Ancient Ethical Worships

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 6 pages

Six pages, and *the shortest file in this batch*. It is an argument about a single word, and it is unusually easy to follow because everything in it turns on that word's history.

The starting point is Professor Alexander Wilder's remark, in his edition of R. Payne Knight's The Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology, that the term paganism has degenerated into slang and is generally used with an opprobrious meaning. The more correct expression, Wilder says, would have been the ancient ethnical worships, and he adopts the popular term only because the better one would hardly be understood — adding, in a passage the file quotes in full, that a religion which can develop a Plato, an Epictetus and an Anaxagoras is not gross, superficial or unworthy of candid attention, and that many rites and doctrines found in the Christian and Jewish traditions appeared first in others, Zoroastrianism having anticipated far more than has been imagined: the cross, the priestly robes and symbols, the sacraments, the sabbath, the festivals and anniversaries all being older than the Christian era by thousands of years. Then comes the etymology that carries the argument. Paganus meant, in the first centuries, an inhabitant of a village — someone who by living far from the centres of the new proselytism had remained in the faith of his fathers. The old worship, excluded from its former shrines and from the metropolitan towns, survived in the pagi, the rural districts, and from that its votaries were named. Blavatsky's own conclusion is stated with some warmth: being neither Christian, Jew nor Muslim she must necessarily be pagan if the scientific etymology means anything, and she says she is democratic in the true sense of the word, respects the people of the fields and the honest labourer scorned by the wealthy, and prefers to be a pagan with the peasants than a Roman Catholic with the Princes of the Church.

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