Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out! About this episode Paganism was the set of original ancient religions around the world. They all had plenty of gods, loved nature, sometimes sacrificed things, and so on. Then the Big Three religions came along and took over. But today paganism has come roaring back!
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:00 Speaker 00 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
1:09 Josh Clark? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck, and we both have antlers on our head, and this is Stuff You Should Know.
1:17 Speaker 04 Just a couple of wooded pagans.
1:20 Josh Clark? Yeah, I'm excited about this one, man.
1:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, you know, we'll reference some previous episodes. We covered Wicca in our witchcraft ep, and there's some Aleister Crowley in here, of course.
1:32 Josh Clark? Yeah, for sure.
1:33 Speaker 04 You knew he was gonna make an appearance. And it seems like there was something else, too, but we'll, if you want the full picture, you know, go back and listen to all those together, just for a spooky. Why do I say spooky? This is not even spooky. That's the whole problem.
1:46 Josh Clark? Yeah, for sure.
1:47 Speaker 04 With the misconception.
1:48 Josh Clark? Yeah, but it's so ingrained that even after you know about it, you know, it's hard not to just shake that stuff.
1:54 Speaker 04 I was a church kid. I was raised Baptist. Pagans were spooky. They killed and sacrificed things.
1:59 Josh Clark? Yeah, I ran across a couple of websites, Christian websites, that essentially still think all of the same things that were, that the church originally said about pagans back, you know, 1,500 years ago.
2:13 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:13 Josh Clark? So it's still alive and well.
2:15 Speaker 04 It's cool to know this story now, having, you know, left the Baptist Church many, many years ago, to finally understand, like, oh, at a certain point in history, they were just like... This is the religion and everything else is the devil.
2:29 Josh Clark? Right. Yeah. And in retrospect, looking at this now, it's like, gosh, talk about getting your wires crossed.
2:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's funny.
2:38 Josh Clark? Yeah. So we're talking about paganism, everybody. And hats off to Dave, too, first of all, for helping us with this. This was a huge, big lump of a topic that almost every one of the things we're going to talk about could be broken out into its own episode.
2:56 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:57 Josh Clark? So we're going to have to summarize in a lot of ways. We're going to get a lot of stuff wrong. So apologies already to all of our pagan listeners out there. And let us know, correct us about what we do get wrong, but we're going to try our best not to get stuff wrong. Because it's a really interesting set of religions. We should say that's what paganism is. It's not a religion. It's a set of typically nature-based religions that before the original ancient paganism predated any of what we call the Abrahamic religions, the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And that's my definition of paganism.
3:39 Speaker 04 Can we stop there?
3:40 Josh Clark? Yeah. We haven't gotten anything wrong so far. So, yeah.
3:44 Speaker 04 Yeah. Well, you mentioned those religions and it's pretty key to mention the Abrahamic religions because basically anything else outside of that was considered pagan historically. The word pagan actually was pretty much an insult at first when Christianity was on the rise. And we'll talk a lot about that here in a second. In the Roman Empire, if you did not convert to Christianity, you were called a paganus, which is Latin for country dweller, which is basically like, hey, if you're not a Christian, you're a bumpkin, AKA pagan. Which is interesting.
4:19 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah, it's definitely interesting. It's funny, because that means that at some point in time, and we'll talk about when that happened, Christianity suddenly leapt forward as like a sophisticated thing. Which is, so the tables basically turned, because originally, some of the Greek and, or actually Roman pagans were very suspicious of Christianity and said all sorts of libelous things against them. And then as Christianity rose to prominence, it used that same playbook against pagans. But yeah, it makes sense that it's like you were considered a hick or not up to date if you were still a pagan once Christianity became a thing in the Roman Empire.
5:01 Speaker 04 I think Bumkin summed it up nicely.
5:03 Josh Clark? I thought so, too. I like Bumkin, because it's like, it's an insult, but it's just so round and happy that it's hard to be angered by it if somebody calls you a bumkin.
5:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, for some reason, bumkin does have just sort of a, like, I feel like bumkins are happy.
5:20 Josh Clark? Right, they don't care what you think of them.
5:23 Speaker 04 All right, so should we talk a little bit about, you know, there's kind of two parts to this. There's ancient paganism, which is one thing that we're going to speak about now. And then later, we're going to talk a little bit about modern paganism. But the kind of key distinction here is, modern paganism isn't like, hey, we just brought back everything they were doing back then, because it went away for a long time, and now we're going to do that same stuff. It was, you know, inspired by some of this stuff, but as you'll see, not a lot of text survived, so modern paganism is basically its own new thing.
5:58 Josh Clark? Yeah, and we'll talk about where it came from, but there's a lot of, well, just incorrect facts on the internet that basically says this, this tradition has continued uninterrupted in secret. It had to be driven into secret by the rise of Christianity, and that just does not seem to be true.
6:17 Speaker 04 But if we're going to go back to ancient paganism, we can talk about some of the different elements of, because like you said, this is a lot of different things that are wrapped up under the term paganism. But animism is the first one, and that is the belief that every, every object on the planet, basically, has a spirit. People do, my dog does, your dog does, that, which I totally believe. The rivers, trees, everything in nature does. Animate or inanimate, which is why it's called animism. And they thought that nature can be like a great thing, it can help protect us, or it can be a dangerous thing, it can cause us harm, and it's up to us to influence that through sacrifice and these rituals that we perform.
6:58 Josh Clark? Yeah, a good example of this, just real quick, is there's no absolute good and evil. That's one of those Abrahamic religious ideas, and paganism does not believe in that. So for example, if you are crossing a raging river, that river might kill you and drown you, but it's not like the river is evil and wants to do that. It just can happen, so there's a risk, but it can also be a neutral thing. You can increase your chances of successfully crossing that river by maybe praying to it, the spirit or the god of that river, or maybe offering a sacrifice. But it's not, there's no evil rivers in any of the pagan religions.
7:38 Speaker 04 Except for the river Styx.
7:40 Josh Clark? Yeah, I guess, maybe, but I think even then, it's not necessarily absolutely evil.
7:46 Speaker 04 Yeah. We've got shamanism, which is sort of like animism plus, animism with a mascot, in that the shaman is the person who steps forward and says, "All right, we've got all these objects that have spirits, and I'm the person that can communicate with them. I will enter a trance, may take some drugs, may do a little singing and dancing to get there, don't you worry about that, but I'll get there in that trance state, and I'll be able to communicate with these spirits, like, go through me."
8:16 Josh Clark? Yeah, I think the singing and dancing is subsequent to taking the drugs.
8:20 Speaker 04 Hey, I went to a rave or two in my day.
8:23 Josh Clark? Exactly. Every single person there was a shaman at that moment.
8:26 Speaker 04 That's what it felt like at the time, probably.
8:29 Josh Clark? So there's a couple of things just from the ancient pagan religions that are still carried on today. Ancestor worship is another big one.
8:37 Speaker 04 Yeah.
8:38 Josh Clark? Especially as we'll see in the neo-pagan Norse traditions. But it's essentially, you can see evidence of this in the fact that we buried people. And the way that we started burying people, as if they're venerated, as if we understand that they need grave goods because there's an afterlife. And so it's not like a hard leap to the idea that those ancestors can help us out now that they're in the spirit world, and so you can worship them. That's a big part of it, too.
9:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, for sure. Then we're going to get into this whole idea that, and something I found that, looking through a lot of these pagan rites and religions, is that they looked at women very differently than early Christian, and some might even argue, late Christian religions do. In that women were worshipped and venerated. The Earth Mother was a big part of the early deities, and worshipped, and they found Venus figurines, these clay and stone figures from like 35,000 years ago, that are clearly like, probably used in fertility rites, because
9:44 Speaker 04 they have exaggerated breasts on these figures and wide hips. And so, the whole idea of the Earth Mother has been around for a long, long time.
9:54 Josh Clark? Yeah, and then you can pretty clearly demonstrate that the Earth Mother eventually evolved into Gaia from the Greek pantheon. Gaia's the mom of all the other gods, which brings up another point, polytheism. It's not monotheistic. There is not one single god. Even if there's a head of the gods, like say Zeus, or Odin, or something like that, there's still plenty of other gods who are gods. They're not saints, they're not angels, they're not assistants. They are gods in and of themselves. And so, polytheism is a huge, huge part of any pagan religion, ancient or modern, too.
10:31 Speaker 04 And I've never looked into this, but I mean, the idea of Mother Nature, that probably is kind of a trickle down from goddess mother, earth mother, right?
10:40 Josh Clark? I would think so, too. Yeah, for sure.
10:42 Speaker 04 Yeah. I'm just taking a stab at that, though, so.
10:45 Josh Clark? You gotta be right, you know? I mean, it's not like that was just coincidental. Somebody came up with that in the 60s or something.
10:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's true.
10:52 Josh Clark? What about sacrifice, the stuff that pagans don't like to talk about?
10:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, this is a can of worms that, you know, we can't fully open because there's a lot of debate about how much sacrifice there has been in all religions throughout ancient world history. A lot of times, the people that say like, "Oh, they were just killing babies left and right," are written by the enemies of these people. In this case, Christian and Roman accounts about how widespread it would be because they're trying to paint them in a certain way. But there definitely has been sacrifice, whether it was human or your finest crop or your best sheep.
11:31 Josh Clark? Yeah, I mean, we know for a fact that Germanic and Celtic tribes sacrificed humans just from the presence of bog bodies and the state that they were, the way that they died. They're pretty much proof positive that there was sacrifice. And even outside of Europe, I mean, you know, the Inca maiden, the Lulea, Lulealo.
11:53 Speaker 04 I think you mean Leilani.
11:55 Josh Clark? The maiden, you remember the Inca maiden that has like your knees pulled up to her chest? And she looks like she's sleeping, but she was sacrificed 500 years ago? I mean, like, it did happen, but the idea that it was widespread or that they drank babies' blood or that kind of stuff? That was the exaggeration that really kind of were smears.
12:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. You know, I finally watched the other day, it was about a month ago, I guess, the Mel Gibson.
12:22 Josh Clark? Apocalypto?
12:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'd never seen that for some reason. I finally watched it.
12:27 Josh Clark? How was it?
12:27 Speaker 04 Did you see it?
12:28 Josh Clark? No, but I've seen the scene that made you think of that.
12:33 Speaker 04 You know, it was pretty good, you know? I'm not like a champion in Mel Gibson, of course, but I just hadn't seen that movie. And I had a, I guess Emily was clearly not with me. And I was like, "Oh, I've got a window," and it popped up and it's like, "You know what? I never saw that. Let me check it out." Very gross and gory in its depictions, but, you know, it was okay.
12:55 Josh Clark? Yeah, Mel Gibson is basically into snuff porn.
13:00 Josh Clark? Like, he loves that stuff. Have you ever seen We Were Soldiers?
13:03 Speaker 04 I did not see that, but that's supposed to be pretty gory too, right?
13:06 Josh Clark? It's one of the most violent, yeah, goriest war movies I've ever seen in my life.
13:11 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:11 Josh Clark? And I've seen The Guns of Navarone.
13:17 Speaker 04 Was that Telly Savalas? No.
13:19 Josh Clark? He was in The Dirty Dozen. That's what you're thinking of.
13:23 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:23 Josh Clark? That was good.
13:24 Speaker 04 Or Force 10 from Navarone. Was he in that one too?
13:26 Josh Clark? I don't know if he was in that one. He was definitely in The Dirty Dozen. That was a great one.
13:30 Speaker 04 Yeah. All right, we're getting away off topic here though, because we need to talk about idol worship and tree worship. That's another pretty common element in a lot of different pagan religions. You know, it's right there in the Ten Commandments. Do not worship false idols. Idolatry was a big no-no to Christians, and that's basically any physical representation of a god or a spirit. We usually, you know, growing up Baptist, thought of him as like statues and stuff from biblical stories. But it can be a rock or something. And then trees. Trees are big in many, many, most pagan religions. They love their trees.
14:04 Josh Clark? Yeah, they love them for sure. So yeah, those are some high points, or basics, I guess, is a better way to put it, of ancient pagan religions. And because, as we said before, there's not really a lot that survived from the ancients to today, a lot of that stuff has been gleaned by archaeologists, anthropologists, and it's from that base of knowledge that modern pagans draw from to create the newer versions of the pagan religions.
14:36 Speaker 04 Yeah. It feels like a break time, right?
14:39 Josh Clark? Yeah, I guess so.
14:40 Speaker 04 All right, we'll take a break and we'll come back and talk about when Christianity decided, that's it, we're going to change the narrative, right after this.
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15:55 Speaker 05 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
15:58 Josh Clark? Hey, this is Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know.
16:01 Speaker 04 That's Alan Goya, planning engineer at AT&T, and he's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T Fiber and 5G, redefining the fans' experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
16:17 Speaker 05 It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
16:24 Josh Clark? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
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16:44 Speaker 05 What the fans' experience, it's incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
16:48 Josh Clark? AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.
16:51 Speaker 07 Connecting changes everything. AT&T.
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17:32 Speaker 04 All right, so we promised talk of Christianity, stamping out paganism, or trying to at least. And that started with Constantine, who was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity officially. I think you sort of hinted earlier that Christianity was a pretty smallish, persecuted sect of people at first, until Constantine came along and said, "Actually, I'm Christian now." And all the other Roman elites were like, "Well, if Constantine, the emperor, is Christian, then maybe we should look into this a little more."
18:05 Josh Clark? Right. And so the tide turned on pagans basically right out of the gate. But Constantine himself didn't do anything to persecute, he didn't use his official position as emperor to persecute pagans.
18:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, he dipped his toe in the pool publicly.
18:19 Josh Clark? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So actually, I think he was fully immersed in the baptismal font instead.
18:26 Speaker 04 Well, yeah.
18:27 Josh Clark? His son, though, went full bore after pagans and outlawed paganism. He passed the first laws, Constantineus, Constantius, yeah, not Constantinople.
18:40 Speaker 04 Constantius?
18:42 Josh Clark? Yes.
18:42 Speaker 04 Yeah.
18:43 Josh Clark? He passed the first laws that made paganism and practices of paganism illegal. It was basically amounted to any public displays of paganism were outlawed. But not too long after a couple of decades, his successor, Theodosius, he said, "Christianity is the state religion of the Roman Empire, and if you do anything pagan, including in your own home, like, you're toast. Don't let us see you go anywhere near a chicken, or you're in big trouble."
19:16 Speaker 04 And they said, "What is toast?" And they went, "You know when your bread gets too close to the fire and it tastes better? That's toast."
19:22 Josh Clark? "I hadn't tried that."
19:24 Speaker 04 So Christianity is on the rise and they started to stamp out pagan religions all over the Roman Empire through the laws that you mentioned and through a pretty brilliant plan, which was literally demonizing them. I never really have thought about that word much until this, like, you know, that demon is the root there.
19:46 Josh Clark? Right.
19:46 Speaker 04 But that's literally what they did. They were like, you know what? Everyone that you're, have been worshiping, they are the devil in disguise.
19:55 Josh Clark? Right.
19:56 Speaker 04 Like the literal devil, Satan.
19:57 Josh Clark? Yes. And they actually took some of the existing gods and just basically copy pasted them into the conception of the devil, of Satan. And again, keep in mind here, these pagan religions, they don't have anything even approximating Satan. Like gods can be good or evil, protective or dangerous, but there's no like one evil
20:23 Speaker 04 Yeah.
20:24 Josh Clark? polar foil
20:26 Speaker 04 Yeah.
20:26 Josh Clark? to God, because there is no one God. It's not dual, it's plural. That's, that's part of pagan religion, right? So it's ironic that they're like, your god is Satan. And they're like, which one? They're like, the one with the horns, the one with the antlers.
20:40 Speaker 04 Right.
20:40 Josh Clark? And so that's, that's basically how the modern conception of Satan came along. And so basically, any god would just be equated with evil, with a demon, with Satan himself. And if you were caught practicing this, now you started to risk being killed by the people in charge.
20:57 Speaker 04 Yeah. Dave found this one pretty prominent Celtic god, Cernunos. Yeah?
21:04 Josh Clark? Yeah.
21:05 Speaker 04 Okay. C E R N U N N?
21:09 Josh Clark? It's like, it's a, yeah. It's like a mashup of Michael Cera, John Cena, and John Cernuno.
21:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, Sir, uh, man, I almost said it wrong again. Sir Nuno's was, like I said, a prominent Celtic god and had, it was the antler god, had antlers. And they, they basically look back now and say, between Sir Nuno's and the Greek god Pan, um, like it's not a far leap to go from antlers to horns. And that was basically the, probably the model for the Christian devil that, uh, you know, once they decided, hey, we're just going to be binary from now on.
21:47 Josh Clark? Right. But the Sir Nuno's was wearing antlers because they were, they indicated protectiveness, not necessarily of humans, but of the forest, uh, and the countryside. And you could be in Sir Nuno's good graces by taking care of those things, or you could run afoul of Sir Nuno's. And if you say, just stepped on a bunch of docks for no good reason.
22:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
22:10 Josh Clark? But that, but he became Satan eventually, or he was one of the ones. I think they went basically local religion by local religion and identified who could be Satan.
22:20 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
22:21 Josh Clark? Demonized them and all the others.
22:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, that makes sense. Like, who do they identify with? Like, who's going to scare them?
22:28 Josh Clark? Exactly. So now, because your god, your ancient pagan god is Satan, um, if you are caught worshiping that god or any god in, or any kind of polytheistic pagan religion, you're now in league with the devil. And again, you can be put to death for that kind of thing. And that developed into witch trials, the inquisition, all sorts of terrible stuff. That was essentially the Christian church persecuting in an effort to stamp out, uh, it's like any local rival religions.
22:58 Speaker 04 Yeah. Well, stamp out is one thing they did. And, you know, with the Christian armies and colonialism and missionaries, that was what they were doing all over the West. Uh, and then what they couldn't stamp out, or I don't know if it was what they couldn't stamp out, but they were stamping out everything they wanted to. And then they also said, but actually, this Halloween and Christmas and Easter are pretty fun. Uh, and those are pagan, you know, based. So we're just going to tweak those and make them our own because who, who doesn't like, uh, Halloween?
23:30 Josh Clark? Yeah, everybody likes Halloween, which started out as Samhain, as we'll see. I think we've talked about that probably 15 times.
23:37 Speaker 04 Yeah.
23:38 Josh Clark? You know what I think actually triggered this, me thinking of this topic?
23:42 Speaker 04 What movie?
23:43 Josh Clark? No, it was Easter.
23:45 Speaker 04 Oh.
23:45 Josh Clark? I was thinking about, I happened to be up and out around sunrise on Easter. And it reminded me as a kid, being raised Catholic, of going to sunrise mass in Easter. And I was like, dude, you're standing there celebrating a religious service, watching the sun rise on a specific day in the spring. Like, it is so pagan-based in it's, in like, in every single way. I think even Easter is like a shift or an adaptation of like, Oster, which I believe was one of the polytheistic pagan gods.
24:19 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:20 Josh Clark? Like, it was, it's just there, out in the open, basically. And that made me wonder about the whole thing.
24:26 Speaker 04 Yeah. You know, growing up in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the most dedicated would hike up Stone Mountain in the dead of night to go to the sunrise service on top of Stone Mountain.
24:38 Josh Clark? Yeah, pretty cool.
24:39 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:40 Josh Clark? So they were basically stamping with one foot, giving back rubs with the other, with their hands. Stamp, stamp, rub, rub. That's what the Christians did to basically win the PR war of the religions and take over, essentially.
24:54 Speaker 04 Yeah. If you're looking at the pagan comeback, which we're going to get into now, you can go back to the Renaissance when they said, hey, the Greek and Roman philosophers and all those books they were writing, it's like, super interesting. We're into that stuff again, and we have the printing press now, so we can really print this stuff up and disseminate it. And there were Renaissance painters, painting all these amazing romantic paintings of like mythological creatures and gods. And then the Enlightenment came along and said, Renaissance, hold my mead.
25:27 Josh Clark? So, yeah, the Enlightenment was like, in a couple of strange ways, it was really fertile ground for
25:35 Josh Clark? like, an interest in paganism to come along. For one, the Enlightenment thinkers just essentially, as a first step, just rejected Christianity and monotheism in particular. And they also were like, I really like the philosophy of these ancient Greeks and ancient Romans. They were polytheistic, maybe I could be too. So it kind of aroused like an intellectual interest in that.
26:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
26:00 Josh Clark? But it also, it created an interest in paganism in a different way, too, because the Enlightenment created such rational thinking that some people were kind of repelled by it. And they're like, I'm gonna go seek answers and purpose in nature instead. And that probably more than anything is how the Enlightenment led to an interest in paganism.
26:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, and I also thought it was super interesting how much the arts played into all this. You know, I mentioned the Renaissance painters, but also Romantic poets. Like, you can't read Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley without like wanting to go out into the woods and like be among nature. There were very, just very moving poems about the world, the natural world around us, and the sort of unseen magic in nature.
26:50 Josh Clark? Yeah, you've never wanted to take your clothes off in the woods? Read some Keats.
26:54 Speaker 04 Right.
26:55 Josh Clark? See how you feel after that.
26:57 Speaker 04 Ooh, I'm not a, I'm not a big naked in the, I'm not a big naked guy, period. I think it's been established, but probably because of the Baptist upbringing, but I feel too vulnerable out there in the woods.
27:08 Josh Clark? Yeah, I know, I get that. There's mosquitoes and beetles and those worms that crawl up your pee hole.
27:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'll just, you can find me in my skivvies at least.
27:17 Josh Clark? Are you a never nude?
27:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, I shower in a bathing suit.
27:22 Josh Clark? In cut-off jeans?
27:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, the cutoff, oh man, it's so great.
27:26 Josh Clark? What else? Oh, oh, there was another thing that kind of created, it might have grown out of this interest essentially. Like, kind of scholarship on paganism.
27:37 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:38 Josh Clark? Some was good, some was the kind of stuff that you would equate with finding on the History Channel today.
27:44 Speaker 04 You know, that was in the article, and we talked about it a little bit offline. I did not know, I don't watch enough History Channel. I thought the History Channel was just like... We used to call it the war channel because it was always just black and white World War II documentaries. But I know there is another side of the History Channel where with the aliens guy, like, did they have a lot of that kind of stuff?
28:05 Josh Clark? I think it's pretty much all.
28:09 Josh Clark? Yeah, that.
28:10 Speaker 04 Is it really? Okay.
28:11 Josh Clark? Yeah, pretty much. And I think it has been that way for a really long time. And I mean, not to bag on the History Channel, it's interesting, but I guess what I'm equating it to is really interesting unsupported theories that like if you're an actual scientist and you look into it, you're like, this is just made up.
28:30 Speaker 04 They're trying to make the entertaining television, basically.
28:32 Josh Clark? Yes, but the problem is is they present it factually and it gets taken factually by a lot of people. So they've caused a lot of problems. They essentially have ruined the world single-handedly, the History Channel has.
28:43 Speaker 04 Well, I'm glad I know this because I'm going to stop saying, well, the History Channel said.
28:48 Josh Clark? I would stop that, yeah.
28:51 Speaker 04 But yeah, there were a couple of key people that came out of this that you kind of referenced. One was a guy named James Fraser. He was an anthropologist who wrote a book, very influential book in 1890 called The Golden Bow. B O U, I'm sorry. Yeah, U. W. Jesus, what's going on with me? B O U G H.
29:11 Josh Clark? I'm going with bow.
29:13 Speaker 04 It's pronounced bow.
29:15 Josh Clark? I think that's a History Channel type argument.
29:20 Speaker 04 It, okay, we're not going to argue with this because who cares? But that's the way it's spelled. And his argument was that, you know, all religions basically go back to this one pagan myth about a king that was sacrificed to bless the land with fertility. And you can kind of trace them all back, back to this.
29:39 Josh Clark? Yeah. And so modern historians have said, it's a great theory, Fraser, but you're, it's not correct. Fraser is not a History Channel type. He was a legitimate anthropologist. And one of the reasons the Golden Bow, bow figures in is that he did an amazing amount of exhaustive research that in the book, he describes a lot of ancient pagan traditions and beliefs and stuff. So the Golden Bow became kind of like a handbook for the modern pagan movements that followed.
30:10 Speaker 04 Do you know what I feel like inserting here?
30:12 Josh Clark? What?
30:13 Speaker 04 The way that you pronounce the word be. Like, why did they get Count Dracula to? Who is that guy?
30:20 Josh Clark? I, I don't know. What was this? Like a book on tape you heard once?
30:24 Speaker 04 No, no, no, no. This is the YouTube guy. When you look up pronunciations.
30:27 Josh Clark? Oh, oh, yeah.
30:28 Speaker 04 One gentleman that talks like he came from Transylvania.
30:31 Josh Clark? Yeah, he really does, doesn't he? I never thought about it. He's great.
30:34 Speaker 04 Well, now this is saying bow, but I looked it up earlier and it said bow.
30:39 Josh Clark? Okay. Bow. Bow. Bow.
30:43 Speaker 04 I don't know if I believe that lady.
30:44 Josh Clark? Like, when the bow breaks. Wouldn't you just sit up and tell your mom that she got it wrong if she's saying when the bow breaks?
30:50 Speaker 04 Yeah, I've always said bow, but, you know, maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe the internet's wrong. That'd be a first.
30:55 Josh Clark? How about buh?
30:57 Speaker 04 Yeah.
30:58 Josh Clark? What was that? Buh?
30:59 Speaker 04 When the buh breaks?
31:02 Speaker 04 Uh, and then there is a History Channel type person that we should talk about, the Egyptologist Margaret Murray. She was, she's definitely on that side of things, right?
31:13 Josh Clark? Yeah, she came up in the Bella and the Witch Elm episode because she was saying like Bella was murdered by a witch cult.
31:19 Speaker 04 Right.
31:19 Josh Clark? And she's one of the people who argued that the, the modern European witches traced their lineage unbroken back to fertility feminist cult that's been in the British Isles ever since time immemorial. And that, that's one of the things that's been debunked is that it's just not true. Like, the Christian church, and in their turn Judaism and Islam as well, did such a thorough job of interrupting the transmission from the ancient world to the modern world, that it's just, like, that's just not really possible. Now, that's not to say that, like, in certain, like, super, you know, rural
32:01 Josh Clark? local areas, there's like not folk traditions that actually do date back really far. Um, I mean, everybody's seen Wicker Man.
32:10 Speaker 04 Right.
32:10 Josh Clark? But the thing is, like, the, like, Wicker Man would be actually a bad example because that, like, is an actual ritual. Um, they knew exactly what they were doing. They were performing rites, that kind of stuff. This would be more like, hey, we're dancing around the maypole, but we don't necessarily know every single thing that's going on. We're not performing every single aspect of this ancient ritual, even though the ritual in some form or fashion still survives today. It's not the full.
32:41 Josh Clark? The full.
32:42 Speaker 04 Monty?
32:43 Josh Clark? It's not the full Monty of the actual pagan folk religion that they're they're kind of venerating still.
32:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:50 Josh Clark? Does that make sense?
32:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely.
32:51 Josh Clark? Okay.
32:52 Speaker 04 Should we take our second break?
32:53 Josh Clark? Yeah.
32:54 Speaker 04 All right, we're going to take that break and we're going to move into the world of modern paganism right after this.
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34:35 Speaker 04 All right. If you've been putting off car shopping because it sounds like a whole thing, buying your car online on AutoTrader makes it way easier, like almost easier than ordering your coffee easier. Really?
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35:47 Josh Clark? By the way, Chuck, Yumi and I have a friend named Alex Mary, who's an artist. And she does something called Morris dancing. And a lot of the Morris dances resemble paganism. Like, sometimes there's antlers and stuff like that. But it also, more than anything, reminds me of stuff they would have done in that 824 movie Midsommar.
36:11 Josh Clark? And it's basically folk dancing that dates back to the 15th century and probably before, but they can definitely trace it back that far. I was asking her about paganism. She's like, nope, not a pagan. I'm a Morris dancer.
36:24 Speaker 04 That's super cool.
36:25 Josh Clark? Yeah.
36:26 Speaker 04 And not to get off topic, but since you brought up 824, I just have to shout out their newest weird comedy from Tim Robinson.
36:34 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah.
36:35 Speaker 04 Actually, not from Tim Robinson, he's in it, but the movie Friendship, I can highly recommend. And I went to the opening 11 a.m. screening in Atlanta and my friend, because you love Tim Robinson, you'll be glad to know, at Phipps Plaza at 11 a.m. on a Friday, there were probably 25 to 30, like, Tim Robinson fans in there.
36:55 Josh Clark? Nice.
36:55 Speaker 04 At that first showing.
36:56 Josh Clark? Was it rowdy?
36:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, you know, it's been a long time since I've seen a crowded, and it was crowded because it was probably a 50-person theater, so it was 70% full. A crowded, like, movie with other people, like a comedy, where just a bunch of people are laughing at once, and it was so much fun.
37:13 Josh Clark? That's awesome, man.
37:15 Speaker 04 It was great.
37:16 Josh Clark? I wish I could have gone.
37:17 Speaker 04 I wish you could have gone too.
37:19 Josh Clark? Oh, oh, yeah, are we talking about, what, modern paganism?
37:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, so we mentioned, you know, in several different ways, that modern paganism is its own thing. One of the reasons why it's its own thing is because they just didn't write down a lot of stuff back then, and stuff that was written down, it wasn't like the literal, detailed handbook of how to do this ritual or this rite.
37:41 Josh Clark? Yeah, it's pretty rare.
37:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, so that's one of the reasons, and it was all stamped out. Some of the stuff that we've gotten, modern-wise, comes from these Icelandic, or maybe all of it, these Icelandic texts called the edas, is that right?
37:54 Josh Clark? Yeah, as far as Norse religions, Norse pagan religions that fall under the umbrella term heathenism, this is where they get all their stuff.
38:02 Speaker 04 Yeah.
38:02 Josh Clark? I don't know if it's edas or edas, I think I agreed too soon.
38:07 Speaker 04 Okay.
38:07 Josh Clark? Okay?
38:08 Speaker 04 Maybe edas.
38:09 Josh Clark? That, and then the Viking sagas, and so the Viking sagas aren't, like you said, it's not a handbook of how to worship Norse gods, but just mentions of it, like, incidental references to stuff like that. The neo-pagans who worship Norse gods have kind of taken that, gleaned from that, what some of these rituals and thoughts and mythologies were.
38:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, and we're not going to talk about all modern pagan religions, but we're going to mention, you know, we're going to highlight a few. We have to talk briefly, at least, about the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but again, if you want to hear a lot about that, listen to our Aleister, really good episode, I think, Aleister Crowley episode.
38:48 Josh Clark? Yeah.
38:49 Speaker 04 This was the secret society that Aleister Crowley was a member of. He was never the leader, right? Or was he just sort of a?
38:56 Josh Clark? I think he did break off and try to become a leader at some point.
39:00 Speaker 04 I don't remember.
39:01 Josh Clark? Yeah.
39:01 Speaker 04 Maybe I should go back and listen to it.
39:03 Josh Clark? I don't remember either. But their whole thing, the reason we mentioned them is they were probably the first, what you could consider, modern pagan religion. They practiced magic and they were into the Egyptian occult stuff. So that's why we bring them up. There's, I don't think there's too many Golden Dawn people running around, but I guarantee there are some.
39:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's gotta be.
39:25 Josh Clark? What about Wicca?
39:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, we talked about Wicca in our witchcraft episode. That was from a long time ago, though, so it may not be our best work.
39:35 Josh Clark? No, I would, that's one that would probably be pretty good to redo someday.
39:39 Speaker 04 Nah, we're not gonna redo stuff, are we?
39:41 Josh Clark? Okay, fine.
39:44 Speaker 04 Modern witchcraft, or Wicca, W I C C A. Originally, it was W I C A, as named by a guy named Gerald Gardner, who was a British customs official, who worked in Malaysia, then came back to England in 1936, wrote a bunch of Golden Dawn stuff, a bunch of Aleister Crowley stuff, a bunch of Margaret Murray stuff, our History Channel lady. And he said, you know what? One night in 1939, a coven of witches initiated me, and they were members of this ancient fertility cult that I read about from Margaret Murray.
40:17 Josh Clark? Yeah. So it depends on who you talk to. Gardner might either be described as a huckster who made all this up, or a very gentle man. I saw somebody describe him, who knew him, as utterly without malice, who may have made all this up. But he was known for writing what's called the Book of Shadows, which has become a big part of the Wiccan religion, which is essentially a personal recipe book of spells and rituals that has worked for a particular witch or coven. And sometimes it's shared, and people can borrow from it and add to it, and they create their own Book of Shadows.
40:59 Josh Clark? But having your own, basically, you know in those Bugs Bunny cartoons where that witch is like looking through her book? That would technically be a Book of Shadows that she's looking through to find like the ingredients for her potions or whatever. That's a pretty, literally cartoonish depiction of it, but that's, you know, essentially what she was doing.
41:20 Speaker 04 My favorite part is when she would leave the frame very quickly and her hairpins would fall out of her hair and float in the air.
41:26 Josh Clark? She was one of the most disturbing cartoon characters of all time, if you ask me. Man.
41:33 Speaker 04 Yeah.
41:34 Josh Clark? Like she was, she had that high pitched voice and didn't she have like kind of a red cousin it type who wore like tennis shoes? He was a little off putting as well.
41:43 Speaker 04 I don't remember that, but if I saw it, I'd probably know it.
41:46 Josh Clark? Yeah. So, yeah, the witch from Bugs Bunny.
41:50 Speaker 04 That's right. But back to Wiccans, they became very popular in the 60s and 70s with the feminist set and the environmentalist set. And there's still the Gerald Gardner focused. They call it Gardenarian Wicca. But if you, if you're out at the 7-Eleven and you meet a modern Wiccan, she's probably practicing what's called Dianic Wicca, which is more woman centered. It came around in 1971 by a Wiccan activist named, not Susanna, but Zuzanna Budapest. Great name.
42:25 Josh Clark? Yeah, and it wasn't until 2000, I think 15, that Susanna Budapest indoctrinated her first male clergy member into Dianic Wicca and other Dianic Wicca temples split off. And so it's, it's rare to find a man in this, in this religion. Like it's all women. And I read that they're anti patriarchy. They actually try to use their magic against the patriarchy, but they're not anti male. The reason that they exclude males is because their religion is created to, to celebrate and honor the life cycles, the biological cycles in a lot of cases of a woman as she's born and then ages and then dies.
43:09 Josh Clark? And that essentially there's not a lot of role for men in that religion, but you know, you guys go form your own stuff. Go become Druids, I think is their motto.
43:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, and here's a little dinner party factoid if someone brings up Wiccan around the table, you can say, hey, did you know that it was actually first recognized as a true religion in 1986 in the United States when the Supreme Court ruled in Detmer v. Landon? You don't have to know that part, but you could really knock their socks off if you do.
43:37 Josh Clark? Yeah, you could.
43:38 Speaker 04 It was where a prisoner was denied the use of ritual Wiccan objects. And they're like, hey, this is my religious stuff and the First Amendment protects this. And the Supreme Court said, you know what? You're right.
43:50 Josh Clark? Yeah. Probably a liberal court.
43:53 Speaker 04 Right.
43:55 Josh Clark? One other thing I gotta say, I ran across, the UK finally suspended their witchcraft laws, their bans against practicing witchcraft in 1951, which is why Gerald Gardner's books start popping up in the 50s, even though he'd been doing this since the late 30s.
44:13 Speaker 04 Wow.
44:14 Josh Clark? Isn't that interesting? Like, he could have been arrested and thrown in prison for practicing witchcraft before 1951.
44:21 Speaker 04 Wow. All right, so those were sort of the big heavy hitters that were the first big ones of modern paganism when it staged its comeback. But there are dozens of other smaller, much smaller, modern pagan movements. Wicca is definitely the largest, but heathenry is one of them, which is basically an umbrella term for people who, like you mentioned, the Norse and Germanic deities. They're really into Marvel, I guess.
44:50 Josh Clark? Marvel and Lord of the Rings. Like, if you thought Led Zeppelin was into Lord of the Rings, man, introduce yourself to a heathen. Like, they are into that stuff.
45:01 Speaker 04 A lot of Valhalla.
45:02 Josh Clark? Yeah, and I think the two biggest Germanic heathen religions, actually, I guess, I don't even think they're sects, but one is Asatru. They worship the Asir gods, who would be the highest of the pantheon of Norse mythology, like Odin and Thor. And so people who are into Asatru are very much into honor and valor and getting into Valhalla. And then there's the Vanatru, which they're concerned with the veneer gods, who are the rest of the gods, who are more earthy, more nature-based, they're into prosperity, that kind of stuff. And I think there's way more Asatru than Vanatru right now.
45:46 Josh Clark? And then one other thing about heathenism, there's a really interesting, like, kind of side history that you can go look up about the black metal scene, specifically the Norwegian black metal scene, that essentially turned into, turned their focus from Satanism, like, traditional metal, to heathenry. And so you've got, like, folk metal, Viking metal, like, they essentially just became heathens, but metal, and it just got really out of hand in the early 90s. It was really interesting stuff.
46:20 Speaker 04 Well, yeah, and I don't know if we could get a whole episode out of this. We probably could, or maybe a short stuff, but there was the very famous case of, well, there were, there were these series of arsonists, these church arsonists, like, 20 of them, these, these very, very old wooden medieval churches in Norway that were burned down. I think 20 of them were attributed, these arsonists were attributed to black metal fans. And a couple of the arsonists were very prominent in the early Norwegian black metal scene. These guys, they were bandmates at first in this band, Mayhem, but I think Varg Fikernes?
46:58 Josh Clark? Sure.
46:59 Speaker 04 He left Mayhem at a certain point, but Euronimus is how this guy's known, Osteen Arset, known, aka Euronimus, I think, stayed in this black metal group, Mayhem, for the run, until he was murdered by Varg.
47:16 Josh Clark? Yeah. And they didn't exactly, like, set paganism's general public image on fire. Well, actually, they kind of did. Yeah, Arset was a Satanist. Fikernes is, in addition to being a murderer, he's a avowed neo-Nazi. And the whole scene in particular kind of gets caught up with nationalism a lot, so it's not a very representative.
47:40 Josh Clark? Picture of paganism as a whole, or neo paganism as a whole, but it's still, I mean, it's just ridiculously interesting what happened there.
47:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, totally.
47:49 Josh Clark? It's worth mentioning, I guess.
47:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, I remember when this happened and I just, I didn't know much about, I still don't know much about that whole music scene, but it's, it's super interesting. My cousin is into it.
48:00 Josh Clark? Yeah, I was checking a lot of it out and some of it's really good. I'm not into folk metal, though, at all.
48:07 Speaker 04 What is folk, what is that? What's it sound like?
48:10 Josh Clark? It's, you know, that kind of like, super proud Irish music that's like, rock from like, Boston? Imagine that is like, metal, or, almost, almost.
48:24 Speaker 04 Yeah.
48:24 Josh Clark? Or no, the, the, so, yes, that, that Irish, like, rock does, from Boston. This is like, the Norwegian metal version of that.
48:33 Speaker 04 Okay.
48:34 Josh Clark? Yeah.
48:35 Speaker 04 I'll, I'll listen to something, see, see what it does to me.
48:37 Josh Clark? Okay, just look up folk metal and you'll, you'll see. But some of the other stuff is really good. Like, Mayhem stuff was pretty interesting.
48:45 Speaker 04 What if this changed my life and set me on a course that one would never have expected, here, 54 years old?
48:50 Josh Clark? You start wearing corpse makeup?
48:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, maybe. Get some antlers.
48:54 Josh Clark? Yeah, why not, man? Why not? Like, really, ask yourself, why not do that?
48:59 Speaker 04 I mean, I don't know, it's no crazier than any of the rest of them, if you ask me.
49:03 Josh Clark? Yeah.
49:04 Speaker 04 Uh, you mentioned Druids earlier, kind of been passing, but that is a modern belief system that is tied to pre-Christian, British Isle sort of religion. That's where the Druids came from, right?
49:17 Josh Clark? Yeah, and I saw that Druids are, a big difference between them and others is that, that nature itself is the divine. It's not like a manifestation of God, or the goddesses, or any, like, it's nature. And I also saw that they, the practitioners don't really consider it a religion, they consider it more a philosophy, or a way of life.
49:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, it was, uh, modern druidry was started by a guy named Ross Nichols. And I don't know why, I just find it funny that like, the modern druids and, and modern wiccans were, were started by guys named Ross and Gerald.
49:50 Josh Clark? Yeah.
49:52 Speaker 04 Isn't that a little weird?
49:53 Josh Clark? Yeah, they sound like a couple of guys who might live in a van together.
49:56 Speaker 04 They might, who knows?
49:58 Josh Clark? Uh, there's also ceremonial magic, which would trace itself to, I guess, the, um, golden dawn. Uh, there's neo-paganism, which we should talk about because a lot of people use neo-paganism as a term incorrectly to describe modern paganism, which is what we've been talking about this whole time. Neo-paganism itself is a specific kind of pagan religion. So, all neo-pagans are pagan, but all pagans aren't neo-pagans. And if you basically want to just come at this by saying, "I like a little of this, I like a little of that, oh, I would like to do a little bit of ritual magic, yes, I want to go out in the woods and practice all this stuff," then neo-paganism is for you. It is wide open. They believe that everybody's
50:43 Josh Clark? beliefs are equal. Um, they're very much opposed to the idea of absolute good and evil. They're very into nature. It's pretty much, I think, what people think about when they think about modern pagan religions.
50:57 Speaker 04 And that's neo-paganism?
50:58 Josh Clark? Yes.
50:59 Speaker 04 All right.
51:00 Josh Clark? And if you want to know more about that, there's a great site called neo-paganism.org. They seem to be pretty authoritative on it.
51:08 Speaker 04 They should be with that website. That'd be a real shame if they weren't, yeah.
51:11 Josh Clark? Right. It's in comic scenes. And just one other thing about neo-paganism, um, I think, I said that a lot of people, that's what they think of, but they might be saying Wicca when they're talking about neo-paganism. There's big differences between those two. Wicca is very magical-based. The intent is to harness the power of nature to get something done, like get a, a job successfully, or, um, make someone fall in love with you, whatever.
51:39 Josh Clark? And Wicca is very much esoteric, so that means that there's a, a set amount of knowledge out there. There's hidden mystery knowledge in the universe, that if you are an initiate into Wicca, like you have to be initiated into a coven. And you apply yourself and work and study and you can have these mysteries of the universe revealed to you, not at all what neo pagans believe. There's just a ton of differences, but I mean, if any of this has floated your boat, you're like, I really want to check this out. There's a lot of stuff on the internet that you can go read up on. I would just say use your, your just general common sense to decide what site
52:21 Josh Clark? you're on is whether it's legitimate or authoritative, or if it's just some dude making stuff up.
52:28 Speaker 04 Got to have the right font where you know you're in trouble.
52:30 Josh Clark? Exactly. It's a dead giveaway.
52:32 Speaker 04 You also mentioned a great band name in there, Hidden Mystery Knowledge.
52:35 Josh Clark? That's a good one. I feel like that's more an album, though.
52:38 Speaker 04 Okay.
52:39 Josh Clark? And you better believe they're going to have some Lord of the Rings character as the illustration.
52:44 Speaker 04 True.
52:45 Josh Clark? Well, if you want to know more about that stuff, like I said, go out on the internet. And since I said that, and Chuck had just said true, that means that it's time for a listener man.
52:58 Speaker 04 I'm going to call this popcorn cooking tip. I'm surprised I haven't thought of.
53:02 Josh Clark? Oh, okay.
53:03 Speaker 04 Hey, guys, writing because I want to tell you about my favorite way to cook popcorn, in bacon grease.
53:08 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah, I've heard of that.
53:10 Speaker 04 I hadn't heard of it. It's just right there in front of my face, too.
53:13 Josh Clark? You've got bacon grease in front of your face?
53:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, I do. My aunt taught me her tried and true method for cooking popcorn on the stove top. She puts a spoonful of bacon grease in a skillet, pours a popcorn salt over the grease. Oh, boy. Plops a couple of kernels in there and heats the whole thing up. And when the grease is the right temperature, those kernels are going to pop and alert you. You can start cooking. You pour in the rest of the kernels, cover your skillet, and let it pop away. The bacon grease gives the popcorn a little extra flavor. It really makes it even more delicious. You should give it a try sometime. Just don't forget to cover your skillet.
53:43 Josh Clark? Okay.
53:45 Speaker 04 Thanks for all the years of podcasting, listening pleasure you've provided for me. I wish you both the best. That is from Randy with an I.
53:50 Josh Clark? Thanks a lot, Randy with an I. Did Randy sign the I with a little heart instead of a dot? Because that'd be fantastic.
53:57 Speaker 04 Yeah.
53:58 Josh Clark? Thanks a lot, Randy. That was a great tip. We appreciate it. I'm quite sure everybody who loves popcorn and bacon that's listening appreciated that. If you want to be like Randy and send us a tip that everybody can appreciate, you can send it off to [email protected] .
54:16 Speaker 00 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
54:33 Speaker 01 In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.
54:56 Josh Clark? If car shopping feels like a whole thing, buying your car online on AutoTrader makes it way easier. Really, shop tons of cars online, compare prices, check financing and trade-in options from wherever you are. Start online, test drive at the dealer, and finish wherever works for you. Your info stays with you, so there's no starting over. Plus, you're working with local dealers with real people there to help. Buy your car online on AutoTrader. Really. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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