Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
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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. Just a couple of wooded pagans. Yeah, I'm excited about this one, man. 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. Yeah, for sure. You knew he was going to make an appearance. Yeah.

And it seems like there was something else, too. But if you want the full picture, 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.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, but it's so ingrained that even after you know about it, you know, it's hard not to just shake that stuff. I was a church kid. I was raised Baptist. Pagans were spooky. They killed and sacrificed things. Yeah. I ran across a couple of websites, Christian websites, that essentially still think all of the same things that the church originally said about pagans back, you know,

1,500 years ago. Yeah. So it's still alive and well. 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. Right. Yeah. And in retrospect, looking at this now, it's like, gosh, talk about getting your wires crossed. Yeah, that's funny.

Yeah. So we're talking about paganism, everybody. And hats off to Dave, too, first of all, for helping us with this. This is 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. Yeah.

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 beliefs.

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. Can we stop there? Yeah. We haven't gotten anything wrong so far, so yeah. 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 paganus, which is Latin for country dweller, which is basically like, hey, if you're not a Christian, you're a bumpkin, a.k.a. pagan, which is interesting.

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. So the tables basically turned because originally some of the Greek and actually Roman scholars

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. I think Bumpkin summed it up nicely. I thought so too. I like Bumpkin 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 bumpkin. Yeah. For some reason, bumpkin does have just sort of a like I feel like bumpkins are happy. Right. They don't care what you think of them. All right. So should we talk a little bit about, you know, there's kind of two parts to this. There's ancient paganism and

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.

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 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. Yeah. 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 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. Yeah, a good example of this is 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't 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

Of that river or maybe offering a sacrifice. But it's not there's no evil rivers in any of the pagan religions. Except for the river Styx. Yeah, I guess maybe. But I think even then it's not necessarily absolutely evil. Yeah. We've got shamanism, which is sort of like animism plus animism with a mascot.

And 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." Yeah, I think the singing and dancing is subsequent to taking the drugs.

Hey, I went to a rave or two in my day. Every single person there was a shaman at that moment. That's what it felt like at the time, probably. Right.

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, 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 in 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. 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 women.

religions do, uh, in that, uh, women were, were worshiped and venerated. They were, uh, the earth mother was a big part of the early deities, uh, and worshiped. And they found Venus figurines, these, uh, clay and stone figures from like 35,000 years ago that are clearly like, uh,

Probably used in fertility rites because they have, you know, 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. Yeah. And then you can pretty clearly demonstrate that the Earth Mother is...

eventually evolved into Gaia from the Greek pantheon. Gaia is 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.

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? I would think so, too. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I'm just taking a stab at that, though. You got to be right, you know? I mean, it's not like that was just coincidental. Somebody came up with that in the 60s or something. Yeah, that's true. What about sacrifice, the stuff that pagans don't like to talk about? 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 these, 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.

Yeah. I mean, we know for a fact that Germanic and Celtic tribes sacrificed humans just from the presence of bog bodies in 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. I think you mean Leilani. Hmm.

The maiden, you remember the Inca maiden that has like her 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 like drank baby's blood or that kind of stuff, that was the exaggeration that really kind of were smears. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I finally watched the other day, it was about a month ago, I guess, the Mel Gibson podcast.

Apocalypto? Yeah. I'd never seen that for some reason. I finally watched it. How was it? Did you see it? No, but I've seen the scene that made you think of that. You know, it was pretty good. You know, I'm not like championing 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. Yeah, Mel Gibson is basically into snuff porn. Like, he loves that stuff. Have you ever seen We Were Soldiers? I did not see that, but that's supposed to be pretty gory too, right? It's one of the most violent, yeah, goriest war movies I've ever seen in my life. Yeah. And I've seen The Guns of Navarone. Oh, is that Tully Savalas? No.

He was in...

The Dirty Dozen. That's what you're thinking. Yeah. That was good. Or Force 10 from Navarone. Was he in that one too? I don't know if he was in that one. He was definitely in the Dirty Dozen. That was a great one. Yeah. All right. We're getting way 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 that

We usually, you know, growing up, Baptists thought of them 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 places.

Most pagan religions, they love their trees. 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. Yeah. It feels like a break time, right? Yeah, I guess so. 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. Thank you.

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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. 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. Yeah, he dipped his toe in the pool publicly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So actually, I think he was fully immersed in the baptismal font instead. Well, yeah.

His son, though, went full bore after pagans and outlawed paganism. He passed the first laws, Constantinus, Constantius, not Constantinople. Constantius. Yes. Yeah.

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. 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. I hadn't tried that.

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 is like, you know, that demon is the root there. But that's literally what they did. They were like, you know what?

Everyone that you have been worshiping, they are the devil in disguise. Right. Like the literal devil, Satan. 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. Right.

Like gods can be good or evil, protective or dangerous, but there's no like one evil polar foil to God because there is no one God. It's not dual, it's plural. 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. And so 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. Yeah, Dave found this one pretty prominent Celtic god, Cernunnos.

Yeah? Yeah. Okay. C-E-R-N-U-N-N-O. It's like a mashup of Michael Cera, John Cena, and John Sununu.

Uh, 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. Right. But the Sir Nuno's is wearing antlers because they were, they indicated protectiveness, not necessarily of humans, but of the forest 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 ducks for no good reason. Yeah. The,

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 and then demonized them and all the others. Yeah, that makes sense. Like, who do they identify with? Like, who's going to scare them? Exactly. So now, because your God, your ancient pagan God is Satan...

if you are caught worshiping that God or any God 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 any local rival religions.

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. 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.

And those are pagan-based. So we're just going to tweak those and make them our own because who doesn't like Halloween? Yeah, everybody likes Halloween, which started out as Samhain, as we'll see. I think we've talked about that probably 15 times. Oh, yeah.

You know what I think actually triggered me thinking of this topic? What movie? No, it was Easter. No. 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 and it's in like in every single way. I think even Easter is like a shift or an adaptation of like Ostair, which I believe was one of the polytheistic pagan gods. Yeah. Like it was it's just there out in the open, basically. And that made me wonder about the whole thing. 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. Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah. So they were basically stamping with one foot, giving back rubs 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. 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. So, yeah, the Enlightenment was like in a couple of strange ways. It was really fertile ground for 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. Yeah. 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 going to go seek answers and purpose in nature instead. And that,

Probably more than anything is how the Enlightenment led to an interest in paganism. 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. They were very...

Just very moving poems about the world, the natural world around us and the sort of unseen magic in nature. Yeah. You've never wanted to take your clothes off in the woods? Read some Keats. Right. See how you feel after that.

Oh, 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. Yeah, no, I get that. There's mosquitoes and beetles and those worms that crawl up your pee hole. Yeah, I'll just you can find me in my skivvies at least. Are you a never nude?

Yeah, I shower in a bathing suit. In cut-off jeans. Yeah, the cut-offs. Oh, man, it's so great. What else? Oh, there was another thing that kind of created – it might have grown out of this interest essentially. Like kind of scholarship on paganism. Yeah. Some was good. Some was the kind of stuff that you would equate with finding on the History Channel today.

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 alien sky, like, do they have a lot of that kind of stuff? I think it's pretty much all...

Yeah, that. Is it really? Okay. 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. They're trying to make the entertaining television, basically. 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. Well, I'm glad I know this because I'm going to stop saying, well, the History Channel said. Stop that. Yeah.

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 Frazier. He was an anthropologist who wrote a book, very influential book in 1890 called The Golden Bow. B-O-U. I'm sorry. Yeah. W. Jesus. What's going on with me? B-O-U-G-H. I'm going with bow. It's pronounced bow. I think that's a History Channel type argument. Yeah.

OK, 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. Yeah. And so modern historians have said that'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 Bough, Beau, 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 Bough became kind of like a handbook for the modern pagan movements that followed. Do you know what I feel like inserting here? What?

The way that you pronounce the word be-o-n. Like, why did they get Count Dracula to, who is that guy? I don't know. Was this like a book on tape you heard once? No, no, no, no. This is the YouTube guy. When you look up pronunciations, there is one gentleman that talks like he came from Transylvania. Yeah, he really does, doesn't he? I never thought about it. He's great. Well, now this is saying bow, but I looked it up earlier and it said bow. Okay. Bow. Bow.

Bow. I don't know if I believe that lady. 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? I've always said bow, but, you know, maybe I'm wrong or maybe the Internet's wrong. That'd be a first. How about buh? Yeah. When the buh breaks. 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? Yeah. She came up in the Bella and the Witch Elm episode because she was saying like Bella was murdered by a witch cult. Right. And she's one of the people who argued that the modern European witches trace their lineage unbroken back to fertility feminist cult that's been in the British Isles ever since time immemorial. And that's one of the things that's been debunked is that it's just not

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, local areas, there's, like, not folk traditions that actually do date back really far. I mean, everybody's seen Wicker Man. Yeah.

But the thing is, like, like Wicker Man would be actually a bad example because that like is an actual ritual. 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 practicing.

performing every single aspect of this ancient ritual, even though the ritual in some form or fashion still survived to today. It's not the full, the full, um, Monty? It's not the full Monty of the actual pagan folk religion that they're, they're kind of venerating still. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Should we take our second break? Yeah. 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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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. Sometimes there's antlers and stuff like that. But it also more than anything reminds me of stuff they would have done in that A24 movie Midsommar. And it's basically like folk dancing that dates back to like 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. That's super cool. Yeah. And not to get off topic, but since you brought up A24, I just have to shout out their newest weird comedy from Tim Robinson. Oh, yeah. 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. Nice. At that first show. Was it rowdy? 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 percent full. Yeah.

a crowded movie with other people, like a comedy, where just a bunch of people are laughing at once. And it was so much fun. That's awesome, man. It was great. I wish I could have gone. I wish you could have gone, too. Oh, yeah. Are we talking about, what, modern paganism? Yeah. So we mentioned 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. It was pretty rare. 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 Eddas. Is that right? Yeah, as far as Norse religions, Norse pagan religions that fall under the umbrella term heathenism, this is where they get all their stuff. Yeah. I don't know if it's Eddas or Eddas. I think I agreed too soon.

Okay. Maybe Edith. 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.

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 Alistair, really good episode, I think, Alistair Crowley episode. Yeah. This was the secret society that Alistair Crowley was a member of.

He was never the leader, right? Or was he just sort of a... I think he did break off and try to become a leader at some point. I don't remember. Yeah. Maybe I should go back and listen to it. 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. I don't think there's too many Golden Dawn people running around, but I guarantee there are some. Yeah, there's got to be. What about Wicca? 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. No, that's one that would probably be pretty good to redo someday. We're not going to redo stuff, are we? Okay, fine. Yeah.

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 Alistair 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. 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 book.

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. 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. 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. She was one of the most disturbing cartoon characters of all time, if you ask me. I love her. Man. Yeah. Yeah.

She had that high-pitched voice. And didn't she have kind of a red Cousin It type who wore tennis shoes? He was a little off-putting as well. I don't remember that, but if I saw it, I'd probably know it. So, yeah, the witch from Bugs Bunny. 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 is still the Gerald Gardner focused. They call it Gardnerian Wicca. But if you're out at the 7-Eleven and you meet a modern Wiccan, it's

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 Susanna Budapest. Great name. 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 rare to find a man 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 celebrate and honor the patriarchy.

Yeah.

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. It was where a prisoner was denied the use of ritual 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. Yeah. Probably a liberal court. Right. One other thing I got to 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. Wow. Isn't that interesting? Like he could have been arrested and thrown in prison for practicing witchcraft before 1951. Wow.

All right. So those were sort of the big heavy hitters that were the first big ones that 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 a umbrella term for people who, like you mentioned, the Norse and Germanic deities. Right. They're really into Marvel, I guess.

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. A lot of Valhalla. 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 Aesir 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. And then one other thing about heathenism, there's a really interesting 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. 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 these...

series of arsons, these church arsons, like 20 of them, these very, very old wooden medieval churches in Norway that were burned down. I think 20 of them were attributed, these arsons 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? Sure.

He left Mayhem at a certain point, but Euronymous is how this guy's known. Osteen Arseth, aka Euronymous, I think stayed in this black metal group Mayhem for the run until he was murdered by Varg. Yeah.

And they didn't exactly like set paganism's general public image on fire. Well, actually, they kind of did. Yeah. Yeah. Arseth was a Satanist. Vickernese 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 scene.

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 yeah totally it's worth mentioning I guess 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 yeah I was checking a lot of it out some of it's really good I'm not into folk metal though at all what is that

What's it sound like? It's, you know, that kind of like super proud Irish music that's like rock from Boston. Imagine that is like metal. It's got like bagpipes. Almost. Almost. Yeah. Or no. So, yes, that Irish like rock does from Boston. This is like the Norwegian metal version of that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

I'll listen to something, see what it does to me. Okay. Just look up folk metal and you'll see. But some of the other stuff is really good. Like mayhem stuff was pretty interesting. What if this changed my life and set me on a course that one would never have expected here at 54 years old? You start wearing corpse makeup. Yeah, maybe. Get some antlers. Yeah, why not, man? Why not? Like really ask yourself, why not do that?

I mean, I don't know. It's no crazier than any of the rest of them, if you ask me. Yeah. You mentioned Druids earlier, kind of in passing, but that is a modern belief system that is tied to pre-Christian beliefs.

British Isle sort of religion. That's where the Druids came from, right? Yeah. And I saw that Druids are, a big difference between them and others is that nature itself is the divine. It's not like a manifestation of God or the goddesses or anything, like it's nature. And I also saw that the practitioners don't really consider it a religion. They consider it more of philosophy or a way of life.

Yeah, and it was 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 modern Wiccans were started by guys named Ross and Gerald. Yeah. Isn't that a little weird? Yeah, they sound like a couple of guys who might live in a van together. They might. Who knows? There's also ceremonial magic, which would trace itself to, I guess, the Golden Dawn ritual.

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 beliefs are equal. They're very much opposed to the idea of absolute good and evil. They're very into nature. It's pretty

Pretty much, I think, what people think about when they think about modern pagan religions. And that's neo-paganism. Yes. All right. 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. They should be with that website. That'd be a real shame if they weren't, yeah. Right. It's in Comic Sans. And just one other thing about neo-paganism. I think I said that a lot of people, that's what they think of, but they might be

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 job successfully or make someone fall in love with you, whatever. And

Wicca is very much esoteric, so that means that there's 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

You're just general common sense to decide what site you're on, whether it's legitimate or authoritative or if it's just some dude making stuff up. Got to have the right font where you know you're in trouble. Exactly. It's a dead giveaway. You also mentioned a great band name in there, Hidden Mystery Knowledge. That's a good one. I feel like that's more an album, though. Okay. And you better believe they're going to have some Lord of the Rings character as the illustration. True.

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 Listener Mail. I'm going to call this popcorn cooking tip. I'm surprised I haven't thought of. Oh, okay. Hey, guys, writing because I want to tell you about my favorite way to cook popcorn in bacon grease. Oh, yeah, I've heard of that. I hadn't heard of it. It's just right there in front of my face, too. You've got bacon grease in front of your face? Yeah, I do.

Okay. Okay.

Thanks for all the years of podcasting. Listening pleasure you provided for me. I wish you both the best. That is from Randy with an I. 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. 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 stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

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