have romantic dreams about the Antiquity, but was unable to break free from the prejudices of the religion he had been raised in. To put it more specifically: is there anything else Pagan in this text besides mentioning multiple gods?
A reliable sign distinguishing real Pagans from fakers and wannabees is their attitude to sex. No one Judeo-Christian liar can plausibly imitate the natural Pagan sexuality. He can turn the Christian morality upside down (like Donatien de Sade did), but cannot break free from its limitations.
So, what is Pagan sexuality? This question can be jokingly answered with a phrase from Anton Chekhov's comedy: "In Greece you can find everything!" Or, more seriously: all healthy manifestations of human sexuality were known to the Ancient Greeks. If they were unaware about something that you can see in modern porn, it's probably an ugly product of Judeo-Christo-Islamic morality. For example: the Ancient Greeks did not practise sadomasochism, fetishism of clothing and footwear, or zoophilia. Nor did they value virginity to any degree: the word παρθένος did not mean "virgin" as Christians often say, but an unmarried young woman. A παρθένος could already have children; they were called παρθένῐος, and this word was also used for any kids born out of wedlock. And the Parthenon (Παρθενώνας) was the temple of Athena the Young, not the virgin.
In general, the Ancient Greek culture can be viewed as a kind of the "standard of Paganism" — first of all, because politicians never interfered with the cult of the Greek gods and the philosophical concepts based on it. So, if you need an example of pure Paganism without distortions and admixtures, — this is the Ancient Greece. Fortunately, we have sufficiently much texts and art preserved from the Ancient Greek culture — unlike the cultures of Germanic or Slavic Paganism.
Despite of this, modern Satanists take undeservedly little inspiration from the Greek Paganism. I think that the main reason for it is the difference between the Greek aesthetics (first of all, the anthropomorphic depiction of the gods) and the Western stereotypes of "dark" cultural phenomena. However, this is mostly a product of mass pop culture, grown from the Judeo-Christian roots. If we think more thoroughly, we can find that the anthropomorphism fits well into the Satanic ideas.
As one unpleasant character said in the novel of one boring Christian writer: "Whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right?" Those who believe that they have the right portray their gods in an anthropomorphic form, to say "I'm almost like a god". The same way, those trembling creatures show their deities in a way that scares any trembling creature, or just prohibit depicting the gods at all — because the unknown is what scares those trembling creatures the most.
In general, we need to take any information sources more critically, not only when looking for knowledge about the ancient Paganism. We need also be more critical to the things that have already become a part of our Satanic culture. Let's look on everything that we call Satanic and ask: where has this all come from? Is not it a product of mass pop culture, which can play with "dark" images for increasing the sales, but remains Judeo-Christian in its essence? Are we sure that those demons did not source from the Christian "demonology" written by a Catholic monk to describe his alcoholic delirium? that the occult symbols we use don't originate from the Kabbala and other Jewish mysticism?
It's high time to throw all this Judeo-Christian junk into garbage. Our Satanic home deserves to host better and more beautiful ideas and images, created by those who did not know about Judaism, Christianity or Islam at all — the Pagans. Of course, everything that's already been said about distinguishing genuine Paganism from Judeo-Christian fakes needs to be taken into account.
[1] J.Schwartz, F.Houghton, R.Macchiarelli, L.Bondioli "Skeletal Remains from Punic Carthage Do Not Support Systematic Sacrifice of Infants" (PLOS One, February 2010) https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0009177 (^ back ^)
[2] James Adams in "The Latin sexual vocabulary" (London, "Duckworth", 1982) wondered: why the same Roman authors openly used words for sexual organs and practices in some texts while restraining from them in the other. Actually, these are just genuine Roman texts and Christian falsifications. (^ back ^)
[3] So, the answer to all joking questions about how to fuck an undine is: no way. This creature deals only with those who have their penis cut off. (^ back ^)
[4] Looking at what actually happened, there was no real "captivity". The Jews always used to settle on the whole territory of any empire that ever conquered Palestine. For example: after the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the Jews came to Greece, after the Roman conquest they settled on the whole territory of the Roman Empire, after the Arab conquests they appeared everywhere in the Caliphate. The Persian invasion was not an exception: after the "liberation" from the "captivity" the Jews were quite cold about returning to their sweet home Palestine and, instead, spread along the whole territory ruled by Cyrus, even as far as Punjab. (^ back ^)
[5] Rodney Stark "The Rise of Christianity. A Sociologist Reconsiders History." (Princeton University Press, 2020) (^ back ^)
[6] Notice this: the atrocities that Christians attribute to Paganism they actually are committing themselves. (^ back ^)