‘Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.’
Gustav Mahler
Modern people have a strange and distorted relationship with tradition. Some people believe we have no traditions or culture in the west, as though our traditions have evaporated.
To some extent, this is true. We have lost a great deal of our more rural folk traditions that were likely carried on for thousands of years. The industrialization of the west radically changed our way of life, and many traditions that fit with an agrarian lifestyle were either forgotten or discarded.
Nonetheless, we still have traditions today, but strangely, we have difficulty seeing them. One of the features of traditions is that they are so close to us that we rarely perceive their presence. Traditions are what we do year after year and become background noise that we quickly learn to ignore.
But what is tradition? And more importantly, what does it mean for the pagan religions rebuilding themselves today?
The word tradition goes back to the Latin tradere, “to deliver or hand over .”Tradition is a transmission. It is an inheritance. This ultimately means that somebody else has to hand a tradition to you; it is not something you can create or fabricate on your own.
Many pagan reconstruction groups have been trying to revive what they call ancient traditions but is that even possible? How do we restore a religious and cultural way of life from 2000 years ago? Today, we would need help to revive Victorian English traditions, much less ancient Roman. The traditions of the ancient Romans were tied to the rhythms of their life, their agricultural lifestyles, and the needs of an ancient city before industrialization. All that to say, our traditions are in harmony with who we are, and we are not ancient people anymore.
There is nothing traditional about dressing up as a Roman senator in a toga or a Viking warrior. Nothing. To think it is traditional is to completely misunderstand that tradition is given to us by our culture and immediate ancestors. It is not reconstructed from a period in our distant past.
The definition of tradition implies that there is a giver of a tradition and a receiver. To put it another way, traditions choose us; we do not choose our traditions. Once we have been given a tradition, we choose what to do with it, but we don’t get to choose the tradition itself.
What most pagans are doing today is anti-traditional. They are discarding the tradition they have been handed and constructing a new one based on their personal preferences. It would be similar to a Catholic dressing up like Charlemagne and calling himself a knight because that is part of the Catholic “tradition .”He would stroll into Sunday mass dressed in medieval garb, a sword clanking around his waist so he could connect with his “authentic” Catholic heritage. We can see the absurdity of that type of person, and yet a person dressing as an ancient Roman patrician is considered ‘traditional’ in pagan circles.
Pagan Reconstructionism is a part of the modern-day cults of identity lifestyles. Divorced from tradition, people can construct whatever fantasy identity they want to be a part of. People can pretend they are a comic book character, cat, or heroic knight. Our political ideologies can subsume our identity, as can our favorite corporate intellectual property or franchise. Only by disconnecting from tradition do any of these new identities become possible. Reconstructionism is the religious variety of non-traditional identities.
For the modern pagan who believes he has no inherited tradition, this reality is cause for despair and anxiety. But they need not worry; we have a tradition. The spiritual tradition of the west is the Catholic tradition. That may bother some who consider themselves pagan but understand I don’t mean you have to be a Christian. I mean that our cultural and spiritual inheritance has been carried to today and handed to us via the Catholic Church. We can dislike that all we want, but it is undeniable. Our spiritual architecture, methods of worship and spiritual practice, and norms around piety and devotion are all Catholic and have been for roughly 1500 years.
Now you may say, if tradition is inherited, then we should be religiously Catholic.
Not so fast. We have been handed the Catholic tradition, but ultimately, we must decide what to do with it. We are the ancestors now. We are the current link in the chain. We could reject it outright and try to construct a new spiritual tradition from scratch, but that would be giving up all the inherited wonder of tradition that our ancestors gave us. That would be genuinely anti-traditional.
I’ve spent my life studying religion, and I, like many others, have discovered the long-discarded wisdom of our ancient ancestors and been swayed to believe in them. Ultimately, I didn’t choose to believe in the ancients; I read the ancient works and was convinced. I was compelled to see the truth in what they said. I have looked at the responses the Catholic church has to persuade me to ignore these arguments from the ancients and found them lacking. I couldn’t believe in Catholic doctrines even if I wanted.
So I am at a crossroads. I want to respect my ancestors and be a steward of the tradition I have inherited, yet I find myself at odds with the philosophy and theology of my given tradition.
Being a member of a tradition is not just blindly following what your ancestors did just because it is tradition. Things change generation after generation, and tradition moves with it slowly. Ultimately, the baton is in my hand, and I have the decision to make. Do I continue on the theology of the Catholic path, or do I make a change? For some reason, this has become an all-or-nothing decision for many pagans. They are either 100% Catholic/Christian or 100% pagan, and all things must be altered. But this is silly. Why would we jettison all of our inherited culture and tradition over theological disagreements? Our theological differences may be significant and have far-reaching effects, but what about them invalidates the rest of the tradition?
Put more plainly, what is evil or wrong about Gregorian chant?
Why should we part with stained glass and cathedral architecture?
Are these things irreparably Christian or just part of the spiritual history and tradition of the west? Are they not part of the story of how we got here?
What about priestly vestments? What Christian evil do chasubles and albs represent? Are they not merely the traditional clothes modern westerners wear when they make an offering to God or Gods?
These are serious questions. Even the early Catholics realized it was folly to throw out centuries of pagan practices, holidays, and philosophy, so they incorporated all those that would fit with their new vision. There is no reason to discard every aspect of the western spiritual tradition because it was Christian at some point.
Somewhat ironically, all the things I’ve mentioned have their roots in the pre-Christian past.
Gregorian chant is a more developed version of western plainsong which goes back to pre-Christian chanting practices. Gothic Cathedrals are based on Roman basilicas and temples, and almost all priestly vestments are based on clothing worn initially in ancient times. The chasuble, for example, is based on the Roman caracalla, from which the emperor Caracalla got his nickname for wearing.
The reality is that the tradition inherited in the west requires some changes. We need to reject the theology, scriptures, and many doctrines that have made the Catholic church so poisonous. By doing so, we also cease to be Catholics by name.
However, if we care about tradition, we should strive as hard as we can to preserve and maintain every part of our tradition that does not pose a problem. That is how we preserve the fire.
This also helps us modern pagans solve many problems plaguing the community.
Once we break from tradition, we spiral out of control because our preferences ultimately guide us, and there is nothing to stop us from constructing endless identities and practices in the search for something stable. The natural stability we seek comes from inherited traditions, not fabricated identities.
Thus we have countless versions of paganism, all reconstructing different time periods and rituals. Some are merging pantheons and deriving eclectic beliefs from several sources for no particular reason. Some mix in foreign spiritual practices and ignore traditional western ones because they are “Christian .”Others obsess over their DNA results, convinced it is critical to understanding their rootlessness. “Maybe I’ll know who I am when I have found my haplogroup!”
There is nothing to ground this endless search. Pagans are lost in modern identity culture and searching for something that isn’t there. They think tradition is something you find or construct when it is given to us. We will always be rootless, confused, and lost until we accept the tradition we were given.
Now I believe that, at some level, the Catholic tradition belongs to all western European peoples. At some point in the recent past, we were all Catholics. Some Germanics and Nordics may feel a closer affinity to Protestantism which was an acknowledgment that the Mediterranean religious culture of Catholicism did not reflect the spirit of the Germanic people. The divide between “barbarians” and the Hellenes is far older than Christianity; Catholicism was powerless to change that in the end. In that case, some Germanic and Nordic Asatru groups have successfully merged the Protestant tradition with Asatru. Perhaps, that’s a better fit for those people.
For the rest of us, the living Catholic tradition is our cultural inheritance that requires our attention and reformation. It is time to conform this inheritance back to our Romanist theological roots. I won’t touch on why that is necessary, but I have written about that issue in the linked articles below.
On the Nicene Interpretation
Why not be Catholic?
For the Glory of Jove
