Psycho Paganism

Consider Freud’s cast of characters. Oedipus, Narcissus, Eros, Thanatos, even Psyche. What do they have in common. They all come from pagan myth and legend, even from pagan literature. 

When Freud chose to grace the world with his thoughts about Moses and monotheism, in his last book, he seemed to cast himself as the anti-Moses, leading his people back to the Egypt of the pharaohs. That is, back to pagan idolatry. Freud had no real use for monotheism.

So, Freudian psychoanalysis bases itself on the notion that the unconscious mind is structured like a pagan Greek tragedy. Thus, that we are all pagans beneath the skin, but that civilization, that would be Judeo-Christian civilization, repressed our pagan past and alienated us from the raw vitality made manifest therein.

As though that were not sufficient, Freud’s sometime colleague, Carl Jung was hawking pagan idolatry. So much so that he even, for a time, believed that Hitler himself was a Norse deity come back to life.

For extra credit today, name our leading Jungian psychologist. If said psychologist has been pretending to be promoting the values of Judeo-Christianity, he is conning you. Or perhaps, he is conning himself.

Anyway, an Israeli journalist by name of Liel Leibovitz recently wrote an article in Commentary wherein he argued that we as a civilization have increasingly abandoned Judeo-Christianity, and have replaced it with pagan idolatry.

One feels compelled to point out that one Tara Isabella Burton argued the same point several years ago in her book, Strange Rites. I recommend her book. 

Anyway, Leibovitz has some statistics:

In 1990, scholars from Trinity College set out to learn just how many of their fellow Americans practiced some form of pagan religion. The numbers were unsurprisingly small: about 8,000, or enough to pack your average Journey reunion concert. But the researchers asked again in 2008, and this time, 340,000 Americans said yes to paganism. A decade later, the Pew survey posed the same question, and, if it is to believed, there are now about 1.5 million Americans professing an array of pagan persuasions, from Wicca to the Viking lore, making paganism one of the nation’s fastest-growing persuasions.

It is fairly obvious that paganism derives from polytheism. In contemporary terms, we are invited to worship at multiple cults to multiple divinities. The more common term is multiculturalism. The result is moral chaos, different sets of moral rules for different members of different cults. 

Now, Liebovitz adds this point. 

… the soul of paganism, illuminated by the idea that no fixed system of belief or set of solid convictions ought to constrain us as we stumble our way through life.

Dare we mention, if the natural world is associated with a panoply of deities and if said deities can transform themselves at will, scientific or objective knowledge about the workings of said natural world would seem to be precluded.

At the least, this tells us why, caught as we are in an encompassing narrative, we refuse to debate issues of climate change. We believe that our polluting machines and industrial might have offended some very serious deities and that the gods will avenge the slight. At that point, why bother to debate the issue.

As for how pagans attest to their faith, one way has traditionally been to sacrifice children. Now, is this what was happening during the Covid pandemic, when we sacrificed children’s minds and education by shutting down schools? Obviously, people keep telling us that said children will easily make up the lost learning. But such is dubious, at least.

Liebovitz explains our child sacrifice:

Child sacrifice, alas, is alive and well in America these days, too. We may not, like the Vikings, toss our young into wells as offerings to the heavens, but turn over every rock in our craggy contemporary political landscape and you’ll find some pagan policy offering up the well-being of children to the gods of virtue. 

In March 2020, to choose one stinging example, Sweden bucked the global trend and responded to Covid-19 by keeping schools open. The results of this experiment were available shortly thereafter: Zero dead kids, almost zero kids sick, and very little, if any, risk to teachers. By January 2021, a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention affirmed that Covid rates in schools that had reopened were 37 percent lower than the rates in the same communities at large. The Biden administration largely ignored this evidence; it took some liberal cities such as New York a full 18 months to reopen their schools.

The results: dramatic upticks in juvenile mental-health crises, sharp declines in basic academic proficiency and just about every other metric of human misery visited on our children. A rational society, to say nothing about one guided by traditional values, would have curbed this suffering long before it blossomed so terribly; the pagans instead composed a fanciful narrative of what constitutes righteous behavior and then forced it on their children, whose pain was then explained away as a necessary evil if one wanted the forces of science to vanquish the darkness and cleanse the soul. When Anthony Fauci said, “I am the science,” he couldn’t have sounded more like the mighty Perun had he worn a cape and a crown.

You may not know that Perun is the ultimate in Slavic divinities, but we might also remark that in Greek mythology, Athena is the goddess of wisdom, that is, of science. Her Roman counterpart is Minerva.

As though the Covid response was not bad enough, we have since gotten into the business of mutilating children. We have imagined that children can change genders by changing their minds. The result-- we have subjected them to biochemical and surgical mutilation. We call it trans rights, but it is really a form of child sacrifice-- to the gods and goddesses.