Rekindling the Flame of Pagan Life Today, Part 1
“The challenge of the Renaissance was not the recovery of the past, but finding the spark that had given it life… the flame had to be rekindled.” -Malcolm Bull, The Mirror of the Gods: How Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods.
The quote from Malcolm Bull’s book led me to ask what was the spark that rekindled the flame of pagan life during the Renaissance? Obviously, it was not Christianity. It was in part the failure of Christianity to fully grasp our Renaissance ancestors that made it possible for pagan life to be rekindled. The spark that rekindled the flame of pagan life during the Renaissance was the turning away of our ancestors from an exclusively Christian perspective to a perspective that at least included a pagan perspective, if it did not completely reject the perspective of Christianity. The inclusion of a pagan perspective meant paying attention to and venerating pagan goddesses and gods, their ancient images and stories, and how they once were worshiped.
What exactly was rekindled? The pagan perspective was rekindled. Put differently, the pagan soul itself was rekindled.
I do not think that there was only one, unified pagan perspective that was rekindled. I think that what was rekindled was multiple, complex perspectives. In other words, for every pagan soul that was rekindled there was a unique perspective. There were as many perspectives as there were pagans to have them.
I think that the challenge for us pagans today is not to recover, reconstruct or revive the pagan past. The past is over and cannot be reconstructed or revived. Our challenge is the same as it was for our Renaissance ancestors; namely, to find the spark that rekindles our lives as pagans today.
The spark that gives us life today may be, as it was for our Renaissance ancestors, the awareness of the failure of Christianity (if that is the case for us individually) to completely grasp our souls and to turn fully to our ancestral goddesses and gods, their images and stories, and how our ancestors worshiped them. Some of us are already doing this on our own, as solitaries. Some of us are doing it with others, in small groups and communities. We are rekindling relationships with many different goddesses and gods from many different pantheons. What unities us is our rekindling of the flame of living as pagans.