How Can One Be Pagan?
Interview with Alain de Benoist
In this expansive and thought-provoking interview, Alain de Benoist revisits the central themes of his influential work On Being a Pagan (Comment peut-on être païen?)*, offering a rigorous critique of both Christianity and contemporary neopaganism. Engaging with interviewer Charles Champetier, Benoist explores the philosophical, ethical, and spiritual foundations of paganism as a coherent worldview, one rooted in the cosmic order, myth, and a non-dualist conception of the divine. He reflects on the challenges of reviving paganism in a post-Christian, secularized world, distinguishes between authentic spiritual engagement and modern pastiche, and considers the affinities between pagan thought and ecological or feminist movements. The result is a powerful defense of paganism as an alternative ethos for modernity, one that emphasizes harmony with the world rather than its transcendence.
* “Comment peut-on être païen?” literally translates to “How can one be pagan?,” however, the English translation of the work was titled “On Being a Pagan”
Originally published in Éléments no. 89 (Summer 1997)
Translated by Alexander Raynor
Alain de Benoist is one of the rare European intellectuals who have endeavored to think seriously about paganism. In responding to the questions posed to him here by Charles Champetier, he provides a critical panorama of neopaganism, but also, and above all, offers us a powerful reflection on the ethical and philosophical foundations of a new attitude toward life.
Charles Champetier: With the publication of On Being a Pagan about fifteen years ago, neopaganism burst onto the French intellectual scene. How do you judge, with distance, this manifesto-book? And fundamentally, why did you embark on this path?
Alain de Benoist: We must start with simple things. For several millennia, the peoples of Europe practiced religions that are habitually called "pagan," an ancient designation that was originally pejorative. These religions constituted a system of representations, values, and specific figures. They were the framework and spiritual support of numerous cultures and great civilizations of which we are, directly or indirectly, but not exclusively, the heirs. The pagan religions were then combated by Christianity, which carried another system of representation and which envisioned religious fact in an entirely different form.
The comparative study of these two systems allows us to understand the causes of their confrontation. At the same time, it incites us to determine our position in relation to them. Taking a position for paganism means striving, not to conceive, but to see the world according to the guiding lines of the system of representation that is proper to it.
There are many ways of coming to paganism. It can be through aesthetic sentiment, or through instinctive rejection of the Christian conception of the world. It can be through the will to connect oneself to a tradition or to sources intimately associated with it. It can also be, and this would rather be my case, through the conviction that the pathologies of the modern world are the daughters, illegitimate but certain, of Christian theology. A quite natural movement then leads one to cast a look of sympathy, of friendly connivance toward this other religion, pagan, which for so long resisted Christianization. Of course, in the final analysis, there is never an absolutely compelling reason to adhere to one system rather than another. If there were one, it would justify that this system be proposed or imposed on everyone, which I refuse to do. At most we can observe that one of these systems corresponds better to our sensibility, that it has had effects in the past that we judge better, that it situates itself in the more exact prolongation of a tradition to which we wish to adhere, in brief that it corresponds more than another to what we believe to be the truth.
Paganism is a global system. It is this system that I had endeavored to describe in On Being a Pagan, systematically highlighting how it opposes, in my view irreducibly, the Christian conception of man and the world. Some have judged this approach too "intellectual." It is indeed, but I see no other possible approach. Studying paganism, beyond the pleasure of knowledge that one derives from it, offers an intellectual and spiritual alternative. It allows us to see how our most distant ancestors conceived the relations of man to the world and the relations of men among themselves, what were the ethical attitudes they privileged, what place they attributed to the social bond, what idea they had of temporality, what was their conception of the sacred. The teachings that one derives from it are valid for all times, and first for our own. They determine lines of conduct and aid in the work of thought. When the myth tells us that by marrying Themis, goddess of order and justice, Zeus engendered the Seasons and the Destinies, for example, we learn something that goes well beyond the narrative. Similarly, the myth of Gullweig warns us against the "passion for gold." The fate reserved for Prometheus teaches us something about the consequences of cunning and technical unleashing. And the Delphic precept: "Nothing in excess" helps us understand the perverse character of the contemporary principle of "always more."
Charles Champetier: One can today identify numerous "neopaganisms." I would distinguish for my part three large ensembles: a communitarian or "sectarian" neopaganism, based on imitation of ancient rites or reactivation of regional popular traditions; a literary neopaganism (see for example the interview with Christian Laborde recently published in Éléments), mainly founded on intuition and poetic inspiration; and finally an intellectual neopaganism, where myth, the imaginary, the archetype, the "polytheism of values," are so many active elements of interpretation and comprehension of the world. Does this ensemble seem unitary to you or, on the contrary, dispersed?
A. de B.: The pagan tradition (or, more generally, the reference to Antiquity) has never ceased, to various degrees, to inspire writers and artists. Most German romantics, beginning with Schelling, Görres or Novalis, opposed to a modern world judged soulless the memory of an ancient world where, as Schiller says, "everything was vestige of a god." In the 19th century, Antiquity was also a major source of inspiration for neoclassicists as well as for symbolists or Parnassians. But in fact, entire swaths of contemporary literature would need to be cited if one wanted to make a complete inventory of this "paganism." Let us think only of Leconte de Lisle, José Maria de Heredia, Théodore de Banville, Louis Ménard, Jean Moréas, Pierre Louys, Edouard Schuré, Hugues Rebell, Edouard Du Jardin, Gabriele D'Annunzio, D.H. Lawrence, Jean Giono, Knut Hamsun, Henry de Montherlant, Marguerite Yourcenar, John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, not forgetting Fernando Pessoa who, in The Return of the Gods, writes: "The gods are not dead: only our perception of the gods is dead. They have not departed: we have ceased to see them [...] But they continue to be there and to live as they have always lived, in the same perfection and the same serenity."
Of course, among the authors I have just cited, "pagan" inspiration takes different forms. For some, it may be a formal reference, making only an appeal to the aesthetics of images and words. For others, it may be a nostalgic reaction against the disenchantment induced by the ideology of progress. Others have more clearly sought to found through paganism a new feeling of nature, another type of relationship to the world. But in all cases, this permanent reference, this spontaneous desire to connect oneself to a past perceived, more or less consciously, as a remedy to the evils of the present, has the value of a symptom.
Communitarian or "sectarian" neopaganism is obviously quite another thing, and I would be much more reserved on this point. I already wrote, in On Being a Pagan: "What seems to us above all to be feared today is less the disappearance of paganism than its resurgence under primitive and puerile forms, related to that second religiosity of which Spengler rightly made one of the characteristic traits of cultures in decline." The flowering of neopagan groups that we have witnessed for fifteen years has only reinforced me in this sentiment. The extreme diversity of these groups alone gives food for thought. For some, "paganism" essentially boils down to joyful reunions, to friendly evenings where one celebrates, with some appropriate rituals, community life and the pleasures of existence. Others regroup within veritable "Churches" or religious communities, whose ceremonies tend rather toward Protestant or neo-Pietist interiorization. Still others pull "paganism" toward pure transgression, ranging from "sexual magic" to the black mass. The whole is almost invariably accompanied by complicated rituals, grandiloquent invocations, pompous titles. The result is that "pagan ceremonies" can just as well resemble the well-watered community celebration as austere meditation, the Masonic "lodge" of the fringe, the orgy or the costume ball. Obviously, many of these movements have strictly nothing to do, except for the use of the word, with paganism. As for groups with a more strictly religious vocation, their mode of functioning often relates them to sects. While disapproving of the anti-sect hysteria that we witness today, hysteria that only adds to the confusion because of the amalgamations it practices, I must say that I feel personally quite foreign to all this. I see in it much pastiche, much parody, but very little paganism!
The confusion reaches its peak with the "neopagan" groups, especially Anglo-Saxon ones, that inscribe themselves in the New Age movement. More or less stemming from the hippie movement and Californian contestation of the sixties, this movement has as its main characteristic its syncretic and composite character: "anything goes." Its principal themes are ecofeminism, the millennialism of "Aquarius," an invincible penchant toward all forms of occultism and the paranormal, an aspiration to personal transformation allowing the individual to vibrate in unison with the "soul of the world." Its references are eclectic: the "Northern Way" and "runic astrology" get along well with Sufism, Kabbalah, Oriental spiritualities, spiritism (rebaptized channeling), theosophy or "astral travel." The central idea is that we are entering the era of Aquarius, which will be characterized by the fluidity of human relations and the emergence of a planetary consciousness.
The extremely numerous "neopagan" groups that evolve in this milieu rarely escape this syncretism, in fact a patchwork of beliefs and themes of all sorts, where one sees tarots and karmic "charms" mingle, dream interpretation and invocations to the Great Goddess, Egyptian hermetic traditions and the Upanishads, Castaneda and King Arthur, Frithjof Schuon and Jungian psychology, Thor's hammer and the Yi-King, "Thelemic magic" and yoga, the Tree of Life and "shamanic trance," etc.
In this hotchpotch, everything is obviously not to be rejected, beginning with themes like ecofeminism, the holistic vision of things, non-dualism, etc. But these themes are drowned, without the slightest rigor, in unbridled confusionism, founded on the implicit postulate of the compatibility, even convertibility, of all beliefs, all wisdoms and all practices. To this is added a debauchery of good sentiments, which often verges on the naive optimism that Americans are accustomed to, and above all this naive belief that individual experience is the sole criterion for validating the inner journey and that one can resort to ready-made spiritualities like so many recipes for happiness and "fulfillment." In the end, with its fashions and successive enthusiasms (Hildegard of Bingen, runic divination, "guardian angels"), the New Age constitutes a subculture irresistibly evoking those composite beliefs that one saw developing in Rome under the late Antiquity, on the margins of official rites, and which associated without further discernment Egyptian or Chaldean speculations, fragments of Oriental cults, astral theories, superstitious practices, "gnoses" of Iranian or Babylonian origin, oracles of all provenances.
Charles Champetier: Is your judgment too severe? Don't these "neopagan" groups that we see developing today in almost all Western countries, including moreover in Eastern Europe, have at least the merit of restoring to honor a material that has remained too long forgotten?
A. de B.: I bear only an overall judgment there. If one examined each of these groups separately, which is difficult to do here, I would be the first to bring corrections and nuances. It is obvious that certain "neopagan" communities are more interesting and more serious than others. Among their animators, whose sincerity and good intentions are not in question, there are some who have real knowledge of ancient pagan religions and who work seriously to know them even better. Their publications are sometimes well done, and I will not make the error of believing that they only address gentle dreamers or monomaniacs, or individuals in situations of failure, who hope to resolve their frustrations and intimate problems by adhering to groups in which they hope to find the place that real life refuses them. It nevertheless remains that, taken globally, this movement inscribes itself very well in the current "market of beliefs" where each one, on the basis of a sort of spiritual bricolage, comes according to his moods to make his choice between different religions and possible "wisdoms." This "market," where quantities of marginal spiritualities flourish, oscillating between the fusional temptation represented by sects and a desire to "care for one's soul" as one cares for one's body, through à la carte recipes, is one of the most obvious symptoms of the spiritual crisis of our epoch.
The whole question is in fact to know whether one can or cannot give life back to ancient cults without falling into sectarianism or simulacrum, that is to say without finally falling back into this nihilism that all true paganism should on the contrary have the objective of overcoming. Now, the attempts made in this domain seem to me to run up against serious obstacles.
"The whole question is to know whether one can or cannot give life back to ancient cults without falling into sectarianism or simulacrum, that is to say without finally falling back into this nihilism that all true paganism should on the contrary have the objective of overcoming."
There is first of all the problem of filiation. There is of course no continuity between ancient paganism and, whatever they say, modern neopagan groups. This does not prevent them, however, from affirming that they transmit inherited knowledge coming from the depths of ages, when this knowledge is often only the product of their imagination or a compilation of speculations advanced by others before them. The truth is that, if we know many things about ancient European religions, we ignore even more. I will take a simple example. Many neodruidic or druidizing groups claim to develop a "druidic teaching." But, if it is quite certain that the ancient druids taught something (the fact is attested by contemporary testimonies), we know strictly nothing of what constituted their teaching. The classical texts, Greek or Latin, are mute on this point. The medieval texts, essentially narratives from medieval Ireland, are compilations of pre-Christian oral narratives, often very well preserved, but devoid of any properly druidic commentary. The rituals adopted by most modern druidizing groups were in fact fabricated from whole cloth in the 18th century by the Welsh scholar Iolo Morgannwg (Edward Williams). Added to this are borrowings from Scottish Masonry, as well as from certain Welsh narratives, like the Mabinogi. All this is very interesting, but tells us strictly nothing about the "druidic tradition." No druidic filiation having survived Christianity, any druidic resurgence can only be parodic or folkloric. The same goes for "runic astrology" or "Nordic magic." We know that runes were used in the past for divination, and that there are good chances that they are of religious or "cosmic" origin. We also know that all ancient cultures have more or less resorted to magic. We finally know that certain popular traditions, preserved especially in rural milieux, have prolonged ancient beliefs. But we know nothing more. Everything that is written on the subject is therefore, once again, only contemporary speculation or compilation of earlier speculations.
Of course, one cannot exclude that intuition, added to a deep knowledge of what we know for certain about pagan religions, might succeed in restoring part of a lost knowledge. Such an approach nevertheless remains arbitrary, and to a large extent subjective.
Some of these groups moreover easily fall into a sort of Christianity turned upside down. One knows these circles where the texts of the Edda have replaced the Bible, but where the same patronizing morality has been preserved and where one apparently continues to expect from "paganism" what Christians expect from Christianity: moral norms and recipes for salvation. Such groups seem to me to have taken over two traits that Walter F. Otto describes, not without reason, as specifically Christian: the "virus of interiority," that is to say the idea "that religion is inseparable from a personal relation with God, that the sole commerce with divinity is woven through an individual subject," and the idea "that religious sentiment is born from a need for salvation that goes hand in hand with transcendence." Now, in paganism, not only is there no perspective of salvation, but God does not surge in the interior forum of the individual; he comes to meet him from the things of the world.
Some imagine that there could exist a "paganism of the catacombs" analogous to what was once the "Christianity of the catacombs." But this has nothing obvious about it, for Christianity possesses an individualist substratum that paganism does not have: faith is less narrowly dependent on external circumstances. Living as a pagan in a world that is not goes by no means without saying.
More generally, it must be said that the current "neopagan" literature most often attests to a rather poor level of reflection. The "holistic" approach frequently serves as a pretext for a sort of cosmic egalitarianism, where what is specific to man disappears completely. In-depth reflection is replaced by conventional rhetoric, based on references to "awakening," to "cosmic energy," to "identity with the One-World" or with the "Great All." The very notion of paganism is sometimes presented in a smoky way. The definition of paganism as apology for "life," for example, most often refers to a vulgar Nietzscheanism (the God of the Bible as expression of a resentment against life) or to a confused vitalism (the "healthy, robust, vital, combative life") going hand in hand with a vaguely biological "superhumanism" just as naive. This forgets that almost all religions give a positive value to life. None of them, perhaps, gives it as much value as Judaism, which goes so far as to reject martyrdom and to make survival a value in itself. Christianity also considers that all human life possesses absolute value, whereas paganism does not profess this idea, and moreover pagans have always considered that there are things worse than death, that is to say things that justify giving one's life for them or choosing to die rather than live without them.
The definition of paganism as "religion of nature," which one finds recurrently in "neopagan" literature, is no less problematic. One forgets that originally, it emanates from Christians, who saw in "nature" an intrinsic limitation in relation to supernature. This sentiment was so vivid that, despite the praise of creation made by Saint Augustine in the City of God, one had to wait until the beginning of the 13th century to see it attenuate. But after the works of Eliade and Dumézil, one can no longer reduce the ancient pagan religions to a simple cult of nature. Paganism was never a pure naturalism, even if "natural" and cosmic data play a central role in it. It was never a pantheism either, as with Giordano Bruno or Spinoza, even if one encounters pantheistic elements in almost all religious cultures. Among certain "neopaganists," pantheism is moreover only a pretext to put man in the place of God, in the best tradition of modernity! Speaking of "nature," finally, one cannot act as if this word were not one of the most charged with ambiguity in all the history of Western thought. One cannot act as if Christian theology had never existed, that is to say without taking a position on the problematics it has raised. What does one mean exactly when one speaks of "rediscovering harmony with nature" or of "reconnecting with natural laws"? Does not the fact that one can violate a "natural law" already demonstrate that its "naturalness" is doubtful? Philosophy has put the notion of nature in relation (or opposition) with culture, artifice, history or freedom. Christian theology has further complicated things by positing nature in relation to grace (human nature is what presupposes grace, namely a man capable of encountering God), which amounts to defining nature as what, among philosophers, corresponds to anti-nature, that is to say to freedom. One knows moreover that the translation of Greek physis by Latin natura brought about a veritable "denaturation" of the term. Now, it is indeed from the notion of physis that the idea of "nature" must be rethought. If one reflects on the nature of things from their proper origin, as physis precisely, and not as ktisis (or creatura), one understands that paganism could not flatly posit God as synonymous with nature, but that it posits Being as the dimension that allows all beings to exist, without however being their cause.
But there is another problem, more fundamental perhaps. In paganism, there is only sense to our presence in the world insofar as this paganism constitutes the general atmosphere in which the city bathes. If in paganism, the city is defined above all as a "religious association," to use the terms of Fustel de Coulanges, religion is defined inversely as the soul of the city or collectivity. By positing itself as a separate, self-sufficient being, the modern individual brings down to earth, for his profit, the idea of a unique God sufficient unto himself. But in paganism, the gods themselves form a sort of society: even if one could "be like them," it would never be to find oneself alone. Society is enlarged personality; personality, restricted society.
The question then arises of knowing whether paganism can be, like so many current beliefs, an opinion professed in private by a few. Some apparently imagine that there could exist a "paganism of the catacombs" analogous to what was once the "Christianity of the catacombs." But this has nothing obvious about it, for Christianity possesses an individualist substratum that paganism does not have: faith is less narrowly dependent on external circumstances. Living as a pagan in a world that is not goes by no means without saying. Certainly, one can individually try to put oneself (back) in tune with myth. One can seek to awaken in oneself a meditative thought. But one must be conscious that such an approach implies withdrawing mentally from the world, that is to say doing exactly the contrary of what paganism preaches: active participation and unreserved adhesion to the world. Of course, there is nothing in common between the current world and the world of Antiquity. The current world is a world that has been changed, remodeled, by those who were originally its contemners. This is indeed where the problem lies. For, I repeat, one cannot act as if we did not have behind us two millennia of non-pagan (or very little pagan) history. One cannot act as if this history had not occurred, striving to reconnect, without further ado, with an interrupted tradition. This history structures us profoundly despite ourselves. It informs our way of looking at the world, including when we contest it. It renders us incapable of seeing in paganism what the Ancients saw there, that is to say the very reflection of the totality of the real, a founding "discourse" organizing the ensemble of our representations. Paganism was formerly life itself. It can today only be a conviction among others, professed in private by a few. But can one then still speak of paganism?
This is the reason why I sincerely doubt that our modern "neopaganists" adhere to their gods as their distant ancestors could do. Even if they wanted to, they simply could not: the current world prevents them by its mere existence. We can go to collect ourselves at Delphi and draw the lesson from the myth of Apollo, but Apollo can no longer be for us what he was for the Greek who went to consult the Pythia. And as faith cannot be decreed, the risk is great of falling back, once again, into simulacrum or commemoration.
Charles Champetier: Apart from groups that officially declare themselves "neopagan," are there today milieus that one can consider as more receptive than others to pagan themes? I think of course first of ecologists.
A. de B.: Ecology is obviously very close to paganism, because of its global approach to environmental problems, the importance it gives to the relation between man and the world, and also of course its critique of the devastation of the Earth under the effect of productivist obsession, the ideology of progress and technicist enframing. This proximity is especially marked in radical ecology, sometimes called "deep ecology," even if, in my opinion, it commits the error, symmetrically inverse to that of Cartesian humanism, of dissolving in a reductionist fashion human specificity into the rest of the living. It is moreover notorious that the adversaries of deep ecology have frequently accused it of reconnecting with old pagan cults.
But there is not only ecology. Certain neofeminist milieus, principally in the United States, but also elsewhere, show themselves today singularly receptive to "pagan" ideas. That this receptivity often inscribes itself in the framework of a New Age type ideology does not prevent it from being symptomatic. In Noa Noa, Gauguin said: "The gods of yesteryear have kept an asylum in the memory of women." I also believe that there is a fundamentally "feminine" element in paganism. Not only because "witches" have sometimes been considered as "wise women" who would have known how to preserve ancient beliefs (the truth is that we do not know much about this). Not only because the paganism we have inherited is also pre-Indo-European paganism which, as we know, accorded an essential place to feminine divinities: behind the Christian Marian cult, one easily finds the Mother-Goddess of pre-Indo-European Neolithic civilizations. Not only finally because the pagan traditions that have come down to us best are those that related to the third function, in the Dumézilian sense of the term, and that this function, linked in a privileged way to the rural milieu in which these traditions were preserved, corresponds notably to the domain of production and reproduction. (Paganism survived thanks to the people, to peasants and to women, much more than thanks to elites, to city-dwellers and to men. And it is equally within the third function that most beliefs stemming from the pre-Indo-European background were integrated). But also, quite simply, because paganism, like any cosmic and traditional religion, possesses numerous characteristics that relate it symbolically to nature and to the feminine universe.
That Indo-European society is essentially patriarchal, that its pantheon is organized most often around a Father-God, that its universe makes an important place for masculine and warrior values, should not create illusions on this point. The comparison with the biblical universe, which is itself properly masculine, is revealing. Typically masculine is indeed the primacy of Law (in relation to mores), of hearing (in relation to sight), of logos (in relation to physis), of concept (in relation to image), of abstract (in relation to concrete), of history (in relation to myth). Masculine is equally the linear conception of history, rectilinear conception opposed to the cyclical or spherical vision, which perceives the universe as a great organism subject for all eternity to the law of cycles. Inversely, feminine thought, in what it can have that is specific, directly rejoins pagan thought insofar as one and the other are characterized by a more global (more holistic) approach to things, a more concrete approach (but making at the same time a greater place for the imaginary) than strictly analytical or conceptual, a greater proximity in relation to the body, to carnal realities, to nature conceived as totality giving itself to be grasped through the visible, etc. This aspect, which I believe fundamental, has often been lost from view.
Charles Champetier: One sometimes has the impression that God is absent from neopaganism. One speaks willingly of sacred or myth, more rarely of the divine. Our critics of Christian inspiration moreover willingly pose the equation: paganism = atheism. Does this absence of God (or gods) result from a simple terminological inflection, the sacred being equivalent in fact to the divine? Does this signify on the contrary that paganism recognizes no transcendence? Finally, to synthesize this question, does paganism suppose a faith or a belief?
A. de B.: First a simple remark: the word "god" (Indo-European *deyw6-) is a strictly pagan word, which finds its origin in the Indo-European designation of the "diurnal sky" (*dyew-). The Bible never speaks of "God." It speaks of Yahweh, of Adonai, of Elohim, of the Eternal, of the Father, of Christ, of the Messiah—when it speaks of "God," it is by appealing to a term of pagan origin!
I have many times explained that what specifies Christianity, and with it the other religions stemming from the Bible, is not at all monotheism (which, originally, is only monolatry), but its dualist ontology, namely the distinction it operates between created Being and uncreated Being. What implicitly contains all Christian faith is not the first words of the credo: "credo in unum Deum," but indeed those that follow: "patrem omnipotentem, factorem coeli et terrae." This distinctive trait radically separates the Abrahamic religions, which are "historical" religions, from all other religions of the world, which are "cosmic" religions.
Christian dualism expresses itself to perfection in this formula of the Fourth Lateran Council: "For between the creator and the creature no resemblance can be affirmed, without this implying an even greater dissemblance." Positing the world as the result of a contingent creation which, by definition, adds nothing to the perfection of its creator, this dualism affects the world with a lesser-being, and thus devalues it. "Love not the world, nor what is in the world," one reads in the First Epistle of John (2, 15). In Christianity, this imperative constitutes the negative foundation of the love of God and the love of others, in opposition to any solidarity with an "inferior nature." Being desacralized, profaned in the proper sense, that is to say rejected to the side of the profane, the world then finds itself transformed into an object. As authors as different as Étienne Gilson, Alexandre Koyré or Martin Heidegger have shown, it is no longer a part of the cosmos, forming a harmonious whole where men and gods coexist in the visible and invisible, but a simple object that can rightfully become the prey of technicist enframing. Thus is opened the path that leads to secularization, and thus to atheism.
The accusation of atheism brought by Christians against paganism is therefore totally devoid of sense. Atheism appears with Christianity, as this form of negation that is proper to it. The new status that Christianity attributes to man is also that without which man could not oppose himself to it. Atheism moreover continues to oppose God and the world. It no longer explains one by the other, but puts them in competition, giving to the second all that it methodically undertakes to remove from the first. It wants to demonstrate that God does not exist, exactly as Christians have striven to prove his existence, whereas the idea of God could not be enunciated under the horizon of proof.
Atheism is therefore indeed a modern phenomenon, which implies Christian theism as the antithesis without which it could not exist. In paganism, things are different. Pagan peoples have not known atheism, at least in the sense we give it. I therefore think that paganism is incompatible with atheism, if one defines the latter as the radical negation of any form of divine or absolute that cannot be reduced to man. And I would add that paganism is not "Promethean" either, but implies on the contrary the refusal of this titan hybris that leads man to dismiss the gods in the vain hope of putting himself in their place.
That said, believing that pagans venerated their gods as Christians adore theirs would be an error. At once immanent and transcendent, the God of Christians exists only from himself, as absolute self-sufficiency, absolutely unconditioned reality and perfect freedom. And it is as such that he reveals himself to man. In paganism, there is no revelation, but rather monstration, unveiling, epiphany. The world in its totality is transparent to the divine. On the other hand, whereas in Christianity, man's relation to God is above all hierarchical (I must obey God), in paganism, man's relation to the gods is above all of the order of gift and counter-gift: the gods give me, I give to the gods. Sacrifice is not testimony of obedience, but a way of maintaining and contributing to the order of the cosmos.
The gods, one could say, are not the last word of paganism, precisely because paganism places the gods themselves under the horizon of the question of Being. One knows the admirable words of Heraclitus: "This world-here, the same for all, no god nor man has made it. But it was always there, is and will be. Eternal fire lighting up in measure and going out in measure" (frag. 30). It allows us to understand why myth places Destiny above the gods. And also why paganism gives so much importance to reasoning by analogy, where Plato saw the most beautiful of all bonds, for it is founded on the idea of cosmos.
As to knowing whether paganism is a faith or a religion, one would have to begin by asking whether the indiscriminate use of the word "religion" to designate any form of belief attested in the world does not constitute today a semantic facility having above all the advantage of allowing our contemporaries to dissertate on the supposed "convergence" of these religions, whether in an "ecumenical" perspective or in that of an imaginary "Primordial Tradition." In Northern Europe, in any case, the word "religion" is a term of foreign importation. I would be tempted, for my part, to say that a pagan does not believe, but that he adheres. And that this adhesion, indissociable from a collective belonging, also implies a pietas, which is the clear consciousness of the assumption of finitude as common reality.
Charles Champetier: For some time, we have been witnessing a rather delirious offensive aimed at assimilating paganism to morbid practices, such as desecrations of sepultures, or to "Satanism" professed in certain "hard" musical milieus more or less linked to the extreme right. What does this parallel inspire in you? More broadly, is paganism necessarily anti-Christian? Conversely, has Christianity always been anti-pagan?
A. de B.: There is no doubt that "Satanism" is only inverted Christianity. To adore Satan is to adore the fallen Angel, that is to say the negative double of the God of the Bible. The contradiction of any "Satanist" approach is that it cannot do without the God it claims to oppose, for otherwise its "transgressions" would have no meaning. What is the point of blaspheming against God if one is convinced that he does not exist? What sense can the profanation of a host have if it is only a wafer of unleavened bread? From this point of view, one could say that "Satanism" contributes on the dark side to the perpetuity of Christianity—at the same time as it provides newspapers lacking copy with "sensationalism" very much in the spirit of the times.
On the milieus to which you allude, there is not much to say. One finds there above all adolescents desirous of outbidding in provocation, who navigate between ephemeral fanzines and aggressive musical creations, of "hard metal" or "black gothic" style. Some are frank psychopaths, who feel invincibly attracted by brutality, cemeteries, black masses, even necrophilia. The greatest number, fortunately, have only undergone the influence of comic strips and science fiction! Their "paganism" consists essentially in dreaming about heroes with big biceps and concrete jaws, or in making the apology of what is the very contrary of paganism: pure violence and chaos. Perhaps one should, concerning them, speak of Conan the Barbarian or Dungeons and Dragons style paganism.
The relations between Christianity and paganism are a much more complex question, and truth obliges one to say that they have often been bloody. Whereas under the Roman empire, Christians had never been troubled except for political reasons, the Church persecuted pagans for more than a millennium for religious motives. Paganism was forbidden in the Roman empire in 392, before being punished by death in 435. The era of morally justified, and even recommended, massacre begins historically with the hecatombs ordered by Yahweh (Deut. 7, 16; 20, 16). That of religious wars, and also that of heresies (a term that simply has no meaning in paganism), begins with Christianity. During late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, evangelization entailed the eradication of paganism by all means. From the 11th and 12th centuries, as Robert Moore has well shown, Western society becomes, under the impulse of Christian princes and prelates, a structurally persecuting society. Within this society, a part supposed to incarnate "evil"—whether pagans, heretics, Jews, "lepers," "sodomites," "witches," etc.—must henceforth be set aside, and sometimes even eradicated. Christian intolerance, founded on the imperative of conversion and on belief in absolute good and evil, thus leads to segregation. Its transposition into the profane sphere will give rise to all the normative practices of exclusion, relegation and confinement of "non-conformists" studied by Michel Foucault. This leads one to doubt René Girard's opinion, according to which Christianity is the only religion not to resort to the practice of the scapegoat, that is to say not to make persecution and recourse to legal infamy one of the means of social cohesion.
Christians first denounced paganism as a cult rendered to "idols" or to demons. In a second stage, not succeeding in uprooting popular beliefs, they took over from the pagan tradition everything that could be "recuperated" without harming the essential foundations of their faith. Western Christianity thus became a mixed phenomenon, which could finally present itself, as Father Festugière said, "as the achievement of what the best among the pagans had already thought." One must indeed see in reality that such a heritage was only accepted after having been rendered harmless. In the Middle Ages, the author of the life of Saint Eloi (Vita Eligii) still pronounces against pagan letters revealing invectives inspired by Saint Jerome: "What do Pythagoras, Socrates and Aristotle counsel us in their philosophy? What profit do we derive from reading those criminal poets called Homer, Virgil and Menander? In what are Sallust, Herodotus, Titus Livy, who recount the history of the pagans, useful to Christian society? In what can the discourses of Lysias, Gracchus, Demosthenes and Cicero, exclusively occupied with oratorical art, be compared to the pure and beautiful doctrines of Christ?"
When one speaks of the relations between paganism and Christianity, one must therefore take into account at the same time two fundamental givens. On one side, on the doctrinal level, there is no possible conciliation between Christian theology and pagan ontology. On the other hand, on the historical and sociological level, it is evident that Christianity presents itself as a mixed phenomenon, which has for example led it to develop a sort of unavowed polytheism through Marian cult and the cult of saints. Fernando Pessoa, once again, seems to me to see correctly when he writes: "What the pagan most willingly accepts in Christianity is popular devotion to saints, it is the rite, it is the processions [...] The pagan willingly accepts a procession, but turns his back on Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus. The Christian interpretation of the world turns his heart, but a Church feast with its lights, its flowers, its songs... all that he accepts as so many good things, even issued from a bad thing, for these are things truly human and they are the pagan manifestation of Christianity." One will note in passing that it is to this "pagan manifestation of Christianity" that traditionalist Christians are often most attached, while the modernist current wants on the contrary to eliminate it.
In the biography he has devoted to Heidegger, Rüdiger Safranski reports an anecdote that goes in the same direction. When he entered a chapel or a church, Heidegger always put his hand in the basin of holy water and genuflected. This had surprised Max Müller who, Safranski recounts, "asked him one day if his attitude did not have something inconsistent about it, since he had rejected the dogmas of the Church." Heidegger replied: "One must think historically. And in a place where one has prayed so much, the divine is near in a quite particular way." It is a beautiful response.
All this to say that a paganism that would define itself only by its opposition to Christian dogmas would condemn itself thereby to having no identity except in relation to them. That would still be inverted Christianity (in the sense where Joseph de Maistre distinguished Counter-Revolution from a "revolution in the opposite direction"). This is the reason why, while being obviously critical vis-à-vis Christianity, I would not define myself personally as anti-Christian, but rather as a-Christian.
Paganism, wanting to be hospitable to difference, the notion of "religious war" simply has no meaning for it. The existence of Christianity therefore bothers it no more than that of Judaism or Islam. It is even ready to fight in their favor, if their religious freedom were threatened. The problem only begins with proselytism. From the pagan point of view, any will to convert others—that is to say finally to change them—is indeed an aberration. Judaism, in this regard, poses no problem, for it is above all the religion of a people. Islam is already more problematic, for it gives itself the vocation of exceeding the civilization that saw it born. But it is above all Christianity that, by its universalism, condemns itself to being unable to accommodate a paganism that will always be in its eyes an injury to the "true faith" and an obstacle to the reign of Christ. Between this Christian desire to convert the world, which is above all a desire to produce and reproduce others through one's own discourse, and the Christian conception of "love," I think there exists a powerful link. Philippe Forget has well highlighted this in an article on "Catholic virtues" published in the review Panoramiques. "The Catholic claims to love, he writes, but he always encounters others through a sentiment of incompleteness. He wants to perfect them. He therefore never welcomes others in their singular alterity, their fundamental 'strangeness.' He aims to add meaning to them, his meaning. He therefore does not admit others in their effectivity and cannot let them grow toward excellence in their singular identity. Others are always somehow lacking. Truth must be brought to them [...] Thomas Aquinas defined love as covetousness: Catholic love is an incessant hermeneutical covetousness, which aims to immerse the meaning of others. Here, Catholicism, detected in its originality, reveals itself to be the matrix of the West, place of an insatiable will that, defining and norming the being of others, incarnates itself in a planet of the homogeneous. Others like oneself: such is the end (telos) of this will that originates in Catholicity, and which the Greek, radical enemy of all excess (hybris), the Jew or the Hindu ignore."
Charles Champetier: In the past, religions have always been normative. They were not only great exemplary narratives, but imposed respect for a certain number of norms. This is true, of course, for Christianity, but also for pre-Christian religions. The apostles of "pagan tolerance" cannot all the same forget that Socrates was condemned to drink hemlock for the crime of atheism, or that the refusal to recognize the divine character of Roman imperial power was sometimes severely repressed! Does neopaganism have the same normative pretension? Can the sacred it detects in the world in turn define prohibitions, thus laws? Is neopaganism, in other words, neutral or an ordainer of values? Does it have an imperative discourse on good and evil?
A. de B.: The question is in my opinion badly posed. Thus formulated, it lets one suppose that religion necessarily constitutes the source of morality, which is not at all self-evident. Christianity is assuredly a moral religion, since its reason for being is to offer a possibility of "salvation." Moral fault then merges with sin, that is to say the failure to observe God's commandments. Inversely, "if God does not exist, everything is permitted." But it is not the same in paganism. The gods of paganism are not there to sanction failures of morality, even less to engage in the accounting of good and bad actions. It can even happen that their own actions seem "immoral" to us. Does this signify that pagans are freed from all ethical norm? Obviously not. This signifies only that for them religion is not the foundation of morality, which does not prevent it from being normative in another sense (all rites are normative, without being moral for all that). When Titus, Pythagoras or Publius Syrus urgently recommend practicing charity, when Seneca or Marcus Aurelius advocate benevolence and generosity, they have no need to found their exhortations on a decree of the gods. Plato certainly affirms that no morality is possible without belief in retribution in the afterlife. However, Aristotle writes the Ethics to Nicomachus while explicitly denying personal immortality of the soul. This is because pagan morality is not a morality of retribution: morally, man does not need to be "saved," but to be helped to construct himself.
Humanity did not wait for Christianity to have moral preoccupations. A society that would not distinguish between what is morally good and morally bad could indeed quite simply not exist. There is reason to laugh, from this point of view, when one reads in certain "neopagan" publications that good and evil do not exist for a pagan (or that "pagan morality" comes down to the liberal hedonist point of view: "Do everything that pleases you, provided that it does not harm others")!
However, Kantian idealism is itself quite incapable of determining the foundation of moral exigency (that is to say, according to Kant, the source of aspiration to a pure and formally autonomous will). Aristotle sees more correctly when he says that morality is an "inherited virtue" (Politics, 4, 9). The fundamental source of morality is in fact human plasticity. Man is not entirely determined by his instincts, and his instincts are not entirely programmed in their object. It results that he is always in a position to construct or lose himself, to debase or aggrandize himself, and that the realization of his desires can just as well entail his destruction. Not being integrally acted upon by his nature, being as Heraclitus says capable of the best as of the worst, he cannot construct himself from the presuppositions of his nature except on condition of having a moral code that gives meaning to these words: the better and the worse. It is in this sense that one can say that morality, even before being inculcated and learned, is founded first on a disposition (hexeis), in the Aristotelian sense of the term.
When one speaks of morality, I believe moreover that one must distinguish three different levels. There are first the elementary moral rules that are indispensable to all life in society. These rules are roughly universal, which suggests that they were acquired during the evolution of the species. They translate into laws determining conducts in such a way that these can respond to the exigencies of morality itself even if it is not moral sense (but for example fear of sanction) that inspires them. There are then the ethical values (or value systems) that have crystallized within different cultures, and which can vary considerably from one culture to another. These values also have a social content, but their transgression is not always sanctioned by law. In paganism, the dominant value system is obviously the system of honor, which puts the accent above all on gift, gratuity, pride, given word. Jean-Pierre Vernant, after Dodds and many others, has very correctly described ancient Greece as a "culture of shame and honor opposed to cultures of fault and duty." "When a Greek has acted badly, he writes, he does not have the sentiment of having made himself guilty of a sin, which would be like an interior sickness, but of having been unworthy of what he himself and others expected of him, of having lost face. When he acts well, it is not by conforming to an obligation that would be imposed on him, a rule of duty decreed by God or the categorical imperative of a universal reason. It is by yielding to the attraction of values, at once aesthetic and moral, the Beautiful and the Good. Ethics is not obedience to a constraint, but intimate accord of the individual with the order and beauty of the world" (Between Myth and Politics).
The third level, finally, corresponds to the ethics of virtues, that is to say to the effort that one must exercise on oneself to arrive at excellence thanks to the practice of virtues. (The term is obviously to be taken in its original sense of "good natural quality"). This ethics of virtues possesses an evidently more personal dimension, but it is not independent of the value system in which it is exercised either. The word "ethics" refers to Greek ethos, "habit," just as the word "morality" refers to Latin mores, "mores." Aristotle says that virtues do not surge in us by nature nor against nature, but that we are by nature capable of acquiring them and of attaining excellence through habit, that is to say through a continuous desire for self-construction.
The difference between pagans and Christians is therefore not at all a "moral" difference, in the sense where some would conduct themselves morally better than others. It bears rather on the foundations and motives of the moral act, and on the values that some and others choose to privilege. Vladimir Soloviev maintained for example that only pity can serve as interior foundation for the moral rapport with others. This idea is foreign to paganism, according to which there are other ways of recognizing the value of others than limiting oneself to feeling pity for them. Similarly, the question is not to know whether morality is necessary or superfluous, for its necessity is evident, but to know whether the very meaning of our presence in the world and whether this world itself are indebted to a moral judgment, which I obviously do not believe. Paganism bears no moral judgment on the world. For it there is only one Being, and there is no good superior to this Being.
Charles Champetier: "The question is not to know whether morality is necessary or superfluous, for its necessity is evident, but to know whether the very meaning of our presence in the world and whether this world itself are indebted to a moral judgment, which I obviously do not believe. Paganism bears no moral judgment on the world. For it there is only one Being, and there is no good superior to this Being."
As for the trial of Socrates, which is an exceptional case, one cannot understand it except by replacing it in its political context. I will only recall that Socrates' disciples were never persecuted and that the most famous among them, Plato, could teach without obstacle in his academy. But I will also note that the trial of Socrates presents at least the interest of showing that, contrary to what some have affirmed a bit hastily, the Ancients believed in their myths. In the contrary case, indeed, the best way to ruin Socrates would certainly not have been to accuse him of "atheism"! André Neyton writes that "the absolute faith of the very great pagan mass for several millennia cannot be doubted." If this had not been the case, it would not have been necessary to persecute pagans for centuries to make them renounce an already lost faith.
Charles Champetier: The tone of On Being a Pagan was quite Nietzschean. Since then, your writings on the sacred—I think of L'éclipse du sacré (The Eclipse of the Sacred) and also L'Empire intérieur (The Interior Empire)—seem to draw more willingly on Heidegger. What has been the influence of the master of Freiburg on your reflection? Do the great themes of Heideggerian thought define according to you a "pagan" ontology?
A. de B.: I think indeed that by resolving the antinomy of Being and Becoming, and by radically separating metaphysics and ontology, Heidegger restores in its plenitude what is most profound in the pagan conception of Being. Being becomes. Being is not the world, but it cannot be without it. The essential reproach that Heidegger makes to Western metaphysics is to have prospered on the forgetting of Being, and to have created the conditions of a constant aggravation of this forgetting. Western metaphysics considers Being only as necessary reason, as simple first cause of beings. This approach has finally debouched on modern subjectivity, which is only realized metaphysics. For Heidegger, the beginning of all work of thought does not consist in speculating on the reason for being of beings, but in meditating on the fact that there is something, and not nothing. Now, I believe that paganism itself finds its source in astonishment, in the astonished gaze that poses itself on the world and arouses this fundamental question: how does it happen that there is something, and not nothing?
Heidegger sees in ancient Greece the "auroral" moment of thought. But contrary to others before him, he does not intend to limit himself to rereading Aristotle or Plato, for he estimates that Greek philosophy of the classical epoch already rests on its own inadequation vis-à-vis the essence of truth. The origin of thought is found for him among the pre-Socratics. They are the ones who represent the most absolutely originary origin. For Heidegger, the Greek origin makes sign in the direction of the "not yet," in the sense that it always contains more than what has been able until now to draw its origin from it, namely a "disposition" permitting to apprehend Being historically, as spiritual destiny, so as to create the conditions thanks to which the commencement could be recommenced in a more authentic and more originary fashion. It is in this that the dialogue with the Greek thinkers of the origin "still awaits to be commenced."
The "origin" does not refer here to a "primitive" event, nor even to a determined place. It signifies rather that from which the thing is what it is, that is to say the provenance of its essence. In paganism, one can similarly only go toward there whence one comes, toward the first donation, where Being merges with the inaugural gift that accords man to the totality of the world, without reducing anything of what is proper to him. This attachment to foundations excludes no ulterior influence. It does not seek to disengage an element more "pure" than others, but limits itself to recognizing the determining role of what founds. The "past" commands spiritual experience, quite simply because memory constitutes a major place of rooting of the sacred. All spiritual consciousness is consciousness of a foundation linked to the origin without being for all that antagonistic to history. History is open to the most diverse influences. Consciousness of the origin puts them in perspective by stimulating the faculty of memory. Recourse to memory finds itself today directly confronted with a dominant ideology that only inscribes itself in the instantaneous (the perpetual present) and in the operative. It constitutes a vital counterweight to the omnipotence of procedures of domination of the real that function in the sole register of immediacy and efficacity.
Charles Champetier: Certain critics of neopaganism, adepts of the reductio ad hitlerum once denounced by Leo Strauss, willingly affirm that Nazism can be interpreted as a great pagan movement of the 20th century (neopagans thereby becoming neo-Nazis!). What exactly was the relation of Nazism to religion?
A. de B.: The fable of a "Nazi paganism" has never ceased to be maintained by some for obvious propaganda ends. The exaltation of "old Germans" under the Third Reich seemed to sanction it, whereas it had only a purely nationalist character and had no more "pagan" significance than the exaltation of Vercingetorix under the Vichy regime. To this were added delirious speculations on "magical Nazism" or "Nazi occultism," which have never ceased to turn the heads of weak spirits since the epoch of The Morning of the Magicians. All this corresponds strictly to nothing.
Nazism is first a pure product of modernity. Historically, as Denis de Rougemont had well remarked, the National Socialist revolution of 1933 is the equivalent of the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917. All three, despite their incontestable doctrinal divergences, are characterized by the institution of a single party, the dictatorship of public salvation, centralization, mass mobilization, deliberate use of terror, the conviction of inaugurating "new times," of producing a "new humanity," etc. In its practice, Nazism was a brown Jacobinism just as Bolshevism was a red Jacobinism. Its motto ("Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer"), with its insistence on the Unique, clearly derives from political "monotheism." Born in Bavaria, Catholic land par excellence, the Nazi party, though less monolithic than one might have thought (the "Führerstaat" was in many respects a polyarchy), moreover secularizes the Catholic conception of institution. It presents itself as a Church directed by an infallible pope (the Führer), with its clergy (party functionaries), its elite of "Jesuits" (the SS), its dogmatic truths, its excommunications, its persecutions against "heretics."
The 24th point of the official program of the NSDAP, adopted in Munich on February 24, 1920, stipulates that "the party as such defends the point of view of a positive Christianity, without binding itself to a precise confession." By "positive Christianity" (positives Christentum), one must understand ideologically a Christianity as dejudaized as possible, and above all, politically, a Christianity abstaining from any opposition to the regime. In January 1933, it is moreover with the support of the Catholic party, the Zentrum, then directed by Franz von Papen, that Hitler attains power. It is equally with the votes of the Zentrum that the law (Ermächtigungsgesetz) is voted on March 23, 1933, granting him full powers for four years. On July 20, a concordat is signed between the Reich and the Vatican, thanks to the efforts of Franz von Papen and Mgr Ludwig Kaas. It obliges bishops to swear an oath to the Reich. This signature raises immediate opposition in anti-Christian milieus. Von Papen will later be named Reich ambassador to Turkey, before being elevated after the war to the dignity of papal chamberlain by Pius XII.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler expresses his express will not to engage in religious quarrels. "It is God's will, he writes, which formerly gave men their form, their nature and their faculties. To destroy his work is to declare war on the Lord's creation, on divine will. Thus each must act—of course, within his Church—and each must consider as the first and most sacred of duties to take position against any man who, by his conduct, his words or his acts, quits the terrain of his own confession to go seek quarrel with the other confession." "I do not hesitate to declare, he adds, that I see in the men who seek today to mix the racist movement with religious quarrels, worse enemies of my people than any international communist can be [...] It will always be the first duty of the leaders of the National Socialist movement to oppose, in the most decided fashion, any attempt made to engage the National Socialist movement, and to immediately exclude from the ranks of the party those who would make propaganda for such projects."
Hitler reasoned in fact politically. He knew that his electors were mostly Catholic or Protestant, and had only contempt for the völkische or neopagan groups, appeared since the beginning of the century, who proposed to openly combat Christianity. "These obscurantist professors who propagate their Nordic religions do nothing but spoil everything," he said. At the same time, like any dictator, he contested the right of Churches "to meddle in temporal affairs," that is to say to interfere with his politics. His official objective was the "deconfessionalization of public life." Religious life was thus beaten down to the private, in the best tradition of secularism. From 1928, he had Artur Dinter excluded, whom he reproached for wanting to found a Christian Church where Catholics would have been placed in a subordinate position. He himself, moreover, continued until his death to pay his contribution to the Catholic Church.
Convinced that "the State must remain the absolute master," what he would in fact have wished was a national Church entirely detached from Rome. "Against a Church that identifies itself with the State, as is the case in England, I have nothing to say," he declared on December 1, 1941. This is the reason why he encouraged the movement of "German Christians" (Deutsche Christen), organized from 1925 within the Deutsch-christliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft, which, under the Third Reich, defined itself as the "intra-ecclesiastical branch of the National Socialist movement."
Paganism was only tolerated under the Third Reich insofar as it remained confined to the private domain and did not enter into conflict with official policy. Pagan groups were in fact progressively brought into line, just as the Churches were, notably after the publication of the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, in 1937. The Tannenbergbund of the couple Erich and Mathilde Ludendorff was forbidden from 1933, and the Bund für deutsche Götterkenntnis, which succeeded it in 1937, was immediately placed under monitored freedom. The Indologist and Sanskritist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer had to abandon from March 1936 the presidency of the Deutsche Glaubensbewegung. "German Faith and the Jews pull on the same string!" proclaimed in 1938 the anti-Semitic journal Der Stürmer! Friedrich Bernhard Marby, founder in 1931 of the Bund der Runenforscher and publisher of the "Marby-Runen-Bücherei," saw all editorial activity forbidden to him from 1935. Arrested in March 1937, condemned to life detention, he spent nearly nine years in concentration camps, notably at Dachau and Flossenbürg, before being liberated in April 1945 by Allied troops. H.A. Weishaar (Kurt Paehlke), founder in 1918 of the Bund der Guoten, was also interned until the end of the war at Bergen-Belsen camp. The völkisch writer and dramatist Ernst Wachler, founder in 1903 of the Harzer Bergtheater near Thale, was pursued for "racial" reasons and died in September 1944 at Theresienstadt camp. Wilhelm Kusserow, founder in 1935 of the Nordische Glaubensgemeinschaft, was denounced as a "British agent." In 1941, practically all pagan groups had been forbidden.
In private, Hitler showed himself certainly more radical toward the Churches. But the critique he addressed to them had strictly nothing "pagan" about it. It derives much more from the flattest rationalism and scientism. The reading of the "table talk" (Tischgespräche), published by Flammarion in 1952, is edifying in this regard. To the Catholic Church, whose secular skill in conjugating spiritual and temporal power he nevertheless admires, Hitler reproaches above all "exploiting human stupidity." Religion is for him only "obscurantism" and "superstition," to which are opposed, as among the Enlightenment, "scientific spirit" and the prerogatives of "reason." "It is not a question, he declares on September 23, 1941, that National Socialism ever set about aping a religion by establishing a cult. Its unique ambition must be to scientifically construct a doctrine that is nothing more than a homage to reason." And on October 14, 1941, in the presence of Himmler: "Man, weighed down by a past of superstition, is afraid of things he cannot, or cannot yet explain—that is to say of the unknown. If someone experiences metaphysical needs, I cannot satisfy him with the Party program. Time will flow until the moment when science can respond to all questions [...] Myths deteriorate little by little. It only remains to bring proof that in nature no frontier exists between the organic and inorganic. When knowledge of nature is widely spread [...] then Christian doctrine will be convinced of absurdity [...] Science has already impregnated humanity. Thus, the more Christianity clings to dogmas, the more rapid will be its decline [...] Nothing would be more stupid in my eyes than to reestablish the cult of Wotan. Our old mythology lost all value when Christianity implanted itself in Germany [...] A movement like ours must not let itself be drawn into metaphysical digressions. It must stick to the spirit of exact science!"
As many of those who have seriously studied Nazi ideology have recognized, National Socialism appears in the end as a millenarian religion of salvation. Secular religion of course, but nonetheless perfectly recognizable, which aims, through an entrancing mass liturgy, spectacularly staging the hopes and fears of each one, through also a cult of the leader presented as a savior sent by Providence, to realize a promise of collective salvation, founded on a total transformation of life, an absolute domination of the Earth and the instauration of a "reign" of a thousand years.
As in all secular religions of this type, the realization of the new millennium implies the elimination of agents of evil and corruption. Such is the function devolved to Hitlerian anti-Semitism which, while inscribing itself against the background of social-Darwinian inspired philosophy ("success justifies right"), reinterprets history at the same time in terms of absolute Good (the Aryan) and Evil (the Jew): one must disappear so that the other can survive. "The Jew, Hitler writes in Mein Kampf, accomplishes his baneful mission, until the day when another power rises against him and throws him back, after a fierce struggle, him the assailant of the heavens, to Lucifer!" The "master race" being obviously only a caricature of the idea of election, it is not exaggerated to speak here of mimetic messianism. Jean-Joseph Goux, in his book on The Iconoclasts, has very well remarked it: the "practical theology" of Nazism is entirely commanded by a Judeophobic obsession that pushes Hitler to pose the German people as rival "chosen people" of the Jewish people, that is to say to try to displace in the direction of his people the "religious fantasy of the Alliance." To Hermann Rauschning, he would moreover have declared: "There cannot be two chosen peoples. We are God's people. These few words decide everything." Such delirium is obviously completely foreign to paganism which, in my opinion, could not admit that men or women be persecuted for their belonging to a people. "As much as the jealous god of Christian and Muslim monotheisms, racist delirium was totalitarian, writes François Perrin. Paganism was not" (Franc-parler). This is also what Christopher Gérard recently recalled in Antaios: "The supreme fault is what the Greeks, our masters, called hybris, excess [...] The most terrible example of contemporary hybris is modern totalitarianisms which, by dint of wanting to 'change man,' only debase him."