Pagan New Year Quotes

We too can begin a new life, one that brings satisfaction and enrichment, whether this is by singing, dancing, running through the waves, walking barefoot on the grass or making love under the stars. Perhaps your dreams are greater than this, or perhaps more conservative, but whatever they are, Beltane is a wonderful time for expressing who you truly are.

I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is... In any case, I always thought that if the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water, the water was bound to reflect it. Hence my sentiment for water, for its folds, wrinkles. and ripples, and - as I am a Northerner - for its grayness. I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.

So now, as the Maiden form of the Goddess whispers to us of hope and new beginnings at the festival of Imbolc, it is on a cold February morning that you are invited to step onto the ‘Wheel of the Year.

On Christmas. "Santa Claus represents God on assistance," said Clyde. "Santa Claus is a negative-idealed god, the pagan god of material worship," Leon stated. "Christmas means the rebirth, regeneration. Some people have Christmas every day. The Christmas tree stands up and either the wife trims it or they trim it together with righteous-idealed sexual intercourse. Or the husband prays to God through his Christmas tree and trims his bodily Christmas tree. Christ-mast; the mast of Christ, the upstanding penis—that's what it means to me." "Santa Claus is a good symbolization for Christmas," said Joseph. "Department stores, shopping, the coming of the New Year. Christmas means better business in the stores.

Legend has it that during the festival of Eostre, all fires had to be extinguished in the Goddess’ honour and could only be relit from a sacred flame in the centre of the village. The new fire was seen as a symbol of sacredness and purity, something which everyone wanted to bring into their homes at such a lovely time of year when everything was fresh and new.

Other prophets, other messiahs, came and went in Jesus’ day. Routinely, they died violently at the hands of the pagan enemy. Their movements either died with them, sometimes literally, or transformed themselves into a new movement around a new leader. Jesus’ movement did neither. Within days of his execution it found a new lease of life; within weeks it was announcing that he was indeed the messiah; within a year or two it was proclaiming him to pagans as their rightful Lord. How can a historian explain this astonishing transformation?

At the beginning of a new year, many people have nothing better to do than to make a list of bad deeds and resolve from now on—how many such “from-now-ons” have there already been!—to begin with better intentions, but they are still stuck in the middle of their paganism.

I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me for ever. Curious as it may sound, it was New Mexico that liberated me from the present era of civilization, the great era of material and mechanical development. Months spent in holy Kandy, in Ceylon, the holy of holies of southern Buddhism, had not touched the great psyche of materialism and idealism which dominated me. And years, even in the exquisite beauty of Sicily, right among the old Greek paganism that still lives there, had not shattered the essential Christianity on which my character was established. Australia was a sort of dream or trance, like being under a spell, the self remaining unchanged, so long as the trance did not last too long. Tahiti, in a mere glimpse, repelled me: and so did California, after a stay of a few weeks. There seemed a strange brutality in the spirit of the western coast, and I felt: O, let me get away! But the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend. There was a certain magnificence in the high-up day, a certain eagle-like royalty, so different from the equally pure, equally pristine and lovely morning of Australia, which is so soft, so utterly pure in its softness, and betrayed by green parrot flying. But in the lovely morning of Australia one went into a dream. In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new.

Today we have become so familiar with the intolerance that has unfortunately been a characteristic of monotheism that we may not appreciate that this hostility toward other gods was a new religious attitude. Paganism was an essentially tolerant faith: provided that old cults were not threatened by the arrival of a new deity, there was always room for another god alongside the traditional pantheon.

Each of you have experienced numerous transformations during your life. From the moment you took your first step you began a lifelong movement toward the new and unknown. You expanded the limits of your world. You pushed your boundaries larger, and then larger still. And not only physically, but cognitively, emotionally, morally, socially, and spiritually as well. Concerning your spiritual growth, the concepts of God that you had at age five may not be adequate for you at age twenty, and the concepts of God you had at age twenty may not be adequate again when you reach your forties and later, your elder years. Across the span of your life you may travel through a variety of views about who and what ultimate authority is or isn’t, what the purpose of life is, what your values and taboos are, and the importance (or not) of ritual, myth, and symbols.

New Year’s Eve at the Witches’ Ball, with all the wiccans, druids, and pagans in their incredible costumes, was the best time of the year. Easily Zin’s favorite holiday, because the night was for everyone of all traditions, religions, and countries. Celebrated by anyone, anywhere, on that hour. It represented the boundary between years, this in-between time. Plus, that evening was about the moment. It was here now. Indisputably immediate.

I see charismatics—people I know well and love—scrounging around in the Old Testament and making preposterous claims about Donald Trump being some kind of modern-day Cyrus. Please. Do these people not have a New Testament? Don’t they know that God has raised Jesus Christ from the dead and exalted him to his right hand? Don’t they know that God has given dominion over the nations to his exalted Son? Don’t they know that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to King Jesus? God may have occasionally worked his will through pagan kings in the world before Christ, but we’re now living in Anno Domini—the year of our Lord. If you’re looking for God to work his will through a pagan king (who will always coincidently belong to your political party!), I’m thinking you haven’t spent much time seriously reading and digesting the New Testament epistles. God is no longer raising up pagan kings to enact his purposes, God has raised Jesus from the dead, and the fullness of God’s purposes are accomplished through him!

Muhammad had become the head of a collection of tribal groups that were not bound together by blood but by a shared ideology, an astonishing innovation in Arabian society. Nobody was forced to convert to the religion of the Quran, but Muslims, pagans and Jews all belonged to one ummah, could not attack one another, and vowed to give each other protection. News of this extraordinary new ‘supertribe’ spread, and though at the outset nobody thought that it had a chance of survival, it proved to be an inspiration that would bring peace to Arabia before the death of the Prophet in 632, just ten years after the hijrah.

We shall never know where the Israelites discovered Yahweh, if indeed he really was a completely new deity. Again, this would be a very important question for us today, but it was not so crucial for the biblical writers. In pagan antiquity, gods were often merged and amalgamated, or the gods of one locality accepted as identical with the god of another people. All we can be sure of is that, whatever his provenance, the events of the Exodus made Yahweh the definitive God of Israel and that Moses was able to convince the Israelites that he really was one and the same as El, the God beloved by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The Israelites called Yahweh “the God of our fathers,” yet it seems that he may have been quite a different deity from El, the Canaanite High God worshipped by the patriarchs. He may have been the god of other people before he became the God of Israel. In all his early appearances to Moses, Yahweh insists repeatedly and at some length that he is indeed the God of Abraham, even though he had originally been called El Shaddai. This insistence may preserve the distant echoes of a very early debate about the identity of the God of Moses. It has been suggested that Yahweh was originally a warrior god, a god of volcanoes, a god worshipped in Midian, in what is now Jordan.17 We shall never know where the Israelites discovered Yahweh, if indeed he really was a completely new deity. Again, this would be a very important question for us today, but it was not so crucial for the biblical writers. In pagan antiquity, gods were often merged and amalgamated, or the gods of one locality accepted as identical with the god of another people. All we can be sure of is that, whatever his provenance, the events of the Exodus made Yahweh the definitive God of Israel and that Moses was able to convince the Israelites that he really was one and the same as El, the God beloved by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Of course, there were innumerable conversions during these years, as Christianity became the religion of Western Europe and Christendom took its characteristic shape. Many of these were undramatic – serfs responding to the importunity of their lords – or group events, as in the conversion of Clovis’s troops. But for many others there was no longer need of conversion. The contours of Christian experience had shifted. Whereas up to the time of Augustine there had been four stages of initiation and incorporation into the church, there were no typically two. The first stage was brief and obligatory – baptism in the days or months after birth. The second stage would happen later and would take longer – if it took place at all – when confirmation happened and when parents instructed their children and godparents instructed their godchildren in the beliefs and behavior of the Christian church. Indeed, at this time of the rapid spread of Christianity into new territories, it was vitally necessary that the baptizands be taught well. The heroic and valorous values of the folk, the glorious narratives of warriors, the adulation of wealth and strength – all of these were as firmly in place in seventh-century Gaul as the pagan values and narratives had been in third-century Rome. If Christianity were to be a religion of revelation that could challenge the commonplaces of Gallic society, if new habits were to be taught and new role models were to be adopted, there would have to be some form of postbaptismal pastoral follow-up.

If one could nominate an absolutely tragic day in human history, it would be the occasion that is now commemorated by the vapid and annoying holiday known as “Hannukah.” For once, instead of Christianity plagiarizing from Judaism, the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with “Christmas,” which is itself a quasi-Christian annexation, complete with burning logs and holly and mistletoe, of a pagan Northland solstice originally illuminated by the Aurora Borealis. Here is the terminus to which banal “multiculturalism” has brought us. But it was nothing remotely multicultural that induced Judah Maccabeus to reconsecrate the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC, and to establish the date which the soft celebrants of Hannukah now so emptily commemorate. The Maccabees, who founded the Hasmonean dynasty, were forcibly restoring Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews of Palestine and elsewhere who had become attracted by Hellenism. These true early multiculturalists had become bored by “the law,” offended by circumcision, interested by Greek literature, drawn by the physical and intellectual exercises of the gymnasium, and rather adept at philosophy. They could feel the pull exerted by Athens, even if only by way of Rome and by the memory of Alexander’s time, and were impatient with the stark fear and superstition mandated by the Pentateuch. They obviously seemed too cosmopolitan to the votaries of the old Temple—and it must have been easy to accuse them of “dual loyalty” when they agreed to have a temple of Zeus on the site where smoky and bloody altars used to propitiate the unsmiling deity of yore. At any rate, when the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to make a Hellenic offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the next few years of the Maccabean “revolt,” many more assimilated Jews were slain, or forcibly circumcised, or both, and the women who had flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered even worse. Since the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to the less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas in the Mediterranean light, the scene was set for the uneasy collusion between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the imperial governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could have been spared the whole thing.

Missiologists have in recent years begun to think seriously about inculturation, and historians have begun to learn from them. When the Christian message is inserted into a cultural framework, if the messengers are insensitive to the local culture the result can be cultural imperialism. On the other hand, if they grant too much hegemony to the local culture, the result at best is 'syncretism' and at worst 'Christo-paganism.' Things are most wholesome when sensitive interchange takes place leading to 'a truly critical symbiosis.' But for this to happen, there must be a second stage - a time of 'pastoral follow-up work,' of catechizing and life formation enabling the new faith to express its genius in the institutions and reflexes of its new host culture.

In a letter of advice to the Augustinian mission, Gregory counselled them to treat conversion as a process of adaptation, telling them to offer the newly converted Anglo-Saxons Christian feasts in exchange for their existing festivals and to repurpose the sites of pagan shrines as Christian churches. The idea was that it would be easier for people to accept the new religion if they were allowed to keep aspects of their old festivals:

Today, we give thanks to the cycle of rebirth For the grains, corn, and fruit that we pluck from the earth To those who carry with them the seed of new life That we reap during harvest with the basket and scythe We give thanks for the blessings upon fertile ground That keeps us fed and hale all the year-’round Everything that is and all that has been Carried forth by faithful servants within A blessing unto nature and the goddess of three Ever sacred is your will that is worked through me.

The war on Christianity was also made manifest in the efforts to introduce neopaganism into the lives of the people. Joseph Ratzinger recalled that a young teacher in the village erected a maypole as a symbol of the pagan concept of the “life force.” He organized festivals for the summer solstice in homage to the sacredness of nature and dismissed traditional notions of sin, virtue, and redemption as alien ideas imposed by the cultural imperialism of the Jewish and Roman religion of Christianity. The old religious ideas had to make way for the new order, and the new order demanded a new age. Sixty years later, in his memoirs, Cardinal Ratzinger compared the anti-Christian neopaganism of the Nazis with the anti-Christian neopaganism of our own day: “When nowadays I hear how in many parts of the world Christianity is criticized as a destruction of individual cultural identity and an imposition of European values, I am amazed at how similar the types of argumentation are and at how familiar many a turn of phrase sounds.

MANASSEH WAS THE WORST KING the Hebrews ever had. He was a thoroughly bad man presiding over a totally corrupt government. He reigned in Jerusalem for fifty-five years, a dark and evil half century. He encouraged a pagan worship that involved whole communities in sexual orgies. He installed cult prostitutes at shrines throughout the countryside. He imported wizards and sorcerers who enslaved the people in superstitions and manipulated them with their magic. The man could not do enough evil. There seemed to be no end to his barbarous cruelties. His capacity for inventing new forms of evil seemed bottomless. His appetite for the sordid was insatiable. One day he placed his son on the altar in some black and terrible ritual of witchcraft and burned him as an offering (2 Kings 21). The great Solomonic temple in Jerusalem, resplendent in its holy simplicity, empty of any form of god so that the invisible God could be attended to in worship, swarmed with magicians and prostitutes. Idols shaped as beasts and monsters defiled the holy place. Lust and greed were deified. Murders were commonplace. Manasseh dragged the people into a mire far more stinking than anything the world had yet seen. The sacred historian’s judgment was blunt: “Manasseh led them off the beaten path into practices of evil even exceeding the evil of the pagan nations that GOD had earlier destroyed” (2 Kings 21:9).[2]

Despite the verve and wit of his writing, Fox is simply wrong on so many points it is hard to know where to begin. To argue that there is no “mystical” tradition within the heritage of orthodox Christianity is simply astonishing. His exegesis of biblical texts exhibits the kind and range of errors that a first-year seminarian would be worked over for—either that, or, more likely perhaps, his exegesis betrays a thorough commitment to the canons of postmodernity (but in that case, why is he so passionate about trying to convince the rest of us what ought to be?). There is no attempt to wrestle with the rising literature that places “green” concerns within the framework of the Bible’s story-line and the matrix of Christian theology;56 rather, there is an eclectic and emotional takeover of Christian terms, history, heritage, and language in order to serve an agenda fundamentally extra-biblical and finally anti-biblical. The real tragedy is that Fox’s analysis of the human dilemma is unutterably shallow. Even when he makes telling points about the earth, the best of them can easily be brought under the framework of responsible Christian living in God’s universe. But his thought, characterized by a kind of new paganism, does not deal with most of the human ills and sins that generate the very evils he is concerned about—and a lot of others to which he is curiously indifferent.

A smart person, one who perhaps had her mind filled with religious ideas as a child but who recognizes that genuine mysteries exist with respect to the origins of the universe, can experience real pain if she opts for an easy mysticism. By the same token, if she refuses to opt for that easy mysticism and announces that she doesn't know ultimate answers and can't know ultimate answers, then she falls prey to the coldness and sadness that come with suspecting that the universe is taking no interest in her. Pain is waiting for her in either case, whether she tries to maintain a mysticism that she can see right through or if she sheds that easy mysticism but then doesn't know how to handle the resultant meaninglessness. As it happens, natural psychology provides a complete, satisfying, and uplifting response to this conundrum, one based on the idea of living the paradigm shift from seeking meaning to making meaning. If, however, she happens not to land on this good idea, she can spend a lifetime mired simultaneously in both unhappy camps, drawn to one mystical or spiritual enthusiasm after another—one year a Catholic, then a Buddhist, then a pagan, then a Taoist, then something with no name but with New Age trappings, and so on—while at the same time paralyzed by the thought that the universe has no meaning.

He was a priest now, pagan, half-naked in the night, performing obscure rites of interment. Or he was the lead player in his own novel, or in one of those new arcade games William loved, compelled to repeat some totemic motion until he got it right. Only once did he feel, as he had on New Year's Eve, that someone was standing among the trees, watching. Well, let him watch, damn it. Something was being enacted here, as if it had been this deeper mission calling Mercer home all along. And now that he'd completed it, maybe he would be allowed to advance through to the next level, to a world where no one got shot.

every year the church in the United States draws closer and closer to the situation faced by the New Testament church: an embattled minority living in a pluralistic, pagan society.

I remember my wise friend James Fahey’s words, “Let them live their lives exactly as they choose.” In other words let it all go. Focus, rather, only on my own life, for that is all I have the right to do. I have no business at all trying to fix, control, change or influence anyone else, period! If people insist on demonising me, or stopping me doing things out of fear and control, then let them. I’ve met so many open, loving, peace-filled and thoroughly magical new friends over the last two years that I’m much better off in the true friend department anyway.

other pagan beliefs which have found a home in rabbinical Judaism, such as the existence of demons in bathrooms,[193] the breaking of glass in weddings,[194] reincarnation of souls,[195] belief in the existence of the little Mermaid,[196] practices of witchcraft,[197] God versus the god of the sea,[198] the belief in a time of purgatory,[199] prayers for raising the souls of the dead (“kaddish”),[200] the industry of amulets,[201] turning Purim into a pagan carnival,[202] putting rocks on tombstones,[203] worshipping pictures of saints,[204] using sacred candles,[205] changing the new year (i.e., Rosh Hashanah) into a pagan date,[206] and the custom of women separating a tenth of the challah bread (הפרשת חלה).[207]

Brilliant. And how do you know he’s a saint?” “He’s got a halo?” “Excellent, and does that golden halo remind you of anything?” Hitzrot broke into a smile. “Yeah! Those Egyptian things we studied last term. Those . . . um . . . sun disks!” “Thank you, Hitzrot. Go back to sleep.” Langdon turned back to the class. “Halos, like much of Christian symbology, were borrowed from the ancient Egyptian religion of sun worship. Christianity is filled with examples of sun worship.” “Excuse me?” the girl in front said. “I go to church all the time, and I don’t see much sun worshiping going on!” “Really? What do you celebrate on December twenty-fifth?” “Christmas. The birth of Jesus Christ.” “And yet according to the Bible, Christ was born in March, so what are we doing celebrating in late December?” Silence. Langdon smiled. “December twenty-fifth, my friends, is the ancient pagan holiday of sol invictus—Unconquered Sun—coinciding with the winter solstice. It’s that wonderful time of year when the sun returns, and the days start getting longer.” Langdon took another bite of apple. “Conquering religions,” he continued, “often adopt existing holidays to make conversion less shocking. It’s called transmutation. It helps people acclimatize to the new faith. Worshipers keep the same holy dates, pray in the same sacred locations, use a similar symbology . . . and they simply substitute a different god.” Now the girl in front looked furious. “You’re implying Christianity is just some kind of . . . repackaged sun worship!” “Not at all. Christianity did not borrow only from sun worship. The ritual of Christian canonization is taken from the ancient ‘god-making’ rite of Euhemerus. The practice of ‘god-eating’—that is, Holy Communion—was borrowed from the Aztecs. Even the concept of Christ dying for our sins is arguably not exclusively Christian; the self-sacrifice of a young man to absolve the sins of his people appears in the earliest tradition of the Quetzalcoatl.” The girl glared. “So, is anything in Christianity original?” “Very little in any organized faith is truly original. Religions are not born from scratch. They grow from one another. Modern religion is a collage . . . an assimilated historical record of man’s quest to understand the divine.

The change was subtle at first but, in time, grew more and more blatant and brazen. Whether by conscious intent or unconscious abandonment, the people began driving God out of their lives, out of their culture, out of their government, and out of the instruction of their children. In His place they brought in idols and foreign gods, and in place of His ways they now followed the ways of the pagan nations that surrounded them. They redefined what was right and wrong. They created a new morality to replace the old. They called evil “good,” and good “evil.” What they had once celebrated, they now condemned, and what they once worshipped, they now reviled. On the other hand, what they had once condemned, they now celebrated, and what they had once reviled, they now worshipped. They grew increasingly carnal, materialistic, sexually immoral, and self-indulgent, and their culture, likewise, grew increasingly coarse and vulgar. And then, as did the nations surrounding them, they began to lift up their children as sacrifices on the altars of their new gods. As for those in their midst who refused to go along with their moral and spiritual apostasy, those who remained faithful to God and His ways, they were now marginalized, mocked, vilified, and, finally, persecuted. The nation that had been brought into existence to be a vessel of God’s purposes had now transformed into its very opposite—a civilization turned in upon itself, at war against its own foundations, and at war with God.

There are a few things I love about the first week of February. There is Candlemas, or Saint Brigid’s Day, on the 2nd. Candlemas is the first cross-quarter day of the new year, midway between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. I love Candlemas because before it was a Christian observance, it was a Pagan Holyday, the day to celebrate Brigid, the prominent female deity from the Tuatha De Danaan, the pre-Christian Gods of the Celts of Ireland. So pervasive was her worship, that the Christians couldn’t stop the Irish from honoring her, so they adopted her into their own mythology as St. Brigid. February 2nd is close to the end of winter, and Brigid, among other qualities, is the Goddess of the hearth. Celebrants light fires and candles to ward off the dregs of winter and await the coming spring. I have celebrated Candlemas over the years by organizing a candle dance event, where people would gather to learn a few simple folk dances done with candles in our hands. It is at once solemn, graceful, and joyful, as we hold onto the light and step towards spring. Another thing I love about the first week of February is the Superbowl. Yes, that’s right. People are complex, you see. We are creatures of both spirit and banality. We celebrate with ancient dance, and also gladiatorial contest.

Speaking on the Christian talk show The 700 Club, Falwell told interviewer Pat Robertson that America was a godless nation. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this,” Falwell said, speaking of the attacks, “because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortions, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians, who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘You helped this happen.’”1 Five years later, in a 2006 interview with Wired magazine, author Sam Harris—widely known as one of the Four Horsemen of the New

The pages of history go silent. But the stones of Athens provide a small coda to the story of the seven philosophers. It is clear, from the archaeological evidence, that the grand villa on the slopes of the Acropolis was confiscated not long after the philosophers left. It is also clear that it was given to a new Christian owner. Whoever this Christian was, they had little time for the ancient art that filled the house. The beautiful pool was turned into a baptistery. The statues above it were evidently considered intolerable: the finely wrought images of Zeus, Apollo and Pan were hacked away. Mutilated stumps are now all that remain of the faces of the gods; ugly and incongruous above the still-delicate bodies. The statues were tossed into the well. The mosaic on the floor of the dining room fared little better. Its great central panel, which had contained another pagan scene, was roughly removed. A crude cross pattern, of vastly inferior workmanship, was laid in its place. The lovely statue of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, suffered as badly as the statue of Athena in Palmyra had. Not only was she beheaded she was then, a final humiliation, placed face down in the corner of a courtyard to be used as a step. Over the coming years, her back would be worn away as the goddess of wisdom was ground down by generations of Christian feet. The ‘triumph’ of Christianity was complete.

An early, and quite remarkable manifestation of this deviant religiosity, and one which briefly united European revivalist polytheism and the continuous Indigenous traditions of North America, took place long before the American Revolution, when Thomas Morton arrived in New England in 1624 as a partner in a fur trading venture. Morton and thirty men indentured to the company defected and founded an independent colony that sought to live in harmony with the native Algonquian people of the region, the Wampanoag, and conduct the fur trade with them on a radically different basis than the prevailing norms. His colony began to attract further defectors from the harsh Puritan regime, and grew rapidly. In addition to intermarrying with local indigenous people, Morton’s colonists also began supplying them with guns. Morton named his colony, in what is now Quincy, Massachusetts, ‘Merry Mount’, and at its center ceremonially erected an 80-foot tall Maypole topped with deer antlers, reading before it odes he had composed to Hellenic Gods and holding dances around it. The Puritans reported that Morton, in addition to having “set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together… and worse practices,” had explicitly “anew revived & celebrated the feasts of the Roman Goddess Flora, or the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians.”42 Morton was thus combining rural European folk traditions with the classical pagan culture of which he had learned in his higher education and seeking to emulate, if not wholly integrate, Indigenous practices. Morton’s synthesis thus includes all of the ingredients of later Neo-Paganism of the kind we see in Wicca, including its libertine aspects. After about two years of this, Puritan troops invaded Merry Mount, which they called ‘Mount Dagon’, in reference to the Syrian God whom the Bible speaks of as worshiped by the Israelites’ rivals, the Philistines; it’s not clear whether this was their own coinage, or that of Morton’s colonists. The Puritans apprehended Morton, destroyed the Maypole and scattered the colonists in the settlement, though some were still there and reportedly continuing to engage in pagan worship in 1629, when they were raided again.