AP: Have you ever thought whether Paganism and Christianity have anything in common? Whether they are compatible or not? Well, today we will have a special guest talking just about this.
Hello everyone I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel, your online resource for the academic study of magick and magick practising religions and traditions.
Today I have a special guest here in the channel and her name is Jennifer Uzzell. Jennifer is a doctoral researcher at Durham University and she specializes in Druidry, death rights, and Paganism in general. She is also a senior examiner in religious studies both at GCAC and A level and was head of religious education at a number of schools for many years. So she is very knowledgeable when it comes to religions. So I’m really really happy to have her here on the channel. She’s also a dear friend of mine so please help me in welcoming Jennifer Uzzell.
Oh, hello Jenny how are you today?
Jennifer Uzzell JU: I’m very well thank you.
AP: I’m really happy that you accepted to be once again here on Angela’s Symposium. I always, always love to have you as a guest you’re really knowledgeable and I’m absolutely sure that my audience will love what you’re going to say.
JU: I don’t know. Some of it’s a bit controversial, I think, this time.
AP: That’s even better. That makes it even more interesting. So now that we have hyped up… before even starting. So yeah, today we are going to talk about the relationship between Christianity and Paganism, between Christian and Pagan magic and we will end by addressing the current state of the relationship between Christians and Pagans. My first question is: what was the relationship between Christianity and Paganism when Christianity first started to take roots?
JU: Okay, so when Christianity first began, obviously, it was in the Middle East and it was in the context of a Hellenistic world. So a world that was dominated by Greek culture. So the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, all had very ancient religions at that point and when Christianity arrived we sometimes have the impression that the relationship was straightforward – Christianity was persecuted, persecuted, persecuted and then everybody was Christian. And it was obviously a far more complicated relationship than that over the course of about 300 years. And the world that Christianity arrived in was a world where, something that we call mystery religions, had been going for about 200 years so they start around about 200 BCE and what is different about the mystery religions, compared to the state religions that had preceded them, is that they were about personal relationships. So the Greek and Roman state religions were very much about preserving the city of Rome, about preserving Greek culture, they weren’t about individuals.
The mystery religions start to bring in the idea that an individual can have a relationship with a god and the Eleusinian Mysteries at Eleusis, are the best known, that concerned Demeter and Persephone. There were also mysteries around Dionysus, around Orpheus, and around Isis and Cybele who came from what is now Turkey. And all of these have to do with a mystical, personal, emotional relationship with a god or goddess that continues after death so there is the possibility, now, of personal survival after death. And this, again, is quite a new idea in this form and of course, these are themes that are also there in Christianity. So there is the basis there for dialogue.
Quite a few of Paul’s letters specifically warn Christians about getting involved with these groups. He says this is not something you can do as well as that. But people did – otherwise he wouldn’t have said it. So you have this dialogue and as part of my master’s degree, I researched the relationship, specifically, between Baptism and Eucharist in the early church and things that were going on in the mystery religions at the same time. And whilst quite a bit has been written, most of it negative, about whether Christianity borrowed any ideas from the mystery religions around it in certain places, and I think it almost certainly did, but what I said, that was maybe a bit new, is that I think it also gave things. So there was this exchange of ideas; certainly around sacred food, certainly around washing or cleansing. I wrote a bit about the relationship between the taurobolium, which is where an initiate was covered in bull’s blood, and you have the language of being ‘cleansed in blood’ that comes into the New Testament as well.
So there is a conversation that’s going on between those two things and that is really interesting. And I know we’re going to talk later about magic specifically, but in all of these cultures; in the Greek culture, in the Roman culture, in the Egyptian culture it had been normal for individuals to invoke particular deities in what really is magic, it was an attempt to manipulate things for their own benefit. And it could be anything, it could be connected with love, marriage, pregnancy, getting back things that have been stolen, all of these things there are magical formulae. And what’s really interesting is that some of them are Christian. So they use Christian language to try and get exactly the same result. So we know that this was going on.
AP: Yeah this has now entered into the territory of my second question which is: whether is there a difference between Christian and Pagan magic. Is there a specific relation between the two? Are the two completely different?
JU: Well, it entirely depends. This is where we get controversial, I suppose. It entirely depends on how you’re going to define magic and, as you and I both know, we could write books just on that. If you take magic and of course, there are a large number of Christians who would say there is no magic in Christianity and that Christianity is actively opposed to magic. And that is, I suppose, the standard Christian view, it doesn’t seem to reflect how people have behaved in history. If we just say that and whether you see this as a legitimate part of Christianity or whether you see this as some sort of misunderstanding or degradation of Christianity will entirely depend on where you’re coming from, to begin with, I suppose. But certainly, these magical texts are absolutely fascinating. I have a book of ancient Christian, magic formulae, mostly Coptic, some of them are Greek documents, they date from the third to the fifth century, I think. Most of them are around Alexandria and Egypt. Some of them syncretise, so one of the very earliest ones syncretises the names of Egyptian gods with Jewish words such as Adonai – appears in there.
So there is syncretism going on but there are also attempts to invoke the name of the Trinity and because I have said this in the name of the Trinity it must happen. Now, that’s not supplication, that is an attempt to manipulate using words of power which, for me, brings it into the realm of magic rather than into the realm of prayer. And it’s also very interesting that at this period the Trinity is not fixed. So whereas now if you say to somebody what is the Holy Trinity then you will always get the answer the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In these texts, the Father and the Son are pretty much fixed but who the third party is, changes quite a bit. Sometimes it’s the Virgin Mary, sometimes it’s Sophia, sometimes it’s the Holy Spirit but there is ambiguity and there is movement and of course the Bible mentions angels, it doesn’t go into great detail about angels. But Jewish and Christian mystical writings picked up the idea of angels and went with it so the Talmud the various sort of apocryphal writings talk about angels quite a lot and this led to an almost science around the Renaissance, around angels and demons.
AP: Yeah, like John Dee for example.
JU: Exactly like John Dee. What John Dee was doing, most people certainly most occultists acknowledged that work John Dee was doing, was magic invoking the names of angels in particular. But it’s quite clear that he is doing it in the name of God, that is Christian angels that he is invoking and so, again, you have an attempt to control, very firmly placed within a Christian worldview, using things that quite clearly are coming from a magical rather than a conventional religious perspective.
AP: So you don’t think that there… oh sorry.
JU: I was just going to say, like the witch trials. Probably the best known of the witch trials in Britain is the Pendle Witches in, I think it was, about 1607, somewhere in that area. And the two main people that were accused in that were Chattox and Demdike who were two sort of matriarchs of Pendle and we know, from some of the trial records, that what they were doing was using Christian formulae. So when one of the informants talks about the spell, I think it was Demdike was using, it’s using Christian language, is commanding, in the name of the Trinity.
So is there a difference between Pagan and Christian magic? I would say where magic is being used in a Christian context and certainly, that does and has happened, then the difference is the names, is the words of power, the difference is what things are commanded in the name of. And of course, if you go into the Old Testament, you have Jesus commanding things and you have the disciples commanding people to be healed in the name of Jesus because the name itself holds power. And this idea is taken up and it’s run with throughout history certainly into the Middle Ages certainly up to the Reformation. People are using Bible verses, they are using charms with Bible verses written on them, they are invoking the names of angels, the name of Christ, the names of the disciples as words of power which bring about change in their own right rather than as supplicatory prayer. So I would say, if there is a difference, it’s only in so far as the world view that is in the background of it and the words of power that are being used.
AP: So do you think that magic can be seen, inherently, either Pagan or Christian or Jewish or any other religion, or is it just something that comes after a specific worldview or a theoretical framework which is, as you said, in the background?
JU: I certainly don’t think it is specifically belonging to any religion. I will, no doubt, be proved wrong but I can’t think of any religion that has not used magic. There are many religions that strongly disapprove of it and where it certainly isn’t within the orthodox iteration of the religion but it has existed, I think, in pretty much every religion and every worldview. And that makes perfect sense because people living in uncertainty, at the mercy of nature, at the mercy of disease, at the mercy of the weather are going to do whatever they feel they can to try and manipulate to try and make things work more in their favour than against it. And the mechanisms by which they do that, which we have generally called magic, are going to depend on what they think are the powerful things that they can influence. But certainly, there is mysticism, there is magic in every religion that I’ve come across.
AP: Yeah, I quite agree. I used to lead a module or a course at Leeds Trinity University on magic in religions and how magic gets embedded across different religions but I didn’t dare to go into monotheisms, to be honest, I used to focus more on polytheisms. Just because, as you said, it’s pretty controversial and…
JU: It is very controversial and it will you know I am sitting back and waiting for the flack after this. But the fact is that it has been used that way in Christianity and I think he would have to go a long way to prove that it hasn’t. Whether you want to argue that that is because people have misused, misinterpreted, misunderstood what they should have been doing as Christians that is a perfectly valid theological standpoint. But certainly, people have used the name of God, the name of Jesus, the names of angels, and magical formulae, and rituals that are derived directly from Christianity in order to try to influence the world around them.
AP: Yeah I guess…
JU: And have influenced it by magic rather than by prayer.
AP: Yeah, I guess that it is different whether you want to approach the matter from a theological standpoint or from an anthropological standpoint because, of course, as a theologian, you would think about the orthodoxy of that specific religion but as an anthropologist, you look at what people do, regardless of what the what is written in the book as the perfect expression of that specific religion. What matters to from an anthropological point of view, I guess, also sociological and religious studies point of view – is to see what people do regardless of what they are supposed to do.
JU: And that’s it. You know the difference between lived religion and the dogma and what’s coming from the top is, well, that’s a whole different realm of study in its own right.
I just want to give you an example before we move on. This is an example of a spell. So this is to do with an amulet to protect you from evil spirits. Well, that again there is about as magical as you can get I think. It says;
“I adjure you by the four Gospels of the Son, whether a tertian fever or caution fever or other fever depart from a’n who wears this divine protector because the one who commands you is the God of Israel whom the angels bless and the people fear and every evil spirit dreads. Again, the demon whose name is who has the feet of a wolf but the head of a frog I adjure by the seven circles of Heaven, the second aquamarine… There’s bits missing from this… Of the third of steel the fourth of malachite the sixth of gold. I adjure you unclean spirit, who do wrong the Lord, do not injure the one who wears these adjurations.”
And I’ll leave it there but it gives you an idea of the sort of thing that’s going on. They’re empowering an amulet for protection and they are doing it in the name or using power names that come very clearly from Christianity.
AP: Yeah that’s very interesting and speaking of living religions, another thing that I want to ask you is are there elements or festivals which are Pagan? I mean that Pagans are involved with or elements of Paganism of contemporary Paganism, which either take root in Christianity or are somewhat related to Christianity?
JU: Yes, is the short answer. So we’ll do the controversial one first, shall we? If I’m setting myself up for trouble I might as well go all out on it.
AP: That’s gonna be the theme of this interview.
JU: I think it is, isn’t it? So a lot you will hear, a lot you will see a lot of Pagans, particularly this time of year, talking about Samhain. Samhain, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a Pagan festival that more or less coincides with Halloween. And it is, for a lot of Pagans, it is the main festival of the year. It’s the new year and it’s one of the most important festivals for a lot of people. It’s connected particularly with ancestors, with the dead – whether they be the dead of your own family or whether that be honouring ancestors in a more general sense. And a lot of Pagans will tell you that this was originally a Pagan festival and that the Christian church came along and tried to suppress it by turning it into Halloween which of course is short for All Hallows Even’ which is the day when all of the Saints are honoured and the day before that is the day when all of the martyrs are honoured so it is, to that extent, connected with death. There is no evidence whatsoever that suggests that this is true. The earliest you can find an absolute connection between Halloween and death is, I think, it’s the 900s. I can’t check exactly but it comes out of Catholicism, it doesn’t come out of Paganism or any argument that Paganism is having with the church. So Halloween, as a festival around death in any way shape or form, is a rare example of a festival that Paganism has borrowed from Christianity – but it works, it works brilliantly. There’s no problem with that, as you know, as we said, if we look at this as anthropologists there is no religion anywhere that is absolutely pure and is absolutely free of relationship or borrowing or conversation with the religions around it. That is just not how religions work. So Samhain has been taken on by contemporary Paganism picking up on the themes that come out of Halloween and taken into a huge festival around the honouring of the dead and the honouring of ancestors. And it’s wonderful but it’s not Pagan in the sense that it goes back to pre-Christian religion.
The other big controversial one, of course, is Christmas and again there will be much controversy and arguing about whether various aspects of Christmas were stolen by Christians from the Pagans or vice versa and whether Father Christmas goes back to some old shamanic figure. Again, no evidence at all for that and you can argue the toss on this one. In this case, I suspect, that you have a real conversation in that some elements have come from pre-Christian religion and some elements are Christian that have then been fed back into Paganism. So, yeah.
AP: Of course it is important to highlight that you are mainly talking about the UK as a reference, as a geographical…
JU: In terms of folklore, yes, if you’re going to talk about Christmas and Yule. Then there are certain Scandinavian countries where conversations are very current as well.
AP: Yeah, yeah, for example, even in Italy with the ancient Roman religion you may have certain festivals which resemble what the Christian festivals then have come to be. But, as you said, you really don’t have pureness when it comes to religious festivals. So sometimes they influence each other and they come back in ways, having gathered something from what came before that.
JU: Yeah, and I think it’s also really important and this is something that comes up in discussions about folklore a great deal, as well. Can you look at folklore or folk customs and can you in those fine traces of pre-Christian religion? And I think on both sides of this debate there’s been a tendency to hugely oversimplify. You’ll have gathered by now I’m not a fan of simplifying anything. Everything is complicated. If it’s not complicated, you haven’t understood it properly.
AP: That’s a very academic way of looking at things.
JU: Yes, when it when Christianity came to Britain, for example, and there seems to have been two separate occasions on which it arrived in Britain. Once into a country that was British and once into a country that was Anglo-Saxon. But when it came, the world view that was held by people, was not a modern, scientific, rationalist worldview and we tend to, having had you know several hundred years of Protestant, Post-Reformation Christianity which tends to be quite rational, we think that the Christianity has always been like this. So the world that Christianity first arrived into in Britain was a world that was populated by elves, and nature spirits and things that had to be propitiated, things that had to be kept happy and because people accepted Christianity that didn’t change. You still have that same worldview, you may be a Christian but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to protect yourself from the elves and again this is where magic can come into it from this point of view because we have a number of herbariums from Anglo-Saxon England. One of which in particular the Lacnunga is very magical and again the magical formulae that are being used are Christian. So there’s one that commands in the name of God, in the name of Christ, it’s a healing charm called the Nine Herbs Charm but it also talks about Woden, who is very much an Anglo-Saxon god. So you have this syncretism even way back then.
And there’s a charm for, I think this is in the Herbarium of Apuleius, but I’m probably wrong, for bringing fertility back to a barren field and it is such a syncretism between Pagan ideas and Christian ideas that it’s really quite amazing. So you take sods of earth from each corner of the field and you take them into church to bless them and then you literally plough seed into them, in a very sort of sexual imagery, and the charm itself begins “Ecce ecce ecce mader modere”? which means earth mother of men. So most people would see that as a very Pagan world view, addressing the earth directly almost as a goddess and yet all of these ideas exist within the same magical charm for bringing fertility to a field.
Now, would the people who did that see themselves as Pagans – I think absolutely not. They would have seen themselves as Christians. Are they using ideas and names and probably methods that go back into a pre-Christian past? Almost certainly yes. So this, when people start to say, oh well that’s Pagan, or that’s Christian; for a very long time, that clear line didn’t exist and so when we use folklore to try and see ancient relics you have to remember this. So one that is very often discussed in Pagan circles, for example, is the Mari Lwyd which is a horse’s skull on a stick with a sort of cape around it which is in South Wales, in particular, taken around from house to house around Christmas time into New Year up to the wassail times. And then there’s a poetic ritual exchange at the doorway before the skull and its handler are let in. And then it causes chaos and it’s given food and drink and it basically brings blessings for the New Year. Now that is very often, by Pagans, seen as a Pagan thing and it looks like a very Pagan thing. It’s a horse skull on a stick, it looks very Pagan and the ideas connected with it are very Pagan but the earliest attestation of it is in the mid-1800s. So it may be, people have suggested connections with Epona, who is a Roman – Romano-British horse goddess, maybe. They’ve suggested connections with Rhiannon who is a medieval figure from the Mabinogion, which is a series of Welsh stories.
It may be that the point is we can’t know, these things are unknowable but have the people, that traditionally have done these things, thought of themselves as Pagans? No, I don’t think they have. And the same is true for Morris Dancers, the same is true for maypoles. All of these things that are now assimilated and used in the Pagan community, I don’t think that the people who did those, in the Middle Ages, thought of themselves in any way as Pagan. They thought of themselves as good Christians but they’re using ideas and imagery and those things may well have their roots that go back pre-Christian but that doesn’t mean the people themselves thought of themselves as Pagan. Does that make some sort of sense?
AP: Yeah, yeah. It makes me think about quite a few things that I’ve been pondering about. Yeah, I don’t want you to go… because it’s quite a rabbit hole but it pertains to the idea of, I guess, contradictions in religious beliefs and how… we tend to think that how people live a religion is very straightforward and follows what the religion says but, actually, you can have conflicting world paradigms and conflicting worldviews which they, in person, can endorse at the same time. Yeah, it is about the…
JU: And it can lead to variation as well. So, for example, again talking about Anglo-Saxon England, there are some very early hymns, Cædmon is a good example, that are Christian; they’re very definitely Christian, there is no doubt about that whatsoever but again they’re bringing in worldviews and understandings that are quite distinctively Anglo-Saxon in character. And you would not find things that are similar, for example, in the Middle East in a Middle Eastern Christian context. So one very good example is the Dream of the Rood which is a poem that is supposedly spoken by the Cross, which is about as Christian as you can get but it addresses God as ‘All Father’ which is a term that we have good reason to think goes back into, certainly, Icelandic Pagan belief. It talks about Jesus, as a young hero, which is an idea that comes very much out of the heroic, tragic worldview connected with ‘weird’, meaning fate more or less, that comes out of the Anglo-Saxon worldview and it’s about Christ, as a warrior, combating on the Cross so that the Cross is described as a battle. And the very fact of the tree, the Rood is described as a tree and there are echoes in the imagery of the world tree of this sort of tree that connects the worlds. So you know it’s Christian, there is absolutely no doubt that it’s Christian but it’s a very distinctive Anglo-Saxon type of Christianity that has its roots in a worldview that goes back into a Pagan past. So Yeah.
AP: Yeah, that makes sense and as a last question I’d like to ask you: what is the current state of the relationship between Pagans and Christians, rather than Paganism and Christianity? I mean the actual practitioners or religious believers.
JU: Obviously, hugely varied, as you would expect. Again, worth pointing out that I’m talking here specifically about Britain because that’s what I know about and that is pretty much the only thing that I know about. There are obviously Christians who feel very strongly that Paganism is associated with devil worship, that it’s satanic that it is evil and I think it’s very sad that a lot of Christians view Paganism as evil in a way that they wouldn’t view, for example, Hinduism – as evil. They might think that it was wrong but they wouldn’t necessarily think that it was evil and that is very regrettable and it’s a great shame.
Likewise, there are Pagans who are very, very opposed to Christianity, sometimes, because of experiences that they had in their youth or when they were growing up or because they were raised in a very strict Christian environment. And there are still Pagans out there who believe that the ‘burning times’, where witches were executed in the Middle Ages in England almost never by burning, almost always by hanging, were Pagan survivors of an ancient religion that was being persecuted by the church. And I think, this is an idea that has now been pretty much completely discredited in academic circles. Whatever was happening with the witch trials and I think again, it’s complicated, there were a lot of things going on with the witch trials. But insofar as there was any magic involved, just to take us back a step, it was Christian magic in the way that I have just described. And even where, and there will have been one or two, at least, you have women who believe that they have made a pact with the devil, the thing that they believe they have made a pact with is the Christian devil. So you know whilst there are references in the Malleus Maleficarum to Diana and various other things, by and large, hugely this is not the survival of a Pagan religion this is something else. But there are still a lot of Pagans who don’t see that and who are very anti-Christianity because of that.
What I find hugely fascinating and hugely interesting, however, is the middle ground where you have Pagans, very often Druids, not exclusively Druids, but a lot of the people that I’ve seen involved in this are Druids – although that might just be because I’m researching Druidry. And Christians who have a particular, obviously, open-mindedness, but also very often a particular tendency to see the divine in nature coming together to have conversations about where the middle ground is, what they have in common, what they can learn from each other. Not necessarily Pagans trying to convert Christians or even Christians trying to convert Pagans. But genuine interfaith dialogue where people are saying okay, what can we learn from you, what can you learn from us, how does that benefit both of us going forward, and what ideas can we share. There was in, I think 2014, a conference that was held, that was attended by Pagans and Christians who were keen to explore this relationship and the proceedings of that were published in a book called “Celebrating Planet Earth” which I would very strongly recommend to anybody who has an interest in this and it’s it’s got all sorts of things in it. It has got discussions about what are the main differences, so, for example, the introduction, which is by Graham Harvey, looks at the key element of Christianity has to do with salvation whereas the key element of Paganism tends to have to do with a re-enchantment of the world and seeing the world as connected and alive and magic and a discussion of to what extent those two views can be compatible.
So there’s that sort of very theoretical stuff and then there’s also a discussion of how far it is possible or desirable for Christians and Pagans to take part in ritual together and what they discovered was the figure of Bridget is extremely useful, in this context, because Bridget appears to have been a Celtic goddess. She may be quite widely dispersed geographically, there’s discussions about that, may appear in the North of England as Brigantia but she is very much, she’s connected with the hearth, she’s connected with fire, she’s connected with healing, she’s connected with poetic inspiration and, of course, in Ireland in particular, the cult of Saint Bridget around Kildare. Bridget is a Christian saint who was believed to have been the daughter of a Druid who converted to Christianity. So the figure of Bridget is somewhere where Christians and Pagans, at least of a certain type, can meet and can both engage without either feeling that they are compromising themselves in any way. So Bridget became the centre of quite a lot of the ritual that was going on at this conference. And this is what I was hoping was going to arrive because I had forgotten the name of this place, which is entirely my fault.
There is a monastic community, a convent in Scotland called the Ceile De and I’ll send you what that it’s C E I L E, separate word D E and I’m almost certainly pronouncing it wrong but it’s a community, it’s a monastic community it has lay brothers and it has nuns who regard the pre-Christian Paganism of the British Isles as standing in the same relationship to their Christianity as the Old Testament does. So they don’t see it as something that was evil that has to now be overcome and rejected but they see it as something that was building towards their understanding of Christianity, which sees Christ very much as the higher self rather than as the incarnation of God. So and again Bridget is the central figure. They have released CDs of chants to Bridget and it’s just this place where both flavours, I suppose, have a place of dialogue.
There’s also there’s a couple of people, I’m sure a lot of your listeners will have come across, Mark Townsend springs to mind. He was an Anglican Vicar who came to have quite a deep relationship with Druidry and who places himself as having, it would be wrong to say a foot in both camps, but sees both forms of spirituality as being valid and useful. So again a couple of books that he’s written that really go into and explore and particularly around the person of Christ and what sort of sense Christ makes in a Pagan context rather than in a Christian context. So there’s a book called “Jesus Through Pagan Eyes” and another one called “The Diary of a Heretic” and both of those explain and explore this meeting place between Pagan theology and Christian theology and what sort of conversation and what sort of useful fusion and synthesis can be made between the two.
The other figure is Paul Cudby and his wife Allison Eve who are deeply involved with the Forest Church which is a Christian movement that seeks to really explore the divine connection in nature and it’s something that’s far deeper and far more at ease with Pagan ways of doing things than just having church services outside. So they do sometimes call the quarters, they call the elements and the quarters and Alison Eve Cudby – Paul Cudby’s wife runs an online group that develops ritual that actively involves nature and the whole person in developing ritual in a Christian context. And Paul Cudby has written a book called “The Shaken Path” which is a Christian vicar looking, in a positive way, at Paganism and a dialogue with Paganism and again, at where the common ground is and their common understanding and his Facebook page has both Christians and Pagans on it and the conversations – very open, friendly, constructive conversations about where the meeting points are.
So, whilst I’m not going to go out and say, and again I have personally a number of ordained Christian friends who are very open and are very happy about working together with Paganism and you know, where can Paganism and Christianity come together and work because we’re both working with traditions that are very ancient in Britain. You know Christianity’s been here for at least 1600 years. Paganism’s longer and again I get quite worried when people talk about pre-Christian Paganism as if it’s one thing, it wasn’t. Greek Paganism was different to Roman Paganism, was different to Egyptian Paganism, was different to Celtic Paganism. So you know but the Celtic and the Saxon ideas have been in this country for millennia. So, certainly in the British context, there are certainly people that said, okay so these are both to some extent indigenous, with a small “i”, cultures in that they both are fully embedded and fully culturalised in this country. So how do we work together with them? Where are our meeting grounds? And you know while it isn’t a mass movement, sadly, I am very hopeful. I think this is a very good thing and I am hopeful that we will see more of this dialogue and more of this sharing of ideas and practices and ritual going forward.
AP: Nice, on this hopeful note we can end our interview. Thank you very much, Jenny. I think it was really fascinating. I think that you are you know that I think that you are very eloquent and I just like listening to you, so hopefully, my viewers soon will like you too.
JU: Oh thank you and hopefully not too controversial. I would rather that nothing in there was controversial but there you go.
AP: Yeah but as you said when you look at things from an academic point of view they tend to be very complicated and complex and usually the answer to any question is ‘it depends’ rather than yes or no. Yeah, but it’s difficult. I mean normally people don’t like to have these kinds of answers because they are really complex and you really have to dig deeper in order to understand it fully. So a yes or no answer tends to be more reassuring somehow. But yeah, that’s why we’re here…
JU: To drag people out of the comfort zone
AP: Because it’s out of the comfort zone that people grow and our minds expand.
JU: Absolutely, absolutely and I think, whilst the dialogue between Paganism and Christianity, for a lot of people, both Pagan and Christian, is out of that comfort zone I think it’s a place where huge real growth can happen. So I hope it continues.
AP: Thank you again Jenny for being here on my YouTube channel you will surely see her again in the near future. I can anticipate that and I will leave all the contact details and all the books mentioned in the infobox. So do check it out and let us know what you thought of what we have discussed. It’d be really nice to read your thoughts.
JU: I shall look forward to reading the comments.
AP: Okay and if you did like this video, SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell so that you will never miss when I upload a new video and do let me know which part of the interview you liked the most and whether you want me to expand on something specifically both in the comments and in the future. And, as always, stay tuned for all the academic fun.
Bye for now.
Jennifer Uzzell’s contact details:
email: j.s.uzzell@durham.ac.uk
twitter at @jenny_uzzell
blog: https://theforesthouse.wordpress.com/…
REFERENCES
Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power. Meyer, M. and Smith, R (Eds.) (1994) Harper Collins.
Celebrating Planet Earth Cush, D. (Ed.) (2015) Moon Books
Diary of a Heretic: The Pagan Adventures of a Christian Priest. Townsend, M. (2013) Moon Books.
Forest Church: A Field Guide to Nature Connection for Groups and Individuals. Stanley, B. (2016) Anamchara Books.
Jesus through Pagan Eyes: Bridging Neo-Pagan Perspectives with a Progressive Vision of Christ. Townsend, M. (2012) Flux.
The Shaken Path: A Christian Priest’s Exploration of Modern Pagan Belief and Practice. Cudby, P. (2017) Christian Alternative.