Hindus And Neo-Paganism

[Guest guest]

Koenraad Elst

Hindus And Neo-Paganism

 

The late Ram Swarup (1920-98), definitely the most important Hindu

philosopher of independent India's first half-century, liked to point

out that other cultures had traditions similar to Hinduism before

Christianity or Islam wiped them out. As he put it in his path-

breaking study of polytheism, The Word as Revelation (1980):

 

"There was a time when the old Pagan Gods were pretty fulfilling and

they inspired the best of men and women to acts of greatness, love,

nobility, sacrifice and heroism. It is, therefore, a good thing to

turn to them in thought and pay them our homage. We know pilgrimage,

as ordinarily understood, as wayfaring to visit a shrine or a holy

place. But there can also be a pilgrimage in time and we can journey

back and make our offerings of the heart to those Names and Forms and

Forces which once incarnated and expressed man's higher life. (...)

The peoples of Egypt, Persia, Greece, Germany and the Scandinavian

countries are no less ancient than the peoples of India; but they

lost their Gods, and therefore they lost their sense of historical

continuity and identity. (...) What is true of Europe is also true of

Africa and South America. The countries of these continents have

recently gained political freedom of a sort, but (...) if they wish

to rise in a deeper sense, they must recover their soul, their Gods

(...) If they do enough self-churning, then their own Gods will put

forth new meanings in response to their new needs. (...) If there is

sufficient aspiration, invoking and soliciting, there is no doubt

that even Gods apparently lost could come back again. They are there

all the time." (p.131-133)

 

The cultural process of self-rediscovery after centuries of

Christianity is already in full swing in many parts of Europe and

North America (I have only little information about other continents

and will leave them outside the scope of this article). In Europe,

two organizations try to unite the various national groups: the

England-based Pagan Federation and the Lithuania-based World Congress

of Ethnic Religions. Both have made a brief acquaintance with

Hinduism. Leading Pagan thinker Prudence Jones had a correspondence

with Ram Swarup, whose articles on polytheism have also been

published in other Pagan media, e.g. in the California-based Church

of All Worlds' magazine Green Egg. The opening conference of the WCER

(Vilnius 1998 was attended by three NRI Hindus; one of them was

present again this year, and a delegation from India itself was on

its way but couldn't make it because of Lithuania's slowness in

handling the visa applications. The WCER's leading ideologues Jonas

Trinkunas (Lithuania) and Denis Dornoy (French, living in Denmark)

also sent a message to the Dharma Sansad, the "religious parliament",

in February 1999:

 

To the delegates at the Dharma Sansad, Ahmedabad, 5-8 February 1999:

 

Respectful greetings,

 

As workers for the revival of the religion of our ancestors, and as

convenors of the World Congress of Ethnic Religions, we are happy and

honoured to communicate with the representatives of the world's

largest surviving ancient religion, the Sanatana Dharma. We want to

pay our respect to the people who have kept alight the Vedic fire for

thousands of years, even when besieged by hostile forces, and who are

currently guiding Hindu society through the challenges of the modern

age.

 

We wish to draw the attention of the Hindu leaders to the efforts

currently made to maintain the ancestral religions of the Native

Americans, Africans, and other "Pagan" peoples in the face of the

subversion of their cultures and aggression against their dharmic

practices by agents of self-righteous missionary religions. We

support the peaceful efforts of all nations to safeguard their

cultural and spiritual heritage against subversion and destruction.

We also wish to draw your attention to the efforts to revive or

reconstruct the ancestral religions of those nations who were

overwhelmed by Christianization or Islamization in the past. By

common origin or simply by a common inspiration, these ancient

religions share a lot with the Sanatana Dharma, in both its tribal

and its Sanskritic manifestations. We therefore wish to express our

hope and intention of establishing a friendly cooperation.

 

Clearly, there is a measure of common ground between Hinduism and

Pagan revivalism, both typologically (as non-Abrahamic religions) and

strategically. At Ram Swarup's suggestion, I have done some

participant observation of this movement, or spectrum of movements,

in the last couple of years. I have made many friends in these

circles, and I sympathize with the whole idea of the revival of the

wrongfully eliminated ancestral religions. That said, I do have mixed

feelings about the actual performance of this fledgling new

incarnation of the old religion, which suffers of some serious

childhood diseases. In particular, I would like to draw attention at

present to a few problems in the encounter and budding cooperation

between Hinduism and Pagan revivalism.

 

Lifestyle

One thing which is bound to strike Hindu newcomers in certain neo-

Pagan circles as uncomfortable, is the seeming predominance of what

Indians know all too well as hippyism, the kind of loose and

undisciplined behaviour which Western rucksack travellers have

displayed while sojourning in India. Wiccas (neo-witches) dancing

naked in the moonlight may not be the Shankaracharya's idea of

Dharma. And while nakedness as such need not be immoral in any way,

the fact is that the looser morality which Asians tend to identify as

typically modern-Western is entirely the norm in most neo-Pagan

circles. As Fred Lamond candidly admits in his must-read introduction

Religion without Beliefs, Essays in Pantheist Theology, Comparative

Religion and Ethics (Janus Publ., London 1997, p.111): "Our practical

ethics are 90% the same" as those of established religions, but "the

only area where our principles differ sharply from theirs is in

sexual ethics. To Pagans, sexual intimacy before marriage is neither

sinful nor immoral (...) we regard shared sexual passion under most

circumstances as a sacrament which, far from harming our souls, can

be a gateway to self-transcendence and unity with the divine."

 

The Church of All Worlds even promotes "polyamory" as an alternative

to the monogamous household. The Germanic-oriented neo-Pagans

(Odinism, Asatru/"loyalty to the gods") are more mainstream in this

regard, partly because they recruit more among working-class people,

who are less attracted to artistic variations in lifestyle;

nonetheless, one of their most gifted ideologues in the 1980s,

Stephen Flowers a.k.a. Edred Thorsson, subsequently outed himself as -

- in Freudian terms -- a zealous polymorphous pervert. Hindus in

India, and perhaps even more the overseas Hindus who have experienced

a close-knit family structure and the concomitant "family values" as

a great asset in their professional success (Margaret

Thatcher's "model immigrant community"), would probably feel closer

to the prudish morality of Evangelicals than to the libertine neo-

Pagans.

 

Other Hindu taboos, as on beef-eating or meat-eating in general, are

equally foreign to Western neo-Pagans. Though vegetarianism is a

major trend in some circles, others celebrate hunting and do-it-

yourself slaughtering of your next meal as part of the return to a

more natural way of life. Even among the vegetarians, the motive is

more often health and ecology (meat production requiring a much

larger land surface than the production of vegetable food with the

same nutritional value) rather than Hindu considerations such as

compassion with all sentient beings and the taboo on touching, let

alone digesting, animal tissue in a state of decomposition.

 

>From an orthodox Hindu viewpoint, most neo-Pagan groups would have a

status similar to the tribals of forested Central India. Though the

tribals are recognized as Indian fellow-Pagans, Hindus by Savarkar's

definition, they are nonetheless commonly perceived as savages

because of their disregard for certain taboos and because of their

not so strict morality (as in the common youth dormitories where

sexual experimentation is encouraged). The city jungles of the West

have somehow spawned a lifestyle similar to that of the tiger-

infested and snake-haunted jungles of India.

 

Absence of a yogic tradition

Another point which neo-Pagans have in common with the Indian tribals

as compared with the literate Hindu-Buddhist mainstream, is that they

do not have an established tradition of yoga. One of the most

important fruits of civilization is a system of techniques allowing

man to reach beyond the ordinary, world-absorbed (c.q. dream-

absorbed) consciousness. This does create an inequality within the

broad category of non-Abrahamic or "Pagan" religions. I am aware that

this is bound to put some readers off as being elitist, but there is

a real difference between the systematically developed techniques of

consciousness as practised in Hindu and Buddhist monasteries (and by

laymen every morning and evening), on the one hand, and the whole

spectrum of ordinary religious experience on the other: ritual,

celebration, devotional practices, even erratic mystical experiences

as anyone may have in exceptional moments (from first love to near-

death experiences). The best way to realize this difference is to

meet an accomplished yogi: the quality of profound peace he radiates

is unlike anything else. This doesn't mean that other activities,

religious and secular, are somehow bad and to be shunned. Not at all:

whereas Western adepts of yoga often deride "organized religion" with

its rituals, I have never heard of an Indian or East-Asian

practitioner who did not observe some calendar of rituals (e.g. Zen

as a tradition of meditation is heavily ritualized). Advanced

students of yogic techniques don't set themselves against the

surrounding folk religion, but adapt to it and add their own insights

to it as a jewel to the crown. Both in Chinese Taoism and in

Hinduism, we see how folk religion gets transformed by having the

spiritual tradition as a point of reference in its midst. Contrary to

what early Orientalists imagined, 99% of the people in the Orient are

not sages; yet, they are aware of the existence and nearness of such

a class of seers, and this infuses their religion with a quality

absent in the purely naturalistic Pagan religions.

 

Did such a spiritual tradition exist within the pre-Christian

religions of Europe? In Greek and Hellenistic culture, we certainly

see traces of it, but they are usually attributed to Egyptian or

Asian influence. The Druids are usually credited with such a

tradition, but as far as we can see, their central claim to honour

within Celtic society was their memorization of a whole library of

mythological and historical narratives. This was similar to the

Brahmins learning the Vedas and other classics by heart, which is

part of their *karmakanda*, "ritualism", distinct from the

*jnanakanda*, the search for absolute knowledge developed in the

younger layers of the Vedas, the Upanishads. Moreover, as a serious

blemish on their reputation as dreamy sages, the Druids were also

officiants at bloody sacrifices, allegedly even human sacrifice,

which even the robust Romans found repulsive and barbaric. In the

development of Vedic religion, we see animal sacrifice phased out in

favour of symbolic replacement sacrifices (coconuts etc.), but

Druidic religion was prevented from making such progress from

barbarity to civilization because it was killed by Roman armies and

Christian missionaries. When the neo-Druids in organizations like

OBOD, the "Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids", practise an altogether

more peaceful religion, they can justify that (e.g. when The Times

derided them on 22 June 1998 as "milk-and-water Pagans" for not even

sacrificing human virgins on Summer Solstice in Stonehenge) by

explaining that they supply the evolution which Druidry would have

gone through, had it survived through the last two thousand years.

 

At any rate, a perusal of the remaining (often distorted) Pagan

literature of the Celts and also of the Germanic peoples shows a lot

of celebration of life, of courage and passion, and some insightful

meditations on the mysteries of life and death, but nothing like a

yogic tradition. Neo-Pagans who understand that something is missing

make up for it by borrowing heavily from the living traditions of

Asia. Thus, the OBOD has imported a lot of Hindu-Buddhist lore into

its curriculum as a substitute for the unknown and irretrievable

doctrines which the ancient Druids must have taught. To some extent,

this is historically justified because European and Asian Pagan

traditions did have certain doctrines in common, e.g. the belief in

reincarnation is well-attested by Greco-Roman observers of the

Druidic tradition, in Virgil's Aeneis and other European Pagan

sources. But to some extent, it may be just fantasy: it is really

possible that our Celtic and Germanic ancestors did miss out on some

philosophical developments which were taking place in more civilized

parts of the world. And whatever they did know and teach has largely

been lost, or only been registered by Christian monks who didn't

understand much of it anymore. So, either way, neo-Pagans trying to

supply the innermost teachings to a tradition of which folklore and

scanty surviving texts have only preserved a skeleton, have no choice

but to look to surviving traditions like Hinduism.

 

Xenophobia

Alternatively, some neo-Pagan ideologues reject any input from Asian

or other traditions. In the Netherlands, the late Noud van den

Eerenbeemt, a Germanic heathen, used to teach something he

called "Runic yoga", meaning a series of body postures imitating the

shapes of the old-Germanic alphabet signs or Runes. I think this was

a bit silly, as Hatha-yogic postures are designed to produce certain

effects in the energetics of the body, not to impersonate certain

visual shapes. However, some heathens rejected it for a wholly

different reason: yoga is a non-European invention, hence "unfit for

European people". They were apparently unaware that the Runic

alphabet itself was once imported from the south, and that the Indo-

European languages themselves, and the religious lore they carried,

were once imported from the East: at least from Russia, according to

the dominant theory, or perhaps even from Afghanistan or India.

 

Those are the people who reject Christianity on grounds of its

foreign origin: an "Asian religion unfit for Europeans", just like

Hinduism. That is wholly mistaken: if Christianity was an erroneous

belief system, it was erroneous even for people in its countries of

origin, just as Islam was initially rejected even by the compatriots

of the Prophet, the Arabs. Conversely, if Christianity is true, it

stands to reason that we should all drop our ancestral religion and

embrace Christianity, just like Paul did, and Constantine, and

Clovis, and Vladimir.

 

Hindus stand warned that a minoritarian but activist strand within

the Pagan reawakening is motivated by such xenophobia, which is

largely based on ignorance or at least on the insufficient

realization of the syncretic nature of even their own ancestral

religions. Often they are people who care little about religion and

more about ethnicity, using religion only to give some colour to

their assertion of ethnic identity. My impression is that in the

Odinist movement in the USA, with its increasing racial polarization,

this "white pride" tendency is not just an embarrassing fringe, as it

is in Europe, but may well represent the mainstream. And if it isn't

that yet, it will become predominant in the near future: as whites

slip into minority status in the USA, those whites who are on the

receiving end of the social changes (remember that Odinists are

largely working-class) will probably lose their current inhibitions

about racial self-identification on the African-American model.

Whereas Christians have their own variety of white racism (KKK,

Christian Identity), the large floating mass of secularized white

Americans will increasingly find a cultural rallying-point in

European, esp. Germanic neo-Paganism. Those Odinists who take their

distances from such development will soon find themselves outnumbered

by the new recruits for whom colour is more important than religious

experiences.

 

In Europe too we see that purely secular nationalist or racist

circles affect Pagan terminology (the Flemish group Odal, the

Austrian periodical Ostarra, the German periodical Sleipnir, the

widespread use of the Celtic Cross by Euro-nationalists), but because

of the more thorough secularization of European culture, this remains

more purely a political code which does not interfere with the actual

revival of ancestral religion. Most neo-Pagan including Odinist

groups in Europe statutorily exclude neo-Nazis, Satanists and other

such fringe characters.

 

In efforts at cooperation, Hindus will not much come into contact

with the xenophobic faction among the Pagan revivalists, precisely

because the latter are not interested in brown immigrants, except

negatively. And except for the identification of Hinduism with the

caste system, which in turn has been identified with a kind of racial

apartheid system. As you can check in David Duke's book My Awakening,

the Bible of the racialist Right in the USA, the Hindu caste system

is widely understood as a system imposed by the "Aryan invaders" on

the "dark-skinned natives" to preserve their racial purity. That the

Indo-Aryans didn't succeed in the alleged endeavour of race

preservation and ended up brown-skinned themselves is another matter;

fact is that the Vedas are regarded by ignorant Westerners as a

description of the subjugation of the browns by the whites, and as an

injunction to racial self-preservation.

 

In continental Europe too, there is a movement of so-called

Traditionalists, inspired by Rene' Gue'non and Julius Evola, who take

a similar view of the caste system, and who see it as part of the

Indo-European heritage, hence relevant also for the European branches

of the great Indo-European family. Obviously, these aren't the

friends you need, and if such people approach you, do patiently

explain to them that the basis of modern science was laid by dark-

skinned people like the Harappans: mathematics, astronomy, writing

etc. Perhaps that will change their outlook on racial and cultural

differences.

 

Monotheism vs. polytheism

A very minor philosophical point of disagreement concerns the notion

of polytheism. To many Western neo-Pagans, this is the central point

of difference with the Abrahamic religions, and so they brandish

their polytheism as the defining trait of their religion. Thus, the

Belgian periodical Antaios calls itself a medium for "polytheist

studies". While most Hindus have no problem with polytheism, they

will find the issue in itself less important: depending how you

define "god", something can be said for both monotheism and

polytheism. The ancient Greek philosophers, though undoubtedly Pagan,

nonetheless sought for a unifying principle underlying the whole of

creation. It is only because of the Judeo-Christo-Islamic crusade

against polytheism that this has become such a crucial issue for

Westerners trying to revive their Pagan roots. As Ram Swarup puts it:

 

"And yet the birth of Many Gods will not herald the death of One God;

on the other hand, it will enrich and deepen our understanding of

both. For One God and Many Gods are spiritually one. (...) A purely

monotheistic unity fails to represent the living unity of the Spirit

and expresses merely the intellect's love of the uniform and the

general. Similarly, purely polytheistic Gods without any principle of

unity amongst them lose their inner coherence. (...) The Vedic

approach is probably the best. It gives unity without sacrificing

diversity. (...) Monotheism is not saved by polytheism, nor

polytheism by monotheism, but both are saved by going deep into the

life of the soul. (...) Depending on the cultures in which they were

born, mystics have given monotheistic as well as polytheistic

renderings and interpretations of their inner life and experiences."

(The Word as Revelation: Names of Gods, 1980, p.128-133)

 

Is Hinduism an ethnic religion?

When the WCER constituted itself, there was a lot of discussion about

how to formulate its Pagan identity. The term Pagan or Heathen was

avoided because members, esp. from Eastern Europe, said that the term

had come to sound so negative after centuries of Christian

indoctrination, that it simply carried the wrong connotations:

immorality, violence, backwardness. The term "polytheistic" was also

not acceptable, because Paganism admits also of pantheistic and even

atheistic viewpoints, and within polytheistic frameworks we find that

religious practice often takes the form of henotheism, i.e. worship

of a single god chosen from among many (what Hindus call the ishta

devata, the "chosen deity"). Another proposal was the "old religion"

or the "ancestral religion", terms already used by some Pagan

revivalist groups, esp. in Scandinavia (e.g. Forn Sidr, "the earlier

customs"). Personally, I think that would have been the best, as it

describes exactly the status of the religion being revived,

regardless of its being polytheistic or pantheistic or whatever. It

would also be similar to the Sanskrit term Sanatana Dharma, "the

eternal mores/duty/order".

 

The founding conference settled for the term "ethnic", indeed a Greek

term by which the Hellenized Jews and first Christians designated the

Pagans. Note, however, that as the equivalent of Hebrew Goyim, "the

nations", it would nonetheless include Judaism itself, this being the

ethnic religion par excellence. The founding declaration of the WCER

(see www.wcer.org) makes it unambiguously clear that no narrow ethnic

exclusivism is meant, it puts the ethnic religions in the framework

of "universalism". This will prove necessary, for the term "ethnic"

all by itself may well attract all kinds of cranky political

ethnicists who will need to be educated about the interwovenness of

Pagan religions across ethnic frontiers. Thus, Germanic religion is

at the very least composed of the pre-Indo-European native religion

of northern Europe plus the religion of the incoming Indo-Europeans,

the latter having lots in common with the neighbouring Baltic and

Slavic religions, and even with the more distant Greek, Roman, and

Hindu religions. When we study the ancient religions, we find that

they have lots in common, e.g. their focus on the starry sky as the

manifest locus of the gods at play.

 

For Hindus, the question should be faced whether Hinduism qualifies

as an "ethnic" religion. Historically, that description has a point,

yet Hinduism has, starting from the riverine plains of northern

India, spread to the farthest corners of the south and the inland

hills and forests, assimilating ever new tribes or ethnic groups. It

has also spread to Central and Southeast Asia. Today, it is spreading

in the West, both by migration and by attracting spontaneous Western

converts. So, that is something to think about.

 

Conclusion

Hindus should welcome the revival of the pre-Christian religions of

the West, often cognate religions through the common Indo-European

origins, otherwise at least typologically related religions which are

not based on a monopolistic prophet or scripture. At the same time,

they should be watchful for impure motives and degenerative trends,

or for phenomena which may be acceptable in a multicultural framework

but with which they need not involve themselves. The ancestral

religions of Europe are at present in a formative stage, a stage of

groping in the dark, of gradual rediscovery or self-reconstitution.

At this stage they attract people with a variety of motives and

divergent levels of knowledge and understanding. Still immature,

these religions often look to Hinduism for guidance.