Out Of The Shadows, An Exploration of Dark Paganism & Magick Options

I was emailed reguarding a post on The Orical (found @ www.onewitch.com) about this book. It seems to cover an aspect of Paganism that many consider taboo. I hope to aquire this book soon. You can find more info on it at http://www.waningmoon.com/book/ (IMG:style_emoticons/default/yes.gif)

"The Taboos were set by the so called Romano Christians who had the understanding of a peanut. "

As opposed to the forest dwelling savages you appear to favor.

"including the mother goddess, carried out systematic torture, genocide."

I am not certain whether I understood your post correctly due to a rather hazy use of english language in it, but I will suppose that it indicates that

1.There was a mother goddess cult in Europe at the time of the Roman empire

and

2.The spreading christianity carried out genocide and systematic torture to secure its position.

Now, from a purely historical point of view, neither claim has much available support. The only confirmed fertility cult involving a mother goddess was in the somewhat shorter east european populace of the paleolithic and mesolithic period (as opposed to the western cro-magnon variety, which was taller and more civilised), where several (read:several, not severeal thousand) idols of fat ladies were found. This ethnic group was actually crushed by later arrivals millenia before the Romans ever came that way. Mind you, one of the arrivals were the Celts from the middle east. You don't often go worshipping the deities of savages you just killed out (imagine the british coming into india and instead of spreading christianity, adopting hinduism) There was also some emphasis on female deities in ireland. We'll get there later.
Conclusion: a pan-european female fertility cult is a myth. The fertility figures dissapeared with the advent of the neolithic period.

Violent expansion of christianity. Not for what you might call general use. The areas where you (read:neopagans) would expect the most feverish resistance, being the hardcore celts of the british isles and the vikings of scandinavia and iceland, both adopted christianity quite peacefully. In fact ireland is the best example, where local deities were gradually unified with christian saints. If you are thinking of stakes and fires now, that was 1000 years later in Europe, and particularly in ireland, never. The more usual way was to convince a monarch to get baptised, or demonstrate a miracle (Iceland I think was a monk grabbing a red-hot iron bar in his hand and not getting burnt, but it might have been somewhere else). So, I would avoid black and white categorisations here. The transition was in the vast majority of cases smooth and not against the will of the populace. Also note that local myths and pantheons often survived only thanks to christian monks who recorded them. Also try reading Snori Snurlessons (spelling?) Edda, the only authentic source of norse mythology...he speaks of God, Adam and Eve before going into Odin, and not in a "those fuckers came and burned out priests at the stake" way. That's just the modern persecution-seeking mentality of bored people.

"I am a follower of the old Celtic ways"
Bold statement. You're probably the only one who actually knows what they were then. Now "follower of somebody's well-meant, yet somewhat naive and historically inacurrate attempts to reconstruct celtic faith, omiting all the embarassing parts", that would be believable (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

This post has been edited by Rakesh: Mar 27 2005, 05:33 PM