I.
In John Buchan’s 1927 novel Witch Wood, a newly ordained minister of the Scottish Kirk, David Sempill, stumbles upon a pagan orgy in his border parish of Woodilee. It is 1644, the height of Scottish Covenanting and the War of the Three Kingdoms. Sempill, plagued by self-doubt over his political lukewarmness towards the radical politics of the Kirk, goes wandering in the woods for solace.
It is Beltane Eve, the night before May Day. His housekeeper tries to warn him in her broad Scots dialect, “This is the day they ca’ Rood-Mass and the morn is Beltane, and it behoves a’ decent bodies to be indoors at the darkenin’ on Beltane’s Eve.” Nevertheless, Sempill goes out. “Old wives’ tales,” he says.
To his horror, he discovers that the old wife in his household was warning him soundly. He stumbles first on a weather-beaten site of sacrifice with ancient markings on it (“Jovi Optimo Maximo”), draped in white. “This uncouth thing,” thinks Sempill, “has once been an altar.” The past tense is, it turns out, incorrect. He soon sees figures in the glade around the altar, “human or infernal…moving around it in a slow dance.”
Sempill, somewhat dazed and confused, begins to gain more clarity. He sees that the figures are not demonic: “The figures were indeed human, men and women both—the women half naked, but the men with strange headpieces like animals.” Sempill is soon appalled by what he sees. The dance he witnessed “seemed the uttermost evil,” with the gathering’s “grinning masks, the white tranced female faces, the obscene postures” and “music as horrid as a moan of terror.”
It dawns on him that these are his people. They are people from his parish, men and women who sit under his spiritual authority, and gather each Sabbath to worship and hear him preach. The figures he initially thought might be infernal are, in fact, people who profess Christ and live in submission to the Kirk.
Any lukewarmness he feels about the Kirk’s war against the Crown is replaced by a righteous anger. As Buchan tells it, “the fury of an Israelitish prophet came upon him.” Sempill attempts to assert his authority by verbal appeal, but the revellers ignore him: “The pipe screeched and the dance went on.”
God would not be mocked under Sempill’s watch, though: “A passion such as he had never known stiffened every nerve and sinew.” Sempill hurls himself into the dancers, “into that reek of unclean bestial pelts and sweating bodies,” and, reaching for the ancient altar, seizes the cloth and scatters the contents. Then he makes for the leader, a male figure wearing an outrageous animal head and pelt and playing the pipe. “Aroynt you, Sathanas,” Sempill cries, as he “snatched the pipe from the dog-faced figure, and shivered it on his masked head.”
II.
Christian readers of Buchan are no doubt sympathetic with Sempill’s righteous eruption. He is driven to a fury previously unknown by what he witnesses. A disgusting blasphemy such as a Rood-mass orgy cannot be tolerated by an earnest Christian, let alone an ordained minister of God’s word and sacrament.
However, a question hangs over the remainder of Buchan’s novel: why are these people, these people who profess Christ, participating in a pagan rite? What motivates them? What drives them to such heathen revelry?
These questions hang over the entirety of the Scriptures, in fact. Israel, the recipient of God’s special elective affection, the bearer of the Lord’s promises, repeatedly descends into the same madness that Sempill witnesses in the woods near Woodilee. They go after the Ashtaroths and Baals. They return to the worship of idols, the gods of the nations. Why do this, when they know the true and living God?
III.
God is clear. “You shall have no other gods before me” issues from his mouth to Moses (Ex 20:3). “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” (20:4). Moses is given further instructions about this later in the same chapter. God says that the Israelites are not to “make gods of silver to be with me, nor shall you make for yourselves gods of gold” (20:23). Yahweh is not like an idol. He is not to be compared to an idol. Indeed, idols do not belong with him. False gods are not Gods.
Yet the Israelites continually fall into the trap of idolatry and heathenism. Something draws them in. Even Solomon, who saw the glory cloud in the temple, received a direct answer to a prayer for wisdom, and enjoyed manifold other blessings at the Lord’s hand, went wandering after pagan promises. “His heart,” writes the historian in 1 Kings 11, “was not wholly true to the Lord his God.” He does not just miss a few gatherings in the temple or forget to do his devotions: “Solomon went after the Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites.” Even worse, “Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the abomination of Moab,” a god of death and plague, “and for Molech the abomination of the Ammonites,” who accepted immolated children as sacrifices (1 Ki 11:4–7).
Abominations. That is what these pagan gods are. Utterly bereft of any good. Repulsive. Wicked. Our righteous fury should be kindled when we read of Solomon’s spiritual unfaithfulness, just as Reverend Sempill’s was when he saw the orgy in the Scottish woods. There is no excuse for it, no winking at it. God is not mocked, nor does he share his glory with another, especially a devil. This is what Paul says when he parses the problem of the Corinthian Christians eating food sacrificed in pagan temples. “I imply,” writes Paul, “that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God.” No wonder Molech, Chemosh, and Milcom are called abominations. They are not just wood and stone; they are infernal rebels, demons that deceive the lost and steal rightful worship from God.
IV.
This does not explain the appeal of paganism, though. Nor does it adequately situate paganism as related to the universal human need to worship. Millions around the world, sadly, do not know the Christian God. Yet millions also worship something. That something is not nothing. If it is not nothing, then we should try and understand it.
The need to do this is urgent. As Louise Perry put so well in her diagnosis of the West’s spiritual crisis, “the Christian era” can be understood “as a clearing in a forest,” and “the forest is paganism.” The darkness of paganism is returning to our world. Indeed, it never went away, and Perry’s haunting conclusion is that “the forest” of paganism “is reclaiming its ground.” Our world is rewilding and re-enchanting. Whether this is a good thing is yet to be determined. We do know that paganism is one religious expression that is making a comeback.
Christians in the past have viewed pagans in sympathetic terms. The anonymous author of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf reflected on what his people had left behind in the pagan north. He did not pine for paganism, even though he pined for the old heroes. The Christian poet comments on the Danes’ heathen rites,
Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed
offerings to idols, swore oaths
that the killer of souls might come to their aid
and save the people. That was their way,
their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts
they remembered hell.[1]
The Danes, deep in their hearts, knew that they had to cry out to something. They remembered hell. The poet goes on.
The Almighty Judge
of good deeds and bad, the Lord God,
Head of the Heavens and High King of the World,
was unknown to them. Oh, cursed is he
who in time of trouble has to thrust his soul
in the fire’s embrace, forfeiting help;
he has nowhere to turn.[2]
Did they not know any better? Did the Danes ignore God’s revelation in the things that have been made? Do they have an excuse for their heathenism? The Anglo-Saxon poet thinks not. And yet God is described as “unknown to them.” At the same time, those who have to trust in “the killer of souls” are said to be “cursed.”
Nevertheless, the Nordic tribes were not without the blessing of God. The Christian poet, speaking through Hrothgar, King of the Danes, notes that God is kind to them.
It is a great wonder
how Almighty God in His magnificence
favours our race with rank and scope
and the god of wisdom; His sway is wide.[3]
These pagans are not entirely without an awareness of the Creator’s hand in their lives. But their despair, especially that of the Geats at the end of the poem when Beowulf dies, offers a clear insight into the pagan predicament. The Geats have no hope beyond this life, no comfort except from the security gained by a good and powerful ruler. Their horizon is limited to the temporal, and that includes their pagan religious beliefs.
V.
We all have experiences of the temporal where we feel a connection to the divine. We can all likely think of places of great beauty, peace, and power, where we simply must pray and praise. I often find myself conversing with God by the sea. This part of God’s creation is liminal, a thin place. The same could be said for cold mountain peaks or the never-ending desert sands. These places where the separation between nature and supernature seems almost non-existent.
Paul Kingsnorth describes his pre-conversion encounters with nature as infused with spiritual significance. In his conversion account, Kingsnorth says, “Nothing humans could build could come close to the intense wonder and mystery of the natural world,” adding that “this was my religion…my pagan grace.” Kingsnorth further states that he “found God in nature, so I needed a nature religion.”
This realization led Kingsnorth to join a Wiccan coven where he became “a priest of the witch gods” and carried out rituals under the full moon in the woods. Kingsnorth, like so many across the long millennia, found solace and spiritual experience in the liminal places of God’s creation. Like the backsliders in Buchan’s Witch Wood, Kingsnorth discovered significance “in the woods, worshipping a nature goddess under the stars.”
Paul’s theology of paganism is coherent with this. Nature, the things that God has made, is a real temptation to fallen humanity. “What can be known about God is plain” to humanity “because God has shown it to them…in the things that have been made.” God can be sensed, somehow, Paul is saying, in the things that he has made. However, this revelation in the post-fall world did not result in worship of the one true God. Instead, “their foolish hearts were darkened” and “they became fools.” They “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:19–24).
God is revealed in nature. Nature is, in some sense, divine, though not in a pantheistic way where nature is God. Nature is infused with something divine that leaks out into the human consciousness and onto the human experience. Hence Kingsnorth’s satisfaction with worshipping pagan gods in the woods: “At last I was home…everything seemed to have fallen into place.” The mythologist Martin Shaw, in an interview with Rod Dreher, talks about vigils in the wilderness, days on end of “simply sitting still and fasting.” For Shaw, this was more than an epiphanic experience. Nature had given something to him, and he wanted “to give something back.” Whatever Kingsnorth, Shaw, and countless others experience in liminal nature, it is a real spiritual thing.
VI.
I have used the term “liminal” to describe places where the human person interfaces readily with the spiritual. Another word that could be used is “high places.” In the Bible, God is encountered on mountains, which are thought to be closer to God. Is it their height that creates the sense of closeness to the divine? Or perhaps the majesty of the setting? We are not entirely sure.
What we can see repeatedly in the Old Testament is that “high places” were a problem. To leave them intact was a mistake. Why? Perhaps because, like Martin Shaw in the wilderness and Paul Kingsnorth in the woods, humans readily experience the divine in the liminal “high places.” And because of our fallenness, our darkened hearts, the divine that we might seek and encounter in high places is often of the wrong ilk.
Perhaps this is why King Asa is described in mixed terms, a king of Judah “who did what was right in the eyes of the Lord.” Yes, he removed the idols and cult prostitutes. He “also removed Maacah his mother from being queen mother because she had made an abominable image for Asherah.” This all bodes very well. Then comes the qualification, “But the high places were not taken away” (1 Ki 15:11–14).
Why is this mistake so significant? And why is King Josiah’s comprehensive destruction of not only idols and pagan temples, but also high places, significant? In 2 Kings, the boy-king is described on a rampage of religious reform. A notable inclusion in the long list of reforms stands in contrast to Asa. Josiah “defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem…which Solomon the king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the abomination of the Sidonians, and for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites” (2 Ki 23:13). Solomon’s pagan idolatry was finally reversed. The high places were gone.
VII.
This leaves us in a position to provide some more or less speculative answers to my earlier questions. What is paganism? Why do people worship nature, adoring the creature rather than the creator? Is it a kind of madness? Does it make any sense?
It does make sense. Paganism is, essentially, the worship of nature. Pagan religions are nature religions of one sort or another. Even those who bow to gods like Freya or Thor are bowing to something that is in some sense temporal. In a way, then, paganism is natural. Christians affirm that creation, nature, is deeply connected to God, an interface with the divine.
It was this, perhaps, that led the fallen angels to flee into the trees, lakes, streams, caves, and rocks. Maybe they knew that the curse that God had put on humankind was one where the children of Adam and Eve would make the great exchange and seek the divine in creation. Perhaps demons knew then, as they know now, that nature is the nearest thing to supernature. They knew that humans would sense that these liminal spaces, these high places, have the potential to be meeting places with God.
Paganism is natural. It is driven by human sin. But it is not driven by madness. In fact, understood in this way, paganism is more rational than any of the various forms of modern atheism. Pagans, those who worship nature and the gods of nature, should garner our sympathy, insofar as they are reaching for the spiritually real. Nature is extraordinary. It is right that pagans expect the supernatural to be present in the natural.
At the same time, paganism is an abomination. It is detestable because the God we worship is a holy God who made the heavens and the earth and all that is in them. This God is the only thing in reality that is truly deserving of our worship. To do otherwise, to worship the demons who dwell in the things that God has made, is to invert the creator-creature distinction and to worship created things rather than the Creator, who alone is forever to be praised.
VIII.
In an arresting short story entitled “The Grove of Ashtaroth,” John Buchan describes the descent into heathen madness of a businessman named Lawson. The latter is trekking in the South African wilderness with his friend, the story’s unnamed narrator, when they stumble upon a house set beautifully in the mountains. Near the house is a copse, which the narrator notes “even in that half light struck me as different from the others.” There is something uncanny about the circle of trees. “It was no Christian wood,” he says. “It was not a copse, but a ‘grove,’—one such as Artemis may have flitted through in the moonlight.”
In the middle of the grove stands a “quite flawless” conical tower “about thirty feet high, of solid masonry.” Lawson and the narrator are unnerved by the scene, preternatural and inexplicable as it is. “We turned between the slender trees and,—was it fancy?—an odd tremor went through me.” The feeling is only enhanced when the narrator feels he is impinging upon a sacred space: “I felt as if I were penetrating the temenos of some strange and lovely divinity.”
Lawson is noticeably affected by this odd, liminal experience. His friend sees that, as they depart the grove, “his eyes were always turning back and his hand trembled.” Even more foreboding, Lawson’s eyes “seemed ravenous with fire” as he later sat gazing over the glen. “Where can I read about these things?” he asks his friend, wanting to know more about the grove and the tower.
A few years later, the narrator returns to the glen to visit Lawson, who has since acquired the property and improved it. But, upon arrival, the narrator finds Lawson has not improved himself. He is overweight, in a constant stupor, and strangely short-tempered and pugnacious, a stark contrast to the old Lawson. In his bewilderment, the narrator stays late into the night in the library, pondering the troubling situation.
Soon, all is revealed. He witnesses Lawson ascend to the grove with some heathenish implements of worship, and follows him. The place is alive with spiritual weight and presence. “I did not think any harm would come to me,” writes the narrator, “for the powers of the air seemed not malignant.” But they were real. “I knew them for powers, and felt awed and abased.”
The narrator lies in wait at the grove, staring at the little conical tower, until Lawson appears naked, carrying a blade and “a half-moon of alabaster.” Lawson immediately begins a blasphemous danse grotesque, cutting his skin, flinging his arms, shrieking to the skies. “I grew sick with disgust,—not terror, but honest physical loathing,” recounts the narrator.
Then the world changed. “For one second…I seemed to peer into a new world.” Here, the narrator sees the world in an entirely different frame. The scales of lifeless modernity fall from his eyes. “I seemed to see the earth peopled with forms not human, scarcely divine, but more desirable than man or god.” Then, “the calm face of Nature broke up for me into wrinkles of wild knowledge.” The world really is alive with spiritual life, and seeing this he sees the grotesque rite of his friend in a new light: “It was a delicate mystery of worship, as wholesome as the morning song of birds…I saw in it only the sweet simplicity of Nature and all riddles of lust and terror soothed away as a child’s nightmares are calmed by a mother.”
The narrator awakens from his macabre dream to carry his friend from the grove. Despite his pagan revelations, he is not swayed. He knows he must help Lawson. When he returns to the house, he seeks out Jobson, Lawson’s Scottish employee, and together they set out to “follow the example of King Josiah” and annihilate the grove.
They do so, chopping the trees and shooting the flock of doves that haunt Ashtaroth’s lair. But the narrator is drawn in again, this time by an inexplicable sense of pathos.
It was as if someone were pleading with me. A gentle voice, not threatening, but pleading—something too fine for the sensual ear, but touching inner chords of the spirit…it was the viewless, bodiless grace of this delectable vale, some old exquisite divinity of the groves. There was the heart of all sorrow in it, and the soul of all loveliness. It seemed a woman’s voice, some lost lady who had brought nothing but goodness unrepaid to the world. And what the voice told me was that I was destroying her last shelter.
The abomination of the Sidonians was losing her home in God’s creation. The narrator is genuinely torn. He knows that what he has witnessed requires action, and he knows what is required to destroy the grove. And yet he also feels the tug of the liminal place, the high place, that he is destroying. “I knew,” he says, “I was killing rare and unrecoverable beauty…the whole loveliness of nature seemed to plead its divinity.”
Nature, a truly beautiful and divinely dressed maiden, calls to each of us. To the Christian, it tells of God’s majesty, of his love for us, his wisdom, his goodness. God is always speaking, and he speaks clearly and loudly in his creation. The devils who rebelled against the Most High God use that creation, still beautiful and divinely dressed, to gain illicit adoration from those in spiritual darkness.
At the conclusion of “The Grove of Ashtaroth,” the narrator knows that he has done the right thing. He has banished an abomination from the grove. He leaves a note for Lawson explaining his actions, beginning with verses from the book of 2 Kings 23, which recounts the idol-sacking of Josiah. “I think you will realise,” he writes, “that I have saved your soul.”
However, the very human, pathological temptation to turn to paganism is laid bare as the narrator leaves the glen and looks back at Lawson’s property. “Somehow, I know not why, the lake, the stream, the garden-coverts, even the green slopes of hill, wore an air of loneliness and desecration. And then my heartache returned.” The tension the narrator feels is a thoroughly human tension. All of us are pulled towards nature, as achingly beautiful as it is. There is a constant temptation to revert to adoration of the things that have been made.
However, the Christian can speak into this. Nature tugs at what John Calvin called the sensus divinitatis, the human sense of deity. Pagans, and those drawn into the adoration of nature, are responding in a confused manner to this natural sense of the divine. Pagans are right to look for the divine. Christians should harness this, affirm the pagan’s desire, but redirect it. They need to look higher than the trees and the fjords. They need to look to the one who made all things and upholds them by the power of his word. They need to look to Christ.
Paganism is natural and understandable because nature is beautiful, majestic and somehow divine. In this, Christianity can agree with paganism, and we should be ready to demonstrate sympathy with the pagan deference to nature. At the same time, Christians know that worshipping nature is not the answer. The Scriptures give us no choice but to worship the true God. The God of nature, the God who made nature, gives us everything pagans seek, but in abundance.
Simon P. Kennedy is a Senior Research Fellow at Alphacrucis University College, and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. He is also a Non-resident Fellow at the Danube Institute in Budapest.
NOTES
[1] Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), ll. 175–180.
[2] Heaney, Beowulf, ll. 180–186.
[3] Heaney, Beowulf, ll. 1726–1729.