Hindus And Neo-Paganism

[Guest guest]

Koenraad Elst

Hindus And Neo-Paganism

 

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

philosophers 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.