What Is The Relevance of Ancient European Paganism For Today?

The core of any culture is its answer to the meaning of life. While "The meaning of life" is ultimately arbitrary, philosophy and history show that only a finite number of possibilities exist. Whatever possibility is chosen defines the life paths of a group of people, and hence ultimately, their survival. This is why it is an important question.
Above image from https://yoikiguide.com/hitchhikers-guide-42-meaning-of-life/

Ancient Druidry Is the Source Of European Culture

(May 15, 2025)

Before the Romans and Greeks, before the Celts and Norse, existed the Ancient Druidism of the European Neolithic farmers who migrated out of northern Mesopotamia. This was the source culture of Europe and later, most of the world.

For better or for worse, the defense of one's culture has been a major motivating force in history alongside that of material well-being. Cultural evolution centered around memes was a faster from of adaptive change then biological evolution centered around genes, a trait which is likely uniquely found only in modern humans. Only in modern times with the rise of literacy based adaptive change has reasoning allowed for faster social change than cultural evolution.

An existing culture always comes from some mix of earlier cultures. When humans lived in tribal groups those tribes having the best adapted culture for their environment prospered more than others. Also, those that could preserve their successful culture for longer also prospered more than others while those which held on to a less successful culture declined. So successful human tribes developed a balance between cultural tolerance and cultural dogmatism. This balance seems to have been achieved by each tribe having a continuum of different personality types. Their conservatives sought to preserve existing culture with a tendency to blame others for problems. In contrast, the liberals sought innovation and tolerance with a tendency to blame themselves for problems.

A culture is is best imagined as an inverted 3-layered pyramid. The whole pyramid is supported by its paradigms at the bottom. Religions are changeable paradigms which represent the transitional state from a paradigm to the traditional way of doing or making things.

"Meaning of Life" Is Defined By Paradigms and Religions

(May 14, 2025) Runic texts cannot be understood and hence translated without first understanding the culture behind them. This knowledge has been unknown up to now and achieving it was an iterative process. First a set of rough translations were done, then the word meanings and grammar used were refined consistency and content. This refined approach was next applied to the next set of runic texts and the process was repeated for both this new set and the old set. This process was repeated over many years until consistent translations over the whole series of sets was achieved.

At its simplest a paradigm is how we see things as demonstrated above. Shift attention and we see this same picture differently. Being able to choose the way we perceive this well known picture makes it analogous to a religious paradigm. If we could not change perception at will then it would be analogous to a cultural paradigm. Such changeability requires exposure to alternate views.

What is a Paradigm?

(April 1, 2025) Facts must be organized so they can be found when needed. This requires a mental framework, that is, a paradigm for working with acquired facts. If new facts cannot be fitted into a person's existing paradigm they will be ignored. Those facts are just not seen. Paradigms should not be confused with social or cultural classification schemes (which they often are). They exist at a much deeper level.

The 3 main divisions of philosophy revolve around the 3 main questions of existence which in turn are the main classification dimensions of religion.

Philosophy Seeks To Classify Paradigms and Religions

(April 4, 2025) Religions themselves can be characterized by their answers to these three fundamental questions of existence:

(Metaphysical Cosmology) Where are the deities or other causal powers? When are they active? Can one control them, if so how?
(Epistemology) What is your primary community knowledge source (authority)? - Is it nature, a sacred text, guru, institution, or tradition?
(Axiology) Why are you here? - What is your life goal? What is the purpose of your life if any? How should one live (ethics)?

(May 14, 2025) This chart shows how paradigms have changed in Europe with the paradigm revolutions in red. The traditional timeline below. While the traditional timeline is descriptive it not very insightful in regards to historical causes. The translation of runic texts has pushed history further back in time to about 1900 BCE which has clarified the paradigm history of Europe. The Renaissance as an historical paradigm change is still ongoing. Innovations in thought and perceptions based upon viewing nature as a community authority continues to evolve.

The Paradigms of History

(April 1, 2025, updated May 15, 2025 ) History has 2 great paradigm shifts between 3 phases of history. The phases of history are shown below with their main religious groupings in parenthesis:

Ancient Pagan Era - Literate areas have religions with literate priesthoods for the first time. The only religion from this early time had was Ancient Druidry having non-personified (perceptheistic) deities. As deities were personified we get we get the religions of Pythagoreanism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Hinduism as well as the first bardic tales involving personified deities (Homer's works) which led to the classical religion.
Scriptural Era - Literate areas developed religions with sacred scriptures which supported empires and in return were themselves supported by empires and nation-states. Dualist religions having sacred scriptures along with personified deities are: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A dualist religion having sacred scriptures but without personified deities is Buddhism which became the official religion of the Ashokan empire.
Modern Era - Literacy spreads taking religion away from specialist priests. Existing religions split into many and new religions arise: Humanists, Materialists, New Agers, Witches, Modern Pagans.

The great paradigm shifts were the:

Dualist Revolution (500 BCE - 300 CE)
Renaissance Revolution (1400 CE - 2000 CE) Includes Enlightenment & Romantic movements

One example of a paradigm change is a scientific revolution like the one in which plate tectonics replaced the idea of a static earth with rising and falling land bridges. Changes in paradigm tend to follow the circular pattern above. This cycle was first described by Thomas Kuhn in his book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962at http://faculty.humanities.uci.edu/bjbecker/revoltingideas/week1d.html

Religions (Paradigms Which Can Be Changed) Are Only Changed With Difficulty

(November 27, 2023, Updated April 1, 2025) Paradigms can be difficult to change because they are heavily influenced by humanity's psychology. Either the psychology of identity or the difficulty in unlearning something then relearning. The first learning of something is always the easiest. This combination of change difficulty and identity psychology can make such people having such a "brain-washed" paradigm appear completely irrational to others. Holding onto an identity paradigm will even make them willing to perform atrocities in defense of that paradigm. This was noticed by German Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was jailed and eventually killed by the Nazis. He wrote this:

“The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison)

Sacred oak groves are not just Celtic. Lithuania was the last Druid Pagan region in Europe to be forcefully converted to Christianity meaning we have a good number of Christian texts about their Druid Pagan past. Additionally, many Druid Akkadian place names and traditions seem to have survived.
This photo shows one of the last sacred oaks having a place label of Alko or Gojus as seen from the west near Šventragiai village in Lithuania. More than 500 forests and former forest sites have the word gojus in their name. Beginning in the 1500's the number of locations called Gojas grew rapidly with the word gojus replacing alka. Photo by V. Vaitkevičius, 2008 (in Vaitkevičius 2016).

Gojus is the Druid Akkadian phrase G'.G.UṢ meaning "Breaking-through with the energy of the Originator." The "Originator" in this case is an epithet for the source of the astrological fate powers which is the dark new moon god Su.

Comparison of Ancient Druidry With Modern Nature Pagan Practices

(May 15, 2025)

Differences

Metaphysics (Nature of Reality) - Most modern Pagans accept that reality today is divided into a material and spiritual realm. Ancient Druidry had no such division. Spiritual powers were the cause of various sorts of motion on earth. Today we have the concept of energy and momentum.

Similarities

Metaphysics (Life After Death) - Reincarnation of each person's spark of life (spirit) responsible for motion body motion.
Epistemology (Community Knowledge Source) - Community knowledge came from nature and cultural tradition (sacred texts did not yet exist). Ancient Druid deities represented a set of fundamental forces seen in nature and were used to explain natural phenomena.
Epistemology (Personal Knowledge Source) - Spiritual influences/powers were felt and not seen (perceptheism). Feelings and dreams were the source of personal knowledge. Conversely, manipulating feelings and emotional energy with the assumption that they will affect things is emotion magic. Special places in nature such as groves , springs, and high places were felt to be places of divine power.
Axiology (Purpose of Existence) - To keep the balance of nature

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